
AI 'could leave half of world unemployed' - evo_9
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/13/artificial-intelligence-ai-unemployment-jobs-moshe-vardi
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api
In the short term this is not something to fear, but in the long term it is.
There is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete and non-Turing-
complete automation.

Imagine what the great Chinese outsourcing wave has done to the West's labor
market, but without the normal economics of labor factoring into it. As more
and more has been outsourced to China, Chinese wages have risen. That would
not happen with automation. Instead you'd have the _hyper-deflationary_
economics of high tech, with "wages" effectively dropping geometrically with
volume.

In the end we will face two choices:

(1) Abandon the puritan work ethic and its liberal forms such as the labor
theory of value.

(2) Create a future that looks like "The Hunger Games."

~~~
Lawtonfogle
>Abandon the puritan work ethic and its liberal forms such as the labor theory
of value.

Even if we abandon it in the financial sense, there is it's currently unnamed
cousin that applies to more personal human interactions that might not be left
behind (unless we get androids that are able to meet all human needs,
including those related to socialization and touch).

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JoeAltmaier
We used to dream of a utopian society where robots did all the work. Now we
fear it?

~~~
Terr_
The question is who owns the robots and what power-relationships those robots
enable.

The utopian dream is always a robot which is allied _with_ you, not a robot
which extends the power other people have _over_ you. (Nor, going further, a
robot which is independently a threat.)

So the dream of a robot utopia is actually more of a social one, where robots
_somehow_ obviate the casual power-games of employment and obligation. That
can either be by "eliminating scarcity", or else by serving as morally-
acceptable targets for humans to dominate instead of one-another.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Currently they're industrial, helping make stuff for all of us. Putting us out
of work is a transitional problem; the issue before us is, how do we deal with
the transition?

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CM30
And what happens when no one can afford to buy the stuff produced by companies
mostly staffed with robots? Unless some sort of basic income is instated
before that point, I guess they just go broke and things kind of even out a
little. Robots don't buy things made by robots.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
A pity if its bread and milk? Or medicine? We really have to sort this out
before that happens.

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SixSigma
That's a good thing.

