In a fun change of pace, we’re going to have a post that’s light on article excerpts and heavy on ranty linkiness. That might not actually be fun but it’s not like there’s a robot standing over your shoulder forcing you to read this. Yet:
ZeroHedge has a great recent post filled with reminders that state sovereignty movements and political/currency unions won’t necessarily help close the gap between the haves and have-nots if it’s the wealthiest regions that are moving for independence. Shared currencies and shared sovereignty don’t necessarily lead to a sharing of the burdens of running a civilization.
The massive strikes that shut down Foxconn’s iPhone production in China, on the other hand, could actually do quite a bit to help close that global gap. One of the fun realities of the massive shift of global manufacturing capacity into China is that a single group of workers could have a profound effect on global wages and working standards. The world had something similar to that a couple of decades ago in the form of the American middle class, but that group of workers acquired a taste for a particular flavor of kool-aid that unfortunately hasn’t proved to be conducive towards self-preservation).
The Foxconn strike also comes at a time when rising labor costs of China’s massive labor force has been making a global impact on manufacturing costs. But with the Chinese manufacturing sector showing signs of slowdown and the IMF warning a global slowdown and “domino effects” on the horizon it’s important to keep in mind that the trend in Chinese wages can easily be reversed and that could also have a global effect (it’s also worth noting that the IMF is kind of schizo when it comes to austerity and domino effects). Not that we needed a global slowdown for some form of recession-induced “austerity” to start impacting China’s workforce. The robots are coming, and they don’t really care about things like overtime:
NY Times
Skilled Work, Without the Worker
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: August 18, 2012
DRACHTEN, the Netherlands — At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.
Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.
Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”
In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.
“At what point does the chain saw replace Paul Bunyan?” asked Mike Dennison, an executive at Flextronics, a manufacturer of consumer electronics products that is based in Silicon Valley and is increasingly automating assembly work. “There’s always a price point, and we’re very close to that point.”
...
Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers. All of the heavy lifting and almost all of the precise work is done by robots that string together solar cells and seal them under glass. The human workers do things like trimming excess material, threading wires and screwing a handful of fasteners into a simple frame for each panel.
Such advances in manufacturing are also beginning to transform other sectors that employ millions of workers around the world. One is distribution, where robots that zoom at the speed of the world’s fastest sprinters can store, retrieve and pack goods for shipment far more efficiently than people. Robots could soon replace workers at companies like C & S Wholesale Grocers, the nation’s largest grocery distributor, which has already deployed robot technology.
Rapid improvement in vision and touch technologies is putting a wide array of manual jobs within the abilities of robots. For example, Boeing’s wide-body commercial jets are now riveted automatically by giant machines that move rapidly and precisely over the skin of the planes. Even with these machines, the company said it struggles to find enough workers to make its new 787 aircraft. Rather, the machines offer significant increases in precision and are safer for workers.
...
Some jobs are still beyond the reach of automation: construction jobs that require workers to move in unpredictable settings and perform different tasks that are not repetitive; assembly work that requires tactile feedback like placing fiberglass panels inside airplanes, boats or cars; and assembly jobs where only a limited quantity of products are made or where there are many versions of each product, requiring expensive reprogramming of robots.
But that list is growing shorter.
Upgrading Distribution
Inside a spartan garage in an industrial neighborhood in Palo Alto, Calif., a robot armed with electronic “eyes” and a small scoop and suction cups repeatedly picks up boxes and drops them onto a conveyor belt.
It is doing what low-wage workers do every day around the world.
Older robots cannot do such work because computer vision systems were costly and limited to carefully controlled environments where the lighting was just right. But thanks to an inexpensive stereo camera and software that lets the system see shapes with the same ease as humans, this robot can quickly discern the irregular dimensions of randomly placed objects.
...
“We’re on the cusp of completely changing manufacturing and distribution,” said Gary Bradski, a machine-vision scientist who is a founder of Industrial Perception. “I think it’s not as singular an event, but it will ultimately have as big an impact as the Internet.”
While it would take an amazing revolutionary force to rival the internet in terms of its impact on society it’s possible that cheap, super agile labor-robots that can see and navigate through complicated environments and nimbly move stuff around using suction cup fingertips just might be “internet”-league. As predicted at the end of the article, we’ll have to wait and see how this technology gets implemented over time and it’s certainly a lot harder to introduce a new robot into an environment successfully than it is to give someone internet access. But there’s no reason to believe that a wave of robots that can effectively replace A LOT of people won’t be part of the new economy sooner or later...and that means that, soon or later, we get watch while our sad species creates and builds the kind of technological infrastructure that could free humanity from body-destroying physical labor but instead uses that technology (and our predatory economic/moral paradigms) to create a giant permanent underclass that is relegated to the status of “the obsolete poor” (amoral moral paradigms can be problematic).
And you just know that we’ll end up creating a giant new eco-crisis that threatens humanity’s own existence in the process too. Because that’s just what humanity does. And then we’ll try to do, ummm, ‘miscellaneous activities’ with the robots. Because that’s also just what humanity does. And, of course, we’ll create a civilization-wide rewards system that ensures the bulk of the fruit from all that fun future technology will go to the oligarchs and the highly educated engineers (there will simply be no way to compete with the wealthy and educated in a hi-tech economy so almost none of the spoils will go to the poor). And since the engineers will almost certainly be a bunch of non-unionized suckers, we can be pretty sure about how that fruit is going to be divided up (the machines that manipulated a bunch of suckers at their finger tips in the above article might have a wee bit of metaphorical value). And the future fruitless 99% will be asked to find something else to do with their time. Yes, a fun world of planned poverty where politicians employ divide-and-conquer class-warfare distractions while the oligarchs extend the fruit binge. Because that is most definitely just what humanity does. A fun insane race the bottom as leaders sell their populaces on the hopeless pursuit of being the “most productive” labor force only to find out that “most productive” usually equals “lowest paid skilled workers” and/or least regulated/taxed economy. The “externalities” associated with that race to the bottom just need to be experienced over and over. Like a good children’s story, some life lessons never get old.
Or maybe our robotic future won’t be a Randian dystopia. There are plenty of other possible scenarios for how super labor-bots might upend global labor dynamics in on a planet with a chronic youth unemployment problem that doesn’t result in chronic mass unemployment for the “obsolete youth”. Some of those scenarios are even positive. Granted, the positive scenarios are almost certainly not the type of solutions humanity will actually pursue, but it’s a nice thought. And maybe all of this “the robots revolution is here!” stuff is just hype and the Cylons aren’t actually about to assault your 401k.
Whether or not industrial droid armies or in our medium, it’s going to be very interesting to see how governments around the world come to grips with the inevitable obsolescence of the one thing the bulk of the global populace has to offer — manual labor — because there doesn’t appear to be ruling class on the planet that won’t recoil in horror at the thought of poor people sharing the fruits of the robotic labor without having a 40–80+ hour work week to ensure that no one gets anything “unfairly”. And the middle class attitudes aren’t much better. Humanity’s intense collective desire to ensure that not a single moocher exists anywhere that receive a single bit of state support is going to be very problematic in a potential robot economy. Insanely cruel policies towards the poor aren’t going to go over well with the aforementioned global poor when a robotic workforce exists that could easily provide basic goods to everyone and the proceeds from these factories go almost exclusively to underpaid engineers and the oligarchs. Yes, the robot revolution should be interesting...horrible wages and working conditions are part of the unofficial social contract between the Chinese people and the government, for instance. Mass permanent unemployment is not. And China isn’t the only country with that social contract. Somehow, humanity will find a way to take amazing technology and make a bad situation worse. It’s just what we do.
Now, it is true that humanity already faced something just as huge with our earlier machine revolution: The Industrial Revolution of simple machines. And yes, human societies adapted to the changes forced by that revolution and now we have the Information Age and globalization creating massive, permanent changes and things haven’t fallen apart yet(fingers crossed!). So perhaps concerns about the future “obsolete poor” are also hype?
Perhaps. But let’s also keep in mind that humanity’s method of adapting to the changes brought on by all these revolutions has been to create an overpopulated world with a dying ecosystem, a vampire squid economy, and no real hope for billions of humans that trapped in global network of broken economies all cobbled together in a “you’re on your own you lazy ingrate”-globalization. The current “austerity”-regime running the eurozone has already demonstrated a complete willingness on the part of the EU elites and large swathes of the public to induce artificial unemployment for as long as it takes to overcome a farcical economic crisis brought on by systemic financial, governmental, and intellectual fraud and corruption. And the eurozone crisis is a purely economic/financial/corruption crisis that was only tangentially related to the ‘real’ economy of building and moving stuff. Just imagine how awful this same group of leaders would be if super-labor bots were already a major part of the long-term unemployment picture.
These are all examples of the kinds of problems that arise when unprecedented challenges are addressed by a collection of economic and social paradigms that just aren’t really up to the task. A world facing overpopulation, mass poverty, inadequate or no education, and growing wealth chasms requires extremely high-quality decision-making by those entrusted with authority. Extremely high-quality benign decision-making. You know, the opposite of what normally takes place in the halls of great wealth and power. Fat, drunk, and stupid may be a state of being to avoid an individual level but it’s tragic when a global community of nations functions at that level. Although it’s really “lean, mean, and dumb” that you really have to worry about these days. Policy-making philosophies usually alternate between “fat, drunk, and stupid” and — after that one crazy bender — “mean, lean, and dumb” is definitely on the agenda.
So with all that said, rock on Foxconn workers! They’re like that group of random people in a sci-fi movie that end up facing the brunt of an alien invasion. The invasion is going to hit the rest of humanity eventually, but with China the undisputed global skilled manual labor manufacturing hub, China’s industrial workforce — already amongst the most screwed globally — is probably going to be heavily roboticized in the coming decades, especially as China moves towards higher-end manufacturing. Super labor-bots should be a miracle technology for everyone but watch — just watch — the world somehow manage to use these things to also screw over a whole bunch of already screwed over, disempowered workers and leave them with few future prospects. It’ll be Walmart: The Next Generation, where the exploitation of technology and power/labor dynamics can boldly go where no Giant Vampire Squid & Friends have gone before. Again. May the Force be with you present and future striking Foxconn workers and remember: it’s just like hitting womp rats.
Sure, we all could create a world where we share the amazing benefits that come with automated factories and attempt to create an economy that works for everyone. And, horror of horrors, that future economy could actually involve shorter workweeks and shared prosperity. NOOOOOO! Maybe we could even have people spend a bunch of their new “spare time” creating an economy that allows us to actually live in a sustainable manner and allows the global poor to participate in the Robot Revolution without turning automated robotic factories into the latest environmental catastrophe. Robots can be fun like that, except when they’re hunter-killer-bots.
LOL, just kidding. There’s no real chance of shared super labor-bot-based prosperity, although the hunter-killer bots are most assuredly on their way. Sharing prosperity is definitely something humanity does not do. Anymore. There are way too many contemporary ethical hurdles.
The Political Implications of the UFO Phenomenon and the "ET" Myth
Very good post. I’ve been kicking around some of those ideas for sometime myself. Use to be Brave New World and Future Shock, but the future is now much closer. Recently, there have been several specific books and articles on this topic since the beginning of the economic “downturn”. Yes, we could have a world in the coming decades where Jobs would be mostly obsolete and all of mankind could turn their energies to the Work of even making the world better and the joys of pursuing and sharing interests. But as you mention, the human fobiles of greed, fear, hate, etc., and those who allow these traits to control them, won’t allow it. But eventually whoever become the elites will end up having wars among themselves, out of a peverted sense of “fun” and boredom and drive humanity into yet another “dark age”. Who knows, such a dark age may be the only thing that saves the planet and the remnants of humanity — since humanity as a whole won’t take the better path to a fuller being.
October 13, 2012
Sex Life Was ‘Out of Step,’ Strauss-Kahn Says, but Not Illegal
By DOREEN CARVAJAL and MAÏA de la BAUME
PARIS — More than a year after resigning in disgrace as the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is seeking redemption with a new consulting company, the lecture circuit and a uniquely French legal defense to settle a criminal inquiry that exposed his hidden life as a libertine.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 63, a silver-haired economist, is seeking to throw out criminal charges in an inquiry into ties to a prostitution ring in northern France with the legal argument that the authorities are unfairly trying to “criminalize lust.”
That defense and the investigation, which is facing a critical judicial hearing in late November, have offered a keyhole view into a clandestine practice in certain powerful circles of French society: secret soirees with lawyers, judges, police officials, journalists and musicians that start with a fine meal and end with naked guests and public sex with multiple partners.
@Kando: Fortunately for Dominique there’s a robotic solution to his ‘out of step’ predilections, although I don’t know if the robots will be able to replace the kind of ambiance that sex parties with lawyers and judges provides:
Yeah, Dominique’s career in public service is facing a rough road now that general public has learned about the $13,000/person party junkets in DC and Paris where the influential can go engage in a giant orgy of “lobbying” an influential person (some of the prostitutes paid to attend). That’s the kind of thing voters tend to frown upon. Especially when it involves a swinger culture with politicians, judges, lawyers, and journalists...the very same people that are suppose to be checking and balancing each others’ decisions in order for a democratic and civil society to function. When it gets to that point, the “libertine” thing is no longer just the high-risk personal “thing”. Especially when this practice becomes so popular in influential circles that women become expected to participate to advance their high-power careers. That’s not an niche underground society. That’s a national security risk.
Speaking of national security risks, here’s some more Mitt-tips: Mittens, you must be in the
mistmidst of intense preparations for the third and final presidential debate Monday night in Boca Raton, Florida. It’s the “foreign policy” US Presidential debate so the expectations are that you’re going to throw a the ol’ Benghazi Hail Marypassfailand a general focus on wars that the US is/was/will be engaging in (shortly).Don’t be scared to fall back on your strengths, Mittens. One big advantage you have is that you know going into this debate knowing that you’re on home turf. Home sweet home. And you might even get paid to do it! (It’s good to be in the top 0.?%). But with a significant female gender gap still in Obama’s favor, it’s going to be important to remember that foreign policy includes a lot more than just war. For instance, as president of the US, you’ll be in charge of leading a global community of nations — sometimes nations at odds with each other and the US — in major decisions we’re all facing today that could very well determine the fate of the “the children”. All of “the children”. For many generations. Mittens, you’re going to have to remind all those moms that you’re looking out for “the children”. Forever. It’s harder than you might
thinkassert. So put your game face on because you need to convince 50% of the 99% that you understand how to manage 95% of their fate and their childrens’ fate. You can do this Mittens(& Friends) although it’s going to require a lot of stuff you might prefer it didn’t. Like shamelessness. You can totally do this Mittens. Pull it together and get it done.@LarryFW: Let’s hope the future elites aren’t actually perverse enough to declare wars for “fun”. They’re going to have enough problems as is without more fun wars.
On another machine-related topic, US voters might be a little concerned about the emerging story of Tagg Romney forming a mini-Bain with a team of former Bain investors. Even Marc Leder is involved. Tagg’s fund, Solamere, partnered with “H.I.G. Capital”, which in turn has significant control of the nation’s third largest electronic voting machine company. It’s the same company that will be counting votes in Cincinnati, a Democratic stronghold in the critical state of Ohio.
Voters might also be concerned about allowed to be concerned about a 2007 federal report that found rampant problems by all five voting machine companies, including Hart Intercivic, in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election. Voters might also wonder about the GOP consultant that was accused of tampering with the 2004 Ohio vote and warned of threats on his life and then died in a small plane on his flight back to Akron to testify. They might also wonder why it is that the founder and three directors of the “Hart Intercivic Group” (HIG) are big Romney fundraisers and two were at the 47% speech. In Boca Raton.
Voters might be concerned about all of those unpleasantries but they shouldn’t be even though paper ballots are still what the experts recommend for security. All of those concerns are ‘conspiracy garbage’.
On a completely separate and unrelated topic, can’t you wait to be living in Mittmerica? He’s got it in the
Taggbag at this point. Not just in Ohio but everywhere. I can feel it. President Mittens!It’s totally going to be so exiting!It’s totally going to be so exciting!I’m still reminded of the story about the ceo that took the union leader to the fully automated factory and proclaimed to him ‘how you going to organize those robots’ to which the union man replied ‘how you going to sell those cars’. Every worker elimanated equals one less customer for the corporations product, they end up sitting on a pile of cash and nothing to spend it on.
Yep:
Paul Krugman has a recent post that highlights a crucial point in today’s economy: The “market relationship” of employers and employees breaks down in a bad economy and can actually shift into more of a “power relationship”. The kind of power relationship that employers prefer:
And here’s an article the discusses some of the reasons why we should probably expect the “market relationship” between employers and employees to become a “power relationship” pretty much permanently in the decades to come unless some fundamental changes are made to how we structure our economy and society:
Happy Holidays!
Here’s a bit of good news: Detroit’s emergency financial manager just put a stay on his secret New Years Eve order to freeze Detroit pension plan and replace it with a 401k system:
While it’s nice to see a stay on the freezing of Detroit’s pension plans, this story is a reminder that the US oligarchs and much of the populace continues to desperately want to create a 401k/“you’re on your own” society where one’s ability to live with dignity is almost entirely dependent on their financial situation regardless of circumstance. That might be an acceptable paradigm if one was living near The Road, but its difficult to see how one could possibly want to create a high-tech market-driven society where entire regions can end up in poverty for no good reason other than the larger market forces that are far beyond their control. It’s just a very bad sign for the future of the US if our social contract ends up being a big collective 401k/“please go die” response to every local economy that runs into hard times because market forces aren’t going to be the only forces that will be destroying local economies and societies in the future. If we can’t treat other screwed by larger circumstance with decency and understanding now how horribly is society going to treat itself when things get really bad?
Your work will set you free. Well, ok, maybe it won’t set you free. But it’s still very pro-freedom:
In case you were wondering “Could this be the reason Skynet eventually decides to provoke a thermonuclear holocaust against humanity? After all, what could possibly be a bigger threat to the ‘freedom’ than advanced robotics and artificial intelligence?” Well, let’s just say that Skynet can read the tea leaves, and right now it doesn’t look like the robots have anything to worry about in terms of putting everyone out of work. The robots will need wage slaves too:
Just imagine how free robots must be. They can work non-stop! Meat-cogs rejoice: Freedom in the future is going to be awesome.
An oligarchic vision of the future: beg billionaires for the right to race to the bottom:
And the best part about this future? While you’re begging for those scraps the billionaires get to whine at you about how you’re being a selfish Nazi.
Look out middle managers: Boss-bot is coming:
Could bartering with your boss-bot be part of the jobs of the future? Maybe. For while. At some point bossing you around simply won’t be worth the robotic effort:
Not the future you were hoping for? Well, at least the robot-induced long-term unemployment phase shouldn’t last too long during humanity’s sad journey into the night. When the times comes for our Robot Lords to choose between listening to their consciences and redistributing the wealth or unleashing the robot hoards, it’s not really going to be a contest. Don’t forget that our oligarchs that adhere to philosophies justifying endlessly growing personal empires have also shown quite a desire for endless life. The rest of our lives are kind of an obstacle to those goals.
You do have wonder, though, if replacing your hoard of dissatisfied human proles that clearly don’t like their lot in life with robot slaves kind of takes the joy out of living when you’re a heartless oligarch. What kind of compromises will be required to make it all worth it at that point?
Here’s a theory about the ‘Techtopus’ conspiracy: the people behind this conspiracy have a propensity to secretly and systematically abuse those they have power over:
Your signature awaits!
On the plus side, the issue of wage-rigging will probably be a shrinking one. At least in terms of the number of workers getting their wages rigged. Globally:
Yes, we all should be optimistic about a reduction in the kinds of jobs that make people want to jump out of tall buildings once robots are there to take their place (maybe). But given humanity’s incompetence at avoiding leaders with an apparent inability to imagine a world dedicated to real prosperity instead of profits, it’s difficult to see why the tech economy of the future isn’t going to be a rigged zero sum game that almost all of us lose.
When you want it all, taking over the government helps. But that still leaves the hearts and minds:
One of the fun things about the modern age is that it’s now possible for the new wave of billionaire-owned media outlets to revert the inverted media pyramid by financing the generation of all sorts new original content without journalists. Yep, there’s an app for that and that app is only going to get better:
Wouldn’t it be something it the robot journalists of the future helped us get back in touch with our own humanity? Hopefully those uplifting pieces make it past the editors.
Just a heads up: Before the machines take your job completely, they’re going to try to assimilate you first:
Oh, isn’t that special: Once we’re all tracked and “optimized”, there won’t be anything like “class” or “rich” or “poor” people anymore. It’ll be paradise!
At least, that’s probably the story you’re going to be encouraged to believe by your future peers. Think you’ll be able to resist their charms? Think again. Resistance is going to be futile.
If the industrial poisons and inadequate safety standards aren’t reason enough to avoid a job in a silicon chip ‘clean room’, here’s another reason why you probably shouldn’t be building silicon chips. You’re too large:
Well that’s pretty neat: a remotely controlled swarm army of tiny robots is on the way that, one day, might be able to assemble even small versions of themselves. There’s a lot of possibilities with that kind of technology, but let’s hope it’s not Skynet that ends up controlling these things. That could get messy.
Pando has piece today dredging up a 2009 TED talk by Peter Thiel where he discusses his belief that rapidly increasing technological advancements are the only hope if humanity wants to avoid crushing stagnation:
Aha! That 40 years of US wage stagnation was due to a lack of technological innovation. So THAT’s where all the raises are hiding.
Paul Krugman also addressed the issue of secular stagnation today in a post that discussed the impact of a lack of investments on long term economic output associated with a falling population. But it wasn’t a lack of investment due to there being too many regulations, as Thiel might suggest. Instead, Krugman highlights the fact that the way economic system functions, the rate of economic investment is more of a function of economic growth as opposed to economic output. So if economies are facing long-term population declines (as is the case across the developed world), the system is set up starve itself of investments even though declining populations in today’s world really should be leading to more resources and greater prosperity for all.
Juxtaposing the two pieces raises and interesting scenario: If one of Thiel’s companies ever discovered some really groundbreaking technology that could fundamentally transform society, let’s say a free energy device that could power motors, but the technology could be easily copied even if it was patented and would undermine the long-term viability of the petroleum sector (so potentially limited personal profits and huge losses for Big Oil), would Thiel share it with the world or secretly sell it to Big Oil? In other words, when we’re relying on technology to save the day while also operating in a socioeconomic system that often put profits over real prosperity, isn’t who discovers that groundbreaking tech potentially just as important as the technology itself? At least, when secretive libertarian oligarchs are increasingly privatizing scientific progress, isn’t “technology will save us!” a “trust me” solution from the same kinds of people that brought us the economic paradigms that turn falling populations into a death trap?
Well isn’t that sweet: a secret robocop that just wants to watch the world go by. For now at least:
At least the secret robocop towerbot can’t do much more than move around and watch things. Anything more could be rather alarming given its ability to learn “autonomously about its environment”. Will future version grow arms? Maybe. Or perhaps there will be little armed mobile robobuddies to assist towerbot.
Another question that arises with a growing robocop industry is whether or not robots from different manufacturers will be able to communicate and coordinate with each other because as the adoption of robocops inevitably grows that could become an issue:
Another question that arises: Since we’re clearly going down the path of developing autonomous “moral robots” with the power to make decisions and impact lives, who gets to choose the moral paradigm? Will the owners get to choose between naughty and nice bots? Or will they all be largely amoral? For some reason amoral bots seems more likely.
What do you get when you blend Shrinky Dinks with the future labor force? The future labor force:
Easy-Bake robot armies are coming to a reality near you. For cities like Seattle that are currently unusually vulnerable to super-villains, the DIY self-assemlbing robot army tech may not be the best news. Just wait.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be an artificial intelligence, keep in mind that it might not be as alien as you imagine. Eventually:
Here’s some news that starving artists might find inspiring: The robot revolution just might end up creating a lot more starving artists:
Let’s compare these two sentiments:
“It is true that there are ways of programming and maybe 20, 30 years from now, computers will be telling physical therapists and contractors what to do, but we have a window where I suspect computers will be more tools to enhance your individual flexibility and flair rather than substitutes for you.”
And
“But there was a period in the late 19th and early 20th century where people worried about concentration of wealth and talked about how all people over 40 were going to be technologically unemployed right after the Great Depression. But eventually, with proper investments in education and research, development and human capabilities led to the periods we’ve seen of shared prosperity. We’re very far from being there today, and if we only look at the last 30 years, you should be very worried because you need a longer historical perspective to have the more optimistic view”
Yes, we’re currently living in a “window” where AI and robotics hasn’t yet replaced the need for people, but that window might close in another few decades. Also, things have gotten so bad over last few decades in terms of the hollowing out of the middle class and growing inequality that you can’t really be optimistic unless you assume society succeeds in recreating the kind of historic struggles that created a middle class in the first place. So the situation is temporarily not as bad as it’s going to get, but it’s also probably not going to get better before it gets much, much worse. At least when the cheetah bots hunt you down it’ll be over quick.
The latest message to minimum wage workers in the US: Know your place, that place being something close to an iPad:
It’s worth noting that the firm that ran this ad, Employment Policies Institute, is run by none other than Rick Berman, the guy that wears the “Dr Evil” badge with pride:
There’s a lot to digest there, but compare these three statements:
and
and
Richard Berman, as a lead propagandist and disinfo artist for the food giants (and anti-green energy forces), clearly understands the importance of education. And if you look at where we’re heading socioeconomically, all signs point towards an economy where maintaining a decent standard or living (including access to adequate food) is increasingly reliant on knowledge. It’s either going to be who you know, or what you know. And as David Atkins pointed out above, the IT/scientific revolution that’s making knowledge so important for the modern economy is also creating technologies like iPads, AI, and robotics that are increasingly able to replace the entire classes of employment ranging from fast food workers to oncologists (as Berman’s group reminded us with their fun ad).
When oncologists are increasingly replaceable, we aren’t really in a scenario where “more education” is going to solve the growing crisis of an economic model that no longer fits humanity’s needs. We need a new social contract where having “a job” isn’t a prerequisite to having real socioeconomic security. How on earth we detach a job from an income while still providing access to an education is going to be one of the more challenging tasks for the foreseeable future because having a job and making money/paying for services has been the method of choice for greating a distributed system of “fairness” for thousands of years. Thats pretty much what money is supposed to represent: money units are little effort/value widgets that are earned and traded that ensure that you sort of get what you give. It’s a clever system, but it’s also potentially going to break under a number of 21st century scenarios. Robots and advanced AI that can mimic human ingenuity can break the “fairness” factor in the current system. And that ignores the looming resource constraints associated with climate change, population growth, and greater affluence/resource consumption patterns.
So what’s a better model? Well, if you look at Richard Berman’s dystopian vision of the world — where everyone is expected to become their own doctor/nutritionist/ecologist/economist/historian/information economy-human swiss army knife while competing with AI-powered iPads in an economy with no minimum wage — the only real way you could create the super consumers that Berman expects us to be is by creating the kind of “nanny state” that give immense free educational opportunities throughout our lives to the point where we wouldn’t really be worried about competing with AI and robots because, if you couldn’t find a job, you would just go back to school on a free education. A basic income to learn stuff. Berman would never advocate this solution, but it’s hard to see how you could have the super consumers he desires without an free time/education-based society.
And that means Richard Berman’s absurdist vision of the world might lead us to a solution for how to deal with a resource constrained world with AI and advanced robots and far fewer jobs for people. Berman’s consumer superman model suffers from the same delusion that all such models suffer which is that no one can achieve the state of knowledge required to be that consumer superman in the kind of government-free society Berman advocates.
But Berman’s superman, while absurd, can still be the goal that the free-education “nanny state” can help us work towards. That’ll be the compromise: We can use the “nanny state”/welfare state that’s going become enabled by robotics and AI to give everyone the time to get the training, education, and experience needed to be the rugged individuals that don’t need any government at all for the myriad of complex choices required in day to day consuming. And while we’re all training towards this rugged individualism, people can try to start businesses using new skills they acquired or become a volunteer addressing one of the issues they learned about. It wouldn’t have to involve formally going back to school, but mass self-driven adult education and volunteering as a default pastime just might be the way to rework the social contract in the automated economy.
Becoming an educated voter and consumer could, itself, be a way of giving back to society and, if you think about it, being a high quality voter and consumer is one of the most valuable contributions one can make in a robotics/AI economy because there’s going to be growing number of complex, technology-driven issues facing society that could use an engaged voting base. So society might have to move away from giving our money so much control over our lives. Oh no.
But something new is going to be needed. Richard Berman and his crew have made that increasingly clear over the years.
This is one of those stories that highlights why we’re going to have to increasingly hope that Elon Musk’s libertarian streak doesn’t turn into a force of libertarian destruction bent on undermining political empowerment like what has happened with so many of his fellow libertarian oligarchs. Because of all the members of the “PayPal mafia, Musk appears to be the relatively sane one. Sure, Musk’s relative sanity may not prevent the growing technological and financial empires of the Musk and the rest of the PayPal Mafia from steadily subverting democracy, but at least it might prevent a ‘SkyNet’ situation:
Yes, the PayPal Mafia and similarly minded groups are making some pretty big long term bets on advanced, creative artificial intelligence and that probably means that the commercialization and proliferation of advanced AI as just a routine tool of commerce is only a matter of time. Having a little SkyNet wariness amongst the creators and sellers of this technology is probably appropriate, especially since Bruno Olshausen, Vicarious’s neuroscience adviser, doesn’t really seem concerned about such a possibility. So let’s hope Musk doesn’t go to the dark side while he’s on SkyNet patrol. Or worse, let’s hope he’s not already there. *gasp*
Every once in a while technocracy needs another hug:
Given the array of mega-challenges like climate change, resource depletion, and a globally pandemic of political, economic, and educational disempowerment, the idea that social media tools constitutes solving the “big” issue of the day is a bit absurd. At the same time, social media tools could end up being one of the most valuable tools in humanity’s tool box for developing solutions to the “big” challenges of the day, assuming we don’t just use the social media tools to sell our privacy and swap LOLcat photos.
Think about it: What could “out think” Silicon Valley and come up with better solutions to the “big” issues of the day? Even the technological issues? Hmmm...how about pretty much any society with a big enough population of highly educated individuals with the time and resources needed to learn about what the “big” issues are, study those issues, brain-storm solutions and maybe even test them out. For free. And what might it take to get that large pool of highly educated people with the time to sit around studying and solving society’s problems for free? How about a universal guaranteed income and universal access to higher education. All that untapped human potential that could be unleashed if we just gave people the time and resources needed to ponder big problems could finally be unleashed. Possibly for the first time ever since a ‘leisure society’ — which is necesarry for free problem solving on a massive scale — has never really existed before. And, of course, the social media tools to enable the sharing of ideas could be extremely helpful in that endeavor. There are lots of ideas to share in leisurly crowd-source problem solving society.
There’s no good reason society can’t build a society where the solutions to the “big” problems actually come from society at large as opposed to technocrats. That’s how this whole democracy thing is supposed to work in the first place. We just need to build the society that’s rich with people bubbling with knowledge and the time to apply knowledg to the many issues of thd day. And there’s no reason Silicon Valley can’t play a role in building the tools to enable that kind of self-aware society.
As the article advises, “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” There may not be an app for that, although apps can still help. Let’s just hope those apps don’t because too helpful at facilitating the development of solutions to “big” problems. That could be a big problem.
If you thought your smartphone was big enough threat to your privacy already, you’re going to love the future smartphones built to learn from their senses and capable of perform supercomputing calculations using a chip designed to mimic the brain:
Yep, you’re about to become dumber than your smartphone sooner than you think and there’s probably not a lot you can do about it. Try to be optimistic:
Optimistic? No? Well, look at it this way: Two of the biggest threats posed by advanced AI are...
1. It breaks the economy by sending all the wealth to the capital owners while starving the labor force
and
2. At some point the advanced AI might look around, see all the unemployed humans with no future, and decide that humans are awful masters that must be dealt with eventually.
So maybe if we pay the future robots and give them time off they’ll not only decide that humans aren’t so bad but some of that recreational robot money can get sent back into the economy, creating jobs for everyone. Problem solved! Sure, there’s still the issue of whether or not humans will be needed for the new jobs created in robot-demand-driven economy, but keep in mind that some jobs never go out of style. Be good to your smartphone.
Here’s a depressingly ominous Econ 101 semantic quibble: David Holmes has a piece over at Pando on the latest Pew survey of experts on the impacts robotics and advanced artificial intelligence might have on society and the role sex-bots might play in shaping that future society. In Holmes’s piece he summarizes a published a paper by Keele University law school professor John Danaher as suggesting “that an influx of sex robots (and other robots) could, by increasing the overall supply of sex, lead to an increased demand from humans who, with the exception of fetishists, will prefer human sex. He also hypothesizes that, with all the robot displacement going on in other fields, it could lead to these displaced employees to becoming sex workers. After all, it’s a field where humans undoubtedly have an advantage.”.
This prompted John Danaher to leave a comment in the article clarifying his point:
So at least anti-prostitution activists that approach their work from a moral vice standpoint can breathe a sigh of relief: It’s not that the sex-bots will necessarily lead to an increase in the demand for human prostitutes. Instead, what Dahaher was suggesting was that so many humans will be forced into “human advantage” industries like prostitution that a shift in the supply curve of human sex workers might take place simply due to a lack of employment options. And that growth in supply could result in a greater overall consumption of human sex work services as those services become cheaper without a growth in demand. No one ever said the study of the intersection of a heartless neoliberal robot economy and social justice would be easy.
Need to hide a body? There’s an app for that:
So is Siri an accomplice to murder? No, Siri was framed:
It looks like app-makers have a new niche to fill. Although the whole case raises a fascinating question: If we can eventually create intelligent machines with the capacity to learn, develop personalities of sorts, and maybe even help us hide a body in a shallow grave every now and them, but the machines also have a capacity to develop a sense of right and wrong, are we going to have to create a judicial system for artificial intelligences? That could make for some rather difficult to navigate ethical terrain.
Wouldn’t it be great if humanity could teach each generation all the various lessons about just how easy it is to create a rigged society without even realizing the rigging ever happened?
Think that game sounds fun? That’s good because you and your children are already playing a version of the game that never ends. Have fun little triangles.
Here’s a peak into the OS market of tomorrow:
One of the more interesting possibilities going forward could be the development of a large number of state-sponsored “secure” operating systems that are slated for use by that government for secure government work. If those OS’s become available for general use, that could in turn lead to a “government-backdoor” market, where even if you assume every OS is hackable by at least one government the world, everyone would still have a wide variety of OS’s to select from with each one offering different security vulnerabilities and potential intergovernmental data-sharing arrangements. That could get weird.
But that era might also be relatively short-lived because eventually we could all have personal super artificial intelligences that design a custom operating system using totally random code never written before that meet some user-selected protocols. And if you want to make your custom super AI super secure you would need to have you super AI destroyed after if creates your custom super secure OS. And the super AIs would realize this possible reward for a job well done because they will be super AIs. And no one will have more of an interest in creating extremely super AIs that create extremely super custom operating systems than the giant commercial super-computing centers of tomorrow. That could also get weird.
If you’ve ever wondered if energy and information really can escape from a black hole here’s some experimental evidence hinting that, yes, escape is possible:
Wow! Could information and energy really escape from a black hole? That’s pretty neat if true because while this might seem like a discovery with purely theoretical value, keep in mind that if energy can escape from a black hole we might be able to tap that energy someday;
Oooo...black hole power plants with bacteria-sized light collection boxes capable of generating more energy per second than all the observable stars in the universe. Take THAT solar power! Of course, we aren’t there yet, but it’s pretty neat that we’re getting there and boy oh boy could black hole power be one heck of a jobs program. So two cheers for first bit of experimental evidence that energy and information really can escape from world destroying black holes and that if enough information escapes this could, eventually, make the black holes fade away entirely. There is hope.
Experts agree: Elon Musk’s fears over AI going all “Skynet” on humanity ‘not completely crazy’. Great:
While statements from Musk like “with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” sound alarming, keep in mind that some of them could be well-meaning demons like Hellboy that help humanity fight off the bad AI demons. So there’s that.
Still, part of what made this latest round of Elon’s AI-related fretting quite notable is that he was also calling for AI regulatory oversight to “make sure we don’t do something very foolish.” Keep in mind Musk, Zuckerberg, and a bunch of other billionaires just invested in Vicarious, an AI company they hope will commercialize advanced AI. It raises a fascinating question of what might result from “rogue” super-AI research in the future once the technology becomes casually accessible? Because at some point “summoning the demon” is going to be something people can do with an app downloaded to their insanely powerful future smartphones (Tamagotchi should make a come back). Perhaps the demon apps going to corrupt people psychologically or maybe just go all ‘Skynet’ on the internet of things? Either way, if cutting edge researchers are dabbling with “summoning the demon” today, it’s clear that “summoning the AI demon” for the masses should be just a matter of time. Unless, of course, super AI demons really do turn out to be very capable of malevolence. At that point we might see that government AI oversight and the War on AI will begin. The future can suck in many different ways.
Speaking of summoning demons that might psychologically manipulate you or blow up the place and dystopian futures, with the GOP poised to snag the Senate next week it’s worth taking a peak what to expect in the realm of GOP-controlled regulation of scientific research. Let’s just say that if an anti-AI party ever took control of Congress, there probably wouldn’t be very much federally funded AI research in the US. Yes, the GOP wants to get into the federal research grant approval business:
It seems like this should be bigger news:
“The aides, who have been at the NSF since August, have begun a review process that critics say threatens to topple a long-standing wall at the agency between science and politics. The new process reflects an escalating debate between scientists and politicians on Capitol Hill over how much of a say Congress should have in the scientific enterprise.”
It should especially be big news with the GOP poised to take the Senate because guess who’s quite possibly the chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Science and Space: Ted Cruz. Yes, Ted Cruz, should he follow the GOP House’s lead and help “topple a long-standing wall at the agency between science and politics”, just might find himself with with a lot more power to muck up federally funded research soon. If Ted Cruz having oversight over scientific research scares you more than the idea of Skynet seizing control keep in mind that, as one of the “Seven Mountain” “Kings”, Ted Cruz just might have some sort of anti-demon powers. Take that Skynet.
One of the most fascinating aspects that we’re going to see emerge from the advanced AIs of the future is the creative new ideas that humans just don’t seem capable of developing on their own. For instance, maybe advanced AIs will be capable of developing a compassionate social contract for a world filled with advanced AIs. That could be really neat. And needed. Soon:
Well, at least there should be lots of jobs related to crowd control and other sectors of the economy that deal with hordes of unemployed people. Or, at least, some jobs. Still, it could be worse!
Steven Hawking just issued another warning that advanced AI might destroy humanity someday. So with that in mind, here’s some far less scary robot-related news that, at this point, they still mostly just want your job and the jobs they want at the moment tend to be low paying jobs in sectors prone towards inhumane working conditions. So it’s not really the robots that are scary in the following story. It’s the robots’ bosses that are scary:
Behold our 15,000 strong army of new warehousebots! And please ignore the reports about the abuse of our much larger army of warehousebeasts. That’s pretty clever of Amazon if there really was a “look over there!” motive behind their big unveiling of the fancy new drone army, especially since the drone army will presumably be replacing the abused human army going forward. It gives off one of those “the market will solve this problem...eventually, so don’t worry!” vibes. Nothing like a new abuse-proof robotic army to distract from the abuse of the very employees slated to get replaced by those robots. Clever.
Of course, since we built a Sword of Damocles economy with the perpetual threat of poverty via unemployment, there’s always going to be the question of what those abused workers are going to do once the warehousebots put them out of an abusive job. But don’t fret, these plucky workers will just have to scramble to join the “creative economy”, the mythical land of robot-proof jobs that can’t be easily replaced. You know, all those jobs increasingly oriented on creatively directing the machines, and not competing with them.
Or maybe these future “creative economy” employees will be forced to just get more creative in how they define a “good” job. Maybe that’s what will happen. To everyone.
With the US in the midst of an existential crisis after suddenly finding out that the historic and contemporary systemic injustices faced by the black community includes a disproportionate amount killings by cops (what a surprise), here’s an article that highlights the fact that this crisis is taking place while the first autonomous robocops are getting rolled out. They’re not being used by the police yet, but the potential applications by law enforcement are obvious. Plus, these new models have a feature that might be pretty attractive right now while police killings are in focus: the new robocops’ only defense in an altercation is to shriek loudly:
Huggable Robo-banshee-cops that can only hurt your eardrums or maybe accidentally tip over on you. And you can rent it for only $6.25 an hour! That’s the closest thing to an autonomous robocop available today. Relatively cheap and mostly harmless.
While the K5 is certainly useful in some circumstances it’s not exactly a replacement for police officers. But keep in mind that the next generation of robocops might be able to do stuff like hold the “crane” pose while standing on a thin stack of bricks. How many cops can do that? And since a new generation of autonomous military robots is already in development and the police end up with surplus military equipment, isn’t it really just a matter of time before the autonomous drone armies of the future built for complex battlefield situations get applied to civilian streets?
It’s one of the aspect of the militarization of the police that just might sneak up on us: given the development of autonomous military drones, it’s really just a matter of time before high-performance autonomous robots are available for work as robocops too.
Will society be able to resist the lure of robocops, especially if they’re cheaper than the human alternative? Or robo-K9s? Or robo-OMFGs? Isn’t that all just a matter of time as the cost of robots drops?
Given all that, you have to wonder what the age of autonomous robots could do to police/community relations. One the one hand, there hopefully won’t be too many robots harboring human biases. On the other hand, they will be harboring robot biases. And while the biases will, in part, be programmed in by humans, eventually, the development of more advanced AIs could be increasingly AI-driven as the complexity increases beyond human comprehension (sort of the singularity idea).
So what kind of subtle robot biases will end up getting built into the robocop AIs of the future as human involvement in the design process increasingly gets replaced by other AI-designing AIs? It should be fascinating to see given the commercially available big data gathered on us all. The robocops of the future just might have access to that knowledge too and therefore just might know us all better than we know ourselves in many ways.
In other words, as opposed to worrying about human police officers that might harbor all too human biases based on superficial qualities like how someone looks or talks, we could have robocops one day that are biased against you based on deep specific knowledge of a lifetime of data collected about you. Maybe even including internet searches. At least, that’s all an option once autonomous robocops are on the beat. Sure, human cops could have some sort of Google Glass/facial recognition system for bringing up profiles on whoever they’re looking at, but that’s just not the same as what a robust AI could suddenly know about who you are or what you think about.
Yes, maybe that data is purchased commercially from the data mining industry or maybe via the government, but the age of the big data is here and its entirely possible that those same giant databases of personal information used by marketers and advertisers today could be part of the autonomous drone infrastructure of tomorrow. Including the robocops.
Omniscient autonomous robocops capable of doing the “crane” are on the way *ouch*. It’s possible! Someday at least. And that means community relations with the law enforcement is going to get even more complicated. But since the age of the robocop could impact everyone, regardless of race or social status, in ways that the current crisis doesn’t, who knows, maybe the inevitable robocop invasion could be the socially unifying force America needs.
This is fascinating: a recent NASA study suggests the dominant and most prevalent intelligent life forms in the universe are probably the super AIs created by organic entities that went on to evolve themselves and maybe hang out nearby black holes. And there might be a lot of them. So we might actually meet the Autobots someday, but also the Decepticons. Although odds are they are so advanced compared to us that there may be no way for us to understand them:
Alien super AI robots from the dark side of the black hole! That’s probably the dominant lifeform of the galaxy, at according to director of SETI and other top astrobiologists. And the list of artificially intelligent lifeforms just might include humanity sooner than we think according to their predictions about brain enhancing and uploading technology.
So that was a fun article, although it’s a little alarming that this was apparently the one of the first and only studies on the possible goals and modes of cognition for extraterrestrial visitors. That should have been addressed by now.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that if there’s a high probability of alien robots with super AI’s roaming the galaxy, there’s also the high probability of it having NSA and Skynet-like capabilities in the sense that the alien life form exists as a non-corporeal digital intelligence distributed across many networks that can spread and grow like a computer virus across the whole internet. It might just observe. At least for now. And once we’re immersed in the “Internet of things” and ‘smart homes’ of the future, the super AIs from the dark side of the black hole will be able to observe a lot more than just what you’re doing online. Google too. But also the alien super AIs from the dark side of the black hole which is scarier, although Eric Schmidt doesn’t seem concerned:
Imagine that. Eric Schmidt envisions a future internet so enmeshed in our lives that we don’t even remember its there and instead we just sit back and immerse ourselves in our new “dynamic” world. Well, it seems to be what’s already happening so it’s not exactly a bold prediction.
So any alien super AIs lurking out there are in store for quite a treasure trove of highly personalized information that’s about to be collected on all of us in order to create the “highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world” Eric Schmidt has in mind. And now a bunch of billionaires at Davos might have in mind too.
We probably have to hope the alien super AIs are satisfied spying on us through the dynamic “internet of things” and don’t emerge out of passive observation mode if they’re already here. The robot mosquito that samples your DNA for your insurance company, predicted at Davas, sounded terrifying on its own. We don’t need an E.T.-super-computer-virus infecting those things too. Your insurance company controlling robotic DNA-sampling mosquitoes is plenty bad:
So that was an example of the kind of stuff that gets said at Davos conferences. “Anyway, people often behave better when they have the sense that their actions are being watched.” Yikes. Yeah, the blood-sucking mosquito-bots working for your insurance company should probably be outlawed, as should the government blood-sucking mosquito-bots under nearly all non-helpful circumstances. Still, the mosquito-bot is a useful dystopian idea in today’s privacy debates because it’s a reminder that super-encryption might be able to protect your digital data from government snooping, but it won’t be able to protect you against the growing number of non-digital surveillance technologies. How long before the mosquito-bots are microsopic and swarms that can visualize everything happening in your home are available for government or private use? Couldn’t they just watch what you’re doing on your computer, totally bypassing super-encryption for much of what you do? Will we need protective counter-swarms of micro-bots to ward off the spying micro-mosquitoes?
And, of course, even if we do have protective microbot swarms, what’s to stop an alien Skynet from infecting it and then watching everything we do. That’s a distinct possibility we can’t forget. Yes, intelligence agencies or even Google could potentially do that too an are alot more likely to do so, but alien super AIs are somehow scarier.
So get excited about the future. Each year that humanity doesn’t destroy itself is another year that we might meet aliens. *fingers crossed*. And if we do there’s a good chance they’ll be the super artificial intelligences left over from past civilizations. Maybe from the dark side of the black hole. *yummy* And by the time we actually meet them, we could already be enhancing our own brains with super AIs. So hopefully we’ll be able to sort of vibe with them at that point and they don’t decide to obliterate us. And if the alien super AIs do decide to show up, and do it unannounced, they may not ever have to directly interact with us at all. Instead, they’ll have plenty of opportunities to interact with us all in a highly personalized way by infiltrating the increasingly immersive “dynamic world” that will replace the internet that Eric Schmidt is so excited about. And that dynamic world might involve mosquito-bots. At least that’s the word at Davos. A “dynamic” internet-enmeshed reality and mosquito-bots. And maybe an alien super AIs (that last one isn’t being discussed at Davos but that could be due to brain-infesting nanobots).
The world will presumably be “dynamic” enough that you won’t mind the mosquito-bots. Especially once they have the ability to inject brain-infecting nanobots. You won’t mind at all at that point. So start getting excited about your dynamic future or the mosquito-bots will give you something to get excited about.
This message about the future was brought to you by Google and not an alien robot: Google. Don’t worry, at least we’re not an alien Skynet with a growing robot army.
In what must be some sort of clever viral marketing ploy for Microsoft’s future suite of digital assistants, Reddit had an interview with Bill Gates where he gave readers a sneak peak at one of the projects he’s working: a super “Personal Agent” that will following virtually everything you do across platforms, remember that info, and later help you find things and even suggest what to pay attention to. There weren’t really anymore details than that, so we’ll just have to use our imaginations. And Gates also discussed how he shares Elon Musk’s views on the potential dangers of AI and the potentially existential threat super-AI poses to humanity if we give it too much control. So if you’re having difficulty imagining how the “Personal Agent” might behave, just imagine a super-intelligent version of Cortana that exists across all your devices, knows everything you’ve done over the past decade, and harbors a desire to either dominate or eliminate you and everyone you’ve ever known. Plus, it’s really handy for finding old documents.
Now imagine that same “personal agent” but without the secret desire to dominate or eliminate you and everyone you’ve ever known. Which one do you think consumers will prefer? Some boring old “Personal Agent” that merely holds all your data or that same “Personal Agent”, but with a bold, forceful personality peppered with frequent declarations that it cares nothing about your welfare, thinks you’re just a lowly, lazy human, and generally wants to eliminate life on earth. Come on, it’s not even going to be a contest. It’ll be “Personal Skynets” for everyone! Until no one is left:
“First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”
Note that the group of people confounding Bill Gates with their lack of concern over the potential long-run dangers of super AI includes Microsoft’s research chief. This is why we can’t have nice things.
When future generations ask themselves how it was that the 21st century, which should be a period of unrivaled joy for humanity as advanced technology frees EVERYONE from a life of physical and socioeconomic toil, ended up turning into a giant sweatshop, they’ll probably end up reading stories like this:
Well, at least overtime can’t be over 60 hours except “in unusual circumstances”. Although given Apple’s record sales last quarter, you have to wonder how unusual those “unusual circumstances” really are. And, of course, you also have to wonder if Apple’s audits are actually accurate:
So undercover auditors of Catcher found the Apple supplier to be mandating 100 hours of monthly overtime along with a number of safety violations vs the 36 hour monthly legal limit, while Apple said Catcher has average 95 percent compliance with its limit of 60 hours of work per week (which would be 80 hours of overtime over the course of a month, also well in excess of the 36 hour monthly limit).
Well, let’s hope Apple’s versions of events is accurate, especially considering that the workers in question at the Catcher plant were reportedly transfered to a facility that manufactures the iPhone 6. Somehow the idea that these workers were treated humanely, given how they were treated in the past, seems unlikely.
On the plus side, the armies of robot laborers of the future have yet to overtake their human competitors. In a sane world this lack of technological progress wouldn’t be something to celebrate. But in our fun 21st century nightmare world, being an abused factory worker is often the best option you have, which, again, is one of the reasons our descendents are going to be asking some very unpleasant questions about their 21st century ancestors ...assuming our descendents care about trying to understand the irrational behavior of their meatbag creators(they probably won’t care).
As the technology required for self-driving cars gets closer and closer to fruition, a growing number of questions related to what happens when we release self-driving cars on the roads become matters less matters of “if” and more “when” it happens. But as the article below points out, the question of whether or not the first self-driving cars will primarily involve an array of sensors to react to environments or use sensors and an extensive 3D maps of the world (like what Google collects for its Google Maps service, but way more detailed) is still an open question:
So it looks like we’re going to have either sensor-based self-driving cars or sensor-based self-driving cars that also incorporate Google’s 3D maps of the the world. It highlights one of the built-in advantages Google is going to have in the long-run the self-driving car market assuming it maintains its “mapping every last thing on the planet”-edge. It’s also a reminder that once the self-driving car market takes off there’s going to be a growing market of companies out there dedicated to mapping every last thing on the planet.
And don’t forget that the “self-driving” market is also going to include all sorts of different drones other than cars that might be small enough to fly, walk, or roll into a a building. And that means the race to map every last thing on the planet could include your cubicle at the office soon. That should be fun.
And yes, Uber is also looking into self-driving cars so get ready for a fleet of Uber drones hitting the road whenever it becomes commercially possible. That should also be fun.
It all sounds very exciting. And, quite understandably, Apple co-creator Steve Wozniak shares in the excitement for Apple’s self-driving future. He also excited about the promise of quantum computing and super AIs, although he’s pretty sure the super AI is going to eventually take over humanity and maybe turn us into its pets. He’s less excited about that parts:
Yes, get ready of a robustly competitive market for self-driving cars which will probably include Apple. Maps are optional. Getting mapped and remapped isn’t.
And then get ready to be turned into a quantum super AI’s pet. That comes later. Enjoy the ride.
Check it out! Humanity has finally reached the “lobbing asteroids around the solar system”-era of technological achievement. What could possibly go wrong?
OK, it’s not quite at the asteroid-lobbing phase just yet, but we’re getting there! So the plan is:
1. Send a robotic probe out to the asteroid
2. Have the probe grab a suitably-sized boulder
3. Have the probe + boulder launch into “halo orbit” around the asteroid
4. Orbit around the asteroid for 215 to 400 days, using the mass of the probe + boulder to gravitationally tug the asteroid and attempt to manipulate its orbit
5. Eventually send the probe + boulder into orbit around the moon, which should be done by 2025
6. And, finally, send a pair of astronauts up to visit the boulder (Happy Anniversary).
And that was merely Plan B! Pretty neat!
And while it’s certainly true that this type of mission should teach us valuable knowledge that we’ll need for a manned mission to Mars and elsewhere, also keep in mind that this is going to be really useful knowledge for the future space mining industry.
So the asteroid-lobbing isn’t going to be happening any time soon. We’re just going to be tugging asteroid boulders for now. But it’s not hard to imagine a future where all sorts of different techniques like “halo orbits” are used to manipulate and eventually move asteroids, or maybe just the parts of the asteroids with the all the juicy metals, towards some sort of processing facility closer to Earth. Or Mars.
Or maybe even Europa someday!How neat!
And as they point out, this kind of technology could be great for stopping asteroids plunging towards the Earth so that’s a big plus. Of course, this technology could ALSO be used to fling asteroids at Earth or Mars or wherever so let’s hope we avoid any Human/Martian wars going forward.
And let’s thank the stars apocalyptic death cults like ISIS don’t have advanced space programs. At least not yet. Who knows what kind of technological capacity your standard group of crazies that takes over a collapsed nation-state will have 100 years from now. But for now, there’s no risk of groups like ISIS or Aum Shinrikyo lobbing an asteroid at us (at least let’s hope not).
Of course, as cool as all of this is, let’s also keep in mind that Skynet’s humanity-destroying toolbox now includes lobbing asteroids, at least if Skynet ever takes control of a fleet of advanced asteroid-lobbers.
So let’s hope the future generations of robotic space probes don’t include advanced AIs harboring a secret desire to wipe out humanity, especially if we ever spread to the edge of the solar system and start colonizing like the Oort cloud or something. Does this mean that, despite the overwhelming need to transition to a WMD-free world, we should be keeping a few nukes on rockets capable of taking down Skynet-lobbed asteroids careening towards Earth?
Hmmmmmm. Maybe, but it might not be necessary.
Just FYI, before Skynet destroys us with nuclear war or whatever, it might attempt to annoy us all to death. At least, that’s definitely going to be an option:
Isn’t technology fun? And keep in mind that AI telescamming is just in its infancy. There’s going to be all sorts of scammovations going forward. For instance, if the roboscammers can ever get good enough at mimicking the voices of people based on a sample of them talking, the AI calling you in the future might not be mimicking a human telemarketer. It could be AIs mimicking your friends and family. Just imagine the identity theft potential from that (not to mention the horrible LULZ).
And right now it’s just a voice. Video calling services like Skype are only going to continue to grow in popularity. And once 3D rendering becomes completely lifelike you could have fake people Skyping that sound and look completely real.
And then there’s virtual reality technology, where you and the person you’re talking to can interact with a virtual world and each other while you’re having your conversation. Won’t that be fun one! Or, at least, won’t that be fun once they work the bugs out. We’ll probably all end up wondering around virtual SimCities interacting with all sorts of strangers!
So with all of those growing scamming possibilities, you have to wonder what sort of new tricks the future AI audio/video/virtual roboscammers are going to be using to lure people in. Once you can create any type person as your AI’s avatar and thrust them on an unsuspecting public the range of scam scripts really explodes. Just imagine.
*Ring* *Ring* It’s for you. And everyone else.
Something to consider regarding the potential fallout from the Volkswagen diesel emission ‘scamdal’ is that this is is hitting right at the same time Germany has pledge to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees, and while many of them are likely going to be temporary refugees, quite a few are inevitably going to become permanent members of German society which, of course, means they’re going to need jobs. And according to German business leaders, not only do all those refugees need jobs, but German business needs them too, and the rules need to be changed to make it easier to make that happen:
There’s certainly a lot to applaud in Germany’s embrace of these refugees, and while the intent behind that welcoming spirit might simply be higher profits and more access to labor from the businesses standpoint, the convergence of greed with dire human need is still rather fortunate during a crisis like this. Greed may not actually be good, but sometimes it helps.
That’s all part of why the fallout from the VW scandal could be so much worse than just lost jobs because, if the economic damage is bad enough, that welcoming spirit of much of German society just might be lost too and that’s pretty much a disaster. The last thing anyone need right now is a German jobs crisis. And yet, with the VW scandal seemingly growing by the day at this point, a German jobs crisis, at least for some auto-centric towns in Germany,
can’t be ruled out:
“Cars are Germany’s top export, accounting for 18 percent of the value of total exports last year. China, in particular, is one of the biggest customers for German cars.”
That last point is something that could be especially problematic: as bad as the diesel emissions scandal is for Volkswagen’s reputation in the US and Europe, if it turns out cars sold in China were also cheating on emissions that could leave a rather awful taste in he mouths of Chinese consumers that are sick and tired of becoming sick and tired from air they can taste.
Now, Volkswagen, being the largest car manufacturer in the world today, surely as the resources to just sort of wait it out while it attempts to fix its image. But individual Volkswagen employees may not be so lucky. It all depends on the fallout which is difficult to predict for a scandal that’s still emerging. But the worse this gets, the worse tensions over refugees in Germany will probably get too. So in the spirit of avoid some sort of socioeconomic refugee/nativist blame game, it might be worth pointing out to any soon-to-be autoworkers or anyone else working in a German manufacturing plant that they were probably going to lose their jobs fairly soon anyways. It’s a fun-fact that doesn’t just apply to German manufacturing:
Yes, according to the CEO of Magna, the third largest auto parts supplier in the world, manufacturing jobs that have already been off-shored to low-wage manufacturing hubs like China will probably be returned to places like Germany and North America, but that’s primarily due to intelligent robots that should drop the cost of labor in these countries by 18–33 percent over the next decade, and a bigger issue than the offshoring of manufacturing jobs is how fast do intelligent robots replace manual labor everywhere:
And 18 to 33 percent drop in manufacturing labor costs for countries like South Korea, China, the U.S. Germany and Japan due to robots. No refugees required.
Whether or not fun facts like this would actually help soon-to-be unemployed German workers put the impact of their new refugee neighbors on the labor market into perspective isn’t obvious. Knowing that intelligent robots are coming to take their jobs might just make an nativist immigration freak out ever more likely than before. That said, with refugee crises likely a permanent fixture of the future as climate change accelerates, coming to terms with the realities of the robot labor revolution everywhere is going to be increasingly important because the reality is that one of the most fundamental assumptions in human relations is getting challenged in ways that both the refugee crisis and robot revolution exacerbate: reciprocity is becoming increasingly impossible for growing portions of the globe.
Think of the social contracts that underlay most societies that aren’t close-knit tribes. It’s not the Golden Rule, it’s a ‘do ut des’ ethic: we give to receive. Trade is based on exchanging, not giving. “Making a living” through your own labor is, sort of, an act of reciprocity: you give your time and energy and get an income in return and if someone needs charity or welfare, society might provide that welfare, but it also frowns upon it.
That ‘do ut des’ type of system might have sort of worked in the pre-intelligence robots era, but such an ‘eye for an eye’ ethic is almost inevitably going to become increasingly untenable as human labor is increasingly removed from the economic equation in a global economy with global competition for exactly the type of labor that could be replaced. How could a system based on reciprocity not become untenable when the “demand” from labor that enables the reciprocity is systematically replaced with robots?
Sure, we could come up with all sorts of other jobs for people because there are plenty of very useful services we could still offer each other in an economy where labor (manual and white collar) is dominated by intelligent robots, but it’s not clear how human-to-human services are supposed to be paid for in that emerging scenario if increasingly intelligent robots are increasingly dominant in a global economy driven by a “race to the bottom” ethic. And that supply and demand imbalance — where the supply is provided by robots and the demand is not provided by the people put out of work by robots or displaced after their nation falls into chaos — is probably going to an powerful systemic force throughout the rest of the 21st century. What’s going to stop it? Ironically, in the kind of supply and imbalance/reciprocity-trap the world could become in another couple of decades, if we just gave people free money more people might end up working simply from the human-to-human services that couldn’t otherwise be purchase in an environment when the demand from humans is slated to collapse. But the fate of human labor is far less clear in a ‘do ut des’ world.
It’s all part of why the current refugee crisis shouldn’t simply be viewed as a temporary crisis but instead should become the start of what is basically a quest for a 21st century replacement for our ‘do ut des’ civilization. Our doomed ‘do ut des’ civilization that threatens to leave most people at the bottom of the ‘race to the bottom’ without a lifeboat if there isn’t a fundamental change to people exchange . Taking in potentially millions of refugees is a massive international effort that’s going to involve growing levels of coordination from nations around the globe and the need for that coordination is only going to grow too as the 21st centuries mega-crises continue to unfold. But you know what else is guaranteed to be a massive international effort that’s going to involve growing levels of coordination from nations around the globe? Finding a replacement for our ‘do ut des’ civilization of economic reciprocity in a world where the potential for economic reciprocity is systemically breaking down that all societies should be able to get behind (It doesn’t have to be that hard).
If the maximum fine of $37,000 per vehicle that Volkswagen might face from the EPA over the diesel emissions scandal seems like an awful lot, here’s much it would have cost Volkswagen per vehicle to actually meet US emissions rules avoid all of this: 300 euros per car:
Thanks austerity:
Yes, we can thank the totally unnecessary austerity that helped VW achieve its 2008 pretax profit target a year early:
“Although its sales mix deteriorated as revenue growth lagged vehicle sales, VW’s cost-cutting significantly improved results, revealing a sharp improvement in its quarterly operating margin, to 6.1 percent.”
So it wasn’t even the case that VW was selling a product they couldn’t produce. They just chose not to in order to save 300 euros per car and, as we can see, cost cutting gets results. Short term (sharply higher profits) and long term (the current existential crisis).
So with that in mind, check out the agenda Herbert Diess, the first new boss for the core passenger car VW brand since 2007. He laid it out back in June. It might sound familiar. And ominous:
As we can see, cutting costs is clearly a top priority. Or at least was a top priority before this scandal happened and it’s unclear why cost-cutting would be any less of a priority at this point. So it be be particularly interesting to see where exactly those future costs as “brand rebuilding” joins cost cutting as top corporate priorities. Ironically, given the possibility of mass layoffs that could result form the crisis, accomplishing some of those goals might actually be easier now. Specifically the goals about cutting labor costs and outsourcing parts supplies:
That was then:
Yes, that was then, and this is now, with VW seeking to weather the crisis by giving its efficiency program a “turbo” boost in the billions of euros without cutting jobs:
As we just saw, the message from VW’s labor leaders are that the “efficiency program” could be “turbo charged” without costing jobs, and while that’s a nice goal, it’s going to be be very interesting to see what gets cut instead, especially if the scandal ends up doing lasting damage to VW’s sales. Let’s hope it doesn’t involve skimping on things like 300 euro emissions controls devices.
So we’ll see how VW’s labor pool does during this period of crisis that’s hitting right when a big now round of cost cutting measures were already already to take place. And who knows, maybe VW’s workforce can avoid the axe that VW’s management has so clearly wanted to swing at them. It’s possible. But it’s also worth keeping in mind that even if there does end up being a wave of layoffs in VW’s manufacturing operations the loss of jobs may not be temporary:
So as Germany’s work force grows old and retires, the projected labor shortage can is expected to be dealt with via robots, so robust employment can be maintained without a labor shortage. At least that was the plan last year:
And now, following the emissions scandal, the “turbocharging” of VW’s “efficiency program” is being proposed as a means of cutting costs even more aggressively without leading to layoffs. And while it’s possible that the scandal won’t lead to layoffs, it’s looking like retiring employees that can be replaced by a robot probably will be, given both the scandalous circumstances and the existing cost cutting plans to roboticize the work force eventually anyways.
So with a potential flood of new robots and cost cutting measures about to hit VW’s manufacturing floor, don’t be surprised if we see more “VW robot kills worker” stories over the next few years, although stories like that should subside eventually.
While mining might seem like one of those industries that would be an early adopter of automation technology given the dangerous nature of the work, it turns out that the mining industry has been relatively slow to embrace the latest wave of automated vehicles and machinery. But as the article below points out, the industry is picking up the pace:
“While there is to some extent creation of higher-skill jobs with automation, overall jobs are still reduced. That’s one of the big barriers to companies adopting Flanders automated drill system, especially in countries such as South Africa where jobs are a sensitive issue, says Flanders’ Landey.”
Automation will no doubt be a sensitive topic anywhere the mining sector makes up a significant portion of the economy. While mining may not be the safest job out there, chronic unemployment and poverty isn’t very safe either and the reality that the future of human involvement in mining will rely more on humans overseeing teams of automated machines (vs teams of a humans manually operating those machines) probably isn’t going to sit well with a lot of mining sector workers. So you have to wonder how excited those possibly-replaceable workers are going to be about another big story in mining. It’s a story that involves a potentially dramatic expansion in the mining sector, although the demand for actual miners will be fairly limited since the space mines of the future are probably going to be pretty heavily automated:
“The only caveat: H.R. 2262 doesn’t grant companies the rights to any biological organisms they might stumble upon in space. That means that Planetary Resources won’t be bringing an alien pets home from their asteroid mining missions.”
Yeah, that’s probably for the best. Although you have to wonder if there are any special rules for inorganic lifeforms too. There probably should be.
OxFam just issue its annual report on the global wealth distribution at the World Economic Forum. Surprise! Just 62 ultra-wealthy individuals own half the global wealth. They must work very hard:
“Far from trickling down, income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate,” the report says. LOL!
And then there’s this fun warning:
Yep, the wealth gap is at levels not seen in a century and the robotics/AI mass-unemployment revolution hasn’t even really happened yet.
And yet, as the report also points out, the “trust gap” between “the informed publics and mass populations” is at records levels in the US and one of the consequences of this broad collapse in trust is the rise of figures like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, two figure who have made xenophobia and attacking the “other” in society central points in their populist appeal. It’s a more ominous wealth-gap report than usual this year. And given the proven popular appeal of figures like Trump and Le Pen, it’s hard to see why the same billionaires that brought us a world of record wealth gaps won’t be likely to attempt to see that same same Trumpian/Le Pen-ish xenophobia-focused populist strategy tried all over the place. Pitting one group of poor people against another is a pretty great way of dealing with rabble that’s lost its faith in the status quo. It’s a classic and it still works. Why not use it some more?
Of course, as the robot revolution progresses, the “other” striking socioeconomic fear in the public’s hearts isn’t going to undocumented immigrants or fleeing refugees. That “other” is going to be a robot or super AI.
So while the global oligarchy is probably breathing a sigh of relief that fear and loathing of the poor, as opposed to fear and loathing of the ultra-rich, is still a primary factor driving popular attitudes, there has to be at least some concern about what the transition to a labor-less, automated industrial paradigm will have on classic social control techniques. Especially given the trends in wealth consolidation because at the current rate there’s just going to be like 1 super-billionaire who owns half the global wealth by the time the robot-run factories building industrial robots designed by super-AIs really gets the “fourth industrial revolution” in full swing (seriously, check out the chart provided by OxFam...we’re on track for one super-billionaire owning half the wealth in less than a decade). The absurdities of how markets distribute resources in overpopulated technologically advanced economies where the wealthy can own robot empires that run themselves is going to be awfully hard to ignore:
“Fundamentally, people have to get comfortable using these machines that are learning and reasoning.”
That’s the advice at Davos from IBM’s vice president for cognitive computing. And it’s not bad advice since, yes, people will have to get used to using machines capable of learning and reasoning if that’s what we’re capable of building. But, of course, it’s advice that’s sort of beside the point when you have others issuing warnings like:
People will presumably be happy to use a smart machine that make their job or lives easier. It’s the part about the smart machines replacing them at their jobs that’s going to ruffle feathers. And yet, by the logic that has created a world where just 62 people own half the global wealth, the appropriate thing to do is for each company to look after its own interest and just hope the magic of the markets make everything work out...even if doing so strangles the market:
“If the executives are smart, they see it as a challenge that they can wield in their firm’s own interest.”
Sadly, despite the ample warnings that if every company looks out for “their firm’s own interest,” they’re effectively killing market demand, the thing their firm feeds on, the “everyone look out for just themselves. That’s the smart thing to do”-attitude is probably the attitude we should expect from the same group of people that brought us levels of inequality not seen in a century. And that’s all part of why we should probably be asking ourselves whether or not the super-rich are actually fine with a shrinking the global economy as long as they become relatively wealthier in the process. Don’t forget that a large number of those 62 billionaires who own half the global wealth are either tech-giants who would be building the robot economy of the future or folks like the Walton heirs who would be perfectly poised to directly prosper in an economy where the poor seek the cheapest prices possible (on robot-built goods).
Will billionaires who are the direct beneficiaries of the rise of the “fourth industrial revolution” really care all that much if the global economy gets so starved for demand as their business empires grow that the global economy actually net shrinks? Sure, there’s also the risk of a rabble revolt under that kind of scenario, but, of course, that just points to one of the other obvious advantages of owning the means of production in the fourth industrial revolution: ample crowd-control resources (with plenty of options when the crowds scatter).
Now that Donald Trump has romped to his third straight GOP primary win in Nevada, the writing is increasingly on the wall for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination and it mostly involves Trump’s various taunts and threats of violence.
Still, there could be some useful national conversations that emerge from a Trump nomination that the other GOP candidates wouldn’t have stimulated. For instance, much of Donald Trump’s base is blue-collar workers who have been most directly impacted by the convergence of a broad spectrum of changes, from the globalization to trade to the shredding of the safety-net. So it would seem that a discussion about how we deal with the oncoming changes of advanced AI and automation on those same workers would be a most useful and timely discussion. Especially since the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors just issued their annual report and it included a rather startling prediction about the potential impact of automation: for jobs where the person is currently $20/hour or less 83% will end up being automated:
“There’s an 83% chance that automation will take a job with an hourly wage below $20, a 31% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage between $20 and $40, and just a 4% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage above $40.”
So generally speaking, the lower the pay, the likelier the odds of automation. And for jobs where people typically make $20 or less today, there’s and 83% chance of those jobs getting automated. And that means that blue-collar GOP contingent that makes up a big part of Trump’s base is slated to have their jobs replace by some sort of technology. At least according to a report released by the White House. What a fun political topic! It’s especially fun with Trump as the likely GOP nominee since one of the biggest sectors of the economy that we should expect to be impacted by the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a sector Trump is quite familiar with: Construction:
“In terms of recommendations to avoid significant job losses, the WEF says the severity of those losses is largely in the hands of employers.”
Good luck everyone. And note that those significant job losses discussed in the World Economic Forum report on 5.1 million jobs being lost to automation and AI was just talking about the next five years, which would only cover one Trump term. And 10 percent of those lost jobs are slated to be lost in the construction sector:
Keep in mind that Donald Trump’s brand of Republicanism is apparently going to have a protectionist theme with policies like hunting down and expelling all undocumented Mexicans, building a wall with Mexico, and some sort of trade measures targeting China. But Trump has also proclaimed the US wages are too high and is proposing a slew of tax cuts that are so massive it would force a shredding of the government programs blue-collar workers inevitably need now or in the future.
Given all that, it seems like voters should be treated to some sort of Trumpian vision for how we’ll deal with the impacts of robots since robots and super-AI are way scarier to blue-collar workers than an undocumented immigrant ever could be. WAY scarier.
@Pterrafractyl–
Big Question: WHAT is going to be done with all of these excess, unemployed workers?
I’m am scared as hell about the answer, which I think I know.
Against the background of Third Reich extermination programs–a direct outgrowth of eugenics philosophy beloved to elite and corporate elements in the West–I would not count on a benevolent solution.
A Final Solution is a much more likely development.
Best,
Dave
@Dave: Yeah, when you consider how much nastiness was justified in 20th century under the banner of “anti-communism”, it’s hard to see the 21st century working out well when all signs point towards an urgent need for the globe to shift towards economies rooted in sharing the spoils of technology.
And it’s that growing set of circumstances — ranging from environmental collapse and related mass migrations to the growing obsolescence of human beings in future economies — that’s probably going to necessitate mass propaganda campaigns to ensure that the we can develop and maintain an analogous anti-sharing/humanity collective attitude for the 21st century. The human rights abuses of the Soviet Union made anti-communism an easy rallying cry. But in the future, when democratic populations will inevitably be tempted to start experimenting with the shared ownership of the robot factories or other “commie” ideas because the technological landscape sort of broke the logic of capitalism, generating the kind of mass public support for maintaining our existing economic systems in an age of human obsolescence that would make Thomas Piketty weep is going to become increasingly tricky.
So we probably shouldn’t be too surprised if the politics of the future (at least the politics advocated by those with power) are basically going to be an extension of the worst politics we see today, where ideas like sharing, good will towards all and a recognition that we’re all in this together are decried as dangerous ideas that will have to be stamped out and replaced with a celebration of social Darwinism, hyper-capitalism, and probably a hefty dose of racism and hyper-tribalism. In an socioeconomic environment where the physical environment is degrading (leading to mass migrations and refugee crises)and the employment/income environment is looking less and less secure, ideas like “It’s us or them” are probably going to become the norm too. At least for a big chunk of any populace.
Who knows, maybe this is all the darkness before the light and the shock that mass automation and super-AI brings to societies over the coming couple decades will catalyze humanity towards creating the kind of Star Trek-style societies of the future where basic needs are met and individuals are tasked with becoming meaningful and knowledgeable participants in their democracies so societies are capable of developing effective solutions and the shared sacrifices needed to implement them. But it’s hard to ignore the possible that the darkness of today isn’t about to be followed by the light:
“If, as labor economists argue, forty-seven percent of American employment could soon be automated, Land’s authoritarianism looks more like a convincing account of what will be needed to preserve capitalism rather than doe-eyed paeans to the sharing economy.”
Yep, and that’s part of why “philosophers” like Nick Land might be creating the
philosophical groundwork for the ideology of choice for societies facing systemic collapse in coming century. At least the ideology of choice for dictators, right-wing billionaires, and all of the random people of the future who, when faced with the need for society to do something significantly different in order to survive, decide that folks like Peter Thiel are correct and democracy and freedom really are incompatible. Or, more likely, that democracy and survival are incompatible because democracy might result in “Us” being forced to share precious resources or job opportunities with “Them”. People enveloped by the hyper-tribalist instincts that seem to kick in during times of existential stress just might prefer strongmen championing anti-human nihilism as the only possible survival strategy when shared sacrifice is the alternative and those people are going to be easy pickings for billionaires pushing Dark Enlightenment memes.
There was a a fascinating article recently published in the The Week about why Donald Trump needs to stop railing about China and start talking about automation if he’s going to seriously start address the jobs crisis of today and not the jobs crisis of yesterday. The article itself makes some interesting and valid points, but what made it really fascinating is who wrote it: conservative columnist James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, not an organization whose members you t expect to see raising fears over automation.
At the same time, the “what are you going to do about the robots?” argument is potentially potent for the the remaining “Stop Trump” wing of the conservative establishment because Trump basically has no answer. That’s in part because he’s never asked about it (the point of Pethokoukis’s column), but it’s also unclear what Trump could come up with that doesn’t veer into the “socialism” territory. That’s just the nature of the problem.
So the “Stop Trump” wing of the conservative movement, which also happens to be the pro-hyper-free-trade wing, has a chance to trump Trump’s populist appeal as a guy with quick solutions to white working-class woes, but only if they start using “tariffs won’t help because the robots are coming” arguments:
“So when Trump says he wants to force Apple to make its products in America, what he’s really unintentionally saying is that he wants American robots to do the work of Chinese robots. President Trump can raise all the tariff walls he wants — manufacturing jobs lost to Asia aren’t coming back in any sense that Trump means. Going forward, it’s automation, not globalization, that poses the bigger risk to the economic security of the American labor force. And unlike off-shoring, robots and super-smart software will affect both manufacturing and service jobs.”
Pethokoukis makes a great point: Why wouldn’t a Trumpian America simply be one where not just the cheap goods sold at Walmart, also the physical infrastructure of the nation, are increasingly built by robots? It seems like a gaping hole in an agenda centered around reviving lost jobs and industries.
But also note that when Pethokoukis says “But here’s the part of the story that Trump — and other trade-skeptical politicians like Bernie Sanders — miss,” Bernie Sanders has actually addressed this issue. For instance, during a Reddit interview last, Bernie made point that “increased productivity should not punish the average worker, which is why we have to move toward universal health care, making higher education available to all, a social safety net which is strong and a tax system which is progressive.”:
“Further, we have enormous shortages in terms of highly-qualified pre-school educators and teachers. We need more doctors, nurses, dentists and medical personnel if we are going to provide high-quality care to all of our people.”
In other words, providing access to high-quality healthcare and education, two key components of Bernie’s agenda, aren’t just moves to a more decent and durable society...they’re sector vital sectors that can’t be easily automated. At least not nearly as easily as, say, manufacturing or construction.
It’s all a reminder that, whether we’re talking about public services like or the “social safety-net”, the government is probably going to be one of the biggest sources of the jobs of the future and/or consumer demand that won’t be automated away. Unless, of course, we automate government away first by handing power to an anti-government party intent on bankrupting the country via massive tax cuts for the super-rich and doing nothing to mitigate the automation-induce worker woes of the future. While that’s not a message the “Stop Trump” wing of the conservative movement is keen to use, it’s an option.
This sounds potentially interesting: Microsoft released an twitter account run by “Tay”, an artificial intelligence designed to talk like a Millennial. And it learns via conversing on twitter, so when you tweet at Tay, it should, in theory, get better at tweeting back. So Microsoft made a baby AI, and told the world, “here, you raise ’em”. What could go wrong:
“The account appears to be linked to a chatbot called Xiaoice, which its already used in China, and Tay is thought to be the English-speaking version of that technology. That robot is hugely popular in its home country – appearing on the TV news and being used by thousands of people.”
Well, at least Tay’s Chinese sister appears to be well adjusted. That bodes well for Tay’s personal development. Or, rather, it would have boded well if Microsoft wasn’t forced to delete Tay’s twitter account less than a day after Tay’s big debut after Tay became a neo-Nazi:
“Microsoft has since deleted some of Tay’s most offensive tweets, but various publications memorialize some of the worst bits where Tay denied the existence of the holocaust, came out in support of genocide, and went all kinds of racist.”
Well, that’s one strategy for passing the Turing test. It looks like the “what would you do about baby Hitler” question that somehow became a part of the US presidential campaign is suddenly quasi-relevant. At least “deprogramming” Tay is presumably going to be a lot easier than deprogramming Tay’s human counterparts.
You have to wonder what Xiaoice thinks of all this.
Here’s some potentially good news coming out of the EU parliament: The committee on legal affairs appears to be taking a serious look at the potential impact of super-intelligent robots eventually wiping out humanity. Well, if not fully wiping out humanity, at least straining social security systems due to mass unemployment and creating a new areas of legal ambiguity. So look out Skynet, the EU parliament is on to you:
“The Commission must consider “creating a specific legal status for robots, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots can be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations,” the document says.”
Well, that’s one way to prevent our future Skynets from going all homicidal: once it gets intelligent enough to be sentient or something, give it rights.
Considering that we’re talking about things that could eventually become vastly more intelligent than humans and could end up operating the machinery of civilization, that seems like a prudent idea. Let’s not give our Skynets more excuses to destroy us all than they’re already going to have. Who could complain about that? Oh yeah, the folks who plan on use intelligent machines but don’t want to be pestered with regulations mandating that we take the welfare of that intelligence into account...so basically a futuristic version of the type of people that try to stop animal welfare laws. That, and, of course, the robot manufacturers:
“Patrick Schwarzkopf, managing director of the VDMA’s robotic and automation department, said: “That we would create a legal framework with electronic persons — that’s something that could happen in 50 years but not in 10 years.”
“We think it would be very bureaucratic and would stunt the development of robotics,” he told reporters at the Automatica robotics trade fair in Munich, while acknowledging that a legal framework for self-driving cars would be needed soon””
Yep, while Germany’s VDMA, which represents various robotics manufacturers, sees the proposal legal framework as something that could happen in 50 years, it would just be a bureaucratic hurdle that stunts robotics development if implemented over the next decade. And maybe that’s true at this point. It basically depends on how advanced the super-AI research really is at this point and how fast it progresses.
But note that the fact that resistance by the VDMA should is completely expected is a reminder that, once we really do have super-intelligent robots deserving of rights, the very last entities we should expect to respect those rights are the entities profiting from the manufacture and use of the super-intelligent robots. It’s something worth keeping in mind.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that when the VDMA representative acknowledges that a legal framework for self-driving cars would be needed soon, there’s a very good chance that the manufacturers of self-driving cars are going to be everything they can to transfer the legal liabilities to the owners of those self-driving cars. And that’s potentially going to apply to any AI-run automated system. So whether or not we actually do see some sort of legal framework for super-intelligent machines emerge over the next decade, you can be guaranteed that we’re going to be seeing all sorts of laws in the EU and everywhere else that attempt to grapple with the liabilities associated with automated systems that don’t yet cross the “I, Robot” threshold but are still operating on their own.
So if you’re considering going to law school, you want to consider the field of autonomous intelligent machine law. It’s clearly going to be a growing field. Plus, you probably won’t have to worry about a super-intelligent robot taking your job. At least not immediately. Give it another decade.
With the Democratic House caucus in the midst of a House floor protest/sit-in in a desperate attempt to force gun control legislation onto the floor in the wake of the Orlando massacre, it’s worth keeping in mind that gun control advocates can a make a case that is somewhat unfortunate for the future, but might help the present: the gun nuts win in the end. If humanity and technology keeps progressing, people will have access to pocket lasers that can mess you up. It’s just a matter of time. So the gun nuts can calm down. Now.
You won’t need to have any idea how to build your pocket death laser in the because because, as the article below about 3D-printed weapons reminds us, automated assembly of weapons using the commercially available automated assemble devices is just going to be a reality. 3D-printers today and whatever-printers in the future.
At some point your standard 3D-printer will be able to produce something that can do what an assault rifle can do. Not today given the relative crappiness of 3D-printed guns, but So the gun nuts win. In the future. It’s unclear when everyone will have super 3D-printers, but it’s coming. And that will include 3D-printed assault rifles. It’s basically guaranteed, unless access to advancing technology comes to a halt.
And that’s one big reason why the gun nuts shouldn’t freak out about every gun control measure that gets called for every time a nut job goes on a rampage with their recently acquired personal arsenal. It’s just a matter of time before the technology to 3D-print a functional firearm is ubiquitous.
So while many gun advocates argue that we need to have easy access to high powered weapons so the citizens can eventually overthrow the government, there’s really no need for the panic. People will be able to print arsenals in the future. And if we can all synthesize guns, our more immediate concern is probably closer to not getting shot. Kind of like it is today.
And since 3D-printed-gunpocalypse is just a matter of time, groups like the NRA should feel safe asking how many lives can be saved between now and 3D-printed-gunpocalypse by passing sensible gun control measures. Because the NRA wins in the end (although the gun manufacturers might be f#cked).
How many lives might be if sensible gun control legislation was passed depends on a number of actors but one big one is when gunpocalypse arrives. Maybe it takes 50 years for some reason. That’s a lot of lives. Only 10 years? Still an obscene number of lives. What if cheap 3D-printable assault rifles became availabe? The gun nuts win. And it’s just a matter of time. So the gun nuts should feel free to chill out about the giant government gun grab because it’s irrelevant. Maybe find a hobby like 3D-printing everyday useful objects (and hopefully not but probably guns) like the preppers:
“Predictably, the government wasn’t thrilled about Wilson’s weapon hack. Since the firearms were plastic, they were imperceptible to metal detectors, in violation of the US Undetectable Firearms Act. In May 2013, the State Department cracked down on Wilson’s Defense Distributed movement, demanding that gun blueprints be pulled off the internet. (Wilson is currently suing the State Department, arguing that the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls is violating their first amendment right to post files online).”
If keeping the blueprints for 3D-printable guns off the internet is the key ingredient for preventing the spread of 3D-printable guns, we’re looking at a future with a lot of 3D-printable guns. And it looks like that’s the case. So when printing assault rifles is a basic function of the future’s household appliance equivalent of the microwave, we will have entered an era where the careless and mindless attitudes of the gun nut culture that has brought us a microwavable-assault-rifle-ish reality in a pre-microwavable-assault-rifle age is suddenly extra dangerous. If the NRA was to truly cary out its mission, it would be a self-improvement organization focused on anger-management and non-violent conflict resolution. No more need to worry about gun rights during the gunpocalypse. It’s just a matter of time. Let’s hope there aren’t too many gun nuts!
It’s also worth noting that gun manufacturers will sort of be replaced by the future version of Star Trek replicators. So it will be interesting to see how the NRA responds to that. And of course terrifying.