Two quotes come to mind:<p>"Never send a human to do a machine's job."
-- Agent Smith<p>"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
-- Buckminster Fuller
It's been my worry for a while that we will achieve the marxist workers utopia technically, where the vast majority of work is done by robot, but culturally we will be stuck with a small group of people enjoying the rewards of capital and technology and an enormous group of miserable poor fighting each other to get the rare chance to work.<p>Even if you think that such an outcome is 'deserved' for the capitalist and technologist in the short term, in the long term, as the divide grows sharper, I believe most people will come to see that there's something appalling about giving all of the wealth of the world to the descendants of the few and nothing to the rest. Already one family in the USA control more wealth than approximately half the population. And this will get starker.<p>Technology enhances power, and we are currently stuck with a system where much more worrying than the 'rich getting richer', the 'powerful get more powerful'. And the technological concentration of power in the hands of capital goes alongside the concentration of military and political power too. In the past, when capital got too far ahead of labour, there was always the spectacle of revolution to act as a last ditch moderator and equaliser, but the future will give those in power unprecedented access to surveillance, intelligence and military ability to allow the divide to grow bigger than ever before.<p>We need to find a way to share the amazing gains that technology brings with labour as well as with capital, and do so in a way that doesn't disincentivise the creation of new technology, and we need to start coming up with this really soon to have any chance of heading off a disaster. I think this is one of the most serious issues facing us as people who care about technology and the world.
Robots have been taking over jobs for a long time. The problem is that people have too narrow a definition of "robot". Is a Bobcat a robot? A job that 30 years ago might have been done by a row of men with shovels can now be done faster and far more cheaply by one guy with a Bobcat. How about a forklift? Hauling 100 pound bags of stuff around used to be a major source of human employment. Now, we put those bags on a pallet and carry them with a forklift.<p>Is a food processor a robot? A century ago, fine French cooking was defined by its labor-intensive sauces, manually grinding and sieving vegetables down to liquids. Now, it can be done in seconds by a cheap little machine. Meanwhile, two people and a Hobart can wash all the dishes generated by a large restaurant. Is that Hobart a robot?<p>Automation doesn't just replace labor. It allows new forms of labor. Most of us here work on computers. What would we have been doing 100 years ago, before there were computers? Would we have been clerks? Adding numbers manually? Artists drawing things by hand for print?
So I was having a debate with a colleague a few weeks ago: the suggestion was that in 20 years time the a large percentage of surgeries done in hospitals will be done by robots .<p>Importantly, we didn't specify which surgeries, but through the conversation the implication was not that robots would be removing millions of weird moles and skin marks - we're talking serious, long surgeries.<p>I'd be really interested to hear the HN community's view on this. I have my own (strong) opinions based on my knowledge of AI and ML as a field, but perhaps other people have their own strong opinions (and perhaps people can change my mind!)
This is a key reason why I feel it's important to be working in technology, especially as a developer. It will take longer before your job is automated away.<p>My wife works in a position that I feel could be automated, and it's scary when you give it much thought.<p>When the time comes that there are people who are able to work because their skills keep them valuable and people who can't work because their skills are no longer needed, I know which side I want to be on, regardless of any sort of moral implications.
Things that are formulaic, repetitive and doesn't necessarily need "human" input will inherently be reached barring any catastrophic events that set all of humanity back. Terminator is robots with agency bias added, so that scenario happening is a bit unlikely. Elysium on other hand might be a slightly better portrayal of things to come.<p>There are some other serious implications of the rise of such technology too, political ones. The "elite" & "powerful" have depended on the masses for labor, economic output etc. When a good chunk of the masses become somewhat "useless", what happens to them? Thanks to drones and "big dogs", it can be somewhat ensured that a massive population of people will have no real recourse to socio-economic or other inequities and injustices.
Personal service will probably continue. In fact its a large part of the American job scene. Somebody cuts your hair, your lawn. Somebody does your taxes. Some of these can be done by robots, but its hard to replace the human interaction.<p>Will that mean personal services will become as rare as employing a butler is now? Maybe. Or maybe some of these will never be efficiently replaced by bots. And new ones may come up.<p>In some countries, the 'haves' employ dozens of 'have-nots' in an effort to allow everybody a position in society. With robots, it may be enough to nanny an industrialist's children to school each morning. Then return to your bot-run apartment to enjoy automatic perfect coffee and read your blogs.
The article's central point at least partially hinges on the continuation of Moore's Law. However, if the exponential rise in computing power at stead cost does not continue, the coming 'rise of robots' might be substantially slower.<p>There is some evidence that Moore's Law might come to an end:
<a href="http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-appears-be-coming-end-no-moore" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchip...</a><p>Our knowledge of AI suggests that performing basic human tasks like perception and navigation in the physical world is extremely computationally expensive. Even though improvements in algorithms would speed things up somewhat. The required computing resources would still be fairly expensive for complicated tasks many workers routinely perform.<p>On the bright side, this might give us time to adjust our institutions to the new reality.<p>Thoughts?
"We tend to miss this because the bloated copies of Microsoft Word we use do not seem faster than 20 years ago." - person obviously not familiar with Office 365.<p>"Even the Chinese must fear the robots." - especially them IMHO (world's manufacturing outsourcing center).
Moore's law has not much to do with computational power anymore, it's always been about transistor numbers in cpus. While this has traditionally mapped 1:1 with computing power, it doesn't work like this anymore. It's not an exponential growth in computing because our techniques of parallelism and algorithms haven't been keeping up with all this power.<p>Very interesting article nonetheless, just felt like clarifying this tiny point.
And this is why I want to find work in automation, robotics, or AI or something.<p>Labor against capitalist. Sharpen the contradictions! Radicalize the moderates[1]! Bring it all on!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6GLoKkkCtY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6GLoKkkCtY</a>
This other article on the front page of HN today seems to contradict this [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-appears-be-coming-end-no-moore" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchip...</a>