Automation and the future

My friend asked me today how i felt about Uber buying the startup company Otto which is a company that makes self-driving trucks. He asked how a potential 5m people losing their jobs. Self Driving trucks, Uber buys it

I'm all for technology and automation and i believe its just the way a competitive economy behaves but there seems to be a lot of disagreement towards AI and robots doing all these low tier jobs. Today i watched a video on Facebook of this burger-flipper robot and 90% of the comments were hating on it.

What do you think the outcome of this situation will be? How are workers going to react when McDonalds decides to start replacing them with a machine.

Eventually more and more complex jobs are going to be automated and start implementing AI. Machines can deliver babies and they can do taxes more efficiently than accountants. Surgeon and self-programming AI are not far.



^ This is not an AI surgery, but it's a cool video

Will there be some sort of regulation?
How do you think people will adjust to this radical change?

EDIT: Recently watched this interesting video on automation i think everyone should watch.

 

You can't suppress technological advancement in fear of job loss, progression doesn't work that way. People probably had the same concerns about computers wiping out a lot of career choices 50 years ago. But now, because it was never halted, we live in a vastly more prestigious and capable time. The world will always go on.

With that being said, Uber taking over a company specializing in self-driving vehicles seems strange, because they contradict each other. The more one company succeeds, the more the other fails. Maybe just insurance in a conglomerate? I'unno, hopefully Uber isn't trying to tap into the market and purposely scare people away from the concept of automated driving to keep alive.

 

It's undeniable that humanity is, in its current state, aproaching what could be called a third industrial revolution, this time moved by increasingly advanced robotics and AI.

I can't think of no other outcome from such phenomenon than that of a massive layover of low to mid level workers (mainly manual labor) which, just as happened after the first industrial revolution will give way to yet "another" great depression. As a result the wealth gap will become even larger in its disparity.

But if history is any lesson such depression will eventually simmer and cool down and society will somehow carry on, how exactly, is anyone guess

 

Violently, no doubt.

What do you mean by complex?

Practice of law? Psychiatry?

Is that right?
I've never heard of that. Googling all I could find was this...

Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force

Patent US3216423 - Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force

Seems not very practical...

Then again, the idea was conceived over 50 years ago.

We can be pretty sure increased automation will go hand-in-hand with regulation.
If nothing else, the proposition of, and a demand for it will be one of many reactions people will toward the continued automation of labor.

 

I had this talk with my brother. We both are graduating with our Bachelors in CS at the same time and this exact topic came up.

We felt that it may become a big problem. Cars fix themselves or automatically get fixed. Food is auto-prepared. Every job we have gets automated, except the people that automate them(lucky us).

So where do people get their income? I don't know. We thought maybe at that point the "perfect society" comes in to play? Everything is automated, no need to work. Why should anyone have to work. I personally hate that idea. But I don't know what happens when we have abundance, with no income to pay for any of it. we discussed that maybe everyone becomes an artist and follows some kind of artistic passion, and our trade becomes paying for eachothers art. lol

 

While it is not practical right now, technology seems to be improving drastically.

Obviously more complex jobs require very complex programming and higher processing power and when you start looking at what Google is doing with their AI projects it is safe to say that an AI practicing law is just a decade or two away.

 

I was also having a debate with my friend about how AI at some point is going to be able to do better art than people.

Theoretically speaking in a hundred years if we have access to much more powerful technology (i.e Quantum/Optical Computing) upper tier companies like Google are probably going to be able to program an AI that is capable of recreating some emotions in some way. I imagine it being some sort of self programming machine which learns emotions and is able to empathize.

If the code is complex enough i believe it will be able in some way to recreate how a human makes art.

Do you as a CS major believe that such high complex machines will be able to be created?

 

Well, thats the thing about art. It's not something a algorithm or machine can make until you achieve true artificial intelligence equal to our own capabilities. Which may someday happen, but not soon.

So for now, art is safe. This is because art is expression. It's not a formula. Yes, machines could draw fantastic pictures and sculpt amazing statues or even generate a full feature film. But it wouldn't be expressive.

If you really follow down that rabbit hole though, you come to ideas like machine art is based on a mathematical algorithm and human art is also based on a algorithm of chemical reactions. So at the point where a machine could simulate all the same reactions of a human with no errors, it would then be human and could make art.(and it'd probably be the end of humans if machines progressed so far as to have those capabilities)

 

I agree with you. I see this human-like AI happening if we don't blow ourselves up in a nuclear war before. If you like this topic i recommend you watch this cool movie called Ex Machina which is kinda the AI i'm talking about.

 

People will just have to adapt to living in a technology-driven world. You can't slow down the progression of the human race for the sake of saving soon to be jobs of the past. Country leaders will always be there, it's not like it's going to get to the point where everyone is poor because there are no jobs. There will probably just be laws that require companies to hire people to babysit the automation machines, for example, even if it's not needed. Or these big companies will be required to pay huge fees that normal people would get in the form of welfare. There is no doubt that people will get lazy though lol

 

There will likely be laws requiring the corps and other businesses to dish out a Universal Basic Income in some tax-bracket-esque style. The slippery slope implications of this method hardly have to be said, though. The hope is that economists are even now working out how to maintain the stability of an automation driven society, though without proper government-mandated education (coming from someone who is for little government) the middle class has little option but to slowly disappear and be superseded by a system predicated on intellectuals, engineers and investors on one side of the fence with those who have no use (per lack of increasingly advanced education) on the other.

You should see the field of piledriving. Machines do majority of the work. Unless it's a hard-money job, corporations are literally paying companies to send too many people to work. The down side of this is that in a dangerous field like piledriving, too many people means more accidents, means more insurance claim, means corporations are essentially setting fire to money. The only justification and lifeline that this system has is that more people can theoretically make sure everything gets done and also watch out for one another in a field you're trained solely on how not to die.

Sure, everyone may not be poor because of a lack of jobs though corporations will be all too thrilled when automation solves the menial tasks in fields like piledriving and companies can no longer justify wanting to place (and be paid for) 10 workers for tasks that require 4.

 

There's a lot of misconceptions about how AI behaves in this thread. You guys are implying the change will be quick and advanced AI will wipe out droves of jobs at once. That's simply not the case. AI still has a long way to go and its implementation is slow. The elimination of truck drivers, for instance, won't happen until self-driving cars are good enough that they can go unsupervised. That won't happen for decades. You could enter the workforce as a truck driver today and still have a healthy career ahead of you.

Exactly, it's all about adapting. The problem with western governments (and I suppose capitalist governments overall) is that they're too concerned with the bottom line. It's all about short term gain. If governments aren't interested in addressing this now (as it'll be an issue in a few decades) then we'll end up with a fucked up dystopia that'll crash every system we know from the economy to the government. Traditional capitalism doesn't account for automation or the massive removal of jobs, be it over time or not. It's in a capitalist's best interest to promote skill-based jobs/education, universal basic income, and other initiatives to keep the economy rolling. If people don't have jobs then they don't have money so they don't spend. Socialist/left-leaning governments are already miles ahead. The right will need to make a hard left if it wants to continue existing in the future. I'm looking at you, America - this is not a problem that the free market will "figure out".

This is all very hypothetical of course. As I mentioned, AI isn't this magical process that'll change the world overnight. It will take a lot of time for things to change, and by the time they do, I honestly think we'll be able to shrug it off and move on. You'll see articles every now and then until that point talking about how there are no jobs. I'm sorry to say, but being a cashier isn't exactly an intelligent career move. As I mentioned before, governments will need to promote skilled positions and training to get over the bump.

Anyway, I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself. Guess I'll end it there.

 

I would never drive in a automatic car bro u cant trust that kind of technology mah man, the best computer is our brain.. Well sometimes

 

There would be far less accidents if everyone was forced to use an automatic car. These automated cars are so much faster than humans at making decisions. And on top of that, it would probably get to the point where the vehicles can communicate with each other. So in what would be a head on collision, the vehicles could communicate to say "I'm going this way and you go that way" to avoid a collision. A lot of head on collisions happen because the drivers do not know how to anticipate each other.

 

I think that in order for automation to be sustainable, there has to be compensation given to all the lower labor jobs that get lost due to the automation.

For example, around one percent of the working class in the United States are truck drivers. If self-driving cars makes their jobs obsolete, then we have a lot of unemployment all at once. There has to be a government plan ready to aid these people once automation develops otherwise we could see a depression and more wealth inequality which is never a good thing. We need to help the middle class if the economy is to grow.

 

in 1k years we will be able to visit another galaxies.

 

Computer automation helps improve economies some studies find, when manual labor jobs are replaced by robots they create a greater demand for higher skilled jobs, advertising, design, etc

 

While it is always a possibility I find that highly unlikely. Also, please stick to the topic. This has nothing to do with intergalactic travel

 

I agree, my concern comes when i wonder if this automation and AI revolution will be coming way too soon for humanity to adapt.

 

Wow. This was a good thread to read through.

I'm glad that we are still advancing. Sadly people will be out of jobs. But like many others mentioned, we can't stop growth out of fear.

I just hope that we can adapt as fast as we are progressing.