19 ms·

In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Marketers

105 points by sndean 9y ago

sverige 9y ago
What is great about being a human is that, even if the premise turns out to be true, 1) I will never be a marketer, and yet 2) I will not starve. I don't have to be smarter than a robot, I just have to be smarter than the person who made the robot.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  I don't think I follow any of that.
  - qbrass 9y ago
    They're going to eat the person who made the robot.
    - sverige 9y ago
      I think you both should design robots.
- pixl97 9y ago
  If you were smarter than the person that made the robot, you'd have just made the damn robot yourself. Also, make sure your robot maker isn't making kill-bots.
  - sverige 9y ago
    The unstated premise in your argument is that a smart person would make a robot if they had the ability. But what if a person were so smart that they could foresee that making the robot would be detrimental in the long term? And then you answer your own premise by pointing out the obvious reason it would be detrimental: kill-bots. We all know that is where it is headed. It is unchangeable human nature.
swampthinker 9y ago
Re: The ATM point. The evidence they cite is this graph [1]. I'm not sure that this is a compelling graph. Sure the number of tellers has been growing, but it's been very slow growth. Meanwhile, ATM's have been skyrocketing in popularity. One could easily argue that teller job creation was heavily impacted by ATM's, but offset by overall population growth. [1]http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/ http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...
- dboreham 9y ago
  People use less cash now so there's that too.
- fwn 9y ago
  I don't know how it works in the US but in the German retail banking market there is only one clearly superior pathway to compete and this is through abolishing the banks local presence all together. Our credit unions are not competitive and will have to merge away into a direct bank at some point. They currently survive on path dependencies. Germany is a cash heavy market & free universal ATMs are omnipresent. Ironically mostly through credit unions.
m52go 9y ago
"but but there is NO job humans can do that a robot cannot do" this is the gist of the reactions i got to a comment i made on an article on a similar topic here a few days ago. this article better articulated what i was trying to say there: But machines are not effective at persuading, at developing advertising campaigns, at branding products or corporations, or at greeting you at the door in a charming manner, as is done so often in restaurants, even if you order on an iPad. Those activities will remain the province of human beings for a long time to come. people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion). we're still weird, unpredictable creatures who eat, sleep, poop, and work in a 4-dimensional world...so there will ALWAYS be a human component to delivering products and services. even if a good bit of the designing, building, and distribution of these services may be automated.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion). Well, it's being done to increase profit. That's a bit different.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    Even if we eliminated money, we would be automating work to benefit us. That's the root motivation.
  - rexpop 9y ago
    Right. As we accelerate, the divergence from shareholders' desires and consumers' increases.
  - anotherbrownguy 9y ago
    How is that a bad thing? Why would you not want to increase profit?
    - 9y ago
jon_richards 9y ago
I fundamentally disagree with this article. Automation hits some places earlier than others, but I think "marketing" isn't as far away as they think. We're starting to develop bots that can make puns, text to speech that sounds human, etc. What happens when bots can pass the Turing Test? When they know everything about the trends you follow, finances you have, products you've bought, shows you watch, places you go, jokes you enjoy? Marketing will start becoming "personalised", and I don't think humans will be behind the controls for long after that. Humans won't be marketing, they will be marketed. Humans will be a novelty, like a hand-carved chair or a horse-drawn carriage. Probably worse than the human-free product, but worth paying a bit extra for the idea of it.
- echelon 9y ago
  > Humans will be a novelty, like a hand-carved chair or a horse-drawn carriage. This is the good outcome. In a post-intelligence world, humans will be cute zoo animals. We might have freedom, but I can't imagine us having any measure of real control. Even if modern society continues, it will be a cordoned off bubble, a "human preserve". If we're unruly and give the robots too much trouble, they could just dispense with us. Or dumb us down and make us tame--domesticate us, like animals.
  - EdSharkey 9y ago
    Since around 2004, seemingly all additional compute the human race had developed for itself has been put towards gathering and processing telemetry for the purposes of marketing and control. AI as a technology is simply more horsepower and automation for surveillance. I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon. Not like this is news, but the end of world has always been right around the corner - most everything is broken here and death is everywhere. The strangest thing to me about comments like this is the assumption that a nefarious super-intelligence would stop at subjugating us. If a super-intelligence was evil and had power to act, it would just kill us all and sterilize the planet, given the chance. I just don't believe we have the ability to make a standalone computer super-intelligence - we universally suck at coding at-scale. Don't get me wrong, the AI and machine learning algorithms we have are amazing, but we're not going to get a being out of those experiments. What I'm worried about is humans: humans continuing to turn tech against other humans for surveillance and telemetry in support of totalitarianism. And, I'm worried about humans augmenting their brains with compute. If there ever will be an evil super-intelligence, I wager it will be a (meta-)man.
mirimir 9y ago
For the model presented, I'd say more like "customer service". But then, for whom? For each other, I guess. In that world, I'd rather become a human-assisted robot. Potentially immortal, even.
Klockan 9y ago
Programmers programming AI's to automate marketing will definitely have a job longer than marketers.
unabst 9y ago
The robot economy is not a jobs issue. It is a wealth issue. An entrepreneur's primary function is to create jobs. Every job ever created that wasn't made by the government was a direct or indirect consequence of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is thriving. A business's primary function is to hire people. Any large business that isn't firing is hiring. And public businesses need to grow to stay in business. 75% of Google's income is from ads. There couldn't be an easier service to automate and robotize than an ad system. Yet, not only are they hiring, but they're looking to spend this money in completely unrelated areas. They're literally starting from "A" and going down the alphabet. Entrepreneurs and businesses will always look to automate. But they will also always look to hire. Elon Musk is partially responsible for this AI job paranoia, but not only is Tesla not fully robotized they have a shortage of workers and they're hiring like mad [1]. Jobs are about skills, and yes, if you're doing a job that is a candidate for new methods of automation - like driving - your job is in danger. But unless you're only capable of doing one job, all you'll do is find another. You're not a "robot". And even if humanoids begin to take over more human work, entrepreneurs and businesses will simply hire more and hire them all. We will work alongside our robotic co-workers, and the economy (should) just expand to meet our collective output. But herein lies the real issue. Robots will not be owned by robots. They will be owned by people. And if robots are productive, they'll become the new real estate. A robot with a job will be like a house that pays rent. Bill Gates recently came out with a robot tax video [2]. But taxes are not enough to equalize the wealth gap. It hasn't worked for humans, and it won't work for bots. Not only money, but ownership needs to be redistributed. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a solution for this old problem either. So what if you lost your job if you own two apartments that bring in a middle class wage? Replace apartments with robots. The Robot Economy is not about jobs. It's about wealth. --- [1] https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/ https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg
- grondilu 9y ago
  > An entrepreneur's primary function is to create jobs. [...] A business's primary function is to hire people. Where does that weird idea come from?
DrNuke 9y ago
Small services for local communities will not die, though. If no money circulates, we will go back to barter and communes.
- rosser 9y ago
  We won't go "back" to barter because, contrary to popular — and mistaken — belief, we didn't come from there. Go pick up a copy of "Debt: The First 5000 Years" for a complete defenestration of that tired trope.
godelski 9y ago
The author seems to miss a lot here. Sure, there will be industries that will follow the ATM model, but many more won't. I mean how do you miss cars? It is the most talked about industry to be disrupted by AI and there is no way it is going to create more jobs. Also, the author clearly misses Coke's marketing strategy. It is pretty well understood that Coke doesn't advertise to get people to buy their product. AI has been good at getting us to buy products. And I'm pretty sure AI will also get good at keeping us using products. Really it just comes off as naive and overly optimistic.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  there is no way it is going to create more jobs This seems like a crazy assertion to me. I think you're thinking very small and short-term, as in: 3mm people don't drive anymore for their job, so we have 3mm fewer jobs. In a world where no one drives, no one owns cars, they zip around in a global mesh that's tied together with all other forms of transport and logistics, which are also automated...how can we possibly predict what such a world will look like, and what new opportunities, lifestyles, and paradigm shifts will occur?
Animats 9y ago
One word: Amazon.
vinceguidry 9y ago
You can generalize this to: Someone still has to understand everything in order to make it actually useful for humans. You can build a robot to do work previously done by a human, but you can't make it actually understand when it needs to be working and on what. That would be an exponentially harder problem to make a computer solve. Making computers want interesting things is perhaps THE problem in artificial intelligence. If you can solve it, you've got AGI. You can hand a machine learning algorithm a very constrained environment and it can work out some basic goals, like making a high score go up. But increase the complexity of the environment and all of a sudden, the algorithm needs to learn how to simulate it, significantly ramping up the difficulty of what it has to do. Humans are going to start getting inexorably shifted out of things that humans really shouldn't be doing in the first place, to be replaced by the just-as-difficult task of commanding our new robot slaves. Maybe for a little while it'll be difficult for humans to find purchase in the brave new world, but the limitations of machines to literally read our brains and tell us what we want is going to quickly make themselves known and humans all over the world will take on the role of specifying the behavior of machines that are getting increasingly smarter. You're going to see the same sort of stratification of haves and have-nots you have now, I see little about the new production modes that's going to change the fundamentals of economics. But everybody is going to have more of it, because making things is going to get much, much easier, even easier than it is now, and it's already really easy.
ShirsenduK 9y ago
As the world goes more towards digital content, the more robots/AI/software will do the marketing. The growth of Facebook revenues is a clear indication that software is better at marketing than humans. They know which buttons to push and when to get the right response. They know you better than the marketing manager at company xyz. Marketing automation is already here and its only going to get bigger and better. The sales and marketing teams will shrink to 1-2 persons even for large corporations. They will make us more efficient.
- gottlos 9y ago
  While I dont disagree, I put it to you that 'clickbait' techniques are easily arrived at by iterative testing; but are poor outcomes for the long term. IE: I don't see an AI negotiating a multi year memorandum of understanding between companies based on "X did Y and you wont believe what happens next!" Those will make money; but will they just cause stagnation/niche specialized behaviours that have less benefit to society as a whole?
  - ShirsenduK 9y ago
    Marketing automation is not about clickbait but knowing who your users are, what are their biases and then showing you only that ad which will have a response and not show what won't work. Thereby, making $ spent on marketing more efficient. Companies are generally run by financials rather than societal benefit. I do not know whether that is a good thing or not, only future will tell. :)
paulus_magnus2 9y ago
tax advisors. marketing can be automated
neilwilson 9y ago
The bit everybody misses is that people still need something to do with their day. The problem is the wrong conception of what work actually is. Work is what you do with your day that you find enjoyable and that others consider useful. When that gets paid we call it a job. And that's it. Work is leisure you get paid to do. It's a social activity that furthers the cause of the group of humans engaged in it. If it isn't, then perhaps the system we've chosen to allocate work is broken rather than the concept of work. Perhaps we need a system that ensures there are always more jobs than people that want them, and that creates work and jobs based upon agreed social value. Which then forces the market sector to compete, which in turn forces market value to align properly with the social value we're after.
- stale2002 9y ago
  What if instead of having jobs, you just let people do whatever they want? If you want to work together with other people to do some goal, then do that. If you want to spend all your time watching movies or traveling or playing video games, then you could do that and zero of the "work" stuff. The mega rich already live in that world. They can choose to work, or not, and are generally able to do anything. I don't hear them complaining about how they are bored or need something to do with their life. Now imagine that everyone had the same resources as the mega rich do now.
  - neilwilson 9y ago
    If people can do whatever they want, does that include those running the robots? Because if I'm a robot operator and you can do whatever you want, then I know I'm not going to get anything of value from you. So why should I work beyond Tuesday to make stuff that you need to live? I may as well go home and be 'free'. Your money is literally worthless to me. We know what everybody doing what they want leads to. It leads to land redistribution and hyperinflation - as demonstrated in spades in Zimbabwe. Unless you are completely self-sufficient then you have to look at the systemic impact of your idea on everybody. Then you'll find it has a severe fallacy of composition in it. The mega rich get away with it simply because they have a slave class (the rest of us) to do their bidding. If you can do whatever you want, who is the slave class working more than they need to to service your needs? To maintain an advanced society we need the robots working 24x7 and the land worked 24x7. To get people to give up their time to do that you have to give them something in return. Money isn't enough. That is the service to others you have to do if you want the carrots others grow. As Ali said: Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. What we lack is a mechanism to allow people to make that rent.
anacleto 9y ago
The fundamentally wrong thing I see over and over again: Marketing != Advertising.
rumcajz 9y ago
"In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Consumers."
EGreg 9y ago
More legal work is done by smart software, but cultivating client relationships has never been more important. I always found this turn of phrasd to be somewhat odd. Why has cultivating relstionships never been more important? What is it about today that makes this true? And if it's not true, then the whole "but" is just handwaving nonsense inserted in place of the crux of the whole argument.
xg15 9y ago
Slightly OT, but did anyone else get the feeling that the author feels like he has to appeal to a very pro-advertising readership even though he is actually quite aware of the negative effects of advertising? Whenever he wants to write about something becoming more marketing or advertising oriented, he quickly adds some points along the lines of "...of course advertising is usually totally awesome but..." Those bits seldomly even have any sources or arguments to them to make them convincing. Some examples: > To be sure, a lot of commercial persuasion is useful. Marketing informs consumers about new products and their properties, or convinces them that one product is better for them than another. > Each business tries to pull customers away from the other brands, and while the final matching of customers to products is usually closely attuned to what people want, [...] > Although consumers enjoy these panderings to some degree, [...]
ThomPete 9y ago
In a robot economy there will be no need for marketers. People can get whatever they want.
ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago
Robots will be better marketers than humans. In a robot economy all humans will just be consumers.
- goatlover 9y ago
  What are the humans using for money, since they're not getting paid to work?
  - pixl97 9y ago
    UBI or pitchforks?
scotty79 9y ago
It already happenef and it's not about robots. It's about abundance. If the market is not saturated pretty much everybody is working on building stuff faster and cheaper. It sells itself. When market gets saturated suddenly your survival is dependant on conning people into buying your staff instead of those of your competition. The more the production part is mastered, the more resources you need to pour into marketing to just stay afloat. Since the production got more efficient humans got shifted to marketing. But the same way people in stock trading are getting replaced with algorithms, people will get replaced in marketing as well.
- libertine 9y ago
  There are marketing decisions that can be automated, or at least to support decisions (even if you just need to click OK to adjust your funnel), but there are other parts of marketing that use similar processes to those who develop art - and i'm not comparing marketers to artists! If we reach the time where AI fully understands human behavior and emotions, I think by that time the concept of marketing will be long gone...
davidjnelson 9y ago
It would be great if society could progress to the Star Trek inspired utopia. Using technology to build replicators to create food rather than robots to farm food using traditional methods for instance.

105 points by sndean 9y ago

What is great about being a human is that, even if the premise turns out to be true, 1) I will never be a marketer, and yet 2) I will not starve. I don't have to be smarter than a robot, I just have to be smarter than the person who made the robot.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
I don't think I follow any of that.
- qbrass 9y ago
  They're going to eat the person who made the robot.
  - sverige 9y ago
    I think you both should design robots.
pixl97 9y ago
If you were smarter than the person that made the robot, you'd have just made the damn robot yourself. Also, make sure your robot maker isn't making kill-bots.
- sverige 9y ago
  The unstated premise in your argument is that a smart person would make a robot if they had the ability. But what if a person were so smart that they could foresee that making the robot would be detrimental in the long term? And then you answer your own premise by pointing out the obvious reason it would be detrimental: kill-bots. We all know that is where it is headed. It is unchangeable human nature.

swampthinker 9y ago

Re: The ATM point. The evidence they cite is this graph [1]. I'm not sure that this is a compelling graph. Sure the number of tellers has been growing, but it's been very slow growth. Meanwhile, ATM's have been skyrocketing in popularity. One could easily argue that teller job creation was heavily impacted by ATM's, but offset by overall population growth. [1]http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/ http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...

dboreham 9y ago
People use less cash now so there's that too.
fwn 9y ago
I don't know how it works in the US but in the German retail banking market there is only one clearly superior pathway to compete and this is through abolishing the banks local presence all together. Our credit unions are not competitive and will have to merge away into a direct bank at some point. They currently survive on path dependencies. Germany is a cash heavy market & free universal ATMs are omnipresent. Ironically mostly through credit unions.

m52go 9y ago

"but but there is NO job humans can do that a robot cannot do" this is the gist of the reactions i got to a comment i made on an article on a similar topic here a few days ago. this article better articulated what i was trying to say there: But machines are not effective at persuading, at developing advertising campaigns, at branding products or corporations, or at greeting you at the door in a charming manner, as is done so often in restaurants, even if you order on an iPad. Those activities will remain the province of human beings for a long time to come. people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion). we're still weird, unpredictable creatures who eat, sleep, poop, and work in a 4-dimensional world...so there will ALWAYS be a human component to delivering products and services. even if a good bit of the designing, building, and distribution of these services may be automated.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion). Well, it's being done to increase profit. That's a bit different.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Even if we eliminated money, we would be automating work to benefit us. That's the root motivation.
- rexpop 9y ago
  Right. As we accelerate, the divergence from shareholders' desires and consumers' increases.
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  How is that a bad thing? Why would you not want to increase profit?
  - 9y ago

jon_richards 9y ago

I fundamentally disagree with this article. Automation hits some places earlier than others, but I think "marketing" isn't as far away as they think. We're starting to develop bots that can make puns, text to speech that sounds human, etc. What happens when bots can pass the Turing Test? When they know everything about the trends you follow, finances you have, products you've bought, shows you watch, places you go, jokes you enjoy? Marketing will start becoming "personalised", and I don't think humans will be behind the controls for long after that. Humans won't be marketing, they will be marketed. Humans will be a novelty, like a hand-carved chair or a horse-drawn carriage. Probably worse than the human-free product, but worth paying a bit extra for the idea of it.

echelon 9y ago
> Humans will be a novelty, like a hand-carved chair or a horse-drawn carriage. This is the good outcome. In a post-intelligence world, humans will be cute zoo animals. We might have freedom, but I can't imagine us having any measure of real control. Even if modern society continues, it will be a cordoned off bubble, a "human preserve". If we're unruly and give the robots too much trouble, they could just dispense with us. Or dumb us down and make us tame--domesticate us, like animals.
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  Since around 2004, seemingly all additional compute the human race had developed for itself has been put towards gathering and processing telemetry for the purposes of marketing and control. AI as a technology is simply more horsepower and automation for surveillance. I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon. Not like this is news, but the end of world has always been right around the corner - most everything is broken here and death is everywhere. The strangest thing to me about comments like this is the assumption that a nefarious super-intelligence would stop at subjugating us. If a super-intelligence was evil and had power to act, it would just kill us all and sterilize the planet, given the chance. I just don't believe we have the ability to make a standalone computer super-intelligence - we universally suck at coding at-scale. Don't get me wrong, the AI and machine learning algorithms we have are amazing, but we're not going to get a being out of those experiments. What I'm worried about is humans: humans continuing to turn tech against other humans for surveillance and telemetry in support of totalitarianism. And, I'm worried about humans augmenting their brains with compute. If there ever will be an evil super-intelligence, I wager it will be a (meta-)man.

mirimir 9y ago

For the model presented, I'd say more like "customer service". But then, for whom? For each other, I guess. In that world, I'd rather become a human-assisted robot. Potentially immortal, even.

Klockan 9y ago

Programmers programming AI's to automate marketing will definitely have a job longer than marketers.

unabst 9y ago

The robot economy is not a jobs issue. It is a wealth issue. An entrepreneur's primary function is to create jobs. Every job ever created that wasn't made by the government was a direct or indirect consequence of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is thriving. A business's primary function is to hire people. Any large business that isn't firing is hiring. And public businesses need to grow to stay in business. 75% of Google's income is from ads. There couldn't be an easier service to automate and robotize than an ad system. Yet, not only are they hiring, but they're looking to spend this money in completely unrelated areas. They're literally starting from "A" and going down the alphabet. Entrepreneurs and businesses will always look to automate. But they will also always look to hire. Elon Musk is partially responsible for this AI job paranoia, but not only is Tesla not fully robotized they have a shortage of workers and they're hiring like mad [1]. Jobs are about skills, and yes, if you're doing a job that is a candidate for new methods of automation - like driving - your job is in danger. But unless you're only capable of doing one job, all you'll do is find another. You're not a "robot". And even if humanoids begin to take over more human work, entrepreneurs and businesses will simply hire more and hire them all. We will work alongside our robotic co-workers, and the economy (should) just expand to meet our collective output. But herein lies the real issue. Robots will not be owned by robots. They will be owned by people. And if robots are productive, they'll become the new real estate. A robot with a job will be like a house that pays rent. Bill Gates recently came out with a robot tax video [2]. But taxes are not enough to equalize the wealth gap. It hasn't worked for humans, and it won't work for bots. Not only money, but ownership needs to be redistributed. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a solution for this old problem either. So what if you lost your job if you own two apartments that bring in a middle class wage? Replace apartments with robots. The Robot Economy is not about jobs. It's about wealth. --- [1] https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/ https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg

grondilu 9y ago
> An entrepreneur's primary function is to create jobs. [...] A business's primary function is to hire people. Where does that weird idea come from?

DrNuke 9y ago

Small services for local communities will not die, though. If no money circulates, we will go back to barter and communes.

rosser 9y ago
We won't go "back" to barter because, contrary to popular — and mistaken — belief, we didn't come from there. Go pick up a copy of "Debt: The First 5000 Years" for a complete defenestration of that tired trope.

godelski 9y ago

The author seems to miss a lot here. Sure, there will be industries that will follow the ATM model, but many more won't. I mean how do you miss cars? It is the most talked about industry to be disrupted by AI and there is no way it is going to create more jobs. Also, the author clearly misses Coke's marketing strategy. It is pretty well understood that Coke doesn't advertise to get people to buy their product. AI has been good at getting us to buy products. And I'm pretty sure AI will also get good at keeping us using products. Really it just comes off as naive and overly optimistic.

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
there is no way it is going to create more jobs This seems like a crazy assertion to me. I think you're thinking very small and short-term, as in: 3mm people don't drive anymore for their job, so we have 3mm fewer jobs. In a world where no one drives, no one owns cars, they zip around in a global mesh that's tied together with all other forms of transport and logistics, which are also automated...how can we possibly predict what such a world will look like, and what new opportunities, lifestyles, and paradigm shifts will occur?

Animats 9y ago

One word: Amazon.

vinceguidry 9y ago

You can generalize this to: Someone still has to understand everything in order to make it actually useful for humans. You can build a robot to do work previously done by a human, but you can't make it actually understand when it needs to be working and on what. That would be an exponentially harder problem to make a computer solve. Making computers want interesting things is perhaps THE problem in artificial intelligence. If you can solve it, you've got AGI. You can hand a machine learning algorithm a very constrained environment and it can work out some basic goals, like making a high score go up. But increase the complexity of the environment and all of a sudden, the algorithm needs to learn how to simulate it, significantly ramping up the difficulty of what it has to do. Humans are going to start getting inexorably shifted out of things that humans really shouldn't be doing in the first place, to be replaced by the just-as-difficult task of commanding our new robot slaves. Maybe for a little while it'll be difficult for humans to find purchase in the brave new world, but the limitations of machines to literally read our brains and tell us what we want is going to quickly make themselves known and humans all over the world will take on the role of specifying the behavior of machines that are getting increasingly smarter. You're going to see the same sort of stratification of haves and have-nots you have now, I see little about the new production modes that's going to change the fundamentals of economics. But everybody is going to have more of it, because making things is going to get much, much easier, even easier than it is now, and it's already really easy.

ShirsenduK 9y ago

As the world goes more towards digital content, the more robots/AI/software will do the marketing. The growth of Facebook revenues is a clear indication that software is better at marketing than humans. They know which buttons to push and when to get the right response. They know you better than the marketing manager at company xyz. Marketing automation is already here and its only going to get bigger and better. The sales and marketing teams will shrink to 1-2 persons even for large corporations. They will make us more efficient.

gottlos 9y ago
While I dont disagree, I put it to you that 'clickbait' techniques are easily arrived at by iterative testing; but are poor outcomes for the long term. IE: I don't see an AI negotiating a multi year memorandum of understanding between companies based on "X did Y and you wont believe what happens next!" Those will make money; but will they just cause stagnation/niche specialized behaviours that have less benefit to society as a whole?
- ShirsenduK 9y ago
  Marketing automation is not about clickbait but knowing who your users are, what are their biases and then showing you only that ad which will have a response and not show what won't work. Thereby, making $ spent on marketing more efficient. Companies are generally run by financials rather than societal benefit. I do not know whether that is a good thing or not, only future will tell. :)

paulus_magnus2 9y ago

tax advisors. marketing can be automated

neilwilson 9y ago

The bit everybody misses is that people still need something to do with their day. The problem is the wrong conception of what work actually is. Work is what you do with your day that you find enjoyable and that others consider useful. When that gets paid we call it a job. And that's it. Work is leisure you get paid to do. It's a social activity that furthers the cause of the group of humans engaged in it. If it isn't, then perhaps the system we've chosen to allocate work is broken rather than the concept of work. Perhaps we need a system that ensures there are always more jobs than people that want them, and that creates work and jobs based upon agreed social value. Which then forces the market sector to compete, which in turn forces market value to align properly with the social value we're after.

stale2002 9y ago
What if instead of having jobs, you just let people do whatever they want? If you want to work together with other people to do some goal, then do that. If you want to spend all your time watching movies or traveling or playing video games, then you could do that and zero of the "work" stuff. The mega rich already live in that world. They can choose to work, or not, and are generally able to do anything. I don't hear them complaining about how they are bored or need something to do with their life. Now imagine that everyone had the same resources as the mega rich do now.
- neilwilson 9y ago
  If people can do whatever they want, does that include those running the robots? Because if I'm a robot operator and you can do whatever you want, then I know I'm not going to get anything of value from you. So why should I work beyond Tuesday to make stuff that you need to live? I may as well go home and be 'free'. Your money is literally worthless to me. We know what everybody doing what they want leads to. It leads to land redistribution and hyperinflation - as demonstrated in spades in Zimbabwe. Unless you are completely self-sufficient then you have to look at the systemic impact of your idea on everybody. Then you'll find it has a severe fallacy of composition in it. The mega rich get away with it simply because they have a slave class (the rest of us) to do their bidding. If you can do whatever you want, who is the slave class working more than they need to to service your needs? To maintain an advanced society we need the robots working 24x7 and the land worked 24x7. To get people to give up their time to do that you have to give them something in return. Money isn't enough. That is the service to others you have to do if you want the carrots others grow. As Ali said: Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. What we lack is a mechanism to allow people to make that rent.

anacleto 9y ago

The fundamentally wrong thing I see over and over again: Marketing != Advertising.

rumcajz 9y ago

"In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Consumers."

EGreg 9y ago

More legal work is done by smart software, but cultivating client relationships has never been more important. I always found this turn of phrasd to be somewhat odd. Why has cultivating relstionships never been more important? What is it about today that makes this true? And if it's not true, then the whole "but" is just handwaving nonsense inserted in place of the crux of the whole argument.

xg15 9y ago

Slightly OT, but did anyone else get the feeling that the author feels like he has to appeal to a very pro-advertising readership even though he is actually quite aware of the negative effects of advertising? Whenever he wants to write about something becoming more marketing or advertising oriented, he quickly adds some points along the lines of "...of course advertising is usually totally awesome but..." Those bits seldomly even have any sources or arguments to them to make them convincing. Some examples: > To be sure, a lot of commercial persuasion is useful. Marketing informs consumers about new products and their properties, or convinces them that one product is better for them than another. > Each business tries to pull customers away from the other brands, and while the final matching of customers to products is usually closely attuned to what people want, [...] > Although consumers enjoy these panderings to some degree, [...]

ThomPete 9y ago

In a robot economy there will be no need for marketers. People can get whatever they want.

ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago

Robots will be better marketers than humans. In a robot economy all humans will just be consumers.

goatlover 9y ago
What are the humans using for money, since they're not getting paid to work?
- pixl97 9y ago
  UBI or pitchforks?

scotty79 9y ago

It already happenef and it's not about robots. It's about abundance. If the market is not saturated pretty much everybody is working on building stuff faster and cheaper. It sells itself. When market gets saturated suddenly your survival is dependant on conning people into buying your staff instead of those of your competition. The more the production part is mastered, the more resources you need to pour into marketing to just stay afloat. Since the production got more efficient humans got shifted to marketing. But the same way people in stock trading are getting replaced with algorithms, people will get replaced in marketing as well.

libertine 9y ago
There are marketing decisions that can be automated, or at least to support decisions (even if you just need to click OK to adjust your funnel), but there are other parts of marketing that use similar processes to those who develop art - and i'm not comparing marketers to artists! If we reach the time where AI fully understands human behavior and emotions, I think by that time the concept of marketing will be long gone...

davidjnelson 9y ago

It would be great if society could progress to the Star Trek inspired utopia. Using technology to build replicators to create food rather than robots to farm food using traditional methods for instance.