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People don't need to work at 9-5 jobs to be happy, so I don't worry about automation from an existential point of view. There are numerous retired people who ca

People don't need to work at 9-5 jobs to be happy, so I don't worry about automation from an existential point of view. There are numerous retired people who can attest to this. Now, many of them say they value their retirements precisely because they worked for decades in pursuit of retirement, but this idea is contradicted by the Ancient Greeks. Athens had an extremely high slave to citizen ratio. I've read that the average citizen (a more exclusive category then than now but still) owned 7 slaves. The result of this was that most privileged Athenians didn't really have to work. Their days consisted of haggling and gossiping in the market, working out in the gymnasium, attending lectures and getting drunk with friends at symposiums (house parties). It's what they were used to. Now, will the average citizen enjoy such a life in a fully automated world or will they just live in perpetual poverty buffered only by barely sufficient handouts of food and other basic goods needed for survival? That's a more pressing question.

3pt14159 10y ago
There is a difference between existing without end and self-actualization. Greek citizens were the dominant class of the dominant civilization. They have more in common with software developers than with welfare or disability recipients. I don't think it's all gloom and doom ahead, but I do think we're going to need to substantially up the intelligence of the average human if we want to exist in a future that doesn't look like constant monster truck shows and house parties.
- IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
  > They have more in common with software developers than with welfare or disability recipients. That was the point of the argument: Will people be the winners and robots the "slaves", or will there be only a few capital owners owning (the fruits of the labors of) not a handful of slaves each, but millions of those modern "slaves" and most people none?
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    Well there also is the other aspect of personal fulfillment that I think the parent was trying to touch on. I personally have plenty of creative things I'd love to do if I wouldn't have to worry about money. For example I'd love to do significantly more ceramics work, build a video game, explore some glass blowing and maybe even get a economics degree for fun. Others might get depressed and just watch reality TV all day or even develop a drug dependency. Our society is currently very much coupling self worth to career success.
    - TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
      Well our career success is kind of important. Healthcare isn't free, housing isn't free, and retirement is very, very expensive. Of course this lack of stability for the lower and middle classes would lead to depression.
      - ajmurmann 10y ago
        Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was assuming a scenario where machines automated most work away and our physical needs are taken care off by something like basic income guarantee and low prices due to automation.
    - mattnewton 10y ago
      I think it's the low socio-economic status that makes people less creative. It is exhausting and stressful to worry about money, and tv and drugs look a lot better to an exhausted and stressed person. I only have personal anecdotes for evidence of this theory though.
      - spiralx 10y ago
        Poverty has been shown to have a significant effect on IQ - about the same amount as alcoholism according to a study a few years ago: http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect-on-intelligence-2013-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect-on-intelligenc...
        10y ago
  - noobermin 10y ago
    You'd be surprised, you just described a world not far removed from reality today.
    - IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
      Uhm... I described an "either...or". So, which one? or do you mean one in which inequality already is a problem? Naturally. The question is if robots change it towards more inequality or less.
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      There is a big difference. In parts of the ancient world that had mass slavery, slaveholders needed their slaves to produce their wealth, so no matter how they oppressed them, there was a motivation to keep them alive. In the feudal system, lords needed their peasants to produce their wealth, so no matter how they oppressed them, there was a motivation to keep them alive, strong and in growing numbers. In the industrial age, capitalists needed their workers to produce their wealth, so no matter how they tried to oppress them, there was a motivation to keep them from striking and even more so, actively consuming to stimulate the rest of economy. In the new age, whoever (or whatever) is at the top won't need most of humans in any way whatsoever.
      - visarga 10y ago
        As long as they only encourage the use of contraception, and have no plan of killing already born people, it's a good idea to lower the total population of our planet.
- welanes 10y ago
  If production is taken care of by robots, what's left is consumption and creation. The "average" human will be happy to consume endlessly as the proliferation of click-bait and video games shows. And for those with an inclination to create, what better than all the time in the world to pursue a talent and bask in the talent of others? For the vast majority of people, work provides a means, not a meaning. A world without cubicles ought to reduce rather than increase nihilism levels worldwide, so I imagine self-actualization won't be the primary concern. Health and basic income will be our major challenges ahead.
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    "The "average" human will be happy to consume endlessly as the proliferation of click-bait and video games shows." So it seems, but I really doubt it. They are not really happy doing it, they just kind of gave up on success in the real world, and go for the cheap distraction/virtual success. And I think a good percentage of them would start become really productive, once they don't feel forced to be "productive" in a way and place they actually hate and unfortunately started to hate "being productive"..
    - Atropos 10y ago
      I am not so sure. For me at least, it was much more difficult to be in the unstructured university environment than having a job. Routines make life easier for me, I like having micro-accomplishments every day in working life etc... I know many people are probably different, but still, a life of creative work is not so easy. The tortured writer or the procrastinating PhD student is basically a cultural cliché at this point, as well as the 3rd generation killing all the rich family wealth. If you gave me 100 million dollars right now, I have a real fear I would just waste my life doing nothing but hedonistic pleasure, while telling myself I'm still working on my next novel or political theory of justice or ...
  - novalis78 10y ago
    In a sense we already have 'a basic income'. It's called 'social welfare state' and causes innumerable individuals to migrate across the globe. With that come tectonic shifts in culture and (we shall see) a loss of a lot of factors that made these systems work in the first place. Not quite unlike Ancient Rome, which too had a sort of basic income, triggering massive changes to its initial fabric of success. Don't get me wrong, I could see capitalism's endgame to be a form of utopia but I'd be curious to know how something like that would actually work and not destroy the generating forces of abundance unless it was introduced gloabally at once and / or in some form organically, I.e in a sustainable way that will not dislodge half the population of the planet.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Disclaimer: although I'm a libertarian, I see no reason why technology couldn't help us live in a world with no work at all. I believe this is a good and noble goal for humanity to have. Philosophy question: does adversity build character? In my personal experience, and looking at all the people I've encountered in life, for the most part it's quite difficult to self-actualize. If you had given me a million dollars as a 20-year-old, you could have come back a month later and I would have a bunch of crap I didn't need and would be a worse person for it, not a better person. They killed Socrates. And they killed him because he didn't fit in. He was actually thinking for himself and asking difficult questions. One of the reasons the word "democracy" had such a bad reputation over the centuries was all the examples of the Greeks acting like mindless morons. The Greeks were conquered. And their conquerors, the Romans, were quite concerned for many decades that the Greek influence was destroying their way of life. You can read Romans complaining that other Romans were growing soft and decadent by doing things like sleeping on a bed (instead of the ground). Once a sufficiently violent and organized group of people came along, Greek society was absorbed and diffused throughout western civilization. Greece was no more. It was Rome -- with a Greek influence. Living in a world of leisure, thought, and self-actualization is a noble goal, but it's not a goal without a lot of danger attached to it. We need to tread carefully here and avoid at all cost making simplistic arguments.
  - RobertoG 10y ago
    "Philosophy question: does adversity build character? [..]. If you had given me a million dollars as a 20-year-old,[..] I would have a bunch of crap I didn't need and would be a worse person for it, not a better person." Not that I disagree, but there is the other side of the coin that we don't hear frequently: does adversity destroy character? Because I'm sure we can all think of more than one example.
    - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
      I completely agree. How about this formulation: is stress, whether internal or external, required for learning? My answer is yes. With no stress there is no desire for change. The best case is the self-actualized person, where they form their own goals and provide internal stress in order to learn more and reach them. But even then, I think we can all think of folks with so much internal drive that they distorted their personality.
Humjob 10y ago
I think you mean a high slave to citizen ratio.
throwaway91111 10y ago
Of course, you do need a 9-5 job, because you moved to the city for your last job because that's the only area that could employ you, and you need that job to afford the apartment you got in the area with employment. My significant other works part time and would have to move back home, basically, to afford basic shelter and food. And it's not like the productivity gains are going to leave management--literally a laughable concept. Finally, over 50% of retirees retired earlier than expected (which is not to say they dipped into retirement early; I have no idea about that stat, but IIRC it's even a higher rate). You can't not plan for retirement and be rational. Retirement itself is a modern concept to encourage older workers to leave their jobs to younger workers. It's a 20th century invention. Humans have, for the vast majority of existence, worked until death.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  I think that's his "more pressing question" that he ended with. All of the reasons you gave for why people need 9-5 jobs have to do with the distribution of the productivity gains from automation. If you fix the problem where management makes 99% of the returns from automation and workers make 1%, then the other problems with automation go away.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    Err, I guess my point was more that retirement and leisure ARE the problems in themselves. Even if we figure out how to distribute the gains better, we are still in a world where humans have lost value. Are we prepared for a world of leisure? Will people WANT this world?
    - forgotmysn 10y ago
      Are people ready to stop flipping burgers? Yes, I think they are. Are people ready to stop pursuing their passions? No, and I don't think they ever will.
      - visarga 10y ago
st3v3r 10y ago
"People don't need to work at 9-5 jobs to be happy" I'm guessing it's going to be extremely difficult to be happy when you're struggling to afford food or keep a roof over your family's head.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ivanhoe 10y ago
  If we get in position where majority struggles to afford food or pay a rent then market will shrink, no one will buy anything and corporations will quickly find themself out of business. You need a middle class (or at least above the poverty line people) to consume your products, otherwise it doesn't make sense to use robots for mass production in a first place. You need a mass market for the mass production, so government and corporations will have to find a way to funnel enough money to people so they can continue to spend it and keep the economy going.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    I really do not trust that line of thinking.
eksemplar 10y ago
I work in a digitization departement in a multiplicity, which translates to me doing almost nothing but replacing jobs with software automation. Things like going through 500.000 cases containing multiple documents and sorting them correctly can be done with Azure services in 5 hours after a 14 month algorithm training period. It takes 5 people working 37 hours a week 3-5 months to achieve the same result and they will have a larger margin of error than the machine. I know this, because we did the same process as a competition between man and machine. Getting back to the point, however, everyone loves my department. Part of this is because people aren't really fired due to automation, we solve the freed up resources by not hiring people when someone retires, but the main reason is because we automate boring stuff. Nobody wants to sort through 500.000 cases manually, so you're absolutely correct, automation can free up humanity. Some people will spend their time being productive, but the truth is you don't have to. That is, if we manage to take back ownership from companies. Today western society is build around income tax, and as long as that doesn't change, we're not heading for freedom but for oblivion.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Could you detail what type of processing are you doing to the documents? Merely OCR or some type of NLP?
  - eksemplar 10y ago
    Mainly OCR. We were looking for cases where a specific set of law required forms were missing. It took 14 days to train the algorithm to recognize these forms, and maybe 1,5 months to learn how to use the algorithm and the Azure cloud. I can't give you the exact technical details because I'm not the CS guy, but I can tel you that we used Googles OCR and a common tree algorithm suggested by "the internet" for machine learning. The machine vastly outperformed humans in most cases, especially with 50+ page compilations, but got beat when documents had been scanned extremely poorly.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  >That is, if we manage to take back ownership from companies. Today western society is build around income tax, and as long as that doesn't change, we're not heading for freedom but for oblivion. I don't understand. Ownership of what do you want us to take back and who is us?
CPLX 10y ago
Another take on this, of course, is that 1/7th of the society were the idle rich and the rest were slaves, which may have far more in common with the present day than you are letting on. The only way your analysis makes even a little sense is to view the slaves as non human. Which conveniently ignores the entire thing everyone is actually afraid of, which is concentration of ownership of productive capital.

3pt14159 10y ago

There is a difference between existing without end and self-actualization. Greek citizens were the dominant class of the dominant civilization. They have more in common with software developers than with welfare or disability recipients. I don't think it's all gloom and doom ahead, but I do think we're going to need to substantially up the intelligence of the average human if we want to exist in a future that doesn't look like constant monster truck shows and house parties.

IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
> They have more in common with software developers than with welfare or disability recipients. That was the point of the argument: Will people be the winners and robots the "slaves", or will there be only a few capital owners owning (the fruits of the labors of) not a handful of slaves each, but millions of those modern "slaves" and most people none?
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Well there also is the other aspect of personal fulfillment that I think the parent was trying to touch on. I personally have plenty of creative things I'd love to do if I wouldn't have to worry about money. For example I'd love to do significantly more ceramics work, build a video game, explore some glass blowing and maybe even get a economics degree for fun. Others might get depressed and just watch reality TV all day or even develop a drug dependency. Our society is currently very much coupling self worth to career success.
  - TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
    Well our career success is kind of important. Healthcare isn't free, housing isn't free, and retirement is very, very expensive. Of course this lack of stability for the lower and middle classes would lead to depression.
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was assuming a scenario where machines automated most work away and our physical needs are taken care off by something like basic income guarantee and low prices due to automation.
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    I think it's the low socio-economic status that makes people less creative. It is exhausting and stressful to worry about money, and tv and drugs look a lot better to an exhausted and stressed person. I only have personal anecdotes for evidence of this theory though.
    - spiralx 10y ago
      Poverty has been shown to have a significant effect on IQ - about the same amount as alcoholism according to a study a few years ago: http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect-on-intelligence-2013-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect-on-intelligenc...
      - 10y ago
- noobermin 10y ago
  You'd be surprised, you just described a world not far removed from reality today.
  - IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
    Uhm... I described an "either...or". So, which one? or do you mean one in which inequality already is a problem? Naturally. The question is if robots change it towards more inequality or less.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    There is a big difference. In parts of the ancient world that had mass slavery, slaveholders needed their slaves to produce their wealth, so no matter how they oppressed them, there was a motivation to keep them alive. In the feudal system, lords needed their peasants to produce their wealth, so no matter how they oppressed them, there was a motivation to keep them alive, strong and in growing numbers. In the industrial age, capitalists needed their workers to produce their wealth, so no matter how they tried to oppress them, there was a motivation to keep them from striking and even more so, actively consuming to stimulate the rest of economy. In the new age, whoever (or whatever) is at the top won't need most of humans in any way whatsoever.
    - visarga 10y ago
      As long as they only encourage the use of contraception, and have no plan of killing already born people, it's a good idea to lower the total population of our planet.
welanes 10y ago
If production is taken care of by robots, what's left is consumption and creation. The "average" human will be happy to consume endlessly as the proliferation of click-bait and video games shows. And for those with an inclination to create, what better than all the time in the world to pursue a talent and bask in the talent of others? For the vast majority of people, work provides a means, not a meaning. A world without cubicles ought to reduce rather than increase nihilism levels worldwide, so I imagine self-actualization won't be the primary concern. Health and basic income will be our major challenges ahead.
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  "The "average" human will be happy to consume endlessly as the proliferation of click-bait and video games shows." So it seems, but I really doubt it. They are not really happy doing it, they just kind of gave up on success in the real world, and go for the cheap distraction/virtual success. And I think a good percentage of them would start become really productive, once they don't feel forced to be "productive" in a way and place they actually hate and unfortunately started to hate "being productive"..
  - Atropos 10y ago
    I am not so sure. For me at least, it was much more difficult to be in the unstructured university environment than having a job. Routines make life easier for me, I like having micro-accomplishments every day in working life etc... I know many people are probably different, but still, a life of creative work is not so easy. The tortured writer or the procrastinating PhD student is basically a cultural cliché at this point, as well as the 3rd generation killing all the rich family wealth. If you gave me 100 million dollars right now, I have a real fear I would just waste my life doing nothing but hedonistic pleasure, while telling myself I'm still working on my next novel or political theory of justice or ...
- novalis78 10y ago
  In a sense we already have 'a basic income'. It's called 'social welfare state' and causes innumerable individuals to migrate across the globe. With that come tectonic shifts in culture and (we shall see) a loss of a lot of factors that made these systems work in the first place. Not quite unlike Ancient Rome, which too had a sort of basic income, triggering massive changes to its initial fabric of success. Don't get me wrong, I could see capitalism's endgame to be a form of utopia but I'd be curious to know how something like that would actually work and not destroy the generating forces of abundance unless it was introduced gloabally at once and / or in some form organically, I.e in a sustainable way that will not dislodge half the population of the planet.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Disclaimer: although I'm a libertarian, I see no reason why technology couldn't help us live in a world with no work at all. I believe this is a good and noble goal for humanity to have. Philosophy question: does adversity build character? In my personal experience, and looking at all the people I've encountered in life, for the most part it's quite difficult to self-actualize. If you had given me a million dollars as a 20-year-old, you could have come back a month later and I would have a bunch of crap I didn't need and would be a worse person for it, not a better person. They killed Socrates. And they killed him because he didn't fit in. He was actually thinking for himself and asking difficult questions. One of the reasons the word "democracy" had such a bad reputation over the centuries was all the examples of the Greeks acting like mindless morons. The Greeks were conquered. And their conquerors, the Romans, were quite concerned for many decades that the Greek influence was destroying their way of life. You can read Romans complaining that other Romans were growing soft and decadent by doing things like sleeping on a bed (instead of the ground). Once a sufficiently violent and organized group of people came along, Greek society was absorbed and diffused throughout western civilization. Greece was no more. It was Rome -- with a Greek influence. Living in a world of leisure, thought, and self-actualization is a noble goal, but it's not a goal without a lot of danger attached to it. We need to tread carefully here and avoid at all cost making simplistic arguments.
- RobertoG 10y ago
  "Philosophy question: does adversity build character? [..]. If you had given me a million dollars as a 20-year-old,[..] I would have a bunch of crap I didn't need and would be a worse person for it, not a better person." Not that I disagree, but there is the other side of the coin that we don't hear frequently: does adversity destroy character? Because I'm sure we can all think of more than one example.
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    I completely agree. How about this formulation: is stress, whether internal or external, required for learning? My answer is yes. With no stress there is no desire for change. The best case is the self-actualized person, where they form their own goals and provide internal stress in order to learn more and reach them. But even then, I think we can all think of folks with so much internal drive that they distorted their personality.

Humjob 10y ago

I think you mean a high slave to citizen ratio.

throwaway91111 10y ago

Of course, you do need a 9-5 job, because you moved to the city for your last job because that's the only area that could employ you, and you need that job to afford the apartment you got in the area with employment. My significant other works part time and would have to move back home, basically, to afford basic shelter and food. And it's not like the productivity gains are going to leave management--literally a laughable concept. Finally, over 50% of retirees retired earlier than expected (which is not to say they dipped into retirement early; I have no idea about that stat, but IIRC it's even a higher rate). You can't not plan for retirement and be rational. Retirement itself is a modern concept to encourage older workers to leave their jobs to younger workers. It's a 20th century invention. Humans have, for the vast majority of existence, worked until death.

nostrademons 10y ago
I think that's his "more pressing question" that he ended with. All of the reasons you gave for why people need 9-5 jobs have to do with the distribution of the productivity gains from automation. If you fix the problem where management makes 99% of the returns from automation and workers make 1%, then the other problems with automation go away.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  Err, I guess my point was more that retirement and leisure ARE the problems in themselves. Even if we figure out how to distribute the gains better, we are still in a world where humans have lost value. Are we prepared for a world of leisure? Will people WANT this world?
  - forgotmysn 10y ago
    Are people ready to stop flipping burgers? Yes, I think they are. Are people ready to stop pursuing their passions? No, and I don't think they ever will.
    - visarga 10y ago

st3v3r 10y ago

"People don't need to work at 9-5 jobs to be happy" I'm guessing it's going to be extremely difficult to be happy when you're struggling to afford food or keep a roof over your family's head.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ivanhoe 10y ago
If we get in position where majority struggles to afford food or pay a rent then market will shrink, no one will buy anything and corporations will quickly find themself out of business. You need a middle class (or at least above the poverty line people) to consume your products, otherwise it doesn't make sense to use robots for mass production in a first place. You need a mass market for the mass production, so government and corporations will have to find a way to funnel enough money to people so they can continue to spend it and keep the economy going.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  I really do not trust that line of thinking.

eksemplar 10y ago

I work in a digitization departement in a multiplicity, which translates to me doing almost nothing but replacing jobs with software automation. Things like going through 500.000 cases containing multiple documents and sorting them correctly can be done with Azure services in 5 hours after a 14 month algorithm training period. It takes 5 people working 37 hours a week 3-5 months to achieve the same result and they will have a larger margin of error than the machine. I know this, because we did the same process as a competition between man and machine. Getting back to the point, however, everyone loves my department. Part of this is because people aren't really fired due to automation, we solve the freed up resources by not hiring people when someone retires, but the main reason is because we automate boring stuff. Nobody wants to sort through 500.000 cases manually, so you're absolutely correct, automation can free up humanity. Some people will spend their time being productive, but the truth is you don't have to. That is, if we manage to take back ownership from companies. Today western society is build around income tax, and as long as that doesn't change, we're not heading for freedom but for oblivion.

raverbashing 10y ago
Could you detail what type of processing are you doing to the documents? Merely OCR or some type of NLP?
- eksemplar 10y ago
  Mainly OCR. We were looking for cases where a specific set of law required forms were missing. It took 14 days to train the algorithm to recognize these forms, and maybe 1,5 months to learn how to use the algorithm and the Azure cloud. I can't give you the exact technical details because I'm not the CS guy, but I can tel you that we used Googles OCR and a common tree algorithm suggested by "the internet" for machine learning. The machine vastly outperformed humans in most cases, especially with 50+ page compilations, but got beat when documents had been scanned extremely poorly.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
>That is, if we manage to take back ownership from companies. Today western society is build around income tax, and as long as that doesn't change, we're not heading for freedom but for oblivion. I don't understand. Ownership of what do you want us to take back and who is us?

CPLX 10y ago

Another take on this, of course, is that 1/7th of the society were the idle rich and the rest were slaves, which may have far more in common with the present day than you are letting on. The only way your analysis makes even a little sense is to view the slaves as non human. Which conveniently ignores the entire thing everyone is actually afraid of, which is concentration of ownership of productive capital.