
Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives - 2noame
https://medium.com/basic-income/deep-learning-is-going-to-teach-us-all-the-lesson-of-our-lives-jobs-are-for-machines-7c6442e37a49
======
IsaacL
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

[...]

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

([http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm))

~~~
williamcotton
_" The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem published by Rudyard Kipling
in 1919, which, editor Andrew Rutherford said, contained "age-old,
unfashionable wisdom" that Kipling saw as having been forgotten by society and
replaced by "habits of wishful thinking."

The "copybook headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims,
extolling virtues such as honesty or fair dealing that were printed at the top
of the pages of 19th-century British students' special notebook pages, called
copybooks. The school-children had to write them by hand repeatedly down the
page.

David Gilmour says that while topics of the work are the "usual subjects", the
commentary "sound better in verse" while Alice Ramos says that they are "far
removed from Horace's elegant succinctness" but do "make the same point with
some force."_ \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Headi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Headings)

------
cs702
This is linkbait-ish, breathless hype. I stopped reading after "we've gone
from linear to parabolic!"

~~~
sowhatquestion
Yeah, it reminded me of Spaceballs. "They've gone to plaid!"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAWL8ejf2nM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAWL8ejf2nM)

------
nepstein
AI => automation => unemployment => basic income

That basic argument makes sense to me but the leap to say that AlphaGo proves
automation is accelerating doesn't.

Go is one of many task-specific AI's. It's not clear that it implies anything
about generalized AI (which most experts agree is still very far off) or the
rate at which task-specific AI's are developed.

~~~
x5n1
Basic income = food stamps. Enjoy being a worthless loser for the rest of your
life.

~~~
AstralStorm
Better a worthless loser than a rampaging radical or starved loser.

~~~
x5n1
It's wishful thinking to think that men can be reduced to this and that an
eventual revolution will not ensue. A new political and social order must be
found. "Men were not meant to live like this," people will eventually agree.

------
AustinG08
I wonder if "Deep Learning" could be applied to something like interstellar
travel to figure out how exactly it could be done.

~~~
therobot24
probably not

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sharemywin
The 2 job classes that's wages have fallen the most also happen to be the ones
most effected by globalization of trade.

~~~
williamcotton
The other two happen to be the ones that are most dependent on intellectual
property protections in public marketplaces.

------
smhx
there's a subtle transition between "deep learning masters very specialized
skills" to "let's generalize this thought to everything possible".

I work in deep learning and I think the article is more fear than food for
thought.

------
williamcotton
_All of this is why it’s those most knowledgeable in the AI field who are now
actively sounding the alarm for basic income. During a panel discussion at the
end of 2015 at Singularity University, prominent data scientist Jeremy Howard
asked “Do you want half of people to starve because they literally can’t add
economic value, or not?” before going on to suggest, ”If the answer is not,
then the smartest way to distribute the wealth is by implementing a universal
basic income.”_

People all over the world are adding an incredible amount of economic value to
the knowledge economy, it's just being captured completely by Google, Apple,
Amazon, Facebook, etc.

 _First, news publishers have lost control over distribution.

Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have
built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and
platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing
this trend, and digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have
built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system,
not against it.

Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social
media companies.

The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple,
Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat
and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms
of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is
monetized.

There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever
has been in the past. Networks favor economies of scale, so our careful
curation of plurality in media markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke,
and the market dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out
such anomalies are failing.

We need regulation to make sure all citizens gain equal access to the networks
of opportunity and services they need. We also need to know that all public
speech and expression will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be
treated equally. This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.

For this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the
responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these
platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the
responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that this
is the outcome of their engineering success._ \-
[http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php](http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php)

Silicon Valley has seemingly abandoned the notion of treating intellectual
property as a capital good. Facebook is a marketing platform, not a
marketplace. The solution is to add actual market value to intellectual
property instead of covering operations costs with advertising.

If I write a song I can sell it on an open marketplace to competing
publishers. It will be treated as a capital good. It can be recorded by
numerous recording artists and packaged and resold in myriad other ways. All
of that is measurable productivity. All of that lets songwriters, publishers,
recording artists and music marketers make real profits and pay their rent.

If I write a song and publish it to a private social media platform like
Facebook it goes nowhere. It's not a capital good, there is no notion of
intellectual property, and I am not financially rewarded for the benefits that
it gives to the other users of Facebook. There's no market value for a
Facebook post. The only measurable value is from the indirect commerce that it
stimulates. Facebook captures all of the profits from selling advertising.
Facebook is not a public platform. It is a private, closed platform that we're
all stuck with it due to network effects.

 _Capital, like energy, is a dormant value. Bringing it to life requires us to
go beyond looking at our assets as they are to actively thinking about them as
they could be. It requires a process for fixing an asset 's economic potential
into a form that can be used to initiate additional production.

[...]

Any asset whose economic and social aspects are not fixed in a formal property
system is extremely hard to move in the market. How can the huge amounts of
assets changing hands in a modern market economy be controlled, if not through
a formal property process? Without such a system, any trade of an asset, say a
piece of real estate, requires an enormous effort just to determine the basics
of the transaction: Does the seller own the real estate and have the right to
transfer it? Can he pledge it? Will the new owner be accepted as such by those
who enforce property rights? What are the effective means to exclude other
claimants? This is why the exchange of most assets outside the West is
restricted to local circles of trading partners._ \-
[http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/03/desoto.htm](http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/03/desoto.htm)

There's a lot of potential economic energy contained in the non-repetitive
cognitive tasks that billions of people are performing on social media every
day, it's just not being treated like capital, rather being captured by the
private intellectual property industries.

Can we please explore some tried-and-true methods of establishing and
maintaining marketplaces of intellectual property before we give up and start
preaching about silly experiments like basic income?

Blindly paying people basic income in order to create intellectual property
that is completely captured by Google is literally the dumbest way to
distribute wealth through society.

 _dumb

verb

2.

literary

make dumb or unheard; silence.

"a splendor that dazed the mind and dumbed the tongue"_

We need to speak and we need to speak through the free and public exchange of
information with measurable value.

------
darawk
It didn't win 5 times in a row without defeat. It won 3 times, lost, and then
won again.

~~~
jimfleming
I don't agree with the premise of the article but the 5-0 results refer to Fan
Hui's match ("Europe’s top Go player").

The article describes the outcome of Lee Sedol's match correctly:

> Lee went on to lose all but one of their match’s five games.

~~~
jontas
It wasn't written very clearly, I had to reread that paragraph a few times
before understanding what you just explained.

