
Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots - antjanus
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stephen-hawking-capitalism-robots_5616c20ce4b0dbb8000d9f15
======
Moshe_Silnorin
You should note, this is an extremely misleading article. He is in fact
worried about AI.

Hawkings wrote this in the same thread:

You’re right: media often misrepresent what is actually said. The real risk
with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely
good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours,
we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out
of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and
there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s
not place humanity in the position of those ants. Please encourage your
students to think not only about how to create AI, but also about how to
ensure its beneficial use.

This was what her wrote when asked about technological unemployment:

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things
are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the
machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if
the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far,
the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-
increasing inequality.

~~~
oberstein
Thanks for bringing out his AI comment, it seems much more aligned with the
main superintelligence research community now than when I read his thoughts
last. Updated.

------
damosneeze
It would be nice if the elephant in the room were addressed: We are Not in a
capitalist society. We are in a corporatist society.

It took a joint collaboration between corporations and government to blow up
the economy with the 2008 financial crisis. And then the government bailed out
the financial elites. In a capitalist society, those who failed would go
under. In fact, we probably wouldn't have reached that crisis point, because
the Fed would not exist (and would not be manipulating interest rates), there
would be no revolving door between corporations and government (Former Goldman
Sachs CEO becomes Treasury Secretary, promptly gives trillions of dollars to
Wall St; Former senior executive for Monsanto becomes head of FDA).

Granted, pure capitalism is not exactly possible given the flawed existence of
humans and our fragile societies. But let's at least call our current system
what it is: corporatism. Maybe even with a dash of nepotism, militarism and
fascism.

~~~
minority-one
You're the only voice of reason on this thread.

What we should be really scared of is a population whose majority clamors for
democracy yet prefers to trust government over holding representatives
accountable.

The problem is the people have been rendered powerless through mis-education
to the point they've forgotten their non-interventionist history. Keeping guns
is necessary but not sufficient for the government to fear its people.

People have also been convinced the only way to get educated is to go into
debt, since independent thought is ridiculed on mainstream entertainment
venues. That gives governments an opportunity to control what people learn.

It goes on and on but it all starts with what you rightfully noted, that this
is no Capitalism, but Corporatism. I wouldn't expect a university professor
(even an economist) to understand this finer point as I know first-hand those
people either have approved opinions or they don't have a job in academia.

For those who only dabble in economics (and here I include up to Ph.Ds in
Economics) here's a hint: if your economy only has one money, and its price is
centrally controlled, as interest rates are by the Fed in the U.S., what you
have is not Capitalism, because no saving of capital is taking place.

~~~
damosneeze
Great points.

On the topic of mainstream education, my brother is "unschooling" his
children. They went to public school for one year, then he saw what was
happening not only with the level of standardized education, but also the
drills to "prepare" for school shootings. Schools prepare not by hiring
security guards, but by having realistic simulations of a shooter, and having
the children cower under their desks. Welcome to the new normal: Dept of
Education's standards for dealing with ~~nuclear~~ handgun proliferation.

i visited my brother last year and it was interesting to see his kids interact
socially. this is typically one of the big arguments that comes up for
homeschooled children: How will your children grow socially? How will they
learn to interact? After watching them at their golf practice, surrounded by
tons of other kids, it was clear: my brother's kids were leaders, and the
other kids were mostly followers.

his kids learn what they want, guided by their father's loose curriculum. They
started learning algebra at 7, with the assistance of some very clever iPad
apps. They read. They play games. And most of all, they enjoy life. They're
not just waiting for recess. Or high school. Or college. Or their first job.

Those kids will be just fine.

------
mpweiher
Right. The usual counter is the following: "This was predicted every time we
had technological upheavals, and it never happened. Therefore it won't happen
this time either."

Although there is some truth to this, the past tends to be only a limited
predictor for the future ("It's tough to make predictions, especially about
the future." \-- Yogi Berra ), and of course logically this stance cannot be
supported.

Also, there is some grounds to believe that this time actually is different:
whereas production and consumption used to expand to soak up new found
productivity, we're reaching both resource limits in terms of what can be
produced, and at least in the west saturation in terms of consumption. We
already consume way more than we really want/need, and more and more people
are realizing that their stuff is not liberating them, but rather taking them
hostage.

Furthermore, there also is evidence that this is already happening. Blue
collar wages are stagnating or in decline, same though to a lesser extent for
the middle class. Debt has soared as people try to maintain their standard of
living.

Robots have the capacity to help us bring about the 15 hour work week Keynes
predicted, or maybe even the 4 hour work week, but we probably will have to
restructure our wealth distribution mechanisms somewhat to achieve it.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Right. The usual counter is the following: "This was predicted every time we
> had technological upheavals, and it never happened. Therefore it won't
> happen this time either."

Which is, of course, false in its premise -- it happened with the
technological developments which were happening alongside the development of
the economic system which would become dominant in the developed world of the
time, which would later be named "capitalism" by its critics, and was
_mitigated_ to a certain degree (but not, by any stretch of the imagination,
_solved_ ) when capitalism was largely replaced in the developed world with
modern "mixed economies" which limit the capitalist property system through
the adoption of redistributive and socialized regulatory mechanisms while
retaining the capitalist arrangement in outline (in the developed world, this
approach has prevailed, for now, over both retaining -- or reverting to --
capitalism without compromising its structure and abandoning its property
structure outright.)

~~~
hammock
"It happened"? What is "it"? (credit to parent for being unhelpfully ambiguous
as well)

~~~
chc
I believe "it" refers to the sort of failure case described in the OP.

------
Tloewald
He's right of course. It's essentially the "billionaires in gated communities
guarded by robot drones" argument.

[http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-robot-
lords-a...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-robot-lords-and-
end-of-people-power.html)

It's amazing how many things look like a tragedy of the commons (rather than a
wonderful efficient market) when you hit boundary conditions.

------
heimatau
Well, his argument is very logical and grounded in evidence. Hypothetically,
robots could cause a problem but capitalism is currently tearing the fabric of
society apart due to wealth inequality.

When I first saw this article, I said this to myself, "But robots...but
matrix...but terminator" a few hours later, I realized the grounded logic he
is conveying.

Currently, robots/ai are like the gun issues of today. Guns don't kill people.
People do and legislating gun control is sticky (so is regulating ai).

~~~
BerislavLopac
I've always found this logic quite flawed: we have capitalism, and we have
wealth inequality, therefore capitalism causes wealth inequality.

As far as I am aware, every single economical system in history has produced
wealth inequality, so replacing it with something else wouldn't really change
much. It's been tried numerous times, and none of those experiments managed to
solve the issue of wealth inequality in a sustainable way.

Capitalism is far from being an ideal system, but it works, and replacing it
can cause only more pain for everyone. I can see the appeal of blaming it for
everything; it's a handy scapegoat, "the devil we know" \-- but I haven't seen
many realistic proposals what should replace it.

~~~
azth
> As far as I am aware, every single economical system in history has produced
> wealth inequality

Check out the Islamic perspective on economics and finance. It sets certain
restrictions, while keeping many things open to the requirements of the
society: no interest, shared risk, the population is responsible for the poor,
etc. while still allowing the opportunities to acquire wealth.

It was during the days of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz[0] that it was reported that
there were no more poor people left to take Zakat[1], because everyone did
their duties.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_II)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat)

~~~
zo1
>" _shared risk, the population is responsible for the poor_ "

I pay taxes for those two already. Must I still blame capitalism?

Not trying to be obtuse, but some of the thing mentioned are already
supposedly part of our society. Represented by proxy through our government,
yet we don't hold it accountable. Capitalism is not our problem.

~~~
azth
Look at what the big corporations around us are doing. Capitalism is about
maximizing profit, with seemingly no regard for ethics or morals. Things like
opening slave shops in China for cheap manufacturing, with horrible working
conditions? That would be banned Islamically, because humans have the right to
work in safe places, and in decent conditions.

HFT and whatever Wall street is up to? Same thing. It's all exploitative and
benefits only a few, while harming most.

Edit: sharing risk on certain transactions, and paying taxes are two different
things.

Edit: another example: what about mind numbing advertisements? What about ads
for prescription only medication? Purely a product of capitalism. Sexist car
advertisements with naked women in them? Yep.

Edit: isn't tax evasion by inversion
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_inversion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_inversion))
also a product of capitalism?

~~~
BerislavLopac
"with seemingly no regard for ethics or morals"

Are you saying that economic systems have morality? And that all capitalist
lack ethics and morals? There are many different forms of the two -- who is to
decide which form is acceptable?

Again, the reason for everything happening in the society is not any single
political and economical system -- like soylent green, it's the people.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Are you saying that economic systems have morality?

Economic systems are about how scarce resources are allocated. The choice of
the mechanism for doing this is _always_ , inherently, based on a value system
(possibly an extremely simple one consisting of a single value proposition).

In that sense, _any_ economic systems involves a moral choice -- to say that a
particular economic systems has "no regard for ethics or morals" really
usually means that that system is perceived to have no regard for the _the
value propositions that the speaker believes to define correct morality_.

~~~
BerislavLopac
Well, no economic system exists in its own right; they're all just human
interpretations of a large number of human decisions and actions. So it's not
an economic system that involves a moral choice; it's moral choices that, on
scale, get interpreted as economic systems.

That being said, I absolutely agree with your final statement.

------
enahs-sf
I fundamentally don't understand how capitalism will work in a society where
scarcity is essentially nil. It doesn't make sense. Maybe someone could
explain it to me?

~~~
davidw
As the economists say, 'human wants are unlimited'. If one thing isn't scarce,
something else will be.

~~~
Amorymeltzer
I like the way Zach Weiner over at SMBC put this:

>A human is only happy if she has two, and everybody else has one. And even
then, she starts imagining three.

([http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3531](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3531))

------
thoman23
I'm going to dumb it down a bit, and say that I like to think of two movies
with different visions of a technologically advanced future: WALL-E and
Elysium (aka that Matt Damon movie where all the rich people live on the space
station). In WALL-E, nobody works and everybody (well, everybody that survived
the initial apocalypse anyway) lives the literal fat life while robots serve
them all equally. In Elysium, the abundance of health and life that comes from
technological advances are hoarded away for exclusive use by the wealthy.

Of the 2 visions, I always found the Elysium model to be much more
likely...actually I would argue inevitable. Given human nature, I just can't
foresee a world where everyone lounges around in equally-served harmony.
No...there will always be an elite, and the elite will find a way to procure
and consume a vastly disproportionate amount of resources. Even in the movie
Elysium, after the proletariat storm the space castle at the end, any
"victory" will be short-lived and will just produce a new elite.

So I guess I'm suggesting that the proclaimed political/economic system is
irrelevant. The reality ends up looking pretty much the same in either case.
And that reality will probably not be pretty once human labor is fully
commoditized through technology.

~~~
zo1
The problem with Elysium is that it just does not sound plausible once you get
into the meat of it. Why would the rich "hoard" their technological advances
for exclusive use?

For that matter, what _is_ wealth in such a context anyways? What are they
wealthy of? Magical mythical currency that they exchange with other rich
people? No, they have to give it to someone to do something. Even if it means
giving it to the soldiers that have to police the ever-growing population
below.

Really, the whole story just relies on an unproven notion that "wealthy people
are evil", as that is the only motive that can hold up. Why couldn't the poor
simply pool their resources together (government?) and buy one of these things
from the rich people.

I'm really bothered that the narrative in the media and movies is constantly
presented as "the poor rise up against the evil rich".

~~~
DanBC
> The problem with Elysium is that it just does not sound plausible once you
> get into the meat of it. Why would the rich "hoard" their technological
> advances for exclusive use?

Right now today this minute there are poor children in India living near
garbage dumps picking through other people's litter.

[http://wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-
groups/waste-...](http://wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-groups/waste-
pickers)

[http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-
projects/drivers_urb_change/urb_env...](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-
projects/drivers_urb_change/urb_environment/pdf_hazards_pollution/IIED_hunt_indiachildren.pdf)

Have a look at the image tab here:
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=child+waste+pickers](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=child+waste+pickers)

Your second paragraph is just saying "trickle down works" when we know it
doesn't.

~~~
zo1
" _our second paragraph is just saying "trickle down works" when we know it
doesn't._"

I was simply pointing out the fact that this story portrays the rich in some
sort of bubble, where they don't interact economically with the rest.

Any who, "trickle down economics", most popular straw-man ever (I theorize). I
don't subscribe to it, nor was I recommending it. Let's coin a new phrase:
"free-trickle" and let everyone trickle to everyone else. In the economic
sense.

>" _Right now today this minute there are poor children in India living near
garbage dumps picking through other people 's litter._"

Are you saying this is due to the rich hoarding their technological advances
for exclusive use? Poverty in the third world is a hugely complicated problem.
Not to mention the amount of money people, rich people, and government have
been throwing at it because it's universally recognized as a "Bad Thing".

I'm not going to stand by idly while a small group of people get blamed for
something we have all collectively tasked, and funded the government to do.
Let's assign blame where it's really due.

------
ddingus
He's right, but I am hungry for alternatives.

And what does a transition look like?

When I see this kind of thing, I think "of course!", but then I don't know
what to advocate for, and what that might look like and how people will manage
through the change.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _And what does a transition look like?_

That's the crux of the matter, isn't it?

~~~
BerislavLopac
No, this is: "but then I don't know what to advocate for"

Everybody "knows" that things should be changed, but nobody knows how and to
what.

~~~
ddingus
Indeed. I see positive, fact based and data driven policy advocacy as most
productive.

Fear, worry, shame based advocacy does more harm than good. Generally, of
course. Sometimes we need those things, but not as norms in the political
dialog.

When we are FOR things, it seems easier to work together on them to expected
outcomes. Being AGAINST things is much easier, but so often leaves a hole we
hope will be filled by market forces and that outcome will be better, or
worthy.

Sometimes it is. I believe in markets, but they do come with inherent
conflicts of interest that can be difficult to manage.

On this issue, it seems necessary to have a plan and a just and reasonable
outcome goal.

------
rsync
Are they different ? Is a construct that is built up and acquires a direction
and momentum that grows beyond human reins and sense any different than a
robot ?

They're both machines, which makes them distinct from humans and human
decisions and human reasoning. We should neither be on guard against "robots"
or capitalism[1] - rather, we should be on guard against machines in all their
forms as they tend to affect humans without the safeguard of human reasoning.

I paraphrase Herbert:

Thou shalt not suffer a machine to rule over you.

[1] ... or democracy or catholicism ...

------
mixedmath
I was the one who wrote that question to Stephen Hawking. Now that it's been
brought up here, perhaps it would be nice to ask the question here.

How does HN feel about technological unemployment?

~~~
calibraxis
The fact that people fear technological unemployment — freedom — is a sign we
live under an idiotic system.

~~~
rskar
Freedom, as in freedom from work? The supposed upside of that freedom is based
on the assumption that one is still somehow entitled to some of that good
stuff that AI/robots may bring. But that's exactly the issue. Right now we
understand "capitalism" (stakeholders entitled to dividends) and "barter"
(parties entitled to swap) as the sort of entitlements that underpin all
others, and both of these leverage property rights. A sovereignty/government
would then tap into these plus holdings of property itself by levying
tributes/taxes, from which it may then redistribute portions as some other
forms of entitlement.

Or not; it's still an open debate on whether and how sovereignty/government
might counterbalance via entitlements (such as basic income schemes, etc.) the
social changes that technological unemployment could bring.

In the meantime, the facts are that most people must strike bargains in order
to obtain most (or possibly all) of the material needs of their lifestyles
(and possibly also provide for dependents), and that the most usual bargaining
to be struck involves their offer of labor; hence their reasons for all the
dreading about technological unemployment. If most could clearly find their
way to situations where employment wasn't a requirement towards getting their
material needs met, then such fears would abate.

------
eevilspock
* crickets * (after 40 min on the front page, but it's there!)

How does HN, a hotbed of libertarian free-market worship that also reveres
smarts and science, respond to this?

~~~
solson
My response to Hawking would be a question: Who or what is smart enough to
decide how much wealth each person should have and design a efficient system
to distribute it and what evidence do you have that the outcome would be
better than a free market?

~~~
michaelchisari
You're arguing against a command economy, but there are multitudes of options
when it comes to creating a more equitable society than micromanaging wealth.

------
RRRA
I like how it takes a well known figure to state the obvious and get people to
actually talk about the basic flaws of a system...

------
kazinator
> _As it is, the chasm between the super rich and the rest is growing._

"The rest", as a complement to "super rich" in the above, clearly means "not
super rich". This necessarily includes various categories such as "merely
rich, but short of super", as well as "well-off", "struggling", and "flat
broke".

The poverty line is an abstraction that demarcates zones in a political field.
What it means to be "poor" is a moving target. Someone from the 1600's would
laugh at what constitutes a "poor" person today. How can someone be poor and
have all that stuff (automobile, iPad, high speed Internet, 50" TV, ...), and
weigh 300 pounds, too? And still alive at 45 years old, and smiling---with no
missing teeth when doing so. What's more, working only 5 days a week for some
7 hours a day.

------
dynomight
There must be a law, or observation, concerning a balance of effort expended
between 'labor replaced by tech' & 'hassle created by the labor saving tech'.

------
aggieben
It would help if the writers who want to complain about inequality knew what
_bourgeoisie_ means.

