I finally got around to reading Manna. Fascinating story. It’s not so much that it’s badly written (though I can’t argue the point) but that it’s written in a style that has been out of fashion for about a century. Very early SF stories used to use a very similar format for describing scientific and social advances that would Change the World. “Professor Formison’s Fluxo-logic Capacitor, by altering the variations in the ether, allowed an individual wearing it to ride gravity waves, and thus Nathaniel found himself floating in the air, gazing in wonder at the ground below him, shielded from the harmful effects that would have been incurred by a plunge to his doom by the marvelous abilities of the Fluxo-Logic Capacitor.”
It was also commonplace in SF in those days to contrast the marvelous wonderfulness of Society A which had embraced Ringolated Tharianism with the awfulness of Society B which had not done so. Society A would often how towering spires of shining glasslike buildings with the inhabitants frolicking happily about while Society B’s inhabitants lived in pathetic hovels made of Terrorfoam and grumbled while eating reconstituted cardboard or something like it. 'Manna" pretty much exactly follows this plan.
Still an interesting read. I think what made the first part so riveting was the sheer plausibility of the initial robotic incursion: workers at fast food restaurants already wear headpieces and operate computer ordering menus, it’s so EASY to see all of them wearing headsets and responding to a computer’s orders. The software described isn’t even an A.I., it’s an expert system at best. The step-by-step incursions into human freedom are all very tiny and limited, but you wind up in what I see as not even a worst-case scenario, but one’s that nasty enough as it is … ninety percent of the US population unemployed and unemployable, housed in what are essentially jails.
The section involving the Australia Project is much less interesting because it’s practically a rote copy of century-old SF tropes.
An excellent video, thanks for bringing it to our attention. I found it particularly informative to discover there is ALREADY a robot that has solved the hand-eye problem. It’s not as fast or as deft as a human being with its robot hands, but it can learn to do anything it sees a human do. It’s just a matter of upgrading now.
New thought: could we turn the smarter corporate and independently wealthy minds toward thinking they NEED us as consumers, to maintain their vast wealth? After all, a market for consumer goods that is six billion strong is a LOT more lucrative than a market that is just 350 million strong. Hell, Monsanto alone has a HUGE vested interest in having a lot of hungry mouths to feed, evil bastids though they be.
After all, in the long term consumers may be unnecessary, but in the short term bottom lines are gonna be HURTIN’ if too many people lose their ability to buy things. And corporations definitely think in the short term.
I know conservative and libertarians are gonna howl like mad dogs at the very concept of a basic income, much less a generous one, but corporate types tend to be a little bit less ideological in their approach. Whatever works, works, and if giving no-account layabouts a decent living wage (a Goodies for Undesirables program indeed!) is how the corporate bottom line stays healthy and the shareholders stay happy, I think they might suddenly become bastions of generosity.
And the sneakiest fun part of this is, the trend toward control of our democracy by the wealthy might just work to our advantage, and to libertarian and conservatives’ disadvantage.
This thread is such a pleasure to reread. Everyone posting in it should be proud of their contributions; and I hope it is remembered when future econonic, social, and technological historians take the measure of our age.
The post quoted above, #32, strikes me as a very interesting and unique contribution that got initially lost in the shuffle amidst the embarrassment of riches (if anyone quoted it or responded to it before now, I missed it).
ETA: Captor, you seem to have become more optimistic than you were in 2012.
Here’s an interesting twist on this future, that keeps coming at us all the time:
In the latter third or so of this podcast, about the Amazon site/service Mechanical Turk*, they pivot from “this allows sites to get things done that require a human touch” to “the people working on this site are helping train computers to hasten their obsolescence”. Inevitable, but sadly ironic all the same.
*Which, as an aside, is not a term I’d ever heard before–and the original Turk is a fascinating story as it turns out.
I don’t know if thinking “the absolute worst may not happen due to corporate greed” is OPTIMISM but it is a cheering thought. On the other hand, I suspect there will be much unnecessary human suffering as I think there are many wealthy conservatives and libertarians who would GLADLY shoot themselves in the foot economically speaking to defend their ideological interests.
There are, but they aren’t going to gain control. Even during the time Bush was president and both houses of Congress were in Republican hands, the hardcore libertarian, “drown the government in the bathtub” faction was left on the outside and very frustrated. And with every year, every day even, their most ardent supporters (old white guys) die off and are replaced in the voting pool by 18 year olds who are not down with that vision of government and society.
That’s a big one. It doesn’t surprise me, though: I’ve been counselling my kids for years to go to law school and aim for being trial lawyers or judges, as I think these fields will be legally barred (no pun intended) to robots/AIs for longer than almost any other. The CW is that today’s teens should aim for science/engineering/coding type educations for good employment prospects in well paying fields. But I think a lot of that will dry up within a few decades as it gets shifted over to being handled by AIs. Any humans left in the process will be glorified technicians that won’t need enough skill to demand high wages (kind of like what happened with photo developing in its latter stages before digital photography took over).
Thanks for the update. It strikes me too that lots of jobs have already been “automated” in a more invisible sense. When software tools allow one human being to do what took five or ten previously, those others who are no longer needed have essentially had their job automated even if there are still humans with their job title. We may see people reluctant to just let AIs sit there and make all decisions, but gradually evolve to where there are (to our contemporary standards) shockingly few humans involved–like ten people running a big insurance company or investment bank.
Sure, but that trajectory can’t be sustained forever. We’ve managed for a long time to keep finding more work to do beyond fulfilling basic needs, but I think the dropoff in workforce participation shows that we’re running out of new needs to create (at least at the rate that requires creating enough software-amplified human jobs to keep everyone employed).
Edited to add: if you go back far enough, you find that this wasn’t “always” true either: the rise of agriculture really only benefited a small elite at the expense of the masses.
I think we’re a lot further from that time than some people imagine.
While the workforce participation rate has fallen, modestly, in recent years in the US, it had been growing for a long time before that. There is not yet any pattern of increasing unemployment in the developed world.
But sure, maybe in some future time we’ll be post-scarcity or whatever and there won’t be jobs (and by and large we won’t care).
Even if I agreed with this, I don’t see how it’s relevant to my use of the word “always”.
All I said was that humans have always used tools to reduce the labour needed to do X work. I didn’t make any claim about what this meant for the job market.
Earlier in this thread, I had speculated that when humans are no longer needed for conventional productivity, they might still be able to find work as entertainers. But a story I heard on today’s Marketplace reminded me that the future is onrushing in that regard as well. It referenced a recent Hollywood Reporter story about how the dead actor Paul Walker is being resurrected, high-tech Weekend at Bernie’s style, to keep the megahit Fast and Furious franchise churning out profits:
This kind of matter-of-fact prose really makes me feel like I’m living in the future: it seems like it was not long ago at all that this kind of shit would really freak people out (but then, recently I read about a goat that has spider DNA so it can make spider silk in its milk, and no one seems to be freaking about that either, so I guess I’m just a fuddy-duddy). It reminded me of a movie I saw last year, The Congress, which explored this terrain although kind of abandoned it and took a weird detour just as the premise was catching my interest. But Googling that film, I found this discussion:
That was smart of Tom Cruise, but the finger will not stay in the dike forever. I think the idea is revoltingly ghoulish, personally. Just make brand new virtual actors instead, that are perfectly engineered to be super hot, eternally youthful, but with just the right amount of “imperfection”. That’s kind of messed up, too, but at least it’s not taking an actual person’s image from beyond the grave and making them dance like a marionette in a way they never agreed to.
Yeah, I’m skeptical about that one. Firstly the 2,000 dishes is a goal; it’s not clear how many it can do right now. In the Economist’s article, the implication was right now it can just do one dish, after you lay out the (chopped) ingredients for it.
The main reason I’m skeptical is because I think using standard kitchen equipment and motion capture is inherently bug-prone.
Not that I think an automated cook is some kind of fantasy idea; it’s something that would be incredibly useful / profitable and the technology does appear to be in place. I just suspect the first robust system will either use custom apparatus to cook with, or use sensors, cameras etc to interact in a standard kitchen.