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I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technolo

I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy. I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the decisions that need to be made.

sitkack 12y ago
I really hope we dont let the bottom half of our economy fall before we strive for the restructuring we will need. Because when we let stuff fail, billions or trillions in value will vanish with it.
furyofantares 12y ago
I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils. I have concerns about this myself, but I don't find that video remotely convincing.
- Afforess 12y ago
  CGP Grey went through the analogy of horses and the history of technology to emphasize the line of thinking that the invention of new technology will lead to the creation of new jobs is a fallacy and false. In the past, new technological changes lead to the demise of horses. There were no "new" jobs that horses could fulfill. So it will be with humans.
  - furyofantares 12y ago
    Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Horses have never created their own jobs using their own ingenuity. We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses. Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services. Or social structure does not depend on horses feeling a sense of meaning in their lives. We didn't react to horse unemployment by finding new things for horses to do because, aside from the horse owners, we did not value the employment of horses and the horses did not create new jobs for themselves because... they are horses. Without necessarily disagreeing with the conclusion, the analogy comes off as extremely silly. I do in fact agree that we need to think about what society we are building as we approach machines that rival humans on all levels, so it's frustrating to see a video that pretends that the employment of horses is at all similar to the employment of humans.
    - Afforess 12y ago
      Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your complaints are mostly irrelevant.
      - coryrc 12y ago
        In this case, the GP clearly points out why that facsimile is not helpful in understanding the issue.
    - evv 12y ago
      > Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Dark as it may seem, many people would say the same about most human consumers in this country. Looking at the most successful creations in the past century, most are made by corporations. While people have been spearheading those efforts so far, the whole novel creation process would be automated if and when it can be. (The "if" in this case is weather or not you believe in "the singularity") > We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses. .. but a society of horses sure would. We, as a society of humans, are worried about the future of human jobs. Our human society and social structure is in for one hell of a shock, but the world will move on. > Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services. And our economy barely relies on humans anymore. As long as there is something with money to spend, the economy doesn't really care. Look at the banking industry. Look at all these B2B partnerships.. who cares about humans in those relationships? Robots are getting better and better at deciding how to spend money. Is the analogy really that silly? I love it because it helps wake people up to the reality we live in: we are the horses in this new age, growing ever more irrelevant. The world economy couldn't care less about humans. This is getting depressing. I'm gonna go listen to "Dog Days are Over" by Florence and the Machine...
      - bcoates 12y ago
        Uh, it's only depressing if you agree with the nutjob elitists that think everyone else is a horse that needs their constant guidance to do something with their life. Do you have any idea how the banking industry and B2B operations work? People. Lots and lots of people. Way less automation than low-margin retail junk, which itself is way less automated than most people think it is. You have it exactly backwards: It's not that the economy is run by robots that are not interested in you. Robots are not interested in the economy, but the economy is very interested in you -- money is just a way of keeping score.
  - Joeri 12y ago
    The analogy is itself a fallacy. The jobs that were displaced were not those of horses, but of horse breeders, trainers, keepers and drivers. The horses in this story were not the laborers but the tools. Those people, unlike horses, could retrain to do a different kind of job which was in-demand. Horse traders could become car salesmen. Horse drivers could become car drivers. The replacement of horses by cars led to an increase in jobs, not a decrease.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  he actually directly addresses this by stating the standard argument that low skill/resolution jobs are replaced by higher skill/resolution jobs. The issue is not that there will not be new jobs, the issue is that the automation of these new jobs is accelerating - so people cannot adapt fast enough to be able to competently take these new jobs as their old jobs become obsolete.
- Dewie 12y ago
  He addressed this by talking about how there really aren't being created many new kinds of jobs, and that the large bulk of employment these days are in professions that have had a long history already.
- Siecje 12y ago
  In the video he says that the new jobs we have created do not make up a significant portion of all jobs.
  - furyofantares 12y ago
    He starts the video exactly the opposite -- he pointed out that all humans used to be involved in food production and now almost none are and briefly summarized thousands of years of history of humans creating new things to do when the old things became unnecessary. That's a long timescale of course... on a shorter timescale I can't think of many jobs that existed 100 years ago that still exist today, at least not as a significant percentage of the current job force. Of course then he says "but this time it's different" before he starts on all the poor, and I think dishonest, logic. So then, yes, he listed a lot of jobs that will go away, insinuated it's basically all of them (with which I agree, but no argument was made), and then took the strawman "well maybe you think creative jobs won't go away" and then defeated that strawman by incorrectly assuming creativity is limited to artists, poets, directors, and actors and said "there can't be such a thing as a poem and painting based economy", which I think is what you are referring to. That's just as dishonest as the horse analogy. It assumes without argument that creative people won't look at the new robotic world around them and find new things to create, or at the humans around them eager to work and find new ways to utilize them, all with the assistance of AIs and robots.
aivosha 12y ago
In the video, the analogy between horses loosing out to cars and humans loosing out to AI is false. Humans are the ones building the AI. Horses however did not build the cars. Its a very important distinction we are not at a liberty to dismiss.
- Afforess 12y ago
  Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your nitpick is therefore irrelevant.
  - aivosha 12y ago
    I did not say the analogy is not representative. I said its wrong. Now if horses were building cars and being worried about their future, I'd say fine. But its not the case. Here horses are not in the same position at all as humans. So its not helping to "compare and contrast", its building up a wrong mindset, wrong premise.
    - GrantS 12y ago
      It is never made explicit in the video but imagine that corporations are the current dominant super-organism on which the economy depends. Humans are only designing and building cars because corporations have no better way of getting that job done. Thus, humans are used by corporations just as horses were used by humans before the corporation became the dominant economic species on the planet. Corporations may not always need humans to survive. Just as cars replaced horses for the benefit of human masters, robots may replace humans for the benefit of corporate masters. You may still disagree with the analogy but I think this is at least the proper analogy to be arguing about.
      - phaemon 12y ago
        I think that's an excellent analogy for what's occurring at this stage in humankind's development.
ModernMech 12y ago
As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 minutes to read the following counterpoint. Self-service checkout – “What used to be 30 humans is now 1 human overseeing 30 self-service check outs” – At all the grocery stores I’ve been to in my area, there are still ~30 human-staffed checkout lanes and 4 – 6 self-service machines, which replaced maybe two rows of check outs and still employs a human for oversight. However, these self-service checkouts allow the stores to operate 24/7, because after 10:00 they are the only lanes open. Now the store is open longer so it can make more money, whereas before they closed at 10:00. More money for the store means perhaps a whole new store opening, employing more people than would have otherwise been employed without self-service lanes. Self-driving cars – “They are not the future, they are here and they work” – For narrow definitions of "here" and "work". There's a big difference between being developed in a lab and driving up and down the coast in sunny Cali, and being deployed to millions of consumers around the globe in multitudinous climates. He lists some things self-driving cars do better than humans, but fails to mention that self-driving cars lack the complex decision making, cognition, and communication abilities that are required in every-day driving. Self-driving cars are low hanging fruit for roboticists because we have a set of rules governing transportation, and that’s prime material for automation. Take the rules, code them up, done. Problem is, the rules are broken constantly, and in a way that driving a million miles up and down the west coast won’t solve (How many miles exactly has the Google car driven in snow?). Self-driving cars will come, but as long as there are still human drivers and weather, they will not live up to the hype they are currently generating. Take it from someone who actually engineers these types of robots. Law Bots – He claims that bots will replace the bulk of lawyering because they can sift through a million e-mails quickly. And what happens when the bot is done? The lawyer gets back to work. It sounds to me like the bot is making the lawyer more efficient. Instead of spending weeks going through e-mails, he can use a computer to help him, and do his job more efficiently. So maybe we need fewer lawyers? The only reason we needed more in the first place was because of the amount of e-mail and electronic documents created by computers. To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous. Doctor bots – He says that knowing the reaction of every drug between every other drug is beyond the scope of human capability… sounds like a great job for robots then! Again, this is an instance of a robot augmenting the capabilities of a human, not replacing one. He goes on to say that the doctor bots will be able to read the latest research, understand it, and then go on to implement the knowledge. First, one has to wonder how the research is being generated if human doctors are being replaced by robots. Second, as long as we’re assuming an AI advanced enough to read a research paper, generate inferences and implications based on that research, and act on that new knowledge, we might as well assume that all disease has also been cured, eliminating the need for doctor bots in the first place. Creative bots – Finally, and most egregiously. Creativity is right up there next to sentience in the totem pole of AI capabilities, and is well into the realm of science fiction. The (only) example he gives, Emily Howell as a source of machine creative music is a complete joke. Here’s what the inventor of the bot has to say about it: > Professor Cope argues that Emily Howell’s music is still predominantly created by humans. “Computers are not separate things,” he said. “The computer is human-made. The program itself is human-made. The music in the database is human as well. There’s so much about this that is human. There’s just a lot more humans involved in making this than usual.” Emily Howell is a program designed by a human to output a specific kind of music. It may be music that has not been written before by any human, but it is not creative. In the end, the music is the result of an algorithm, designed by a human. In my view, a creative machine is one that performs a task, on purpose, it was not programmed to perform. So those are the big problems I have with what he showed. What is even more aggravating is what he left out. What about robots that do things humans can't do. What about a robot that can fit into a 1/2" pipe, or one that can fly (we call them drones), or one that can go into a nuclear reactor or the bottom of the sea. Those robots are taking away 0 jobs, and create hundreds (if not thousands) of jobs for those that design, engineer, manufacture, repair, sell, program, manage, and use those robots. Finally, robots are great at replacing some tasks that can be automated, but not so great at others. We've had robot receptionists for a while now. They are so terrible, that having a human receptionist is now a competitive advantage for some businesses. I think the general point that this video misses, is that robots are terrible at interfacing with people. Any human-facing occupation, even if it has aspects that can be automated, will probably still exist no matter how pervasive robots become in our lives. When robots can interact with humans well, we're probably talking about a future that is too far out for us to accurately predict.

sitkack 12y ago

I really hope we dont let the bottom half of our economy fall before we strive for the restructuring we will need. Because when we let stuff fail, billions or trillions in value will vanish with it.

furyofantares 12y ago

I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils. I have concerns about this myself, but I don't find that video remotely convincing.

Afforess 12y ago
CGP Grey went through the analogy of horses and the history of technology to emphasize the line of thinking that the invention of new technology will lead to the creation of new jobs is a fallacy and false. In the past, new technological changes lead to the demise of horses. There were no "new" jobs that horses could fulfill. So it will be with humans.
- furyofantares 12y ago
  Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Horses have never created their own jobs using their own ingenuity. We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses. Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services. Or social structure does not depend on horses feeling a sense of meaning in their lives. We didn't react to horse unemployment by finding new things for horses to do because, aside from the horse owners, we did not value the employment of horses and the horses did not create new jobs for themselves because... they are horses. Without necessarily disagreeing with the conclusion, the analogy comes off as extremely silly. I do in fact agree that we need to think about what society we are building as we approach machines that rival humans on all levels, so it's frustrating to see a video that pretends that the employment of horses is at all similar to the employment of humans.
  - Afforess 12y ago
    Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your complaints are mostly irrelevant.
    - coryrc 12y ago
      In this case, the GP clearly points out why that facsimile is not helpful in understanding the issue.
  - evv 12y ago
    > Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Dark as it may seem, many people would say the same about most human consumers in this country. Looking at the most successful creations in the past century, most are made by corporations. While people have been spearheading those efforts so far, the whole novel creation process would be automated if and when it can be. (The "if" in this case is weather or not you believe in "the singularity") > We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses. .. but a society of horses sure would. We, as a society of humans, are worried about the future of human jobs. Our human society and social structure is in for one hell of a shock, but the world will move on. > Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services. And our economy barely relies on humans anymore. As long as there is something with money to spend, the economy doesn't really care. Look at the banking industry. Look at all these B2B partnerships.. who cares about humans in those relationships? Robots are getting better and better at deciding how to spend money. Is the analogy really that silly? I love it because it helps wake people up to the reality we live in: we are the horses in this new age, growing ever more irrelevant. The world economy couldn't care less about humans. This is getting depressing. I'm gonna go listen to "Dog Days are Over" by Florence and the Machine...
    - bcoates 12y ago
      Uh, it's only depressing if you agree with the nutjob elitists that think everyone else is a horse that needs their constant guidance to do something with their life. Do you have any idea how the banking industry and B2B operations work? People. Lots and lots of people. Way less automation than low-margin retail junk, which itself is way less automated than most people think it is. You have it exactly backwards: It's not that the economy is run by robots that are not interested in you. Robots are not interested in the economy, but the economy is very interested in you -- money is just a way of keeping score.
- Joeri 12y ago
  The analogy is itself a fallacy. The jobs that were displaced were not those of horses, but of horse breeders, trainers, keepers and drivers. The horses in this story were not the laborers but the tools. Those people, unlike horses, could retrain to do a different kind of job which was in-demand. Horse traders could become car salesmen. Horse drivers could become car drivers. The replacement of horses by cars led to an increase in jobs, not a decrease.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
he actually directly addresses this by stating the standard argument that low skill/resolution jobs are replaced by higher skill/resolution jobs. The issue is not that there will not be new jobs, the issue is that the automation of these new jobs is accelerating - so people cannot adapt fast enough to be able to competently take these new jobs as their old jobs become obsolete.
Dewie 12y ago
He addressed this by talking about how there really aren't being created many new kinds of jobs, and that the large bulk of employment these days are in professions that have had a long history already.
Siecje 12y ago
In the video he says that the new jobs we have created do not make up a significant portion of all jobs.
- furyofantares 12y ago
  He starts the video exactly the opposite -- he pointed out that all humans used to be involved in food production and now almost none are and briefly summarized thousands of years of history of humans creating new things to do when the old things became unnecessary. That's a long timescale of course... on a shorter timescale I can't think of many jobs that existed 100 years ago that still exist today, at least not as a significant percentage of the current job force. Of course then he says "but this time it's different" before he starts on all the poor, and I think dishonest, logic. So then, yes, he listed a lot of jobs that will go away, insinuated it's basically all of them (with which I agree, but no argument was made), and then took the strawman "well maybe you think creative jobs won't go away" and then defeated that strawman by incorrectly assuming creativity is limited to artists, poets, directors, and actors and said "there can't be such a thing as a poem and painting based economy", which I think is what you are referring to. That's just as dishonest as the horse analogy. It assumes without argument that creative people won't look at the new robotic world around them and find new things to create, or at the humans around them eager to work and find new ways to utilize them, all with the assistance of AIs and robots.

aivosha 12y ago

In the video, the analogy between horses loosing out to cars and humans loosing out to AI is false. Humans are the ones building the AI. Horses however did not build the cars. Its a very important distinction we are not at a liberty to dismiss.

Afforess 12y ago
Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your nitpick is therefore irrelevant.
- aivosha 12y ago
  I did not say the analogy is not representative. I said its wrong. Now if horses were building cars and being worried about their future, I'd say fine. But its not the case. Here horses are not in the same position at all as humans. So its not helping to "compare and contrast", its building up a wrong mindset, wrong premise.
  - GrantS 12y ago
    It is never made explicit in the video but imagine that corporations are the current dominant super-organism on which the economy depends. Humans are only designing and building cars because corporations have no better way of getting that job done. Thus, humans are used by corporations just as horses were used by humans before the corporation became the dominant economic species on the planet. Corporations may not always need humans to survive. Just as cars replaced horses for the benefit of human masters, robots may replace humans for the benefit of corporate masters. You may still disagree with the analogy but I think this is at least the proper analogy to be arguing about.
    - phaemon 12y ago
      I think that's an excellent analogy for what's occurring at this stage in humankind's development.

ModernMech 12y ago

As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 minutes to read the following counterpoint. Self-service checkout – “What used to be 30 humans is now 1 human overseeing 30 self-service check outs” – At all the grocery stores I’ve been to in my area, there are still ~30 human-staffed checkout lanes and 4 – 6 self-service machines, which replaced maybe two rows of check outs and still employs a human for oversight. However, these self-service checkouts allow the stores to operate 24/7, because after 10:00 they are the only lanes open. Now the store is open longer so it can make more money, whereas before they closed at 10:00. More money for the store means perhaps a whole new store opening, employing more people than would have otherwise been employed without self-service lanes. Self-driving cars – “They are not the future, they are here and they work” – For narrow definitions of "here" and "work". There's a big difference between being developed in a lab and driving up and down the coast in sunny Cali, and being deployed to millions of consumers around the globe in multitudinous climates. He lists some things self-driving cars do better than humans, but fails to mention that self-driving cars lack the complex decision making, cognition, and communication abilities that are required in every-day driving. Self-driving cars are low hanging fruit for roboticists because we have a set of rules governing transportation, and that’s prime material for automation. Take the rules, code them up, done. Problem is, the rules are broken constantly, and in a way that driving a million miles up and down the west coast won’t solve (How many miles exactly has the Google car driven in snow?). Self-driving cars will come, but as long as there are still human drivers and weather, they will not live up to the hype they are currently generating. Take it from someone who actually engineers these types of robots. Law Bots – He claims that bots will replace the bulk of lawyering because they can sift through a million e-mails quickly. And what happens when the bot is done? The lawyer gets back to work. It sounds to me like the bot is making the lawyer more efficient. Instead of spending weeks going through e-mails, he can use a computer to help him, and do his job more efficiently. So maybe we need fewer lawyers? The only reason we needed more in the first place was because of the amount of e-mail and electronic documents created by computers. To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous. Doctor bots – He says that knowing the reaction of every drug between every other drug is beyond the scope of human capability… sounds like a great job for robots then! Again, this is an instance of a robot augmenting the capabilities of a human, not replacing one. He goes on to say that the doctor bots will be able to read the latest research, understand it, and then go on to implement the knowledge. First, one has to wonder how the research is being generated if human doctors are being replaced by robots. Second, as long as we’re assuming an AI advanced enough to read a research paper, generate inferences and implications based on that research, and act on that new knowledge, we might as well assume that all disease has also been cured, eliminating the need for doctor bots in the first place. Creative bots – Finally, and most egregiously. Creativity is right up there next to sentience in the totem pole of AI capabilities, and is well into the realm of science fiction. The (only) example he gives, Emily Howell as a source of machine creative music is a complete joke. Here’s what the inventor of the bot has to say about it: > Professor Cope argues that Emily Howell’s music is still predominantly created by humans. “Computers are not separate things,” he said. “The computer is human-made. The program itself is human-made. The music in the database is human as well. There’s so much about this that is human. There’s just a lot more humans involved in making this than usual.” Emily Howell is a program designed by a human to output a specific kind of music. It may be music that has not been written before by any human, but it is not creative. In the end, the music is the result of an algorithm, designed by a human. In my view, a creative machine is one that performs a task, on purpose, it was not programmed to perform. So those are the big problems I have with what he showed. What is even more aggravating is what he left out. What about robots that do things humans can't do. What about a robot that can fit into a 1/2" pipe, or one that can fly (we call them drones), or one that can go into a nuclear reactor or the bottom of the sea. Those robots are taking away 0 jobs, and create hundreds (if not thousands) of jobs for those that design, engineer, manufacture, repair, sell, program, manage, and use those robots. Finally, robots are great at replacing some tasks that can be automated, but not so great at others. We've had robot receptionists for a while now. They are so terrible, that having a human receptionist is now a competitive advantage for some businesses. I think the general point that this video misses, is that robots are terrible at interfacing with people. Any human-facing occupation, even if it has aspects that can be automated, will probably still exist no matter how pervasive robots become in our lives. When robots can interact with humans well, we're probably talking about a future that is too far out for us to accurately predict.