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This problem is inherently transient. The worst case is that it takes a full generation for skills and customs to adapt. Skills like "reading" and "writing" we

by ef4 13y ago

This problem is inherently transient. The worst case is that it takes a full generation for skills and customs to adapt. Skills like "reading" and "writing" were once the province of highly-educated specialists. They became mainstream when the economic incentives made them critical to have. People learn what they need to learn -- especially if they start as children. It's entirely appropriate to worry about how we can help people during this painful transition. But we need to be careful not to turn this temporary problem into a permanent one by creating cultures of dependence.

JamesArgo 13y ago
I think the assertion is we are approaching a time in which skills will be automated away faster than the time it takes to acquire them. Where will AI be in a "full generation"? I don't know, but a good bet is getting very close to human-level intelligence, and far surpassing it in many many specialized tasks.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > Where will AI be in a "full generation"? I don't know, but a good bet is getting very close to human-level intelligence LOL, no. The amount AI would have to advance from its current state to "very close to human-level intelligence" would have to be orders of magnitude more than it has evolved from its initial state to its present state (over the last 50-60 years). Pray tell, what technologies can you name that evolved faster in their second half-century than their first? Does that mean we definitely won't have human-scale AI in 50 years? No, because revolutions are impossible to predict. What it does mean, however, is that human-scale AI is not the predictable outcome of existing evolutionary trends. Indeed, developments in AI more or less stalled out in the 1980's, most of what we've seen to date is new applications of techniques pioneered decades ago. To use an analogy, what do you think CPU clockspeeds will be 10 years from now? It's possible that some breakthrough will happen and we'll have 20 GHz processors, but projecting existing trends suggests that the increase in clockspeeds from 2013 to 2023 will be a lesser percentage than what we saw from 1993 to 2003.
  - JamesArgo 13y ago
    If you think AI stalled out in the 80s, you deserve a LOL right back. We didn't even have Bayesian nets in the eighties. AI has made huge progress since the eighties, look at Geoff Hinton's work, look at all Sebastian Thrun has done with automated cars - something many experts thought would take 50 years in the late nineties. AI is just now blossoming. It's a very exciting field at the moment.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      I think what happened is that it fell out of popular usage to call most AI applications "AI", and a lot of the more extreme claims about the near-term potential of AI died out, so there is something of a perception in some corners that the field had died out.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Wikipedia puts the development of Bayesian networks in the 1980's. As for Hinton: I didn't mean to say we had zero progress since the 1980's (though admittedly, that's what "stalled" technically means), but rather that after a flurry of rapid development we hit a point of diminishing pace of development, as all technologies do. I don't know if AI is blossoming right now, but all the interesting things I've seen in the field (Watson, self-driving cars) are not theoretical breakthroughs, but rather new applications. I don't think the technology in self-driving cars gets us fundamentally closer to human-scale AI.
blahedo 13y ago
How is it not a permanent problem? Are you seriously asserting that the skills and jobs that workers re-train into will not have the exact same problem before long?
rquantz 13y ago
People learn what they need to learn -- especially if they start as children. Mass literacy is very much the result of concerted efforts by the state to provide universal education -- it didn't just come into being. Moreover, the point of the article is that we are in a time where education, whether self- or school-directed, can't solve the problem, because the productivity benefits of technology are going almost entirely to those with capital, rather than labor, i.e., the people doing the learning. You can argue with whether that is the case, but be aware that when you say "people will learn what they need to learn," you are actually stating the argument that the OP is already rebutting.
- TDL 13y ago
  "Mass literacy is very much the result of concerted efforts by the state to provide universal education..." This isn't necessarily accurate. The U.S. was a highly literate society before the advent of state sponsored, public education. State sponsored education did indeed increase the literacy rate because many states forced parents to send children to school. http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy
  - rquantz 13y ago
    You're right, I should have said "universal literacy."
    - marknutter 13y ago
      I would be cautious to say we have universal literacy today, even with universal education.
- ef4 13y ago
  You're posing a false dichotomy. Skill is capital. And its worth relative to other forms of capital (cash, land) continues to rise. Consider what's required to start a new business today. You need less cash than ever before. The limiting factor is most definitely skill. Not just obvious specialist skills, but the basic mindset that takes you from "just punching the clock" to "seeking opportunities to help". One reason wealth is concentrating is that the vast majority of people are woefully unskilled in the areas that matter now. This creates big pools of labor that have no leverage, which are naturally easy to exploit. So the existence of growing wealth inequality is not proof that education doesn't matter. It's just as plausible that most people are mis-educated. And when you look at the original intent of our education systems, they were deliberately designed to produce obedient factory workers who could reliably follow simple directions. Which is now an anti-skill.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
You are failing to see the scope of this. Imagine a world where your latte is served by a machine, your taxi drives itself, when you had surgery the guy operating the waldoes was working from his office in Mumbai, you do your own lawyering with the help of Watson running on your iPad, the malls are self service, and the cops are made by Boston Dynamics. Now imagine being sacked because your boss has a Watson too, trying to get a job - any job, and realizing that that the system doesn't need you - you are underqualified for the purely human jobs that remain, and your minimum living wage (covering rent, food, utilities and no slack) costs more than a burger flipping robot's amortized installation expense.
- ef4 13y ago
  No, I'm actually ambitious and optimistic about the scope of this. Massive automation absolutely does not imply massive involuntary unemployment. We've actually been through this before. We used to require 90% of the population to grow food. Now it's less than 1%. The rest didn't end up unemployed -- they ended up involved in entire industries and economies that didn't even exist before. Most of us have jobs that would sound completely fanciful to a farmer circa 1800. He couldn't have remotely guessed how most people would spend their time and earn a living in 2013. The same is true now for us -- I doubt anyone here could explain what most people in 2050 will be doing with their time. But the existence proof for there being useful work to do is the fact that not everyone has everything they could possibly want. So long as there are unmet needs and wants, there are necessarily opportunities for people to work together toward satisfying those needs. Either the poor can afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they will have a high standard of living, or the poor can't afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they constitute a large market in which the robots are not competitive, not relevant, and unable to put people out of work.
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    No, they constitute a small, impoverished market in defiance of their numbers. CF: the present day ecosystem of food, etc provision to very poor people. It's heavily consolidated and the products are trashy because the amount of profit to be had is paper-thin.
DenisM 13y ago
The problem may or may not be transient. Let's examine the cost of making a mistake in each case. If it's not transient, beating the drums of "no culture of dependence!" will send billions of people to starvation. If the problem is transient, culture of dependence could indeed undermine further progress, or more likely cause progress to slow down as fewer people will be pushing the envelope. Which mistake seems worse to you?
mynameishere 13y ago
The worst case is that it takes a full generation for skills and customs to adapt The worst case is that increasingly large percentages of the human population cannot perform any task that a computer can't do better and cheaper. It's fairly obvious. I admire your optimism though.

by ef4 13y ago

JamesArgo 13y ago

I think the assertion is we are approaching a time in which skills will be automated away faster than the time it takes to acquire them. Where will AI be in a "full generation"? I don't know, but a good bet is getting very close to human-level intelligence, and far surpassing it in many many specialized tasks.

rayiner 13y ago
> Where will AI be in a "full generation"? I don't know, but a good bet is getting very close to human-level intelligence LOL, no. The amount AI would have to advance from its current state to "very close to human-level intelligence" would have to be orders of magnitude more than it has evolved from its initial state to its present state (over the last 50-60 years). Pray tell, what technologies can you name that evolved faster in their second half-century than their first? Does that mean we definitely won't have human-scale AI in 50 years? No, because revolutions are impossible to predict. What it does mean, however, is that human-scale AI is not the predictable outcome of existing evolutionary trends. Indeed, developments in AI more or less stalled out in the 1980's, most of what we've seen to date is new applications of techniques pioneered decades ago. To use an analogy, what do you think CPU clockspeeds will be 10 years from now? It's possible that some breakthrough will happen and we'll have 20 GHz processors, but projecting existing trends suggests that the increase in clockspeeds from 2013 to 2023 will be a lesser percentage than what we saw from 1993 to 2003.
- JamesArgo 13y ago
  If you think AI stalled out in the 80s, you deserve a LOL right back. We didn't even have Bayesian nets in the eighties. AI has made huge progress since the eighties, look at Geoff Hinton's work, look at all Sebastian Thrun has done with automated cars - something many experts thought would take 50 years in the late nineties. AI is just now blossoming. It's a very exciting field at the moment.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    I think what happened is that it fell out of popular usage to call most AI applications "AI", and a lot of the more extreme claims about the near-term potential of AI died out, so there is something of a perception in some corners that the field had died out.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Wikipedia puts the development of Bayesian networks in the 1980's. As for Hinton: I didn't mean to say we had zero progress since the 1980's (though admittedly, that's what "stalled" technically means), but rather that after a flurry of rapid development we hit a point of diminishing pace of development, as all technologies do. I don't know if AI is blossoming right now, but all the interesting things I've seen in the field (Watson, self-driving cars) are not theoretical breakthroughs, but rather new applications. I don't think the technology in self-driving cars gets us fundamentally closer to human-scale AI.

blahedo 13y ago

How is it not a permanent problem? Are you seriously asserting that the skills and jobs that workers re-train into will not have the exact same problem before long?

rquantz 13y ago

People learn what they need to learn -- especially if they start as children. Mass literacy is very much the result of concerted efforts by the state to provide universal education -- it didn't just come into being. Moreover, the point of the article is that we are in a time where education, whether self- or school-directed, can't solve the problem, because the productivity benefits of technology are going almost entirely to those with capital, rather than labor, i.e., the people doing the learning. You can argue with whether that is the case, but be aware that when you say "people will learn what they need to learn," you are actually stating the argument that the OP is already rebutting.

TDL 13y ago
"Mass literacy is very much the result of concerted efforts by the state to provide universal education..." This isn't necessarily accurate. The U.S. was a highly literate society before the advent of state sponsored, public education. State sponsored education did indeed increase the literacy rate because many states forced parents to send children to school. http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy
- rquantz 13y ago
  You're right, I should have said "universal literacy."
  - marknutter 13y ago
    I would be cautious to say we have universal literacy today, even with universal education.
ef4 13y ago
You're posing a false dichotomy. Skill is capital. And its worth relative to other forms of capital (cash, land) continues to rise. Consider what's required to start a new business today. You need less cash than ever before. The limiting factor is most definitely skill. Not just obvious specialist skills, but the basic mindset that takes you from "just punching the clock" to "seeking opportunities to help". One reason wealth is concentrating is that the vast majority of people are woefully unskilled in the areas that matter now. This creates big pools of labor that have no leverage, which are naturally easy to exploit. So the existence of growing wealth inequality is not proof that education doesn't matter. It's just as plausible that most people are mis-educated. And when you look at the original intent of our education systems, they were deliberately designed to produce obedient factory workers who could reliably follow simple directions. Which is now an anti-skill.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

You are failing to see the scope of this. Imagine a world where your latte is served by a machine, your taxi drives itself, when you had surgery the guy operating the waldoes was working from his office in Mumbai, you do your own lawyering with the help of Watson running on your iPad, the malls are self service, and the cops are made by Boston Dynamics. Now imagine being sacked because your boss has a Watson too, trying to get a job - any job, and realizing that that the system doesn't need you - you are underqualified for the purely human jobs that remain, and your minimum living wage (covering rent, food, utilities and no slack) costs more than a burger flipping robot's amortized installation expense.

ef4 13y ago
No, I'm actually ambitious and optimistic about the scope of this. Massive automation absolutely does not imply massive involuntary unemployment. We've actually been through this before. We used to require 90% of the population to grow food. Now it's less than 1%. The rest didn't end up unemployed -- they ended up involved in entire industries and economies that didn't even exist before. Most of us have jobs that would sound completely fanciful to a farmer circa 1800. He couldn't have remotely guessed how most people would spend their time and earn a living in 2013. The same is true now for us -- I doubt anyone here could explain what most people in 2050 will be doing with their time. But the existence proof for there being useful work to do is the fact that not everyone has everything they could possibly want. So long as there are unmet needs and wants, there are necessarily opportunities for people to work together toward satisfying those needs. Either the poor can afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they will have a high standard of living, or the poor can't afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they constitute a large market in which the robots are not competitive, not relevant, and unable to put people out of work.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  No, they constitute a small, impoverished market in defiance of their numbers. CF: the present day ecosystem of food, etc provision to very poor people. It's heavily consolidated and the products are trashy because the amount of profit to be had is paper-thin.

DenisM 13y ago

The problem may or may not be transient. Let's examine the cost of making a mistake in each case. If it's not transient, beating the drums of "no culture of dependence!" will send billions of people to starvation. If the problem is transient, culture of dependence could indeed undermine further progress, or more likely cause progress to slow down as fewer people will be pushing the envelope. Which mistake seems worse to you?

mynameishere 13y ago

The worst case is that it takes a full generation for skills and customs to adapt The worst case is that increasingly large percentages of the human population cannot perform any task that a computer can't do better and cheaper. It's fairly obvious. I admire your optimism though.