But you do think the people who are now in their twenties and washing dishes or driving trucks can be educated to do more complex jobs in twenty years when those are fully automated? Jobs too complex for the automation of 2038 to handle? I really doubt it. Half the population has an IQ below 100, and no amount of education is going to fundamentally change that.
What could “save the day”, at least for a few decades, is genetic engineering that essentially removes anyone with an IQ below 120 from the population. But that will not kick in fully across the working age population for so long, automation will probably outpace even that change anyway.
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That’s one of my favorite Ted talks. I’ve used it in the past in threads like this. Thanks for posting it. There are tons of gloom and doom prediction talks, but this one is one of the more grounded ones IMHO.
What is peculiar here is that you ignore the examples that even Snowboarde Bo found (and he misses too), automation does not mean that humans will be taken out of the picture anytime soon, the ATM example also showed that recently.
Oh boy, I see a lot of assumptions there. Again as Autor pointed out: “These predictions strike me as arrogant. These self-proclaimed oracles are in effect saying, “If I can’t think of what people will do for work in the future, then you, me and our kids aren’t going to think of it either.””
And here you are using a flawed figment of the IQ reasoning: that IQ is destiny. It is not. And that is shown when low income people or minorities that usually will be expected to have less IQ get proper support.
One very powerful item about automation is willfully ignored here: how training and knowledge has become available to people that just a few generations ago had no access to.
Again with the IQ is destiny error. While I can complain about how dumb people like Ben Carson come out nowadays, the fact is that if he had been removed when he was at fifth grade, still disregarding his studies, the world would had missed one of the best surgeons around.
Come to think of it, when he was a little kid, operations that he was able to perform later in life would had been impossible if a lot of automation had not been there to begin with. In other words: Yet another example of how automation opens opportunities, even for people that are not overall bright. Of course, one should not ignore that others will be affected negatively and for that we should fight to get leaders in power that understand opportunities rather than limitations.
To paraphrase Autor, is this time different? Of course…every time is different. A lot of my arguments in these threads were based on what he’s saying there in the last 1/3 of his talk (I encourage everyone to listen to it…it’s not that long and it’s a more reasoned take on this subject than some of these things which are either total gloom and doom or total sunshine out of the ass), especially the part about the agricultural sector (he uses those actually on a farm, I broaden that to the entire sector).
I especially think he’s right wrt the direction they took being something we could do, as a society…they went with mandatory school for kids, we could go with post-high school education (either college or certification training) paid for by taxes. It was one of the greatest returns on investment for those folks in the late 1800’s wrt the explosion of US productivity in the 1900’s, and could be something similar for us today if we could get past the politics and foot dragging.
I was wondering that too, I knew about that one for awhile but nobody was linking to it.
I have to notice here that there was a big misunderstanding from **SlackerInc **, regarding Autor, **SlackerInc **replied that “Autor’s blithely talking about agriculture going down from 40 percent to 2 percent and being filled in by yoga teachers and app developers—does he really think these are the same sorts of people?”, indeed that is not what he said, it was: (bolding and underline mine: )
So, yeah his talk needs to be watched and understood properly and many should not misunderstand what Autor is saying.
Many of them are in that job because of opportunity, not capability.
Yes, half of people are below 100 IQ, because that is the definition, but that doesn’t mean that half the people are stupid. The vast majority of people are well within the bell curve, the few who fall far enough outside that they cannot be trained or taught can be taken care of through various disability or social safety net means.
As the IQ of the population is going up on a constant basis, and a person with an IQ of 100 today would have had an IQ of 120 a few decades ago, that is not really a sensible recommendation. Better childhood development in the areas of nutrition, socialization and education make a much bigger difference than the genetic component (except for serious genetic flaws).
What bias in natural selection is driving an increase in IQ? How does a machine solving the tough problems make people smarter?
Jared Diamond makes the point that the natives of New Guinea are smarter than people in industrialized nations because they must overcome greater challenges to survive.
Male nerds are not sex idols and it’s the females who select.
Machines solving problems that we used to have to spend time and effort solving means that we don’t have to spend time and effort solving those problems, and can instead move onto solving more complex problems.
For whatever Diamond’s opinion is worth, which I don’t know how much that is, I disagree with that. I would also disagree with the notion that those in industrialized nations are smarter because they have an Iphone.
Any increase in IQ would be driven by female selection.
I don’t see any evidence of increasing intelligence. We’ve been in an era of product development, based on the Schottky discovery, for the last 50 years.
Our infrastructure has been on a down hill slope since FDR. Our school system is archaic. And we just elected a moron for President.
Where’s the evidence of increasing IQ in the general population?
The Flynn effect (the gradual rise of IQs) is definitely a real thing. But that doesn’t change the fact that while the bottom 50% of the population may not be dumb, the bottom 25% kind of is. Too dumb to do anything machines of the 2040s can’t do better. So we’d better have a basic income by then, and work on removing the Protestant work guilt and stigma of being unemployed.
As the OP, I don’t agree with your characterization of the thread. I’ve said from the beginning that I think it will be great when AI and automation frees humans from any need to have jobs. Go back and look at the first post if you don’t believe me! I think that is the view of many, though not all, of the subsequent posters as well.
Or we can descend into an Idiocracy lifestyle.
Or we can intellectualize in ways that can’t really be described as “solving problems” (like in my Philosophy of Math course in college) but certainly require high level thinking.
I would guess that some people will go more for Column A, and some for Column B. Column B is what is predicted in the classic E.M. Forster story “The Machine Stops”, but unfortunately for those people their erudition was worth fuck-all when things started breaking down. We are going to have to hope our AIs in the far future always make sure to take care of us, because I can guarantee you we won’t know how to take care of ourselves.
Are you saying that they are too dumb to sing or to dance or to act or to tell an entertaining story, or to make a great home cooked meal, or to make handcrafted items?
There are plenty of things that people can do, that only people can do because people only want them done by people, that can be done by anyone that is not actually at a level that is considered disabled. And even they can do quite a bit.
I’d say it’s closer to the bottom 10% or so that will be a challenge to find productive and rewarding tasks for, but that is the case right now, anyway.
ETA: Though I do agree we need a basic income, or some sort of safety net.
Some part of the population probably will. My theory on that movie was that was just the US, and the rest of the world had built a big wall around us, and sent in just enough foreign aid and care packages and technical support to keep people alive.
How much could you do to maintain your current lifestyle if all the machines stopped working right now?
“Comparison of the IQ distributions indicated that the mean IQ-scores on the test had increased by 9.7 points (the Flynn effect), the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half, and the gains gradually decreased as the IQ of the individuals increased.[11] Some studies have found a reverse Flynn effect with declining scores for those with high IQ.[12][9]”
I believe the term AI is being too broadly applied. Current automatons are doing amazing things but they are not ‘intelligent’. They don’t need to be to replace humans.
I am not sure why that would be. We collectively built what we have now, we will collectively build what we will have then.
If the machines broke now, then we would need to collectively rebuild them. Same as in 100 years.
Either way, if we don’t have the resources of a substantial part of humanity, our life style goes down very quickly. Just making food requires the great majority of your population without modern technologies.
I’m surprised you just blithely assume that will be the case. I feel virtually certain the machinery of 2118 will be designed*, built, and maintained by robots.
*There may be people who will think they are designing stuff, but that will mean they are basically just telling AIs the general parameters of what they want and the AIs are actually doing all the math/architecture/engineering.
It seems that in reality you do get your points from science fiction, not history nor the evidence presented.
So once again, to paraphrase Autor, that is just being too arrogant on the points presented. And on top of that, it is like if no new jobs are appearing thanks to the growing technology.
I know nothing about singing or dancing, but acting takes quite a bit of intelligence, both in memorizing scripts and in breaking down a character and how to play it. I’ve been going to story telling performances, and the stories told are pretty damn complex. It is as hard as writing a short story, probably harder. You don’t just open your mouth and make money from it.
As for cooking, making the same thing over over again in a restaurant can and will be automated. Inventing a dish takes quite a skill set at figuring out which flavors go together. Just watch any of the zillions of cooking challenge shows. Cooking at home is easier, but look at how many people have already delegated that chore to take out places or food packagers. A recipe is an algorithm, and creating one is writing an algorithm, and we all know that not everyone can do that.
Most of the machinery of 2018 is designed*, built, and maintained by robots.
*The process of design has come a long way. Where you used to have dozens of people working on a single schematic, now you have one person designing dozens with the aid of computers. If we get to where a single person is designing hundreds or even thousands by giving the computer general parameters, that is still on a continuum, not a singularity.
It does require some level of intelligence (as do singing and dancing), but it does not require genius level intelligence, and training and education can make anyone above the bottom 10% capable of holding their own, even if they are not the star.
Most food service will be automated, it’s going that way now. As I spent most of my working years in restaurants, and spending some times managing and even being the Chef, I am very aware of how they work. And while I don’t want to watch the cooking challenge shows, (I used to try to because I liked the subject matter, but I really hated the reality show format,) you do bring up another “job” for people. Contestants on reality shows.
The creation of a new dish requires creativity, not high intelligence. It really is just building up a flavor profile to match what you have in your head as to what would be pleasing to the palate, and then arranging it on the plate to look edible. In any case, menu creation and feature design would be the job of the Chef, while his employees would execute it. He could use robots, but not if he wants to have the high quality atmosphere. There are a number of things you have to do to be a 3 or greater star restaurant (forbes/mobile travel guide rating system, you would need to do that to get 1 star in the Michelin.) that really make little sense from a production standpoint, and make no difference to the customer(like fabricating your own steaks), but is simply required to get the grade. I would imagine having an all human staff would remain a requirement for upscale restaurants.
I agree on that last part, although “all human staff” is also on a continuum (given that the staff uses labor-savign devices). But upscale restaurants are also not going to be hiring people from that bottom 25% of the IQ scale.
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