Robotic/automated labour

[coax]

AI won't advance much further without AE. No, not Autechre, but artificial emotion. Without it, robots with AI are not much more than a programmable computer.

 

I can't imagine there being a point where a robot could say take over the job of a quality assurance manager: how would a robot know what is high quality and what is low? How would you program such a thing? A robot would at best be able to churn out reams of a product or item, but I don't see a day when they are complicated and sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a good product and a bad one. Then again, many humans can't either.

 

As for there being less to do, with the population of the world increasing endlessly there's not many jobs left as it is. England is in a pretty dire state job wise, and will only continue to get worse the more people are born. Robots taking over menial jobs is the least of our problems.

 

The one great use for autonomous robots would be in healthcare, in particular for rote jobs such as looking after those with Alzheimers or performing daily cleaning duties. Then again, would you be happier being cleaned up by a robot?

 

I can see certain uses for robotic workers, but I can't see them doing all jobs. All it's going to take is one botched surgery or crashed car and no-one will use them again. For better or for worse.

 

How far AI can advance is still unknown. I don't believe personally that emotion has anything to do with it. Emotions in humans are just another nerve signal like anything else, that are used to guide us. But more importantly, they can be quantified and measured and categorized. Marketing people already know a great deal about how and why people emotionally react to many different things. Imagine what will happen when it can become a true science, of pure simulations and numbers type of thing, if we manage to reverse engineer most of the brain and the nervous system and the body. If they manage to create complex machines and algorithms that can learn and find new things (which they already have done, just not to a great extent), then they can feed all that emotional data in there. Work doesn't have to be done by a robot in the physical world either. Many jobs have been "virtualized", like in accounting, in tour guides, various analysis of things. Some jobs can't be, but it depends on the environment the job is in and how far technology advances that environment. Like say construction and building things can be severely disrupted by 3d printing in the future like the factory and distribution centers were by automation.

 

 

 

Are jobs not a fundamentally a means of earning money to buy food. If robots are making all the food then does it not mean it will be easy to give any the food cheaper/free?

 

Might just mean people have less to do, which might be a problem.

 

The way the economy works now, jobs seems to be fundamental to economic growth.

 

Jobs/working are as much an asset as material products coming from it, but it's pretty abstract to explain and I might not be the best to explain it.

 

I personally don't see problem with people having less to do. Stress has pretty much become an epidemic in first world countries, and more families are becoming dysfunctional because of lack of time.

 

And having more time for self-realization might not be such a bad thing. That probably sounds a bit entitled/lazy/spoiled/whatever, but who wouldn't want more time to do shit you like to do? I bet previous generations would envy that.

 

But having absolutely nothing to do isn't a good thing of course, that might be the main issue.

 

 

 

The problem is the economy and laws don't work that way. You need a job to pay the bills and groceries, and you need to do work that others want to buy to get paid. People don't get less to do when there is more technology, they get more to do. They have to be more creative, more adaptive, retrain their skills every time their job disappears, all because of technology. We'd need literally brand new social welfare laws like basic income, or get rid of work or money altogether. That's a HUGE undertaking.

 

I think right now, it's hard to say how advanced AI can become. But there is nothing technically prohibiting human level intelligence and output in a machine, and that could basically put anyone out of a job. Not there yet though, but it's definitely a possibility

[coax]

(coax says GDP needs to grow - this isn't strictly true, this is only true of a kind of economy that hasn't always existed and will surely stop existing some day, which isn't necessarily a utopian prospect.)

 

Heh missed this. It's not a utopian prospect, and yeah I was talking about the world we live in today. Anything can happen in the future, but realize the debt and central bank system is thoroughly ingrained in the global world, and a downright catastrophe will have to occur for nations to actually revert it. How would one allocate resources? Who would own what? You'd need to restructure everything etc. I don't think that's a very valuable course of debate. As for now GDP has to grow or the debt will crush us all

[Npoess]

 

 

it's cool as long as there is a strong social welfare system as its impacts on labor market is very obvious even today. as technology advances the subsidizing a comfortable existence of a human also becomes easier and cheaper, so i don't really believe that this will necessarily lead to some social catastrophes.

 

The problem is, like Hautlle mentioned, that stuff like welfare is being increasingly unprioritized over most of the world. But I know that reforms have been necessary, but with less and less jobs out there, welfare is needed.

 

 

It's hugely unprioritized in much of the U.S., and the other elephant in the room is that a lot of manual labor is allocated to undocumented workers and legal immigrants alike - especially construction and agricultural jobs. For example, the housing market is booming in Austin, TX and while most of those in my role as a land surveyor are local citizens and residents a huge portion of the hard-working frame builders, concrete pourers, carpenters, landscapers, etc. are Mexican and Central Americans here on work visas or working here illegally. They are all subcontracted and contracted by major housing building companies, some of which have NYSE acronyms because of how big they are.

 

Instead of establishing a basic welfare system and socializing things like healthcare and retirement 100%, there have been food stamp programs eliminated, de-regulation of industry standards, cuts in union rights in certain states, etc. all in the argument that these cuts will "promote job growth." GOPers who run on promises of curbing illegal immigration are funded by corporate lobbyists who prevent them for enacting such laws so companies can use immigrants instead of paying citizens fair wages. Democrats in more liberal states champion for immigration reform then do little to support the illegal immigrants here. Instead the gap between the poor and super rich is huge, middle class and even upper middle class citizens are finding it harder to save and live in places with exploding cost of living. Ironically, for an economy based heavily on commodity spending (food and drink, luxury items, consumer products), we're eliminated that disposable income.

 

I dunno, robots or not, the U.S. needs a pretty big social shift in it's current state.

 

 

It's a very similar story here in Denmark. The welfare reform-program has been immense, even though we have Socialdemocrat government. They pretty much acts as ultra-liberals at this point, and they have the interest of the employers instead of the workers - ideological cop-out for a socialist government. But I can't complain too much, because some of it has been out of necessity, but it's going overboard if you ask me.

 

But it's hard to compare US and Denmark, but it really does sound somewhat similar to what's happening here on some areas. It is worse in the US though, no doubt... I'm don't envy you. What I've read the whole middle-class in the US is rapidly shrinking, it sounds grim.

 

Maybe it's because I come from a country were equality is (or has been) a huge value in many years, but I think a country is only as good as its size of its middle-class. I would hate to lose that here.

 

And on different note on the immigration issues, even though I might be derailing the discussion a bit, the biggest liberal party here has just proposed that foreigners should have different immigration access opportunities depending on which country they're from and hence how likely they are to get a job because of that (another ideological cop-out, no? - not very liberal is it). Everything is being dictated by money now, and discrimination and xenophobia on the rise too... ugh.

 

(sorry if I'm being "marxist", but I need to air some opinions from time to time, but I do consider myself more moderate than that)