These exponential advances, most notably in forms of artificial intelligence, will prove daunting for as long as we continue to insist upon employment as our primary source of income. The White House, in a stunning report to Congress this week, put the probability at 83 percent that a worker making less than $20 an hour in 2010 will eventually lose his job to a machine. Even workers making as much as $40 an hour face odds of 31 percent. — bostonglobe.com
58 Comments
I think about this subject all the time.
I think about this, as I stare at my Amazon Echo.
i don't think people will be eating sandwiches and be happy. maybe eating each other.
^ agree
the question then is, who do we eat?
If only this had happened before, we might have learned how to deal with it. Oh, wait...
We won't be able to deal with 90% of work becoming automated. It will make capitalism utterly impossible to sustain. It's very Naive to think that Socialism will save the day because the ownership class will not allow it to. Power is already in their hands. A fascist dystopia is coming soon...
hmm. so who did the luddites eat?
the Amish are doing just fine. its a different kind of work in the future, all mental, its already happening....and when the US finally adopts Japanese toilet seats we will have arrived
I find it amazing that we are approaching the moment when humans become "obsolete." If our system is designed for creative destruction, where the law is that the best designs will replace the old, what do we think will happen to humans? Do you really think the AI will keep us around just because?
On the positive side, before making humans obsolete, robots will solve the racism and sexism issues by making all work obsolete. That is if they aren't programmed with hate and racism .... which they probably will be.
Efficient, no health insurance, workmans comp, lawsuits, 401k, theft, sick days, lunch breaks, holidays, and 24hour workdays! We are no competition. We already have been replaced by machines. Look at an assembly line circa 1920 compared to 2016. It's almost all robotic. The catch 22 is when 90% of the population is obsolete and essentially unemployable who will buy the goods that are produced by the robots who replaced them?
Big question, if machines took ALL the jobs.... how are we who aren't owners of the then 1 single SUPERCORPORATION going to get paid and live.
How are we going to buy food, BUY the things we need and PAY the utilities and so forth because they will continue to charge us money even when we no longer get wages.
We would starve and die.... the 98% of us. Only the 2% at the top who would have the world's wealth will live. Therefore only the descendants of the 2% will live because they will own everything. The whole damn world.
For what's its worth, most MENTAL jobs especially engineering and other science/mathematical jobs can be replaced by computers/robots/machines. The ONLY jobs that can't yet be replaced by robots are art/creative type jobs.
However, then its not an economy when everyone will train and learn about creative thinking, design, etc.
Then there won't be anyone needing our services because it would become all DIY.
The difference is everyone will be creative/artist/architects DIYers.
BAD for business.
If you haven't noticed, architects don't tend to hire architects to design their own homes and buildings. We do it ourselves. The people who hire us are the ones who don't know how to do it or do not want to do the work.
You would have all supply and zero demand.
Read
What kind of Commie b.s. propaganda are you suggesting?
If no one has jobs, then the people with the money will run with money and leaves us penniless and homeless as they would essentially on everything. Then they'll evict all us except the people with all the money from the planet.
Sounds like a bad divorce where the wife takes the whole damn planet with the divorce and you the man get screwed over and have to leave the planet for a future.
Now where the hell to go?
If that was the case, I'll just have to make sure I have my towel..... if anything.
As I've said before, architecture is the last defense of humanity. It maintains basic and advanced human needs: shelter, food, sex, meaning, home, work, meaning. When architecture is built only as empty real estate, it's a sign the future will be empty buildings, holdings by faceless companies. All designed by BIG (ha!).
LiMX agree. and rick, you obviosly do not work with a lot of engineers, calculators can not replace brains.........see IBM and Bob Dylan TV ad..........consider this, the illegal immigrant worker is essentially a Robot in the USA. they are not citizens which effectively means they have no rights and do not exist technically, yet they do a good deal of labor the unemployed in this country wouldnt touch with a 10 foot pole. perverse and absurd as that sounds, illegal immigrants are already doing the auotmated labour at prices no "citizen" would touch.
an architect saying architecture is the last defense of humanity is the equivalent of a politician saying politics is the last defense of humanity, or a lawyer who only sees the world through the eyes of a lawyer, or a fashion designer who thinks the loss of fashion design would be the end of the spark that separates people from animals.
when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. for what it's worth, the problem you are referring to is not a nail.
curt, we're architects and architecture is real to a degree.
thumbing through Marx's Grundrisse and much of what is being noted in that article was noted essentially in various sections by Marx among others, 150 years ago, and Citizen's image should help make that point.
A.I. is nowhere close to where it has to be to change much of this. It's in my opinion still in the wrong direction anyway.
with that said, quoting Marx makes you look like a Commie or a Bernie fans these days, ha..so here a relevant quote to this and Nicholass piece linked by Beta above.
from an Adam Smith disciple
"Our zone requires labour for the satisfaction of needs, and therefore at least one part of society must always tirelessly labour; others labour in the arts etc., and some, who do not work, still have the products of diligence at their disposal. For this, these proprietors have only civilization and order to thank; they are purely the creatures of civilized institutions. For these have recognized that one can also obtain the fruits of labour through ways other than labour; the men of independent fortune owe their wealth almost entirely to the labour of others, not their own ability, which is not at all better. What divides the rich from the poorer is not the ownership of land or of money, but rather the command of labour." Sir Fr. Morton Eden - The State of the Poor, or an history of the Labouring Classes in England from the Conquest etc.. (1797)
this in the section where Marx writes:
Free Labour = latent pauperism. Eden.
(think architectural interning...)
within the problem of machines, this becomes very interesting...
i agree that we are architects and architecture is real to a degree
i think that when discussing complicated multidisciplinary problems though, we should view them as complex multidisciplinary problems instead of saying 'architecture is the last defense of humanity.' doesn't it kind of sound like limx really thinks the world revolves around him and his interests? that's not productive. people just kind of need to quit thinking they're special.
i would be inclined to believe that in our current economic system, inheritance is more important than command of labor. wealth is earned by having wealth, not by producing something. the value of a commodity is determined by it's value as an investment, by people who want to earn wealth through investment income rather than people who want to use that product for it's intended purpose. corn's use as a gambling chip is more important to the economy than it's use as high fructose corn syrup, cattle feed, or ethanol.
command of labor on the other hand isn't worth much. the way "entrepreneurism" is talked about as something people should aspire to, or as away to build wealth, or whatever it is people are saying (i can't really keep up) ultimately puts the wrong people in leadership positions. this is coming from my perspective as an architect, where a fairly significant number of people aspire to own small businesses and become small business owners without any real desire to learn how to operate a business. their motivation is to design what they want because they think it will be fun. i think this scales to large organizations too. the board of directors at any big umbrella corporation isn't talking about how best to manage people or how to produce a better product. they're talking about how to get people to invest in their company.
nobody in a leadership position at apple talks about designing a better product. they talk about whether apple should be a growth stock or a value stock. marissa mayer isn't talking about how she's going to improve yahoo's core business product. she doesn't even know what yahoo's core business product is. i don't know much about 1797, but in 2016, labor and production are out of vogue.
none of this has anything to do with my ability to design or construct a building.
the idea is that we ascend with our roles leaving easy tasks for robots... we no longer need a guy setting in a kiosk selling metro tickets, but we definitely need someone to program and monitor the operation :P don't make it so complex and try having less babies lol
The industrial revolution produced goods that were valuable to humans: skyscrapers, trains, systems of food distribution. Perhaps a full robot society is still far off, but you can already see Tech companies have little value for humanity--their aim is not physical products but systems of surveillance and control. Marx is out of date, society cannot even hope to control the means of production when the products are no longer physical. There's nothing really of value left. AI makes humans into essentially cattle on a farm, eventually taken out to slaughter.
What's interesting is how both left and right are essentially beginning to rebel against this but the elites on both sides are using identity politics to create conflicts, as was in the case in the past with artificially made race riots meant to essentially keep control for the few. Social networking has not been designed to encourage productive or noble pursuits, but to create conflict, link bait, terrorism, hate.
The tech elite see everything as data on a map, they have no systems that value human life; art, architecture, music, etc.
Many many jobs have already been replaced by machines...sure this is good to an extent like in the case of the cotton Jin or those bomb defusing robots, but when the masses are unemployable it will undoubtably collapse the economic and social order of society. This is imo about 50-100 off. We already have the basic tech in place...we have already seen many jobs become partially-fully automated...voice recognition answering services is one small example...self checkout lines...driverless cars...robotic assembly lines...etc...
And the idea that people will just start doing white collar work is ridiculous. Some jobs will be safe forever...architecture, doctors, programmers....but the bulk of blue collar work will be gone.
The problem is that blue collar work is the root of economics. If nobody has any money, then architects have no clients, doctors have no patients, programmers are making bread and circus apps. All of society funnels down a toilet of strife. If you don't have blue collar workers, the entire society goes to hell... people get resentful, form into primitive tribes, and fight each other.
Rikki, I like it when Trumpians, like yourself, struggle against the future. It makes your subjugation all the more fun.
In the future there will be no more architecture only renderings with moats.
LIMX, that's what I'm saying. Unfortunately I think it is inevitable because of two guaranteed realities. First, companies always make decisions with the intent to increase profit and efficiency and reduce risk. Second, technology (computer and robotics) will exponentially advance.
The catch 22 is that at some point the people will not be able to afford the goods being produced by the machines that replaced them...companies will likely be forced to contract and cater only to the upper class (owners and thinkers) while the rest of society lives in poverty ridden slums. With global warming, ongoing wars, etc...the future looks pretty gloomy imo.
Architects will be fine since they only cater to the upper class anyways. Lol
jla, when there aren't any jobs, we'll go to the universal basic income. that's in the article if you read it.
Olaf,
Actually, most of the engineers uses software to do the grunt work of their occupation. We aren't just talking about calculator. We are talking about computers which is a state machine. Computers do more than mathematics. As an advance state machine, this is where advance logic is involved. When it comes to actual engineering, it is all about physics and math in an application of science.
You talk about needing a brain. Sure if you are a human, you need one to live bonehead.
The aspects that computers/robots can't yet do is creative design solutions. What is an engineer needed for in Architecture? Aside from being a guy to pass off liability to, we usually have designed the structure but we need the engineer to do the number crunching intensive stuff, etc.
Sure, there maybe aspects of what an engineer would do as far as creative role but that would easily be absorbed into the role of Architect. Engineers as we know would probably become Engineering Designers or Structural Designers as the computer/robots would supplant the mathematical oriented role so the title Engineer would be kind of outmoded.
Yes, I do agree with you that A.I. is not there yet to completely replace all aspects of the engineer's role but engineer's can't command the same amount for only 1/10th the work of lesser valued work at that.
Why do architects hire the engineers? For some, it's usually because those architects are scared shitless of the engineering equations needed..... especially when an architect uses a highly convoluted design like you may see with with Frank Gehry's work. Maybe..... for some.
Obviously, architects are not typically trained in advance engineering science. They just have some basic engineering like you might find in "Simplified Engineering for Architects and Builders". Many architects don't even do most of the more advance stuff you may find in the book. Maybe calculate a simple beam or column or footing but not much more than that before they have an engineer do it.
I'm sure some do structural design and dip into some of the engineering calculation and some do more.
Many Architects don't want to do the engineering for a variety of reasons.
However, if you go down the timeline long enough NOT TODAY or 3 MONTHS from now but down the line 50 years, I'm confident that A.I. could largely replace most aspects of engineering and other mathematical oriented jobs. The hardest step is creative designing.
curtkram wrote:
jla, when there aren't any jobs, we'll go to the universal basic income. that's in the article if you read it.
BULLSHIT.
It'll just be the very few with the money having all the money and owning the planet and we who have nothing which would include you because even you won't have a job when there is no demand for us designing buildings. In the course of the process, they'll drain the people and eventually architects (which don't have much to begin with) will have no jobs because the very rich foreclosing the planet in their Conglomerated global super corporation. There'll be maybe 1-2% with all the wealth as the wealth is drained from the rest. Once they have it all, they own it all because they'll out your home and then drain you of the money anyway. Sooner or latter, you'll have nothing because they'll have everything.
THEN we'll have the few with all the money and control and the rest of poor people.
Unless you mean a universal basic income of $0.00.
How are we going to eat. We'll have to find a new planet for ourselves if that was to happen.
b3tadine,
Rikki, I like it when Trumpians, like yourself, struggle against the future. It makes your subjugation all the more fun.
The trick is this, in forming utter monopoly is easy. Japan doesn't have antitrust laws barring monopolies. When corporations that don't fall merge and many of the significant companies that do fall in the hypercapitalism phase that would precede the days of universal basic income of Marx's theory. The thing is you'll have virtually an Oligopoly if not Monopoly to the most extreme.
Just as it has been happening for the past 50-75 years, the distribution of wealth as been consolidating into fewer and fewer people.
You understand that we are effectively working for less and less money. The amount of money we spend on our "employers" are becoming greater. So in effect, our net worth is effectively decreasing even with inflation. The true value or buying power or "wealth power" is less and less over more and more people while fewer and fewer people as a whole are gaining more and more 'wealth power'. Stay the mathematical course and with more and more of our jobs going bye bye. We wouldn't be able to create new occupations fast enough. There is only so much you can do on a single planet economy.
We can't create enough new occupation / new markets (its part of a holistic picture). If 10 Million jobs go in a month, where are these 10 Million workers going to go. Other sectors would be flooded into economic disaster or we create a new market with new occupations to employ those 10 Million workers. The problem is, how many new occupations in new markets can we create on Earth to compensate for losing 90% of the work force as we know it to robots, machines, computers, etc.
The simple fact is, if this took place too much, too quickly, we be f---ed.
That is where space frontier would be the only viable long term future opening up more / new markets for service occupations.
Then we move beyond a planetary economy to an interstellar economy.
Hence forth, something like "High Colonies" ( the RPG game ).
Universal basic income of $0 hahaha
balkins, if you want to eat, grow a garden. if you want money, get a job. life is not nearly as complicated as you try to make it out to be.
when your fictitious ruling class says 'if there is no bread, let them eat cake,' well there are other options too. that's not a realistic scenario at this point though.
LiMX, curtkram, and Jla-x - the purpose of me quoting something from 1797 and referencing famous philosophers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx was to point out the obvious-
NOT A DAMN THING HAS CHANGED, since 1800 England, Germany etc.... Everything you guys just discussed was covered by Marx years ago. When lay people like ourselves discuss economics, nothing we say is frankly anymore advanced than Marx or Smith's basic thoughts over 150-200years ago.
curtkram - I thought the quote was interesting in context of robot labor with regard to command of labor. your points are engaging on this topic and worth addressing.
Doesn't Inheritance provide a good starting point for "command of labor"?
think about the rich kids who don't have to work as architects for a living and "command labor" in accordance with their paper architecture pipe dreams?
Isn't gambling on Corn a method for "commanding labor" indirectly but essentially through speculation alone.
Much of the US's economy is nothing more than speculative labor commanding, I would suggest.
marx and smith would make more sense and be more relevant to today's economy from that perspective olaf. i was thinking more that command of labor meant someone wanted corn, so they told someone to make corn. the product or even the end service has largely been removed from part where people make a profit.
so i guess you now have a labor class, the people who control the resources of production, which are essentially management now rather the titans of industry back in the day, and a third class that doesn't really do anything but have a lot of money. they aren't actually commanding labor or making decisions.
i suppose that could be the proletariat, petite bourgeois, and bourgeois, so i suppose you're right, it's all been done before.
I'm not following "it's been done before". When have robots and supercomputers made the majority of humans unemployable?
There would be the 2% of the population of the super rich in charge that owns the money, the lands and everything. They would have it because they already have the dominant control factor in order to make that happen. The have the "wealth-power" to control. They would command and control the resources. They are the management, the titans of economy and they command the labor.
If robots takes the jobs as the thread indicates the robots would be the labor class.
Then what the hell are the rest of us 98%? We would nothing and have nothing in the equation because we would not any class and person of no class has absolute nothing. The universal base income of a person of no class is $0. We are not part of the economy and therefore not part of the financial distribution and have no land to farm and eat from, no job to work and earn money and/or food supply, no money.
Now do you understand what I am getting at ????
The rich people wouldn't need us because they would have everything and all the buildings so why would they need Architects/Building Designers.
Most other creative work would be negligible and so we lose out big and I mean big time.
If that future path became reality, there would be no other option and no practical way to change things. They can just just systematically kill us off as just excess unneeded population. This would just be no different than what we have seen in the 20th century just as a more larger scale.
Since 2% would have everything, they don't need the other 98% taking up space and consuming resources. You'd see systemic execution of the 98%. Maybe 95% of the entire population.
So, 6.5 BILLION people killed off because they are just waste. No purpose. Not needed.
Isn't that a cruel and ugly future to look forward to.
I hope you enjoy that future.
I hope for a different future than that.
While robots haven't been the case. The idea has been done before but not with robots and computers.
The problem is with robots taking the jobs.... robots/computers/machines would be the 'labor class' and then the 2% would have more and more money funneled into their wallets and what about the rest of us. Us who would have no job and be a no class as we would not be the 2% with the wealth because we would never make it there. It be depleted and funneled into the 2%. The rest of us becomes jobless, penniless and landless (not just homeless) and probably then be killed off because we serve no practical part of that economy except consuming resources that the 2% owns and they would just kill us off when we don't serve them any benefit or gain.
We would just be a waste and pest to them.
thanks curt and jla-x. testing an arguement here and i see the holes.....by done before - see citizens photo, think Automation. isnt a robot nothing other than automation of some human task? more to LiMx point about Marx not relevant, many books I read, social and philosophical, within the last 40 years always dtart with Marx and maybe to Weber, but Marx is staple to philosophy on the economy
where is that?.....and ricki can one own "money"?
Olaf,
Yes in a way. I'll focus on U.S. money... namely the dollar notes. I'm pretty sure its more complicated than that.
While the U.S. dollars are Federal Reserve Note. It's the 'value' of of real world tangibles that is used to back the notes. When it was backed by gold, it would be a proportion of notes to that of gold. Now, its more complicated than that.
However, what you fail to understand is the rich people to some degree already bought the U.S. government and owns it and those people are holding the U.S. by its balls. Therefore, in such a future, they would have the lands. Even when they spend money to acquire the property, they would in turn get that money back. In a way we are spending more money paying the 'tax' of the rich businesses (ie. the profits) than we do we pay taxes to the federal, state, country and/or municipal governments combined.
So yeah, it would be a funny reciprocation circulation of wealth but every cycle these guys progressively retain more and more of the money in the world.
If the government were to try to forcibly take the money from these super rich, (ie. take the notes), the government has to compensate them in terms of gold and other resources used to back the notes. While gold alone as in the traditional Gold standard is no longer used, it is however backed notes or it would be phony money not worth anything. The government has to back the money's worth.
whatever dollars i owned are gone now - thanks Villanova
Fucking dope.
Olaf,
Dope!
now what do you do?
beta? was that dope as in ricki-b or me loosing money....automaton ricki B you are proof AI can learn? what does AI look like on DMT? will IBMs watson or whatever that joke is called believe in god if it takes DMT? is religion something that can be automated?
been stuffing eggs with candy....architecture.
Rikki.........>.........>.>>..........
I know reading is fundamental, but why do I feel brain cells dying, when I read Riki?
Because you're brain is full of out of shape brain cells that they die from the shock of having to work for a change?
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