181–190 of 247 posts
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We need to have an AI tax that redistributes wealth back to the "ordinaries" so they can have the resources to be creative. Even if machines can generate writing and music there's no real point of view to fully machine generated material. You can do the thing they said don't quit your day job to do.
What are the things that need to be invented when robots do everything for you?
This is exactly wrong. Automation happened already, 200 years ago. It upended society. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Things changed dramatically, and nothing remotely of that scale is occurring now. We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally co…
I agree, but this only leads to more questions: why? And is it permanent?
I think we are in a temporary lull. Finance people, in the vain of JP Morgan, have gotten very good at controlling the social processes around both physical resources and human output. They keep most people tired and scared to change jobs, so they can be made to focus on production. The rest who are actively problem solving despite those pressures, the finance folks try to steer them towards a maze where big bets are made and equity changes hands often.
We were bison, and now we're cattle. There's more meat, but less frolicking, and no semblance of any kind of ecosystem that produced so many bison-y moments.
Is it forever? I don't think so. We're only fairly recently getting lots of brains trying to discover tools for doing things outside of finance. And still, it's a trickle. Look at all the beautiful brains on this message board, whose output is getting fed into the feedlots of VCs and Paul Graham.
This is exactly wrong. Automation happened already, 200 years ago. It upended society. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Things changed dramatically, and nothing remotely of that scale is occurring now. We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally co…
Thank you! Finally someone who gets it. IMHO these articles are fake news, journalists love beating the Automation is killing jobs drum. IT certainly is changing and outsourcing is swings and roundabouts. But there's more work than ever.
Oh god, stop with this in every article.
This isn't "fake"; it isn't even "news".
News is either fake or not. A researched opinion piece isn't "fake" because you disagree with the conclusions. It might be wrong, but it isn't "fake".
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Marx speaking...
Maybe, but I'm not sure Marx understood that capitalism would have such a potential for wealth distribution. Today, you can buy a 3D printer for 1/20th of the median US salary. You can buy a super computer that fits in your pocket for 1/50th of it. You can call your broker and buy an ownership stake in Apple, Exxon Mobil, or General Electric for smaller fractions than that. Capitalism has actually provided far more a…
Lately I've really been grappling with how to accomplish this, and it is a Very Hard problem.
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I have done a lot of thinking about this. There are 2 things that keep sticking out to me: First, history. History does not make our future look good. Humanity has gone through a few disruptive changes in the way society viewed work and societal contribution. The most recent was with the spread of factories and assembly-line production. The result of the adoption of those structures/technologies was not good. Society…
How was the New Deal sold in to owners of capital who presumably controlled the press and political system? Would a similar approach work today?
Communist parties were gaining steam back then, and we were under threat of having our own Red October if something extreme wasn't done to blunt the effects of the Great Depression.
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You don't have to make machines sentient, you know. Some people seem to think the goal of AI and robotics should be to make more humans, but we already have plenty of humans. We should make machines that do our work more efficiently so we don't have to do it anymore. We can still do the fun stuff of course, like writing and art, and get famous and all that.
I agree, I'm just not sure we'll be able to convince everyone with the capability of making sentient robots that they shouldn't make sentient robots before they make sentient robots. Human labor has solved a lot of problems. The obvious shortcut to solving lots of problems is mimicking human labor. Given the opportunity to take a shortcut to solve a problem (especially at a profit) some manager in some business will…
And zero people can even describe how a sentient robot could be constructed, even with theoretical future hardware. "We'll have as many flops as some models say a brain has, and programmers are creative" is about as far as anyone can get, but I don't think that qualifies as a plan.
So, it's a fun thing to think about, but like all sci-fi it probably isn't the best basis for societal planning.
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A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled. Can you justify that statement?
The IQ distribution is what it is. For instance you won't teach to code or to do something abstract to everyone in a generation.
This is exactly wrong. Automation happened already, 200 years ago. It upended society. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Things changed dramatically, and nothing remotely of that scale is occurring now. We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally co…
Automation today is now destroying service economy jobs, but it's not clear, at least to me, what new sector is ramping up to pick up the displacement slack. The tech sector isn't going to have enough jobs for everyone getting automated away, and this time around automation is unique in that it's attacking pretty much everything all at once. Human drivers are going to be displaced by autonomous vehicles at the same time as financial advisers are being displaced by wealth allocation algorithms at the same time as warehouse workers are being displaced by picker robots, etc.
(I posted this on another thread this week where it was less relevant, so I'll just repost it here and see if anybody notices.) Mass automation is undermining our democracy in a very specific way: it's acting as the ultimate "resource curse." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse "Countries with an abundance of natural resources, specifically non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less e…
The biggest worry here is the automation of law enforcement. Once we're policed by robots, there's nobody to rise up against the dictators.
Maybe we should ensure that every person has one robot to do their work for them, and that's it. No robots for governments and corporations.
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> Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners I think that inequality will increase but not because of owning capital. Rather because this automation will shift demand away from unskilled workers and into software developers, marketing experts, etc. And I do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough, if any. The good news (for the US)…
While we'll have to agree to disagree about ownership of capital leading to increased inequality, I definitely agree with you when you say that you "do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough" to the demand. I think that while education is fundamental, even if it were always of a high quality and free, not everyone has the temperament or innate ability necessary to make the commitment to get…
If it is not capital ownership, then some other inequality mechanism is at work if the automation trend is true, considering that as automation scoops the obvious and not-so-obvious patterns of workflows in the economy out of the labor market, proportionally none of the benefits accrue to those who are left creating that automation. Think about that for a second.
If you are one of the few who create the automation, then by definition what you are doing is currently not amenable to automation. You are creating a fabulous wealth machine with the automation, but by and large, unless you own a capital stake in that exercise, you will not see compensation proportional to the value you bring to the table. It's a curious dynamic to me, because due to classical economics, I would have expected capital to flow more readily to those whose work could not (yet) be automated, to accelerate delivery towards the proven benefits of automation.