We need one more breakthrough before we can free people from jobs - self-maintaining machines. Which will probably involve self-healing materials. Imagine if you could simplify maintaining underground cables to just making sure there's enough nutrient-rich fluid around them. Then we could automate the production and delivery of such fluid, and we'd be done.
The future without jobs is the future where our infrastructure heals itself, just like our bodies do.
In this case, I think that, to a large extent, maintenance can be side-stepped by recycling and rebuilding. A bit like how the current world works: we can fix anything, but for most things, it's simpler to throw and buy a new one because the labour is more costly than the product itself. One example is asking a computer repair shop to fix your laptop screen (particularly so if said screen is touch-sensitive).
In a world where energy is free (fully solar for example), this is awesome: oh, you just got a month old car but a better design just came out? No problem, you'll get the newest one when your turn comes.
I doubt I'll see this kind of world (if it ever comes) in my lifetime, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched, I think.
And if your instrumentation is good enough, it really becomes a subdisicipline of logistics, plus maybe the machines can begin to defend themselves from ordinary abuse.
You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing.
Over the last 150 years, the proportion of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from ~70% to ~2% [1]. They've literally been replaced by machines.
A large proportion of those people are now doing menial intellectual jobs that likely will be replaced by "AI". A complete shift in the nature of the work we do isn't unprecedented, and it shouldn't be considered impossible, but it shouldn't be considered disastrous either.
edit: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...
The only people who lost jobs were skilled craftsmen, who made up a tiny percent of the population anyway. And they weren't really lost, just replaced with lots of unskilled work.
Agriculture automation came years later, and the farmers weren't entirely screwed because they mostly still owned the land. If you own the robot that replaces you, you aren't necessarily worse off.
The coming technological revolution is entirely about automation. And not just automating skilled jobs, but most unskilled ones. A large percent of the population will be affected.
In most of the fields I've seen they've been replaced by Mexicans.
Just because you don't "see" the work humans currently do doesn't allow you to be ignorant to it happening. Just because you personally don't want to work (as most people) doesn't mean there isn't plenty out there for people to do.
Are housing prices, at least in the U.S. actually attached to the value of work, or they mostly affected by the banks willingness to hand out money?
Let's go another step and take work out of it completely. If houses were free, there would still be houses that are worth far more than others, simply because of proximity to other things of human interest.
That "a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary" means exactly nothing. The size of median salary is market driven, and the price of housing reflects the games banks and housing developers are playing, and thus can be arbitrarily high.
When people only think short-term (what's can I afford monthly) vs. long-term (what will I pay out over the life of the loan vs. what I'm getting now) they make mistakes. These mistakes are self-inflicted but these people tend to then blame any and all others for why they can't get ahead, why the system doesn't work, why the American dream is dead :).
The situation is different from the TVs and computers and cars because those are not considered as important as your own house. Most people eventually have to move out, so they have to participate in the game. I believe we call it "inelastic demand".
I'm on board with surfing all day while you maintain the robots to make my food. Is that cool with you?
What is an example of a non-government bullshit job?
Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass.
I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away.
There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats.
The former think they're saving the world, while the latter are just making money off of the former. It's the same business model as religion and global warming.
But there's a different kind of "prediction", which I think is the type those smart people subscribe to - that we are on the path to an AI, that there's nothing that would make it impossible to achieve as the technology progresses (a reminder: we have a working example that intelligence can be built - our brains). Of course there are a lot of obstacles on the way. Personally, the most probable is that our civilization ends before we reach the necessary level - because of war, or all the economic and political shenanigans we see every day.
And nice, you managed to cram global warming denial in there too.
Wrong/correct? We're talking about predictions, so let's talk about probability.
In the course of 20 years is it more probable that life will look more like it does today or that AI will make us all jobless?
That is why I'm "more likely" right and Elon is "more likely" wrong.
I'll put money down on it. If, in 10 years, it only takes 1 employee per shift to run an entire McDonalds, I'll give you $1,000.
And yes, I don't believe your single factor over-fit models prove anything about global warming. I'll put money down on that too.
I can't say I've seen that said. Any sources? Most predictions I've seen for AI surpassing human intelligence are for mid 21st century. The reasoning isn't rocket science. I wrote an essay about it for some school exam 34 years ago. If you discount the religious stuff then brains are biological computers of roughly fixed ability and regular computers are less able but get better each year. If so, they'll overtake and you can kind of graph it and make a rough estimate of when.
It's low hanging fruit, the public eats it up. Also people can be very intelligent but not have done the research in the field they are commenting on. Elon Musk and Stephan Hawking aren't AI PhDs.
16 years later now, I see that about the only thing that could do some real damage was software in factories and stock exchanges breaking, and requiring downtime to fix. It would be that downtime that could do actual harm. Because I've now seen some code that runs in factories and... man, how this is totally and utterly fucked up. I'm happy nothing bad happened back in 2000. I'm also surprised that some manufacturing plants are running at all.
What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us?
Possible answers:
1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation.
2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force.
3) ?