Onward, to glory.
[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
It’s not technology that’s holding us back at this point.
There needs to be some sort of drastic social change for anything like the above to happen.
[/QUOTE]
Bolding for the most succinct and well typed statement made by anyone, ever. More and more this kind of irony will grate on the masses who see and use employment beating technology every day.
Is it possible we are in the transitional phase already?
I guess it depends on how you define it; but when you see the size of the labour force shrink like it has the past few years, combined with increased corporate profits and the kind of automation I described just upthread (automating even a “knowledge worker” type job, in IT/customer service), I don’t see how one can avoid the conclusion that at the least, we are in *a *transitional phase, whether or not it is *the *transitional phase.
Yeah that was probably a better way of putting it. A transition, not the. Currently it feels like we have invented the ashphalt part, now we need to turn that into highways. I must say though if 15 years ago somebody gave me (somehow) a working Siri circa 2014 I would have grovelled at the feet of the robot gods then and there. Maybe.
The painful thing is it will be hard for people to let go of the old wisdom that more jobs = more prosperity, even when it becomes obvious on paper that it is no longer so.
Ain’t that the truth.
And yeah, Siri kicks ass, but in a few years will look embarrassingly crude.
That was something (one of the many things) I really loved about the movie Her (very mild spoilers follow). The Siri-type OS he interacts with at the beginning of the movie is very smooth, definitely much more so than Siri. But then later when he gets the “OS1” that is marketed as the “world’s first truly intelligent OS”, she lets him know he got an email from someone and out of habit, he says “Read email” like he used to say to his old OS (or “play melancholy song”, etc.). She, slightly miffed, mocks him by responding in an exaggerated “robotic” voice, “OK-I-will-read-email-now”, and he apologises and switches to “what’s it say?”.
Rest assured, my friends. Libertarians and conservatives will just point to the Industrial Revolution, when the human race went from being 90 percent agrarian workers to less than ten percent agrarian workers, but said workers were able to find new jobs in the cities running the new machines.
They seem to have forgotten ENTIRELY about the huge social disruptions and human misery that were involved. Many workers were paid wages so low they literally starved to death while employed – because that’s the free market for ya! This looks to be much worse, because as robots and computer intelligences become more sophisticated, the RANGE of jobs they can do will increase. So even if new jobs are created, robots and computers will be able to do THEM better as well. That was not an issue in the Industrial Revolution. Our conservative and libertarian friends seem to have entirely overlooked this trifling little difference. Because they don’t want to see it.
And fundamentally they have internalised the Protestant work ethic, and believe you are just not a decent, worthwhile human being if you aren’t working hard.
That is a thing that will need to fall by the wayside if we are ever to advance beyond the current era. I notice a brother of mine, who is a fair bit older (creeping up on his 40’s) and who very much has internalized that ethic, even if he is not protestant. Six days a week, 10 hours minimum with plenty of overtime. What time he has spare he uses to excise whatever healthy male aggression is left over - lifting weights or cycling etc. And he wonders why he cannot keep a lady partner around for very long. Its a specific complaint more than a few of his lady friends have had, that he works too hard or is never around. It always ends the same way.
In my own generation, though, I can see the cracks appearing in this kind of thinking. It is not so much “work harder” as it is “work smarter”. People are slowly realising that humans have obligations to themselves not fulfilled by employment. A bit of time to stop and smell the roses kinda thing, I guess.
Yeah, the millennials really do seem to have brought a much better perspective, though it leads the older generations to gripe about them even more than the average “kids today” talk.
Hello All
a lot going on on this thread and not sure where to start and as i am dyslexic i will work my way backwards. You bring up automated cars and the like. For certain of the world military which may already enjoys this, saving lives currently and people with mobility issues ( that can afford it) I think that will be a serious upgrade in the state of the human condition in the future.
I do ask myself though with regards to the general public when they have full access to this tech who will be liable, in the car accident?
Yep. I love driving, but even I think there’s a great advantage in being able to use my journey time to read, or watch TV or whatever. And the drive home while intoxicated is the “killer app”.
Yeah, this is widely acknowledged as one of the biggest hurdles to this technology catching on. I’m sure it will be a pain in the ass while manual and automated cars routinely share the same roads and different countries / states are bound to have a different take on things.
But, since an automated car has to gather a hell of a lot of data anyway, they should trivially have “black box” functionality. Meaning, in the event of a collision they have stored data on exactly what the car did and why, videos of the road (or at least, stored sensor data that you can reconstruct into a video later), data on the car’s current state etc.
It should be possible to work out who or what was at fault. That will certainly help simplify the legal issues.
ETA: Welcome to the Dope!
Liability in car accidents will become a MUCH less important issue because car accidents will become much, much rarer. There will be no drunk drivers. There will be no drivers who are in dire need of sleep. There will be no road rage. This may be the most important benefit of driverless cars.
Yeah, I would expect fatalities especially to drop to the level we see in air travel, if not lower. When they do happen it will most likely be from some kind of equipment failure rather than “driver error”.
Hi Mijin,
Thanks for the welcome, much appreciated. Seems like there are a few interesting characters here, hope to enjoy myself and be less ignorant, sounds doable.
You and several others have made some astute observations and comments.
The black box would be an interesting aspect.
I understood the OP to be asking about transition, which I think we have been in for a while now. I suppose I think that how we introduce and implement legislation is a factor.
I don’t think that economic models and principals will be changing any time soon.
I don’t either, I think the economic models and cultural attitudes, especially among the wealthy and powerful, will lag considerably behind the need for them to change, resulting in much unnecessary human misery.
Hi Evil Captor,
pleasure to meet you.
Interesting comment about the reduction in accidents. I was going with door number 2, that initially car accidents would increase, as the roads will have to accomadate both humans and the AC. Some people are unpredictable and aggressive, and may not realize the other car is automated
Pew has produced an extensive report on this subject after interviewing a number of experts. They are divided nearly equally on whether the automation/AI revolution will or will not eliminate more jobs than it creates by 2025. (I think their time frame is a bit short, as at least one of their experts noted.) One of the interesting points there is how little automation is talked about in terms of people choosing what job field to enter, and the example of X-ray technician is given as a field that was once solidly needed and well-paying, but is likely to go the way of the linotype operator.
Interesting responses to this Pew report in:
Slate
NYT
The Atlantic
Tangentially: in the process of reading these, I found an interesting tweet from Elon Musk:
I think it’s probable too, but somehow I expect that digital superintelligence to be kind and gentle, like that shown in the excellent movie Her. I don’t see anything to fear there, except I suppose a little dent in our pride. But very few of us get to be Nobel Prize winners as is, or titans of industry. So we are already used to being the hoi polloi while the bigshots run things.
The Pew report was interesting, in that almost half of those interviewed thought that automation was gong to be an overall hindrance to human employment, and hence, the human economy. Especially in light of a very perceptive comment by one of the readers of the Atlantic article in the cite: “An important point to keep in mind is the people surveyed have a strong incentive to place technological progress in a positive light. Their own living depends on it.”
So half of the people in technology related industries think that automation is going to be a major problem for, if not destroy, the US economy, even though thinking so is not in their own best interests.
I’d say the handwriting is on the wall, folks. We need a new paradigm for how we distribute wealth, and we need it badly. And the conservatives/libertarians who are the majority among the One Percenters are not going to find any such paradigms attractive, because the old paradigms sure have worked for them.
Your “hence” doesn’t follow. Saying that something may increase unemployment is not the same thing as saying the economy will suffer.
Indeed, it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario where automation could harm an economy; if a robot’s productivity is lower than a human’s, why use it?
As I’ve said upthread though, just because a machine puts someone out of doing some job, doesn’t mean the net result is the number of jobs goes down by one. If that were the case, unemployment would have reached 100% long ago.
I would say you both made logical leaps that are unwarranted. True, that “hence” is not necessarily right–it really depends on what policymakers do, as one of the experts noted in the Pew report. But I was taken aback by this statement:
You seem to be asserting that the only relevant measure of the health of an economy is total productivity, regardless of how capital is distributed. I understand that not everyone sees the economy in as Keynesian a way as I do; but this seems so far the other way to be incredibly radical and completely unsupportable.
I understand you are arguing in a subsequent paragraph that employment will not drop significantly in tandem with automation (although I do wonder how you explain the continued decreases we have seen in a workforce participation). But I am really taking issue specifically with the part I quoted, in which you seem to say that it doesn’t matter even if there is mass unemployment. I think it could lead to a healthy economy, if there is enough government intervention to assure a guaranteed minimum income for everyone. But to say that as long as per capita GDP goes up, the economy is healthy regardless of whether such interventionary steps are taken…I just don’t understand how you can defend such a position.
Well, good point. For the One Percenters the economy has been going gangbusters throughout the 2000s, even after that little hiccough we call The Great Recession. Even for the average guy, it’s been … The Great Recession. I personally long for the day when there’s no relationship at all between the economy and unemployment, because that will almost certainly mean we’re living n post-scarcity society. I suspect we are halfway there already … only 60 percent of Americans work. But I don’t think the lot of the bulk of the 40 percent who don’t work is all that peachy-keen.
So, you’re assuming that when a human laborer is replaced by a robot, the wealth the robot creates will go to the laborer? Interesting notion! Tell me more!
Ah, I think I see what you’re driving at. You’re one of those who think that the threat posed by robotic and intelligent system automation is no different than any other kind of technological displacement. If that is your line of reasoning, I think you are wrong. The thing that makes intelligent systems and robots different is that, as they become more advanced and widespread, the RANGE of jobs they can do will increase. It’s true that machinery took out more and more jobs as the Industrial Revolution took hold, but they never had human cognition, or anything like it. They typically couldn’t be programmed to do multiple tasks. But just as soon as the robotics people manage to get expert system that can mimic the human ability to see things and manipulate them the way humans do, virtually every job in the labor area and many in the service sector are gonna go bye-bye.
Now many who are not alarmed by this prospect say that humans will develop new jobs to make up for it. But it’s always very pie in the sky optimism, just a dumb assumption that because this has occurred in the past that it will occur in the future, even though there are very specific reasons why it won’t, as I’ve stated. So if you want me to buy into your assumption, maybe you can fill in some details, eh? Are we all gonna be doing crafts on Etsy.com or what?