I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.
Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?
Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case.
Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.
But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.
Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the ranges of motion the human limbs go through that make robots a complete non-starter.
Adding to that, a cheap robot arm that can lift as much as a four-year-old is $20k purchase price, plus another $20k for the controller/AI system, and probably $2k-$3k a year in maintenance. Figure four year depreciation when run 8 hours each day, you're looking at a yearly cost of $12k. That's compared to ~$15k for someone working full time on minimum wage. Take into account the huge process of switching your business over to robots, and it just doesn't look good.
Also, we don't need AI to take a customers order, you just need a touchscreen, or even just an app. The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?
Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agree a robot arm isn't an effective way to replace the frycook, but a specialized system like Momentum Machines is developing[1] will be.
The automated fast food joint isn't a regular one with robot arms instead of people, it's a box the size of a small office that takes raw ingredients from a stockpile inside of it and creates fully assembled burgers, fries, chicken strips, and onion rings without any human interaction.
Automation hardware will strike a middle ground between specialization and reuse. Eg the deep fryer will be able to cook several different meals, but it will still only have 1-2 degrees of freedom for putting stuff in and taking it out. Similar story for the grilling surface, veggie chopping system, and the plating / packaging mechanism.
This is much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than truly general purpose robot arms. More importantly though, it takes dramatically less space than a conventional restaurant, so you can plop your company's food-making-box down in Times Square and actually make a profit, while everyone else is stuck four blocks away to break even on the real estate.
The stories will be different in different sectors, but in general I think the coming automation wave is a bunch of quantitative changes coming together to form qualitative ones like this. You could probably build a burger-maker a decade ago too, but the hardware and design know-how necessary have gotten orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant, and so now it's actually happening.
I think this also has some interesting implications for real estate long term - if every mcdonalds needs 50% of the space they currently occupy over time that real estate will be put back in the market, multiply that by every organization doing that and it has some follow in implications that I can't forsee but find very interesting.
OTOH, the nice dining experiences will be done by people who can improvise and improve day-to-day based on their own tastes. eventually, the stuff people do will be the "good" stuff, and the stuff robots do will be the "bad" stuff. Hopefully. A more negative viewpoint says that robots will do the "high value" stuff and the people will only do the "low value" bad stuff.
In fact, if you consider the partial oxygen pressure (which is what matters for your lungs), this air is no worse than the air you find inside an airplane, or at a 2500m (8200 ft) mountain peak; Wikipedia says 140 million people live permanently at above 2500 m.
Now, this already exists and is called a hypoxic air fire prevention system, and is used e.g. in some data centers and in archives of valuable documents. It's not used in fast food restaurants though, because they have better ways of preventing and extinguishing fires at lower cost.
The majority of space in a McDonalds is the dining area and ordering counter area These areas are occupied by customers. The kitchens in a McDonalds is already pretty compact and dense.
I mean, real-time voiced-over translation on Skype? Eventually even mimicing the other person's voice? Yes please!
All thanks to this shallow form of AI that Nick Bostrom coined as "artificial narrow intelligence" (as opposed to "general" intelligence, i.e. human-like; and "superior" beyond ours). It's becoming possible for businesses of all kinds and all trades, thanks to the drastic cost reduction of deep learning since we moved these tasks to GPUs (and these bad boys keep improving at +25% performance per generation roughly every 18 month). And what AI does, sometimes is order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations, anything with "big data" and "subjectivity" in it).
Which leads to the same conclusion as your last sentence.
It's orders of magnitude more scalable but you're music nerd friend will beat Spotify's recommendations any day.
Second of all, following their links we find that in 2012 they had a full scale machine built that had a 95% success rate, and they projected 11 months until they could launch the concept in a restaurant. What has happened since? No word, AFAICT. Happy to be corrected if I missed it somewhere and they have actually launched.
But otherwise, it doesn't exactly convince me this is "the next industrial revolution" if they can't polish out that last 5% of a single-purpose burger-making machine in almost half a decade.
A more concrete if less evocative example is Amazon's warehouse automation. Relatively simple robots with 3 DOF (2D planar movement + a container jack) are wiping out enormous numbers of jobs, both in obvious immediate effects (less fulfillment center jobs) and by decimating conventional retail.
edit: Momentum still has 19 employees on LinkedIn, so they're not completely dead it seems.
But once competition automates, all bets are off everyone must automate or perish.
Its very much like the prostitution industry or pr0n.
None of those are going to automate any time soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T3IkAtOrc&ab_channel=McDon...
For restaurants where one of the main draws is price I think automation is inevitable as a cost saving measure.
I think we'll adapt as a race, but it'll be mighty uncomfortable for some (say those reliant on low skilled jobs, truck drivers, fast food workers, etc.). It's not to say that the way things will get done will even look the same as the transition occurs. I suspect many things will look different. For instance, rather than speaking your order to a person at McDonald's, you make your selections from a menu and a machine creates it, and then you pick it up and take it back to your table. Redbox already does this for movie rental. Think about how they've changed what we expect of renting movies... Same for home construction, particularly of the cookie cutter variety. Rather than a crew of people going through the motions to excavate a hole, lay a foundation, frame the house, put up drywall, paint, etc., Maybe it'll just be 3D printed with a huge machine (this tech actually exists, if in its infancy). Or maybe we'll switch to brick houses because they make brick laying robots (not humanoid, more like boxes which can move around). The next decade or two will be interesting!
But high end pizza places still don't use them and instead rely on stone / brick / coal pizza ovens instead.
Even if all of those assumptions hold today, what makes you think the the robot arm of a decade from now won't cost $20,000, but, with minor maintenance, operate for a decade?
What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC.
Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work that paid better, or was more valuable then putting groceries into plastic bags? If so, why haven't they done that before they were put out of work by a machine? Do engineers not see a connection between this, and the fact that they get to step over human excrement on their way to work?
HackerNews is read by a very weird set of people. All highly motivated and smart. Now, I've worked in a lot of small companies with people who are fairly smart but have no realy desire to win at work (or get promoted) they just want to turn up, do the work and go home. Home is time for family, hobbies, pub, etc.
I've noticed that simple web apps replace people. Excel or an access database, some scripts and someones job is suddenly much easier. People move on, or get demoted to part time, or some small pay cut (or years without a pay rise) and eventually leave.
These are usually the 18 - 25 year olds, employed to help out accounts or a manager or as a secretary while the PA is busy. These are the people that I don't see around so much these days. The gossips, the ones who remember your kids names, who have time for a chat. Who organise a night down the pub where the whole team bonds. They are the glue and the social oil that makes the machine move smoothly.
But they don't seem to get hired these days. Who needs them to print out a thousand letters and put them in envelopes? gmail will do that. Who needs them to find that document filed away in the back office? Or to go to the other office on the other side of town to find that blueprint?
Automation does kill jobs. For good and for bad. Life goes on.
still, there is rarely a line.
You have some might fine AI machines ;)
Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possible outcome of too many unhappy people, changes will be made to ensure people have some base level of happiness on average to prevent that. It's one of the things that makes our current government as stable as it is - the need to respond to the people.
Your point about millions of displaced people rising up and being unhappy is 100% valid. But you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employe people just because it's the right thing to do. Especially in the US where the entire culture is based around corporate profits only ever increasing at a rate greater than inflation. The US is in one big race to the bottom to see who can shave $0.01 off the sale price of their product. That naturally leads to two things. Monopolies and hyper efficiency. Because when your profit margin is pennies per unit you have to move one hell of a lot units to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue.
Sure, but that's what legislation is for. We have a minimum wage and laws protecting workers for a reason. Companies do have a disproportionate influence on politics, but only to a point. When it comes to a truly unhappy populace, politicians know what's more important to continuing to perpetuate the system.
I'm unsatisfied with the ubiquitous horse analogy as well. The economy exists to solve human problems, not horse problems. We are constantly generating new problems and new social performances. It would not surprise me if the economy of the future was based around elaborate, manpower-intensive tea-ceremony-like rituals or something equally preposterous. Human obsolescence is not inevitable, but might be engineered.
If, in the far future, there are greater returns from employing robots than humans, then those humans who need to work will starve.
Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools, you're missing an important point. Economies only have to function for those at the top in order to be promoted. You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit. To them, as long as they get to maintain their quality of life, what do they care about the masses?
If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it. There's even a story that GM had to get a factory in Flint connected to the Detroit water supply because the Flint water was damaging their parts. Plus Flint is not an isolated case. Some people put profit ahead of people, and sadly a high number of those people are in positions of power.
Well, I labeled humans as tools as well, so I'm not treating horses any differently in that respect than I am people, so I think you inferred a slightly different connotation for tool than I meant. Interestingly, the ability to see horses as non-tools is possible largely because their usefulness as a tool was surpassed by other technology. The same with cats and dogs.
> You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit.
Yes, that is one aspect of the current system. The main difference is that it's not the only aspect, as it was for significant periods of history for significant portions of the world.
> If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it.
This is only a counter-example if the problem comes out, everyone wants a change, and nothing happens, and then only somewhat, depending on how much people actually care. I'm not arguing that the world has magically eradicated corruption, negligence and shortsightedness, but I do believe that once exposed the public then gets to steer the response if they care enough. Special interests will still have a disproportionate amount of influence, but when the populace cares enough, that disproportionate influence is a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of an incited populace.
For you maybe, I'd say it's largely because they're sentient beings we share this planet with.
>"when the populace cares enough, that disproportionate influence is a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of an incited populace."
It's a nice idea, but compassion fatigue is a real phenomenon.
http://www.compassionfatigue.org/
If injustices were few and far between, I'd have more hope your approach could work, but considering the scale of the issues we face I don't think we can rely on mobilising the population into action over every injustice. Furthermore, the mass media still plays a large role in spreading misinformation, and smaller news outlets often lack the resources to carry out in-depth investigative journalism. I'd suggest any widespread political movement that doesn't tackle these issues head on is fighting an uphill battle from the start.
And my point is that a view such as this is a luxury people can now have because they are no longer required for survival. There have of course been people in the past that did not view these animals as tools, but for the vast majority of our history the vast majority saw them at least partially as a tool. The vast majority of people were seen as tools as well. Again, what I mean when I say tool and what you interpret when you read tool are very likely subtly different, otherwise I don't think you would have much objection. As I stated, I'm not treating them any different than people in this specific respect.
> It's a nice idea, but compassion fatigue is a real phenomenon.
Which doesn't really matter all that much when the whole point is that it may affect massive amounts of people. If it's affecting that many people, it's not compassion that's being tapped, but the changing circumstances of yourself and your immediate loved ones. Compassion isn't called for when it's happening to you; you don't become inured to pain like that when it's your own pain.
> I don't think we can rely on mobilising the population into action over every injustice.
I'm not proposing we do or can, for every injustice. I'm just noting that the people still have a massive amount of power, and when things affect them enough, they create change. The recent election is proof of this. People felt a change was needed, and felt they weren't being represented (whether true or not), and now we're in for something different. I don't think that necessarily means better, but I doubt it will be the status quo.
Unfortunately, there's a long history of people thinking of and using other people as tools.
Heidegger's question concerning technology is essential reading, but his basic argument is the technological process subordinates all others to be ends to itself. Notice how people don't so much adapt technology to their needs as adjust their needs to the available technology.
Please explain this basic fact to the people at Davos.
I disagree with the general sentiment. What makes humans different is that we can become skilled.
Imagine the big slave population that was used to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Suddenly, modern construction machinery appears over there, making them "unemployed" (slaves had a cost too). I would bet only a very very small part of those slaves couldn't be trained to do something more skilled than pushing rocks around.
Unskilled labor, as in repetitive, boring work where little creativity, reasoning, or dexterity is involved, is an infliction humans have to endure, for the moment. It's a waste of our real ability.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-ht...
From what I've read, we're not going to have completely driverless cars anytime soon (too much difficulty with all the potential edge cases). If we look at productivity growth, it's actually somewhat slow at the moment. People are claiming that soon it will be rapidly increasing, but they've been claiming that for several years now and it's yet to materialize. The evidence of a "robot revolution" is pretty weak at the moment.
And that's not even getting into the question of what effect this would have on the job market. The horse population might have crashed, but that's because you can't retool horse to weld skyscrapers or make advertisements. You can use humans for a variety of tasks, and until we have a post-scarcity society there's always going to be a desire for more production. And even in a post-scarcity society there will probably be a demand for more researchers or artists.
Sure, you might not be able to imagine what people of the future will do, but that's not surprising. If you told someone 150 years ago that less than 2% of the population would be involved with agriculture, they probably would imagine a mass employment catastrophe. They wouldn't imagine jobs like social media manager or video game developer, nor would they probably imagine that there would be enough offices to provide employment to so many administrative assistants. If you go back far enough, people would probably have a hard time believing that so many people could be employed in work that required reading and writing - surely the vast majority of humans can not be trained to read and write!
This actually puzzles me (especially since writing code requires no physical robot, just "an intelligence").
Just recently, we had some AI beat the world's Go champion?
Poker, chess and countless other games are long done.
Programming, in many languages for many tasks, isn't that much of a stretch. In all these games you have a number of primitive operations, sets/rules of valid and invalid state, a goal to work toward.. "same as much of programming, in principle" ;)
I guess at this point the only things holding AI back are (A) the impossibility of parsing human-formulated requirements and specs accurately (we suck at this to, but we're also for now "the only alternative" and can be talked to by same-species inconcise/inconsistent spec-writers painstakingly), and (B) how to deal successfully with all the glitches bugs inconsistencies incompatibilities and special-cases in the various unavoidable-for-interop-required-by-specs human-made APIs, libraries, tools, stale repos, protocols, frameworks..
A more apt comparison would be having an AI create board games that have logical rules, are enjoyable, and are extremely deep.
In this case, specifying a fitness function becomes non-trivial.
Like with designing a board game, how do you know if the program you are writing is getting closer to the goal? Let's say you use the number of unit tests passed as a metric. Ok, but who wrote those unit tests? And more importantly, how do you know you're getting closer to passing some unit test?
In summary, we are still far away from an AI that can fully replace software developers, unless we get a general AI out of nowhere, of course.
In the popular "Humans Need Not Apply" video about this subject. It was suggested that there are signs that "creative" jobs are already being replaced by automation and that professionals are the ones creating tools that replace themselves.
I think there are plenty of manual jobs that I don't think will be done by robots any time soon. Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening.
Digital or easily digitised jobs on the other hand - lawyers, accountants, possibly certain type of programming jobs - will be automated
There may not be robot plumbers, but that's not the only possible outcome.
I've seen tradespeople complaining about others who don't really know what they're doing and just look things up on YouTube in the van outside.
If we had an AI system that could look at images/lidar of plumbing and interact with you to diagnose issues and fast self-driving part delivery, that could result in a system where routine plumbing work gets done by people who would otherwise call a plumber.
I'm not saying this will likely happen soon, but there are other ways this could have an impact besides full-on robotic automation.
Like many other "optimistics" about AI I think reality will be much more of a hybrid one, i.e. plumbers or electricians will be aided, not replaced, by AI and robots. It's like the 100 horses in your car, it didn't kill the transportation industry but took it to a whole other level. Imagine as a plumber having an army of tiny drones to fix things you can't even see, let alone reach, as a human; from diagnosis to actual repair. You would wield such power that eventually one man could fix/maintain a whole skyscraper alone and still be home for dinner with the kids.
It's the difference between what an office worker could do with pen and paper and the post office, and what they could do once came the telephone: suddenly you could talk to hundreds of people every day without moving. Then came computers, internet, now AI and robots... A century ago, thousands of men couldn't do some of what you alone accomplish in your office today.
The most menial tasks will be automated for sure, however whether or not a given job is entirely made of such tasks is another matter entirely.
I, for one, don't think it a bad thing that we eliminate brainless or skill-less jobs, I'd much rather pay for UBI for these people until they learn new skills more likely to be rewarding on a self-growth level. I also think it a good thing that we supplement most professions with ever better tools -- think what a doctor or lawyer can do with a computer and a few ad hoc databases that they couldn't do without. Even as an assistant, if you are freed from most menial tasks (e.g. "computer, send a thank you email to these customers with our classic style") then you can focus on creating more value for the person you assist. You can reclaim your worth as a highly-functioning human being, add much more value to the table, while robots and AI takes care of things your kid could do (but never will, and that is a good thing).
It's basically what allowed civilizations to work twice less (in time, work hours) and actually keep growing that GDP. I don't know where AI takes us in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if on average we could eventually maintain the same level of growth working orders of magnitude less. But since humans love doing stuff, I'm sure most won't work less, they'll just do so much more --and we might yet reconnect with double-digit growth in western countries.
I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago. And if at some point we have self-driving cars or flying cars, we'll still spend roughly the same time commuting as we do today.
I think you'd probably be wrong (though it may depend strongly on which average you take); even with the industrial revolution, working at home, or essentially so (whether yeoman farming or living upstairs from the shop) was a lot more common 150 years ago than it is now, though it may be more common now than it was just before telecommuting.
And no one complained (child work) now we are able to do exactly that.
That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead and hope it all works out eventually.
Despite what Dickens may have written, the period was marked by faster gains for the lower classes than the previous century. And perhaps in part due to what he's written, we now have a social safety net -- I'll admit the quality of this system could be improved. What concerns me is making broad, major social changes in anticipation of a completely speculative (and very specific) view of the future.
I'd be curious about your answer to this: If conditions for the bottom third improve -- instead of falter -- as this trend develops, does that change your policy recommendations (about presumably, UBI)?
[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandth...
2. "the lowest 65 percent" is a pretty big segment. How were the lowest 40% doing, or 20%? I don't know the answer, I just think it's a useful question.
3. Much of this article talks about how rising income is not the same as a rising standard of living, and how it is "plausible" that standards of living decreased for the first 70 or so years of the industrial revolution.
4. Even if wages and standards of living both went up, inequality on its own is a concern. Your quote shows that inequality was worse a century later.
5. I'm not calling for anything specific. My only point is that it's not acceptable to say "we don't need to worry at all, everything will work out". We do need to worry, but it's totally possible that after worrying we'll come to the conclusion that no major changes make sense at this time.
I've just seen a lot of people say "look at the Industrial Revolution, we'll be fine" and I think that's exactly the opposite lesson we should have learned. And I honestly didn't have UBI in mind when I wrote that comment, I was thinking about maybe some kind of subsidized education program for people who need to switch careers because their old career no longer exists. Or anything, I don't know. This isn't my field. I'm just saying this is worth a lot of thought and study, preferably by people who know what they're doing.
>"we don't need to worry at all, everything will work out"
Strawman of course. A nuanced understanding of the historical context of other technological booms is the point of my original post and it's specifically the 'omg AI gonna take our jerbs' kneejerk reaction that I wanted to preempt. I would add that statisticians seem to be less worried about AI threats than your average HNer [1]. And although I don't have a handy source, I know that economists are also likely to brush aside predictions of major impacts.
[1] https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/executive-summary
I'm sympathetic do the idea of saying "we've go to do something" but history unfortunately shows instances where "doing something" is often worse than "doing nothing" so you have to be very very careful.
Wage stagnation is a real problem. It's a kind of vectorized unemployment where everyone in the middle class on down is partially unemployed through a combination of more part time work rather than full time, and stagnant wages. The broadness of the problem makes it seem like we have good employment numbers, but wage stagnation is a big problem, especially in contrast to the rise in cost of living, in particular housing.
Unemployment is a synthetic measure. A mom working 39 hour shifts at Walmart so she doesn't get benefits isn't the same as a cush office job that's rolling in benefits. When we look at post-industrial societies, we look at late stage job creation being problematic. There's a lot of Mcjobs, temp jobs, and contract jobs. Technically those people are employed, but its not sustainable for them.
Yes, the US has done well but its an exception for the most part due to the massive economy at work here and the relative lack of competition, until recently, from other regions. French youth unemployment hit 26% a few months ago. Spain and Greece are just as bad, if not worse. Jobs in many European economies are lifer jobs because if you leave, your chances of getting a new one is slim.
The real question is, when is the camel's back going to break. Another good career job replaced by a McJob thanks to automation won't change the unemployment stats, but it will make people unhappy. It will drive down the economy with less spending and other issues. In other words, wages matter, not just employment numbers.
I would not assume we are sitting pretty right now. This dam is going to break. Arguably, the surprise win of anti-automation, anti-liberal, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectual candidates in the UK and the USA are the first signs of a major fault.
I'll all for technological advancement. As a society, we've accomplished marvelous things. But it's useful to remember whether individuals are actually improving their standard of living or not.
> now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car
The flipside of this is that (for most US) you must have a car to perform basic necessities such as purchasing food to eat. Food that would have otherwise been in your vegetable garden/chicken coop/pond.
Our society is immensely better for well-off city dwellers, but there are large portions of the population whose level of freedom is only slighly better than servitude.
No of course it isn't. But because it's called "artificial intelligence" instead of "conditional probability" or "regression" or something people think otherwise.
The reality is that this kind of technology will make us more productive, bring down the cost of products and services and make them available to a mass market, in exactly the same way literally every tech advance has done.
Of course some jobs and disciplines will be lost, but they will be replaced with different, higher skilled jobs. Just look at the range of disciplines and jobs that the web has created over the last 20 years. I mean just look at Google. The world's largest "AI" platform has spawned entire industries. No evidence this trend won't continue.
- [1] Elon Musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/702534707464896512?
- [2] Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Expone...
- [3] Gates apparently endorsed the book: http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/kurzweil.htm
Survivorship Bias; Not everyone is thriving under the current circumstances, not everyone was thriving during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution.
It already does. Have you tried to build a house without power tools?
Strong-form, self perpetuating, Terminator style AI has not even been invented yet and you're jumping to the closing chapters.
All you need is a bit of advance in robotics, coupled with stronger AI.
Perhaps a proper AGI is not even required for that. Just good enough multipurpose ANI combos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE is slower than a modern house, but not that slow. Further, with just hand tools the Amish where known for raising a barn in one day.
Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is around 50% depending on how you slice it.
Your 50% number is more commonly called the 'labor force participation rate' and it's near 63% right now [1], but has trended down for the past few decades. I would argue (as Keynes did) that if work force participation falls and standards of living continues to rise (or stay flat) then society is having good results.
[1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/94333000-not...
Further just looking at the published unemployment rate in the US there has been several changes to the definition over time. On top of that other countries use different metrics. So no you can point to U3 and call it a day.
Where are you getting that information???
"Skilled labor shortage will continue to plague construction companies" [1]
1. http://www.constructiondive.com/news/10-construction-industr...
People who recognise the threat from cheap AI and robot.
And people who think there is some hand-wavy magical force that will ensure that people will always be employed.
You can see that doesn't work now, you can see low income jobs are down, and while they are rising in China and India, those people are already being replaced by robots.
Now it seems that AI might be able to handle any mind-based job just fine, in a not too distant future. If that is indeed the case, what will human workers do?
* Delocalization of work. The need for physical proximity is still a pervasive bottleneck. As that further relaxes (VR, remote work), what changes? Think "N weeks to get there" Roman empire vs current "call/email/tweet the world". Maybe a world without commutes? Without two-body problems?
* More richly interwoven human/machine-learning hybrid work processes. Say CEO compensation plummets as you get jit virtual "CEO"s. What happens when most businesses can afford competent leadership? Management? Even if the number of businesses increases by an order of magnitude? Or three?
* What does an economy look like if most people are scrambling, looking for opportunities, not working n-hour "jobs"? Where you can again pick up a "help wanted" "paper", and have a work a few hours later?
Yes, it's easy to imagine dystopias. Especially with resurgent aristocracy, regulatory capture, a patent system I expect to remain broken my entire professional career, and so on. But it's also easy to forget just how much potential change is inbound. Modulo the usual dangers of stagnation and wreckage, "you've not seen anything yet". Maybe.
So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment.
Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.
Think about it this way - previously if someone came up with a more efficient way to do a given job, out of 10 people 9 lost employment, but you still needed that one person to do the job. With automation you get rid of 10 people, and add one additional "worker" to the pool of workers. So now 10 people have to compete not only with themselves but also with one robot that can do job of 10 people.
There are ways in which H1B is imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. There will be ways in which making automated cars for hire illegal will be imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. But those attributes haven't driven the former into the dustbin yet. If anything it's about to get stronger under the current political climate, so there's no reason to think the later won't be successful, at the least as a delay tactic so that automation isn't as disruptive as hypothesized.
Also, as a country establishes a more isolationist attitude, it matters less what the rest of the world does, and the rhetoric right now is distinctly a more isolationist attitude.
Also, lots societies needs don't even require Alpha Go level of AI; and computer will make these tasks automatic. And these class of worker won't beat machines logic until a deep learning (sic sic) phase.