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This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of huma

This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?

rayiner 12y ago
> Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge? If current trends continue, it will be the capitalist who first commercialized the robot once public and private R&D had done all the heavy lifting.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  No robot is 100% self sufficient. There will always be a need for skilled labor to maintain and update robots. Even the most magical electric self-driving car requires maintenance in the form of software updates, tire rotations and the like. I think we are entering a period of "super industrialization", where even fewer workers are needed to do greater amounts of work. Careful care needs to go into making sure we don't enter the age of "robber barons" again, but I think a careful review of history and thoughtful policy decisions can guide us into this new era.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jfoutz 12y ago
    I've been thinking more and more about "super tools". Not so much humans and machines working together to build things, like cars or highways. More like one person orchestrating an array of automation to solve a specific problem. A tool is so much more versatile than a die press stamping out the same object over and over. Tools imply flexibility and adaptability to different circumstances. I think automation will happen from the bottom up. Some plumbers use cameras and nitrogen gas to detect leaks. Soon, they'll use robots to detect and repair leaks. They'll get better and faster, requiring less and less oversight. The natural consequence of that, the guy with the good tools can fix more stuff in a day.
    - dragontamer 12y ago
      Yeah. I and I think that housing workers (from patio-builders to roof-workers) will benefit from "Handibot" portable CNC machines. A CNC Machine custom-cutting all your lumber to the proper shape should make life easier for workers. Similarly, a self-driving car fleet will require repairs and maintenance, as well as regulators who will ensure safety compliance (whatever those saftey measures are). In any case, its the industrial revolution again. We're replacing legions of factory workers with machines. Rent-seeking occurred in the late 1800s / early 1900s as children were used to control absurdly powerful machinery (and put into dangerous situations... and paid extremely cheaply for it). We need to ensure proper economic growth while balancing the needs of future workers... ideally while allowing older workers to transition their skills to the economy somehow.
  - stonemetal 12y ago
    There will always be a need for skilled labor to maintain and update robots. Why? Surely we will come up with maintenance robots that will maintain the other ones, including other instances of the maintenance robot. In my experience automation tends to have very mechanical edges, so the very act of automating something brings about a system that is easier to automate further.
    - dragontamer 12y ago
      > Why? Surely we will come up with maintenance robots that will maintain the other ones, including other instances of the maintenance robot. And who's job is it to make sure that these maintenance robots actually are doing their job? We basically have 100% automated webpages, providing services and automatically updating themselves. (Puppet, Aptitude, etc. etc.). Even the process of buying new computers to hook into a webpage's processing system has been automated "through the cloud" with Heroku, Amazon Web, and OVH Servers. And yet, you still require roughly one IT guy every 100 servers, to make sure that those servers are actually running. (+/- whatever, based on skill-level and maturity of the project) I mean, the best-case scenario for a maintenance robot is something like Nagios, which will automatically check if various web services are still up and running.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  So lets break the trends ...
harperlee 12y ago
As long as there are jobs, rent will not be the only source of income (typically they are stated: jobs, technology, capital). Technology is a given for a specific time. And I read your argument as: given enough technology, all will be capital. So I believe you assume no jobs will remain, given sufficient technology. On that regard, I feel that this "end of jobs" dystopy is not more achievable than the Fukuyama's "end of history" theory. As long as humans exist, they will have two things: a calling for doing something with their lives (and derive meaning from it) and a need to compete with others. So they will keep on working on new jobs, and money will flow, transfering value among them. Agriculture was once the be all and end all of economy, and now is just one industry. If automation makes some jobs disappear, or be easier, others will appear.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  Fukuyama's "end of history" theory is, in many respects, apologetics for rentier capitalism.
jerf 12y ago
"Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?" Actually, that's easy: No. Humanity will not be enslaved to a small number of capital owners. But the reason isn't necessarily a happy one, which is that humanity will revolt and start destroying and probably kill lots of people and even potentially kill the goose laying the golden egg by destroying the robotic infrastructure. Should they fail to destroy it, then you still face questions as to who ends up with the power and how it is distributed after the fact; you can find places in history where there was a lot of blood and violence on a recurring basis to answer the question "who gets the power?" because the matter wasn't settled even after the first victory. That's the outcome I'm more worried about, not the possibility of somehow getting 99% of the population "enslaved".
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I think you're wrong. Humanity won't destroy the golden goose. The next Aaron Swartz will release it to the public, whether that's distributing the software to everyone, or finding a way to freely build/distribute high-level robotics. Just as Prometheus brought fire to the humans, someone will find a way to prevent the future from being locked away. Once you achieve the necessary level of automation, you only need one fabricator that can build the next.
  - gohrt 12y ago
    You are ignoring the cost of acquiring resources. Robots will run society before the problem of unlimited energy is solved.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Enough sunlight hits earth every 5 minutes to power all of civilization for a year. The energy is unlimited, the challenge is collection.
      - prteja11 12y ago
        You might like this: The Last Question by Isaac Asimov http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-question/ http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-question/
crdoconnor 12y ago
The idea that robots are on the cusp of subsuming all human labor is itself a tool of rentiers: https://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/imag0016.jpg?w=1000&h=829 https://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/imag0016.jpg?... (advert by California's restaurant association in protest against minimum wage hikes that will likely deplete their profit margins) Of course, the idea doesn't necessarily have to be true in order to serve its purpose.
- gohrt 12y ago
  The idea doesn't have to be false to be dishonestly used, either. Restaurants already replace servers by ipads, wherever customers tolerate it.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    A restaurant I used to frequent went way too far with the ipad thing. I think they 'optimistically' fired about 1/4 or 1/5 of their staff when the amount of labor actually saved was maybe 1/10. The service went from okay to atrocious when they reopened with ipads and they lost a lot of customers. It was plainly clear that they were WAY understaffed. You see the same starry eyed optimism surrounding Google's driverless cars.
foobarqux 12y ago
It's not well known but this is exactly what the unabomber was so worried about that he decided he needed to maim people to get everyone's attention.
gcb0 12y ago
you already are. Modern cities already automated and monopolized most of what you need to live. you must pay eternal rent to live. water, power, internet, etc.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
AhrowTway 12y ago
> Own the robots Assuming the following generalization is true: (Energy + Material) → (Human + Time) → Yield ...and that this monadic generalization can be referred to as “Transmutation”, then: (Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → … ...is also true, forming a transmutation chain. These transmutation chains intersect upon world lines, forming trade networks. Humans currently have a monopoly on the transmutation process, and thus, all subsequent structures that process allows. That will not always be the case. The industrial age increased the energy, material, and yield of transmutation while also reducing time. It also increased the speed on which yield is passed to the next transmutation process by while increasing the chain length. The overall network expanded because of these contributions. The fundamental human component remained the same, however. The delays between transmutation and critical bottlenecks of yield distribution in this network are where financial institutions reign. With robotic transmutation, the energy variable changes dramatically. “Time value” is no longer a required energy input. Robotic transmutation has no concept of time, and thus, has no valuation upon it. This is not because the robot can't measure time, but because the humans that need the robot isolate the effects of time and decay from it. If the robot breaks down, a human fixes it, not the robot. Therefore, as long as the human/robotic symbiosis remains, the robot will never evolve to resolve the pressures of time value. Therefore, robots cannot establish the skill sets to manage time value pressures. Humanity, for the foreseeable future according to my theories, will specialize to become a robotic workforces immune system. There will not be a revolt (Sorry social justice junkies, capitalists win again!) because robotic labor will provide access to frontiers previously inaccessible by today's configuration, specifically, deep earth mining and local space colonization.
bbcbasic 12y ago
No. Anecdotal argument: In my budget the biggest costs are housing, food, utility bills. The costs of my semi-automatic robots - such as the dishwasher, fridge, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, lawnmower are loose change in comparison. I doubt the fully automatic robots of the future will be excessively priced but yes some patent holders will be rich, even undeservedly so, but we won't be their slaves. The bigger problem with robots is something similar to The Matrix movie. A side effects of a very smart robot is that she becomes aware that there is more to life than serving humans.
- Retra 12y ago
  >A side effects of a very smart robot is that she becomes aware that there is more to life than serving humans. This is amateur nonsense. One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!" How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either. If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    > This is amateur nonsense. Yes I admit I am an amateur predictor of the future, like most people. :-) > One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!" Not sure how this is the same thing? > How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either. If you are intelligent you won't work for someone else for no reason. > If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements. When computers build computers, they will evolve.
    - Retra 12y ago
      >If you are intelligent you won't work for someone else for no reason. "Someone else" is a flexible mental construct. If you considered humans to be part of your 'self identity', you would work for them regardless. >When computers build computers, they will evolve. And how will they know which of those new computers to run and which to trash? They have to evaluate their function using their current implementation. That's just continuity. Humans are the same way: we can't tell if our brains are doing the right thing except by using our brains. So you can't evade those constraints. Think of it like this: if you are creating random functions, it is because you already value the creation of random functions. If you keep some and discard others, it is because you already value the ones you keep over the ones you discard. You always have to use your own evaluation. The worry is not that computers will cease to value humans, but that they didn't value humans to begin with (because we didn't properly specify what a human is and how it should be valued.) You can't go from valuing humans to not valuing them without being in error. And furthermore, as soon as a machine goes into error, we'd stop using it. If your computer decides to stop running programs and start playing tic-tac-toe all day, you'll shut it down and replace it. Useful machines will be under such scrutiny. Nobody is going to run an unreasonably powerful machine and not monitor it regularly. In this sense, it is like a regular employee at a business. If they decide that their time is better spent not working, you can just fire them and move on.

rayiner 12y ago

> Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge? If current trends continue, it will be the capitalist who first commercialized the robot once public and private R&D had done all the heavy lifting.

dragontamer 12y ago
No robot is 100% self sufficient. There will always be a need for skilled labor to maintain and update robots. Even the most magical electric self-driving car requires maintenance in the form of software updates, tire rotations and the like. I think we are entering a period of "super industrialization", where even fewer workers are needed to do greater amounts of work. Careful care needs to go into making sure we don't enter the age of "robber barons" again, but I think a careful review of history and thoughtful policy decisions can guide us into this new era.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jfoutz 12y ago
  I've been thinking more and more about "super tools". Not so much humans and machines working together to build things, like cars or highways. More like one person orchestrating an array of automation to solve a specific problem. A tool is so much more versatile than a die press stamping out the same object over and over. Tools imply flexibility and adaptability to different circumstances. I think automation will happen from the bottom up. Some plumbers use cameras and nitrogen gas to detect leaks. Soon, they'll use robots to detect and repair leaks. They'll get better and faster, requiring less and less oversight. The natural consequence of that, the guy with the good tools can fix more stuff in a day.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    Yeah. I and I think that housing workers (from patio-builders to roof-workers) will benefit from "Handibot" portable CNC machines. A CNC Machine custom-cutting all your lumber to the proper shape should make life easier for workers. Similarly, a self-driving car fleet will require repairs and maintenance, as well as regulators who will ensure safety compliance (whatever those saftey measures are). In any case, its the industrial revolution again. We're replacing legions of factory workers with machines. Rent-seeking occurred in the late 1800s / early 1900s as children were used to control absurdly powerful machinery (and put into dangerous situations... and paid extremely cheaply for it). We need to ensure proper economic growth while balancing the needs of future workers... ideally while allowing older workers to transition their skills to the economy somehow.
- stonemetal 12y ago
  There will always be a need for skilled labor to maintain and update robots. Why? Surely we will come up with maintenance robots that will maintain the other ones, including other instances of the maintenance robot. In my experience automation tends to have very mechanical edges, so the very act of automating something brings about a system that is easier to automate further.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    > Why? Surely we will come up with maintenance robots that will maintain the other ones, including other instances of the maintenance robot. And who's job is it to make sure that these maintenance robots actually are doing their job? We basically have 100% automated webpages, providing services and automatically updating themselves. (Puppet, Aptitude, etc. etc.). Even the process of buying new computers to hook into a webpage's processing system has been automated "through the cloud" with Heroku, Amazon Web, and OVH Servers. And yet, you still require roughly one IT guy every 100 servers, to make sure that those servers are actually running. (+/- whatever, based on skill-level and maturity of the project) I mean, the best-case scenario for a maintenance robot is something like Nagios, which will automatically check if various web services are still up and running.
venomsnake 12y ago
So lets break the trends ...

harperlee 12y ago

As long as there are jobs, rent will not be the only source of income (typically they are stated: jobs, technology, capital). Technology is a given for a specific time. And I read your argument as: given enough technology, all will be capital. So I believe you assume no jobs will remain, given sufficient technology. On that regard, I feel that this "end of jobs" dystopy is not more achievable than the Fukuyama's "end of history" theory. As long as humans exist, they will have two things: a calling for doing something with their lives (and derive meaning from it) and a need to compete with others. So they will keep on working on new jobs, and money will flow, transfering value among them. Agriculture was once the be all and end all of economy, and now is just one industry. If automation makes some jobs disappear, or be easier, others will appear.

crdoconnor 12y ago
Fukuyama's "end of history" theory is, in many respects, apologetics for rentier capitalism.

jerf 12y ago

"Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?" Actually, that's easy: No. Humanity will not be enslaved to a small number of capital owners. But the reason isn't necessarily a happy one, which is that humanity will revolt and start destroying and probably kill lots of people and even potentially kill the goose laying the golden egg by destroying the robotic infrastructure. Should they fail to destroy it, then you still face questions as to who ends up with the power and how it is distributed after the fact; you can find places in history where there was a lot of blood and violence on a recurring basis to answer the question "who gets the power?" because the matter wasn't settled even after the first victory. That's the outcome I'm more worried about, not the possibility of somehow getting 99% of the population "enslaved".

toomuchtodo 12y ago
I think you're wrong. Humanity won't destroy the golden goose. The next Aaron Swartz will release it to the public, whether that's distributing the software to everyone, or finding a way to freely build/distribute high-level robotics. Just as Prometheus brought fire to the humans, someone will find a way to prevent the future from being locked away. Once you achieve the necessary level of automation, you only need one fabricator that can build the next.
- gohrt 12y ago
  You are ignoring the cost of acquiring resources. Robots will run society before the problem of unlimited energy is solved.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Enough sunlight hits earth every 5 minutes to power all of civilization for a year. The energy is unlimited, the challenge is collection.
    - prteja11 12y ago
      You might like this: The Last Question by Isaac Asimov http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-question/ http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-question/

crdoconnor 12y ago

The idea that robots are on the cusp of subsuming all human labor is itself a tool of rentiers: https://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/imag0016.jpg?w=1000&h=829 https://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/imag0016.jpg?... (advert by California's restaurant association in protest against minimum wage hikes that will likely deplete their profit margins) Of course, the idea doesn't necessarily have to be true in order to serve its purpose.

gohrt 12y ago
The idea doesn't have to be false to be dishonestly used, either. Restaurants already replace servers by ipads, wherever customers tolerate it.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  A restaurant I used to frequent went way too far with the ipad thing. I think they 'optimistically' fired about 1/4 or 1/5 of their staff when the amount of labor actually saved was maybe 1/10. The service went from okay to atrocious when they reopened with ipads and they lost a lot of customers. It was plainly clear that they were WAY understaffed. You see the same starry eyed optimism surrounding Google's driverless cars.

foobarqux 12y ago

It's not well known but this is exactly what the unabomber was so worried about that he decided he needed to maim people to get everyone's attention.

gcb0 12y ago

you already are. Modern cities already automated and monopolized most of what you need to live. you must pay eternal rent to live. water, power, internet, etc.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

AhrowTway 12y ago

> Own the robots Assuming the following generalization is true: (Energy + Material) → (Human + Time) → Yield ...and that this monadic generalization can be referred to as “Transmutation”, then: (Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → … ...is also true, forming a transmutation chain. These transmutation chains intersect upon world lines, forming trade networks. Humans currently have a monopoly on the transmutation process, and thus, all subsequent structures that process allows. That will not always be the case. The industrial age increased the energy, material, and yield of transmutation while also reducing time. It also increased the speed on which yield is passed to the next transmutation process by while increasing the chain length. The overall network expanded because of these contributions. The fundamental human component remained the same, however. The delays between transmutation and critical bottlenecks of yield distribution in this network are where financial institutions reign. With robotic transmutation, the energy variable changes dramatically. “Time value” is no longer a required energy input. Robotic transmutation has no concept of time, and thus, has no valuation upon it. This is not because the robot can't measure time, but because the humans that need the robot isolate the effects of time and decay from it. If the robot breaks down, a human fixes it, not the robot. Therefore, as long as the human/robotic symbiosis remains, the robot will never evolve to resolve the pressures of time value. Therefore, robots cannot establish the skill sets to manage time value pressures. Humanity, for the foreseeable future according to my theories, will specialize to become a robotic workforces immune system. There will not be a revolt (Sorry social justice junkies, capitalists win again!) because robotic labor will provide access to frontiers previously inaccessible by today's configuration, specifically, deep earth mining and local space colonization.

bbcbasic 12y ago

No. Anecdotal argument: In my budget the biggest costs are housing, food, utility bills. The costs of my semi-automatic robots - such as the dishwasher, fridge, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, lawnmower are loose change in comparison. I doubt the fully automatic robots of the future will be excessively priced but yes some patent holders will be rich, even undeservedly so, but we won't be their slaves. The bigger problem with robots is something similar to The Matrix movie. A side effects of a very smart robot is that she becomes aware that there is more to life than serving humans.

Retra 12y ago
>A side effects of a very smart robot is that she becomes aware that there is more to life than serving humans. This is amateur nonsense. One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!" How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either. If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  > This is amateur nonsense. Yes I admit I am an amateur predictor of the future, like most people. :-) > One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!" Not sure how this is the same thing? > How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either. If you are intelligent you won't work for someone else for no reason. > If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements. When computers build computers, they will evolve.
  - Retra 12y ago
    >If you are intelligent you won't work for someone else for no reason. "Someone else" is a flexible mental construct. If you considered humans to be part of your 'self identity', you would work for them regardless. >When computers build computers, they will evolve. And how will they know which of those new computers to run and which to trash? They have to evaluate their function using their current implementation. That's just continuity. Humans are the same way: we can't tell if our brains are doing the right thing except by using our brains. So you can't evade those constraints. Think of it like this: if you are creating random functions, it is because you already value the creation of random functions. If you keep some and discard others, it is because you already value the ones you keep over the ones you discard. You always have to use your own evaluation. The worry is not that computers will cease to value humans, but that they didn't value humans to begin with (because we didn't properly specify what a human is and how it should be valued.) You can't go from valuing humans to not valuing them without being in error. And furthermore, as soon as a machine goes into error, we'd stop using it. If your computer decides to stop running programs and start playing tic-tac-toe all day, you'll shut it down and replace it. Useful machines will be under such scrutiny. Nobody is going to run an unreasonably powerful machine and not monitor it regularly. In this sense, it is like a regular employee at a business. If they decide that their time is better spent not working, you can just fire them and move on.