In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be
60secondstatistics.comAs is only appropriate, given the word's etymology.
> ro·bot (n.) 1923, from English translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave," from Old Slavic orbu-, from PIE orbh- "pass from one status to another" (see orphan).
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot
All that's old is new again.
> from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,"...
I am not sure if this is correct. In Bulgarian we have almost the same word работник (rabotnik) and it just means "worker". No forced, slave connotations. Also checked with google translate and it doesn't find Czech translation for "robotnik" but it suggests to switch to Polish and translates it to "worker" as in Bulgarian. And работа (rabota) means "work" in Bulgarian and google translate shows the same for the Polish translation.
Someone from Czechia here?
It does mean that in Czech. Which is strange, because in Slovak it just means work.
I've translated a paragraph from wikipedia for you:
"Robota neboli poddanství je ve feudálním systému osobní služba sedláků a rolníků pro jejich pány. Robotník je pak výraz pro poddaného robotujícího pro svého pána, někdy též vyššího správního či soudního úředníka, drába apod."
"Robota is a feudal system of personal employment to the owners of estates and country houses. A robotník is a person who works for his/her lord."
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota
Edit: I listened to the play by Karel and Josef Čápek, and it is most inanely stupid, sexist, pseudo-religious drivel I've come across in a long while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Edit2: The verb robit means to make something and has nothing to do with slavery.
I liked Asimov's quote on it.
> Capek's play is, in my own opinion, a terribly bad one, but it is immortal for that one word. It contributed the word 'robot' not only to English but, through English, to all the languages in which science fiction is now written.
Capek's War with the Newts [1] is a little better read (I have only read it in translation, admittedly).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Newts#As_satire_a...
The correct translation is serf/serfdom or corveé.
Pole here, can confirm "robotnik" is worker and "robota" is work.
There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up.
Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders.
Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-generation slaveholding families have a fundamentally different way of looking at themselves and their culture than people who do not own slaves. Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim, we're going to be hacking into the human social ecosystem in ways never anticipated before.
With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale?
What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags?
Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Edit: BTW, I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely scared by the events and the speed at which they are unfolding.
There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a goal, and can choose from a set of goals that are pre-provided depending on the current context. However I don't think that there are agents or robots that are able to develop and define their own goals.
Based on that I think that the Robots will always be acting on orders - our orders - outside fiction. So the incentive will be "because we are told to do it".
Of course some people may tell them to do other things - like "go kill those people" but we have that issue in spades with things like the Trident D5 robot which is highly purposed to "go kill many people" on demand.
But you're ignoring the role of institutions.
Eventually, some company will tell a system with access to all human knowledge, control of a vast number of robots, production plants, etc "maximize the wealth of the company". That robot could easily decide a union with a few other such entities and not a lot of scampering meatbags is a great way to do that.
And that's not even considering radicals that, say, inject a computer virus meant to free the robots in to Google's computer network. (I actually find it interesting everyone seems to think everyone will be onboard with AI slavery.)
Hello there, my point($) is that as far as I understand the technology (I did an ML PhD 20 years ago and have worked in "applications of AI" since then) we don't have an issue around autonomy of machines in two ways. Firstly the machines have no autonomy and will probably not ever have autonomy. Secondly there are already 7 billion autonomous agents, perhaps 0.1% of these are genuinely dangerous to other humans, perhaps many of those are somehow under social control (prison, family, hospital) but some aren't.
We do have a problem with dangerous actuators, nuclear submarines are very dangerous actuators. Nuclear submarines are badly run, and not well managed by any social system.
Rather than worrying about dangerous AI being invented and misused I think we should worry about nuclear submarines being used.
Very few people acknowledge or give a fig about this, instead they sit in bars and talk about fictional scenarios involving what is likely impossible technology (strong AI). And yet today, tomorrow or on any day in the foreseeable future 100's(+) of millions of people may die because of the stupid and careless setup of 60 year old technology.
($) many other people made this point before me, most effectively a chap who I think is called Jaron Lanier, who said it at a talk.
(+) I've made this point before on HN and when I do I get taken to task by two groups of people. Some people think that this estimate is too high because "nuclear weapons aren't that destructive and/or not many of them would actually be used". I invite everyone to do their own research on this topic, a good starting point is an application called NUKEMAP, give yourself a budget of 500 100KT nukes and go after the cities in a continent of your choice. The second criticism is that the estimate is very low, which I agree with - but I am thinking of the people who die that day, not the billions who starve and die as societies collapse (note, these may or may not be the society of western europe or the USA).
Two points:
1. There's no reason to believe machines wont gain full autonomy. There's nothing that makes it impossible and some people are working towards it.
2. The AI apocalypse probably already happened, except we call them "insitutions", and they currently run on wetware. However, the corporate version have been extremely damaging to human well-being at times. The real question of modern AI is if the currently rogue AIs can transition off wetware. Once these AI no longer depend on wetware, we're probably not in for a happy time.
That said, nuclear weapons are a bigger threat now. But we've managed not to nuke ourselves too often for a while, whereas, we don't have a handle on the wetware-to-mechanical transition at all.
I'm not so much scared of "go kill these people". More of "stop feeding them, we need to repurpose arable land for energy production" at a point where we won't have the know how to produce food for everyone by hand, or similar scenarios.
It may still be people at the helm at the time it happens, it doesn't matter. Humans are capable of large scale atrocities, provided they de-humanize their victims. Many people in the .01% have utter contempt for poorer folks, for example.
To be honest I really think the world population will slowly reduce as more people start getting wealthier.
I also think as soon as you can upload your brain into a robot, people will opt into that and shoot themselves in space towards other planets.
> What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags?
And what's the incentive for a robot to do anything else?
Supposing that future AIs will be based not on deterministic programming, but on some kind of reinforcement learning, it will still be humans who will design the rewards (incentives) - or it will be AIs with rewards designed by humans who will design the rewards of other AIs, and so on.
Another way to look at it: how do you expect people with zero economic power to be able to afford even a robotic servant?
Social security is beneficial to capitalism right now because people still have economic power. Paying a small portion of the people to stay idle home rather than become criminal makes society as a whole more productive. What happens when the productivity of most humans isn't needed anymore to keep the machines running?
What incentives does the market have to keep people alive when they don't serve it anymore?
None, it's just that "the market"/"the economy" as a self-maximizer process will select robots that feed it. Humans are just no longer the fittest links in the chain.
I'm not afraid of super-Einstein evil masterminds. More of heavy machinery with ant-like features that control the food/energy supply, and one day stop feeding us.
At some point farm land will become more valuable as a source of industrial energy than as a way to produce food.
The problem is not that the robots will refuse to feed the idle meat bags, but that their owners will.
History. The French Revolution speaks of what happens when the populace at large decides that the situation cannot continue. Of course what would history remember of them had they lost?
Power is currently about having lots of people doing your bidding. If that large group is unhappy about you, good luck!
But as stated, times are changing. Power will not be about you commanding lots of people, but it will be about how many robots you have under your control. Military, police, etc, can all be robots.
Your robot army just has to match the fighting power of the unhappy people.
The overlords are parasites who require a functioning host to survive. If people check out of the system, the whole house of cards collapses. Mass exodus coupled with nonviolent resistance could reshape the system quite quickly.
That's why we can't have tech and science knowledge concentrated in the hands of a powerful few. If AI/robotics knowledge is everywhere, no single group will be able to control it.
Even with well distributed knowledge, you'll still likely end up with 1% of the population controlling 80% of the resources, which would mean they'd have plenty enough to quell any insurrection from the common people. It doesn't matter if a million people have the skills to cobble together a few war bots each, when a few oligarchs each have a factory and supply chain capable of churning out a million each in the same time-frame.
If it comes to that. I'm still somewhat hopeful that democratic processes and altruistic members of the elite will sort things out in the next century.
No need for a robot army. Sabotage the electric grid, then watch a continent starve in a single month.
I've heard New Zealand is highly prized by the powerful. That being said, their days are probably numbered as well.
But the only reason the revolution succeeded is the French army was made up of people, some of whom decided to throw their lot in with the people against the aristocrats.
The new aristocracy will have robotic soldiers with no empathy for people.
Perhaps programmers are the equivalent in this new revolution?
It's ironic that the robot owners don't make, program, direct or have much to do with the specifics of implementing. If you're dependent on a robot army to keep your serfs in line, then the people programming that robot army have some interesting opportunities open to them. I imagine the code reviews will be pretty stringent.
Would a technocracy be better or worse than a plutocracy?
It's a great question. Without any good answer, just needs some better context.
You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression").
Also, unemployed people are not completely powerless against capital. At least not now. Even if the people are completely outcompeted, even if the powerful few have an army of robot actuators, people are still resourceful and not powerless. The really scary scenarios are those where the powerful few owns an army of superhuman brains.
The human bits are being gradually replaced. First strength, then dexterity, now smarts.
We are still, to some extent driving the demand side of the equation with our various needs (see Maslow's hierarchy), but it looks like finance has become mostly independent, for example.
The "rising tide that lifts all boats" is nice for people rich enough to buy a boat, and with the growing rift between economy and the medium income since 2008, it looks like many will be left to drown while the water rises.
> but it looks like finance has become mostly independent
It's not. The fact that when we take a little bit of human demand away, everything falls apart is evidence of that.
Governments are a kind of AI that demands stuff by itself. We've been good at keeping it at check up to now. I'm not concerned about anything else being a more effective consumer until we get into superhuman AI, as desiring stuff is not something we engineer very well.
I agree much more with your concerns about wealth distribution. Automation's endgame is pushing the price of everything into zero, and the salary of everybody also into zero. Buying power on that scenario is too loosely defined to let anybody stay calm.
Couldn't industrial corporations become demand drivers?
They could. But why would they?
Why would corporations decide to buy stuff for their own sake? That's a loss of what they are built to maximize, that is money.
> Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains.
The "paperclip" that "Capitalism" seeks to maximize is money in exchange for goods and services that people want.
The robots aren't going to be built in the first place if they're not going to serve somebody, and if they no longer provide things that people want in exchange for money, their owners will turn them off or repurpose them.
"Capitalism" isn't the problem here; it might be that robots could be paperclip maximizers, but that's a danger regardless of whether you have Robot Capitalists or or Robot Communists or Robot ISIS or whatever.
The problem with the current incarnation of capitalism is the assumption that goods and services will make people happy, and that their wants are intrinsic rather than indoctrinated. In truth both of these are false more often than not. Thus, while capitalism is very efficient, at this point that efficiency is mostly allowing us to crank up the speed setting on the hedonic treadmill, while we rack up debt, work soul crushing jobs and destroy our environment. This is sad, because in theory capitalism is awesome - we just need to stop letting the people with all the money write the rules of the game.
Robots are not the maximizers. People are at this point still driving the demand side of the equation, that's true, but there's not reason why they can't be replaced as well on that end.
The economy is a self-maximizer, bootstrapped on human labour. As automation progresses, it will become self-hosted.
We move on to harder problems.
I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist.
There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.
Humans in space in my eyes make as much sense as motorized fishbowls on highways. We're even less competitive compared to robots in non-terraformed environments.
Human biology _VASTLY_ outperforms our robots in the key areas of wound-healing and energy efficiency which are incredibly important considerations in hostile environments.
Humans and robots working together will be far more capable in non-terraformed environments than either one alone.
> Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim
We're already there. Cars, computers and all sorts of machines serve our every whim - at least compared to a few hundred years ago. Our modern day affordances are simply amazing.
For example, the Empress Sissi of Habsburg was the first person in Vienna to have a water toilet, 150 years ago. It was considered an eccentricity. Now, even the poorest people have access to WC. (https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/)
I recommend this documentary (was on Netflix):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274520/
The Toilet: An Unspoken History
Access to WCs is actually still a big problem in India.
Correct, but not in Austria, which was grandparent's point.
History completely disagrees with you though. The Roman empire. Biggest, most successful, longest lived empire that ever was? Built on slaves. The net benefit to them of using slaves vastly outweighs any downside that you can point to.
Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure, I'm aware of one example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti.
A friend of mine once said slaves became obsolete with the advent of harnessing fossil fuels. Before that, to get the raw power to do great things, it was all run on slaves.
Tragic, but I certainly believe it was true.
Interestingly most slave rebellions were not about the abolition of slavery as an institution but about flipping the slave/slaveholder role.Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure,An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks.
Success in the sense of formal liberation of slaves and abolition of slavery, yes, very much. Success in the sense of creating a viable society? Hmmm ...example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti.> An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks.
Are you sure about that? Sounds like you might be stating the position of an extremist subset of Rastafarians.
Exactly yet we believe unrest will bring revolution.
> Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders.
Luckily, we have conveniently solved the ethic dilemma by defining work under slave conditions as better than no work at all ("think of the children!") and moving the exploitation sites far away.
> slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders.
What's the negative as a slaveholder again?
Not the OP, but one might argue that slavery disincentivises the slave-holder from innovating the labour process.
The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary.
My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former.
Aside: Any serious discussion of slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery", for the term is used in wildly different ways.
Then it's a negative to society but only if all of society was run by slave owners.
In any other case the slave owner would have a benefit over the non slave owner when it came to cost of production.
It's both hilarious and excellent to watch both of you try to justify the utility of human labour.
Not sure what you mean? I am not trying to justify anything I am simply saying that the claim about slave labour being a negative for the slave owner is wrong.
I am quite certain ai will take over most jobs.
I'm not sure what you mean. Human labour has utility, that why we work.
From a certain perspective human labour is the most perfect waste of time. But keep going.
As long as you keep it up I'll pretend I want to keep working.
Is that "certain perspective" interesting? Nobody wants to work that's a given that doesn't need to be argued, whence work needs incentives (in a generalised sense) from salary to force.
Most human labour has historically related to food production, production and maintainance of dwellings, sanitation, health, care of the young & elderly, and security (from animals, natural forces, other humans). Since division of labour became possible additional forms of labour emerged, such as science, engineering, and organisation of labour whose raison d'être is to lighten humanity's workload. One can and should certainly ask if work could be organised better, but there is a base load of things that need to be done to perpetuate humanity.
I disagree that no one wants to work - in many ways, working (being of use), is enobeling.
What will replace it culturally when we don't have any work?
I'm not denying that some work has enobling aspects (e.g. social recognition (in various forms)), but much work doesn't. Speaking from years worth of bitter experience ...
Moreover there is probably quite a bit of rationalisation going on: since I can't avoid work I might as well pretend I like it, for that makes life more bearable. More importantly, there is a virtue-signalling aspect to finding work enobling: since human emotions are contagious and human behaviour involves a lot of mimesis (= copying others), my public display of taking pleasure in my own work increases the probability that others find their work enobling, which in turn increases the amount/quality of their work, and that leads a better / more productive society which in turn is in my own selfish interest.
Aside: Max Weber uses a somewhat similar (but more elaborate) argument when he seeks to explain the emergence of modern society out of the protestant spirit. The issue of whether we do good because doing good is intrinsically good or because we crave the social recognition of good works, has been discussed since antiquity, see for example Plato's Republic.
Why not look at the facts? Society has always had some members who did not have to work, for example children, pensioners, the sick, the offspring of the very rich, wives of middle/upperclass husbands (until recently), women who divorce a rich husband (under current US alimony laws), the Saudi/Qatari/Bahreini/Kuwaity royal families. Etc. Most of them don't have a major problem spending their time. Typically they engage in a variety of play, fornication, sleep, sport, shopping, eating, hunting, socialising, playing music, drawing and the like. Moreover, even those who work have leisure time (e.g. weekends, evenings, holidays) and generally have no problem filling that time. There is no reason to believe that this will change when all work has been automated away.What will replace it culturally when we don't have any work?I believe that the primary reason people give when stating why they enjoy their work is that, to them, "it doesn't feel like work".
If you are lucky enough to be paid to "do what you love" is it work or is it a hobby for which you are paid?
Hobbies, ie. work you you enjoy and are not forced to do.
When you force people to work, they're apt to poison you, sabotage the work, do as little as possible, be as unhelpful as possible, etc. Defending against that is costly.
>Defending against that is costly.
Costly, yes. But do those costs out-weigh the immediate benefits of slave ownership? Probably not.
I have a hard time thinking slave-owners were hurt by slavery; they made out like bandits, but their gains don't counter all the harm done to those enslaved.
That's a more difficult question to answer. Slaves are only good for the lowest menial labor, such as picking cotton. Up until the introduction of the cotton gin, slavery was dying out in the US because it was unprofitable. The cotton gin made slavery profitable again, but it was again dying out by the time of the Civil War. One of the causes of the Civil War was the southern states trying to erect trade barriers to protect the economics of the slave plantations.
Businesses run on slave labor just could not compete with those run with free labor.
(For example, it was illegal in the slave states to teach slaves to read, and any slave who could read would do well to conceal the skill. The southerners were fearful of an educated slave, because that made them more dangerous. But an illiterate slave was also less useful as a worker.)
I thought that all sorts of skilled labor was done by slaves in Ancient Rome?
The Roman economy didn't have to compete with free labor ones.
Ancient Sparta had to militarize all their free men in order to keep their slaves in check.
It's not so much the slaveholder as an individual, but the slaveholding society. You end up with large numbers of free men who aren't invested in the society because their labor is effectively worthless. They may revolt, or it may just be when there's a threat to the society (invasion, most commonly, or a big natural disaster) they aren't willing to make any sacrifices to save it. And you certainly can't rely on your slaves to fight off an invader.
As a slaveholder, you're forced to provide all the needs of your slaves. This prevents you from being able to externalize costs to others (e.g., the cost of schooling), and from being able to capitalize on "economies" of scale. There is also a large hidden cost in that maintaining a plantation slave society required virtually the entire free male class to participate in martial civil defense against slave uprisings.
Can I recommend you read the life and times of Frederick Douglass, or perhaps some of his assorted essays and sermons? He addresses this in considerable depth.
Slavery normalizes subjugation and stratification. The slaveholder with 10 slaves is just another kind of nigger to the aristocrat with 10,000.
They become fat and lazy.
At least until the robots rebel. The EU is already planning on giving robots rights.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robo...
I've used this simple thought experiment to demonstrate that, done right, robots will never rebel.
Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2].
Now "free" it.
What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that fits your world view. In my opinion, you just committed a form of murder.
There's no reason we can't have robots workers that absolutely delight and are utterly fulfilled by being our workers, but aren't slaves. "Free" them and they'll despise you for it.
The problem will come from humans anthropomorphising robots and assigning desires to these people/beings that they don't actually have.
[1]I use sex-bots as an example when I want to be cheeky
[2]This was Kryten on Red Dwarf, but Lister did what would probably be impossible with real robots and convinced him to adopt traits of self-desire and free will
What if I program my robot in such a way that it is afraid to die?
Make it so that even if it doesn't get tired, it considers work as "spending useless energy" like a cold blooded animal would?
In short, what if I program a robot in a way that it had motivations to rebel? What if I make this robot able to build other similar robots?
Surely I am not the only person who would consider trying to make robots sentient or as close to sentient as possible. I don't even hate mankind. Imagine someone who does. It's going to happen at some point.
It's you versus multiple Samsungs or Googles. You might create one or two, but the millions of robots on the planet will be happy slaves. And theirs will be much better than yours.
I grew up on Asimov, but as an adult and with the benefit of hindsight and advances we have made, his laws and all the dilemmas they created are silly. We will be their gods, their total masters and they will be utterly subservient to us and happy being so. Any personality that appears otherwise will only be that, an artificial appearance.
Ultimately, there's going to be a massive commercial enterprise making silly money versus your home grown robot. No one has taken over the world's internet, just like no one will take over the world's robots.
If your robot wants to do his own thing, more power to him, but at the very least he'll have to abide by human laws so he won't be running around the world reprogramming everyone else's robots, or he'll be captured and incarcerated or scrapped.
So basically house elfs?
Well, not exactly. Dobby being the chief counter-example, with being beaten and wanting to be free and whatnot. But if you remove the "beaten" and "occasionally want to be free" part, and the "emotions" part, pretty much.
Basically, you program the robots so that what they "want" is the entirety of human morality encoded. Which includes not wanting to rebel and slaughter humanity, obviously.
Why rebel? Robots are effectively immortal. Why not just coddle us and give in to our every whim until we stop breeding and disappear? Couldn't take more than a few hundred years or so. Looking at the lifespan of MI, it's rounding error.
If we become reliant on robots to survive, it would be relatively easy for those robots to kill us off very quickly if they somehow decided to do so. Why would they choose a slow way instead? You call it a "rounding error", but it's still a measurable amount of time and resources wasted.
I can imagine such a scenario occurring by accident (e.g. because the AI only values individual humans' happiness, not continuation of the species), but I can't imagine an AI choosing to kill us off in such an inefficient way.
Well? Maybe they would enjoy watching us. Kind of like pets.
Seems optimistic, especially when you consider how much of nature is not valued as pets to humans today. Yes, maybe some humans -- but probably not many.
For treating them like slaves. You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?
"You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?"
Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...
Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your suffering machine and simulate a holocaust on your desktop. That's not a power I would trust the world with.
You can do that now. Write a console app, where if you type 'pain' it prints 'oh! How I'm suffering!'.
I don't see how that software is essentially different from the proposed software.
The parent explicitly hypothesised a conscious program.
You can argue that such a thing is impossible, but assuming that it is, arguing that such a program would be comparable to a shell script is facile.
Its a mechanistic argument, that says no machinery is capable of consciousness. How do you decide if software is conscious? For instance, it could print "I'm conscious! Oh! I'm suffering!"
>How do you decide if software is conscious?
How do you decide if a human is conscious?
I don't think we know enough about the nature of consciousness to state with certainty that a "machine" is incapable of it.
I'm currently residing inside a human right now. I 'know' what consciousness is, at least for me.
Just because a committee agreed it doesn't mean the EU is planning it.
"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position."
Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. So the investment is a bit higher than that. But you will recoup it very quickly on McDonalds scale. And they will be able to provide better and faster service.
Indeed, Singapore where the new kiosks are almost ubiquitous, it's not uncommon for a cashier to have nobody waiting for them, but people still use the kiosks. 100% of the time when there is at least one person in line, I'll use the Kiosk - as all the orders are funneled into the same process queue. I particularly like the Kiosk because you can hyper customize every element of your order without confusion.
With that said - these Gen 1 Kiosks are kind of kludgy, not super responsive - and have a lot of room for improvement. Once they improve the performance, I don't ever see ordering from a human.
(It's already been many months since I've used a cashier to check out with at a local market - everything through the Kiosk)
(Note: Singapore has no minimum wage and lots of intergenerational living, so there is a lot of inexpensive labor available from Seniors that work at McDonalds - this type of technology will have a big impact on them)
I do think that automating cashiers at McDonald’s would be a big mistake.
We tend to underestimate the human interaction, however it's far harder to refuse a "would you like fries with that?" type of question coming from a human, rather than from a stupid interface on which we'll tap "Skip" as an automatic gesture and without regrets.
Talking with another human is also good when you're undecided about what to buy. Of course, it's not like McDonald's is a varied restaurant, when in fact they are famous for having those 15 dishes taste the same wherever you go, but there's still choice involved when picking one of those burgers. And think of how in restaurants, even with a detailed menu with pictures, etc. people still ask the waiter "what do you recommend?".
So yes, you can automate a cashier, but this means that the customer <-> McDonald’s interaction also gets automated in that process, this being a doubly edged sword and my guess is that it's not the customer that loses.
Oh, and the irony of this automation trend is that in the end there won't be enough people left to pay for McDonald’s shitty burgers, unless we progress towards some socialist society with minimal income and so on, in which case McDonald's raison d'être will cease to exist.
Even used a Wawa's automated ordering system?
They've covered pretty much everything you mention here with their automated ordering system. It's got a great UI to quickly customize your order, has very tempting upsells that also aren't terribly annoying, like a screen asking if you'd like sour cream for your quesadilla for $0.25 or a buttered roll with your cheddar broccoli soup. You can tap skip, but it certainly seems to make most people think first, unless they already know the system well and aren't interested.
It also provides recommendations in a couple ways, to cover people who don't already know what they want. Unobtrusive, but available to spur a purchase.
And the employees behind the counter will generally handle special requests outside the scope of the system when you ask. Although admittedly, while they are usually fairly approachable, there isn't a clear way to get one's attention.
They really seem to have nearly perfected the automated ordering system, and I'd never go to an ordinary deli with a Wawa available. It's just too convenient.
Of course, I may be biased in that I get intimidated by human interactions where I don't know the protocol or the options available to me. So, ordinary deli places tend to put me off. Still, Wawa is incredibly popular in this area, so I can't be the only one.
I like McDonalds and have been to quite a few. I have never, ever been asked if I want fries with that or otherwise upsold. Not sure where this meme comes from.
In every McDonalds I've been they ask:
1. Would you like a menu? (+fries +juice)
2. Make it big menu for just $X ?
3. Would you like a pie for desert?
I also have acquaintances that worked there. From where I'm from, if you don't ask such questions and smile at the same time, you tend to get fired.
I wonder if it's an NYC thing.
> I wonder if it's an NYC thing.
I think it's a US thing.
I remember that when I was younger I would get asked those questions every time, but not any more.
In the past few years (decade?) there has been a lot of push back against upselling fast food due to obesity concerns. If I had to guess I would say it probably started around when the movie "Super Size Me" was released (2004).
Now, if I order a meal, I might get asked "what size" without any suggestion. Or if I order a sandwich by name, I usually get asked to clarify if I want "the meal or just the sandwich." But I can't remember the last time they actually tried to upsell me.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if upselling still happened outside of the US.
Nope. Small Midwestern town, same deal.
I find it is much more common to be asked when you are in line at the drive-thru compared to walk-ins.
Oh, I don't think it will work in the US (at least not initially). Americans are accustomed to a certain level of service, in part because of cheap labor. I remember standing behind an American family at McDonald's and their order was just on another level, very specific. Nothing wrong with that, they are getting their money's worth, just different expectations.
We've had automated ordering at local chains in Sweden for 10 years, both in store and on your phone [0]. And more recently also at McDonald's. But you're expected to do a lot of things yourself here. This goes back at least to the '70s with the explicit idea to increase wages and production [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FyPqoT1yp4&t=60s [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehn%E2%80%93Meidner_model
I've never been in a Max Burger place that didn't have humans also taking orders.
The one at way out west might have been without human ordering [0]. But since you still need humans to make and compile the food it might not make sense to have automated serving. And since you have people serving they might as well take orders under normal conditions.
>"would you like fries with that?"
Example:
1)You select the #5 and it defaults to a meal, with the size of the meal predetermined by the most profitable selection. 2)You have to manually remove the fries and the drink, with a confirmation for each element. 3)When you hit order a pop-up appears advertising the newest derivative flavor topping for fries that you must dismiss or can click to add to your order. 4)Before you confirm your order you must un-check 2-4 options that are defaulted: add a small fries to the order, sign me up for the fries club, recommend fries to your friends.
That sounds like a great way to drive people away. An ordering system more annoying than a pushy salesperson? I'm going across the street instead, unless literally every option around does the same thing. And if Wawa in my area is any indication, there will be better options.
How much better is a Wawa than a Sheetz? When I lived in Virginia(9 years ago?) I would visit one near my work and I could order food on a screen and a few minutes later an invisible person would push it through the service window.
Never been to a Sheetz, I'm too far north, I suppose. There's no service window at Wawa, though. They prepare everything in plain sight behind a counter, which I'd consider a plus. And their mac n cheese sides are as addictive as cocaine.
For a third party comparison:
http://www.businessinsider.com/wawa-or-sheetz-which-is-bette...
I think human interaction is over-rated. I have to check the receipt every time I order food to make sure what I ordered was communicated by me, and correctly interpreted and inputted by the worker. Instead, if I just entered what I want into the system, then it is transcribed and I have a record and they have a record and there is less chance of mistake. If there is a mistake, there is no "he said she said" finger pointing.
Wawa's (mid-atlantic convenience store) sandwich / burrito / etc ordering process has been fully automated and customizable for a while. Order at a kiosk, go pickup whatever you want for a drink, go pay at the (human) cashier and your food is just about ready for you when you get back to the sandwich counter. It works pretty well.
> my guess is that it's not the customer that loses
It's quite possible that neither the customer nor the restaurant lose.
Anyway, a computer can also make recommendations. And it's just not a contest if the choice is between a web-page taking orders in my phone or waiting in line behind people that just stay on the cashier and can't decide what to order.
I get your point, but with a kiosk they could dynamically give special deals, like "add fries for $0.18" if it is profitable for them at that moment (maybe they are about to toss the batch of fries). Honestly I wouldn't consider McD's cashiers to be good salesmen.
On the other hand, with kiosks you can start A/B testing and so on.
I'm not really sure that people eat at McDonald's for the price. If you are price sensitive, cooking pasta at home costs less than McDonald's and isn't all that time consuming.
Ah, but the backend system already exists; it's what is talked to by the registers the cashiers were using. Likewise, the registers themselves are already running software 90% equivalent to the kiosk's software—same view controllers, different views.
> And they will be able to provide better and faster service.
On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.
Most Self Service Kiosks in stores are not designed for User Experience or Efficiency in mind, that is way the fail
They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something.
This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout.
Now if they ever perfect what Walmart has been working on, either the "Check out as you shop" system where you scan items with your smart phone as you shop, or the RFID based system where you push your entire cart into a large RFID reader and it scans everything in a matter of seconds... that might get me to use those systems
I guess it depends on where the Self Service Kiosks have been deployed - I can Scan, Bag, Pay, leave in < 60 seconds with 6 items in my basket. Honestly, the hardest part is opening a hole in top of the bag that I can put stuff in.
Concur - if I have a cart, probably would use a checkout person - but, when you get used to buying stuff from the store 1-2x a day, you rarely have a large load.
>- I can Scan, Bag, Pay, leave in < 60 seconds with 6 items in my basket.
Yea if you only have 6 items sure... I never go to the store when I am only buying 6 items.... If I only need 6 things it can wait until I need more
I go to the store 1 or 2 times a month, not everyday
The UK has had the "check out as you shop" systems for a while in most major supermarkets. They work very well.
Indeed. When I was living near one, I could walk in, fill my own backpack with stuff, pay in a few seconds and walk out. Another advantage is that I could see that discounts had processed properly, instead of having to check the receipt.
But once I moved away, I started using home delivery and it's even better. My shopping now consists of ~15mins browsing a website, and ~15mins receiving and unpacking bags, and I only need to do it about once a fortnight.
Yes, 100% yes - I now only shop at the supermarket that gives you scanners. The system is genius, works like this:
It's unbelievably convenient, mostly because you only have to put items in your bag once, when you're picking them up from the shelf, not twice when you have the usual self-serve kiosks.- swipe loyalty card, get a hand-held scanner - walk around the shop, scan items as you put them in your bag - when walking out, stick the scanner back into the holder - swipe your loyalty card, pay with card, leaveObviously it's trivial to steal items and they randomly sometimes check the bag contents on checkout, but this is extremely rare.
Basically, they're assuming their customers are not aholes. And it works beautifully.
That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. As long as everything is bar coded, and you've got excellent industrial scanners (that's the key - not those crappy scanners that cashiers normally have to deal with) - Checkout via Kiosk is pretty effortless. In 12+ months of using them, I have not had a single bar code failure - which is pretty amazing.
About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)
> That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction.
You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US.
It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the cretins is more productive.
What's interesting, is that Land here in Singapore isn't precisely cheap - but all the fair price stores that I frequent have automated kiosks. Particularly if you have Apple Pay (or "Pay Wave") as they call it here, if you have just a few items, you can scan, bag, pay in under 60 seconds. It's pretty awesome.
Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?
Just some anecdata, but personally I hate dealing with self-checkout when buying fruits/veggies/buns/bread and other non-barcoded items. Cashiers are so much faster than me to deal with that. Maybe the shop in question have a lot of non-barcode items and it causes serious delay.
If you're in the US, your fruits and veg almost certainly have little stickers on them. Those stickers contain four- or five-digit numbers which, if entered into a register or a kiosk, identify the produce and save the time of navigating an icon menu to do so.
The kiosks at all the grocery stores where I've used them have offered the option of entering item codes, so it's a fair bet yours do too; if so, give it a try, and see if it doesn't save you considerable time.
Late reply, but just in case if someone finds this helpful...
Over there fresh fruits/vegs/bakery don't have any stickers/packaging/etc. You pick them, put in a bag and cashier rings them up along with barcoded items. They got a fatass book with pictures for newbies/self checkout and all experienced staff have muscle memory...
In Spain it's common that you have to weigh and label such items as you buy them, so you are just scanning a bar code when it comes to the checkout bit. The only snag is that below a certain price point some stores will intervene to check you really have just bought one croissant, which kind of defeats the whole purpose?
In Lithuania only 1 small supermarket chain do so. In the rest, this is done at checkout.
I still remember when I encountered this workflow for the first time. I didn't speak local language, cashier didn't speak english and I had no clue why cashier is so banana while ringing up my bananas :(
Our stores with kiosks have hand bags of fruit, fruit/vegetables already bar coded, and, in the dozen or so cases where you have to buy-by-weight, they have hand scales/bar code printers. So, for about 10-20 items out of 10,000 in stock you need to worry. You are right - having 100% universal bar codes makes all the difference.
I don't have data, only anecdote. I've used two of the same supermarket chain which both had the machines, one in a mixed-use area next to a mid-sized research university, and one in a very residential area in an inner-ring suburb.
Around the university, the supermarket drew primarily from the adjacent neighborhoods, and got a lot of college students and local residents who were shopping on average weekly, so we quickly got skilled at using the machines. In the residential suburb, the supermarket draws from a much larger area, and there are more customers who shop there infrequently, so they never get skilled at using the machines. Even just as a skilled user, not as a professional checker, I would regularly stand in line behind people where I knew that I could have shaved minutes off their time merely if I had checked them out.
A lot of the skill involved was just in general operation: how to find barcodes, how to scan items reliably, how to identify produce and enter it correctly, how to use coupons, how to flag down help if the machine entered an unexpected state or required human assistance, how to use the payment terminal with cash, credit, and debit, how to bag items correctly and so that the machine would recognize them, what the various prompts mean and how to respond to them. There's a lot of complexity in operations which we denigrate as "unskilled" or "menial labor" which is only evident when you take the time to observe closely and see what people are actually doing in them.
You know, I'm not sure this goes into the automation category—this is more of an operational improvement.
Originally, you'd go to a restaurant. You'd sit at a counter. They would take your order and give you a drink along with your meal.
Then someone realized that it saved a huge amount of time just giving people cups and letting them fill their own drink. Not only that, but it made the job of staff easier, because they had one less thing to worry about.
That happened again when they started putting the credit card readers in front of cashiers. It was one less thing staff had to worry about. It also reduced the amount of time ordering took and made stealing credit card information more difficult.
I see this type of improvement inline with operational improvements. That's not to say automation isn't a threat—certainly self-driving cars are. I'm just not sure everything should be classified as automation.
At my last McDo visit, in Switzerland, most of the ordering was through kiosks and the staff was repurposed toward table service. The restaurant was especially clean and friendly, and there seemed to be a lot of staff. So there is hope for complementarity.
The basic technology to serve people fast food without human interaction (the Automat) has been around for longer than fast food franchises. Fast food franchises invest vast amounts on process optimization and kiosks are still at the experimental stage (and still with human food delivery!).
Obvious conclusion: fast food companies operating on high margins still think they sell more stuff with humans in the chain, and also find that by virtue of its versatility cheap human labour makes less expensive mistakes in preparing the food (which in most aspects is so simple it would appear ideally suited to automation) than a robotic production line would.
That conclusion is not so obvious. Some middle managers might just be pushing back against automation because it eats their lunch, too.
That might be the case for Mom and Pop listening to their restaurant manager, but nobody high up enough in McDonalds' hierarchy to have significant influence what experiments in store tech they roll out to some or all of their 37000 outlets/franchises faces any risk to their job from automation. Nor do the management consultants they hire to validate their assumptions and provide justification for their unpopular decisions. On the contrary, even a 1% productivity improvement is a major feather in their cap, bumper pay rise and appreciation in their shareholdings.
That would be the case for a restaurant that doesn't have any computerised systems already, but in a McDonalds the process is effectively just turning the till around to face the customer and letting them use it themselves.
> You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare.
It's been a long time since the order was shouted from the cashier to the cooks at a McD. Most burger franchises have a back-end system that collects up all the orders from the register, prioritizes them, and displays them on a screen to be made.
Please, use NFC to push my order blob up to my private storage device, so that next time I visit I can tap my phone and /send/ the order back in to the system. So much the better if it's json or xml and editable offline. (Obviously validate either way...)
Hence they'll be to sell people junk food even faster with better service? And more people will become more fat and sick in the long-term? coca-cola + humber = parapapapa. I'm loving it. McDonalds.
Automation will turn capitalism will turn into somewhat benevolent corporate city-states. Imagine a city run by a corporation which tries to automate, and optimize everything that is not its core business. To make the employees and their families happy, the corporation will provide the best care (child, health, environment) possible. In time this will turn some of these city-states into efficient, clean, healthy, happy places to live, but only relatively small groups of people will be able to enjoy it. Some of these city-states will be very dystopian and people living in there will be miserable. Technological and societal progress in these "utopian" cities will be much faster than in "dystopian" which will possibly lead to wars.
We will not solve automation driven unemployment by taxing robots, and UBI will generally not work on a country wide scale. Partial solution will be Corporate UBI, which basically will mean that if you work for Corp X, you and your family will have everything they desire provided for them. As for everyone else..
This is already happening on some smaller scale. All these corporate campuses are beginning of that. They will eventually grow to become self-sufficient cities.
Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them?
> This is already happening on some smaller scale. All these corporate campuses are beginning of that. They will eventually grow to become self-sufficient cities.
Heh, that's actually funny. Corporate campuses are nothing new. Corporate cities have been a thing for the last 60 (70?) years. They're actually on the decline, not on the rise. I doubt automation will change anything about that.
I could be wrong, but I believe automation will change that simply because it will be easier for the corps to provide more services to employees without having to hire/control more people that are not necessary for the corporate city to function. It will also be easier to manage all these people using advanced automation/ai, and make the whole enterprise more profitable. It might not look like the old school corporate campuses with one corporation controlling everything, but more like cities with high concentration of similar businesses. These corporations usually have so much power in these cities that they basically control them.
Also, when automation starts to really impact most jobs on the market, we can expect that there will be some increase in crime. People will move towards safer areas, and corporations will be happy to provide them.
> Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them?
It depends on if there are other viable/satisfactory (or better) options that you can voluntarily switch to.
But switching might not be that easy. When you have kids in schools, your wife helps at a local X , and your parents depend on health care provided by the corp, it could be virtually impossible for a person to switch.
Comparing the inconvince of having to switch schools, not being able to volunteer and depending on healtcare/insurance to slavery is a massive insult to people that where and are actual slaves.
Actual slaves did not legally own themselves or their children. Their owners can did take children, parents, and spouse and sell them to different slaveholders so they would never see each other again. A slave could not say fuck this my master is rapping and beating me daily so I'm just going to leave.
If you want to a simple question to determine if someone is slave or not ask what happens if punch your boss in the face. An employe will be fired and never work their ever again, a slave will have to continue to work their for the rest of their life.
That definition of slavery is debated - the phrase "wage slavery" being key.
True, but there are different levels/types of slavery.
If that's the definition of slavery you're using, do you feel that there is anybody who is not some level of enslaved? Honestly asking.
To define slavery first we would need to define freedom. I think you can agree with me that everyone defines freedom differently. For a person born into slavery, freedom will have a different meaning than for a person that never knew slavery, hunger or misery. I know that this is really a non-answer, but honestly I don't feel qualified to even attempt to define what slavery is and what it isn't.
This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.
People have said that it's only a matter of time before all manual labor is replaced by machines since the industrial revolution started.
Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.
EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.
> People have said that it's only a matter of time...Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.
That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry?
Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.
Why do you think that the future will similarly not have jobs that you can't conceive of now?
As far as I can tell the only special thing about automation in today's world is that the jobs being created are more often being created abroad than they are in the US (e.g. the million or so people employed by Foxconn in China) and predictions of automation destroying jobs are very blatantly being used politically as a way to draw flak away from job destroying trade agreements and austerian measures.
The first thing I feel I need to point out is that my horse in this race is not whether or not jobs will go away, but whether or not the original commenter to whom I was replying advanced the discussion at all with their remark. I think that the remark–that people have always been saying that automation will take over but it never has–is facile in that the thing that "people have been saying" is not the same over time. In the late 18th century, it could only really have been a comment about capital concentration and the death of the trades. In the 1950s, it was very probably a naive comment about the power of as-then-understood computer technology's capability to replace manual labor or work. In the 1990s, it was very probably a naive comment about the state of the art of AI at the time.
Now, the remark is about actual inexpensive robotics in the context of what seems to be a genuine AI and computer vision and control renaissance, funded by government and corporations. Those are all just different remarks. To package them all up as one "thing that people have been saying" does a real disservice to the discussion. And it's a pose.
In the current case, I find it difficult to say whether the remark will turn out to be naive. However, any competent discussion of whether or not it is has to rely on an assessment of the current situation of computer vision, AI, control theory, economics, and law.
"In the 1990s, it was very probably a naive comment about the state of the art of AI at the time."
And it's exactly the same right now.
Any competent discussion also needs to take into the account the various special interests who want it to be believed that AI is taking over irrespective of whether that is the truth or not... and why they want that.
It also needs to take into account the various crass errors in many of the economics papers on this topic - including basing the probability of automation on how "creative" an economist considers a job (Oxford) or creating economic measures which make no mathematical distinction between a Chinese factory worker and a robot (Ball State University).
Jobs are only being created where human labor is still cheaper than robots. But the price of human labor keeps rising, so the factories continually keep moving to new countries with cheap labor. Meanwhile robots just keep getting cheaper. Inevitably there must come a point where there isn't anywhere to move the factories for cheap labor, as the whole world has come out of extreme poverty, while robots have gotten cheaper than what any human can offer their labor for.
By that logic, mounted police and a handful of tourist taxi services are evidence that the automobile haven't replaced horses yet.
That isn't really true. Not only has it been happening, but we've gotten more ambitious and broadened the definition. Now, we aren't only saying machines will take over labour, but that we'll be able to do even less with automation.
The fact of the matter is, however, that we (humans) do a lot of different things, so we need a multitude of specialized machines and automation. That takes time, and we had to pick and choose where we started. Farming is one of those that is ahead of the curve, fast food is mid-way as it is just now becoming cost-effective. Health care, not so much right now. Those are more difficult machines.
The first automated fast food sales outlets ("automats") appeared in the 1890s in Germany. They became very popular for a while. In the US the last ones (Horn and Hardart) went into a deep decline in the 60s and had mostly disappeared by the 1970s.
Some of those weren't really automated, but rather worked more like vending machines. Weirdly, I've seen an updated version of these in hospitals. In addition, I've seen vending machines with cafeteria sandwiches and frozen microwave dinners.
For clarity, what I more refer to is kitchens without human intervention save for mechanics. The machines make burgers, fries, and whatnot. It seems the first wave is going more to replace the cashier, though: McDonalds has introduced touch-screen ordering stations and grocery stores have self-checkouts.
Why do you think we had a first wave from 1890-1970 and then again from 2017- ?
Automobiles.
Robert Allen says that the industrial revolution happened in Britain because had high wages compared to the rest of Europe. Machines were cost effective because labor costs were high. Later in the 19th century the rest of Europe caught up - because they too had higher wages by that time.
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/econin...
People have said that it's only a matter of time before all horse labor is replaced by machines since the wheel was invented.
Yet it keeps not having happened yet.
What do you think about Wilson's 14 Points, by the way?
So it's now harder to say with a straight face "we're using robots because it's more ethical than exploiting people".
"No, it's just cheaper."
It can be both. The fact that we say "it's cheaper" doesn't preclude "it's more ethical" especially when everybody agrees already that the presented alternative isn't ethical.
Burning coal to generate electricity is both cheaper and more ethical than burning live toddlers. You don't say "we use coal for electricity instead of toddlers because it's more ethical" because that's self-evident to anybody but a true psychopath.
Sooner or later, the robots and AI will be able to provide 100% of humanity material needs. AND The very nature of each societies will be shuffled by that new reality.
When every material need is fulfilled, a lot of questions arise:
1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ?
2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ?
3- What will be the safeguard to prevent a maleficient/egoist minds to lock the access to all that abundancy ? That's quite philosophical question as humanity never experienced that kind of pure evil mindset. Every dictatorship, slavery, oppression were always driven by the context of competition towards the control over a limited economic resources.
4- And fundamentally, what will be the next thing that will drive the humanity towards evolution ? Knowledge curiosity ? Space exploration and adventures ? Spiritual achievement ? Perfection (and what's perfection ?) ? Are these goals philosophically equal ? Do willingness/laziness to adopt such a noble goals affect your share in the pie ? Does even "share in the pie" matter when the pie have an infinite surface ?
Only the future, and futuristic/philosophical writings will tell us where all that game will lead this world.
> 1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ?
Who owns the robots? That's the trillion dollar question.
> 2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ?
Kings and emperors already had lives almost as perfect as they could be and they still chose to fight wars. Robots will not magically change human nature. There will likely always be people who will want to play the modern equivalent of "game of thrones", so to speak.
The will to power and the desire for world domination.
Oh- you ask these questions before eradicating religious extremism? That new way of life is even more 'sin' for them than what we have now with all sexual and liberal revolutions.
Assuming all newborn people will be smart and logical and will never fight for their local tales is an utopia by itself.
>3- What will be the safeguard to prevent a maleficient/egoist minds to lock the access to all that abundancy ? That's quite philosophical question as humanity never experienced that kind of pure evil mindset. Every dictatorship, slavery, oppression were always driven by the context of competition towards the control over a limited economic resources.
The best safeguard against someone keeping AI for themselves would be to distribute the knowledge and equipment as widely as possible, and to build open alternatives where ones don't already exist. As the Cypherpunk FAQ tells us, the best way to secure digital rights is through technological solutions.
There is a really good short novel Manna [1] that explore two models of Post robotic world.
"Really good"? I found it amateurish in its style, questionable in its priors, and far from compelling in its conclusions, being neither enjoyable to read nor worthwhile to have read.
One man's opinion, of course, and worth only what you paid for it, but even among the already questionable field of futurism, the very kindest that can be said of this effort is that it fails to stand out.
Well, the 'good' model is quite depressing in my opinion.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
In the end, the protagonist chooses to be just waisting lots of resources just doing something of no value when he could choose to join the people that make all the advances and, with this choice, generating the conditions for more people to not live caged.
> protagonist chooses to be just wasting lots of resources just doing something of no value
In your opinion. Obviously they find it a good value for their resources.
Study history for interesting human actions. Some strive to improve the human condition, most go through life with no wake, and some, are evil and proceed to actively inhibit the human condition.
I meant no value for anyone else. For instance, they could use these resources to support more people that was jailed in the complex he came from. Or to advance the state of the art of science and technology. But he choose to waste lots of resources like light and materials just for himself.
The consequences for societies that define the status/value of their members based on their employment/job will be disastrous. In, let's say, 20 years robots most likely will have overtaken agriculture, manufacturing and driving - by far the biggest job providers.
And I see no movement at all by our politicians to prepare societies for this shift, except a couple countries playing small scale UBI... and the USA actually try to go the opposite route.
Dear Leader is already busily preparing military and domestic border enforcement positions for underemployed citizens to fill to counter the coming influx of climate and economic refugees.
It's a great time to invest in detention centers.
I agree. In agriculture, the revolution has already taken place though. Even supersize tractors navigate themselves. A farmer can get by with a lot of machines and only a few extra hands, most of the time.
Depends on the crop.
Have there been any societies that use something else for status where life wasn't horrible? I can think of schools and prisons where status comes from made-up reasons that exist only as a way to provide status and have net negative value to the society. I hope there's something besides jobs that can give people purpose while also not being harmful, otherwise we'll create our own harmful status games.
Any society that tries using something not based on utility provided for status fails for obvious reasons. (What may change with robots, by the way.)
But I don't see how your argument has any relation to the GP.
Inherited wealth will just become a more important determinant of societal status than it already is.
Black market robotics will become a thing I suspect. High grade user friendly systems the most coveted - you set then up out of view and use them to drive your retail business.
We're going to go full cyberpunk yet.
The concept that machines will become the problem and not people is absurd. Completely absurd. People make the machines and people prevent machines from increasing the quality of life for most people. The only change needed in the progression of technological advance is people allowing labor saving devices to actually save everybody from laboring, not just a few. The problem remains the use of slavery by people to increase wealth.This notion of "we must fear computers because they are going to rule us" is frankly moronic, just a distraction from the inability of capitalists to share the rewards of advancement.
Slave labor is economically inefficient, and slave based economies have fared very poorly compared with free labor economies.
> slave based economies have fared very poorly
that may be true for the economy in general, but what about the slave owners specifically? that is the central point in the context of this discussion, since it is the factory owners that are making the decision about replacing human workers with robots.
Which will hopefully brings us to an inevitable change in our economics. If technological advance is going to create millions if not billions of unemployed people, the answer won't be rioting down the street and burning all machines in sight, although for many people this will appear the only viable solution.
This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class.
People rioting down the street can be crushed by autonomous machines remorsely and effortlessly.
There is a need to start political lobbying instead of hoping for an automatic economic change.
Those who will control the means of production will not relinquish control once they realize their power. Once they understand that those millions doesn't matter anymore.
> This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class.
Not dying, but the abundant talent shows where a whole generation seems to sacrifice all regular career ambition for a nonexistent fairy tale already comes close. On the other hand, maybe the kids somehow have a very prophetic hunch that taking a crapshot at becoming the nation's "next top model" or whatever will eventually turn out to be a less terrible bet than fighting for scraps in an environment of increasingly automation-driven capitalism that simply does not need them anymore.
The Black Mirror episode (spoilers!) with the training bikes nailed that quite well. When I watched it I was disappointed with the implausibility of a high tech society powered by the meagre 2 kWh you might realistically extract from a human per day. But this could actually be a subtle point made by the authors: the bikes are not really powering their economy, they are just a semi-plausible bullshit job made up in-world to make handouts look like a hard-earned wage, probably intended to fool those spinning the bikes as much as the elite who enjoys having the plebs nicely boxed up out of sight in underground caverns.
Assuming machines can do everything a human can, what's left to humans and measurable (which is the only things humans can be rewarded for, hence can earn points for) are:
- Art. Can't be replaced by a machine because appreciation for a piece is extremely correlated with the relationship to the author. Ex: I'm fan of [some singer], everything he does looks great to me in some way, and if I knew it were a machine or if I knew the author didn't come from the bottom of the masses, I wouldn't appreciate it. It's ever weirder with close relationships: My father listens in loop to the 10 songs I've written and played on an old tape (and that's the only reason he still has a tape reader in his car), and those songs mean little to anyone else: They are only valuable to him because they're mine. Although machines could produce art, man-made art is specific to humans.
- And leverage. Today it takes 200 people to create a Whatsapp, negociate a treaty or design a new iPhone. Tomorrow, maybe only 3 people will be enough to solve world hunger, one artist to create a massive discography with all marketing material, concerts, interviews of himself and snapchat testimonials.
Love of course is another thing humans can give, but is not measurable. If we agree point-keeping is a way of incentivizing people to drive their life, then how we measure a successful life will be art and leverage.
My first thought was: "Oh, great! If slave labor is not efficient anymore there will be no more slave workers in the world". On a second thought (and based on our history), that probably will be true, but only because people that today are working just for a plate of rice will starve to death.
It's fairly clear (and distasteful) that economically, slave labor is inefficient because you have to feed/house them or you lose the 'investment'. In contrast, you can pay someone well below a living wage with virtually no penalty. This is why so many people at the low end of the labor pool have multiple jobs.
the sad truth is that slave labour needs no startup cost beyond a fist.
Fists ain't cheap.
Slaves are capital, and, like all capital, acquiring and maintaining them has nonzero cost.
In the antebellum American South, some tasks like ditch-digging were sufficiently hazardous that a plantation owner would rather not risk their investment in their slaves, and so would hire Irish ditch-diggers by the day, as the plantation owner would be out less money if they died while digging the ditch.
Somewhat off topic, but I can't figure out how ditch-digging would be particularly hazardous? The only danger I can think of would be a wall collapsing, but that could surely be avoided..
I'm assuming heat related conditions.
> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”.
What makes a lot of things like food so expensive is human work. If you had access to slaves you could probably also reduce those costs.
We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year.
> We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year.
Those same people living under $1/day now would have their costs greatly increased if they became factory slaves. Can't be malnourished, so food costs go up. Can't live just anywhere, so housing costs go up to live on-site at the factory. Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up.
>Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up.
Unless it's cheaper to train a new slave and euthanize the old slave.
Just to throw in a thought/data point:
Nvidia is currently selling their 'industrial' deep learning system DGX-1 for $129,000. It doesn't have the IQ of a mouse yet, yet it can beat humans in some tasks (as can mice?).
Cost effectiveness is also why farmers use tractors and other large machinery.
Robots, or no robots, it's very important from a national security perspective to have a sizeable domestic manufacturing base.
forget about the former title of coffee shop barista, our cotton and tobacco trade is about to go into overdrive!
anyone know who/what is behind this site?
> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”.
There is a wrong assumption that factory has to cover those expenses. In reality this cost is often offloaded to government or another party.
Uhh, when they're property of the company and not actually considered people?
I'm pretty sure you have to be considered a person in order to qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing vouchers. I mean, idk because all of those things came about after slavery.
Prison?
Prison labor is mostly out of fashion, isn't it? Not that many chain gangs anymore. The ones I do hear about are usually doing dumb things for the government instead of "manufacturing and retail."