>"AI ... based on its immense emotional statistical database, will know that the best thing to do is x and y and z and act accordingly."
of course the AI will be designed not to help the caller get to their ends, it will be designed to maximize shareholder value. ie, say just the right things to get you quit, and to upgrade, ie manipulate you.
In the limit you get one shareholder who owns the entire planet, a compliant AI consort, self-replicating production machines that are the AI's hands and eyes - and everyone else is disposable.
And probably dead. Except for some tiny proportion of slaves who are entertaining and/or useful.
The one shareholder will be the most aggressive, narcissistic and psychopathic son of a bitch, because those are the qualities competition selects for.
I thought this election cycle was bad. It's almost reassuring that much worse horrors are possible.
AI is going to displace workers, just like the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution! Oh wait, they figured out other things to do then too...
Also, it may be one with a solution that's easy to state - but not necessarily easy to reach. We can't suddenly change how the economy works - we don't have direct control over it. We can try to transition the current one to the desired future one my means of setting up incentive structures appropriately.
If such a robot reliably makes you .... $10M a year in 2016 dollars and costs $1M to make, that's a trivial finance arrangement - 90 days or less maybe.
I don't know what would or could prevent that assuming the ratio and rough magnitude between those two figures. At that point, you'd hope that the pursuit of status would presumably move elsewhere.
Engineering incentives is beyond difficult. Many, many of the things people complain about most in the modern economy is due to some crufty legacy incentive-engineering left over from years past.
I forget the name of the economist/econ.historian, but he got invited to meet with the Politboro(!) of China. He thought it might be about policy, but they wanted to know about what he knew about why the British government did not fall in the 1870s.
I've made this same argument myself, but I've come to believe that there is a difference of kind between the two revolutions you cite and the coming of AI: each of those found a way to replace a large number of human jobs, but humans were able to find refuge in employment at tasks that the new technologies were ill suited for. To you I ask, what is a human able to do that a sufficiently good AI cannot?
Before the industrial revolution we had lots of horses for horse power. Then we made engines which replaced horses. Horses didn't change jobs, they couldn't.
The thing that you're missing here is that the "ai revolution" is not going to be the singularity. We're not going to magically, one day, have robots that outperform humans at all tasks.
Low hanging fruit here is education, tradespeople (AI will not be repairing your car for a while), managerial and oversight tasks, QA engineers, blah, blah, blah. There are plenty of things that humans will be doing better than AI, and from those we'll probably continue specializing and be more ready to handle when automation of more complex tasks does eventually happen.
> what is a human able to do that a sufficiently good AI cannot?
That may not be the right question. There are all kinds of things that theoretically we could replace with bots over humans but we do not because of convention. For example Home Depot or any Home/Shed tool supply store. Let me explain?
In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age there is a class of humans who generate handcrafted items. They have machines that produce anything to molecular perfection and yet humans (due to our nature) seek to distinguish themselves from other groups of humans using objects. In this case flawed objects, but objects they willingly paid for nonetheless. It's all about status!
This is not outlandish to me. I want to construct a Tiny House. I know that when I develop the skills and accomplish this task I will place considerable value on my creation.
It is extremely likely that this is not optimal because of the division of labour. However I will enjoy my Tiny House regardless.
AI can endlessly optimize production but it cannot manufacture personal pride or social class.
Human nature creates scarcity naturally even within a state of abundance.
We really do like to belong to tribes and be 'self made'.
The article addresses your point. Industrial revolution forced people to move from physical work to mental work. AI revolution will take over mental work, and there's no other kind of work left for us.
Also, I find it weird to put agricultural and industrial revolution together in this context.
Agricultural revolution was when people shifted from doing less physical work (hunting) to doing more physical work (building a civilization). It probably wasn't even by choice, but simply because agricultural societies were more efficient and would conquer those which didn't settle down. About the only thing I see here in common with industrial revolution is the forced change of lifestyle.
My thought when I read that in the article was "Physical Work -> Cognitive Work -> Creative work". So I think the third kind of work humans will move to is creative(Since AI are so far incapable of being actually creative). After that though, I don't know of another.
Perhaps you mean the initial spark of an invention, the idea which strikes like a lightning, and so on? But many inventions happen by accident (like the post-it note invention, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-note...). And then you could argument that only human are crazy enough to find novel usage for useless things.
The problem is that the new job titles we keep inventing require ever-greater degrees of intelligence, while the distribution of human intelligence has been remaining just about the same.
A hundred farm workers get replaced by one tractor, but that's okay, because those hundred workers become tractor repairmen, tractor factory workers, tractor designers, and we can farm far more land and produce wealth more efficiently. But not everyone who could plow a field can design a tractor. A thousand years ago, damn near every job was manual labour and could be done with a two-digit IQ, but we're reaching the point in first-world countries where less than half the work which needs to be done can actually be done by someone in the lower half of the population's intelligence distribution.
If we're not there yet, we will be soon. And I think it's fundamentally different to every previous automation revolution.
I have a fundamental disagreement with the notion that we're using our intellectual capital well today. I think that the modern education system fails nearly every student, and some more than others.
If we pushed towards educating people in practical skills, like tractor design, do you really think that it would be a large number of people who are incapable of grasping the concepts? Especially if we used the modern research we have into how people learn effectively?
Education as an industry and cultural norm needs to grow -- and not in the abominable way that it is now, with us glorifying education for the sake of education -- but a push towards valuing people who have learned specialized skills, regardless of what they are.
There's a reason that we have a dearth of mechanics in the U.S., and it's not because being a mechanic is an unattainable goal, but rather because the social norms around specialized blue collar work are ridiculous in the U.S.
Yea we figured it out... after numerous wars and cultural revolutions. The point is to hopefully avoid those kinds of things when transitioning into the information age.
Besides we still haven't really figured out post-industrial revolution employment all that well. Lots of people in bullshit jobs collecting paychecks just because.
You seem to be making a false equivalency. Both the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution created more jobs than they destroyed. A job being some task that can be done that has a net benefit to society. As it stands even without AI we are seeing more jobs destroyed than created with just the software revolution. Sure there are more people in tech than there were before and they are being paid handsomely, but that is largely because most companies need less employees than they used to while making the same or more amount of money.
Once most of customer service and human drivers are eaten by software, which will probably happen without solving 'hard AI' tech will employ even fewer people.
Jobs will only be created out of that if cheaper transportation and customer service enables a new place in the market that wasn't already existent.
So far I don't know of any jobs that the AI revolution has created other than people that create and train AI systems. It simply wouldn't be profitable to employ these people if they weren't destroying more jobs than they take up.
I often wonder if AI will be able to write good TV shows.
My facebook feed is really interesting, the AI that curates it is doing a good job, it seems to know what I like to see and recommends more interesting things to get sucked into.
I think humans and machines will blend, so there won't be an AI vs human 'war'... we will integrate AI tools into ourselves thus becoming more than human. A hyper connected being.
Its funny, a couple of months ago I wanted to programmatically generate videos from any body of text and have people guess as to what story it was telling so using nltk/some statistical threasholding/ and some random vine api/endpoint I was able to whip up[0] something to play around with my friends. It was pretty cool to see how accurate (or not) it was, but mostly amusing since I haven't seen anything like that in the wild. I had in mind that maybe it could be useful for screen writers to generate prototypes to test out quickly, but moved on with other stuff.
I also agree with the blending, reality thus far seems to be one big mixing matrix of mass energy, and our classification of what is AI vs what is human seems pretty moot in comparison.
> They aren't "useless" they may simply not have job skills of value in the future economy.
I.e. useless. Sure, not morally, but economically. This is what we're talking about when discussing automation of jobs. It's important to be precise, otherwise we risk miscommunication.
When politicians say we must do X or Y to get everyone jobs to "boost the economy", they lose sight of the point of jobs, enact policies which destroy well paying middle class jobs to produce a large quantity of jobs no one really wants to do, thinking quantity can substitute for quality. In this case, they voluntarily give up our power so we can "serve" the economy or GDP, even though no such power relationship ought to exist.
But all they have is quantity. The only thing actually quantifiable in quality is the Likert (1-5) scale stuff marketers use. If it's not quantifiable, how can you even talk seriously about it? Isn't this the flaw in the thing?
Politicians need GDP growth because of how government is financed. This isn't foolish nor power-hungry. It's just more or less a fact.
And turn this on it's head - somewhere, a guy/gal is making something you don't even know you'll need yet, who you have never met. That's the thing least about power I ever did hear.
Specifically, jobs-as-political-fodder is ensconced into law in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1979, which lays on the Fed the dual mandate of currency stability and employment. If it is oppressive, it certainly wasn't anticipated to be that; quite the opposite.
I agree with everything, and I do think it has turned out to be oppressive. Inflation is forced onto people to erode their wealth, to ensure they all work, and prevent their ability to accrue savings. The low interest rate ceiling is an asset transfer from labor to capital, removing the ladder that lets people with low wealth climb up in financial status. There is more oppression with the Fed in control of the financial markets, than without.
It should be the latter, but what mostly happens is the former.
Whenever you go to work to earn money for your bread; whenever you adjust your price to equalize supply and demand; whenever you change a product to make it more profitable - you're serving the economy. Single humans and single companies (hell, even most countries) are too weak to dictate how the market works.
That's why we have taxes so people who do not receive enough compensation for working have enough to live too.
I think it's important to keep in mind money isn't the end goal when we go to work. We work to live. And if we can live without working, it is a choice we can take.
There is some small value in reviewing and voting on content, and I have a feeling that as long as that content is made for other humans, AI will at best be additive to the reviewing and voting by other people. if we see an increase of content produced, we'll need an increase consumed content to make it worthwhile.
What do the supposedly useful humans usefully accomplish today? If we measure 'useful' by money earned then the most useful are supposed to be hedge fund managers that don't actually solve any problems.
The truth is that what really makes people 'useful' is there interactions with other humans. No matter how sophisticated the technology or what level of super-human super-intelligent or even as he speculates super-empathetic type of AI, human relationships will still be the true measure of value for people.
This concept of 'useless human beings' only makes sense if you have a primitive elitist Malthusian view in the first place. Which unfortunately many people do have that.
We should expect unenhanced human 1.0 to become the next chimpanzee analog in the hierarchy. We should hope he is right that the AIs are more empathetic towards their inferiors than we have been.
"Useful" is "creates consumer surplus", best I can tell. I don't know as well that hedge fund managers do that nearly as much as a guy selling produce on the side of the road.
For better or worse, economic "usefulness" is directly tied to you having food in your belly. We can talk all we want about how "primitive elitist Malthusian" it is, but it doesn't change the fact that economically useless people go hungry, and we're all about to become economically useless. Fully automated economy can run fine without us.
So you've got a completely independent "fully automated" economy of robots creating "goods" (as defined by humans) and exchanging them with one another while humans starve to death watching that?
Exactly. When robots do the manufacturing and delivery, algorithms do the orders and stock trading, you can imagine the moment when increasing automation will eventually remove humans from the loop.
The market can and does get stuck in weird stupid-ass loops. Consider, for instance, the advertising industry. Most of its output is aimed at cancelling itself out (e.g. when you and I compete for the same group of customers, my advertising expenditure goes mostly to cancel out yours, and vice versa). Also in on-line advertising, a lot of money is being moved over nothing - consider, for instance, analytics. Many people in Internet marketing are clueless about statistics, but so are their clients - so as long as they can bullshit the customers that their service is helping (graph is going up!), they get paid, and customers are happy, because they're clueless too and can't verify the effectiveness of the service they paid for.
And now for a funny twist - people making those analytics tools know this too, and guess what - they're starting to offer statistically invalid measures that are likely to look like the changes marketing people introduced are working. So those marketing people are being bulshitted by their tools now.
It's not a circle per se, but it shows another example of money moving around over no value created.
Actually, no, I can't imagine that moment, and that's why I'm asking for someone to come up with a sensical narrative that takes us from here to there.
Humans dictate what the "loop" is. They define what gets manufactured, and who it gets delivered to. How do they get out of the loop?
I believe the whole idea of humans becoming "useless" or "obsolete" is the biggest piece of nonsense I've come across in the last few years.
It's a good book but he chickens out of saying difficult to hear things about us humans. It was extremely obvious to me that he skates figure eights around controversial topics because he made contradictory statements several times. In the first half of the book he'll say one thing, and then in the second half he'll kowtow to prevailing orthodoxies about humans.
During my reading I began to think he might be writing it in a Straussian style i.e. one version of reality for intellectuals, another for the plebs. My copy of his books is sprinkled with exclamation marks.
Given how popular witch hunts are these days perhaps that what it takes to get a message out there.
We are biological animals! We are flawed beings! Let's accept this and move on!
I've honestly been curious about this for years. Currently, at least in America, we have a culture where if you are not meeting your financial expectations it is your fault. So if you find yourself in an industry that has been outsourced or replaced by technology, you simply need to retool. Ignoring specifics, this is typically sufficient to satisfy concerns of people that are not directly affected.
So, what happens when retooling isn't even an option? Utopia for some, utopia for all? I just can't seem to make any sense of it, but given the lack of empathy in the current climate for people labeled as other, I would suspect the former.
We don't know what will happen. I'm not sure empathy helps, either. As I understand empathy at a distance ( because personalizing it here seems creepy ) , it's sort of a scarce resource. And I don't consider scapegoating as the opposite of empathy. I think it's a related process - as delineated by Rene Girard. It's the dark side of the empathic response. Both are manifestations of the mimetic response.
Arnold Kling is fond of "The Diamond Age", with Thetes and Vickies. Thetes are proles who live on a stipend type thing; Vickies are the ruling elite with extremely tight social strictures. Hopefully somebody more familiar with the book than I can help - I'm repeating Arnold's view of it.
BTW, Arnold Kling also does work in "PSST" - Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade, which is largely athwart this issue.
I do think that "opting out" will become more and more important as society becomes increasingly ephemeral.
Looking at how the American working class got increasing marginalized to the point where it is a popular trope on television to laugh at 'white trash' or 'hillbilly hicks' has always seemed ugly to me. That contempt has always been suspect. That there isn't even a broad recognition of class warfare as an extant reality in American society just makes it worse and further increases feelings of alienation and marginalization. To be frank it is bullying of the sort that is supposed to occur on playgrounds but on a group scale with adults.
I once asked a question on Reddit indirectly asking about working class men and what the Tiny House community (majority women) thought of them since many working class men would have the skills to help construct houses.
After that I felt pretty sure large swathes of Americans utterly despise each other. It wasn't a good feeling.
I think rich people are well aware of the problem (appeals to superiority) in a way that most people aren't. They are constantly in contact with people trying to butter them up. Gradually they develop a sense of detachment, not really believing they're that awesome as they're being told but searching out independent metrics since the human feedback has become unreliable. Or they go batshit into fantasy land.
I may be biased myself but I honestly believe the middle class is responsible for many of the problems we see. They have been constantly buttered up by sycophant politicians and media sources.
I have even seen statements in the media to the effect that the middle class can do no wrong. Recent complaints about the reduction in size of this class often have this thrown in. It is never considered they might NOT actually be God's gift to planet earth but part of the problem.
Is it so surprising that the government has elected officials in western countries that are almost universally doctors and lawyers? Two groups of people who famously have no time for understanding anything other than their field of study because they spent the better part of their lives absorbed in that intense study. Maybe we can't be saved by lawyers and doctors, no matter that they have high IQ, because they are attracted to work on the wrong problems for society.
Consider how different a Congress of computer geeks and scientists would be. I also believe there would be substantial problems since our group also has failure modes like any other. But to say the least it would be different to what we have right now. To be frank I suspect the denizens of HN are more aware of their failure modes than present day Congress. It is not about IQ, it is about the problems you process.
There exist whole swathes of problem areas I see exactly nobody addressing! But by all means let's cross our t's and dot our i's in trade agreements and constitutional amendments.
I vote for the Brain In A Vat things I saw in Psycho-Pass. They had at least some handle on the distributed nature of knowledge and understanding.
The American middle class has been quite the overall force for positive change - in the dimensions where it can change things. IMO, the "attack on the middle class" narrative is the other side of the advertising seduction dance - put people off balance so you can butter 'em up again.
I think the attraction of medicine and law is status. And you can't do anything about that. That's how hu-mans are wired.
> The American middle class has been quite the overall force for positive change - in the dimensions where it can change things.
Oh no! They got to you too! :-)
If you have an opportunity take a gander at "Ben's Mill" It's a short twenty minute documentary on youtube. I think it is very revealing about the kind of self confidence and respect the working class used to have in western countries but which is now lost.
If nothing else it is a beautiful illustration of how things were, it's well worth the watch.
To render all those people unto 'trailer trash' 'white trash', is despicable. You can tell a lot about people by how they treat others they consider their inferiors.
Doctors are responsible for killing their patients by virtue of not being efficient and by preventing technological adaptions. Even properly done digital medical records are impossible in the present world. I'm sure you read recently on HN that medical staff error is responsible for an incredible number of deaths. When I think: heart disease and cancer, it seems incredible that you should add 'Doctor' into the mix of things most likely to kill us, yet it is so.
Lawyers are harming the economic progress of in the main. Don't even think that is very controversial here. Niall Ferguson has outright accused them of this, that's the establishment!
On balance saying doctors and lawyers are a positive force for good is a crapshoot. Maybe so. Maybe there's objective evidence against the intuitive position. Just maybe, they're parasites in a parasitical system that is getting worse with their intransigeance.
Why don't we offer the masses an opportunity to create a new world? Humans are becoming useless at roughly the same time, the cost of space travel is reaching a cost some 10 - 20% of the traditional cost.
The problem is that we value human life and would never subject people to the dangers of space even if they willingly accept the risk. Life is too valuable!
But what happens when a human life is worth nothing? What happens when a human's contribution to humanity is net negative and every person is, by default, a waste of resources? What happens when a person is cheaper than a machine for some tasks?
It wasn't too long ago that people threw themselves to the ocean in the hope of establishing a better life somewhere unknown. People died, but no one found the cost too high to bear. Life wasn't too valuable then.
We have an opportunity here, but we have to devalue life to take advantage of it. And btw, I don't delude myself. I am sure that my children or grandchildren, no matter how successful I may come to be, will be part of that generation, Generation Zero, the one without value. But I hope they have a purpose, at least.
This article makes the (obvious) assumption that a humans purpose is to work so AI taking our jobs will be a bad thing. Realistically it most likely will be a really bad thing, but optimistically it will free man up to reach his full potential. If we don't need to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day we'll be free to contemplate existence, philosophize etc or play video games and get drunk! AI should bring about utopia.
So humans will be useless, AI will be better. Let's say this happend. Would you want your child's first girlfriend/boyfriend to be a robot ? Would you want some robot to comfort you at the hospice while you die of cancer, or would you prefer a good caring nurse ? Or a side question - would you want a psychopath, who don't care even a little bit, with great acting abilities to comfort you at that hospice ?
Maybe for some things we will prefer caring humans, because they're not just faking it, and this has value. And maybe we could create an economy built around deep human relationships.
I don't like the assumption that the only faculties humans have are cognitive or physical. There's another: the ability to desire. It's what's driven all of our achievement, and it's not something even a highly sophisticated AI could manage: it has to have a sense of its own mortality or need for perpetuation, which are not things I can imagine us finding a valuable purpose for in giving them.
74 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadof course the AI will be designed not to help the caller get to their ends, it will be designed to maximize shareholder value. ie, say just the right things to get you quit, and to upgrade, ie manipulate you.
And probably dead. Except for some tiny proportion of slaves who are entertaining and/or useful.
The one shareholder will be the most aggressive, narcissistic and psychopathic son of a bitch, because those are the qualities competition selects for.
I thought this election cycle was bad. It's almost reassuring that much worse horrors are possible.
Also, it may be one with a solution that's easy to state - but not necessarily easy to reach. We can't suddenly change how the economy works - we don't have direct control over it. We can try to transition the current one to the desired future one my means of setting up incentive structures appropriately.
I don't know what would or could prevent that assuming the ratio and rough magnitude between those two figures. At that point, you'd hope that the pursuit of status would presumably move elsewhere.
Engineering incentives is beyond difficult. Many, many of the things people complain about most in the modern economy is due to some crufty legacy incentive-engineering left over from years past.
Before the industrial revolution we had lots of horses for horse power. Then we made engines which replaced horses. Horses didn't change jobs, they couldn't.
Low hanging fruit here is education, tradespeople (AI will not be repairing your car for a while), managerial and oversight tasks, QA engineers, blah, blah, blah. There are plenty of things that humans will be doing better than AI, and from those we'll probably continue specializing and be more ready to handle when automation of more complex tasks does eventually happen.
That may not be the right question. There are all kinds of things that theoretically we could replace with bots over humans but we do not because of convention. For example Home Depot or any Home/Shed tool supply store. Let me explain?
In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age there is a class of humans who generate handcrafted items. They have machines that produce anything to molecular perfection and yet humans (due to our nature) seek to distinguish themselves from other groups of humans using objects. In this case flawed objects, but objects they willingly paid for nonetheless. It's all about status!
This is not outlandish to me. I want to construct a Tiny House. I know that when I develop the skills and accomplish this task I will place considerable value on my creation.
It is extremely likely that this is not optimal because of the division of labour. However I will enjoy my Tiny House regardless.
AI can endlessly optimize production but it cannot manufacture personal pride or social class.
Human nature creates scarcity naturally even within a state of abundance.
We really do like to belong to tribes and be 'self made'.
Also, I find it weird to put agricultural and industrial revolution together in this context.
Agricultural revolution was when people shifted from doing less physical work (hunting) to doing more physical work (building a civilization). It probably wasn't even by choice, but simply because agricultural societies were more efficient and would conquer those which didn't settle down. About the only thing I see here in common with industrial revolution is the forced change of lifestyle.
Perhaps you mean the initial spark of an invention, the idea which strikes like a lightning, and so on? But many inventions happen by accident (like the post-it note invention, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-note...). And then you could argument that only human are crazy enough to find novel usage for useless things.
I don't know.
Or is it a gradient, where the high end of the mental work will remain performed by humans, and will grow to encompass more work?
And if it works like that, can our education systems change to keep people productive for longer?
A hundred farm workers get replaced by one tractor, but that's okay, because those hundred workers become tractor repairmen, tractor factory workers, tractor designers, and we can farm far more land and produce wealth more efficiently. But not everyone who could plow a field can design a tractor. A thousand years ago, damn near every job was manual labour and could be done with a two-digit IQ, but we're reaching the point in first-world countries where less than half the work which needs to be done can actually be done by someone in the lower half of the population's intelligence distribution.
If we're not there yet, we will be soon. And I think it's fundamentally different to every previous automation revolution.
If we pushed towards educating people in practical skills, like tractor design, do you really think that it would be a large number of people who are incapable of grasping the concepts? Especially if we used the modern research we have into how people learn effectively?
Education as an industry and cultural norm needs to grow -- and not in the abominable way that it is now, with us glorifying education for the sake of education -- but a push towards valuing people who have learned specialized skills, regardless of what they are.
There's a reason that we have a dearth of mechanics in the U.S., and it's not because being a mechanic is an unattainable goal, but rather because the social norms around specialized blue collar work are ridiculous in the U.S.
Besides we still haven't really figured out post-industrial revolution employment all that well. Lots of people in bullshit jobs collecting paychecks just because.
Once most of customer service and human drivers are eaten by software, which will probably happen without solving 'hard AI' tech will employ even fewer people.
Jobs will only be created out of that if cheaper transportation and customer service enables a new place in the market that wasn't already existent.
So far I don't know of any jobs that the AI revolution has created other than people that create and train AI systems. It simply wouldn't be profitable to employ these people if they weren't destroying more jobs than they take up.
I look forward to a flourishing of terrible poetry, bad music, and sure, lots of TV watching etc.
My facebook feed is really interesting, the AI that curates it is doing a good job, it seems to know what I like to see and recommends more interesting things to get sucked into.
I think humans and machines will blend, so there won't be an AI vs human 'war'... we will integrate AI tools into ourselves thus becoming more than human. A hyper connected being.
I also agree with the blending, reality thus far seems to be one big mixing matrix of mass energy, and our classification of what is AI vs what is human seems pretty moot in comparison.
[0]: http://infinite-dusk-4495.herokuapp.com/stories/1-1427256350...
I.e. useless. Sure, not morally, but economically. This is what we're talking about when discussing automation of jobs. It's important to be precise, otherwise we risk miscommunication.
Politicians need GDP growth because of how government is financed. This isn't foolish nor power-hungry. It's just more or less a fact.
And turn this on it's head - somewhere, a guy/gal is making something you don't even know you'll need yet, who you have never met. That's the thing least about power I ever did hear.
Specifically, jobs-as-political-fodder is ensconced into law in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1979, which lays on the Fed the dual mandate of currency stability and employment. If it is oppressive, it certainly wasn't anticipated to be that; quite the opposite.
Whenever you go to work to earn money for your bread; whenever you adjust your price to equalize supply and demand; whenever you change a product to make it more profitable - you're serving the economy. Single humans and single companies (hell, even most countries) are too weak to dictate how the market works.
I think it's important to keep in mind money isn't the end goal when we go to work. We work to live. And if we can live without working, it is a choice we can take.
The truth is that what really makes people 'useful' is there interactions with other humans. No matter how sophisticated the technology or what level of super-human super-intelligent or even as he speculates super-empathetic type of AI, human relationships will still be the true measure of value for people.
This concept of 'useless human beings' only makes sense if you have a primitive elitist Malthusian view in the first place. Which unfortunately many people do have that.
We should expect unenhanced human 1.0 to become the next chimpanzee analog in the hierarchy. We should hope he is right that the AIs are more empathetic towards their inferiors than we have been.
It depends on what you mean by "earned".
So you've got a completely independent "fully automated" economy of robots creating "goods" (as defined by humans) and exchanging them with one another while humans starve to death watching that?
The market can and does get stuck in weird stupid-ass loops. Consider, for instance, the advertising industry. Most of its output is aimed at cancelling itself out (e.g. when you and I compete for the same group of customers, my advertising expenditure goes mostly to cancel out yours, and vice versa). Also in on-line advertising, a lot of money is being moved over nothing - consider, for instance, analytics. Many people in Internet marketing are clueless about statistics, but so are their clients - so as long as they can bullshit the customers that their service is helping (graph is going up!), they get paid, and customers are happy, because they're clueless too and can't verify the effectiveness of the service they paid for.
And now for a funny twist - people making those analytics tools know this too, and guess what - they're starting to offer statistically invalid measures that are likely to look like the changes marketing people introduced are working. So those marketing people are being bulshitted by their tools now.
It's not a circle per se, but it shows another example of money moving around over no value created.
Humans dictate what the "loop" is. They define what gets manufactured, and who it gets delivered to. How do they get out of the loop?
I believe the whole idea of humans becoming "useless" or "obsolete" is the biggest piece of nonsense I've come across in the last few years.
It's a good book but he chickens out of saying difficult to hear things about us humans. It was extremely obvious to me that he skates figure eights around controversial topics because he made contradictory statements several times. In the first half of the book he'll say one thing, and then in the second half he'll kowtow to prevailing orthodoxies about humans.
During my reading I began to think he might be writing it in a Straussian style i.e. one version of reality for intellectuals, another for the plebs. My copy of his books is sprinkled with exclamation marks.
Given how popular witch hunts are these days perhaps that what it takes to get a message out there.
We are biological animals! We are flawed beings! Let's accept this and move on!
So, what happens when retooling isn't even an option? Utopia for some, utopia for all? I just can't seem to make any sense of it, but given the lack of empathy in the current climate for people labeled as other, I would suspect the former.
Arnold Kling is fond of "The Diamond Age", with Thetes and Vickies. Thetes are proles who live on a stipend type thing; Vickies are the ruling elite with extremely tight social strictures. Hopefully somebody more familiar with the book than I can help - I'm repeating Arnold's view of it.
BTW, Arnold Kling also does work in "PSST" - Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade, which is largely athwart this issue.
I do think that "opting out" will become more and more important as society becomes increasingly ephemeral.
There are worse options!
I once asked a question on Reddit indirectly asking about working class men and what the Tiny House community (majority women) thought of them since many working class men would have the skills to help construct houses.
After that I felt pretty sure large swathes of Americans utterly despise each other. It wasn't a good feeling.
*not really.... right next to it, though. Of course I grew up "middle class" like everyone else, right?
I think rich people are well aware of the problem (appeals to superiority) in a way that most people aren't. They are constantly in contact with people trying to butter them up. Gradually they develop a sense of detachment, not really believing they're that awesome as they're being told but searching out independent metrics since the human feedback has become unreliable. Or they go batshit into fantasy land.
I may be biased myself but I honestly believe the middle class is responsible for many of the problems we see. They have been constantly buttered up by sycophant politicians and media sources.
I have even seen statements in the media to the effect that the middle class can do no wrong. Recent complaints about the reduction in size of this class often have this thrown in. It is never considered they might NOT actually be God's gift to planet earth but part of the problem.
Is it so surprising that the government has elected officials in western countries that are almost universally doctors and lawyers? Two groups of people who famously have no time for understanding anything other than their field of study because they spent the better part of their lives absorbed in that intense study. Maybe we can't be saved by lawyers and doctors, no matter that they have high IQ, because they are attracted to work on the wrong problems for society.
Consider how different a Congress of computer geeks and scientists would be. I also believe there would be substantial problems since our group also has failure modes like any other. But to say the least it would be different to what we have right now. To be frank I suspect the denizens of HN are more aware of their failure modes than present day Congress. It is not about IQ, it is about the problems you process.
There exist whole swathes of problem areas I see exactly nobody addressing! But by all means let's cross our t's and dot our i's in trade agreements and constitutional amendments.
I vote for the Brain In A Vat things I saw in Psycho-Pass. They had at least some handle on the distributed nature of knowledge and understanding.
I think the attraction of medicine and law is status. And you can't do anything about that. That's how hu-mans are wired.
Oh no! They got to you too! :-)
If you have an opportunity take a gander at "Ben's Mill" It's a short twenty minute documentary on youtube. I think it is very revealing about the kind of self confidence and respect the working class used to have in western countries but which is now lost.
If nothing else it is a beautiful illustration of how things were, it's well worth the watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s
To render all those people unto 'trailer trash' 'white trash', is despicable. You can tell a lot about people by how they treat others they consider their inferiors.
Doctors are responsible for killing their patients by virtue of not being efficient and by preventing technological adaptions. Even properly done digital medical records are impossible in the present world. I'm sure you read recently on HN that medical staff error is responsible for an incredible number of deaths. When I think: heart disease and cancer, it seems incredible that you should add 'Doctor' into the mix of things most likely to kill us, yet it is so.
Lawyers are harming the economic progress of in the main. Don't even think that is very controversial here. Niall Ferguson has outright accused them of this, that's the establishment!
On balance saying doctors and lawyers are a positive force for good is a crapshoot. Maybe so. Maybe there's objective evidence against the intuitive position. Just maybe, they're parasites in a parasitical system that is getting worse with their intransigeance.
Instead it postulated the already known givens.
The problem is that we value human life and would never subject people to the dangers of space even if they willingly accept the risk. Life is too valuable!
But what happens when a human life is worth nothing? What happens when a human's contribution to humanity is net negative and every person is, by default, a waste of resources? What happens when a person is cheaper than a machine for some tasks?
It wasn't too long ago that people threw themselves to the ocean in the hope of establishing a better life somewhere unknown. People died, but no one found the cost too high to bear. Life wasn't too valuable then.
We have an opportunity here, but we have to devalue life to take advantage of it. And btw, I don't delude myself. I am sure that my children or grandchildren, no matter how successful I may come to be, will be part of that generation, Generation Zero, the one without value. But I hope they have a purpose, at least.
If AI takeoff is slow? Basic income -> intelligence amplification -> mind merging. With the option to stop at any point and have a comfortable life.
Maybe for some things we will prefer caring humans, because they're not just faking it, and this has value. And maybe we could create an economy built around deep human relationships.