This system didn't work very well at the time (it bred slavery and warlordism, and produced a lot of waste, especially towards the end, when trade goods were abundant and population was running out); but it'll become increasingly more doable as capital becomes more productive. Magnanimity is a human instinct, and people already compete on status and prestige; just persuade holders of capital that supporting the unemployed/unemployable is a good thing, make sure they get personal feel-good-ness out of it, and persuade the unemployed/unemployable not to run up the red flag, and you've probably got a stable system.

Probably. I don't think we need to worry about slavery much, but warlordism could become a serious issue. Where potlatch-like culture exists, aggressive bids for the throne (or equivalent) tend to follow; the Earl of Warwick in the War of the Roses comes to mind. Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die) -- the Wars of the Roses had roughly zero impact on the common people of England. (See A Farewell to Alms for a detailed discussion of how England's wars, starting from a pretty early date, avoided messing up England's people.)

This is all hypothetical, though; I'm not saying that a potlatch orientation is the only possible solution, nor even that it's necessarily a working solution at all...

If you like getting giftcards at Xmas, nothing. But gifts from Santa or a potlatch are more fun, and more intimate. Choosing gifts forces us to think about each others' needs and desires, which is extremely pro-social.

Taxes are at least predictable.

It's going to be some damn thing when everyone in the South takes your idea and they build up their civilization around free robotic labor, and then when we hit AI sentience and start ensuring the civil rights of robots the entire South has to be burned to the ground again to free the sentient robots from their owners.

We can still do the fun stuff of course, like writing and art, and get famous and all that.

But most modern AI is learnt from data, not programmed, how will we know if our AI in conscious?

We're not there yet and may never be, but since we do not know what consciousness is or what leads to it, we may stumble into it...

Human labor has solved a lot of problems. The obvious shortcut to solving lots of problems is mimicking human labor. Given the opportunity to take a shortcut to solve a problem (especially at a profit) some manager in some business will do it.

And zero people can even describe how a sentient robot could be constructed, even with theoretical future hardware. "We'll have as many flops as some models say a brain has, and programmers are creative" is about as far as anyone can get, but I don't think that qualifies as a plan.

So, it's a fun thing to think about, but like all sci-fi it probably isn't the best basis for societal planning.

In order to perform at or above human level (in a general fashion), the robot will need a firm, comprehensive understanding of the world. Won't this unavoidably involve an understanding of the self as well?

I don't think any chips today have awareness. But it seems to me that you couldn't have general, adaptable intelligence without it.

I give self-replicating factories a higher probability than AGI. We'll probably have a 100% automated stack that can replicate and repair itself, as well as produce everything we need, all based on locally sourced and plentiful materials, before we have human level AI. It will be a manufacturing singularity. We should bootstrap automation in itself, like we bootstrap compilers. Object production would become similar to compilation, from source code to material object. We'd have optimized material compilers.

When we have a replicator, anyone can have one. Industry would become like agriculture, if you have the initial seeds, you can plant and then you bootstrap your crop.

If you think about self replication, on the whole, industry is a self replicator right now. But we need to make it fully automated, reduce its minimal footprint and make it less reliant on rare materials. There is a need for sustainable, smart materials and open source automation and AI in order to save the population from disenfranchisement. Capital and the means of production should belong to all of us, not just the 1%.

Fresh water, for example, is a scarce (and becoming scarcer) resource, and it's impossible to farm or live without it.

Agree with the comment about ownership. As technology has improved, more and more power has been going to whoever owns the capital.

The problem is that energy is expensive, and fresh water shortages will be worst in countries that are poor and can't afford these plants.

But just a couple corrections re potlatch society: slavery happened in the Pacific Northwest with and without potlatch; potlatch didn't cause slavery. The fishing grounds in this region were the richest in the world at the time (they collapsed almost a century ago under white rule), if you conquered a neighbor (and that was frequent) you could afford to keep 'em and feed 'em, at least for a long time until your population expanded. So slavery was practical in a way it isn't for nomads, say. Excess production was the norm. Unemployment was dealt with largely by exalting art, and devoting an immense amount of the GNP to that, with spectacular results over time. So most excess labor and production was actually devoted to art, not giveaways. I suspect that's the real lesson, although I'm a No Man's Sky devotee - it's a damn wonderful art generator, if you like landscapes, as I do. Maybe humans can't compete there, anymore, either! Warlordism in an age of drones will do little for unemployment; but it's also easier, particularly for democracies, if only your machines get bent up in a successful war of aggression. So it may happen more, but will not be a safety valve for unemployment.

That's a non-sequitur, you may as well say we're seeing this with the explosiong of freelancers and personal businesses.

Because that's really what those youtube personalities are, but that doesn't really address the issue of the older folks who have lost their jobs.

Warlordism sounds much worse than communism and fascism. Any culture that is sufficiently advanced to not be chaos and wars for the lords under walordism, would be much better without the warlords. Advanced societies with abundant resources and abundant capital do not need gatekeeping hoarders playing charity Olympics.

The rest you've said is a gross misrepresentation of the giveaway culture shared amongst many more tribes than just the Northwest ones. And of course, white academia will just refuse and say "our written documentation written by genocidal outsiders is way more accurate than what the cultures themselves say about themselves through their own oral traditions".

This must be an interesting book that somehow argues that wars that killed huge numbers of civilians somehow had zero impact. Looking at the criticism of the book it seems to also argue that there were no negative effects of colonialism.

Funny, I wonder if the millions of people killed in North America between 1500 and 1900 would agree with that.

Which, come to think of it, it's true.

Except some guilt maybe.

That's why we need to place the means of production in the hands of the people, not just of capitalists.

> What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?

Self-supporting human society, a mix of small companies, skilled people and experts, using automation as well, that works to solve the daily necessities for itself. So it would have its own farms, fabs, schools and such, totally self supporting and self bootstrapped. People wouldn't need UBI if they had the means to directly make what they need. We're going that way - everything becoming cheaper, until it lifts itself by self replication.

> Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism, which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

Capitalism has actually provided far more avenues for laborers to own the means of production than any communist revolution has.

As automation gets better and cheaper, there will still be jobs for everyone - they'll just be performed by the robots they purchased for 1/10th, 1/20th or 1/50th of the median wage.

Lately I've really been grappling with how to accomplish this, and it is a Very Hard problem.

Best way to accomplish this, I think, is to have a Basic Income. Give everybody enough to live, and increase that the more machines take over our work.

In our current economic system, we get the former. We need to change the system so it turns into the latter.

Entertainment will take longer, but I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible to algorithmically create. The lesser ones like Big Bang Theory is basically just a nerd reskin of every other sitcom Chuck Lorre has done. That could probably be churned out by a computer by the end of 2020. The more complicated entertainment will take longer to crack though.

Friendship is tough to define. So I'll give you that.

and it's a good thing too, because if we are all out of work there'll be no good reason for us all to have so much intelligence so we'll me devolving back to the apes.

The first version could take the form of a pen pal over email.

Consider, the world before the internet when the postal services was doing all the heavy lifting for communication. Once we got internet, a huge chunk communication was replaced by email etc. But, it also gave rise to eCommerce, on demand delivery services etc. And, the same postal services companies are doing better than ever before.

The real issues won't change though. Those people who are considered rich will be rich because they own land in nice areas, or have a military-backed monopoly on natural resources.

The first issue is due to population size, and the second issue is an eternal issue of war that can't be avoided.

First, history. History does not make our future look good. Humanity has gone through a few disruptive changes in the way society viewed work and societal contribution. The most recent was with the spread of factories and assembly-line production. The result of the adoption of those structures/technologies was not good. Society saw factory workers as 'not deserving' reasonable wages because 'the machines are doing all the work.' Factory owners were more than willing to pay their workers as little as they could get away with. And it turned out, that was very little. Entire families (including children) working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely being able to feed themselves was commonplace. Society had to adopt many radical (in comparison to previous history and other societies, they don't seem radical now because we've kept them around long past any practical utility) changes to function like this. Everything from anti-sex attitudes, the creation of 'adolescent' as a distinct category of person, even changes in the architecture of lower class homes to give separate sleeping quarters for children and adults.

And that didn't get adjusted for until the New Deal in the 1930s. Back when someone couldn't simply say 'socialism' and completely shut down all discussion, the New Deal was actually possible. People today don't realize how 'insane' the New Deal really was. Think of it from the perspective of the factory owner. Previously, you would get an entire family, say 4 workers, 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and you'd pay them just enough to eat and pay rent. After the New Deal, you were expected to pay 1 worker for 8 hours of work 5 days a week such a (comparatively) titanic amount of money that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. Let that sink in. From 96 hours of work from each of 4 workers each week, 384 hours total, down to 40. That increases your labor cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Society re-configured their notion of what work was worth to address the idea that regardless of what tools are being used, the value the worker creates should play SOME role in compensation. And the world did not implode. But could anything proportionally similar ever be imagined to be acceptable to our modern society? I would argue absolutely not.

But there is good news. Maybe. See, this isn't our future. It's our present. Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by only 1%. Computers and automation technology caused average productivity to skyrocket since 1980. But wages were frozen. Not because of any economic reason, the median income of the top 10% rose by 475% during that 1980-2010 period. Profits grew and grew with greater acceleration, but all the benefit went to the owners, executives, etc. Society once again started feeling that workers did not deserve compensation where the value of the work being done played a role. The machine was doing the work. It just seemed too easy. You write some software and make the company $10 million, why should you get a "lottery winning payday"? Apple, Google, Microsoft, and similar employers that set the standards saw this coming and rigged wages in the computer market early on. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the FTC prosecuted them for it. They ended up settling for hundreds of millions of dollars in a huge class-action lawsuit a decade ago. But, really, you could argue it was inevitable. Society didn't see workers using computers as deserving of pay which increased alongside their productivity, so employers obliged society.

But something is different this time. Factories and assembly lines are expensive. And computers are cheap. And distribution, the whole reason we MADE factories and big companies in the first place, is effectively a solved problem. While companies have been getting rid of pensions, doing away with annual raises that exceed cost of living increases, cutting vacation time, expanding the work week, reflexively laying off workers to meet quarterly projections, etc... workers have become more than able to out-compete them. The drawbacks of centralization, which for a century were papered over with the invaluable ability to solve the problem of distribution, are now showing through more and more every day.

Employment is a two-way street. Employers pay workers because they create the value that is profit, and workers seek employment for things like a reliable income stream, the ability to settle down and make plans for the future, the ability to provide for their family. Except employers have welched on every single thing they ever offered to workers. They provide zero insulation from market fluctuations. They adopt practices that make it necessary for workers to jump jobs every 4-5 years just to keep up with the increases in cost of living. Etc. And it actually might have worked... if not for the fact that their ace in the hole, their one golden ticket, solving the problem of distribution (both of products and of work needing to be done, one to customers the other to workers) became worthless thanks to computers and the Internet.

Society changes slowly, and it certainly doesn't abandon century-long traditions overnight. But we're barrelling right for some proper Big changes. We're going to end up with the 'tools of production' (as Marx, who I've never read, would I think call it) in the hands of everyone, with a global market on our desk with commoditized distribution. Eventually enough people will be out of work as automation enables corporations to "reduce their primary cost center" and just trying offering their services online out of desperation that someone will build an excellent marketplace that actually works. And once it takes off, it will hopefully happen so fast that large companies don't even have a chance to react.

And I'm serious about that part. If they do have a chance to react... it could be uglier than you could possibly imagine. Wars have been fought over much, much less wealth. And things like the Internet are still primarily controlled at the last mile by large companies which will be directly and existentially threatened by this kind of thing. The government handed over a trillion dollars to make sure that the banking system didn't have to bear the consequences of their actions, what might they do if 50% of the Fortune 500 were facing insolvency?

So of course there will be a global pressure on salaries. It is just market economics. (You can't coordinate a "New Deal" in countries all over the world at the same time.)

My point about that is -- it isn't all bad. Literally billions of people have left the utmost poverty. It just sucks for the ones of the old "middle privileged" level, like us.

If it was just that, I would cautiously be positive, but I agree -- this new level of automation implies "Big changes", which are scary. Most revolutions seems to end up with a large part of the population dead or in slavery.

The truth is he didn't bother to try and sell it to the people in power because he didn't have to. It was readily apparent that if something wasn't done America might not make it. At the time unemployment rate was at almost 30%. Most american's didn't have access to their bank accounts as many were insolvent. Literally the country was on the brink. Congress was going to do whatever it took to drag us out of that hole even if it meant completely rewriting the rules of well everything.

I don't know that any of that is possible today. The regulations we have in place largely prevent us from being able to get back to that sort of dark economic time. And in my opinion it will take either that sort of global catastrophe, or one of our current major parties to fall apart to enable the sort of cooperation in congress New Deal level policy requires.

Communist parties were gaining steam back then, and we were under threat of having our own Red October if something extreme wasn't done to blunt the effects of the Great Depression.

https://myprivate42.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/lets-shift-to-2...

as well as the obligation to consume, otherwise savings will be invalidated. Dystopia ahead.

Yes we do.

The industrial revolution had far greater impact on labour than any of this mysterious AI will ever have.

The first 'machines' powered by coal etc. instantly 'unemployed' hundreds of people per unit.

Go ahead and look at the productivity/capita charts for the early 19th century - UK citizens were multiple times more productive than citizens of any other nation. It was an astonishing explosion.

Imagine how many people a single train unemployed?

Or the weaving machines that did the work of hundreds.

The impact on labour was definite, direct and measurable - unlike a lot of the 'soft' impact that today's technology has (did MS Word really unemploy 'secretaries' - or was it a host of factors?)

But what happened during the industrial revolution?

Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.

The surpluses from the machines went into the economy, basically providing the foundation for the modern consumer economy.

95% of folks back then worked on farms, mines - or did manual labour/service.

The industrial revolution created the middle class: lawyers, entertainers, restaurants, mass market clothing, design etc.. Electricity created massive new industries (think of what you could not do without electricity!).

The economy has been diversifying rapidly since the start of the 19th century in the UK, and everywhere else about 50 years later.

We will continue to do this.

In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings.

There were no 'pro athletes' in 1930. Now we have massive industries around pro sports.

Working/middle class people did not travel much back in the day. Now they can travel around the world.

There were no consumer electronics past the radio in 1940. Now the are zillions of devices.

In the 1920's cars were made by people - now automated assembly lines.

And FYI - for the last 25 years and for at least the next little while - China (or rather, Mexico, China, India and other low-cost places) are by far and away bigger job killers than automation.

'Automation' as we understand it is not as fast a process as we think it is and the days of 'robot replaces x people' are long gone, it's a more complex and nuanced equation.

Try this one: tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine? Not so many. Customer service? Possibly. Some banker analysts? Possibly. But even in the later, there are other things for them to do, and the bulk of the staff on both sides have more to fear form India than Microsoft. In fact, this is happening right now all over North America: people training dudes in India to do their jobs, after they've been told they've been outsourced ... (train your replacement if you want your severance!) ...

Also - since 1900 - the size of government has expanded dramatically. I'm not 'against government' or anything, but many gov. agencies are abhorrently inefficient. I have a distant family member who's friend, a low-level thug dealer who was recently arrested. The RCMP (Can. police) spent zillions tracking, investigating this guy. Two years of surveillance, bureaucratic justice issues, lawyers - yada yada. So it's not so nice, but we find ways to 'distribute the surpluses' of the new economy in ways, even if they are not very efficient.

The trick is to 'find things for people to do' in a manner that is reasonably efficient and fair.

Check out GDP/capita during 19th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#/media/File:B...

Were there was more automation, wealth exploded. (This chart does not address wages, but there are others that do :) )

As software developers, it's literally our jobs to put people out of work. My software is specifically designed reduce the need for increased labor as the company crows. In my industry, legal, entire departments (like night word processing) no longer exist.

The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on. People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.

It's a lot more than 100 years. The invention of the scientific process, the printing press, the popularization of steel and before that, bronze, heck even the invention of agriculture radically changed human societies by increasing individual productivity and enabling specialization.

> People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.

Right, which is why it's silly for us to look at the technology we have today and say "welp, that's the end of human employment."

And why it's also silly to look at the past and say "meh it worked out last time, everything will be fine".

That has not been my experience at all. As tedious tasks are automated, the people who do those tedious tasks are no longer required.

Ultimately we are lowering the cost of our "product" but it's not to enable more people to afford it. We need to do that because less people can afford the service as is and we need to cut costs just to stay in business. It's a race to the bottom, not a race to the top.

> Why does the person putting together my will or litigating a suit for me need to be backed by an organization with an office building, expensive executives, etc?

These exists because they are currently necessary (they are the "tools" you speak of) but they're a pure business cost and constantly under pressure to not exist. Computers have already reduced this back-end cost immensely. For example, lawyers these days all use dictation software rather than having a secretary write out shorthand. If all the tools can be automated, they eventually will.

This isn't a terribly novel idea. Companies which produce phonebooks have been suing the hell out of municipalities which wish to discontinue the practice of automatically giving a phonebook to their residents for years now. And, by the way, they win those cases. Even in municipalities where they simply want to change receiving a phonebook into an opt-in service, they're suing. That their product actually now goes beyond being worthless directly into the territory of actively destroying value, requiring the munis to put out special dumpsters so that the residents can immediately throw away the useless things, doesn't seem to bother them. They want their money and they don't care how or why they get it.

There was an article about the issue with writing software which does legal things in the Communications of the ACM a year or so ago. I haven't kept up with the topic, but at that time several states had adopted the laws and they were being considered in others. Having lawyers pushing new laws is a pretty easy sell, though, as most legislators come from law in the first place. Some of the states have a nice exemption that just really hammers the intent home - you can run a software service that lets people fill forms, get generated documents, etc... if you pay a lawyer for each thing it does. They don't have to be involved in any way. They don't have to review the documents and put their name on them or anything like that. They just have to get a check. Honestly though, I think that is better than only making it legal for lawyers to use the software. I fear a future where everyone is yolked and herded into a cubicle to sit there and push a single button mindlessly, prodding the automated system to do its thing simply because society and management want people to have to do a job.

This is the same thing, FWIW. Opportunities to use skilled labour rely on the existence of skilled labour capable to fulfil it. The reason is that skilled labour shortages push up the price of labour, and that reduces the viability of businesses that use it as an input, and thus reduces the number of opportunities advertised.

That almost never happens in my experience. Deploying those people to do new things requires training them on those new things, and most companies aren't willing to make that investment, especially since said people are usually near the bottom of the totem pole and the fact that they just got made redundant by software is regarded by management as proof that they are just cogs.

That is either a very amusing typo or your employers are not nice people.

Things did indeed come out well eventually but that better world most definitely did not emerge serenely and rationally. It took the utter annihilation of the pre-WWI world order through decades of enormous violence. Indeed, the egalitarian socialist plan and the response of populist fascist to crush it emerged exactly because of industrialization.

There can be no doubt that displaced workers are not going to smoothly transfer to become professional athletes: a 50 year old unemployed coal miner with no social safety net is not going to peaceable become a wedding planer in a big city even if he could.

Until then, there will be increasing political disruption and radicalization as the advantaged group holds the disadvantaged down believing it's their own fault for not changing careers. And just like last time, the fighting will continue until adequate social safety nets are in place.

It would be better to honestly face the events of the past and not try to convince ourselves that an idealized smooth economic shift is how it's going to work out. But unfortunately we are just at the beginning of this and likely most people in the advantaged group will ideological despise the level of social security that will solve the problem. Indeed, in many quarters, there is a fetishization of and desire to return to that pre-WWI unconstrained economy that caused the nightmares in the 20th century. So, polarization, demagoguery, extremism and eventually violence loom for now I fear.

No - the late 19th century was relatively peaceful.

"But unfortunately we are just at the beginning"

Just at the beggining of the longest period of peace and economic prosperity in history.

Donald Trump, Brexit - this kind of 'nationalism' and 'demagoguery' is not even remotely in the league of anything in the past. Not even close.

>...is not even remotely in the league of anything in the past. Not even close...

I wish this were the case. And while Brexit is only one referendum, possibly recoverable, the Front National, AfD, PVV and Trump use rhetoric that is completely indistinguishable for Eastern and Southern European fascism of the 1920s. Some of it is verbatim quotes translated. And the economic policies of these parties will only worsen the economic well being of the electorate angering them further.

We can keep making optimistic guesses about the next score years but there is also more realistic outcome:

We do not in fact live in a magic time at the end of history. The post WWII (relative) peace is not remotely an inevitable state of affairs. It is an incredibly delicate thing maintained by moderate democratic global nurturing. Inept leaders set on dissolving alliances and treaties combined with aggressive rhetoric and random hostilities executed solely to excite a demagogue's support base could break that peace in any of a dozen powder kegs world wide faster than the bullet that killed prince Ferdinand. Indeed, if NATO weakens enough, as many on the far-right wish, and Putin starts loosing popularity, god help the Baltic states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1800%E2%80%9399

If a company is able to automate its facilities to achieve 2X profits with half the workers, you'll have an higher overall GPD, but the created wealth will be shared by a reduced number of people.

People struggling to make a living won't give a damn whether TV has 3 channels or 300, they can travel cheaply around the world and there is a new smartphone model every year.

This has been sustainable up until technological advancement still allowed for enough decently paid unskilled jobs, but it's clear we are past this point.

We are running out of, as you say, "things for people to do".

I don't think these trends can or should be reversed (because they have undeniable benefits), but how to deal with the consequences is a real challenge.

Poor people in the United States, today, have a significantly higher standard of living than my grandparents, who were neither uneducated or poor for the time.

Poverty has moved way up Maslow's hierarchy.

It should be added that wages going up and the emergence of a middle class was not a direct result of increased productivity. The labour movement had to fight hard to ensure that those productivity gains were shared with workers.

The problem we face with automation is that there is not much of a collective 'working class' to fight that fight.

I fully agree that the labour movement was essential.

BUT - wages did definitely rise far before labour got going - and wages could not rise as they did without underlying productivity gains.

But yes - the labour movement was essential.

Absolutely. The challenge with automation is ensuring that the increased productivity benefits all of society (not necessarily equally). As useful as capitalism is, it doesn't really have a mechanism for doing this properly. The solution will always have to be political.

I think a large part of it has to do with how disruptive computers and software are. One person can walk in and write some software that makes an employee 50x as productive. How do you compensate that? They enabled your employee to create profoundly more value. If compensation is in any way tied to the value of the work being done, the compensation should obviously be similarly profound. You have to divorce value of work and compensation from one another completely to avoid ending up paying software creators very highly and practically creating a special class for them.

The global economy is in good shape.

Western economies are stagnating - but there are 5 billion people who were not even on the economic radar just 50 years ago. They were earning basically 'nothing'.

But now they are earning 'something' and it's growing fast.

There are more than 40 countries with growth over 5% GDP growth in 2015. [1]

There are 5 billion people who need: electricity, clothes, cars, tv, entertainment, sports, medicine etc. etc..

So, no. As prices fall, and globalization expands - all those products and services become accessible to these countries.

And what happens when they get reliable electricity? Governance? Consistent internet access? Their productivity goes up and they can afford to buy more.

Viewed from a 'modern world perspective' - I would be concerned, we are going to have to 'find new jobs' for a lot of people - but from a global perspective, the picture is mostly positive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...

But they are not most of the population.

We're talking about employment here.

5 billion people 'lives improving dramatically' vs. 2 billion people 'lives improving slowly' is a good equation.

That those 2 billion are 'already wealthy' and a small uptick in their wealth increases the global GDP a little bit more is and odd way of looking at it.

By that measure, we should be focusing on Gates and Zuckerbergs wealth more than anything else!

The 'global GDP' is not the point here.

http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a01001/

I have literally seen a room full of people that lost their jobs because of software I wrote (admittedly, not alone, but still). The software was almost ready by that point and it was quite a disturbing experience that still bothers me up to this day to be honest.

It had nothing to do with AI and was quite a long time ago, but I still remember it very vividly.

What I have seen often too is bankers wealthy enough to be able to live on their savings for a long time, and therefore not willing to reconsider their career. And as a result staying unemployed for a long time before coming to the conclusion that they need to do something else.

I'm not saying this is fun and that I wouldn't mind going through it myself but this is capitalist's creative destruction at work. Not something you should feel particularly bad about.

Nobody has to be forced to reconsider his career (so his entire life..) when we just have to cut the link between work and salary that we learn at school.

The economy might adapt to change, but people aren't able to nearly as well.

You say "capitalist's creative destruction", but it's really "greed-driven devastation".

But I do think we (humanity) do ourselves a massive disservice when we push for automation for the sole purpose of reducing costs/boosting profits.

I also think that we need to remember it's real people being affected here. You say "spare them the unpleasant experience" - that's an almost comically insulting way to phrase it - it's really more like "spare them the emotionally traumatic and devastating experience of watching their future evaporate". You say "creative destruction", but you're really talking about lives being literally destroyed. And the key difference here is that (unlike previous time periods), there is no obvious future for these people who are losing their jobs to automation.

You rail against bankers not being willing to reconsider their careers, but what about cashiers at fast food restaurants? What about truck drivers? Train engineers? Miners? etc...

You say it's not something we should feel particularly bad about, but it absolutely is. I can't tell you how hard my eyes roll when I hear people talking in the almost kumbaya-esque way that I'm talking now, but we are all really in this together, and if we can't figure out a way to help people through the transition that is coming, well, what good are we as people?

Speaking so clinically about people's lives being destroyed does no one any favors. That's really all my point is.

> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine

Right now AI is still a future technology. The current AI algorithms are the equivalent of the early GSM phones, which looked like car batteries, very far from modern smartphones. But it is reasonable to expect that they will get better, and it is reasonable to expect that we will be able to emulate the brain with transistors and on a much bigger scale some days.

The second objection is that the demand for unskilled workers keeps shrinking. Our society has adapted to the industrial revolution by having a much larger skilled worker base, pretty much everyone can now read and write, college degrees have become the norm, etc. But there are brick walls to how skilled a society can be. A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled. And even among skilled workers, only a fraction will always be capable to satisfy the demand for the "hotest" skills (engineering, software development, etc).

So I think that as that imbalance develops, we are bound to live with a structurally unequal society. And it doesn't have much to do with capitalism, it has more to do with the evolution of the technology outpacing the biological evolution of our species.

No, it's not reasonable to assume they will emulate brains.

Not even the experts are saying that.

They're not trying to emulate brains at all.

Also, even going back to von Neumann it has always been expected that the brain will be able to be built in hardware, simply because neurons exhibit binary behavior. They fire or not, and all the rest is massive interconnectedness and adaptive changes to their activation potential. There's lots of argument about whether reproducing the behavior of neurons will result in a 'mind' or be useful, but no one would argue that we simply won't be able to build a brain workalike.

Can you justify that statement?

Lets say youre a truck driver and suddenly you lose your job. You cant transfer your existing skill set to driving a cab for very long because guess what? Thats been automated too.

There arent any other jobs that involve sitting at a wheel avoiding bad drivers and rush hour traffic and pulling all nighters. Simultaneously the chance for that person to find work in new markets becomes low. They have to train themselves.

>In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings.

Exactly, we're already beyond the limits of what we can consume. There won't be jobs producing more stuff when there is no one to consume it.

No, because in 1960 everyone had the same thing.

Now - you get programming for your niche, which is different than that of the dude next door.

Take clothing: even in the year 2000 people did not really wear fashion. We had 'the Gap' and not much more. Everything else was expensive.

'Fast fashion' has changed the world. Young people can now afford an absurd variety in fashion. Nobody 50+ ever thought you needed a 'new pair of pants' every season. Now it's normal. Clothes are almost disposable. That's a consequence of increased productivity and adapting demand.

"It's all subsidized through foreigners plights and profited upon wildly"

This is highly speculative, and I don't think in any way substantiated.

"they just exploited other countries through capitalist guises instead of barbaric colonisation."

Borderline racist.

American consumers are fuelling a massive wealth creation boom in places like China and India, where 100's of millions are coming out of poverty.

Trade is generally good for both sides, and it has benefited China/India etc. massively.

It's funny what you call 'exploitation' is 100's of millions of people with massively increasing wealth.

If you want to see China and India desperately poor again, we can 'turn off globalization'. A few more Americans will have jobs, but it will be back to the dark ages for many economies.

I'd be really interested to see sources for this since there is almost no accurate unemployment data pre-1840 and at least in the US it doesn't seem likely as what information we have tells us that during the period from 1800-1840 slaves made up over 26% of the workforce in the United States, peaking at almost 32% in 1810.

I'm assuming you're going by wage estimates from the UK over the period, but if you are those are really contested as a method for evaluating quality of life or actually real wages - many people at the time didn't earn inside the wage system.

I don't disagree that eventually cost of labor and general unemployment improved as a result of the industrial revolution - I just don't think it happened DURING the industrial revolution, at least not until its late stages.

Also, GDP per capita is a really bad way to estimate effects on the working class, particularly in a period famous for massive income inequality.

I need someone to burst my bubble from time to time.

Also, as a side note, I for one would be delighted if the future included people brewing delicious beer for one another as an important part of the economy.

This is a nice tidy test that is not entirely useful. You can't know anyone that didn't get hired into a job that didn't get created. Say a plant doubles output while destaffing by way of retirement. No one loses a job, automation eats more than 1 plants worth of jobs.

Babe Ruth, arguably one of the most famous athletes ever, played from 1914-1935.

Correction: there were 'few' pro athletes. Today, it's almost a career path. Back in the day, it was mostly amateurs.