A question to capitalists; how much should we fear AI?

[Varysblackfyre321]

4 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Yep, same here. Some are obviously going to bemoan the fact that not socialising, death of society, blah blah blah but I honestly don’t care, more often than not I dont want to interact with others and tbh this stranger behind the checkout being paid peanuts probably doesn’t really care how my day isn’t either.

i notice that in Asda and Morrison’s they’ve even got self checkout for the “big shop” too (I.e. conveyor tills). Not seen that in the other big supermarkets, at least the branches near me. Although Tesco have that scan as you shop which again removes the need for a cashier....

i realise I’m doing nothing to consider the issues this causes so will stop there for now

I think most people share your views. Like how many of us when going to the local supermarket actually interact with the cashier more than we need to get our stuff? Not many I’d wager? 

[Varysblackfyre321]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

mandatory retirement at 55. Perhaps if things got bad, mandatory retirement at a certain age. 

Mandatory retirement? Wouldn’t that lead to a lot of people who haven’t saved enough to live comfortably for the rest of their lives out of the Job?

[Martell Spy]

6 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Mandatory retirement? Wouldn’t that lead to a lot of people who haven’t saved enough to live comfortably for the rest of their lives out of the Job?

Non-mandatory retirement. You clipped off the non-. And what this would mean would be Social Security or the equivalent being paid out at 55, rather than 65.

[Spring Bass]

12 hours ago, felice said:

I think you're severely overestimating how much shepherding will be needed. Also, automation doesn't create more space or raw materials; there's a limit to how much stuff ordinary people will be able to fit in their apartments. And more consumption means more energy demand, pollution, and waste to dispose of.

Consumption doesn't just mean physical goods. A high share of our consumption is already in the form of services and intangible goods (such as digital media). 

 

[S John]

4 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Is it feasible that eventually we’ll just let self-checkouts do that? Like just a scanner to verify the ID and the person using it? Like I understand what I’m talking about at this probably is way more expensive than just on hand to verify an ID.

Maybe if ID came in the form of some kind of implanted chip that prevented fraud/ underage people buying.  I could see something like that being a thing down the road as humans grow more comfortable with technology.  Most of us probably aren’t yet comfortable with that level of technological invasivenes.  I know I’m not.  Some might not be too far off though, there are a not insignificant amount of people out there already who might as well have their phones surgically attached.

[HexMachina]

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

But it doesn't have to be that way and in many places it's already not. In principle, it should be possible to buy most items without even taking them out of the cart or basket or whatever is used to carry them. This is actually a common answer to most of the concerns about the machine takeover: the machines always start off as worse than humans, but machines get better while humans stay the same.

Mentioned it earlier but this is already a thing here’s at least

https://secure.tesco.com/clubcard/scan-as-you-shop

[Heartofice]

8 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Mentioned it earlier but this is already a thing here’s at least

https://secure.tesco.com/clubcard/scan-as-you-shop

Really this is all part of a move away from high street shopping and towards online. I have worked  for one of the UKs leading retailers and I can tell you that the future vision is that actual 'shops' will not be seen in the same way as we see them now. I think we will see shops more as showrooms for products, where you can talk to a human and get in depth advice about your needs and products. Think more along the lines of apple stores or car sales rooms. 

Sure there will be some areas where we do need shops, if people want to get food quickly etc. But on the whole I think retail is changing rapidly and our high streets will become more of a rarity,  heavy on restaurants, light on shops.

 

[Nevarfeather]

I think it’s linked to scale, if AI furthers the amount of power in corporate hands versus the amount of power in the hands of Governments and people then I would fear it yes.

If AI isn’t answerable to regulation or employment rights then why should regulation be updated in certain industries. Who would call for it? The people power just isn’t there.  

I think ultimately we like our systems like to be local, clannish, things we can influence with actions and votes.  But if you scale up to big, remote, removed institutions like financial systems and multinationals we can’t influence and that creates problems for society. I think AI is a way of enabling and speeding up the scaling up away from local to multinational. AI can enable corporations to straddle markets and continents. Such as our financial institutions, which allow for huge financial markets. This allows more wealth to be utterly removed from resource availability and local influence is virtually impossible, how can the local level request better regulation and protection for employees when the institution is bigger than a Government and based on the other side of the world?

Humans could always buy influence. I get that. The rich guy could always buy votes in the Government.  But with AI and the ability to scale up business I don’t think we’ve ever been able to own governments at this scale before.

I fear it yes. Part of my work involves visiting huge warehouses, windowless environments where the manufacturing process is dominated by robotics. Nothing creeps me out as much as being shown around a warehouse full of robotics, arms whizzing at speed across complex machinery, a warehouse with automatic processes without a human in sight.  A storage warehouse where robotic forklifts will zoom by at a speed that it uncomfortably nowhere near what a human forklift driver can do. One operations guy showed me how the lights are rarely on in the storage warehouse as the forklifts obviously don’t need the lights on. I was also warned to not step in front of one as it may stop but damn it’ll hurt before it does.  It was just a cavernous creepy dark world filled with robots. It’s utterly dystopian.

[Rippounet]

On 1/21/2019 at 11:44 AM, OldGimletEye said:

At this point, perhaps the only human labor that will be involved is figuring out how to use AI technology to make new products or services. Accordingly, capitalism to some extent might possibly survive. On the other hand, AI technology makes "socialism" more viable.

It's funny, isn't it? We're very close to being able to create a utopian world. Famine could be a thing of the past at least, and with automation, AI, and the internet, we could all conceivably work far less.
Instead, giant corporations reap all the benefits of increased productivity and we're seeing the creation of a new underclass of unemployed workers.

I keep wondering at what point this will become truly dystopian. At some point in the future, cash will pretty much disappear (it's all credit cards and the like now) and there will be an abundance of goods. And yet people will literally starve, just because they won't have enough money on their "card."

I have to confess the optimist in me sees a small window of opportunity. Once cash *and* work will be close to eliminated... It will be conceivable to just give everyone a decent UBI and live in a Star Trek-like society. The 1% will resist of course, but at some point no ideology will be able to defend them hoarding the wealth. Sharing will be the obvious course of action.

[Kalbear]

Capitalists shouldn't fear AI, automation, or robotics all that much. All of those things are, after all, simple extensions of capital, and give capitalists in general more control and less dependence on human workforce. 

The rest of humans should fear and decide if they want to live in a somewhat subsistence utopia where work is gig-based and supplemental, or non-existent - but everyone has largely what they need to survive and educate themselves - or the world is a massive dystopia which puts the Hunger Games to shame.

[Luzifer's right hand]

I work as a plant operator in a chemical plant. It is a field in humans which are often just used for troubleshooting nowadys. 

Many continuous plant tend to have less shift employes than you need to restart a plant after a shutdown and at least around here retires often return temporary for plant startup or significant overtime is required(multiple shifts working at the same time) . 

Big chemical plants often seem incredible empty with just a few or even only one employe working in a control room(just there to react to alerts in a well running plant) or doing plant tours to check for leaks and minor malfunctions which the automation won't detect(often an experinced plant operator will detect a small defect before things break completly just because a noise changed).

It is a mix of hectic activity to get things working again to prevent a shutdown and boredom. Busy plant operators are actually a bad sign in that kind of plant because it means troubleshooting is required. Proper large scale maintenance is done by employes from a contractor which only work in the plant on a temporary basis.

I got 5 people on my shift for example and 3 people are required to run the plant if things run smoothly. Things are often close to collapse during flu season for example because shifts are already too small to cushion  unexpected absences(one person on leave or sick leave is already expected as I work in an eurocommie country).

I think a lot of jobs will move in that direction with just a few troubleshooters reacting to alerts.

Currently most jobs that vanish in my field are actually on the administrative side of things as automation is replacing a lot of jobs there. The number of people working in accounting has dropped significantly in my company for example as things like payroll are mostly automated now. The number "manual" jobs like plant operators are actually increaseing again because the numbers are already too low in some areas. But even the most simple job requires some computer skills now(a lot of troubleshooting is actually trying to figure out what went wrong with the automation and the keyboard is often more important than the wrench). 

[Altherion]

Firefox's weird "new tab" links are showcasing an interesting article on this subject today (the article itself is from a year ago):

Quote

Work is the master of the modern world. For most people, it is impossible to imagine society without it. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in recent history. An obsession with employability runs through education. Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers. Corporate superstars show off their epic work schedules. “Hard-working families” are idealised by politicians. Friends pitch each other business ideas. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is play. Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom. Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets work invade leisure.

...

And yet work is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways. We resist acknowledging these as more than isolated problems – such is work’s centrality to our belief systems – but the evidence of its failures is all around us.

As a source of subsistence, let alone prosperity, work is now insufficient for whole social classes. In the UK, almost two-thirds of those in poverty – around 8 million people – are in working households. In the US, the average wage has stagnated for half a century.

As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners.

It's pretty long and later discusses how work became so pervasive and how it increased despite technology supposedly making life easier. In principle, we don't need to wait for AI to work less, but this requires the kind of political will not seen for half a century.

[Rippounet]

Great article. A few personal thoughts:

Quote

In all these mutually reinforcing ways, work increasingly forms our routines and psyches, and squeezes out other influences. As Joanna Biggs put it in her quietly disturbing 2015 book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, “Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”

Some would say that work is what takes away meaningful things from our lives: family time, leisure, community, religion, and politics - yes, politics in the broad sense of the term are both meaningful and essential to the human experience.

Yet, at the same time, the article doesn't say that much about actual solutions to the problem at hand. One could easily argue that replacing salaried work with craftmanship is just substituting one type of work for another and that "post-workism" is mainly about finding different kinds of work rather than eliminating work. In fact, the paradox is pointed out in the article:

Quote

In Britain, possibly the sharpest outside judge of the movement is Frederick Harry Pitts, a lecturer in management at Bristol University. Pitts used to be a post-workist himself. He is young and leftwing, and before academia he worked in call centres: he knows how awful a lot of modern work is. Yet Pitts is suspicious of how closely the life post-workists envisage – creative, collaborative, high-minded – resembles the life they already live. “There is little wonder the uptake for post-work thinking has been so strong among journalists and academics, as well as artists and creatives,” he wrote in a paper co-authored last year with Ana Dinerstein of Bath University, “since for these groups the alternatives [to traditional work] require little adaptation.”

As an academic, I couldn't agree more. I love the idea of "post-work" but I'm not fooling myself: I know full well that I'm not afraid of "not working"  because much of the work I do is quite voluntary and doesn't really require a salary in the first place (in fact, much of it *is* unpaid, ha ha). A different way to put it is that I'd most probably keep being an academic even if I won the lottery.
And even if I'm planting tomatoes in my garden and trying to fix my toilet myself instead of getting someone to do it for me, it's still work.

I guess one can hope that humans would find different types of hobbies without salaried work: politics, research, sports, gaming... Everyone would probably find their thing. And if not, there's always booze and drugs I guess.

On the other hand, all this provides a very useful political analysis. I fully agree with Graeber:

Quote

 

By the end of the 70s, it was possible to believe that the relatively recent supremacy of work might be coming to an end in the more comfortable parts of the west. Labour-saving computer technologies were becoming widely available for the first time. Frequent strikes provided highly public examples of work routines being interrupted and challenged. And crucially, wages were high enough, for most people, to make working less a practical possibility.

Instead, the work ideology was reimposed. During the 80s, the aggressively pro-business governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan strengthened the power of employers, and used welfare cuts and moralistic rhetoric to create a much harsher environment for people without jobs. David Graeber, who is an anarchist as well as an anthropologist, argues that these policies were motivated by a desire for social control. After the political turbulence of the 60s and 70s, he says, “Conservatives freaked out at the prospect of everyone becoming hippies and abandoning work. They thought: ‘What will become of the social order?’”

 

Yes, having people work is a means of population control. Nothing new here, and there have been variations of this idea for a long time.

 

[Kalbear]

FYI, DeepMind just beat the shit out of professional players at Starcraft 2. 

I watched the replay of one of these games, and holy crap. 

[Altherion]

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Some would say that work is what takes away meaningful things from our lives: family time, leisure, community, religion, and politics - yes, politics in the broad sense of the term are both meaningful and essential to the human experience.

It's a kind of chicken and egg problem: except for leisure (which very few had much of at any point in history), the importance of everything you mention has diminished in recent decades leaving work as an ever increasing source of meaning practically by default. I don't think there was a grand conspiracy to accomplish this, but some decisions by people who benefit from motivated workers certainly made the weakening of other institutions more likely.

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I guess one can hope that humans would find different types of hobbies without salaried work: politics, research, sports, gaming... Everyone would probably find their thing. And if not, there's always booze and drugs I guess.

We don't have to guess though: if society somehow managed to move in this direction, we could do it in stages. For example, we could change the definition of full-time employment to four days per week (without increasing the number of hours per day) or perhaps increase the amount of vacation to two months per year and see how people use this extra time. Of course, this would require a 180 degree turnaround from the direction we're currently moving.

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

FYI, DeepMind just beat the shit out of professional players at Starcraft 2. 

That's pretty scary. Starcraft 2 differs from games like chess and Go in that there are many more possible game states, but, more importantly, it's played with imperfect information (i.e. you can't see the positioning and composition of your opponent's forces unless your units are in a position to do so). If it keeps improving and can handle even more complex simulations, I suspect DARPA is going to want to have a word with DeepMind.

[ants]

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

FYI, DeepMind just beat the shit out of professional players at Starcraft 2. 

I watched the replay of one of these games, and holy crap. 

You know how we always complained the AI was stupid and needed to get better......

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

On 1/24/2019 at 4:39 AM, Altherion said:

Firefox's weird "new tab" links are showcasing an interesting article on this subject today (the article itself is from a year ago):

It's pretty long and later discusses how work became so pervasive and how it increased despite technology supposedly making life easier. In principle, we don't need to wait for AI to work less, but this requires the kind of political will not seen for half a century.

The article is interesting but I think it bears pointing out that average working hours have actually kept falling in most modern countries since the 1970's, rather than climbing up again as is indicated by that article.

Here is a database of OECD nations and their average work hours. You can adjust the start of the measurement period by clicking on the icon named "Time": 

https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS 

As you can see the numbers have been reduced for most countries over the last couple of decades, or remained more or less the same in the case of for example Sweden or the USA. 

However, our modern digital society could still cause people to think about or be more stressed about work than they were previously, due to being addicted to checking their work emails all the time and whatnot. But that is a somewhat different issue. 

Similarly, average wages are a good deal higher today than they were in the 1970's, contrary to what the article claims. 

Anyway, as our technologies keep improving and per capita incomes keep rising it is reasonable to assume that working hours will continue to fall. Eventually reaching the point where most people aren't doing much work. 

 

 

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

Here is a database of OECD nations and their average work hours. You can adjust the start of the measurement period by clicking on the icon named "Time": 

https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS 

As you can see the numbers have been reduced for most countries over the last couple of decades, or remained more or less the same in the case of for example Sweden or the USA.

Always check the methodology before drawing conclusions from data:

Quote

Average annual hours worked is defined as the total number of hours actually worked per year divided by the average number of people in employment per year. Actual hours worked include regular work hours of full-time, part-time and part-year workers, paid and unpaid overtime, hours worked in additional jobs, and exclude time not worked because of public holidays, annual paid leave, own illness, injury and temporary disability, maternity leave, parental leave, schooling or training, slack work for technical or economic reasons, strike or labour dispute, bad weather, compensation leave and other reasons. The data cover employees and self-employed workers.

So you're looking at averages that include part-time or part-year workers to begin with, which means that it's perfectly possible for full-time workers to be working more if more people are working part-time (which is the case, as far as I know).

Then these averages take into account not just holidays and paid leave but also sick days, schooling or training, slack work or bad weather... I believe schooling or training is far more common today than in the 1970s for instance, which adds another layer of doubt in my eyes.

Finally, I'm really not sure how unpaid overtime can be measured. And I know it's extremely common.

So the data you're using could very well be saying the very opposite of what you think it says...

1 hour ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

Similarly, average wages are a good deal higher today than they were in the 1970's, contrary to what the article claims.

Adjusted for inflation or not?

[Erik of Hazelfield]

I definitely think a general decrease of working hours is a credible way forward. It's already being done in a few highly skilled jobs to attract top talent without increasing wages. Turns out for a creative job like software development you don't actually lose that much by reducing the number of hours worked per day - productivity tends to go down towards the end of the day anyway. This will if course not work for all jobs. 

The problem is that businesses are competing on a global market and if they suddenly have to pay their workers the same for less worked hours, they might well take their business elsewhere. Also if you try to reduce the working hours for teachers, police officers, nurses and other publicly financed jobs, taxes will need to rise in order to support that. Even if the increased productivity should offset that, there is still the question of how we can capture and make use of that increase for the greater good.

Solidarity between states is one thing that we should start working on. For instance what we see in the US where states bid under each other with tax exemptions and other deals to secure investments like a new car factory  - it shouldn't have to be like that. Other examples include ships that are flagged in the Bahamas, factories run in China with minimal worker and environmental protection policies or even company headquarters located in the Netherlands in order to minimize taxes. If companies can make use of those loopholes, they will. I think future trade deals should focus on regulating the market to avoid this race to the bottom. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 1/19/2019 at 12:55 AM, Erik of Hazelfield said:

What I do see happening in the next 10 years is self driving cars, buses and trucks. That's not a small thing - the workforce employed in driving those vehicles is enormous, and I don't think they can get new jobs that easily. The old idea that the mundane and repetitive jobs taken over by machines will be replaced by new and more highly skilled jobs simply won't be true in this case. What demand is there for millions of people (mostly male) with a low education level and whose only experience is in a field that doesn't exist anymore?

You know the prospect of Self-driving automobiles  poses an interesting dilemma that’s often overlooked and has had people trying to grapple with for quite a while; that is in a situation where lives are at stake should the AI prioritize the safety of the passenger or seek the option that will do the least damage to everyone around vehicle.