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100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

hyponymo.us

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Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#31

Post by treelovinhippie »

craigyk wrote: post #20
treelovinhippie wrote: post #8

At my last job, something I tried to push unsuccessfully was a company-wide automation initiative. Imagine a company-wide incentive structure for automation whereby if you automate 90-100% of your job, you receive massive bonuses. If you completely automate your job, the bonus could be the entirety of your annual salary as a single payout. Or perhaps a combination of bonus and equity. So now you're out of a job. But…

This is essentially a stand-in for workers "owning the means of production". Congrats, you are now a marxist (dirty commie according to some).

Damn commies! :)

The founders, directors and investors could still own 51% of the company.

Heck, if they wanted they could offer only the bonus payout incentive structure with no equity or revenue share. In essence that would still encourage employees to automate the company. Employees work themselves out of a job, and the owners reap all of the automated revenues.

Or you could not be a dick.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

patmcc wrote: post #12

I really can't imagine 100% unemployment, because I think there will always be a demand for actual human people in some roles: hairdresser, waiter, singer, prostitute, masseuse, athlete, actor, croupier, etc. Will robots/AI be good enough to do all these jobs? Sure, they might even be now. But as long as some people want to be sung to / served by / entertained by an actual flesh-and-blood human, there will still be e…

So the question is - do we really want to keep our market economy and see if it will work out if entire population of the planet works as prostitutes?

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#33

Post by TeMPOraL »

pornel wrote: post #28
patmcc wrote: post #12

I really can't imagine 100% unemployment, because I think there will always be a demand for actual human people in some roles: hairdresser, waiter, singer, prostitute, masseuse, athlete, actor, croupier, etc. Will robots/AI be good enough to do all these jobs? Sure, they might even be now. But as long as some people want to be sung to / served by / entertained by an actual flesh-and-blood human, there will still be e…

Maybe some of these jobs won't be replaced with a robot, but will become completely irrelevant/unnecessary? Instead of having a robot hairdresser, what if cutting hair wasn't even a thing? e.g. maybe we'll all get holo-wigs that let us change hairstyles as easily as profile pictures. Similarly we don't talk to switchboard operators to enter URL in the browser addressbar. We've got AI that does it better and doesn't j…

Exactly. And yes, in principle we could keep inventing completely random and absurd jobs just to keep people busy earning for living - but then, what's the point? Nowdays we have to work because resources are scarce. If we reach the point of post-scarcity, forcing people to slave away their lives for food and shelter seems just evil.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#34

Post by treelovinhippie »

udfalkso wrote: post #30
treelovinhippie wrote: post #8

At my last job, something I tried to push unsuccessfully was a company-wide automation initiative. Imagine a company-wide incentive structure for automation whereby if you automate 90-100% of your job, you receive massive bonuses. If you completely automate your job, the bonus could be the entirety of your annual salary as a single payout. Or perhaps a combination of bonus and equity. So now you're out of a job. But…

I'm curious, what kind of company? What industry?

Really small web dev company. Almost 15 years in business. 15 employees. <$2m annual revenue. Something like 90% of the revenues went to wages, and their processes were ridiculously slow. They had 3 actual devs, 3 designers, 2 SEO people and the rest were managers or admin staff. So many manual processes that could clearly be automated.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#35

Post by rhino369 »

[deleted] wrote: post #15

[deleted]

Just because it happened twice--from ag to factories from factories to service--doesn't mean there will be a huge new need for employment. In the past, human consumption just increased. I'm not so sure there will be a need for all that much more consumption. If the promise of near human level AI occurs, we'd need to have exponential growth in consumption to keep up the pace.

Also, a lot of those jobs disappeared forever in the third world and never came back. Ag jobs were never really replaced with manufacturing job. Only now are some third world countries getting manufacturing jobs. If they are replaced with automated manufacturing those coding, engineering, and management jobs will go to the first world.

So maybe it works out for America and Europe. But someplace like Indonesia and India get permafucked yet again by a new industrial revolution.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

nhaehnle wrote: post #24
[deleted] wrote: post #15

[deleted]

Agriculture provides for the basic needs of humans. What do humans do once their basic needs are met? Some of them go on to do meaningful things that expand the human condition, such as devoting themselves to the arts and the sciences. The vast majority of them turn to zero-sum status games. This is a serious problem, because the more physical wealth can be provided by robots, the more those status games necessarily…

Not only you have zero-sum status games, you have plain old zero-sum games, which do nothing but just waste resources. Prime examples: marketing, political campaigns. Every additional effort people put in those two basically goes to cancel-out the effort of everyone else, giving you a system in which you can waste infinite resources for no marginal gain.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#37

Post by oconnore »

slagfart wrote: post #22

The article alludes to one core bastion of economics - "the invisible hand", without mentioning another - "as humans, we are creatures of infinite wants". With that in mind, a computer can never truly replace a human, as there would never be a purpose in creating a machine that 'wants' things that are different to its owner. Along the same lines, as robots fulfil each current human want, new wants will simply emerge.…

> I'm likely to keep working in my job to have this

You are assuming that humans will remain better at developing towards the remaining non-automated desires of humans. That is unlikely. When a robot is able to reconfigure your house to meet predicted desires, you will probably (and most people will certainly) no longer be relevant in any job that you (or they) are capable of performing.

Anyway, that doesn't matter. What matters is that even if you are a super elite engineer that can compete a few years longer than the average joe, that doesn't fix the problem for some % >50 of the population that are already being rapidly obsoleted.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#38

Post by norswap »

> Instead, my job will be outsourced to a datacenter. Everything I do professionally, from reading and giving feedback on specs to estimating development schedules to architecting and typing in the code and writing unit tests to reviewing others' code, every one of these things will be subject to automation. We can't do it now, of course, not at any price.

The whole thing derives from these flawed premises. Machines are incredibly dumb. Even these machine-learning wizz-things. They can do statistics, inferences, correlations. That's very very far from enough, especially for something like programming, which we can see as turning a spec into code. First, one still has to write a spec (so the "programming" isn't totally gone). Second, it means you essentially need to have "solved" natural language processing; as well as have assigned semantic values to linguistic constructs. Good luck with that.

At this point, I feel compelled to point out that humans don't agree on the meanings of what they say. Most of the time, humans can't write software that meets a spec. That's because of ambiguity, and machines are way way worse at dealing with that than humans are.

I think the error is simply to think the current rate of progress will keep going (and actually even the idea that there's been an acceleration of progress in AI recently is an illusion -- what we're seeing is increased application). It's the same error the fathers of AI made when they assumed everything would be solved in a matter of years. That's where the expression "AI winter" comes from.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#39

Post by gnaritas »

slagfart wrote: post #22

The article alludes to one core bastion of economics - "the invisible hand", without mentioning another - "as humans, we are creatures of infinite wants". With that in mind, a computer can never truly replace a human, as there would never be a purpose in creating a machine that 'wants' things that are different to its owner. Along the same lines, as robots fulfil each current human want, new wants will simply emerge.…

You're rather missing the point; when robots are intelligent enough to replace you, you won't have a job nor will anyone else. All your new wants will handled by robot works, if you can still afford them now that you're out of work. This idea that there's always new work for humans will not hold once we have AI; that's the whole point.

Re: 100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over

#40

Post by api »

If we dealt rationally and benevolently with it, 100% unemployment would be an age of abundance... almost a post-scarcity society. I do not expect to see it soon, but I think it's possible. If technology continues to advance at the same pace it has for the past 50 years and if we can engineer our way out from under the impending fossil fuel energy crunch, I'd say it's probable within the century.

Even before things get as extreme as effectively "100% unemployment," I could certainly see a massive drop in the need for labor. We may already be seeing the leading edge of this.

It wouldn't mean nobody would do any work, but it would mean that basically everyone would be a trust fund brat and able to work on whatever they want.

Truly intelligent beings would do that.

But so far we aren't known for being that intelligent. We will probably continue with means-justifies-the-end market fundamentalism, maybe with a bit of ham-fisted wealth redistribution done in an unfair and inefficient way thrown in to keep the masses from rioting too much.

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