So far, we've invented whole new things to work on. There is no compelling reason to believe that will continue to happen.
Incidentally, that scenario hasn't always left biological entities better off. When technology reduced the wages for travel below the level of horse subsistence, the result was massive deaths among horses. But humans are special, right? That can't ever happen to us.
The fallacy here is that machines “replace” humans. They don’t. They can displace humans from jobs, but the humans don’t disappear. The humans still exist and can still do all the things humans can do, including find ways to create value that other humans are willing to pay for.
Horses, however, cannot. When horses are displaced from their “jobs,” they don’t have the option of finding other ways to create value for humans.
Any causal model that ignores this distinction between humans and other ‘biological entities,’ entities which just happen to play a supporting role in human society, is a model we can expect to make poor predictions about the future of humanity.
There is a finite number of things to do which create value and which humans are willing to pay for (just as is the case with horses). The only difference is that N_human > N_horse.
The fact that N_machine < N_human doesn't mean that N_machine will always be less than N_human. I'm only pointing out that it is a fallacy to claim that it is.
There is a finite number of things to do which create value and which humans are willing to pay for
Ridiculous.
This reminds me of the story of the patent commissioner in the late 1800s who suggested closing the patent office because everything had already been invented that could be.
We are on the cusp of an explosion in new ways for people to create value. I don't understand how someone who has been around HN as long as you have can't see that. Look at YC -- both the endless variety of startups it's funding, and the business itself, which was extremely creative in its inception. And that's just one nexus of activity; there are many.
I almost completely agree with this. I think yummyfajitas' key point rests on the "willing to pay for" part.
The number of things that others do that I am willing to pay for drops as more and more "stuff" become abundant. I generally accept that wants are unlimited but attention is not and free stuff increasingly taxes attention to the point that working to earn additional money to buy more stuff has an attention-denominated opportunity cost.
Good enough is the enemy of better. What happens when people don't feel that the things people are doing to create value are no longer considered valuable to motivate people to keep people from generating that value for monetary reasons? At a macroeconomic scale, either some other extrinsic motivators must appear or we need to be intrinsically motivated in creating ever more value.
In human society, there are a practically unbounded number of things that humans can do that other humans would be willing to pay for. The same cannot be said for horses, which have zero ability in human society to find new ways to create value for humans and thereby for themselves.
To use your notation, when N_horse slumps toward zero, no horse can do anything about it. But when N_human declines, the displaced humans can. Humans can increase their N, horses cannot.
Because it is infinite. We have a kind of imagination and creativity that horses lack.
Look at the arts -- particularly the modern ones of music and filmmaking. Can you not see that there will always be room for songs and movies that say something truly new about the world we live in? I suppose you could wave your hands and say that's all the "content industry" and counts as only one "thing", but I don't think that's fair. Great (or even good) works of art enrich our lives in different ways. "Content" is not a single commodity, like gasoline, of which we only need a certain amount.
And it's obviously not limited to the arts. Every significant new Internet business changes the landscape, creating new opportunities for others.
The silver lining in the cloud of this recession, I think, is that collectively we have a lot more free time. As the OP suggests, perhaps some of this would be well spent in face-to-face interactions. But you can also see people being forced by circumstances to reach into themselves and come up with new ways to create value. Oh, they're on a small scale, mostly; I'm not saying everyone who sits down to write a novel is going to create something as successful as Harry Potter. But they are new.
Can you not see that there will always be room for songs and movies that say something truly new about the world we live in?
No, I can't see this. I think it quite likely that fairly quickly, we will reach the point where existing art is sufficient to satisfy most people. At some point, the quantity of good art will be vastly larger than the amount of consumption any human can do in a lifetime.
And even if this is false, what happens when machines do just as good a job at creating art as humans do? Do you believe some sort of "meta-art" exists that machines will not be able to perform?
At some point, the quantity of good art will be vastly larger than the amount of consumption any human can do in a lifetime.
Oh, I think we passed that point a while ago. I certainly don't have time for all the art I would like to experience. But: so what? Just because a given piece of art finds a relatively small audience, that doesn't mean it's not valuable to those people. We have 7 billion people on this planet now. If you release a music album, and you get .0004% of the world's population to pay $5 each for it, that's $140k, which after production expenses should be enough for you to eat for a year. Tweak the numbers if you like, but we're still looking at needing less than one person in 10^5 to pay for your album in order for you to make a living. If you reach one in 10^4, you're doing well.
Do you believe some sort of "meta-art" exists that machines will not be able to perform?
Yes, actually, I do. Machines will never possess original creativity.
I can't prove this to you. We'll just have to wait and see.
But there certainly aren't any counterexamples to be found yet.
Machines will never possess original creativity.
I can't prove this to you. We'll just have to wait and see. But there certainly aren't any counterexamples to be found yet.
True, but this is again the logical fallacy I was warning against: there was no machine faster than a horse, therefore there never can be.
I believe it because the alternative – that humans cannot find new ways to create value for themselves – is harder to believe.
Assume that there is a point in time in which humans run out of ways to create value for themselves. If you were among the displaced masses, wouldn't you like to have work? Oops. We've just created a new way to create value: by helping you find work. Which contradicts our initial hypothesis.
In other words, the reason I believe that humans can create value for themselves for as long as they want is that the alternative requires me to believe things that are absurd.
I don't think that's a contradiction. If there's no more ways to create value, then what work are people going to help others find? If there is no work to be found, then those people aren't creating value, either.
Why is it absurd? What's your opinion about people that have currently been displaced from their jobs/industry (eg the auto industry), or any other long-term unemployed? Are they just lazy people that haven't found any other ways to create value?
Let’s be clear about what we’re discussing here. The author of the original article suggested that efficiency was a problem because it threatened employment. I believe this claim to be false because, as I’ve written in earlier comments, when improved efficiency allows fewer humans to produce the same value as before, the humans who are no longer needed to produce that “old” value are freed to create new value. This will always be so.
To see why, imagine the opposite: that at some point in time there are displaced masses who are cut off from society because they cannot create new value. But don’t those masses need and want? Don’t those masses have the ability to do things for one another? Of course, they do. So, in this imaginary future, what’s preventing them from creating new value within their own cut-off society?
It’s not efficiency.
It’s people. It’s people who have written the game’s rules, perhaps unknowingly, to prevent the displaced masses from creating their own value. It’s the displaced masses, themselves, who demand that society turn back the clocks. And this future is easy to imagine, for this future is already here.
Which brings me to your question about the auto industry and today’s long-term unemployed. Efficiency isn’t what’s keeping these people out of work. It’s people: politicians and union bosses who sing sweet lies, the unemployed themselves who believe the lies, and executives who drain value from companies for personal gain. These are real problems that keep people out of work.
But efficiency isn’t among them. It’s an imaginary problem.
I get the argument, although the blog you linked to seems broken right now (the graph doesn't show the data that he claims it to show).
I agree: at some point we'll run out of things to employ humans doing.
The big question for society is, what will happen when we reach that point? The relevant evidence is that humans care much more about the continued existence of other humans, to a much stronger degree than they do (in general) about horses.
I am trying this thought experiment: Imagine a human in a position to decide whether to spend a lot of money on saving their horse. Imagine the same human now facing the same choice for saving their neighbor. The arguments are quite different, and it feels morally wrong to apply the economic argument to humans.
The graph shows machines already overtook horses and will eventually overtake humans (even if it hasn't happened yet). No data is graphed, it's just a schematic diagram (as is evidenced by the lack of axis labels).
You are correct that humans may feel more charitable towards each other than towards horses. But the point is that mass unemployment is likely to occur and this will be a completely new phenomenon. I.e., we can't look at the past to predict the future.
I think you're being a bit naive in assuming that when the massive and sustained unemployment (by today's definition) happens, wealthy people will be in a position to "save" their neighbors by throwing a few bucks their way.
If we don't deal with this situation before it happens (and, IMO, this shift has already started though it'll be decades before it takes full shape) there will be bloody revolution to the point of societal collapse. Having a bank account with a lot of zeros in it won't count for much by then.
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/human_vs_machine_prog...
So far, we've invented whole new things to work on. There is no compelling reason to believe that will continue to happen.
Incidentally, that scenario hasn't always left biological entities better off. When technology reduced the wages for travel below the level of horse subsistence, the result was massive deaths among horses. But humans are special, right? That can't ever happen to us.