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The Software Revolution

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Software Revolution

#191

Post by dikaiosune »

hiou wrote: post #155
dikaiosune wrote: post #60

A number of sibling comments are pointing out that we're just increasing the level of skill necessary to do the available jobs, drawing analogies to the industrial revolution. I think a key bottleneck in this progression is the mental capacity of the workforce. Surely there are biological limits on human mental ability, and while we can definitely bend the rules (education, nutrition, nootropics if they actually work…

Interesting point. But it brings up that scarier part of AI. I believe AI will become better at humans at mental processes far before it will be better than human physical labor. For exactly the points you mention. This is already becoming true for many logistical industries. What happens if AI replaces all the high level decision making positions and humans are relegated to handling the low level "last mile" tasks?…

I would generally agree, even for a fairly limited definition of AI. An aside: IIRC, what you're laying out is the "history" of the Dune universe (and I'm sure many others).

I think that computation tends to replace relatively unskilled labor, relative to the skill of whatever created the AI/algorithm/whatever. So right now we're in a situation where software people are automating jobs which are generally less skilled than their own. Which is a little scary when viewed from the haves/have-not perspective I laid out above, but is much scarier from the AI/meatbag perspective you're talking about. It's not so much a difference between skilled & unskilled labor as it is a question of where on the skill totem pole the algorithm's creator resides.

Regarding order pickers, I think that's just a question of economics. When lots of semi-skilled jobs have been automated away and you have thousands of people clamoring for any chance to be paid, it is frequently cheaper to have them do the work than to have a robot do it. Although Amazon did have robots pick orders this last holiday season, suggesting that perhaps economies of scale have finally caught up on that particular type of manual labor:

http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/

Re: The Software Revolution

#192

Post by leereeves »

puranjay wrote: post #180
shin_lao wrote: post #127

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines. It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence o…

The problem is that it was relatively easy to master the technologies of the industrial revolution. It isn't the same for the software revolution. You can take virtually any adult from any part of the world and teach him how to work in a factory within a few months of study. You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding. I think of myself as rela…

Industrial jobs required a great deal of skill until they were broken down into easy tasks and each worker learned only one task. The work of imagining, planning, and creating the Industrial Revolution occupied the greatest minds of that time.

I find it difficult to imagine "assembly lines" for software, creating coding jobs within the reach of a 50 year old truck driver, but as the tools improve, who knows.

Re: The Software Revolution

#193

Post by ghostly_s »

puranjay wrote: post #180
shin_lao wrote: post #127

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines. It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence o…

The problem is that it was relatively easy to master the technologies of the industrial revolution. It isn't the same for the software revolution. You can take virtually any adult from any part of the world and teach him how to work in a factory within a few months of study. You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding. I think of myself as rela…

Your arrogance is showing. Sure, you could learn how to operate a lathe on an assembly line in a matter of weeks; in just the same way nearly any adult of average education could learn in a matter of weeks to write WordPress templates, or cobble together SQL queries, or etc. etc. To become a master machinist, the kind who can do anything with a lathe that a lathe can be asked to do? Years of dedication and expertise.

Re: The Software Revolution

#194

Post by joesmo »

"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea."

It's terrible sure, but it's popular only because our economy requires it. That is the basis for the whole economy. It's not like people are clamoring to serve McDonalds for minimum wage or clean shit out bathrooms. They have no other choices in this economy. The economy demands it. While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless. They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.

"The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing."

It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.

Re: The Software Revolution

#195

Post by jjoonathan »

sp332 wrote: post #162
gaius wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is certainly one point of view but the legions of highly educated unemployed in Western nations suggest that it isn't actually true.

The difference between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree is halving the unemployment rate. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

Yes, but if we could snap our fingers and educate everybody would the unemployment rate of the newly educated people halve? In other words, can the skilled labor market absorb the excess from the unskilled market without seeing a partially or fully compensating reduction in prices?

It's not impossible but I have my doubts.

Re: The Software Revolution

#196

Post by YAYERKA »

>Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea.

It seems warm and fuzzy to think Sam, and the implicit company he keeps (the ultra rich)--who are "leveraging not only their abilities and luck" but already accrued wealth--can and will redistribute it. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday will simply laugh at this prospect.

I'm not sure why Sam feels the need to call what most of the world is doing worthless. I think it's crude and indicative of a narrow social and cultural experience (which surprises me considering his position).

Believe it or not, there are cultures and groups of people who do not revere technology the way most North Americans do.

Also, a good exercise for Sam (and others possessing a similar world view) might be to think about how many "worthless" people and jobs it takes to accomplish the things he does (including this blog post).

Re: The Software Revolution

#197

Post by alexqgb »

shin_lao wrote: post #127

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines. It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence o…

One of the most notable differences between the Industrial and Information revolutions is that wealth from the former was underwritten by a surge in energy. Wealth from the latter depends on extracting greater value from (more or less) existing supplies. In other words, it's largely about the sudden redistribution of output, as opposed to a change in the underlying supply.

(Relatively) enlightened governing philosophies and new economic theories aside, the Industrial Revolution also involved a monumental uptick in the amount of raw energy humans had to work with. Until this point, the latent economic power contained within fossil fuels remained out of reach. Population and productivity were both effectively capped by the amount of energy we could actually extract from the environment (e.g., caloric, in the form of crops for people and livestock as well as wind for sails and mills, along with hydro small dams and rivers for transport).

Nascent capital markets and industrial processes provided real advantages in this energy-constrained world, but adding steam then oil to the process of industrialization is what really kicked growth into overdrive. This influx of energy (and the economic growth it supported) allowed countries like England to develop populations seven or eight times greater than the agricultural carrying capacity of its arable land in astonishingly short order. The ideas of Adam Smith were important, but wouldn't have gotten nearly as far is they didn't have actual steam trains and ships to carry the people who subscribed to them.

All that said, the transition we're going through now is far from complete. Like the early and painfully disruptive days of the Industrial Revolution, the current concerns about stagnation and wealth concentration may give way once we complete another energy transition. A world supplied by highly distributed, low-cost solar and stored energy arrays (batteries, compressed air, molten salt, etc.) could see an increase in the overall supply, in a fashion that liberates a critical mass of people from the more coercive aspects of the global economy. Tapping the sun directly may prove to be as transformative as tapping ancient deposits of carbon. Indeed, the pre-existence of the information layer may prove to be the thing that makes this possible, just as the process of industrialization had begun before the steam engine kicked it into overdrive.

The big question for the long-range optimists is how do we maintain social and stability and cohesion during the transition?

Re: The Software Revolution

#198

Post by lkrubner »

I disagree with this:

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs"

That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the early industrial revolution, and it was able to export its unemployment. And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else. The so-called Third World was summoned into existence. You can get some sense of this by reading Fernand Braudel's work, "The Perspective of the World"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520081161/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_d...

The software revolution will be similar with some nations winning and many others losing.

Re: The Software Revolution

#199

Post by javajosh »

puranjay wrote: post #180
shin_lao wrote: post #127

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines. It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence o…

The problem is that it was relatively easy to master the technologies of the industrial revolution. It isn't the same for the software revolution. You can take virtually any adult from any part of the world and teach him how to work in a factory within a few months of study. You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding. I think of myself as rela…

>You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code.

Yes, but that's because the art of application programming is (mostly) stuck in the "alchemy" era of science. There is precious little systemization of knowledge, processes, and names. All of these frameworks are actually memes competing for mind-share to be an answer to this need. Of course, having one periodic table for software would be better than having 10 competing ones.

Is the inherent complexity of the ordinary programming task (building, deploying, monitoring reactive FSMs mediating user communication) is roughly the same as chemistry? Too early to tell, but I think not.

Re: The Software Revolution

#200

Post by maw »

lkrubner wrote: post #198

I disagree with this: "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs" That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the…

My advice: if you start learning about history don't stop.
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