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The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#161

Post by beat »

I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run out of work, because software is inherently creative. It's the uncreative jobs that rely on humans as muscle or control mechanisms that are in danger.

It's not like humanity has never gone through this before, either. Two centuries ago, 98% of people were employed in farming. Today, it's more like 3% and falling. But it took generations for the robots (farm machinery) to take over. It wasn't as rapid as, say, the rise of self-driving trucks will be.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#162

Post by ozborn »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #116
leereeves wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans expect and demand a lifestyle most Indians only dream of. For example, electric power consumption per capita is 765 kWh in India, 12,988 kWh in the USA. [1] 1: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

Admittedly, the vast majority of India is nowhere near as cold as the vast majority of America. Americans have to spend energy avoiding death by frost much of the year.

Like many living in the southern USA my air conditioning expenses are much higher than my heating expenses, I'm sure many Indians wouldn't mind air conditioning either.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#163

Post by yummyfajitas »

auggierose wrote: post #155
yummyfajitas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc. Now the "…

I don't want my children to be taken care of by people forced by the government to work. I would want them to enjoy that work AND be skilled in it.

No one is forced to do anything. Anyone who doesn't want a government job is free to refuse and make their own way in the world - in fact, that's the preferred option.

If you are actually saying you don't want your children taken care of by someone doing it for the money (or prefer a person selling the "artisinal child care" persona), that's fine. Many wealthy people in the west can afford to hold out for such things.

Others are less picky and just need a responsible adult to keep their children from eating poop or dying of thirst, and teaching them a little Marathi is just a bonus. Should those people be deprived since the service doesn't meet your standards? Note that public schools mainly just meet the latter standard - should we get rid of them also?

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#164

Post by js8 »

cousin_it wrote: post #17
js8 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does he think that having high living standard is about, other than burning resources? By his definition of efficiency, a dead planet is the most efficient.

The burning of resources by robots doesn't by itself contribute to a higher living standard, unless you're measuring the living standard of robots :-)

I thought the point of having robots is to produce more so more can be consumed by people, having higher living standards. Robots (as described in the article) do not have living standard, because they don't have consciousness. They are conceptually no different from any other tool, which requires maintenance, but increases productivity.

So they eventually should contribute to higher living standard (that's their raison d'etre), although of course there are issues of social inequality, which however the OP's argument doesn't seem to address at all.

The efficiency in economics is always defined under assumption that it's somehow externally given (by human desires) what we want to produce. For example, efficiency in producing 1000 cars is given by how much materials and energy you need. But you cannot say that producing 100 cars is always more efficient than producing 1000 cars, because this is given by human desires; by that logic, the most efficient would be if Earth had no humans or even life at all.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#165

Post by system16 »

beat wrote: post #161

I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run out of work, because software is inherently creative. It's the uncreative jobs that rely on humans as muscle or control mechanisms that are in danger. It's not like humanity has never gone through this before, either. Two centuries ago, 98% of people were empl…

A lot of software development is far from creative. Many company projects involve making versions of X that do Y (Facebook for the enterprise!), or modifying an existing tool to fit a new requirement. A lot of it comes down to putting together existing pieces, and while there aren't a lot of solutions today that can accomplish this effectively without humans, I think it's a bit short-sighted to think there won't be in the future and that just because you are a developer you are exempt from this.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#166

Post by johngalt »

Technology has been reducing the need for human labor since the invention of the plow. And yet we aren't all unemployed hunter-gatherers. You could argue that 'this time it's different', but you have to at least acknowledge that luddites of every generation have made similar claims and been wrong every time. Literally tried and proven wrong for centuries.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#167

Post by auggierose »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #163
auggierose wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want my children to be taken care of by people forced by the government to work. I would want them to enjoy that work AND be skilled in it.

No one is forced to do anything. Anyone who doesn't want a government job is free to refuse and make their own way in the world - in fact, that's the preferred option. If you are actually saying you don't want your children taken care of by someone doing it for the money (or prefer a person selling the "artisinal child care" persona), that's fine. Many wealthy people in the west can afford to hold out for such things…

It is a matter of how that job offer is set up. If the terms are "pick one of these 100 government jobs or we cut your benefits" then clearly the people you will get for that job will be different than your standard public school teacher, who is supposed to have studied for that job (at least that is how it is in Germany). IF on the other hand you establish child care as a proper job that people can take or leave, just like being a public school teacher, then that would be adequate. But I would want some government regulated certification for that job, because what being a "responsible adult" means is too vague and too subjective for child care.

So, if child care is just another job (as it is now), what would your proposal mean? Basically, that the government pays for an army of child carers, and that that army would be funded by tax. Just like the public school system.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#169

Post by PeterisP »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #158
PeterisP wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those jobs are impossible without a very high inequality. In the first world, there is a much smaller gap between the average wage and the minimum allowed wage than in India, making impossible many jobs that are time intensive with low revenue. An engineer can have a cook and a driver if they make ten times as much as a cook or a driver; this arrangement doesn't really work if a typical engineer makes e.g. two or thr…

India has lower income inequality than the US. Your hypothesis seems falsified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

This measure of inequality is mostly influenced by the distance between the mean income and the largest earners (who constitute a huge portion of the total GDP), however, I still maintain that in India there is a much larger distance between the mean income and the lowest wages of simple laborers/maids/walas/etc than the first world.

It seems that you are from India, can you give an anecdotal example of how large is difference between the income of "typical" experienced white collar specialist and the income of cheapest maids, cooks or cigarette walas, the bottom part of the labor pool?

E.g. in the UK the median hourly wage is roughly twice as much as the minimum; the very very lowest possible paying job pays half that of a "normal" average job; and statistics show that the median salary of a software engineer, considered a lucrative career, is 6 times that of the minimum.

Obviously the average person can't buy much of services (no matter how unskilled and lowpaid) of others, since buying 40 hours/week of anyone costs at least half of their total income; and a software engineer could have a full-time (again, 40hr/week not the whole week) cook/maid/driver/whatever only if he paid him at least 1/6th of his total income.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#170

Post by pmyjavec »

johngalt wrote: post #166

Technology has been reducing the need for human labor since the invention of the plow. And yet we aren't all unemployed hunter-gatherers. You could argue that 'this time it's different', but you have to at least acknowledge that luddites of every generation have made similar claims and been wrong every time. Literally tried and proven wrong for centuries.

There is nothing to be replaced by in the first place, because most jobs are just arbitrary, and non-required. Not all, but most. I'm sure most people could get by on a fraction of what they actually do.

It just comes down to, people don't really know what they want. That's why we work like we do in the first place, most jobs are just jobs for the sake of it, 9-5, Monday to Friday keeping peoples minds occupied and keeping those at the top important. This includes "special" titles like, CIO, CTO, CEO etc.

Ultimately humans need very little to be happy and survive, but instead we have invented economies and lots of arbitrary stuff, luxuries, we don't really need, jobs are how one gets those useless things.

When I hear about AI and robots taking over the world, taking our jobs etc, it's nice to be able to say, "oh well, there goes sitting in a building 9-5 like a goldfish in a bowl". It's also sad for the robots :(

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