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you do know we've been replacing humans with machines since the Industrial revolution, right? These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They f

you do know we've been replacing humans with machines since the Industrial revolution, right? These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They found other more advanced work, allowing our civilization to produce more wealth allowing all of us to be richer. The same will continue.

mdpye 7y ago
Well... the generation after them do, anyway. The actual people who were actually made redundant in each wave don't generally fare that well.
QualityReboot 7y ago
Right, that's historically been true for humans because we are pattern recognition workhorses. We have some other examples worth considering though, like literal workhorses. Once the engine came around, horses became inefficient and were relegated to shows and races. With AI able to do superhuman pattern recognition, it's only a matter of time before humans also become a luxury, as they're no longer needed for traditional work.
- HenryKissinger 7y ago
  > traditional work In a lot of data science focused places, like mine, people are more or less researchers. There is no repetitive work, and everyone must show creativity and autonomy. You can't automate that.
  - potta_coffee 7y ago
    And not everyone is capable of such work. What about average people who don't really have the facility to become data scientists?
    - HenryKissinger 7y ago
      Given the fact that the economy is at full employment and that there are more job openings than people looking for a job, I'm not too worried at the moment.
      - autoexec 7y ago
        > Given the fact that the economy is at full employment The economy might be at full employment, but people are often underemployed, getting few hours, and shit wages. Most people are employed but many don't make enough to support even just themselves on their earnings let alone a family. Real wages have barely increased since the 1970s while costs have risen. We've had the first generations of Americans who are worse off than their parents. I wouldn't say our current situation was at all encouraging.
        malandrew 7y ago
        > underemployed I don't get why we use this term. You're either employed or you're not. Just because you got an education in something that is no longer valued by society doesn't mean you're entitled to a job doing whatever you're educated to do. Society rewards those that provide some good or service that is wanted/needed. Furthermore, employment by others is not the only option. You can also work for yourself (except when the state forbids it through licensing and permits)
        ajwin 7y ago
        Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't under employed often also refer to when you have part time / casual work but want full time employment? You might not be able to survive of what your earning but your not part of the Unemployment statistics?
        taneq 7y ago
        We have a term, "employed", for people who work and earn a living wage. We have another term, "unemployed", for people who have no work. We need a third term, "underemployed", to describe people in between those two situations, who have some work (so they're not "unemployed") but nonetheless do not earn a living wage (so counting them as "employed" is disingenuous).
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    Uh, yes you can. Robots are already being used for battlefield simulations coming up with moves humans couldn't think of. They beat humans in Go by finding better moves that's entirely creative. They write news articles, paint, create music, and help in diagnosis of disease. Humans are all going to be replaced soon enough. We'll be serving AI masters or wiped out within 50 years tops.
    - ajwin 7y ago
      Why would this comment get down voted?
      - salawat 7y ago
        Likely due to the fact it's bubkus. AI's permutate artwork. They don't feel, they don't assign or derive meaning. They don't feel, they aren't inspired, they aren't moved. They don't derive joy from the beautiful, despair and disgust from the loathsome, awe at the sublime, and dissolution and insignificance in the face of the all encompassing. They don't dance with glee at a bright and bouncy tune, they aren't struck to the edge of tears by the melody of wind through a forest of bottles. They know and can reproduce patterns that are labelled for them, but they don't get it, ya dig? They don't relate or understand the soul of Jazz, the message of Blues/Rock and Roll, the Struggle and perseverance evoked by a good fight song. They can't appreciate the byproducts of their work, or "make 10 more, but different." They can't appreciate, display, or develop technique; they cannot perform. When composing, they generate content based off of higher-dimensional correlations between words as encoded through syntax and grammar, but a poem generated by a machine is not but a permutation of words ejaculated forth, with no rhyme, reason, or correlation to the world at the time; even being removed from the whimsy of it's programmer. Art is a tricky thing. It is what it is because a human found that at that time in their life, in the details of their personal situation was the right time for that work to be born forth into the world, in all it's symbolism, ugliness, beauty, sublimity, and to affect all those who gazed upon it. Think hard about the significance of that. That man's mortality factors into the fruits of his labor; something a machine, deriveable from a prescription can never truly know or imitate. It isn't humanistic chauvinism...merely that as the clock is not the first cause of time, so the AI is not the creator of the Art it produces, if what it produces can even be truly called Art. It may not always remain that way. Right now though, it is. Least that's my guess.
hanniabu 7y ago
I see this argument brought up every time there's a discussion about automation and jobs, but this a different type of revolution.
wonderwonder 7y ago
This is automation on a scale that we have not seen before where machines are actually capable of decision making and precision work. This is combined with a massive concentration of wealth at the top. Also there are a whole lot more people now. Potential long term could be colonization of the moon / mars. Plenty of unskilled labor required and opens a new frontier.
- jfk13 7y ago
  It's not at all obvious to me that colonization of another planet, if we're ever in a position to actually undertake it, will involve "plenty of unskilled labor".
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    Agreed. Pretty much the opposite, actually - shipping, housing, feeding, etc. a bunch of humans is obscenely expensive in the context of space exploration. You're far better off sending a bunch of robots with a couple mechanics to keep them running. Additionally, I'm pretty sure that by the time we're in any kind of position to do actual colonization efforts, automation effects will have long since taken their toll.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      Shipping a smaller number of humans to be...baby factories is probably cheaper than shipping an entire population though.
      - benj111 7y ago
        Even cheaper to ship some embryos, and a couple of gestation tanks. This is starting to get dystopic rather quickly.
- TylerE 7y ago
  It's not really new. Industrial pick and place robots have existed for decades.
groby_b 7y ago
Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt, or because they were easy to exploit. (E.g. child workers). Or lived in subpar housing due to urbanization, which made perfect breeding grounds for typhoid, cholera and assorted fun. You can't just handwave those changes away by saying "ultimately, they found other jobs". They didn't. There were entire generations that suffered. At some point there was an equilibrium, but it was far from instant, and "advanced" work doesn't help the person displaced.
- malandrew 7y ago
  > Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt Maybe that's a feature, not a bug. It's worthwhile imagining how life might be impacted in the present if a sizable portion of the homo genus has not died off over the past ~2.5 million years because they couldn't adapt. How would humans today handle the continued co-existence of homo austalopithecus, habilis, erectus, etc over those ~2.5 million years up until the present?
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    You'll sing a different tune if you find yourself on the wrong end of that equation.
    - vageli 7y ago
      > You'll sing a different tune if you find yourself on the wrong end of that equation. (We all, eventually, end up on the other side of the equation.) Given that resources are indeed not infinite, there must be a limit to this planet's capacity to sustain human beings. Most governments don't seem to want to limit childbirth and instead _encourage_ it (more babies == more taxpayers). Once that limit is exceeded, barring technological advances, what other outcome can there be?
      - anigbrowl 7y ago
        I think you understand perfectly well that I'm commenting on referring to catastrophic famine as 'a feature, not a bug.'
starpilot 7y ago
> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die This is exactly what's happening in every large metro area today. Larger amounts of work are being by fewer, highly paid individuals using technology. This drives up rents and fuels the homeless crisis everywhere.
pzo 7y ago
Most people who use this argument forget about the scale and duration of this transformation back then and now. Back in 1800s there were merely ~1 billion people, then in 1900s it was ~1.6 billion. Lets say even if 50% of people back then lost jobs you had to find new jobs for 'only' ~0.8 billion people and you had more than 100 years for that transition. WWI and WWII at the beginning of 20 century 'helped' to reduce population and keep other busy to rebuild what got destroyed during the war. I guess we would like to avoid that scenario. Now we have 7.7 billion people and it is estimated we will have 10 billion by 2050. Pace of current technical development is much faster than in 1800s and education for acquiring new skills probably takes even longer than in 1800s. Will we be able to hypothetically reskill 5 billion of people in the next 50 years? Personally I doubt it. EDIT: source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
- leoedin 7y ago
  Absolute numbers are a distraction. Retraining 1 person in a population of 10 has the same net demands as retraining 100,000 in a population of 1,000,000. Human society is massively parallel by default.
- darkmighty 7y ago
  I think most people don't imagine properly the world as automation increases at all levels. The first expectation is perhaps that mass unemployment would abide; clearly we don't have mass unemployment in most places (most of the world has a relatively high employment), so the phenomenon must not be occurring or there's the oft-mentioned effect of workers moving to high level tasks. Since Quantum Supremacy was en vogue, let me coin another term: Robotic Supremacy. That is when a robot (i.e. some kind of automatic machine, not necessarily a humanoid robot) will be able to perform each and every task a human can do more economically. Humans will become unemployable. My hypothesis is that Robotic Supremacy is still far away (maybe a century); and also that this milestone doesn't matter as much as it appears. The scenario of unemployability is highly unlikely; there's almost always something you can get a human to do that'll pay their food and shelter (we're fantastic machines evolved for billions of years; robots are still far away from domination in many niches). The question is how much this person will earn -- perhaps increasingly less, not more; because it has more competition and the tasks are not as essential as before. So a natural manifestation would be rise in income/wealth inequality. That's precisely what we're seeing. If left unchecked, most places will see a spiral of a tiny elite concentrating all wealth.
bavell 7y ago
You do know that the rate we're replacing humans with machines far outstrips what we've previously seen, right? As in, this time around it's happening much quicker and is much more widespread compared to the first time around. That people and legislation are already struggling to adapt which will ultimately cause far greater chaos, market disruption and unrest than we've ever seen. We as technologists know better than anyone how quickly new tech can sweep across the industry. Once the tech/product/process is figured out, scaling it is trivial in comparison. This is the same song and dance but 100x as loud and 100x as fast.
- repolfx 7y ago
  I don't know that actually. Can you please prove it with data? I studied the industrial revolution quite extensively at school and I follow AI research today, reading individual research papers. It's not clear that we're going through anything even close to as disruptive as the industrial revolution. In fact I'm sure we're not. Absolute numbers may be higher because the population is so much larger, but as astutely pointed out elsewhere in this thread, civilisation is massively parallel by default so it's proportions that matter. And when we get to that, we're not seeing massive job displacements caused by automation. If anything we should be asking why not: why is the software industry apparently so unexpectedly bad at reducing employment? This isn't just me waffling by the way. Economists say (caveat emptor) the same thing: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/which-productivity-puzzle https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/which-produc... Productivity growth i.e. the rate at which machines replace people, has been falling over the decades. The spike you might expect from massive automation is not only not present, the data shows the opposite - we are getting less bang for our technological buck, it's a long term trend, and economists are worried/puzzled by it. If productivity growth continues trending towards zero, what it means is that our society is getting no automation benefits whatsoever. It means the only way to produce more stuff is to use more people! We can join economists in speculating as to the reasons, but either the data is flawed, or we're in a time of unprecedented job stability, despite the froth and hype around AI (whose impact is so far extremely limited).
chillacy 7y ago
Consider that universal high school, labor union-friendly laws, and labor day were government responses to the last industrial revolution. How will our society change for the next one?
unionpivo 7y ago
> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They found other more advanced work ... This almost never happens in real world. The next generations do benefit that. But the current generation is fucked. You wont retrain 40> years old truck drivers into anything that will pay even remotely the same. Most of them will be stuck doing minimal wage jobs somewhere, and be happy that they have them. (of course there are exceptions) I have seen that play out in ex communist countries, where whole swaths of jobs became obsolete over few years. It's been almost 30 years, newer generations have moved on somewhat, but there are still a lot of people that were better off before. Industrial revolution was great in general, but its effect on people also gave rise to communism (i am not defending it).

mdpye 7y ago

Well... the generation after them do, anyway. The actual people who were actually made redundant in each wave don't generally fare that well.

QualityReboot 7y ago

Right, that's historically been true for humans because we are pattern recognition workhorses. We have some other examples worth considering though, like literal workhorses. Once the engine came around, horses became inefficient and were relegated to shows and races. With AI able to do superhuman pattern recognition, it's only a matter of time before humans also become a luxury, as they're no longer needed for traditional work.

HenryKissinger 7y ago
> traditional work In a lot of data science focused places, like mine, people are more or less researchers. There is no repetitive work, and everyone must show creativity and autonomy. You can't automate that.
- potta_coffee 7y ago
  And not everyone is capable of such work. What about average people who don't really have the facility to become data scientists?
  - HenryKissinger 7y ago
    Given the fact that the economy is at full employment and that there are more job openings than people looking for a job, I'm not too worried at the moment.
    - autoexec 7y ago
      > Given the fact that the economy is at full employment The economy might be at full employment, but people are often underemployed, getting few hours, and shit wages. Most people are employed but many don't make enough to support even just themselves on their earnings let alone a family. Real wages have barely increased since the 1970s while costs have risen. We've had the first generations of Americans who are worse off than their parents. I wouldn't say our current situation was at all encouraging.
      - malandrew 7y ago
        > underemployed I don't get why we use this term. You're either employed or you're not. Just because you got an education in something that is no longer valued by society doesn't mean you're entitled to a job doing whatever you're educated to do. Society rewards those that provide some good or service that is wanted/needed. Furthermore, employment by others is not the only option. You can also work for yourself (except when the state forbids it through licensing and permits)
        ajwin 7y ago
        Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't under employed often also refer to when you have part time / casual work but want full time employment? You might not be able to survive of what your earning but your not part of the Unemployment statistics?
        taneq 7y ago
        We have a term, "employed", for people who work and earn a living wage. We have another term, "unemployed", for people who have no work. We need a third term, "underemployed", to describe people in between those two situations, who have some work (so they're not "unemployed") but nonetheless do not earn a living wage (so counting them as "employed" is disingenuous).
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Uh, yes you can. Robots are already being used for battlefield simulations coming up with moves humans couldn't think of. They beat humans in Go by finding better moves that's entirely creative. They write news articles, paint, create music, and help in diagnosis of disease. Humans are all going to be replaced soon enough. We'll be serving AI masters or wiped out within 50 years tops.
  - ajwin 7y ago
    Why would this comment get down voted?
    - salawat 7y ago
      Likely due to the fact it's bubkus. AI's permutate artwork. They don't feel, they don't assign or derive meaning. They don't feel, they aren't inspired, they aren't moved. They don't derive joy from the beautiful, despair and disgust from the loathsome, awe at the sublime, and dissolution and insignificance in the face of the all encompassing. They don't dance with glee at a bright and bouncy tune, they aren't struck to the edge of tears by the melody of wind through a forest of bottles. They know and can reproduce patterns that are labelled for them, but they don't get it, ya dig? They don't relate or understand the soul of Jazz, the message of Blues/Rock and Roll, the Struggle and perseverance evoked by a good fight song. They can't appreciate the byproducts of their work, or "make 10 more, but different." They can't appreciate, display, or develop technique; they cannot perform. When composing, they generate content based off of higher-dimensional correlations between words as encoded through syntax and grammar, but a poem generated by a machine is not but a permutation of words ejaculated forth, with no rhyme, reason, or correlation to the world at the time; even being removed from the whimsy of it's programmer. Art is a tricky thing. It is what it is because a human found that at that time in their life, in the details of their personal situation was the right time for that work to be born forth into the world, in all it's symbolism, ugliness, beauty, sublimity, and to affect all those who gazed upon it. Think hard about the significance of that. That man's mortality factors into the fruits of his labor; something a machine, deriveable from a prescription can never truly know or imitate. It isn't humanistic chauvinism...merely that as the clock is not the first cause of time, so the AI is not the creator of the Art it produces, if what it produces can even be truly called Art. It may not always remain that way. Right now though, it is. Least that's my guess.

hanniabu 7y ago

I see this argument brought up every time there's a discussion about automation and jobs, but this a different type of revolution.

wonderwonder 7y ago

This is automation on a scale that we have not seen before where machines are actually capable of decision making and precision work. This is combined with a massive concentration of wealth at the top. Also there are a whole lot more people now. Potential long term could be colonization of the moon / mars. Plenty of unskilled labor required and opens a new frontier.

jfk13 7y ago
It's not at all obvious to me that colonization of another planet, if we're ever in a position to actually undertake it, will involve "plenty of unskilled labor".
- mdorazio 7y ago
  Agreed. Pretty much the opposite, actually - shipping, housing, feeding, etc. a bunch of humans is obscenely expensive in the context of space exploration. You're far better off sending a bunch of robots with a couple mechanics to keep them running. Additionally, I'm pretty sure that by the time we're in any kind of position to do actual colonization efforts, automation effects will have long since taken their toll.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Shipping a smaller number of humans to be...baby factories is probably cheaper than shipping an entire population though.
    - benj111 7y ago
      Even cheaper to ship some embryos, and a couple of gestation tanks. This is starting to get dystopic rather quickly.
TylerE 7y ago
It's not really new. Industrial pick and place robots have existed for decades.

groby_b 7y ago

Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt, or because they were easy to exploit. (E.g. child workers). Or lived in subpar housing due to urbanization, which made perfect breeding grounds for typhoid, cholera and assorted fun. You can't just handwave those changes away by saying "ultimately, they found other jobs". They didn't. There were entire generations that suffered. At some point there was an equilibrium, but it was far from instant, and "advanced" work doesn't help the person displaced.

malandrew 7y ago
> Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt Maybe that's a feature, not a bug. It's worthwhile imagining how life might be impacted in the present if a sizable portion of the homo genus has not died off over the past ~2.5 million years because they couldn't adapt. How would humans today handle the continued co-existence of homo austalopithecus, habilis, erectus, etc over those ~2.5 million years up until the present?
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  You'll sing a different tune if you find yourself on the wrong end of that equation.
  - vageli 7y ago
    > You'll sing a different tune if you find yourself on the wrong end of that equation. (We all, eventually, end up on the other side of the equation.) Given that resources are indeed not infinite, there must be a limit to this planet's capacity to sustain human beings. Most governments don't seem to want to limit childbirth and instead _encourage_ it (more babies == more taxpayers). Once that limit is exceeded, barring technological advances, what other outcome can there be?
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      I think you understand perfectly well that I'm commenting on referring to catastrophic famine as 'a feature, not a bug.'

starpilot 7y ago

> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die This is exactly what's happening in every large metro area today. Larger amounts of work are being by fewer, highly paid individuals using technology. This drives up rents and fuels the homeless crisis everywhere.

pzo 7y ago

Most people who use this argument forget about the scale and duration of this transformation back then and now. Back in 1800s there were merely ~1 billion people, then in 1900s it was ~1.6 billion. Lets say even if 50% of people back then lost jobs you had to find new jobs for 'only' ~0.8 billion people and you had more than 100 years for that transition. WWI and WWII at the beginning of 20 century 'helped' to reduce population and keep other busy to rebuild what got destroyed during the war. I guess we would like to avoid that scenario. Now we have 7.7 billion people and it is estimated we will have 10 billion by 2050. Pace of current technical development is much faster than in 1800s and education for acquiring new skills probably takes even longer than in 1800s. Will we be able to hypothetically reskill 5 billion of people in the next 50 years? Personally I doubt it. EDIT: source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

leoedin 7y ago
Absolute numbers are a distraction. Retraining 1 person in a population of 10 has the same net demands as retraining 100,000 in a population of 1,000,000. Human society is massively parallel by default.
darkmighty 7y ago
I think most people don't imagine properly the world as automation increases at all levels. The first expectation is perhaps that mass unemployment would abide; clearly we don't have mass unemployment in most places (most of the world has a relatively high employment), so the phenomenon must not be occurring or there's the oft-mentioned effect of workers moving to high level tasks. Since Quantum Supremacy was en vogue, let me coin another term: Robotic Supremacy. That is when a robot (i.e. some kind of automatic machine, not necessarily a humanoid robot) will be able to perform each and every task a human can do more economically. Humans will become unemployable. My hypothesis is that Robotic Supremacy is still far away (maybe a century); and also that this milestone doesn't matter as much as it appears. The scenario of unemployability is highly unlikely; there's almost always something you can get a human to do that'll pay their food and shelter (we're fantastic machines evolved for billions of years; robots are still far away from domination in many niches). The question is how much this person will earn -- perhaps increasingly less, not more; because it has more competition and the tasks are not as essential as before. So a natural manifestation would be rise in income/wealth inequality. That's precisely what we're seeing. If left unchecked, most places will see a spiral of a tiny elite concentrating all wealth.

bavell 7y ago

You do know that the rate we're replacing humans with machines far outstrips what we've previously seen, right? As in, this time around it's happening much quicker and is much more widespread compared to the first time around. That people and legislation are already struggling to adapt which will ultimately cause far greater chaos, market disruption and unrest than we've ever seen. We as technologists know better than anyone how quickly new tech can sweep across the industry. Once the tech/product/process is figured out, scaling it is trivial in comparison. This is the same song and dance but 100x as loud and 100x as fast.

repolfx 7y ago
I don't know that actually. Can you please prove it with data? I studied the industrial revolution quite extensively at school and I follow AI research today, reading individual research papers. It's not clear that we're going through anything even close to as disruptive as the industrial revolution. In fact I'm sure we're not. Absolute numbers may be higher because the population is so much larger, but as astutely pointed out elsewhere in this thread, civilisation is massively parallel by default so it's proportions that matter. And when we get to that, we're not seeing massive job displacements caused by automation. If anything we should be asking why not: why is the software industry apparently so unexpectedly bad at reducing employment? This isn't just me waffling by the way. Economists say (caveat emptor) the same thing: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/which-productivity-puzzle https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/which-produc... Productivity growth i.e. the rate at which machines replace people, has been falling over the decades. The spike you might expect from massive automation is not only not present, the data shows the opposite - we are getting less bang for our technological buck, it's a long term trend, and economists are worried/puzzled by it. If productivity growth continues trending towards zero, what it means is that our society is getting no automation benefits whatsoever. It means the only way to produce more stuff is to use more people! We can join economists in speculating as to the reasons, but either the data is flawed, or we're in a time of unprecedented job stability, despite the froth and hype around AI (whose impact is so far extremely limited).

chillacy 7y ago

Consider that universal high school, labor union-friendly laws, and labor day were government responses to the last industrial revolution. How will our society change for the next one?

unionpivo 7y ago

> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They found other more advanced work ... This almost never happens in real world. The next generations do benefit that. But the current generation is fucked. You wont retrain 40> years old truck drivers into anything that will pay even remotely the same. Most of them will be stuck doing minimal wage jobs somewhere, and be happy that they have them. (of course there are exceptions) I have seen that play out in ex communist countries, where whole swaths of jobs became obsolete over few years. It's been almost 30 years, newer generations have moved on somewhat, but there are still a lot of people that were better off before. Industrial revolution was great in general, but its effect on people also gave rise to communism (i am not defending it).