Remember in DUNE how they got rid of computers because they got to smart and tried to kill everyone. I wonder if that sort of action is whats going to happen if we can’t find some way to allow people to be productive and have success while eventually replacing every job with a computer or drone. What if in the future inefficiency is injected in the system simply to provide people with some job to do.
Just spit balling.
Their jobs as … high school students?
Given that all the research evidence (e.g. on Roseto effect) points to the centrality of community and strong relationships for human well-being, there is also the option that we increase the value of work which contribute to the community and strengthen relationships: E.g. educators / carers / librarians / park keepers/ street cleaners etc. Work which can’t in a meaningful way be automated.
I.e. we invest in the common good, in parks / in libraries / schools / hospitals / care facilities…I know it’s just a dream, but we do have choices. There is important work humans can do, which can’t be replaced. For crying out people are paying professional huggers…
My dream is that Trump is the fatal symptom of unabated individualism (egoism / narcissism) and the destructive effect of his corrupt army of egomaniacs will lead to a realignment of our values and we will arrive in a world where we actually spend money on things which really matter.
It’s a beautiful dream and I share it with you.
In many cases, the more human aspects of care work seem to be increasingly discouraged, especially when they take up more time. Often while many jobs can’t be automated, parts of them can and a workforce can be reduced to the employees necessary to do the rest.
Fully Automated Luxury Queer Space Communism, if you don’t mind.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. Ostriches, heads in sand.
It’s been a blessing thusfar that tech is run by engineers essentially. Had it been easier to implement programing - and note I deeply believe there has always been a way, through multi-disciplinary approaches, better interfaces, and more flexible outlooks - we’d have been where we are 30 years ago.
This is a revolution driver. We will need to move as rapidly as possible to more advanced tech that can take care of our needs without monetary input. Capitalism doesn’t fit that model too well.
Enforcement tech will rise. Protecting the wealth and income, and ultimately, power, of the capital owning classes. Robocop.
But do we get to Jabba running everything, or Iain M. Banks’ Culture? People at the top find it vey hard to share. Sharing means loss of power.
I’m looking at my own job, which falls into the upper strata of the roles that will die in the next 10 years, and thinking my best way out is to automate it and see what cash I can get!
Eurgh, basically. We can do it, we can transition well, but we’re going to need to be relieved of many pre-conceptions about who gets what and when.
All these spare people - well, let’s get them onto tech programs, and get ourselves as quickly as possible away from the potential for civil war.
Not to be hyperbolic. But I’m sure you see what I mean.
I find that this interactive feature from Planet Money shakes the complacency of middle-class people who think their income sources are safe from automation. It’s a dash of ice-cold water seeing your job has a 50%+ chance of being automated away in the near future.
I started writing a much longer rebuttal to this but I realised the subject needs more time and space than I can give it here (hmm… must dust off the old blog) but I’ll leave you with this, before we get too deep into the wringing of hands and banging of doom bells if you chase the paper trail of references down to the source on this report it comes down to a 2013 working paper out of Oxford Martin School and Oxford University called “The future of unemployment” by Carl Benefikt Frey and Michael Osbourne. The authors attempt to predict which jobs are most likely to be automated, they use a couple of sources, mainly O*NET, am on-line service built for the US department of labour and also the likelihood of a job being outsourced overseas (apparently if a job can be outsourced it is highly likely to be automated). The authors themselves express some reservations over the flagging of likelihood of some of the jobs and clearly state that just because a job can be automated it won’t be automated (often for the usual reason that it isn’t economical). At the end of the document they have a list of jobs and the probability that they can be automated I’ll leave you with a few (admittedly cherry-picked by myself) ones and let you draw your owns conclusions as to how far we should be trusting the latest bit of robotic / AI hype :
Telemarketers 0.99 (can’t we just get rid of those and not replace them ?)
Umpires, Referees and other sporting officials 0.98
Models 0.98 (sorry Gigi, it’s all about the servo motors)
Cooks, Restaurant 0.96 (Seriously ? )
Animal Breeders 0.95
Door to door salespeople 0.94 (So… urban navigation, social interaction etc. solved then ?)
Waiters / Waitresses 0.94 (Come on, we are going to replace minimum wage + tips workers in a highly dynamic environment, dealing with sharp / fragile / hot objects, directly with uninitiated members of the public, using extremely variable natural language without getting sued off the the planet. I mean Willow Garages will sell you a 2 armed PR2 highly maneuverable robot for around $500K. That’s a 94% certainty is it ?)
Etc…
In the interests of full disclosure I’m a robotic engineering lecturer and researcher at a UK university teaching robotics and AI, working with industry to increase automation and large scale data analytics. I have a vested interest in the robotic revolution and honestly there isn’t a subject today that isn’t surrounded by more hype and claptrap.
During the post war period, we tended to have some of the gains from higher productivity go the the remaining workers in the form of higher wages. So that even if we need half as many truck drivers, those that remained could afford to buy more framulators. and so that more people could be employed making them. Or playing violins in concerts, or producing TV shows or whatever new products and services were being added to the economy.
But since the 80s most of the gains from productivity have gone to those who manage and invest in companies, and the wealthy have a tendency to re-invest those gains instead of spending them. So that money has been circling around Wall Street blowing serial bubbles rather than adding to demand for goods and services.
The Soviet Union, with its lack of consumer goods and moribund economy, did not have much for most people to do and did not want people becoming self-employed. They made up jobs. The unofficial slogan was “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”
Let’s just get on with it and make everyone a social media celebrity, and that will be their job.
I used to work with a not very bright (despite her master’s degree) woman who read about robots being able to replace us. “Wouldn’t that be nice, you could buy a robot to do your job and then you could stay home and not have to work.” “Once the cost of those robots came down to five times your annual salary, the company would buy them and fire you.” I replied.
Most of those people have a high school education at best, including a significant portion of the ones with a Bachelors. What tech are they going to do?
My favorite theory is this was a symptom of the waning of the fear of Communism and revolution that had facilitated the rise of Organized Labor in the 20th century. As soon as the capitalists no longer feared the guillotine they stopped sharing productivity gains. So we’re in the middle of a revolution now, but it doesn’t look like the Terror…yet. The low educated Trumpsters are seeing the football snatched away once again by the oligarchs of Goldman Sachs, will they get their AR15’s and really go for it this time?
The author of Dune knew nothing about computers. He had a whole lot of systems, like ornithopters, which required computing power beyond that of the time in which he was writing. It was just a (not very well thought through) fictional device to act as a plot mechanism. A Deus ex machina if you like.
A later author might have had a similar idea to Gibson’s and a had ban on AI’s.
What happens if the task the robot was programmed to do becomes obsolete within 5 years? Teaching a human to do a new task is easy, but a machine much less so.
Ever heard of “reprogramming”? The don’t throw away robot car welders when the model changes.
You are right, in that sense. To stretch your analogy, what if now the car is made of molded plastic parts that require no welding, you might throw away the robot car welders then, unless they are even more general purpose.
