
Don't replace people, augment them - rmason
https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/dont-replace-people-augment-them-8bea60cb80ac#.ef2f7e4on
======
didibus
We should start asking us what's the purpose of humans, instead of talking
about needs and labor, and jobs, and employment, and productivity, etc. We can
automate everything, and augment a few individual to allow them to provide all
the necessities for the entire planet, but why? What is the society we want to
live in, what do we want to do with our lives? What are we trying to
accomplish? Survival for now has mostly been solved, we're all playing a
social game, we create conflict from boredom, success is a social construct,
glory and fame are false realities. If we don't ask ourselves why? If we don't
think about what we want for ourselved, what we want our world to be like,
then we're simply a deterministic construct, like animals, we simoly do things
we're programmed too, and I that case, we're bound to simply replace us all
eventually. Maybe we're just part of evolution, we're the natural event that
leads to sentient machines.

~~~
aaronharnly
"Survival for now has mostly been solved"

Approximately half of the world's population lives on less than $2.50 a day.
Some 1 billion children live in poverty. One in nine people on earth suffer
chronic undernourishment -- one in four in sub-Saharan Africa. Some 3 million
children die annually from undernutrition. Diarrhea kills over 800,000 people
annually, and malaria kills more than 450,000.

I know what you mean -- developed nations have made incredible progress -- but
we have a long long way to go before we can say this species is sitting
pretty.

~~~
douche
> Some 3 million children die annually from undernutrition. Diarrhea kills
> over 800,000 people annually, and malaria kills more than 450,000.

That sounds like great progress. I could easily imagine that, even in absolute
numbers, not per-capita numbers, that might be the lowest rate of preventable
illness in human history.

------
vonnik
In a sense, replacing or augmenting labor is a false dichotomy. We can’t
actually choose one or the other. ("Capital-Labor substitution" is a thing, in
economics; it's structurally unavoidable.) Most nations will choose both, and
the impact will fall unevenly across industries and demographics. That is,
some people and professions will be replaced, and some will be augmented.

And among those people who are replaced, some will adapt well and others
poorly. Those who adapt well, generally, are those who are willing and able to
learn. I suspect that this group will already be in the habit of learning;
they may even be part of a culture of learning inculcated by their parents,
which will reproduce class privilege from one generation to the next. So those
more adept at learning, the metaskill of acquiring new skills, are best
positioned to weather the coming technologic changes, and thrive under new
conditions.

If we step back as technologists, we have to look at the aggregate effects.
They will be contradictory, and therefore, the narrative of technological
change must reflect those contradictions. People will be replaced and
augmented. Society will be harmed and helped.

And as members of that society who are pushing change, we need to think hard
about how to help our fellows on the receiving end cope with their new
reality. We need a gospel of learning, evangelists to preach it, and a church
to support the practice.

~~~
eyelidlessness
I was with you until your last paragraph.

Learning is great, but we don't actually need more people to do it. Need is a
really important term, and we shouldn't use it inappropriately.

What we actually need is to decide whether the people left behind by advances
in technology deserve to not be left behind. We can't continue to live in a
world where people are increasingly finding themselves with zero options.
Either they must become productive with no exceptions (and eliminated if not
productive!), or we must support them.

I think the choice is clear. We are not just advancing technology, we're
creating innumerable surpluses. The only deficit created by those advances is
a construct of profit.

------
aaron695
Augmenting people is the same as replacing them.

The person now has a greater output which means you need less of them.

Then you get back to the same old argument

In the past we have dealt with this by increasing consumption.

But we are hitting limits on increasing consumption at the same rate we are
losing jobs. The world can't handle it and not everyone can create art.

~~~
FlorianOver
>Augmenting people is the same as replacing them. >The person now has a
greater output which means you need less of them.

Attention, i think this is a fallacy in multiple aspects. Maybe they don't
produce more, just higher quality? On the other hand you have jobs where more
is never enough, e.g. Scientists.

~~~
sandworm101
Higher quality is the same as higher production. That higher quality reduces
the need for all sorts of people in QA roles.

Also, not all scientists are blue-sky researchers. Many do lab work, diagnose
disease or provide services to patients. Others perform field tests or public
outreach. Or they teach. Augmenting these people does replace people as fewer
scientists are needed to perform a service once performed by many.

~~~
justinclift
While true in some regards, it's not the whole story.

The author of the article gives the example of a type of eye surgery _only
possible_ through augmentation of the surgeon.

Without augmentation, the surgery isn't possible.

It illustrates that for at least some things "higher quality" isn't the same
as "higher production".

Unless instead of calling this "higher quality" it's better termed something
else. "Previously unavailable products/results/quality?"

------
oconnore
> This is the true opportunity of technology: it extends human capability.
> There is way too much handwringing about the possibility of technology
> eliminating human jobs, and way too little imagining new jobs that could
> only be done with the help of technology.

This is true.

It's also true that we're about to be at a point where extending the
capability of a couple of central operators at a trucking company is going to
introduce significant volatility (being unemployed in an economy that no
longer values your current skills) to thousands of people's lives.

Whether or not that is a long term issue or a short term instability is
irrelevant (though other than some historical hand waving -- it didn't happen
last time! -- there's little evidence that it will be particularly short
term), we still need policy to support those people.

------
emblem21
The entrenched elite can always legislate protectionist policy and scale human
effort horizontally through socialist interventions to make humans cheaper
than state-of-the-art AI. This is especially true in the long interim between
now and holy grail breakthroughs in object recognition.

Charlatans and predators can always rally the surplus humans into being
political forces to siphon off a percentage of productivity gain made by "good
enough" AI.

As an autonomous labor theorist, I'm kept up at night often about what to do
with the surplus humans. On one hand, hard AI problems can be augmented with
remote assistance and intervention. (A cleaner bot discovers spray paint on a
wall.. is it graffiti, an advertisement, or part of a mural? Better summon a
human eye to make sure.)

On the other hand, "good enough" AI will allow total war scenarios to arise
from the ashes as manufacturing millions of murder drones 1.) helps create
employment for a nation and 2.) allows the extermination of the surplus for
cheap. A human death squad takes about 16-18 years of investment to create. A
"good enough" autonomous drone death squad takes about a week.

The most immediate gains of autonomous labor will allow expansion into domains
that are currently too expensive to get a foothold in or scale into. These
opportunities are where many of the remote assistance jobs will be created.
(Deep mining, space construction, etc)

All eyes are on navigating the political climate until those price points are
reached, which is why the cry for universal basic income is so tantalizing.
Helicopter money on the plebs so they won't revolt and destabilize the global
order that makes advanced robotic development possible. If they fail, then the
attractiveness of cheap death squads to resolve the human surplus question
will most certainly win.

------
freshhawk
"We'd more than double average human lifespan"

So ignorance, just playing fast and loose, full understanding but actually
caring about this BS metric? None of those inspire much confidence in someone
making predictions about a complex issue.

------
CM30
Wouldn't another solution be to make sure human built products are seen as
luxury goods compared to ones built by machines? You wouldn't even need to
'augment' anyone if you could sell 'human made' products in the same way as
'organic' produce or 'free range' eggs or those local goods that get certified
as built in one specific part of the world.

I'm sure there would be a certain audience that would pay a premium for goods
not made through automation if the label said it'd help the workers stay
employed.

~~~
nerthus
There already is such a market and the audience is paying premium. Yes,
handcrafted products are a luxury good and yes it is justified by the
creativity which went into the crafting. Am I missing your point? First thing
coming to my mind:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_clock)

~~~
CM30
No, just saying that this could possibly avoid some of the issues with
automation. Might see more handcrafted websites and apps and other stuff as
well as traditional cuckoo clocks and what not.

------
visarga
Interesting. The author is proposing we team humans with machines. It will
certainly happen, but it doesn't solve the deeper problem of technological
unemployment when one person with one robot can do the work of 20.

I think a solution for the problem is for groups of people to associate and
create non-profit "caregiving corporations" which will have the purpose to
provide for their members. Such a corporation could buy land and cultivate for
food, have repair shops for cars and other equipment, a hospital, a school,
could invest and buy properties around the world for tourism (for members),
and many other services.

As robots begin to replace humans, caregiving corporations should invest in
robotics to capitalize on this technology in the name of the people. That's
how people could have easier access to the benefits of the new technologies.

Otherwise, there will be big multinational corporations with big automated
factories and people will be at the mercy of the government, having nothing to
offer to employers. At least in the past everyone had his work to offer in
exchange for a living wage. Not any more. So regular people need to own
capital instead.

------
HappyFunGuy
Remind me how the automobile augmented the horse?

~~~
furyofantares
Horses don't strive to be employed and humans don't worry about the horse
employment rate, either. I don't understand why the comparison to horse-
unemployment is so widespread, a horse is an outdated technology in the
current context, not an unemployed worker.

~~~
HappyFunGuy
Because it lends itself to humor and compassion more easily than the casette
tape / CD one.

------
wallforbidmen
The future of IA is a surplus of people with no job, a wall that condemn those
to starvation, more to come, as in the brexit, other will be thrown out of
fronteers. In the end only a little group of people will remain, the rest will
be in the other side, the wall describe your future. A wall for AI and elites
against humans. </end panic>

Edited added: the winner takes it all will happen in all fields, only one
social network, one big bank, only one country, only one language will be
allowed. Slow runner will be taken out the the race, don't complain, the new
AI has shown our world is a one dimension manifold, a total order will be
established, noise will be eliminated, power and glory at the top, the day in
which the market get all the wealth and the humans are slaves, the triumph of
technology and the dismiss of humanity, who care about the future? noone can
look back or you would be petrified.

------
SatvikBeri
One example related to software is augmenting decision-making before trying to
replace it. PayPal's first major fraud detection algorithm worked by
automatically flagging/delaying a small number of cases and having humans
review them. I've tried to do something similar in my jobs when working on
cases that are trivial for humans to judge but very difficult to completely
specify automatically. Of course you can generally improve these systems with
machine learning over time, so that a human reviews 1 in 10,000 cases instead
of 1 in 100, but having a dual human-computer system is generally way more
efficient at the beginning.

------
philip142au
Really, why not replace them? Its inevitable they will be replaced, the
company which does replace humans at a low cost will beat the one with humans
in it.

------
molly0
All feelings aside. Get augmented our become irrelevant in the future, what
other options are there?

