SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the with-a-capital-T-which-rhymes-with-D-and-that-stands-for-Drones dept.
Gartner’s crystal ball foresee an emerging ‘super class’ of technologies.
Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business. This is Gartner being provocative, as it is typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.
Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2691607/one-in-three-jobs-will-be-taken-by-software-or-robots-by-2025.html
What do you think of Gartner's predictions ? What will happen to all the phone sanitizers?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:44AM
One solution I can think of is to factor in the secondary costs to society. This could be done through government regulation or social movements such as boycotting businesses that replace people with machines.
Neo-luddites will not be successful, as manual labor is very expensive. Wal-Mart proved beyond a doubt that people buy cheap stuff even when it is worse than expensive stuff. However man-made products will not be better; they will be worse. A robot does not get tired and does not "optimize" its own programming. Would you want to buy a hand-made microprocessor? I'm sure 100,000,000 Chinese workers could be hired to cut the masks with Xacto knives from a film that is rolled out on some stadium. Today you cannot even assemble PCBs by hand, as parts are too small to be seen. Most of what you do in videos from Foxconn is simply testing and final assembly. This will be also automated as soon as it makes sense.
Another I can think of is mass colonization, but not sure if we could pull that off in time.
Certainly not. Even energy-wise, there is probably not enough fuel on Earth to launch millions of tons of stuff that is necessary for a colony, not even counting the colonists themselves. Besides, who would want to take seats in Ark B? Colonies are not for weaklings; but by that time everyone on Earth will be dependent on the government and, as such, have unlearned all the skills that it takes to be a successful colonist.
Third option is to move into a new economic system that maintains human freedom and dignity, but that seems like it'll happen well after we discover FTL...
The 3rd option is likely to happen in form of a revolution. The goal of that revolution would be to grab the profits of robot factories and divide them among the leaders.
There is a fourth option, though. All the unwanted people will be killed. Only those who own the robotic factories will remain, along with a minimum number of worker bees to repair the robots and to entertain the owners of the planet. A new social contract can be formed with the workers to make sure that they don't get any ideas.
Do not discount this 4th option. For eons power of a feudal lord was directly proportional to the number of peasants that he could tax and knights that he could send to war. However today this is not true anymore. People are a liability, especially people that are not productive. There is a natural reason to get rid of them. Perhaps a plague can be developed (the Gray Death [wikia.com]), and a cure from it ("Ambrosia") will be distributed only to select few.
What are other options? In essence, with very few jobs available, and those jobs being only offered to high IQ people, most of the Earth's population has to become a planet-wide ghetto. They will be fed, and housed - but you can get a preview of those services if you look into any ghetto, in any large city. Idle hands will be quick to engage in crime, and that crime will be held under control by the military. The value of human life will be nearly zero. The book "Currents of Space" was not written to illustrate this future, but its two classes are basically inevitable on Earth if nothing is done.
A socialist would say that a ghetto is not required. As robotic factories produce plenty of products, those products could be used to feed, house and otherwise entertain everyone. But... if work is optional, what is then going to make capable workers work at those factories and repair robots? If all the goods are equally available, no matter if you work or not, why should one work?
Socialists also carefully ignore that human societies are antagonistic. The best way to keep the tensions under control is to make people work so much that they don't have time or energy to wage war. However if they have infinite time, and nothing better to do, you can be sure that some groups will form to exploit others - not because they need money, but simply to feel power over them. An idyllic society that does not need to worry about earning their daily bread will be playing its traditional game - war. If you don't want to play, then you will be the prey. There will be no way to be neutral. Those wars are waged in ghettos (like Chicago) already.
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:17AM
I think people work for three reasons: subsistence, to better themselves, and for a sense of purpose. While a future of abundance can provide for everyone's needs (not just food and shelter but also decent health care and education) it seems unlikely that any amount of socialist redistribution will satisfy everyone's wants and ambitions. And even so, there are plenty of retired people who are financially independent (having planned and invested properly) and still work, either at jobs or as volunteers, because they want to. Because there is more to life than being a couch potato consumer.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:54PM
it seems unlikely that any amount of socialist redistribution will satisfy everyone's wants and ambitions
That's exactly the problem. Socialism will satisfy your want for food, shelter, and healthcare. But what other wants may you have? Desire to wear uncommon clothes? Anyone can get those. Drive a special car? Anyone can have such a car. What no robot can give you is the power over others. It's a deeply buried trait that keeps humans forming tribes with hierarchy, instead of a flock. Tribes will be also forming in a socialist paradise. In the late USSR this was seen as rise of regional gangs. The universal solution to that was in working everyone to death, so that they don't get ideas. An idle society will have plenty of such ideas, and plenty of people will want to become kings - not because they are hungry right now, but because they want to have power to let others eat or starve. Plenty of today's crime in or near ghettos is aimed not at profit, but at personal gratification (those knockout games are a good example.) And there is yet another uncomfortable truth: some people are just too stupid to live (free.) Perhaps it's a genetic defect. But many crimes are committed not by Professors Moriarty, but by someone with IQ barely above zero and attraction to sadism. How will the socialist society deal with those people?
Some talk about art that should become a major outlet for unused labor and unclaimed time. This was mentioned in The city and the stars [wikipedia.org]. However the market for art is limited; being infinitely copyable (even performing arts,) the society would become quickly flooded with music, paintings, and other items that are mostly garbage. People will realize that not everyone is capable of art, and those who aren't capable should stay away, lest they be ridiculed. Pretty soon people will understand that their whole life is entirely pointless; mass suicides are likely. People, as far as I know, cannot exist without purpose and without work that leads them there.
(Score: 1) by lizardloop on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:19PM
I think your large scale ghetto is the more likely option. If you want an example of it look at the villages around England that are former pit villages. They essentially exist on welfare. Generations growing up on tax payer money because most of the people there are too stupid and lazy to leave and find work elsewhere. They are grim places marred my large gangs of feral youth. When people are bored they tend to have sex a lot and not particularly worry about how many offspring they create. I'm just hoping I can get on the upper curve of all this and find a nice gated community with big automated security bots to keep everyone else out.
Either that or I'll go full hippy and move to a camp site in a forest somewhere.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:45PM
I kind of LOLed at the "people can't assemble PCBs" because I do that all the time. I don't own the gear to do BGAs (a mere credit card swipe away, but not worth it to me at this time compared to the minimal cost of farming out) or do wire bonding direct to bare dies (again, hi ebay, just not worth the $$ to me) but I know people who do. PLCCs, the whole QFP family, the whole SOP family, even some leadless although thats a fussy PITA. As with most impossible things its not very hard to find people doing it. I've also etched my own boards but its a messy PITA and I haven't geared up for multilayer (swipe that credit card...) although its theoretically possible so I order from PCB houses like everyone else. I will say that 0102 discretes and those 00501 caps are no laughing matter but don't exactly stop me either.
Think of what a jeweler or advanced wood carver could do by hand. SMD electronic assembly is extremely easy by comparison. Guys who got into electronics in the era where the manual skills were more like rough house plumbing will have an interesting time of the transition when putting down their sledgehammers and torches, but that doesn't mean jewelers and inlay work wood carvers didn't/can't/won't exist.
Also I'd pay a fair amount of money for hand assembled CPUs. There's more than a small number of retrocomputing people glad to fool around with 60s gear and stuff like that. I've always wanted a straight-8 PDP-8 which is pretty close to a completely discrete transistor design, Really cool. As moores law comes to an inevitable physics related end, there is no point in worrying about R+D once things go steady state and innovation ceases in that field. Why tape out a mask by hand if four centuries from now you're a commodity CPU firm who's been stamping out the same chip for two hundred years. They'll always be some slow R+D and some slow innovation but CPU mfgr in 2414 will be like manufacturing machine screws today in 2014. The implosion when computer tech stops being innovation and drops to static unchanging commodity work will be very impressive to watch.
I think the part you're missing in your first section is art. As long as the rich guys want art and the peasants want at least one thing in their house that is fine art grade, people will make art. Walmart sells a lot of $10 pants that literally unravel and unseam themselves and fall apart at the first month of washing, yet there's no shortage of wedding and prom dress makers and bespoke business suits. Maybe not for everyone, definitely not daily wear for everyone, but I could see it semi-sustainably.
One problem is the peasant class changes from "no longer needed for mass robotic production" like fine furniture carpenters and textile workers, and changes "bubba was borned with two left thumbs and no fine motor coordination at all and has the style sense of a kindergartener" Those people will make a find peasant class, and unfortunately they might not be able to craft fine woodwork or high fashion womens dresses, but they probably have the skill to throw molotovs and riot in general.
Historically religion was a solution to "soak up" excess production. Look at the modern death industrial complex. I'm a good enough wood butcher to know I'm not that good compared to the experts of the field, but I still get the occasional ooh and aah from the muggles so even if the peasants are completely excluded from the "real economy" (and which economy is the real one in that case?) then I can trade some other peasant a really nice homemade coffin for a bag of home grown potatoes.
Killing an economy is easy, historically the folks in charge have never done anything else to their economies. Just like no paper currency has ever survived more than a couple centuries, ever. And in both cases, human nature being what it is, never will in the future either. But its harder to kill barter.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:17PM
Well, definitely you could assemble one PCB by hand, given enough tools and enough time. But it's like that jeweler's art - a cell phone made by you will cost $10,000 but the same phone build by a pick-and-place machine will cost $100. Not too many people will find fun in competition with a specialized robot, just as very few people race on foot against a top fuel dragster. It can become an exotic hobby, just as restoration of old $(anything) is today.
If you want you can create the whole DEC PDP in an FPGA. Then you can run those RT-11 and RSX-11M. Not fun if you need results, but fun enough if you want the process. You do not need to make an IC for that.
As long as the rich guys want art and the peasants want at least one thing in their house that is fine art grade, people will make art.
Most people don't crave for art; and if some housewife absolutely has to have a painting in a room, she can always buy a print for very little money. Given that the 20th century was marred by abstract "art", that print would be likely a work of earlier artists. It's a hard work, after all, to learn how to create paintings by hand. Artists had students, and those were learning the skill for many years. You can't expect a plumber to set aside his wrench and draw you a flower. Completely different skills. I can't draw objects, but I'm good at technical drawings. A friend cannot draw a 1" straight line without wiggles all over the place. Art is not for everyone, both in production and in consumption. I have no paintings in this house, unless you count a large sheet of paper with a table of Netgear routers that they sent me in the box with one of their products.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:36PM
"a cell phone made by you will cost $10,000"
And the problem is what exactly, once the peasants can't afford phones anymore and the population is split into two groups, peasants with no money at all (so they don't care if its $100 or $100000 they can't pay either) and billionaires who also don't care if its $10000.
Also its just not as hard as you might think. I can build microwave ham radio and computer stuff quite quickly. I mean, sure, if some billionaire who doesn't understand the value of money is willing to pay me $10K, I'm not going to complain. But if it takes me a weeks work at a very relaxed pace indeed and the rest of the peasantry is trying to grow potatoes for $10 / week I'm OK with only $1K/wk or even $100/wk. Permanent long term economic decline means deflation. If everyone else's income declines by a factor of 10, I'd be cool dropping back to only $1K/week again. 90s wages will be here again soon enough.
"Most people don't crave for art"
There's more to art than paintings on the wall. Just for "masculine" stuff along think of carved hunting rifles, hot rod cars, ridiculous pocket knives, sports collectibles (beyond mass produced junk)
There are people that live everything in their lives off the rack at walmart, although not many. They always got something... Collecting or custom something or other. Even the poorest rural dude has a custom handmade fishing rod or something. Maybe not much, but something.
"a large sheet of paper with a table of Netgear routers"
At a former financial employer they got a nice cutting edge mainframe and I got a promotional calendar poster that was on my bachelor pad wall, for 3 years after the calendar expired, until I got married and moved out. Still, like I wrote, theres a lot more to art than just paintings on walls.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:33PM
Yes, art and other man-made products may have value. But... in the society that we are discussing there will be no money. Reason #0 is that most of the people are not going to be employed. So how would the exchange of items of art work then? I'm not going to work for a year on a wonderful carved item just to give it away to the first guy who wants it. I'd ask for something in return. What can he give me if he is, like 99% of the population, not an artist? Does it mean that this trade has to be limited to the "productive" part of the population?
Also, futurists do everything possible to jump, suddenly and without preparation, from a capitalist society to a communist society. Even if we assume that communism is possible (not with the current mindset!) - the transition cannot happen overnight. As matter of fact, this transition is happening right now, and that's what the article is about. The transition is not managed currently.
If nothing is done then you will end up with people who own the factories, the designs, and the products. As fewer and fewer workers are employed, those factories would be producing goods that nobody can buy because they have no money at all. One possibility is to tax the factories and give the money to idle people... but then why would the owner want to build the factory in the first place? Also, those factory owners would be the de-facto government. They wouldn't vote against their interests. So it *will* end up with a crisis of overproduction and underconsumption. If left to its own devices, the crisis unfolds into a war of everyone against everyone.
It's also useful to see the situation from the POV of the factory owner. What are his motives? He wants to be rich and powerful. But is there any value in such things when robots can make anything you want for free? Well, some people - less ambitious ones - will be happy to live on an island that has a small robotic factory. They don't need anyone, they are not needed by anyone; no money is required. Those would be the happiest ones in this picture.
But if the owner wants more than that, what is his long term game plan? Obviously, he wants to retain scientists and engineers because he still needs such trifles like immortality, machine intelligence, and so on. Obviously, his robotic factories will be feeding and clothing those productive people that he selects. The rest is not needed; they can be exiled, killed, or otherwise cast away. Remaining people will work, but there is no need for money. The owner of the factories may at that point relinquish control, as it has no more purpose - and then the society turns into communism. But the most essential point of this plan is that not everyone is fit for a communist society. (See Маяковский [wikipedia.org], "Баня [wikipedia.org]"). This communist society will require constant pruning, like a garden, because some of the children of otherwise good people may end up being not so good. Communism cannot survive a load of idle, lazy people who, by their very existence and example, demotivate workers. This is a serious problem with the theory of communism, as it became obvious pretty soon (in USSR) that "a new man" is needed; one who is allowed to not work, but chooses to work because he wants to make his world better. Look around, in the street - how many of those do you recognize? The F/OSS world has, probably, 90% of them, and the remaining ones are amateur artists and writers. I cannot imagine a volunteer sewage worker, or a volunteer plumber, or perhaps a volunteer car mechanic. But someone will have - perhaps, leading an army of robots - descend into sewers to make repairs. Someone will have to use his human hands to make a pipe connection that stumps a robot. Someone will have to reach deep inside a greasy machine to feel for a broken gear. Plenty of work in a communist world will be still unpleasant - not everyone is going to compose songs and program in Go.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:27AM
"So how would the exchange of items of art work then?"
Barter is really old and archeology shows that pretty much everyone has decorated the heck out of everything until the industrial revolution arrived.
I mean, yeah, starving to death savages couldn't have time to engrave their stone axes or something, but it seems as soon as humans have a spare 15 minutes someone starts engraving swords and shields and housewares and tables its like freaking dwarf fortress out there in the pre-industrial world...
Realistically my ability to make money off electronics assembly post-capitalist era / neo feudalist era probably isn't too good. I'm no master carpenter but at least up to really high level apprentice quality so I'll make you a stack of axe handles if you'll give me a couple tons of raw wood, and I'll trade farm / garden tools and things (ranging from handles to entire wheelbarrows) to farmers for chow. I mean seriously, you can't expect someone who's specialty in life is detection and prevention of crop diseases or safely chopping down trees to season and carve wood? I assure you it would be a heck of a lot easier to chop down and hand over a couple extra trees or grow an extra ten baskets of potatoes than it would be for those guys to keep being experts in their field while also learning to be carpenters...