The effects of automation on a grand scale

Great Debates
1

I recently had the opportunity to watch the complete Animatrix. For those not familiar, it was basically a compilation of stories in the Matrix universe. In explaining the pre-Matrix era, it was shown that a race of AI in the form of humanoid robots basically became slaves and performed almost all remedial functions of society.

Now, eventually, possibly in my lifetime (I’m 19), I can possibly see automation on a grand scale like this occurring. It wouldn’t necessarily have to involve AI or violent revolution, but only sufficiently advanced computer and chip designs for whatever job is required. I would also assume, of course, advanced robotic designs for movement, speech output, speech interpretation, and problem solving coming along.

I would say they could perform jobs, including, but not limited to:

  • anyone behind a cash register

  • receptionists

  • waiters, anyone in fast food or in a restaurant, cafeteria workers, chefs, etc.

  • any type of manufacturing

  • the designing of other machines (I believe this already is happening with certain computer chips)

  • construction projects (i.e. skyscrapers, dams, houses, sewers, electrical, roads, etc.)

  • cogs in any bureaucracy (read: govt. jobs)

  • industry (logging, mining, surveying, possible R&D)

-prostitutes (talk about a real doll! <-- this was in the movie)

Since these are mindless machines and would eventually become somewhat cheap, depending on their use I imagine, and would be superior to their flesh and bone counter-parts in every way imaginable, any of the above jobs would be held by a machine.

Now, I never even pretended to be any good at economics…what would this do to say, the United States economy? The only increase in job demand I would imagine would be mechanics to keep the robots from breaking down. Would it be a disaster? Utopia? A rough displacement and then gradual acclimation?

I’m sure that, given sufficiently advanced technology, almost every job except perhaps government leaders and robot mechanics could be filled by a machine eventually! But I don’t know if I want to think that far ahead.

2

Well, anybody behind a cash register nowadays is only providing a human layer between the computer and the customer (with modern credit cards, even the method of payment gets nowhere near the cashier). Receptionists have an essential human function, that won’t be replaced until you fully develop androids. (Actually, maybe that’s happened, and they’re all receptionists…)

Waiters - how does a robot cut a cigar, check the wine, notice that a diner is lacking a dessert spoon before time, etc?

Manufacturing - ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm isn’t most maunfacturing heavily automated nowadays?

Heavy industry, including construction, is necessarily reliant on technology. It always has been.

Prostitutes - now there, you’d need to make a very realistic android.

3

How will they do all of that? I don’t know, if I did I’d be pretty wealthy. Point being, that’s what I am presenting, and I don’t think it’s hard to believe considering the interminable march of progress (think what we’ve accomplished in the previous 100, even 50, years).

You’re also missing the point: there would be no people working all those jobs. Technology wouldn’t be “part of construction” it WOULD be construction. The machines would replace all the people’s jobs in the tens of millions.

4

(bolding mine)

Well, in the short term all those people being laid off would be a bad thing. But in the long term new feilds and new jobs would be created. What you’ve essentialy done is broadened your resourses.

Basically what happens is (as in the past) instead of little Jimmy learning the family trade off his father on how to be a spot welder; little Jimmy picks up another trade because he already knows the one his father does is now obsolete due to modern technology.
My question is where is the breaking point? Can technology progress to the point (theoretically)where we become so automated that none of us has to work? This providing we could work out a free energy souce…

5

I didn’t realize you were planning to live 200 years :smiley:
Basically you are asking about a common theme in Sci-Fi - The Animatrix, I, Robot, A.I. all postulate a world where humanoid robots and artificial intelligence is used to perform the bulk of humanities mundane tasks. Could such a world exist?

Well, for one, you need to think about the nature of automation. We use automation - whether it’s a robotic assembly unit in a car plant or SAP accounting systems in an office for a number of reasons:

  1. The perform work that is too dangerous or difficult for humans
  2. The perform work that is repeatable - every car is built the same way, every transaction processed the same way
  3. To work faster
  4. To perform work that humans can’t - lift heavy objects, process millions of transactions
    Even the most advanced AI can’t do is think creatively. Robots only build what they are told. They can’t think of what to build. They don’t think or reason, they only process. They can be construction workers, not architects. They can be manufacturers, not designers. In other words, they are not suited to the service industry.

Advances in AI and robotics will basically push people into more creative, service jobs - customer service reps, waiters, sales, architecture, medicine, law. Baring a cheap source of energy, there will be some point where it is not cost effective to have a robotic replacement. Some busineses, we just wouldn’t want robots - I accept a robotic McDonalds (mostly drones working there now anyway). I would not accept a robotic Smith & Wollensky.

6

You might be interested in reading R.U.R. by Karl Capek. It originated the use of the term “robot”. An early take on the question.

7

Hmmm…

What will happen when farming is automated? After all, 90% of the population works in agriculture. What will all those people do if they are no longer needed on farms?

Oh, wait. Only 1% of the population works in agriculture. It was 200 years ago that 90% of the population worked in agriculture. What happened to all those farmers?

200 years ago 90% of the population had to work from sunup to sundown all day every day, with no weekends, no vacation, no sick leave, just to get enough food to eat for the day, and to pay off the local mafiosi/feudal overlord (same thing really).

Then we had factory work. People worked backbreaking jobs in manufacturing. Then we had service jobs, or information jobs.

The thing is, every worthless shitpile of a job that can be replaced by machines is a net gain for humanity. That’s one more human being that doesn’t have to slave his life away for to produce a handful of wheat, or make a hoe by hand, or stand on an assembly line screwing widget A into slot B 40 hours a week, or ask “do you want fries with that?” 500 times a day.

Capitalism only applies to scarce goods. No one has to pay for air (at least not yet). If cars and computers come off automated assembly lines as cheaply as air and water, how is that a bad thing? Eventually we’ll be giving them away in cereal boxes. And I’m not really joking. I remember about 10 years ago getting a digital watch in a box of cereal. And I thought about how 100 years ago a watch that kept accurate time like that was a huge investment. A railroad watch would cost several months salary. Now imagine what the owner of that watch would think about giving away a product that would have cost the equivalent of $10,000-$20,000 dollars today.

This is a bad thing? Even in the US most people have crap jobs where they are simply cogs in a machine of some sort. Office drone, burger flipper, etc etc. Imagine if all those jobs were done by machines, and people could do something worthwhile with their time. Imagine if even half the people in third-world shitholes could go to college and do something interesting with their lives instead of working in a sweatshop or as subsistence farmers. What if they became writers, scientists, engineers, game designers, movie producers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, musicians, artists, teachers, theme park designers, political activists and poets instead? Would that be a tragedy?

8

[Moe Syzlak]Hey, them robots ain’t free you know.[/MS]

General purpose robots that can do mosgt of what a human can aren’t even here yet and it will be much longer before they are cheap. What makes more sense to a business: a minimum wage worker and a cheap, special purpose machine to take payments or a sophisticated robot to interact with the customer?

9

But what about a cheap special purpose machine to interact with the customer? Look at how ATMs replace bank tellers…not by having a robot behind a counter doing exactly the same job a human used to do, but by having an automated process that accomplishes the same task but without requiring a human to do it.

Likewise, we don’t see robots with scythes and wheelbarrows harvesting wheat, we have combines that do everything at once and just need to drive around the field. An automated McDonalds won’t have robot fry cooks and robot cashiers, it will be more like a vending machine where you insert your credit card, punch in your order, and cheap purpose built automatic fryer dumps in frozen potatoes, a cheap purpose built flipper flips the burger, cheap purpose built squirters squirt ketchup on buns, and cheap purpose built conveyer belts deliver everything to the serve slot.

Likewise, we won’t see humanoid robots driving cars, the cars will drive themselves, we won’t see humanoid robots answer phones, we’ll just improve our current system of voice messaging.

10

Hopefully, before the robots are created, someone will figure out how to make a service/information-reliant economy work.

11

But who will shove bread down their throats?

Obviously, pushing is the answer.

12

I have to agree. It’s stupid to think that there will be these humanoid robots walking around doing all this stuff that humans do. Modern kill-bots aren’t Terminators driving human vehicles and crushing a mans head with an armored hand. They are innocuous remote controlled airplanes armed with missles. A robotic Fed Ex worker won’t be a humanoid robot with a FedEx hat collecting the mail. It might be a small UAV that comes to your door when summoned and takes your package to a collection center.

When you automate something, it doesn’t have to LOOK human unless you are trying to have it fit into a human environment. And even then, we people are more comfortible with something that looks obviously like a robot (although we prefer it to be at human scale). Something that looks “kinda” human generally repulses us (some scientist came up with a curve that demonstrates how we like robots to look human to a point, then they just creep us out).

13

Also, read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. A very depressing and probably realistic vision of a world in which machines have all the crap jobs. Of course, the bar for what is considered a crap job worthy of automation is gradually raised until high-end bureaucrats and scientists are eventually replaced. I think it’s Vonnegut’s best work, written before he became enamored of his own voice and professed to hate science fiction and claim he never wrote it.

When machines finally “take over,” people will be forced to price their services lower than the hourly cost of running the machines. This figure will probably be pretty low. Of course, there might be some people more willing to pay more for a human to do certain things, just as there are people now who will pay more for fair trade coffee or cruelty free diamonds. They will be in the minority though, and humans will eventually be priced out.

What after that? The birthrate will drop, as people realize there is no future for their kids. Suicides and homicides will both be on the rise, as people become either despondent over the lack of jobs or hyper-competitive to seize one of the few remaining positions. There would probably be a war, because when people are bored and mad their first impulse is to start a war. Eventually, I can see society either morphing into a peaceful utopia where only the richest one percent of people are left sitting fat on their laurels as machines cater to them, or the emergence of rabid technophobia, resulting in a medieval-like society where all machines are banned forever. Unless we blow ourselves up in said war, of course.

Oh, and msmith537, that’s called the “uncanny valley” effect.