a wave of conflicting emotions

[callmeslick]

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/t ... er-n147796

I mean, technology is wonderful, but how many people lose jobs with this innovation? Then, the rational part of me starts debating their fate(and who among us thinks this won't happen in the next couple of decades?) against certain obvious public safety benefits, turnaround time gains, better traffic planning and flow patterns, etc, etc.
What I got to thinking, after switching from sweet tea to red wine on the porch was: the one tool of production that will be on the wane will be human labor, yet we keep producing more humans. That math doesn't end well. Comments awaited.

[Will Robinson]

Who gets to tell the Teamsters Union they wont be needed anymore?

[Top Gun]

As automation becomes more of a driving force in industry, I think we'll eventually come to a point in the future where some people will need to receive an automatic minimal living wage, because the blue-collar jobs they would have held otherwise no longer exist. There's certainly been no shortage of sci-fi dealing with societal reaction to autonomous machines. And if you get far-flung enough, you wind up in a post-scarcity society like Star Trek, where one would only need to work because they enjoy doing so.

[callmeslick]

interesting stuff, TG......may be away from the PC for a couple days for family stuff, but will try and ponder it all further. I wonder if you get to a post-scarcity position without radically increasing both food and water supplies, or decreasing population. That last part is always far more traumatic than mere words suggest.

[Krom]

Automation is the next generation of outsourcing to China. The short term/localized benefits of automation will always outweigh the long term costs to society for any individual or company looking at it. As advances in automation are made, I can imagine a future where there literally are no jobs for anyone and I'm not picturing a post-scarcity happy hippie society either. Our current global economic model/society simply does not work if you take the level of automation high enough. It is something we will have to address, and I'd imagine probably within the next 50-100 years as the pace of advances are rapidly accelerating. However it is late and I'm too tired to come up with any ideas at the moment, so I'm calling it a night.

[Ferno]

the old jobs may disappear, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. If anything, it should be viewed as a chance to re-train in order to fill the new jobs.

For example: If you're a car assembly line worker, you could use some of the skills you picked up in order to work on an assembly line that makes robots.

[Top Gun]

But then the robots start making other robots, and you get shifted to that other line, but then it happens again, and...

[Ferno]

People will always be needed somewhere on the line TG.

If not assemblers, then programmers. If not programmers; diagnosticians.

[roid]

Trucks replaced horse drawn carts. And in-turn horse drawn carts had replaced a line of idiots on a single path, each walking with a single bag of rice over their shoulders.

Scared of job losses? Replace all trucks with a million people walking the planet with bags of rice on their shoulders. Pretty ridiculous no? Yeah no kidding is it.
It is ridiculous to stop the march of technological progress for the sake of avoiding job redundancy. If you want some ridiculously time-wasting job to occupy your time, go push a boulder up a hill, it will be equally useful* to society as you manually piloting a truck in a world where computers can do that better and cheaper
*(ie: 100% useless, so go find something useful to occupy yourself with instead).

And hell, if you still need more jobs, replace all those people carrying rice-bags with 100 billion people each carrying A SINGLE GRAIN OF RICE EACH. There you go, lots more useless "jobs".
The moment computers can pilot trucks better&cheaper than humans, is the moment that manually piloting a truck is no longer a job but a hobby. The world does not owe you a job, and in a world where computers do a better&cheap job - you deserve to be paid a wage for piloting a truck about as much as i deserve to be paid a wage for sticking ice blocks up my arse

------------------

Thankfully, automation breeds automation, robots can build robots, so trucks and the robots that drive them become so affordable that - whereas in the past you could barely afford your truck repayments - now you (and anyone else interested) can afford to run your own automated trucking business with multiple cheap self-driving trucks. Hell, you might even make a robotic factory that can build the trucks.
You can't eat trucks, but you can eat food, and we'll soon enough have small-scale robotic farming in our own backyards. You won't need to buy food, you won't need to buy robots (your friend will give you one, they'll be so common they're free), you won't need to buy anything at all. The economy will collapse and we'll be perfectly fine, because we'll all have free robots which can build anything (including more robots) and we'll all be supplied with more goods than we can ever want for without spending a single dime. We'll all be the poorest of the poor, we will have literally NO MONEY, because money will be next to useless, since we can build absolutely everything we would ever need to buy.
Srsly, we will all be living in the most opulent luxury, without a material want in the world (for what does a modern-day billionaire want for?).

I honestly believe that this is where we are heading, very quickly. With the open-hardware movement; and self-replicating 3D printers getting continually cheaper, faster, more sophisticated, more powerful (can build more things, using more varied techniques, and in a greater variety of materials). I sometimes wonder if we're so close to the end-goal that it's worth just quitting your job and concentrating all your efforts on bringing about this crazy "technological rapture", that's how close it seems we are, it's practically touchable.
TL;DR: HELLO I'M HERE TO TELL YOU ABOUT ROBO-JESUS

[Will Robinson]

Tequila?

[woodchip]

Walter Reuther once said if you use all robots to make cars, who will be able to afford them.

[Tunnelcat]

Walter Reuther once said if you use all robots to make cars, who will be able to afford them.

OMG! Woody's blithering liberalspeak!

[roid]

Tequila?

Surely this is already made by automated process. And it could be miniaturized somewhat, some people make their own tequila right?
Then once the farming of the ingredients is also automated, you're laughing.

[Krom]

You are forgetting roid, that while you might be able to farm in your back yard, mining for and refining useful (but not necessarily rare) minerals is generally not a viable option. All the automation and 3D printers in the world aren't going to work without the necessary raw materials, which while they can be obtained with automated methods are still limited resources which cannot be freely obtained. So once everything is automated, most everyone will be dirt poor with the exception of the few people in control of the resources who will effectively own the entire planet.

[Spidey]

So if everyone had enough land to live off of, why would you even need automation, you could just do it the old fashioned way.

Unfortunately I could never produce enough food to live on with my meager land, and most people in this city have even less.

[roid]

So if everyone had enough land to live off of, why would you even need automation, you could just do it the old fashioned way.

How old-fashioned are we talking here? If you wanna do it for fun, go for it.
(sidenote: Although it's not necessary, we'll inevitably reach a level of AI automation where robots are quite similar to the slave labor of old. So that's a pretty old fashioned way to farm, no? )

But specialization & division of labor gives EVERYONE more spare time, it's one of the reasons we as a species do it, the axes-&-spears example used in this video is a pretty good explanation (around 5mins in):
[youtube]OLHh9E5ilZ4[/youtube]


Assuming we don't just fix the land/resource hording problem ("owning" anything is a bit ridiculous no?), one solution to land shortages is to farm underground (or vertical in skyscapers) with artificial lighting. We'll need plentiful cheap energy, so we'll just build that too.
Also why not goto space, since we'll all have Elon Musk's budget, but much better manufacturing capability.

rare minerals

I think we'd be less dependent on rare materials than we are now. Currently a lot of the minerals we are dependent on, we can route around, it's just (currently) expensive and complicated to do so, until the profit margin shifts and the industry follows along. In 3d printing adding complexity is free, some problems have overly-complex Rube Goldberg-esque solutions , but if they get the job done the customer doesn't care.
Both a simple solution and a complex solution take a mere button-press to print out.

[Krom]

I said "useful (but not necessarily rare) minerals", meaning I'm not even talking about the rare ones. Despite being the some of the most abundant minerals on earth, you still cannot just dig up relevant or useful quantities of aluminum or iron from your back yard. Even very common and abundant raw materials can be surprisingly hard to come by when you get right down to it, and that is before you even talk about refining them to a useful purity.

[roid]

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

In a future of post-scarcity abundance, why would people be super-protectionist rather than generous and care-free? IMO when people are prosperous, happy, safe, and secure, they act less like assholes. But you're suggesting the opposite: that they'd be even more protectionist than they are now. Do you really think so?
IMO it's when times are tough that people/communities shrink back to become insular and close bordered. When people are hungry, scared, or insecure.

If it does become a problem, the ability to "buy up" any resource should probably be illegal, coz what's the point other than to hurt society. It's like... purposefully creating enemies where none need exist, coz utopia is boring? Mutually Assured Starvation.
I have faith there'd be enough seeders to keep society going. Call it a hobby, but helping your fellowman is pretty satisfying.
Society already has various anti-monopolization protections, to help protect our existing capitalist economy from itself, ie: we try to stop single interests from controlling all of one resource, by blocking dangerous mergers etc. Point being, we kinda know what we're doing with this, so extending and adapting these lessons-learned into a new economic environment shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

I reckon we could still mine common-areas regardless, go deeper and deeper, into the earth's mantle, and create new mines deep in the oceans (another common area).

Also i think there'd be a lot of variety in manufacturing the necessities (bread & circuses, shelter & clothing) so that they could be made from a vast variety of raw materials, whatever's available.
Got sand? Here's your sandcastle and glass-robot farm. Got dirt? ★■◆● your dirt. Just kidding, here's a finely polished dirt-mansion.
In a pinch you could probably make everything from air and water, biomimicry man. ★■◆● lets be plagiarist santa.

[Will Robinson]

Here is something interesting on the topic.
Robots learned to lie to each other in order to achieve their programmed goal.

I don't have a clue as to how serious the 'potential threat' is but the guy doesn't seem like a fool. Maybe he is just operating more as an author than a scientist...selling books more than sharing sound insight...

[Tunnelcat]

Here is something interesting on the topic.
Robots learned to lie to each other in order to achieve their programmed goal.

I don't have a clue as to how serious the 'potential threat' is but the guy doesn't seem like a fool. Maybe he is just operating more as an author than a scientist...selling books more than sharing sound insight...

Does artificial intelligence learn to lie by itself, or is it learning from the humans who programed that intelligence?

[Will Robinson]

My guess is they weren't programmed to lie, merely never programmed to not lie. Having survival programmed as a goal doesn't instill morality.

[roid]

re: Will's article on AIs lying.

Evolution makes these things self-regulate. If you're too selfish and lie to everyone for your own benefit, and you're thus successful, you'll spread your lying genes, and soon everyone will be lying to everyone. And thus an adaptation to not trust anyone becomes beneficial (since everyone's a liar), so soon enough no-one trusts eachother. And you've turned a social species into a non-social species. The lying gene is no longer selected for because no-one trusts what anyone says anyway, so it becomes degraded and perhaps starts malfunctioning, it doesn't matter if if ppl lie or not though, coz no-one listens to eachother anymore.
Then some mutants start to trust eachother again, and maybe this time you get lucky and there's some extra adaptations in the mix which allow you to guess if someone is lying or not. Like maybe the mutants only trust their immediate family members, and maybe don't lie to their family members. And maybe they test eachother, so they can eject family members who start to lie to eachother within the family. This forms them into a sort of cooperative tribe with shared genes, with all of the cooperative benefits of trust internally, and all of the anti-liar-protections of distrust externally. Because they share genes, being immediate family, they are like a single super-organism.
It's all about the genes. Helping your family be successful is like being successful yourself, coz it spreads your genes. Well... not exactly your genes, but close enough for it to matter.

ps: the article's reference for that study is a popsci dead link, so i can't tell if they used evolutionary algorithms to evolve the AIs or not. They probably did, because i don't see how the study would be insightful (or possible) otherwise. And this sort of evolutionary algorithms are pretty common in AI research.