# What happens when the robots (peacefully) take over? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 9, 2012, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914 "2012-01-09T11:43:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 25
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2016, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/481 "2016-02-26T14:19:22Z")
The more you can do of that without arms and legs makes things easier. A piece our manufacturing is still focused around tasks that humans excel at. If you minimize the need for limb-like actuation, you can do a lot more with today’s SotA. Those robots that make cars are power hogs. But a forklift in a dark warehouse is much less so. Your solar city example also benefits from long-term use of capital. The more flexibility you have to build in, the harder it gets. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2016, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/482 "2016-03-05T05:15:41Z")
I just happened to catch the tail end of [this fifty-minute BBC programme](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03kptyk) on the radio just now. I’m going to listen to the whole thing, but the last ten minutes was all about the stuff we have discussed in this thread. They had a host and four experts representing a range of views. One scoffed and said there will always be jobs, that technology has actually increased the amount of jobs available. Others talked about there maybe being a fifteen hour workweek; another discussed how the job market is hollowing out with jobs on the highest and lowest ends of the pay scale being preserved by ones in the middle being replaced by technology. One of the most interesting comments was from someone saying that people have such a culturally-ingrained notion that one always has to have a job/career to earn money, that as robots take over more and more of the really necessary work, people will continue to “work” but at increasingly unnecessary things, and he seemed to wish that people would retrain themselves to think about how necessary their jobs really are. I do think someone travelling here from the past (say, a century or two ago) might see us as already getting pretty close to that point. After all, farming–the fundamental work of society until relatively recently–is almost completely automated now, with GPS combines and so on. The number of human work hours involved to create enough food for a person to eat for a year has become quite low (I tried to look up exact numbers but failed). And many consumer goods that once would have required hours of work from artisans are just cranked out on largely automated assembly lines. But we have all kinds of weird jobs like “personal shopper” and “life coach” that the visitor from the past would have had a tough time predicting. When I went to the website to fetch the story, BTW, I saw that its titular subject is a guaranteed minimum income, so presumably they dug into that more earlier in the programme. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 5:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/483 "2016-03-13T05:53:55Z")
I came across [this fairly awful article](http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/mar/12/robots-taking-jobs-future-technology-jerry-kaplan-sxsw) in The Guardian about the ideas of an idiot futurist named Jerry Kaplan, who is quite possibly the most clueless man holding that title, and that’s saying a LOT. The article is disjointed and not at all well thought out, as one commenter said, “It reads like something written by a bright ten-year-old,” but the reason I bring it to your attention, ladies and germs, is because it contains the horrifying concept of job mortgages. Job mortgages are where you are able to borrow against earnings of your future jobs so you can survive and get training when your job is taken away by automation, which Kaplan thinks will happen to 90 percent of workers. Kaplan presents this horrifying prospect of endless debt bondage as a utopian vision of the future. I kid you not. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/484 "2016-03-13T06:55:37Z")
Job mortgages don’t sound absolutely horrible. Student loans are similar: they’re scary, and can lead to trouble, but, in principle, what’s wrong with borrowing money for job training? ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/485 "2016-03-13T14:29:16Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Job mortgages don’t sound absolutely horrible. Student loans are similar: they’re scary, and can lead to trouble, but, in principle, what’s wrong with borrowing money for job training? Ask all the young people in the US who are starting out their lives with crushing debts. I’m sure that’s one reason socialism sounds good to them – capitalism, more and more, seems to consist of a series of scams to make you pay your hard earned money for … nothing, much. And the thought of everyone perpetually indebted as they lose jobs and take out loans to get by to the next job … IF it comes along, and IF they work out in it … is kinda horrifying. Even if you do get a job, you’ll probably need a payday loan to pay off your job mortgage. And if you don’t find a job … you’re even more screwed than if you had no job mortgage. It would be just another tool for making the lives of ordinary Americans more depressing and uncertain. Nothing wrong with that … is there? ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/486 "2016-03-13T14:31:35Z")
Yeah, this “job mortgage” sounds kind of bogus, except that I think it might actually turn out to be a bridge to a universal income. The government will, after a few years, provide relief for mortgages for people who still chronically struggle to find employment; and then eventually the guaranteed income will pass and all the mortgages will be declared null and void. Interesting stopgap though! ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/487 "2016-03-13T22:10:18Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > Ask all the young people in the US who are starting out their lives with crushing debts. . . . There’s a big difference between a reasonable debt and a crushing debt. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of student debt, or of job-retraining debt. There’s everything wrong with crushing levels of such debt. Just because some people get over their heads with credit cards doesn’t mean that credit cards should be abolished. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/488 "2016-03-13T23:21:10Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > There’s a big difference between a reasonable debt and a crushing debt. > > There’s nothing wrong with the concept of student debt, or of job-retraining debt. There’s everything wrong with crushing levels of such debt. > > Just because some people get over their heads with credit cards doesn’t mean that credit cards should be abolished. Well, let’s think about this. You lose your job, hence your income. So you take out a govt. guaranteed job mortgage and retain for another job. So you need eneough to live on for, say, six months. that’s prolly gonna be, what … 12,000 for most Americans providing they are just getting by, don’t have any other huge outstanding debts? That’s a lot of money! And so when you get your new job, you’re back where you were if you are lucky enough to make the same amount of money, except you have a new huge debt. It sounds like a TERRIBLE idea, frankly, one that will choke down an economy cold. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2016, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/489 "2016-03-14T00:36:45Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > Well, let’s think about this. You lose your job, hence your income. . . . Well, at that point, I’m pretty much screwed. At least a job-retraining loan gives me a possibility of a new job and a new income. Without retraining, if my job skills have become obsolete, what am I going to do? I’ll have to be a burger-flipper, and the loss of income is the same as a new income equal to my old one minus loan payments. It’s a big step down either way. Now, yeah, I’m a socialist, and I think that the government should heavily subsidize job retraining classes. But I’m enough of a libertarian not to want to ban job retraining loans. They’ll help some people (and, yeah, they’ll hurt some others.) (I do want to ban short-time, high-interest “pay day” loan shops. 300% APR? That’s just criminal.) ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2016, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/490 "2016-03-14T18:34:29Z")
Vice has a niew article about the robot job holocaust that flat-out goes the whole nine yards, albeit over a longer time span (ile., a centry). It says, in the next century, [all jobs could be automated.](http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/every-job-could-be-a-casualty-of-the-robot-revolution) Yours. Mine. Everyone’s. thing iws, I see everyone thinking this will happen to someone else, not me, as the article points out. Well for older retired and soon-to-be-retured folks, as the Straight Dope tends to skew, that’s not gonna be a problem. For everyone else … gonna be a problem. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2016, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/491 "2016-03-14T19:07:18Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > all jobs could be automated. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s. … thinking this will happen to someone else, not me I’m not so sure that we need to start panicking. Let’s look at some examples from that article : ( -oh the horrors!!!) —27 million people now use Turbo-tax software “instead of hiring a human accountant”. Sorry, but I don’t believe it. Most of those 27 million never hired an accountant anyway. The profession isn’t going to die out any time soon. A quick google shows the opposite–there are lots of jobs out there for accountants. —The article claims that “a CEO could outsource at least one fifth of her tasks to a robot—things like data analysis or reviewing status reports—using currently available technology.” Yeah, maybe she could…But we don’t see many CEO’s complaining, do we? Yes, the robots are coming…but society will survive ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2016, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/492 "2016-03-15T08:38:35Z")
I absolutely believe in a hundred years, virtually all jobs will likely be automated. I don’t necessarily expect that to be a problem, though. It could be a near utopia. I think it’s the nearer term that has more potential to be problematic. One of the things we’ve got to nip in the bud, that I hadn’t even thought of, is that as AI is getting more sophisticated, it is inadvertently [showing signs of racism and sexism.](http://www.npr.org/2016/03/14/470427605/can-computers-be-racist-the-human-like-bias-of-algorithms) Not cool, AI, not cool. ---
**Author:** ![T.M](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ad7895/32.png) [@T.M](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/T.M)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2016, 10:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/493 "2016-03-15T10:15:06Z")
\*\*REVELOUTION \*\* No work for the workers spells poverty, what we will see is a global growth of an underclass, not shirkers but people willing to work but not allowed to. Will we see an upper-class keeping control by culling the working-class as they see as unproductive drones ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2016, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/494 "2016-03-15T16:15:48Z")
Ken Jennings on Lee Sedol losing the Go tournament: > **[Machines Defeated Lee Sedol at Go and Me at Jeopardy! What Happens When They...](https://slate.com/technology/2016/03/googles-alphago-defeated-go-champion-lee-sedol-ken-jennings-explains-what-that-feels-like.html)** > > On Saturday, the machines won again. At a luxury hotel in downtown Seoul, South Korea, a program developed by Google defeated Korean grandmaster Lee... ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2016, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/495 "2016-03-15T21:32:21Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Ken Jennings on Lee Sedol losing the Go tournament: > > [Google’s AlphaGo defeated Go champion Lee Sedol. Ken Jennings explains what that feels like.](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/03/google_s_alphago_defeated_go_champion_lee_sedol_ken_jennings_explains_what.html) Very interesting, thanks for posting. I thought this was kind of funny: > [@](#): > > Go is famously a more complex game than chess, with its larger board, longer games, and many more pieces. Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence team likes to say that there are more possible Go boards than atoms in the known universe, but that vastly understates the computational problem. There are about 10^170 board positions in Go, and only 10^80 atoms in the universe. That means that if there were as many parallel universes as there are atoms in our universe (!), then the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be close to the possibilities on a single Go board. Isn’t “close to” still vastly understating it? I’m no mathematician, but as I understand it, a more apt conclusion to that paragraph would be: “…then the number of possibilities on a single Go board would still be _ten billion times greater_ than the total number of atoms in all those universes combined.” Still not very close if you ask me: that’s like someone whose net worth is all of $8.00 saying they are almost as rich as Bill Gates. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2016, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/496 "2016-03-15T23:33:08Z")
Go is certainly more complex than Chess…but measuring the total number of possible board configurations of either is misleading. There are absolutely gobs of board-situations in both games that would simply never occur in actual play. A slightly better metric is how many turns a typical game lasts, and raise the number of reasonable plays a player has to that power. Still a damn big number! Chess games run, say, 75 moves, and each player has about four different things he might do. Go games run longer, maybe 150 moves…but in a great many cases, there really is only one sensible move to make. It’s pretty rare for there to be more than four sensible moves one might make. (To super simplfy, take “Twixt” the old bridge-building game from 3M games. There are trillions of possible board configurations…but each player has exactly one rational move to make! Between expert players, there is only one game of Twixt!) (Tic-Tac-Toe is another example. The total number of possible board positions is nine-factorial, but most of those are impossible to achieve in the course of play.) ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2016, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/497 "2016-03-16T04:05:59Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > (Tic-Tac-Toe is another example. The total number of possible board positions is nine-factorial, but most of those are impossible to achieve in the course of play.) I think you’re confusing board positions with number of games. Each cell can only have a O, X or be blank. So even allowing impossible configurations (like every cell having an X) only gives 3^9 = 19,683 ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2016, 9:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/498 "2016-03-16T09:16:55Z")
Once again, I heard the tail end of a late night BBC World Service show (“Click”) discussing our topic. One of the panelists made the case that we are looking in the wrong sector of the economy for the greatest initial effects of the “rise of the robots” and AI. He said that it will be a lot easier to replace stockbrokers and other white-collar jobs with AI than to replace plumbers with robots. Factory workers are a form of blue-collar labor that is much easier to replace, but blue-collar work that has to be done out in the world is much trickier. So to flesh that out a bit, the kind of plumbing or electrical work involved in building a new home may well become automated fairly soon. But it is repair work that will take longer to automate. How would this affect the economy? At first blush, this looks like it could be a great boon for people in those trades. But as a result, we might see large numbers of people stream into these fields, depressing wages. Still, if there are more jobs available fixing plumbing and wiring and so on them there are in traditional white collar positions, what happens to the college educated middle and upper classes? I think this might be a good thing in a way, as those are the classes that have the most impact on the political system and so it may hasten a guaranteed income. Once that is passed, the desperation for everyone to become a plumber or electrician would presumably fade (particularly since a guaranteed income for the educated higher socioeconomic classes would likely be a pretty comfortable income) and then those repair jobs would become very highly paid again for a while or come with some kind of societal perq. Worst case, the government might even have to actually draft people into a corps of fix-it crews that would either spend a few years doing this necessary work before permanently retiring with the nation’s gratitude, or maybe do it National Guard style where they would have to work a few days a month. ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2016, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/499 "2016-03-16T12:42:32Z")
From a NYTimes Op-Ed by a couple of M.I.T. Prof’s - this is about the AlphaGo victories I had started a thread about in IMHO, but this seems to relate more directly to our coming robot overlords: [QUOTE=NYTimes] Unlike the case with chess, however, no human can explain how to play Go at the highest levels. The top players, it turns out, can’t fully access their own knowledge about how they’re able to perform so well. This self-ignorance is common to many human abilities, from driving a car in traffic to recognizing a face. This strange state of affairs was beautifully summarized by the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi, who said, “We know more than we can tell.” It’s a phenomenon that has come to be known as “ **Polanyi’s Paradox**.” [/QUOTE] > [@](#): > > What changed? The AlphaGo victories vividly illustrate the power of a new approach in which instead of trying to program smart strategies into a computer, we instead build systems that can learn winning strategies almost entirely on their own, by seeing examples of successes and failures. > > Since these systems don’t rely on human knowledge about the task at hand, they’re not limited by the fact that we know more than we can tell. > > AlphaGo does use simulations and traditional search algorithms to help it decide on some moves, but its real breakthrough is its **ability to overcome Polanyi’s Paradox**. [bolding mine] So this Go victory seems like the latest step in this ongoing discussion. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2016, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914/500 "2016-03-16T13:27:58Z")
Interesting. It puts me to mind of a segment I heard recently on public radio (Science Friday, perhaps?) about an AI program developed at Cornell that derives equations for things it observes empirically. I was surprised to [find just now via Google](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/apr/02/eureka-laws-nature-artificial-intelligence-ai) that this was in the relatively ancient days (for this topic) of 2009. First they determined that it could figure out Newton’s laws from weighing objects and watching them move. Then they had it figure out the math of a double pendulum, which had been beyond them; after that they went on to have it analyze cell growth: > [@](#): > > After proving that the machine worked, Lipson’s team set it to work on the complex problem of metabolism in biological cells. The computer produced some equations, which the scientists are still trying to make sense of. > > “It’s like going to an oracle and asking what’s going on. You are given an equation, but you need to work out what it means before you can understand what’s really going on,” said Lipson. > > The team say they also plan to look at problems in cosmology and even social behaviour, which could reveal the underlying laws at play when people form social networks on the internet. > > “The real test now is whether it can discover new laws of nature and I believe it will. There’s no way forward in a lot of sciences without tools like this,” Lipson said. There’s a point that is expressed more subtly here, but which was laid out explicitly in the radio segment, and is similar to what happened with Go: the “way forward” will involve new developments in science and technology being made without any humans, even teams of humans, understanding them. We will just have to take the computer’s word for it. Kind of unsettling, but it shows that even scientific researchers may soon find their jobs have become obsolete. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914.md?page=24) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-when-the-robots-peacefully-take-over/608914.md?page=26)