And that's going to happen sadly before we reach Star Trek utopia, and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.
And let's not even talk about impoverished countries with exploding populations that are already struggling to provide jobs - an endless cycle of regional warfare, an endless Arab Spring.
Work is almost over. Good riddance to it. Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the fruits of full automation?
> We are going to have ... the super low wage unskilled laborers in a race to the bottom, trying to compete with machines, and a huge, empty nothing in the middle between those groups... and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.
That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power. If they are shortsighted enough to take entirely for themselves the wealth the machines create - rather than using it to guarantee basic security for everyone - then we're in for rough times. I'm betting with you on that one.
They should, but:
>That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power.
And that's why they won't. At least not until their poverty destabilizes the economy. It's expensive and reduces profits for the people making the decisions, at least in the short run.
Something that seems to get missed a bunch when talking about the upcoming lack of work for humans is that a job category doesn't need to be fully automated to cause widespread lack of employment.
Simply automating a job enough to allow 2 people to do the work 3 used to do puts 33% of those doing that job out of work. 33% unemployment is already an economic nightmare and the actual ratios of "X people to do the work Y used to do" will quickly become much more severe than 2 to 3.
Some people will inevitably say "this has happened before", but this time a lot of the automation is going to be purely software. You are not going to have enough new jobs for people "maintaining the robots" at anywhere near the scale required to make up for the lost jobs like you did with the previous more mechanical style of automation.
Your mistake is assuming that a sizable portion of the work these jobs involve can't be replaced by "dumb AI", which is what ML is all about, and that they require a fully general AGI.
If the proposition is that this would lead to fewer humans being needed for these jobs, I suppose that could be the case. In my own field, my criticism of automating, say, legal research and writing, is that the time it would take for me to check the work would be nearly the same as doing it myself. I don't see much efficiency gain, which is why I think the only thing that would truly be better than a human would be an AGI.
Also, if you look at most of what's been automated away, there's very little what we would consider (and even what people 40 years ago would have considered) artificial intelligence involved.
If you look at the legal field, what's changed is the means of gathering and disseminating information. Legal researchers can be much more productive with computer searches, and consumers can get access to advice and forms in some cases without the need of direct face time with a lawyer.
Some of the changes weren't even primarily driven by technology at all, but by new ideas for business models. I think that something like legalzoom could have been done with the technology available decades ago (phones, mail, and catalogs).
Disclaimer: I live in one of these neighborhoods. While I, personally, think we're closer to a post-scarcity society than we realize, I'm still surrounded by those who lack the privilege to think about such things. As such, they're kept awake at 2 AM because their neighbor is having a physiological reaction to whatever drugs he took that day and is storming around his complex, screaming and destroying things. Meanwhile, I'm a straight white male privileged enough to be living in a co-op, where we maintain a better standard of living and don't worry about such things on our property (at least, to some extent.)
Depends on what you mean by progress. Giving someone work experience is progress for her.
I'm not talking about halting progress. I'm talking dividing the employment and subsistence problems. There will still be demand for automation. It just won't be artificially inflated by making employment more expensive than it has to be.
Is it, though? If you spent 8 hours a day pouring soda in to cups would that be progress? We have this absurd fetishization of "work" as though any task performed in exchanged for money is inherently virtuous. Imagine a world where that person is given their wage, but a robot does the job for them. Is that world any worse off?
It's not exciting, but proving you can show up on time every day isn't nothing. There are plenty of great jobs that mostly involve being professional, congenial, and available. It's the work history equivalent of building a good credit rating.
> Giving someone work experience is progress for her.
Progress is getting to the point where people can have technology provide the essentials, so that these repetitive jobs are just for fun, rather than a means for survival. It's like in DS9 where Sisko's father runs a restaurant--for pleasure. If he'd been sick or no longer interested in working, he wouldn't have to worry about starving or finding a place to live.
They're mostly mutually exclusive, and we'll have to face up to that fact.
What we currently have, though, is a poorly designed system which doesn't make this transition easy and doesn't reward actors properly. I'm talking about things like free training for programming and technical skills, conditional support for the unemployed so they can have time to re-train and re-insert in the job market (while maintaining their health and spending), and means to make income distribution little flatter (automation can concentrate income to a degree that gets counterproductive).
"Our infrastructure provides you with X to spend every time period. Spend on what you'd like. Earn more if you'd like with a job/tasks/work of your choosing."
So even if we live in crazy robot utopia world people will be creating things that will still exist in finite amounts that they will trade for other objects that exist in finite amounts. In fact we really already do live in crazy robot utopia world and this is already happening. Almost no one is starving in america and millions of people live primarily on the dole. Those people living on the dole are living better than like 90% of the human race that has ever existed, they are just living relatively worse than the people who are employed or making a living.
In project australia or whatever it sounded like there were easy ways to consolidate resources because people still owned things and could barter them and eventually they would have all the resources and the monthly credit allowance would once again be welfare. I'm not even really sure what is wrong with capitalism as a system because life is getting better for everyone over time, and as long as ownership/monopoly isn't taken to its extreme things continue to work out.
In 2013, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 33.3 million adults and 15.8 million children. [1]
> Those people living on the dole are living better than like 90% of the human race that has ever existed
How is this a metric we should be measuring on?
[1] http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hu...
People have better things to do than repetitive, unfulfilling tasks (unless they enjoy it, of course). We need to get to the Star Trek utopia... what you're talking about sounds like halting progress.