Fantastic article that im sharing parts of to my kids. My 20 year old is getting educated in media and the technology around it, I can see it being eaten by AI but also can see knowledge from it being very useful in adapting to the mess coming. Another kid wants to become a lawyer - big shortage of those strangely. Again AI could take it over, but knowing how to maneuver in legal circles should be valuable for a long time. The youngest wants to do arts, something AI tries but often fails at, she is 11 so by the time she has to choose it'll be more clear hopefully.
Funny, in the 80s I saw programming as a dead end as i figured we'd make programs that could make other programs, heck as programmers how could we resist making ourselves obsolete? Just our nature. Took longer than I expected.
The 80s bit is the good part. Of course we were going to build the thing that replaces us, we were never going to be able to resist it. Took thirty years longer than you thought and about ten years less than most people expected. Arts at 11 is a reasonable bet too. The thing these systems are worst at isn't making the work, it's knowing what's worth making.
Synthetic employees reporting to synthetic managers, in virtual office spaces or linked to robotic machines in the physical world, all busily providing goods and services for sale, with better profit margins for their owners than the meatbags produced.
From the capital investor’s viewpoint this sounds wonderful. Until…
The now unemployed meatbags have no income or savings to purchase more goods and services. The synthetic employees don’t have a salary or the need for goods and services to purchase.
Only the capital investors and owner class have the ability to purchase goods and services.
What’s the new stable state for this economy? What happens to those without the ability to be in the investor/owner class?
Do we magically promote the displaced population of Earth into the investor/owner class? Oh, horrors, socialism! Or do the machines do the obvious optimization, using another surplus resource as feedstock for the system?
That's the slide nobody puts at the end of the deck. You can't strip out the wages and keep the demand, because the demand was made of wages. Every previous wave destroyed jobs and created others, and the honest position is that we don't actually know this one does. Meatbags is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that comment, by the way.
“Meatbags” is a bit of a joke term within software engineering, to refer to humans. I believe it originated with the “Futurama” cartoon, as a term of derision used by a very cynical AI equipped robot character.
But, that aside, the problem we will face as AI and robotic systems displace more and more people is real. Do all profits from replacing people with machines fall to the remaining investor class? As “human-like” intelligences replace people, what are the realistic odds that those people can find or create new jobs with equivalent income that they can fill?
When we faced the development of automated factory production the argument was made that the employees were being freed from drudge work and could shift to work that only humans could do. Some moved to planning and organizing within businesses, some moved to service-related tasks, and some learned to tend the machines. This new class of automation replaces many of these jobs, once again displacing workers.
What new careers will these people shift to? Or are we entering an era where widespread employment growth no longer tracks with capital growth and expenditure? Interesting times…
I knew the term, I promise. Twenty five years in software. I was being glib about the fact that it started life as a robot's word for us and we have all cheerfully adopted it about ourselves, which feels like conceding something rather early in the negotiation.
On the real question, I've no answer and I'm suspicious of anybody who says they have. The freed from drudgery argument worked because there was somewhere else to go. What's different this time is that the somewhere else is the thing being automated.
Interesting times is doing as much heavy lifting as meatbags was.
Fantastic article that im sharing parts of to my kids. My 20 year old is getting educated in media and the technology around it, I can see it being eaten by AI but also can see knowledge from it being very useful in adapting to the mess coming. Another kid wants to become a lawyer - big shortage of those strangely. Again AI could take it over, but knowing how to maneuver in legal circles should be valuable for a long time. The youngest wants to do arts, something AI tries but often fails at, she is 11 so by the time she has to choose it'll be more clear hopefully.
Funny, in the 80s I saw programming as a dead end as i figured we'd make programs that could make other programs, heck as programmers how could we resist making ourselves obsolete? Just our nature. Took longer than I expected.
The 80s bit is the good part. Of course we were going to build the thing that replaces us, we were never going to be able to resist it. Took thirty years longer than you thought and about ten years less than most people expected. Arts at 11 is a reasonable bet too. The thing these systems are worst at isn't making the work, it's knowing what's worth making.
Synthetic employees reporting to synthetic managers, in virtual office spaces or linked to robotic machines in the physical world, all busily providing goods and services for sale, with better profit margins for their owners than the meatbags produced.
From the capital investor’s viewpoint this sounds wonderful. Until…
The now unemployed meatbags have no income or savings to purchase more goods and services. The synthetic employees don’t have a salary or the need for goods and services to purchase.
Only the capital investors and owner class have the ability to purchase goods and services.
What’s the new stable state for this economy? What happens to those without the ability to be in the investor/owner class?
Do we magically promote the displaced population of Earth into the investor/owner class? Oh, horrors, socialism! Or do the machines do the obvious optimization, using another surplus resource as feedstock for the system?
Interesting times ahead.
That's the slide nobody puts at the end of the deck. You can't strip out the wages and keep the demand, because the demand was made of wages. Every previous wave destroyed jobs and created others, and the honest position is that we don't actually know this one does. Meatbags is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that comment, by the way.
“Meatbags” is a bit of a joke term within software engineering, to refer to humans. I believe it originated with the “Futurama” cartoon, as a term of derision used by a very cynical AI equipped robot character.
But, that aside, the problem we will face as AI and robotic systems displace more and more people is real. Do all profits from replacing people with machines fall to the remaining investor class? As “human-like” intelligences replace people, what are the realistic odds that those people can find or create new jobs with equivalent income that they can fill?
When we faced the development of automated factory production the argument was made that the employees were being freed from drudge work and could shift to work that only humans could do. Some moved to planning and organizing within businesses, some moved to service-related tasks, and some learned to tend the machines. This new class of automation replaces many of these jobs, once again displacing workers.
What new careers will these people shift to? Or are we entering an era where widespread employment growth no longer tracks with capital growth and expenditure? Interesting times…
I knew the term, I promise. Twenty five years in software. I was being glib about the fact that it started life as a robot's word for us and we have all cheerfully adopted it about ourselves, which feels like conceding something rather early in the negotiation.
On the real question, I've no answer and I'm suspicious of anybody who says they have. The freed from drudgery argument worked because there was somewhere else to go. What's different this time is that the somewhere else is the thing being automated.
Interesting times is doing as much heavy lifting as meatbags was.