Rise of the machines....

[archerships]

some guy wrote:

It started when I read Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation. (I have mixed feelings about Brain himself -- he is full of fascinating ideas but sometimes demonstrates a tenuous grasp of economics.) After much speculating, he concludes,

"...The arrival of humanoid robots should be a cause for celebration. With the robots doing most of the work, it should be possible for everyone to go on perpetual vacation. Instead, robots will displace millions of employees, leaving them unable to find work and therefore destitute. I believe that it is time to start rethinking our economy and understanding how we will allow people to live their lives in a robotic nation..."

I thought hard about this and ran the idea by some of my friends.

"Technology," they told me, "has always made some jobs obsolete. And new (and better) jobs have always sprung up to replace them. Quit your worrying." To me, this argument carries the same intellectual heft as the idea that "the stock market always goes up in the long term." I accept its truth as historical fact, but I see no reason to accept it as inexorable truth. Indeed, I think this question (the technology/jobs one) is fantastically important.

Every day the earth rotates about its axis, and another dawn begins. I accept this truth as historical fact, but I see no reason to accept it as inexorable truth. After all, what if the earth stopped rotating tomorrow? Think of the impact it would have!

Likewise, despite the invention of fire, wheel, printing press, cotton gin, steam engine, electricity and the myriad other inventions designed to replace human labor, humans have always seemed to find some other line of work.

Inexorable? We can't say.

However, if replacing human labor with machine labor "...left employees unable to find work and therefore destitute..." shouldn't we have seen at least some of that effect this century, when the thresher (among other inventions) drove the percentage of the workforce occupied by farming jobs from 45% to 2% of the population?

Yet that's not what we see. The costs of goods, in terms of the number of hours required to
acquire them have almost all dropped(4). Okay, you might say, so the goods are cheaper, but can anybody buy them? Yes. Real GDP/worker has almost quintupled. (4)

But is this an inexorable pattern? We just don't know.

Though I know how I would bet.

To be sure, I expect there to be some temporary displacements in some fields, just as telephone operators and buggy drives had to adjust. Maybe auto workers and fast food clerks will have to retrain for some other line of work. I'm a Hayekian, so I can't predict exactly how the human labor market will respond to the rise of the machines. But I can offer some food for thought:

* Brain's analysis assumes that humans will remain static in their capabilities. However, paper, telephones, calculators, computers have expanded the brain's capabilities, and we're just beginning to see the beginning of human brain augmentation. Eventually, I expect that humans who want to keep up with robots in the marketplace will be augmented to such an extent that the line between human and machine will become so blurred as to be non-existent.

* Are the Amish destitute? They've voluntarily cut themselves off from most technological
advances this century. I've done no deep analysis of the issue, but they seem to be thriving
(1), despite not taking advantage of modern technology.

* Robots will make jobs requiring a "personal touch" more economical. For example, who would've predicted the growth of the nail salon (2)industry? Until robots reach human level equivalence, humans will be better masseuse artists, butlers, actors, writers, artists, aerobics instructors, etc.

* Who does Brain think is going to buy the goods at RoboMcDonald's? Where does he expect wealthy people to put their money? It's not like Warren Buffet has a big vault filled with cash he swims in every morning. It's invested in companies like Nebraska Furniture Mart, See's Candy, Coca-Cola, Geico, and the Washington Post--all of which have to sell to somebody. If most people are put out of work by machines, who's going to buy all that Coke, furniture, and insurance? Something doesn't compute.

Of course, dire warnings about the collapse of capitalism are almost always followed by a proposal for some coercive government solution. Brain's no exception--in his latest essay, he argues for massive wealth re-distribution program (3) funded by punitive taxation.

Now, I could go on at length about the flaws I perceive in that proposal. But before I do, I'd like to see more evidence that the economic world is going to stop spinning in the first place.

1. http://graze-l.witt.ac.nz/pipermail/graze-l/2000-June/020136.html
2. http://reason.com/9710/ed.vp.shtml
3. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
4. http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/Slouch_wealth2.html

Comments

Two words come to mind...

[drstevechaos.livejournal.com]

Service economy. Has this guy not heard of it? Lower overhead (which is the only way robots would be economically advantageous) means a falling price of goods, thus falling prices free up discretionary income towards other products, ie, services. Unless of course we eventually talk about the robots performing every service, but even then, there's an entire industry centered about the robots... It doesn't fly in the face of historical progress of technology and the market.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Brain thinks robots will replace humans even in service jobs. Low-skilled workers will then have nothing to offer for trade that could not be better provided by robots, and therefore, will be reduced to living in poverty.

I agree with you that he underestimates how much robots would reduce the cost of goods and services. If the price of goods falls faster than workers real wages, then they will still be better off.

[troyworks.livejournal.com]

this is an issue I've thought long and hard about.

perpetual vacation yes. We will somewhat like the next of Amish, bartering services for whatever novelty they have, as most cost of goods will go down dramatically as supply and just in time manufacturing goes up, and demand for mass produced items goes down: would you rather have a shirt custom designed to your body, tempurature, color tastes or something off the shelf?

Raw material transportation will still cost things but with desktop manufacturing and bioengineering much of what had to be shipped will be gotten in alternate ways. More advanced technology will also decrease the costs of transport, as much of the major costs in building massive things are in human labor (e.g. roads require massive amount of people to aquire materials, lay it down, etc).

Jobs will get pushed more and more technical, more interdiscipilinary and more specialized, until at some point computers/strongAi/augmented humans will do everything better than a normal human can -include anything you'd like to attribute to creativity. Any Kasparov like ability if put as a target between man and computers quickly gets broken down into it's bare parts and eventually every aspect probed by brute force if nothing more elegant exists (and several people you know are working on the more elegant approaches). It may take 40 years maybe 80, but I can't see anything (wars, catastrophic breakdown of society) barring smarter than human ai in that time period. RIght now it's not really fair to compare a PC to a human given even a high speed computer can only process the number of synapses connections of an typical ant!

Human Creativity will still be relatively favored in certain aspects of life, but with younger generation I believe that virtual entertainment is going to start taking the place of many social relationships. But even now some computesr are able to analize music, and create novel music and sentences enough like/in the style of the original.

I don't forsee that human augmentation will keep up with the pace of ai self improvement simply because it's not constrained by biology/self-identity. Changing code is easier than changing wetware, and genetic therapy is unlikely ot happen at microwave speeds.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Robots will cause unemployment and extreme inequality? Okay, that's serious enough.

But I think we're in even more trouble once machines start to be an end in themselves, and start competing with humans for (limited) resources. As far as I know, this is likely to happen: natural selection will promote robots who fight for their own survival.
Hod Lipson: Self Replication, Evolutionary Robotics guy

[troyworks.livejournal.com]

yea I can see that but I don't necessarily think it will pan out quite like that. I don't see robots as granular as animals and insects are, given they will have constant connectivity with low latency.

But I do agree that violence is a likely byproduct of limited resources and competition. Robots having no particular species morality or religous ethics or built in evolutary limits (they can upgrade themsevles etc) are much more likely over the period of time to far surpass us, if that's their goal.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

I agree with most of what you wrote. And I agree that if you limited yourself to biological augmentation, you would be hard pressed to keep up. However, I think that the interfaces between flesh and silicon will improve, and that more and more of our intelligence will be based on "artificial" substrates.

[perich.livejournal.com]

as always you rock

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[litheum.livejournal.com]

I'm just happy to finally read something that you've written.

Good stuff.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Glad you like it!

my dream future

[joe-tofu.livejournal.com]

I envision a future with almost no machines. Okay, maybe for the next 100 years everything is going to get faster, shinier, louder, and cooler, but pretty soon we're going to run low on fuels and the cost of energy is just going to go up and up and up until it's prohibitive. I expect 100 years from now the cities of america will resound with the song of bicycles. I imagine the most common "machines" will be these human powered ones, and a lot of those zero-energy homes that smartly heat themselves in winter and cool themselves in summer. Moving freight is a huge fuel expense so I hope that new agriculture and manufacturing technology will allow us to do all the things that the Amish do for themselves, for ourselves, but a lot easier. I think the Internet and computers will be basically the only things running on energy, so we'll have to find some way to keep it running. Travel will be more difficult with no airplanes, but technological improvements will make our work easier so it will not be unreasonable to take a 4 month vacation to go to europe, or whatever. This is how I imagine it. I am no doom-and-gloom environmentalist but I do realize that within a couple of centuries we've got to develop a lifestyle that can last us the next billion years. What do you think?