Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050? 1457
Anonymous writes "Marshall Brain (the guy who started HowStuffWorks) has published an article claiming that robots will take half the jobs in the U.S. by 2050. Some of his predictions: real computer vision systems by 2020, computers with the CPU power and memory of the human brain by 2040, completely robotic fast food restaurants in 2030 (which then unemploy 3.5 million people), etc. It's a pretty astounding article. My question: How many people on /. think he is right (or even close - let's say he's off by 10 or 20 years)? Or is he full of it?"
For more information (Score:2, Interesting)
This article is dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
Autonomous humanoid robots will take disruption to a whole new level. Once fully-autonomous, general-purpose humanoid robots are as easy to buy as an automobile, most people in the economy will not be able to make the labor = money trade anymore. They will have no way to earn money, and that means they end up homeless and on welfare.
This is horseshit. First of all it is impossible, if most people in the economy were on welfare they would be no economy. Where would these companies get money to build and maintain the robots? I don't disagree that there will probably be a lot of automated systems in the near future, but this article is just stupid.
Predict the future by looking at the past (Score:5, Interesting)
is to make forward-looking predictions which are
justified with little more than hand-waiving
arguments, and the other to look at past
history and see what type of hand-waiving
arguments of days gone by have actually come
to fruition.
The author touches on the issue, but IMO is
comparing apples to oranges in this quote:
Rather than talk about airplanes, let's talk
about robotics since that's the subject of the
article. Off the top of my head, the
industries in which robots have dominated
more than any other are in chip fabs and
automobile assembly lines, and this has been
the case for over a decade. Are we seeing
the type of doomsday scenario for the
workforce that this article implies?
Not humanoid robots though (Score:4, Interesting)
But I don't think lt Data will be around any time soon. the AI development is very slow, to the point that all predictions about clever machines retracted.
Human Factor (Score:2, Interesting)
a) people would be uncomfortable in interacting with machine services (i.e. a robotic dentist or gynecologist), or
b) there are protectections by labor union and/or political interests and therefore unlikely to convert to full automation - even in the interest of increased efficiency (a good example would be the United Auto Workers).
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheers,
_GP_
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Uh... Yeah. I'm sure Billy Bob has some great ideas he's just waiting to get out into the world, if it wasn't for that damn fastfood job.
I don't wanna be mean here or anything, but you have to realize that the percentage of the population that actually thinks, creates, innovates and so on, is incredibly small. You don't get a million Nietzsche's from eliminating mundane jobs.
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The use the pay-at-the-pump is nice to me as a customer but I always figured them as really stupid for the store. The reason is that you loose all the foot traffic coming in to buy snacks and drinks.
It was not like they gained much from not paying human employees to ring up the charge since the people are still around to do your rarer purchases.
So guess what is happening how, some places are switching to pay-at-pump systems that allow you to purchase a drinks or snack at the pump, then one of the workers will bring the items out to you.
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:5, Interesting)
More importantly, no matter how much technology we have, we'll always find ways to keep ourselves more occupied with other matters through the USE of the technologies we create. The Matrix is certainly a very fun, very cool movie, but the distopian future of self-aware machines displacing humanity just isn't reality. Yes, I would rather have a robot properly preparing my cheap Wendy's cheeseburger over waiting 5 minutes for some high school kid to get done spitting on it, rubbing it on the floor, and then carelessly handing it to me through the drive-through window. However, when that kid gets displaced by some robot, I'm sure he'll find some other means to buy himself that rice-burner.
Look at history people. The only time a civilization or humanity has been "displaced" has been because the people self-destructed, not because of their inventions, mechanical creations, or otherwise. Now ruining a natural habitat, or creating "gods" to sacrifice themselves to, yes, that has a negative impact, but those aren't technological innovations.
Re:This article is dumb (Score:3, Interesting)
Hyundai/Kia is building a plant down in either Louisiana or Alabama that is going to be 90% lights out. It will produce 500,000 cars, trucks, and minivans a year. They will then undercut every other manufacturer even more than they are now, even precious Honda and Toyota.
I think the American people need to wake up. Maybe this whole moving the IT/White Collar jobs to India/Russia thing will give the yuppies a taste of what it's like to suffer layoffs in the name of the future of the corporation. Maybe all those people who bought Hondas and Toyotas over the last 25 years will see what it's like to lose to the "faster, better, cheaper" competition.
Am I biased? Hell yes. My father is an American automotive worker. He's worked in plants for 35 years. He put my mother and himself through both college and grad school, raised two kids and put them through college, and still somehow managed to dodge layoffs. I grew up wondering every three months if Dad would still have a job once the quarterly earnings were announced. Now he's facing the cutting of his retirement because the damn Koreans have figured out how to outfox everyone else, even the Japanese. I do not feel sorry for a single damn yuppie IT worker who drives a foreign car and loses their job to someone in India or Russia. Even if that foreign car was supposedly "Assembled by Americans" in Kentucky or Louisiana. Who's economy gets 90% of the money from that car? Not the US.
One of my customers said it best: "We are becoming a nation of whores and mercenaries."
By the way, I was a yuppie IT worker at one time. I have the leather jacket and SUV to prove it.
Re:3.5 million (Score:3, Interesting)
Only problem with this is the skill level of the people being eliminated and the new jobs produced. The 3.5MPeople being displaced will be more manual laborers and lower income. While it will be nice to have a subsequent boost of 3.5M jobs for "skilled" technology/machine laborers, those 3.5M displaced will suddenly place a large burden on various social programs as it becomes increasingly harder for them to find work. And that leads to all the various social implications of having a significant number of unemployed, "non skilled" workers.
Supersonic? Bad example. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well actually for normal people that didn't happen until the 70s - Concorde. And after
October they won't be able to do it anymore ironically because of economic reasons so frankly
he couldn't have picked a worse analogy.
We hear this Futurama crud all the time from people with starry eyed techno-vision , yeah
they may come tru e, they may not but I can promise you one thing - any technology that makes
half a country jobless (without any replacement jobs to give them) will face social unrest the like of which has never been seen
and will make the actions of the Luddites look like a scuffle in a playground in comparison. If
technology companies want to persue the profit motive to its logical conclusion then thats up to them , but
they must accept the fact that it may lead to a breakdown of society and hence to their own companys total collapse.
Good point (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, a lot of the process in learning how to fly involves fighting human instinct. When you're learning about stalls for example, as soon as you take the airplane to a stall it starts dropping, and your first instinct is to pull back on the yoke to get it to go back up. Of course, your instructor will have by then pounded into your head to actually drop the nose in order to gain back speed and get out of the stall, but the first few times your response time is always slow because you have to think against your natural instinct.
Historical perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
On a related note, it appears there isn't enough work for everyone any more. The idea, that every healthy adult in the society should have a job, needs to change radically, because we obviously don't need everyone working in order to run this society and feed ourselves. What we could do is split up the work so that everyone could work, say, four hours a day and have plenty of spare time. This would be a natural progression, considering the working hours are already a lot shorter than they were in the early industrial times. Sadly, however, we're stuck in the notion that everyone has to work full days, even if there's no real need.
Re:Not a zero-sum world (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is that we invest a great deal of resources training our workers. When certain types of jobs are obsoleted, the workers must retrain. Even with idealized workers, this represents a substaintial amount of time during which the worker is neither producing nor earning.
However, in the real world, older or less-intelligent workers may find it very difficult to retrain for the new jobs that have been created.
You can talk about economic abstractions all you want, but when a 49-year-old steel worker gets laid off after 32 years of learning to become a good steel worker, he may not find it so easy to move into a service-sector job. Even if he does find a job, he probably won't be able to completely retrain, and thus will not be as productive as he used to be, and his earnings will go way down.
in a 100 years
Now you've found an economy that would be zero-sum. Congrats.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
Certainly this model has been used in a lot of science-fiction stories -- everyone gets a minimum stipend and lives on the productivity of the machines and a few humans. I've always wondered about the overall economic feasibility of such a system, and how we get from here to there. Here's a sample of questions -- many good stories have been written trying to answer some of them.
It's no different than India. But better. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Robot cheap and efficient? Not necessary!! (Score:2, Interesting)
This is not necessarily true.
We all know that robot/computer is good at doing long and repetetive and tedious calculation and work. This made robot excellent in assembly line where each robot only perform a specific function at a time.
But take cleaning as an example. Granted a cleaning robot can mop the floor 24/7. But now suppose somebody stick a gum on the floor. Can the robot clean it up? NO! Now we have to install a scraper, and visual recognition to identify "gum on the floor". Extra Money! Now suppose somebody left an empty cardboard boxes on the floor. Can the robot clean it up? NO! Now we have to install robotic arms. And program it to identify boxes, and pick up and flatten the boxes, and walk to the dumpster and dump the boxes. EXTRA MONEY!!
That's not forget these cleaning bot need maintance too. These highly skilled trained maintance/repair technicians don't come cheap.
Now you ask yourself. Should I get a cleaning bot, or just hire some guys working at minimum wages ??
The advantage of a robot is that it can be programmed to do a specific task extremely well.
The advantage of a human is that he/she can be trained to do infinite number of half-assed jobs.
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, they would. But if you have a robot that performs better than theirs it is plausible that a market for privately-owned robots for contract labor/other work could start to emerge. I realize the concept is somewhat of a stretch, but this may apply to AI/DSS robots and similar technologies. A good argument could be made for both sides on Open v. Closed Source systems, Intellectual Property, and software patents depending on , in part, how much income the robot contributes to its owners. I, for one, would welcome competition from other robots, but if I were almost completely dependant on the money my robot provided to me, I don't think I would tell everybody how I did it. I feel like I'm starting to rant, so I'll leave it at that. I do agree with you that many corps. will have their own robots that perform most tasks to their satisfaction.
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:2, Interesting)
But I have seen an alternate future where local restruants and stores run by people become more like a gathering place for people. Each run independently by moms-and-pops. Each place can become its own village square where the "good" jobs become mental/physical labor intensive work in ways that robots are not optimal for. A golden age of the trades could happen again.
Both futures are possible. Which one do we want to create for ourselves? That will be a big question for this century.
Player Piano (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting read. Slight spoilage below.
What must Vonneguts first readers have made of Player Piano? The story gives off the dank chill of 1984 and Brave New World, but it is less earnest, almost zany, and it wields its message playfully in comparison. The hero is Paul Proteus, an engineer in an America of the future where computers run everything and do everything, making people almost afterthoughts. Paul seems to be on his way up the ladder of success in this techno-utopia -- a perfect wife, a fast-track position at the Ilium Works and a shot at a major promotion -- but he is plagued with doubts about what modern life has become. Through a strange series of events (for some form of Big Brother is, indeed, watching), Paul joins a revolutionary organization called the Ghost Shirts and even becomes its leader. The Ghost Shirts are inspired by the past, when people mattered more than machines, but their revolution collapses with brutal irony. Paul and his companions surrender when they discover their followers have become obsessed with making new machines from the wreckage of the machines they have just smashed.
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is a damn shame.
This is me, when the machines become self-aware and decide to take over: "So, you're saying I get to live in a completely convincing fantasy world in which I can become a master of ten martial arts forms in a day and have super powers, and otherwise live my life with the same opportunities I had in the real world (only with more kung-fu), and the only cost is you get to use my now-useless physical body as a power source? Sign me up!"
Anyway, I'm not worried about robots taking jobs. Robots aren't the reason so many auto workers lost their jobs, it was because the auto industries were simultaneously retarded and greedy and had to close down tons of plants. Since robots were supposed to have replaced auto workers entirely by 1985, I'm saying humans still have a bright future laboring their way into physical disability for the forseeable future. And beyond that, I can't say, because it is unforseeable!
Senior problem is self-correcting. (Score:3, Interesting)
>[...]
>With this being said, I love automated services such as "Pay-at-the-Pump" and especially self-checkout at the grocery stores. It's not that I'm some hermit who likes no human contact, but who wants to make idle chit-chat with some register jockey?
Seniors don't make idle chit-chat with register jockeys because they're old/lonely. They do it because, when they were our age, it was part of doing business. One would know the name of one's grocer, butcher, etc., and have a working relationship with 'em. "Howdy, Granddad-of-Tackhead, got a fresh side of beef in yesterday, here's your four filet mignon - one for you, the missus, and the two kids, cut 2" thick the way you like it. The one on the top's actualy 2 1/4" thick, heh-heh!", "Thanks, Frank-the-Grocer, that new sausage spice blend you made up last week was great too. I'll take a dozen links."
Our generation sees things differently. The register jockey is fundamentally no different than a robot - and that's how he sees his job too. Process your purchase, get you out the door ASAP. "Ungh. Welgumtoburgomatic, canitakyerorderplz?" "DoubleBurgosaurus, sideofrize", "Yawantfrizewidat?" "Yeah, wun sideofrize". "OK, herezyachange", "Thx".
Different time, different culture.
My Grandmother still won't hang up on telemarketers, because she was brought up to believe that hanging up on someone - even someone who she knows is trying to defraud her - is impolite.
Re:Here comes socialism (Score:2, Interesting)
The main problem with getting Hedonism to be sustainable won't be getting robots to take over jobs - it will be working out how to either fairly distribute scarce resources or a way of making scarce resources abundant. Nanotech will probably go a long way here, but there is still only so much planet.
Tk
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:5, Interesting)
We may or may not reach the points in the time suggested but the real issue is what are we going to do with the people and how are we going to allocate the resources.
I moved to Alabama in 1963. There were over a million jobs in the state picking cotton. With the advent of cotton pickers, this number dropped to an insignificant sum of a two or three thousand. There were a significant number of new jobs which arose that replaced some of the lost jobs but even as early as the 1960's and 1970's this was a real problem.
The failed concept here is that every person is somehow able to adapt "Instantly" to the new reality. People who are young do so fairly well so long as they are pretty bright and industrious. Many others particularly as they grow older have increasing difficulty adapting. Careers which once lasted a lifetime now last but a year or two. The Economic Concepts of the "Free Traders" and such simply do not factore in any concept of time or adaptablity factors.
The solution was to build lots of "Projects" where these people live and their progeny to this day. They fill every town in the state. Their cost is dramatically higher than paying these people to work would be. It is on the order of 4 to 5 times as expensive as a fairly decent job!
We need to quit arguing about the supposed supply of new jobs which about 5 years ago the curve of job loss as a net crossed the curve of new jobs that can be supplied. Now even if we recover economically the jobs don't return.
Those who point to jobs going off shore as a job increase don't notice that world wide there is a massive glut of labor. The issue here is pretty deep because if we continue with the stupid "Supply Side" economic ideals as a religious belief that it is, we will do very great damage before we face reality and fix things as they need to be.
I am not suggesting that there are not many routes to solution here, but the confidence that somehow people will need more and more labor as we automate is the triumph of belief over reality
Flagrant ignorance of economics... (Score:5, Interesting)
Insofar as I can tell, the author of the article is unaware of this. Some interesting economic facts:
The principle implied here is a fundamental principle of economic growth: productivity increase, followed by temporary unemployment, followed by re-employment and the general enrichment of the economy. This is the sole reason we make $30k/yr in this country (on average) rather than the $500/yr that was typical until the 18th century.
What's shocking to me is that the author of the article apparently doesn't have the slightest notion how capitalism works or how economic growth occurs. This despite the fact that he lives in a capitalist country and is apparently well-educated. Sometimes it amazes me that this country works as well as it does.
Always a job for.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you've read this far, you must be bored by now (Score:3, Interesting)
And what happened? Job displacement, not replacement. Instead of the dumb adding of numbers or performing repetitive tasks, we humans migrate to jobs which involve thinking.
Someone mentioned ATM's in this thread; well, it's taken a lot longer than people thought, but now in europe you're seeing a large shift. Money is withdrawn and deposited at machines, but services are still done (and will be done) by people (try complaining to a machine that the bank made an error
But on the other hand we get more people working in services, or in artistic professions and the like...there's just a shift where people who can't (and I'm convinced that that should be read: 'won't') adapt are stuck.
Then again, we've seen shifts like this in the past: agriculture to industy, industry to 'office work' (clerk, human number cruncher etc) and now office work to services/arts. Me, I'd say that that's a good thing; sometime in the future we will all be free to do as we like, with everything provided by robot work...it's truly inevitable.
The interesting part is going to be the transition period, where we need fewer and fewer people to actually do something (near the end we'll just need a couple of good thinkers)...will status and necesity be enough motivation for them? Or is that the part where such an automated system can and will break down?
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:2, Interesting)
With the elimination of mundane jobs, the education of the populace would rise, as uneducated labour would not be required. Science, art, and other fields which require much thought would flourish, as people who could otherwise not afford an education, or could not afford to work at a badly paying job, would now be free to do what they want to. This system would, of course, probably create many scientists and artists who were not very good, but the point here is that the quantity would be so much higher, it would still help.
Note that this would not necessarily be something like communism and socialism. A robotic society would be more of a utopian society, since a labour force would not be needed.
I am not sure if I make any sense in this post.
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Flagrant ignorance of economics... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure where you've been during the past three years, but things haven't been this bad in the USA since the Great Depression, and they're getting worse, not better. And this is largely due to increased productivity through automation of jobs.
It all comes down to this - computers and robots are radically different from previous labor-saving inventions. Other types of machines don't double in power every 18 months, and they aren't nearly as adaptable and configurable. The extent to which computers have transformed society over the last 30 years is breathtaking and unprecedented in human history.
I would agree that it comes down to the rate of job creation versus the rate of job elimination. And with Moore's law in effect, the rate of job elimination will remain significantly higher, and you'll have a constantly deteriorating economy as more and more people become unemployed.
Working conditions for those who remain employed will deteriorate as well, because most industries will be in a state of constant rounds of layoffs, so there will be a large group of qualified applicants for any given position. Employees will always have this hanging over their heads and employers will use the situation to their benefit.
After many iterations of this process, here are two possible (albeit extreme) outcomes: 1) a socialized economy where the machines are collectively owned by the population and used for everyone's benefit or 2) a capitalist economy where the machines are owned by the wealthiest 1% and the remaining 99% are kept at subsistence level, or sent to kill each other in wars.
Which one should be aiming for?
Re:Flagrant ignorance of economics... (Score:2, Interesting)
What is my basis for that statement? I adequately documented my basis in the post itself, with reasoning and historical examples. Also the same is said in any number of good economics books.
I'm not sure where you've been during the past three years, but things haven't been this bad in the USA since the Great Depression, and they're getting worse, not better.
The great depression was vastly worse than this. Various other recessions since then have been worse than this. Things have been staying about the same, not getting worse.
And this is largely due to increased productivity through automation of jobs.
The current recession has nothing to do with increased automation. Almost all jobs lost in the last few years have been due to overseas outsourcing and the current downturn is the result of a stock market bubble collapsing.
It all comes down to this - computers and robots are radically different from previous labor-saving inventions. Other types of machines don't double in power every 18 months, and they aren't nearly as adaptable and configurable.
Robots are fundamentally the same as previous labor-saving devices, from an economic perspective. 80% of the population in the 18th century used to be farmers. The tractor and improved agriculture ruled 79% of the entire population obsolete.
The extent to which computers have transformed society over the last 30 years is breathtaking and unprecedented in human history.
The first half of the 20th century was substantially more breathtaking than the latter half. Machine production and the assembly line created far more massive societal transformation ever than computers have thus far.
And with Moore's law in effect, the rate of job elimination will remain significantly higher, and you'll have a constantly deteriorating economy as more and more people become unemployed.
Moore's law does not say that job elimination will remain higher than job creation. Moore's law has been in effect for 30 years and thus far it hasn't destroyed employment; instead it's created vast new industries with millions of new employees and trillions of dollars in market capitaliztion. Improved technology helps the economy; it doesn't hurt it! If improved technology hurt the economy, we could easily remedy the problem by just destroying all technology and reverting back to hunter-gathering. You would find that this solution does not help the economy so much as anticipated.
Working conditions for those who remain employed will deteriorate as well, because most industries will be in a state of constant rounds of layoffs, so there will be a large group of qualified applicants for any given position. Employees will always have this hanging over their heads and employers will use the situation to their benefit.
All industries have always been in a constant state of layoffs followed by re-hirings of different people. Some industries lay off more than are hired, but other industries hire more than are laid off. This has not led to a deterioration of working conditions, but the opposite. Qualified people have always been scarce and there's every reason to believe that they will be scarcer still in the future, at least in most industries.
After many iterations of this process, here are two possible (albeit extreme) outcomes: 1) a socialized economy where the machines are collectively owned by the population and used for everyone's benefit or 2) a capitalist economy where the machines are owned by the wealthiest 1% and the remaining 99% are kept at subsistence level, or sent to kill each other in wars. Which one should be aiming for?
That is a ridiculous false dilemma, since neither of
Actually it may be sooner than you expect. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, first of all, this guy is echoing ideas first voiced by people like kurzweil [slashdot.org]. You may want to take a look to the original if you want to have a clearer idea of what he is talking about. And now please keep in mind this are the conservative estimations. They think that, according to Moore's Law we must be able to have enough computer power to equal to the MAXIMUN ESTIMATED computer power of the human brain. But we all talking of a very conservative stimation here, and we may be for a surprise in the sort future. Let's take a look at how this estimations of the human brain computer power are performed:
- Average number of Neurons in the human brain (excluding the cerebellum): 20.000.0000.0000
- Average number of connections per neuron: 1.000
Each neuron can perform about 200 calculations per second, per connexion.
So, we have 20.000.0000.0000 X 1.000 X 200 = 4.000 TeraOps
Now, 4.000 TeraOps is about 100 times faster than the Earth-Simulator [slashdot.org], the faster computer system in existence, and according to Moore's law, is going to take a while before we have a Data Center-wide cluster that powerful, not to mention a desktop system light enough so we could propel it around with two mechanical legs.
This is the logic after those "no AI before 2020# arguments we hear now so often. But us I said, this is the conservative estimation, and the conservative estimation is not the most likely scenario at all. Well, let me tell you something, and I know what I'm talking about, we will have a few nice surprises in the next few month. Let me give you a hint, there is a obvious flaw in that logic:
- Number of transistors in transistors in the AMD "Hammer" processor: 100.0000.0000
Each transistor can perform at 2.000.000.000 calculations per second.
So, we have 100.0000.0000 X 2.000.0000.0000 = 200.000 TeraOps
Acording to that logic, we may need a 200.000 TeraOps computer to emulate a AMD "Hammer" processor, what is oviuly untrue: 2Ghz Hammer can perform at only 4 TeraOps, and we just need, say, 2 1.8 Ghz Atlons to get to that speed.
The "peak" performance needed to contemplate all the possible states of the system is enormous, yes, but that is not realeted to the true capacity of the system. Not every single transistor in the system flops every cicle, that's not a realistic assumption, just a few of them do. Consecuently, the amount of information and operations you need to perform in order to emulate is orders of magnitude below the conservative estimation of the peak number of states you need to emulate. Now extrapolate to the H Brain. Is it more efficient than the hammer? No doubt. How much efficient is it? 10 Times? 100 times? 1000 times ? 10.000 times?
Even if the human brain happens to be 100.000 times more efficient than your tipical Pentium/Atlon, you'll need only a 2.000 nodes computer cluster to outperform it. And that is something we have at hand right now. The rest is just software.
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only the crappy jobs that nobody wants.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not a zero-sum world (Score:1, Interesting)
First off maybe you should try reading an economics book before you start spouting shit about fuzzy math, 1-1=0, and your *vast* accounting knowledge. If you had the slightest knowledge of economics you would know that this argument is *not* predicated on the notion of limitless resources. In fact the fundamental problem that economics attempts to address is how to balance the limited resources of society with unlimited wants/needs.
Although I'm probably wasting my time the zero sum explantion works like this:
I have a stick and a string that I purchased for $1 each. I use my labor to fashion these 2 items into a bow and I sell it for $3. Waala I just *created* money out of thin air(not really). So 1+1=3? No $1 + $1 + my labor = $3. And you might say why would someone pay me $3 for something that costs $2 to make? Because if he/she didn't I wouldn't have wasted my time making it in the first place(that whole supply-demand thing). Money isn't grown on trees, it's created through the transformation of labor and materials into economic goods and it works in a circular fashion since my materials must be acquired from somewhere else.
If the economy is/was a zero sum game then how the hell does it continue to grow?
If ignorance is blissed you must be grining ear to ear.
The problem is NOT going to be hardware folks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:maybe 100 years.... (Score:2, Interesting)
At the end, obviously.
CONCLUSION:
Robots can reduce the amount of menial work that people need to do. People only get paid for working. Less menial work = less work = less pay. But less work is nice, as in holiday. Solution? pay people even when they don't work (they still need income, so they can choose how to spend their money). In a highly automated society it makes sense to have a high quality of life even for the unemployed (gasp! socialist!), which implies a decent social welfare system. It's either that, or concentrate the power of the economy in the hands of a few people, and write off the rest of the population as superfluous. Obviously, it should be better to work if you can find a job, so the income of an unemployed person should be slightly less than that of the crappiest non-automated job. The good news is that as more jobs are automated, unemployment doesn't suck as much and everyone ends up on holiday eventually (as technology approaches infinity).
BANKS:
Ok, so I'm in New Zealand and people keep on telling me that NZ has the highest EFT-POS (cash-card) usage per capita in the world or something. This appears to be true. The only place where I have to use cash is my favourite cafe, which gives it a nice ritualistic feel that goes well with coffee. I've been into a bank two, maybe three times this year. There are cash machines everywhere if I just need to make a withdrawl, so the bank tellers just end up dealing with inquiries and the like. It works great. Nobody complains about having to interact with faceless uncaring machines that just give them money. Machines are great for dealing with drudgery, the kinds of jobs that people don't really want to do except that it's how they get paid.
FAST FOOD:
So why shouldn't fast food be the same? At the moment we need people to cook stuff properly, but I'm sure we'd all be happy if we could just press the Cheeseburger Button whenever we were hungry. There are plenty of other places to find human intraction.
ETERNAL HOLIDAY:
When the robots rule the world, will we all get to go on holiday? Doesn't seem likely. The transition between here and there doesn't look fun. I think the problem is that everyone who is displaced by a robot will be unemployed, and someone else will be reaping the rewards of better efficiency. I can't see any reason why jobs should magically appear to replace those that are filled by robots.
It seems to me that the consequence of robotification of our job pool would be to concentrate power in the hands of people who could invest in robots, and leave everyone else on welfare.
LABOUR SAVING DEVICES:
I just can't figure out how having robots do menial tasks is meant to give people more free time under the current (capitalist?) system. If you don't need to do boring stuff, you have more time to work, and if you're not working why should you be paid? If we're all going to get an eternal holiday, we need to use some other income mechanism than time == money.
Screw it, this is too long. I'm going to put my conclusion at the top so someone will actually see it. Bye!