What happens when the robots (peacefully) take over?

[SlackerInc]

NPR’s On Point had an interesting discussion today of a guaranteed minimum income. There were callers, and even one of the panelists (Megan McArdle), who insisted that humans will never be automated out of the workforce. I tried to call to get my two cents in, but it was an especially popular topic and it was always busy.

[Evil_Captor]

@Annadroid

hehe “Wealth” is a subjective term and, as mentioned earlier, relative.

Personally, I see no point in acquiring much more than I can use. Hubby and I make sure our kids stay comfy and we stay comfy, and that is enough. After that, we give. We are happy living as we do.
The best bet for survival is not to have a lot of riches, it is to be the most adaptable. Darwin made some mistakes but he was essentially correct (that is why his conclusions are bound in a theory rather than a hypothesis). If your life changes and you cannot adapt fast enough to the changes, you likely will not survive.

How said for you that machine intelligences can think and adapt so much faster than you. And any human being.

[Evil_Captor]

@Lemur866

But even today, when taxes actually cost rich people significant money, we have gigantic social spending programs. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, and on and on and on.

In a future where automated production produces the goods and services needed for a decent living, what does it cost the elites to keep the factory spigots going? NOTHING. That’s the point. The welfare state of the future isn’t being funded by onerous taxes on the rich that cut into their budget for beachfront property on Lake Geneva. It’s just funded by not making it against the law for peasants to own the means of production.

Of course there’s no future in producing goods and services for the middle classes. They won’t have significant money, and producing those goods will be too cheap and easy. That’s the key. How can you get rich selling TVs to poor people when TVs are given away free in cereal boxes? So don’t bother investing in TVs. Does this mean the masses don’t get TVs anymore? No, they’re being given away free in cereal boxes, remember? The masses get their TVs precisely because TVs aren’t worth anything.

And of course, you have a vision of an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He gets millions in bonuses every year. But why? What makes him one of the elite? Because he can pick stocks and make his customer’s money grow. At least in theory. In practice he and his kind extract a lot of the extra value generated from his services. Every gold plated toilet seat the investment banker gets means one less gold plated toilet seat for the guy whose money he manages.

Why isn’t this investment banker affected by the robot job holocaust? Because it seems to me his sort of work is exactly the sort of work that can be automated. Why does Bill Gates need to call up an investment banker to help him buy such and such a company, when he could just go on investmentbanking.com and do it for nearly free?

The robot job holocaust evaporates jobs in the financial sector just as surely as it did in the manufacturing sector last century. That’s the point of all the worry about the loss of jobs. It’s one thing when welders and machinists and blue collar workers lose their jobs at the factory. It’s another when doctors and lawyers and bankers lose theirs.

If you argue that the bankers will just make it illegal to not use human bankers, then their real power isn’t their money, their real power is the political stranglehold they possess. Their money is just a symptom, they’re voting themselves welfare out of the public treasury. It’s socialism gone mad.

And of course, for every couple dozen greedy elitists–like you say, ones who don’t enjoy seeing starving peasants, but wouldn’t lift a finger to actually help a starving peasant–there’s going to be one or two who would lift a finger. Not if they have to break a sweat, mind you, but ones who are kind enough to let the peasants collect whatever scraps of food they like from the dumpsters.

This is a post-scarcity society. The scraps of food from the dumpsters are actually unimaginable wealth by the standards of 2015. Just like a hungry ragged peasant of 1315 would be astonished at seeing the wide asses and brightly colored clothes of the urban poor of 2015. And just as we don’t consider plenty of cheap calories and a bunch of cheap t-shirts from Walmart and a phone glued to your hand to be indicators of wealth in 2015, neither will the abundant consumer goods and services produced by automated systems of 2115 seem like wealth to them. They’ll be living luxury lifestyles by 2015 standards, but they won’t feel rich, not like the guys who really call the shots in 2115.

What you are describing in my best case scenario, the one I hope will occur.

[Evil_Captor]

@SlackerInc

Lemur covered it pretty well, but let me just respond with a couple quick points that cover overlapping ground.

Captor’s fever dream (nightmare) only applies to a world where everyone in the 1% is like the Koch brothers, and the government is completely captive to their interests. (Actually, it would have to be all the governments on Earth, but let’s just talk about the U.S. for simplicity’s sake.) This is the way many of my fellow progressives see the world, but it is this vision which actually misses a lot.

There are first of all liberal billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and others whose names escape me at the moment. Just among them, they could prevent the catastrophe Captor is describing, without any government help. And then there are many other billionaires who are neither liberal nor archconservative, but who certainly don’t want to see starving and rioting in the streets and try to explain to their children why they are not doing anything to feed/clothe/house these people, when it would be a trivially easy for them to do so without getting their hands dirty.

But even if we imagined for the sake of argument that all the 1% were like the Koch brothers, those guys do not have the omnipotence in the political arena that many imagine. Most of the candidates they have supported have lost. And their lift would get a lot heavier at the point where they are pitting themselves and the political elites against 99% of voters, or even 90%.

TL;DR: Most one percenters would not stand for a level of famine that kills off the majority of the population; and even if they would, the government would not let it happen. And the government is the one that controls the police and military. Most of whom, let’s remember, would have relatives that are among that 99%.

What we are talking about is my worst case scenario. I think the most likely outcome is somewhere in between the worst case and the best case, because the current values in our society are not well suited for thinking objectively about post-scarcity times. I do think the way to ensure the best outcome is to bring up these issues and help people understand them. It generally takes a while.

[SlackerInc]

Agreed.

[Evil_Captor]

Another expert, Moshe Vardi weighs in on technological unemployment, says automation will replace more than half of all humans in the workplace in the next 30 years. “We approach a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task.”

I thought the most interesting quote, however, was:

He also predicted that automation’s effect on unemployment would have huge political consequences, and lamented that leaders have largely ignored it. “We are in a presidential election year and this issue is just nowhere on the radar screen.”

[Evil_Captor]

The robots are coming.

I give all forms of manual labor 10-20 years.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Evil_Captor

The robots are coming.

I give all forms of manual labor 10-20 years.

When we’re huddled in caves, trying to understand why the robots rose up against us and slaughtered most of humanity, we’ll cue up this video to 1:28 and watch the moment when the first robot thought, “Sonofabitch, they’re all gonna die.”

[SlackerInc]

Wow, that is a seriously awesome video. I remember their previous videos from just a year or two back (I think), with models that were much less flexible and resilient.

It’s true that it’s a real oversight for this not to be a topic in the presidential campaign. I wonder when it will become one. 2020? 2024?

[Lemur866]

Pretty impressive. But of course robots like this aren’t going to be taking many human jobs. Most of the “robots” that take over human jobs won’t look like anything in particular, because the work they do won’t need a human shape. And most won’t actually be robots at all, or even expert systems. Just new ways of doing things that require a lot less human input.

[Tangent]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

When we’re huddled in caves, trying to understand why the robots rose up against us and slaughtered most of humanity, we’ll cue up this video to 1:28 and watch the moment when the first robot thought, “Sonofabitch, they’re all gonna die.”

I now expect hockey players will be the first victims of homicidal robots.

[John_Mace]

@Evil_Captor

The robots are coming.

I give all forms of manual labor 10-20 years.

I wanted to see the robot grab the hokey stick and start beating the guy over the head with it.

I do fear for all the jobs, though, that entail lifting boxes and putting them on shelves. It would be such a shame if humans didn’t have to do that sort of work in the future. Or walking in the snow.

[Tangent]

@Evil_Captor

The robots are coming.

I give all forms of manual labor 10-20 years.

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

When we’re huddled in caves, trying to understand why the robots rose up against us and slaughtered most of humanity, we’ll cue up this video to 1:28 and watch the moment when the first robot thought, “Sonofabitch, they’re all gonna die.”

And here’s the remix : She tried to warn us! - GIF on Imgur

[SlackerInc]

@John_Mace

I wanted to see the robot grab the hokey stick and start beating the guy over the head with it.

I do fear for all the jobs, though, that entail lifting boxes and putting them on shelves. It would be such a shame if humans didn’t have to do that sort of work in the future. Or walking in the snow.

You scoff, but this displays a level of flexibility that suggests they are on the cusp of being able to do any sort of manual labor.

[Evil_Captor]

@Lemur866

Pretty impressive. But of course robots like this aren’t going to be taking many human jobs. Most of the “robots” that take over human jobs won’t look like anything in particular, because the work they do won’t need a human shape. And most won’t actually be robots at all, or even expert systems. Just new ways of doing things that require a lot less human input.

I agree, but as much infrastructure is currently designed to accomodate humans and things that move like humans, it opens up a lot of different options for robots.

[Evil_Captor]

@Tangent

And here’s the remix : She tried to warn us! - GIF on Imgur

Nice!

[Ruken]

@SlackerInc

You scoff, but this displays a level of flexibility that suggests they are on the cusp of being able to do any sort of manual labor.

Not very efficiently though. Keeping a human going is like running a 100W lightbulb. BD’s hydraulic approach to actuation helps, but they’ve a long way to go, especially for untethered applications.

[SlackerInc]

It wasn’t long ago you could say the same about self-driving cars.

[Ruken]

@SlackerInc

It wasn’t long ago you could say the same about self-driving cars.

No, we couldn’t say that. Because the energy inputs to control a vehicle are minimal. Self-driving cars are enabled by controls innovation, not energy efficiency innovations. Controls innovation has certainly helped here. But for untethered, long-duration applications, these bots are going to need innovations in energy-efficient actuation, and in storage, both in energy density and power density.

I can put 2.4 kWh over two fueling periods into a human to work a shift and keep him on standby overnight. I want to know how long BD’s bots can go on one charge; I’ll see what I can dig up. If I get stuck, we can always ask the smart people in GQ.

I’m not saying robots like this cannot or will not be viable for many tasks currently performed by humans. But it’s important to understand what innovations are required.

So that we can make money off of them, to spend on leisure in our post-robot paradise, or to buy phased plasma rifles to fight the robots.

[SlackerInc]

Right, I’d agree that for widespread robotic infrastructure, we need to ramp up bigtime on stuff like solar (or fusion reactors if they finally figure them out). But in theory, in places like the Southwest you should be able to put up some (increasingly cheap) solar panels, and use those to power a bunch of solar panel factories and charge up the trucks that bring stuff in and out. Then put up all those solar panels you just made and use the power to start cranking out robots, and use the robots to put up more solar panels, rinse/repeat…until you’ve got big swaths of desert made into robot boomtowns that, unlike the oil boom/bust towns in North Dakota, don’t need a bunch of housing, stores, entertainment, etc. Then you can start making all kinds of other stuff out there. Almost like colonizing a planet.