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"In the short term, this could mean research into the economic effects of AI to stop smart systems putting millions of people out of work." This seems unfortun

"In the short term, this could mean research into the economic effects of AI to stop smart systems putting millions of people out of work." This seems unfortunate and somewhat challenging to do. Our current economic model encourages improving efficiency of systems. This seems like a good thing. Its really too bad that people "need" jobs. Jobs should be creating value or they shouldn't exist. Artificially "creating" jobs to prop up the systems feels like fighting against reality and a bad long term plan.

bulletsvshumans 12y ago
How about a tax on AI that goes towards unemployment benefits of some kind?
- maaaats 12y ago
  But what is "AI"? Once something in AI gains traction, it quickly becomes part of the standard computer-science-toolkit. For instance, programmatically tuning some variables can be considered a standard task, either with some bruteforce or a small search between the possible combinations. This was earlier considered AI, but is now a common approach. AI now would probably be to do more advanced problems with genetic algorithms or similar. But where to draw the line?
  - matt4077 12y ago
    A nice and steep tax on capital gains would do fine. As technology progresses and machines contribute more and more value the income they generate returns to those that financed them.
- rndn 12y ago
  I think, the perceived danger here is more the lack of social acceptance of unemployed people. I think however, that if a large part or even a majority of the population is unemployable it will necessarily lead to social acceptance. People will simply have a lot of leisure time.
  - DanielBMarkham 12y ago
    It's more than that. You hit on it in the last part of your comment. This is about having tons of leisure life. How is it parceled out? How do people stay engaged in life and happy? Remember, there are already lots of rich people who have as much leisure life as they want. And it's not a good thing for many of them. It's like a study posted on HN said a while back: you can have a meaningful life, or your can have a happy life. They are not the same thing. The more people that have meaningful lives, whether sweeping the streets, inventing new things, or writing novels? The better we all are. The more people choosing simply to be happy? Society will stagnate and die. So this isn't some case of somebody telling somebody else what to do. Assuming we are entering the age of "robots do everything", our species has a crisis of meaning at hand.
    - rndn 12y ago
      But even in leisure time there are things to achieve, for example learning new skills, exercising and gaining reputation in virtual worlds. I think the concept of "meaning in life" is more flexible than often assumed.
  - nhaehnle 12y ago
    It is not just social acceptance, though. It is also the problem that one's livelihood is closely tied to one's employment. With both these things, the question is how the social acceptance and the detachment of livelihood from employment comes about. Will it require revolutions and civil war with accompanying bloodshed when the downtrodden unemployed rise up? Or will we be collectively smart enough to reform our economic systems before the rift through society becomes too deep?
    - rndn 12y ago
      Maybe I'm thinking in too simple terms, but I can't imagine that being a major problem because it will affect people from all classes in the same way and the change will probably be fairly quick (once the technology is available, everyone will want it immediately to remain competitive). Intelligence is distributed like a Gauss bell, so it will equally hit lower, upper and middle class, making the necessity for a basic income very quickly obvious. I don't think the lower class will be excluded from such a social system. I personally think the bigger risks are AIs themselves, used as weapons or when they go out of control.
- 3beard 12y ago
  I don't understand why AI eliminating jobs is considered a problem. If any job can be done by a computer program it simply means that humanity has outgrown this kind of work and that nobody should do that mindnumbing crap anymore. Let's forget that the word "computer" used to mean "guy who sits in an office of an accounting firm, and adds numbers all day long".
  - AlisdairO 12y ago
    That's fantastic, as long as there are alternative jobs for those people to go to that they can feasibly perform. This has historically been the case with technology replacing work, but it's not clear whether it's the case this time. If there's no (or insufficient) jobs for people to go to, in a society that predicates your ability to live a pleasant life on having one, you have a huge social problem. Our current system is not set up to cope with 40% of the population being out of work.
  - jimbokun 12y ago
    Because with our current economic model, all the benefits will go to the people supplying the capital to develop and deploy the AI. In the long term, we may discover more sophisticated AI has different goals and priorities than us, and we won't be able to control it or turn it off.
  - atrilla 12y ago
    I agree. In fact, this is a recurrent piece of criticism that also appeared on an MIT Tech review, which I commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253
  - programminggeek 12y ago
    Because there are too many people and people need to feed themselves and their families. For example, consider if your job was made obsolete in 20-30 years. That there was no longer a need to program or manage computers any longer. All of a sudden all of this knowledge in your head is now basically useless and you have not likely developed any other meaningful skillset. What do you do and what does society do for you? THAT is why eliminating jobs is a problem. At some point the jobs simply aren't replaced by other things, or the other things are menial tasks, not meaningful tasks. If you eliminate enough jobs there isn't enough money to keep the consumer based economy afloat, and then the companies that own the robots go out of business because people who buy their products no longer have jobs or money to afford their product. There are no clear solutions to this problem either.
- lukasm 12y ago
  Money is not the only problem. Unemployment leads to loneliness, demotivation, social stigma. This is not only caused by social pressure to have a job. Even rich people work. We need some form of Minimal Activity. The letter will have no effect. Similarly, you can sing a letter to stop drugs.
  - verbin217 12y ago
    In a world where unemployment was more pervasive and expected it likely wouldn't be that way.
    - lukasm 12y ago
      Rich people also get lonely.
JulianMorrison 12y ago
The idea of work, money and paying for things is obsolete and becoming dangerous. It needs replacing with a non-awful allocation economy.
- kylebrown 12y ago
  What are the better alternatives for allocating resources? Any distribution mechanism will need a standard metric for measuring and dividing piles of resources. Money is that metric. I do agree with you about work though. Assuming a future government structure similar to our current one, a humane economic policy will probably need to provide some form of universal basic income.
  - harperlee 12y ago
    I'm still not convinced that work is obsolete or becoming dangerous... As long as humans have desires (whatever weird e.g. I want my hair to be the bluest and spikiest), and as long as these desires there are not the same for everyone, there will be incentives to exchange value, and while money is the unit of measure, work is the effort directed to get that value for you. Also, the side effect of all this is that me make things, so is work dangerous? Perhaps /we/ are, as work is a byproduct of our way of being.
- marknutter 12y ago
  How then do you propose we assign value to things?
  - harperlee 12y ago
    If money is three things (unit of measure, holder of value, and method of exchange), perhaps there is a way of dividing these in two or more subsets. Measure and exchange seem difficult to separate; perhaps not being able to "hold" money could be interesting.
IgorPartola 12y ago
We are now entering a new age where our current form of capitalism will not work. You see, when there was enough demand on the workforce (as in, there was as much or more work to do than there were workers), things worked reasonably well. Now we are entering an era where there is much less demand for workers, yet we are not yet productive enough to just sit back, relax, and let machines handle 99.9%+ of the work. Think about it: 50% unemployment is terrible. 100% unemployment is not unemployment. It means there are enough resources to go around that nobody has to work. There is so much food, shelter, and entertainment that we don't need to get up in the morning and go to work. Obviously, 100% unemployment cannot happen. In all likelyhood, we'll still need doctors, chefs, artists, etc. But that the direction we are going in, and we better figure out how to set up a new economy to adapt to the new realities. I envision a shift in the mind set. Personally, if I have more money then I could spend in a lifetime, and choose to work to make myself even richer, I don't care if 10 other families are living off my wealth. People will have a choice: do something productive for society, and live a slightly better lifestyle, or pursue more personal fulfillment. We'll see a lot more artists, and a lot less custodians. In the long run, I believe this shift will be a good thing, but it will require us to stop using terms like "moocher class".
- john_b 12y ago
  Austrian economists like to point out that human wants and needs are effectively infinite (mostly due to the "wants" part), so there is fundamentally no reason that our economy should cease functioning just because the "needs" portion becomes increasingly automated and efficient. The problem is getting people to pay for the "wants" part. I'm worried that the internet has accustomed people to treating creative content as a free resource by nature of being on the internet. It's the most efficient distribution mechanism for a lot of creative works, but the economics of an ad-filled internet experience with the user as product is very disturbing on a grand scale. The whole dream of economic progress since the Enlightenment was that our needs would become increasingly solved so that we could focus on what we really enjoy as human beings. To quote John Adams: > "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." But we live in a world with an ever expanding supply of people and a rapidly diminishing set of "necessary" jobs. If we want to avoid the end game of that situation (revolution) we need to find ways to get the economics of the unnecessary-but-still-valuable to work.
CornishHen 12y ago
I agree that there's a benefit to making processes more efficient by replacing human labor with AI where possible, but I interpreted this to refer to systems that have wide economic effects, like robosigning foreclosures or selling company stocks.
- bsaunder 12y ago
  Consider the wide economic effect of self-driving cars (once finally highly reliable). This one application of AI could almost single handedly push us over the edge. The job decimation will be huge: truck drivers, delivery drivers, taxis, bus drivers, automotive insurance industry, traffic enforcement, collision repair shops, emergency services, car sales, car manufacturing (less accidents more vehicle sharing). I'm sure it will create a few new job types, but a couple of orders of magnitude less jobs than the destruction. Hopefully the world considers this a good thing. Honestly it seems that most people are too ignorant to see economic pain this will cause until it has happened. Unfortunately, I'm sure unions and industry groups see this train coming and will put up road blocks (pun intended) to delaying an inevitable roll out of the technology.

bulletsvshumans 12y ago

How about a tax on AI that goes towards unemployment benefits of some kind?

maaaats 12y ago
But what is "AI"? Once something in AI gains traction, it quickly becomes part of the standard computer-science-toolkit. For instance, programmatically tuning some variables can be considered a standard task, either with some bruteforce or a small search between the possible combinations. This was earlier considered AI, but is now a common approach. AI now would probably be to do more advanced problems with genetic algorithms or similar. But where to draw the line?
- matt4077 12y ago
  A nice and steep tax on capital gains would do fine. As technology progresses and machines contribute more and more value the income they generate returns to those that financed them.
rndn 12y ago
I think, the perceived danger here is more the lack of social acceptance of unemployed people. I think however, that if a large part or even a majority of the population is unemployable it will necessarily lead to social acceptance. People will simply have a lot of leisure time.
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  It's more than that. You hit on it in the last part of your comment. This is about having tons of leisure life. How is it parceled out? How do people stay engaged in life and happy? Remember, there are already lots of rich people who have as much leisure life as they want. And it's not a good thing for many of them. It's like a study posted on HN said a while back: you can have a meaningful life, or your can have a happy life. They are not the same thing. The more people that have meaningful lives, whether sweeping the streets, inventing new things, or writing novels? The better we all are. The more people choosing simply to be happy? Society will stagnate and die. So this isn't some case of somebody telling somebody else what to do. Assuming we are entering the age of "robots do everything", our species has a crisis of meaning at hand.
  - rndn 12y ago
    But even in leisure time there are things to achieve, for example learning new skills, exercising and gaining reputation in virtual worlds. I think the concept of "meaning in life" is more flexible than often assumed.
- nhaehnle 12y ago
  It is not just social acceptance, though. It is also the problem that one's livelihood is closely tied to one's employment. With both these things, the question is how the social acceptance and the detachment of livelihood from employment comes about. Will it require revolutions and civil war with accompanying bloodshed when the downtrodden unemployed rise up? Or will we be collectively smart enough to reform our economic systems before the rift through society becomes too deep?
  - rndn 12y ago
    Maybe I'm thinking in too simple terms, but I can't imagine that being a major problem because it will affect people from all classes in the same way and the change will probably be fairly quick (once the technology is available, everyone will want it immediately to remain competitive). Intelligence is distributed like a Gauss bell, so it will equally hit lower, upper and middle class, making the necessity for a basic income very quickly obvious. I don't think the lower class will be excluded from such a social system. I personally think the bigger risks are AIs themselves, used as weapons or when they go out of control.
3beard 12y ago
I don't understand why AI eliminating jobs is considered a problem. If any job can be done by a computer program it simply means that humanity has outgrown this kind of work and that nobody should do that mindnumbing crap anymore. Let's forget that the word "computer" used to mean "guy who sits in an office of an accounting firm, and adds numbers all day long".
- AlisdairO 12y ago
  That's fantastic, as long as there are alternative jobs for those people to go to that they can feasibly perform. This has historically been the case with technology replacing work, but it's not clear whether it's the case this time. If there's no (or insufficient) jobs for people to go to, in a society that predicates your ability to live a pleasant life on having one, you have a huge social problem. Our current system is not set up to cope with 40% of the population being out of work.
- jimbokun 12y ago
  Because with our current economic model, all the benefits will go to the people supplying the capital to develop and deploy the AI. In the long term, we may discover more sophisticated AI has different goals and priorities than us, and we won't be able to control it or turn it off.
- atrilla 12y ago
  I agree. In fact, this is a recurrent piece of criticism that also appeared on an MIT Tech review, which I commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253
- programminggeek 12y ago
  Because there are too many people and people need to feed themselves and their families. For example, consider if your job was made obsolete in 20-30 years. That there was no longer a need to program or manage computers any longer. All of a sudden all of this knowledge in your head is now basically useless and you have not likely developed any other meaningful skillset. What do you do and what does society do for you? THAT is why eliminating jobs is a problem. At some point the jobs simply aren't replaced by other things, or the other things are menial tasks, not meaningful tasks. If you eliminate enough jobs there isn't enough money to keep the consumer based economy afloat, and then the companies that own the robots go out of business because people who buy their products no longer have jobs or money to afford their product. There are no clear solutions to this problem either.
lukasm 12y ago
Money is not the only problem. Unemployment leads to loneliness, demotivation, social stigma. This is not only caused by social pressure to have a job. Even rich people work. We need some form of Minimal Activity. The letter will have no effect. Similarly, you can sing a letter to stop drugs.
- verbin217 12y ago
  In a world where unemployment was more pervasive and expected it likely wouldn't be that way.
  - lukasm 12y ago
    Rich people also get lonely.

JulianMorrison 12y ago

The idea of work, money and paying for things is obsolete and becoming dangerous. It needs replacing with a non-awful allocation economy.

kylebrown 12y ago
What are the better alternatives for allocating resources? Any distribution mechanism will need a standard metric for measuring and dividing piles of resources. Money is that metric. I do agree with you about work though. Assuming a future government structure similar to our current one, a humane economic policy will probably need to provide some form of universal basic income.
- harperlee 12y ago
  I'm still not convinced that work is obsolete or becoming dangerous... As long as humans have desires (whatever weird e.g. I want my hair to be the bluest and spikiest), and as long as these desires there are not the same for everyone, there will be incentives to exchange value, and while money is the unit of measure, work is the effort directed to get that value for you. Also, the side effect of all this is that me make things, so is work dangerous? Perhaps /we/ are, as work is a byproduct of our way of being.
marknutter 12y ago
How then do you propose we assign value to things?
- harperlee 12y ago
  If money is three things (unit of measure, holder of value, and method of exchange), perhaps there is a way of dividing these in two or more subsets. Measure and exchange seem difficult to separate; perhaps not being able to "hold" money could be interesting.

IgorPartola 12y ago

We are now entering a new age where our current form of capitalism will not work. You see, when there was enough demand on the workforce (as in, there was as much or more work to do than there were workers), things worked reasonably well. Now we are entering an era where there is much less demand for workers, yet we are not yet productive enough to just sit back, relax, and let machines handle 99.9%+ of the work. Think about it: 50% unemployment is terrible. 100% unemployment is not unemployment. It means there are enough resources to go around that nobody has to work. There is so much food, shelter, and entertainment that we don't need to get up in the morning and go to work. Obviously, 100% unemployment cannot happen. In all likelyhood, we'll still need doctors, chefs, artists, etc. But that the direction we are going in, and we better figure out how to set up a new economy to adapt to the new realities. I envision a shift in the mind set. Personally, if I have more money then I could spend in a lifetime, and choose to work to make myself even richer, I don't care if 10 other families are living off my wealth. People will have a choice: do something productive for society, and live a slightly better lifestyle, or pursue more personal fulfillment. We'll see a lot more artists, and a lot less custodians. In the long run, I believe this shift will be a good thing, but it will require us to stop using terms like "moocher class".

john_b 12y ago
Austrian economists like to point out that human wants and needs are effectively infinite (mostly due to the "wants" part), so there is fundamentally no reason that our economy should cease functioning just because the "needs" portion becomes increasingly automated and efficient. The problem is getting people to pay for the "wants" part. I'm worried that the internet has accustomed people to treating creative content as a free resource by nature of being on the internet. It's the most efficient distribution mechanism for a lot of creative works, but the economics of an ad-filled internet experience with the user as product is very disturbing on a grand scale. The whole dream of economic progress since the Enlightenment was that our needs would become increasingly solved so that we could focus on what we really enjoy as human beings. To quote John Adams: > "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." But we live in a world with an ever expanding supply of people and a rapidly diminishing set of "necessary" jobs. If we want to avoid the end game of that situation (revolution) we need to find ways to get the economics of the unnecessary-but-still-valuable to work.

CornishHen 12y ago

I agree that there's a benefit to making processes more efficient by replacing human labor with AI where possible, but I interpreted this to refer to systems that have wide economic effects, like robosigning foreclosures or selling company stocks.

bsaunder 12y ago
Consider the wide economic effect of self-driving cars (once finally highly reliable). This one application of AI could almost single handedly push us over the edge. The job decimation will be huge: truck drivers, delivery drivers, taxis, bus drivers, automotive insurance industry, traffic enforcement, collision repair shops, emergency services, car sales, car manufacturing (less accidents more vehicle sharing). I'm sure it will create a few new job types, but a couple of orders of magnitude less jobs than the destruction. Hopefully the world considers this a good thing. Honestly it seems that most people are too ignorant to see economic pain this will cause until it has happened. Unfortunately, I'm sure unions and industry groups see this train coming and will put up road blocks (pun intended) to delaying an inevitable roll out of the technology.