What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans. Take food service for instance. No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots. Human interaction is part of the experience and part of the value. (At McDonald's, by contrast, the humans don't add value and could easily be replaced.) The "human touch" is going to become more important, not less, as automation increases.
Just own the damn robots
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Re: Just own the damn robots
#162What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans. Take food service for instance. No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots. Human interaction is part of the experience and part of the value. (At McDonald's, by contrast, the humans don'…
> What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans
Mainly because percentage-wise there are so few of them, and they don't make up a significant enough portion of the economy to keep it afloat.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't mean that the technology hasn't progressed. Cheap labor from countries like China has made it less profitable to invest in automation.
China is investing in automation at a faster pace than anyone else.
And wages are growing faster in China than anywhere else. Automation has never been associated with mass unemployment or declining wages. In fact, the reality is exactly the opposite: it is the ultimate cause of all increases in workers' compensation.
The belief that automation will hurt workers goes back 200 years and is found in sources as diverse as Marx's writings, JFK's speeches, and warnings from world renowned scientists (the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution). It's a product of the natural human tendency towards pessimism (which is a very useful survival instinct).
Re: Just own the damn robots
#164What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans. Take food service for instance. No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots. Human interaction is part of the experience and part of the value. (At McDonald's, by contrast, the humans don'…
> No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots.
I’m sorry, but that actually sounds like a wonderfully peaceful way to dine.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has always proved to be unstable. It will always result in revolution. The 90% will demand an equal share. The sad bit is that the revolutions seem to destroy the robots, not share the wealth. The 90% elect a different 10%, who then build more robots. See Animal Farm for details. The 10% have to share the pie, at least enough to prevent revolution.
The revolution aspect will still be relevant when we consider autonomous war machines? What power the 90% have when its opposed to drones, or some other hi-tech weapon?
It worked for Gandhi fighting (or rather, not fighting) the British. Superior weaponry doesn't necessarily lead to victory in this kind of conflict.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#166I just don't buy it. I understand I'm in a minority, so let me indulge myself and explain, for a moment, why I think AI / Robots are nothing to worry about. My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have. My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a…
Machines didn't take all the jobs in agriculture either, but they changed the society from >90% of the population working the fields to <10% what we have today. Imagine what would happen if a similar development would affect all kinds of work. Even if structural unemployment is "just" 40% our current social system would be wholly inadequate.
Yes, but that's a really bad comparison because the net result ended up being a huge increase in new jobs that were created, thanks to the machines. We have tons more people and jobs today.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#167Like all things this well written on this topic I feel like it hits the nail on the head and misses a few things because it’s an article by necessity must paint in broad strucks so let me say this: It’s completely right that automation/ robotics will accelerate the displacement of workers and cause upheaval. Certainly owning the productive fruits of this will make one very rich. What won’t happen is that these will d…
There an article somewhere which breaks down the types of automation, into a useable manner. Theres automation of tasks which free up labor to do MORE work - so if you were a bricklayer, and were bottlenecked by number of hands, the wheelbarrow would be a force multiplier. Theres removal of jobs with less useful jobs, so the chef got replaced by the burger flipper (not really, but I can't think of a good example at t…
>And finally removal of jobs entirely, with no need of replacement.
For example, computers - who were replaced by computers.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#168"We’re in an age where we’re being told AI is about to start writing its own software." The most pregnant sentence in the entire piece.
I'll believe it when I see it. By that I mean, actually replacing programmers, not as an academic or highly specialized exercise. I think it will take AGI to automate programming on any large scale such as to eliminate a meaningful percentage of programmers.
Otherwise, it just becomes another tool for the programmer, where they're being asked to build ever more complex software for ever more kinds of applications.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#169I just don't buy it. I understand I'm in a minority, so let me indulge myself and explain, for a moment, why I think AI / Robots are nothing to worry about. My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have. My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a…
I work in business development in the public sector. First we did digitzation, turning paper archives into something digital. Then we started standardizing and connecting the archives while improving worker interaction with them. These days we're doing automation. None of this has led to people getting fired. It has cost a massive amount of jobs though. All unnoticed because we simply didn't rehire for positions when…
> At one point in our history, one of the most important jobs in a large city, was removing the endless tones of horse shit from the streets every day. Cars made those guys as obsolete as AI will do almost everything.
Which was replaced by lots of mechanics, factory workers, marketers, office workers and salesmen. A lot of jobs were created by automating away the horse. I wonder how many people predicted that back then?
I don't see much evidence yet that AI is going to automate most existing jobs, unless Google, FB, Hitachi, etc is secretly on the cusp of AGI. The current machine learning isn't anywhere near that. This is being blown out of proportion, but it's always been since the beginnings of AI.
Maybe someday. Or 20 years from now, along with cold fusion and flying cars.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At this point, there will be a genuine question: why do we need to work to benefit from the goods of these industries? For the same reason you can't look over to your neighbor's driveway and say, since he doesn't use his truck all day while he's at work, why can't I drive it ? The people who built those automated industries expended capital, and likely, borrowed against future revenue to do so. What you are free to…
> The people who built those automated industries expended capital, and likely, borrowed against future revenue to do so. > What you are free to do is compete with them. You can drive them into their stupid lender's hands by forcing a collapsing of margins in the industry using your wits. So the solution for the hordes of people who were put out of work by automation, is to gamble it all on the bet that they can outc…
I'm not suggesting that literally, I'm saying that's what the overall system does. Someone will gamble their time on beating powerful established businesses, and they will figure out some efficiency to win by.
Some of the factory workers will find other work, some in other industries, or other businesses in the same industry.
But when you are suggesting policy, you think about the overall system, not just the poor factory workers. The overall system works, even if labor isn't part of production due to automation, because labor builds, maintains, and services the automation. Sometimes there's some debugging involved too.
Yes some workers will lose their jobs because they don't have marketable skills any more. That's why we invest in education. Maybe not terribly wisely, but that's the idea.