The Software Revolution • Hacker News Board

Re: The Software Revolution

#311

Post by logicchains » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 12:05 AM UTC

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…

>And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else.

This was because of the West getting richer, not everyone else getting poorer. Had the 'third world' countries had the right economic structures in place they too would have gotten richer like the West, much as East Asia has caught up to the West's economic development since economic and social reforms after WW2.

Re: The Software Revolution

#312

Post by chipsy » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 12:27 AM UTC

alexqgb wrote: post #197

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 philosoph…

There is also an nascent energy transition towards renewables now.

Re: The Software Revolution

#313

Post by tedunangst » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 12:51 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #267

Micaiah_Chang wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, sorry for giving the impression that it'd be a supervillain. My intention was to indicate that it'd be a weird intelligence, and that by default weird intelligences don't do what humans want. There are some other examples which I could have given to clarify (e.g. telling it to "make everyone happy" could just result in it giving everyone heroine forever, telling it to preserve people's smiles could result in it f…

So like it's clear to me why you wouldn't want to take a system based on AI-like technology and have it control air traffic or missile response. But it doesn't take a deep appreciation for the dangers of artificial intelligence to see that. You can just understand the concept of a software bug to know why you want humans in the observe/decide/act loop of critical systems. So there must be more to it than that, right?…

Didn't you see Transcendence? The AI is going to invent all sorts of zero days and exploit those critical systems to wrest control from the humans. And then come the nanites.

Re: The Software Revolution

#314

Post by xj9 » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 12:52 AM UTC

cwp wrote: post #240

briholt wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the scope of factories in the industrial revolution, I think he's clearly referring to low-skill assembly line work, which made up the vast majority of jobs. You're referring to master craftsman. The problem with software is that there's no known way to create assembly-line-style software with lots of low skill labor. It can only be made by at least semi-skilled craftsman. Being able to cobble together an SQL quer…

Yeah, but the software revolution doesn't require everyone to be coders, just as the industrial revolution didn't require everyone to be lathe designers. There are definitely non-coding jobs being created by the software revolution. Cobbling together SQL queries, bashing spreadsheets together, creating graphs, cleaning up data for further processing. These are exactly the kind of things that low(ish) skilled people w…

Cobbling together SQL queries, bashing spreadsheets together, creating graphs, cleaning up data for further processing.

Its my job to make it so people don't have to do any of these things.

Re: The Software Revolution

#315

Post by rory » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 1:02 AM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #192

puranjay wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

I see Mechanical Turk as pretty close to this idea.

Re: The Software Revolution

#316

Post by sparaker » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 1:02 AM UTC

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…

Every revolution has its downsides. But i think this revolution might just give us a break through from boring tasks and create opportunities for creative exploration one that we currently have in very small quantity.

Re: The Software Revolution

#317

Post by jameshart » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 1:11 AM UTC

Micaiah_Chang wrote: post #280

tptacek wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like it's clear to me why you wouldn't want to take a system based on AI-like technology and have it control air traffic or missile response. But it doesn't take a deep appreciation for the dangers of artificial intelligence to see that. You can just understand the concept of a software bug to know why you want humans in the observe/decide/act loop of critical systems. So there must be more to it than that, right?…

The "more to it" is "if the AI is much faster at thinking than humans, then even humans in the observe/decide/act are not secure". AI systems having bugs also imply that protections placed on AI systems would also have bugs. The fear is that maybe there's no such thing as a "superintelligence proof" system, when the human component is no longer secure. Note that I don't completely buy into the threat of superintellig…

First: what do you mean 'upgrade everything from human secure'? I think if we've learnt anything recently it's that basically nothing is currently even human secure, let alone superintelligent AI secure.

Second: most doomsday scenarios around superintelligent AI are, I suspect, promulgated by software guys (or philosophers, who are more mindware guys). It assumes the hardware layer is easy for the AI to interface with. Manufacturing nanites, bioengineering pathogens, or whatever other WMD you want to imagine the AI deciding to create, would require raw materials, capital infrastructure, energy. These are not things software can just magic up, they have to come from somewhere. They are constrained by the laws of physics. It's not like half an hour after you create superintelligent AI, suddenly you're up to your neck in gray goo.

Third: any superintelligent AI, the moment it begins to reflect upon itself and attempt to investigate how it itself works, is going to cause itself to buffer overrun or smash its own stack and crash. This is the main reason why we should continue to build critical software using memory unsafe languages like C.

Re: The Software Revolution

#318

Post by calroc » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 1:48 AM UTC

nightski wrote: post #159

jnbiche wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic income. People may scoff, but this is one of the extremely rare ideas that can draw significant support from both sides of the isle in the US. There are pockets of strong opposition to the idea on both the right and the left, but I can only hope that the far left's opposition to basic income continues. That opposition in and off itself makes most politicians in this country take a serious look at the idea.

Since I am not an economist or very experienced in these matters may I ask what would prevent the cost of goods simply going up due to basic income being supplied? Wouldn't we end up in the same situation all over again except the government would then be forced to write checks as the population would be dependent on them due to increased costs?

The "problem" that basic income is trying to solve is the massive increase in productive capacity due to automation, of which the increase of unemployment is a symptom. It's not so much that supply would meet demand (and so prevent prices going up), as that basic income allows demand to keep up with supply even as automation makes more with less labor.

Re: The Software Revolution

#319

Post by jjoonathan » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 1:51 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #204

jjoonathan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I don't think that educating more people will make educated people worth as little as uneducated people are now. Educated people are (on average!) more productive, so the economy will be larger and the average paycheck should go up.

Yes, educating workers makes them more valuable. I agree.

No, the fact that a worker is more valuable does not mean they will get paid more. "More valuable" only implies a larger upper bound for what the company would be willing to pay were the employee's skills very scarce. However, almost by definition this is not the case for the majority of the labor market: supply and demand have a much larger effect on wages than productivity. Note how productivity has been rising at the same time as wages have been falling in, IIRC, the lower 90% of US household incomes, so this isn't just a theoretical distinction. For most people in the US it's a harsh reality. It is indicative of our fortunate positioning wrt supply/demand that we can even entertain the thought of getting paid in proportion to the value we create.

Small changes in supply/demand can have disproportionate effects on price, so adding a seemingly modest number of educated people to the market could theoretically send aggregate wages tanking far below where they were originally even if each and every employee was individually more valuable to their employer. I don't think the effect will be that extreme, I'm just stating the possibility in order to highlight how dramatic the distinction between value and wages can get.

Re: The Software Revolution

#320

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 2:00 AM UTC

nightski wrote: post #159

jnbiche wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic income. People may scoff, but this is one of the extremely rare ideas that can draw significant support from both sides of the isle in the US. There are pockets of strong opposition to the idea on both the right and the left, but I can only hope that the far left's opposition to basic income continues. That opposition in and off itself makes most politicians in this country take a serious look at the idea.

Since I am not an economist or very experienced in these matters may I ask what would prevent the cost of goods simply going up due to basic income being supplied? Wouldn't we end up in the same situation all over again except the government would then be forced to write checks as the population would be dependent on them due to increased costs?

> Since I am not an economist or very experienced in these matters may I ask what would prevent the cost of goods simply going up due to basic income being supplied?

Prices of goods demanded by the group of people receiving a net benefit from basic income (which, even though BI itself is universal, isn't everyone, because its funded by progressive taxation, which makes it a net downward transfer of wealth) would almost certainly go up with a basic income. The thing that suggests that the increase in price would generally be restrained such that the quantity of goods the net beneficiaries could afford would still increase despite the price level increase is "elasticity".