
The rise of the useless class - uyoakaoma
http://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/
======
charles-salvia
I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking,
humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full
"general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite recent
advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e.
adding more columns to a matrix), we don't really have anything that even
approaches an artificial general intelligence. What we _do_ have is a suite of
sophisticated statistical algorithms that basically perform regression using
huge data sets. This often approximates _some_ subset of what a general
artifical intelligence could do for _some_ use cases that mostly apply to
recognizing fuzzy patterns. But it's not even close to approaching human-level
intelligence.

In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the "pattern
recognition" aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while
making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with
higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity
(apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly
domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to
play Go.)

I don't doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously
threaten human usefulness/dignity, but I question the timeline of "decades
away".

~~~
geforce
For this reason, I wouldn't be surprised if AI actually generate more work, at
least for most of our lifetime. People that will supervise and correct AI
errors while/after they process data, while current jobs mostly stays "until
the AI is ready to actually take over".

If this makes you laugh, you have probably never worked in the public sector
or big corps.

~~~
devonkim
The problem is that the financial performance and massive inertia of these
organizations are becoming such financial liabilities that our economies will
be held back by organizational / cultural _and_ technical debt at the same
time in these organizations. I've been observing the trend for the past decade
where the top tech companies are accelerating in output while most of the
large institutions are falling further and further behind. Intel can keep
pushing all the way to the theoretical limits of silicon for transistor size,
but the economic costs including just sheer interest on fab facilities alone
of getting there would bankrupt the company or hurt its credit rating.

To put it into a more concrete analogy, Google is putting out autonomous cars
when tons of companies are celebrating releasing the Model T or are still
currently developing it with massive delays and cost overruns. Meanwhile, much
of the appetite for government spending is dwindling for various reasons and
this will cause a lot of strife that hurts already-slow moving organizations.
Furthermore, brand recognition by the current generation of entrepreneurs for
old hat technology companies is looking absolutely horrific. The next Fortune
500 CEOs 30 years from now are likely in their 30s or 40s now and they're well
aware of the lack of compelling vision by so-called "technology" companies
that are really just technology re-sellers and are thus unsuitable partners
for increasingly tech-reliant businesses (the few that don't have such plans
may be so clueless they won't matter).

------
sevensor
My first reaction when I saw (ted.com) after the link was that this would be
an essay about ted speakers. I should have known that it would be more chatter
about machines making people obsolete.

~~~
rdiddly
Nice one!

My reaction was more like, we have this already due to plain old economic
stagnation and (in the US) offshoring. No AI needed!

~~~
yomly
It seems convenient to blame technology, and it is definitely going to be the
bigger cause in the long term.

This said, I am strongly of the opinion that globalization is not a force that
benefits everyone (to put it nicely) and it is not constructive that this
opinion is not discussed more widely without having to pussyfoot around dirty
words like protectionism and nationalism as if they are automatically bad
words.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Globalization is centralization: finance is centralized in New York and
London; manufacturing is centralized in China and Germany; IT outsourcing is
centralized in India.

Over the 19th and early 20th century, the benefits of American westward
expansion and the development of the industrial Midwest largely accrued to the
big banks in New York. The same is occurring, just on a larger scale and
accelerated due to leaps in technology.

~~~
dantheman
The US manufactures more than it ever did, page 2 of this pdf shows it quite
clearly:
[https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf)

The US is more than double Germany.

~~~
Nomentatus
But with fewer workers.

~~~
dantheman
Progress?

------
shas3
I'm sure there is a good critique of that Frey and Osborne paper.
Epistemologically, it sounds weird to assign 'probabilities of automation.' I
don't have the time to read the paper in detail, but here are a few things:

1\. Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and
withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased.

2\. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will we reach a point where it is
cheaper to automate a job than hire a person? Think of non-forklift
lifting/moving of heavy stuff, we don't really need people doing this
manually, robots should be able to do it. But we see with the Boston Dynamics
robots that we are many years or decades away from commoditizing lifting
robots.

3\. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't
necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are
'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc).

~~~
dragonwriter
> Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and
> withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased.

Did the number of cashier's _per customer_ (or perhaps more significantly, as
a share of the population -- not labor force) increase? If you look at even
AEIs graph [0] that they use to try to sell idea that ATMs didn't kill
cashiers' jobs, it shows cashiers increasing rapidly during the very slow
rollout of ATMs in the 1970s and 1980s, and the growth tapering off to very
slow growth as ATMs take off in the 1990s and beyond (and remaining relatively
flat even after the number of ATMs itself flattens in the mid-00s, probably as
ATMs basically reached saturation but are still increasing functions, reducing
the need for more tellers.)

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

~~~
weberc2
Why is your proposed metric better than the original? Honest question.

~~~
sophacles
Not the parent, but all other things remaining the same, population growth
alone will drive the need for more cashiers. Since ATMs did not stop
population growth, percentage based metrics help account for that.

So the different types of numbers can help drive home different points:

* in absolute numbers, ATMs didn't cause any job losses.

* in relative numbers, there are less job opportunities in this space. (e.g. there used to be a need for 1 cashier per N people, not there is only a slot for 1 cashier per 2N people).

The second type of thinking is what people are worried about - if we keep
reducing percentage of people who are needed to do stuff, what the other folks
do?

~~~
Anderkent
There's also the factory vs car improvement difference. Factories did not make
workers obsolete; cars did make horses obsolete. I'm not sure we can ahead of
time tell whether particular technological improvements are more like
factories or cars.

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'm not sure we can ahead of time tell whether particular technological
> improvements are more like factories or cars._

When those improvements are AI-driven automation, we can.

~~~
marcosdumay
AI is a huge area that will lead to many advances, each one with different
impact.

------
unityByFreedom
> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by
> the time they are 40."

I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican
position which leads to people not valuing public education.

Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and
biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we
have collected over our existence here and should continue to be passed on to
as many people as we can.

I find the excitement for UBI concerning. People seem to have already tossed
up their hands and said, "well, I'll be useless in the future, I guess I can't
work now!".

Meanwhile, Mike Rowe has been saying for years that there are unfulfilled blue
collar jobs. Our culture's problem is not that machines will take over or that
schools are failing to educate students. It's that we don't find enough value
in the contributions that we _do_ make. It's okay to not be a successful tech
founder. Everyone is useful in some way or another.

~~~
Houshalter
School is _already_ useless. See this essay for instance
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/02/contra-robinson-on-
sch...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/02/contra-robinson-on-schooling/)

How many people use say more than 1% of the knowledge they learn in High
School? Hell how many people even remember more than 1% of it? There have been
studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal education and are
allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do only sightly worse
than schooled kids.

~~~
unityByFreedom
> School is already useless

I realize there are people who feel that way. I'm not one of them. There are a
lot of things I synthesized from school. For me, practicing learning a bunch
of different things was useful in itself.

Some people learn better in school, and some find ways to do it on their own.

> There have been studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal
> education and are allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do
> only sightly worse than schooled kids

There is a big difference between having a few unschooled kids and changing
the whole system to be unschooled.

If unschooled is going to be the way of the future, do it at local levels and
let it grow with its success. We need not defund public education to achieve
an idealized educational system that isn't going to work for everyone.

------
sebringj
This is short-term pessimism, inline with the common dystopian future of sci-
fi. It is really difficult to predict human behaviors and technology in the
long term.

Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting
things can happen.

Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with
the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and
telekinetic so then we get the neural internet from that. We would actually be
less divided, more connected and more productive as a human race. Our current
sense of self is too selfish and our intellect too limited. I'm sure it would
be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case so
everyone could make better decisions, not just about themselves but about
humanity, etc. because they could perceive things at a grander scale.

~~~
shas3
I think this is already happening. In fact most AI pessimists don't consider
that "man + machine >> machine." Consider chess. Kasparov's defeat happened in
mid-1990s. Machine is considered > man. Yet, in freestyle chess, where players
are allowed to consult machines, we have achieved ever greater heights of
performance. In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be
incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better. Similar
things will happen in Go, Poker, etc. The handicap of not using a computer to
inform your moves exists to make things more competitive, it doesn't mean that
we are worse off!

Taking this further, most technology we use daily (word processors, email, the
Internet, etc.) are enhancements of the man+machine organism and enhance our
performance as well as the 'machine''s.

~~~
sebringj
Yah I think so too. Super Tangent warning: I recently saw the documentary on
Koko the Gorilla and was amazed at her emotional intelligence and
communication skills. Why not integrate AI into other animals besides humans?

~~~
sebringj
One more tangent: The perception of time would be very different if we were
highly integrated into machines right? What if you could perceive things at
1000 times the normal human?

------
binarymax
I want to be like my dog, but smarter and with more freedom.

Every day I look at the lazy beast and wonder at the simplicity of its
existence. Give me that life and an allowance for supplies to create, eat,
socialize, and travel and let me loose.

~~~
ryandvm
This is the missing component of the Drake equation.

The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is
sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a
galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing
Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death
cycle...

~~~
Houshalter
But if they have superior AI, what stops the AI from expanding outward
instead? Such an advanced civilization has nothing to lose by sending a few
robot colonists out through the galaxy.

~~~
pasquinelli
Maybe if we were smarter we'd see that they might in fact have a lot to lose.

------
davidivadavid
Am I the only person who finds the whole concept of judging _people_ as useful
or useless completely nonsensical? So, machines will be able to perform jobs
that are currently done by people. How does that make people _useless_? It
assumes there's some sort of preordained, global utility function. "Oh, your
job as a cab driver has been automated. You're useless." Uh, what? Useless to
what? To whom?

Humans _define_ what is useful or not. They're certainly not going to will
themselves into uselessness, curl up into a ball and die. The idea that humans
can be useless is complete nonsense to me. It's something akin to a type
error. And I have a hard time understanding why that meme keeps being repeated
and debated without anyone pointing this out.

~~~
ninju
I believe the designation of the people as _useless_ is based on the fact that
part of our value to society is measured by the utility that provide to
society and with continuing automation of human tasks it will be harder for us
to find way for all the humans in the world to provide utility at the same
level as they are now.

Now I agree with you that this (valuing people by the utility they provide) is
a shallow and incorrect way of measuring a human being's value but it is true.

~~~
davidivadavid
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I think I'm talking
about something slightly different. First, I think that what you're pointing
out in your first paragraph, while wildly accepted, is completely unproven.
Second, I don't think valuing people by utility is necessarily shallow, but
the way I worded my original post might lead you to believe that.

Here's what I'm getting at (and failing horribly, because I'm too lazy to
think it through): many articles have been written that seem to outline
scenarios where runaway automation leads to a situation where you have some
sort of closed loop automated economy where humans have no role to play, thus
making humanity "useless." I think that's hogwash. It presupposes that the
goal of humanity is to perform a certain number of tasks that happen to be the
tasks we currently perform. If we can find something to substitute that
performs the same tasks, our goal is accomplished, and thus humanity is
"useless."

That's when I generally go: that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

~~~
ninju
Yes, I agree that the idea that with continued automation humanity's role on
earth will become un-necessary and superfluous (the _useless_ that I believe
you are referring to) is hogwash and not a concern.

The reason for the automation revolution (I just coined that phrase) is allow
humanity to become a better citizen of the planet and not to discarded.

------
mojomark
Of course automation will inevitably be capable of displacing all human acts
(jobs and art). The author concludes with the same tired, naiive and
unsatisfactory outlook: 'you don't need worry about it because robots will
just kill off humans'.

However, it seems obvious that humanity will handle this like many cultures
have - by choice. Just like some people chose not to eat GM food, and others
(Amish) generally elect not to use electricity, humans too will reach a point
where they will simply choose to either accept that their lives are 100%
sustained by autonomy or, live a life free of AI-generated products (i.e.
food, services, art, etc).

~~~
kbos87
I'm curious to see how long it will take for the world to experience any
meaningful kind of pushback against automation or AI. Today, I feel like all I
see are a dwindling number of people saying they'd "rather deal with a real
person", and a growing number of people who come close to fetishizing
automation.

Maybe once Uber decides to flip the switch on all of the drivers who are now
dependent on them for some if not all of their income, we'll see people in the
streets vandalizing and otherwise circumventing empty self driving vehicles.

~~~
mojomark
Honestly, like you point out, I think it's happening at micro-levels already.
Certainly entire societies have voluntarily cut themselves off largelt from
technology altogether - not just Amish, but modern off-grid people as well.
However, just like some "bush people" will bend the rules and return to modern
technology in diar situations (e.g. they need an insulin shot), I'd bet
dollars to donuts that medical needs will drive many situations where self-
declared "AI-free" people will opt for an AI product, since there are certain
to be many AI-generated medical treatments currently out of the reach of
limited human brains to develop.

------
ar15saveslives
> Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of
> learning, followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model
> will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the
> game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent
> themselves repeatedly.

That's already the case, imo.

~~~
mattlevan
Agreed. It'd be quite difficult to measure whether or not someone learns
something new, anyway, because of the variety of things available to learn
(large and small). If we're talking about learning entirely new skills,
though, yea, obviously a cashier will probably not need to learn any
significant new skills over the course of their career.

As always, people who do make learning new things a part of their life's
rituals will generally be more successful than those who do not.

Nice username, by the way.

------
rndmize
Arguably, some of this is already happening. IMO there was a much better
article a few months ago -
[https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/](https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/)

~~~
mojomark
Indeed - I'm only 50% through, but defibitely a MUCH more informed and
insightful article already

------
ideonexus
This is the most fascinating quote for me. If corporations and nations are
entities capable of owning things, could we give such power to
software/algorithms? How would that work?

 _As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might
become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful
algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality.
Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. Human law
already recognizes intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as
“legal persons.” Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind,
they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they
can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to
algorithms. An algorithm could then own a transportation empire or a venture-
capital fund without having to obey the wishes of any human master. Before
dismissing the idea, remember that most of our planet is already legally owned
by non-human intersubjective entities, namely nations and corporations.
Indeed, 5,000 years ago much of Sumer was owned by imaginary gods such as Enki
and Inanna. If gods can possess land and employ people, why not algorithms?_

~~~
pasquinelli
Algorithms require hardware to run on, so they'll have all their assets
drained away from them in the former of rent to the landlord, that is, the
person who owns the hardware they run on.

~~~
ideonexus
Thinking out-loud in terms of a corporation. The owners are the landlord for
the corporation, but that corporation is it's own legal entity. Owners come
and go, but that corporate entity remains and insulates the owners from many
legal and financial repercussions of the company's actions. It's a similar
thing with countries. I'm not personally held responsible for the actions of
the United States or the Town in which I dwell, but I am one of the landlords
for those entities.

I think the question here is whether there are advantages to making algorithms
legal entities similar to our other communal legal entities. It's a radical
idea, but so is UBI and some other suggestions for mitigating the obsolescence
of many human being as a result of automation.

------
markvdb
If you want to see what technology and automation do, and early ideas of how
to support the "useless" class, don't look at California. Look at places like
Switzerland, Scandinavia and Belgium.

The wage cost pressure is just pricing low productivity work out of the market
there more quickly than elsewhere. A taxi in the valley is cheap. A taxi in
any of these? Rather more expensive...

Jobs being replaced with technology? Government policy trying to do something
about it? Keep an eye on what happens in these countries...

------
dhuntermn
what happens when human labor (and life) is cheaper than robotic output? storm
the castle with a swarm of useless humans, or put your really expensive robot
at risk?

------
Animats
This has already happened. That's why Trump won. Check out Detroit or the Rust
Belt, or most towns under 5,000 people not near a major population center.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I disagree. It isn't really that folks don't have their old job. With that job
went their livelihoods. Houses, jobs, medical insurance. Bills get late and
suddenly finding food becomes an issue. Others just have very stagnant wages,
so they work harder but can't stretch their paycheck as far anymore.

Do you think Trump would have still been elected if we had a proper safety net
and social support for folks?

~~~
laughfactory
This is so true. As someone who's had the misfortune to be on unemployment
twice in my career, and food stamps once, I can tell you our "safety net" is
bullshit. Unemployment maxes out at $450/week and takes months for the checks
to start arriving. Try making ends meet in that scenario, and better hope you
get a couple months of severance. Food stamps work fairly well, but you've got
still got the slow and inefficient government albatross in the mix. Long story
short: we spend a ludicrous amount of money on a safety net which provides
zero safety for anyone.

------
charles-salvia
Meh... the new in-demand job for "useless" people will be gathering all the
training data to feed into TensorFlow.

------
accordionclown
i'm deeply offended by an attitude that leads to word-choices such as
"useless" and "bums" and "superfluous" in regard to human beings who simply do
not have jobs.

are people really "useless" if they do not provide labor to make rich people
richer?

if the economic system can't make a profit off your presence, are you
"superfluous"?

is this the mentality that would cause our "leaders" to abandon health-care
for the large majority of our population who will soon be unable to afford
insurance?

and please don't tell me that a _job_ is necessary to make people feel useful.
many wealthy people seem to be able to do nothing productive at all, without
having doubt about their right to exist.

------
abrodersen
Obviously, we should put them on the B Ark and send them to another planet.

~~~
Entangled
Trimming the 10% at the top and the bottom on a yearly basis would provide a
better outcome according to game theory.

