12 ms·

The rise of the useless class

105 points by uyoakaoma 10y ago

sevensor 10y ago
My first reaction when I saw (ted.com) after the link was that this would be an essay about ted speakers. I should have known that it would be more chatter about machines making people obsolete.
- rdiddly 10y ago
  Nice one! My reaction was more like, we have this already due to plain old economic stagnation and (in the US) offshoring. No AI needed!
  - yomly 10y ago
    It seems convenient to blame technology, and it is definitely going to be the bigger cause in the long term. This said, I am strongly of the opinion that globalization is not a force that benefits everyone (to put it nicely) and it is not constructive that this opinion is not discussed more widely without having to pussyfoot around dirty words like protectionism and nationalism as if they are automatically bad words.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      Globalization is centralization: finance is centralized in New York and London; manufacturing is centralized in China and Germany; IT outsourcing is centralized in India. Over the 19th and early 20th century, the benefits of American westward expansion and the development of the industrial Midwest largely accrued to the big banks in New York. The same is occurring, just on a larger scale and accelerated due to leaps in technology.
      - dantheman 10y ago
        The US manufactures more than it ever did, page 2 of this pdf shows it quite clearly: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf The US is more than double Germany.
        Nomentatus 10y ago
        But with fewer workers.
        dantheman 10y ago
        Progress?
      - yomly 10y ago
        There's a lot here to discuss. I think you're right: look at the huge tech grab between China and America. Almost all Western Internet + parts of Asia goes through America (Google/Amazon/Facebook) for example. As for centralization, I agree with you, but what do you do with all the people who didn't back the right industry? They're slowly being displaced. If you subscribe to the concept of social welfare, a government should be ensuring their quality of life. This includes access to employment, education, healthcare and even pleasure. This is the inconvenient truth of the current world we live in, but frustratingly it took a Trump and a Brexit to happen for the idea to get much coverage, and even still it is mired in unnecessary political complications that are not strictly relevant.
      - Nomentatus 10y ago
        Actually massive British investments provided a lot of the capital, so London got a very large share as well.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    The 'nice' thing about technology being to blame instead of offshoring is that there is no clear and obvious villain to point pitchforks at. That's useful for some people. So: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/265cd8fb02fb44a69cf0eaa2063e11d9/mexico-taking-us-factory-jobs-blame-robots-instead http://bigstory.ap.org/article/265cd8fb02fb44a69cf0eaa2063e1... "Blame robots [for your imminent unemployment]. [Proved by] "A study at Ball State University's Center for Business and Economic Research" ("The myth and reality of manufacturing in America"). Which states: http://conexus.cberdata.org/files/MfgReality.pdf http://conexus.cberdata.org/files/MfgReality.pdf "We begin by examining productivity. The most common measure of productivity is the average product of labor, which is simply the value of all goods manufactured in the U.S. divided by the number of workers. " ^^ Which literally means that according to the author's calculations, if you offshore 50 workers and maintain sales, you have decreased US employment / GDP ratio and thus increased. The of the paper then measures productivity, states that it's gone up and segues into a lot of reasons why it thinks the increase in productivity is actually because of machines. Then they invent a calculation involving the trade deficit to determine the number of jobs lost by outsourcing (where one Chinese person buying a $5 million house/year in Cali "makes up for" losing 20 $50k/year jobs) and finish up with what can only be described as an unrelated whinge about US corporate tax rates (just in case you were left with any lingering doubts about whose side they're on). Authors: Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA. tl;dr some people use phony math to explain why it's wrong to point pitchforks at the 1%.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  I should have known that it would be more chatter about machines making people obsolete. It has the potential to be a very vexing problem, actually. That may condemn literally hundreds of millions of people to poverty, feelings of uselessness (if not outright despair and depression). And very likely be contributing to higher suicide rates, among the newly obsolesced. In that vein, it seems rather callous to describe earnest attempts to get a handle on the problem as "chatter".
abrodersen 10y ago
Obviously, we should put them on the B Ark and send them to another planet.
- jaclaz 10y ago
  Did you consider that we would need to have scientists predict that the planet will be devoured by an enormous mutant star goat beforehand (or maybe a gigantic swarm of twelve foot piranha bees),and convince them about that didn't you? ;)
- sevensor 10y ago
  But our telephones would become unsanitary!
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    We are way, way too late for that. We solved that problem by making sure each phone is only used by one person. So even if people poke their grubby fingers at their phones for the entire time they are sitting on their toilets, there won't be a planet-wide epidemic of a phone-vectored disease.
- Entangled 10y ago
  Trimming the 10% at the top and the bottom on a yearly basis would provide a better outcome according to game theory.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    You described US Education system.
- VLM 10y ago
  This is pretty much how coasties view middle America, and vice versa.
- antod 10y ago
  Weren't we already the result of someone else doing that?
shas3 10y ago
I'm sure there is a good critique of that Frey and Osborne paper. Epistemologically, it sounds weird to assign 'probabilities of automation.' I don't have the time to read the paper in detail, but here are a few things: 1. Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased. 2. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will we reach a point where it is cheaper to automate a job than hire a person? Think of non-forklift lifting/moving of heavy stuff, we don't really need people doing this manually, robots should be able to do it. But we see with the Boston Dynamics robots that we are many years or decades away from commoditizing lifting robots. 3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc).
- Anderkent 10y ago
  >3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc) Actually, those jobs are still there. The current useless class are the people who are not capable of holding a modern job. And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When you take away someone's ability to support themselves because there are new, more efficient ways of using the shared resources, they're entitled to compensation [1]; but as a society we don't have a good way of enforcing that. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
  - DashRattlesnake 10y ago
    > supermarket cashiers Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers). [1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does
    - Anderkent 10y ago
dhuntermn 10y ago
what happens when human labor (and life) is cheaper than robotic output? storm the castle with a swarm of useless humans, or put your really expensive robot at risk?
binarymax 10y ago
I want to be like my dog, but smarter and with more freedom. Every day I look at the lazy beast and wonder at the simplicity of its existence. Give me that life and an allowance for supplies to create, eat, socialize, and travel and let me loose.
- Ygg2 10y ago
  Don't dogs have very little agency. They don't even decide when they get sprayed/neutered.
  - binarymax 10y ago
    I said my dog :) She wasn't spayed, and in general has a pretty awesome life (for a dog).
  - coldtea 10y ago
    OK, replace it with cats. Which decide everything.
    - Ygg2 10y ago
      Sure, but everyone wants to be a cat. Because a cat's the only cat who knows where it's at.
- ryandvm 10y ago
  This is the missing component of the Drake equation. The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death cycle...
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    But if they have superior AI, what stops the AI from expanding outward instead? Such an advanced civilization has nothing to lose by sending a few robot colonists out through the galaxy.
charles-salvia 10y ago
Meh... the new in-demand job for "useless" people will be gathering all the training data to feed into TensorFlow.
rndmize 10y ago
Arguably, some of this is already happening. IMO there was a much better article a few months ago - https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/ https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/
- 12bits 10y ago
  thanks
- mojomark 10y ago
  Indeed - I'm only 50% through, but defibitely a MUCH more informed and insightful article already
charles-salvia 10y ago
I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full "general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite recent advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e. adding more columns to a matrix), we don't really have anything that even approaches an artificial general intelligence. What we do have is a suite of sophisticated statistical algorithms that basically perform regression using huge data sets. This often approximates some subset of what a general artifical intelligence could do for some use cases that mostly apply to recognizing fuzzy patterns. But it's not even close to approaching human-level intelligence. In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the "pattern recognition" aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity (apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to play Go.) I don't doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously threaten human usefulness/dignity, but I question the timeline of "decades away".
- geforce 10y ago
  For this reason, I wouldn't be surprised if AI actually generate more work, at least for most of our lifetime. People that will supervise and correct AI errors while/after they process data, while current jobs mostly stays "until the AI is ready to actually take over". If this makes you laugh, you have probably never worked in the public sector or big corps.
  - charles-salvia 10y ago
    Yeah - see my half-joke comment below
  - devonkim 10y ago
    The problem is that the financial performance and massive inertia of these organizations are becoming such financial liabilities that our economies will be held back by organizational / cultural and technical debt at the same time in these organizations. I've been observing the trend for the past decade where the top tech companies are accelerating in output while most of the large institutions are falling further and further behind. Intel can keep pushing all the way to the theoretical limits of silicon for transistor size, but the economic costs including just sheer interest on fab facilities alone of getting there would bankrupt the company or hurt its credit rating. To put it into a more concrete analogy, Google is putting out autonomous cars when tons of companies are celebrating releasing the Model T or are still currently developing it with massive delays and cost overruns. Meanwhile, much of the appetite for government spending is dwindling for various reasons and this will cause a lot of strife that hurts already-slow moving organizations. Furthermore, brand recognition by the current generation of entrepreneurs for old hat technology companies is looking absolutely horrific. The next Fortune 500 CEOs 30 years from now are likely in their 30s or 40s now and they're well aware of the lack of compelling vision by so-called "technology" companies that are really just technology re-sellers and are thus unsuitable partners for increasingly tech-reliant businesses (the few that don't have such plans may be so clueless they won't matter).
ar15saveslives 10y ago
> Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning, followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. That's already the case, imo.
- mattlevan 10y ago
  Agreed. It'd be quite difficult to measure whether or not someone learns something new, anyway, because of the variety of things available to learn (large and small). If we're talking about learning entirely new skills, though, yea, obviously a cashier will probably not need to learn any significant new skills over the course of their career. As always, people who do make learning new things a part of their life's rituals will generally be more successful than those who do not. Nice username, by the way.
mojomark 10y ago
Of course automation will inevitably be capable of displacing all human acts (jobs and art). The author concludes with the same tired, naiive and unsatisfactory outlook: 'you don't need worry about it because robots will just kill off humans'. However, it seems obvious that humanity will handle this like many cultures have - by choice. Just like some people chose not to eat GM food, and others (Amish) generally elect not to use electricity, humans too will reach a point where they will simply choose to either accept that their lives are 100% sustained by autonomy or, live a life free of AI-generated products (i.e. food, services, art, etc).
- kbos87 10y ago
  I'm curious to see how long it will take for the world to experience any meaningful kind of pushback against automation or AI. Today, I feel like all I see are a dwindling number of people saying they'd "rather deal with a real person", and a growing number of people who come close to fetishizing automation. Maybe once Uber decides to flip the switch on all of the drivers who are now dependent on them for some if not all of their income, we'll see people in the streets vandalizing and otherwise circumventing empty self driving vehicles.
  - mojomark 10y ago
    Honestly, like you point out, I think it's happening at micro-levels already. Certainly entire societies have voluntarily cut themselves off largelt from technology altogether - not just Amish, but modern off-grid people as well. However, just like some "bush people" will bend the rules and return to modern technology in diar situations (e.g. they need an insulin shot), I'd bet dollars to donuts that medical needs will drive many situations where self-declared "AI-free" people will opt for an AI product, since there are certain to be many AI-generated medical treatments currently out of the reach of limited human brains to develop.
sebringj 10y ago
This is short-term pessimism, inline with the common dystopian future of sci-fi. It is really difficult to predict human behaviors and technology in the long term. Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen. Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekinetic so then we get the neural internet from that. We would actually be less divided, more connected and more productive as a human race. Our current sense of self is too selfish and our intellect too limited. I'm sure it would be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case so everyone could make better decisions, not just about themselves but about humanity, etc. because they could perceive things at a grander scale.
- shas3 10y ago
  I think this is already happening. In fact most AI pessimists don't consider that "man + machine >> machine." Consider chess. Kasparov's defeat happened in mid-1990s. Machine is considered > man. Yet, in freestyle chess, where players are allowed to consult machines, we have achieved ever greater heights of performance. In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better. Similar things will happen in Go, Poker, etc. The handicap of not using a computer to inform your moves exists to make things more competitive, it doesn't mean that we are worse off! Taking this further, most technology we use daily (word processors, email, the Internet, etc.) are enhancements of the man+machine organism and enhance our performance as well as the 'machine''s.
  - sebringj 10y ago
    Yah I think so too. Super Tangent warning: I recently saw the documentary on Koko the Gorilla and was amazed at her emotional intelligence and communication skills. Why not integrate AI into other animals besides humans?
    - sebringj 10y ago
      One more tangent: The perception of time would be very different if we were highly integrated into machines right? What if you could perceive things at 1000 times the normal human?
Animats 10y ago
This has already happened. That's why Trump won. Check out Detroit or the Rust Belt, or most towns under 5,000 people not near a major population center.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  I disagree. It isn't really that folks don't have their old job. With that job went their livelihoods. Houses, jobs, medical insurance. Bills get late and suddenly finding food becomes an issue. Others just have very stagnant wages, so they work harder but can't stretch their paycheck as far anymore. Do you think Trump would have still been elected if we had a proper safety net and social support for folks?
  - laughfactory 10y ago
    This is so true. As someone who's had the misfortune to be on unemployment twice in my career, and food stamps once, I can tell you our "safety net" is bullshit. Unemployment maxes out at $450/week and takes months for the checks to start arriving. Try making ends meet in that scenario, and better hope you get a couple months of severance. Food stamps work fairly well, but you've got still got the slow and inefficient government albatross in the mix. Long story short: we spend a ludicrous amount of money on a safety net which provides zero safety for anyone.
ideonexus 10y ago
This is the most fascinating quote for me. If corporations and nations are entities capable of owning things, could we give such power to software/algorithms? How would that work? As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. Human law already recognizes intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as “legal persons.” Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to algorithms. An algorithm could then own a transportation empire or a venture-capital fund without having to obey the wishes of any human master. Before dismissing the idea, remember that most of our planet is already legally owned by non-human intersubjective entities, namely nations and corporations. Indeed, 5,000 years ago much of Sumer was owned by imaginary gods such as Enki and Inanna. If gods can possess land and employ people, why not algorithms?
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  Algorithms require hardware to run on, so they'll have all their assets drained away from them in the former of rent to the landlord, that is, the person who owns the hardware they run on.
  - ideonexus 10y ago
    Thinking out-loud in terms of a corporation. The owners are the landlord for the corporation, but that corporation is it's own legal entity. Owners come and go, but that corporate entity remains and insulates the owners from many legal and financial repercussions of the company's actions. It's a similar thing with countries. I'm not personally held responsible for the actions of the United States or the Town in which I dwell, but I am one of the landlords for those entities. I think the question here is whether there are advantages to making algorithms legal entities similar to our other communal legal entities. It's a radical idea, but so is UBI and some other suggestions for mitigating the obsolescence of many human being as a result of automation.
markvdb 10y ago
If you want to see what technology and automation do, and early ideas of how to support the "useless" class, don't look at California. Look at places like Switzerland, Scandinavia and Belgium. The wage cost pressure is just pricing low productivity work out of the market there more quickly than elsewhere. A taxi in the valley is cheap. A taxi in any of these? Rather more expensive... Jobs being replaced with technology? Government policy trying to do something about it? Keep an eye on what happens in these countries...
unityByFreedom 10y ago
> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40." I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education. Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existence here and should continue to be passed on to as many people as we can. I find the excitement for UBI concerning. People seem to have already tossed up their hands and said, "well, I'll be useless in the future, I guess I can't work now!". Meanwhile, Mike Rowe has been saying for years that there are unfulfilled blue collar jobs. Our culture's problem is not that machines will take over or that schools are failing to educate students. It's that we don't find enough value in the contributions that we do make. It's okay to not be a successful tech founder. Everyone is useful in some way or another.
- dantheman 10y ago
  I think you'd find very few republicans favoring UBI...
  - twinkletwinkle 10y ago
    Actually lots of them do, because they see it as a way to remove "entitlements". Delete food stamps, delete welfare, delete all aspects of the social safety net, and implement a simple UBI. It's the same regressive strategy as "do your taxes on a postcard". Treat every equally, not equitably.
  - unityByFreedom 10y ago
    You're thinking of the wrong generation. Libertarians support it. They are one option for a future Republican platform. The tech generation's wealthy view UBI as a way to simplify the tax code, thus saving money. UBI would cause inflation and lower the lower class. Their buying power would eventually be worth nothing in a capitalist society. One couldn't expect the government to appropriately increase UBI over time. Stay in school, kids. There's no future where you don't need to do work in order to have the lifestyle you want.
davidivadavid 10y ago
Am I the only person who finds the whole concept of judging people as useful or useless completely nonsensical? So, machines will be able to perform jobs that are currently done by people. How does that make people useless? It assumes there's some sort of preordained, global utility function. "Oh, your job as a cab driver has been automated. You're useless." Uh, what? Useless to what? To whom? Humans define what is useful or not. They're certainly not going to will themselves into uselessness, curl up into a ball and die. The idea that humans can be useless is complete nonsense to me. It's something akin to a type error. And I have a hard time understanding why that meme keeps being repeated and debated without anyone pointing this out.
- ninju 10y ago
  I believe the designation of the people as useless is based on the fact that part of our value to society is measured by the utility that provide to society and with continuing automation of human tasks it will be harder for us to find way for all the humans in the world to provide utility at the same level as they are now. Now I agree with you that this (valuing people by the utility they provide) is a shallow and incorrect way of measuring a human being's value but it is true.
  - davidivadavid 10y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I think I'm talking about something slightly different. First, I think that what you're pointing out in your first paragraph, while wildly accepted, is completely unproven. Second, I don't think valuing people by utility is necessarily shallow, but the way I worded my original post might lead you to believe that. Here's what I'm getting at (and failing horribly, because I'm too lazy to think it through): many articles have been written that seem to outline scenarios where runaway automation leads to a situation where you have some sort of closed loop automated economy where humans have no role to play, thus making humanity "useless." I think that's hogwash. It presupposes that the goal of humanity is to perform a certain number of tasks that happen to be the tasks we currently perform. If we can find something to substitute that performs the same tasks, our goal is accomplished, and thus humanity is "useless." That's when I generally go: that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
accordionclown 10y ago
i'm deeply offended by an attitude that leads to word-choices such as "useless" and "bums" and "superfluous" in regard to human beings who simply do not have jobs. are people really "useless" if they do not provide labor to make rich people richer? if the economic system can't make a profit off your presence, are you "superfluous"? is this the mentality that would cause our "leaders" to abandon health-care for the large majority of our population who will soon be unable to afford insurance? and please don't tell me that a _job_ is necessary to make people feel useful. many wealthy people seem to be able to do nothing productive at all, without having doubt about their right to exist.

105 points by uyoakaoma 10y ago

My first reaction when I saw (ted.com) after the link was that this would be an essay about ted speakers. I should have known that it would be more chatter about machines making people obsolete.

rdiddly 10y ago
Nice one! My reaction was more like, we have this already due to plain old economic stagnation and (in the US) offshoring. No AI needed!
- yomly 10y ago
  It seems convenient to blame technology, and it is definitely going to be the bigger cause in the long term. This said, I am strongly of the opinion that globalization is not a force that benefits everyone (to put it nicely) and it is not constructive that this opinion is not discussed more widely without having to pussyfoot around dirty words like protectionism and nationalism as if they are automatically bad words.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Globalization is centralization: finance is centralized in New York and London; manufacturing is centralized in China and Germany; IT outsourcing is centralized in India. Over the 19th and early 20th century, the benefits of American westward expansion and the development of the industrial Midwest largely accrued to the big banks in New York. The same is occurring, just on a larger scale and accelerated due to leaps in technology.
    - dantheman 10y ago
      The US manufactures more than it ever did, page 2 of this pdf shows it quite clearly: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf The US is more than double Germany.
      - Nomentatus 10y ago
        But with fewer workers.
        dantheman 10y ago
        Progress?
    - yomly 10y ago
      There's a lot here to discuss. I think you're right: look at the huge tech grab between China and America. Almost all Western Internet + parts of Asia goes through America (Google/Amazon/Facebook) for example. As for centralization, I agree with you, but what do you do with all the people who didn't back the right industry? They're slowly being displaced. If you subscribe to the concept of social welfare, a government should be ensuring their quality of life. This includes access to employment, education, healthcare and even pleasure. This is the inconvenient truth of the current world we live in, but frustratingly it took a Trump and a Brexit to happen for the idea to get much coverage, and even still it is mired in unnecessary political complications that are not strictly relevant.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Actually massive British investments provided a lot of the capital, so London got a very large share as well.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  The 'nice' thing about technology being to blame instead of offshoring is that there is no clear and obvious villain to point pitchforks at. That's useful for some people. So: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/265cd8fb02fb44a69cf0eaa2063e11d9/mexico-taking-us-factory-jobs-blame-robots-instead http://bigstory.ap.org/article/265cd8fb02fb44a69cf0eaa2063e1... "Blame robots [for your imminent unemployment]. [Proved by] "A study at Ball State University's Center for Business and Economic Research" ("The myth and reality of manufacturing in America"). Which states: http://conexus.cberdata.org/files/MfgReality.pdf http://conexus.cberdata.org/files/MfgReality.pdf "We begin by examining productivity. The most common measure of productivity is the average product of labor, which is simply the value of all goods manufactured in the U.S. divided by the number of workers. " ^^ Which literally means that according to the author's calculations, if you offshore 50 workers and maintain sales, you have decreased US employment / GDP ratio and thus increased. The of the paper then measures productivity, states that it's gone up and segues into a lot of reasons why it thinks the increase in productivity is actually because of machines. Then they invent a calculation involving the trade deficit to determine the number of jobs lost by outsourcing (where one Chinese person buying a $5 million house/year in Cali "makes up for" losing 20 $50k/year jobs) and finish up with what can only be described as an unrelated whinge about US corporate tax rates (just in case you were left with any lingering doubts about whose side they're on). Authors: Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA. tl;dr some people use phony math to explain why it's wrong to point pitchforks at the 1%.
kafkaesq 10y ago
I should have known that it would be more chatter about machines making people obsolete. It has the potential to be a very vexing problem, actually. That may condemn literally hundreds of millions of people to poverty, feelings of uselessness (if not outright despair and depression). And very likely be contributing to higher suicide rates, among the newly obsolesced. In that vein, it seems rather callous to describe earnest attempts to get a handle on the problem as "chatter".

abrodersen 10y ago

Obviously, we should put them on the B Ark and send them to another planet.

jaclaz 10y ago
Did you consider that we would need to have scientists predict that the planet will be devoured by an enormous mutant star goat beforehand (or maybe a gigantic swarm of twelve foot piranha bees),and convince them about that didn't you? ;)
sevensor 10y ago
But our telephones would become unsanitary!
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  We are way, way too late for that. We solved that problem by making sure each phone is only used by one person. So even if people poke their grubby fingers at their phones for the entire time they are sitting on their toilets, there won't be a planet-wide epidemic of a phone-vectored disease.
Entangled 10y ago
Trimming the 10% at the top and the bottom on a yearly basis would provide a better outcome according to game theory.
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  You described US Education system.
VLM 10y ago
This is pretty much how coasties view middle America, and vice versa.
antod 10y ago
Weren't we already the result of someone else doing that?

shas3 10y ago

I'm sure there is a good critique of that Frey and Osborne paper. Epistemologically, it sounds weird to assign 'probabilities of automation.' I don't have the time to read the paper in detail, but here are a few things: 1. Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased. 2. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will we reach a point where it is cheaper to automate a job than hire a person? Think of non-forklift lifting/moving of heavy stuff, we don't really need people doing this manually, robots should be able to do it. But we see with the Boston Dynamics robots that we are many years or decades away from commoditizing lifting robots. 3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc).

Anderkent 10y ago
>3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc) Actually, those jobs are still there. The current useless class are the people who are not capable of holding a modern job. And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When you take away someone's ability to support themselves because there are new, more efficient ways of using the shared resources, they're entitled to compensation [1]; but as a society we don't have a good way of enforcing that. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  > supermarket cashiers Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers). [1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does
  - Anderkent 10y ago

dhuntermn 10y ago

what happens when human labor (and life) is cheaper than robotic output? storm the castle with a swarm of useless humans, or put your really expensive robot at risk?

binarymax 10y ago

I want to be like my dog, but smarter and with more freedom. Every day I look at the lazy beast and wonder at the simplicity of its existence. Give me that life and an allowance for supplies to create, eat, socialize, and travel and let me loose.

Ygg2 10y ago
Don't dogs have very little agency. They don't even decide when they get sprayed/neutered.
- binarymax 10y ago
  I said my dog :) She wasn't spayed, and in general has a pretty awesome life (for a dog).
- coldtea 10y ago
  OK, replace it with cats. Which decide everything.
  - Ygg2 10y ago
    Sure, but everyone wants to be a cat. Because a cat's the only cat who knows where it's at.
ryandvm 10y ago
This is the missing component of the Drake equation. The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death cycle...
- Houshalter 10y ago
  But if they have superior AI, what stops the AI from expanding outward instead? Such an advanced civilization has nothing to lose by sending a few robot colonists out through the galaxy.

charles-salvia 10y ago

Meh... the new in-demand job for "useless" people will be gathering all the training data to feed into TensorFlow.

rndmize 10y ago

Arguably, some of this is already happening. IMO there was a much better article a few months ago - https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/ https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

12bits 10y ago
thanks
mojomark 10y ago
Indeed - I'm only 50% through, but defibitely a MUCH more informed and insightful article already

charles-salvia 10y ago

I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full "general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite recent advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e. adding more columns to a matrix), we don't really have anything that even approaches an artificial general intelligence. What we do have is a suite of sophisticated statistical algorithms that basically perform regression using huge data sets. This often approximates some subset of what a general artifical intelligence could do for some use cases that mostly apply to recognizing fuzzy patterns. But it's not even close to approaching human-level intelligence. In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the "pattern recognition" aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity (apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to play Go.) I don't doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously threaten human usefulness/dignity, but I question the timeline of "decades away".

geforce 10y ago
For this reason, I wouldn't be surprised if AI actually generate more work, at least for most of our lifetime. People that will supervise and correct AI errors while/after they process data, while current jobs mostly stays "until the AI is ready to actually take over". If this makes you laugh, you have probably never worked in the public sector or big corps.
- charles-salvia 10y ago
  Yeah - see my half-joke comment below
- devonkim 10y ago
  The problem is that the financial performance and massive inertia of these organizations are becoming such financial liabilities that our economies will be held back by organizational / cultural and technical debt at the same time in these organizations. I've been observing the trend for the past decade where the top tech companies are accelerating in output while most of the large institutions are falling further and further behind. Intel can keep pushing all the way to the theoretical limits of silicon for transistor size, but the economic costs including just sheer interest on fab facilities alone of getting there would bankrupt the company or hurt its credit rating. To put it into a more concrete analogy, Google is putting out autonomous cars when tons of companies are celebrating releasing the Model T or are still currently developing it with massive delays and cost overruns. Meanwhile, much of the appetite for government spending is dwindling for various reasons and this will cause a lot of strife that hurts already-slow moving organizations. Furthermore, brand recognition by the current generation of entrepreneurs for old hat technology companies is looking absolutely horrific. The next Fortune 500 CEOs 30 years from now are likely in their 30s or 40s now and they're well aware of the lack of compelling vision by so-called "technology" companies that are really just technology re-sellers and are thus unsuitable partners for increasingly tech-reliant businesses (the few that don't have such plans may be so clueless they won't matter).

ar15saveslives 10y ago

> Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning, followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. That's already the case, imo.

mattlevan 10y ago
Agreed. It'd be quite difficult to measure whether or not someone learns something new, anyway, because of the variety of things available to learn (large and small). If we're talking about learning entirely new skills, though, yea, obviously a cashier will probably not need to learn any significant new skills over the course of their career. As always, people who do make learning new things a part of their life's rituals will generally be more successful than those who do not. Nice username, by the way.

mojomark 10y ago

Of course automation will inevitably be capable of displacing all human acts (jobs and art). The author concludes with the same tired, naiive and unsatisfactory outlook: 'you don't need worry about it because robots will just kill off humans'. However, it seems obvious that humanity will handle this like many cultures have - by choice. Just like some people chose not to eat GM food, and others (Amish) generally elect not to use electricity, humans too will reach a point where they will simply choose to either accept that their lives are 100% sustained by autonomy or, live a life free of AI-generated products (i.e. food, services, art, etc).

kbos87 10y ago
I'm curious to see how long it will take for the world to experience any meaningful kind of pushback against automation or AI. Today, I feel like all I see are a dwindling number of people saying they'd "rather deal with a real person", and a growing number of people who come close to fetishizing automation. Maybe once Uber decides to flip the switch on all of the drivers who are now dependent on them for some if not all of their income, we'll see people in the streets vandalizing and otherwise circumventing empty self driving vehicles.
- mojomark 10y ago
  Honestly, like you point out, I think it's happening at micro-levels already. Certainly entire societies have voluntarily cut themselves off largelt from technology altogether - not just Amish, but modern off-grid people as well. However, just like some "bush people" will bend the rules and return to modern technology in diar situations (e.g. they need an insulin shot), I'd bet dollars to donuts that medical needs will drive many situations where self-declared "AI-free" people will opt for an AI product, since there are certain to be many AI-generated medical treatments currently out of the reach of limited human brains to develop.

sebringj 10y ago

This is short-term pessimism, inline with the common dystopian future of sci-fi. It is really difficult to predict human behaviors and technology in the long term. Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen. Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekinetic so then we get the neural internet from that. We would actually be less divided, more connected and more productive as a human race. Our current sense of self is too selfish and our intellect too limited. I'm sure it would be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case so everyone could make better decisions, not just about themselves but about humanity, etc. because they could perceive things at a grander scale.

shas3 10y ago
I think this is already happening. In fact most AI pessimists don't consider that "man + machine >> machine." Consider chess. Kasparov's defeat happened in mid-1990s. Machine is considered > man. Yet, in freestyle chess, where players are allowed to consult machines, we have achieved ever greater heights of performance. In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better. Similar things will happen in Go, Poker, etc. The handicap of not using a computer to inform your moves exists to make things more competitive, it doesn't mean that we are worse off! Taking this further, most technology we use daily (word processors, email, the Internet, etc.) are enhancements of the man+machine organism and enhance our performance as well as the 'machine''s.
- sebringj 10y ago
  Yah I think so too. Super Tangent warning: I recently saw the documentary on Koko the Gorilla and was amazed at her emotional intelligence and communication skills. Why not integrate AI into other animals besides humans?
  - sebringj 10y ago
    One more tangent: The perception of time would be very different if we were highly integrated into machines right? What if you could perceive things at 1000 times the normal human?

Animats 10y ago

This has already happened. That's why Trump won. Check out Detroit or the Rust Belt, or most towns under 5,000 people not near a major population center.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
I disagree. It isn't really that folks don't have their old job. With that job went their livelihoods. Houses, jobs, medical insurance. Bills get late and suddenly finding food becomes an issue. Others just have very stagnant wages, so they work harder but can't stretch their paycheck as far anymore. Do you think Trump would have still been elected if we had a proper safety net and social support for folks?
- laughfactory 10y ago
  This is so true. As someone who's had the misfortune to be on unemployment twice in my career, and food stamps once, I can tell you our "safety net" is bullshit. Unemployment maxes out at $450/week and takes months for the checks to start arriving. Try making ends meet in that scenario, and better hope you get a couple months of severance. Food stamps work fairly well, but you've got still got the slow and inefficient government albatross in the mix. Long story short: we spend a ludicrous amount of money on a safety net which provides zero safety for anyone.

ideonexus 10y ago

This is the most fascinating quote for me. If corporations and nations are entities capable of owning things, could we give such power to software/algorithms? How would that work? As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. Human law already recognizes intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as “legal persons.” Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to algorithms. An algorithm could then own a transportation empire or a venture-capital fund without having to obey the wishes of any human master. Before dismissing the idea, remember that most of our planet is already legally owned by non-human intersubjective entities, namely nations and corporations. Indeed, 5,000 years ago much of Sumer was owned by imaginary gods such as Enki and Inanna. If gods can possess land and employ people, why not algorithms?

pasquinelli 10y ago
Algorithms require hardware to run on, so they'll have all their assets drained away from them in the former of rent to the landlord, that is, the person who owns the hardware they run on.
- ideonexus 10y ago
  Thinking out-loud in terms of a corporation. The owners are the landlord for the corporation, but that corporation is it's own legal entity. Owners come and go, but that corporate entity remains and insulates the owners from many legal and financial repercussions of the company's actions. It's a similar thing with countries. I'm not personally held responsible for the actions of the United States or the Town in which I dwell, but I am one of the landlords for those entities. I think the question here is whether there are advantages to making algorithms legal entities similar to our other communal legal entities. It's a radical idea, but so is UBI and some other suggestions for mitigating the obsolescence of many human being as a result of automation.

markvdb 10y ago

If you want to see what technology and automation do, and early ideas of how to support the "useless" class, don't look at California. Look at places like Switzerland, Scandinavia and Belgium. The wage cost pressure is just pricing low productivity work out of the market there more quickly than elsewhere. A taxi in the valley is cheap. A taxi in any of these? Rather more expensive... Jobs being replaced with technology? Government policy trying to do something about it? Keep an eye on what happens in these countries...

unityByFreedom 10y ago

> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40." I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education. Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existence here and should continue to be passed on to as many people as we can. I find the excitement for UBI concerning. People seem to have already tossed up their hands and said, "well, I'll be useless in the future, I guess I can't work now!". Meanwhile, Mike Rowe has been saying for years that there are unfulfilled blue collar jobs. Our culture's problem is not that machines will take over or that schools are failing to educate students. It's that we don't find enough value in the contributions that we do make. It's okay to not be a successful tech founder. Everyone is useful in some way or another.

dantheman 10y ago
I think you'd find very few republicans favoring UBI...
- twinkletwinkle 10y ago
  Actually lots of them do, because they see it as a way to remove "entitlements". Delete food stamps, delete welfare, delete all aspects of the social safety net, and implement a simple UBI. It's the same regressive strategy as "do your taxes on a postcard". Treat every equally, not equitably.
- unityByFreedom 10y ago
  You're thinking of the wrong generation. Libertarians support it. They are one option for a future Republican platform. The tech generation's wealthy view UBI as a way to simplify the tax code, thus saving money. UBI would cause inflation and lower the lower class. Their buying power would eventually be worth nothing in a capitalist society. One couldn't expect the government to appropriately increase UBI over time. Stay in school, kids. There's no future where you don't need to do work in order to have the lifestyle you want.

davidivadavid 10y ago

Am I the only person who finds the whole concept of judging people as useful or useless completely nonsensical? So, machines will be able to perform jobs that are currently done by people. How does that make people useless? It assumes there's some sort of preordained, global utility function. "Oh, your job as a cab driver has been automated. You're useless." Uh, what? Useless to what? To whom? Humans define what is useful or not. They're certainly not going to will themselves into uselessness, curl up into a ball and die. The idea that humans can be useless is complete nonsense to me. It's something akin to a type error. And I have a hard time understanding why that meme keeps being repeated and debated without anyone pointing this out.

ninju 10y ago
I believe the designation of the people as useless is based on the fact that part of our value to society is measured by the utility that provide to society and with continuing automation of human tasks it will be harder for us to find way for all the humans in the world to provide utility at the same level as they are now. Now I agree with you that this (valuing people by the utility they provide) is a shallow and incorrect way of measuring a human being's value but it is true.
- davidivadavid 10y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I think I'm talking about something slightly different. First, I think that what you're pointing out in your first paragraph, while wildly accepted, is completely unproven. Second, I don't think valuing people by utility is necessarily shallow, but the way I worded my original post might lead you to believe that. Here's what I'm getting at (and failing horribly, because I'm too lazy to think it through): many articles have been written that seem to outline scenarios where runaway automation leads to a situation where you have some sort of closed loop automated economy where humans have no role to play, thus making humanity "useless." I think that's hogwash. It presupposes that the goal of humanity is to perform a certain number of tasks that happen to be the tasks we currently perform. If we can find something to substitute that performs the same tasks, our goal is accomplished, and thus humanity is "useless." That's when I generally go: that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

accordionclown 10y ago

i'm deeply offended by an attitude that leads to word-choices such as "useless" and "bums" and "superfluous" in regard to human beings who simply do not have jobs. are people really "useless" if they do not provide labor to make rich people richer? if the economic system can't make a profit off your presence, are you "superfluous"? is this the mentality that would cause our "leaders" to abandon health-care for the large majority of our population who will soon be unable to afford insurance? and please don't tell me that a _job_ is necessary to make people feel useful. many wealthy people seem to be able to do nothing productive at all, without having doubt about their right to exist.