I have three children with my wife and we decided to teach our kids the hard way how to lower expectations and survive the last year.<p>We quit our jobs and moved to Puerto Rico and moved to a mountain top in the center of the island. Our goal was to show them what life is like in most other parts of the world where people struggle.<p>They run around and play in the forest, help tend the garden, and learn from us, books, and exploration. It's been our year of "disconnecting" from the rat race and learning how to thrive as a family of 5 on under $1200 a month.<p>We're packing up and moving to Ithaca, NY at the end of the summer but I hope none of us go straight back to a consumer-based lifestyle even though we'll have the income to do it.<p>When regular employment dries up and all they have is self-sufficiency, maybe they'll now have the tools to be content.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two MIT economists, recently wrote a book about this, called The Second Machine Age (here: <a href="http://www.amzn.to/0393239357" rel="nofollow">http://www.amzn.to/0393239357</a>). We're teetering on the edge of economic shifts, and we have a lot of questions we're going to need to ask about how people will live in a world where jobs simply aren't available.<p>When 60% of the workforce is unemployable, either there will be massive unemployment, and the crime, poverty, and starvation associated, or there will be a massive paradigm shift in how we think about employment, money, and scarcity.<p>I'm hoping we get to the latter before the former.
The solution is obvious: education. Education, education, education. Making it a truly common good will require a massive shift in the way most people are brought up in the west, which is why it won't happen over a couple years but rather over a couple generations, which is why it's high time we got going.<p>Once you can <i>do things</i> in and with your head, the world becomes your playground. Once the kids understand that hurting people in any way is literally senseless, that the civil servant state and nine-to-five work is destroying intellect, once they realise the awesomeness that lies within that big melon everyone of us is carrying around, I think humanity as a whole can get out of this mess properly.<p>And I think enlightment is the <i>only</i> way humans are going anywhere other than destruction, by whom- or whatever it may be. The consumer (a.k.a. mind-numbing) industry everybody seems to be so happy about is definitely <i>not</i> the way to go. Forgive the metaphor, but plugging everybody into the matrix and feeding them bullshit 24/7 just to keep them <i>happy</i> is not how we can stay on top of things and our intelligent machines. If the complex machinery that is a Human is reduced to a consumer, it is of no value to electronic machines out to solve the galaxy's problems (other than maybe as an energy source ).<p>It seems as though we won't be going anywhere far away from the solar system for a while, so instead let's go deep. Let's go into ourselves and discover the worlds inside that nature has provided us with.
Presently I think we undervalue creative endeavors.<p>Something like this: <a href="http://www.wired.com/2016/05/mysteries-chickpea-water-magical-substitute-eggs-no-really/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2016/05/mysteries-chickpea-water-magica...</a> springs to mind as an example.<p>Are there going to be unemployed truck drivers, and ditch diggers... yes. Will there be a larger place for craftsmenship, and art, I would sure hope so. The question is how we get through the transition.
My son is young and being silly he said he could drop out of school to become a truck driver for a relative. I had to break it to him that by the time he started to get somewhere with such a job he'd become unemployed due to self driving trucks!
A machine probably isn't going to make unique hand-made tables. There's a trend right now, we mock hipsters for their love of "artisinal" products.... but in an age where machines make everything the same, I think people make things that aren't. If you just want a table, you can go to ikea and get the machine made table that everyone else who doesn't care bought too. If you want that "one good" product, you can ask an artist to make one. Or you can find a place with tools, and make it yourself.<p>To me the future is one where we all have access to the basics, and you choose to have a few things that are of quality.<p>The catch is, making things by hand isn't very profitable. I think a minimum income paid for by machine "owners", distributed to everyone frees normal people find the work they LOVE instead of just "work".<p>If I didn't have to worry about money, i'd split my time between the woodshop, and designing a new programming language.
>> "and rehashing that tired trope about how old jobs that got displaced by new technologies eventually were replaced with new, but different jobs we couldn’t fathom at the time.<p>That’s not the case this time. This time it’s different."<p>I guess the point here is that the author cant fathom new job types in the future, so therefore there will be no new job types in the future. Glad we got that one settled!<p>This argument has been going on literally for hundreds of years. Just because the author cant fathom new job types proves nothing.<p>People lose jobs because of decisions made by other people. Science will not ever come to an end, and there will always be new job types because of that.<p>Just imagine when commercial space travel becomes a serious thing. They will look back and say "did you know once a month they used to argue on HN about how in the future there will be no jobs? They were so silly because they didnt know about space travel."<p>And then someone else will say "yea they were wrong then, but this time its different..."
What strikes me as odd about apocalyptic "the perils of the singularity" navel-gazing is that we automatically assume that machines, and ONLY the machines, will improve far beyond our capabilities - perhaps even infinitely.<p>Why shouldn't we improve as well? Every day it seems there is a new story about further advances in amazing / fast / cheap / etc. gene splicing technology, or some new breakthrough in understanding how cancers work, or how longevity may be achieved, or how to correct color-blindness, etc.<p>Is it any less presumptive to assert that humans will make ourselves more and more amazing, as it is to assert that machines inevitably will?
Maybe, in my rosy colored view and after some really serious growing pains, widespread AI would finally allow humans to pursue art and knowledge without worrying about the basics.
I think we should think about Advanced Chess (aka Cyborg Chess) in this context. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess</a><p>Humans already operate on a very high level of abstraction. I'm not aware of how my food is being digested, I'm not aware of how my muscles are being maintained. (Although, come to think of that, I do wish I could direct my muscles to get swole without going to the gym.) I'm not really aware of every photon my eyes capture, I'm given a blurry "executive summary" that has the contrast in the center turned up to 11, and the color spectrum I see has had a clustering algorithm run on it.<p>Similarly, executives in a company don't always know what's going on in the day-to-day of their reports. They have an idea, but they don't actually solve the problems, and in same cases they don't even know how to solve the problems.<p>We use computers to help inform our decisions. As long as we can continue the path where humans work <i>with</i> AI, we will have some place with them.
The people who will reap the rewards of machine work will be those that own machines, directly or indirectly through corporate ownership, or own valuable assets, like mining rights or intellectual property.<p>These people will end up with the lion's share of money.<p>Then who will the machines produce value for? The hyperrich in this situation of course.<p>So a few people will be both the owners and the superrich consumers. From a purely mathematical standpoint, this will result in a vibrant economy.<p>From the perspective of the 99% or 99.995% this will be a disaster. But the history of life is the history of the winners.<p>The only way to change that will involve a serious redesign of civilization from the bottom up. I am for that, but human beings don't seem to be well suited for that task. The mindless muddying of every important political issue of our times by news, corporations and politicians suggests most of the human race is going to take a huge hit and then waste its miserable time fighting about why instead of coming together.
<p><pre><code> I like to think
(and the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
</code></pre>
Richard Brautigan, 1967.<p>(Edit, format)
Well, if we establish a basic income and produce enough to suffice then people will live as the aristocracy lived the past hundreds of years. Basically European gentlemen of means did not work.<p>The major <i>if</i> is the basic income part - if this is established, psychologically people will adapt to the eternal weekend just fine.
Two points... First, never underestimate the power of middle management and custom automation tooling. Second, you aren't really going to be able to outsource the plumber, mechanic and electrician any time soon.