
Difference Engine: Luddite legacy - mark_l_watson
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence
======
danbruc
I don't follow the argumentation that the Luddite Fallacy was wrong and is
becoming true - I would say it was always true but the effect was just
overcompensated by other effects now declining in importance.

Further I think the negative tone is not justified; I think a world without
labor is a desirable world. That's also why I think all statements along the
line »we have to create more jobs (in the sense of more work)« are ridiculous
- why on earth would we desire to have more work to do?

The final state - a world without labor where everything is produced by
machines - poses no direct problems; all goods are free and everybody is free
to do what ever he desires. (There will probably be some indirect problems
when billions of people are on holiday everyday, resource constraints, one
must probably ensure that no one starts to hoard all kinds of goods reducing
the supply for others and surly a thousand things I don't think about but this
is probably all manageable.)

The real challenge is the change from status quo. The first jobs ceasing to
exist or beginning to be unprofitable are naturally the ones comprising of
mostly unskilled work and than expanding towards higher and higher required
skills. This in turn split the society in two groups - one group still working
and one group no longer working or doing unprofitable work. This on its own is
not a problem but it is a major problem in connection with the way our society
currently works.

The economy does not only produce goods to satisfy the demand of the
population but although permits laborers to consume these goods by paying
them. Consequently we have to either find a way to detangle these both
responsibilities of the economy or ensure that all people are able to do a
fair share of the remaining work (this is more jobs in the sense of splitting
work fairly). The later option is probably the one that is harder to implement
because the remaining work will require higher and higher skills and therefore
more and more people will not able to do any of this work successfully.

~~~
schiffern
> _all goods are free_

Making all goods _very inexpensive_ (necessities for pennies/day) solves the
problems of "free".

Of course it's also a very dangerous idea, because it's so similar to the
present system that it invites one to change it. Here's a small exercise:

    
    
      1. Choose a product (potatos, t-shirts, rockets, diamonds, *anything*).
    
      2. Imagine you pay modern prices for it, but made in a totally automated
         factory.
    
      3. Using your knowledge of business, ask yourself: When that money
         eventually reaches a person, who is it? Who ultimately gets your
         consumer dollar? The person who installed the solar panels?
         Mined the ore? Ponied up the capital? Built the building? Ran the
         company?
    
      4. You haven't fully thought out the implications of the AI economy. Automate
         that person's job and repeat.
    

Every iteration of this loop is a business opportunity.

Contrast this with the "free" economy (à la Roddenberry's 'Star Trek'), which
is non-threatening because there's no clear plan of action from here to there.

~~~
danbruc
I am unable to follow your argumentation - if an economy is _fully_ automated,
there is no money - at least not in the way we currently understand it. No
human is working and gets paid so there is no money to spend on goods.

There will still be some limited resources and things will remain having a
value that could be equated with an currency, but this will be different from
our current money. For example it could be the case that we are only able to
mine 10 grams of diamond for everybody. Whoever desires to have more diamonds
is free to exchange them with others not caring about their share of diamonds
probably involving some currency.

I still have the feeling that I am missing your point; maybe you could
elaborate it a bit more.

~~~
ef4
> if an economy is fully automated, there is no money - at least not in the
> way we currently understand it. No human is working and gets paid so there
> is no money to spend on goods.

Not true. Labor is one way to earn money. But not the only way.

People also earn money from capital investments, and spend money on capital
investments. The robotic car factory still pays the robotic smelter who pays
the robotic miner. None of their prices are quite zero, because there are real
capital costs in building and maintaining their own infrastructure.

Why else would anyone build an automated economy in the first place, if not in
pursuit of capital returns? The first person to build a fully automatic widget
factory gets to sell widgets at the prevailing price, but with much lower
costs, giving him fat profit margins. As his competitors also automate, the
prices eventually fall and his margin goes away.

We can expect to see this cycle repeat many, many times. It has already been
happening for a long time. "Fully automated" is just one end of a long
continuum we've already been travelling.

~~~
danbruc
Why would you pay robots? And there are no infrastructure costs because robots
will build and maintain the infrastructure. Capital investment becomes useless
- all goods are free, money has no value, so why would you want to make money?

It may be questionable if we ever reach full automation but in this
hypothetical scenario money as we know it will be worthless.

~~~
schiffern
>Why would you pay robots?

Of course you are correct. But you still pay _the company that owns the
robots._ (Unless you're suggesting that there will be robots with no owner? I
don't have to point out the problems with that, do I?)

The relevant question is, "what expenses does a company that runs a robotic
factory have?"

This was Step 3 of my exercise. I offer it as a tool someone might use to
answer their own questions.

~~~
danbruc
_Unless you're suggesting that there will be robots with no owner? I don't
have to point out the problems with that, do I?_

That's actually what I had in mind - we build some robots doing all the work,
maintaining themselves and what not. They would happily continue building
iPhones even after the last human died. And they are owned - if you want to
call it that - communistically by all humans. From time to time everybody can
vote if he prefers to have more iPhones or more Android phones, vanilla ice
cream or strawberry to actually produce the desired goods and that's it.

You are hinting at some problems with that scenario but I am unable to see
them - would you mind to elaborate on this?

~~~
ef4
> From time to time everybody can vote if he prefers to have more iPhones or
> more Android phones, vanilla ice cream or strawberry to actually produce the
> desired goods and that's it.

This is the crux of the problem: it's not just final consumer goods that need
to be chosen, but every intermediate good up and down the value chain. And
each of those choices is subject to differences of opinion, rapidly changing
inputs, and shifting technologies.

And even at the consumer-goods level, the complexity of the voting would be
astounding. It's not going to be a question of simple two-way elections -- you
really need to measure a gigantic matrix of relative preferences for each
person, and nobody has enough information about relative inputs costs to even
accurately fill out their own matrix.

This is precisely why market pricing is so useful, and why it is unlikely to
ever disappear entirely.

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ChuckMcM
So this is from 2011 and this is the thesis paragraph:

 _"But here is the question: if the pace of technological progress is
accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has
unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business
profits to record levels? Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession
officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only
one percentage point better than the country's joblessness three years ago at
the depths of the recession."_

Unemployment has dropped a couple of points since then, but the answer to the
question was this, "Is it over or isn't it?" And by "it" we mean the
Recession. As far as I can tell the American economy has run in an
unsustainable over utilized state for the last few years. People who had jobs
so afraid of losing them that they do anything to keep them, employers so
burned by the Great Recession they operate understaffed rather than risk
putting precious capital at risk. That is an unsustainable point, workers burn
out and businesses leave money on the table because they aren't at full
production.

What we've seen is that as the job market started opening up there has been a
lot of movement, and relaxation on the part of workers such that business is
required to hire to keep productivity high. Much more along more 'normal'
patterns than we've had over the last 5 years.

The lesson for me was that great spasms in the economy result in a lot of
irrational behavior (from a market perspective not an individual perspective)
which takes a while to work out. The next interesting lesson will be see what
the US government learns from these forced budget cuts. Which, if you recall,
had everyone gnashing their teeth about how it was going to put the economy
back on the skids.

All in all it points out why economics is a great source of questions and a
lousy source of answers :-)

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mark_l_watson
I posted this article because it touches on a subject that my friends and I
were talking about on a hike last week: how does society handle a world where
production is so very efficient that relatively few people need to work to
meet the basic necessities of the world's population.

Some of my hiking friends didn't like my solution: a broad socialist style
safety net to cover only basic needs with (probably) stiff competition for the
fewer jobs, assuming that most people would want as good of a lifestyle as
possible for their families. A good job == money for travel and richer
experiences.

I see such a future world as an exciting place!

~~~
AYBABTME
When I think about those kind of things, I see a future à la Star Trek, where
there is no need for money, where humanity is only driven by it's curiosity
and thirst for knowledge.

~~~
varjag
Except there would be no practical need for human intervention for space
exploration either.. it was automated long before many other industries down
on the Earth.

~~~
AYBABTME
There would be no practical need for human presence on Earth too. If we accept
this idea, we can deduce that the physical location of humans would be
irrelevant.

Consequently, we can assume that space exploration for the sake of enjoyment
would be plausible.

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davidf18
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this in his 1952 novel, "Player Piano"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)> which I read as a child.

GB Shaw: "All professions are conspiracies against the laity."

The examples given, lawyer and radiologist, achieve high income largely
through artificially induced market scarcity by limiting entrants into these
professions.

Abraham Lincoln, one of the nation's greatest lawyers, never went to undergrad
school, never went to law school. Today, in the US, to be a lawyer one has to
attend 7 years of post-high school education (in Europe and Israel it is 3
years) at a cost of about $500,000 if attending private schools.

For doing image recognition on mammograms, one has to attend 4 years of
difficult pre-med, 4 years of difficult med school, 5 years of a hard to get
into (eg artificial scarcity) radiology residency, and perhaps 2 years
mammogram fellowship. Does it really take 13 or 15 years of post-high school
education and training to be able to do image recognition of mammograms?

In addition, there is a great deal of variation in results of radiology
readings which machines will help to make more uniform.

------
willholloway
A basic minimum income might be better understood and accepted if thought of
as a dividend payment on the publicly owned or taxed capital of society.

We need only look at the wealthy to see what life is like when you don't have
to work for a living. The change need not be scary. When the threshold from
scarcity to abundance is crossed by the automated AI economy it will be as if
every human was suddenly independently wealthy.

------
irickt
Direct link: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-
in...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence)

------
skylan_q
_The original Henry Ford, committed to raising productivity and lowering
prices remorselessly, appreciated this profoundly—and insisted on paying his
workers twice the going rate, so they could afford to buy his cars._

When will this myth die? He paid double so that he could retain employees
because turnover was costing him too much. It's mathematically impossible to
pay your employees and expect them to be the the purchasers of your product
while remaining profitable.

~~~
danbruc
It is only impossible if _only_ your employees are your customers - this was
obviously never the case.

~~~
anthuswilliams
What are you talking about? If other people are buying his cars, he will still
make less money paying his employees to buy his cars than he would have
otherwise.

~~~
danbruc
Less profitable is not unprofitable.

~~~
shrughes
So it's less profitable. Do you think you're coming up with a retort here?

~~~
danbruc
What are you up to? Did I state something wrong?

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gte910h
Basic income does seem to work as a solution to this; also gets rid of the
need for minimum wage statutes. Any other schemes?

~~~
Eyght
I'd be very surprised if we didn't start to hear calls for a tax on the
robots.

~~~
tg3
property tax would be reasonable - income tax would be ludicrous.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>income tax would be ludicrous.

But why? Income tax is supposed to support the infrastructure needed to
maintain and protect all of our great stuff. The fact that robots did all the
work doesn't negate the need for roads and wars and bank bailouts. I wonder,
if we still had slavery, would slave owners be required to pay income tax for
the income generated by their slaves?

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cinquemb
It's interesting to see articles like these and the comments to them focusing
entirely on the "software eating the world" and never discuss in as much
detail that people make the machines/software.

Reminds me of the debate between Thiel and Andreessen posted on here recently…

~~~
irickt
In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen [video]

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5641799>

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Vivtek
Hey, I do believe there's an elephant in this room!

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eksith
Is it just me, or does that robot in the graphic look very similar to the ones
in the Björk video "All is Full of Love"?

