100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over (2013)

https://hyponymo.us/2013/01/29/100-percent-unemployment/

by rzk • 1 year ago

53 81 1 year ago

hyponymo.us

yamrzou2• 1 year ago

Previous discussion (Feb 2015, 90 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9065490

prasoonds• 1 year ago

Really illuminating. Reading the comments, I can't help but think how bad most of us are at predicting the future. While the OP's world might still be somewhat far away, it doesn't seem nearly as far-fetched now as it would have seemed in 2013.

dinkblam• 1 year ago

humanity being out-of-work is the premise of Marx's writings and we are not closer to it now than those 170 years ago.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I really can’t wait.

I have so many side projects I need to finish and my day job keeps interfering with them.

netdevphoenix• 1 year ago

It's okay. Your robot will finish them for you so you can focus on your soul destroying CRUD app at work :)

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

It's not that my day job isn't interesting. It's just that it takes too much time.

I love helping other engineers build cool stuff and teaching them how to better wield Python.

danhds• 1 year ago

I worry that day jobs are useful far beyond money for side projects. You do what you don't want all day, but then you are able to feel happy enough to do great work when you go back home to do what you really want.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I actually enjoy my day job. It's just that it's a large part of my day and I feel that I my other interests (restoring old computers, exploring them and how people worked with them, mostly) end up being neglected.

Kye2• 1 year ago

Relevant Ray Bradbury story (Don’t Get Technatal): https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ray-bradbury/short-fiction...

Written in the 1930s about the far future world of 1975.

BoingBoomTschak• 1 year ago

Or Judge Dredd's futsies.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v24• 1 year ago

Time flies. I suppose the difference between now and 2013 are LLMs, which did seem to trigger renewed interest in robotics and related branches of knowledge. That said, if history is any indicator, it will not go well.

nxm• 1 year ago

Please elaborate

DoctorDabadedoo2• 1 year ago

Robotics is hard and robotics companies fold as fast as flies die on a hot summer day.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v24• 1 year ago

None of what I am about to write is groundbreaking or new thought. More likely than not, it already has been discussed from various perspectives usually when people are accused of being luddites or a question of impact of automation on society comes along.

Industrial revolutions ( as there were several including few not listed in the first wiki entry like green revolution [2] or whatever computer revolution ended up being called)[1] at this core did a lot of things, but in just about every instance the major leap came with a social upheavals[3] even if, eventually, new normal was found. Not surprisingly, related major changes in living conditions also spawned new attempts at governing humans ( socialism and its offspring ).

All this simple background to say the following, those industrial revolutions changed only a facet of the existing social structure. 100% unemployment would likely implode existing social order. The tension resulting from it would quickly become uncontrollable unless quickly channeled, negated, or absorbed..

As you can likely tell, I am pretty pessimistic about our future as a species.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution [3]https://schoolshistory.org.uk/topics/british-history/industr...

whatever1• 1 year ago

The machines will have owners; likely, these owners will be very few due to the concentration of wealth that they will have accumulated by the time we reach full automation.

So, probably a guy will own all the agricultural automation, another one the warehouse automation, another one the software, etc.

Then there will also be the resource owners (probably states or big landlords). Since resources are finite (land, minerals), the automation owners will need to pay for these.

Among these folks, there will be an exchange of money.

So, for the rest of us, if we don’t own some resource, the outlook does not seem very bright. Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.

master-lincoln• 1 year ago

Or we just rob the resource owners and burn the automation.

harperlee• 1 year ago

Or tax their capital with income redistribution purposes, as we are already doing with more down to earth means of production.

krior• 1 year ago

Works well until the security sector gets automated.

hyencomper• 1 year ago

I think there would be open-source machine variants that many people could own and modify. As population growth is slowing, finite resources should hopefully have a better and wider distribution among people as they would not be constraints.

thrance4• 1 year ago

We'll have to seize it all by then.

edu• 1 year ago

It’s seems pretty obvious that in that scenario that’s what will happen. Hopefully it won’t be too dramatic…

Cumpiler693• 1 year ago

How do you propose we do the seizing?

Historically that never had good results, because the people who want to seize the wealth and the power are exactly those who shouldn't have it and be trusted with it, so you're exchanging one set of oligarchs with another set of despots.

Cantinflas• 1 year ago

Violence can also be taken over by robots, it's another job that they can do better

nikolayasdf123• 1 year ago

that sounds like Mad Max tbh,

Wilsoniumite• 1 year ago

I wrote about this a bit on my blog [1] but to add to this idea,

Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.

Pre industrial revolution, labor was in a sense cheaper than it was during the industrial revolution, and one genuinely interesting set of professions that existed then was house servants. Butlers, maids, cooks, under butlers and so on. It would not be inconceivable to see the return of these kinds of jobs? Ones where the value of human labor is so low that working for someone with wealth in their own home is common?

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2024/09/09/how-do-we-fix-it/

scrappyjoe3• 1 year ago

I suppose that house servants performed two functions - menial tasks, and emotional labour. Competence at both was essential. A house servant who was great at making beds but super annoying or had no emotional intelligence probably didn't last very long.

The menial tasks component will probably be automated away. Which leaves the emotional labour. Put another way, our job will be to be liked by the people with power. Liked enough to be kept around.

The only job left in the future is that of the pet.

franktankbank• 1 year ago

Maids already are common in barely upper middle class homes. They don't live there but.

chii• 1 year ago

Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.

or something new that an ai or machine hasn't managed yet, and something that have not been imagined today. And why not prostitution, if it comes to it?

And with the automation being so widespread, goods would be so cheap that the meagre taxes paid would sustain the costs of food stamps, basic living necessities, etc.

Ekaros• 1 year ago

Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.

I wonder, I wonder... I think there is certain prestige companion jobs that might exist. But your AI girlfriends and why not sex dolls with perfect bodies tailored to taste can do lot of the lifting.

Then again, child bearing and rearing might be viable "occupation". After all having lot of kids have been always been popular in certain classes.

lm28469• 1 year ago

That sounds a lot like what we already have, the HN crowd is just lucky to be in the top 30% earners

fendy3002• 1 year ago

there's two ways to face this situation, the pessimistic one is to just die. Futuristic sci-fi stories usually have endangered human or even human extinction aspect in there, with / without harsh climate and / or war / conflict.

The optimistic? Hold out until the chance come. In thousands (millions) years of human civilization, not a single civilization can stay eternal. That kind of civilization will perish too, if not the humanity to perish first, especially because Murphy's law (if something can go wrong, it will, and usually at the worst time).

And IMO that kind of civilization will still have a long way to arrive, and we're more likely already dead before it arrive. Because that one Murphy's law, and limited resources for automation. In an area where infrastructure is not yet sufficient, usually human are the best to handle the job.

ashoeafoot3• 1 year ago

society will nor be stable long enough to see this

ssssvd2• 1 year ago

Property rights require legal framework supported by a legitimised monopoly on violence (which is, almost universally, a nation state). Disenfranchising people means delegitimising the state means wrecking the frame of ownership rights. That's probably the biggest conundrum ahead.

1. Capital owners need us as labour units. 2. Capital owners need nation state as the guarantor of their rights to accumulated capital. 3. Nation state needs us to legitimise itself.

AI/robotics kills (1). How the system will rebalance from here?

Kye2• 1 year ago

Someone will own and rent out all the killbots to people looking to protect their stuff.

maxerickson• 1 year ago

We can sell them safety.

bsenftner2• 1 year ago

I think this line of reasoning is premature. The drive to mass automate is delusional. The complexity of that undertaking is barely grasped, and the tech to enable it may be visible on the horizon, but what we are working with today is not that technology. The AI today is "Atari graphics" and, yeah, sure, we can see the photo realistic fully automated civilization in this capability, but there is a gargantuan series of unsolved and nobody wants to touch them human political and human maturity issues that will stall and derail all of this thinking. The tech is on the horizon, but the human race's ability to meet it is not, we've got growing up to do.

ssssvd2• 1 year ago

How many 100s of billions had been invested into Atari Graphics? What administrations supported Atari Graphics as a nation-wide top-level project?

The key difference in AI is the combined investment of industry champions AND nations states on mind-boggling scale. That can cut the adoption from 40 years to 10. Today's graduates would hardly be able to pay their edu debts by then.

bsenftner2• 1 year ago

You've missed my point: it is not a financing issue that will prevent mass automation, it is not a technology issue that will prevent mass automation, it is a social politics issue that will derail the entire goal. It's pretty hard to automate while a war is taking place, and if this tech is used to create mass unemployment that will trigger war.

apples_oranges• 1 year ago

On a related note, I AM losing a bit of the joy of programming, because I let LLMs generate increasingly greater amounts of it. Who knew that previously writing boilerplate code secretly has made me happier..

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

Maybe the key is to write more complex projects that you normally would.

Recently, I wanted to learn a new language. I tried to pick some simple projects to start with (e.g. write a compression algorithm, a basic 3D renderer, a lambda calculus interpreter and so on). I realized that LLM could do the work for me and lost my motivation.

But maybe, I could try to write something much harder and use the LLM to help me.

scandox2• 1 year ago

With Folded Hands (1947) by Jack Williamson is my favourite vision of such a future I've ever read. From the Dad losing his job to the kids giving up violin because they can't compete with their Humanoid "servants" it captures the sense of futility very well.

I think history can be read as a history of human obsolescence. Even the powerful people who thought their values and ideas were important thrown on the scrap heap eventually like everyone else.

Luck is living a whole life without experiencing it personally.

Oarch• 1 year ago

My favourite is Player Piano by Vonnegut. I find it absurd how prescient it is for a novel that came out in 1952.

leovingi• 1 year ago

kids giving up violin because they can't compete with their Humanoid "servants"

It's an interesting situation to consider in a fictional story, except we already have real-world proof of this NOT happening the way some authors envision it. We already have machines that can beat master players at Chess and it hasn't led to people giving up on chess - not playing it, not learning it.

scandox2• 1 year ago

I agree the original idea is an over-simplification. But the feeling it captures when you do find yourself obsolete in some way is accurate.

kmacleod• 1 year ago

Voyage from Yesteryear (1982), James P. Hogan is my favorite. Essentially, yes, the robots can do better once shown but people create because it's enjoyable and, where desired, robots produce copies or maintain. The robots in this case have also been instructed to encourage human leadership and stay out of the way of it.

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

100% Unemployment

This is a prediction that has been made for a long time but has never been realized.

Also with the end of abundant energy, our descendants may have to work much harder than us.

DaveMcMartin• 1 year ago

I also have this pessimism. That's why I'm pivoting to hardware and embedded programming.

kelahcim3• 1 year ago

I, sharing the same feeling, have taken more drastic step. Instead of changing a specialisation within IT I have recently graduated in Psychology.

yamrzou2• 1 year ago

Interesting! Would you mind sharing more about your story?

jokoon• 1 year ago

If AI can barely replace car drivers or truck drivers, I think developers will unfortunately have to keep writing code.

Of course AI made progress in the language realm with chatGPT, but I don't see any advance in the realm of consciousness, general AI, emotions, etc.

There was some recent, small progress where the brain of a fly was mapped.

But I don't see transverse research made between cognition, psychology, neuroscience and AI, which is terrible.

Science doesn't even have any relevant insight on a good definition of intelligence that could be transposed into an algorithm.

There is also quantum biology, that argues that many biological systems use quantum mechanics.

Maybe quantum computing will offer new horizons with additional computing power but it will maybe take 20 more years.

gpderetta2• 1 year ago

We have little reason to believe that intellectual jobs are harder to automate than physical jobs. Consider the Moravec's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox).

snakeyjake• 1 year ago

It depends.

Many "intellectual" jobs build things that have never existed before and I have never seen an automation for something that has never existed before.

I have also not yet seen a model create something new that was not already contained within the dataset it was trained on. An astronaut on a horse is only superficially original and does not count as "new".

Of course, I am not omniscient so that may have already occurred but there is so much bullshittery in the "AI" (it's not I) space that any claim that it has occurred should be quarantined into the "likely a lie" zone of of one's brain until there is overwhelming evidence in the amount needed to convince an astronaut who has been in orbit and gazed upon the Earth that the planet is flat.

Lichtso• 1 year ago

Maybe quantum computing will offer new horizons with additional computing power

When somebody starts talking about quantum computing outside cryptography I immediately know that they have no idea what they are talking about. That is because they think quantum computing is a faster general purpose computer, which it definitely is not. Instead it has its own complexity classes [0] and most of the problems we care about in general purpose computing seem to not be in there. This to me strongly suggests that biological brains would not gain any advantage by using quantum computing and are thus very unlikely to do so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory

felipesabino• 1 year ago

Interesting that two complete opposite views are in the first page today. The other one being "AI isn't going to kill the software industry" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810175

samiv• 1 year ago

The robots as most people might expect will not take over.

The robots will be the software that will slowly start to replace knowledge workers or anyone who works with a computer.

If you conduct your work on a computer someone is already planning to replace you with software. Think about that for a second.

Incidentally also the knowledge workers are typically the higher income classes in a society. When their jobs start getting cut across the board where will they go?

Releasing workers that used to work with computers in offices with no replacement jobs has only one direction and that is to re-train as a skilled worker such carpenter, plumber etc. (Nothing wrong with those jobs), but all that motion and extra surplus of blue collar workers is going to drive down the wages. Also who will be able to pay these workers a living wage? Bezos and Musk and the few other winners of this game called "capitalism"? In this world the humans will become the "robots" at low cost and will essentially be replaceable and only exist to serve those few with still wealth to go around.

I honestly believe in the future we really need to rethink the whole structure of the society (basic income) or else the economy is going to displace a lot of people to the fringes of the society working 3-jobs and living out of a car. (Or just downright slums/streets). And when that happens to enough people and there's a critical mass of people with "nothing to lose" revolutions will start.

The late Marshall Brain had written a short story "Manna" that is very prescient and outlines a few possible alternative futures for the man kind. Unfortunately personally I'm not very optimistic about a "good" outcome.

ipdashc• 1 year ago

short story "Manna" that is very prescient and outlines a few possible alternative futures for the man kind. Unfortunately personally I'm not very optimistic about a "good" outcome.

Yeah, it's a good story and pretty thought-provoking, but it's kind of hilarious how quickly the quality nosedives once it switches to the "good" scenario. IMO you can tell he believed in the "bad" one a lot more and it feels like the good one was just shoehorned in to supply an optimistic option. Which is a bit scary...

blagie• 1 year ago

We seem to have no mechanisms to "rethink."

Market dynamics + personal ambitions are driving change.

At the same time, we have no means of popular revolution. Drones are automating war, and LLMs can monitor literally all conversations. Bottom-up revolution is futile. To the contrary, it's likely whomever produces the best drones could pull of a corporate revolution.

Market dynamics here centralize power and lead to a natural monopoly. That's perhaps better than competition, since competition pushes for moving fast, which means safety goes by the wayside.

Carpenters and plumbers will be obsoleted by robots too. Robot AI is maybe 5-10 years behind LLMs.

OpenAI was supposed to be the driving force behind fixing this, but it sold out, and is now building Skynet instead of preventing it.

htjatg• 1 year ago

Many here say that a political revolution will follow. That is possible, but the oligarchs could equip a foreign legion with no cultural affinity towards the population.

Or those that plunder Tolkien for their company names will succeed in their Skynet endeavors. Anduril currently seems like a joke, hopefully it stays that way. On the other hand, the satellite network required for coordinating Skynet is already operational.

whamlastxmas2• 1 year ago

Anduril just secured like 8 billion in funding for their giant manufacturing campus. And Palmer seems perfectly capable.

Hopefully we can collectively ban robots for anything regarding policing, though we unfortunately do already use them on humans in SWAT circumstances.

jslakro• 1 year ago

Articles cited in the writing:

New Yorker: https://archive.ph/J3Kex

Wired: https://archive.ph/pNqag

Kon-Peki• 1 year ago

Ultimately, all wealth is derived from the consumption of the teeming masses.

There is no point to owning a warehouse if no goods flow through it. There is no point to owning vast tracts of farmland if the food it produces is not purchased and eaten. An empty office building has negative value. Etc.

UBI is an interesting idea to deal with such a situation, but is guaranteed to fail because there is enormous incentive for the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.

So what will happen? Massive wealth destruction, unevenly distributed. What will that cause? The wealthy to go to war against each other.

Your one and only job is to figure out how to avoid becoming collateral damage.

If you make it through to the other side (if anyone makes it through to the other side), your existence will be more highly valued than it is now.

pragmatic• 1 year ago

Bit surprised no one has mentioned human evolution/machine hybridization.

Cyberpunk style.

100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over (2013)

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