17 ms·

On the subject of robotics supplanting human toil, Ray Kurzweil recently said: "In my view, it will lead to richer lives, and longer lives, but I would put an

by l33tbro 13y ago

On the subject of robotics supplanting human toil, Ray Kurzweil recently said: "In my view, it will lead to richer lives, and longer lives, but I would put an emphasis on the richer part. And I’m not just talking about financial riches. Life is getting [better] as we enrich our lives with technology. You can see that now—a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more information and human knowledge than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. People were lucky if they could get a book 100 years ago. We’re going to continue that expansion. Music is going to be richer. We’re going to have virtual reality experiences we can enjoy. All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence." Source: http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/14/how-nanobots-will-help-the-immune-system-and-why-well-be-much-smarter-thanks-to-machines-2/ http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/14/how-nanobots-will-help-th... He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience.

adventured 13y ago
Robotics, technology, etc. sure haven't led to more jobs in America the last 50 years. I'd be hard pressed to name a large country (a nation with a sizable pool of labor) in which it has. The American standard of living has fallen by half during that time. And while seemingly most Americans think China is the big job stealer, manufacturing wise, the reality is huge productivity gains have killed off far more manufacturing jobs than China has taken. Kurzeil is guilty of a science fiction style utopian dream in this case, in my opinion. He's of a generation that thought the future would sparkle. The future that has come to pass - so far - has been far off course from that expectation. I think he's placing far too much hope on technology unto itself. I regard technology as a neutral player on the field; and in the right situation, it can provide a huge multiplier. Political issues are far more important than technology - if you have an environment that is hostile to innovation, science, starting businesses, manufacturing, employment, capital formation and savings, etc then no amount of technology will save you ultimately from erosion. There's a joke in Zimbabwe, that goes something like this: what did we have before candle light? Electric light. Political situations can neutralize all potential technological benefits, leading to stagnation or worse. I think that effect is at least somewhat to blame for the problems America has seen in standards of living, despite the dramatic leap in technology.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Robotics, technology, etc. sure haven't led to more jobs in America the last 50 years. I'd be hard pressed to name a large country (a nation with a sizable pool of labor) in which it has. The American standard of living has fallen by half during that time. I'm sorry, are you seriously arguing that the American median standard of living was better in 1963? I could spend 20 minutes or so going statistic by statistic, but more or less everything has improved dramatically since then, most especially for the lower 20% or so of the income scale.
  - adventured 13y ago
    The American standard of living was drastically better in the mid 1960s in fact. It took one worker in the household to pay the bills; now, two people work and can't make ends meet. Mortgages were 15 years, not 30. The savings rate was extremely higher; now the savings rate is negative. America had little debt, and consumers had little debt. College education could be paid for with a part time job; now we're sitting on $1.2 or so trillion in debt on that end alone. The minimum wage was equivalent to over $40,000 in 1967. Now a decent job pays that. Using nearly any measurement, even the bogus CPI from the Feds, you find that wages peaked in about the late 1960s to 1970. And meanwhile, we've had to accumulate vast amounts of debt just to maintain these levels, so in real terms the standard of living has plunged. In the 1960s, America had roughly half of all global manufacturing to itself. A lot of that was due to our manufacturing base surviving WW2 fully intact. However, we saw the benefit of that, and it showed up in the form of jobs and wages. Now, welfare program dependency is at all time highs. Poverty rates are at multi-decade highs. The split between the rich and the poor is up dramatically, as workers drown, good jobs disappear and the rich shift capital to avoid the devaluation of the dollar. The % of the population dependent on food stamps is off the charts. The labor force participation rate is at multi-decade lows. The Federal Government is running a 3/4 trillion dollar deficit, propping up millions of jobs. Interest on all of our debt is as low as it can possibly go, and won't stay this cheap, that includes student loans, consumer debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt. Add it all up, and there has been an extraordinary real erosion of the standard of living over four decades.
    - 13y ago
alaskamiller 13y ago
Kurzweil and other olds like him believe in the Star Trek future. They believe in a beautiful utopia future that is unlockable by abundance. That's why 3d printing and virtual reality are so exciting for them. A meme back then was from Buckminster Fuller, renowned architect, thinking, and systems analyst--what they used to call hackers back then. Fuller made a proclamation that in the future we will reach a point in society where a person will only need to work 1 full work to generate enough value that lets them live for the rest of the year. How crazy is that? Well when you have replicators and automation to do all the work, you have more time to focus on other things. For example say you want to be an artist. To do so you endeavor on the artist path, living the artist lifestyle. You don't work a 9 to 5 so that you can focus on your art, because of that you don't have a lot of money, and thus you live the hipster way. In the cheaper edges of a big city, you work entry level retail jobs, and you're constantly at the edge of failure. Many of us like to create art, but because we don't want to live that kind of poor lifestyle we don't pursue what our passions are. We're misfit, square pegs in round holes of society. You absolve people of toil and now you have no fear. Without fear you create more. When you try more you do more. J. K. Rowling credits her completion of Harry Potter based on England's welfare system. They removed her anxiety and fear by helping her out when she had no job. Because of that she took the plunge to write Harry Potter. Imagine if all 7 billion of us are free to try, really try, at art. Think of the industrial revolution. Think of the internet revolution. None of that will compare to the next wave and all that new activities will bring. That's how the world is enriched by removing work. Or, we can all end up reverting back to living in caves. Who knows.
- amerika_blog 13y ago
  I hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks out from total boredom and frustration.
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    Open your eyes and maybe you'll see why art can stop that.
twoodfin 13y ago
He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience. This isn't hard to answer. As a share of the U.S. economy, the entertainment sector (movies, TV, video games...) has grown consistently. Why? Because people are spending less money on almost everything else thanks to declining human labor input costs. Another big winner has been restaurants which are, on average, much more numerous and of dramatically higher quality and variety in your median metro area than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Air travel is also, of course, way up, as more people visit faraway places. I don't see why we should mourn the decline in traditional "labor". Robots aren't going to be cooking anyone a six course meal or directing the next Star Wars movie any time soon.
- adventured 13y ago
  Because traditional labor made up nearly all of the middle class jobs in 1967, when the US standard of living peaked. What do you replace 100 million labor based jobs with? So far, spanning decades, there hasn't been a good answer to that question, and the middle class continues to erode year after year. So now here we sit with 14% U6 unemployment ('the new normal'), and a labor force participation rate that matches 35 or so years ago (before the full influx of women into the work force, so the current numbers are that much uglier). I'll note that in the last several years, the radical majority of job creation has been both part-time and hospitality based (eg hotels and bars). Hospitality pays notoriously terrible wages for the average worker. That doesn't sound like a good future to me.
  - hackinthebochs 13y ago
    >So now here we sit with 14% U6 unemployment ('the new normal'), and a labor force participation rate that matches 35 or so years ag The other important statistic you're missing is that corporate profits are way up, even better than pre 2008 levels in fact. The question is why, if the economy is so bad that employment is perpetually depressed, how are corporate profits so high? The answer is that production is in fact back to where it used to be. But through automation and piling more work onto fewer people, corporations are reaping ever bigger profits at the expense of the rest of the economy. In fact, the problem we're seeing is a prelude to the very future folks like kurzweli talk about: a future where human labor is obsolete in favor of automation. It's not that the future is necessarily one of destitution for the vast majority of humanity, its one where current thoughts on how to best distribute wealth will have to change. These really are easy problems to solve: some form of basic income. The hard question is how do we get from where we are to there without a very nasty revolution. One good step would be to simply mandate a reduced work-week. Full time becomes say 30 hours rather than 40. These sorts of steps are going to become necessary to maintain social stability as these trends towards fewer and fewer jobs increase.
csomar 13y ago
He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience. My understanding is that humans are limited. For a robot to function, you need to build and maintain it (minimal maintenance). Humans requires lots of effort, though. They get sick, they have to go to work, they can't work long hours, they get tired, bored...
Fuxy 13y ago
That's very optimistic and idealistic but the harsh truth is we treat people as resources and if we replace them with cheaper robots that make the company richer but at the same time leaves that person unemployed. This transfer of wealth that make the rich richer and the poor desperate for food on the table is not healthy for the political stability of the country. If we leave this unchecked it's just a matter of time before we will see the masses declare a war on technology out of desperation.

by l33tbro 13y ago

adventured 13y ago

Robotics, technology, etc. sure haven't led to more jobs in America the last 50 years. I'd be hard pressed to name a large country (a nation with a sizable pool of labor) in which it has. The American standard of living has fallen by half during that time. And while seemingly most Americans think China is the big job stealer, manufacturing wise, the reality is huge productivity gains have killed off far more manufacturing jobs than China has taken. Kurzeil is guilty of a science fiction style utopian dream in this case, in my opinion. He's of a generation that thought the future would sparkle. The future that has come to pass - so far - has been far off course from that expectation. I think he's placing far too much hope on technology unto itself. I regard technology as a neutral player on the field; and in the right situation, it can provide a huge multiplier. Political issues are far more important than technology - if you have an environment that is hostile to innovation, science, starting businesses, manufacturing, employment, capital formation and savings, etc then no amount of technology will save you ultimately from erosion. There's a joke in Zimbabwe, that goes something like this: what did we have before candle light? Electric light. Political situations can neutralize all potential technological benefits, leading to stagnation or worse. I think that effect is at least somewhat to blame for the problems America has seen in standards of living, despite the dramatic leap in technology.

twoodfin 13y ago
Robotics, technology, etc. sure haven't led to more jobs in America the last 50 years. I'd be hard pressed to name a large country (a nation with a sizable pool of labor) in which it has. The American standard of living has fallen by half during that time. I'm sorry, are you seriously arguing that the American median standard of living was better in 1963? I could spend 20 minutes or so going statistic by statistic, but more or less everything has improved dramatically since then, most especially for the lower 20% or so of the income scale.
- adventured 13y ago
  The American standard of living was drastically better in the mid 1960s in fact. It took one worker in the household to pay the bills; now, two people work and can't make ends meet. Mortgages were 15 years, not 30. The savings rate was extremely higher; now the savings rate is negative. America had little debt, and consumers had little debt. College education could be paid for with a part time job; now we're sitting on $1.2 or so trillion in debt on that end alone. The minimum wage was equivalent to over $40,000 in 1967. Now a decent job pays that. Using nearly any measurement, even the bogus CPI from the Feds, you find that wages peaked in about the late 1960s to 1970. And meanwhile, we've had to accumulate vast amounts of debt just to maintain these levels, so in real terms the standard of living has plunged. In the 1960s, America had roughly half of all global manufacturing to itself. A lot of that was due to our manufacturing base surviving WW2 fully intact. However, we saw the benefit of that, and it showed up in the form of jobs and wages. Now, welfare program dependency is at all time highs. Poverty rates are at multi-decade highs. The split between the rich and the poor is up dramatically, as workers drown, good jobs disappear and the rich shift capital to avoid the devaluation of the dollar. The % of the population dependent on food stamps is off the charts. The labor force participation rate is at multi-decade lows. The Federal Government is running a 3/4 trillion dollar deficit, propping up millions of jobs. Interest on all of our debt is as low as it can possibly go, and won't stay this cheap, that includes student loans, consumer debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt. Add it all up, and there has been an extraordinary real erosion of the standard of living over four decades.
  - 13y ago

alaskamiller 13y ago

Kurzweil and other olds like him believe in the Star Trek future. They believe in a beautiful utopia future that is unlockable by abundance. That's why 3d printing and virtual reality are so exciting for them. A meme back then was from Buckminster Fuller, renowned architect, thinking, and systems analyst--what they used to call hackers back then. Fuller made a proclamation that in the future we will reach a point in society where a person will only need to work 1 full work to generate enough value that lets them live for the rest of the year. How crazy is that? Well when you have replicators and automation to do all the work, you have more time to focus on other things. For example say you want to be an artist. To do so you endeavor on the artist path, living the artist lifestyle. You don't work a 9 to 5 so that you can focus on your art, because of that you don't have a lot of money, and thus you live the hipster way. In the cheaper edges of a big city, you work entry level retail jobs, and you're constantly at the edge of failure. Many of us like to create art, but because we don't want to live that kind of poor lifestyle we don't pursue what our passions are. We're misfit, square pegs in round holes of society. You absolve people of toil and now you have no fear. Without fear you create more. When you try more you do more. J. K. Rowling credits her completion of Harry Potter based on England's welfare system. They removed her anxiety and fear by helping her out when she had no job. Because of that she took the plunge to write Harry Potter. Imagine if all 7 billion of us are free to try, really try, at art. Think of the industrial revolution. Think of the internet revolution. None of that will compare to the next wave and all that new activities will bring. That's how the world is enriched by removing work. Or, we can all end up reverting back to living in caves. Who knows.

amerika_blog 13y ago
I hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks out from total boredom and frustration.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  Open your eyes and maybe you'll see why art can stop that.

twoodfin 13y ago

He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience. This isn't hard to answer. As a share of the U.S. economy, the entertainment sector (movies, TV, video games...) has grown consistently. Why? Because people are spending less money on almost everything else thanks to declining human labor input costs. Another big winner has been restaurants which are, on average, much more numerous and of dramatically higher quality and variety in your median metro area than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Air travel is also, of course, way up, as more people visit faraway places. I don't see why we should mourn the decline in traditional "labor". Robots aren't going to be cooking anyone a six course meal or directing the next Star Wars movie any time soon.

adventured 13y ago
Because traditional labor made up nearly all of the middle class jobs in 1967, when the US standard of living peaked. What do you replace 100 million labor based jobs with? So far, spanning decades, there hasn't been a good answer to that question, and the middle class continues to erode year after year. So now here we sit with 14% U6 unemployment ('the new normal'), and a labor force participation rate that matches 35 or so years ago (before the full influx of women into the work force, so the current numbers are that much uglier). I'll note that in the last several years, the radical majority of job creation has been both part-time and hospitality based (eg hotels and bars). Hospitality pays notoriously terrible wages for the average worker. That doesn't sound like a good future to me.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  >So now here we sit with 14% U6 unemployment ('the new normal'), and a labor force participation rate that matches 35 or so years ag The other important statistic you're missing is that corporate profits are way up, even better than pre 2008 levels in fact. The question is why, if the economy is so bad that employment is perpetually depressed, how are corporate profits so high? The answer is that production is in fact back to where it used to be. But through automation and piling more work onto fewer people, corporations are reaping ever bigger profits at the expense of the rest of the economy. In fact, the problem we're seeing is a prelude to the very future folks like kurzweli talk about: a future where human labor is obsolete in favor of automation. It's not that the future is necessarily one of destitution for the vast majority of humanity, its one where current thoughts on how to best distribute wealth will have to change. These really are easy problems to solve: some form of basic income. The hard question is how do we get from where we are to there without a very nasty revolution. One good step would be to simply mandate a reduced work-week. Full time becomes say 30 hours rather than 40. These sorts of steps are going to become necessary to maintain social stability as these trends towards fewer and fewer jobs increase.

csomar 13y ago

He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience. My understanding is that humans are limited. For a robot to function, you need to build and maintain it (minimal maintenance). Humans requires lots of effort, though. They get sick, they have to go to work, they can't work long hours, they get tired, bored...

Fuxy 13y ago

That's very optimistic and idealistic but the harsh truth is we treat people as resources and if we replace them with cheaper robots that make the company richer but at the same time leaves that person unemployed. This transfer of wealth that make the rich richer and the poor desperate for food on the table is not healthy for the political stability of the country. If we leave this unchecked it's just a matter of time before we will see the masses declare a war on technology out of desperation.