
When Robots Take All the Work, What'll Be Left for Us to Do? - e15ctr0n
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/when-robots-take-all-the-work-whatll-be-left-for-us-to-do/
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anigbrowl
This is an important and increasingly pressing question. On one level, you can
ask 'what will we do with ourselves' \- that is, to give our lives a sense of
purpose and so on. To me that's easy - we already know how people like to
entertain or amuse themselves, and beyond simple consumption and hedonism it's
also obvious that people are happy to do some kinds of work for self-
fulfilment rather than efficiency - eg gardening when you could just buy food
or flowers from a farm, washing dishes even though you could get a dishwasher,
painting for pleasure even though you could take a photograph and/or have the
image printed or repainted on canvas. In short, I don't worry about how we'll
occupy our time.

But I do worry about the question of how people make a living in these
conditions. It's not enough to say 'basic income' because absent a massive
economic shift most robots are going to be privately owned, and the owners of
such capital will ask why they should donate a large volume of their profit to
support non-productive individuals. Put another way, I'm not sure that the
arrival of technological abundance will necessarily be accompanied by optimal
social structures in the short term. A sudden and drastic acceleration in
social stratification followed by unrest sems to be a far more common pattern.
A luddite backlash is also a possibility, and a stronger one than usual given
the factor of AI, which some people seem to have an atavistic fear of.

~~~
treenyc
Productivity is over rated. It made sense in a scarcity based economic
worldview when we didn't have the technology and know how to create abundant
wealth.

How do one measure productivity?

Is it based on number of (quantity) of products produced and service offered?

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Zirro
I have done a lot of thinking about this lately. In my country a lot of the
recent political discussions have revolved around the creation of jobs. Though
their ideas differ, they all seem to agree that everyone who is able to work
should have a job. I don't think that is required.

I believe that (unless humanity faces a devastating event) the times when
there is a job available for everyone are gone. Robots will eventually take
over a majority of our current jobs.

Many peoples first reaction to this is to regard it as if it was a dystopia,
but I believe we should embrace it. There are a lot of jobs out there which
people choose only because they need an income. If the need for these jobs can
be eliminated through the use of robots, and the income of the people can be
supplied through a basic income, they can pursue jobs and passions which they
didn't dare to do before. The basic income can be financed by replacing
current ways of supporting those with poor economies, and will require less
money if robots are performing many services.

Jobs will still exist, but only for those who are well-educated. Not everyone
is suited for that, and I don't think forcing them to choose between poverty
or education is a solution.

Robots will take over many of our jobs, and I believe it is time to embrace it
and change our society for it to work.

~~~
transfire
I we don't embrace it, we will get a dystopia.

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yogthos
It simply blows my mind that automation of work can be seen as a negative. The
problem isn't in the fact that the work is being automated it's with the fact
that we structure our society around work. The simple answer is that without
work we could do things that we enjoy doing.

~~~
rayiner
I don't think people see automation per se as a negative. Rather, they are
skeptical of our ability to restructure our society, and fear the social
impact of automation in that context.

I mean, what happens when AI replaces programmers? When a designer can "write
a program" just by telling a computer in natural language what he wants to do?
Not only will most of HN be out of work, but many of our hobbies will be
irrelevant. Who will read a blog post about Rust making it easier to write
correct concurrent software when some AI is going to handle that much better
than a human ever could?

~~~
yogthos
Sure, but the focus should be on how to restructure society as opposed to
bemoan automation. It's worth noting that automation of jobs has been going on
for a long time now, and nobody would want to go back to doing any of them.

~~~
krapp
> and nobody would want to go back to doing any of them.

I'm sure at some point in the recent past you could have found some formerly
employed factory workers who would disagree. It's true, jobs replaced by
automation tend to be jobs that people would rather not do, but the loss of
_employment_ itself is a different matter. A crappy job is better than no job
at all.

~~~
yogthos
Again, my point is that it's the fault of the society for not providing a good
transition path as opposed to the automation itself.

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xsmasher
"The work that robots can't do," just like now.

Rewind this conversation about 150 years and ask what the steel-drivers will
do when the steam drill puts them out of business.

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tannerc
It's when we create the robots that can build (and program) other robots that
this conversation will really get interesting.

Until then, who's going to be the brains behind making the machines? Certainly
humans (albeit, and understandably, a small segment). That's work, right?

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thuuuomas
>"But customer service itself is a human problem."

...Says an unnamed academic who, in all likelihood, hasn't worked retail in
the 21st century.

Tho, you'd think they'd go to a grocery store once in awhile & be subjected to
the customer service atrocity that is the self-checkout. (Or touch an ipad
barista at a coffee shop, or patiently repeat "speak to a representative" to
an automated telephone system...)

~~~
john_b
Did you even read the article? Right before the part you quoted the author
_defined_ customer service to be the un-automatable parts of what we now
consider customer service, the purpose of the redefinition being to make
people realize that not all aspects of it can be automated. You mentioned
problems with the computerized components of what we today call "customer
service". You're arguing with a definition the author didn't use, not to
mention making a speculative ad hominem attack...

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lotsofmangos
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

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greatergoodguy
I will do magic tricks.

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NaNaN
Let's make games.

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zackmorris
I'm concerned that this is one of the great problems that humanity can't deal
with, like the tragedy of the commons. Only a small percentage of the
population recognizes that freedom from labor is a positive thing. So the way
I see it, we have two choices:

1) let the small percentage automate their way to freedom and the rest can
join if they wish

2) adopt automation on a wide, institutional scale the way we did with public
education and social security

Unfortunately, with the political slant of the country leaning so far towards
libertarianism at the moment (government = bad, taxes = bad, welfare = bad,
etc) I am becoming more convinced every day that we will go with option #1 and
create a two-tier society. The tiny elite today has trouble discerning where
unearned income comes from. They don’t seem to care if their capital gains
come from a working class or automation. As someone who dabbled in dead end
manual labor jobs for most of my 20s, I find that appalling. It’s like trying
to talk to someone about vegetarianism who has never slaughtered an animal by
hand.

So, these things will probably go the way they always go. A small percentage
who sacrifice tremendously for the greater good of society, with the masses
riding the coattails of progress glibly unaware of it. I suppose in the end
that that has always been the American way, or at the very least, the western
way.

Maybe a path towards enlightenment is to picture a day in the near future as
we approach the singularity and find that economic gain is no longer tied to
labor. It’s going to be a bit like winning the lottery, here and there, small
amounts at first but growing larger every day. I will believe that automation
has arrived when I begin seeing random acts of selflessness by people who
recognize that financially, they have arrived. As in, randomly receiving a
call one day that your credit card bill has been paid in full. Or maybe a city
receives a large donation for the building of bike paths. Or a solar panel
installer goes door to door and gives people free kits to get off the grid and
never pay another electric bill. I think small, targeted amounts of money
injected directly into the system like that could be quite disruptive.

So in the end such ominous changes could come to pass with a whimper instead
of a bang. It could be one of the great advances in civilization that people
thousands of years from now look back at in awe, wondering how we ever
transitioned from a dog-eat-dog hierarchy to egalitarian anarchy. I guess they
will have just had to have been there, witnessing the epic stupidity that
we’ve witnessed over the course of our lives. Stepping back from that,
rejecting it summarily is not such a hard thing to do. Not if you grok that
the other side of the threshold is not just possible, but probable. And then
be willing to take a leap of faith and persevere long enough to see it
through.

