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It was some article here on HN a while back that framed this much better for me. It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and

It was some article here on HN a while back that framed this much better for me. It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree. There's lots of stats like Ikea factories making 17x the bookcases they did in 1985 but with the same number of staff. But even in our technical and development niche, look at something like Instagram. They went from idea to billions of users with what a decade ago would have been a laughably small staff. The future is the top 10% of staff executing with an army of automated services at their command to do the work that 90% of their colleagues used to do.

mooreds 9y ago
Some might say it's a "Brave New World" :) The real question is what happens to the 90%.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it matters how comfortable the 90% is when they become unemployed. Is basic income enough to fulfill individual passions and interests? What happens to a large body of humans whose needs are taken care of but who aren't strictly needed for anything?
  - germinalphrase 9y ago
    Also, do the 10% believe that they are a static group deserving of persistent participation in the "working class" - or is this a competitive and fluid group in which the children of the 90% may move into/out of as their skills/ability apply? Which is to ask - is it worth maintaining a 90% at all or should we 'solve that problem'?
    - philipkglass 9y ago
      When even a small percentage of the rich oppose an extermination program for the bottom 90%, it turns a plan for tidy mass murder into chaotic war with dangerous risks to even the richest. That's why I don't put much weight on the "rich exterminate the unneeded poor" scenario, as outlined in Peter Frase's "B" scenario from Four Futures.
      - vkou 9y ago
        The more likely outcome of a true post-scarcity society is the 90% will be house servants for the 10%.
        marcus_holmes 9y ago
        This has always proved to be unstable. It will always result in revolution. The 90% will demand an equal share. The sad bit is that the revolutions seem to destroy the robots, not share the wealth. The 90% elect a different 10%, who then build more robots. See Animal Farm for details. The 10% have to share the pie, at least enough to prevent revolution.
        bmomb 9y ago
        The revolution aspect will still be relevant when we consider autonomous war machines? What power the 90% have when its opposed to drones, or some other hi-tech weapon?
        marcus_holmes 9y ago
        It worked for Gandhi fighting (or rather, not fighting) the British. Superior weaponry doesn't necessarily lead to victory in this kind of conflict.
        explainplease 9y ago
        If you haven't already, I highly recommend playing the Paperclips game that was posted recently. When your enemies are merely numbers on a screen, what does it matter who or what they are? Your machines are tasked to eliminate them, and if your machines are better than their machines--or, in this case, if the enemy don't have any machines--you win, and they disappear. Then you task your machines to clean up the mess, and in a short time, it's as if your enemies never existed. We hope that there would be enough good people among the wealthy and powerful to avoid such a scenario--but would there? Do we know that for certain? I don't think we do. Look at how the wealthy and powerful already exploit people on both small and large scales, from Hollywood execs satisfying their sexual desires one victim at a time, to corporate execs exploiting cheap overseas labor that, to them, are merely numbers on a screen, helping them increase margins. It all boils down to the same problem in the end, that of evil, and it's not going away, merely taking different forms throughout the ages.
  - Danihan 9y ago
    See WSHH fight comp videos for the answer.
  - nradov 9y ago
    Very few people would "thrive" on a basic income. Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid. People need a reason to exist and meaningful work to do. Very few have the drive and discipline to become artists/inventors/philosophers/musicians/actors. Plus the majority of those who do become artists are unlikely to create anything that the rest of society would value. Have you been to an Arts & Crafts fair lately? Most of the stuff there has negative value, in that you'd have to pay me to take it. We need a better solution than basic income.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      > Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid. You mean like retirement communities?
    - lsiebert 9y ago
      Communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid are not the equivalent to the country as a whole on basic income, and government aid now imposes multiple work and reporting requirements that help prevent people on government aid from pursuing creative endeavors. No, if you want to look at basic income, look at the children of the wealthy, who never have to work. Most still pursue education, get degrees, and work in a variety of fields including art. Also it's important not to conflate your interests in art with the universe of art appreciators. Because there is plenty of artistic work that I don't personally enjoy, but which there is a demand for. Jewelry comes to mind... I've bought cuff links but that's about it for the past year, but necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings still get sold despite my lack of interest.
      - fastball 9y ago
        The difference between basic income and the children of the wealthy is the spectre of the money disappearing. Only the most short-sighted of the wealthy do not realize that there are many ways in which their wealth could dry up. This provides an impetus to use the money constructively while you have it, because it might not be around forever. Basic income does not give the same drive. You can watch TV all day, doing nothing to better yourself, doing nothing to manage your money, and you know that there will always be more where that came from.
  - rodgerd 9y ago
    It's a simple choice: Judge Dredd or the Culture.
  - pasquinelli 9y ago
    you know as far back as i can remember we've treated people, as a society, in the way you'd treat anything there was quite a bit too much of lying around.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  i have another question: is it the top 10% that's needed, or would a middling 10% do about as well, if they have the "right" backgound?
Chathamization 9y ago
> It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree. That's been happening for hundreds of years. It's actually going more slowly now - productivity growth is some of the slowest that we've seen over the past 70 years[1]. It seems more likely that flashy tech (like articles about self driving cars and drone delivery) helped people believe a false narrative about the high unemployment that followed the financial crisis. It was also a narrative that exempted the political leadership - hey, we can't do anything to fix things, it's just a brave new world. But the numbers are show that the theory is bunk. Not just the productivity numbers I mentioned, but also the employment participation rate[2]. [1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
- MarkPNeyer 9y ago
  It's been happening for thousands of years. Agriculture was the first instance of automation (Farming) replacing labor (hunting). It was also the birth of massive inequality. From another thread: Today I have already consumed more sugar than most of my distant ancestors would see in a year. The device i hold in my pocket reminds me that it is time to perform the action, and so i will perform the action. I sit down about 10 hours a day, and I have never once hunted for an animal I would eat, nor retried food from nature to consume, aside from a few raspberries on the hill in my parents' back yard when I was a child. The contours of my life are dictated largely by a curious system called 'capitalism', a distributed computational mechanism whereby larger numbers of agents act with only one goal: to maximize their own utilities. I think capitalism is a mostly benevolent AI attempting to limit the oppressive conditions of our reality's scarcity, and to allow billions of us to live on a planet that can only support so many hunter-gatherers per square meter. Many suspect it is not benevolent. They may easily be right. The singularity is already upon us; it's unevenly distributed. It started with the sedentary shift. Agricultural societies dropped the egalitarian nature of their ancestors, they had lower average health, and they had a tiny elite cast of nobles presiding over a much larger population of what were essentially slaves. As hunter-gatherer population increased, fighting was more frequent. An army of slaves beats a smaller contingent of well-fed free men. This terrible knowledge was the apple in the garden. What we call our written history is essentially the singularity playing itself out, as knowledge accumulates, depends, reflects itself, and expands. Our lives are already controlled by this embodied, accumulated knowledge. Capitalism, rule by the head, our tools are knowledge condensed into matter, and we are controlled by them, living lives as far from our natural environments as cows in a farm or chickens in tiny cages, towering over the streets of hong kong. I don't think it's destroying us, any more than we seek to destroy chickens or cows. Well, sometimes we do. I had a veggie burger for lunch today though.
Sean1708 9y ago
But didn't that all happen during the Industrial Revolution as well? Why is this any different?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > But didn't that all happen during the Industrial Revolution as well? Arguably. > Why is this any different? Even if it wasn't, massive changes to politico-economic systems to redistribute gains were needed to mitigate the adverse distributional effects of the industrial revolution, so...
  - Sean1708 9y ago
    I'm sorry of I appeared adversarial, it was a genuine question. Why can we not make changes to the current politico-economic system if we were able to do it in the past?

mooreds 9y ago

Some might say it's a "Brave New World" :) The real question is what happens to the 90%.

CobrastanJorji 9y ago
The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it matters how comfortable the 90% is when they become unemployed. Is basic income enough to fulfill individual passions and interests? What happens to a large body of humans whose needs are taken care of but who aren't strictly needed for anything?
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  Also, do the 10% believe that they are a static group deserving of persistent participation in the "working class" - or is this a competitive and fluid group in which the children of the 90% may move into/out of as their skills/ability apply? Which is to ask - is it worth maintaining a 90% at all or should we 'solve that problem'?
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    When even a small percentage of the rich oppose an extermination program for the bottom 90%, it turns a plan for tidy mass murder into chaotic war with dangerous risks to even the richest. That's why I don't put much weight on the "rich exterminate the unneeded poor" scenario, as outlined in Peter Frase's "B" scenario from Four Futures.
    - vkou 9y ago
      The more likely outcome of a true post-scarcity society is the 90% will be house servants for the 10%.
      - marcus_holmes 9y ago
        This has always proved to be unstable. It will always result in revolution. The 90% will demand an equal share. The sad bit is that the revolutions seem to destroy the robots, not share the wealth. The 90% elect a different 10%, who then build more robots. See Animal Farm for details. The 10% have to share the pie, at least enough to prevent revolution.
        bmomb 9y ago
        The revolution aspect will still be relevant when we consider autonomous war machines? What power the 90% have when its opposed to drones, or some other hi-tech weapon?
        marcus_holmes 9y ago
        It worked for Gandhi fighting (or rather, not fighting) the British. Superior weaponry doesn't necessarily lead to victory in this kind of conflict.
        explainplease 9y ago
        If you haven't already, I highly recommend playing the Paperclips game that was posted recently. When your enemies are merely numbers on a screen, what does it matter who or what they are? Your machines are tasked to eliminate them, and if your machines are better than their machines--or, in this case, if the enemy don't have any machines--you win, and they disappear. Then you task your machines to clean up the mess, and in a short time, it's as if your enemies never existed. We hope that there would be enough good people among the wealthy and powerful to avoid such a scenario--but would there? Do we know that for certain? I don't think we do. Look at how the wealthy and powerful already exploit people on both small and large scales, from Hollywood execs satisfying their sexual desires one victim at a time, to corporate execs exploiting cheap overseas labor that, to them, are merely numbers on a screen, helping them increase margins. It all boils down to the same problem in the end, that of evil, and it's not going away, merely taking different forms throughout the ages.
- Danihan 9y ago
  See WSHH fight comp videos for the answer.
- nradov 9y ago
  Very few people would "thrive" on a basic income. Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid. People need a reason to exist and meaningful work to do. Very few have the drive and discipline to become artists/inventors/philosophers/musicians/actors. Plus the majority of those who do become artists are unlikely to create anything that the rest of society would value. Have you been to an Arts & Crafts fair lately? Most of the stuff there has negative value, in that you'd have to pay me to take it. We need a better solution than basic income.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    > Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid. You mean like retirement communities?
  - lsiebert 9y ago
    Communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid are not the equivalent to the country as a whole on basic income, and government aid now imposes multiple work and reporting requirements that help prevent people on government aid from pursuing creative endeavors. No, if you want to look at basic income, look at the children of the wealthy, who never have to work. Most still pursue education, get degrees, and work in a variety of fields including art. Also it's important not to conflate your interests in art with the universe of art appreciators. Because there is plenty of artistic work that I don't personally enjoy, but which there is a demand for. Jewelry comes to mind... I've bought cuff links but that's about it for the past year, but necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings still get sold despite my lack of interest.
    - fastball 9y ago
      The difference between basic income and the children of the wealthy is the spectre of the money disappearing. Only the most short-sighted of the wealthy do not realize that there are many ways in which their wealth could dry up. This provides an impetus to use the money constructively while you have it, because it might not be around forever. Basic income does not give the same drive. You can watch TV all day, doing nothing to better yourself, doing nothing to manage your money, and you know that there will always be more where that came from.
- rodgerd 9y ago
  It's a simple choice: Judge Dredd or the Culture.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  you know as far back as i can remember we've treated people, as a society, in the way you'd treat anything there was quite a bit too much of lying around.
pasquinelli 9y ago
i have another question: is it the top 10% that's needed, or would a middling 10% do about as well, if they have the "right" backgound?

Chathamization 9y ago

> It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree. That's been happening for hundreds of years. It's actually going more slowly now - productivity growth is some of the slowest that we've seen over the past 70 years[1]. It seems more likely that flashy tech (like articles about self driving cars and drone delivery) helped people believe a false narrative about the high unemployment that followed the financial crisis. It was also a narrative that exempted the political leadership - hey, we can't do anything to fix things, it's just a brave new world. But the numbers are show that the theory is bunk. Not just the productivity numbers I mentioned, but also the employment participation rate[2]. [1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

MarkPNeyer 9y ago
It's been happening for thousands of years. Agriculture was the first instance of automation (Farming) replacing labor (hunting). It was also the birth of massive inequality. From another thread: Today I have already consumed more sugar than most of my distant ancestors would see in a year. The device i hold in my pocket reminds me that it is time to perform the action, and so i will perform the action. I sit down about 10 hours a day, and I have never once hunted for an animal I would eat, nor retried food from nature to consume, aside from a few raspberries on the hill in my parents' back yard when I was a child. The contours of my life are dictated largely by a curious system called 'capitalism', a distributed computational mechanism whereby larger numbers of agents act with only one goal: to maximize their own utilities. I think capitalism is a mostly benevolent AI attempting to limit the oppressive conditions of our reality's scarcity, and to allow billions of us to live on a planet that can only support so many hunter-gatherers per square meter. Many suspect it is not benevolent. They may easily be right. The singularity is already upon us; it's unevenly distributed. It started with the sedentary shift. Agricultural societies dropped the egalitarian nature of their ancestors, they had lower average health, and they had a tiny elite cast of nobles presiding over a much larger population of what were essentially slaves. As hunter-gatherer population increased, fighting was more frequent. An army of slaves beats a smaller contingent of well-fed free men. This terrible knowledge was the apple in the garden. What we call our written history is essentially the singularity playing itself out, as knowledge accumulates, depends, reflects itself, and expands. Our lives are already controlled by this embodied, accumulated knowledge. Capitalism, rule by the head, our tools are knowledge condensed into matter, and we are controlled by them, living lives as far from our natural environments as cows in a farm or chickens in tiny cages, towering over the streets of hong kong. I don't think it's destroying us, any more than we seek to destroy chickens or cows. Well, sometimes we do. I had a veggie burger for lunch today though.

Sean1708 9y ago

But didn't that all happen during the Industrial Revolution as well? Why is this any different?

dragonwriter 9y ago
> But didn't that all happen during the Industrial Revolution as well? Arguably. > Why is this any different? Even if it wasn't, massive changes to politico-economic systems to redistribute gains were needed to mitigate the adverse distributional effects of the industrial revolution, so...
- Sean1708 9y ago
  I'm sorry of I appeared adversarial, it was a genuine question. Why can we not make changes to the current politico-economic system if we were able to do it in the past?