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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

The question is will we iteratively destroy each job until 5% of the current workers still can afford an opulent living while the other 95% are crushed by misery and accusations of inadequacies, or will we, as a society, realize that we can suppress the need for work altogether and try to make the smoothest transition possible?

This is not a technical question but a political one. Seeing how most politicians paint unemployed as subhumans that barely deserve to live, I am not that optimistic :-/

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> The question is will we iteratively destroy each job until 5% of the current workers still can afford an opulent living while the other 95% are crushed by misery

If 95% are crushed by misery, where will the 5% get their money from? I'm guessing money will only be exchanged between the 5%, meaning the economy will be a lot different.

Also, what will keep the 95% from revolting? That amount of people will surely form a formidable army. What will save the 5%?

> Seeing how most politicians paint unemployed as subhumans that barely deserve to live, I am not that optimistic :-/

Changing the way we treat unemployed people is surely a necessary step forward, but it's not black and white. There are people who don't want to work because they're lazy or incompetent. There are people who want to work and are very competent, but can't find a suitable job. There are many types of people in between.

> If 95% are crushed by misery, where will the 5% get their money from?

I am not sure I see the problem. The 95% need goods and food. They buy it from the 5%. The 5% decide of the amount of money they accept to redistribute to the 95%. That can go on for a while.

> Also, what will keep the 95% from revolting?

Absolutely. But I am arguing that if your path toward a positive income has revolt as a necessary step, it is improvable. And even so, there is a risk:

> What will save the 5%?

What makes you think that soldiers will be sparred from automation?

> There are people who don't want to work because they're lazy or incompetent. There are people who want to work and are very competent, but can't find a suitable job.

It sounds to me that society would then benefit by having the lazy or incompetent people kept out of the work pool and paid to not work instead of having to make themselves absolutely necessary.

If you have worked in any medium or big organization I am sure that you can think of people who would have actually saved their employer's money by receiving a salary and not come to work.

>Also, what will keep the 95% from revolting?

Security robots!

More seriously, as robots do more and more, people will start to place a premium on having a human do the work where they notice the difference (so, not Amazon warehouses but probably the local Starbucks). With this factored in, 95% unemployment is unlikely until artificial general intelligence.

Would you pay a premium for being served by a human? Do you pay a premium to have a driver, to have a maid, to have a chef, when you can do without?

I know I would not. If a machine gives me accurate medical advice, I wont go to the doctor. If a machine makes good burgers, I won't pay a random student to flip burgers for me.

It would actually feel awkward and quite contemptful to ask a human to do the task of a robot.

I'll answer your specific questions first. Driver, no. Maid, no. (But keep in mind that robot maids/janitors are considerably farther away than self-driving cars. Cleaning environments not specifically designed for it is really complicated and I expect humans to outperform robots at it for longer than at most other kinds of physical labor.) For a fancier meal than burgers, yes, I'd pay a premium to have a human chef cook it. Doctor, definitely not in most cases.

As for it being "awkward and contemptful," I suspect you are imagining humans perform a task exactly as a robot would. That will be the minority of cases, because the economics are strongly against it in most. Instead, you'll pay humans for their ability to customize their work or the products they produce in a way that isn't economical to automate. (Burger flipping is doomed for this reason -- not much to differentiate humans form robots there.) Hence, chefs, plumbers, tailors, auto mechanics, specialist doctors, interior decorators, etc. will be assisted by "weak" AI but won't be replaced by it.

I have seen this kind of denial for more than 20 years now. I have seen people argue that driving could not be automated, that people would never accept an automated cashier, that webshops would never compete against physical shops.

The level of performance and customization that robots can achieve in every single of the task you quote is far superior to humans'. I expect none of your list items to present any technical problem in 10 years. Maybe plumber, give it 20.

I think you do my argument a disservice by equating it to the general trend of people denying X can be automated until X is automated. It is more specific: I say that some jobs (roughly, those requiring an agent to rapidly gain an understanding of existing unstandardized systems) need AGI to automate to human satisfaction in a way that doesn't require constant human supervision. It predicts, for instance, wide replacement of cashiers (which is already happening) and construction workers (which isn't yet).

>Maybe plumber, give it 20.

Perhaps we have different standards for "automated." Do you expect remote operators standing by ready to take over for a plumberbot or giving it hints at least once per service operation on average in 2036? If so, I find that technically plausible. I also expect new buildings to be built for automated service.

If we are talking fully automated human-quality repair and improvement of legacy plumbing, do you to expect a long time to get from there to AGI?

> roughly, those requiring an agent to rapidly gain an understanding of existing unstandardized systems

So, basically, machine learning.

Look, the tech is not there yet for an automated plumber, which is why it does not exist yet. 20 years ago we did not have the tech for automated driving but it finally got there.

I see machine learning improve every year, These last few years have seen a huge rise of popularity of deep learning approaches. And since the DeepDream gizmo, we hear less people talking about how creativity can't be automated.

Yes, in 20 years the tech will be here for a piece of software to figure out where the pipes must be in a house, make plans to test different hypothesis, plan a procedure of intervention, wiggle tubes together to make them fit without any other human instructions than "this tap does not work, go fix it". I have some supicions on what the correct way to go is, and am fairly confident that some other ways exist and that we will find one that will work.

I can't comment on AGI from this point. It really depends on your definitions. Some make AGI an unachievable goal. Under common and reasonnable definitions, yes, we will be close by then but we already are not very far.

And in my earlier comments I talk about 95% of unemployement just to cut some of the philosophical debate, but naturally I expect that we will reach 100% pretty quickly.

I think it's a question that this election (in the US) is addressing, but only on the periphery. We're more likely to address the symptoms and misattribute them to other forces.

Right now western societies could easily go on with 30 hour workweeks. It would reduce unemployment and people who are working would have more time for their families or to do voluntary stuff. Another idea is a basic income which allows a simple and good life. White old men in suits are part of the problem why there's no real progress on these ideas and education is part of the solution.

My belief is that right now we give incentive to people to prevent the automation of their work. Were we to do the opposite (e.g. by promising a guaranteed life-time salary to every worker who got fired because of automation) it would not take 10 years to make the world work out of voluntary work alone.

And it's interesting how the social democracies seem to have more of a plan on how to proceed than the purely capitalist nations.

Which purely capitalist nations are you thinking of?

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