I was definitely not implying humaniform robots - I own a Roomba, after all. But while we have lots of robots for specialized jobs, we don’t have any as flexible as humans yet. It is more of a mechanical engineering job than an AI job. In fact, I very much doubt the robots would be intelligent. It would seem far more efficient to network them to a master computer who could control them, coordinate them, and handle many at once without constraints on size or storage. Kind of like drones.
The problem arises when there are still many jobs that need a human to do them, just not enough to employ most of the population. Or when you have a society like America with its near fanatic hatred of anything resembling “socialism”; America is the kind of country that would largely react to 90% unemployment by blaming the unemployed for being lazy and refuse to try to solve the problem, since any solution would have to be “socialism” (by American definitions of the term).
Some would, things got pretty bad in the Great Depression, but then people rallied around and fixed the problem. America would EVENTUALLY, after much human suffering, do the right thing. But there are a lot of Asian cultures where the leadership regards average folk with the same tender feelings we reserve for rats and other such vermin. If they did not NEED common folks to grow crops and make things to make them wealthy, they would happily watch their own people starve by the millions. That is where things would be worst. Things might be as bad in some African nations, but by the time they get to anything approaching a post-scarcity society, the template for running one smoothly will already have been established.
Er… the problem is when you introduce such policies at the moment while you are technically correct in the short term, in the long term it leads to stagnation and lack of entrepeunerial drive an so on. Current western taxation rates are obscene enough as it is, along with the bureaucracy. I am a pretty extreme capitalist. And the free market is a great way of putting value on things at the moment - your blog is probably worthless. Although please link to it, I may change my mind when I see it 
But it doesn’t have to be that way in the future. Once computers can do everything humans can, it doesn’t make much sense to speak of human capital and so we can take people away from the market and have a much more pleasant society.
I wonder what role the market will have then? I think it will have to stay in place with the robots.
First of all, it’s not actually a singularity, it’s a horizon. And second, the whole point of the concept is that we can’t conceive of what will come after then. By definition, we can’t tell what will happen beyond the technological horizon. As we get closer to any given time, we’ll be able to start forming an understanding of what will happen, but then there will be a new horizon, further off.
I completely disagree. People need a spur to go out and try to succeed, true, but human ego and ambition provides more than enough spur. Even if all their basic needs are provided for, their egos will drive them to go out and do interesting and possibly useful stuff. Sure, some will just sit in their rooms and watch TV, but they are not the ones would have done interesting and useful stuff in a laissez faire capitalist system, anyway. Most everybody will want to be somewhere above the bottom level of the ladder, and will make some effort to get there, however comfy that bottom level is.
I freely concede that my blog is worthless in terms of economic activity, to do so would be to argue against the evidence. Still, I and the people who voluntarily spend time there must get something out of it … well, the ones who aren’t bots. However, I believe there is a rule against linking to your books, sites, etc., on the board, let it become a hotbed of self-promotion. I’ll send you an IM.
Once the total number of people in the US that are needed to do everythng necessary for human comfort shrinks to, say … one million people or so, that’s all farming, manufacturing and service jobs, one million people … we’ll HAVE to find soemthing for the other 400 million to do, eh?
It will be an antique. You know, like buggy whip manufacturing plants. A sweet day for us all.
One big problem is what happens when there are still a few low-skill or otherwise unappealing jobs that can’t be automated? Typically, automation doesn’t wipe out a whole industry’s workforce, it just makes it more efficient, with one person using automation to do what many people did before. So maybe you need one person to be the Maytag repairman, monitoring a bunch of machines and stepping in only rarely. Or maybe you still have one sewage pipe that won’t be refitted for another ten years that the sewer maintenance bots can’t get through. If everyone has all the mass-produced physical products they could want, what do you offer people to do those jobs? How much money would it take for you to want those jobs if you already have a personal holodeck and most of the programs are given away by people who just want the satisfaction of producing them (like most bloggers and wiki editors now)?
I’ve heard it postulated that this is already becoming a problem–that young people are less motivated to work hard and succeed financially now because all the money in the world won’t get you a nicer iPhone or a more apps than anyone else. It’ll still get you a nicer house and car and other things, but those are less important overall as more and more of our time and energy is spent using entertainment and luxury devices that can be obtained and used rather cheaply.
You are assuming that computers in their most advanced states can actually become humans instead of a different ‘animal’ that they are, which is yet to be demonstrated. Why do we assume that the evolution of computers will produce a human, computers are unique ‘beings’ onto themselves and have their own ‘evolutionary’ path. Considering their makeup we have to assume that there path will be dissimilar to human evolution and thus will take them away from being human, and thus will not be replacing humans, but co-existing with them, taking on the computer tasks which suit them.
People need people and people have desires of their hearts that must be fulfilled. People are not going to be satisfied with just interaction with computers. What the computers are going to do is eliminate the ‘dog’ work that gets in the way of work people desire to do. Make the jobs go easier, take care of the paperwork for instance.
At the core each person is a artist of sorts, and will create wonderful things once the burden of such ‘dog’ work is removed. So instead of communism you will have a true human family, interacting, exploring, learning, playing and working together fulfilling the desires of their heart, happy to support each other because everyone is producing works of creation.
There will always be scarce goods, even with automated manufacture taking the place of industry and automated decision-making taking the place of human experts. Land will be scarce, (although new land could be manufactured in space at least until we run out of asteroids and planets), energy will be scarce (if we gather enough energy from the Sun we will have a very large amount of energy to play with, and cooling might be a more important consideration than energy use), and certain rare elements will be in demand -we can recycle, though that takes more energy, and we can mine the Earth and sky.
Note that a considerable amount of energy would be required to cope with the side effects of mining and exploitation. We could mine the entire crust of the Earth for all its valuable minerals, but it would take a certain (finite but considerable) amount of energy to make it green and healthy again afterwards.
Because almost all of the wealth in a post-scarcity society would not be created directly by humans, it is likely that some sort of allocation process will be devised to spread wealth into the human population (if any exists at that time).
Some possibilities
A money-free society where scarce goods are allocated by some centralised authority. This centralised authority might be an elected body, and unelected committee, an automated nonsentient system or a sentient computer. Just hope that the sentient computer is benevolent and likes humans, or has some other motive to spread wealth into the population.
A money-free society where scarce goods are traded using social capital; see the concept of whuffie, social capital; that decides the allocation of fame- and regard- related benefits.
A society where all automatically generated wealth is estimated and shared out equally as credit between the citizens at periodical intervals. It’s up to them how they spend it. Over time some will gain a greater fraction of the wealth than others, but the regular allocation of new wealth will prevent anyone going without.
A society where only a proportion of the automatically generated wealth is allocated as credit to all citizens; the rest is traded in a monetary economy. This requires that a proportion of the automatic wealth-generating technology is privately owned. Over time some citizens will become significantly more wealthy than others, but the base-rate allocation will prevent anyone from being destitute.
A society with no base-rate allocation of automatically generated wealth, and all automated wealth-generating technology will be privately owned. This will lead to a society with very large differences in wealth, and quite possibly to a poor underclass; but also will encourage enterprise and large-scale projects. Note however that any large-scale project will also eventually run into the physical limits of the universe- the speed of light, the amount of matter and energy available with one’s c-horizon, and the amount of available processing power.
I think, instead, that humans will evolve into robots.
As our technology increases and biological “upgrades” become a practical reality, I think evolutionary pressure will drive humans onto a course that turns them more and more into cybernetic organisms. e.g. Bob at work gets a memory upgrade and now excels at his job. Others in order to compete, get the same upgrade, ad infinitum.
Not sure how all the cards fall at the end of the game, though.
If breast implants are any guide, the pressure is not as great as some would believe.
Thanks for the PM with your blog in it Evil Captor, I’ve not really seen anything quite like it apart from a periodical Victoria Coren used to edit briefly which I forget the name of.
I can actually see it having some value in the brave new world (and I agree with you about Mary McCray) - also makes me think if we do have some kind of system where humans are doing anything at all in a “productive” sense then the richest are going to be prostitutes.
Are you certain you can’t link to it? I can imagine it going over quite well with most people - and also disturbing a small number, making a great thread to lurk in!
This doesn’t make any sense to me. As I argued above, in a world…where one man…owns a magical box…that can make anything…
Well, if one man owns a fabricator that can make anything, then he’s the richest man in the world. If 100 men own fabricators than can make anything, then they form the world ruling class. But if 10,000,000 people own fabricators that can make anything then fabricators are worthless. Not because people don’t need the stuff pouring out of the fabricators, but because there is so much stuff pouring out that there’s no way demand anything of value in exchange for fabricated stuff.
When the marginal cost of production of an item is zero, then the marginal profit on that item is zero. There will still be a market economy for things that have a non-zero marginal cost. But the market value of manufacturing will be barely measurable.
The disparities in wealth in a society where all forms of wealth-creation are privately owned do not arise from goods and services which are abundant, but rather from those which are scarce.
If you have something which is valuable (intellectual property, living room, personal services, handmade art) you can trade this for wealth, and invest in wealth-producing technology.
Yes, and that is why ownership of fabricators won’t make you rich. Fabricators and the goods they produce will be worthless, because they won’t be scarce. That means there will be no “privately owned automated wealth-generating technology”, because if it is automatable then it can’t generate wealth, just worthless or near-worthless junk.
Yes, fabricators can be privately owned, but they won’t generate wealth, any more than your TV set generates wealth. If you had the only flat screen TV set that could display thousands of movies and shows back in 1912, then you’d have technology you could use to generate wealth–you could charge people to watch your TV and make a fortune. But in 2012 everybody has a flat screen TV and so you no longer have a way to make money from your TV.
Unless the recipes used by the fabricators are all open source, some or many of the goods produced by the fabricators may be subject to copyright, which could represent a source of revenue for the owners of those rights.
It seems quite likely that the most valuable source of wealth would be living-room; a wealthy individual might own inhabitable space, a commodity that could not easily be fabricated. In almost any post-scarcity society I can imagine, inhabitable space (whether it is real or virtual) would be at a premium.
Yes, patterns could be a potential source of wealth. Except once we’ve got a post-scarcity economy, what’s the point of enforcing intellectual property rights of that sort?
And even if we declare that if you want, you can copyright your patterns and charge whatever you like to access them, and even assuming there would be some effective method of stopping piracy, there will be millons of patterns that won’t be copyrighted. Only if you want the latest and greatest version of whatever would you need to pay for a particular copyrighted pattern. If there are 50,000 free flying car designs available, how much could the designer of the 50,001st design hope to charge?
And then consider that the average person downloading patterns to his fabricator won’t have a job and therefore won’t be able to produce anything of value to other people anyway. That’s why he’s out of a job, right? If he could produce something that the designer wanted, then doing that would be his job and he wouldn’t be unemployed and unemployable. So even if this poor schlub wanted premium content there’s nothing he can produce to trade for it, so he better get used to free content.
Or, if we decide that this poor schlub can do something worthwile after all, then he isn’t unemployable, and there is work for everybody even if it isn’t work that people in the 21st century would recognize.
I suspect that the quality and size of living spaces will be the social demarcator. You can furnish a one-bedroom apartment as lusciously as you like or a room in a hotel as lusciously as you like, it’s still what it is. There will be rooms, apartments, modest single family homes, immodest single family homes, mansions, and estates. People are hierarchical in nature, they will find a way to sort themselves out, and those on the bottom will be looked down on by those on the top, because they CAN. It will be nice when the people on the bottom no longer have to starve or go homeless to give those above them a feeling of superiority.
But it won’t be “living space” that will be at a premium, but acreage. To get lots of spacious apartments you just need to build up. Maybe you won’t get a spacious apartment in Manhattan, or with a (non-simulated) view of the Golden Gate Bridge, but luxury high-rise apartments in Peoria shouldn’t be expensive to create, the scarce good is the land underneath the high-rise, not the high-rise itself.
So even if 98% of the Earth’s surface is reserved land controlled by the Powers-That-Be and off limits, we can still stack up the peons in giant arcologies on Baffin Island. Baffin Island is 500,000 square kilometers, so with 10 billion people if we turned the whole thing into a 20 story arcology that makes 1 square kilometer of floor space per capite censi.
Not quite a square kilometre, but three orders of magnitude less, actually; nevertheless a sizeable apartment.
Given fabricators that can provide all the basic human needs, plus a wide array of human luxuries such as instant communication and entertainment on tap, the plebs would probably be perfectly happy in their one hectare lodgings.