You don't want to have a human sticking their fingers in a grinder, or handling red-hot castings, or trying to install a washer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours straight, or attending the movement of a sewing machine within 1/8" for literal miles of seams sewn each day... those are all mind-numbing or dangerous things I've automated. But the machines can't efficiently understand when they're wearing out, they fault in a myriad of ways and need troubleshooting, they need someone to monitor the quality of incoming and outgoing product, keep them fed with parts, and to do other common-sense human tasks.
There are certainly things that people have tried to automate that didn't make sense. But there are a lot of things that haven't yet been automated which should be.
An airplane is much more complicated from a systems perspective (but yet can be more easily automated from an operational POV). To make an airplane fly, there are dozens of control surfaces, very complex mechanical systems, and not to mention a greater degree of danger (i.e., explosions) and loss of life should these systems fail. Yet, when everything "works" within their engineered/designed parameters, we can construct control algorithms around these operational envelopes.
Also, at 10k feet in the air, there are rules that govern flight paths (overseen by controllers); radar and beacons that help keep planes on track; and most importantly much less traffic/congestion (as opposed to a bus or car).
This provides the pilots (and also sailors) the ability to automate their flight at steady-state. This is where it gets interesting. If a plane loses a control surface or a critical system fails, these controls systems will be pushed outside of their operational envelopes, and this is where a human takes over.
It's not a question of "if" but "when" things will fail....
Whether these tools are just analog trim tabs that allow the stick to be adjusted so that a stable aircraft basically holds itself in straight-and-level flight, or complex fly-by-wire autopilot algorithms that keep an unstable aircraft in straight-and-level flight, taking the mundane, repetitive, mind-numbing workload of closing the loop between the six-pack of instruments and the sticks for hours on end. A pilot who has been watching the VSI and heading for three hours on a cross-country flight, tediously keeping the plane within 300 feet of its assigned flight level and ensuring that the passengers don't even perceive tiny changes in heading and attitude, or a trucker who has been driving their tractor-trailer cross-country for 60 hours in 7 days, holding an 8.5-foot-wide vehicle between a pair of 12-foot-wide lane lines, and adjusting the throttle up and down hills to keep their speed within a couple MPH of the speed limit, is going to be fatigued and when it comes time to deal with an emergency on landing or a sudden, unexpected brake check from a small car pulling in front of the truck, that fatigue has a cost.
There's a point where cruise control and autopilots can make these tasks safer, allowing pilots to keep ahead of the needs of aircraft, and allowing drivers to keep their eyes scanning the other vehicles, their mirrors, and the road ahead, rather than going back-and-forth between the speedometer and the lane lines. I absolutely acknowledge that there's also a point where this automation gets in the way or causes operators to tune out and be unprepared when asked to take over when the envelope is exceeded. Right-sizing that level of automation is critical!
Automation ==/== AI. Automation consists of a series of systems that are designed (i.e., programmed using control algorithms, logic rules, machine/deep-learning) to operate under a series of pre-set boundaries. The boundaries are typically defined under "normal" operating conditions, and safe-guards are put into place once the automated systems deviate from those "normal" operating conditions (I see a lot of practitioners esp. in the ML world fail to account for abnormal conditions...may be this is what happened w/ the Uber driver?).
The only comment I will say about AI is that I'm glad I am seeing RL and the like come more into play. I also contend this feels like a supervisory problem.
That’s not really what happens though. I also have some experience in automation. We humans don’t free ourselves up to do human things. We become slaves to the machines and automation. Yes, automating something frees up a human from doing the same thing, but when does it stop? The human just moves on to some other automation task in a never ending quest of scale.
People in a factory I worked in last week aren't gnawing furniture out of lumber with their teeth, nor are they whittling it with stone knives, sawing it with steel hand tools, or cutting it with power tools, they're loading and unloading CNC routers. It's not one person and $500M worth of equipment that lets a forklift operator dump logs in at one side and spit out semi trucks loaded with pallets of furniture, nor is it 2000 people and a bunch of hand tools, and it's about 200 skilled people and $20M worth of equipment. The most important feature of the equipment is the diagnostics, adjustments, and flexibility, allowing their operators to use their human judgement to improve operations.
We have declined a few of potentially profitable projects in the past year because we felt they were not a good match for our values, when customers had specs that required locking out operators from doing more than pressing "Cycle start", were unwilling to invest in training due to high turnover, or otherwise treated people poorly, or especially when they wanted to cut corners on safety, those are just not places that we partner with. This isn't purely altruistic, the effort invested in those undesirable shops is typically less valuable over the long term compared to the rising companies that treat their people better.
If automation was truly in the spirit of freeing people from having to struggle to survive, imagine a system build around an automated future where because everything is so efficient and there's no need for menial labor, you can just kind of do whatever you want; art, research, gardening, you name it. Freeloaders in the system sum up to a rounding error for the resources needed to support them because the system is efficient. Enough people like the system that they willingly work to maintain it and improve it (it's even exciting for them to study and build new and better ways of providing the resources than the existing way), but ultimately you just have time to do the things you tell yourself right now you can't do because you need to take meetings/clean up the house/work 8+ hours a day to sustain a basic living, etc.
It's likely going to be a tough transition as long as we still think in terms of "I as a person must maximize my gains and protect them from everyone else", but automation could easily provide such a life for everyone if it advances enough. That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
In some alternate world, perhaps.
In the real world, developing AI is costing capitalists a lot of capital, and they fully expect to capitalize on this technology, at the expense of all the rest of us.
> That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
This is ridiculous. 99% of us simply have no choice. We keep working, not because of "personal gain" but so we can continue to eat food and have shelter over our heads. Our relationship to "personal gain" is simply irrelevant in this equation because we have no power.
Only a tiny number of people who are already incredibly rich because of obsessive attention to personal gain will have any say, and of course, they will decide in favor of MORE personal gain.
Blaming the rest of us for this is simply victim-blaming.
If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference. Everyone has a very good baseline, like _VERY_ good. Clothing, food, transportation, energy, housing. When this is all taken care of in a great way, what exactly will corporations have to sell anymore to have the power they have now?
Personal gain doesn't just mean exorbitant wealth, it means the entire style of life we've built modern society around. Yes, I work for personal gain because I want to travel, eat cool food, and get nice things to make my life better. Everyone does this because they have to. That's not victim blaming, it's a fact of life that everyone does this. Many have to work harder and struggle more because of the inequality of the system that forces the only means of living as "work towards personal gain."
Now just try to imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you didn't have to focus on personal gain, you just implicitly had a guaranteed stable and nice and comfortable life; what would you do? Would you still try to chase only ventures that secure your future further, or would you maybe start to consider more passion projects?
To be perfectly clear, I absolutely understand that this is not as simple of a matter of "hey everyone, let's just be nicer" and then we will have utopia. Far from it, I understand there are deeply entrenched systems that force this way of consumption and struggle on the entire planet.
The first step towards something better however is to accept that it can be possible; as long as we're telling ourselves it can never be better, naturally it's going to be stuck this way. You can see small examples of this everywhere; municipal ISPs versus the incumbent ISPs are a perfect example of a community saying "hey, the corporation is bullshit, let's do our own thing", and this works out pretty well, results in better and cheaper service for communities, and ultimately weakens corporations as they have to play nicer in order to play at all.
What other elements in your life could be improved like this? That is all I'm asking you to think about.
False. There would only be class difference. Even in Star Trek, some people are starship captains who own French vineyards or luxury apartments in San Francisco while other people can only manage to live in a trailer in the desert, or on marginal planets on the border that are surrendered to the Cardassians, and if those colonists try to declare independence from the Cardassians, Starfleet will literally use weapons of mass destruction to make their homeworlds uninhabitable to human beings.
This is _my_ fantasy world, not bound by the history of Star Trek; the show itself in later series got ruined by awful writers who couldn't figure out how to make a sci-fi utopia fun to watch and instead made a faux-military/action drama for no reason. I want no part in that future.
Second, I think you actually miss the point of these episodes; the challenge in the Cardassian border wars and issues was "how does a space utopia exist with a (comically) fascist regime?" Debatably, the actions of the Maquis and other border colonies were persons stuck in a land ownership mindset which is exactly what I think we need to avoid. Data even proved this in the episode with the Sheliak to convince the people of Tau Cygni V that a place is just a place.
I have no idea what you're referring to about a trailer in a desert, but in actual Star Trek, everyone had a home, had food, had a place to live.
Regarding luxury apartments and vineyards, I must ask: why would you care? If you have a spacious and great apartment that meets your absolute every need for you and your family, why would you care if someone has more square meters or a higher floor on a high-rise? In a world where transporters and shuttlecraft and replicators exist, why would you care where your home is located except that it meets your personal vision of a perfect home? You can live in the middle of the alps and have every modern convenience at your fingertips and just enjoy the snow.
As for the vineyard, again, I think you're looking at this from a very current perspective; in a world with replicators and synthehol where only a few specific snobs care about real alcohol versus replicated alcohol, owning a vineyard and manually tending to it likely is just something where everyone goes "right, have fun with that." (Also, Picard didn't own the vineyard, his brother did. I guess in the Picard series he controlled it also? But never watched it)
I really cannot take the comment seriously as I think you both miss the point of the episodes regarding property/land and also are not considering how people might view apartment sizes and such in a world when transportation, knowledge, information, energy costs, food, basically everything is already taken care of. Remember, even humble Scotty thought he was being given an admiral's treatment in TNG when he got a _basic_ quarters for his stay.
Try to imagine that's what your normal life looks like, and then ask yourself how much you would care if someone has a few extra square meters.
Also, class difference has been decoupled from material wealth for centuries already. Just like a prosperous burgher from an Italian city-state in the early modern period was never considered the equal of an aristocrat who held a fraction of his wealth, a successful arctic fisherman, electrical lineman, or oil field worker is still in a lower social class than a less wealthy Ivy League graduate.
A future where the baseline minimum isn't homelessness and suffering in the street simply has not been done before.
Remove the need to struggle for a basic comfortable life, a new world has a chance to thrive.
The past has the burden of dealing with the fact that the difference between a day-labourer and a wealthy elite is the former has to struggle to meet basic survival and participation in society is eliminated the the basic day-to-day is already met.
Human nature will adjust, just like it did to the industrial revolution, to the digital revolution, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of data entry specialists were replaced by digital automation; even more land-laborers were replaced by farm automation.
The difference with the future I want is that there is a guarantee of a good and basic living, whereas the past had no ability to guarantee this.
Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them. It becomes a non-issue; just like some years ago emoji were a status symbol (remember, you used to need to _pay_ for stupid emojis), they're a standard now.
The world can be better, we see this everywhere even today with municipal and community efforts, with OSS, and so on. It's already here in many spheres, it's just a matter of accepting that there's no harm in a percentage of society taking advantage of such a system.
The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
Literally anyone who was alive during the 19th century would say that we’ve done this already.
> The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
My point was that the oil workers and arctic fishermen are already richer than many of the Ivy Leaguers, yet occupy a lower social status because our elite status games are decoupled from material wealth. Making material wealth even less relevant to daily life will only intensify these trends.
> Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them.
No, it just means those luxuries will cease to function as markers of status. It doesn’t mean markers of status will go away. Most markers of elite status have little to do with money because money is already too easy to get.
Now, only a tiny percentage of people produce food, and the rest can be community managers on twitter.
I now understand just how much progress we've made as a civilization
But all the decisions of that officer had to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major matters.
https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the...
Capitalism is a failure in this aspect. Humans become a machine to grow more capital at the cost of quality of life and the environment.
[1] https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_coercive_laws_of_compet...
But they’re not because they need the paycheck.
You’re fooling yourself to think the fruits of automated labor will not end up simply laying them off with basically no other benefits than the general population: slightly cheaper air travel (if nobody else gobbles up the differential).
In the end excessive automation it’s a bad proposition for labor in general.
But we will never get that choice. Once all our jobs are destroyed, there isn't going to be any help coming. We will simply be classed as inferior workers, and society will brush us off in favor of the 0.1%