"While we’re on the road to our Star Trek future, but before we finally get there, the rich are going to get richer—because they own the robots—and the rest of us are going to get poorer because we’ll be out of jobs. Unless we figure out what we’re going to do about that, the misery of workers over the next few decades will be far worse than anything the Industrial Revolution produced."
It was interesting reading some of the comments on the Paradise Papers yesterday. Lots of people commenting they feel helpless and frustrated in this and situations like this. The rich have the ability to break the law seemingly at will and never get punished. The rest can spend 18 months in prison for smoking pot, or being black and in the wrong place. I don't pay taxes, I'm in trouble. The rich can afford to just not pay them. etc. etc.
But it was also pointed out that no one is likely to do anything about it, because any outrage will blow over as soon as the press start on the next set of scandalous headlines, and unless your life is (/all our lives are) disrupted in a big enough way that you feel the need to rock the boat - you won't rock the boat.
Which makes me ask, will the robot revolution be the thing that rocks the boat? Distrust of government (corporations / power) and quiet dissatisfaction seems to grow by the day. And yet - no one reacts, because the status quo is just enough. But if you start to remove jobs without having a social state in place to cope with it, and every day you're looking at the perfectly curated Instagram lives of those who have everything - what's going to happen? Do we hit breaking point?
I don't really know. Interesting and somewhat scary times, though.
I fear that what will happen is that the unemployed/underemployed masses will be manipulated into focusing their frustrations on culture wars, kinda like what is happening now and has happened in the past. 'Those people are taking your jobs!' 'Those people are amoral and lazy!' 'Those people are terrorists!' 'Those people are taking benefits that were meant for you!'
I mean we're at a point in history where there are many people who are voting for politicians who are brazenly seeking to destroy healthcare, give even bigger tax cuts to rich people, tear down regulatory agencies that protect people from pollution, fraud, and unsafe food. To some degree some people believe that 'regulation kills jobs' but I'm pretty sure most people want clean air, safe food, fair education policy, affordable healthcare, etc. But because of all of the political tribalism and the painting of the other side as outright villains, people are supporting politicians who are pushing policies that hurt them directly.
As long as there are convenient scapegoats and wedge issues that can be exploited it's going to be hard to turn public opinion towards reining in the oligarchy. Especially since the super rich have much more sophisticated tools for regulatory capture and manipulation of sentiment now.
>I fear that what will happen is that the unemployed/underemployed masses will be manipulated into focusing their frustrations on culture wars, kinda like what is happening now and has happened in the past. 'Those people are taking your jobs!' 'Those people are amoral and lazy!' 'Those people are terrorists!' 'Those people are taking benefits that were meant for you!'
That's partly what this job-stealing automation hysteria is about. Robots are also a convenient scapegoat.
Anecdotally, I think people are voting for people who don't 'feel' like a politician. It doesn't so much matter what they're saying, more than they're addressing the specific issue that upsets you, and distancing themselves from "those in power". Politicians (in general) seem so far removed from everyday life, anyone promising to act for the everyman, and distancing themselves from 'establishment' is going to get some kind of traction. Add clever uses of technology into the mix and it gets pretty potent.
What really stands out to me is how often the government are willing to use military/police force to protect business, and how willing these services are to use violence against their own countrymen.
my optimist hopes the internet can foster intellect, fact sharing for what works best in societies and access for all to this discussion. The realist looks at it today seeing increased manipulation and tribalism... Time will tell!
I'm definitely not likely to do something about it. My income is growing at a nice pace, I can afford all the necessities, plus vacations and leisure activities. I live in a miraculous age of fast travel and global connectivity.
It's the Global Economy, the Knowledge Economy, and I'm one of the "winners". I imagine most people who post here are on the "winning" side as well.
So why would I rock the boat? Protest? Protest what? Are these "rich parasites" even breaking the law? I don't know, honestly. Their lawyers are probably pretty convincing. Maybe the laws have loopholes, maybe I'd be exploiting those loopholes myself if I knew how to work the system.
"While we’re on the road to our Star Trek future, but before we finally get there, the rich are going to get richer—because they own the robots—and the rest of us are going to get poorer because we’ll be out of jobs. Unless we figure out what we’re going to do about that, the misery of workers over the next few decades will be far worse than anything the Industrial Revolution produced."
Marx predicted all this, to a T. It really is the logical end-game of capitalism. I have a feeling Marx is going to become very relevant again. We'll see if the NFL, Netflix, and cheap food will be enough to contain that genie this time.
One would have thought that November is not cherry-picking season. Apparently not.
"Almost overnight, the quality of [Google's] translations skyrocketed." In certain languages, and still dependent on the human brain to reparse the not-quite-gibberish into something that makes sense.
"Driverless cars soon" - and flying ones, too, "in production in a few years" for a century now.
"the progress of the past couple of decades has been stunning. After many years of nothing much happening [in AI]" - is that lack of research, or just that alt-facts make for a nicer story?
"However, if you keep up the doubling for a while, [therefore strong AI], [Moore's not dead, proof by handwaving, technoesoteric New Age babble]". From this point on, the story dissolves into "let us assume the Moon is made of cheese. Why didn't anyone start mining it yet?!?"
> "Almost overnight, the quality of [Google's] translations skyrocketed." In certain languages, and still dependent on the human brain to reparse the not-quite-gibberish into something that makes sense.
But it happened replacing a system carefully crafted for 10 years, for another one that barely needed a couple of months to get better than the old one. And it can be made better than google's, today: https://www.deepl.com/translator
> "Driverless cars soon" - and flying ones, too, "in production in a few years" for a century now.
We had driverless car prototypes for a century? Wow. /s
- Fair point. Conflating machine learning with strong AI (as evidenced on the machine translation example) still dubious.
- We had flying cars promised for a century, "any year now."
Very similar status to "level 5 autonomous driving any moment now, don't look at the edge cases."
Truck drivers are held up as the classic example of a job that will be decimated very soon. A million jobs, wiped out, read the fear mongering headlines.
The hysteria is remarkable. Ten Million plus jobs are created and destroyed every single year in the US. We're facing at least a 8-12 million person jobs gap, in terms of not having enough labor, over the next ten years alone (with 6.5 million unfilled full-time jobs right now and the U6 rate pushing down toward two decade lows). And that's assuming modest average economic growth of perhaps 1.5% annually (2.5-3% and we'll have an extreme labor shortage).
To amplify the actual context problem, if we had a perfect solution for automating away truck driving jobs today, it would take decades to fully deploy it. In reality, we're still a decade away from meaningful scale commercial testing.
Yeah I'm a little bit dubious about this article too, the author appears to have absolutely no training or experience related to AI and it doesn't look like this article is based on any actual research.
30ish years later, we still have doctors primarily delivering our diagnosis. The march of progress may look exponential, but the hype is often overstated.
The terminology "expert system" has morphed into new terms over the years, but the problem has remained the same. Creating a system that can diagnose patients given the data that the patient supplies. Its the diagnosis problem plain and simple... but what has been called "Expert System" in the past will now morph into "AI" and "Machine Learning" under today's terms.
The human brain is really, really, really bad at being a computer. It seems like computers are also really, really, really bad at trying to be a human brain.
The typical layman / non-computer programmer simply fails to understand the limitations of a typical computer. They see computers doing human-like tasks (like winning in Jeopardy), but then don't realize the enormous amount of programming effort that was required for that task to happen.
Be wary of any hockey-stick graphs; as a rule of thumb, its producer is trying to sell you something. (Here, it seems the author is peddling a FUD package). You are quite correct, the text is straight out of a fin-de-siecle technooptimist pamphlet - except in the 1890s, the machines were supposed to liberate mankind, where now they're coming to enslave us.
At this point I almost think you could automate away my Primary care provider. All he does is take vitals, perform a cursory examination (may include a CBC, etc.) and then refer you to a specialist. I wonder why a nurse can't do the exam and plug all of my data into a system that spits out a diagnosis (You have strep throat - 98% confidence) and/or a referral to someone with some real expertise.
That's actually a big debate right now. But the AI is completely not involved at all. A Nurse Practitioner is 4-years of undergrad + 2-years of Nurses school (which is roughly equivalent to a Masters Degree).
So there's a big belief that highly trained Nurses ought to be good enough for primary care.
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With that said, I've traveled a bit across America and many rural areas only have small ~3 or 4 room "hospitals" that cover entire towns, or even entire counties (~2 hour drive area to the next 5-room "hospital").
In these cases, you definitely want a Doctor who has experience in way more fields.
Nurse Practitioners are probably good enough for primary care in cities, where referrals to specialists is possible. In rural areas where specialists may be a 4+ hour drive away, its simply not feasible to recommend a specialist. The doctor at the small county hospital is all you've got.
And there's your problem. It Works for trivial issues, breaks badly for anything outside the happy path. But hey, we only care about the happy path, 80/20, that's good enough for a computer program! (Nowhere good enough for a diagnosis, but that's a minor issue we'll address in the next major version, or handwave away)
This might just be a detail, but the author seems to think their phone's CPU is doing some heavy lifting when they search something on Google (in this case, why erasers are pink). If I'm not mistaken, even the voice recognition happens on a server, and the phone just records audio and sends it. And the interpretation of the query and returning a result have nothing to do with the device itself either.
"Google has to be smart enough to figure out in context that I said pink and that I’m asking about the historical reason for the color of erasers, not their health or the way they’re shaped. And it did. In less than a second. With nothing more than a cheap little microprocessor and a slow link to the internet."
Not a detail at all: the author seems to confuse "the whole Google cloud system works as expected - approximately in line with the 80/20 adage" for "the phone in my pocket is independently capable of intelligent, contextful, humanlike reasoning."
Google just needs to see where the previous million people went after asking this particular question - odds are good that the million-and-first person will also want that particular answer. It's a clever trick all right, and a marvel of engineering, but no robots: this is mostly human behavior: collected, averaged, and parrotted back. (Yes, there is machine search at the base of it; unlike Altavista before, the relevance of the results is shaped by its human users though)
In the 50s, everyone knew by the year 2000 everyone would have a rocket car, because technology was progressing so fast. Turns out the most advanced aeronautical tech peaked in the 70s, and we just stopped giving a shit about advancing it past that point. We're only now bringing back supersonic transatlantic flights, 14 years after we stopped them because it turned out it was expensive.
When people talk about AI, they don't talk realistically, they talk theoretically. Just look at trains. New York City subways have been trying to modernize their switching system for 25 years. Estimates show as long as 50 more years just to finish upgrading existing tracks. Are the people that are upgrading the track going to get replaced before then? Not likely.
Even if all practical common sense is thrown aside and you imagine a Jetsons world where robots have taken over most jobs, there will be new jobs, because we will have new industries built on top of the automated ones. We just invent new jobs, the same way we invented them for a technology industry that did not even remotely exist 50 years ago.
All of this AI hype also depends on the status quo, and in all likelihood our society won't even be remotely the same in 40 years. Estimations like these depend on the US maintaining its hegemonic dominance over global trade. How the hell is it going to do that if its deficit grows exponentially and it can barely fund its federal budget every few months? Is Silicon Valley going to keep pumping out new technology once the unlimited tap of VC money dries up? Can the industry withstand a collapse of the current regime of super-consolidated monopolies? Will bare-bones politics end up poisoning and strip-mining the land we currently overburden for a few genetically modified crops, reducing economic output to fracking protected wilderness for oil and gas and white collar work in a paltry few cities on the coasts?
Who knows, but assuming robots will take all our jobs in 40 years sounds like extremely magical thinking.
> Turns out the most advanced aeronautical tech peaked in the 70s, and we just stopped giving a shit about advancing it past that point.
Really? Gains have been massive since the 70's. Today the goalposts are comfort and cost efficiency. So we're not getting the more sexy speed advancements the jet engine brought us. But cost, comfort, safety have all improved massively. And last year we even ha a solar plane fly around the world. Self landing space rockets. Flying wings. Drones. I feel your ignoring much beyond going supersonic.
Those examples support my point. Not only did we have more advanced technology then, we were able to achieve superior technology in a decade or less, when we felt like it, and the rest of the time we didn't focus on advancement at all. Just because we can achieve it has absolutely nothing to do with whether we will or not.
The Moon Race was a thinly veiled ICBM race - and in military research, cost is rarely a concern. With this type of warfare no longer a major concern came SALT, SALT II, bean-counting, and the end of this line of development.
There is a concept in philosophy called the Is-Ought gap, which is to say that you can’t tell what ought to be simply by looking at what currently is. This is something that applies to AI that I think is often overlooked.
A computer can tell me what my bank account IS, and a smart enough program could use supporting information to tell me what it WILL be or even MIGHT be… but it can never tell me what it OUGHT to be. Especially in a world without perfect interoperability (or with some things done offline/cash). Similarly a can tell me what IS on a monthly performance report, and in a steady and routine business environment it will tell me what MIGHT be useful on the report, it can never tell me what OUGHT to be on it
If a robot can write code in our environment and deal with all the politics and stupid decisions and wishy washy product direction (we don't know what we want, just implement everything) and broken technologies, you're welcome Mr Robot.
I do wonder how robots will deal with our fickle human ways. How will they help a person who can't even express themselves in words or speech because they're near illiterate? This isn't a facile question - this is a large percentage of the people I've written software for.
Because what will happend is that the robot won't deal with it. Their creators will simply assume the use case is only 1% of their input and will just lock it out. We will live in a more and more standardized and inflexible society.
It's happening already.
This week, I had to bring a car for a second checkup and I was late to my appointment. The gal told me I had to reschedule because the computer didn't allow to be late at a second checkup: the date between the first and the second was fixed.
Because I'm a computer scientist, I knew what to do: let's "forget" about the whole thing and create a new "first checkup" for which I could come without a schedule. I told her and she though it was a great idea and we worked around the system. Luckily they didn't have a check for that and she was able to do my checkup.
So when the robot will take your job, they will just ignore a whole lot of cases and make everyone not fitting the exact size of the box living in hell.
> I do wonder how robots will deal with our fickle human ways.
They won't have to. Politics are human ways. But, who knows? When they reach super-intelligence, maybe they're going to become competitive, jealous, envious, greedy, etc. as well.
The anecdote about the pink eraser isn't as impressive as the author makes out. A manual google search of 'why are erasers pink' returns the same article from Design*Sponge (that the author mentioned as the source for the response to his voice query) as the top Google result. So, the remarks about how the answer shows evidence of context awareness don't really ring true. The assistant is just passing his question into Google and reading back the response. The sum may be greater than the parts, but nothing revolutionary here.
The US has a vast inbound labor shortage problem. AI + robotics are not going to solve that problem over the next 20 years.
US population growth has continued to erode toward barely expanding, and that's with immigration included. That decline is going to get worse by the decade, while simultaneously boomers continue to plunge out of the labor force over the next decade.
The US economy added between $4.5 and $5 trillion to its GDP in the last decade (an economy the size of Japan). That's while only adding ~23 million people. It's going to become increasingly difficult to replicate that growth without dramatic productivity gains. AI and robotics, automation broadly, are likely the only means to accomplish that.
Simply put, we're going to need dramatic productivity gains just to repeat the growth from the past ten years, and that growth wasn't spectacular. Want routine 3% to 4% GDP growth against sub 1% population growth? Better bring on the automation, and as much of it as possible.
Who's "we" and why should they care about GDP growth? Surely not normal people. I don't care about GDP growth. "GDP growth" means someone already rich is getting richer. Why should normal people care about productivity gains? To most of us, "productivity gains" means my company can lay me off now because Sally can do the work of both of us. Where is this labor shortage? You say labor shortage, I say companies refusing to pay enough for labor, then complaining they can't find workers.
> I say companies refusing to pay enough for labor, then complaining they can't find workers.
They'll pay any amount for labor up to the point where the cost of the labor outweighs the additional profit for the company that the labor will induce.
I think most people don't actually want "growth", they just want a good quality of life for themselves and their family.
Unfortunately, most of our economic assumptions are predicated on the notion that an economy that isn't growing must be stagnating. There hasn't been much work on how to sustain prosperity without growth, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
> US population growth has continued to erode toward barely expanding, and that's with immigration included. That decline is going to get worse by the decade, while simultaneously boomers continue to plunge out of the labor force over the next decade.
Universal health care might help. Having a kid is gonna be a really, really bad idea financially-speaking regardless, but the risk of their having even a middlingly-bad chronic health problem and ruining your finances for life (on top of the ordinary time lost and stress caused by such misfortune) make having a kid like playing Russian roulette with your bank account, credit, and retirement.
Japan and especially Europe are even worse off than us (at least we're reproducing near replacement-level), and China has a looming demographic problem due to the lasting impacts of their one-child policy (recently softened (though too late), so I hear).
And on the other side of technology there's 3D printing. It will allow to reduce transportation of goods (only raw materials), and we already can "print" houses.
So if unemployment starts striking big time according to this article, in the same time houses will be cheap, food will be cheap...
The real question is : when nobody will have to work anymore, what people will do ? There's a big risk of population rise to the rooftop, because, you know, when you're bore...
The economic incentives for replacing people with machines are far greater than that for going to Mars. So, if that's all you have that's not really reassuring.
Nobody knows. What is known is that every past tremendous increase in the working ability of mankind has not resulted in catastrophe despite people predicting that it would.
Sure, but with a universal income that barely keeps them above water, they will continue to spend everything they get and drive the main consumer economy.
So we can say that universal income is just a way of keeping people 'alive' to let corporation earn the money - just like slaves were kept alive to do things for free.
As a frequent reader of Kevin’s, I can say that he’s certainly not tech-ignorant. In fact, the article itself suggests a pretty decent grasp on the issues.
Regarding weenie-ism, he predicts driverless trucks in 2027, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. Now have a look at this article:
There's nothing to deeply worry about for several reasons.
As truckers retire as the automation age sets in, you stop creating new ones at the same rate (specifically you vastly reduce your rate of creation). Most likely we end up with a human driver shortage 30 years out due to that alone.
Did you notice we don't have a vast inventory of unemployed radio DJ's spilling out of universities every year? They've nearly stopped making them; adaptation has happened. That's not to compare the scales, it's a principle in action that will apply exactly the same to trucking.
It'll take at least 25-30 years to remove just half of all truck driving jobs, assuming that market does get heavily automated. Dramatically over-estimating change in the short-term is by far the single most frequently repeated error in tech journalism and tech prognostication if you look at the post WW2 era.
Very high sunk costs in the trucking industry guarantee heavily restrained self-driving progress in the early adoption years. Safe, highly tested, approved commercial solutions won't be ready for a decade. From there staple another decade of sunk cost time onto the equation.
In that 20-30 year span when truckers are supposed to be getting fired by the hundreds of thousands, we have a big labor shortage problem that makes one to two million truck driving job losses look like a trivial issue by comparison (while simultaneously the trucking industry stops producing replacement numbers). To say nothing of the fact that that industry employs 8-10 million people. With very modest economic growth over 20-30 years, you absorb a million trucker jobs within that industry alone.
If we cycle 100,000 automated-away truck driving jobs out of the economy per year on average for 20 years (assume a spike potential of 50-100k above that), it's meaningless. Half of those truckers will retire before they get fired. We need millions of workers that we are not going to have in the next few decades, as we're facing population contraction most likely.
It was interesting reading some of the comments on the Paradise Papers yesterday. Lots of people commenting they feel helpless and frustrated in this and situations like this. The rich have the ability to break the law seemingly at will and never get punished. The rest can spend 18 months in prison for smoking pot, or being black and in the wrong place. I don't pay taxes, I'm in trouble. The rich can afford to just not pay them. etc. etc.
But it was also pointed out that no one is likely to do anything about it, because any outrage will blow over as soon as the press start on the next set of scandalous headlines, and unless your life is (/all our lives are) disrupted in a big enough way that you feel the need to rock the boat - you won't rock the boat.
Which makes me ask, will the robot revolution be the thing that rocks the boat? Distrust of government (corporations / power) and quiet dissatisfaction seems to grow by the day. And yet - no one reacts, because the status quo is just enough. But if you start to remove jobs without having a social state in place to cope with it, and every day you're looking at the perfectly curated Instagram lives of those who have everything - what's going to happen? Do we hit breaking point?
I don't really know. Interesting and somewhat scary times, though.