If only there was a way for people to learn new skills, if only we could somehow teach people useful things and do so without financially bankrupting them ... Oh well, such is life But seriously,...
If only there was a way for people to learn new skills, if only we could somehow teach people useful things and do so without financially bankrupting them ... Oh well, such is life
But seriously, the answer to automation is to push the displaced into emerging industries that still require living breathing human beings.
UBI will come, hell one day in the farish future we might be in some kind of star trekian society where people only work because they want to better themselves, but to get there the average education level of society needs to come up and automation is gonna push this, we should welcome it and retrain the displaced.
Better to re-train and educate people now when automation is taking away skilled labor than get to point where AI is taking away most jobs and wonder "What now?"
I'm worried that we're already dangerously close to a point where educating billions of people won't be enough to ensure employment. Eliminate even a few easy to automate jobs right now:...
I'm worried that we're already dangerously close to a point where educating billions of people won't be enough to ensure employment. Eliminate even a few easy to automate jobs right now: Cashiering, fast food cooking, trucking, and we're looking at millions of unemployed people in the US alone. Creating and running the machines that will replace them will be hundreds, or maybe a few thousands jobs. Do we have millions of jobs, low or high paying, requiring education or not?
Teach a person how to do maintenance on an automated system and they can compete for the few jobs with all his displaced friends. Give that person the opportunity to go back to school and gain a...
Teach a person how to do maintenance on an automated system and they can compete for the few jobs with all his displaced friends.
Give that person the opportunity to go back to school and gain a STEM degree and they'll be able to compete for a vast swath of new and emerging jobs.
It won't be 1:1 every trucker is now still in the trucking industry on the degree'ed side instead of the labor side.
For every type of job automation eliminates there is the potential for new jobs and industries to be created. We're not just going to apply automation and AI to existing industries, there are going to be new and emerging industries and markets; things we can't even see coming now, all we can do is make vague guesses at the shapes of the shadows.
For instance I'm an engineer and right now I'm learning Python and Tensorflow to try and automate some stuff in my industry that hasn't been automated before, I realize that if I want to make it to retirement I want to be on the automating side, not the automated side.
See, that's just not a given. There's no reason to think that humans will always be more capable than AI/robotics at every task, not enough to guarantee entire new industries requiring meat-based...
For every type of job automation eliminates there is the potential for new jobs and industries to be created...there are going to be new and emerging industries and markets; things we can't even see coming now
See, that's just not a given. There's no reason to think that humans will always be more capable than AI/robotics at every task, not enough to guarantee entire new industries requiring meat-based labor. Until science gives proof that humans possess some ethereal, divine spark that machines will not, and can not obtain, there's just no reason to think that we're special enough to not be replaced.
Anything a person is capable of, a machine has the potential to do. So far as we know, we're just biological machines that follow the laws of physics just like everything else. Robotics and machine intelligence have the potential to meet, and surpass, all human capabilities. You don't have to pay a machine a salary, healthcare, dental, give them sick leave or vacation or maternity, or limit them to 8-hour workdays, or even ever shut them off at all. I recall reading some figures claiming that something around 1/3 of a businesses expenses are employee salaries and benefits, that's an immense incentive to automate.
The US, at least, is primarily a service-based economy. We (meaning humans) don't really manufacture anymore. Agriculture is highly industrialized, and is handled primarily by a small amount of people. We're already seeing some service jobs go by the wayside. Cashier robots have been in most supermarkets that I've been to, for years. Fast food restaurants are starting to put in self-order kiosks, because the social pressure for a higher minimum wage is making them economically feasible. Self-driving cars are only going to get better, and the best ones we have are already better than human drivers. The transportation industry employs several millions in the US. A technology such as Google Duplex, and others that will assuredly be based on it, have the potential to take over call-center jobs. We're going to keep replacing humans with robots and algorithms. What possible new industries will arise that will employ all of these people forced out of their current specialties? If we can't think of any, we can't assume they'll actually arise.
I've commonly heard about everyone become a programmer or a maintainer, but there's reason to think the machines won't be able to do those jobs either. And even if we turn into a maintenance-based economy, or a programmer-based economy, that just won't be enough to employ everybody. In the US we already have a problem with many people being underemployed. How many millions have degrees and aren't using them, not because they lack the will or the drive, but because the jobs that utilize them are few than the amount of degree holders?
The Great Depression saw 25% unemployment. Machines don't have to take all of jobs before we reach a point of economic and social catastrophe.
I think we, as a culture, need to have a serious conversation about why we think people need to work. If there is no work for humans to do, we should look at that situation as a potential utopia. A world in which we don't have to spend the best hours of the best days of the best years of our lives, slaving away generating capital for the wealthy, should be a wonderful world indeed.
Like I said in my first comment, ubi and maybe Star Trekian work because I feel like it society will have to happen at some point. I was talking more about immediate next 50 years (If we're lucky,...
Like I said in my first comment, ubi and maybe Star Trekian work because I feel like it society will have to happen at some point.
I was talking more about immediate next 50 years (If we're lucky, computational power is the real bottle neck that'll slow down ai talking it all over)
I agree with everything you said in the long term tho, I'm just trying to make the 30 years to retirement.
I really don't think it's going to take even 25 years to reach 25% unemployment. Computational Power isn't slowing down anytime soon. Yes, we're reaching the limits of silicon-based transistors....
I really don't think it's going to take even 25 years to reach 25% unemployment.
Computational Power isn't slowing down anytime soon. Yes, we're reaching the limits of silicon-based transistors. But we're already putting R&D into alternate materials, and photonics-technologies are being heavily researched as well. Universal Quantum Computers, when they arrive, will drastically improve our capabilities for any kind of computation that requires factorization or the simulation of physics-based problems. Chemistry, and its sub-fields, is going to experience a massive boom once UQC's are available in Universities. Neuromorphic Computational Architectures as well, will be utilized in conjunction with narrow AI and cognitive tasking. The fusion of these technologies with traditional computing will not bottleneck our computational capabilities anytime soon. We might have to stop making things so small, at worst.
I think that expecting the Automated Age to not arrive within the next half-century is a very dangerous assumption.
Like I said, I'm attempting to get on the automating side instead of the automated side for that very reason. Once again I completely agree with you lol
Like I said, I'm attempting to get on the automating side instead of the automated side for that very reason. Once again I completely agree with you lol
The problem is, there isn't an unlimited potential for new industries that employ billions of people. After the growing of food, preparation of food, gathering of materials, production of goods,...
The problem is, there isn't an unlimited potential for new industries that employ billions of people. After the growing of food, preparation of food, gathering of materials, production of goods, transportation of goods, and serving of goods, we've automated the vast majority of what being human is.
Social media isn't included in your list but it employs a bunch of people even more if you include the people who manage their companies social media. We don't have to only do nessesities, we're...
Social media isn't included in your list but it employs a bunch of people even more if you include the people who manage their companies social media.
We don't have to only do nessesities, we're at a point where nessesities are going to become cheap to produce and require very little humans. Now we can focus on the fun shit, the just because shit.
It's not as simple as it's being framed. This won't happen overnight by any means. Companies have to research, develop, change existing infrastructure, remove, replace, test, maintain etc. And...
It's not as simple as it's being framed. This won't happen overnight by any means. Companies have to research, develop, change existing infrastructure, remove, replace, test, maintain etc. And believe it or not, but a significant amount of unemployed people will affect the bottom line of these companies.
Of course, I'm in no way claiming that I expect a stable economy with millions of people losing work. But the majority of money transfer from the poor to the rich isn't as customers, but as...
Of course, I'm in no way claiming that I expect a stable economy with millions of people losing work.
But the majority of money transfer from the poor to the rich isn't as customers, but as debtors and renters. Debt can be taken by force, and rent is often split between roommates - in other words, money will still flow up even with mass unemployment.
If only there was a way for people to learn new skills, if only we could somehow teach people useful things and do so without financially bankrupting them ... Oh well, such is life
But seriously, the answer to automation is to push the displaced into emerging industries that still require living breathing human beings.
UBI will come, hell one day in the farish future we might be in some kind of star trekian society where people only work because they want to better themselves, but to get there the average education level of society needs to come up and automation is gonna push this, we should welcome it and retrain the displaced.
Better to re-train and educate people now when automation is taking away skilled labor than get to point where AI is taking away most jobs and wonder "What now?"
I'm worried that we're already dangerously close to a point where educating billions of people won't be enough to ensure employment. Eliminate even a few easy to automate jobs right now: Cashiering, fast food cooking, trucking, and we're looking at millions of unemployed people in the US alone. Creating and running the machines that will replace them will be hundreds, or maybe a few thousands jobs. Do we have millions of jobs, low or high paying, requiring education or not?
Teach a person how to do maintenance on an automated system and they can compete for the few jobs with all his displaced friends.
Give that person the opportunity to go back to school and gain a STEM degree and they'll be able to compete for a vast swath of new and emerging jobs.
It won't be 1:1 every trucker is now still in the trucking industry on the degree'ed side instead of the labor side.
For every type of job automation eliminates there is the potential for new jobs and industries to be created. We're not just going to apply automation and AI to existing industries, there are going to be new and emerging industries and markets; things we can't even see coming now, all we can do is make vague guesses at the shapes of the shadows.
For instance I'm an engineer and right now I'm learning Python and Tensorflow to try and automate some stuff in my industry that hasn't been automated before, I realize that if I want to make it to retirement I want to be on the automating side, not the automated side.
See, that's just not a given. There's no reason to think that humans will always be more capable than AI/robotics at every task, not enough to guarantee entire new industries requiring meat-based labor. Until science gives proof that humans possess some ethereal, divine spark that machines will not, and can not obtain, there's just no reason to think that we're special enough to not be replaced.
Anything a person is capable of, a machine has the potential to do. So far as we know, we're just biological machines that follow the laws of physics just like everything else. Robotics and machine intelligence have the potential to meet, and surpass, all human capabilities. You don't have to pay a machine a salary, healthcare, dental, give them sick leave or vacation or maternity, or limit them to 8-hour workdays, or even ever shut them off at all. I recall reading some figures claiming that something around 1/3 of a businesses expenses are employee salaries and benefits, that's an immense incentive to automate.
The US, at least, is primarily a service-based economy. We (meaning humans) don't really manufacture anymore. Agriculture is highly industrialized, and is handled primarily by a small amount of people. We're already seeing some service jobs go by the wayside. Cashier robots have been in most supermarkets that I've been to, for years. Fast food restaurants are starting to put in self-order kiosks, because the social pressure for a higher minimum wage is making them economically feasible. Self-driving cars are only going to get better, and the best ones we have are already better than human drivers. The transportation industry employs several millions in the US. A technology such as Google Duplex, and others that will assuredly be based on it, have the potential to take over call-center jobs. We're going to keep replacing humans with robots and algorithms. What possible new industries will arise that will employ all of these people forced out of their current specialties? If we can't think of any, we can't assume they'll actually arise.
I've commonly heard about everyone become a programmer or a maintainer, but there's reason to think the machines won't be able to do those jobs either. And even if we turn into a maintenance-based economy, or a programmer-based economy, that just won't be enough to employ everybody. In the US we already have a problem with many people being underemployed. How many millions have degrees and aren't using them, not because they lack the will or the drive, but because the jobs that utilize them are few than the amount of degree holders?
The Great Depression saw 25% unemployment. Machines don't have to take all of jobs before we reach a point of economic and social catastrophe.
I think we, as a culture, need to have a serious conversation about why we think people need to work. If there is no work for humans to do, we should look at that situation as a potential utopia. A world in which we don't have to spend the best hours of the best days of the best years of our lives, slaving away generating capital for the wealthy, should be a wonderful world indeed.
Like I said in my first comment, ubi and maybe Star Trekian work because I feel like it society will have to happen at some point.
I was talking more about immediate next 50 years (If we're lucky, computational power is the real bottle neck that'll slow down ai talking it all over)
I agree with everything you said in the long term tho, I'm just trying to make the 30 years to retirement.
I really don't think it's going to take even 25 years to reach 25% unemployment.
Computational Power isn't slowing down anytime soon. Yes, we're reaching the limits of silicon-based transistors. But we're already putting R&D into alternate materials, and photonics-technologies are being heavily researched as well. Universal Quantum Computers, when they arrive, will drastically improve our capabilities for any kind of computation that requires factorization or the simulation of physics-based problems. Chemistry, and its sub-fields, is going to experience a massive boom once UQC's are available in Universities. Neuromorphic Computational Architectures as well, will be utilized in conjunction with narrow AI and cognitive tasking. The fusion of these technologies with traditional computing will not bottleneck our computational capabilities anytime soon. We might have to stop making things so small, at worst.
I think that expecting the Automated Age to not arrive within the next half-century is a very dangerous assumption.
Like I said, I'm attempting to get on the automating side instead of the automated side for that very reason. Once again I completely agree with you lol
The problem is, there isn't an unlimited potential for new industries that employ billions of people. After the growing of food, preparation of food, gathering of materials, production of goods, transportation of goods, and serving of goods, we've automated the vast majority of what being human is.
Social media isn't included in your list but it employs a bunch of people even more if you include the people who manage their companies social media.
We don't have to only do nessesities, we're at a point where nessesities are going to become cheap to produce and require very little humans. Now we can focus on the fun shit, the just because shit.
It's not as simple as it's being framed. This won't happen overnight by any means. Companies have to research, develop, change existing infrastructure, remove, replace, test, maintain etc. And believe it or not, but a significant amount of unemployed people will affect the bottom line of these companies.
Of course, I'm in no way claiming that I expect a stable economy with millions of people losing work.
But the majority of money transfer from the poor to the rich isn't as customers, but as debtors and renters. Debt can be taken by force, and rent is often split between roommates - in other words, money will still flow up even with mass unemployment.