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Main Paineframe posted:There's a long-standing belief that a decent lifestyle should be earned, not given. There's also an associated belief that someone who is diligent and works hard is guaranteed to get that decent lifestyle in the end, and that any economic problems they have are just short-term periods of bad luck or misfortune that they'll surely overcome in the long run as long as they're truly hard-working. There's another aasociated belief that help for those who don't work (regardless of the reason) is unfair and an insult to the virtues of the people who do work. It's like the just world fallacy, but applied to economic outcomes. Also bear in mind that the rich and powerful have a vested interest in keeping those beliefs rolling. Put simply, if you're a greedy bastard sitting on a pile of food while people are starving in the streets, wouldn't you do everything you could to reinforce the idea that they're all poor because they're not working hard enough, or because that foreigner took their job away? And in a near future where bots take the jobs from millions of people, the massive increased profits from not needing to pay for frail human workers any more is going to flow right into the coffers of the already rich business owners. Are they going to share? Before the starving masses come sniffing around your swimming pool full of gold and asking why exactly you should have all the money, you'd better get your army of lobbyists to work ensuring that no social safety net gets funded by increasing your taxes. Better call up your fellow rich buddies who own media companies and remind them to keep pumping out those 'look at this welfare queen who wastes your tax money on a TV and a refrigerator' news stories. Of course a consumerist society doesn't work too well without, you know, consumers. So maybe some businesses are smart enough to realize that it's actually better to share the wealth so that people can trade said wealth back to them for their products. But how many corporations are really forward thinking enough to do this? By design, they don't look beyond the next quarter's profits. Seems more likely that they just keep desperately squeezing for short-term gain until there's nothing left. I'd like to be convinced that the outlook for the future isn't terribly grim, but I can't really think of a plausible scenario for that. Long term, sure, the survivors probably end up with a nice post-scarcity golden age. Short term? Eh...
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Dec 1, 2016 22:57
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Paradoxish posted:People probably aren't going to become unemployable because of automation. Low-end jobs are always going to be around unless we start seriously raising the minimum wage, so what's more likely is a constant downward pressure on middle- and lower-end wages as the share of people qualified to work "good" jobs shrinks. This is pretty well covered in that video in the OP. The whole point is basically, no, low-end jobs really aren't going to need humans. There are already bots that are nearly good enough to do any physical labor job, without complex programming. They just 'learn' by watching someone do it or are even capable of being told 'these are the materials, this is the output we need' and then essentially figure it out on their own (which they only need to do once and then all of your bots know it forever). While it may not be immediately cost effective to trade out every burger-flipper for a robot, it's not exactly a distant science fiction idea either. Minimum wage plus social security taxes, medicare taxes, unemployment taxes and so on all add up. A bot doesn't have to be all that cheap to compete, especially over the long term. And once you get some early adoption and economies of scale kick in the price starts to go down, it gets even cheaper to make, more business can afford more bots and it snowballs.
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Dec 1, 2016 23:43
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Keep in mind, this isn't something that happens instantly. The workforce of America doesn't collectively walk into the office one morning to see Robbie the job stealing robot sitting at their desk. This is something that happens slowly over years, and is in fact already happening. Just refer back to that 'decoupling productivity and employment' image in the OP. Note how employment has been flattening out for the last bit of that graph, while productivity is still going up? That's how it happens. Fewer and fewer people are needed to do the work as more and more automated solutions take over. It's not going to be a sudden shock with headlines reading "ROBOTS TAKE ALL THE JOBS". It's going to be what we're already seeing, fewer jobs, stagnant wages, more and more of the profits moving to the richest members of society... sound familiar? And we don't need all the jobs to go away for it to be a big problem. Ignore any even remotely futuristic ideas and just look at self-driving cars, which are at most 5 years away from being on the roads everywhere. Moving things on roads from point A to point B accounts for roughly 15% of all the jobs in the country. And that's ignoring other 'moving things around' jobs on smaller scales, like say warehouse work, which to a bot is just an easier version of the already solved self-driving car problem. The worst unemployment of the recent great recession was at 10%. The Great Depression peaked at 27%. From the video in the OP, if you look at all the jobs that could reasonably be expected to be automated in the near future, you get to about 45% unemployment. Without doing something to avert it, those are end-of-the-world, rioting in the streets kind of numbers.
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Dec 2, 2016 17:32
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:If everything is truely so cheap to manufacture that everything costs less than minimum wage to make then why are the poor without? This is a world where a life-saving pill that costs pennies to manufacture can be sold for $750 per dose. Capitalism finds a way.
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Dec 2, 2016 18:46
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wateroverfire posted:As more people are permanently unemplyoyed or underemployed the government will take up the slack by expanding social safety nets. That's a nice idea. Which republican senators, congresspeople, or presidential candidates are going to support it? Edit: I mean yeah, everyone basically agrees that the way to fix it is to legislate a standard of living below which we will not allow people to drop. But with decades of demonizing socialism and 'moochers' and the rhetoric of 'makers and takers' the prospects don't look good. At the moment it's much more likely that we'll have to steer the ship into the iceberg and start drowning before they admit that maybe we should change course. BobTheJanitor fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 19:19
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wateroverfire posted:It doesn't have to be anything as explicit as that, really. Noticing the problem and doing something about it is the preferred path, yeah, but I remain skeptical because it doesn't follow on from what we see in reality. The most likely response of governments around the world to the recent recession was 'austerity' and 'tighten your belt' and similar things that boil down to 'you get nothing, deal with it'. We may get to mincome eventually, but I think the path there is going to be a lot harder than it needs to be as long as we continue to fetishize hard work and bootstraps. boner confessor posted:on the other hand, the current crop of republicans are discussing how best to voucherize medicare and dismantle social security, so Basically, this.
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Dec 2, 2016 20:13
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like people can imagine the part a heart surgeon loses his job because a robot does it cheaper and better, but somehow that sci-fi story never also has the part where everyone now can get cheap heart surgery. Picking a medical example is undercutting your point a bit here, since that's probably the most egregious example of a field in which prices are insanely bloated and yet people have no choice but to pay them or die. Owlofcreamcheese posted:So why can only the rich afford to have or run them? Why can't the community hospital buy one? The same reason you can't formulate Daraprim in your basement and sell it on the street corner for its actual value instead of the 5,000% increased cost that Turing sells it for.
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Dec 2, 2016 21:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:To be fair, entire countries seem that they ARE doing that. Manufacturing generics. That's fair, I am mostly thinking from an American perspective on this. Maybe some glorious European socialist states will have a better transition time. At least until the new all-robot U.S. Army finds a reason to come bomb them. And although I have been presenting a pretty grim outlook, I do think that increasing automation will (eventually) be a good thing. I'm betting at some point we'll all get our heads out of our asses and realize that forcing the rules of a society that needs labor to survive onto a society that has no use for human labor is a dumb thing, and we can all just sit back while the robots do all the heavy lifting. The real question is if we think ahead and adapt our social structures as the changes happen, or if we resist and have to start seeing society break down at the edges before we do something about it.
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Dec 3, 2016 01:10
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Cicero posted:Are you from 30 years in the future or something? We can barely make bipedal robots that can open a door and walk through it without falling over. Missed this, but no, just go look at the video in the OP. Or just search for news on that 'Baxter' robot that it mentions. Programming it consists of showing it what to do, and then it does it. Instead of just automatically repeating one exact task like most industrial robots, it can "learn" by being shown a new task. It's also designed to be safe enough to work next to people, unlike the industrial automated things that will mindlessly smack into someone and usually have to be caged off for safety. And it only costs about $25,000. It's not being marketed as something to take over all the jobs (yet). The line is that it will 'help' your existing workers. Which means you buy one and then maybe you don't hire the next few people you would have hired, because now you only need one person to work with the robot and you still get just as much done. And thus the gap between productivity and wages widens a little bit more.
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Dec 5, 2016 18:52
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Cicero posted:Baxter is still a very long way off from being able to replace human manual labor. Yes, it has the capability to learn a very basic mechanical task by being shown what to do, and that level of computer vision and mechanical control is a good step up, but it doesn't have any higher-level intelligence around that task that you would probably need to replace people. Not to mention that it's still a big, immobile robot. It looks like it might fit well in a factory, but I mean, we've had industrial 'robots' in factories for some time now. The whole point is that it's designed to take robots away from the 'giant dumb repetitive task' role in a factory and make it fit in doing tasks safely in a human-sized environment. But instead of knowing only how to attach part 7 onto frame 3 when both pieces are in exactly the right spot, it can do all kinds of tasks that involve non-specific manual manipulation. And it's the first iteration. This isn't the end game of worker bots, this is the equivalent of the first general-purpose computers from the 1950s that filled an entire room, and which now fit in your pocket. But I doubt it's going to take decades for similar bots to become ubiquitous and much more capable than this first generation.
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Dec 5, 2016 20:29
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That WH report seems to shy away from advocating any kind of basic income solution and only hints at vague things like 'increasing the social safety net' while mostly falling back on retraining as the solution. Which, of course, doesn't deal with the obvious question of what you're going to be retraining these people for as more and more jobs automate away, or how you're going to fit the millions of people in need of retraining into a system that's hardly built to contain them. There are a few experiments in basic income going on in other countries, though. And past experiments in the area have shown that most of the assumptions people make about it are wrong. Most people receiving it don't stop working, they tend to be healthier and more productive, it helps the local economy and encourages entrepreneurs to try new business ideas. You'd think that would be a bipartisan win-win. But no, we live in a post-sanity society, so we'll probably soon be screaming BOOTSTRAPS at each other while we fight over the last scraps of rat meat.
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Dec 23, 2016 19:16
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It seems like UBI almost requires a functional economy in order to start it rolling. If we wait and try to implement it when it appears to be a necessity, after 50% of the population is out of a job and monetary circulation has flatlined, it would probably be too late. What transactions are you going to tax in order to fund it?
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Dec 23, 2016 21:32
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Blue Star posted:Selfdriving cars, for example, are pure hype. We're still decades and decades away from having the necessary technology.  I'm not even sure if I'm falling for troll bait, but... the basic technology is here, and it works. it's only a matter of regulations catching up at this point. Like, yeah, if you want to get technical, we don't have anything that you can just punch in a destination and then take a nap while it drives you there through all weather conditions, yet. But normal city or highway driving are perfectly doable and have been done.
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Dec 23, 2016 23:03
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Main Paineframe posted:We can't just sit back and say "well, if the problem gets REAL bad I'm sure someone will solve it". Hell, look at how well that's worked for climate change. I mean, if things get real bad and we don't have any plans in place, there will be a solution, but it's not going to be a good one. Once the riots and wars destroy all the technology along with half of the population, we'll no longer have the problem of joblessness to worry about! 
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Dec 23, 2016 23:40
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BedBuglet posted:Perfect conditions being the key words. Most of the robots have real issues with inclement weather. Not for long.
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Jan 6, 2017 17:55
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Tei posted:I am not a expert, but I believe few people are voluntary organ donors. If more people get that route it would make the availability greater. Well... no. The voluntary donors are the people that the organs are already coming from. Voluntary doesn't mean 'oh you need a heart? Well take mine right now!' It means when you die in some way that doesn't ruin your organs (i.e. a car crash), they can take them out and get them to people who need them. If people aren't dying in accidents that leave their organs healthy and useful, but instead dying from heart disease or cancer or other ailments that make their organs undesirable, then you have an organ shortage problem. But yeah there is also some hope that we'll get to the point of growing artificial organs soon, so maybe that will cancel out the problem. If president jackass doesn't decide to nuke all the scientists on a whim, of course.
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Jan 26, 2017 17:39
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Until there's a high enough demand for built-in privacy measures, companies will just keep on doing that poo poo. There's plenty of money to be made off of personal information, but not much money to be made by promising not to use/sell that info. We're stuck waiting on the broken GOP government to do something (haha no) or until a breach of privacy bad enough to scare the hell out of people happens. The latter seems more likely as we enter a world where more and more people are going to have devices all over their house listening to everything they say 24 hours a day. Imagine your own massive data-leak scenario here. Maybe then the public demand gets high enough that it becomes a profitable strategy to advertise that your smart light switch auto-deletes everything it hears every 60 seconds, or whatever.
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Jul 26, 2017 22:45
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 13:24 |
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So the team behind AlphaGo has been busy, apparently. After AlphaGo beat the world champion, they started working on a revised version of it, called AlphaGo Zero. Instead of being trained on lots of previous games, it was essentially just fed the basic ruleset and then played games against itself. With no other input except that, it became good enough to beat AlphaGo. Then they took it another step and generalized it even further, to AlphaZero which isn't specific to any one game. Using the same setup of 'here are the rules, play against yourself until you get good' it was able to learn go, chess, and shogi to a level that could beat the best existing AI players of those games within 24 hours. The paper is here if you'd like to peruse it while worrying about what happens when they tell AlphaZero to try its hands at stock trading: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
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Dec 7, 2017 00:59
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