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OFFICIAL (Non-Drone) RISE OF THE ROBOTS Thread

TuffaloDeac10

TuffaloDeac10

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Lord Robert Skidelsky brings the heat on Project Syndicate:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/co...-in-a-world-of-automation-by-robert-skidelsky

What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of the robots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, this question crops up whenever unemployment rises....

As a recent article in the Financial Times points out, in two areas notoriously immune to productivity increases, education and health care, technology is already reducing the demand for skilled labor. Translation, data analysis, legal research – a whole range of high-skilled jobs may wither away. So, what will the new generation of workers be trained for?

Optimists airily assert that “many new types of job will be created.” They ask us to think of the lead drivers of multi-car road trains (once our electric cars join up “convoy-style”), big data analysts, or robot mechanics. That does not sound like too many new jobs to me.

Imagine a handful of technicians replacing a fleet of taxi drivers and truckers, a small cadre of human mechanics maintaining a full robot workforce, or a single data analyst and his software replacing a bank of quantitative researchers. What produces value in such an economy will no longer be wage labor...

It is not true that automation has caused the rise of unemployment since 2008. What is noticeable, though, is that structural unemployment – the unemployment that remains even after economies have recovered – has been on an upward trend over the last 25 years. We are finding it increasingly difficult to keep unemployment down...

No doubt some of the claims made for robots replacing human labor will prove as far-fetched now as they have in the past. But it is hard to resist the conclusion that “technological unemployment,” as John Maynard Keynes called it, will continue to rise, as more and more people become redundant.

The optimist may reply that the pessimist’s imagination is too weak to envisage the full range of wonderful new job possibilities that automation is opening up. But perhaps the optimist’s imagination is too weak to imagine a different trajectory – toward a world in which people enjoy the fruits of automation as leisure rather than as additional income...

Today we find a great deal of work-sharing in poor countries. It is the accepted means of making a limited amount of available work go around. Economists call it “disguised unemployment.”

If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemployment is a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape from poverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of “spreading the work” that still has to be done by human labor.

If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to ten, with each diminishing block of labor time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.
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I realize none of this has to do with Obama or Benghazi and might therefore be an unattractive topic of conversation for some here, but this is by far the most interesting thing around for me. What do y'all think about the rise of the robots?

More here:
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/john-quiggin-keynesian-utopiav1/
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/06/07/1031561/beyond-scarcity-the-parable-of-water/? (registration required)
http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-articles-about-robots-2012-12 (rather than linking direct to all PK's blog entries on the subject)

Lots of links:
http://theleisuresociety.tumblr.com/post/39057729530/the-tech-debate-blasts-off-a-linkfest
 
Junebug said:
Who makes the robots? More robots?
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Yes. And they will design better robots to build the the robots. Eventually, it will be robots all the way down.

Anybody here ever read Ian Banks' sci-fi Culture novels? They are about a far future society in which human labor has become completely unnecessary, all needs are provided for, and people find meaning in their lives by giving essentially unnecessary but entertaining voluntary assistance to the AIs that run the society. We are not anywhere near such a world now, but I am starting to wonder if we are beginning to see the conditions that could one day lead to such a situation. In a world where human labor loses value, you either have to set up a situation where people can share some portion of the wealth without working, or a Blade Runner world where the people that own the robots live on top of the towers and everyone else struggles for existence.
 
Junebug said:
Who makes the robots? More robots?
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Eventually.

923, haven't read those books. My take is there are basically two options: a Star Trek universe in which people use material abundance to go exploring the mysteries of the universe (or just chill by the pool) or a Star Wars universe in which an uneven distribution of capital allows some to have Death Stars while others have just about nothing.
 
The Banks novels take it one step further, and imagine AIs that have become so transcendently brilliant that humanity basically turns over management of the whole society to them. They take care of everybody.
 
Deacon923 said:
The Banks novels take it one step further, and imagine AIs that have become so transcendently brilliant that humanity basically turns over management of the whole society to them. They take care of everybody.
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Seems a little hopeful to me. I'd be surprised if AI gets to point of designing itself, not that I'm anything of a computer expert. OGD is planning to live forever; hopefully he can grace this thread with his presence.
 
yeah, obviously they are far out imaginative sci-fi novels, but they do make you think - what happens when humans become essentially superfluous to the operation of the economy, except to enjoy its products? That is happening, to some degree, right now to low-skilled workers in Western economies. They just don't serve much of a function in the economy, except to buy stuff with their paltry government benefits.
 
Deacon923 said:
The Banks novels take it one step further, and imagine AIs that have become so transcendently brilliant that humanity basically turns over management of the whole society to them. They take care of everybody.
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I doubt anyone has ever called Allen Iverson "transcendentally brilliant" very often.
 
RJKarl said:
I doubt anyone has ever called Allen Iverson "transcendentally brilliant" very often.
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There's nothing worse than when an under-performing athlete quotes the "Practice" speech at you. Makes me wish I could replace them with robots.
 
Which specific robots is everyone most looking forward to? If you had to choose between self-driving cars and tacocopter drones, which would you pick?
 
i would read the abbreviated version of the unibombers manifesto... though a sociopath, he has through provoking, even legit, arguments about inherent dangers in technology, as they apply today and in the near future, not 200 years from now.
 
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TuffaloDeac10 said:
Which specific robots is everyone most looking forward to? If you had to choose between self-driving cars and tacocopter drones, which would you pick?
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i want the nano virus and the blueprints for making the nano-antidote. then i will infect all of humanity except myself and the women.
 
i just want to be able to ask my computer questions like in Star Trek, obvi
 
I'm pumped for self-driving cars. They could eliminate the worst parts of strip malls and most the bad features of auto-oriented infrastructure. Could totally change commuting and they should also lead to safer roads, which is a really huge improvement for human well-being.
 
They have been talking about auto driven cars and "smart" freeways since the 60s.
 
RJKarl said:
They have been talking about auto driven cars and "smart" freeways since the 60s.
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Good for the 60s! They were on to something big!

Google has taken it upon itself to build a fleet of driverless cars. They are AWESOME. Your state just passed a law requiring the development of regulations for autonomous vehicles, as have Nevada and I think Florida. Major auto manufacturers are developing autonomous cars. Volvo has tested a linked-car convoy in Spain. This is going to be huge. Will obliterate taxi drivers, though.

 
They have had stories out here about the Google cars a couple of times.

One of fun "future of cars" things that used to be brought up was programming where you were going before getting on a freeway, turnpike, interstate and then having your car automatically hooked into a conveyor belt in the road that took you to where you were going. It would move at the speed limit.
 
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