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Robots, Automation and Basic Income: Big 21st Century Problems
That_Guy
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
We are on the cusp of a great technological singularity. What industrialization did to slavery, automation and robotics will do to general labor. Sales Associates and Bell Hops are already being replaced with robots. The first fully automated, self driving big-rigs are on the road. Assembly line robots are becoming smaller, more agile, and cheaper than skilled laborers. Some time soonish we will see the a dramatic shift in the labor market away from skilled workers to (basically) a more advanced ASIMO.
The vast majority of people in "civilized" countries are employed in some form of skilled or unskilled labor. This thread is to debate the coming labor crisis. What's going to happen to your neighborhood pub when the bartender is replaced by a robot? What will happen to little billy from down the street when grocery store stocker/bagger jobs are all filled by robots? What will happen to Uncle Jeb when his trucking company decides that it's cheaper to use driverless big-rigs?
I don't claim to have the answers. Our society over the next decade is going to have to have a serious discussion about labor distribution and the nature of "work" in general. Global unemployment is already insane due to global economic stagnation and income disparity. We could be looking at an unemployment rates akin to the late Roman empire.
So, how should we as a society handle this?
The vast majority of people in "civilized" countries are employed in some form of skilled or unskilled labor. This thread is to debate the coming labor crisis. What's going to happen to your neighborhood pub when the bartender is replaced by a robot? What will happen to little billy from down the street when grocery store stocker/bagger jobs are all filled by robots? What will happen to Uncle Jeb when his trucking company decides that it's cheaper to use driverless big-rigs?
I don't claim to have the answers. Our society over the next decade is going to have to have a serious discussion about labor distribution and the nature of "work" in general. Global unemployment is already insane due to global economic stagnation and income disparity. We could be looking at an unemployment rates akin to the late Roman empire.
So, how should we as a society handle this?
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Otherwise you have to reduce the human population or accept that a large portion of it will be fighting the grocery bot 9000 for food on a regular basis and almost certainly joining some kind of crazy mob thing which will either cause chaos or horrible draconian policies by those in power.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
Like, in Star Trek, everything needed to live a healthy happy life is provided. You work because you want to, not because you need to.
I am only half joking, but it does seem like that corporations see 40 hour work week as a guideline these days.
You want it to wind up on the "people" side of that spectrum, because the other way ends up messy.
Then global warming will kill a whole bunch of us and whoever's left will be living in the 1700's again.
Or the Star Trek thing. Whichever.
One important part of this is that people will find ways to earn what they need, which is why mob and/or draconian police force is what you get if you go pure capitalism.
The real problem is that people in power do not wish to give up resources, even if it would be better for them in the long run.
One thing I find so neat is how many of these specialized robots can blend in with the scenery so you do not have to notice their presence. A ton of labor has already been automated with machines and chemicals.
How automated do you think things will get? My guess is that there will always be humans as a backup, but if that is one human technician as backup for every 1000 robot repairmen it really does not matter for society as a whole.
I recall people talking about how computers and the internet would make the 30 hour work week 'inevitable'. Now people get the same amount accomplished in less time, but spend more time screwing around on the internet. Most days, I could probably accomplish the same amount of work I do in an eight hour shift in an hour or two if I really focused and buckled down.
There's always (for some definitions of always) going to be jobs where a human is 'smarter than a monkey, cheaper than a robot'.
Even if those time sinks are just entertainment, we'll have more people doing things they want to do, even if that's just writing slash fiction and asking their family to play Farmville. The big thing is getting away from the 'have to look busy' mindset and accept that it's fine for people to screw around as long as what needs to get done is getting done.
A Robot Walks into a Bar
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365294848/
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
If people in power view humans as a novelty past a certain point because of automation removing the need to care about supporting a labor force, why should they give us a minimum living requirement? Especially when we have people like the modern Republican party who can convince a not insubstantial amount of regular people to believe socialism and social safety nets are evil.
Stock market. It's not humans buying and selling anymore, just bots trading with bots.
I said should for a reason.
The reality is probably going to be massive unemployment and unrest before anything improves.
Yeah, I'm pretty much reading an implied "and Basic Income" tacked onto the end of the thread title.
Rainer Strack talks about this, as part of his TED talk about coming labor shortage, due to low birth rates.
http://www.ted.com/talks/rainer_strack_the_surprising_workforce_crisis_of_2030_and_how_to_start_solving_it_now
The nature of that unemployment and unrest will probably be a deciding factor in whether this species continues or not, if I'm frank. We've constructed our societies and states and economic systems on the assumption that there will always be a need for humans to do things to support themselves, and we may very well be nearing the end of that track, at least as it pertains to most jobs and most things that are required to survive; what comes after will probably require a radical shift in perspective on the value of human life and how one should lead their life going forward.
To extend the idea further into a post automation society; Into adulthood you are given the option to return to school for any skills you might desire with a guarantee of work in the field you persure. Social insurance provides a basic living wage, food, housing, and transportation to every citizen. The government bears the full cost of the system which is paid for by automated labor in a purely socialist society. The government owns the means of production and provides for everyone to at least be a healthy and happy member of society, if not productive one.
Now you read it for real
Nah. It'll almost definitely get really shitty. But culture and society have changed their expectations before and will continue to do so in the future.
Let us create two classes of citizens? One of them forced to pay fairly significant taxes.
The other super rich?
This seems problematic.
Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck
It's overwhelmingly on the side of advocating basic income, but it also does a really good job laying out the current state of the trucking industry and the ripple effect self-driving vehicles is going to have once it becomes legal nationally.
No dice.
People will overwhelmingly pick the short term benefit that screws over the kid.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Like, if I'm in a self-driving vehicle, but for some reason it crashes into another self-driven vehicle, who is responsible for the damages?
Same as now. The insurance company presumably.
Depending on the cause other people could be held liable. Say if the programming has a demonstrable issue or the owner wasn't providing proper maintenance, etc.
Not insurmountable, but when you need to coordinate upgrades between two or more companies how the costs are going to be distributed and multiple different workforce cultures can run up against each other.
The idea of having a near permanent learning class would be interesting, basically highly educated people who are a resource that can be used when suddenly needed highly educated up to date workers are needed. Normally they have no "job" but learning and simulations and training. When robots break down or come to a problem they can not solve, a bunch of learners are hired short term to fix the issue.
But what if the AI is drunk and talking on a cellphone? Do you throw it in jail?
geth chimed in and, yep
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
Let's let the robots govern themselves then, nothing wrong could come from that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
Unfortunately, I suspect we, as a species, will run into quite a bit of social unrest, as automation increases the unemployment rate at an increasingly faster pace than new jobs can be created. We have plenty of assholes at the top, that view anyone on the social safety net, as being moochers (whether it's true or not). Add in how these types have this warped view that one's job is the only thing that defines them, and you pretty much have a recipe where society won't move fast enough to address the issue.
As for who is at risk of being replaced by robots. Well it comes down to how clear cut the steps are for doing the job and how well the automaton is suited for the task. I'd say automated check outs usually fare poorly in stores, where the setup ends up wasting more time for the customers. A trained cashier is used to entering in stuff that can't be scanned. The experienced ones are also usually more efficient at scanning and bagging items, than most customers (not to mention that manned check out aisles are better designed for doing both tasks at once than self check outs.
For tasks where the process is ambiguous, I'd say the automatons aren't quite a threat yet. The job I work right now requires that I classify ads and create accounts to be used for ad classification. Let me tell you, there tons of advertisers that are fucking incompetent, when it comes to designing ads that are effective at selling their products (if you wondered why they haven't stop with fucking obnoxious flash ads, it's because many of them haven't learned that people tend not to click ads and assume they don't even need to include the product name/or the advertiser). The company I work for has plenty of competition from other companies that rely on bots to do what I do. The bots can create reports quicker than any human can, but the quality of the reports is shit compared to what a well trained human can put together; especially, when clients want more detailed oriented reports. I'm sure at some point, someone will create a bot that is able to do what I do better than me, but I have a feeling that's going to be one of the last areas hit by automation.
There will still be taxes to pay for general infrastructure, but education, healthcare, and money when you can't work can all be rolled into one plan. If the rich don't want insurance they don't have to buy it. They can attend private schools, go to private hospitals, and saddle the cost when they can't work. You know, exactly how they ALREADY DO. Social insurance covers the other 99% who can't afford those things by moving to a single provider system, dramatically simplifying the process for the consumer while telling insurance companies to go fuck themselves. What's worse? A hundred crooked insurance companies all competing to bring in the biggest profits while doing everything possible to deny coverage to those who need it would cost them the most money, all while answering to no one. Or a single slightly less corrupt company that is at least answerable to the american public? Congress aside, I still trust most of the federal government more than I trust my insurance company.
This whole idea is premised on the idea that people finally realize insurance companies are not working in their best interests which is never going to happen. Obamacare is just one very small step towards a single provider system. It at least says that medical coverage is medical coverage. You can't deny someone just because they are too poor or have a pre-existing condition. It doesn't go nearly far enough in my opinion.
Though this idea might see life as a framework for a post-labor society.