

Rise of the Machines: Downfall of the Economy? - mooreds
http://www.roubinisedge.com/nouriel-unplugged/rise-of-the-machines-downfall-of-the-economy

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bnolsen
Dumb Dumb Dumb. If allowed the economy will shift to compensate, in ways that
people can't predict. More automation means more efficient wealth generation,
food production, etc. This allows more people to do something other than worry
about scrounging around for food to keep themselves alive, or spend more time
doing basic things to keep their lives going. It should allow for more people
pursuing what interests them, especially if allowed and the government doesn't
tell people what should interest them.

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Houshalter
We already can produce plenty of food, robots won't significantly affect that.
But good luck affording it when you don't have any skills a machine doesn't.

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IndianAstronaut
Early in the 20th century we had to institute lots of schooling reforms to
keep up with the job destroying capacity of the tractor. The tractor has
replaced over 70% of the workforce.

We will need to do the same for the early 21st century.

~~~
Houshalter
No we won't. Early "automation" was incredibly limited to just mechanical
work. AI can in principle do anything a human can do.

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dragontamer
This article has issues. XKCD explains it best here:
[http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

Take for example... "Other low-wage and labor intensive jobs in retail, such
as stocking the shelves of supermarkets with food, will soon be replaced by
machines that can do those jobs better and faster than humans could."

Here's a state-of-the-art robot folding some towels.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo)

The amount of image processing and calculation needed to fold towels or stock
shelves is in fact well beyond the reach of current AI / technology.

Yes yes yes, there's that shirt folding machine prototype going around. But
that only gets the job done with a good deal of human assistance. (Placing the
shirt on the machine correctly, assuming shirts are a certain shape, etc.
etc.). A "Shelf-stocking" robot sounds like a horribly complicated AI task,
the likes this world has never seen before. A research team might be able to
accomplish it, but such a thing is clearly beyond the reach of typical tech
within the next 10 years.

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Houshalter
Computer vision is advancing exponentially. This year the imageNet machine
vision challenge winner got 6.7% top-5 classification error. 2013 was 11%,
2012 was 15%. And since there is an upper limit of 0% and each percentage
point is exponentially harder than the last, this is actually significantly
better than it seems. That's about as good as humans are estimated to be at
this task, and humans require much more time to search through reference
images.

The future of robotics is not manually programming robots with every move they
should make, using handcrafted features to do vision,like your towel robot.
It's letting the robots learn how to do tasks by themselves.

~~~
dragontamer
''' The future of robotics is not manually programming robots with every move
they should make, using handcrafted features to do vision,like your towel
robot. It's letting the robots learn how to do tasks by themselves. '''

That's still programming. If you've ever touched "Logic Programming Languages"
like Prologue, you learn that you leave an enormous amount of reasoning to
machines today.

For the more mainstream programmer: it is a brutal amount of AI that is used
to calculate "auto" specifications and template parameters in C++. But in
either case, the AI may be significantly faster or accurate today... but you
still require a programmer that understands how to use the AI and give it
direction.

True, not every move needs to be programmed anymore. But neither are we
programming in Assembly language. We've got huge advances in compiler
technology (which really are stemmed from the automated reasoning groups in
AI). At the end of the day however, the AI's purpose is defined by the
programmer.

~~~
Houshalter
Yes of course the thing will have to be programmed to some degree. The point
is that it's within the realm of possibility to use AI to do computer vision
and robot control, rather than having some programmer trying to figure out
every possible edge case of a messy real world problem.

Instead the programmer designs the reward function and collects data and sets
the hyper parameters, then the AI figures out how to solve the hard parts of
the task itself.

