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The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

286 points by peter123 10y ago

geodel 10y ago
Middle class is not some fundamental type of entity. New class types might arise for future AI supported life. Or maybe population would reduce to a level sufficient to maintain new type of living which would be comfortable/luxurious in terms of what we think today.
- jplasmeier 10y ago
  So, like Brave New World?
visarga 10y ago
So the unemployed would need to find a way to support themselves by their own work, by cooperation and by using automation as well. A combination of solar technology, robotics, AI and classic engineering could be a formula for self reliance.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Why not just wrest control of the means of production for themselves? The more concentrated the wealth, the easier it becomes to target it. When people see no other practical means of economic advancement revolutions tend to ensue.
  - natoliniak 10y ago
    yes, the old "specter of communism" is always hanging around. I don't think people will just rollover and cease to exist once they are deemed not needed by a society.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  Yes, let them eat cake instead.
- sp332 10y ago
  Agriculture is controlled by a relatively small sliver of people. If you can't convince some of them to be on your side and give you food, then your movement is going to starve.
- prodmerc 10y ago
  The kind of unemployed people that would require does not exist. People are going to be unemployed and starving because they can't use or even access "solar technology, robotics, AI and classic engineering"
onlyrealcuzzo 10y ago
AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, sure. So have many other advances in the past. It seems like the decline of organized labor unions would be a bigger threat to the Middle Class than technology.
- mirimir 10y ago
  It's more like "was" than "would be".
chubasco 10y ago
Skynet probably wasn't built for its own sake. It was probably built to protect the people who owned Skynet from the people that didn't.
- inderLogging 10y ago
  Skynet has a specific origin story, explained in the movie, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet fights back. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia. Skynet knows that the Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here. It was an out-growth of the cold war arms race. Nuclear deterrents aren't as much about protection as they are about posturing. Lives aren't quite "saved" by nuclear arsenals.
problems 10y ago
People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular. I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  It would be facile to ignore the massive and frequently bloody consequences of such previous economic disruptions. People didn't just go through a period of anxiety and then drift into new jobs and feel content again during previous industrial revolutions.
  - lend000 10y ago
    You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society. Sure, governments could have banned the printing press and stayed in the dark ages (scribes would still be making a good living, though.) Edit: it all depends on tone... I still read the comment with the tone that implies disruptions as being as negative as they are positive, whereas I would frame disruptions are more positive. Granted, that's not to ignore the countless people who have had their lives uprooted by not being able to keep up with fast moving societies.
    - sanderjd 10y ago
      That's not how I read the comment. I read it as admitting that both things can be (and probably are) true: these sorts of disruptions can be awful and bloody for the people living through them and can also be a net benefit to society. It's looking like we may very well be those people who will be living through the next one of these, so it's reasonable for us to be worried about the awfulness of the transition.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      > You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society I don't think he does, though. I'd be much quicker to say that other people frame the disruptions as though they never had significant downsides; I constantly see people saying "most people found new work eventually without too much of a pay cut" as though that implies no one suffered. More theoretically, we ought to be capable of imagining some net-positive change which causes front-end disruptions so devastating that we can't endure through to the positive result. Imagine rendering 50% of people unemployed in one year and ask whether they would all quietly drift into new jobs, or whether they would set all the data centers on fire and cancel out the progress. I don't think things are that bad, but pretending a long-run positive exempts you from planning for short-run harms is pretty unfair.
anigbrowl 10y ago
Some fear that after squeezing immigration—which would put a brake on the kind of entrepreneurship McAfee calls for—the White House will move to bottle up automation and artificial intelligence. Sounds bizarre but totally possible. If you haven't heard of Aleksandr Dugin then it's time to play catch-up, because even if you think he's batshit insane he's quite influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin People in the developed world have come to take technological progress for granted because of the inexorable economic logic. But with automation, adherence to default axioms about basic concepts like property ownership inevitably leads to most of the capital being concentrated in very few hands, resulting in some sort of modern serfdom. Nationalist programs implicitly depend on autarky, and the goal of nationalism is not maximum collective utility but rather vitalism - continuous improvement through the struggle for survival. Conflict, even defeat, is preferable for nationalists to ennui.
rick_perez 10y ago
We don't need AI to end the middle class. Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. It's almost a way of taking an industry and redistributing the wealth.
- dragontamer 10y ago
  > Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. Right idea, wrong complaint. GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi. There was a time when it took specialized knowledge to know the layout of a city. GPS took away the one edge the Taxi-industry had... experience in driving and roads. Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology. As soon as GPS-systems were so cheap that they are in literally everybody's pockets... the Taxicab industry became an endangered species.
  - rick_perez 10y ago
    "GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi." No, not really. When I travel to a new city, I always use a Taxi to get around. GPS actually helps out the taxi drivers because I don't need to sit there explaining exactly where to go. I can just tell them the address. In a foreign country, it's even better: Just give them a business card or piece of paper with the address on it. "Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology." Uber is the first major company to avoid all of the taxi unions and the medallion systems and hire any driver off the street for what amounts to some extra beer money for the drivers. It's really convenient and nice for consumers, but guts the industry of jobs that could actually earn someone a real living. "the Taxicab industry became an endangered species." Again, no it didn't. I'm not sure how much traveling you have done but when you need to get somewhere on time, Trains and Subways don't really cut it. You need to take a taxi. Unless we have an instant form of travel without cars, we will always have a need for taxis. Uber did, however, show us that when unions are in place and create a monopoly in an industry, they really have no incentive to actually make things better for the consumer.
excalibur 10y ago
Why can't it be both?
boona 10y ago
So was the telegram, the telephone, automobiles, computers, but every time it's meant an astonishing increase in wealth for everyone. Employment isn't even the end all be all, we would be much happier with 50% employment and greater levels of wealth.
- v4voodoo 10y ago
  Who is we? The 50% that's employed and thus can afford to live, or the 50% that's homeless?
mirimir 10y ago
Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Part I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4 So yes, human revolution may come first.
orasis 10y ago
I'm working on a machine learning product for conversion optimization, https://improve.ai https://improve.ai. Despite my initial fears, I'm noticing that, like any tool, it simply allows the user to do more with less. My product isn't going to replace conversion rate optimization consultants - it's just another tool they use to provide more value to their clients. If the barrier to using machine learning were high, then I would be concerned that the benefits would only go to few. But since very powerful APIs will be increasingly cheap and democratized, the barriers will be quite low to reap the benefits of these technologies. We often get caught up in the technical minutiae of machine learning, but you already don't need to be a deep learning expert to take advantage of, for example, cheap speech recognition APIs. This lowered barrier to entry will only accelerate. But, then again, I'm an optimist. :-)
- jeremydavid 10y ago
  I think there's more to conversation rate optimisation than randomly testing variations of a greeting. The price testing you mentioned looks interesting, but a good CRO consultant will do research and figure out the objections manually. Then, instead of having to test an infinite amount of variations with millions of visitors to reach statistical significance, they can test one or two. I call what your tool seems to do "throwing darts in the dark". And if I've completely misunderstood your product, perhaps you've got some optimising to do ;)
  - orasis 10y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. The "Hello World" was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but obviously didn't come off that way. Oops! We initially built the tool for this app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-second-meditation-daily/id667197203?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-second-meditation-daily/id... From hundreds of different daily meditations it has learned precisely which order to show the content in to maximize retention. So it knows the best message for day 1, day 2, day 3, etc. The first month retention for this app is 43%, up from the 20s before optimization. The current rating is solid 5 stars ands usually in the top 10 in the mindfulness category. The In App Purchase prices are automatically optimized, and soon we'll be throwing in a bunch of different background images, all of which will be automatically optimized. Anyway, I really appreciate the feedback.
rrggrr 10y ago
>McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. False. McAfee will find a corresponding increase in middle class jobs in India and China and elsewhere for the same time period. The narrative that says automation has destroyed the middle class is demonstrably overstated to the point of being close to false. Employers arbitraged labor rates across borders, pure and simple. This issue is vastly more complex than the scope of the Wired article which suffers from temporal distortion about what has occurred versus what will occur and when.
- gech 10y ago
  You're stating that a positive cancels a negative?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Absolutely. A lot of these people don't seem to see the world beyond US. If x job losses in the US is compensated by 2x-3x job gains in India/China, why is that a bad thing? Are Westerns somehow more worthy than people from third world countries?
- ahartman00 10y ago
  exactly. here are some citations regarding the decrease in world poverty. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2016/0606/Worst-forms-of-famine-see-decline http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2016/0606/Wors... http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2015/1019/Extreme-poverty-could-cease-to-exist-in-15-years http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2015/1019/Extr... http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2014/1216/Child-labor-Number-of-children-involved-is-shrinking-every-year http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2014/1216/Chil...
- whiskers08xmt 10y ago
  While some jobs have been replaced over sees, it seems like more have been replaced by gradual automation. https://www.ft.com/content/dec677c0-b7e6-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9a62 https://www.ft.com/content/dec677c0-b7e6-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9...
enjalot 10y ago
This problem has been weighing heavily on my mind since reading The Second Machine Age. The first thing I've read that gives me some hope for finding a solution is Rushkoff's "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus" I highly recommend reading both books, because more perspective is needed to think abouy this than just "what machines can and cant automate"
Animats 10y ago
There are basic capabilities humans have, and capabilities machines have. Human capabilities are more or less fixed. Machine capabilities keep expanding. About half of work done today could be automated with technology we already have. All it takes is wider deployment of the most automated technologies. The current phase is not because computers are smarter. It's that they're really cheap. If a computer can do it, it will be cheaper than a human. Next employment area in the US about to get clobbered: fruit and vegetable picking.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I
- BWStearns 10y ago
  I get your point but I'm not entirely sure human capabilities are fixed. In fact I would opt to say that we're the only species that has evidence of not being fixed in capabilities. I have no doubt that pg was a better programmer in the 90s than I am today. However if me now and him then were pitted against each other to build some web app I'm thinking I have pretty good odds. Human capabilities are their inate skills * education * available tooling. Education and tooling improve as time goes forward (generally and hopefully).
Fricken 10y ago
Throughout the 20th century new technology has been steadily increasing the value of human labour, but some forms of human labour have increased more than others, and this imbalance has caused a market distortions. Technology has done a great deal to make railroad engineers more valuable for instance, because one guy could suddenly move hundreds of tons of goods. Used to be it took an army to do that. On the other hand we have plumbers, and the amount of work a plumber can do has changed little in a century. There is no plumber who can to the work of a hundred plumbers from 100 years ago. This causes a market distortion is what is hurting so much of what America calls the middle class. If we deploy AI well, it may correct some of these market distortions. A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. Maybe. If one were to entertain the notion that there are certain jobs we haven't automated enough, which hurts their ability to compete with the value we get from low cost goods and services.
- cavanasm 10y ago
  Just curious, but are there stats on how the comparative income of some professions has changed due to changes like this? I feel like the change in the importance and work done by people in jobs impacted in this way (you mention railroad engineers specifically) hasn't substantially changed the amount such people are paid, but this is admittedly only a gut instinct.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  > A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. This also implies that fewer individual plumber/robot/AI teams than the current number of plumbers. To offset that, we either need quite a bit more work at this level, or we need a rethink of the whole work-to-live system. In the past it has always turned out that there are new kinds of jobs to be done. That may happen this time too. Things like living off of making YouTube videos are perhaps an early indicator of the direction we should be looking in. But it seems like most of the new models that are successful are based on ads and it seems to me that advertising-based business models can only ever make up a relatively small portion of the total economy.
stevehiehn 10y ago
Each time this conversation comes up I notice people often like to suggest that history is just repeating and we have seen this before. I think its important to recognize patterns in cycles but its also important to be open to the possibility we've only seen local cycles and larger global cycles are still revealing themselves. In other words is AI really analogous to shifts we've seen before?
- _rpd 10y ago
  The "AI" being discussed is mainly competent data mining and machine learning. If we stay at that level, then there are easily bigger shifts that we've adjusted to in the past. But self-improving AI is truly on a different level, as is AI with human-level 'general intelligence'.
  - stevehiehn 10y ago
    I hear ya on the data mining observation. I have been digging into 'applied' ML for the last two years or so and its painfully obvious how many articles are based on science fiction and not the current state of things (which appears to be mostly reinforcement learning)
    - _rpd 10y ago
      So much tech journalism falls prey to the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence ... http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generalization_from/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...
- eternalban 10y ago
  I agree. History certainly didn't repeat itself when it came to the scientific and technological explosion of the past ~150+ years. But if we are considering history, we may also wish to recall that education was strictly for the clerical and aristocratic classes before the industrial revolution. And we may also wish to remember that in US none other than the robber baron John D. Rockefeller took initiative to shape the educational paradigm for the "peasants". Will the peasants need to be educated anymore?
philipkglass 10y ago
That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” Etzioni says. It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It's like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it's one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I'd rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without-regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.
- shams93 10y ago
  Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.
  - waqf 10y ago
    People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.
    - wilkommen 10y ago
      The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
So us as technologists and engineers contributing towards this AI field, how do we help sustain middle-class? The state of STEM education is unfortunate at public schools here in the USA.
wmccullough 10y ago
It scares me too, but you know, I'm ready to embrace whatever comes next. I've been thinking alot about this over the course of the last year. Say that enough things get automated that we have massive numbers of unemployed, how do we address that? Instead of dodging the question by exclaiming that it won't happen, we probably should address a much deeper and more fundamental question: Why does the value of a person come from their method of earning a living? We have to detach individual value from choice of career first. Once we've done that, we really have a real question to answer, and it's deeply existential: Do we really want humankind's story to be about the majority of a population working at dead-end jobs just to buy food and water? Aren't we here for more? I for one don't buy the theory that we will self organize into makerspaces and become "creators". Creativity beyond survival is a luxury when life and death are on the line. I don't have the answers, but I certainly have many questions. If I had to guess what would happen in the event that extreme A.I. automation puts us out of work, I'd suspect we will organize back into tribes to focus on subsistence. I've found that if you look at the history books, a centralized government isn't the best entity to take care of masses of unemployed people. In large enough countries, people would end up starving in the bread lines. I think we need to really think about why we're here. Why are we so bent on using automation to complete the tasks of our shitty 9-5 lives instead of building a utopia? People are quick to say that we need to replace a money based economy, but that's too superficial a solution. Money is merely a shared myth used by us to trade our time and value for a symbol that we can use to prove our worth. Until we transfer where the "worth" of an individual comes from, we're going to be in this cycle.
- bad_user 10y ago
  Such questions have been asked for a long time, because this problem was visible ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It's what inspired Marx after all. And no, I'll never advocate for communism because I think Marx was wrong and because in practice it ends with crimes against human kind. But we are here because of greed. And along with all other problems that we face, like global warming, overpopulation, pollution, etc, I think it's going to get a lot worse before getting better. Some form of socialism is inevitable though, that much is certain. Having guaranteed food, shelter and medical care is a must.
- 10y ago
tabeth 10y ago
Even though I am considered 'skilled labor', I hardly consider myself so skilled to be making the incredible AI machines that will be the ones to take over the jobs (in comparison to the competition, anyway). As for "less skilled folks" like myself, here's an abridged list of things you can do (in additional to software) to start hedging your bet against AI. - Real estate (Landlord): I'd suggest you save money and start buying some property. Dump some sweat equity into certain markets and you may have something here. AI can never beat the ultimate constraint -- land. - Environmental science: AI is great, but I doubt computer vision and robotics will become good enough to replace foresters and the like anytime soon. If you live in a wooded area, it may be worth it to start investigating it. Plus, it's healthy to walk around in nature anyway. Double whammy. - Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  I think the statement "AI/robots won't be able to do X" is incorrect for all X given a long enough time frame.
- StRoy 10y ago
  > - Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand. That already depends on the type of skill being taught. Learning a new language, for example, has never been dependent on teachers and I think I've been doing quite well with purely self taught English, and that was before methods like duolingo appeared. My mother is living in retirement and has started learning languages as a way to pass time, she has learned enough English through duolingo to achieve a conversational level and she never had a teacher. Is it really impossible for more sophisticated AIs to truly replace language teachers in schools, and have students do things through a computer? and possibly replace teachers in many other fields of studies too. I'd wager most of the less advanced courses in pre-college stuff could do well with modern, computerized, interactive methods of learning. I don't think you could replace the interaction with a teacher for more advanced studies, though.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lcfcjs 10y ago
End of the working class, possibly. End of Middle Class? No, they'll all become programmers or controllers of AI.
optimuspaul 10y ago
Once everything is automated there will be little need for money, we'll all be kings! Damn hell ass kings!
- chadcmulligan 10y ago
  This is the bit I can't understand about the nay sayers. AI promises a world of everything you could want. The problem is the current way of assigning goods (money for labour) is obsolete. The really funny thing (to me) is the people who'd benefit most by this are the ones wailing the most. It's the disconnects that confuse me the most. "What about houses, how can we afford a house without a job?" is a complaint I hear. Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0. The hard part imho is the transition where some jobs are obsoleted, but some aren't and some things still cost lots because they haven't been automated yet. This is where we are now I think.
  - codexon 10y ago
    > Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0. Ok and how will you pay the guy who owns the lumber if you have nothing he wants? And the guy who owns the construction bots? And the owner of the land?
    - chadcmulligan 10y ago
      Yes, thats what I'm wondering - when you have a fully automated supply chain that builds houses with 0 labour (probably never be 0, but near enough for the sake of argument). Lets say we have a world that everything is automated to produce all the stuff we need. Then how do you pay for that stuff because no one will be working. Also what will prompt people to make new machines to build new stuff?
      - thomyorkie 10y ago
        foglets perhaps will do the trick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog
gukov 10y ago
Every living organism is designed by evolution to strive for survival and reproduction. It's the constant fight that gets you out of the bed every morning. Having nothing to do all day but paint will eventually result in premature death. Think animals in captivity. What if the end of humanity will be caused not by a nuclear war but by a peaceful AI that made us zoo animals?
- _rpd 10y ago
  At some point attention becomes the ultimate resource. Most people earn income by paying attention to somebody else's projects. But with a little introspection and basic goal setting training, many people identify projects to which they would prefer to give their attention if income were not an issue. I think a society in which a higher proportion of one's time can be spent on personal projects vs. other's projects is a goal worth working towards.
- kmnc 10y ago
  If we have the technological prowess to replace human labor in full yet can't figure out what to then do with our lives other then paint then we truly are a doomed species. It seems like people lack imagination, everyone either thinks "don't worry we will still have jobs (appeals to social history)" or the "with nothing to do we will wither and die (appeals to evolutionary history)". I think both those camps are missing something which should be self evident if we ever get to this point: The freedom and ability to create meaning in ones own life. I do agree with you though, if we are kept in captivity by political and social structures (ahem..religion) that fail to evolve with technology (which seems like human nature sadly) then the average human will go the way of the sloth or the people in idiocracy. I am hopeful though that the AI will save us from that captivity more so then reinforce it yet that may be a foolish hope. Is being a zoo animal so bad if we have the full capabilities of very powerful AI? What if those AI's were specifically devoted to making it a better zoo? At that point what is the difference? What is inherently bad about being a zoo animal if you can't see the walls and the zoo keepers don't abuse you?
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic. We'll find our fights, whether mountain climbing, video games, even gaining recognition as a painter.
multinglets 10y ago
Heady fucking stuff, just wow.
hyperion2010 10y ago
Great! Maybe we will finally have the excess capacity to finally send people into local archives all over the world so that we can save the data about the past and feed it to the machines. If you want data for models there is tons of it lurking in the basements of municipal buildings all over the world, and you might find a lost Da Vinci manuscript while you are at it!
Girlang 10y ago
The Middle Class would have never existed if it wasn't artificially created. It just doesn't naturally happen.
pvnick 10y ago
The idea that technology will cause widespread job-loss and economic upheaval is such an old fear, and it never works that way. Technological innovations lead to wealth creation 100% of the time, along with more opportunities for more people, even if some jobs are initially replaced with other jobs. "This time is different" is announced everytime, and it's always the same. This book is very good for anybody wishing to understand basic economic theory and see many examples throughout history of this exact debate taking place over and over and over again: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ (see the chapter "The Curse of Machinery").
- 234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago
  Yes but this time it's different. Throughout history, until the past 50 years or so, the new technology has typically replaced a mechanical function humans were performing. The coming evolution of software and robotics will start performing the mental work humans, until very recently, were the ONLY thing on the planet capable of doing. For the past 3000 years of "modern humans", we have had a monopoly on the human brain and creative intelligence. That monopoly is coming to an end. What will the average worker do when a robot that can out-wit them? You cannot just handwave this problem away saying "it always creates new jobs!!11". This problem is well-summarized by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
  - twoodfin 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure travel agents believed they were doing "mental work".
laughfactory 10y ago
The problem with UBI is inflation. Give everyone another $1000/month (or whatever) and all you've done is make every existing dollar in the economy worth less.
- noisy_boy 10y ago
  This is exactly the question I don't see answered. How will you handle increased prices? Unless instead of $1000/pm, you give an equivalent purchasing power/quota based on normal/average/reasonable per-capita consumption. Like a token that allows you to buy a certain amount of food/clothes/medicines etc. So what happens if I don't need to buy anymore clothes today but need more medicines but another guy is in a reverse situation? How about we translate this purchasing quota into points and have an exchange for people to trade them? Did we re-invent barter system/money in another form?
- e12e 10y ago
  Make the UBI micro-adjusted (month-to-month) for inflation based on a consumer index - and so indirectly tax passive capital (which is only earning meager interest)?
philipkglass 10y ago
Now I'll highlight a concern I do actually have about a fully robotized economy: weapons proliferation. The key pieces of information needed to build a serviceable anti-tank missile or a jug of nerve gas are already lying on the shelves of thousands of technical libraries. The details may be classified, but the broad outlines in the open literature are good enough for someone with patience and a technical background to fill in workable solutions. Fortunately for civilization to date, {diligent, technically educated, sufficiently well funded, homicidal} is a set of attributes that rarely co-occurs. We've seen homicidal maniacs who were patient and well-funded enough to make their own nerve gas just once so far (Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 1990s). Things change if machines do all the real work and a would-be killer doesn't need any special skills to get deadlier weapons. The unhinged man who rage-kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could, in the future, ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun. Outbreaks of lethal violence might be rarer, since people who are materially well-off are generally less likely to murder, but the rarer killings rooted in rage or ideology could become a lot deadlier. In a few post-scarcity science fiction settings impulses to violence are stopped with direct human nerve implants linked to a machine panopticon that can halt dangerous actions. I don't consider that a plausible or even desirable future. In my favorite space opera setting, the Culture of Iain M. Banks, killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight running millions of times faster than biological intelligence. That sounds dreamy to me, but it involves a lot of made up Space Opera physics so I don't think it is plausible. Thinking about a future where AI is capable enough to manufacture anything people ask for, but not capable enough to act as benevolent gods, leads to some odd mixtures of prosperity and catastrophe.
- ahartman00 10y ago
  "ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun" I know the NSA and IoT get a lot of criticism here. But this seems like a good usecase for the always connected, phone home systems, with an all seeing eye. :) "killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight" As someone who used to work in a warehouse, ai which can detect anomalous orders seems incredibly plausible. Considering they have all been storing data for years, you have plenty of training data. Making something that notices when certain substances are shipped to someone who is not a normal customer seems trivial, if it doesnt exist. I mean the conservation of mass means that the explosive has to come from somewhere :)
kisstheblade 10y ago
I think we will laugh at this "AI threat" in 30 years after yet another long "AI winter". I mean I haven't been convinced of any "AI" displayed. All just seems to be glorified pattern matching with little practical use. I mean siri and cortana and alexa are all dumb as sh*t. Sure some cars can negotiate some clearly marked streets in nice weather. I don't think there is an automatic leap from these technologies to more advanced AI that actually would for example enable totally autonomous cars. Sure there are incremental improvements in robotics etc that helps to raise the efficiency of some operations but then the humans can move on to different jobs and enable other things. Eg. radiology where humans can treat people some AI has marked the scans as "suspect". So better treatment because of "AI", but the doctor still has a job. Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be. "It's AI I tells you, luddites!"
- StRoy 10y ago
  > Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. > This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be You are decades behind the times. > http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 > Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots' > http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal... > In a new report from Digitimes, Foxconn executive Dai Jia-peng has laid out the company’s three-step plan for automating its Chinese factories. The company’s ultimate goal is to fully automate production of things like PCs, LCD monitors, and its most famous product—the iPhone. > Foxconn makes its own manufacturing robots, known as Foxbots, and has already deployed about 40,000 of them. Some, which the company considers "stage one," assist workers at their stations. Foxconn already has individual fully automated production lines—they're "stage two"—in factories in Chengdu, Chongquing, and Zhengzhou. > Stage three of the process would be fully automated factories, with only a handful of workers. Even China with its cheap labor is now willing to invest in that technology. If Trump ever becomes "successful" at "bringing those jobs back" to the USA, it will be jobs for machines.
redsummer 10y ago
AI makes me want to join the Amish. You learn things to give yourself a future and self-fulfilment. But AI will catch up with your skills eventually. You would need to spend all your time learning if you want to keep ahead, and never have time to put to work what you have learned. Wouldn't you rather have a community and a meaningful life than be a meat-based beta version of a future AI?
jganetsk 10y ago
The problem isn't AI. It's capitalism. People are fearing the ultimate triumph of capital over labor.. If people owned the robots, then there would be no problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwB9-9QOQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwB9-9QOQI
- dgudkov 10y ago
  It's an interesting perspective, but what would stop people from having shares in companies that own robots?
  - jganetsk 10y ago
    All people should have shares in companies that own robots. Or they should at least have a claim in the return on capital. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-funded-by-capital-income-by-yanis-varoufakis-2016-10?barrier=accessreg https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-fu...
lostmsu 10y ago
I still think it is the end of all classes.
macawfish 10y ago
Well, I dint know what they decded the ethics were for biotechnology, but genetically engineering seeds so that farmers depend on the auxiliary herbicides from singular corporations strikes me as unethical. Not to mention that farmers are reliant on those same corporations for seed itself. Seeds that have been cultivated for hundreds of thousands of years are getting replaced with zombie varieties that disrupt ecologies. This is a crisis. We are losing our collective seed memory. To me, capitalism is not about free markets, it's about debt markets. Maybe that's because the only capitalism I've ever known is ideologically restricted. Its champions are often hypocrites of their religion, where income from rent is deemed productive while work done by a mother in taking care of her children is consumptive and indebted.
nubol 10y ago
I don't find many articles talking about how AI integration in the industry could lower the production costs in many markets, that would allow consumers to be able to buy products cheaper, so they could work less to be able to pay basic stuff. Also it would allow people to be more capable to scale multiple tasks, for instance: instead of being a taxi driver you become the manager of a driver less taxi.

286 points by peter123 10y ago

Middle class is not some fundamental type of entity. New class types might arise for future AI supported life. Or maybe population would reduce to a level sufficient to maintain new type of living which would be comfortable/luxurious in terms of what we think today.

jplasmeier 10y ago
So, like Brave New World?

visarga 10y ago

So the unemployed would need to find a way to support themselves by their own work, by cooperation and by using automation as well. A combination of solar technology, robotics, AI and classic engineering could be a formula for self reliance.

anigbrowl 10y ago
Why not just wrest control of the means of production for themselves? The more concentrated the wealth, the easier it becomes to target it. When people see no other practical means of economic advancement revolutions tend to ensue.
- natoliniak 10y ago
  yes, the old "specter of communism" is always hanging around. I don't think people will just rollover and cease to exist once they are deemed not needed by a society.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Yes, let them eat cake instead.
sp332 10y ago
Agriculture is controlled by a relatively small sliver of people. If you can't convince some of them to be on your side and give you food, then your movement is going to starve.
prodmerc 10y ago
The kind of unemployed people that would require does not exist. People are going to be unemployed and starving because they can't use or even access "solar technology, robotics, AI and classic engineering"

onlyrealcuzzo 10y ago

AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, sure. So have many other advances in the past. It seems like the decline of organized labor unions would be a bigger threat to the Middle Class than technology.

mirimir 10y ago
It's more like "was" than "would be".

chubasco 10y ago

Skynet probably wasn't built for its own sake. It was probably built to protect the people who owned Skynet from the people that didn't.

inderLogging 10y ago
Skynet has a specific origin story, explained in the movie, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet fights back. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia. Skynet knows that the Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here. It was an out-growth of the cold war arms race. Nuclear deterrents aren't as much about protection as they are about posturing. Lives aren't quite "saved" by nuclear arsenals.

problems 10y ago

People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular. I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.

anigbrowl 10y ago
It would be facile to ignore the massive and frequently bloody consequences of such previous economic disruptions. People didn't just go through a period of anxiety and then drift into new jobs and feel content again during previous industrial revolutions.
- lend000 10y ago
  You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society. Sure, governments could have banned the printing press and stayed in the dark ages (scribes would still be making a good living, though.) Edit: it all depends on tone... I still read the comment with the tone that implies disruptions as being as negative as they are positive, whereas I would frame disruptions are more positive. Granted, that's not to ignore the countless people who have had their lives uprooted by not being able to keep up with fast moving societies.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    That's not how I read the comment. I read it as admitting that both things can be (and probably are) true: these sorts of disruptions can be awful and bloody for the people living through them and can also be a net benefit to society. It's looking like we may very well be those people who will be living through the next one of these, so it's reasonable for us to be worried about the awfulness of the transition.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    > You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society I don't think he does, though. I'd be much quicker to say that other people frame the disruptions as though they never had significant downsides; I constantly see people saying "most people found new work eventually without too much of a pay cut" as though that implies no one suffered. More theoretically, we ought to be capable of imagining some net-positive change which causes front-end disruptions so devastating that we can't endure through to the positive result. Imagine rendering 50% of people unemployed in one year and ask whether they would all quietly drift into new jobs, or whether they would set all the data centers on fire and cancel out the progress. I don't think things are that bad, but pretending a long-run positive exempts you from planning for short-run harms is pretty unfair.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Some fear that after squeezing immigration—which would put a brake on the kind of entrepreneurship McAfee calls for—the White House will move to bottle up automation and artificial intelligence. Sounds bizarre but totally possible. If you haven't heard of Aleksandr Dugin then it's time to play catch-up, because even if you think he's batshit insane he's quite influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin People in the developed world have come to take technological progress for granted because of the inexorable economic logic. But with automation, adherence to default axioms about basic concepts like property ownership inevitably leads to most of the capital being concentrated in very few hands, resulting in some sort of modern serfdom. Nationalist programs implicitly depend on autarky, and the goal of nationalism is not maximum collective utility but rather vitalism - continuous improvement through the struggle for survival. Conflict, even defeat, is preferable for nationalists to ennui.

rick_perez 10y ago

We don't need AI to end the middle class. Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. It's almost a way of taking an industry and redistributing the wealth.

dragontamer 10y ago
> Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. Right idea, wrong complaint. GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi. There was a time when it took specialized knowledge to know the layout of a city. GPS took away the one edge the Taxi-industry had... experience in driving and roads. Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology. As soon as GPS-systems were so cheap that they are in literally everybody's pockets... the Taxicab industry became an endangered species.
- rick_perez 10y ago
  "GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi." No, not really. When I travel to a new city, I always use a Taxi to get around. GPS actually helps out the taxi drivers because I don't need to sit there explaining exactly where to go. I can just tell them the address. In a foreign country, it's even better: Just give them a business card or piece of paper with the address on it. "Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology." Uber is the first major company to avoid all of the taxi unions and the medallion systems and hire any driver off the street for what amounts to some extra beer money for the drivers. It's really convenient and nice for consumers, but guts the industry of jobs that could actually earn someone a real living. "the Taxicab industry became an endangered species." Again, no it didn't. I'm not sure how much traveling you have done but when you need to get somewhere on time, Trains and Subways don't really cut it. You need to take a taxi. Unless we have an instant form of travel without cars, we will always have a need for taxis. Uber did, however, show us that when unions are in place and create a monopoly in an industry, they really have no incentive to actually make things better for the consumer.

excalibur 10y ago

Why can't it be both?

boona 10y ago

So was the telegram, the telephone, automobiles, computers, but every time it's meant an astonishing increase in wealth for everyone. Employment isn't even the end all be all, we would be much happier with 50% employment and greater levels of wealth.

v4voodoo 10y ago
Who is we? The 50% that's employed and thus can afford to live, or the 50% that's homeless?

mirimir 10y ago

Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Part I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4 So yes, human revolution may come first.

orasis 10y ago

I'm working on a machine learning product for conversion optimization, https://improve.ai https://improve.ai. Despite my initial fears, I'm noticing that, like any tool, it simply allows the user to do more with less. My product isn't going to replace conversion rate optimization consultants - it's just another tool they use to provide more value to their clients. If the barrier to using machine learning were high, then I would be concerned that the benefits would only go to few. But since very powerful APIs will be increasingly cheap and democratized, the barriers will be quite low to reap the benefits of these technologies. We often get caught up in the technical minutiae of machine learning, but you already don't need to be a deep learning expert to take advantage of, for example, cheap speech recognition APIs. This lowered barrier to entry will only accelerate. But, then again, I'm an optimist. :-)

jeremydavid 10y ago
I think there's more to conversation rate optimisation than randomly testing variations of a greeting. The price testing you mentioned looks interesting, but a good CRO consultant will do research and figure out the objections manually. Then, instead of having to test an infinite amount of variations with millions of visitors to reach statistical significance, they can test one or two. I call what your tool seems to do "throwing darts in the dark". And if I've completely misunderstood your product, perhaps you've got some optimising to do ;)
- orasis 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. The "Hello World" was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but obviously didn't come off that way. Oops! We initially built the tool for this app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-second-meditation-daily/id667197203?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-second-meditation-daily/id... From hundreds of different daily meditations it has learned precisely which order to show the content in to maximize retention. So it knows the best message for day 1, day 2, day 3, etc. The first month retention for this app is 43%, up from the 20s before optimization. The current rating is solid 5 stars ands usually in the top 10 in the mindfulness category. The In App Purchase prices are automatically optimized, and soon we'll be throwing in a bunch of different background images, all of which will be automatically optimized. Anyway, I really appreciate the feedback.

rrggrr 10y ago

>McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. False. McAfee will find a corresponding increase in middle class jobs in India and China and elsewhere for the same time period. The narrative that says automation has destroyed the middle class is demonstrably overstated to the point of being close to false. Employers arbitraged labor rates across borders, pure and simple. This issue is vastly more complex than the scope of the Wired article which suffers from temporal distortion about what has occurred versus what will occur and when.

gech 10y ago
You're stating that a positive cancels a negative?
deleted 10y ago
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maverick_iceman 10y ago
Absolutely. A lot of these people don't seem to see the world beyond US. If x job losses in the US is compensated by 2x-3x job gains in India/China, why is that a bad thing? Are Westerns somehow more worthy than people from third world countries?
ahartman00 10y ago
exactly. here are some citations regarding the decrease in world poverty. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2016/0606/Worst-forms-of-famine-see-decline http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2016/0606/Wors... http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2015/1019/Extreme-poverty-could-cease-to-exist-in-15-years http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2015/1019/Extr... http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2014/1216/Child-labor-Number-of-children-involved-is-shrinking-every-year http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch/2014/1216/Chil...
whiskers08xmt 10y ago
While some jobs have been replaced over sees, it seems like more have been replaced by gradual automation. https://www.ft.com/content/dec677c0-b7e6-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9a62 https://www.ft.com/content/dec677c0-b7e6-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9...

enjalot 10y ago

This problem has been weighing heavily on my mind since reading The Second Machine Age. The first thing I've read that gives me some hope for finding a solution is Rushkoff's "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus" I highly recommend reading both books, because more perspective is needed to think abouy this than just "what machines can and cant automate"

Animats 10y ago

There are basic capabilities humans have, and capabilities machines have. Human capabilities are more or less fixed. Machine capabilities keep expanding. About half of work done today could be automated with technology we already have. All it takes is wider deployment of the most automated technologies. The current phase is not because computers are smarter. It's that they're really cheap. If a computer can do it, it will be cheaper than a human. Next employment area in the US about to get clobbered: fruit and vegetable picking.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I

BWStearns 10y ago
I get your point but I'm not entirely sure human capabilities are fixed. In fact I would opt to say that we're the only species that has evidence of not being fixed in capabilities. I have no doubt that pg was a better programmer in the 90s than I am today. However if me now and him then were pitted against each other to build some web app I'm thinking I have pretty good odds. Human capabilities are their inate skills * education * available tooling. Education and tooling improve as time goes forward (generally and hopefully).

Fricken 10y ago

Throughout the 20th century new technology has been steadily increasing the value of human labour, but some forms of human labour have increased more than others, and this imbalance has caused a market distortions. Technology has done a great deal to make railroad engineers more valuable for instance, because one guy could suddenly move hundreds of tons of goods. Used to be it took an army to do that. On the other hand we have plumbers, and the amount of work a plumber can do has changed little in a century. There is no plumber who can to the work of a hundred plumbers from 100 years ago. This causes a market distortion is what is hurting so much of what America calls the middle class. If we deploy AI well, it may correct some of these market distortions. A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. Maybe. If one were to entertain the notion that there are certain jobs we haven't automated enough, which hurts their ability to compete with the value we get from low cost goods and services.

cavanasm 10y ago
Just curious, but are there stats on how the comparative income of some professions has changed due to changes like this? I feel like the change in the importance and work done by people in jobs impacted in this way (you mention railroad engineers specifically) hasn't substantially changed the amount such people are paid, but this is admittedly only a gut instinct.
sanderjd 10y ago
> A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. This also implies that fewer individual plumber/robot/AI teams than the current number of plumbers. To offset that, we either need quite a bit more work at this level, or we need a rethink of the whole work-to-live system. In the past it has always turned out that there are new kinds of jobs to be done. That may happen this time too. Things like living off of making YouTube videos are perhaps an early indicator of the direction we should be looking in. But it seems like most of the new models that are successful are based on ads and it seems to me that advertising-based business models can only ever make up a relatively small portion of the total economy.

stevehiehn 10y ago

Each time this conversation comes up I notice people often like to suggest that history is just repeating and we have seen this before. I think its important to recognize patterns in cycles but its also important to be open to the possibility we've only seen local cycles and larger global cycles are still revealing themselves. In other words is AI really analogous to shifts we've seen before?

_rpd 10y ago
The "AI" being discussed is mainly competent data mining and machine learning. If we stay at that level, then there are easily bigger shifts that we've adjusted to in the past. But self-improving AI is truly on a different level, as is AI with human-level 'general intelligence'.
- stevehiehn 10y ago
  I hear ya on the data mining observation. I have been digging into 'applied' ML for the last two years or so and its painfully obvious how many articles are based on science fiction and not the current state of things (which appears to be mostly reinforcement learning)
  - _rpd 10y ago
    So much tech journalism falls prey to the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence ... http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generalization_from/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...
eternalban 10y ago
I agree. History certainly didn't repeat itself when it came to the scientific and technological explosion of the past ~150+ years. But if we are considering history, we may also wish to recall that education was strictly for the clerical and aristocratic classes before the industrial revolution. And we may also wish to remember that in US none other than the robber baron John D. Rockefeller took initiative to shape the educational paradigm for the "peasants". Will the peasants need to be educated anymore?

philipkglass 10y ago

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” Etzioni says. It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It's like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it's one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I'd rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without-regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.

shams93 10y ago
Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.
- waqf 10y ago
  People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.
  - wilkommen 10y ago
    The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

So us as technologists and engineers contributing towards this AI field, how do we help sustain middle-class? The state of STEM education is unfortunate at public schools here in the USA.

wmccullough 10y ago

It scares me too, but you know, I'm ready to embrace whatever comes next. I've been thinking alot about this over the course of the last year. Say that enough things get automated that we have massive numbers of unemployed, how do we address that? Instead of dodging the question by exclaiming that it won't happen, we probably should address a much deeper and more fundamental question: Why does the value of a person come from their method of earning a living? We have to detach individual value from choice of career first. Once we've done that, we really have a real question to answer, and it's deeply existential: Do we really want humankind's story to be about the majority of a population working at dead-end jobs just to buy food and water? Aren't we here for more? I for one don't buy the theory that we will self organize into makerspaces and become "creators". Creativity beyond survival is a luxury when life and death are on the line. I don't have the answers, but I certainly have many questions. If I had to guess what would happen in the event that extreme A.I. automation puts us out of work, I'd suspect we will organize back into tribes to focus on subsistence. I've found that if you look at the history books, a centralized government isn't the best entity to take care of masses of unemployed people. In large enough countries, people would end up starving in the bread lines. I think we need to really think about why we're here. Why are we so bent on using automation to complete the tasks of our shitty 9-5 lives instead of building a utopia? People are quick to say that we need to replace a money based economy, but that's too superficial a solution. Money is merely a shared myth used by us to trade our time and value for a symbol that we can use to prove our worth. Until we transfer where the "worth" of an individual comes from, we're going to be in this cycle.

bad_user 10y ago
Such questions have been asked for a long time, because this problem was visible ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It's what inspired Marx after all. And no, I'll never advocate for communism because I think Marx was wrong and because in practice it ends with crimes against human kind. But we are here because of greed. And along with all other problems that we face, like global warming, overpopulation, pollution, etc, I think it's going to get a lot worse before getting better. Some form of socialism is inevitable though, that much is certain. Having guaranteed food, shelter and medical care is a must.
10y ago

tabeth 10y ago

Even though I am considered 'skilled labor', I hardly consider myself so skilled to be making the incredible AI machines that will be the ones to take over the jobs (in comparison to the competition, anyway). As for "less skilled folks" like myself, here's an abridged list of things you can do (in additional to software) to start hedging your bet against AI. - Real estate (Landlord): I'd suggest you save money and start buying some property. Dump some sweat equity into certain markets and you may have something here. AI can never beat the ultimate constraint -- land. - Environmental science: AI is great, but I doubt computer vision and robotics will become good enough to replace foresters and the like anytime soon. If you live in a wooded area, it may be worth it to start investigating it. Plus, it's healthy to walk around in nature anyway. Double whammy. - Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.

ryandrake 10y ago
I think the statement "AI/robots won't be able to do X" is incorrect for all X given a long enough time frame.
StRoy 10y ago
> - Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand. That already depends on the type of skill being taught. Learning a new language, for example, has never been dependent on teachers and I think I've been doing quite well with purely self taught English, and that was before methods like duolingo appeared. My mother is living in retirement and has started learning languages as a way to pass time, she has learned enough English through duolingo to achieve a conversational level and she never had a teacher. Is it really impossible for more sophisticated AIs to truly replace language teachers in schools, and have students do things through a computer? and possibly replace teachers in many other fields of studies too. I'd wager most of the less advanced courses in pre-college stuff could do well with modern, computerized, interactive methods of learning. I don't think you could replace the interaction with a teacher for more advanced studies, though.

deleted 10y ago

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lcfcjs 10y ago

End of the working class, possibly. End of Middle Class? No, they'll all become programmers or controllers of AI.

optimuspaul 10y ago

Once everything is automated there will be little need for money, we'll all be kings! Damn hell ass kings!

chadcmulligan 10y ago
This is the bit I can't understand about the nay sayers. AI promises a world of everything you could want. The problem is the current way of assigning goods (money for labour) is obsolete. The really funny thing (to me) is the people who'd benefit most by this are the ones wailing the most. It's the disconnects that confuse me the most. "What about houses, how can we afford a house without a job?" is a complaint I hear. Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0. The hard part imho is the transition where some jobs are obsoleted, but some aren't and some things still cost lots because they haven't been automated yet. This is where we are now I think.
- codexon 10y ago
  > Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0. Ok and how will you pay the guy who owns the lumber if you have nothing he wants? And the guy who owns the construction bots? And the owner of the land?
  - chadcmulligan 10y ago
    Yes, thats what I'm wondering - when you have a fully automated supply chain that builds houses with 0 labour (probably never be 0, but near enough for the sake of argument). Lets say we have a world that everything is automated to produce all the stuff we need. Then how do you pay for that stuff because no one will be working. Also what will prompt people to make new machines to build new stuff?
    - thomyorkie 10y ago
      foglets perhaps will do the trick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog

gukov 10y ago

Every living organism is designed by evolution to strive for survival and reproduction. It's the constant fight that gets you out of the bed every morning. Having nothing to do all day but paint will eventually result in premature death. Think animals in captivity. What if the end of humanity will be caused not by a nuclear war but by a peaceful AI that made us zoo animals?

_rpd 10y ago
At some point attention becomes the ultimate resource. Most people earn income by paying attention to somebody else's projects. But with a little introspection and basic goal setting training, many people identify projects to which they would prefer to give their attention if income were not an issue. I think a society in which a higher proportion of one's time can be spent on personal projects vs. other's projects is a goal worth working towards.
kmnc 10y ago
If we have the technological prowess to replace human labor in full yet can't figure out what to then do with our lives other then paint then we truly are a doomed species. It seems like people lack imagination, everyone either thinks "don't worry we will still have jobs (appeals to social history)" or the "with nothing to do we will wither and die (appeals to evolutionary history)". I think both those camps are missing something which should be self evident if we ever get to this point: The freedom and ability to create meaning in ones own life. I do agree with you though, if we are kept in captivity by political and social structures (ahem..religion) that fail to evolve with technology (which seems like human nature sadly) then the average human will go the way of the sloth or the people in idiocracy. I am hopeful though that the AI will save us from that captivity more so then reinforce it yet that may be a foolish hope. Is being a zoo animal so bad if we have the full capabilities of very powerful AI? What if those AI's were specifically devoted to making it a better zoo? At that point what is the difference? What is inherently bad about being a zoo animal if you can't see the walls and the zoo keepers don't abuse you?
andrewflnr 10y ago
I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic. We'll find our fights, whether mountain climbing, video games, even gaining recognition as a painter.

multinglets 10y ago

Heady fucking stuff, just wow.

hyperion2010 10y ago

Great! Maybe we will finally have the excess capacity to finally send people into local archives all over the world so that we can save the data about the past and feed it to the machines. If you want data for models there is tons of it lurking in the basements of municipal buildings all over the world, and you might find a lost Da Vinci manuscript while you are at it!

Girlang 10y ago

The Middle Class would have never existed if it wasn't artificially created. It just doesn't naturally happen.

pvnick 10y ago

The idea that technology will cause widespread job-loss and economic upheaval is such an old fear, and it never works that way. Technological innovations lead to wealth creation 100% of the time, along with more opportunities for more people, even if some jobs are initially replaced with other jobs. "This time is different" is announced everytime, and it's always the same. This book is very good for anybody wishing to understand basic economic theory and see many examples throughout history of this exact debate taking place over and over and over again: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ (see the chapter "The Curse of Machinery").

234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago
Yes but this time it's different. Throughout history, until the past 50 years or so, the new technology has typically replaced a mechanical function humans were performing. The coming evolution of software and robotics will start performing the mental work humans, until very recently, were the ONLY thing on the planet capable of doing. For the past 3000 years of "modern humans", we have had a monopoly on the human brain and creative intelligence. That monopoly is coming to an end. What will the average worker do when a robot that can out-wit them? You cannot just handwave this problem away saying "it always creates new jobs!!11". This problem is well-summarized by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- twoodfin 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure travel agents believed they were doing "mental work".

laughfactory 10y ago

The problem with UBI is inflation. Give everyone another $1000/month (or whatever) and all you've done is make every existing dollar in the economy worth less.

noisy_boy 10y ago
This is exactly the question I don't see answered. How will you handle increased prices? Unless instead of $1000/pm, you give an equivalent purchasing power/quota based on normal/average/reasonable per-capita consumption. Like a token that allows you to buy a certain amount of food/clothes/medicines etc. So what happens if I don't need to buy anymore clothes today but need more medicines but another guy is in a reverse situation? How about we translate this purchasing quota into points and have an exchange for people to trade them? Did we re-invent barter system/money in another form?
e12e 10y ago
Make the UBI micro-adjusted (month-to-month) for inflation based on a consumer index - and so indirectly tax passive capital (which is only earning meager interest)?

philipkglass 10y ago

Now I'll highlight a concern I do actually have about a fully robotized economy: weapons proliferation. The key pieces of information needed to build a serviceable anti-tank missile or a jug of nerve gas are already lying on the shelves of thousands of technical libraries. The details may be classified, but the broad outlines in the open literature are good enough for someone with patience and a technical background to fill in workable solutions. Fortunately for civilization to date, {diligent, technically educated, sufficiently well funded, homicidal} is a set of attributes that rarely co-occurs. We've seen homicidal maniacs who were patient and well-funded enough to make their own nerve gas just once so far (Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 1990s). Things change if machines do all the real work and a would-be killer doesn't need any special skills to get deadlier weapons. The unhinged man who rage-kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could, in the future, ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun. Outbreaks of lethal violence might be rarer, since people who are materially well-off are generally less likely to murder, but the rarer killings rooted in rage or ideology could become a lot deadlier. In a few post-scarcity science fiction settings impulses to violence are stopped with direct human nerve implants linked to a machine panopticon that can halt dangerous actions. I don't consider that a plausible or even desirable future. In my favorite space opera setting, the Culture of Iain M. Banks, killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight running millions of times faster than biological intelligence. That sounds dreamy to me, but it involves a lot of made up Space Opera physics so I don't think it is plausible. Thinking about a future where AI is capable enough to manufacture anything people ask for, but not capable enough to act as benevolent gods, leads to some odd mixtures of prosperity and catastrophe.

ahartman00 10y ago
"ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun" I know the NSA and IoT get a lot of criticism here. But this seems like a good usecase for the always connected, phone home systems, with an all seeing eye. :) "killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight" As someone who used to work in a warehouse, ai which can detect anomalous orders seems incredibly plausible. Considering they have all been storing data for years, you have plenty of training data. Making something that notices when certain substances are shipped to someone who is not a normal customer seems trivial, if it doesnt exist. I mean the conservation of mass means that the explosive has to come from somewhere :)

kisstheblade 10y ago

I think we will laugh at this "AI threat" in 30 years after yet another long "AI winter". I mean I haven't been convinced of any "AI" displayed. All just seems to be glorified pattern matching with little practical use. I mean siri and cortana and alexa are all dumb as sh*t. Sure some cars can negotiate some clearly marked streets in nice weather. I don't think there is an automatic leap from these technologies to more advanced AI that actually would for example enable totally autonomous cars. Sure there are incremental improvements in robotics etc that helps to raise the efficiency of some operations but then the humans can move on to different jobs and enable other things. Eg. radiology where humans can treat people some AI has marked the scans as "suspect". So better treatment because of "AI", but the doctor still has a job. Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be. "It's AI I tells you, luddites!"

StRoy 10y ago
> Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. > This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be You are decades behind the times. > http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 > Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots' > http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal... > In a new report from Digitimes, Foxconn executive Dai Jia-peng has laid out the company’s three-step plan for automating its Chinese factories. The company’s ultimate goal is to fully automate production of things like PCs, LCD monitors, and its most famous product—the iPhone. > Foxconn makes its own manufacturing robots, known as Foxbots, and has already deployed about 40,000 of them. Some, which the company considers "stage one," assist workers at their stations. Foxconn already has individual fully automated production lines—they're "stage two"—in factories in Chengdu, Chongquing, and Zhengzhou. > Stage three of the process would be fully automated factories, with only a handful of workers. Even China with its cheap labor is now willing to invest in that technology. If Trump ever becomes "successful" at "bringing those jobs back" to the USA, it will be jobs for machines.

redsummer 10y ago

AI makes me want to join the Amish. You learn things to give yourself a future and self-fulfilment. But AI will catch up with your skills eventually. You would need to spend all your time learning if you want to keep ahead, and never have time to put to work what you have learned. Wouldn't you rather have a community and a meaningful life than be a meat-based beta version of a future AI?

jganetsk 10y ago

The problem isn't AI. It's capitalism. People are fearing the ultimate triumph of capital over labor.. If people owned the robots, then there would be no problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwB9-9QOQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwB9-9QOQI

dgudkov 10y ago
It's an interesting perspective, but what would stop people from having shares in companies that own robots?
- jganetsk 10y ago
  All people should have shares in companies that own robots. Or they should at least have a claim in the return on capital. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-funded-by-capital-income-by-yanis-varoufakis-2016-10?barrier=accessreg https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-fu...

lostmsu 10y ago

I still think it is the end of all classes.

macawfish 10y ago

Well, I dint know what they decded the ethics were for biotechnology, but genetically engineering seeds so that farmers depend on the auxiliary herbicides from singular corporations strikes me as unethical. Not to mention that farmers are reliant on those same corporations for seed itself. Seeds that have been cultivated for hundreds of thousands of years are getting replaced with zombie varieties that disrupt ecologies. This is a crisis. We are losing our collective seed memory. To me, capitalism is not about free markets, it's about debt markets. Maybe that's because the only capitalism I've ever known is ideologically restricted. Its champions are often hypocrites of their religion, where income from rent is deemed productive while work done by a mother in taking care of her children is consumptive and indebted.

nubol 10y ago

I don't find many articles talking about how AI integration in the industry could lower the production costs in many markets, that would allow consumers to be able to buy products cheaper, so they could work less to be able to pay basic stuff. Also it would allow people to be more capable to scale multiple tasks, for instance: instead of being a taxi driver you become the manager of a driver less taxi.