you do know we've been replacing humans with machines since the Industrial revolution, right? These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They found other more advanced work, allowing our civilization to produce more wealth allowing all of us to be richer. The same will continue.
Most people who use this argument forget about the scale and duration of this transformation back then and now. Back in 1800s there were merely ~1 billion people, then in 1900s it was ~1.6 billion. Lets say even if 50% of people back then lost jobs you had to find new jobs for 'only' ~0.8 billion people and you had more than 100 years for that transition. WWI and WWII at the beginning of 20 century 'helped' to reduce population and keep other busy to rebuild what got destroyed during the war. I guess we would like to avoid that scenario.
Now we have 7.7 billion people and it is estimated we will have 10 billion by 2050. Pace of current technical development is much faster than in 1800s and education for acquiring new skills probably takes even longer than in 1800s.
Will we be able to hypothetically reskill 5 billion of people in the next 50 years? Personally I doubt it.
Absolute numbers are a distraction. Retraining 1 person in a population of 10 has the same net demands as retraining 100,000 in a population of 1,000,000. Human society is massively parallel by default.
I think most people don't imagine properly the world as automation increases at all levels.
The first expectation is perhaps that mass unemployment would abide; clearly we don't have mass unemployment in most places (most of the world has a relatively high employment), so the phenomenon must not be occurring or there's the oft-mentioned effect of workers moving to high level tasks.
Since Quantum Supremacy was en vogue, let me coin another term: Robotic Supremacy. That is when a robot (i.e. some kind of automatic machine, not necessarily a humanoid robot) will be able to perform each and every task a human can do more economically. Humans will become unemployable. My hypothesis is that Robotic Supremacy is still far away (maybe a century); and also that this milestone doesn't matter as much as it appears.
The scenario of unemployability is highly unlikely; there's almost always something you can get a human to do that'll pay their food and shelter (we're fantastic machines evolved for billions of years; robots are still far away from domination in many niches). The question is how much this person will earn -- perhaps increasingly less, not more; because it has more competition and the tasks are not as essential as before. So a natural manifestation would be rise in income/wealth inequality. That's precisely what we're seeing. If left unchecked, most places will see a spiral of a tiny elite concentrating all wealth.
Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt, or because they were easy to exploit. (E.g. child workers). Or lived in subpar housing due to urbanization, which made perfect breeding grounds for typhoid, cholera and assorted fun.
You can't just handwave those changes away by saying "ultimately, they found other jobs". They didn't. There were entire generations that suffered. At some point there was an equilibrium, but it was far from instant, and "advanced" work doesn't help the person displaced.
They didn't die out, but they died in much larger numbers, because the industrial revolution lead to an exploitation of child labor. Combined with non-existent protections, a lot of them did die on the job.
Children started to be children for longer because labor unions helped end the practice. That was a good chunk of time after those jobs changed, and it wouldn't have happened without active pushback. (The AFL pushed for an end for child labor under 14 in 1881, and it took until 1938 to get the Fair Labor Standards Act)
The idea that paradigm-shifting transitions somehow don't affect anybody because "there will be new jobs" shows a stunning unawareness of historical precedent, or how capitalism in general works.
"because the industrial revolution lead to an exploitation of child labor"
I'm skeptical of the idea that before factories, farms didn't use child labor. Isn't the practice of closing school during the summer kind of suggestive?
Anyway, you seem to be arguing the opposite of the previous post, that there were more jobs and this was bad. I thought the issue was there were fewer jobs and that was bad.
What does "education wasn't a given for the poor" mean? That's such a vague statement I don't see how you can link it to anything. Education can mean grammar school, high school, college...people in the past, who were farmers, were generally poorer and less educated. However, less educated doesn't mean no education. My grandfather was a farmer in the 19th (and early 20th) century, and no, he didn't have a college degree, but that doesn't mean he never went to school or was illiterate.
Linking to a google query like that is a step below even Wikipedia. If you have a source you consider authoritative, why don't you provide that. I'm not going to read the clickbait garbage in those hits.
"Journal of Inquiry & Action in Education, 5(1), 2012" was a top link for me, apologies for not picking that, but I figured Google has something for every bias.
> Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt
Maybe that's a feature, not a bug. It's worthwhile imagining how life might be impacted in the present if a sizable portion of the homo genus has not died off over the past ~2.5 million years because they couldn't adapt. How would humans today handle the continued co-existence of homo austalopithecus, habilis, erectus, etc over those ~2.5 million years up until the present?
> You'll sing a different tune if you find yourself on the wrong end of that equation.
(We all, eventually, end up on the other side of the equation.)
Given that resources are indeed not infinite, there must be a limit to this planet's capacity to sustain human beings. Most governments don't seem to want to limit childbirth and instead _encourage_ it (more babies == more taxpayers).
Once that limit is exceeded, barring technological advances, what other outcome can there be?
Right, that's historically been true for humans because we are pattern recognition workhorses.
We have some other examples worth considering though, like literal workhorses. Once the engine came around, horses became inefficient and were relegated to shows and races. With AI able to do superhuman pattern recognition, it's only a matter of time before humans also become a luxury, as they're no longer needed for traditional work.
In a lot of data science focused places, like mine, people are more or less researchers. There is no repetitive work, and everyone must show creativity and autonomy. You can't automate that.
Uh, yes you can. Robots are already being used for battlefield simulations coming up with moves humans couldn't think of. They beat humans in Go by finding better moves that's entirely creative. They write news articles, paint, create music, and help in diagnosis of disease. Humans are all going to be replaced soon enough. We'll be serving AI masters or wiped out within 50 years tops.
AI's permutate artwork. They don't feel, they don't assign or derive meaning. They don't feel, they aren't inspired, they aren't moved.
They don't derive joy from the beautiful, despair and disgust from the loathsome, awe at the sublime, and dissolution and insignificance in the face of the all encompassing.
They don't dance with glee at a bright and bouncy tune, they aren't struck to the edge of tears by the melody of wind through a forest of bottles. They know and can reproduce patterns that are labelled for them, but they don't get it, ya dig?
They don't relate or understand the soul of Jazz, the message of Blues/Rock and Roll, the Struggle and perseverance evoked by a good fight song.
They can't appreciate the byproducts of their work, or "make 10 more, but different."
They can't appreciate, display, or develop technique; they cannot perform. When composing, they generate content based off of higher-dimensional correlations between words as encoded through syntax and grammar, but a poem generated by a machine is not but a permutation of words ejaculated forth, with no rhyme, reason, or correlation to the world at the time; even being removed from the whimsy of it's programmer.
Art is a tricky thing. It is what it is because a human found that at that time in their life, in the details of their personal situation was the right time for that work to be born forth into the world, in all it's symbolism, ugliness, beauty, sublimity, and to affect all those who gazed upon it.
Think hard about the significance of that. That man's mortality factors into the fruits of his labor; something a machine, deriveable from a prescription can never truly know or imitate.
It isn't humanistic chauvinism...merely that as the clock is not the first cause of time, so the AI is not the creator of the Art it produces, if what it produces can even be truly called Art.
It may not always remain that way. Right now though, it is.
Art isn't born in the mind of the creator. It's born in the mind of the consumer.
People are moved everyday by music created by machines. That's enough to put artists out of business because the output is the same even if the input is different.
So you see art as an emotional response in a bottle?
I never really accepted that. Otherwise, the response I've gotten to a hypothetical man under a rock perfectly replicating the Mona Lisa without having witnessed or heard of it before would be as great and worthy of celebration of artistic work as the original; many of more artistic inclinations I've spoken to balk at the very suggestion. Man that was a fun day in Philosophy of Art class.
Most of the artistic I've gone back and forth with do not see the end product alone as Art, but also the process, from ideation, to execution, and finally display. The reason behind the creation of that particular work and not another even has a place in the Art-Ness of the work-of-art.
Just because something is moving to someone, somewhere can be said to be necessary, but not quite sufficient to bestow the quality of being Art. It's a rather perplexing problem to discuss. I tend to approach it like linguists do language. Descriptive, not prescriptive. Though I haven't mingled in artistic circles recently to reconduct a census with regard to generative music/art. Most of those I do run into though tend to be non-committal on the subject and just treat it as just what I've described. A pleasant, and surprisingly novel sensation from an unexpected origin.
Given the fact that the economy is at full employment and that there are more job openings than people looking for a job, I'm not too worried at the moment.
> Given the fact that the economy is at full employment
The economy might be at full employment, but people are often underemployed, getting few hours, and shit wages. Most people are employed but many don't make enough to support even just themselves on their earnings let alone a family. Real wages have barely increased since the 1970s while costs have risen. We've had the first generations of Americans who are worse off than their parents. I wouldn't say our current situation was at all encouraging.
I don't get why we use this term. You're either employed or you're not. Just because you got an education in something that is no longer valued by society doesn't mean you're entitled to a job doing whatever you're educated to do.
Society rewards those that provide some good or service that is wanted/needed.
Furthermore, employment by others is not the only option. You can also work for yourself (except when the state forbids it through licensing and permits)
We have a term, "employed", for people who work and earn a living wage.
We have another term, "unemployed", for people who have no work.
We need a third term, "underemployed", to describe people in between those two situations, who have some work (so they're not "unemployed") but nonetheless do not earn a living wage (so counting them as "employed" is disingenuous).
Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't under employed often also refer to when you have part time / casual work but want full time employment? You might not be able to survive of what your earning but your not part of the Unemployment statistics?
Where are you getting this? From the govt statistics that don't include people who have dropped out of the workforce entirely? The same stats that don't differentiate between a salaried career and scraping by in the transient gig economy?
I'm extremely skeptical. Can we afford to just dismiss all these legitimate concerns because, "the govt told me everything is okay"?
Seems like a poor way to rationalize avoiding planning ahead.
The number of open positions says nothing about the nature of the work. I can open a position for a doctor to work for me for $100 a month and while it's an "open position" it will not be and could never be filled and yet it's still a job opening.
In addition some people are working multiple jobs to barely survive so again there is no defined relationship of number of jobs to number of workers or whether that's a good or a bad thing.
I would agree with you if wages had risen enough that workers could work one job and have their needs met but that won't happen any time soon, especially with robots on the horizon. The only thing that makes sense is to plan ahead.
I think that caused by social separation. Today people have hundreds or even thousands of "facebook friends" but not one where they can sleep on the couch when they are down.
Also consumerism. Lots of people have the latest and greatest iPhone and OLED TV but don't have 6 months worth of savings(I think that's the minimum you should have) in the bank.
It's a lot harder to find your next job when you stressing because you are going to be evicted.
> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die
This is exactly what's happening in every large metro area today. Larger amounts of work are being by fewer, highly paid individuals using technology. This drives up rents and fuels the homeless crisis everywhere.
You do know that the rate we're replacing humans with machines far outstrips what we've previously seen, right? As in, this time around it's happening much quicker and is much more widespread compared to the first time around. That people and legislation are already struggling to adapt which will ultimately cause far greater chaos, market disruption and unrest than we've ever seen.
We as technologists know better than anyone how quickly new tech can sweep across the industry. Once the tech/product/process is figured out, scaling it is trivial in comparison. This is the same song and dance but 100x as loud and 100x as fast.
I don't know that actually. Can you please prove it with data?
I studied the industrial revolution quite extensively at school and I follow AI research today, reading individual research papers.
It's not clear that we're going through anything even close to as disruptive as the industrial revolution. In fact I'm sure we're not. Absolute numbers may be higher because the population is so much larger, but as astutely pointed out elsewhere in this thread, civilisation is massively parallel by default so it's proportions that matter.
And when we get to that, we're not seeing massive job displacements caused by automation. If anything we should be asking why not: why is the software industry apparently so unexpectedly bad at reducing employment? This isn't just me waffling by the way. Economists say (caveat emptor) the same thing:
Productivity growth i.e. the rate at which machines replace people, has been falling over the decades. The spike you might expect from massive automation is not only not present, the data shows the opposite - we are getting less bang for our technological buck, it's a long term trend, and economists are worried/puzzled by it. If productivity growth continues trending towards zero, what it means is that our society is getting no automation benefits whatsoever. It means the only way to produce more stuff is to use more people!
We can join economists in speculating as to the reasons, but either the data is flawed, or we're in a time of unprecedented job stability, despite the froth and hype around AI (whose impact is so far extremely limited).
This is automation on a scale that we have not seen before where machines are actually capable of decision making and precision work. This is combined with a massive concentration of wealth at the top. Also there are a whole lot more people now. Potential long term could be colonization of the moon / mars. Plenty of unskilled labor required and opens a new frontier.
It's not at all obvious to me that colonization of another planet, if we're ever in a position to actually undertake it, will involve "plenty of unskilled labor".
Agreed. Pretty much the opposite, actually - shipping, housing, feeding, etc. a bunch of humans is obscenely expensive in the context of space exploration. You're far better off sending a bunch of robots with a couple mechanics to keep them running. Additionally, I'm pretty sure that by the time we're in any kind of position to do actual colonization efforts, automation effects will have long since taken their toll.
Consider that universal high school, labor union-friendly laws, and labor day were government responses to the last industrial revolution. How will our society change for the next one?
> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They found other more advanced work ...
This almost never happens in real world. The next generations do benefit that. But the current generation is fucked.
You wont retrain 40> years old truck drivers into anything that will pay even remotely the same. Most of them will be stuck doing minimal wage jobs somewhere, and be happy that they have them.
(of course there are exceptions)
I have seen that play out in ex communist countries, where whole swaths of jobs became obsolete over few years.
It's been almost 30 years, newer generations have moved on somewhat, but there are still a lot of people that were better off before.
Industrial revolution was great in general, but its effect on people also gave rise to communism (i am not defending it).
