41–50 of 93 posts
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Of course, it does it gradually. So you see low-skilled jobs disappearing, and no useful jobs being created in their place. As this process continues, I expect we'll be facing a growing number of people trapped in poverty who have no means and abilities to retrain themselves for jobs with more skill requirements.
> 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…
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-...
> 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…
> 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 society being unable to find any job? And that most likely includes your or mine parents, siblings and friends, who will no doubt come to us techies for assistance. And if current trends continue, it's 10 years away, not 100.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 massage my back" barter-style, but that evolves into currency eventually.
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…
The basic, not fully thought out idea, was that if you automated your own job you got the full bonus. If you automate another person's job, you both split the bonus 50/50.
I think with most jobs, automation would definitely involve programming and tech skills. But there would be a lot of non-tech tasks as well, such as thoroughly understanding their workflow and processes and identifying more efficient practices.
"Automation" can also be a combination of computer and human outsourcing too.
In the small web dev company I was working for (launching internal startups), the "creative process" of designing website mockups was incredibly time consuming. I suggested we collect all of the customer requirements and collateral, and automatically outsource the mockups via API to something like MobileWorks/Freelancer/Elance/99Designs/DesignCrowd etc
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 g…
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.
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For example, you will find countless people to help dig various archeological site, help processing the various museum collection still hidden in boxed, ...
Also "historically" is misleading. Historically the industrial revolution was one of the worst period to live - the conversion of those 90% to the industry was not a happy story. And the post-war golden age was after the worst wars ever.
We are also dealing with some hard limit this time. On the production side, we are hitting earth physical limit on about everything. Even on the consumer side, we are hitting some limit, even for virtual activities, there are only 24 hour a day for you to consume.
History is good to remind you to be optimistic. However, history is not a solution: some guy in 100 year may look back at this period as another great time in human history, but that's down to us find the details on how to achieve it.
We also need to remind ourselves, that the rich cannot feel rich without an army of poor underneath them. I can guarantee having the very rich people shielded from the rest is actually not an evolution of our race.