Via Digg, just read this article from the New York Times concerning the terrifying future of AI.
What threw me is the focus on lost jobs to robots. I can certainly understand an individual worrying about losing his job (especially if he's old, and it's a highly specialized job, and that's all he knows how to do), but what's the point of a society doing so?
This is something I've thought about a lot for the Ghost Targets series. In the books, I make casual reference to the twenty-hour work week, but the direction of the series is toward less and less, and that seems to me like the direction of the future, anyway. We develop better and better technology so that we can get more results from less effort. Ultimately, that should mean more and more free time. Ultimately, that should mean lives of leisure for most of the populace.
I realize that the people who lose jobs to robots won't be the CEOs and magnates of industry, but the poor and the scrabbling. Actually, that's been going on for most of a century now. I assume the concern of the scientists in this article is that it'll reach up into the middle class, too. But let's say that happens, let's say a significant portion of the lower and middle class are unemployed now, because their efforts aren't needed to make the things the corporations want to sell....
Those corporations still have to sell the things. With the help of computers they can make the things for cheaper (else why fire the people?), and the now the people in aggregate have less money to spend, so the things can and must cost less. You divide what work people are needed for across a much larger pool of available employees, and so the time-worked-per-person-per-day drops. You can inflate currency so people get paid the same for a twenty-hour work week, or you can drop prices of goods so that all these people getting paid half wages can still afford to buy them. Either way, people are working half as much and enjoying the exact same standard of living.
We did this already, when we went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, and then (to a lesser extent) when our production went from manufacturing- to service-based. Employ machines to increase leisure. It's why we made plows, it's why we made assembly lines, and it's why we made the assembly language. When I'm sitting at home and write a Python script to rename a bunch of computer files for me (a boring task) so that I can spend that time playing a video game, that's the point of it. We'll do that on a large scale, and next thing you know half of the world is entertainers, and the other half is audience, and everything else is an afterthought.
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This is a very positive spin on what could happen. Historically, do you think that when the lower classes became less useful the rich gave them jobs just so they would have someone to sell products to? It seems more likely that there would be a larger division of the classes instead of the rich propping up the poor.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic. A lot of people have thought what will happen. I think in the short term that Toby is correct. The poor and uneducated and some of the middle class will be out of work. At the very least they will have to be adaptive to whatever work needs to be done. In the long term I see something similar to Aaron’s thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI’m going to ignore the idea that machines or war will wipe us out. While it is very plausable that it may happen it doesn’t lead to a very happy ending.
To look at the core of things, what is the purpose of these machines? 1) To make our lives better. They will do things that we don’t like doing. They will assist us in our needs: food, clothing, shelter, social interaction. 2) To do things better, cheaper and faster.
In the short term they will assist us in doing things we don’t like doing: house maintenance, food preparation, cleaning, etc. But this will be mostly for the wealthy and middle class. They will assist in manufacturing and will take away the need for a lot of middle class jobs that a computer can do much more efficiently (ie accounting). This of course will drive prices down. What will be interesting if these machines become cheaper/more efficient than what they can do in other countries so that it removes the need to offshore manufacturing. How will this affect economics?
In the long term I see that we will integrate machines into humans. We will integrate intelligent computers and memory into our brains so that we will become extremely intelligent and remember everything. We will have nanotechnology that will continually repair our bodies so that we never age. It may be possible that we could modify our genetics so that we won’t get sick, maybe even modify our image. Of course these computers will create links with each other so that we could communicate with anyone else at any time. Maybe even create virtual worlds so that you can live in a dream world with other people. If you were given a choice of living in the real world or living in a dream world what would you pick? If we don’t age and don’t get sick how quickly will we overrun the world? We can expand up, into the ocean and even underground but eventually we will have to go into space. What is interesting is that space travel becomes interesting when you don’t age and you can live in a dream world. You could travel hundreds of years to get to a destination and survive the trip.
There are multiple potential problems. The most pressing problem is greed (for money or power). Of course malicious thoughts are another problem. If you build an Ironman so that a human is extraordinarily strong how do you control that? What happens if a hacker creates an unbeatable virus? Computers will understand us better when we connect them to our brain. But will they like what they see? Will it accept the differences between all of us? If we link up with everyone in the world will knowledge be shared between everyone? Will we learn to accept other people or will we segregate if we can communicate or live in an artificial world with other people? Will religion exist? Very interesting stuff.