blah blah blah....stop advancing technology....blah blah blah....I'm SCARED!!!...

.....wait...you mean people will have to educate themselves and actively work to become productive shitizens, instead of finding some menial robot job that pays excessive wages???

Wait...you mean...so...wait....so I should NOT complain about my super-cheap technology that I get because we enslave Asian workers....but I SHOULD complain about super-cheap shit I but because of robots? Both of which takes jobs from "my peeps"...

Fuck off....

Get a fucking education, make yourself relevant to the changing techno-economy, and you won't have to worry.

The assholes that said, "FUCK YOU, I'M A CANDLE MAKER!!!!!" and refused to acknowledge advancement in a new society of Light Bulbs...I hope they suffered and starved. Likewise, the idiots that seek to diminish the advancement of technology for selfish reasons (i.e. FUCK the benefit to society of advanced technolgoy...it means I have to learn a new job to survive!) I have no sympathy for you.

And yes...it is bullshit that we are reaching some critical mass where technology advances so rapidly that man cannot be employed. Technology is NOT yet at the point where it will "self advance". i.e. Humans are required to design the next, better robot.

What this really comes down to is a lack of trust in humanity. Which is really fucking strange...because the paranoid peeps that believe this nonsense probably ALSO believe that man is all-powerful and will destroy the earth, etc etc etc. So....what is it? Are we all-powerful? Is simply slaves to our technology?

Yes yes yes....blah blahb ablh....my argument is bullshit...blah blah blah....and....

....by the same token, you old, tired Ludite argument that ***THIS TIME*** technology will be the end of mankind....bullshit. NONSENSE. Hysterical idiocy from people that...wait for it....this is from the people in society that think hamburger flippers in a fast food restaurant deserve $15/hour...


ding ding ding. And there it is....


You may now feel free to personally attack me, as I know most of you will, because you can't stick to the arguments when I comment. Bring it on.

Did you even read the article? Your arguments don't particularly relate to what it says in any way, except peripherally being about robots. It doesn't suggest we should stop technological progress. It just suggests that we should solve the resulting inequality problem by ensuring people actually have their basic needs met - because we can afford to.

Heck, the oil countries have been essentially doing this for *decades*, which is why the average oil country citizen is extremely wealthy.

You watch, Japan is going to do this first. They're working very very hard on home assist robots, because their population curve is going to go fully upside down pine tree very soon, and they don't do very well when they try to import cheap foreign workers.

@ thorfi: Did you even need to ask your first question. Look who you're addressing.

Well, I figure it doesn't hurt to ask, even when I suspect I know the answer. I'm not fond of opening with chainsaw diplomacy. ;-)

@krellin: I agree mostly with this guy. I disagree with him on the SMALL part I agree with you on. However, I strongly disagree with you on most of what you say.

As an educator, I see that only a portion of society is cut out for higher education. Everyone has abilities, and only a small percentage is geared to complete high school, go to college and pursue a career.

Many people are instead gifted in other areas: athletics, trade skills, laborers, builders, mechanics and other "blue collar" work.

The problem is not that robots will take all of our jobs, it's simply that the jobs humans do will be those that pay less than the job they used to have before the robot took over.

I am working at the corvette plant until school starts back up and I can tell you that wages have decreased. Sure, the amount they're paid is higher, but compared to the amount it takes to live, it's less. Most people at factories are temporary workers paid minimum wage and never hired. It used to be that one parent could work to provide for a family. Now, it usually requires 2 working incomes, sometimes more to merely put food on the table.

so it's not about "blah blah blah, go get a higher education" because many aren't cut out for it, and for the many that are, there aren't enough jobs in most fields to handle all of the graduates which means those that have the degree then have to turn to cheap labor jobs to survive.


I think that the 1 person on top shouldn't have a $100 million dollar salary, but should instead decrease to, say $25 million and use the extra 75 to increase worker wages.


The people at the top often work very hard to drive down costs to increase their own pockets. For example, state senators and other officials have no problem giving themself a 5% raise and needing to cut state spending and decide not to increase teacher pay, state park worker pay or other state funded jobs.

" It used to be that one parent could work to provide for a family. Now, it usually requires 2 working incomes, sometimes more to merely put food on the table."

Funny. I wonder what would happen if one of those two wage slaves decided to stop working in every household in America. The resulting serious labor shortage would cause a drastic rise in wages across the board.

But for some reason this kind of thing can't be talked about out loud...

I agree, however it's awfully difficult to get that number of people to decide to not work and stay not working until companies give in.

In read the article. Purveyors of doom. Sky is falling. Catastrophes. Famine. Bkahbkahbkah. Classic Luddite. "No....seriously, I'm right THIS TIME...."

And the sheep will bray and fret and have nervous squitters all night long....

The SOLUTION, of course, is some typical anti-capitalist tripe... Predictable as the wind.

Japan back in the 1980s considered using industrial robots to almost completely make cars. They didn't do full automation because it would have caused massive unemployment. So they sacrificed quality to keep people working.

It's the same with all those countries selling bananas to the world. They keep their workers employed at low skilled jobs by not improving efficiency.

Besides if robots take over too many jobs it will make it easier for Skynet to destroy us.

"The problem is not that robots will take all of our jobs, it's simply that the jobs humans do will be those that pay less than the job they used to have before the robot took over."

I disagree with only this point. Self-driving card will end several industries - taxis, wheeled freight, industrial mining, all things currently done by human drivers. Sure, you will still ne able to get a car and drive for pleasure but...

And no, not today, google's self-driving cars are new, expensive and untrusted. But in twenty years they may be ubiquitous, cheap, and safer than human drivers.

But that is just one example. We also have machine learnig algorithms, we have the ability to compose music via software - and with human input you could even tailor the output (with a genetic algorithm) to be customized and personal. There are many creative tasks which will begin to be taken over by robots/computer programs. The service industry will suffer, and that is the biggest one, manufacturing is dead (though home 3 printing may help, it will become a cottage industry at best)

Watch cgp grey's video 'humans need not apply' - which was some of the inspiration for this article, though the article is about income inequality.

I do agree Tru that not all people are cut out to be creative/get a higher education. But i don't agree that their jobs can't also be taken over by machines. Programmers are writing the software which will replace them. Self-learning aoftware to do tasks we're not smart enough to figure out ourselves. An they are everywhere - google's results algorithm knows what results you want - but the programmers who wrote it can no tell you what it is doing, because it has learned your preferences, it has lesrned how to weight your preferences to give the best output (and you can use a site like 'duck, duck, go' to see what unwieghted preferences look like - it uses google, but without personal biases, and it is no-where near as useful)

That said, a huge number of people in Ireland now have college level educations, i know people with master's degree who can't find work, when before a bachelor's degree would guarentee you a job. If everyone goes into higher education there will be a devaluing of the qualifications. And it has already happened in Ireland (in the 90s the Irish governement introduced free college fees for all, meaning almost everyone could go to third level, and i think 80-90% did just that) Yet the unemployment rate is... Well massovely variable, depending on the global economy. But still. It has not gone to near zero. And is especially high among the young well educated Irish.

People like to talk about all the jobs technology destroys, buy never all the jobs technology creates. Computers destroyed a lot of administrative jobs, but created a whole field of technician jobs. I suspect robots will have the same impact.

@krellin: On education, "Some may think education is the answer, and to a point it is, but it takes years for someone to learn something new, whereas technology can learn something new in seconds. There is no way to outpace technology with education. New jobs will always be created, but not as fast as they are destroyed. It takes time, and tech is an exponential function. Human labor can't compete on that level."

@abge: Yes but the issue is the number of jobs created vs destroyed. Chances are these machines which can replace minds will destroy more jobs than they create. Everyone can't be an engineer, and that is the issue.

I would never suggest everyone be an engineer. Robots will need to be maintained and monitored, which are likely to be very good blue collared jobs.

@abge: My apologies for the oversimplification. Point is 1000 machines may be able to replace maybe 100 something workers, and so long as the jobs created (monitoring, maitenance, etc...) is less than 100 then it becomes concerning.

And don't forget to factor in population growth, time to train and the advancement in efficiency of machines over time.

David Autor and some other economists have done some interesting recent on how hyper-intelligent AI and robots might displace most labour in the future.

They start with two overlapping binaries of labour: cognitive/non-cognitive, and routine/non-routine.

Right now, routine non-cognitive work has basically been replaced by computers. Routine cognitive work is going the same way. Non-routine work is harder, but non-routine non-cognitive work (i.e. driving a truck) could well be completely replaced by hyper-intelligent AI in the right robots in the next decade or two. That leaves only non-routine cognitive work... there isn't enough of that to go around.

I think the article is basically right. At some point in the next couple of decades, we could well have to rethink how we have structured society. Earning a living off of your labour in a world of zero marginal cost will not be viable for the vast majority of the population.

@abge: the prediction is that the technicians fixing the robots will be robots, too.

Eventually. But not soon. In the near future we'll see robots in hospitality and medical environments. Robots that can fix other robots are quite a ways off

abge: Not really a difficult problem. If the robots can self diagnose logistics problems, they get the appropriate module auto replaced. If they can't, then the whole robot gets pulled out and replaced, and it's sent for recycling. Self repairing robots, job done. Combine that with designing the bots to be maximally replaceable and modular, and yeah, not much need for humans.

The ease at which you think that can be accomplished makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about.

I'm with the pro-tech side here abge. There is a lot to worry about. The programmer and technician jobs that the digital jobs that the digital ages has created....isn't all that much. Citing the CGP Grey video, I think its just shy of 2 million jobs created by computers. The reason why this hasn't hurt is due to an explosion of trade and very good economic times until recently.

For robots to have a society-breaking effect, we don't need them to replace everyone. Just to replace enough. Those transportation jobs that would likely be gone in twenty years? That's several times more than the jobs created by computers (and that will be created by robots). Once we hit 15%-20% unemployment - that's great depression levels, and there will be mass social unrest.

But I suppose instead of drawing plans for it now we could just go the Baby Boomer way and say "Ah, fuck it. Its our kid's problem"

@gold

I'm not sure what you mean by "pro-tech" in this context. I'm certainly not anti-tech, I just think the change will happen is small increments that we can adapt to. I'm not saying that change isn't coming or that we should do nothing about it.

As to jobs, what about all the non-technical jobs that computers and especially the internet has created? We're seeing an explosion in the entertainment industry, for instance.

The only Internet area that had a boom during the last down turn in the tech industry was for people to create porn web sites. The hardware side collapsed because of over capacity. The software side was flat since there wasn't consumer demand that could get by on older versions.

The entertainment industry has only recently shifted over to doing special effects mostly with computers instead of miniature models and stuntmen. If it wasn't for Marvel superhero movies there wouldn't be major demand.

What you are seeing is jobs that used to require graduate degrees being automated by computers. Lawyers and their para legals are having case research and examining documents done by computer programs scanning documents by keywords. Thereby freeing up lawyers to file even more cases to clog up the legal system.

It's not just low level jobs being replaced, but ones that used to require years of education.

I don't think people realize that when one job becomes unavailable, workers that would have gone into that field do something else instead. Earlier predictions of a similar nature, such as farm productivity causing mass unemployment, have failed to come true because the economy is more flexible than people realize. I think the problem is that we honestly have no idea what the next major industry is going to be, so when we see certain fields contracting we automatically assume that the number of jobs is going down, even though it probably isn't. There will just be more services in the future, as a result of less people working in manufacturing. Sure, it takes time to train people, but it's a big stretch to say this will cause mass unemployment.

@Branki - you need to realize that these fear mongers believe they live in a static world, not a dynamic world. It's surprising that as the eveing settles upon them, and then turns into the darkness of night, they don't all commit mass suicide for fear the the sun will never return.

It is the same niave thinking that lets them think that, for example,if you tax all the wealth out of the rich, that the economy will go on just as before...as opposed to, you know, the rich wouldn't have anymore money to spend, and all the jobs that produce the good the rich buy would go away...

It is the naive thinking that makes them say, "Double the minimum wage!" and thinking that there would be no job loss, and no cost increases associated with the action.

But...you know...they have to constantly come up with new ways to tell us the sky is falling, because all their other predictions have this nasty habit of never coming true...

krellin - taxing the shit out of the rich would have less of an adverse affect than raising the minimum wage an equivalent amount, imo. IMF studies have shown that as income inequality increases, growth decreases.

Abge - by pro-tech, I mean pro-"Tech will cause lots of problems". What people aren't understanding here is that there's no space for humans to move into one these jobs are all automated. Traditionally, its been something like this. Agricultural workers move to cities and work in factories. Factory workers move on to services and offices. But where do office workers move to? Where do the stock and bond traders go when the platforms are all automated (as seen by a huge decrease in the headcount of investment banks worldwide). Or musical composers when computers can write music indistinguishable from human's 1000x faster?

It used to be automation took over routine, manual jobs. Now they're taking over highly skilled, professional jobs. This isn't the car mechanic replacing the farrier. This is an automatic farrier replacing the farrier. A robotic farrier that costs pennies an hour, that even if it took 20x longer than a human to do the job, would still be more cost efficient than the human 100% of the time.

Taxing the rich more has the same effect as taxing them less since the flaw in the Laffer curve was that the rich already employ people to reduce their taxes in any circumstance. Giving the rich more money won't increase their spending since most are spending as much as they want.

Now increasing the money at the lower end of the economic range does produce more spending since they rarely have a surplus to save. Give the lower class some money and it stays in the bank only until they see something they want to buy.

Getting rid of jobs for the lower classes eliminates their spending since most don't have the money to pay for retraining. That's why the Clinton welfare plan had money to pay the unemployed to learn for a different job than the one they left. The problem was that some of the new jobs disappeared as the new workers became ready to do them. The government is worse than individuals at guessing what the next new job area will be.

"IMF studies have shown that as income inequality increases, growth decreases."

Ahhhhh ha ha h ah aha ah ahaha haa.... IMF studies. lol Really? YOu are seeking council from the Global Government money-men? Yeah...because they've been doing SUCH a good job managing international wealth...lol