Anyone else is happy about that ? When everything will be done by machines we will have to think about what it means to exist in this world without being a little hand.
'The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we eat?" the second by the question "Why do we eat?" and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?"' - Douglas Adams
Perhaps they shouldn't, but we've just gone and replaced their jobs without having solved scarcity - which is the magic pill that needs to be invented for a function society where you can do nothing productive yet still live.
In all practicality this means we need to retrain tens of thousands of people in some other form of repetitive task that hasn't been taken over by a robot. It doesn't mean they get to go off to a Star Trek-ian utopia where they can pursue higher pursuits without having to worry about survival.
In the long run this will probably pan out to be a net positive - these robots can do a job better, more precisely, and less expensively than a human, which will advance the state of the art further.
In the short run this will create unrest, poverty, starvation, and possibly arrest the hard-earned development of a country trying desperately to claw its way out of poverty.
It's funny, software automates far, far more than robots do, and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software destroys jobs. Software adds value, it may create efficiencies but it is not a job destroyer. And the same is true of physical automation as well.
We've come a long way since the days where everyone worked on the farm, or everyone worked in a factory. Automation has never created poverty or starvation. Look at Japan, which went through exactly the same process as China is today. In the mid 20th century it was a country heavily dependent on exports fueled by cheap labor (in 1950 Japan's per capita GDP was less than 1/5th of the US's). But it didn't take long for them to automated like crazy. Is Japan a poor, unruly, starving country today? No, it's one of the richest countries in the world with one of the highest standards of living.
> "and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software destroys jobs"
You've found one right here. Not all software destroys jobs, but much of it certainly does. More often than not this destruction is a net positive for society - but it tends to create localized minima that are hard to resolve.
In less abstract speech: by using software to destroy jobs we create more jobs that ostensibly have a greater positive impact to society, but that's really very little comfort to the auto plant worker in Michigan, or the call center agent in Minnesota, or the travel agent in California, most of whom are severely underqualified for these new jobs, and have no reasonable way of becoming qualified.
Humans are not discrete units of productivity - specializations, experience, education, intelligence, all of which exist as substantial barriers in making humans easily interchangeable.
One cannot reasonably take the position of "relax! we won't even remember this in 100 years", even though it is true. While society will recover from these periods of change, you still have millions of unemployed, hungry, desperate people at your door step right now, and you will have to face that problem regardless.
> "Automation has never created poverty or starvation."
Are you serious?
"Automation has never created a net decrease in productivity in the long term (measured in decades)" is probably more accurate.
If you want to see automation creating poverty and starvation just go to the rust belt in this country. Go to Detroit and see the boarded up houses, the burned out husks of neighborhoods, and then try to say with a straight face "automation has never created poverty or starvation".
Whenever this topic comes up on HN (and elsewhere) the response is invariably highly binary. Either automation is a noble advancement with no negative effects, or automation is a complete evil that destroys people. Both views are equally ridiculous. Automation is an inevitable fact that is, in the long term, a positive for society - but it creates very significant localized destruction for substantial amounts of time (measured in terms of human life).
The ignorance of that last part is dangerous. Automation has already put millions out of work just in this country alone, and will continue to put more people out of work. There are substantial gaps between the unemployed and the new classes of jobs that are being created, and bridging this gap is neither inevitable, nor trivial, nor will the magic of unbridled capitalism solve it automatically. It is a tremendous social issue that faces every society on this planet, and it should not be trivialized.
This is why a capitalist economy must be balanced with a robust welfare state. We luckily have an economic system that creates enough wealth to easily take care of the losers it also creates and still leave everyone better off.
I think it will depend on the culture its dropped into. Norway seems to have benefited greatly from its oil but its been a curse for some African countries. Total automation could be the same.
> but we've just gone and replaced their jobs without having solved scarcity
But surely automation, by robots or otherwise, is part of the solution to scarcity? By your definition, you couldn't have a post-scarcity society without them, for who would do the farming and the like in such a society?
It is, but it's the transition process that's difficult - you need to sustain people gradually automated out of their jobs while the post-scarcity economy is not yet working.
> where you can do nothing productive yet still live.
It's actually not possible to do that. Humans simply can't. As soon as a person has no reason to live, they start deteriorating.
If the person is healthy enough they turn to vices and intoxicants (legal or otherwise) to try to feel something. Other people simply wither. But in all cases a persons life is cut much shorter.
In lieu of a job, having children works too, since meeting their children's needs gives people a reason to exist (unless they have too much money, and hire a nanny).
The thing is, the same value is created, no matter if the work is done by humans or robots. The extreme would be a world where all work is done by robots, and the same value is created without the involvment of any human.
There shouldn't really be any reason for anyone to starve in such a world. It might sound like communism, but think of it.
The last I looked food isn't free, and I don't see Apple or Foxconn planning on using their increased profits to provide food for those that are now going to be without work.
>There shouldn't really be any reason for anyone to starve in such a world.
There is, because having food when your neighbor starves gives you power over them. Even in a world where all the work is done by robots, unless all the decisions about what work is done, how much and for whom, are also being made by robots, someone will find a way to oppress someone else with the system.
Which is exactly what will happen when the higher paychecks deploy automation everywhere, thus solving the "we need all those people to make stuff" problem.
The thing you're envisioning as a happy outcome, that is automation used everywhere and a society living happily above work is too "socialist" and "communal" to come to pass.
The huge masses of people would be useless, and left to rot, as are the huge masses of African, Asian, Indian, etc people today.
These workers have no other way to earn money. I am not saying Foxconn is an angel, but it is the only option these workers have. The other options are to work in agriculture, or educate/train themselves in some other trade/profession. We know how difficult agriculture is. Re-training takes time, effort and money, and I am not sure if the workers can afford any of the three.
It would be wonderful if all the shitty/boring/junk/monotonous work is left to robots. But that has to happen gradually. While we improve robots technology, we should also solve the problem of finding enough work for the workforce that the robots will replace. These two needs to go hand in hand. Otherwise we'll have some serious trouble in our hands. We are at 7 billion people today, and we are on track for 9 billion in the next few decades. How are we going to keep this many people busy?
I notice that lack of ways to earn money affects already some western countries for a decade or two.
Some people (especially young ones not yet placed inside hierarchies that are excuses to give money to the older ones) have trouble with earning basic levels of income.
There are few solutions to that discovered so far.
US for example builds prisons. Hires some young people as guards and puts lots of others inside. It's easily done by penalizing almost harmless activity popular among poor youth. Then uses this as excuse to provide for both groups.
Northern European countries give their young lots of education. It's nice because some of those young people might eventually learn to do something actually economically useful like building robots, electronics or software. All this education also gives government great excuse for providing for those students and their families (having a child while young is encouraged there).
I'm not sure what kind of excuse will china make up to provide for their youth but I hope it won't be something horrible.
You have stumbled into an old fallacy, the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs. More robots increases productivity for society and creates the excess resources for new and better jobs in other sectors, normally the service sector. This is a huge win.
You have stumbled onto an old fallacy either - that the creation of new jobs as a result of technological development floats all boats equally.
Replacing people with robots certainly increases productivity, and frees up resources for other pursuits - it is also unlikely that the people whose jobs have been removed will find employment in many of these new jobs.
So sure, the entirety of the closed system (i.e. the Earth) has experienced a net productivity boost - but for the areas impacted (i.e. that part of China) this is very much a net negative.
This is probably the greatest social issue we face today. We are very rapidly replacing the jobs of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people. We are creating jobs elsewhere as a result - but the intersection of these new jobs with the skills of the unemployed is very low, and the nature of these new jobs also means retraining is becoming harder, not easier.
Someday they will be forced to. Its just cost of production will fall down so rapidly and to such low amounts.
Getting rich that way will be like trying to fill a terabyte scale hard drive by adding 10 byte text files. It will be a exercise in futility. Think of it more like free phone calls, unlimited internet band width and free apps.
But think about it - if the cost of labor plummets, and material costs plummet because the labor required to gather and refine materials plummets, the cost of pretty much every need and most wants are ridiculously low to non-existant. It's quite similar to the discussions about the economic impact of a molecular assembler.
Indeed, I read that book last year and it felt really relevant, Vonnegut sort of nailed it with the second/third industrial revolution and the kind of social problems it would cause.
