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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

#51

Post by dm2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #43
norswap wrote: post #38

> 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…

First of all, > Machines are incredibly dumb. Even these machine-learning wizz-things. They can do statistics, inferences, correlations. Do you think human brain does something more? All we can do is statistics, inferences and correlations, and we do it poorly. Moreover, there is an even bigger problem than 100% automation of everything - namely, the automation of 50% of jobs. What are we going to do with half of the…

Other technologies will make the need for jobs obsolete.

It's called a post-scarcity society and it must be achieved at the same time or slightly before most jobs become automated.

A molecular re-arranger would be the holy grail of a post-scarcity society.

Also, you're not giving enough credit to the human brain. Whatever it does, we can't even get close to replicating it with current computer technology.

Yes, they can emulate a bee or an ant with computers, but that creature doesn't have the ability to reason and come up with ideas, and dream (as far as we know and are emulating).

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

#52

Post by redeemer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #26
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 sounds like a cool idea - if and only if everyone coordinates to it together fairly, which seems extremely hard to achieve. I can see tons of caveats, e.g. - If you automate away your non-tech co-worker (someone who can't contribute much to the automation of jobs other than his own), will he get the bonus? If so, how do you assure people doing the automating won't feel treated unfairly as the non-tech guy just g…

> If you automate away your non-tech co-worker ... will he get the bonus?

Yes, and you get nothing. It's fair; just don't automate away other people's jobs, automate away your own.

> If someone automates you away, will you get anything?

Yes, 100% of the bonus. It's not a choice, you must leave. I still think that's fair.

> If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away?

You don't automate away your co-workers unless you like doing free work. Problem solved. If you have the most difficult to automate away job, you entered into it knowingly. The market will ensure that those jobs will be higher paid by supply and demand.

This model doesn't require cooperation to work, just a relatively clear set of job responsibilities and a clear definition of what it means for you to be automated away.

I actually really love this idea, from an employer's perspective.

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

#53

Post by Osmium »

hodwik wrote: post #47

The human mind, while having less data storage, and being drastically slower for some types of problems, will stay significantly faster than computers at other types of problems. We merely must learn to better teach those brains (matrix upload?), extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators) and utilize them for the problem sets they excel at.

> The human mind ... will stay significantly faster than computers at other types of problems

This is controversial. Semantic tagging of photographs used to be something that was done much better by the human brain, but all of a sudden it seems like computers are catching up fast. I hesitate to say there's any one domain that we won't be able to tackle algorithmically/via machine learning in some way.

> extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators)

My phone is already my artificial memory enhancement. Communication is via a high latency, unreliable interface, but it's (for all intents and purposes) an extension of my brain ;)

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

#54

Post by teraflop »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #6
leereeves wrote: post #3

For anyone who hasn't seen this story: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Also Iain Banks' Culture novels have this question as an occasional theme (and the main themes are also very interesting, of course).

There's an interesting little passage where the protagonist of Use of Weapons, experiencing the Culture's society for the first time, meets a sociologist who works part-time cleaning tables at a cafeteria -- even though the job could easily be automated.

“I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?”

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

#55

Post by TeMPOraL »

patmcc wrote: post #44
TeMPOraL wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't suggesting we invent jobs to keep people busy - I think we should strive towards employment being required for no one. Once food and material goods are post-scarcity, absolutely they should be provided to all. But as long as anything is scarce (and experiences are, broadly, and I don't think there's any way around that), we'll have something like "employment". It might start at "I'll sing you a song if you m…

Ok, maybe you weren't suggesting that but I see this tossed around quite often - that people will always find new jobs and therefore we can keep requiring everyone to work for sustenance. And we're inventing many bullshit jobs right now - not to look too far, half of the work done in web development is probably contributing to nothing else than zero-sum games of companies trying to out-advertise one another.

I agree - as long as resources required for basic survival are scarce, there will be employment. But the point is, we shouldn't try to maintain the status quo as long as possible; we should jump to letting people live without a job the first moment this becomes feasible.

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

#56

Post by jellicle »

treelovinhippie wrote: post #19
CarVac wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is the perceived unfairness that occurs when someone else in the company, sharing your approximate job, puts you out of work via automation. How do you compensate those who lose their jobs as a result? What if they were also trying, but just happened to not be first to succeed? It's a really cool idea though. (As a manufacturing engineer in a fairly old-fashioned company, I am currently trying to au…

Yeah it would need a lot of thought around the incentive structures. The original thought was that if you fully automate your own job you get your salary as a bonus. But if you fully automate someone else's job, you both split their salary 50/50 as a bonus. Now both of you are free to work on automating other jobs in the org. So you'd end up with various teams working together to automate jobs in the org. As a byprod…

Why would a good capitalist pay years of salary, percentages of the company, or whatever else you're talking about offering, when they can simply outsource the automation job for $5,000 to China? And then fire you.

And then hire you back on a $5,000 1099 contract to automate other people's jobs?

You seem to be trying to come up with some sort of "fair" system, as if that were how compensation works now or ever will work.

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

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

redeemer wrote: post #52
TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a cool idea - if and only if everyone coordinates to it together fairly, which seems extremely hard to achieve. I can see tons of caveats, e.g. - If you automate away your non-tech co-worker (someone who can't contribute much to the automation of jobs other than his own), will he get the bonus? If so, how do you assure people doing the automating won't feel treated unfairly as the non-tech guy just g…

> If you automate away your non-tech co-worker ... will he get the bonus? Yes, and you get nothing. It's fair; just don't automate away other people's jobs, automate away your own. > If someone automates you away, will you get anything? Yes, 100% of the bonus. It's not a choice, you must leave. I still think that's fair. > If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself…

Ok, so how about when you're an accountant? Now your employer has a strong incentive to pay someone extra to eliminate you, and you have no way of automating yourself because you don't know squat about programming.

That's the kind of situation that needs to be handled.

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

#58

Post by moe »

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.…

machines have been replacing humans since the industrial revolution, but humans have just taken a position higher up the chain

The question is what happens when we approach the end of that chain.

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

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

patmcc wrote: post #44
TeMPOraL wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't suggesting we invent jobs to keep people busy - I think we should strive towards employment being required for no one. Once food and material goods are post-scarcity, absolutely they should be provided to all. But as long as anything is scarce (and experiences are, broadly, and I don't think there's any way around that), we'll have something like "employment". It might start at "I'll sing you a song if you m…

> But as long as anything is scarce (and experiences are, broadly, and I don't think there's any way around that), we'll have something like "employment".

If labor isn't scarce (e.g., if there are easy substitutes that provide the utility provided by labor), then there's no real basis for employment even if there is scarcity in goods.

Scarcity guarantees that people will have an incentive to sacrifice to get scarce goods, but if labor isn't scarce, then sacrificing time in the form of labor isn't likely to be an option to do that.

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