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Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those r

by kandu 15y ago

Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those related to the humanity of humans. Life could become dedicated to enjoying art in various forms, and this art will be conceived mostly by humans. If people will have no work to do, they could hire entertainers. They could do jobs as a hobby - e.g., manually producing stuff that could as well be made by robots, but that other humans will buy just because it was hand made. They could enjoy experimenting with various lifestyles, effectively creating diverse subcultures, and these cultures will trade items that are uniquely developed within the culture. Imagine a world where people could enjoy the variety of clothing that existed in the world 300 years ago and that has been now elliminated by the hustle of modern life and by a global trade in clothes. Even if they will be produced by robots, designing these clothes will remain mostly a human job. Virtually anyone could wear designer clothes, and many people could become such designers. The same could be applied to food, music, movies, and so on. Education and corporal care would also become a large part of the economy that would hire humans and not robots. There will be plenty of niches, and people will have the time to invest in developing specialized skills, rediscovering skills long forgotten. Eliberated by the stress of modern life, life will simply become more enjoyable.

ars 15y ago
Sounds like a horrible world to me. "Life could become dedicated to enjoying art"?? Ugh!!!! "...could enjoy the variety of clothing..." are you kidding? That sounds horrible. There is a basic human need to be needed. People who have everything but are not needed are miserable. People who are needed, but have little are happy.
- mietek 15y ago
  The "Culture" series of novels by Iain M. Banks explores these issues in some detail.
- Joeri 15y ago
  Being needed and being appreciated aren't the same thing. What we want is appreciation, even if what we do is sort of pointless. That opens up all kinds of possibilities to how to spend our time. For example, if you didn't need to work to meet your basic needs, you could decide to devote your time to beating videogame records. It would be completely useless, but still lead to lots of appreciation for your skill. Doing a hobby all day long could become the norm. I have to second the culture series as good reading on this topic. It paints a believable picture of an Ai-driven post-material society where people still feel that they live full lives.
127 15y ago
Sounds like a society of couch potatoes and drug addicts to me. From my perspective you have a much too optimistic view on the human race. If people are not forced to exceed, they will not. Suffering, that does not cripple, defines us. It makes us stronger, more agile, more determined. I would go so far as to say that when we have dreams and goals and we strive to achieve them, by making work towards step by step, each moment we feel better about ourself. Each success builds us and makes us more confident. If it were not for women, I'd just sit home playing World of Warcraft, drinking energy drinks and masturbating, to put it bluntly. Even if our basic material needs are met through automation, we are all still engaged in a very bitter competition for other resources, you do realize. There simply can not exist a state of utopia as long as we reproduce sexually (I have a very Freudian view on this). This is a catch-22 of course. The state we are in defines what we consider an utopia. You are assuming that if we didn't have to worry about producing material resources, creativity and intellect would be the determining factor in who gets their way. Why not violence? Why not intimidation and sociopathy? As tightly knit social groups (small villages and communities) break down and we live in one global village, nobody really knows each other. Most of the people we meet are complete strangers to us. It's much easier for exploitative and cruel personalities to thrive, because they can stay hidden in plain sight. They can pretend and manipulate to their dark hearts content without the fear of retribution. If they get discovered they can just move to a different location. As we have more material resources as welfare and a legal arm heavily protective of women and children, women don't need a protector nor a financier. They can just get the sperm they want and raise kids outside of marriage. Old institutions that were the bedrock of civilized society will all but crumble to dust. Widespread soft polygamy will replace it. Those with the most instant charm and good appearances will win, instead of those who build things to last on the long run. Short term strategies will win over the long term ones. These are all hyperboles I use to describe my views of the modes of societal change and interaction. It is my theory that the easier it is to meet material needs, the lazier people get and more prone to instant gratification. It's not that difficult to extrapolate from this one simple truth. Also one of the problems I didn't touch upon, is how our natural instincts that were developed for a very different world will overtake and corrupt us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli. Slow seduction of irrational and unbalanced stimulus can make our behaviour very self destructive on the long run.
zanny 15y ago
The downfall of this is where our current economic system projects us : Developers make AI and machines capable of replacing farming, mining, power generation, resource refinement completely, except for technicians and mechanics. It isn't far off from the same machines entering the human service workforce, replacing the cashier and drive through clerk. They replace cars and planes (already have auto pilot, google car in ~10 years). At this point, we have crisis. Our current system has you buying a good and the company providing it making the money. If the company consists of hundreds of technicians as its only labor force because the entire production process is automated (your big Mac is farmed by robots, overseen by robots, butchered, packed, shipped by robots, cooked by robots, and served by robots) and the ~$5 you pay for it goes entirely to the company coffers. It would not take long for everyone's wealth to trickle into the hands of the few hundreds of people positioned to rule over the production of 99% of goods. It is kind of like what OWS is doing right now, but much worse. There is no fast food job for the high school grad to do - you must learn engineering, art, or hard science to have any function to society, because any rote task or even service job has been replaced by robots. And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms. The company becomes a siphon of any money they make straight into the stock holders. And there would be no employees, because everything is automated. You don't even need an engineer to watch the top level of maintenance bots, because you have 10+ of them and they know how to fix themselves. The end result though is that we have this situation where we pay money for what robots do, not people, and the money just goes to those that funded the robots original creation forever. That kind of situation would not last long, but it would be nice to avoid. It will require a huge reinterpretation of any viable economic system when you can make goods and provide services without any human interaction.
- 127 15y ago
  One thing I hope the technological advancement will bring is synthetic meat. With extremely cheap energy (both environmentally and financially) synthetic product should not be too expensive to compete with slaughtering real live animals. We are predators, yes, but that does not mean we can step up the ladder and satisfy our diet using a higher level of technology without any real animal suffering. This does exclude meat gained through hunting to keep populations in check. Factory farmed animal meat is just something so morally repugnant to me. If there's no real need for it, why do it? >And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms. I don't think this is logically possible. The job of a programmer is to transform human intention and desire into a computer readable input. How would you determine a heuristic for the genetic algorithm? The heuristic would have to be written by a human being on some level. There's only so far you can automate automation itself and I think you are grossly underestimating how difficult it is or will be. Programming is a trinity between human paradigms, algorithmic mathematics and magic. The closer you bring the math and algorithms to the human paradigms and desires, the more it will resemble magic. It is an asymptotic progression. The magic will be never achieved. What you are talking about is constructing the perfect programming language. People have been trying to do this since the start of previous century (Lambda calculus). You really think we will experience some tremendous leap in the close future? In short: you will always have to have a way to describe what you want of the computer, and this is called a programming language.
Tsagadai 15y ago
The modern capitalist society is extremely unlikely to end up in this state. Companies grow larger, that is their modus operandi. Once capital can be used to buy capital that produces capital you have eliminated humans from the equation. There is a level which we are approaching where some industries will become almost entirely automated. What happens in that situation is a few people make all the money and the rest don't. We are seeing an ever increasing disparity between wealth gained through capital investment and wealth gained directly through labour. Even high-end labour produces far less money than investment does. Most high-end labour tasks are tightly coupled to capital investment. Do you really think that the history of wealth production is somehow going to change radically to a sudden redistribution of wealth to everyone so they can relax and take it easy while living off the fruits of others investments?
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  yeah, standards of living will remain stagnant as the evil rich overlords accrue ever increasing wealth! Oh wait 200-2010 was the single greatest decade in all of human history for the amount of people raised out of subsistence living to a reasonable standard of living and 2010-2020 promises to be even better. Darn reality messing up my morality plays. Real life is not a status game.
  - Tsagadai 15y ago
    I agree with you in part, capitalism has brought billions out of poverty and backbreaking labour. When you compare serfdom to pretty much any alternative is better. You will also notice if you read the data correctly that individual wealth has risen across the board. Everyone has more than they would have otherwise had in the 1950s. That's great but it doesn't mean that economic discussion is now over because all arguments have been won and lost. What I was wondering about in my post was what happens when capital no longer requires much labour. This is happening now, hedgefunds are a great examples of this. They are amazingly efficient and produce very large sums of capital for the amount of labour required (revenue per employee). I'm not saying all labour is equal, I am saying capital is producing more in industries with less labour. Potentially, a financial model could get so good (or so stable) that it requires only minor updates to the system in order continue deriving a profit. You then have a situation where capital creates capital with only a statistically insignificant amount of labour. Efficiency pushes the system forward and delivers much to people while people have a valuable product to sell, their labour. When their labour is not valuable, they are unemployed. If their labour cannot generate enough value, why would they ever be employed in an ultimately efficient system? My argument still stands, if you would like to respond to it. Why would capitalism suddenly change to give accumulated wealth back? Will the masses just rely on philanthropic whims?

by kandu 15y ago

ars 15y ago

Sounds like a horrible world to me. "Life could become dedicated to enjoying art"?? Ugh!!!! "...could enjoy the variety of clothing..." are you kidding? That sounds horrible. There is a basic human need to be needed. People who have everything but are not needed are miserable. People who are needed, but have little are happy.

mietek 15y ago
The "Culture" series of novels by Iain M. Banks explores these issues in some detail.
Joeri 15y ago
Being needed and being appreciated aren't the same thing. What we want is appreciation, even if what we do is sort of pointless. That opens up all kinds of possibilities to how to spend our time. For example, if you didn't need to work to meet your basic needs, you could decide to devote your time to beating videogame records. It would be completely useless, but still lead to lots of appreciation for your skill. Doing a hobby all day long could become the norm. I have to second the culture series as good reading on this topic. It paints a believable picture of an Ai-driven post-material society where people still feel that they live full lives.

127 15y ago

Sounds like a society of couch potatoes and drug addicts to me. From my perspective you have a much too optimistic view on the human race. If people are not forced to exceed, they will not. Suffering, that does not cripple, defines us. It makes us stronger, more agile, more determined. I would go so far as to say that when we have dreams and goals and we strive to achieve them, by making work towards step by step, each moment we feel better about ourself. Each success builds us and makes us more confident. If it were not for women, I'd just sit home playing World of Warcraft, drinking energy drinks and masturbating, to put it bluntly. Even if our basic material needs are met through automation, we are all still engaged in a very bitter competition for other resources, you do realize. There simply can not exist a state of utopia as long as we reproduce sexually (I have a very Freudian view on this). This is a catch-22 of course. The state we are in defines what we consider an utopia. You are assuming that if we didn't have to worry about producing material resources, creativity and intellect would be the determining factor in who gets their way. Why not violence? Why not intimidation and sociopathy? As tightly knit social groups (small villages and communities) break down and we live in one global village, nobody really knows each other. Most of the people we meet are complete strangers to us. It's much easier for exploitative and cruel personalities to thrive, because they can stay hidden in plain sight. They can pretend and manipulate to their dark hearts content without the fear of retribution. If they get discovered they can just move to a different location. As we have more material resources as welfare and a legal arm heavily protective of women and children, women don't need a protector nor a financier. They can just get the sperm they want and raise kids outside of marriage. Old institutions that were the bedrock of civilized society will all but crumble to dust. Widespread soft polygamy will replace it. Those with the most instant charm and good appearances will win, instead of those who build things to last on the long run. Short term strategies will win over the long term ones. These are all hyperboles I use to describe my views of the modes of societal change and interaction. It is my theory that the easier it is to meet material needs, the lazier people get and more prone to instant gratification. It's not that difficult to extrapolate from this one simple truth. Also one of the problems I didn't touch upon, is how our natural instincts that were developed for a very different world will overtake and corrupt us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli. Slow seduction of irrational and unbalanced stimulus can make our behaviour very self destructive on the long run.

zanny 15y ago

The downfall of this is where our current economic system projects us : Developers make AI and machines capable of replacing farming, mining, power generation, resource refinement completely, except for technicians and mechanics. It isn't far off from the same machines entering the human service workforce, replacing the cashier and drive through clerk. They replace cars and planes (already have auto pilot, google car in ~10 years). At this point, we have crisis. Our current system has you buying a good and the company providing it making the money. If the company consists of hundreds of technicians as its only labor force because the entire production process is automated (your big Mac is farmed by robots, overseen by robots, butchered, packed, shipped by robots, cooked by robots, and served by robots) and the ~$5 you pay for it goes entirely to the company coffers. It would not take long for everyone's wealth to trickle into the hands of the few hundreds of people positioned to rule over the production of 99% of goods. It is kind of like what OWS is doing right now, but much worse. There is no fast food job for the high school grad to do - you must learn engineering, art, or hard science to have any function to society, because any rote task or even service job has been replaced by robots. And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms. The company becomes a siphon of any money they make straight into the stock holders. And there would be no employees, because everything is automated. You don't even need an engineer to watch the top level of maintenance bots, because you have 10+ of them and they know how to fix themselves. The end result though is that we have this situation where we pay money for what robots do, not people, and the money just goes to those that funded the robots original creation forever. That kind of situation would not last long, but it would be nice to avoid. It will require a huge reinterpretation of any viable economic system when you can make goods and provide services without any human interaction.

127 15y ago
One thing I hope the technological advancement will bring is synthetic meat. With extremely cheap energy (both environmentally and financially) synthetic product should not be too expensive to compete with slaughtering real live animals. We are predators, yes, but that does not mean we can step up the ladder and satisfy our diet using a higher level of technology without any real animal suffering. This does exclude meat gained through hunting to keep populations in check. Factory farmed animal meat is just something so morally repugnant to me. If there's no real need for it, why do it? >And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms. I don't think this is logically possible. The job of a programmer is to transform human intention and desire into a computer readable input. How would you determine a heuristic for the genetic algorithm? The heuristic would have to be written by a human being on some level. There's only so far you can automate automation itself and I think you are grossly underestimating how difficult it is or will be. Programming is a trinity between human paradigms, algorithmic mathematics and magic. The closer you bring the math and algorithms to the human paradigms and desires, the more it will resemble magic. It is an asymptotic progression. The magic will be never achieved. What you are talking about is constructing the perfect programming language. People have been trying to do this since the start of previous century (Lambda calculus). You really think we will experience some tremendous leap in the close future? In short: you will always have to have a way to describe what you want of the computer, and this is called a programming language.

Tsagadai 15y ago

The modern capitalist society is extremely unlikely to end up in this state. Companies grow larger, that is their modus operandi. Once capital can be used to buy capital that produces capital you have eliminated humans from the equation. There is a level which we are approaching where some industries will become almost entirely automated. What happens in that situation is a few people make all the money and the rest don't. We are seeing an ever increasing disparity between wealth gained through capital investment and wealth gained directly through labour. Even high-end labour produces far less money than investment does. Most high-end labour tasks are tightly coupled to capital investment. Do you really think that the history of wealth production is somehow going to change radically to a sudden redistribution of wealth to everyone so they can relax and take it easy while living off the fruits of others investments?

nazgulnarsil 15y ago
yeah, standards of living will remain stagnant as the evil rich overlords accrue ever increasing wealth! Oh wait 200-2010 was the single greatest decade in all of human history for the amount of people raised out of subsistence living to a reasonable standard of living and 2010-2020 promises to be even better. Darn reality messing up my morality plays. Real life is not a status game.
- Tsagadai 15y ago
  I agree with you in part, capitalism has brought billions out of poverty and backbreaking labour. When you compare serfdom to pretty much any alternative is better. You will also notice if you read the data correctly that individual wealth has risen across the board. Everyone has more than they would have otherwise had in the 1950s. That's great but it doesn't mean that economic discussion is now over because all arguments have been won and lost. What I was wondering about in my post was what happens when capital no longer requires much labour. This is happening now, hedgefunds are a great examples of this. They are amazingly efficient and produce very large sums of capital for the amount of labour required (revenue per employee). I'm not saying all labour is equal, I am saying capital is producing more in industries with less labour. Potentially, a financial model could get so good (or so stable) that it requires only minor updates to the system in order continue deriving a profit. You then have a situation where capital creates capital with only a statistically insignificant amount of labour. Efficiency pushes the system forward and delivers much to people while people have a valuable product to sell, their labour. When their labour is not valuable, they are unemployed. If their labour cannot generate enough value, why would they ever be employed in an ultimately efficient system? My argument still stands, if you would like to respond to it. Why would capitalism suddenly change to give accumulated wealth back? Will the masses just rely on philanthropic whims?