
Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs - ssclafani
http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/06/13/this-is-probably-a-good-time-to-say-that-i-dont-believe-robots-will-eat-all-the-jobs/
======
nabla9
I find several problems with this argument.

First, it is oversimplification. Robots don't eat jobs as in "there is nothing
more to do for humans." The argument is that automation will decrease the wage
share (labour share) and increase the share of capital (wage share has been in
decline in OECD countries since early 70's.)

Secondly, history disagrees. Luddites had it right first. When
industrialization started, automation reduced the living standards of workers
for several decades. What turned things around was political struggle and
unions. There was violence and people were shot at factory gates. Automation
itself is not going to create utopia. There has to be political change in how
we share profits.

Automation and Robots create new economic situation where the value and ratio
between human capital and capital changes.

Krugman has written few easy to digest articles that explain why Anderseens
first and second point are very problematic.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-
robo...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/)

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-
phy...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-physical-
capital/)

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-
and-w...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-wages-
the-analytics-wonkish/)

~~~
opendais
Yep, it is going to be pretty much Industrial Revolution 3.0.

The people that are too old to learn new skills are going to need to end up on
social security [and capital will need to be taxed for it]. For everyone else,
there will need to be a permanent safety net [basic income, continuation of
existing welfare programs on a larger scale, or something like that] and
heavily subsidized post secondary education for any skillset that is desirable
in that new economy [which will have to come out of capital's share as well].

Otherwise, we'll just end up with more crime and bloodshed.

~~~
mahdib
The system in place is intended to maximize profits for a ruling class. It was
put in place when the feudal and the slave system was deemed inefficient. The
vassalage and chains were replaced by laws and religious dogma. “Thou shall
not steal”, “Its against the law to steal”. When we see rising in criminality
its because some people are fleeing the system. Crimes are a symptom of lack
of control of the actual economic system.

------
jal278
> Your job, and every job, goes to a machine. [...] This sort of thinking is
> textbook Luddism

The quick condemnation as "Luddism" is counter-productive because it allows
side-stepping critical thinking about how new technologies may impact our life
-- whether it is ultimately for the good or the bad.

The cry of _luddism_ should be made cautiously, because it so often is
accompanied by rose-color technological optimism.

Technology surely does hold the potential to make our lives better, and there
are many ways in which it has, but when we talk about truly radical
technologies that can utterly and irrevocably change the world and the way we
view ourselves in relation to it (e.g. powerful AI), it is worthwhile to think
long and hard before that game-changer arrives.

For example, I do agree that I'd like most jobs to be automated eventually,
with the outcome of:

> The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences,
> creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.

Yet, I highly doubt that the default outcome of:

> Let markets work ( this means voluntary contracts and free trade) so that
> capital and labor can rapidly reallocate to create new fields and jobs.

Is going to be this sort of automation utopia where we're free from labor.
More likely there will be a long and painful battle about implementing basic
income or some other powerful social safety net; it will likely only be after
increased poverty and misery that the safety net will be begrudgingly granted
if the particular brand of captialism we currently embrace continues.

A more pessimistic outcome is that powerful AI arrives before we've really
thought through the moral and ethical issues, and it possibly destroys us, or
is developed and exploited by military interests to who knows what outcome.

~~~
hershel
> The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences,
> creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.

Some of those , like arts and philosophy and exploration and adventure would
not generate an income, and would be done for free/fun.

Some others like science[1] and large parts of creativity[2] might be highly
automated, requiring only a few experts.

Fields that aren't highly repetitive(like many types of programming) and
things that require a human touch(which computers also seem to attack[3])
might be more resistant to automation.

[1][http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148614-automating-
scien...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148614-automating-scientific-
discovery/fulltext)

[2][http://www.computerandvideogames.com/453386/no-mans-sky-
proc...](http://www.computerandvideogames.com/453386/no-mans-sky-procedural-
creation-scares-me-creator-says/)

[3][http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/a-video-
ga...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/a-video-game-
designed-to-treat-depression-worked-better-than-counseling/256324/)

~~~
stonemetal
>Some of those , like arts and philosophy and exploration and adventure would
not generate an income, and would be done for free/fun.

Why would they not generate income? Currently all of those activities are done
both for fun and for profit.

~~~
hershel
It's really hard to make money on those fields.Very very few do, and i don't
expect it to become any better.

~~~
UK-AL
In the crazy utopian world described, there would probably be a lot of
accumulated capital struggling to get used productively.

My idea would be in the struggle to accumulate/protect capital, in a world
where human materialistic needs are perfectly met. The money will flow into
highly risky creative projects. Where the vast vast majority of projects are
expected to fail, funded by highly diversified funds.

Virtually everyone would be expected to obtain/raise money working for these
funds on creative projects. It would be considered the 'norm'.

Kickstarter for example could be beginning of this

~~~
hershel
First , the problem is that this won't happen in an utopian world, this will
happen in our materialistic world.

We're quite far from that utopian world.That will take long political
struggle. My guess is that when we're there , machines will probably surpass
humans even in the arts.

Even if not,as far as i know ,the "youtube economy" i.e. people who earn full
time salary on you tube is quite small. So i'm a bit pessimistic about it
filling the economy.

~~~
UK-AL
"Even if not,as far as i know ,the "youtube economy" i.e. people who earn full
time salary on you tube is quite small. So i'm a bit pessimistic about it
filling the economy."

The point is that money making projects will be so rare, that people would
have no choice but to put money into projects that have the remotest chance
making money. Funds will fund millions/billions of projects on the basis of
finding one superstar project. They would diversified on a massive scale. This
would be better than letting money flounder.

That or a kickstarter model where people simply give money to projects that
interests them.

~~~
hershel
Why will money making projects will be so rare ? people have a certain amount
of attention=money and money to give to entertainment. That probably won't
drastically change.

And from that pile of money, the industry has quite an efficient ways to find
superstar projects. On the other hand, on the surface your way doesn't seem
efficient or profitable , and it even goes against improvements we made in
that process like using big data.

And with regards to kickstarter, i haven't yet though about how it and the
future.

~~~
UK-AL
Money making entertainment projects are rare now. Imagine how many bands there
are, only a tiny fraction will make it big.

Except that work will be the only work left. So money will have to flow to it.

~~~
hershel
Money could flow to robots' owners. You can always buy better food and stuff.

~~~
UK-AL
Where would the robot owners put all that money?

------
rayiner
> The counterargument to a finite supply of work comes from economist Milton
> Friedman — Human wants and needs are infinite, which means there is always
> more to do.

I think one aspect of this that's often ignored is that while human needs
might be finite, natural resources are not. I think a lot of the economic
malaise felt in the west as of late has to do with simple resource
constraints: our ability to simply grow the economy in order to compensate for
jobs lost to automation and globalization is limited by the simple fact that
the price of crude oil has looked like this over the past 30 years:
[http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-
char...](http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart).

~~~
gress
Also, why do we give credence to this statement from Friedman? Are human needs
really infinite? From what evidence is this conclusion drawn?

~~~
opendais
Human _needs_ are finite. A person only truly _needs_ so much food, so much
housing, so much medical care, so much socialization, so much entertainment.

Human _wants_ are likely infinite for many people.

~~~
dragonwriter
In economics, the term "needs" generally means very close to want "wants"
means in general conversation, and probably not at all what you mean by
"needs". (Its not as odd as it sounds, since "needs" actually is meaningless
without reference to a purpose, and in economics the relevant purpose is
approximately "to acheive a state in which no greater satisfaction is
possible" \-- often, in general conversation, the purpose for which "needs"
are identified is unspecified and not all clear, making the meaning of any
claim about needs highly ambiguous.)

------
tluyben2
I think, just like always on HN, that people who write these kind of posts and
respond to them (agreeing) are not often in contact with 'the common man'.
Like the Turing test 'news'; a lot of of people I know would be mistaken for a
computer and if I would make a computer which acts exactly like they do,
people here would call it a failure and not intelligent. I am convinced the
singularity will come and we are all replaceable in the end, however I think
before this there will come a (possibly long) time when machines will replace
80%(+) of the working population. There will be no jobs to replace those jobs
as the humans doing them simply cannot do things which are vastly different.
In the past, for instance with horse carriage to cars, you could see that
operation of a car is related to that of a carriage. There is no such move to
be made with people who put glue on four corners of the iPhone glass plate (in
exactly the same place every time or get fired) and who are replaced by a more
accurate and faster robots. Moves like this can be made with general
practitioners (most local MDs are already replaced by machines; the only thing
they do is search for your issues and prescribe what comes out or refer you to
someone who might know) or the run of the mill lawyer or accountant who, in
essence, bring nothing to the table already but the fact they have a piece of
paper. A lot of people here can do a better job than these (especially MDs and
accountants) with Google and their common sense and education. (Edit: I mean
by this; these jobs need to be and will be disrupted but only the law/system
is preventing that at the moment. There was talk of Watson somewhere with one
nurse replacing (many) GPs at a time, but I bet that didn't happen yet because
GPs like the status quo.)

I'm not bleak about the future as I do also think we'll need (and force) a
more EU distribution of the wealth in the end, but there will be a quite hard
period when that's not in place and 1 billion Chinese are out of a job...

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
Yeah, the impending problem is that sub 90 IQ people are rendered totally
useless. That quarter of the population is already much less employable than
it was just a generation ago. The social consequences of this process are
already evident.

These elite IQ guys like Andreesen in coastal bubbles are totally out of touch
with broader society. They really don't grasp that a huge fraction of the
population is not going to be training up for the services and digital
economy, because that's not realistically possible.

~~~
mynameishere
A 90 IQ is probably a decent rough measure at this point, because that's about
what it takes to handle a cash register or a grill. And when the those jobs
are gone, it will inch up, 91, 92, etc. But forget it. Look at the future this
guy has concocted in his head:

 _The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences,
creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure._

...it's like he's never met anyone who didn't attend a top tier university.
Here's reality:

 _The main fields of human endeavor will be copulating, hustling, consuming
low-brow entertainment, eating, and the occasional lunatic running amok._

...and honestly, we're square on that path right now. There are _huge_ numbers
of people who are literally useless eaters. Go to a Wal-mart supercenter
sometime. Huge big fat people buying candy, soda, potato chips, frozen meals--
often paid by the public dole. I'm not even complaining. Unless you start a
sterilization program (and we aren't) it's the unavoidable present and future.

~~~
Houshalter
Congratulations on finding ways to make yourself feel superior to the lower
class. You are exactly the type of person humanity needs more of.

~~~
mercer
While I don't share the pessimism or sense of superiority one might read into
OP's post, I think their point remains (somewhat) valid.

There are many people who 'endeavor' exactly the way he describes, many more
than I always wanted to believe. And many of them are quite intelligent, so
it's not just about IQ.

While changing our approaches to education and the right motivation, in my
opinion, can bring people _much_ further than some of us are inclined to
believe, this is a limited solution for all the grownups who live in the way
OP describes.

------
ilaksh
This is the best rationalization for maintaining the current structure that I
have ever seen. I can almost buy it.

I don't think that our current leading-edge technology has really gotten
enough penetration to see how it is going to change things. And I think that
within two or three decades, the capability of those machines/AIs is going to
increase by a very great amount.

It is almost of a leap of faith to have this worldview, but I have seen so
many powerful AI wins recently (self-driving cars, Jeopardy bots) changes and
advances in actual artificial general intelligence, that I think we are going
to see "strong" AI within two to four decades.

Even if that doesn't happen, the leading-edge machine-learning and automation
robotics is only starting to be deployed.

Within a few decades, I think there are going to be so many jobs replaced, the
current structures will be inadequate.

And as more and more jobs are replaced by deep learning systems and/or better
natural language processing, even before we get to "strong AI", I don't see
how the structure is going to accommodate that.

The problem is that within not too many decades, I believe, almost
_everything_ people do can and will be done better by AIs/robots.

So whether we can keep our jobs is not even really our main issue. What we
really need to think about is, how can we stay relevant in a world where AIs
that are twice as intelligent as people are common? The answer, I believe, is
to incorporate those AIs within our bodies.

Ultimately to buy into that line of thinking really requires a significant
change in your worldview, which is why I think a lot of these discussions
aren't really fruitful. It comes down to your beliefs. (Everyone has beliefs,
whether they are boring and reassuring, or "crazy" sounding like me.)

~~~
purringmeow
We are very far from merging with an AI, but what's probably going to happen
during our lifetime in my opinion is the displacement of even skilled labor by
AI/automation. This is definitely scary, considering how slow catching up have
laws and regulations been throughout history. I am almost certain there will
be a period filled with social unrest and some sort of crises.

------
dm2
Automation will undoubtedly take many jobs. Some technologies will create
jobs, some will make the cost of living decrease and the standard of living
increase. Restructuring society, the economy, and the government isn't easy by
any stretch of the imagination, but it's not impossible and could lead to a
better quality of life for everyone.

A partial post-scarcity economy would offset the job loss, then there could be
regulation that limits working hours to 30 or 20 per week which would be
enough because goods and services would cost less (because of automation).

3D printers and "molecular assemblers" will allow for instant creation of
goods, (print every part of a car if you had enough raw materials/trash).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
scarcity_economy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler)

There needs to be more planning for the government of the future. Maybe a
world government would be good, maybe it wouldn't. Should every citizen be
able to vote on every issue rather than have a congress? Obviously congress
would never do away with themselves, so how would we go about removing them or
a similar organization from the government if it became necessary in the
future? Do citizens even have that power anymore?

What about more competition between states? Government should be as important
to people as sports is. Anyone want to attempt gamification of government and
online-voting?

By the way, for the "impossible to secure" argument against online-voting, who
cares if it gets hacked? If someone hacks the voting systems then it should be
easy to notice that the votes people made do not equal the total (because
people would be able to verify their votes) and if it's bad enough then just
fix the security hole, reset the votes, and try again.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
>Regulation ensure that people have jobs, even if that means limiting the
number of hours per week people can work.

Some kind of guaranteed basic income or national dividend is a more efficient
way to ensure that people who haven't accumulated capital get treated
humanely.

~~~
dm2
For things like that it might be best to limit federal regulation and let
states decide those issues. This would allow for experimentation of these
ideas that are too complex to correctly predict every variable.

There are numerous issues that need to be figured out for a Utopian future
society, we're not even sure we want that kind of society.

------
richcollins
_Human wants and needs are infinite_

I doubt that this is true. If we one day find a way to experience permanent
bliss I can't imagine that we'd want or need anything else.

~~~
mappu
MDMA was patented in 1912. Does dopamine count as chemically-induced bliss?

~~~
richcollins
Sure but I don't think it meets the "permanent" criteria

------
tormeh
The current system will just lead to a continued and ever more absurd growth
in the service sector. In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each
others' hair and saying nice things to each other for money. With the most
detail and attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then
trickling down. It does sound absurd, doesn't it? But we're already getting
there. Does your kitchen really need a marble counter top? No, but you want to
feel important/worthy enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, and a luxurious
lifestyle includes a marble counter top, so you get one. Replace "kitchen" and
"marble counter top" with whatever you want to. The two great expanding
economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury
cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal
trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great example of this. High-end
prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all for providing emotional
support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate modern workers, in my
opinion, and most of us will be following in their footsteps soon enough.

~~~
munificent
> In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and
> saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and
> attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then
> trickling down.

Your claim here is based on the utterly false dichotomy that says that helping
someone's self image (cutting their hair) and improving their emotional state
(saying nice things to them) are not useful.

These things are all useful, it's just that the ones you decry are higher up
on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's a _good_ sign: it means that our lower
needs are already being met so we can focus on higher desires and aspirations.

Personally, a world where most people spend their "work" helping other
actualize themselves instead of scraping rocks out of mines or digging up food
and barely subsisting sounds like a pretty good improvement to me.

> The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is
> conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes)

As prices tend towards zero, it's no longer conspicuous consumption. The whole
point of conspicuous consumption is to show your wealth by throwing it away.
You can't be a conspicuous consumer of Taco Bell, and if automation leads us
to a world where granite countertops cost as much as a fast food burrito, then
choosing one is just a matter of personal preference and self-expression.

> and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers).

You say that like it's a bad thing, but you could also lump therapists,
psychiatrists, counsellors, and many clergy-members in there too. What's so
bad about a job that helps someone's emotional well-being?

~~~
hershel
Paying for someone to say nice things about you is pretty similar to paying to
a prostitute to sleep with you ,and eating junk food instead of eating decent
food.

We as a society should aim for more, and not diminish ourselves to satisfy the
market.

------
cornholio
>“But most people are like horses; they have only their manual labor to
offer…” I don’t believe that, and I don’t want to live in a world in which
that’s the case. I think people everywhere have far more potential.

Developing that potential requires significant investment and the outcome is
highly competitive: we are already seeing a massive polarization of the labor
force ('hollowing out'). Sure, the new economy creates well paid internet and
creative jobs, but those are highly competitive fields where 2nd best just
does not cut it. It went from something that any monkey could do
(agriculture), to something that required some education (craftsmanship), to
formal education (cashier), to requiring college (programmer) to requiring a
certain elite education (investment banker), and so on. Society is becoming
more and more polarized and instead of StarTrek it looks like we are heading
for Metropolis.

> What would be the key characteristics of that world, and what would it be
> like to live in it? For starters, it’s a consumer utopia. Everyone enjoys a
> standard of living that kings and popes could have only dreamed of.

Does not follow. The robots will replace human work, but resources will still
be important. So an excellent house might cost $10.000 in land and materials,
but since you would have no job and no money you would not afford it.
Meanwhile, someone who owns the robot factory and associated intellectual
property, might decide 1 trillion dollars is a fair price to acquire the whole
state of Maine and transform it into his personal golf course.

The end game of post scarcity capitalism is a completely feudal society where
workers have no market value and are merely held as pets by the rich lords who
want to.

------
eatitraw
Can someone point to me why everyone is so sure there will be robots?

Let me explain why I am asking. It seems to me that we already hit some sort
of physical limit for the clock rates. We can't (easily) double clock rate of
a CPU, so we add more CPUs. But programming multithreaded applications is more
difficult, so it is more difficult to utilize this power.

Can't we hit similar limit for humans? Is there a limit on what humans can
comprehend and build? Let's say one programmer can code 1 abstract feature-
unit per day. There are limits. What makes everyone think that replacing
humans with robots will require not 10^100 abstract units of features? Why no
one considers that this problem may be just _too difficult_.

~~~
krapp
Partly because the robots we're talking about here don't necessarily have to
be of the humanoid/strong AI type.

Bear in mind that rug weaving was considered too complex and intricate to be
automated, until it was. Also bear in mind that humans used to build cars in
factories, now robots do, and that the very term "computer" used to refer to
something a human being did, rather than a machine.

The complexity of the necessary systems don't need to appear all at once, but
can be built on top of, and feed off of, one another. You replace jobs
piecemeal -- first the simple labor-intensive jobs, then complex
manufacturing, then automate logistics. At some point, autonomous cars are
delivering goods manufactured entirely by robots on behalf of autonomous
corporations.

Eventually, as technology and AI improves, you could have creative works done
entirely by machines, or almost entirely. Movies written, directed by,
starring, composed, engineered and distributed entirely by AI, with books and
music and toys and everything.

There's no evidence that it's too difficult, but plenty of evidence of things
once considered impossible, which turn out now to be commonplace, or taken for
granted.

------
berkay
First this: "I would argue that 200 years of recent history confirms
Friedman’s point of view." Then this: "This is not a world we have ever lived
in." "We just know we will create an enormous number of them."

It's unfortunate to see even the mighty brains fall victim to rationalization.
Dismissing anyone who is concerned the social impact of what's coming as
Luddites hinted this was a output of an ideologue and not a philosopher, and
it degraded from there.

------
Houshalter
There is absolutely no economic law that says the value of labor has to be
greater than minimum wage, or even livable. Yes there is theoretically an
infinite demand for labor, and unemployed people can always find some really
low demand job or work for even less than the machines. But that isn't optimal
for them. Goods might get cheaper, but not by much. The limiting factor isn't
labor costs, we already have vastly automated a lot of industries and
outsourced others to ridiculously low wage countries.

------
keppy
The Title Of This Article Makes Me Think Of Jaden Smith

[https://twitter.com/officialjaden](https://twitter.com/officialjaden)

