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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 6, 2017 - 07:13pm PT
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negociate
machines do a pretty good job of spell-checking, if you let them
the cycle time of the work of the 1990s to a commercial product that IBM and Microsoft, et al. are racing to sell is an interesting topic in and of itself.
in part a large fraction of the people haven't a clue that this is going on... and another large fraction of people are making a good living doing it.
So let's take a 20 year cycle time, less than a career lifetime, and the machines will push the design cycle to respond to even short time periods, from some academic arcana to a "must have" product for every business.
Which means that the likelihood of being displaced from one of those targeted jobs is quite large.
While there are still jobs for fixing stuff: people, plumbing, cars... etc., and still jobs for building stuff, we are increasingly coming to a time when we pretty much have all the stuff we need.
When that happens, globally, the production of stuff is no longer a major part of the world economy.
It's not like we need a lot of steel rail anymore in this country... we have all we're going to need...
What is the post-consumer economy look like?
What do people do for jobs?
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
Nothing creative to say
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That rig walks in snow better than I do!
"we pretty much have all the stuff we need"
We've had pretty much all the stuff we need.
Leisure is not a problem of scarcity, but of distribution. If you take my meaning.
There are sufficient food stuffs and housing to cover everyone's heads and fill their bellies. But allocation isn't merely transportation.
Rik's point about predatory global social systems and capital extraction will be blunted more specifically by legal systems that legitimizes only certain social modes of being.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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I was starting to write a joking post but that thing scares the bujeezus out of me. I am not afraid of the technology itself. I understand the intellectual impulse to tie it all together and solve the problems. But I am afraid of what the humans who control it will use it for.
It's a slow motion train-wreck, beyond trainwreck, end of civilization, with most people laughing and incredulous when you point it out.
I so wish our emotional development could keep pace with our intellectual development. And in the next cycle of repeating history, get ready for the commercials that extol the virtues of fighting robots, how they will save millions of lives by taking people out of war.
When I was growing up, I had a "History Day" project on Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling. He was an inventor and a medical doctor. He designed the modern machine gun. What was his motivation?
It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished
Imagine his forehead slap if you could sit down and have a conversation with him about our world today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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I wonder when the startling parallels between sci-fi dystopias and our reality become so blaringly unavoidable that the cognitive dissonance is too much for anyone to handle?
Perhaps people will still be cheering for the good jobs created when we need a new pod factory to hold humans when the machines are looking for alternative sources of energy after we block out the sun to stop their solar powered advance? By the time we get there, I'll be ready to be plugged into the Matrix. Reality just won't be worth it any more. Probably my kids or grandkids' problem though- not mine.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Bionic are the next big wave in robotics imo... people predisposed and prewired to command legions of robots.
No need, machine learning based orchestration already does this far better and more efficiently than any human could regardless of how they might be wired.
Oh, robots are just big iPhones with a 10-minute battery life. Both mobile energy / battery technology and utility-scale energy storage are the biggest hurdles facing us at the moment and is stalling technological advancement in all kinds of fields.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Pardon me, but you people seem to portray a world where vendors / supply are pushing change forward. That’s not what I see. I see people calling for or responding kindly to change. It’s not that someone or group is driving the bus; it’s who wants to get on or use to their advantage that bus. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Really, . . . who really needs a smartphone? YOU do, don't you?
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Ed, this subject is critically important, and thanks for bringing it up.
There are many example of huge effects being created by adoption of technology, and they are hurtling towards us at warp speed!
The often discussed transition to autonomous trucks will have a HUGE impact on trucking jobs.
I've been suggesting for some time a change at the Medical School level. Most of the 1,000 or so lectures are TERRIBLE. But some are wonderful, and actually motivate people in the direction of their lives. The 1,000 lectures are pretty much standardized, and all medical schools record them for later viewing. If you take any individual lecture, at the 300-odd medical schools you will probably find a bell-shaped curve on the quality of the lecture---a few brilliant, most mediocre, some terrible.
Identify the brilliant lectures for each of the 1,000, and use those to educate nationally.
You will produce MUCH better physicians, the professors who are actually interested in teaching will teach, and the vast majority, that are there to do research, will not be distracted by the class they have to teach that they couldn't care less about. (the vast majority)
Transformation.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Someday soon we're going to storm Boston Scientific with pitchforks and torches. Kill every mother's son in the building, too.
That sh#t is unholy, brother.
DMT, just make sure you get the right target. Boston DYNAMICS makes the robots, Boston SCIENTIFIC makes medical products!
:)
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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I can certainly see those robots in a wide variety of functions, though.
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Jon Beck
Trad climber
Oceanside
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That dude with the hockey stick better hope that robot did not have facial recognition. Creepy video
As jobs become fewer and higher paying the market will have to adjust. Time share jobs is one possibility. When my son was in kindergarten he had two teachers that time shared the job, they both had kids. It was a public school too, very cool idea.
One radical idea is to pay people not to work, sort of like paying farmers not to grow crops. The idea was floated in Switzerland, but was voted down.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/05/news/economy/switzerland-basic-income-referendum/
The right wing reactionaries will reject it as communism. How does Chuck Grassley defend farm subsidies with a straight face? Stupid question, cuz he receives subsidies himself, and his buddies in Iowa receive over a billion a year.
How much would they have to pay you to not work, how could we make it work? Maybe you have to work for 5 years before you are eligible to get a subsidy. One problem would be the underground economy.
Mechanization is not necessarily more efficient in the long term. The logging industry was destroyed by mechanization. The Amish are the most effecient farmers.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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I can certainly see those robots in a wide variety of functions, though.
Humanoid robotic forms are a solution in search of a problem for the most part. Other and more task-specific robotic forms are usually much better suited to any given job. The whole humanoid thing is more and exploration of ourselves than something that's going to be a commercial success anytime soon if ever.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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[quote]
One radical idea is to pay people not to work, sort of like paying farmers not to grow crops. The idea was floated in Switzerland, but was voted down.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/05/news/economy/switzerland-basic-income-referendum/[/quote]
The more interesting idea (at least to me) is not paying people not to work, but rather is the so-called "basic income," where everyone gets something like a government stipend, regardless of whether they work and regardless of any other wealth.
Among other possible benefits, the basic income could spur innovation as people will be free to pursue whatever ventures seem like a good idea (and for which they can get funding), without the worry of having to go to a normal job everyday to avoid starvation.
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fear
Ice climber
hartford, ct
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War is baked in at this point.
Get the proles to kill each other en masse over colorful flags/imaginary supernatural friends/skin color/etc....
Works everytime too starting such conflagrations but the key is controlling the genocide that results. Tricky to do in a nuclear age where the planet might be rendered useless to all.
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Mike Friedrichs
Sport climber
City of Salt
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Interesting that this is thought of as something new when Marx wrote very eloquently about it before the industrial revolution. He not only predicted that jobs would be lost to technology but also wrote about its effect on job satisfaction and the human condition.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Interesting that this is thought of as something new when Marx wrote very eloquently about it before the industrial revolution. He not only predicted that jobs would be lost to technology but also wrote about its effect on job satisfaction and the human condition.
There was a copy of Das Kapital in my high school, and I remember trying to read it. I suspect I was one of maybe 5 hands that touched it over the years I was there, including the librarian. I confess to being quickly lost, and not having the passion or maturity or patience to get through it. Perhaps if it was required reading it would have overcome my personal limitations and made me a wiser person.
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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In retrospect it's a simple problem. We had the information and we didn't act! Foresight - what's the problem? In retrospect it's easy.
Humans and their silly survivor biased belief processes.... I just can't get over how clever I am for evolving these opposable thumbs!
My dog though is still pissing me off. What's wrong with him??!!
Love you, humans!
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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I see two main solutions within the next 1-3 generations:
Nutjob's post above, that starts with this quote, is interesting, and he's hardly the only one who's thought this way. But anyone who believes walling out (or exterminating) the filthy masses of the poor should read "The Dosadi Experiment" by Frank Herbert.
Most of you know Herbert for his mega-famous "Dune". And there's a lesson about trying to wall off or exterminate the masses in that book. But "The Dosadi Experiment" takes it further.
Probably available for about $0.01 + shipping on Amazon, or a couple of bucks on your Kindle.
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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Retrospect is easy, and we learn our lessons in foresight from fiction. Sounds about right, for humans. But I don't expect the computers to be so easily amused.
The thing that has biased our evolved human belief processes in "irrational" ways is (human) survival bias, and we might not be as effective at teaching the computers to be as fussed about that as 4 billion years of evolution has taught us to be.
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