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On September 30 2016 03:53 LegalLord wrote: So could someone link me an argument by an economist of some reputation who makes the case for UBI? I'm sure some of you have that, and it would be helpful since most arguments I've seen come from the leftist "idealists" without any common sense for policy.
Here's an old interview of Friedman on his proposal for a negative income tax
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
On September 29 2016 04:07 Sent. wrote: Do you guys think universal income can bring back housewives?
No, because it's not that much money. Job stability and a societal arrangement that lends itself better to families would, however, help with that. Too many families don't have that arrangement simply because the job stability for the husband isn't there.
Depends what kind of universal income we're talking about. Assuming it's equal to the current minimum wage, would a mother of children of young age wouldn't have to work for a living. Thus, would she prefer to stay at home all day or to do a low-skilled work? Or would she choose to invest her time in charities? Or in whatever hobby she likes? Etc.
That's actually what's the most exciting about universal income, imo : it's that it's full of surprises, we have little idea of how it would play out in reality.
The problem isn't at the low end of the earnings spectrum. I would wager that housewives are more common among the poorer part of the population, the one that depends strongly on government programs. The middle class families are the ones that really have moved away from having children - and by extension, parents dedicated to the task of child-raising - because in the current system it's difficult to maintain a decent (i.e. substantially better than subsistence) living on one salary, especially in a less stable employment environment. So both spouses have to work to maintain that living, leading to generally fewer children.
It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree.
Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale.
On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote: It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous.
On September 30 2016 04:03 Thaniri wrote: The machine used to be only as smart as its user. The machines of the future will be orders of magnitude more intelligent than the people who created them. Their limitation will only be the mechanics and sensors they use to take in information and interact with the world around them.
Autonomous cars are already proving to be more reliable than human drivers for example. This means that in the future there will be no productivity reason to hire a TIR driver, pizza delivery driver, taxi driver... Commercial pilots these days only control their planes on takeoff and landing, and apparently even that could be done through autopilot.
Any trivial labour, such as unskilled construction, flipping burgers, data entry can be watched by a robot that learns and then does the task.
Data analysis is being done by neural networks. Computers are better than humans at chess. Google recently announced their translation software is rapidly approaching human levels. Big technology companies involved in IM services all believe that chatting with bots will be a part of the future. Robots are beginning to be involved in surgical operations.
A tractor is as good at plowing a field as 5 horses, but still requires a farmer to man it. The tractor of the future will be autonomous, requiring only 1 technician to service 100 tractors on 100 farms.
The level of productivity increase is going to be higher than the previous industrial revolution.
Wishful thinking coming from someone who refuse to acknowledge that to produce something, you need someone to buy it, and some energy.
Where did that response even come from? I only talked about productivity increases due to technology, not economics. You can produce something without anyone ever buying it. Once.
I'll let people smarter than me deal with that problem.
On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote: It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous.
I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last.
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree.
Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale.
No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.)
On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote: It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous.
I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last.
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree.
Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale.
No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.)
I pretty much agree with that. 1950 we had 2.6 Billion humans living on this planet and Automatisation really started around that time. Now we have 7.3 Billion humans living on this planet. If even just half of them were employed and everyone was employed back then, we still have more jobs than we had people 65 years ago, despite Automatisation removing a lot of jobs.
Jobs disappear constantly, every day one job gets made redundant and a new type of work appears. The kind of work changes, for example unskilled labor definitely decreases and people with little to no education have it much harder each year to find work, but in turn new jobs for specialists appear, e.g. in the service or health industry. The industry and economy develops into ever more specialized branches that require ever more specialized education and it definitely leaves people behind that have trouble adapting or are too old to catch up, but the actual amount of work that can be done is infinite. That is why I consider free and good education and education opportunities the most important factor in a society. If people can't get a good education then they won't be able to get a job later in their lives when their current job disappears and they'll be a drain on society later down the line.
Either way, with a bit of hyperbole, as long as we aren't flying around in space ships mining asteroids to build Deathstars to kick alien butts, we still have work that can be done.
On September 30 2016 09:05 Thaniri wrote: Where did that response even come from? I only talked about productivity increases due to technology, not economics. You can produce something without anyone ever buying it. Once.
I'll let people smarter than me deal with that problem.
No people don't produce stuff when there is no way to sell it - production is defined by what Keynes called the effective demand (the agregation of the anticipations on future demand of goods and services) - which is why productivity since the last 30 years have been stagnating, despite all the technological innovations that appeared. And the myth of an infinite increase in productivity is only possible if you put aside the elephant in the room, which is energy. You cannot increase your overall use of capital in the production without using more energy than we are already doing ; and our current consumption of energy is already too important ! The more you use capital, the more energy you will consume and the more it will cost you, until labor become efficient cost wise again.
Our current unemployment has two reasons, and none of those are linked to technology : it's the high inequalities and our bad policies (which are all liberal) that create a lack of demand (because rich people save too much and it does not trickle down) and the ecological limit to our growth that is pointing out (through all the cost it has on our daily lives).
On September 30 2016 09:05 Thaniri wrote: Where did that response even come from? I only talked about productivity increases due to technology, not economics. You can produce something without anyone ever buying it. Once.
I'll let people smarter than me deal with that problem.
No people don't produce stuff when there is no way to sell it - production is defined by what Keynes called the effective demand (the agregation of the anticipations on future demand of goods and services) - which is why productivity since the last 30 years have been stagnating, despite all the technological innovations that appeared. And the myth of an infinite increase in productivity is only possible if you put aside the elephant in the room, which is energy. You cannot increase your overall use of capital in the production without using more energy than we are already doing ; and our current consumption of energy is already too important ! The more you use capital, the more energy you will consume and the more it will cost you, until labor become efficient cost wise again.
Our current unemployment has two reasons, and none of those are linked to technology : it's the high inequalities and our bad policies (which are all liberal) that create a lack of demand (because rich people save too much and it does not trickle down) and the ecological limit to our growth that is pointing out (through all the cost it has on our daily lives).
The problem of lack of jobs due to automation and outsourcing has been partly hidden over the past forty years by a huge increase in government positions.
Anyway Deutsche Bank talk is starting to hit the mainstream media consistently now and their share price just hit single digits, a 30 odd year low.Is a bailout on the horizon? It'd be the biggest in history.
On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote: It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous.
I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last.
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree.
Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale.
No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.)
That's what I mean by fairytale. It worked in the past, so why worry about it for the present or future, even though we have all evidence that this will become a massive problem.
To me this is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending some problems don't exists in the future on the basis that other problems didn't exist in the past.
After controlling for double counting and people who left Germany again, the official number for asylumn seekers in Germany for 2015 is 890.000. Authorities registered 820.000 completed asylumn requests. 50.000 requested asylum, but didn't go through with the full process. Majority of those is expected to have moved on to another country. The remaining 20.000 are unaccompanied minors who have yet to be processed.
On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote: It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous.
I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last.
On September 30 2016 06:04 zatic wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:53 Thaniri wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:18 Nyxisto wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree.
Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale.
No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.)
That's what I mean by fairytale. It worked in the past, so why worry about it for the present or future, even though we have all evidence that this will become a massive problem.
To me this is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending some problems don't exists in the future on the basis that other problems didn't exist in the past.
On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote: It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous.
I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last.
On September 30 2016 06:04 zatic wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:53 Thaniri wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:18 Nyxisto wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree.
Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale.
No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.)
That's what I mean by fairytale. It worked in the past, so why worry about it for the present or future, even though we have all evidence that this will become a massive problem.
To me this is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending some problems don't exists in the future on the basis that other problems didn't exist in the past.
Then show me all that evidence please.
You really need evidence that automation replaces human labor?
We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation, wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship with an occupation’s probability of computerisation.
We distinguish between high, medium and low risk occupations, depending on their probability of computerisation. We make no attempt to estimate the number of jobs that will actually be automated, and focus on potential job automatability over some unspecified number of years. According to our estimates around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two. Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 44 2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation. Additional support for this finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots (MGI, 2013) and the gradually diminishment of the comparative advantage of human labour in tasks involving mobility and dexterity (Robotics-VO, 2013).
European Union states agreed on Friday on a fast-track, joint ratification of the Paris accord to combat climate change, pushing the landmark global pact to the brink of entering into force.
The 2015 Paris deal will guide a radical shift of the world economy away from fossil fuels. Friday's agreement by environment ministers from all EU 28 member states marks a rare political breakthrough for the bloc at a time of uncertainty over Britain's departure and discord over the migration crisis.
"What some believed impossible is now real," tweeted European Council President Donald Tusk, whose home country Poland had been the main state resisting such a swift accord.
European Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete hailed a "historic" decision and said the deal answered criticisms that the EU had lost leadership on climate change. "In difficult times, we get our act together," he said.
December's Paris accord, by almost 200 nations, aims to slash greenhouse gas emissions by shifting away from fossil fuels to limit global warming to "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times.
EU approval is a milestone because it would push the deal over the threshold required for ratification, of nations representing at least 55 percent of global emissions. China and the United States, the top emitters, ratified the pact this month.
"The Paris Agreement sends an unequivocal market signal," said Stephanie Pfeifer, CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which includes investors managing over 13 trillion euros ($14.6 trillion) in assets.
The decision by the EU, which accounts for about 12 percent of global emissions, needs approval by the European Parliament in a vote on Oct. 4. That in turn has to be endorsed by ministers, a process that could be done in a day.
If the Paris accord threshold is reached next week, it will formally enter into force after 30 days - ahead of the next round of climate talks in November in Marrakech, Morocco.
Cementing the accord before the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 8 would make it harder to challenge if Republican Donald Trump, who has opposed it, beats Democrat Hillary Clinton, a strong supporter.
So far, 61 nations representing 47.8 percent of emissions have ratified. India, with 4 percent, is set to ratify on Sunday.
On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote: It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore?
Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous.
I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last.
On September 30 2016 06:04 zatic wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:53 Thaniri wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:18 Nyxisto wrote:
On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote: Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors.
I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc.
edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite.
You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree.
Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale.
No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.)
That's what I mean by fairytale. It worked in the past, so why worry about it for the present or future, even though we have all evidence that this will become a massive problem.
To me this is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending some problems don't exists in the future on the basis that other problems didn't exist in the past.
Then show me all that evidence please.
You really need evidence that automation replaces human labor?
We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation, wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship with an occupation’s probability of computerisation.
We distinguish between high, medium and low risk occupations, depending on their probability of computerisation. We make no attempt to estimate the number of jobs that will actually be automated, and focus on potential job automatability over some unspecified number of years. According to our estimates around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two. Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 44 2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation. Additional support for this finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots (MGI, 2013) and the gradually diminishment of the comparative advantage of human labour in tasks involving mobility and dexterity (Robotics-VO, 2013).
No I don't want evidence that technology replaces labour that was never the discussion. I want evidence that it causes unemployment, that the jobs which the new technology creates are less than the jobs it destroys.
Overall paid employment has risen in most countries. In the six considered here, only Japan has seen a decline. This is driven by increasing participation of women, and increases in population, including immigration in some cases. It is also caused by the increasing demand for services, and the creation of completely new products and markets, often related to the application of electronics to communication. The statistics mainly point to reduction in employment in manufacturing in the developed countries, but this is often a small reduction. It coincides with an increase in output and an increase in robotics use except in the case of Japan. The extra number that have gained employment in the years 2000 to 2008 is far greater than the small numbers losing their jobs in manufacturing.
The new jobs have been in: 1) distribution and services, Some of the distribution jobs are the result of manufacturers outsourcing their distribution. In the past these jobs would have been classified as part of manufacturing. 2) and also in new manufacturing applications, particularly using technology advances to create new consumer products [mobile phones, computers, games etc]. In the industrialising countries, as could be expected, there has been a sharp rise in employment in manufacturing, as well as increase in output. Productivity increases are not just caused by automation and robotics, but it is one of three main factors, along with increased size of manufacturing plants and the globalisation of sourcing. Note: while the IFR numbers provide a clear basis from which to work, it has not always been possible to separate robotics from automation in our analyses. Individual countries differ greatly, the importance of manufacturing is only 11% of employment in USA…but 24% in Germany and as high as 27% in more recently industrialising countries such as The Republic of Korea, The level of robotics use has almost always doubled, in all of the six countries [except Japan] in the eight years covered by the study. The proportion of the workforce that is unemployed has hardly changed in this period. [see charts opposite and table overleaf].
Automating a particular task, so that it can be done more quickly or cheaply, increases the demand for human workers to do the other tasks around it that have not been automated.
During the Industrial Revolution more and more tasks in the weaving process were automated, prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do, such as operating a machine, and then tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. This caused output to grow explosively. In America during the 19th century the amount of coarse cloth a single weaver could produce in an hour increased by a factor of 50, and the amount of labour required per yard of cloth fell by 98%. This made cloth cheaper and increased demand for it, which in turn created more jobs for weavers: their numbers quadrupled between 1830 and 1900. In other words, technology gradually changed the nature of the weaver’s job, and the skills required to do it, rather than replacing it altogether.
The same pattern can be seen in industry after industry after the introduction of computers, says Mr Bessen: rather than destroying jobs, automation redefines them, and in ways that reduce costs and boost demand. In a recent analysis of the American workforce between 1982 and 2012, he found that employment grew significantly faster in occupations (for example, graphic design) that made more use of computers, as automation sped up one aspect of a job, enabling workers to do the other parts better. The net effect was that more computer-intensive jobs within an industry displaced less computer-intensive ones. Computers thus reallocate rather than displace jobs, requiring workers to learn new skills. This is true of a wide range of occupations, Mr Bessen found, not just in computer-related fields such as software development but also in administrative work, health care and many other areas. Only manufacturing jobs expanded more slowly than the workforce did over the period of study, but that had more to do with business cycles and offshoring to China than with technology, he says.
For example, the introduction of software capable of analysing large volumes of legal documents might have been expected to reduce the number of legal clerks and paralegals, who act as human search engines during the “discovery” phase of a case; in fact automation has reduced the cost of discovery and increased demand for it. “Judges are more willing to allow discovery now, because it’s cheaper and easier,” says Mr Bessen. The number of legal clerks in America increased by 1.1% a year between 2000 and 2013. Similarly, the automation of shopping through e-commerce, along with more accurate recommendations, encourages people to buy more and has increased overall employment in retailing.
Focusing only on what is lost misses “a central economic mechanism by which automation affects the demand for labour”, notes Mr Autor: that it raises the value of the tasks that can be done only by humans. Ultimately, he says, those worried that automation will cause mass unemployment are succumbing to what economists call the “lump of labour” fallacy. “This notion that there’s only a finite amount of work to do, and therefore that if you automate some of it there’s less for people to do, is just totally wrong,” he says. Those sounding warnings about technological unemployment “basically ignore the issue of the economic response to automation”, says Mr Bessen.
www.economist.com The economist article is behind a pay wall but you can read it if you create an account.
On September 30 2016 09:05 Thaniri wrote: Where did that response even come from? I only talked about productivity increases due to technology, not economics. You can produce something without anyone ever buying it. Once.
I'll let people smarter than me deal with that problem.
No people don't produce stuff when there is no way to sell it - production is defined by what Keynes called the effective demand (the agregation of the anticipations on future demand of goods and services) - which is why productivity since the last 30 years have been stagnating, despite all the technological innovations that appeared. And the myth of an infinite increase in productivity is only possible if you put aside the elephant in the room, which is energy. You cannot increase your overall use of capital in the production without using more energy than we are already doing ; and our current consumption of energy is already too important ! The more you use capital, the more energy you will consume and the more it will cost you, until labor become efficient cost wise again.
Our current unemployment has two reasons, and none of those are linked to technology : it's the high inequalities and our bad policies (which are all liberal) that create a lack of demand (because rich people save too much and it does not trickle down) and the ecological limit to our growth that is pointing out (through all the cost it has on our daily lives).
Trickle down economics does not work,..
Exactly : which is why a high level of inequality is bad from a purely economical standpoint.
EPT
