Topic: Technological unemployment is (almost) here - page 43. (Read 88276 times)

Just imagine on a island with only 2 people A and B. If A have super high efficiency and can produce anything they need, then it seems that the other one B don't need to work at all

But who receive the ownership of those products usually can decide how to use it. So if A is making all the production, he has the right to keep everything, thus B will starve. B's survival purely depends on A and A might keep B living but give him only enough to keep his life

Someone will argue that B can make his own living by work by himself, but after A became very rich, he already bought all the land on the island thus B have to pay A rent. B's miserable production have to be given to A to pay his rent, but since A already have everything, he accept B's product just as a symbolic payment (He don't need B's product anyway), just to keep B alive

That's what happened in reality. In order to counter this inevitable result, since last century, government established social security to protect the people who already lost the possibility to make a living by their own: A were taxed and part of his production were re-allocated to B, but that process still don't change the nature of unemployment which is caused by A's super high productivity

Basically put, you can not violate the ownership, that will punish the motivation of honest working. But if you respect each one's work, some of the people will become super rich and some others will lose everything, to its root, this is caused by each people's different personality

It is absolutely a fallacy, correctly called the "Luddite fallacy," and it isn't so much an economic fallacy as a logical one. The underlying mistake is to view jobs as an end in themselves. A job is a task that people want done so much that they are willing to pay for it. A society with no jobs is - by definition - a society where NOTHING NEEDS DOING because that society is so incredibly efficient that EVERY NEED ANYONE HAS IS ALREADY SATISFIED. Needless to say, such a society would be paradise.

Even just getting close to that situation looks like this: your life is already pretty great, you can get your basic needs and a whole lot more met by working only a few hours a week, even at very low wages since everything is incredibly cheap thanks to the efficiency of automation. If you can't work at all, everyone else is so rich and stuff is so cheap that their proverbial coins in your tin are already enough to live better than the average American does today.

Need I carry on? In a free market where working is not prohibited in any way, a lack of jobs is a lack of unfulfilled needs, which is a utopia. The absolute opposite of people being "left in the dust." They're instead left wanting for nothing. Of course in the real world there are always more "last 1%" services people want provided. If my life is already near perfect, I'd pay people a nice wage just to identify tiny itches on my body and scratch them so I don't have to take my hands away from the keyboard while writing posts. We'll realistically never run out of things to employ people for, and if we did that means we are in heaven.

No solution is needed to this "problem," and the poll is a false dichotomy. The solution is to let it happen, kick back, and enjoy sipping margaritas on the beach while robots do (almost) all the work for you.

I don't think you're factoring in that when strong AI arrives, we'll be able to create cheap copies of the better person/AI. So not only is Bob better than you at everything, Bob can also make as many copies of himself as he wants for $1000 each, and pay them only enough to keep the AI running, which likely will cost far less than what you'd want as wages. In that case, Bob is better off never hiring you for anything.


How do you know that the cheapness of goods will be enough to make up for the reduced value of your labor? What you need to look at is the ratio of your productivity to your cost of living, compared to the productivity of an AI to its cost of living. As mentioned above, the AI will likely need far less capital to 'live' than you will. The AI will be paid more than you because it's more productive, but it will be paid barely enough to survive. In that case, you won't be able to support yourself.

the past 2 revolutions created bubbles and ended in recession followed by world wars, why would now be any different? The first 2 steps have already happen and some may say we're living ww3

here is a succinct and well polished video that explains why even if one person is better at literally everything than another person it still makes economic sense for both of them to work and trade with each other (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0H7r_Dl1CQ). This means that as long as people want to work, there will always be work available.

As for the issue of not being payed enough to survive, that will be entirely offset by the fact that the same productivity that has displaced them has also made the products that they consume proportionately cheaper, after all that was the reason why the entrepreneur chose to displace them to begin with.

No guarantee, but I think it's likely that sometime between 2020 and 2030 computing will move away from silicon semiconductors. Possible alternatives include graphine semiconductors, optical computing, or single-atom transistors:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/nanotechnology/a-singleatom-transistor

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/persuading-light-to-mix-it-up-with-matter-1024.html

A rounding error compared to the power of transistor density.  For the last 70 years the overhwelming majority of computing power increase from the Intel 4004 to Intel Xeon Phi has been the transistor count increasing or more importantly the transistor count at constant cost.  It has increased from 2300 to 5 billion.   That is an almost hard to comprehend 2,300,000x "bonus" to performance.  Yeah along the years there have been marchitecture improvements but if we relied on them alone we would be lucky to Intel 386 level computing power (at current prices).  Of course if you are willing to pay 1000x the price you might get 486 level computing power.

My point is there is no guarantee that computing power will grow exponentially per unit of cost beyond 2020 to 2030 (depends on which timeline you think is most probable).  We may see computing grow significantly slower something more in line with other industries where a 5% to 8% year over year performance gain is considered a solid showing. 

it will be a VERY long time before machines become better at literally everything. Even when machines are making pretty decent artwork, there will still be a VERY long gap before machines become better critics than humans. So like say you have your favorite show and it gets discontinued, so you tell hall 9000 to continue it for you. For someone else who wants to know what media to consume, and has limited time on his hands, your reviews and critiques of hal 9000's productions would be a valuable asset to him.

at the point where there isnt even a market for human artists or human critics. well then things would be so fundamentally different its hard to contemplate. machines may just have their own society and we would assume the role to them that dogs and cats fill for us.