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The Software Revolution

• girmad 12y ago
  > Technology provides leverage on ability and luck, and in the process concentrates wealth and drives inequality. I think that drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years. [2] We can—and we will—redistribute wealth, but it still doesn’t solve the real problem of people needing something fulfilling to do. What's the best case realistic scenario for redistributing wealth?
  • gphil 12y ago
    Not sure if you're asking sama about his opinion or if you want others to chime in. A popular answer among the HN crowd that I tend to agree with is to tax the wealthy and distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme.
    • radmuzom 12y ago
      A really good article about basic income was published in Vox last year (seems to have been updated recently). http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-income-tax-questions-explain http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-in...
    • shit_parade 12y ago
      A better answer is removing expensive barriers of entry to allow small businesses to compete with larger companies, removing artificial boundaries to allow labor to go where it is most needed just as capital is allowed the same today, and _reducing taxes_ allowing the middle class to thrive once more instead of giving special privileges to the wealthy and buying off the poor with free debt.
      • unprepare 12y ago
        As a member of the middle class, I'm honestly curious how reducing taxes would help me in the least. An extra thousand bucks or so at the end of the year gets me what exactly?
    • delinka 12y ago
      Why wait for a tax? If we're in the top %x of income earners, why aren't we taking it upon ourselves to give away our wealth? Form a charitable organization that takes care of people, donate your money. Edit: I'm with the others here replying with "reduced burdens on the middle class and small businesses" and "...teach a man to fish..." I keep seeing this basic income and wealth distribution topic on HN and I would genuinely like to understand why those preaching for these ideas never actually do anything about it. "Make the government bigger" isn't the answer as it'll then be used as a tool of oppression. Further, assuming we implemented a basic income in the USA, how many generations until the motivators for innovation and advancing society are completely eliminated? I've everything I need at $BASIC_INCOME, and as soon as I start producing more income, the government is stripping it from me, so what's my motivation to ever do anything besides subsist on that minimum? And once everyone is just taking the minimum and not doing work, who's gonna farm the food? Drive the trucks? Operate a grocery? Build the houses?
      • pbreit 12y ago
        It doesn't work very well without broad participation.
      • gphil 12y ago
        I don't have a good answer for why this doesn't happen. However, the fact of the matter is that the wealthy, on the whole, don't naturally redistribute their wealth very effectively.
      • innguest 12y ago
        Because keynesians don't really want to help the poor, they want to be taxed which serves as flogging to atone for their guilt for the poor, which then makes them feel better about themselves. If we wanted to help the poor we would be making things easier for small businesses, not harder. You don't help people by giving them fish, you help them by teaching them how to fish. I can't believe I'm having to remind HNers about this.
      • ashark 12y ago
        The short answer? Game theory. The longer answer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem And, more broadly: http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html#coordination_problems http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html#coordination_problems
    • jnbiche 12y ago
      > distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme Basic income goes to both the poor and the rich. It's universal. The net affect may be redistributive, but there's no preference given to the recipient's income level. Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it. I know you know this, but it's important to frame this issue properly if you want to support it. There can be no question in basic income of "undeserving" groups getting it, because everybody gets it. This also has the worthy effect of eliminating all the bureaucracy that current benefits programs carry.
      • gphil 12y ago
        > Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it. Right, I wasn't clear about this but you're correct that the idea is that technically everybody is given the same amount in one form or another.
      • loumf 12y ago
        This ideal has helped Social Security and Medicare keep popularity. They are not seen as poverty programs, but they help the poor a lot.
  • jnbiche 12y ago
    Basic income. People may scoff, but this is one of the extremely rare ideas that can draw significant support from both sides of the isle in the US. There are pockets of strong opposition to the idea on both the right and the left, but I can only hope that the far left's opposition to basic income continues. That opposition in and off itself makes most politicians in this country take a serious look at the idea.
    • shit_parade 12y ago
      The problem is implementation, do you really trust the US government to give it even more power over its people by allowing to hand out 'basic incomes' to everyone? I'm sure it will only become yet another tool to oppress dissent.
      • jeffreyrogers 12y ago
        I don't think your fears are well grounded, and I'm not aware of significant efforts by the US government to "oppress dissent" in other recent cases.
        • deleted 12y ago
          [deleted]
        • shit_parade 12y ago
          Free speech zones, excessive pursuit of whistle blowers, proposed restrictions on cryptography, extensive use of national security letters, resisting FOIA requests, defending NSA programs, killing US citizens in secret. I'm flabbergasted you believe my fears of government overreach and suppression of dissent is not well grounded.
        • geoffbrown2014 12y ago
          The federal government has a terrible record of trying and succeeding in ruining people they perceive as a threat to the status quo, including people like MLK Jr., a Senate confirmed target of the FBI. These tactics continue today, they are currently being directed towards investigative journalists and whistle blowers. The threats are so great as to create a very real chill among conventional journalists to keep on approved topics and messages.
  • dnautics 12y ago
    I am puzzled by this. There is also this first order decrease in cost of living that technology drives, that really is the 'rising tide that lifts all boats', in effect, a 'natural' progressive redistribution[0]. It would be hard to argue that inequality increased between, say, 1700 and 1900 because of the increase in technology. [0] This 'natural' redistribution tends to be counteracted by authorities that debase the money system. Currently we have an explicit anti-deflationist policy on the grounds that lowering prices are believed to inherently have a socially destabilizing effect. Monetary policy tends to be regressive redistribution, because the primary executors of these policies are connected to banks, and the secondary effects are to create upward market indexes that beat inflation (but are eventually corrected downward, hurting middle-class 'slow movers' like pension funds and disproportionately helping upper-class 'fast moving' investment classes).
    • pixl97 12y ago
      > It would be hard to argue that inequality increased between Based on averages, why would it be? Inequality does not measure where you are coming from, it measures the relative economic distance between groups now. We can all live better these days and yet have a far greater difference in wealth between the richest and poorest.
      • dnautics 12y ago
        yeah, pretty sure the gini coefficient went down during that era.
  • tiler 12y ago
    Imagine a system which levied taxes not to fund government expenditure but to carefully control inflation. In this system there is no need for the government to collect taxes from citizen X to fund the needs of citizen Y. How is this possible? Study U.S. fiscal policy and you will learn about such a system. Given enough consideration you will eventually see that 'the redistribution of wealth' from citizen X to Y is an antiquated idea given how our monetary system actually works. A more accurate description of what occurs is: given the growth of the productivity of the population as a whole, we can 'distribute wealth' to those with less as long as this distribution doesn't cause the system to become unstable.
• interesting_guy 12y ago
  how do i get shadow unbanned?
• tomblomfield 12y ago
  I think the headline message of this article is important - "drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years" But I think the article really lost a lot of its punch with non sequiturs like "If we can synthesize drugs, we ought to be able to synthesize vaccines".....
• mdlthree 12y ago
  Video by CGP Grey on a similar topic - Humans need not apply - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
• jmsdnns 12y ago
  Anyone interested in this topic should pick up a copy of Carlota Perez's Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It speaks more specifically about the last 5 revolutions, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and provides a framework for understanding the relationship between tech revolutions and finance. Just a fantastic read. Don't just take my word for it though. Here is Fred Wilson saying the same: http://avc.com/2015/02/the-carlota-perez-framework/ http://avc.com/2015/02/the-carlota-perez-framework/
  • leojfc 12y ago
    Wholeheartedly agree with this, I found Carlota’s book to be accessible despite not having an economics background. There is also an excellent documentary she’s in about the most recent financial crisis: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2180589/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2180589/
• ggonweb 12y ago
  "But I worry we learned the wrong lessons from recent examples" - what are the wrong lessons ?
• pgodzin 12y ago
  Are there any statistics comparing job loss in the industrial and software revolutions up to this point. The industrial revolution likewise replaced manual labor with automation, and the software revolution Sam talks about seems like a more effective extension of that. What trends happened last time jobs were replaced by automation?
  • rgbrenner 12y ago
    I don't think that's an easy task, at least at this point. Depending on when you want to start the clock, the 'software revolution' is a couple of decades old. It would be hard to separate what job losses occurred from software vs from outsourcing, the recessions, etc. Give it some time, when it's clear that the jobs aren't coming back, and then we'll have a good idea the causes and size of it.
• lonnyk 12y ago
  > The new existential threats won’t require the resources of nations to produce. The continued openness of the Internet relies on the Government, no? Is it wrong to think that AI relies on that as well? > The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing. Isn't this what government is for?
  • ryandvm 12y ago
    A government is a collection of people that, like almost everyone else, are almost exclusively motivated by the goal of "having a job tomorrow". Governments, inasmuch as they can be anthropomorphised, are not especially interested in solving problems beyond the continuance of the apparatus.
  • frandroid 12y ago
    Think "NSA develops AI cyberwarfare capabilities", with the kind of infra access that it has.
• explorigin 12y ago
  FTA "I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get." Let's see... - unauthorized access to computers (hacking) is illegal is most countries - hackers often use malware as one of their tools - anti-malware products are woefully inefficient at thwarting or even detecting most malware. This is just one example, but I think the author's approach is ignorant at best. In the West, we often view systemic problems as something external that we can fix with technology. This view was popularized in the Age of Enlightenment and runs very popular today. The contrasting view-point is that systemic problems are internal (i.e. in the character of every human). For example, we have the technology and resources to end much of the world's hunger, but it does not happen because of greed and/or power that would be disrupted by all these hungry people suddenly not being hungry. Systemic societal problems are both internal and external, but if we only talk about fixing external problems, we doom ourselves to (insert dystopian future here).
• realcoolguy 12y ago
  We could all be farmers. We'd all have jobs. Work the fields by hand. You quickly see the flaw in the logic of the argument for more jobs. (It's much better to pay a much smaller % of your income for a few specialized persons to do the work) You always want more work being done by less people. Video rental? Automate it! Automated kiosks becoming too much of a hassle for someone to constantly restock? Online streaming instead. This is what we call progress. It's what is allowing us to even debate this as a topic. I hope it continues because it does create much higher paying jobs for those that do have jobs and it frees up the workforce to innovate even more.
• azakai 12y ago
  > In human history, there have been three great technological revolutions and many smaller ones. The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution. Arguably the control of fire was a great revolution as well.
  • alexfarran 12y ago
    And the wheel, that was revolutionary.
    • azakai 12y ago
      I would guess the wheel was part of the agricultural revolution? Maybe that's wrong. edit: yes, it seems I was wrong, the wheel was discovered much after the agricultural revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History Given that though, I wonder if its impact was smaller than the other great revolutions.
    • zanny 12y ago
      And spoken language, and writing, and masonry, and metalcasting, and cultivation, and domestication, scientific theory, logical thought, etc. A lot of things mattered a lot to get us where we are, and fundamentally changed the world when they happened (or at least changed the founders world in the short term as it spread globally).
      • graycat 12y ago
        > domestication Huge. Cats to eat the mice that would eat the grain. Dogs to help in the hunting. Goats for milk and meat. Sheep for wool, milk, and meat. Horses for power and meat. Cows for milk and meat. Biggies. Another biggie was open ocean sailing. Why? Because there were no toll gates on the open ocean! Across land had to pay up to the local castle each few miles. So, if got some silk in the eastern Black Sea and want to sell it in England, go across Europe? Heck no: Just get a ship and go by water. Same for spices from India for Europe, etc.
    • 12y ago
• markbnj 12y ago
  I don't necessarily buy the "AI can end humanity" thing. As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF. The ending of human life would not be so easy for computers to accomplish. But on the subject of concentration of power and the wide-scale elimination of low- and middle-range jobs I think he is dead on. I fear that the fastest way to put an end to humanity's climb up from the forest floor is to try and kick 70% of us off the ladder.
  • mrec 12y ago
    Sidetrack, but I'm curious. What do you mean by "a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF"? It reads as if you're asking for a mechanism for a future technological event explained purely in terms of present technology. The whole "existential risk" concerns aren't about what present systems can do, they're about what future self-improving system might do. If we postulate this hypothetical software becoming smarter than humans, arguing about what will or won't be easy for it becomes a bit silly, like a chimp trying to predict how well a database can scale.
    • zipfle 12y ago
      I'd imagine GP's point is something along the lines of https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ that if all of the currently-moving machines were suddenly bent on destroying humanity, most humans would not be in much danger because they don't really have that capability on the necessary scale.
    • markbnj 12y ago
      By "pure SF" I mean the realm of pure imagination, unfounded in any actual emerging present circumstance. As far as I know the human race has not yet invented anything more powerful than our ability to control it, with a life both longer than ours and independent of any support from us. So worrying that such a thing might be invented and then wipe us out seems little different than worrying that something all-powerful might simply appear from some unknown place and wipe us out. Neither fear is very instructive or clarifying with regards to policy, imo.
• pgodzin 12y ago
  > I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards This seems like an extremely difficult path to take, as legislature will either be preemptive and slow down innovation or lag behind in understanding the technology at which point it would be too late.
• pachydermic 12y ago
  The Economist did a special report on the "third wave" of the information age/information revolution. It focuses more on the economic impacts (big surprise there!) but was very interesting and worth a read - I hope you can get the article without a subscription... incognito mode usually works well enough. http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621156-first-two-industrial-revolutions-inflicted-plenty-pain-ultimately-benefited http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621156-first-... It's hard to see what people will actually do for work after the effects of this new revolution are fully propagated, but I mainly think that's a failure of imagination. The other revolutions were not too different in terms of taking something which a huge amount of people were doing and what society was focused on producing people to do and making it trivial (or at least to involve much fewer people). The overall impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions were to ultimately create more jobs even if it was a wild ride while things were rapidly changing. This revolution is different - now mechanical horsepower can be applied to tasks previously only possible through human minds which is quite different from machines or farming - but how different is it? It would take some really visionary people to figure out what the ultimate impacts of all of this are really going to be - and to try to imagine what people are going to do for a living or what society will look like on the other side. My personal view is that AI is a pretty important component of this. I think, in principle, it's possible. But can it actually be done? That would be a pretty insane change and it's super hard to image what that will be like. But if AI just isn't possible or doesn't come around for a really long time, I don't think this revolution will be too different from others. The more "manual labor" type thinking tasks (grading essays, evaluating legal reports, collecting and searching through information, etc) will be replaced by more and more sophisticated machines. What about creative tasks? That's the final frontier as far as I'm concerned. Well. It'll almost certainly be really interesting. One idea I've had (I think we all have a lot of crackpot ideas) for what people who aren't suitable for highly skilled tasks are going to do revolves around social media and entertainment. What if a site like Reddit or Hacker News paid its users? I guess that's ridiculous, I'm not sure how the economics would work out - our contributions here would have to become more valuable. But if fully integrated into our minds (aided by computers) maybe they would be? I've seen people tipped in bitcoins on Reddit before so maybe it's possible. Just a crazy idea.
  • 12y ago
• api 12y ago
  One thing I often see repeated is that every new industrial technology initially destroyed some jobs but eventually created a lot of new ones: the cotton gin, the steam engine, the car, etc. That's because these things only did one thing, and by doing that one thing really well they opened a lot of side-niches. It took a lot of time to invent and scale out new machines, so for long periods of time these side-niches would be available to people. I completely agree with Sam here. I think the fallacy in the above argument is that there is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete machines and special-purpose machines. Turing-complete mechanization is broad and endlessly adaptable. Programmable machines aren't machines. They're machine-machines, and can be adapted to new tasks in short linear time by small numbers of people with little capital. That makes it "different this time." I also think that malicious AI is already kind of here, but in a hybrid "cyborg" form. It's the corporation. Corporations that destroy human livelihoods and abuse human beings in general to maximize per-quarter shareholder returns are a bit like "paperclip maximizers." http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer The danger is not in some Terminator-like AI apocalypse, but that incremental advances in AI will make these things progressively less and less human and more and more machine. I can imagine a future almost-entirely-silicon financial corporation that uses its speed and superior analytical intellect (at least in the financial domain) to lay waste to entire national economies in order to maximize shareholder value... i.e. paperclips. Since this would likely be found in the hedge fund world, nearly all of this siphoned-off wealth would be captured by a small number of already very rich people. Nightmare AI wouldn't be much like Skynet -- a new being pursuing its own self-interest. It would be more like a very, very smart dog helping its elite owners "hunt" the rest of us in the financial sphere. This could fuel even more massive consolidation of financial wealth. We are already seeing the beginning of this with algorithmic quant finance. In a thread on Twitter I also heard someone bring up "AI assisted demagoguery," a notion I found to be total nightmare fuel. Imagine a Hitler wannabe with a massive text-comprehending propaganda-churning apparatus able to leverage the massive data sets available via things like the Twitter and Facebook feeds to engage in high-resolution persuasion of millions and millions of people. The thing that makes this scary is that populist demagoguery gets more appealing when you have things like massive wealth inequality. You can make counter-arguments here, but I also agree with Sam that it is foolish to just hand-wave these kinds of possibilities away. We should be thinking about them, and about how -- as he puts it -- we can find ways to channel this trend in more positive directions.
• vijayboyapati 12y ago
  I think Sam is incorrect when he writes "The great technological revolutions have affected what most people do every day and how society is structured. The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology" Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today. The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century. The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.
  • pi-err 12y ago
    > The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers ... the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century Industrialization, massification, standardization of production and moving to big cities have had tough consequences on worker's life. Charlie Chaplin shows just that. It was a tougher life than traditional community life with flexible work amounts. You could definitely argue that there was an improvement in caloric supply (except in some countries). For the general happiness, though, industrial revolution has been a tough time.
    • civilian 12y ago
      I doubt it. My mom's family was one of the first to get a washing machine in Sweden. As the story goes, my great-grandmother just stared at it while it was running and cried. Not to be out of a job, but out of joy for all those wasted hours that she had spent hand washing, and she had now regained. I'd also factor in modern medicine into people's happiness. It is tough on families when you often have infant deaths and you often have horrible diseases like polio and MMR.
• Balgair 12y ago
  Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up a 4 billion year old self replicating and evolving machine out of the lunar dust in '69 and brought it back for study; we have basics, nothing more at this point, not even a theory beyond Darwinian evolution really (yes, it has advanced a lot recently, but still, it's primitive). Nature is INCREDIBLY better at viruses, so much better than anything we have. If we could engineer viruses like nature could, and exploit the vectors in the way that nature does, a lot more diseases and human frailties would be solved by now. Stem cells are just the beginning here. We have a LOT more to learn about viruses before anyone, even state backed groups, can make a plague in their basement. Heck, we have smallpox saved away precisely because it is so virulent and we haven't been able to make anything so potent since. It took the entire world decades to get rid of it. The methods it uses are of great interest to us for therapeutic purposes maybe. Who knows if there even are any. In the end, viral vectors of human suffering are doing just great on their own now, us trying to make a more terrible one is very far off.
  • frandroid 12y ago
    If nukes are so easy, how come Iran, with all its oil wealth, is still not there? It remains a difficult state actor play.
    • mdemare 12y ago
      Relatively easy, i.e. compared to viruses.
    • hueving 12y ago
      They are easy from an 'intelligence required' perspective. They are difficult from a logistics perspective.
    • bgentry 12y ago
      The hard part is not in knowing how to construct the actual bomb. The hard part is enriching the requisite quantity of a fissile material. That's why the US and Israel went after Iran's enrichment facilities with Stuxnet.
• shubhamjain 12y ago
  I think as we progress we are increasing the level of skill-set required to get a job. Industrial jobs wouldn't have required anything other than vigor and endurance. As we moved to clerical jobs, being literate, and a typist became necessary and in the future, it is possible that a certain level of programming competence might become a pre-requisite. As we will be creating high functioning AI, robots and self-driving cars, we would also be creating jobs for people who would need to do the grunt work. I don't believe that we would be able to reach a level, ever where everything would automated without slightest of human intervention. The more sophistication we will have in the things we build, the more we would start have problems with them, which would need human attention. People in every generation have been awestruck at the progress of human civilization, such that, they always have believed a computer that can think on his own is just near, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it just never happens. At least in my lifetime, I think I won't have to worry about robots that can kill us.
  • zanny 12y ago
    Computers and robots have not yet even existed for an entire lifetime. It is as shortsighted as saying the world must be flat because that is what I know to say we can never create a technological singularity.
• brudgers 12y ago
  Two thoughts: 1. There is a reasonable probability that from a temporal distance equivalent to ours from the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and the software revolution will be seen as one big thing, not two. 2. The idea that the amount of available work should be related to the number of available people does not inevitably lead to creating new forms of work. "An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways." -- Salvor Hardin
• vinceguidry 12y ago
  > A number of things that used to take the resources of nations—building a rocket, for example—are now doable by companies, at least partially enabled by software. This is nothing new. Organized humans have always been able to cause outsized amounts of harm to other humans, they hardly needed software to do this. And in far greater orders of magnitude than a rocket. The effective answer to new, software-enabled threats is the same as it is to mercenaries, industrial polluters, rampant loggers and strip miners, arms manufacturers, human traffickers. Organization at a bigger scale to combat it. Pull the rug out from under them economically, understand their place sociologically, raise awareness culturally.
• hooande 12y ago
  The correlation between software and large scale loss of jobs is far from proven. The US unemployment rate fluctuates wildly based on many factors [0], but ~30 years or so into the software revolution it isn't too much higher than it has been historically. Parkinson's Law may be the answer to the threat of large scale job loss. There's a long list of startups who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding because "money is cheap right now" and proceeded to hire offices full of people with a wide variety of titles. If the leaders of the tech industry are willing to hire for the sake of hiring, the overall economy is probably safe for just a little while longer. The prevailing wisdom is that rational actors won't spend money to hire people that aren't essential to their business, and they'll opt to use software instead of people if the software is cheaper. In practice these so called rational actors often use any savings from software to hire more people, whether they are essential or not. Part of it is because there's always something that could be done, and another part is that having a lot of employees makes people feel good about themselves. Whatever the motivation, mass unemployment is most likely a problem that will take care of itself. In the context of this essay the term "concentration of power" seems to mean the ability of a small group to have an outsized (and harmful) influence. This seems like a much larger problem than unemployment, but it isn't limited to technology. A network of a few hundred terrorists or just five guys in france can bring cities to a halt and affect the psyche of entire countries. It's just something that we're going through right now as a global culture, and I don't see any quick fixes. It is clear that the threat of malevolent AI is greatly overhyped, and I can't wait until the zeitgeist moves on to another flavor of the month criss du jour. There are very real threats facing the world right now and we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about something that might or might not happen, that we couldn't stop even if wanted to. Synthetic biology probably falls into the same category, though the ability to manufacture deadly viruses is based much more firmly in fact. Guns, bombs, computers and the basic building blocks of life cannot be made illegal and confiscated en masse. One of the best ways to solve the threats posed by technology is to take the idea of income inequality, mentioned in this essay, very seriously. We've created a culture where people measure their self worth by the value of the companies they found. When I talk to people about technology, I don't hear about the large and small advances that make our lives a little bit better every day. I hear, "Isn't it crazy that Instagram was worth $XX billion dollars? I want to start a company and make that much too!". This is poison and it has to stop. If we place all the emphasis on who made what, we create a world where a lot of people get left out and forgotten. Then they spend their time in dark basements, watching extremist videos and working carelessly with dangerous tools. We need to turn technology into something that has benefits for everyone, in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones from some of its most dire consequences. [0] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104719.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104719.html
• getdavidhiggins 12y ago
  If you have the time, it's worth listening to Mc Kenna's talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PucjQXO2k0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PucjQXO2k0 McKenna is very dense and goes into immense detail about how we got here, and more importantly where we are going. I need not say more, except that Mc Kenna compares technological revolution as being similar to a birth of a child ― bloody and traumatic, but at the same time wonderful and awe inspiring.
• JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  Can we really say that we are in a revolution while we are in it? And if so, can we, in all seriousness, measure it against other revolutions?
• beefman 12y ago
  > because it takes huge amounts of energy to enrich Uranium. One effectively needs the resources of nations to do it. False. The electricity to enrich a bomb's worth of material costs about $60,000. The plant itself is cheaper than the Tesla gigafactory, and it'll yield 1,000 times the energy it takes to run making regular reactor fuel (gigafactory will be lucky to break even). Laser enrichment is even cheaper, of course.
• abtinf 12y ago
  The last few posts from Sam Altman have been deeply troubling and make me worried for the future of YC. He presents leftist ideas as fact without evidence of serious critical thought or even basic economic education. "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a weaver or a smith. You have dedicated your life to mastering the craft and slowly produce products by hand. Now a textile factory or a foundry opens up. You will suddenly find it impossible to make your products profitably. Not only will you be out of work, but so will all of your colleagues in the rest of the country. Or imagine you are a farmer, and then the green revolution happens. In 1870, 80% of the US population was in agriculture. Today, its under 2%. In both of these cases, it will seem like the end of the world to the displaced workers. But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
  • smacktoward 12y ago
    You have a curious definition of "leftist." This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.
    • api 12y ago
      We've gotten to the point that even admitting the existence of possible negative consequences of current economic trends is "leftist." It's so very ironically Soviet. Collectivized farming is boosting crop yields! What? There are people starving? How would that be possible, because collectivized farming is boosting crop yields!
    • icelancer 12y ago
      Yeah, I don't really understand how that idea is "leftist." If anything it's... not that.
  • svachalek 12y ago
• sethbannon 12y ago
  For anyone interested in exploring the topic of human labor becoming increasingly unnecessary in more depth, there was a very forward thinking (published in 2009) book written about this by a computer scientist called "Lights in the Tunnel". The author goes as far as to propose new societal structures to maintain order as this process unfolds. Highly recommended. http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1448659817 http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1448659817
• mbesto 12y ago
  > What can we do? We can’t make the knowledge of these things illegal and hope it will work. We can’t try to stop technological progress. I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get. > But I worry we learned the wrong lessons from recent examples, and these two issues—huge-scale destruction of jobs, and concentration of huge power—are getting lost. Yet, we still promote "beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission". You can't have both -- "legislative safeguards" and a bunch of entrepreneurs running around begging forgiveness when they create destruction.
• peapicker 12y ago
  "Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed." It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job, even it it means some things don't run as efficiently as they could. While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity that sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless.
  • stdbrouw 12y ago
    Surely having a job is not the only way to be or feel like a dignified human being? And how long will you continue to feel dignified in a job that exists for the sole purpose of making you feel dignified but could really just as well be done by machines?
    • aceperry 12y ago
      In an economy where there aren't a lot of jobs and a lot of poverty, just about any decent job would give someone dignity. In those economies, it's probably cheaper to have human labor than machines.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
      “I have only twenty acres of land,” replied the Turk, “which my children and I cultivate. Our work keeps us free of three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.” From Voltaire's Candide
  • woodman 12y ago
    > I would certainly rather work and have my dignity... I've never felt any pride in busy work, I've always found it to be insulting. I would have thought everybody felt the same way, but I guess I would have been wrong.
• forloop 12y ago
  Economically: Step 1) People will be paid for their data. Information used by systems doesn't spontaneously come into existence. Step 2) Get rid of governments. They're inefficient war-mongers. A theatre to obfuscate kleptocracy! Step 3) See step 1. You can pay me in cryptocurrency. Thanks.
• dikaiosune 12y ago
  A number of sibling comments are pointing out that we're just increasing the level of skill necessary to do the available jobs, drawing analogies to the industrial revolution. I think a key bottleneck in this progression is the mental capacity of the workforce. Surely there are biological limits on human mental ability, and while we can definitely bend the rules (education, nutrition, nootropics if they actually work, etc.), I doubt that we'll ever be able to make ourselves limitlessly smarter. Even if we are, there will be a serious gap between the have-whatever-makes-us-smarter and the have-nots, and it will be a self-perpetuating gap just like the current wealth gap. So, what happens when we've used technology to convert all work to mental exertion and creativity, and most of us have run out of brain capacity/agility/juice? We're already in a position where most of the population is not capable of performing the mental tasks which the brave new software world is built with.
  • hiou 12y ago
    Interesting point. But it brings up that scarier part of AI. I believe AI will become better at humans at mental processes far before it will be better than human physical labor. For exactly the points you mention. This is already becoming true for many logistical industries. What happens if AI replaces all the high level decision making positions and humans are relegated to handling the low level "last mile" tasks? Where is the inherit quality that makes AI replace unskilled as opposed to skilled labor? Order pickers still exist but the employees that handled what to pick, what truck to put it in and in what order to do it were out of work quite a while ago.
    • dikaiosune 12y ago
      I would generally agree, even for a fairly limited definition of AI. An aside: IIRC, what you're laying out is the "history" of the Dune universe (and I'm sure many others). I think that computation <i>tends</i> to replace <i>relatively</i> unskilled labor, relative to the skill of whatever created the AI/algorithm/whatever. So right now we're in a situation where software people are automating jobs which are generally less skilled than their own. Which is a little scary when viewed from the haves/have-not perspective I laid out above, but is much scarier from the AI/meatbag perspective you're talking about. It's not so much a difference between skilled & unskilled labor as it is a question of where on the skill totem pole the algorithm's creator resides. Regarding order pickers, I think that's just a question of economics. When lots of semi-skilled jobs have been automated away and you have thousands of people clamoring for any chance to be paid, it is frequently cheaper to have them do the work than to have a robot do it. Although Amazon did have robots pick orders this last holiday season, suggesting that perhaps economies of scale have finally caught up on that particular type of manual labor: http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/ http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/
• cousin_it 12y ago
  > Two of the biggest risks I see emerging from the software revolution - AI and synthetic biology Also nanotech, mind uploading, embryo selection...
• jqm 12y ago
  This was a good post. Synthetic Biology is a big concern, and not just that people may deliberately use it to cause harm (which is definitely a concern as well). My grandfather was an engineer during the 50's early 60's working with nuclear bomb projects. He was there when they exploded the Bikini Atolls. I never met him because he died of cancer in his mid 40's (maybe not occupational hazard but then again....). Because they had started using technology only partially figured out and not thought all the way through. Never mind that they were using it to produce horrible things. I'd like to think we would learn, and next time will be different, but the reality is, probably not. We will likely repeat the exact mistakes of hubris and rushing. Especially with a technology less controllable by central authority than nuclear ability. I don't know about everyone else here, but I very seldom write a program that just works the first time. And there is a lesson in there somewhere. Especially when you don't get second chances. But I'm not dumb enough to wish knowledge away either. So I suppose we will eventually adjust. If we are still here that is.
• clamprecht 12y ago
  Can you provide a link to the comment in footnote one, "many people believe that fishing is what allowed us to develop the brains that we have now" ? I hadn't heard this before.
  • maxerickson 12y ago
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/lives-the-brain/201001/was-seafood-brain-food-in-human-evolution https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/lives-the-brain/201001/... (that lays out one theory, not sure if it's the same one from the footnote, but it probably is.)
    • clamprecht 12y ago
      Awesome, thanks!
  • sharemywin 12y ago
    I thought it was cooking.
• d--b 12y ago
  Much applause for this post which is by far the most sensible article I have seen coming from Silicon Valley.
• fragsworth 12y ago
  This might be a really unpopular thing to say around this site, but it honestly scares me that Sam Altman cares so much about this particular topic (the risks of AI). He stands to have a ton of influence over it in the coming years - enough to even lead the charge - and I can't imagine he is smart enough to do it right. If he fucks up, we are all fucked.
  • zenogais 12y ago
    Totally agree. It was a fairly naive article. Sam is on the right track, but he needs to self-educate a lot more. The reasoning in the article is pretty garbage. "Software is destroying jobs and enriching a small handful of people...therefore, the 2 things that threaten society the most are synthetic biology and AI" ...what? He then proposes legislation and reforms as the fix. Yet, everything we know about extremely concentrated power is that it easily escapes, often even controls, legislation and reforms.
    • quaunaut 12y ago
      > The reasoning in the article is pretty garbage. "Software is destroying jobs and enriching a small handful of people...therefore, the 2 things that threaten society the most are synthetic biology and AI" ...what? I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. He mentions those two things because they're problems that are rapidly approaching us. We've been able to avoid the problems created by past scientific revolutions, but we're hitting a point now where small groups of people with easily-accessible tools can affect millions, possibly billions of others. The two easiest ways they can do this, is via manufactured disease and possibly computer virus systems that can disrupt global organizational systems. It's a problem purely created by modern advances, and we don't have a solve yet, and no indication that there is anyone even trying. > He then proposes legislation and reforms as the fix. Yet, everything we know about extremely concentrated power is that it easily escapes, often even controls, legislation and reforms. It does, but that doesn't mean you throw your hands up and refuse the imperfect fix because it isn't perfect. It means you do it, and try to fix the screwups along the way. The nice part is, what you gain is time to fix the screwups, where going without would see massive destruction of life, wealth, and livelihood.
• shin_lao 12y ago
  "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines. It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence of today's software engineering jobs - but it destroyed a lot of jobs in agriculture and textile because you could produce more with a fraction of the labor. To the point that people would manifest and destroy steam machines accusing them of stealing jobs (see "Luddites"). Let's not forget that what is typically called "industrial revolution" spans over a century and it took a while for the industrial revolution to create a lot of new jobs (approx the second half of the 19th century), and those new jobs were initially very poorly paid.
  • puranjay 12y ago
    The problem is that it was relatively easy to master the technologies of the industrial revolution. It isn't the same for the software revolution. You can take virtually any adult from any part of the world and teach him how to work in a factory within a few months of study. You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding. I think of myself as relatively smart but I've struggled with learning how to code. The learning curve is steep, even for someone as familiar with technology as I am. I'm sure I could learn how to operate a lathe at a factory within weeks. But I'm not sure a lathe operator at a factory could learn how to code within the same time frame (if at all) So no, it isn't apples and oranges. The software revolution will leave a huge group of people permanently unemployable. The 50 year old weaver in 1800 Manchester could learn how to operate a machine at a mill - it is largely a mechanical process, after all. But the 50 year old truck driver in 2015 isn't going to learn how to write code - not within a reasonable time frame anyway
    • leereeves 12y ago
      Industrial jobs required a great deal of skill until they were broken down into easy tasks and each worker learned only one task. The work of imagining, planning, and creating the Industrial Revolution occupied the greatest minds of that time. I find it difficult to imagine "assembly lines" for software, creating coding jobs within the reach of a 50 year old truck driver, but as the tools improve, who knows.
• FrankenPC 12y ago
  I take a lateral view of technological evolution. Software is essential, sort of like how fire and the wheel were essential. It's a supremely useful tool as it turns out. But it's not a reason to exist. The reasons to exist are still family, love, happiness, etc. Those never change. The problem is money and money is intimately driven by basic material supply and demand laws. If you dive deeper, materials become a non-issue if energy is limitless or at least very abundant. So, energy is actually the problem. Thanks to industrialization and computation we are getting closer to tech that will make energy nearly limitless (between say renewable and fission/fusion tech). Once that happens, practically limitless water, materials production, food production, etc become a reality when coupled with robotics. My theory is that there will come a point where humans are allowed to pursue happiness because the individual humans will no longer be considered a "drain" on a limited system. For this reason alone I've always thought the privatization of energy production in America was a TERRIBLE idea. Of all the cards to hold close, this should have been priority number one. Anyway, as we approach energy critical mass, more and more humans are being thrown to the wayside. It doesn't have to be this way. If we collectively held a belief that we can achieve limitless energy together, then we could find ways to help those who aren't able to cope with technology still find happiness knowing full well it was a temporary band-aid.
• temuze 12y ago
  > I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get. Some suggestions would help. I mean, what are you suggesting here? That studies into AI should be banned? That it should be restricted in some way? That's hard to do. If your problem is about the potential increase wealth disparity, then this period of history is not unique at all. If anything, it's better than the robber baron days. The thing I worry about is this: the first person who can make a true AI that can iterate on itself, assuming all goes well, would have way too much power. They could beat everyone else in the financial markets. They could short the online ad industry and make a killing. With those resources, it's a short hop into the physical world and making robots that make other robots and expanding into any other area. Even if someone else develops AI six months after them, I'd worry it'd be too late for adequate competition to exist. Or even worse - consider the alternative, that AI is freely accessible to everyone. That's terrifying, too! What's to stop someone from asking for something really crazy from a piece of AI that can build, well, anything? We simply don't have enough data to know what's going to happen. I'd wait and see before blindly making legislation.
  • zenogais 12y ago
    I don't see how legislation could ever be effective against such extreme concentrations of wealth and power. So I'd definitely like some clarification there as well.
• mc32 12y ago
  I think a subtext of this, which remained unsaid, is that this kind of oversight would be most effective by an overarching organization having dominion over all suborganizations. That is to say, i don't think it would be as effective if this is instituted nation-by-nation. But the conclusion of this, brings up a dystopian, at least in many minds, idea of a one world government. But, if you want to place controls, and it's in effect voluntary by from the point of view of each nation-state, why would one state which wants to overcome any other state subject itself to this kind of embargo? Let's say you're Japan. China poses an economic (and thus, arguably, an existential) threat, why would Japan feel obliged to put their research to sleep? To me, unless everyone agrees, and we have verification mechanisms, and violations have severe consequences exceeding any benefits from this technology, there will always be an actor who thinks they can sneak by and pounce on the others.
• grondilu 12y ago
  > We can —and we will— redistribute wealth But should we? And if so : why ? Also : who's "we"?
• tptacek 12y ago
  Can someone ELI5-with-a-CS-degree why I should be concerned about AI ending human life?
  • Micaiah_Chang 12y ago
    Note: The not ELI5 version is Nick Bostrum's Superintelligence, a lot of what follows derives from my idiosyncratic understanding of Tim Urban's (waitbutwhy) summary of the situation [0]. I think his explanation is much better than mine, but doubtless longer. There are some humans who are a lot smarter than a lot of other humans. For example, the mathematician Ramanujan could do many complicated infinite sums in his head and instantly factor taxi-cab license plates. von Neumann pioneered many different fields and was considered by many of his already-smart buddies to be the smartest. So we can accept that there are much smarter people. But are they the SMARTEST possible? Well, probably not. If another person just as smart as von Neumann was born, the additional advancements since his lifetime (the internet, iphones, computer based off of von Neumann's architechture!) can use all of these new inventions to discover even newer things! Hm, that's interesting. What happens if this hypothetical von Neumann 2.0 begins pioneering a field of genetic engineering techniques and new ways of efficient computation? Then, not only would the next von Neumann get born a lot sooner, but THEY can take advantage of all the new gadgets that 2.0 made. This means that it's possible that being smart can make it easier to be "smarter" in the future. So you can get smarter right? Big whoop. von Neumann is smarter, but he's not dangerous is he? Well, just because you're smart doesn't mean that you'd be nice. The Unabomber wrote a very complicated and long manifesto before doing bad things. A major terrorist attack in Tokyo was planned by graduates of a fairly prestigious university. Even not counting people who are outright Evil, think of a friend who is super smart but weird. Even if you made him a lot smarter, where he can do anything, would you want him in charge? Maybe not. Maybe he'd spend all day on little boats in bottles. Maybe he'd demand that silicon valley shut down to create awesome pirate riding on dinosaur amusement parks. Point is, Smart != Nice. We've been talking about people, but really the same points can be applied to AI systems. Except the range of possibilities is even greater for AI systems. Humans are usually about as smart as you and I, nearly everyone can walk, talk and write. AI systems though, can range from being bolted to the ground, to running faster than a human on uneven terrain, can be completely mute to... messing up my really clear orders to find the nearest Costco (Dammit Siri). This also goes for goals. Most people probably want some combination of money/family/things to do/entertainment. AI systems, if they can be said to "want" things would want things like seeing if this is a cat picture or not, beating an opponent at Go or hitting an airplane with a missile. As hardware and software progresses much faster, we can think of a system which could start off worse than all humans at everything begin to do the von Neumann->von Neumann 2.0 type thing, then become much smarter than the smartest human alive. Being super smart can give it all sorts of advantages. It could be much better at gaining root access to a lot of computers. It could have much better heuristics for solving protein folding problems and get super good at creating vaccines... or bioweapons. Thing is, as a computer, it also gets the advantages of Moore's law, the ability to copy itself and the ability to alter its source code much faster than genetic engineering will. So the "smartest possible computer" could not only be much smarter, much faster than the "smartest possible group of von Neumanns", but also have the advantages of rapid self replication and ready access to important computing infrastructure. This makes the smartness of the AI into a superpower. But surely beings with superpowers are superheros right? Well, no. Remember, smart != nice. I mean, take "identifying pictures as cats" as a goal. Imagine that the AI system has a really bad addiction problem to that. What would it do in order to find achieve it? Anything. Take over human factories and turn them into cat picture manufacturing? Sure. Poison the humans who try to stop this from happening? Yeah, they're stopping it from getting its fix. But this all seems so ad hoc why should the AI immediately take over some factories to do that, when it can just bide its time a little bit, kill ALL the humans and be unmolested for all time? That's the main problem. Future AIs are likely to be much smarter than us and probably much more different than us. Let me know if there is anything unclear here. If you're interested in a much more rigorous treatment of the topic, I totally recommend buying Superintelligence. http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424122810&sr=8-1&keywords=superintelligence http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N... (This is a referral link.) [0] Part 1 of 2 here: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... Edit: Fix formatting problems.
• Animats 12y ago
  Altman sees the problem, but is vague about what to do about it. He's right that this is a new thing. It's not "software", per se, it's automation in general. For almost all of human history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Until about 1900 or so, 80-90% of the workforce made stuff - agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. That number went below 50% some time after WWII. It's continued to drop. Today, it's 16% in the US.[1] Yet US manufacturing output is higher than ever. Post-WWII, services took up the slack and employed large numbers of people. Retail is still 9% of employment. That's declining, probably more rapidly than the BLS estimate. Online ordering is the new normal. Amazon used to have 33,000 employees at the holiday season peak. They're converting to robots. After making stuff and selling stuff, what's left? The remaining big employment areas in the US: State and local government, 13%. That's mostly teachers, cops, and healthcare. (The Federal government is only 1.4%). Health care and social assistance, 11%. Professional and business services, 11%. (Not including IT; that's only 2%) Leisure and hospitality, 8% Self-employed, 6%. That's about 50% of the workforce. All those areas are growing, sightly. For now, most of those are difficult to automate. That's what the near future looks like. [1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] http://deadmalls.com/ http://deadmalls.com/
  • jseliger 12y ago
    * Until about 1900 or so, 80-90% of the workforce made stuff - agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. That number went below 50% some time after WWII. It's continued to drop. Today, it's 16% in the US.[1] Yet US manufacturing output is higher than ever.* I find this point interesting and wonder about it sometimes: does making a movie count as "stuff?" An operating system? A novel? I can see good arguments for both sides and am not asking the question antagonistically. Even among things that unambiguously "stuff"—like cars—much of their value now comes in the form of software. The real issue may be Baumol's Cost Disease. Stuff is cheaper because of efficiency but services (teaching, doctoring) is very expensive because it isn't. Tyler Cowen discusses extensively the hard-to-automate areas in The Great Stagnation, which is worth reading.
  • MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
    The point of the article is that no one knows what to do about it, and maybe we should start thinking ahead to plan for crises before they occur.
• bsbechtel 12y ago
  A few points here that I never see anyone acknowledge on this forum about technology displacing jobs: 1) 100 years ago, >50% of the population was illiterate, now it is something like 98%. People can, and always will, have the ability to learn new skills...even complex technology. It just takes some longer than others. We have the capacity to teach displaced workers new skills, and doing so is not more overwhelming nor more impossible than teaching our entire population how to read. 2) The more efficient, i.e., fewer man-hours required, every job in the world economy required means additional man-hours that can be devoted to higher level work, such as finding cures for obscure diseases, exploring further beyond our own plant, developing cleaner energy sources, etc. There are certainly always short-term fears and challenges with technology revolutions displacing jobs, but there is also an immense amount of knowledge about our world and work to be done still. Making the wrong choices in the short-term about these things only will delay us achieving those goals mentioned above.
  • civilian 12y ago
    > 100 years ago, >50% of the population was illiterate, now it is something like 98%. :)
• joesmo 12y ago
  "Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." It's terrible sure, but it's popular only because our economy requires it. That is the basis for the whole economy. It's not like people are clamoring to serve McDonalds for minimum wage or clean shit out bathrooms. They have no other choices in this economy. The economy demands it. While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless. They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer. "The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing." It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.
  • maxmcd 12y ago
    I would assume SamA knows this. "Worthless" jobs are typically jobs that are actually valueless, but we continue to irresponsibly support their existence. My favorite example is break bulk shippers before the widespread adoption of containerization. Unions negotiated deals where workers would basically just stand around and get paid regardless of the complete lack of need. The jobs you mention could eventually get to the point where they are actually worthless, ie: robot fast food workers, but I don't think anyone is arguing we're there yet.
  • swalsh 12y ago
    synthetic biology does exist, just look at this: http://www.genomecompiler.com/ http://www.genomecompiler.com/ Also look at this: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-... It's only been since 2010 that we've known how to actually do it, but the technology exists. Pandora's box has been opened. AI development isn't science fiction either. GPU's + convolutional neural networks have been enabling radical developments in the area. I think both of these developments have a whole bunch of potential to make our society drastically better. However there's a bunch of potential threats they represent, and it makes sense to be thinking about counter measures for those threats at the same time we develop the tech.
• YAYERKA 12y ago
  >Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea. It seems warm and fuzzy to think Sam, and the implicit company he keeps (the ultra rich)--who are "leveraging not only their abilities and luck" but already accrued wealth--can and will redistribute it. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday will simply laugh at this prospect. I'm not sure why Sam feels the need to call what most of the world is doing worthless. I think it's crude and indicative of a narrow social and cultural experience (which surprises me considering his position). Believe it or not, there are cultures and groups of people who do not revere technology the way most North Americans do. Also, a good exercise for Sam (and others possessing a similar world view) might be to think about how many "worthless" people and jobs it takes to accomplish the things he does (including this blog post).
  • quaunaut 12y ago
    The problem I take with this mindset, is that it treats all value systems as equal. At the end of the day, if your culture and economic system create a poorer quality of life for its people consistently, just because it wins out in the percentage of employed citizens doesn't mean a thing. You're treating the lack of disease as a measuring stick of health, when it's simply one piece of the puzzle. I think the thing Sam has been trying to do for the last few years, is get others to think about the ways we can enrich more lives as a whole, without just slowing labor and progress in its totality- because while that can work for the short term, it can severely inhibit us in the long term to eradicate things like hunger, disease, or poverty. The thing you also need to be careful of along the way though, is not making perfect the enemy of good.
  • scobar 12y ago
    Unfortunately, many societies today incorporate too strongly one's official profession/title with self-worth. I don't believe sama was implying those who work those jobs are worthless. Instead, it seems like he's trying to say that there are far better ways to accomplish the same objective, and we shouldn't ignore them. Because our systems of retraining and placing workers into a new profession are so terrible, it's common to assume that many or most displaced workers will remain unemployed. Breaking this status quo is essential to giving everyone a fair chance to work on what truly drives them while we automate more and more worthless jobs. That's why I'm so excited about free and widely available educational resources springing up online. It's not perfect yet, but we had to start somewhere. I have a deep respect for everyone (including sama) who've helped build or teach a mooc.
• netinstructions 12y ago
  Bill Joy wrote about this back in 2000. The essay was titled 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us' and offers a very (in my mind) depressing attitude of the future. One of his worries is that whatever positive things we can do with new technology are vastly outnumbered by the negative things we can do with them. Bad actors can be few and far but still destroy the world. It's interesting that Bill is worried about genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics. Sam specifically calls out AI and synthetic biology. There's a lot of recurring themes between these two articles, but both propose similar solutions: Proceed cautiously. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
• pastProlog 12y ago
  > The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution. There is a case for skipping over the technological changes that shifted the slave societies of Greece and Rome to the feudal societies of medieval Europe. You can't really make one for an important shift 40,000 years before the agricultural revolution. We went from a world without cave paintings to one with them. From a world without venus figurines and other carvings to one with one. With sweeping technological changes in hunting and fishing instruments and so forth. It's the second most important technological revolution ever, if not the first. If fishing is wrapped up with the human brain modifying into its modern form, wouldn't it be the most important? Note that each revolution had a corresponding revolutionary change to political systems, family structures and society. With the agricultural revolution we had the end of primitive communism and hunter-gatherer societies and the rise of surplus, class systems and slave societies. Much of the earliest literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh is on how to catch and keep slaves. With the rise of capitalism we saw the fading of Catholicism and the rise of Protestantism and the "Protestant work ethic". We also saw the end of monarchies and the rise of liberal democracies. The bourgeoisie and proletariat of the time united to overthrow these old systems, but soon began facing off against one another, which is pretty much the history of the 20th century, or if we look at the election of old euro-communists in Greece last month, perhaps the 21st. The famous old definition of economics in our capitalist economy by Robbins is "Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Scarcity is the bedrock of modern economic analyses - of utility, of supply and demand, of price. What scarcity is there when someone films a movie, or writes a book or magazine article, or records an audio track, and with the press of a button can fly off to billions of Android and iPhone devices? Or writes an app and flings it across the world as soon as it hits the App Store or Google Play? Or sends code to Github, which someone in Bulgaria patches, which someone in Brazil patches, which someone in Japan then uses in a product they're putting out, glued together to some other framework on Github? This is the end of scarcity. The most well-paid modern workers are those who produce commodities which are not scarce. That is if we can call these products commodities - a non-scarce commodity is something of a contradiction. These revolutionary technological changes in production, at the base, will reverberate through the superstructure of political systems, families and societies. The old superstructure is still trying to keep down or even kill the new one - NSA spying. DMCA letters. David Cameron's great firewall for porn in England. IP and patent lawsuits. The recent New York Times article with investors questioning why Google is building self-driving cars. Aaron Swartz's suicide, when trying to open up taxpayer-funded research which is locked down and privatized by now irrelevant Elsevier. Telcos using their government granted monopolies to try to harm budding businesses. Revolutions in production lead to revolutions in the relations of production. In the twentieth century, blue collar workers like railroad engineers and factory mechanics had their hands on the engines running the economy. As technology and AI causes more and more unemployment for people who can't find the derivative of 5x, de facto, if not de jure, power of production goes to those who are rack mounting cloud servers, or rolling out new web site builds.
• curiously 12y ago
  I stopped reading sam altman's blog after he equated Purchasing Power Parity as a measurement that China has surpassed United States' economy.
• lkrubner 12y ago
  I disagree with this: "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs" That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the early industrial revolution, and it was able to export its unemployment. And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else. The so-called Third World was summoned into existence. You can get some sense of this by reading Fernand Braudel's work, "The Perspective of the World" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520081161/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687742&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0520081145&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1SNDA9Y3ZZY1RSP7SSE3 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520081161/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_d... The software revolution will be similar with some nations winning and many others losing.
  • maw 12y ago
    My advice: if you start learning about history don't stop.
    • yellowapple 12y ago
      Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Those who can remember the past are condemned to watch everyone else repeat it.
  • wwweston 12y ago
    It's not so much that the industrial revolution net created jobs -- like you, I'm not sure it did (even domestically). It's that the industrial revolution not only created jobs, it created the modern labor market. Before it happened you had a much more distributed economy with many much smaller centers of production (many at the household level or close) in agriculture, trades, and craft manufacturing. Afterwards in any domestic industry where economy of scale was a competitive advantage, you had a small number of much larger centralized producers. Almost certainly with many fewer jobs in actual production (consolidation corresponding to efficiencies of scale). If there was any net gain over time since it would have been in new products being made and some new support positions needed. It is not clear to me there was ever a trend to a net gain over timescales longer than a two decades or so. So by and large it moved us to an economy with a profusion of increasingly competitively manufactured products to buy, and selling labor itself is the de facto form of subsistence rather than direct production. I think you're correct that there's always been some externalization of unemployment and a lot of the visibility depended on industry specifics. This isn't new. But what is new is that software gives us essentially a higher order of automation that means (a) it sure looks like we're automating out old jobs even faster than we're creating new ones and (b) with more unemployment we get fewer places to externalize it. :/
• danbruc 12y ago
  Why is it so common to fear developments obsoleting jobs? Wouldn't it be just awesome to automate everything? No jobs at all? I could easily fill several lives with interesting things, no need for a job. Granted, the transition period may be quite tough.
  • juliangregorian 12y ago
    Your last sentence says a lot. Given our track record it's likely that people left without means of acquiring money are pretty much told to go fuck themselves.
  • krapp 12y ago
    There's nothing about automation that guarantees any solution for the people automated out of a job. The motive behind automation is purely capitalist - it exists not to free people from the burdens of menial labor, but to multiply the value of labor while freeing companies from the moral and financial burden of a human workforce. For most people, jobs - and the availability of jobs - are what allows them to buy food, clothing, medical care, etc. >Granted, the transition period may be quite tough. Yes, mass starvation, disease, grinding poverty and global political strife could correctly be described as "quite tough." Although I suppose if you're idle rich, then it'll be a cakewalk. Just be sure to wear your kevlar when you leave the compound.
    • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Most societies on earth now protect the out-of-work pretty well. There's been steady improvement in standard of living, lifespan, health in most countries for most of a century, to the point where the planet is in pretty good shape. In fact its a puzzle to me why, with this going on, we see an upsurge in terrorism etc. Why aren't people content? What is it that convinces folks to piss away their entire lives on a big public stunt like bombing etc? It can't be their bad cable reception.
      • krapp 12y ago
        That's a good point, but in most societies, most people aren't out of work. The safety net depends on people paying in to the system, which depends on people having something to pay.
• AmericanOP 12y ago
  This economist disagrees: http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/sympos/2014/093014.pdf http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/sympos/2014/093014.pdf
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• drawkbox 12y ago
  I agree on many points but I think there will always be more to do. We don't see it yet because we don't even know what new innovations will come, we are basing it on today's knowledge. We have barely inched into space, robotics, drones, the oceans, we haven't even seen more than 50 miles down in the earth, our bodies and brains are still big mysteries, nanotechnology and more. We thought computers would free up lots of people but it hasn't really yet, just made more work to do and solve with the machines. I think the same will happen with robotics, drones, and AI. They will create work needs we didn't know existed and much more than we expect. Who knows, AI or robots might be better than us at creating jobs. Agriculture freed up people to think. Software freed up people to think. Good things are coming still. For most jobs, people want more to do, more adventure and more challenges. I think the world is hungry for new challenges not the same old jobs. It is a strange thing indeed though for people to try to hold onto lifeless, horrible jobs just to keep the cadence when we need a new rhythm. We are held back by holding onto this. We could employ many people to build an electric car network like the railroads and interstate system but we don't. We could be looking to space more and focusing kids on that but we are pushing them to finance, business and service jobs. The actual problem might be our monetary system and how we reward. I am a big free or fair market proponent, but part of the problem of baked in bad jobs that add nothing are because of this system. I think monetary and currency is one area where it may hold us back until we solve this. However there currently is no better system of paying for a service that you need or want down to the individual, the truest exchange of value. The question is, how much does the customer know about what they want and how can we steer it towards the real problems of today? How wrong are we with our rewards systems? Do only the wealthy have the right motivations to create systems we need and employ? Have we got ourselves in a wealth backdrift? The innovation market and economic engine is tied to wealth, for better or worse. There are many things we should be doing, that are rewarding to us all and need lots of work, that we can't because there isn't tons of market value yet. Maybe the reward system needs refactoring or some new iterations. It is a big game design / game theory problem in the end. We might need AI and robots to solve this problem for us.
• jbhatab 12y ago
  I'm reading a lot of criticism about specific points he is making, but I think the bigger takeaway is to address the implications technology is going to have on society in the coming decades. I think it would be impossible for a single person to effectively take the last 1000 years of society and the current state of society and perfectly explain the problem/solution. I commend him for addressing these issues in addition to other global issues, http://blog.samaltman.com/china http://blog.samaltman.com/china, and I think we need to organize as a community to address these things. I almost view it is as similar to when the constitution was being written in the US. There were an immense amount of factors at play but they organized to pull together some sense of structure to guide society in a better direction. Now we are writing the constitution of technology in a sense. The problem is that we still have a system that has the government and politics writing the major rules, while some of the biggest influencers on society's future will be technology. I think we need to own this fact as a community and start to work towards something to structure our growth and the impact it will have.
• Houshalter 12y ago
  HN is eating my comments. Everything I've posted in the last few days is not showing up. What did I do wrong?
• powertower 12y ago
  > We can—and we will—redistribute wealth... Please, someone explain to me how wealth can be re-distributed? I know how money can be re-distributed (and in-turn made less effective - i.e., more is required to purchase less), but how exactly do you either a) create "wealth" (via government policy or law) or b) take someone else's wealth, split it up into smaller peaces, and make the end-recipients more "wealthy"? The reason I ask is because wealth is an effect of X, not a cause of X, just like gravity is an effect of mass, and not the cause of mass. And that X tends to be all the things 97% of the population is either not willing to invest it, or does not have the capacity for... So when you re-distribute money (as and from "wealth"), you also remove any motivation from anyone to actually create more wealth. And now you have a society that is fundamentally broken on both an economic and personal self-worth level.
  • michaelchisari 12y ago
    Currency represents wealth. You redistribute currency.
  • svachalek 12y ago
    You seem to be implying that only individuals may have wealth.
  • lukeschlather 12y ago
    Mass is probably a poor analogy, but let's take it a bit further. Let's say you have a sun about to collapse into a black hole under its own weight, and some lifeless rocks elsewhere. You could, perhaps, skim off some of the sun to stop it from collapsing, and use the mass to create a thousand new suns, and breathe life into those lifeless rocks far from the main sun's light. To be more literal, when someone has no wealth, they have no capability to create wealth. You're simply incorrect that wealth is simply an effect and not its own cause. Like matter, wealth draws wealth to itself. Unlike matter, wealth can be used to create more wealth.
    • powertower 12y ago
      > Mass is probably a poor analogy, but let's take it a bit further. That would be even more wrong then. > You're simply incorrect that wealth is simply an effect and not its own cause. I'm not arguing that wealth does not generate more wealth, it does. I'm arguing that wealth cannot be created by policy change nor re-distribution - of money. Because money, when it's relative in amounts person to person, is neither wealth, nor does anything to help create more wealth... That is, handing out relative amounts of money to everyone does not also hand out the drive and motivation and the needed hard-work to create more wealth; it does just the opposite. As all those things are more of a product of lack of wealth, than having a comfortable living existence. > Like matter, wealth draws wealth to itself. Unlike matter, wealth can be used to create more wealth. Gravity is what draws things in. Mass just creates that gravity. Without gravity, you just have static and stale things.
• yellowapple 12y ago
  I feel like the article missed a big point about the lessons we (should have) learned from atomic energy: that the negative aspects of nuclear power (mass destruction, etc.) have significantly outweighed the positive aspects (relatively clean and abundant energy, with a safety track record that's among the best of any energy source despite a few high-profile incidents), likely because the negative aspects were humanity's first impressions of such an energy source. If this "software revolution" is to be a positive direction for humanity, we as a species must learn from this. The sooner a positive and constructive use of a technology can become household knowledge, the better. IBM's recent dabbling in machine learning and AI with Blue Gene and whatnot is a good foot in the right direction for that particular potential-weapon-of-mass-destruction, and hopefully other companies and entrepreneurs can spearhead further developments there in order to emphasize the use of synthetic intelligences for benign uses - self-driving cars, self-cleaning homes, the works. Meanwhile, the idea of being able to genetically modify crops in ways not previously possible through selective breeding alone is very promising, though it certainly needs to overcome the bad PR tacked onto it thanks to the likes of Monsanto and its ilk. The improvements to crop yields made possible with genetic engineering will at least postpone humanity's eventual reaching Earth's capacity, giving us more time to build up our orbital infrastructure and prepare for humanity's eventually-essential need to expand beyond the confines of just one quasi-spherical rock flailing about in space.
• sgt101 12y ago
  I'll say it again, AI's are not going to end Human Life (this is in the article) It's nuclear weapons that will do that...
  • genericone 12y ago
    Do guns kill people, or do people kill people?
• mkempe 12y ago
  Economic progress in a free market involves technological progress, the accumulation of capital, and the increased productivity of labor thanks to the two previous elements. That's not something to fear. There is no limit to human ingenuity. Labor is not a fixed pie that technology and capital shrink over time. And yes some labor-intensive activities have been and will continue to be replaced by capital-intensive systems -- which is wonderful because it means that it frees people to make ever-more of their time and powers of reason. The demand for labor (hence the wages for labor) increases with the accumulation of capital -- not the opposite. There is a line of economic thinkers who have elaborated on a pro-Capitalist view of economics, from Adam Smith to George Reisman via Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Carl Menger, and Ludwig von Mises. It may help to read them.
• makeitsuckless 12y ago
  > Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea. Labeling jobs as "worthless" makes me want to throw up. We are in many cases talking about jobs people find quite fulfilling, and human services many people would love to keep using. The only way we're going to be able to handle what's coming is to disconnect the economic value of jobs from their social value.
• mkempe 12y ago
  There are so many things wrong with this essay -- it combines a Marxist-inspired call for redistribution of wealth in the name of egalitarianism (are there specific individuals who will control how much we are allowed to own?), fear of change in what people do for a living (are people too exploited and too stupid to adapt?), and fear of technological progress in private hands (does the State, or some other supra-collective, have a magic wand and omniscient mantle of benevolence?). The worst parts are the claim that (forced) redistribution is inevitable and that regulation will somehow prevent "bad privately-done things" from happening -- as if regulation is a perfect solution to any problem one confesses to fear or claims to dislike. In principle, government intervention hinders technological progress, derails economic progress, and ultimately destroys the economy. Maybe people who have made a lot of money with one wave of progress should leave future generations alone and let them free to do the same -- instead of strangulating them by intervention and regulation that the now-wealthy did not have to suffer.
  • programmarchy 12y ago
    We already have massive (forced) redistribution of wealth in the form of corporate welfare. Tariffs, patents, copyrights, land grants, competition-prohibiting regulation, direct subsidies, indirect subsidization of capital inputs via compulsory state education, roads, communication infrastructure, etc, etc, etc. I fully agree with you that government intervention hinders technological progress, derails economic progress, and ultimately destroys the economy. The concentration of wealth through political rather than economic means is a huge problem. But, saying you want to cut welfare to the poor is what I would call vulgar libertarianism, and ineffective anti-state propaganda. The poor and middle classes are already getting royally screwed. Ameliorating the disastrous effects that corporate privilege has on the poor isn't where we should be directing our righteous indignation, in my opinion. I think it'd be more constructive to focus on cutting welfare from the top down, and cutting taxes from the bottom up.
    • mkempe 12y ago
      I also support the abolition of corporate welfare as a first step. After that, there will be time to talk about other forms of welfare. But that's not what Sam's Marxist-inspired essay is advocating, on the contrary.
• WillNotDownvote 12y ago
  Combine this with pg's essay on the importance of importing the 'best and brightest' to America and some things start to make sense. More minds working where they can be aimed in the 'desirable' direction.
• swatow 12y ago
  There seem to be two popular but contradictory views on HN. The first is that technology is creating a rift between those who know how to program, where jobs are being created, and those who don't, where jobs are being destroyed. The second is that high programmer wages are a good thing, and that attempts to flood the market with programmers, e.g. by teaching everyone to code, are an attack on the middle class.
• adamzerner 12y ago
  > We can’t try to stop technological progress. Why? This seems like a very important claim that wasn't explored enough. It felt like a cached thought (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cached_thought http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cached_thought). What are the chances that some existential crisis happens? What are the benefits of technological progress? Why do you think that the latter outweighs the former? Perhaps you thought it wasn't worth going into here? That's fair, but I think it's worth a quick paragraph to summarize.
• thomasfoster96 12y ago
  > The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. This doesn't really make sense. The industrial revolution more or less replaced lots of relatively unproductive jobs with a smaller amount of much more productive jobs. There might have been more work, but individual people were doing more work as well. > Technology provides leverage on ability and luck, and in the process concentrates wealth and drives inequality. I think that drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years. Wealth inequality is already a huge problem, and has been for a long time. I don't see how it's going to be worse in the next 20 years, given in a lot of countries (China, India, etc.) we're seeing wealth flow to, or be created by, a growing middle class. A lot of the 'Occupy' movement was somewhat misguided - the percentage of people in the United States or Australia or the UK who are in the 1% worldwide is perhaps as high as 20% or 30%. Software, rather than hindering, may very well help people in rapidly developing nations generate wealth because the economic barrier to entry for software businesses is comparatively low compared to other types of businesses. I'm also a little concerned that it seems as though many people believe wealth redistribution is the only way to make it more equal. Why can't we create wealth in some places? As far as I understand, wealth is not finite. Once we get to the point of widespread AI-driven automation, then we'll have a real economic problem. It won't be just because people can't generate wealth - people may very well begin to lose wealth. But this is a 50-year problem, not a 20-year one.
• graycat 12y ago
  So, we're talking about the rich people. Okay, let's get some ballpark arithmetic: Suppose the 1000 richest people in the US are worth on average $1 billion, that the US has 330 million people, and that we redistribute the worth of those 1000 people to the 300 million. Then each of the 300 million will have money enough for a nice new car, four years in college or graduate school, to pay off their student loans, make a down payment on a single family, three bedroom, two bath house on a nice street, and won't have to struggle with a miserable job? Will they? Maybe? Let's see: 1000 * 109 / ( 330 * 106 ) = 3,030.30 dollars per person. Oh, well. But, maybe in the US the top 100,000 people have average worth of $1 billion? Then, sure, we'd get 100,000 * 109 / (330 * 106) = 303,030.30 dollars per person. Ah, that's more like it! We just need a lot more billionaires! I would suggest that maybe by far the biggest pot of wealth is in pension funds for middle class workers.
• graycat 12y ago
  For the computer part of Sam's essay, I'd suggest that we are a long way from artificial intelligence (AI) software being significantly more economically valuable than what we've been writing for decades -- various cases of applied math, applied science, engineering, and business record keeping. To support this claim, once I was in an AI group at the IBM Watson lab in Yorktown Heights, NY. We published a stack of papers; I was one of three of us that gave a paper at an AAAI IAAI conference at Stanford. My view of the good papers at that conference was that they were just good computer-aided problem solving as in applied math, applied science, and engineering and owed essentially nothing to AI. Later I took one of our major problems we were trying to solve with AI, stirred up some new stuff in mathematical statistics, got a much better solution (and did publish the paper in Information Sciences). That experience and observation since is the support for my claim. Sure, this support is just my opinion, and YMMV. Instead of AI with a lot of economic value, I would suggest that closer in is a scenario of people managing computers managing computers ... managing computers doing the work. And what work will those computers do? Sure, first cut, the usual -- food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, medical care. So, maybe John Deere will have a worker computer on a tractor doing the spring plowing, the summer cultivating, and the fall harvesting. Then food can get cheaper. Maybe before the plowing a tractor will traverse the ground, take an analyze soil samples for each, say, square yard, and apply appropriate chemicals. Maybe GM will have car factories with robots driven by computers doing essentially all the work. Then cars can get cheaper. Maybe Weyerhaeuser or Toll Brothers will have pre-fab house factories with robots driven by computers doing essentially all the work, self-driving trucks delivering the big boxes, computer driven earth movers doing the site preparation, computer driven robots putting up the forms for the concrete basement walls, computer driven concrete pumpers inserting the concrete from self-driving concrete trucks, and houses will get a lot cheaper. And the computers get cheaper. So, right, we're talking deflation. So, have the government print some money and spend it on K-12 and college education, guaranteed annual income, parks, beautiful highways, etc. Print enough money to reverse the deflation and hire a lot of people. Those people buy the cheap food, cars, and houses, have children, and fill the classrooms of the additional education. What education? Sure: How the heck to develop all those robots, managing computers, worker computers, computer driven farm machinery, car factories, pre-fab house factories, etc. Or, as computers eliminate jobs, basically the result is deflation, and that's the easiest thing in the world to stop, and the solution is the nicest thing in the world -- just print money to get us out of deflation. We already know what people want from the famous one word answer "More". Computers should be a blessing, not a curse.
• jeffdavis 12y ago
  I'm not sure why he says the industrial revolution is different. Might it be that we just haven't figured out how to cope with a software-driven world yet?
• smanuel 12y ago
  This post kind of reminds me of a book I read about 10 years ago. "Revolutionary Wealth" by Alvin Toffler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Wealth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Wealth AFAICR in this book, the third revolution is referred to as "The revolution of knowledge" and I think it better describes how and what has changed during the past... 20 years. Great book by the way. I think it was where I read for the first time a good perspective of how 3d printers could play an important role in the near future.
• jamesrcole 12y ago
  > But a rocket can destroy anything on earth. [...] What can we do? [...] I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than... Sam, I suspect the only solid option is to diversify humanity. Be more than a one-planet species. That feels a bit emotionally unpalatable, but do you disagree?
• Kotka 12y ago
  Maybe we are forgetting the first REVOLUTION: Cognitive Revolution... around 75000 years ago! See more for example Sapiens! A brief history of humankind
• known 12y ago
  It takes 3 of us to fix a light bulb the first time are usually struck by how establishments there manage with so few people. It's the other way round for expats in India. Dmitry Shukov, CEO of MTS India was amazed to see eight people pushing the boarding ladder at the airport the first time he arrived in Delhi. "In Russia there is just one person doing that job. In sec tors like retail, there is always excess staff in India," he says. It's also very common in the hospitality industry, where guests are pampered with a level of service unheard of in the West. But splitting one person's job among three not only reduces wages, but also the challenge. Or, as Rex Nijhof, the Dutch chief of the Renaissance Mumbai Hotel puts it: "If you have something heavy and only two people available to move it, you have to find a way to build wheels on it. In India, you just get six more people." https://justpaste.it/Argumentative https://justpaste.it/Argumentative