What would happen in a society where human labor is replaced by machines?

[DesiPower]

Wall-E?

 

[ninaholic37]

It has already begun; there is now a vending machine that dispenses hot French fries:

http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/06/theres-now-a-vending-machine-that-dispenses-hot-french-fries/

How long do they take to cook? I tried a pizza from vending machine once and it was still frozen when it came out and tasted terrible lol

 

[PowerEngineer]

I have also been pondering this question.

To make the issue clearer, let's presume for the sake of argument that we reach the point where everything needed to provide for the earth's population (say 10 billion people) is produced by massive self-managing automation/robotics that requires only one billion "workers" to maintain it all. What can the 9 billion non-workers do to "earn" a share of what is being produced when there is nothing of value that they can contribute to the production process?

It would seem that the whole idea of "earning a living" through work would have to be rethought. Maybe everyone serves a mandatory 10-year stint as a "worker" in return for "everything" over a 100-year life span. Social Security on steroids!

What worries me is that the traditional hard-core capitalistic answer is to let the 9 billion starve because they have nothing of value to contribute. D:

I think it's clear that we are now moving in this direction. I'm not unhappy that I'll be long gone before we get there. Good luck to you young whipper-snappers!

 

[pcgeek11]

The OP has obviously never worked with / on robotic devices...

 

[MongGrel]

The OP has obviously never worked with / on robotic devices...

Yep.

It's all ready well on it's way.

 

[mikeford]

What is the difference between robot factory and factory in some other country?

The 20" Lasko box fans that Home Depot sells on sale for $13 could be made in a robot factory or just a place with cheap labor. Most of it I think is robot or automated assembly.

People continue to do what the machines are not practical to do. Taxi drivers are about to drastically be reduced by self driving cars.

People lacking ability to earn minimum wage will not have jobs and depend on some type of welfare system paid for by those who still work.

High demand skills will form a fringe below the wealthy, sort of a buffer zone between the rich and the non working.

 

[soccerballtux]

How long do they take to cook? I tried a pizza from vending machine once and it was still frozen when it came out and tasted terrible lol

seriously? lmao

 

[MrPickins]

Which ones though?
Prostitutes, maybe? Some of those jobs can be replaced, but I'm sure there'll always be a market for the human touch.
Up until they make "suitable" androids for the job.


Once we've got computer systems that can truly learn things on their own, and recognize patterns and use that knowledge, it will be possible to automate a lot of formerly untouchable white-collar jobs.
Even before they reach human-level intelligence, they'll still be close enough to automate away some jobs.

(Then the next big economic impact will come when these learning systems are turned loose on the stock market, and start to analyze and find complex correlations that no human mind could comprehend. )

I think you vastly overestimate what AI will be capable of in the near future.

 

[lxskllr]

I think you vastly overestimate what AI will be capable of in the near future.

I don't see where he said "near future". That's an indistinct term anyway. I don't consider 100 years to be an especially long time, and I think AI/robotics will be quite advanced by then. 100 years past, the Victrola was the hot new shit.

 

[Muse]

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

Bend over... ah, that feels good.

How long do they take to cook? I tried a pizza from vending machine once and it was still frozen when it came out and tasted terrible lol

I have not bought anything from a vending machine in probably over 10 years. I'm in search of God and I always pack a lunch.

However, I have a bread making machine, a new toaster oven, 6 computers, a car, a bike, roller skates, a self defrosting fridge/freezer, a smartphone, an HDTV card in my computer, a big screen projection system and a library card... life is good. Actually, life sucks, uh, what was I thinking?

 

[Muse]

(Then the next big economic impact will come when these learning systems are turned loose on the stock market, and start to analyze and find complex correlations that no human mind could comprehend. )

They're doing that now, it was a 60 Minutes feature. It's not super intelligence, it's taking advantage of the stock market by getting a split second advantage in seeing price swings before everyone else does. If you (a machine!) can do that it can place trades to skim profits off the internet of equity markets. There's more crooked than you can imagine in this world. My advice, keep your nose clean, the law of karma says that gives you the best odds of being happy and healthy by and by.

 

[Ns1]

(Then the next big economic impact will come when these learning systems are turned loose on the stock market, and start to analyze and find complex correlations that no human mind could comprehend. )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading

 

[Jeff7]

I think you vastly overestimate what AI will be capable of in the near future.

It seems that quite a few well-educated people in that particular field also do.

Near future? Probably not in a few years. 20-30 years? There'll be a lot more "untouchable" or "safe" jobs finding themselves automated.

Hell, I can do the work of a room full of draftsmen. Want to make a few revisions to an engineering drawing? No need to scrap half the set and start from scratch.
Or I can skip the draftsman stage for the most part and email a solid model directly to a machine shop in a few seconds, and have finished parts in a week.

I still have a job, but that room of drafters doesn't. I'm sure at one time, human computers were also working "safe" jobs that couldn't ever be automated. Now we can fit a few billion transistors into one or two cubic feet of space and sell it to a consumer.

They're doing that now, it was a 60 Minutes feature. It's not super intelligence, it's taking advantage of the stock market by getting a split second advantage in seeing price swings before everyone else does. If you (a machine!) can do that it can place trades to skim profits off the internet of equity markets. There's more crooked than you can imagine in this world. My advice, keep your nose clean, the law of karma says that gives you the best odds of being happy and healthy by and by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading

That's always struck me as a brute-force approach. I'm thinking more of a genuinely intelligent system that actively learns how to recognize new patterns, and to improve itself on the fly, and to make correlations between data and sophisticated predictions that a human would likely initially perceive as a series of errors.

It simply reacts faster than a human can react. Yes, I think it's a bullshit cheat of the system. ("Let's spend a hundred million dollars to move our business closer to the physical exchange so that we can get a better ping time." It's online gaming tactics, except you can skim billions off of the market with your ping times, and by DOS-attacking competitors with quote requests, all in a fast game of Hot Potato.) My understanding is that stocks are a way of raising funds in the present by selling partial of the company. Then it turned into executive compensation, incentivizing them not to increase the value of the company, but to increase the perceived value of the stock itself. And then high-speed trading decoupled stocks even further from the true value of the company, into a ping war with a high cost of entry.

I don't see where he said "near future". That's an indistinct term anyway. I don't consider 100 years to be an especially long time, and I think AI/robotics will be quite advanced by then. 100 years past, the Victrola was the hot new shit.

That's where my mind's at.
Go back 150 years and explain GPS to anyone.


"Special long-wavelength light shining from clocks 12,000 miles away in space will permit a small handheld device to speak instructions to you so that you can pilot a special carriage along a vast interstate highway system that spans the coast. The carriage is powered by small explosions that occur many hundreds of times per second. The clocks in space are special because they're moving fast, and time slows down when you move really fast, but it's alright because they compensate for that."


That would sound worse than someone today saying that computers will exceed the capabilities of the human brain in under 50 years.

(Yes, I said something about 20-30 years earlier. You don't need human-level intelligence to automate jobs. Pattern recognition can be extremely powerful, even if it's not an intelligent system, though that skill is a very important part of intelligence as we understand it. Patterns are useful ways of effectively compressing data to manage it more easily.)

 

[Muse]

There will be different types of jobs, that's all. Technology and the companies creating said technology create new jobs that didn't exist before. Things need servicing and repair. People need customer service, technical support, etc. As telecommunications/networking companies and tech evolve and expand, those places need more people too, and it's always a hierarchy ranging from entry level upwards. They always need peasants for something or other.

change is scary! but sometimes you gotta make an effort to evolve with the times.
that's life!

Well, yes, this is the perspective. Just like what we have happening today was only partially knowable 50 years ago, what we'll have in 40 more years is only partially now knowable because a lot of things will have evolved in ways we simply can't know, and it is exponential unless we get thrown a curve like a nuclear war or a killer disease we can't deal with. Even the global warming syndrome might prove catastrophic in combination with other factors.

 

[smackababy]

Hopefully, all the poor people (those with little to no real skills or drive to obtain said skills) die off.

Unfortunately, since we've allowed them to outnumber those with skills like 1000 to 1, they will likely riot if we decide to stop supporting them with resources. Eventually, regardless of how we act, we will run out of resources and most will die anyway. If we are lucky, this will start to happen before we eliminate all guns, so some group (the group with the guns, btw) can take over and ration the limited remaining resources in some way (likely, not the best or least selfish, but it is better than a free for all).

 

[SSSnail]

You'll still have to eat. You'll need money for food. Hookers and blow aren't free, either.

 

[John Connor]

It will be just technicians, IT and robot makers. But when robots can make themselves you can kiss your ass good bye. LOL