Well, it would require learning new variables without human input, and it would require rationality. It would not operate mathematically.
They would also begin asking for wages, which is counterproductive from the point of view of an entrepreneur looking to replace labor with capital-goods.
I’m not so sure about that. We’re not even sure what intelligence is even to this day. It’s a combination of communication and cooperation.
It may be that we have already produced a super-intelligence more advanced than humans. Wikipedia, for example, learns faster and holds more knowledge than any individual human. But what it does or what its motivations are is moot. Some ant colonies, on the other hand, don’t know much but behave ruthlessly intelligently.
When it comes to intelligence, bigger is not the same as better.
Well, it is true that we still don’t know how intelligence and conscience comes about. But again, if we just design a software that can evolve (not easy, of course, but far easier than designing an “intelligent” machine) it will create its own “intelligence” and rationality. I’m not an AI expert but that’s how I would try to do it. And it seems pretty probable (if they haven’t already done it). who knows, perhaps someone here is an AI trying to learn about AE[:P]
a robotic society is teh win.
Labor is the ultimate resource and demand for it is never satisfied. In a robotic economy, most humans would become intellectuals, artists, and entertainers. Very little manual labor would be needed. ‘Unemployment’ is inconsequential when civilization has reached the level when manual labor is obsolete.
These assertions have been made by technophobes for the past 100 years who are scared that technological advancements are going to displace the role of the individual in the workplace.
The problem is that these systems will also eliminate jobs in massive numbers. In fact, we are about to see a seismic shift in the American workforce. As a nation, we have no way to understand or handle the level of unemployment that we will see in our economy over the next several decades.
These are assumptions and guesses. As a nation, we have no way to see the future, so we can’t really assume there will be mass unemployment due to advancements in the first place.
Rest of the article seems to over-exaggerate robots in the workforce. I highly doubt robots are going to replace everything, and in business itself you have to think whether or not it’s economical. Robots are not creative beings, either. They can only do what they are programmed to do.
I read that, and thought it something that was said many decades ago, until I realized that it is probably quoted from the article linked in the opening post. Either way, mass unemployment will lead to mass necessities of creativity to survive, which will lead to new formations of jobs, including jobs that require a large amount of the workforce to be hired to be efficient. It all balances out in the long run.
Well I think that’s a mistake. There are lots of evolved software programs out there, but they have all been evolved to solve very specific problems. Looking at nature, plankton is highly evolved as well, and grows in enormous quantities. Being optimized is not the same as being intelligent.
Yea it’s a statement made in economic ignorance. As more people go unemployed the needs of the market grow prorportionaly. Eventually people will be tired of starving and develop business’s and services to accommodate the growing needs. In a market economy high rates of unemployment are simple not sustainable. Despite what the talking heads tell us. People will have a desire to help themselves and others, and it will be done through a market. Now on the other hand, as long as we have a heavy amount of welfare that turn around will be pushed off.
It is just the same flawed argument that has been used since the industrial revolution. What will we do when there are no jobs in agricultre omg omg!
If we don’t have to spend our time at an assembly line all we can find another way to be useful to other people.
The fact that we don’t know exactly what everyone would do with there time instead right now makes no difference. This is simply what we know as economic growth. Technology and capital makes less time required to produce value X so now can have time to produce X+Y.
Also this argument is based on faulty premise that jobs are something good. Jobs aren’t good, they are bad and remove spare time. How can it be a problem that we don’t have to work for our wealth but it is built almost for free by machines instead?
The only argument I see one could make against this is that robots make production a product of capital alone rather then capital + labour. Thus people that have no capital won’t be able to be useful and have nothing to trade with other people to sustain themselves.
But there are many problem with such an argument.
For starters anyone can start saving and accumulate capital.
Also it seems to ignore the law of comparative advantages.
And finally it assumes that there is such a thing as “the problem of plenty”. Which there isn’t. A theme-park doesn’t turn of the water because water is so cheap that paying for it is all transaction cost. They instead make it free and include the cost for it in something else they are charging for.
In the future for instance I think we will see homes come pre-packaged with plasma-tvs and whatever gadgets one might want in a future home. There could be hospitals funded by advertisements on the walls or maybe you get a free robo-hospital visit along with your unhealthy lunch…
It’s more false in the sense that relative prices wouldn’t fall as costs fall in relation to productivity gains. Consider how rubbing alcohol today is still about a buck per bottle (I can’t remember fluid ounces…) as it has been for as long as I can remember (and I’m 29 years old). All of that had to come from productivity gains either directly due to technology and/or scales of economy. Either way you slice it, the rubbing alcohol is still cheap.
To extend this reasoning let us consider the manufacturing of cars. A car that would be manufactured by a robot from start to finish would become similarly cheap. So instead of paying a retarded price of 30k, it might be feasible for the same model with the same features to come at 10k. Or more in terms of math: the cost of car is at X, but after roboticization of production it could yield X - N (where N can be both productivity gains from technology and scales of economy from such roboticization of production).
So all that means is that roboticization of production can yield a relative decline/deflation of prices so long as it follows that it yields productivity gains and works well with scales of economy. If it doesn’t satisfy either of those conditions then there’s no real benefit to any company to roboticize its production (save for specialized repetitive tasks as they’ve been doing for decades).
Thus, what such roboticization would do to the whole of the economy is not to leave a vast swath of people unemployed or at least not in the long term (as changes to any production cycle will make certain job skills useless, thus such people will have to retrain or repurpose those skills), which means those same people can be used elsewhere in the economy rather than doing repetitive and/or laborous jobs (I should know, I’m a package loader at UPS. I wouldn’t miss the job in the least if they figured a way to roboticize it.). Plus, the side effect of roboticization would yield a relative deflation in prices, thus an improvement in the standard of living for everyone, even the people that would temporarily lose their old jobs.
Don’t think in terms of jobs, think in terms of the stuff we have. If machines did everything or almost everything then the price of everything would go down dramtatically and that means higher standards of living.
Suppose you live in an island and you had a robot cooking your food and doing stuff for you. You could practically just eat and spend time on leisure all day. This is the unemployment scenario and it doesn’t seem so bad.
Now compare this with a scenario where you have to hunt and collect fruit and everything. Sure you’ll create plenty of jobs for yourself but you’ll be miserably poor.