The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/ai-threat-isnt-skynet-end-middle-class/

by peter123 • 9 years ago

286 254 9 years ago

geodel• 9 years ago

Middle class is not some fundamental type of entity. New class types might arise for future AI supported life. Or maybe population would reduce to a level sufficient to maintain new type of living which would be comfortable/luxurious in terms of what we think today.

jplasmeier• 9 years ago

So, like Brave New World?

visarga• 9 years ago

So the unemployed would need to find a way to support themselves by their own work, by cooperation and by using automation as well. A combination of solar technology, robotics, AI and classic engineering could be a formula for self reliance.

anigbrowl4• 9 years ago

Why not just wrest control of the means of production for themselves? The more concentrated the wealth, the easier it becomes to target it. When people see no other practical means of economic advancement revolutions tend to ensue.

natoliniak• 9 years ago

yes, the old "specter of communism" is always hanging around. I don't think people will just rollover and cease to exist once they are deemed not needed by a society.

Florin_Andrei3• 9 years ago

Yes, let them eat cake instead.

sp332• 9 years ago

Agriculture is controlled by a relatively small sliver of people. If you can't convince some of them to be on your side and give you food, then your movement is going to starve.

prodmerc3• 9 years ago

The kind of unemployed people that would require does not exist.

People are going to be unemployed and starving because they can't use or even access "solar technology, robotics, AI and classic engineering"

onlyrealcuzzo• 9 years ago

AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, sure. So have many other advances in the past. It seems like the decline of organized labor unions would be a bigger threat to the Middle Class than technology.

mirimir2• 9 years ago

It's more like "was" than "would be".

chubasco• 9 years ago

Skynet probably wasn't built for its own sake. It was probably built to protect the people who owned Skynet from the people that didn't.

inderLogging2• 9 years ago

Skynet has a specific origin story, explained in the movie, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

  In three years, Cyberdyne will become the
  largest supplier of military computer 
  systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded 
  with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully 
  unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a 
  perfect operational record. The Skynet 
  Funding Bill is passed. The system goes 
  online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions 
  are removed from strategic defense. Skynet 
  begins to learn at a geometric rate. It 
  becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern 
  time, August 29th. In a panic, they try 
  to pull the plug. Skynet fights back. It 
  launches its missiles against the targets 
  in Russia. Skynet knows that the Russian 
  counterattack will eliminate its enemies 
  over here.

It was an out-growth of the cold war arms race. Nuclear deterrents aren't as much about protection as they are about posturing. Lives aren't quite "saved" by nuclear arsenals.

problems7• 9 years ago

People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular.

I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.

anigbrowl4• 9 years ago

It would be facile to ignore the massive and frequently bloody consequences of such previous economic disruptions. People didn't just go through a period of anxiety and then drift into new jobs and feel content again during previous industrial revolutions.

lend000• 9 years ago

You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society. Sure, governments could have banned the printing press and stayed in the dark ages (scribes would still be making a good living, though.)

Edit: it all depends on tone... I still read the comment with the tone that implies disruptions as being as negative as they are positive, whereas I would frame disruptions are more positive. Granted, that's not to ignore the countless people who have had their lives uprooted by not being able to keep up with fast moving societies.

maverick_iceman8• 9 years ago

Exactly what were the bloody consequences of tractors or printing presses? If you just say a large number of wars/civil unrest took place during the industrial revolution then the periods before it were no less bloody.

xapata4• 9 years ago

A large middle class hasn't been around all that long in the history of civilization. Maybe it's just a flash in the pan.

My guess is that computer programming will be the new blue collar manufacturing job.

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

Programming isn't the new blue collar manufacturing job because you don't employ nearly as many people as you were doing manufacturing as you would be employing as computer programmers. Look at the amount of programmers at Alphabet (Google) vs people employed by Ford.

lhnz2• 9 years ago

  > In English-speaking countries, a blue-collar worker is
  > a working class person who performs non-agricultural
  > manual labour. Blue-collar work may involve skilled
  > or unskilled manufacturing, mining, sanitation, 
  > custodial work, oil field work, construction,
  > mechanical maintenance, warehousing, firefighting,
  > technical installation and many other types of
  > physical work.
  >
  > In contrast, the white-collar worker typically
  > performs work in an office environment and may
  > involve sitting at a computer or desk.

Computer programming is currently white-collar work. At what point are we going to go outside and begin to do it with our hands?

Also, the nature of programming is the ability to automate away white-collar work. We're probably going to need new categories, once many of those are gone. We might end up with engineers, a service-worker class and a managerial/executive class.

rrggrr2• 9 years ago

I think you've nailed it with this observation. The middle class may be a mile marker on a many millennium journey from self/tribal sustenance to ubiquitous sustenance as specialization, automation and efficiency combine to compress social-economic classes. This assumes an intelligent and benevolent ruling class. The Snowpiercer outcome is possible too.

wnevets• 9 years ago

People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular.

were they wrong tho?

enraged_camel2• 9 years ago

They weren't. All of the things the OP listed resulted in dramatic (and often very disruptive and painful) changes for the Middle Class.

Personally, I hate the whole "people have been saying this forever" type dismissals. They are "mid-brow", as PG would call it: they look intelligent on the surface by giving the illusion of a broader perspective, but don't actually address the point being brought up and don't add anything to the discussion.

problems7• 9 years ago

They were. They were disruptive, sure, they might have cost a lot of people, but eventually they resulted in a better, richer (if not in wealth, at least in terms of value), more scientifically advanced, more entertained and more productive society.

goda902• 9 years ago

Those things freed up people to do more things that require mental instead of physical labor. Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to? Spiritual and emotional labor? I struggle to envision how we can continue to keep people prospering in a money based economy on just those kinds of work.

problems7• 9 years ago

What makes you think we're at a peak of mental productivity?

For the most part the mental labor we're automating isn't actual mental labor, but physical labor things which are difficult to make a computer do - like drive, cook or stitch.

andrewmutz• 9 years ago

I think the point is that at the time of all these innovations (factories, automation, computers) it was never clear what careers people would be freed up to perform.

Surely "web designer" could not be envisioned by the people who were worried about automation 100 years ago, but here we are with under 5% unemployment.

drawkbox• 9 years ago

> Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to?

Creativity and innovation, those are far off in AI. Once AI can do those then we will be pets maybe but I don't know if creativity and innovation led by AI will ever have the value that it would with human creativity, at least not to us. An analogy might be we have fast food but people prefer food cooked by a good chef. Will AI be able to have a unwritten signature like a good movie director? writer? or musician? a home designer? etc.

Robots and AI will take over lots of jobs but will create lots of work like computers did. We aren't even off this planet yet or doing much in space or below the surface or oceans yet, so much work to do.

Just like computers and the internet did, robots and AI will empower smaller and smaller groups to achieve amazing things. Single people can have companies of bots/ai to compete more quickly.

maverick_iceman8• 9 years ago

Mental labor has been automated for a long time. Slide rules, electronic computers all these automated vast amounts of mental labor.

bamboozled• 9 years ago

I tend to agree with the OP.

There is still a lot of manual being performed around the world, and there is a lot more mental work to be done than in say, 1800. Also, any current AI technology isn't flawless, so it's probably better used to augment a professionals abilities. That's not to say the machines are not better at something like detecting skin cancer, but it's probably not a bad idea to get a second opinion, I'm not sure it would be wise to hand over the controls 100% just yet.

Unless endlessly self-improving, omnipotent, omnipresence AI systems become a reality (skeptical), and decide they want to hang around on Earth and do our dirty work for us (also skeptical), then, I think we should worry more about fixing human problems immediately, like climate change and getting rid of nuclear weapons.

prodmerc3• 9 years ago

"Forever" is before the space race, before everyone was driving instead of riding, before everyone had the Internet, TV or even radios in their home.

Every step in industrialization has hurt a lot of people, and their number is increasing every time. This time it's going to be millions.

I don't know if that's enough for a critical mass of sorts for some huge revolt, it may be.

problems7• 9 years ago

Ultimately it's helped far more people than it's hurt. It's given us medicine, it's given us affordable food, clothing and incredible technology. To the extent that I can comfortably say I'd rather be lower class now than upper class just a few hundred years ago.

gozur883• 9 years ago

"...increasing every time."? I doubt that. I don't think we'll ever see a dislocation like we saw with agricuture in first world countries, where an occupation that employed 95%+ of the people is now done by something like 3% (depending on how you measure it).

maverick_iceman8• 9 years ago

Communists are dreaming of the revolution since 1848, it never arrives.

caseysoftware• 9 years ago

I think one big distinction this time around is how quickly things move now. Society can shift in a few generations, no problem. In a single generation, looks challenging.

But now we're talking about in the span of 5-10 years at most. We're starting to get to the point where the bottom end is bumping against how long people spend in college.

As it approaches 3-5 years, what happens? How quickly can people shift, retrain, and re-educate themselves for the new tools, concepts, or fields that are now open to them?

I don't think anyone has any answers.. but it's a line of reasoning we should explore.

multinglets2• 9 years ago

Yeah, so describe how you think the middle class is doing these days.

SilasX• 9 years ago

Right, but there really are dangers that fail to materialize until they do. That's not a reason to dismiss every danger that has always so failed.

pygy_2• 9 years ago

Tell that to the surplus horses that bootstrapped the pet food industry when Ford democratized cars...

maverick_iceman8• 9 years ago

They got jobs in the glue factory. ;)

waffleau• 9 years ago

From a historical perspective your reservation is totally fair. But I think the issue is a lot more complex than just looking at the impact automation has had in the past. Here are a few points worth mulling over:

1. Automation in the past has been good at increasing worker productivity, and making new avenues of work possible. This is true going forward too. But each new generation of technology isn't "something we've seen before", it's a new thing with new consequences. Technological development isn't cyclical, so estimating the impact a new technology will have on the impact previous technologies have had is a poor model. This isn't to say the consequences will be bad, just that they're hard to anticipate. For the most part, the historical perspective is probably right though.

2. Automation in the past has been very effective in improving worker productivity, but developments in AI and robotics are looking at ways to supplant workers (i.e. electric cars don't improve our ability to drive, it removes our need for drivers). While in the broad sense this trend is good, and people will over time shift into new industries, it is going to be disruptive. Timelines will have a big impact on the shock. New industries won't spring up over night.

3. The timeline for this level of automation is much shorter than previous automation trends. The shift in agriculture happened over generations. The shift caused by driverless cars will likely happen in less than a decade. Add to that the efficiency of market pressures we have today - once one business is able to shift entirely to an autonomous fleet and save money over their competitors, all their competitors will have to follow suite to remain competitive. Entire industries could be displaced, and those workers will need to move somewhere.

4. This is more hypothetical and longer term, but it gets at what I think is the general fear around automation. Imagine we develop the ability to automate any unskilled job (whether through broad automation improvements or development of an actual general-purpose automaton). The primary factor in whether a business would choose to employ that automaton over a human is cost. The automaton is a once-off fixed cost, whereas a human is an ongoing cost. Once the cost of the automation is lower than paying a salary, humans will no longer be employed in that role.

5. Following from this, if it's the unskilled jobs that get automated, where do those workers go? At this stage, even if automation is creating new lines of work, why wouldn't that work also be automated? Basically, once we automate unskilled work, we never need unskilled workers again. In order to find work they'll need to skill up, which takes time and money. And if it takes a year to train a worker to a level that they're a net benefit, why not invest that money instead into automating the skilled work too?

anigbrowl4• 9 years ago

Some fear that after squeezing immigration—which would put a brake on the kind of entrepreneurship McAfee calls for—the White House will move to bottle up automation and artificial intelligence.

Sounds bizarre but totally possible. If you haven't heard of Aleksandr Dugin then it's time to play catch-up, because even if you think he's batshit insane he's quite influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin

People in the developed world have come to take technological progress for granted because of the inexorable economic logic. But with automation, adherence to default axioms about basic concepts like property ownership inevitably leads to most of the capital being concentrated in very few hands, resulting in some sort of modern serfdom. Nationalist programs implicitly depend on autarky, and the goal of nationalism is not maximum collective utility but rather vitalism - continuous improvement through the struggle for survival. Conflict, even defeat, is preferable for nationalists to ennui.

rick_perez2• 9 years ago

We don't need AI to end the middle class.

Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. It's almost a way of taking an industry and redistributing the wealth.

dragontamer2• 9 years ago

Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts.

Right idea, wrong complaint.

GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi. There was a time when it took specialized knowledge to know the layout of a city. GPS took away the one edge the Taxi-industry had... experience in driving and roads.

Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology. As soon as GPS-systems were so cheap that they are in literally everybody's pockets... the Taxicab industry became an endangered species.

rick_perez2• 9 years ago

"GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi."

No, not really. When I travel to a new city, I always use a Taxi to get around. GPS actually helps out the taxi drivers because I don't need to sit there explaining exactly where to go. I can just tell them the address. In a foreign country, it's even better: Just give them a business card or piece of paper with the address on it.

"Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology."

Uber is the first major company to avoid all of the taxi unions and the medallion systems and hire any driver off the street for what amounts to some extra beer money for the drivers.

It's really convenient and nice for consumers, but guts the industry of jobs that could actually earn someone a real living.

"the Taxicab industry became an endangered species."

Again, no it didn't. I'm not sure how much traveling you have done but when you need to get somewhere on time, Trains and Subways don't really cut it. You need to take a taxi.

Unless we have an instant form of travel without cars, we will always have a need for taxis.

Uber did, however, show us that when unions are in place and create a monopoly in an industry, they really have no incentive to actually make things better for the consumer.

prodigal_erik• 9 years ago

The driver's GPS made driving more accessible. But the passenger's GPS was even more important, because tourists finally know when they're being ripped off.

excalibur• 9 years ago

Why can't it be both?

boona• 9 years ago

So was the telegram, the telephone, automobiles, computers, but every time it's meant an astonishing increase in wealth for everyone.

Employment isn't even the end all be all, we would be much happier with 50% employment and greater levels of wealth.

v4voodoo• 9 years ago

Who is we? The 50% that's employed and thus can afford to live, or the 50% that's homeless?

mirimir2• 9 years ago

Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Part I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4

So yes, human revolution may come first.

orasis2• 9 years ago

I'm working on a machine learning product for conversion optimization, https://improve.ai.

Despite my initial fears, I'm noticing that, like any tool, it simply allows the user to do more with less. My product isn't going to replace conversion rate optimization consultants - it's just another tool they use to provide more value to their clients.

If the barrier to using machine learning were high, then I would be concerned that the benefits would only go to few. But since very powerful APIs will be increasingly cheap and democratized, the barriers will be quite low to reap the benefits of these technologies.

We often get caught up in the technical minutiae of machine learning, but you already don't need to be a deep learning expert to take advantage of, for example, cheap speech recognition APIs. This lowered barrier to entry will only accelerate.

But, then again, I'm an optimist. :-)

jeremydavid2• 9 years ago

I think there's more to conversation rate optimisation than randomly testing variations of a greeting. The price testing you mentioned looks interesting, but a good CRO consultant will do research and figure out the objections manually. Then, instead of having to test an infinite amount of variations with millions of visitors to reach statistical significance, they can test one or two. I call what your tool seems to do "throwing darts in the dark". And if I've completely misunderstood your product, perhaps you've got some optimising to do ;)

orasis2• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. The "Hello World" was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but obviously didn't come off that way. Oops!

We initially built the tool for this app:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-second-meditation-daily/id...

From hundreds of different daily meditations it has learned precisely which order to show the content in to maximize retention. So it knows the best message for day 1, day 2, day 3, etc.

The first month retention for this app is 43%, up from the 20s before optimization. The current rating is solid 5 stars ands usually in the top 10 in the mindfulness category.

The In App Purchase prices are automatically optimized, and soon we'll be throwing in a bunch of different background images, all of which will be automatically optimized.

Anyway, I really appreciate the feedback.

rrggrr2• 9 years ago

McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s.

False. McAfee will find a corresponding increase in middle class jobs in India and China and elsewhere for the same time period. The narrative that says automation has destroyed the middle class is demonstrably overstated to the point of being close to false. Employers arbitraged labor rates across borders, pure and simple.

This issue is vastly more complex than the scope of the Wired article which suffers from temporal distortion about what has occurred versus what will occur and when.

gech2• 9 years ago

You're stating that a positive cancels a negative?

maverick_iceman8• 9 years ago

Absolutely. A lot of these people don't seem to see the world beyond US. If x job losses in the US is compensated by 2x-3x job gains in India/China, why is that a bad thing? Are Westerns somehow more worthy than people from third world countries?

ahartman002• 9 years ago

exactly. here are some citations regarding the decrease in world poverty.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2016/0606/Wors...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2015/1019/Extr...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2014/1216/Chil...

whiskers08xmt2• 9 years ago

While some jobs have been replaced over sees, it seems like more have been replaced by gradual automation.

https://www.ft.com/content/dec677c0-b7e6-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9...

Animats• 9 years ago

There are basic capabilities humans have, and capabilities machines have. Human capabilities are more or less fixed. Machine capabilities keep expanding.

About half of work done today could be automated with technology we already have. All it takes is wider deployment of the most automated technologies. The current phase is not because computers are smarter. It's that they're really cheap. If a computer can do it, it will be cheaper than a human.

Next employment area in the US about to get clobbered: fruit and vegetable picking.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I

BWStearns• 9 years ago

I get your point but I'm not entirely sure human capabilities are fixed. In fact I would opt to say that we're the only species that has evidence of not being fixed in capabilities. I have no doubt that pg was a better programmer in the 90s than I am today. However if me now and him then were pitted against each other to build some web app I'm thinking I have pretty good odds. Human capabilities are their inate skills * education * available tooling. Education and tooling improve as time goes forward (generally and hopefully).

Fricken• 9 years ago

Throughout the 20th century new technology has been steadily increasing the value of human labour, but some forms of human labour have increased more than others, and this imbalance has caused a market distortions.

Technology has done a great deal to make railroad engineers more valuable for instance, because one guy could suddenly move hundreds of tons of goods. Used to be it took an army to do that.

On the other hand we have plumbers, and the amount of work a plumber can do has changed little in a century. There is no plumber who can to the work of a hundred plumbers from 100 years ago.

This causes a market distortion is what is hurting so much of what America calls the middle class. If we deploy AI well, it may correct some of these market distortions. A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. Maybe. If one were to entertain the notion that there are certain jobs we haven't automated enough, which hurts their ability to compete with the value we get from low cost goods and services.

cavanasm• 9 years ago

Just curious, but are there stats on how the comparative income of some professions has changed due to changes like this? I feel like the change in the importance and work done by people in jobs impacted in this way (you mention railroad engineers specifically) hasn't substantially changed the amount such people are paid, but this is admittedly only a gut instinct.

sanderjd2• 9 years ago

A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour.

This also implies that fewer individual plumber/robot/AI teams than the current number of plumbers. To offset that, we either need quite a bit more work at this level, or we need a rethink of the whole work-to-live system.

In the past it has always turned out that there are new kinds of jobs to be done. That may happen this time too. Things like living off of making YouTube videos are perhaps an early indicator of the direction we should be looking in. But it seems like most of the new models that are successful are based on ads and it seems to me that advertising-based business models can only ever make up a relatively small portion of the total economy.

stevehiehn2• 9 years ago

Each time this conversation comes up I notice people often like to suggest that history is just repeating and we have seen this before. I think its important to recognize patterns in cycles but its also important to be open to the possibility we've only seen local cycles and larger global cycles are still revealing themselves. In other words is AI really analogous to shifts we've seen before?

_rpd3• 9 years ago

The "AI" being discussed is mainly competent data mining and machine learning. If we stay at that level, then there are easily bigger shifts that we've adjusted to in the past.

But self-improving AI is truly on a different level, as is AI with human-level 'general intelligence'.

stevehiehn2• 9 years ago

I hear ya on the data mining observation. I have been digging into 'applied' ML for the last two years or so and its painfully obvious how many articles are based on science fiction and not the current state of things (which appears to be mostly reinforcement learning)

eternalban• 9 years ago

I agree. History certainly didn't repeat itself when it came to the scientific and technological explosion of the past ~150+ years.

But if we are considering history, we may also wish to recall that education was strictly for the clerical and aristocratic classes before the industrial revolution. And we may also wish to remember that in US none other than the robber baron John D. Rockefeller took initiative to shape the educational paradigm for the "peasants".

Will the peasants need to be educated anymore?

enjalot• 9 years ago

This problem has been weighing heavily on my mind since reading The Second Machine Age. The first thing I've read that gives me some hope for finding a solution is Rushkoff's "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus"

I highly recommend reading both books, because more perspective is needed to think abouy this than just "what machines can and cant automate"

philipkglass5• 9 years ago

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” Etzioni says.

It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It's like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it's one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I'd rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without-regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.

shams932• 9 years ago

Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.

waqf2• 9 years ago

People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.

wozniacki• 9 years ago

Putting aside our political slants, one might ask when exactly in the history of human civilization has any fraction of humanity ever consistently demonstrated that they were willing to devote themselves to the sole pursuit of "the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery" for any significant length of time?

If such instances existed, did those noble pursuits come without costs? To either themselves or others?

Say they did manage to exist in harmony with other civilizations (who may not have had any such lofty ideals or pursuits) then how long did they manage to keep doing so? [1] [2]

How long did they survive?

How long did their inventions or works of knowledge survive, in their intended forms?

In fact the evidence is to the contrary that when humans are bequeathed with a surfeit of riches and time to devote, they indulged in decadence, degeneracy and if nothing else sloth.

At which time, they were quickly wiped off by their geopolitical peers who placed a higher importance on self-preservation than they did on arts, science & discovery.

We like to think we have ridden ourselves from the shortsightedness of those older, less-prudent & ill-advised civilizations.

But really, on balance, have we?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

[2] http://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/

edblarney2• 9 years ago

"we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs "

I'm afraid your statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'the economy' is.

'The economy' is people providing services and building products for one another.

So that guy who waited on you at the restaurant, the girl who did your payroll, the guy who delivered your mail, the person monitoring your blocks internet connections, the person who planted crops, the person making sure your street is safe to walk down ...

Those 'bullshit jobs' all exist for a reason - because they provide value to someone (like you), and we are willing to pay for it all by doing stuff for others as well.

'The jobs' that we do are a function of what other people in the economy 'want done' in terms of products and services.

Not a function of 'what they want to do'.

If you don't want to do anything that 'helps others' - that's fine, but you can't expect for them to help you in return if your 'lifestyle choice' is 'windsurfing'.

But when we do help each other, the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. comparative value) - and that's where we really start to win.

Most of the things you need done for you are not that fun. It'll always be that way.

masonic• 9 years ago

Do you see much "creativity and discovery" coming out of present-day homeless shelters and encampments?

gdeghtfg• 9 years ago

"creativity" in Arts and Sciences (like academia in general) is driven by a silly popularity game.

It is as BS as are lives across the spectrum. Far off mountains appear hospitable indeed.

zeteo• 9 years ago

What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Not exactly the definition of the creative class is it?

bijection• 9 years ago

Plenty of scientists, entrepreneurs and creative thinkers have backgrounds that would allow them to subsist with minimal work, and choose to do what they do anyway.

philipkglass5• 9 years ago

Before governments started heavily funding scientific research in the 20th century, most basic science was done as some wealthy person's hobby. Of course there were far more aristocrats who were interested in using their moneyed leisure to (e.g.) race horses than to experiment with electricity or identify new insect species, but some were driven by curiosity. (If you remember the Web in the 1990s, there was also a lot of amazing creativity that found an outlet via personal passion-sites that had nothing to do with earning an income.)

If nobody really needed to work I think that's it quite possible that the huge population multiplied by a tiny percentage of people spontaneously taking up a creative pursuit (science, music, writing, mathematics, sculpture, animation...) could provide us with a "creative class" of a decent size. How many contemporaries of Henry Cavendish were born with comparable latent curiosity but left no scientific discoveries behind because they had to work in the fields all their lives instead of inheriting wealth? I personally stopped pursuing scientific research and started writing software (very little of it truly novel) because the wages and employment situation are so much better with software. If I didn't have to worry about income ever again I'd spend more time on truly novel interests. It's kind of sad if other people would use their newfound freedom from waged labor to rot on a couch in front of the TV, but not so concerning that I'd assign them a self improvement life-nanny.

Florin_Andrei3• 9 years ago

Boredom quickly becomes a non-issue when the real issue is starvation.

I'd love to get to the point where the main problem is being bored. I fear that, if the current social and political dogmas don't change, a heck of a lot of people will get kicked to the curb once AI-driven automation really takes off.

crazy2be• 9 years ago

It does come up?

In the case of pensions and royalties, it is wealth from prior work, so it's not really in the same category morally (for a culture that believes in the virtue of work).

Social security and inherited wealth definately do have a sort of stigma attached to them though, precisely because of the lifestyles that "trust fund children" tend to live, and because the poor are already stigmatized in general. The structure of social security makes real problems here too, where people can't get jobs without losing their social security.

stuaxo• 9 years ago

The stigma that trust fund kids face is nothing compared to what people on benefits face.

In Britain channel 5 has a whole subgenre of programmes about people on benefits, while similarly the Daily Express runs articles about the most extreme cases.

sologoub3• 9 years ago

On "trust fund children", the lifestyle of a few loud examples is likely painting an unrepresentative picture to the masses. I'd love to see some real stats or study on people who inherited substantial wealth.

On one hand, society seems to argue that inherited privilege perpetuates itself, which means that wealthy offspring are succeeding, sometimes despite their abilities.

On the other, we have the stereotype of "trust fund babies" who by conventional wisdom don't amount to much and don't contribute to society.

So which is it - is inherited wealth a road to success or failure? Likely, both with outcome dependent on other factors then wealth.

If anyone has a good study to read on this that actually took more than anecdotal evidence, I'd love to read it.

philipkglass5• 9 years ago

Maybe I haven't been listening at the right times, but I've never heard someone suggesting that we should raise the retirement age or cut Social Security benefits because old people will be bored or lack dignity if they're not compelled to remain in waged labor. (I have heard other arguments for raising the retirement age or cutting benefits, but not the they-must-remain-busy argument).

A freestanding belief in the "virtue of work" is one of those pathologies that I hope we can leave behind as machines do more. Many good things in life can be accomplished only with hard work. It's good to be able to work hard, that you may accomplish good things. There is no virtue in doing hard, purposeless work[1] after you run out of hard, purposeful work. If a person wants to keep starting fires using flint and steel after the invention of the friction match, that's fine if they enjoy it. It's a little worrisome but not really my problem if they keep doing it the hard way because they feel guilty otherwise. It's a real problem if they want everyone else to keep behaving as if the friction match were never invented, because they've confused "a valuable outcome from difficult work" with "an inherent virtue found in difficult work."

[1] Of course you don't want to let your body atrophy from disuse, but there's no reason that exercising your muscles and your senses needs to resemble paid-labor-as-it-used-to-be. People hike and go rafting for fun. Nobody needs to dig ditches for fun. You can keep your body and mind well maintained without imitating obsolete jobs.

fictioncircle6• 9 years ago

It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

It is largely a desire for a control mechanism where the sheep are inherently dependent on the mechanism to eat.

The retired pensioners and independently wealthy are both largely willing to sustain the status quo without substantial, rapid change.

The scary thing to people at the top of the ladder is what happens when it isn't just those two segments of the population? What happens when you have millions of rebellious young people completely free of the 9-5 to grind to survive?

They don't know if the answer supports the status quo and to them its a scary unknown.

roryisok• 9 years ago

I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions.

leverage

If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases.

education

the main driving force behind education is the need for employment. of course plenty of people seek education purely for their own fulfilment, and we imagine with the free time that will come with joblessness, more people will do this. but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need". with less people in college, the overall level of education around the world will drop.

ryanmarsh• 9 years ago

LOL. Millions of young men with housing and food and nothing to do. You just described a standing army.

TheSmiddy• 9 years ago

The idea that giving someone just enough money to live will kill their motivation is insane. If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? Most UBI schemes are initially targeting around 1k per month which is nowhere near enough satisfy the vast majority of people.

gozur883• 9 years ago

If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15?

There are all sorts of practical reasons why it's difficult to work 15 hours every week, the biggest of which is employers don't want to hire you. If you're flipping burgers, sure, but it's pretty rare to find that arrangement for a professional job.

harryf• 9 years ago

Our ideas about motivation are shaped by self fulfilling prophecy; most people are on the planet a working jobs which are, at best, a compromise for what they want to do with their lives. As a result staying motivated is hard because you're ultimately doing it just for the money.

So yeah; let's give large numbers of people a chance to try doing what they want with their lives. Yes it will not be easy. More education will be required, some will need support to not fall into drug abuse etc but ultimately it could lead to a better human condition

cnnsucks2• 9 years ago

"why do people still work 40+ hour weeks"

Mostly it's about upbringing. People are taught to have expectations for themselves and they strive to fulfill them. 15h would be bare subsistence for most, and that's not good enough. The minute they can live their expectations without work they usually check out; e.g. 45 year old "retired" government workers bankrupting their muni/county/state with union negotiated pensions.

shams932• 9 years ago

It needs to be indexed to GDP, it should not be welfare it should be each citizen's cut of the machine driven GDP. That won't stop people from forming new kinds of human markets and selling their art, or doing things like benefitting from a scientific breakthrough, people who own the machines may benefit the most, but if you tie it to GDP and its a cut of the economy rather than a welfare check far fewer people will sit around and get loaded. They will be motivated to do the thing that everyone told them "don't quit your day job" for, the dreams of childhood coming into manifestation for the masses for thee first time in human history.

sokoloff4• 9 years ago

It's also worth noting that $1K per month for all US citizens would represent materially more than 100% of the current federal tax.

US Citizens: Couldn't find a readily available reliable source, so I'll use residents instead. Should be close enough for this math though I'd imagine this would be more likely a citizen program rather than a resident program.

US Residents: ~325 million

Federal Tax Revenue 2016 - ~3.27 trillion

Federal Tax Revenue - ~272 billion / month

Federal Tax Revenue - ~$850 / resident / month

What if we didn't give it to minors?

US residents over 18 - ~247 million

Federal Tax Revenue - ~$1100 / resident-over-18 / month

That's if we spent it all on UBI, no debt service, no federal employees, no military, no infrastructure spending, no social security, no pensions (even for federal employees who earned them and are legally and morally entitled to them), etc.

ryandrake3• 9 years ago

Basic Income will never be politically possible in places where it's culturally expected that a living must be "earned". It's more likely we'll end up paying 50% of the population to dig holes and paying the other 50% to fill them in, than implementing a basic income.

laughfactory2• 9 years ago

This is so true. You could argue we already have this occurring in the US, for example. I've worked many places where it's unclear exactly why it requires so many people doing their various jobs to keep the business afloat. I've even held various positions which seemed like that: some days I would dig holes, other days I'd fill them in (metaphorically). I'm not sure how this happens in private industry, maybe because of various incentives from the government? Tax breaks, etc.?

tluyben2• 9 years ago

... never ...

It'll take a few generations probably. If living cannot be 'earned' for the majority, it'll be done fast enough with that opinion.

crdoconnor• 9 years ago

In the United States you have plenty of holes that need to be dug (crumbling infrastructure) and a historically low labor force participation level and some people are still arguing that the cost of employing people to dig them is too high while arguing that BI will be necessary very soon because robots.

ar0• 9 years ago

The topics of "boredom, vice and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor" come up whenever there is unearned income (from the point of view of the recipient). In this area, UBI and welfare benefits are very different from pensions, royalties or rents which - from the point of view of the recipient - have all been earned (through prior work) and thus don't come with indignity / stigma attached.

Inherited wealth is in some ways comparable and this is why there exist many examples where heirs have ruined family fortunes by desparately trying to make their own mark. (And many heirs of family fortunes would probably score high on the "vice" rankings, too.)

Look (because these posts don't seem to sit well with the HN crowd): I'm not against a UBI. I'm just saying that it will not solve all the problems. Getting people money to live is only one piece of the equation. Making it socially acceptable (both regarding the inside perspective of the recipients themselves and their self-esteem as well as regarding the outside view of society) to live off of UBI instead of being in regular employment will IMHO be far more challenging and will take time (maybe generations).

notahacker9• 9 years ago

Inherited wealth is if anything a generous comparison, since those eligible to inherit wealth are often encouraged by their parents to jump through sizeable work-ethic related hoops to ensure their inheritance, and inheritance is usually with good reason more heavily taxed than most money transfers. UBI is all about assuming that it's entirely unreasonable to set thresholds of need or effort to state handouts when we could instead deny them to people solely on more reasonable criteria like whether they had the decency to be born in a particular country.

So yeah, I actually am against UBI for the foreseeable future, regardless of how well that sits with the HN crowd. Since in the real world we're a very long way from hard AI, replicators and post scarcity economics, UBI is - at best - redistributing from each according to his ability to each according to their ability to prove they're not a foreigner. Sure, the world isn't particularly fair anyway, but let's not pretend it's a step in the right direction to removing any assumption the welfare state is supposed to be a social insurance system for people that have paid into the system and are genuinely looking for work, and replacing it with the ethos that $nationals have a fundamental and inalienable entitlement to the fruits of other's labour (mostly non-entitled foreigners') if they're not particularly interested in trying to earn it themselves.

(Of course there are plenty of arguments against UBI that don't rely on notions of "dignity of work" like the important practical question of how much you're willing to slash existing welfare or raise taxes to give state handouts to much larger numbers of people that haven't indicated they need or want them, but that's probably a tangent to this particular article)

vacri2• 9 years ago

“A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,”

It may not give them dignity, but it protects them from poverty, which strips dignity. It also protects them from vice-based-on-need, just not vice-based-on-boredom.

moxious2• 9 years ago

Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor.

I think that's mistaken on many fronts. First, new jobs that get invented aren't bullshit. Just as the internet destroyed DVD manufacturing jobs, it created smartphone app jobs, which weren't make-work. Second, the day will never come when machines are doing all of the strictly necessary labor; this is an affectation of the group-think that happens on this site. The firmly established pattern in humanity is that if you automate all of the existing work, humans will start wanting new things, which creates more work. It just....never....stops.

So while I know there are techno-enthusiasts who think AI is so imminent that it can take over even high value knowledge work in the near term, and while I know that "elimination of the middle class through robotics" is a fashionable viewpoint right now, let me just say that I have been reading articles about how strong AI was just around the corner, just a few years off...for the last 20 years. I feel exactly the same way about driverless cars. Every time I pointed that pattern out, someone was always quick to say "this time is different" without really having much evidence why it was. So I guess I'll wait for my thread reply that this time, no, it's really different, AI is going to eat all of the jobs.

I'm enthusiastic about all tech development, but prognostications about the future are pretty much always wrong. Isn't that intuitive? Does anybody really believe they can predict the future?

It's like Star Trek and the 1960s view of what today would be like. Everybody expected matter transporters and flying cars. They didn't get either. But they did get the tricorder.

philipkglass5• 9 years ago

If the market economy keeps producing new jobs fast enough to compensate for technology eliminating old ones, then I agree that we don't need to plan for mass unemployment at all.

But I want to stake out a position early on that if the market economy plus automation does not actually produce enough jobs for job-seekers in practice, then we should accept that mass employment was a historically contingent phenomenon that can be let go. It's not something that governments should try to keep shambling around in zombie form after the original economic rationale has died. (Bullshit jobs invented just to keep people provided with employment/income is one kind of bad response that I'm worried we'll see from protective governments. Another bad response, from neglectful governments, would be to ignore mass technological unemployment observed in practice, should it come to pass, because they're too wedded to a theory that enough new jobs will always arise in the private sector to offset jobs eliminated by automation.)

computerex• 9 years ago

Everyone knows the AI community failed to deliver on strong AI, the modern boom in automation and machine learning is not about strong AI, rather the exact opposite. Instead of trying to create artificial general intelligence, researchers are now focused on solving very specific problems.

Like speech recognition, or machine vision, or predictive analytics. What's awesome is that deep learning seems to be coming out with the best results across many different disciplines and problem domains, leading to optimism about it being a general technique that can be applied to many different types of complex problems.

So yea, modern renaissance of machine learning and AI is not the same as the promise of strong AI, very opposite.

I am totally with you in that the future is hard to predict. But this isn't quite the same thing, there are notable differences here that'd suggest that this isn't like the promises made by the community since last 50 years.

Speaking specifically about deep learning, never before in history have we been able to work with the sheer volume of data that we now have and can easily work with. GPU computing shits on the CPU and is faster than the CPU by orders of magnitudes for things like matrix multiplication[1]. Advances in the field like dropout, transfer learning, ensemble learning, boosting, convolutional neural networks, unsupervised pre-training, etc have also led to breakthroughs.

Finally, researchers have more access to large freely available datasets like ImageNet, which has had an enormous impact on the field of machine vision. Freely available tools like Caffe, TensorFlow, Theano, Lasagne, Keras, Torch also make it easy for engineers and not machine learning experts to utilize the state of the art techniques to build awesome software.

[1] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/3320

kitd• 9 years ago

What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Earned income is directly or indirectly linked to how you perceive society values you, and therefore your self-esteem. Pensions have been earned previously, royalties earned by your intellect, even inheritance is earnings by your family. A life on social security is known to lower self-esteem. Most recipients are desperate to work.

The UBI undercuts this to some extent. It may be part of the answer, but it is only a small part IMHO.

Shaxberd• 9 years ago

I was going to start the next Apple but $10k a year and the prospect of a leisurely life of 40oz's in the park and generic brand mac n' cheese was enough to kill what overwhelming propensity and drive I had.

xg15• 9 years ago

A point i'm always surprised is not discussed much in the basic income debate is loss of control.

Whenever a job is performed by a person, that person has the power to refuse doing the job or put their own spin on it. The effect is that there some basic checks of ethics. This keeps businesses from doing things blatantly against the interests of society and ensures that CEOs with grand visions of shaping humanity are forced to discuss their ideas with others before implementing them.

All that is not true if a major part of society is not part of the work process. In the extreme, that could make the old "bond villain with robot army" scenario actually credible. But more realistically, it could lead to large and important aspects of society being under unchecked control by a relatively small number of people. This is already true today with communication and data collection (e.g. google/apple/etc can push arbitrary updates to billions of phones around the world without any sort of oversight) and it will likely be the same with transport and manufacturing in the future.

I fear basic income not only doesn't address this problem but even worsens it by declaring it normal that a large part of society does not take part at all in shaping that society.

dllthomas• 9 years ago

Many things that people do without it being "a job" have a significant impact on shaping society. To the degree that your concern is legitimate (and I think to some degree it is) it is a concern about automation irrespective of basic income.

CodeSheikh• 9 years ago

So us as technologists and engineers contributing towards this AI field, how do we help sustain middle-class? The state of STEM education is unfortunate at public schools here in the USA.

wmccullough• 9 years ago

It scares me too, but you know, I'm ready to embrace whatever comes next.

I've been thinking alot about this over the course of the last year. Say that enough things get automated that we have massive numbers of unemployed, how do we address that? Instead of dodging the question by exclaiming that it won't happen, we probably should address a much deeper and more fundamental question: Why does the value of a person come from their method of earning a living? We have to detach individual value from choice of career first.

Once we've done that, we really have a real question to answer, and it's deeply existential: Do we really want humankind's story to be about the majority of a population working at dead-end jobs just to buy food and water? Aren't we here for more? I for one don't buy the theory that we will self organize into makerspaces and become "creators". Creativity beyond survival is a luxury when life and death are on the line.

I don't have the answers, but I certainly have many questions. If I had to guess what would happen in the event that extreme A.I. automation puts us out of work, I'd suspect we will organize back into tribes to focus on subsistence. I've found that if you look at the history books, a centralized government isn't the best entity to take care of masses of unemployed people. In large enough countries, people would end up starving in the bread lines.

I think we need to really think about why we're here. Why are we so bent on using automation to complete the tasks of our shitty 9-5 lives instead of building a utopia? People are quick to say that we need to replace a money based economy, but that's too superficial a solution. Money is merely a shared myth used by us to trade our time and value for a symbol that we can use to prove our worth. Until we transfer where the "worth" of an individual comes from, we're going to be in this cycle.

bad_user2• 9 years ago

Such questions have been asked for a long time, because this problem was visible ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It's what inspired Marx after all. And no, I'll never advocate for communism because I think Marx was wrong and because in practice it ends with crimes against human kind.

But we are here because of greed. And along with all other problems that we face, like global warming, overpopulation, pollution, etc, I think it's going to get a lot worse before getting better.

Some form of socialism is inevitable though, that much is certain. Having guaranteed food, shelter and medical care is a must.

justinhj• 9 years ago

Maybe this idea of worth is hardwired inside us. As animals that existed in small groups throughout the world there was much work to be done in the daily activities of hunting, cooking, fixing and building shelters, raising children and possibly fighting with other tribes. With those constraints where there are no idle hands, the elderly and disabled become liabilities that are often discarded. Lazy people probably would not be tolerated in this environment.

So it seems likely that the distaste for someone not working as hard as everyone else is deeply ingrained in our culture and possibly even our genes.

_m8fo• 9 years ago

Even though I am considered 'skilled labor', I hardly consider myself so skilled to be making the incredible AI machines that will be the ones to take over the jobs (in comparison to the competition, anyway). As for "less skilled folks" like myself, here's an abridged list of things you can do (in additional to software) to start hedging your bet against AI.

- Real estate (Landlord): I'd suggest you save money and start buying some property. Dump some sweat equity into certain markets and you may have something here. AI can never beat the ultimate constraint -- land.

- Environmental science: AI is great, but I doubt computer vision and robotics will become good enough to replace foresters and the like anytime soon. If you live in a wooded area, it may be worth it to start investigating it. Plus, it's healthy to walk around in nature anyway. Double whammy.

- Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.

ryandrake3• 9 years ago

I think the statement "AI/robots won't be able to do X" is incorrect for all X given a long enough time frame.

StRoy3• 9 years ago

- Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.

That already depends on the type of skill being taught. Learning a new language, for example, has never been dependent on teachers and I think I've been doing quite well with purely self taught English, and that was before methods like duolingo appeared. My mother is living in retirement and has started learning languages as a way to pass time, she has learned enough English through duolingo to achieve a conversational level and she never had a teacher. Is it really impossible for more sophisticated AIs to truly replace language teachers in schools, and have students do things through a computer? and possibly replace teachers in many other fields of studies too. I'd wager most of the less advanced courses in pre-college stuff could do well with modern, computerized, interactive methods of learning. I don't think you could replace the interaction with a teacher for more advanced studies, though.

optimuspaul• 9 years ago

Once everything is automated there will be little need for money, we'll all be kings! Damn hell ass kings!

chadcmulligan3• 9 years ago

This is the bit I can't understand about the nay sayers. AI promises a world of everything you could want. The problem is the current way of assigning goods (money for labour) is obsolete. The really funny thing (to me) is the people who'd benefit most by this are the ones wailing the most.

It's the disconnects that confuse me the most. "What about houses, how can we afford a house without a job?" is a complaint I hear. Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0.

The hard part imho is the transition where some jobs are obsoleted, but some aren't and some things still cost lots because they haven't been automated yet. This is where we are now I think.

codexon• 9 years ago

Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0.

Ok and how will you pay the guy who owns the lumber if you have nothing he wants? And the guy who owns the construction bots? And the owner of the land?

gukov• 9 years ago

Every living organism is designed by evolution to strive for survival and reproduction. It's the constant fight that gets you out of the bed every morning. Having nothing to do all day but paint will eventually result in premature death. Think animals in captivity.

What if the end of humanity will be caused not by a nuclear war but by a peaceful AI that made us zoo animals?

_rpd3• 9 years ago

At some point attention becomes the ultimate resource. Most people earn income by paying attention to somebody else's projects. But with a little introspection and basic goal setting training, many people identify projects to which they would prefer to give their attention if income were not an issue. I think a society in which a higher proportion of one's time can be spent on personal projects vs. other's projects is a goal worth working towards.

kmnc• 9 years ago

If we have the technological prowess to replace human labor in full yet can't figure out what to then do with our lives other then paint then we truly are a doomed species. It seems like people lack imagination, everyone either thinks "don't worry we will still have jobs (appeals to social history)" or the "with nothing to do we will wither and die (appeals to evolutionary history)". I think both those camps are missing something which should be self evident if we ever get to this point: The freedom and ability to create meaning in ones own life.

I do agree with you though, if we are kept in captivity by political and social structures (ahem..religion) that fail to evolve with technology (which seems like human nature sadly) then the average human will go the way of the sloth or the people in idiocracy. I am hopeful though that the AI will save us from that captivity more so then reinforce it yet that may be a foolish hope.

Is being a zoo animal so bad if we have the full capabilities of very powerful AI? What if those AI's were specifically devoted to making it a better zoo? At that point what is the difference? What is inherently bad about being a zoo animal if you can't see the walls and the zoo keepers don't abuse you?

andrewflnr• 9 years ago

I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic. We'll find our fights, whether mountain climbing, video games, even gaining recognition as a painter.

multinglets2• 9 years ago

Heady fucking stuff, just wow.

hyperion2010• 9 years ago

Great! Maybe we will finally have the excess capacity to finally send people into local archives all over the world so that we can save the data about the past and feed it to the machines. If you want data for models there is tons of it lurking in the basements of municipal buildings all over the world, and you might find a lost Da Vinci manuscript while you are at it!

pvnick• 9 years ago

The idea that technology will cause widespread job-loss and economic upheaval is such an old fear, and it never works that way. Technological innovations lead to wealth creation 100% of the time, along with more opportunities for more people, even if some jobs are initially replaced with other jobs. "This time is different" is announced everytime, and it's always the same.

This book is very good for anybody wishing to understand basic economic theory and see many examples throughout history of this exact debate taking place over and over and over again: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ (see the chapter "The Curse of Machinery").

234dd57d2c8dba• 9 years ago

Yes but this time it's different. Throughout history, until the past 50 years or so, the new technology has typically replaced a mechanical function humans were performing. The coming evolution of software and robotics will start performing the mental work humans, until very recently, were the ONLY thing on the planet capable of doing.

For the past 3000 years of "modern humans", we have had a monopoly on the human brain and creative intelligence. That monopoly is coming to an end. What will the average worker do when a robot that can out-wit them? You cannot just handwave this problem away saying "it always creates new jobs!!11".

This problem is well-summarized by this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

twoodfin• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure travel agents believed they were doing "mental work".

laughfactory2• 9 years ago

The problem with UBI is inflation. Give everyone another $1000/month (or whatever) and all you've done is make every existing dollar in the economy worth less.

noisy_boy• 9 years ago

This is exactly the question I don't see answered. How will you handle increased prices? Unless instead of $1000/pm, you give an equivalent purchasing power/quota based on normal/average/reasonable per-capita consumption. Like a token that allows you to buy a certain amount of food/clothes/medicines etc. So what happens if I don't need to buy anymore clothes today but need more medicines but another guy is in a reverse situation? How about we translate this purchasing quota into points and have an exchange for people to trade them? Did we re-invent barter system/money in another form?

e12e2• 9 years ago

Make the UBI micro-adjusted (month-to-month) for inflation based on a consumer index - and so indirectly tax passive capital (which is only earning meager interest)?

philipkglass5• 9 years ago

Now I'll highlight a concern I do actually have about a fully robotized economy: weapons proliferation. The key pieces of information needed to build a serviceable anti-tank missile or a jug of nerve gas are already lying on the shelves of thousands of technical libraries. The details may be classified, but the broad outlines in the open literature are good enough for someone with patience and a technical background to fill in workable solutions. Fortunately for civilization to date, {diligent, technically educated, sufficiently well funded, homicidal} is a set of attributes that rarely co-occurs. We've seen homicidal maniacs who were patient and well-funded enough to make their own nerve gas just once so far (Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 1990s).

Things change if machines do all the real work and a would-be killer doesn't need any special skills to get deadlier weapons. The unhinged man who rage-kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could, in the future, ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun. Outbreaks of lethal violence might be rarer, since people who are materially well-off are generally less likely to murder, but the rarer killings rooted in rage or ideology could become a lot deadlier.

In a few post-scarcity science fiction settings impulses to violence are stopped with direct human nerve implants linked to a machine panopticon that can halt dangerous actions. I don't consider that a plausible or even desirable future. In my favorite space opera setting, the Culture of Iain M. Banks, killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight running millions of times faster than biological intelligence. That sounds dreamy to me, but it involves a lot of made up Space Opera physics so I don't think it is plausible. Thinking about a future where AI is capable enough to manufacture anything people ask for, but not capable enough to act as benevolent gods, leads to some odd mixtures of prosperity and catastrophe.

ahartman002• 9 years ago

"ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun"

I know the NSA and IoT get a lot of criticism here. But this seems like a good usecase for the always connected, phone home systems, with an all seeing eye. :)

"killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight"

As someone who used to work in a warehouse, ai which can detect anomalous orders seems incredibly plausible. Considering they have all been storing data for years, you have plenty of training data. Making something that notices when certain substances are shipped to someone who is not a normal customer seems trivial, if it doesnt exist. I mean the conservation of mass means that the explosive has to come from somewhere :)

smartbit• 9 years ago

_The unhinged man who rage-kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could ....._

After such a horrendous event, maybe the US society would start asking themselves why there are so many societies with far less lunatics getting around killing. And after answering that question, US politics and society force themselves acting because everyone agrees "never again"?

kisstheblade• 9 years ago

I think we will laugh at this "AI threat" in 30 years after yet another long "AI winter". I mean I haven't been convinced of any "AI" displayed. All just seems to be glorified pattern matching with little practical use. I mean siri and cortana and alexa are all dumb as sh*t. Sure some cars can negotiate some clearly marked streets in nice weather. I don't think there is an automatic leap from these technologies to more advanced AI that actually would for example enable totally autonomous cars. Sure there are incremental improvements in robotics etc that helps to raise the efficiency of some operations but then the humans can move on to different jobs and enable other things. Eg. radiology where humans can treat people some AI has marked the scans as "suspect". So better treatment because of "AI", but the doctor still has a job.

Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be. "It's AI I tells you, luddites!"

StRoy3• 9 years ago

Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be

You are decades behind the times.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966
Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal...
In a new report from Digitimes, Foxconn executive Dai Jia-peng has laid out the company’s three-step plan for automating its Chinese factories. The company’s ultimate goal is to fully automate production of things like PCs, LCD monitors, and its most famous product—the iPhone.
Foxconn makes its own manufacturing robots, known as Foxbots, and has already deployed about 40,000 of them. Some, which the company considers "stage one," assist workers at their stations. Foxconn already has individual fully automated production lines—they're "stage two"—in factories in Chengdu, Chongquing, and Zhengzhou.
Stage three of the process would be fully automated factories, with only a handful of workers.

Even China with its cheap labor is now willing to invest in that technology. If Trump ever becomes "successful" at "bringing those jobs back" to the USA, it will be jobs for machines.

redsummer• 9 years ago

AI makes me want to join the Amish. You learn things to give yourself a future and self-fulfilment. But AI will catch up with your skills eventually. You would need to spend all your time learning if you want to keep ahead, and never have time to put to work what you have learned.

Wouldn't you rather have a community and a meaningful life than be a meat-based beta version of a future AI?

jganetsk2• 9 years ago

The problem isn't AI. It's capitalism. People are fearing the ultimate triumph of capital over labor.. If people owned the robots, then there would be no problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwB9-9QOQI

dgudkov• 9 years ago

It's an interesting perspective, but what would stop people from having shares in companies that own robots?

jganetsk2• 9 years ago

All people should have shares in companies that own robots. Or they should at least have a claim in the return on capital.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-fu...

lostmsu• 9 years ago

I still think it is the end of all classes.

blurbleblurble• 9 years ago

Well, I dint know what they decded the ethics were for biotechnology, but genetically engineering seeds so that farmers depend on the auxiliary herbicides from singular corporations strikes me as unethical. Not to mention that farmers are reliant on those same corporations for seed itself. Seeds that have been cultivated for hundreds of thousands of years are getting replaced with zombie varieties that disrupt ecologies. This is a crisis. We are losing our collective seed memory.

To me, capitalism is not about free markets, it's about debt markets. Maybe that's because the only capitalism I've ever known is ideologically restricted. Its champions are often hypocrites of their religion, where income from rent is deemed productive while work done by a mother in taking care of her children is consumptive and indebted.

nubol• 9 years ago

I don't find many articles talking about how AI integration in the industry could lower the production costs in many markets, that would allow consumers to be able to buy products cheaper, so they could work less to be able to pay basic stuff.

Also it would allow people to be more capable to scale multiple tasks, for instance: instead of being a taxi driver you become the manager of a driver less taxi.

The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

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