What happens when the robots (peacefully) take over?

Great Debates
141

If you believe at all in demand-side economics (and again, I really have trouble understanding how anyone could not), then this is a potential threat at least in the medium-term for the 1% as well. If the number of consumers who can buy their products drops significantly, they are going to have a problem. I say medium-term, because in the long term, automation may get so advanced that as described upthread, as long as they have access to the sun and basic raw materials, the owners of the means of production may be able to construct themselves an arbitrarily cushy lifestyle without need of consumers.

But it’s very difficult to imagine that they will use that ability to make themselves oases of confort while the masses starve and riot. At that point, it seems very likely that either governments will open factories of their own to provide for the people, or the technology may be so cheap and ubiquitous that everyone can have a little factory in their home (which also constructs their home).

So it’s in the near and medium term where things could go a lot of different ways, depending, again, on who holds sway in the policymaking world. Captor, I think you are right on to see threats to blue-collar and service sector jobs; but I think you failed to note the potential for AI to encroach into white collar areas traditionally thought of as part of the “knowledge sector”. I mentioned upthread how jobs like x-ray technician are becoming obsolete; that can apply even to further up the educational foodchain, where law clerks and even some types of attorneys may become unneeded. (Trial lawyers will probably hold on for quite a long time.) These adjustments may be the most painful and disruptive in some ways, as they will affect people who invested more time and educational debt into getting where they are–and the loss of their pride of place in the upper middle-class may be harder to accept than for service workers to adjust to the elimination of their McJobs.

I’m sure glad my wife, who just entered the working world three years ago, is a second grade special ed teacher. I think that job will remain pretty steadily needed to be filled by humans for the foreseeable future. (One of the links I posted recently stated that women’s jobs like nursing, social work, and teaching will be less threatened by automation. Thus we could see a continued acceleration of the “End of Men” phenomenon.)

142

Still perusing various nooks and crannies of the Pew report. This is a point we would do well to keep in mind:

Similarly, it’s quite possible this could happen with jobs. Someone frozen now and thawed in a couple hundred years might find some of the “jobs” and “careers” of that time completely ludicrous, esoteric make-work.

143

It was just a slip actually. I meant something like it’s hard to see how automation could negatively affect economic growth. Of course I agree that the distribution of wealth is very important too.

We’ve gone through this earlier in the thread, but I don’t think “workforce participation” is such a useful measure here because there are lots of reasons for a person not working for a while, some bad some good.
Sticking with unemployment figures, and taking the US as an example, they’ve wobbled around the same mark for a century, indeed estimates for 1850-1900 also show a similar unemployment rate, despite the vast changes that have happened in that time.

144

Okay, good.

I hate to say the unemployment rate is misleading, because it’s something Republicans are always saying, but it kind of is. We could get to a point where only ten percent of the population is in the workforce, and still have the same unemployment rate if people keep dropping out of the workforce and don’t really try to get back in. If we get a guaranteed minimum income, as I and some others are advocating, you can guarantee the unemployment rate will drop substantially.

145

Well it depends on government policy. Several developed countries already have a de facto living allowance, where you can claim unemployment benefits indefinitely. I recall at least one country (Netherlands?) that did want to go the whole hog and call it a living allowance but eventually retreated due to political fallout.

But one thing is clear; a scenario where most people are out of work and can’t afford at least the standard of living we have today doesn’t make sense.

Imagine we’re all in tattered rags because we have no job and can’t afford (robot-made) clothes. Well then how about I learn to make shoes and you learn to make shirts and we trade with each other? IOW the fewer people that can afford what robots produce, the less disruptive they will be to the existing economy.

146

Your point is well taken, but I do think it’s fair to point out that the indigent (in the industrialized world) are more helpless in many ways than the poor people of bygone eras.

147

…which would be a good thing, and that just shows another reason why workforce participation is misleading.

I have to call cite on that one.

My impression is that for most societies, for most of history, if you were born into a poor family you’d almost certainly be poor yourself, having spent your formative years working instead of receiving an education.

And if we’re talking all of the industrialized world, well, much of the industrialized world actually has pretty good social mobility. You can’t look at america and assume everywhere is like that.

148

But I’m not primarily talking about social mobility. I was responding to the idea that if indigent people were shut out of the economy, with no social safety net, they could make clothes and shoes and trade them to each other. My impression (and I’m not sure I can provide the kind of cite you want) is that desperately poor people 75 or 100 years ago were more resourceful about making do with very little. In the countryside, they might gather or grow food, or go hunting for rabbits or squirrels. They could build at least a shack, and gather firewood to stay warm. In the city, they might collect scrap metal or rags and sell them. In either place, the women could make or mend the family’s clothes.

Conservatives will read this and think that sounds like the good old days. I don’t agree at all. I’m glad for the advances in social safety nets that allow people not to live a desperate, hardscrabble, hand to mouth existence. But it seems to me that there’s no denying that in the industrialized world, everyone’s softer in terms of basic survival skills–including hedge fund managers. When that is combined with a lack of marketable job skills, and you live in a world where a long gap on your resume is fatal to your employment chances, that makes the people on the bottom rung pretty helpless.

149

I realize the question of whether modern-day poor people are “helpless” is pretty tangential to the topic of this thread, so I started a new thread on that topic.

150

I agree, it does not make sense, but can any observer of our current political and social climate argue that we are making sense, or moving in any direction but toward the nonsensical? And my fear is the the conservative and libertarian ideologies which are very popular among the One Percent could easily lead to massive human tragedies. The power of the wealthy is in the ascendancy to such an extent that many people would say America is becoming a democracy in name only, ruled in fact by wealthy corporate oligarchs. Libertarian and conservative principles of independence and self-reliance are all very fine, but when 90 percent or more of the populace is unemployable/unnecessary in a fully automated world, things are going to get nasty fast under such principles.

This does not look like a positive outcome to me. The bulk of the US population reduced to subsistence farming and handcrafting in a world where the wealthy own all the land and almost all of the goods? I agree that people will help each other if they can’t get work, but I suspect there will be a lot or rioting and fighting going on before we all turn into post-scarcity Ma and Pa Waltons.

151

It was an extreme example aimed to illustrate a point. And the point was that automation won’t reduce our standard of living.
If no-one can afford robot-made goods / services, then there is no change to the current, modern economy. OTOH if robot-made goods / services displace human labour, it’s because it’s cheaper that way, and society benefits.

Now, when I say “society benefits”, it may be the case that a lot of that benefit falls into the laps of the rich; that’s quite possible and why I agree that government policy and societal attitudes are very important here. I don’t think libertarian ideas are the right way to go in a hypothetical future where everyone’s basic needs at least could be trivially met by a fraction of taxation.

152

It seems the problem of making your own goods to compete with the robotically produced goods is not going to be the cost of the goods themselves, but the input materials. We have determined that the robotic creation of the goods drives the labor value of the good towards zero, so the raw cost of the good becomes the largest factor in manufacturing.

If you can’t afford the shoes the robots make, then you would not be able to afford the cloth, rubber, and/or leather required to make them, same with clothes, furniture, food or any other consumer item that is made mechanically rather than through human labor. They may be cheaper, but as you are even poorer, it moves such things even farther out of reach.

It may be possible to keep everyone alive through a minimal effort on the part of the robots at this point, but that would be at the whims of whoever (or whatever) is controlling the output and distribution of the goods and services produced. The throngs of pensioners would have little value to contribute to the effort of society, and therefore, there would be a continual effort among those who do believe that their contributions are valuable to cut off support to all the freeloaders, even if the support costs literally nothing to them.

The solution then, is to find something useful for all these unemployed people in a post- (or at least near post-) scarcity economy. This is actually easy in any scenarios where the human brain is still more complex than any computer system, which I believe should hold for much longer than Kurzweil or other singularityists (sp?) will. The brain is ridiculously complex, and intelligence is an emergence of that complexity. I do not see that complexity being emulated by designed electronic systems ever. Even if there are as many transistors on a chip as neurons in a human brain, they still will not have the complex and changing connections to each other as neurons do. Some may argue that quantum computing may change that, but quantum computing may also rely on fusion to operate.

Systems like Folding @ Home where human intuition is coupled with computer automation to accomplish modeling tasks that would take much longer with only computer brute force processing could be where the minds of many of the pensioners are focused. I can think of examples in metallurgy and biology that could also make use of this hybrid system. (I do not know of any current projects to use this, but I can think of how to design them.) Software and chip design would also be more enabled by an organic brain than by designed computer systems. Our free time would of course give our more creative types to extend the boundaries of our cultures art and entertainment, less of a concrete value, but valuable nonetheless.

There could be a very real and useful post scarcity economy based on pretty much everyone just sitting around all day and finding ways to make things better, while robotic systems tended to the basic needs.

153

That is taking a very dim view of human nature, one I believe is unwarranted. Sure, there will be Ayn Rand followers who think this way, but they are not going to get anywhere near a majority, especially as it approaches “costing literally nothing to them”. The majority of people already reject this kind of ideology when it really is costing them something.

Nah, you just need the majority of voters to support the government’s protecting their share of the pie by fiat.

154

Have you met humans? Have you seen the way they treat and talk about the homeless and unemployed? I don’t think it’s a dim view so much as not being highly optimistic about the altruism of human nature.

If there are only a few hundred or thousand people who actually own the means of production, they are going to be the ones to determine who gets the products produced. They will have little interest in supporting what they see as dead weight.

While I actually agree with this statement, I fear that we would actually be voting with the minority on it.

155

What’s your evidence for that dour opinion? Look at how much of the federal budget is already essentially transfer payments from the wealthy to the less wealthy. And that is increasing all the time. There are certainly right wing/libertarian think tanks that grouse about this, but they are not winning the day. Votes still count more than money.

156

Without reading it, I think you posted my cite for my “dour opinion.” Republicans and especially tea-partiers would vote away those transfer payments in a heartbeat. While they currently do not have enough power to actually do so, it is not a given that they will not eventually take it. I hope that our society tends towards altruism, but I certainly do not take it as a given. I certainly would not want to depend upon such altruism to support humanity indefinitely.

Point being, there are tasks that can be done by those forced out of the labor market that have enough value to remove the argument that the transfer payments are supporting “dead weight”, and instead that people are being paid and supported for performing a useful function in society.

157

I think you should read the cite! :stuck_out_tongue:

158

I had skimmed it, without reading it before to get an impression of what it said. Now that I have read it, I still feel that that cite proves my point that here are plenty out there that are quite resentful about the current state of transfer payments. I do not see them agreeing to increasing them to a growing population of unemployed.

From the last line of the article, “This raises an obvious and troubling question: Is it reasonable or fiscally responsible to ask the top 20 percent of households to pay for the government benefits of the other 80 percent of households?”

I assume the article wishes us to answer the question “no”, and would continue to do so as the numbers went to 10%/90% or 5%/95% or further.

Whether the article represents the majority opinion is a different matter, obviously at this very moment, it seems that the majority is okay with this situation. I do not see any guarantee that that will remain the case, and that those who would promote or follow the thoughts behind those in your cite will never prevail.

We do need to be ready for there to be a use for all of the unemployed labor workforce, or they will be simply pensioners at the whim of their benefactors, and that is not the most stable arrangement.

159

I’m not deadset against your proposal, I just see it as unnecessary. Why wouldn’t these kinds of conservatives and libertarians grow increasingly *more *marginalized as the percentages go upward?

160

As far as their personal vote, sure. Their ability to influence legislation, I am not so sanguine. Their ability to convince voters to vote against their own best interests has been demonstrated already in the last few elections.

My proposal is a simple one. Instead of being unemployed and sitting around doing nothing “productive” for society, one can sit around and fold proteins, furthering our scientific knowledge. They can help to create new alloys or model drug interactions too. These are valuable things to society, and things that computers will be a long time catching up to the ability of a human brain.

This is something we probably ought to be doing now. Creating productive games, and incorporating them into current games would be a good start. I could see a pharmaceutical company paying an MMORPG to add a protein folding game into it’s quest system. I see many games with fairly complex puzzles to solve for in game rewards, having a puzzle game that has real world benefits would be a simple step most gamers wouldn’t even notice. If you had to fold a protein, or model an alloy, or even help plan a Hamiltonian route, in order to open a chest or create an artifact, then your gaming is now helping society, and in return, society has reason to continue supporting you for more than esoteric “humanitarian” reasons.