
In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Marketers - sndean
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-26/in-a-robot-economy-all-humans-will-be-marketers
======
jon_richards
I fundamentally disagree with this article. Automation hits some places
earlier than others, but I think "marketing" isn't as far away as they think.
We're starting to develop bots that can make puns, text to speech that sounds
human, etc. What happens when bots can pass the Turing Test? When they know
everything about the trends you follow, finances you have, products you've
bought, shows you watch, places you go, jokes you enjoy? Marketing will start
becoming "personalised", and I don't think humans will be behind the controls
for long after that.

Humans won't be marketing, they will be marketed. Humans will be a novelty,
like a hand-carved chair or a horse-drawn carriage. Probably worse than the
human-free product, but worth paying a bit extra for the idea of it.

~~~
analog31
Here's something that's puzzled me: Why would robots _want_ to do all of those
things? What if robots became capable of taking over the world, but had no
motivation to do so?

Why would they make puns, or speech that sounds human? They could make speech
that is more pleasant to robots if they didn't care about humans. I don't go
around making speech that sounds dog-like.

~~~
stretchwithme
That's just it. A living thing has motivation created and honed by the need to
reproduce. It IS its own motivation.

A machine can only measure parameters and take action to get to some target.
Its priorities are set by its program and the data it has. Its own continued
existence and propagation are not the default. It cannot want and doesn't need
to the way a living thing does.

And I don't see reason to try to give machines such qualities. People have
wanted servants that have no concern for their own needs for as long as there
have been people. Slaves that are selfless and highly capable. And that is how
most automation will be designed.

Fiction presents human-like machines but that hardly means that is what will
build or want when the time actually comes.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
A need to reproduce isn't the only thing that motivates humans...

~~~
gluczywo
True for an individual.

For life seen as a part of system/society reproduction is the key motivation
(for lack of a better word). Non-reproducing activities are irrelevant
temporary aberrations because societies that don't reproduce get extinct and
are replaced by societies that focus on reproduction.

------
m52go
"but but there is NO job humans can do that a robot cannot do"

this is the gist of the reactions i got to a comment i made on an article on a
similar topic here a few days ago.

this article better articulated what i was trying to say there:

 _But machines are not effective at persuading, at developing advertising
campaigns, at branding products or corporations, or at greeting you at the
door in a charming manner, as is done so often in restaurants, even if you
order on an iPad. Those activities will remain the province of human beings
for a long time to come._

people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve
_us_ better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to
better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion).

we're still weird, unpredictable creatures who eat, sleep, poop, and work in a
4-dimensional world...so there will ALWAYS be a human component to delivering
products and services.

even if a good bit of the designing, building, and distribution of these
services may be automated.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us
better, the people (i guess you could argue it 's really being done to better
serve shareholders, but that's another discussion)._

Well, it's being done to increase profit. That's a bit different.

~~~
anotherbrownguy
How is that a bad thing? Why would you not want to increase profit?

~~~
xg15
For starters, it takes the priority away from "serving us better" as the GP's
claim was.

~~~
anotherbrownguy
Serving customers better is a means to an end (i.e. maximizing profits), not
an end it itself.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Exactly. And not the only possible mean to achieve that end. For example,
we've discovered that marketing has a much better ROI than actually building
quality things people want.

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scotty79
It already happenef and it's not about robots. It's about abundance.

If the market is not saturated pretty much everybody is working on building
stuff faster and cheaper. It sells itself.

When market gets saturated suddenly your survival is dependant on conning
people into buying your staff instead of those of your competition.

The more the production part is mastered, the more resources you need to pour
into marketing to just stay afloat.

Since the production got more efficient humans got shifted to marketing. But
the same way people in stock trading are getting replaced with algorithms,
people will get replaced in marketing as well.

~~~
libertine
There are marketing decisions that can be automated, or at least to support
decisions (even if you just need to click OK to adjust your funnel), but there
are other parts of marketing that use similar processes to those who develop
art - and i'm not comparing marketers to artists!

If we reach the time where AI fully understands human behavior and emotions, I
think by that time the concept of marketing will be long gone...

------
neilwilson
The bit everybody misses is that people still need something to do with their
day.

The problem is the wrong conception of what work actually is. Work is what you
do with your day that you find enjoyable and that others consider useful. When
that gets paid we call it a job.

And that's it.

Work is leisure you get paid to do. It's a social activity that furthers the
cause of the group of humans engaged in it.

If it isn't, then perhaps the system we've chosen to allocate work is broken
rather than the concept of work.

Perhaps we need a system that ensures there are always more jobs than people
that want them, and that creates work and jobs based upon agreed social value.
Which then forces the market sector to compete, which in turn forces market
value to align properly with the social value we're after.

~~~
stale2002
What if instead of having jobs, you just let people do whatever they want?

If you want to work together with other people to do some goal, then do that.

If you want to spend all your time watching movies or traveling or playing
video games, then you could do that and zero of the "work" stuff.

The mega rich already live in that world. They can choose to work, or not, and
are generally able to do anything. I don't hear them complaining about how
they are bored or need something to do with their life.

Now imagine that everyone had the same resources as the mega rich do now.

~~~
neilwilson
If people can do whatever they want, does that include those running the
robots?

Because if I'm a robot operator and you can do whatever you want, then I know
I'm not going to get anything of value from you. So why should I work beyond
Tuesday to make stuff that you need to live? I may as well go home and be
'free'. Your money is literally worthless to me.

We know what everybody doing what they want leads to. It leads to land
redistribution and hyperinflation - as demonstrated in spades in Zimbabwe.

Unless you are completely self-sufficient then you have to look at the
systemic impact of your idea on _everybody_. Then you'll find it has a severe
fallacy of composition in it.

The mega rich get away with it simply because they have a slave class (the
rest of us) to do their bidding. If you can do whatever you want, who is the
slave class working more than they need to to service your needs?

To maintain an advanced society we need the robots working 24x7 and the land
worked 24x7. To get people to give up their time to do that you have to give
them something in return. Money isn't enough. That is the service to others
you have to do if you want the carrots others grow.

As Ali said: Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on
earth. What we lack is a mechanism to allow people to make that rent.

~~~
stale2002
Robots would do the work.

The future may not need many human robot operators either.

If the world only needs a couple hundred thousand people to run the robots,
maybe there will be enough of them who are willing to do it just because it is
fun to run the robots and provide for the world.

People do charity all the time today and the world of the future would need
much less charity.

Obviously most people would not be interested in doing this work for free. But
fortunately we might only need. 0.001% of the population to be willing to do
it for free.

I expect that at least 0.001% of the population in the future will be
charitable enough that they will be willing to do work for free in order to
provide for the entire world, by running the robots.

------
swampthinker
Re: The ATM point. The evidence they cite is this graph [1]. I'm not sure that
this is a compelling graph. Sure the number of tellers has been growing, but
it's been very slow growth. Meanwhile, ATM's have been skyrocketing in
popularity. One could easily argue that teller job creation was heavily
impacted by ATM's, but offset by overall population growth.

[1][http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-
rise-r...](http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-
and-jobs/)

~~~
fwn
I don't know how it works in the US but in the German retail banking market
there is only one clearly superior pathway to compete and this is through
abolishing the banks local presence all together.

Our credit unions are not competitive and will have to merge away into a
direct bank at some point. They currently survive on path dependencies.

Germany is a cash heavy market & free universal ATMs are omnipresent.
Ironically mostly through credit unions.

------
vinceguidry
You can generalize this to: Someone still has to understand everything in
order to make it actually useful for humans. You can build a robot to do work
previously done by a human, but you can't make it actually understand when it
needs to be working and on what. That would be an exponentially harder problem
to make a computer solve.

Making computers want interesting things is perhaps THE problem in artificial
intelligence. If you can solve it, you've got AGI. You can hand a machine
learning algorithm a very constrained environment and it can work out some
basic goals, like making a high score go up.

But increase the complexity of the environment and all of a sudden, the
algorithm needs to learn how to simulate it, significantly ramping up the
difficulty of what it has to do.

Humans are going to start getting inexorably shifted out of things that humans
really shouldn't be doing in the first place, to be replaced by the just-as-
difficult task of commanding our new robot slaves. Maybe for a little while
it'll be difficult for humans to find purchase in the brave new world, but the
limitations of machines to _literally read our brains and tell us what we
want_ is going to quickly make themselves known and humans all over the world
will take on the role of specifying the behavior of machines that are getting
increasingly smarter.

You're going to see the same sort of stratification of haves and have-nots you
have now, I see little about the new production modes that's going to change
the fundamentals of economics. But everybody is going to have more of it,
because making things is going to get much, much easier, even easier than it
is now, and it's already really easy.

------
Klockan
Programmers programming AI's to automate marketing will definitely have a job
longer than marketers.

------
ShirsenduK
As the world goes more towards digital content, the more robots/AI/software
will do the marketing. The growth of Facebook revenues is a clear indication
that software is better at marketing than humans. They know which buttons to
push and when to get the right response. They know you better than the
marketing manager at company xyz.

Marketing automation is already here and its only going to get bigger and
better. The sales and marketing teams will shrink to 1-2 persons even for
large corporations. They will make us more efficient.

~~~
gottlos
While I dont disagree, I put it to you that 'clickbait' techniques are easily
arrived at by iterative testing; but are poor outcomes for the long term. IE:
I don't see an AI negotiating a multi year memorandum of understanding between
companies based on "X did Y and you wont believe what happens next!"

Those will make money; but will they just cause stagnation/niche specialized
behaviours that have less benefit to society as a whole?

~~~
ShirsenduK
Marketing automation is not about clickbait but knowing who your users are,
what are their biases and then showing you only that ad which will have a
response and not show what won't work. Thereby, making $ spent on marketing
more efficient. Companies are generally run by financials rather than societal
benefit. I do not know whether that is a good thing or not, only future will
tell. :)

------
EGreg
_More legal work is done by smart software, but cultivating client
relationships has never been more important._

I always found this turn of phrasd to be somewhat odd.

Why has cultivating relstionships never been more important? What is it about
today that makes this true? And if it's not true, then the whole "but" is just
handwaving nonsense inserted in place of the crux of the whole argument.

------
xg15
Slightly OT, but did anyone else get the feeling that the author feels like he
has to appeal to a very pro-advertising readership even though he is actually
quite aware of the negative effects of advertising?

Whenever he wants to write about something becoming more marketing or
advertising oriented, he quickly adds some points along the lines of "...of
course advertising is usually totally awesome but..."

Those bits seldomly even have any sources or arguments to them to make them
convincing.

Some examples:

> _To be sure, a lot of commercial persuasion is useful. Marketing informs
> consumers about new products and their properties, or convinces them that
> one product is better for them than another._

> _Each business tries to pull customers away from the other brands, and while
> the final matching of customers to products is usually closely attuned to
> what people want, [...]_

> _Although consumers enjoy these panderings to some degree, [...]_

------
godelski
The author seems to miss a lot here. Sure, there will be industries that will
follow the ATM model, but many more won't. I mean how do you miss cars? It is
the most talked about industry to be disrupted by AI and there is no way it is
going to create more jobs.

Also, the author clearly misses Coke's marketing strategy. It is pretty well
understood that Coke doesn't advertise to get people to buy their product. AI
has been good at getting us to buy products. And I'm pretty sure AI will also
get good at keeping us using products.

Really it just comes off as naive and overly optimistic.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_there is no way it is going to create more jobs_

This seems like a crazy assertion to me. I think you're thinking very small
and short-term, as in: 3mm people don't drive anymore for their job, so we
have 3mm fewer jobs.

In a world where no one drives, no one owns cars, they zip around in a global
mesh that's tied together with all other forms of transport and logistics,
which are also automated...how can we possibly predict what such a world will
look like, and what new opportunities, lifestyles, and paradigm shifts will
occur?

------
ThomPete
In a robot economy there will be no need for marketers. People can get
whatever they want.

------
anacleto
The fundamentally wrong thing I see over and over again: Marketing !=
Advertising.

------
davidjnelson
It would be great if society could progress to the Star Trek inspired utopia.
Using technology to build replicators to create food rather than robots to
farm food using traditional methods for instance.

------
mirimir
For the model presented, I'd say more like "customer service". But then, for
whom? For each other, I guess.

In that world, I'd rather become a human-assisted robot. Potentially immortal,
even.

------
DrNuke
Small services for local communities will not die, though. If no money
circulates, we will go back to barter and communes.

~~~
rosser
We won't go "back" to barter because, contrary to popular — and mistaken —
belief, we didn't come _from_ there.

Go pick up a copy of "Debt: The First 5000 Years" for a complete
defenestration of that tired trope.

------
ValleyOfTheMtns
Robots will be better marketers than humans.

In a robot economy all humans will just be consumers.

~~~
goatlover
What are the humans using for money, since they're not getting paid to work?

~~~
pixl97
UBI or pitchforks?

------
rumcajz
"In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Consumers."

------
Animats
One word: Amazon.

------
paulus_magnus2
tax advisors. marketing can be automated

------
unabst
The robot economy is not a jobs issue. It is a wealth issue.

An entrepreneur's primary function is to create jobs. Every job ever created
that wasn't made by the government was a direct or indirect consequence of an
entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is thriving.

A business's primary function is to hire people. Any large business that isn't
firing is hiring. And public businesses need to grow to stay in business. 75%
of Google's income is from ads. There couldn't be an easier service to
automate and robotize than an ad system. Yet, not only are they hiring, but
they're looking to spend this money in completely unrelated areas. They're
literally starting from "A" and going down the alphabet.

Entrepreneurs and businesses will always look to automate. But they will also
always look to hire. Elon Musk is partially responsible for this AI job
paranoia, but not only is Tesla not fully robotized they have a shortage of
workers and they're hiring like mad [1].

Jobs are about skills, and yes, if you're doing a job that is a candidate for
new methods of automation - like driving - your job is in danger. But unless
you're only capable of doing one job, all you'll do is find another. You're
not a "robot".

And even if humanoids begin to take over more human work, entrepreneurs and
businesses will simply hire more and hire them all. We will work alongside our
robotic co-workers, and the economy (should) just expand to meet our
collective output.

But herein lies the real issue.

Robots will not be owned by robots. They will be owned by people. And if
robots are productive, they'll become the new real estate. A robot with a job
will be like a house that pays rent.

Bill Gates recently came out with a robot tax video [2]. But taxes are not
enough to equalize the wealth gap. It hasn't worked for humans, and it won't
work for bots.

Not only money, but ownership needs to be redistributed. Unfortunately, we
have yet to find a solution for this old problem either.

So what if you lost your job if you own two apartments that bring in a middle
class wage? Replace apartments with robots.

The Robot Economy is not about jobs. It's about wealth.

\---

[1]
[https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/](https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg)

~~~
grondilu
> An entrepreneur's primary function is to create jobs. [...] A business's
> primary function is to hire people.

Where does that weird idea come from?

~~~
unabst
Out of all the definitions and all of the activities the word entails, there
is one thing all entrepreneurs have in common. They create jobs, starting with
themselves.

That's one job made from none. They can decide not to hire or be happy alone,
but eventually, you'd be hard pressed not to hire if your business is thriving
and you're generating more work than you can handle yourself. Business have
always grown with people. People consuming work = a job.

The job market is not zero sum.

~~~
grondilu
> Out of all the definitions and all of the activities the word entails, there
> is one thing all entrepreneurs have in common. They create jobs, starting
> with themselves.

When I clean my house, I sweep the floor. That doesn't mean the purpose of
cleaning my house is to sweep the floor.

~~~
unabst
No. But sweeping the floor exists as a function of cleaning the house, and if
sweeping was the one thing done without exception, it would be a primary
function.

The purpose would be for your house to get cleaned, but we can clean the house
without ending in a clean house. We wouldn't however, not have swept the
floor, for that would mean we didn't even attempt to clean the house.

Either way, this is semantics. My main point has nothing to do with "primary
function" is debatable or not. Entrepreneurs create jobs. This is a fact that
doesn't change however you word it.

I apologize if my word choice was poor, but feel free to substitute with your
own wording.

------
sverige
What is great about being a human is that, even if the premise turns out to be
true, 1) I will never be a marketer, and yet 2) I will not starve. I don't
have to be smarter than a robot, I just have to be smarter than the person who
made the robot.

~~~
pixl97
If you were smarter than the person that made the robot, you'd have just made
the damn robot yourself.

Also, make sure your robot maker isn't making kill-bots.

~~~
sverige
The unstated premise in your argument is that a smart person would make a
robot if they had the ability. But what if a person were so smart that they
could foresee that making the robot would be detrimental in the long term?

And then you answer your own premise by pointing out the obvious reason it
would be detrimental: kill-bots. We all know that is where it is headed. It is
unchangeable human nature.

