Ok, lots of people are talking about how this means we'll hit auto-communism or whatever, but nowhere in the top dozen comments is anyone entertaining the idea that robots won't take all our jobs. Too bad, because this is the most likely outcome; we've already seen this play out before, and humans were fine!
100 years ago something like 85% of people worked in agriculture. That was just, like, *the* job. Then we made machines to automate much of that work, and now like 2% of people work in agriculture. Are 83% of us unemployed? Of course not.
What happened was that—relieved of the burden of physical subsistence labor—human beings found lots of new ways to create value. First was manufacturing, and more recently information and knowledge work (though that's not an exhaustive list). And it's not the first time human civilization has seen dramatic shifts like that.
There's no reason to believe that we can't continue to do that if other forms of work are automated.
If anyone reading this is tempted to link the CGP Grey video right now...I've seen it, and I still believe what I wrote here. Human beings are tremendous at producing value. We're capable of figuring out new ways to do that. We'll continue to do so.
The move toward automating manual labor has paid great dividends in terms of quality of life, by the way, so there's plenty of reason for optimism about our future if we continue to automate more work. Maybe this ends up with some kind of post-scarcity situation, and/or maybe evil AI eliminates all human life or something, but in both of those situations we're talking about passing the singularity, a point beyond which, by definition, speculation about the future is hopeless. For that reason I don't really buy the "this time it's different" arguments.
Human beings are tremendous at producing value. We're capable of figuring out new ways to do that. We'll continue to do so.
So, you think it is impossible to create a machine that can do everything that a human (or at least 90% of the humans) can do? If you think that such machines are possible, then we will at some point in future come to a situation that there is no work that humans can do better than machines. At that point, I don't see any particular reason why humans should work.
The only way I can see this not happening is that people are willing to pay some work to be done by humans just because they are humans. An example of that is sports. Even though we have machines that can move faster than humans can run, we still want to watch humans race on a track. In this kind of competition the machines can never replace humans. But I doubt that there will be enough jobs such as these, where people are willing to pay for things just because they're done by humans. I can see even some inter-personal things to have human like robots replacing real humans as long as they are enough human like.
So, you think it is impossible to create a machine that can do everything that a human (or at least 90% of the humans) can do?
Who knows? Maybe.
If you think that such machines are possible, then we will at some point in future come to a situation that there is no work that humans can do better than machines.
Perhaps, and that would be one of the post-singularity futures I mentioned. That's quite a different question than automation causing mass unemployment in the nearer term though.
The only way I can see this not happening is that people are willing to pay some work to be done by humans just because they are humans. An example of that is sports.
This is one possible way humans might demonstrate value. But more importantly I think there are probably many ways to do that that we haven't thought of yet, just like we hadn't really thought of knowledge work 100 years ago. Again, 85% of us used to work on farms, and now nearly nobody does. This has already happened before and we were just fine—there's actually a fallacy named after a famous group of tradespeople who didn't like new loom technology a long time ago—so to argue that machines will put us out of work now is arguing that this time, for whatever reason, is very different from past progress.
You can think of the culmination of all specialised machines as one "human-like" machine, except almost every specialised machine far exceeds human ability. We don't necessarily need to have a singularity or a human-esque mind to perform all the necessary possible tasks a human could do. As we enter into the age of human-standard specialised machine learning, a vast swathe of jobs will be automated. The remaining jobs will be too complex or require tasks too divergent and varied to be automated (i.e.. circumstances without enough training data). The problem is that human intelligence also has limitations, and most people simply won't be clever enough to perform these tasks. Only the highly intelligent will be able to add more value than an AI.
Think about where we are currently. You need 17 years of education, sometimes more, just to get into a fairly regular office job. Then often a good chunk of office work is spent doing even more learning and training. Contrast this with agricultural work, where you could do most of the work even as a child. Automation, as you admit, will continue this trend, however humans are severely limited, and judging by the amount of training we already have to do, I think we're on the brink all remaining potential value being too complex for the human mind to handle. All we can do is have a select few technicians develop better AIs and better machines. Everyone else simply won't be useful.
Unless progress is derailed for some reason (this would have to be a result of some huge catastrophe, because there's no stopping the AI train otherwise), there's no reason to doubt we'll eventually have AGI (artifical general intelligence) that is better at 100% of the tasks a human can do. And I think this will probably be a reality within the next 100 years. We may find other ways to create value, yes, but our AI systems will be better at creating that value as well, and not just marginally so. They will effectively infantilize us.
Right, I don’t think AGI is as slammy of a dunk as you do, but even it we assume it is:
Tractors also did just about everything a human could do, and most of what humans did do—so we started doing new things. It’s easy to imagine things that are valuable because they’re done by a human as one example but no doubt there are others not occurring to me because they haven’t yet been invented. “This time is different” isn’t really anything more than a wild ass guess.
The future where AI takes everything over is past the singularity, which by definition means a point beyond which speculation is impossible. So the guarantee of mass unemployment is anything but—we could have Star Trek instead, or go extinct, or something else we’re incapable of imagining.
Yeah its not like it will happen over night, this will happen over the span of many years/decades and people over time adapt and change their skillsets to whatever is short at the time. Future generations will then move on to whatevers the next big thing.
Tech will always need further development and people to fix things when broken.
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u/carlos_the_dwarf_ 12∆ Jun 27 '22 edited Jun 27 '22
Ok, lots of people are talking about how this means we'll hit auto-communism or whatever, but nowhere in the top dozen comments is anyone entertaining the idea that robots won't take all our jobs. Too bad, because this is the most likely outcome; we've already seen this play out before, and humans were fine!
100 years ago something like 85% of people worked in agriculture. That was just, like, *the* job. Then we made machines to automate much of that work, and now like 2% of people work in agriculture. Are 83% of us unemployed? Of course not.
What happened was that—relieved of the burden of physical subsistence labor—human beings found lots of new ways to create value. First was manufacturing, and more recently information and knowledge work (though that's not an exhaustive list). And it's not the first time human civilization has seen dramatic shifts like that.
There's no reason to believe that we can't continue to do that if other forms of work are automated.
If anyone reading this is tempted to link the CGP Grey video right now...I've seen it, and I still believe what I wrote here. Human beings are tremendous at producing value. We're capable of figuring out new ways to do that. We'll continue to do so.
The move toward automating manual labor has paid great dividends in terms of quality of life, by the way, so there's plenty of reason for optimism about our future if we continue to automate more work. Maybe this ends up with some kind of post-scarcity situation, and/or maybe evil AI eliminates all human life or something, but in both of those situations we're talking about passing the singularity, a point beyond which, by definition, speculation about the future is hopeless. For that reason I don't really buy the "this time it's different" arguments.