**** Work

michael94

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Job comes from gob as in small bit of something like birds would fight over at the beach. Lol. Also Job from the bible. It is a big mockery of the peasants fighting over breadcrumbs. Most jobs destroy wealth instead of create it... I grew up and went to school in a pretty wealthy area I can probably count on one hand the number of parents whose jobs the world wouldn't be better without ( including my own father ).

Work is good, jobs are bad.

"Do a thing for it'a own sake."
 

Constatine

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What is your alternative to the job? What would such a society look like? How would it function?
 
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Dessert_All_Day
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You can't expect a society in general without work. It would just be a bunch of individuals caring for themselves. Like every man was stuck on a desert island with his friends.

I didn't say I expect a society without work. You asked what my alternative was, to which I responded leisure. That doesn't mean everyone prefers leisure--but I do.

Also I completely disagree that half American jobs are going to be automated. It is not within our culture to do so.

Is that a prediction you're making?
 

Constatine

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I didn't say I expect a society without work. You asked what my alternative was, to which I responded leisure. That doesn't mean everyone prefers leisure--but I do.



Is that a prediction you're making?
Yeah I don't think half Americans are going to lose their jobs. There would be too much back lash. People would riot non stop.
 

Richiebogie

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People will always want services, like hairdressers, cooks, cleaners, drivers...

Even if two people have no money, by swapping a haircut for a bottle of home-brewed rice beer, say, they are both better off.

It is win-win. Free trade (no coercion) leads to wealth creation.

Taxation, government spending and government job creation messes with this.
 
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Dessert_All_Day
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People will always want services, like hairdressers, cooks, cleaners, drivers...

umm...

Even if two people have no money, by swapping a haircut for a bottle of home-brewed rice beer, say, they are both better off.

AI will likely be better at cutting hair and brewing rice beer than humans. That's not to say you wouldn't find a person every now and again who'd rather pay more to have a human cut his/her hair worse than the AI would, but that'd be more of a "hobby" rather than a full-time or part-time job.

It is win-win. Free trade (no coercion) leads to wealth creation. Taxation, government spending and government job creation messes with this.

Not sure how this relates to anything.
 

Constatine

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Prepare economies now for job-killing robots, IMF urges governments



People can riot all they want. It won't do any good against the military, the police, and drones, all paid or owned by the rich.
I think job killing robots are the boogieman in our culture now. It is extremely difficult and expensive to replace a job with an AI. A robot that cuts hair without murdering the person (which it inevitably will as any large software program will eventually behave in abnormal or unforseen ways) will cost millions and would take all of Google to design. One that can recognize a good haircut and accurately communicate with a human as a human would is currently impossible. A worker may be given advanced tools that may make less workers necessary but in most circumstances the development and application of such tools is not cost effective.
Also if you were to not work then how would you survive? It's entirely possible to survive without even acknowledging modern day culture but it would require much more work than living in the society.
 
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yerrag

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Don't you think jobs are simply a way to keep people who have surplus energy away from becoming destructive?

If people are independently useful, they can be meaningfully employed by themselves to provide some value to society. They don't need to be provided jobs. If people are not begging for jobs, then there really is no need to have politicians to dole out pork.
 
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Dessert_All_Day
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I think job killing robots are the boogieman in our culture now. It is extremely difficult and expensive to replace a job with an AI. A robot that cuts hair without murdering the person (which it inevitably will as any large software program will eventually behave in abnormal or unforseen ways) will cost millions and would take all of Google to design. One that can recognize a good haircut and accurately communicate with a human as a human would is currently impossible. A worker may be given advanced tools that may make less workers necessary but in most circumstances the development and application of such tools is not cost effective.
Also if you were to not work then how would you survive? It's entirely possible to survive without even acknowledging modern day culture but it would require much more work than living in the society.

You're badly underestimating AI capabilities. Driving a car is far more complex than cutting hair and far, far more dangerous. And yet there very well may be no more human drivers within a decade.

Also if you were to not work then how would you survive? It's entirely possible to survive without even acknowledging modern day culture but it would require much more work than living in the society.

Well if you're asking me personally, I'll never be in a situation where I'm forced to work the types of 9-5 jobs that are at risk of automation.

If you're asking it from a societal perspective, as I said previously: we're about to find out. Because a lot of peoples' livelihoods are at risk in the coming years, and they'll have no other skills to fall back on.
 
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Dessert_All_Day
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Don't you think jobs are simply a way to keep people who have surplus energy away from becoming destructive?

No, I don't think this. For less intelligent people this could be the case perhaps. For smarter folks, most 9-5 jobs just waste their time and energy so they're not able to research/study/create anything that can meaningfully improve society.

If people are independently useful, they can be meaningfully employed by themselves to provide some value to society. They don't need to be provided jobs. If people are not begging for jobs, then there really is no need to have politicians to dole out pork.

But people are begging for jobs as we speak. Most of these people have an IQ of less than 100. With autononous cars, autonomous fast food joints, autonomous warehouses, what are they supposed to do when they lose their low-skill job to automation? Spend every waking hour trying to learn new skills which they're hopelessly terrible at and then compete with smarter people in an increasingly saturated job market?
 

Dante

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You're badly underestimating AI capabilities. Driving a car is far more complex than cutting hair and far, far more dangerous. And yet there very well may be no more human drivers within a decade.
As far as I know, self driving cars work in very limited settings, not in overcrowded roads,they may replace long distance highway transport in developed countries but I don't see self driving cars replacing human drivers in most countries/scenarios. You would be surprised to know that a team created a self driving car back in the 90s in Europe. I haven't been upto speed with machine learning in the past two years but there have been very little breakthroughs in the algorithms in the past 20 years afaik. It's just that hardware got better.
AI has gone better but it's mostly the improved hardware that has driven the progress. The current deep neural networks models have been there for 2 decades actually. 2-3 years ago, the best general purpose AI I saw was deepmind's general game player which got nature's cover . So, I think Constatine is right about robotic hair dresser.
 
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Dessert_All_Day
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As far as I know, self driving cars work in very limited settings, not in overcrowded roads,they may replace long distance highway transport in developed countries but I don't see self driving cars replacing human drivers in most countries/scenarios. You would be surprised to know that juergen schmidhuber's team created a self driving car back in the 90s in Europe. I haven't been upto speed with machine learning in the past two years but there have been very little breakthroughs in the algorithms in the past 20 years afaik. It's just that hardware got better.
AI has gone better but it's mostly the improved hardware that has driven the progress. The current deep neural networks models have been there for 2 decades actually. 2-3 years ago, the best general purpose AI I saw was deepmind's general game player which got nature's cover . So, I think Constatine is right about robotic hair dresser.

Many prominent AI researchers would disagree with your assessment. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but I would be surprised if there were still humans driving cars in 2030 in the United States.

So, I think Constatine is right about robotic hair dresser.

I'm not even sure what Constatine's point was regarding a robotic hair dresser. If he's saying robots will never be able to cut hair, he's clearly wrong.

If he's saying the best human hair dresser will be better than the best robot hair dresser for many more years, that doesn't make the job any more promising for humans, since most people don't require "the best hair dresser in the world" -- they just want inexpensive, decent haircuts. Since robots will be able to provide such haircuts at a fraction of the cost that humans charge (robots won't need need sleep, vacation, healthcare, tips, etc.) we can chalk it up as yet another previously-done-by-humans job that gets eliminated.
 
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Constatine

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You're badly underestimating AI capabilities. Driving a car is far more complex than cutting hair and far, far more dangerous. And yet there very well may be no more human drivers within a decade.



Well if you're asking me personally, I'll never be in a situation where I'm forced to work the types of 9-5 jobs that are at risk of automation.

If you're asking it from a societal perspective, as I said previously: we're about to find out. Because a lot of peoples' livelihoods are at risk in the coming years, and they'll have no other skills to fall back on.
I have some experience designing AI. Though not a lot. But I am a software engineer (there seems to be a lot of us on this forum). Driving a car is much more simple than cutting hair or other tasks. You essentially use various sensors to design a digital map and then program the car to move legally. You can't do much with such complex input so you create a very advanced neural network or what not then train it in real life situations until it can drive well. A team of inexperienced programmers can make a rudimentary self driving robot. Its hard but not that hard. As for the robot hair dresser it is a similar process but the input is so much more complex as is the desired outcomes. You have a constantly waving and changing terrain that consists of many tiny hair follicles that you must interact with in complex ways, you must communicate accurately with a human being regarding such a complex topic, and then you must deal with the fact that there are almost infinite potential outputs. And something that many software designers often ignore is that you should never have software as a fail safe against disastrous situations. As eventually if a program is large enough it will behave unexpectedly. This is almost a law. That Tesla driver who was decapitated was obviously foolish for putting his complete faith in the car as it encountered a real life situation it was not equipped to handle. A robot hair dresser will eventually gut somebody unless it is mechanically incapable of doing so. My overall point with this is that the general public greatly overestimates AI capabilities and that jobs will be reduced via advanced tools given to humans long before AI can deal with complex dynamic situations safely. In our time it is unlikely AI will ever cut hair or do like jobs that require human intuition.


I think I made some bad assumptions of what your point was. Can you clarify? To me that first article you posted seems to be advocating a worse version of socialism. People would get paid for doing nothing? At least socialism requires one to pretend to contribute to society. In such a world no one would work. Then you are left without a functional society at all. Every man would have to live without the goods and services of modern day society. No power, no internet, no cars, no grown food for you, no food distribution, etc.
 
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Dessert_All_Day
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I have some experience designing AI. Though not a lot. But I am a software engineer (there seems to be a lot of us on this forum). Driving a car is much more simple than cutting hair or other tasks. You essentially use various sensors to design a digital map and then program the car to move legally. You can't do much with such complex input so you create a very advanced neural network or what not then train it in real life situations until it can drive well. A team of inexperienced programmers can make a rudimentary self driving robot. Its hard but not that hard. As for the robot hair dresser it is a similar process but the input is so much more complex as is the desired outcomes. You have a constantly waving and changing terrain that consists of many tiny hair follicles that you must interact with in complex ways, you must communicate accurately with a human being regarding such a complex topic, and then you must deal with the fact that there are almost infinite potential outputs.

This is only the case when a fashion model or someone that wants a really specific style to his hair is getting his hair done. It's not true for most people, and you're therefore straying from the original point: the job of cutting hair will cease to be a profession for all but the most serious hairdressers (a very small percentage of people who cut hair for a living). Nobody argued that cutting hair wasn't difficult for AI. I simply made the points (which you've failed to convince me are incorrect) that (1) self-driving cars are more complex to program than hair-cutting robots and (2) everyone except the very best hairdressers will have their wage pushed so far down by the competition from said robots as to be out of a job.

Note also that self-driving cars are far more profitable than robotic hairdressers because of their effect on multiple other major industries, as well as being much more desirable by society because of the deaths currently caused by human drivers. And so we should expect there to be far more economic incentive to bring them to market than robotic hairdressers, even if hairdressers are easier to program.

And something that many software designers often ignore is that you should never have software as a fail safe against disastrous situations. As eventually if a program is large enough it will behave unexpectedly. This is almost a law. That Tesla driver who was decapitated was obviously foolish for putting his complete faith in the car as it encountered a real life situation it was not equipped to handle. A robot hair dresser will eventually gut somebody unless it is mechanically incapable of doing so.

These error rates have already been factored in. Why single out AI as being capable of malfunctioning and assume humans never do? A human driver/hair dresser will once and a while have a heart attack, stroke, seizure, brain malfunction etc. that results in a freak accident. Once the AI is malfunctioning at an acceptable rate, the AI is safe enough--it need not be even close to perfect to be far safer than humans.

My overall point with this is that the general public greatly overestimates AI capabilities and that jobs will be reduced via advanced tools given to humans long before AI can deal with complex dynamic situations safely.

I think the general public underestimates AI capabilities, which is why we've got people like Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, etc. trying to convince people just how badly their intuitions are failing them in this regard.

In our time it is unlikely AI will ever cut hair or do like jobs that require human intuition.

People just a few decades ago were saying the exact same thing about jobs that have since been either completely taken over by AI or will be very soon (wall street traders, accountants, medical professionals, food prep workers, truck drivers, and many others).
 
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