- Sep 2019
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www.foreignaffairs.com www.foreignaffairs.com
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A clear distinction between job and home life erodes, moreover, as work becomes ad hoc and can be done anywhere, even as the so-called sharing economy marketizes a range of direct peer-to-peer transactions outside standard corporate channels.
In a world where you can learn nearly anything online, working from "home" is the best option, and generally makes people happier.
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As those platforms expand, everybody can sell things (on eBay), rent out a spare room (on Airbnb), perform a task (on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), or share a ride (on BlaBlaCar).
People are looking for "Side Hustles" instead of trying to work under someone else.
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Those who can intuit and develop such models and satisfy such needs—entrepreneurs—are the kings of this new world, putting their talents to use in listening to customers, identifying their unmet desires, and creating businesses to serve them.
I believe entrepreneurs have always been the kings of the world, in terms of innovations. but I believe with automation, these entrepreneurs could get the credit they may not have gotten in the previous years.
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In the shift from the industrial to the digital economy, many jobs and activities are being destroyed, but new wealth is also being created.
It depends on what jobs and activities that are being destroyed. If these jobs and activities put a burden on our society, who really cares if they get destroyed?
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Just as technological development is restructuring the economy, in other words, so the welfare state will need to be restructured as well, to adapt itself to the conditions of the day.
To me, this just sounds like people not wanting to help the less privileged. Hording money, and keeping it all for themselves, and then blaming the innocent for the problems of this country. It's okay to restructure the economy, as long as we are helping every citizen, and not just the 1%.
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But making the situation even worse will be the changing nature of employment.
Employment is constantly changing. Whether it's a company laying off to pay fewer people, or hiring people that will work for less money. Robots aren't to blame for greedy business owners trying to horde their wealth.
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“lousy jobs,”
The same article lists middling jobs as "mainly clerical jobs and skilled manual jobs in manufacturing", and lousy jobs as "mainly in low-paying service occupations".
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“lovely jobs”
I'm curious to know what Maarten Goos and Alan Manning calling Lovely Jobs. Google result found an article from December 2003 stating that "Lovely Jobs" were "mainly in professional and managerial occupations in finance and business services."
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Jules Verne
He vaguely predicted electric batteries, submarine advances, and the moon landing.
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The future is, at least to some extent, unknowable
But highly predictable.
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It has also allowed India to emerge as a significant exporter of technological services.
So, innovation is a good thing, and helps countries that maybe weren't as big as America, is what I'm gathering from this.
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the helpless
The helpless are only helpless because we've created a society that doesn't like helping the helpless, because no one sees the altruistic gains in it. With autonomous robots taking all the jobs, there is no competition to get a better job. Everyone is equal. No one is helpless.
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and the elderly is hard
I'm a firm believer that the elderly should get automated vehicles, which would allow them to travel, without putting people at risk, due to their declined senses.
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Achieving a two percent economy-wide annual rise in labor productivity may simply be a much bigger challenge than it was in the past.
This. This is exactly what should sum up this argument. We are a FAR bigger would than we were 100 years ago.
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Meanwhile, other, more recent general-purpose technologies—biotechnology and nanotechnology, most notably—have so far made little impact, either economically or more widely.
Not because it doesn't work, but because it's such a fresh invention. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it surely burned in one. Just like Aladdin and Jasmine so feverishly sang, "A whole new world A new fantastic point of view No one to tell us no Or where to go Or say we're only dreaming." That's the future we are working towards.
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The only recent connections between homes and the outside world are satellite dishes and broadband. Neither is close to being as important as clean water, sewerage, gas, electricity, and the telephone.
Nothing will ever be as valuable as clean water. It is the most important commodity in the world. However, with satellite dishes, and broadband, we can find out about the Hong Kong protests within a second. That is highly important. The internet is definitely in my top five most important inventions.
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Yet it is also essential to remember what has not changed to any fundamental degree. Transportation technologies and speeds are essentially the same as they were half a century ago. The dominant source of commercial energy remains the burning of fossil fuels—introduced with coal and steam in the First Industrial Revolution, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—and even nuclear power is now an elderly technology. Although fracking is noteworthy, it does not compare with the opening of the petroleum age in the late nineteenth century.
This has a lot to do with the politics behind it, and not so much the lack of innovation. Our current president is trying to revive a dying industry. It has almost nothing to do with the lack of innovation.
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He would have found that of 1940 beyond his imagination.
100 years of innovation will do that. I'm sure someone from 1840 could almost recognize 1940, but someone from 1940 shouldn't be able to recognize 2019.
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Over the past two centuries, historic breakthroughs have been responsible for generating huge unmeasured value. The motor vehicle eliminated vast quantities of manure from urban streets. The refrigerator prevented food from becoming contaminated. Clean running water and vaccines delivered drastic declines in child mortality rates. The introduction of running water, gas and electric cookers, vacuums, and washing machines helped liberate women from domestic labor. The telephone removed obstacles to speedy contact with the police, fire brigades, and ambulance services. The discovery of electric light eliminated forced idleness. Central heating and air conditioning ended discomfort. The introduction of the railroad, the steam ship, the motor car, and the airplane annihilated distance.
This illustrates to me that innovation is not only necessary, but unstoppable. It's going to happen whether we agree with it or not.
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The reason we are impressed by the relatively paltry innovations of our own time is that we take for granted the innovations of the past.
I don't think we take these innovations for granted. I just think that when you aren't born in a certain time, you can't necessarily give them the credit that those innovations deserve. We rarely talk about how indoor plumbing is the greatest invention of all time, but simply because we aren't writing books on it doesn't mean we are taking it for granted.
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an iPhone was out of reach for even the richest man on earth.
I'm not sure I get this. The first IPhone was released with a price tag of $499.00, which, with inflation calculated in, was $617.48. The richest man in 2007 was Bill Gates, who had $62.29 billion. He could literally buy over 100 million IPhones.
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They emphasize the plethora of cheap or free services (Skype, Wikipedia)
You'd think that with all these free services, you wouldn't have to go to college to follow your career. I'm gonna guess that robots will not have to go to college to become a doctor, and will they simply rely off the knowledge of the vast internet.
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soaring unemployment and inequality.
While I agree that there will be soaring unemployment, which I don't disagree with, I don't believe that there would be inequality. People choose to not allow others to be equal to them, but as history shows us, people do eventually become equal, whether through laws and regulations, or by people being decent people.
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Since Mary Shelley created the cautionary tale of Frankenstein, the idea of intelligent machines has also frightened us.
The story of Frankenstein can teach us a lot about our society, and the future of autonomous robots. The village didn't accept Frankenstein's monster, because it was different, and that humans shouldn't create life. By the end, Frankenstein's monster is crying over his creator, the only person who could truly help the monster. Frankenstein, through no choice of his own, has no one in this world, and decides to kill himself, because of him being an abortion, which were his own words. If people had accepted the monster, the story would be far different. The same can be said for people from other countries, and eventually, autonomous robots.
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not just strong and swift but also supremely intelligent and even self-creating.
That is a God. Beings that create beings, who create beings.
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People might never be immortal, but their lives would be healthy and long.
What is immortality? The very essence of immortality is not living forever, but your work living forever, and we can achieve immortality if future generations don't have to work due to automation.
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they started to hope for lives more like those of the gods their ancestors had imagined.
With full scale automation, we can become gods. Oxford defines God as the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being. If we create robots to work for us, then we become Gods.
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But hope in a better future is not uniquely American
Is hope in the future an American quality, though? Recent events seem to define the opposite.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's funny that F. Scott Fitzgerald believes so certainly about the future, when he came from the lost generation, not knowing the certainty of their future following WW1.
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- Aug 2019
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www.foreignaffairs.com www.foreignaffairs.com
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Having valuable labor to offer is not the only way to remain economically important; having capital to invest or spend also ensures continued relevance.
Is that really the only thing that matters in the world? Capital? This mindset gets us nowhere, except fearing that robots will take our jobs.
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If that happens, it will raise the specter that the world may not be able to maintain the industrial era’s remarkable trajectory of steadily rising employment prospects and wages for a growing population.
I don't believe jobs, at least right now, will disappear. some jobs will just evolve into other jobs. A robot might take the job of a janitor, while the janitor will be used at a job that may have evolved into something more important.
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but it seems unlikely that hardware, software, robots, and artificial intelligence will be able to take over from human labor within the next decade.
This is exactly the same mindset that people had when they thought that horses would stick around forever.
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We’re also able to formulate goals and then work out how to achieve them.
I think this is because we are able to ask why those goals are important, whereas a robot simply does as it's commanded.
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There’s no robot anywhere in the world right now, for example, that can sort a bowlful of coins as well as the average child or clear a table as well as a restaurant busboy.
It is correct to say that we don't have a restaurant busboy right now. However, it's only a matter of time until we invent a robot that will do exactly that.
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So another reason that humans won’t soon go the way of the horse is that humans can do many valuable things that will remain beyond the reach of technology.
I don't necessarily agree with this. Humans are always creating, and I think at some point, we will design a robot for literally every task imaginable.
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The animals were vital not only on farms but also in the country’s rapidly growing urban centers, where they carried goods and people on hackney carriages and horse-drawn omnibuses.
In a time when weaponry was vastly increasing, the people of the time had to have some kind of idea that transportation was going to advance beyond horses.
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Perhaps some innovative humans would still be required in this world to dream up new goods and services to be consumed, but not many.
This would ideally leave humans open to create, while robots produced.
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However comforting this argument may be, it is also incorrect, because technology can sever the link between infinite desires and full employment.
We base our wants on various things, the most important of which is social status. It's why the IPhone is so valued. Without having employment, that also changes your social status, in turn changing your wants and desires to more ethical things to desire.
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Even if human labor becomes far less necessary overall, however, people, unlike horses, can choose to prevent themselves from becoming economically irrelevant.
Can we though? We are choosing to make these robots, thus, choosing to become economically irrelevant. It's not a robots fault that we decided to this to ourselves.
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“The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses . . . was first diminished and then eliminated.”
A company that makes, and profits off of a product doesn't care who makes the product. At the end of the day, the only thing the company cares about in terms of production is that it is produced, not by who produces it.
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horses became largely irrelevant
The horses only became irrelevant in terms of what they could do for humans. Horses still had a purpose, but it evolved into something new. Just because they aren't helping humans doesn't mean they don't have a purpose.
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“results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity, which requires progressively less human labor.”
What exactly is wrong with less human labor?
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by collecting and then monetizing information about consumers’ behavior, often without their knowledge or acquiescence.
This is how it would be easy to enslave humanity. When you have unlimited access to every persons personal information, you are able to control them better. With access to information, and the best exoskeleton money can buy, it's pretty clear who the leaders would be.
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Such technologies have the potential to vastly magnify the already-significant gaps in opportunity and achievement that exist between people of different economic means.
This Is exactly what I mean about using it for personal gain. Not only would it magnify the gap, but it would decide the leaders of the world.
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robotic technology is increasingly more efficient than human labor
With every job automated, people could spend more time on the arts, and what made people actually happy, That's how we achieve would peace.
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intelligent machines might someday push humans’ buttons so well that we will become the automatons, under the sway (and even control) of well-informed, highly social robots that have learned how to influence our behavior.
This is actually something I hadn't considered. I was certain that we would use robotics to our advantage, and not robots becoming the leaders of humans, due to the sheer amount of information they could pull from the collective cloud about knowledge, peoples personal information, and the emotions that guide them.
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As more automation technologies begin to appear in the physical world, such processes will become even more invasive.
Robotic organs that can self diagnose?
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This kind of basic data mining has become commonplace: think, for example, of how Google analyzes users’ search histories and e-mail messages in order to determine what products they might be interested in buying and then uses that information to sell targeted advertising space to other firms.
Advertisements will surely become more rampant with robots walking around in everyday life. "Pay 0.99 to Amazon Brain to save this memory." Robots would be streaming ads nearly nonstop. There will even be advertisement bots.
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Some, such as Moravec, foresee a post-evolutionary successor to Homo sapiens that will usher in a new leisure age of comfort and prosperity. Others envision robotic vessels able to “upload” human consciousness. And Kurzweil has suggested that the technological singularity will offer people a kind of software-based immortality.
I am absolutely okay with all of these things. Everyone hates their jobs. Some may be happy with what they do, but people want to experience life. No one can do that while working. If robots take over, that will allow humans to usher in world peace.
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The ability to perform complex mathematical calculations, produce top-quality language translation, and even deliver virtuosic musical performances might one day depend not solely on innate skill and practice but also on having access to the best brain-computer hybrid architecture.
Will this new ability be used for these things? Whenever something is invented, people always find a way to use it for personal gain, resulting in personal loss by the less than fortunate.
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Today, nearly all our social interactions take place with other humans,
Today, the majority of interactions between humans takes place because of robots. We are already talking to robots. Just with our friends voice on the other side.
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Educators and regulators must help robot inventors acquire knowledge, and the inventors, in turn, must pledge to create more transparent artificial beings.
This, to me, is the most important sentence of the article. Knowledge is the most important thing, if a singularity did happen. The 2% rule (being 2% smarter than anything you're working with) is pivotal in creating automatons. Surely, these inventors creating these AI's would install some kind of killswitch, in case the singularity grew to be too much.
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It has become possible to imagine the leap from the personal computer to the personal robot.
Personal Robot. There is no leap needed here, because we are already seeing it with out cell phones. Our cellphones are literally us in machine form. It knows everything needed to know about you to be you. It knows your likes, dislikes, the way your brain functions, what you are interested in, what you potential health risks are, etc. If we were able to pull this data from the phone, and put it into an AI, I believe that the AI would be able to perfectly mimic your behavior, and pass off as you to someone that knows you. That's the future. Uploading our consciousness to a data bank, and living forever.
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all the while driving more safely and efficiently than humans
Since 1/20/2016, there have been 5 deaths associated with self-driving cars. Now, a distinction needs to be made. Some cars are automated, which require human intervention to stop a disaster, and some cars are autonomous, which means that it acts on it's own accord, and does not need an intervention. There have been 0 deaths associated with autonomous cars.
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A robot’s capabilities are defined by what its body can do and what its brain can compute and control. Today’s robots can perform basic locomotion on the ground, in the air, and in the water. They can recognize objects, map new environments, perform “pick-and-place” operations on an assembly line, imitate simple human motions, acquire simple skills, and even act in coordination with other robots and human partners.
These are all programmed activities. We may not understand how to program emotion right now, but it could very well make it's way into robot AI in the near future.
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Humans are better than robots at abstraction, generalization, and creative thinking, thanks to their ability to reason, draw from prior experience, and imagine.
I don't believe creativity or an imagination is a skill exclusively to humans. I believe that our imagination is taught to use through our experiences, and preconceived notions that we gather throughout life. I believe that a robot can be perfectly creative, if given the right ability to be creative.
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it is to find ways for machines to assist and collaborate with humans more effectively.
At what point does the collaboration become something bigger? Time will tell.
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how they cooperate with one another and with humans.
At some point, it will no longer be about cooperating with humans, and eventually managing them.
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Many major car manufacturers have announced plans to build self-driving cars and predict that they will be able to sell them to consumers by 2020.
Currently, the cars with self driving capabilities are from these manufacturers: Tesla, Audi, Mercedes-Benz,Cadillac, BMW, Lexus,Volvo, Ford,and Chrysler. These are some of the biggest vehicle manufacturers, and it will be a stepping stone for smaller companies to hop on the bandwagon.
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These issues are the focus of ongoing research.
While I agree with this being a major focus, I don't believe it is the main focus.The main focus should always be the safety of the occupants in the vehicle, and the people directly surrounding it, and not so much sticking on the road, though those two could things be exclusive to each other.
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Self-driving cars would not merely represent a private luxury
But it would be though. Currently, having autonomous driving abilities in your car, adds about $100,000 to the price tag, according to Esurance. Semi-autonomous features would add between $5,000-$10,000 to the base vehicle cost. Where there is a way to profit off something, it'll be made more and more expensive, with fully autonomous vehicles not being available to the general public, due to the cost of producing self-driving cars.
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Meanwhile, California, Florida, Michigan, and Nevada have all passed legislation to allow autonomous cars on their roads, and many other state legislatures in the United States are considering such measures.
This is an extremely positive thing. There are currently no regulations to make sure people still know how to drive, after driving for 50 plus years. I'm a firm believer in updating your drivers testing ability every 10-20 years. Careless driving causes the most wrecks and fatalities. With self-driving cars, there will be less death, and the elderly would not have to put themselves into an unsafe environment to get groceries. Adding to this, a logical next step in self-driving cars is being fully electric. This would decrease fuel consumption, potentially leading to less wars, and a generally healthier environment, which is definitely a positive.
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I belong to a team of researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania currently working to create a “robot compiler” that could take a particular specification—for example, “I want a robot to tidy up the room”—and compute a robot design, a fabrication plan, and a custom programming environment for using the robot.
This is the very start of being able to program a robot to take over any job, which I think is a good thing. If used correctly, Every job would benefit from incorporating AI into their daily routines.
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repeatable actions
Every single thing in life is repetition. The things you do in your day, what you eat, when you eat it. Life is a revolving door of repetition, and over time, an articulated AI would be able to do everyday tasks that humans didn't think it could do.
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In a factory equipped with such robots, human workers would still be in control, and robots would assist them.
Autonomous vs Automated.
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Today’s robots can perform only limited reasoning due to the fact that their computations are carefully specified. Everything a robot does is spelled out with simple instructions, and the scope of the robot’s reasoning is entirely contained in its program.
The equation used to make these robots perform isn't the perfect equation, if that makes sense. We haven't come up with the perfect equation to allow these robots to fully think for themselves. If we can identify the equation that our physical brains run on, we will be one step closer to identifying how to make a robot "brain" mimic our own.
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“Have I been here before?”
We associate "Have I been here before?" with a feeling. It's like smelling something, and being taken to that place mentally where the trigger comes from. AI can't necessarily "feel" the same way a human can, and once we cross that barrier, I believe that robots would be able to answer the question "Have I been here before?" much quicker, due to it's association with the "feeling" that was presented to the AI while there previously.
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consult its own stored data
This is exactly how humans make decisions. We take an example, base it off how we perceive it, consult our stored data, and then make the decision based on all of that. Robots aren't becoming more human. They are just elevating to the point in which humans are already robotic in nature.
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Communication between robots and people is also currently quite limited.
Communications between people and people is also quite limited. Doesn't stop us from advancing in the directions we believe are correct.
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human intervention completely changes the way the robot deals with a problem and greatly empowers the machine to do more.
This truth can also be applied to children, which is essentially where robotics are in it's lifespan; infancy. A kid will do whatever mindless activity they are doing, until an adult tells them what to do, thus changing their behavior. If a kid is yelling at another kid, an adult will generally explain why this behavior is not okay, changing the child's perception on it. Because again, we are all robotic in nature.
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watch videos, and even nap
Why would anyone want to watch videos or take a nap while "driving", but we are already tied to our phones all day long, so maybe instead of texting and driving, it would alleviate the stress of needing to pull over to make a phone call.
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In turn, robots will support people by automating some physically difficult or tedious jobs: stocking shelves, cleaning windows, sweeping sidewalks, delivering orders to customers.
This is a great idea, in theory. Time will tell if that theory is correct. A good majority of people can't even get along with other humans, so I do find it almost impossible to believe that we will get along with another group of "people".
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with consequences that will be equally profound.
It will certainly be life changing, but we just can't know if it'll be good or bad. That's why we always see advanced AI as the villain in most SciFi movies. It's a fear we don't quite understand, making them the almost perfect villain to humankind.
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improve the quality of existing jobs
I don't believe it will improve the quality of existing jobs, because the point of robotics is to make the job easier. Easy and quality usually aren't in the same sentence when thinking about work, personally.
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