Whoohoo! Glad you liked it.

However it isn't just truck driving, farming, or retail work.

It's edumacated jobs too:

http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are-taking/

what do you do for work and for the feelings of value that come with it?

Retirees--a large and growing segment of the population--have to find answers to that question every day. Most of us (I've been retired for 10 years) manage just fine. Living on a Universal Basic Income sounds pretty much like being retired on Social Security.

I think a more important question is, would entrepreneurs continue to generate the wealth needed to pay everyone a UBI if most of their reward was taxed away?

When the drivers' and farm pickers', etc. jobs are taken over by machinery they will do what has always been done.

Complain a lot, get government to "protect" their livelihoods (even if it is for a short time); and eventually find other lines of work or try to live of the "basic life income."

In the meantime, some folks will learn the new technology and be the ones running/repairing the machines and be the envy of those who did nothing but complain about losing their jobs.

And, then, they will have to fight like hell to protect their assets because the "basic life income" won't be enough and the lazy people will demand that others be "taxed to hell" to pay for it all.

Oh, and did anyone notice the following paragraph?

"One reason for creating a robot to do this is that robots do not risk contaminating the fruit, unlike human fruit pickers."

In other words, unlike many current human harvesters, robots don't sh&t in the fields!

Well, the first jobs killed by modern computing power were...computers - people doing calculations.

L. F. Richardson, the father of numerical weather forecasting, estimated that it would take 60,000 people to grind out a forecast that would be available prior to the time of the forecast.

Fortunately, ENIAC came along and relieved them of the drudgery.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Richardson.html

Will we just have a nation lying on the couch all day, sneering on social media?

Yes, or at least a significant chunk of a nation.

Because somebody will do something clever and productive with his basic income, while somebody else spends it all. The result will be "unfair."

Because somebody will augment her basic income with various side gigs, and wind up saving enough to get a nicer apartment, while somebody else doesn't. The result will be "unfair."

Because people will confuse "guaranteed income" with "guaranteed standard of living." The results will be "unfair."

A number of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, have begun investigating the possibility of a government-provided universal basic income. A no-strings-attached mass cash transfer will ensure that no matter what happens in the future, everyone will have a reasonable income. How would such a massive new entitlement be paid for? By taxing the innovators in Silicon Valley.

We can only hope they'll be benevolent monarchs.

I remember when America didn't allow illegal immigrants into the country.

Crops rotted in the fields. Houses had no roofs. You couldn't get a hamburger let alone a meal in a restaurant. Lawns were six feet tall, everyone smelled awful because the laundry wasn't done. Hotels forced guests to clean the bathrooms and make the beds and cocaine had to deliver itself to Los Angeles.

But then again, we didn't have a Democratic President colluding with the Republicans to destroy millions of American jobs with the same treaty that displaced tens of thousands of Mexican campesinos from their family farms, either, so I guess times have changed.

Personally I'm looking forward to robots destroying web page developers and office workers.

Boston Dynamics installs swearing module in robot.

"What the fk, Kevin?!"

When you delve into the 'analysis' behind these predictions, you'll see that it ends w/ a lot of hand waving about AI and robots. Specifically it rests on the belief that advances in deep learning will proceed along a Moore's Law - like trajectory continuously into the future.

But Machine Learning experts have warned against exactly this assumption. Deep learning is the application of machine learning techniques ( often using artificial neural networks ) in massively parallel computing architectures.

You can't assume that this approach can be generalized to all types of problems, and adding more compute won't make that so. Deep learning is good at tasks that present large sample sets, discrete states, and finite outcomes. So it's good at classification problems and making predictions where there is a long history of consistent choices a/o outcomes.

But it's not going to reason about contingencies unless they are highly constrained. That's another domain of AI, which like most AI hasn't progressed significantly since the 80's - ANN's are from the same era.

Anyway - my point is that it's likely that the consequences of AI and roboticization will be very different from what our benevolent overlords desire.

Another point that I'd like to make is that the current generation of SV 'elite' are very different from prior generations in that they typically aren't developing new technology. Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter etc. are media companies that use the internet to deliver services. They do very little in way of R&D or pure research.

There is no reason to privilege their opinions on these matters.

One guy complained about how irritating self-checkout is. I agree. They put the work they used to do on you.

That's not the half of it. What's really broken about self-checkout is that the machine insists you repeatedly move things to places that are hard to reach for tall customers. Redesign the machine so it sticks to its job of tallying purchases, and stops giving orders about where we place them, and it will become usable. But I'm not holding my breath.

Will that basic income allotment depend upon which party you vote for? (fly-over country is not well thought of at the moment)

... replace what percentage of your salary when your high tech company replaces you w/a foreign worker? Obviously Google, etc. are open borders companies for a reason.

... be independent of your own savings or take your pension/savings/health benies away (to be fair).

Will exemptions be allowed as in those for Obamacare? (silly question - do you really think Congress is going to reduce their benefits/salaries)

One guy complained about how irritating self-checkout is. I agree.

Every store I've ever seen that does self checkout has the option of going to a cashier. I haven't seen a single store that requires self checkout.

Personally, I prefer it. The bags are packed how I like.

However, I pointed out to him, it's probably a short time before self-checkout involves walking out of the store with a bag and having a sensor charge you for everything in it.

That store is already here in Seattle: Amazon unveils smart convenience store sans checkouts, cashiers

The store is open to those employees of the tech giant participating in a beta testing program. At lunchtime Monday, the sidewalk outside the place was crowded with those participants, clutching orange bags. The store is expected to be open to the public in early 2017.

Amazon says that what makes the store tick is a combination of computer vision, the aggregation of data from different sensors and machine learning. It calls the whole cocktail “Just Walk Out technology.”

. . .

Shoppers walking into the store call up the Amazon Go app and hold their smartphone to a scanner as they would at an airport security line. That opens a gate. Then they just pick any combination of products and walk out. Amazon charges them after they leave the store.

Unlike the self-serve registers present at many supermarkets, there’s no need to stand in line or go through any register.

The answers I received made clear that Silicon Valley's elites envision a world in which an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial "gig work" and government aid.

The way the Valley elite see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur; some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth so that others can live comfortably. Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.

This is disgusting. Typical elitist thinking. Have most of us subsist on a so-called basic income, in which no amount of money taken from these knuckleheads would provide the remaining tens of millions of us with a decent income, which means to provide it, the country will go further into debt.

And a pox on automation. I tried the self-scanner at my local Wal-Mart. The damned thing was so slow that I though the item didn't register, and so I ended up scanning it twice. Give me a human cashier any day.

And also, what happens when the famed robot hamburger maker goes into production and breaks down. What about all the crappy fruits and vegetables some dumb robot picks, when these Mexicans, as illegal as they are, hopefully have a discerning eye for bad produce.

Fuck automation.

Odds are good we'll be fine. Many if not most jobs are miserable, and much of our money goes to making our jobs possible. Individually and collectively. What if all the people who flip burgers all day, just didn't? What if the folks who currently push paper all day, stopped doing so and had time to cook their own dinner? Very poor people will be no worse or better off, and the working class will find other ways to be productive. Given 50 years or so to adjust, we'll wonder why the idea was so difficult.

Most of these 'robots are taking all the jobs' articles are lacking in historical perspective. Mechanization of human work has been going on for a long time. Circa 1950, there were about 500,000 elevator operators in America. There were also very large clerical organizations doing things like billing and subscription management that were about the get automated by mainframe computers.

Going back further, a Spinning Jenny (introduced circa late 1700s) could do as much work as 10 human spinsters. The steam- and water-powered textile equipment that then lay a few years down the road provided additional orders of magnitude in labor reduction.

In the mid-1800s, the sewing machine greatly reduced the labor content of sewing. In the early 1900s, the record, the radio, and the 'talkies' eliminated the jobs of people who had worked in local orchestras. I could go on and on.

I'm not convinced that today's automation advances represent anything but a continuation of a long-standing trend line.

The problem with automating jobs in the US is that we're not producing workers for the age of automation. Our high school graduates cannot do much beyond simple math. Coding and programming are beyond the average US high school graduate.

The days when a person with few mathematical or language skills could simply go to work in a factory, join the union, and make a middle class living with a routine, repetitive job are over. We're competing in open trade with countries whose employees can live on 50¢ an hour and our factory workers require at least $40 per hour in order to pay their union dues and living expenses. Those routine, repetitive jobs are being shipped to the cheaper countries.

Tomorrow's workers are going to need a specialized skills in order to be competitive with machines and with lower-priced foreign workers. As PJ O'Rourke points out, you can buy a refrigerator online and have it delivered, but getting it repaired still requires a guy to come to your house, preferably a guy who is skilled a not stoned.

"Most of these 'robots are taking all the jobs' articles are lacking in historical perspective"

I don't think so because what we are about to experience is unprecedented.

Historically machines have been more like tools used by the worker not a full on replacement of the worker.

When computers came along we needed those out of work secretaries to transfer their basic skills of typing into data entry (not that hard IMO) or over the phone customer service.

Learning to use a sewing machine for repetitive piece-work (most places that sew your clothes a worker spends all day sewing just one side of one sleeve on one type of blouse for example) is not so hard that the ladies sewing by hand couldn't make the transition.

Now machines are predicted to be able to replace humans through the entire process. We can create plants that partially fertilize themselves, robots that tend to the soil, plant the seeds, pick the crops, package the product, load the product, ship the product, unload the product, scan the product, enter into a database, shelve the product, and sell the product.

We are still in the infant stages of this but where will your average worker fit into this if they don't have some type of special skill set? And again this automation isn't exclusive to farming, manufacturing, or driving.

What the valley intelligentsia envision is a third world hell hole. A small group of people control all of the means of production and merely provide a minimum of benefits to the general populace so they don't riot and burn everything down. They just described Venezuela. But what do you expect from a bunch of people who don't actually produce much other than advertising.

No Ppen this isn't unprecedented. It is exactly the same. You just haven't seen all the intermediate steps that went from hand stitching to fully automated clothes machine. There have been continuous incremental automation improvements in factories.

"The problem with automating jobs in the US is that we're not producing workers for the age of automation."

Conan you've missed the point. It isn't that we aren't producing workers for the age of automation. It is that we are producing people unfit for work in any age. They aren't fit for the industrial age. They aren't fit for the agricultural age. That they are unfit for the automation age is irrelevant because they plain are unfit for work. That is what we need to fix.

We just had an experiment with collectivism where we dramatically increased the minimum cost of an employee (Obamacare, Sarbox, Dodd-Frank just to begin. EEOC rulings, yada yada). This has had the predictable effect of driving low skill workers out of the market. The issue is not that we are losing checkout jobs to robots. It is that economic growth is so low there are no new jobs to replace them. Economic growth has been sub 3% for almost a decade. New company formation is at a similar low. Wealth is concentrating into fewer and fewer hands. This is what always happens when collectivist policies are implemented. It is what happened in the US in the 70s. It is what happened to Russia. And China under Mao. And every other fricken place that does this. Even without automation you would see the exact same things happening.

Do you really care if you can't get a job bagging groceries as long as you can get a job doing something else? Automation is irrelevant. Growth is what is needed.

" You just haven't seen all the intermediate steps that went from hand stitching to fully automated clothes machine. There have been continuous incremental automation improvements in factories."

It's literally my job and my best friends job lmao. Granted I don't spend alot of time on the shop floor anymore. But yes I've seen exactly how automation is quite different than when I first started in this field a decade ago.

In my best friends factory they fired every skilled worker and replaced them with guys making $12 an hour because machines do most of the work.

Another cool thing is that I know his VIP is planning on firing 90% of the sales staff in 5 years thanks to the way their AI and overseas staff is handling sales.

We are still in the infant stages of this but where will your average worker fit into this if they don't have some type of special skill set? And again this automation isn't exclusive to farming, manufacturing, or driving.

Ppen at February 12, 2017 6:31 PM

My prediction is that you will start to see a bakanization in the high tech countries where certain groups of people for religious or economic reasons reject technology in order to maintain their values and their culture.

The sedentary indoor lifestyle has contributed to a lot of health problems in my lifetime. It is only going to get worse. With nothing to do drug abuse and alcoholism is going to skyrocket.

I for one, intend to reject a lot of labor saving tech just to keep myself up and moving as long as possible.

The world needs something for twenty something young men to do. If you dont provide a lot of hard physical labor, their interests tend to spill out into crime, terrorism and war.

Japan deliberately rejects a lot of mechinization in order to provide jobs for their people. A number of countries are going to have to do the same, and beef up their military or they will be overun by the barbarians in short order.

"The world needs something for twenty something young men to do. If you dont provide a lot of hard physical labor, their interests tend to spill out into crime, terrorism and war."

This is my concern too. There is also a lack of leadership among men... those old school guys that beat young men into a purpose driven work ethic are gone from the shops. Mean ass hell bitter bastards but my god those were the only ones that beat some sense into these young men.

I frankly don't know what the future is for young men except playing lots of video games and getting fat and depressed while battling alcoholism.

I'm not able to be here as often as I used to be, but if I recall correctly... being here to witness the rare occurrence of Isab and Ppen pointedly agreeing on something substantive makes up for not being able to see Friday's Snow Moon lunar eclipse through Pittsburgh's ubiquitous cloud cover.

Sometimes I love this space.

Thank you Amy (and Conan, Cousin Dave, Crid, Isab, KateC, Lenona, Patrick, Ppen, Radwaste...)

"Universal basic income". Sons of bitches learned absolutely nothing from history. The person with a guaranteed income not only does not work, but is shown constantly that possessions, the product of work, are not earned.

Why should you not be robbed, when you did not earn your possessions? The answer to that question is the key to most violence in projects nationwide.

"It's literally my job and my best friends job lmao. Granted I don't spend alot of time on the shop floor anymore. But yes I've seen exactly how automation is quite different than when I first started in this field a decade ago."

So you haven't been paying attention. No, this really isn't that different. No one makes buggy whips anymore. All kinds of technology and products have become obsolete. People like to have this dream like idea of working for one company for a lifetime and that was never real. Significantly because people live longer than most companies do.

"In my best friends factory they fired every skilled worker and replaced them with guys making $12 an hour because machines do most of the work."

First off, so what? If those people can move on to other jobs does this really matter? I know looking for a job isn't fun. But it also isn't anything new.

Secondly, "where will your average worker fit into this if they don't have some type of special skill set?" Where do those skilled workers fit in the situation you just described? They just got fired for unskilled labor.

Thank you, Michelle! I appreciate it.

As far as the topic goes... a lot of people were predicting "the end of work" back in the late 19th century. Recall that at the time, about 75% of the Western world's employment was in farm labor, but farm machinery was rapidly displacing those workers. What mechanization took away, it gave back... I live in a city where, in the first half of the 20th century, the economy was dominated by cotton mills. Those were jobs that the machinery created. (Or, maybe more accurately, the machines created the market, and then the market created the jobs.) How would that work out this time? Not sure, but I can see the possibility of a whole lot of people becoming employed in the service sector. And it's still true that if you have a bunch of robots, someone's got to build them and program them and repair them. Consider the number of mechanic jobs that the automobile created -- it was way more than the number of people who were ever involved in building or repairing coaches.

Davos Man is a different problem. That's the aim of a group of unreformed self-styled royalty, in the 18th-century style, who are still smarting from the Enlightenment. They wish to gut the Western middle class and redistribute its assets to the Third World, thereby re-creating the medieval era on a global scale (and making themselves fabulously wealthy in the process). Screw them. If there is an overarching theme to Trump and Brexit, this is it.

From "Dinner at Eight" (the relevant part starts at the 1:00 mark):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99oA8Oi19sg

And at least one commentator - plus one reviewer at Filmsite dot org - thinks that the book referred to in the clip was likely by...Huxley! (Hint, hint.)

> Thank you Amy (and Conan,
> Cousin Dave, Crid, Isab,
> KateC, Lenona, Patrick,
> Ppen, Radwaste...)

Fuck that.

I want first billing.

First commenter billing, at least. (Amy keeps the lights on. Also Gregg deserves some love.)

Reconsideration: Alphabetical.

Well... No.

Not good enough.

Y'know, they say the Christian God is a jealous God.

Well, dammit, I am a jealous blog commenter.

   Don't
     You
       Dig
         My
           Formatting?

Damn. Not even a mention.

Well, back to work. These carpets aren't going to reclaim themselves.

"I want first billing."

Ooh, jealousy! I actually got top billing! Hey Mom, I'm a star! They like me! They really like me!

"On the cover of the Rolling Stone..."

People get meaning and feel they are valued from work.

Wow, I certainly don't - and I'm one of the "lucky" ones with a decent-paying climate-controlled office job. It's a way to earn money and nothing else, and if someone would pay me for existing, I'd happily quite working and devote all of my time to my hobbies and friends.

I don't know what "we" will do with the surplus six and a half billion people on this planet who make a mess and who nobody really needs. The "unnecessariat" is going to get a lot bigger.

But, y'know, breeders gonna breed.

I'm glad to hear you like Uber! Please, if you're ever visiting Minneapolis, let me know. I would be happy to be your Uber driver during your visit!

Crid I'm captivated by your formatting.

Thanks for pointing out Gregg - he does his job so well he all but disappears (also, Aida upstages him in all the photos in which they appear together).

THANK YOU GREGG!

Gog, I'm going to blame it on Widow Brain (it's a thing).

Love to you, too.

Some people are under-thinking the scope of the problem. IBM's Watson can already replace a lot of skilled programmers and diagnosticians, and the technology will only get better. It's not going to be just truck drivers and burger flippers losing jobs. I would guess artists and craftsmen might be those least at risk. It will be a different world.

MarkD..."Some people are under-thinking the scope of the problem. IBM's Watson can already replace a lot of skilled programmers and diagnosticians, and the technology will only get better."

Software has been replacing programmers since almost the dawn of the computer age, starting with assemblers and compilers and continuing through various forms of packaged software and problem-oriented languages and systems. Currently, web-commerce systems such as Weebly and Wix allow nontechnical people to quickly implement systems that 5 years ago would have required significant technical effort.

Again, this stuff is not as radical and new as it is often portrayed.

For the last four years we have had ~2M new jobs created per year. Over that same time period we have had a population increase of ~2.2M per year. We aren't creating enough new jobs to keep up with population growth. Yes automation puts a downward pressure on jobs. But economic growth is a much more significant issue. We have had ~2.2% annual GDP growth over that same time period. A normal growth rate for the US is 3% and above. That extra percentage point alone would add ~1M new jobs each year. At that point the losses due to automation become irrelevant. And on the plus side the added productivity per worker due to automation increases the average quality of life.

Automation has eliminated more jobs than outsourcing by a large margin. But we shouldn't be afraid of 'robots taking ur jerbs'. The real issue is that over regulation and too much power in DC have stalled out the US economy in general. Even without those robots stealing our jobs the bureaucrats would have killed those jobs off anyways. Bureaucrats are the real issue. Not some sort of post capitalist society.

Predictions of "the end of work" actually date back to the 1820's, if not earlier. Look up Robert Owen, for example; extrapolating from the trends he saw around him, he envisioned a future where children would work for ten to twenty years and retire before they were thirty. His textile mills reduced the labor input to clothing by a factor of 10 or so; meanwhile, the cotton gin made large-scale production of one of the raw materials for clothes possible, and the early steam engines allowed considerable expansion of mining, and were just beginning to affect transportation. In most other areas technology had not yet increased productivity, but in the field that employed most men - agriculture - the cotton gin was not the only innovation. Merely adding an iron edge to a wooden plow substantially increased what one horse and one man could plow in a day; soon iron plowshares would make it possible to hitch up two horses (without breaking the plow) and double the land one farmer could handle.

Where Owen went wrong was in assuming that this productivity would be used to reduce work rather than increase wealth. In his day, most men owned just two sets of clothes, a new one for going to church on Sunday, and an older set (demoted from last year's Sunday suit) for work. Only the really rich could afford many sets of clothes, like everyone has today. If we still lived like a small shopkeeper of Owen's day, we _could_ retire at 30 - without spending our childhood at hard labor. (Education and ending child labor are other luxuries that came with increasing wealth.)