Humans Need Not Apply

[Blahface]

A strange thing here: Human muscle power is surprisingly non--green.

(To get that muscle power requires food--and that food is grown with machinery and fossil fuel. The low efficiencies involved end up making it compare unfavorably with directly powering a machine with fossil fuel.)

Humans are basically pigs though. They are going gorge themselves regardless. Might as well get some useful power out of it.

 

[arkirk]

I am trying to decide just what is the purpose of that video. According to it, it is just a matter of building more robots. Well, how will they be powered? As this equipment comes into being, it displaces more and more of the ecosystem with its own mass. It also pollutes more and more of the ecosystem.,,with many pollutants that are toxic to humans. So they take your job, take your environment, then tell you bye bye. Every energy consuming system (robots included) require an energy source and having once expended that energy, they require more. it really is a matter that all systems, human and robotic are headed to oblivion. We are not there yet, so go ahead and enjoy your sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

A strange thing here: Human muscle power is surprisingly non--green.

(To get that muscle power requires food--and that food is grown with machinery and fossil fuel. The low efficiencies involved end up making it compare unfavorably with directly powering a machine with fossil fuel.)

You are a technological fundamentalist who is focused in on only one type of technology. You have no reason to make the statement that human muscle power is "surprisingly non-green" That is pure bullshit. You are actually very closed minded on the issues of alternative energy and healthy living. You refuse to admit that man having machines doing everything for him by petroleum powered equipment does three things...leads to unfit humans and exhausted resources and environmental pollutions. This has been going on for a long time. Your notion that it is okay for huge numbers of people to consume food that requires petroleum to produce is still depleting resources and still polluting our air.

Actually I believe that technology has a place in our economy...a very important place. It is just a matter of directing it to the good of all of us, not just increasing production for profit. We need technology to deal with our environmental problems. The problem is we have a technology that directs our unsustainable consumption ever upward. Research appears to be directed from the inner sanctum of places like Goldman Sachs that only measures it success in increased production and consumption. That was what the video seemed to portend.

Our current shakers and movers just press forward with the processing of the surface of the earth into waste that cannot produce food, poison air and water, and destroy ecosystems that provide us oxygen and food. I am not opposed to robots even...if they do things we need done to render our economy sustainable. We currently are ignoring data provided by our current technology and chasing the kind of dreams in the video, not realizing that it all has to be green or else we should not be doing it.

If you are a true technological fundamentalist. surely you are aware of the earth watching and analyzing robots we have in space that are telling us things like....You have to get busy and stop polluting your environment. Much of the robotic information we receive from scientific investigation is simply circular filed if it gets in the way of petroleum powered technology and profit. All of our technology has not yet led to a common understanding that our economy is a subsystem in nature and not the other way around.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A strange thing here: Human muscle power is surprisingly non--green.

(To get that muscle power requires food--and that food is grown with machinery and fossil fuel. The low efficiencies involved end up making it compare unfavorably with directly powering a machine with fossil fuel.)

You are a technological fundamentalist who is focused in on only one type of technology. You have no reason to make the statement that human muscle power is "surprisingly non-green" That is pure bullshit. You are actually very closed minded on the issues of alternative energy and healthy living. You refuse to admit that man having machines doing everything for him by petroleum powered equipment does three things...leads to unfit humans and exhausted resources and environmental pollutions. This has been going on for a long time. Your notion that it is okay for huge numbers of people to consume food that requires petroleum to produce is still depleting resources and still polluting our air.

There can be reasons to get out and exercise but that's a different issue than saying that human muscles are a green source of power.

And I'm not negative on alternative energy, I just recognize that it's not the panacea you think it is.

As for food that requires petroleum to produce--there's no other kind if we want to have anything like the current population levels.

If you are a true technological fundamentalist. surely you are aware of the earth watching and analyzing robots we have in space that are telling us things like....You have to get busy and stop polluting your environment. Much of the robotic information we receive from scientific investigation is simply circular filed if it gets in the way of petroleum powered technology and profit. All of our technology has not yet led to a common understanding that our economy is a subsystem in nature and not the other way around.

Moderation in all things!

The extreme green position will be catastrophic for the human race in time. The resources will run out, things will crash.

 

[Blahface]

For anyone interested, the creator of this video went more in-depth about this on his latest episode of his podcast "Hello Internet". It is episode 19: Pit of Doom. He talks more about why this time automation really is going to be a problem. He starts talking about it at the 34:45 minute mark.

 

[DBT]

If automation eliminates a large percentage of the need for human labour, of course it's going to cause a huge social and economical problems. What happens to the human workforce? How do workers earn a living? Who pays the taxes? Who has the money to pay for goods and services?

 

[lpetrich]

Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization | MIT Technology Review

The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.

The authors first considered several jobs that they could be confident about how easy to automate they were. They then compared their subjective estimates with lists of skills required for the jobs. Perception and manipulation turned out to be relatively easy to automate, while creative intelligence and social intelligence are relatively difficult to automate.

BTW, one can find a transcript of the OP's video at Humans Need Not Apply — CGP Grey

 

[lpetrich]

David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded” - Salon.com
noting
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE!
From that second one:

Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully…

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Was it due to craving lots of consumer goods? Many of the new jobs are not exactly for making them, and despite recruiting a lot of Chinese and the like to produce them, much of their production is automated. In the US and the UK, agriculture has declined precipitously over the last century, and more recently, manufacturing has gone down.

DG proposes that much of the growth has been in administrative sorts of jobs, and related ones like financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, human resources, and public relations. He proposes calling them "bullshit jobs", empty jobs that don't really produce much of value, something like digging a hole and then filling it up again. However, such jobs involve a lot of social intelligence, meaning that they are difficult to automate.

As DG points out, in capitalism, that is not supposed to happen. If anything, it is like the Soviet Union, which got full employment by creating lots of makework jobs, like 3 people to handle a customer's order.

This seems to me like part of Peter Turchin's long-term cycle of history: elite overproduction. After a period of relatively egalitarian growth, a society's elites start to grow much faster, and they eventually make the society top-heavy. The elites then fight each other over the top spots.

Do economists have an explanation for this combination of greater productivity with increased work hours? What is it and what do you think of it?

Curiously, economists don’t tend to find much interest in such questions—really fundamental things about values, for instance, or broader political or social questions about what people’s lives are actually like. They rarely have much to say about them if left to their own devices. It’s only when some non-economist begins proposing social or political explanations for the rise of apparently meaningless administrative and managerial positions, that they jump in and say “No, no, we could have explained that perfectly well in economic terms,” and make something up.

That's the sort of thing that makes some people think that economics is not much better than Panglossian pseudoscience.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an enormous effort on the part of the people running this country to turn that around: to convince everyone that value really comes from the minds and visions of entrepreneurs, and that ordinary working people are just mindless robots who bring those visions to reality.

The ultimate in this position is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where the people who go on strike are mostly business leaders.

But at the same time, they’ve had to validate work on some level, so they’ve simultaneously been telling us: work is a value in itself. It creates discipline, maturity, or some such, and anyone who doesn’t work most of the time at something they don’t enjoy is a bad person, lazy, dangerous, parasitical. So work is valuable whether or not it produces anything of value.

This leads to the position that one ought to dig holes and fill them up again, because it demonstrates what a work ethic that one has, how virtuous one is. That problem will only become worse as automation continues to advance.

Actually I saw something telling written by a right-wing activist on some blog—he said, well the funny thing is, when we first started our school reform campaigns, we tried to focus on the administrators. But it didn’t take. Then we shifted to the teachers and suddenly the whole thing exploded.

Though teaching involves a lot of social intelligence, one gets the impression from anti-teacher sentiment that many people consider some social-intelligence jobs more equal than others.

What can be done?

But I don’t think we can solve the problem by mass individual defection. Or some kind of spiritual awakening. That’s what a lot of people tried in the ‘60s and the result was a savage counter-offensive which made the situation even worse.

The Occupy movement tried something similar, and suffered a similar fate.

He proposes a labor movement that

manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.

But such a movement ought to concentrate on difficult-to-automate jobs, especially jobs involving a lot of social intelligence.

 

[prideandfall]

I'm not sure how a universal basic income would be feasible unless there was a broad tax agreement among nations. The only way I see it being affordable is to jack taxes up so high that it would cause corporations and wealthy individuals to flee the country. It is a shame because automation does seem like a legitimate problem.

To provide a universal basic income today would be expensive, because most jobs are done by expensive people, and so products are expensive. When automation replaces all these people, the cost of the products will be much lower, so a much lower universal income would be required.

because when a product becomes cheaper to make, companies immediately reduce the price to the consumer, instead of leaving the price as it is (or jacking it up in the name of "cover R&D expenses) and simply make more profit.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

To provide a universal basic income today would be expensive, because most jobs are done by expensive people, and so products are expensive. When automation replaces all these people, the cost of the products will be much lower, so a much lower universal income would be required.

because when a product becomes cheaper to make, companies immediately reduce the price to the consumer, instead of leaving the price as it is (or jacking it up in the name of "cover R&D expenses) and simply make more profit.

And the flipside of that: because the worker's net wages have been reduced (since nobody is actually making those products anymore), the demand for consumer credit increases as well. A company that has investments both with lenders as well as with consumer products can make a net profit both by keeping prices artificially high and by extending lines of credit to consumers to pay for those overpriced goods.

I have been predicting for many years (and have been happy to be wrong so far) that credit card companies and banks will eventually develop a concept of "contrabrand." That is, a list of products you are not allowed to use or will receive a non-trivial surcharge or fees for using. If, say, Bank of America has a partnership with Coca Cola, then you find a 20% surcharge on your credit card bill every time you use your card to purchase Pepsi products; Chase Bank, partnered with Microsoft, will decline any credit card purchase that includes apple products, and Wells Fargo doubles your interest rate if any of your home appliances don't come from Wells Fargo approved brands.

I strongly believe that the automation of the American workforce will result in nothing more than the legalization of price fixing and racketeering (at least, at a corporate level). For the rest of us, it's back to the police state.

 

[lpetrich]

And the flipside of that: because the worker's net wages have been reduced (since nobody is actually making those products anymore), the demand for consumer credit increases as well. A company that has investments both with lenders as well as with consumer products can make a net profit both by keeping prices artificially high and by extending lines of credit to consumers to pay for those overpriced goods.

That's what's been keeping the economy going so far: massive debt. Instead of paying people enough to buy their companies' products, the economic elite has been offering lots and lots of loans. Some people argue that people should not attempt to live beyond their means. But if everybody saved as much as they can, it would produce an economic slump. That is the result of  paradox of thrift. Some business leaders have indeed recognized that lack of consumer buying power can be a problem. In the early 1920's the National Association of Manufacturers begged consumers to "end the buyers' strike" (Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work - Benjamin Hunnicutt - Google Books), saying that it was causing mass unemployment. and this begging became a big movement among Chambers of Commerce and bankers. "Your Purchases Keep America Employed", they said. Likewise, after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush II administration begged everybody to keep on buying to avoid an economic slump. I didn't see any outrage from the oh-so-righteous-economics-geniuses capitalism groupies.

I have been predicting for many years (and have been happy to be wrong so far) that credit card companies and banks will eventually develop a concept of "contrabrand." That is, a list of products you are not allowed to use or will receive a non-trivial surcharge or fees for using...

Ingenious. Has anyone tried to hire you as a business strategist?

 

[lpetrich]

H.I. #19: Pit of Doom — Hello Internet featuring CGP Grey and Brady Haran discussing "Humans Need Not Apply". It is most interesting. CGP Grey got into this issue because he noticed what machine-learning software can do, software like artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. Strictly speaking, such software implements rather general functions with function optimizers to adjust their parameters for best fit. But the ability to learn means that it does not have to be explicitly preprogrammed in gory detail.

CGP Grey suspected that this time it is different because computers and robots are now competing in mental labor as well as in manual labor. He also tried to find out how many people are online video producers and smartphone app developers and the like. Something like several thousand, much less than the overall population. So there won't be enough new jobs available to absorb the large numbers of people likely to become technologically unemployed.

He talks about a "Pit of Doom", because he thinks that that's what's between the present and what massive automation will make possible: a society where everybody will be able to live very nice lives with robots and computers and the like doing most of the more routine work. In between is a state where large numbers of people are unemployed without any way of making a living.

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review

Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who’s worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.

 

[arkirk]

Our economic problem is actually a series of cascading parallel problems, none of which our current economic system addresses. The real problem is that there is no way of attacking these problems separately. Their combined effect on our society tends to unravel social organization and leads to an ever downward spiral in terms of quality of life for the average man. For example, how do we tackle food insecurity for 2 billion people on the planet and 1 billion hungry ones without increasing food production. How do we do this...produce more natural gas to produce the fertilizers to produce that food. So how do we get this natural gas? Pollute our water supplies.

Israel claims in Gaza that it has pinpoint accuracy in its bombing. We see how that has turned out. We need to address the efficiency of our social organization with even better pinpoint accuracy on the environmental front. Every action, environmental, or social seems to evoke a slightly more than equal opposite reaction. The source of this opposition seems to be the arbitrary owners of everything in the capitalist economy. I am not saying that if capitalism were eliminated, we would have utopia. It is more a matter of simply having some chance of constructing a safer, less painful environment for the average person. These issues have become extremely technical at times and those with some personal plan to become or stay wealthy can easily defeat the best social solutions with diversion and confusion.

The last thing we need is the bank cards telling us what to buy for ourselves with phony money. Actually, the banks own huge numbers of what used to be called superfund sites. It was their financing that created them. We simply need more humanism in our government and in our personal philosophies.

 

[Blahface]

H.I. #19: Pit of Doom — Hello Internet featuring CGP Grey and Brady Haran discussing "Humans Need Not Apply". It is most interesting. CGP Grey got into this issue because he noticed what machine-learning software can do, software like artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. Strictly speaking, such software implements rather general functions with function optimizers to adjust their parameters for best fit. But the ability to learn means that it does not have to be explicitly preprogrammed in gory detail.

CGP Grey suspected that this time it is different because computers and robots are now competing in mental labor as well as in manual labor. He also tried to find out how many people are online video producers and smartphone app developers and the like. Something like several thousand, much less than the overall population. So there won't be enough new jobs available to absorb the large numbers of people likely to become technologically unemployed.

He talks about a "Pit of Doom", because he thinks that that's what's between the present and what massive automation will make possible: a society where everybody will be able to live very nice lives with robots and computers and the like doing most of the more routine work. In between is a state where large numbers of people are unemployed without any way of making a living.

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review

Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who’s worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.

For more information about machine learning and how it is going to destroy the job market, you should watch this very interesting talk by Jeremy Howard. The intro is a little boring, but it picks up after that and is definitely worth watching.

 

[lpetrich]

For more information about machine learning and how it is going to destroy the job market, you should watch this very interesting talk by Jeremy Howard. The intro is a little boring, but it picks up after that and is definitely worth watching.

Very interesting. Nice to see the way that categorical data is handled, data like different words. It's turned into a vector with all the possible words, and all its entries are 0 except the one at a word's index number, which is 1.

It's also evident that such machine learning has been made possible by the capabilities of present-day CPU chips. Not only the more familiar ones, but those inside video cards, GPU's. These are usually SIMD chips, Single Instruction Multiple Data ones, operating on several data sets at the same time. In recent years, a mini-industry has emerged of using GPU chips for various non-graphics operations. CPU clock-cycle frequencies have been leveling off at a few GHz, but CPU capabilities are now growing more horizontally than vertically, getting more and more processors. So we haven't run into the limits of CPU chips yet, and there's plenty of opportunity for improved AI by brute force.

 

[ApostateAbe]

The only solution I see is universal basic income...

Thread bump. I agree. I thought about the future of automation, that automation will make low-skilled labor obsolete. Socialism almost seems inevitable, and it would mean a permanent division between the rich and the poor, no more chances for social mobility. I can think of only one alternative to widespread socialism (not that socialism in a highly-efficient world would be so bad), and that is genetic engineering for intelligence and other uniquely-human talents. All humans would be creative geniuses.

 

[Nexus]

Thread bump. I agree. I thought about the future of automation, that automation will make low-skilled labor obsolete. Socialism almost seems inevitable, and it would mean a permanent division between the rich and the poor, no more chances for social mobility.

Once warfare is automated along with the industry of warfare. The sociopaths running things aren't going to keep around a large underclass mooching off their resources and squatting in their world.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Thread bump. I agree. I thought about the future of automation, that automation will make low-skilled labor obsolete. Socialism almost seems inevitable, and it would mean a permanent division between the rich and the poor, no more chances for social mobility.

Once warfare is automated along with the industry of warfare. The sociopaths running things aren't going to keep around a large underclass mooching off their resources and squatting in their world.

Yep. Once you're no longer a source of revenue, what good are you? The wealthy and powerful will just tighten their grip on government and as they do, slowly, methodically, continue to shape the world as is their wont.
Put yourself on top of the heap and consider universal basic income. Keep the heard alive? Consumption without production. Humph! They'll find ways to thin the heard down to the talent. Use ecology, conservation, sustainability (buzzwords) to shape laws. It has to be done for the sake of the planet. That will put them on the right path toward population control.
Unless of course you think the .1% is going to capitulate.
I gotta go feed my unicorn.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Should we take it for granted that the "sociopaths running things" are a singular actor?

 

[dismal]

Should we take it for granted that the "sociopaths running things" are a singular actor?

Yes, and it's Joe Biden.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Should we take it for granted that the "sociopaths running things" are a singular actor?

Yes, and it's Joe Biden.

That's just what Nancy Pelosi wants you to think. Biden's nothing more than a frontman patsy.