First off, they can’t do everything. A dumb teenager at McDonalds can take orders, clean the floors, and make the fries; no machine can do all that. A machine can’t hit a baseball, write a sonnet, or run a restaurant. No machine can search for a cure for cancer or fill your cavities. There will probably never be a machine that can mow your lawn, prune your trees, then shovel the snow. Those are just things I can think of off the top of my head.
Second, what you aren’t understanding is that we lack the knowledge and imagination to dream up what working life will be like when many of today’s jobs are automated away, just like 100 years ago nobody could have dreamed up the 1000’s of jobs at Google. Automation makes workers more efficient and productive which opens up all new possibilities.
Depends on what’s being sold. Somebody at McD selling Happy Meals is doing repetitive work. Someone selling private planes needs to be a lot more creative, I imagine.
I have no expectation whatsoever that “videographers” will even be a thing in the future, because I’m pretty sure they aren’t even a thing NOW.
You don’t understand how economies work. What you are talking about is sheer absurdity; it’s farcical. Why on earth would 300 million Americans just sit around and starve to death while a few people are served by robots? They wouldn’t. If you waved a magic wand right now and suddenly reorganized society into rich robot-served people and a huge swath of people without robots, what they’d do, rather that just sitting down and dying, is they’d work. They’re start growing food and making it for each other, and building shelter and making clothes. Oh, then one would get a robot and that’d give the unwashed masses a bit more wealth to start a school and some of them could work as teachers, and… oh, hey, it’s an economy again.
The machines did not put us all out of work the last ten times people said exactly the same things you are saying now, because it makes no sense. The math literally doesn’t work.
I think it’s not so simple as you’re making it out to be. If a company starts making digital high-school dropouts that can do anything an unskilled worker can do, only faster cheaper and longer, what are you going to do with those unskilled workers? There is going to be a quick tsunami of unemployed once robo-labor agencies start renting out those robots on the cheap.
It seems like an article of faith that things will be fine. Yeah, I agree things will adjust. I find it unlikely that they will adjust in the best possible fashion without government guidance.
Yeah, and the last ten times they didn’t replace the human element due to technical limitations. I don’t doubt there are other service and technical jobs that will be created in this future. But having 70 million people go unemployed while we think of them is a big issue.
What you’re leaving out is that all of a sudden there’s a huge supply of cheap labor (the robots) that the unskilled workers can use to make themselves more productive. Maybe they open a restaurant; maybe they use them to work the fields and sell the resulting produce. Maybe they do something we’ve never thought of before. This is what always happens when automation eliminates a job–something that used to be expensive is now cheap, which opens up a whole new market to exploit.
Yes; I foresee a time where the 1% suddenly evolve stadium-sized stomachs, and use ED-209 robots as “scarehumans”, keeping millions away from all arable land.
The fewer people that can afford the robots the less they will change the world.
If a robot chef costs $1 million, then Joe Schlub can’t afford it, but neither does it makes sense for OmniCorp International to put one in every restaurant, and they hire humans instead.
If it’s $10k, then corporations will use them, but so will small business owners.
Having grown up poor, I can assure you, I’ve met a lot of unskilled workers. They aren’t going to open restaurants or start farms, because 1: They don’t have the capital. 2: They don’t have the skills necessary to do it.
You need the money to get the lease, the equipment, the design for the menus, the advertising and whatever else you need to start a restaurant. If the daily labor cost is low, that just lets the guy with the start up money run lean. And you also need to know what you’re doing in this business to run it well. Most unskilled workers aren’t that skilled at business.
It also depends. If the robots are durable, labor suppliers will purchase them and rent them out.
You’ll probably be able to get day labor on your cell phone. “I need six workers than can lift 300kg and have at least 12 hour batteries, and a self-driving front loader. Load them with landscaping and regrading skillsets. Have them show up in 20 minutes at 200 XX Street. Oh, and my foreman is Slovenian, so upload the EU language pack.”
For one thing, those robo-losers aren’t neccesarily going to be cheaper, because if they’re faster, more accurate and work longer, their owners are going to rent them out for MORE than similar human losers go for.
I mean, if you need a ditch dug in 2 days, let’s say you could hire 5 humans to dig it in 2 8 hour days, and have it be within some nominal specification, that would cost you $580 at today’s minimum wage. A robot rental company could have their robots do it in 24 hours straight and do it exactly to spec. Why in the world would they undercut the humans? The smart decision is to charge MORE for that kind of service and pocket the difference. Everyone’s happy- you get your ditch dug in 1/3 the time, and the robot owner gets a bit more cash.
And there ARE going to be people who will still hire the humans; they’d rather spend $580 and get it good enough in 2 days instead of spending $650 and getting it 24 hours later and laser-precise, or hiring a guy with an excavator to come do it in 6 hours for somewhere over $700.
That, I think, is the most telling part. There are a LOT of things that could be automated now, without sophisticated robotics or AI, but they’re not being automated because there’s no real call for it.
There’s no reason that someone couldn’t engineer a burger-making machine right now, but there’s no market for it - it’s cheaper and more versatile and GOOD ENOUGH to hire a person to make burgers, even if they’re not as exactly consistently cooked or as rapidly made as a machine would do it, because that person can also run the register, sweep the floors, go clean up barf, call the cops if unruly drunks start trashing the place, help an injured co-worker, man the drive through, troubleshoot machinery problems, come up with workarounds to problems, etc… A burger making machine can only make burgers.
We’re looking at some sort of range between the present day and the advent of strong AI. I’ll contend that if and when strong AI is achieved, that sort of artificial intelligence won’t be any more satisfied with digging ditches than a human is.
So until then, we’re looking at essentially improved versions of what we already have- one thing I do see happening is the retail equivalent of the no-toll-booth toll roads, where you go into a store, the store’s systems recognize you somehow (face recognition, ping your phone/watch/PDA, or whatever), and you just walk out with your stuff, and the store uses RFID or something like that to automatically charge you for what you walk out with. It’ll also use the same system to call the cops on shoplifters (people w/o accounts with the store, or no money to pay). There’s no reason that people paying with cash or checks wouldn’t be allowed- the system would just track their faces and verify that their transactions were paid for as they left; I imagine they could easily enough monitor what was scanned vs. what was in the cart to keep them and the cashiers honest as well.
That kind of thing might run some cashiers out of jobs, but that sort of technology would be the province of Wal-Mart, Target and other massive retailers. MId-range chains and local stores won’t be able to afford that, just like for the most part, they can’t afford self-checkout. Plus, there will be a non-trivial number of companies who choose for whatever PR or humanitarian reasons NOT to use that kind of technology.
Some jobs may go away, but the idea that robots will replace all human labor is something that we won’t see anytime soon- not in our lifetimes, and probably not even in our great-great-great grandchildren’s.
If the robots are cheap enough to wipe out all unskilled labor then they are cheap enough to be bought by unskilled workers.
Again, you’re not showing enough imagination. 50 years ago computers where mainly large room-sized contraptions that only rich companies could afford. Since then computers have automated away millions of jobs. And yet today everybody–including unskilled laborers–own multiple computers much more powerful than those room-sized machines. Many of unskilled laborers use those computers to make money (like Uber). 50 years ago you would have been railing about how computers are going to take away jobs and the poor won’t be able to afford them. Oops, that’s what you’re arguing today.
Again, agreed that the issue won’t likely be unemployment so much as an acceleration of the increasing income and social inequality currently in progress, which is EXACTLY what has happened the last times, the last comparable circumstance having been the industrial revolution.
Don’t know why posters here ignore the actual facts so much. In favor of using “enough imagination.”
Well, so do I. We have social problems and people who need help from government now, as we have had every day since basically forever.
No, EVERY time I was referring to they replaced the human element. The whole point of machines is replacing the human element. Robots in factories, digital telephone switches, and any number of agricultural advances replaced “the human element” with a machine. What else would you want a machine for? That’s the entire point of a machine; to replace human effort. The human element has been eliminated a thousand times, and what happens is humans do other things. All Evil Captor is doing now is complaining that the definition of “human element” that exists right now is the one that, for reasons quite unexplained, can never be replaced.
Of course, as you point out, society has problems with income inequality. Well, sure it does, but it’s not particularly a problem attached to automation, is it? Income inequality is a economic feature that appears in both technologically progressive and backward societies throughout all stages of human history.
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You think the unskilled workers are going to be the ones who own the robots? With what will they pay for the robots?
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So if the unskilled workers don’t have access to the robots what in the holy hell does it matter? Your science fiction scenario posits a situation where 300 million people are impoverished because robots, but at the same time you appear to be saying that they won’t have any robots. (Of curse, we are talking about special super-robots that don’t exist yet, but you assure us they will soon, so let’s assume that.)
Well, isn’t that exactly what we have now? We’ve got 300 million people in the USA and no super-robots. If in the future the super-rich people all run away to a gated community with their robots, the 300 million remaining people will be in exactly the same position they are now. They really don’t need Mark Cuban and Bill Gates as much as you seem to think they do. And if the super-robots serve up everything Mark Cuban needs, why would they ever interact with the rest of the population?
Small business owners typically are not poor people. But I don’t envision humanoid robot displacing people anyway. I think the job displacement will occur as it has already been occurring, with software becoming increasingly able to do office jobs and robotic hands taking over physical labor. Humanoid robots that displace humans in the workplace will be the tail end of the robot job holocaust.
I don’t think the industrial revolution had any hand in income inequality. I’d say feudalism and its remnants were a much bigger factor.
I guess that’s a jab at me? Is the computer revolution not a fact? Is it not a fact that in 1963 industry leaders predicted massive unemployment due to automation? The only thing the doom-sayers can bring to this argument is “but this time it’s different!” which isn’t much of a fact.