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Just own the damn robots

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Re: Just own the damn robots

#181

Post by fspeech »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #163
fspeech wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes automation is the necessary condition for real wage growth. The only way for real wages to grow is for productivity to grow, which means more automation assuming work force skill level is stable. Is it also sufficient? I think there is valid concern about aggregate demand, esp if the transition is too fast. I don't think that is currently a problem though as our productivity has been growing too slowly, not too fast.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#182

Post by pasquinelli »

mooreds wrote: post #34
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was some article here on HN a while back that framed this much better for me. It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree. There's lots of stats like Ikea factories making 17x the bookcases they did in 1985 but with the same number of staff. But even in our technical and development niche, look at s…

Some might say it's a "Brave New World" :) The real question is what happens to the 90%.

i have another question: is it the top 10% that's needed, or would a middling 10% do about as well, if they have the "right" backgound?

Re: Just own the damn robots

#183

Post by ben_w »

visarga wrote: post #134
chopin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also numerous examples of failed mass uprisings. If you can throw enough robots at the problem, the 0.1% would have nothing to fear.

We don't need uprisings. We just need to own the damn robots. When high automation comes, it's not going to be only the rich that own robots. As an analogy, take smartphones - there are 5 billions of them in use in 2017. Almost everyone can have the best phone today, or one that was as good as the best from a couple of years ago. There are going to be cheap and useful robots for everyone, 3d-printed, open sourced des…

Which is great, unless your robots have any bugs that allow remote takeovers. How frequent are root-giving zero-day bugs at the moment?

If these robots can move, not even “requires physical access” will save you from the Zombie Robot Apocalypse.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#184

Post by pasquinelli »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #54
mooreds wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some might say it's a "Brave New World" :) The real question is what happens to the 90%.

The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it mat…

you know as far back as i can remember we've treated people, as a society, in the way you'd treat anything there was quite a bit too much of lying around.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#185

Post by pasquinelli »

nradov wrote: post #112
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it mat…

Very few people would "thrive" on a basic income. Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid. People need a reason to exist and meaningful work to do. Very few have the drive and discipline to become artists/inventors/philosophers/musicians/actors. Plus the majority of those who do become artists are unlikely to create anything that the rest of society would value. Have you be…

"Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid."

pretty sure i live in one of them, so tell me what i see.

"People need a reason to exist and meaningful work to do."

how are they managing now? most people have a lot of meaningless work and i don't know anyone that can tell me the reason they exist beyond empty platitudes.

"Very few have the drive and discipline to become artists/inventors/philosophers/musicians/actors."

you only need some special drive for that stuff, (collectively called playing), to push forward with it while working a day-job.

"Plus the majority of those who do become artists are unlikely to create anything that the rest of society would value."

roughly all of them, really. at least that's how it is right now and i don't see why it would change.

"We need a better solution than basic income."

k, let's do basic income, then see what needs improving ;)

Re: Just own the damn robots

#186

Post by hudibras »

kmicklas wrote: post #70
paulpauper wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix has a ~200 PE ratio, there is no means for it to ever justify its existing valuation (400 million global subscribers? no chance), much less a far higher one. Their present business model has never proven the ability to produce good margins, content has perpetually sapped their earnings potential and is likely to continue to do so. Facebook and Google will stagnate and grow into their valuations. Google partic…

> will be permanently successful Surely you don't mean actually permanent. So what time scale do you think they will last?

GE has been in business for 125 years and is still going strong. Not unreasonable to expect the same for at least some tech companies.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#187

Post by pasquinelli »

germinalphrase wrote: post #63
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it mat…

Also, do the 10% believe that they are a static group deserving of persistent participation in the "working class" - or is this a competitive and fluid group in which the children of the 90% may move into/out of as their skills/ability apply? Which is to ask - is it worth maintaining a 90% at all or should we 'solve that problem'?

"Also, do the 10% believe that they are a static group deserving of persistent participation in the 'working class'"

yes. i seriously question the need for the "top" 10%. whatever spread of percentile that maps to the right sort of people would do.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#188

Post by candiodari »

paulpauper wrote: post #37

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel, Player Piano, we are introduced to a future in which only engineers and managers have gainful employment and meaningful lives. If you’re not one of the engineers and managers, then you’re in the army of nameless people fixing roads and bridges. You live in Homestead, far from the machines that do everything, and are treated throughout your life like a helpless baby. The world no longer…

> The fact he wrote this 65 years ago yet the labor force and population have grown in lockstep

Only the reporting has grown in lockstep. The metrics have changed to make this happen. Some of the real story can be seen in these graphs:

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12026620

(you'll have to change the dates to get the full picture. Works with a POST so I can't link to it. Note that unemployment essentially is labour force - jobs. Hence, the weakest members of the jobs force are counted double. Also, discouraged workers are discounted (and the rules for discouraged workers means they are essentially anyone unemployed for more than some months). The real unemployment rate, discounting double jobs and including discouraged workers is somewhere between 9 and 16%)

The short of it is that the job market froze, with a few bubbles in between, at around 1984-1987 or so, at an unemployment rate of around 8% or so and has been slowly but very steadily increasing since. Even the rate at which this is happening is increasing. The government, of course, has changed definitions again and again to show better numbers, but so far they don't go all out China on us (ie. the real data still appears to be published by the government, unlike in China where we know 15 million people were fired last year in several provinces due to protests and violence resulting from it, but this is not reported anywhere in government data)

Granted, that's still not quite the story of Kurt Vonnegut, but keep in mind that we're about 30 years into a phase in history where jobs grow slightly slower than population growth. This could be accelerating, or it could simply be that under Obama there was no real jobs recovery despite "extraordinary measures" by the Fed.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#189

Post by eksemplar »

goatlover wrote: post #169
eksemplar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

A lot of digitization and AI potential isn't really that advanced. Most of it is simply removing non-creativethink requiring tasks from the workspace. Those task take up a lot of time though, and that's why it's going to change the world.

I already talked about how nobody noticed that jobs were being lost to retirement, but that's really only part of it. Another important factor has been the size of workforce generations, which had been decreasing for the past decades, meaning that our overall unemployment rates didn't go up.

We're at the bottom of that curve though, and if you look at unemployment rates solely for young people, then you'll notice how they have exploded.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#190

Post by arichard123 »

visarga wrote: post #129
arichard123 wrote: post #21

I 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…

> 5) Intuitive leaps. e.g. Rubics cube. You're trolling, right? Intuitive leaps are the bread and butter of neural nets.

No, I wasn't trolling. I think we have a different concept of what an intuitive leap is. A neural net, as far as my understanding goes, needs training in the field that it makes decisions in. I think you believe that process itself contains intuitive leaps. Neural nets trained to walk develop weird walking styles, and I think that you think that is evidence of an intuitive leap. If that's what you mean, I would disagree.

You train it to walk, and it won't understand how to climb. You train it to climb on a climbing wall and it won't understand that it can't climb on glass, or string, or a waterfall without additional training.

Whereas you and I wouldn't need to try and fail to climb a waterfall. We would just know it isn't going to work. We would also understand, without having tested it, that those climbing skills would enable us to climb a tree, or a rope net, or ladder.

We might even be able to make a judgement about how well we could climb each before disaster.

If I were wrong on this, and I could see an AI trained to do X and then apply it to Y then it would cause me to review my beliefs on AI.

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