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

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.<p>So, probably a guy will own all the agricultural automation, another one the warehouse automation, another one the software, etc.<p>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.<p>Among these folks, there will be an exchange of money.<p>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.

With Folded Hands (1947) by Jack Williamson is my favourite vision of such a future I&#x27;ve ever read. From the Dad losing his job to the kids giving up violin because they can&#x27;t compete with their Humanoid &quot;servants&quot; it captures the sense of futility very well.<p>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.<p>Luck is living a whole life without experiencing it personally.

I really can’t wait.<p>I have so many side projects I need to finish and my day job keeps interfering with them.

Interesting that two complete opposite views are in the first page today. The other one being &quot;AI isn&#x27;t going to kill the software industry&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42810175">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42810175</a>

&gt; 100% Unemployment<p>This is a prediction that has been made for a <i>long</i> time but has never been realized.<p>Also with the end of abundant energy, our descendants may have to work much harder than us.

Relevant Ray Bradbury story (Don’t Get Technatal): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardebooks.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;ray-bradbury&#x2F;short-fiction&#x2F;text&#x2F;dont-get-technatal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardebooks.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;ray-bradbury&#x2F;short-fiction...</a><p>Written in the 1930s about the far future world of 1975.

Ultimately, all wealth is derived from the consumption of the teeming masses.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So what will happen? Massive wealth destruction, unevenly distributed. What will that cause? The wealthy to go to war against each other.<p>Your one and only job is to figure out how to avoid becoming collateral damage.<p>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.

If AI can barely replace car drivers or truck drivers, I think developers will unfortunately have to keep writing code.<p>Of course AI made progress in the language realm with chatGPT, but I don&#x27;t see any advance in the realm of consciousness, general AI, emotions, etc.<p>There was some recent, small progress where the brain of a fly was mapped.<p>But I don&#x27;t see transverse research made between cognition, psychology, neuroscience and AI, which is terrible.<p>Science doesn&#x27;t even have any relevant insight on a good definition of intelligence that could be transposed into an algorithm.<p>There is also quantum biology, that argues that many biological systems use quantum mechanics.<p>Maybe quantum computing will offer new horizons with additional computing power but it will maybe take 20 more years.

The robots as most people might expect will not take over.<p>The robots will be the software that will slowly start to replace knowledge workers or anyone who works with a computer.<p>If you conduct your work on a computer someone is already planning to replace you with software. Think about that for a second.<p>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?<p>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 &quot;capitalism&quot;? In this world the humans will become the &quot;robots&quot; at low cost and will essentially be replaceable and only exist to serve those few with still wealth to go around.<p>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&#x2F;streets). And when that happens to enough people and there&#x27;s a critical mass of people with &quot;nothing to lose&quot; revolutions will start.<p>The late Marshall Brain had written a short story &quot;Manna&quot; that is very prescient and outlines a few possible alternative futures for the man kind. Unfortunately personally I&#x27;m not very optimistic about a &quot;good&quot; outcome.

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.

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..

Previous discussion (Feb 2015, 90 comments):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9065490">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9065490</a>

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 &quot;Atari graphics&quot; 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&#x27;s ability to meet it is not, we&#x27;ve got growing up to do.

Articles cited in the writing:<p>New Yorker: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;J3Kex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;J3Kex</a><p>Wired: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;pNqag" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;pNqag</a>

I also have this pessimism. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m pivoting to hardware and embedded programming.

Bit surprised no one has mentioned human evolution&#x2F;machine hybridization.<p>Cyberpunk style.

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.<p>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.