I find several problems with this argument.<p>First, it is oversimplification. Robots don't eat jobs as in "there is nothing more to do for humans." The argument is that automation will decrease the wage share (labour share) and increase the share of capital (wage share has been in decline in OECD countries since early 70's.)<p>Secondly, history disagrees. Luddites had it right first. When industrialization started, automation reduced the living standards of workers for several decades. What turned things around was political struggle and unions. There was violence and people were shot at factory gates. Automation itself is not going to create utopia. There has to be political change in how we share profits.<p>Automation and Robots create new economic situation where the value and ratio between human capital and capital changes.<p>Krugman has written few easy to digest articles that explain why Anderseens first and second point are very problematic.<p><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/" rel="nofollow">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...</a><p><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-physical-capital/" rel="nofollow">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-phy...</a><p><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-wages-the-analytics-wonkish/" rel="nofollow">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-w...</a>
> Your job, and every job, goes to a machine. [...] This sort of thinking is textbook Luddism<p>The quick condemnation as "Luddism" is counter-productive because it allows side-stepping critical thinking about how new technologies may impact our life -- whether it is ultimately for the good or the bad.<p>The cry of <i>luddism</i> should be made cautiously, because it so often is accompanied by rose-color technological optimism.<p>Technology surely does hold the potential to make our lives better, and there are many ways in which it has, but when we talk about truly radical technologies that can utterly and irrevocably change the world and the way we view ourselves in relation to it (e.g. powerful AI), it is worthwhile to think long and hard before that game-changer arrives.<p>For example, I do agree that I'd like most jobs to be automated eventually, with the outcome of:<p>> The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.<p>Yet, I highly doubt that the default outcome of:<p>> Let markets work ( this means voluntary contracts and free trade) so that capital and labor can rapidly reallocate to create new fields and jobs.<p>Is going to be this sort of automation utopia where we're free from labor. More likely there will be a long and painful battle about implementing basic income or some other powerful social safety net; it will likely only be after increased poverty and misery that the safety net will be begrudgingly granted if the particular brand of captialism we currently embrace continues.<p>A more pessimistic outcome is that powerful AI arrives before we've really thought through the moral and ethical issues, and it possibly destroys us, or is developed and exploited by military interests to who knows what outcome.
> The counterargument to a finite supply of work comes from economist Milton Friedman — Human wants and needs are infinite, which means there is always more to do.<p>I think one aspect of this that's often ignored is that while human needs might be finite, natural resources are not. I think a lot of the economic malaise felt in the west as of late has to do with simple resource constraints: our ability to simply grow the economy in order to compensate for jobs lost to automation and globalization is limited by the simple fact that the price of crude oil has looked like this over the past 30 years: <a href="http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart" rel="nofollow">http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-char...</a>.
I think, just like always on HN, that people who write these kind of posts and respond to them (agreeing) are not often in contact with 'the common man'. Like the Turing test 'news'; a lot of of people I know would be mistaken for a computer and if I would make a computer which acts exactly like they do, people here would call it a failure and not intelligent. I am convinced the singularity will come and we are all replaceable in the end, however I think before this there will come a (possibly long) time when machines will replace 80%(+) of the working population. There will be no jobs to replace those jobs as the humans doing them simply cannot do things which are vastly different. In the past, for instance with horse carriage to cars, you could see that operation of a car is related to that of a carriage. There is no such move to be made with people who put glue on four corners of the iPhone glass plate (in exactly the same place every time or get fired) and who are replaced by a more accurate and faster robots. Moves like this can be made with general practitioners (most local MDs are already replaced by machines; the only thing they do is search for your issues and prescribe what comes out or refer you to someone who might know) or the run of the mill lawyer or accountant who, in essence, bring nothing to the table already but the fact they have a piece of paper. A lot of people here can do a better job than these (especially MDs and accountants) with Google and their common sense and education. (Edit: I mean by this; these jobs need to be and will be disrupted but only the law/system is preventing that at the moment. There was talk of Watson somewhere with one nurse replacing (many) GPs at a time, but I bet that didn't happen yet because GPs like the status quo.)<p>I'm not bleak about the future as I do also think we'll need (and force) a more EU distribution of the wealth in the end, but there will be a quite hard period when that's not in place and 1 billion Chinese are out of a job...
This is the best rationalization for maintaining the current structure that I have ever seen. I can almost buy it.<p>I don't think that our current leading-edge technology has really gotten enough penetration to see how it is going to change things. And I think that within two or three decades, the capability of those machines/AIs is going to increase by a very great amount.<p>It is almost of a leap of faith to have this worldview, but I have seen so many powerful AI wins recently (self-driving cars, Jeopardy bots) changes and advances in actual artificial general intelligence, that I think we are going to see "strong" AI within two to four decades.<p>Even if that doesn't happen, the leading-edge machine-learning and automation robotics is only starting to be deployed.<p>Within a few decades, I think there are going to be so many jobs replaced, the current structures will be inadequate.<p>And as more and more jobs are replaced by deep learning systems and/or better natural language processing, even before we get to "strong AI", I don't see how the structure is going to accommodate that.<p>The problem is that within not too many decades, I believe, almost _everything_ people do can and will be done better by AIs/robots.<p>So whether we can keep our jobs is not even really our main issue. What we really need to think about is, how can we stay relevant in a world where AIs that are twice as intelligent as people are common? The answer, I believe, is to incorporate those AIs within our bodies.<p>Ultimately to buy into that line of thinking really requires a significant change in your worldview, which is why I think a lot of these discussions aren't really fruitful. It comes down to your beliefs. (Everyone has beliefs, whether they are boring and reassuring, or "crazy" sounding like me.)
Automation will undoubtedly take many jobs. Some technologies will create jobs, some will make the cost of living decrease and the standard of living increase. Restructuring society, the economy, and the government isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not impossible and could lead to a better quality of life for everyone.<p>A partial post-scarcity economy would offset the job loss, then there could be regulation that limits working hours to 30 or 20 per week which would be enough because goods and services would cost less (because of automation).<p>3D printers and "molecular assemblers" will allow for instant creation of goods, (print every part of a car if you had enough raw materials/trash).<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler</a><p>There needs to be more planning for the government of the future. Maybe a world government would be good, maybe it wouldn't. Should every citizen be able to vote on every issue rather than have a congress? Obviously congress would never do away with themselves, so how would we go about removing them or a similar organization from the government if it became necessary in the future? Do citizens even have that power anymore?<p>What about more competition between states? Government should be as important to people as sports is. Anyone want to attempt gamification of government and online-voting?<p>By the way, for the "impossible to secure" argument against online-voting, who cares if it gets hacked? If someone hacks the voting systems then it should be easy to notice that the votes people made do not equal the total (because people would be able to verify their votes) and if it's bad enough then just fix the security hole, reset the votes, and try again.
<i>Human wants and needs are infinite</i><p>I doubt that this is true. If we one day find a way to experience permanent bliss I can't imagine that we'd want or need anything else.
The current system will just lead to a continued and ever more absurd growth in the service sector. In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then trickling down. It does sound absurd, doesn't it? But we're already getting there. Does your kitchen really need a marble counter top? No, but you want to feel important/worthy enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, and a luxurious lifestyle includes a marble counter top, so you get one. Replace "kitchen" and "marble counter top" with whatever you want to.
The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great example of this. High-end prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all for providing emotional support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate modern workers, in my opinion, and most of us will be following in their footsteps soon enough.
>“But most people are like horses; they have only their manual labor to offer…” I don’t believe that, and I don’t want to live in a world in which that’s the case. I think people everywhere have far more potential.<p>Developing that potential requires significant investment and the outcome is highly competitive: we are already seeing a massive polarization of the labor force ('hollowing out'). Sure, the new economy creates well paid internet and creative jobs, but those are highly competitive fields where 2nd best just does not cut it. It went from something that any monkey could do (agriculture), to something that required some education (craftsmanship), to formal education (cashier), to requiring college (programmer) to requiring a certain elite education (investment banker), and so on. Society is becoming more and more polarized and instead of StarTrek it looks like we are heading for Metropolis.<p>> What would be the key characteristics of that world, and what would it be like to live in it? For starters, it’s a consumer utopia. Everyone enjoys a standard of living that kings and popes could have only dreamed of.<p>Does not follow. The robots will replace human work, but resources will still be important. So an excellent house might cost $10.000 in land and materials, but since you would have no job and no money you would not afford it. Meanwhile, someone who owns the robot factory and associated intellectual property, might decide 1 trillion dollars is a fair price to acquire the whole state of Maine and transform it into his personal golf course.<p>The end game of post scarcity capitalism is a completely feudal society where workers have no market value and are merely held as pets by the rich lords who want to.
Can someone point to me why everyone is so sure there will be robots?<p>Let me explain why I am asking. It seems to me that we already hit some sort of physical limit for the clock rates. We can't (easily) double clock rate of a CPU, so we add more CPUs. But programming multithreaded applications is more difficult, so it is more difficult to utilize this power.<p>Can't we hit similar limit for humans? Is there a limit on what humans can comprehend and build? Let's say one programmer can code 1 abstract feature-unit per day. There are limits. What makes everyone think that replacing humans with robots will require not 10^100 abstract units of features? Why no one considers that this problem may be just _too difficult_.
First this: "I would argue that 200 years of recent history confirms Friedman’s point of view."
Then this: "This is not a world we have ever lived in."
"We just know we will create an enormous number of them."<p>It's unfortunate to see even the mighty brains fall victim to rationalization. Dismissing anyone who is concerned the social impact of what's coming as Luddites hinted this was a output of an ideologue and not a philosopher, and it degraded from there.
There is absolutely no economic law that says the value of labor has to be greater than minimum wage, or even livable. Yes there is theoretically an infinite demand for labor, and unemployed people can always find some really low demand job or work for even less than the machines. But that isn't optimal for them. Goods might get cheaper, but not by much. The limiting factor isn't labor costs, we already have vastly automated a lot of industries and outsourced others to ridiculously low wage countries.
The Title Of This Article Makes Me Think Of Jaden Smith<p><a href="https://twitter.com/officialjaden" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/officialjaden</a>