In a counter-intuitive fashion, it is quite possible that we will need fewer and fewer programmers. Once a problem has been solved, there is no need to solve it again, and again. All of Facebook is made of 2000 employees, many of them are not software engineers.
Therapists: People are getting great results treating anxiety, or supporting stroke victims, and so on, using computers. Obviously, therapists have little incentive to automate their work, just like the teachers. But it only delays automation, it won’t prevent it. Imagine a piece of software that can monitor your anxiety 24/7 and provide help when needed?
Prostitution: I bet many Japanese men (and women) would pay good money for a night of sex with Hatsune Miku. The fact that you can’t get diseases is a strong incentive.
As for the political implications, I think that they are far reaching and more immediate than most people think. We have to collectively come up with solutions. Alas, most people are totally oblivious to the strong trends.
A good teaching program can only be good if there are good teachers that help create the software.
I am sure that in the seventies, people would have said that a good information retrieval system can only come about if librarian help create the software.
Then the Web (created by a Physicist) and Google (created by Computer Scientists) came about.
My point being that it is not clear that “teachers” will make themselves obsolete.
you’re really saying is that the forces of capitalism will eventually cause someone to give in to the siren call of money and help create the program that will replace them.
It is less about money than the freedom to tinker.
What about therapists? A computer could be easier to confide in, but might there be something to human interaction / affirmation in helping with psychological issues? Especially for those feeling alienated by an automated world?
Or entertainers? Is the theater going to be robots wearing people masks (e.g. “The Darfsteller” by Walter Miller)? Would anybody care how much a pitching machine’s slider breaks?
Prostitue? The sexbot is an old sci-fi standby, but I can’t imagine there won’t be some who prefer a human’s touch.
Plus there are some weird economics that start to come into play if you decide against killing all unnecessary humans. I consume roughly the same amount of resources spending my day idly by a pool or sorting envelopes. Even if a computer can do that 10,000 times faster, the energy to create and sustain me have already been allocated, where the sorting machine can ethically be turned off or not built.
But minor points :), overall I agree that we’re well on our way to automating most jobs.
Gives a 404. Otherwise I love the post. Very provocative and it will be interesting to see the disruption of knowledge work in the 21st century just as manufacturing was disrupted by automation in the 20th.
I’ve been thinking of this issue for a while since I started my PhD in Machine Learning. It looks like things will only be more extreme as we move towards hard AI. The solution, in my opinion, is to get rid of the financial system based on scarcity all together, or follow a mixed economical system (scarcity for resources which are distributed in an egalitarian way, and abundance for everything else). The P2P Foundation has a lot of interesting alternative models, including Ripple pay for P2P money, P2P governance, P2P manufacturing, and so on. I think this will shape the next phase, since traditional top-down money is defined as exchange of human labor, it has no future in automated/AI world.
However as we approach this realization collectively as a species, things will be economically harsher for most.
I used to worry about whether we will mobilize ourselves in a timely manner before the solution is clear to everyone, but then my adviser pointed me at Bernard Lietaer’s work on complimentary currency systems, which can serve as an interim solution.
Johnsays:
Underlying all of this is that computers really aren’t better at any of this stuff. A good teaching program can only be good if there are good teachers that help create the software. Same goes with every other profession. When you say certain professions are only delaying the inevitable, what you’re really saying is that the forces of capitalism will eventually cause someone to give in to the siren call of money and help create the program that will replace them. The computer itself can’t do diddly.
Christiansays:
Your train of thought / theme is one that has been stuck with me for a long time.
While I think, you are right and we/ human mainly stick to not automating certain jobs / processes because of superstition/incentive/… or facing to acknowledge that we are in fact not the crown of achievement in every respect, I find it hard to arrive at that point when those jobs we consider now as “need general intelligence” will be replaced.
That is, I suppose a redefinition of values, incentive, true meaning of fulfillment, purpose of life has to be established – which can hardly be provided by today’s elite.
I would be happy to have my “job†being reduced to 1/10th of the work I have to do once I have survival guaranteed, and no need to worry for the future
As argued by Vleben in the Theory of the Leisure Class (available for free on the Gutenberg Project site), most of our work goes toward aquiring “status”, not “survival”. (This is true, at least, in countries such as the USA.)
If you want to achieve a high status through work, then you must work far more than just what is required for survival.
I don’t need to save for my kids education because it will be free
Schooling and degrees remain costly because they belong to the industrial society.
Fortunately, education is already available cheaply. Spend a few years on MathOverflow and Wikipedia, and you can become a very good mathematician without setting foot on a campus. Moreover, you can already get certified (through MathOverflow badges) as a good mathematician.
The models are here, but it takes courage to let go of the old.
Lorenzosays:
Dear Daniel,
Interesting post as usual. I stumbled upon your blog by chance, and I found we both share similar views on a myriad of additional topics including this one. It is just anectodal evidence but this makes me think that in the tech/educated/internet-savy community the matter of machines subsuming humans’ jobs is becoming more and more evident to the point where it is no longer a matter of ‘if’ or ‘when’ will this happen, but of ‘how’.
So how are we going to do it? Either we embrace this change, and reconsider the whole job == money == (purchasing power) equation, or we will be left with some nice rioting. I know it’s “never that simple” (c) but given that the two forces at play here have both exponential growths, we might be caught completely unprepared by the velocity of such a sudden change. Market and interest combined together push for an exponential growth; technological change is (again, anectodally) following that pattern as well. Certainly there are places where the Internet is controlled/old/slow/not available/much less important than bare survival, but this is largely irrelevant for now. They will catch up at some point. Perhaps we’ll “outsource” to countries where power or cooling are cheaper because of latitude, instead of outsourcing where the cost of labour is cheaper.
I would be happy to have my “job” being reduced to 1/10th of the work I have to do once I have survival guaranteed, and no need to worry for the future (i.e. I know I don’t need to save for my kids education because it will be free, as well as my health care, etc.). In a way if ‘software’ could automate my daily job in the parts I do not like doing, well, I’d be happy. And I probably would end up doing what I like most anyways. But we’ll see.
As anyone who has experienced that form of direct democracy known as “governance by referendum” will tell you, the only thing worse than having politicians running things is having random voters doing so. Everyone thinks they know what the solutions to various problems are, but few have even the slightest idea how things really work, or how much money the government sounds on it’s various activities.
Auto grading of calculus is already here, and commonplace. It’s fair to middling, using technology like Maple to recognize equation input, it’s moderately picky about format, order of terms, etc.
@Pascal
In a counter-intuitive fashion, it is quite possible that we will need fewer and fewer programmers. Once a problem has been solved, there is no need to solve it again, and again. All of Facebook is made of 2000 employees, many of them are not software engineers.
@Paul
Therapists: People are getting great results treating anxiety, or supporting stroke victims, and so on, using computers. Obviously, therapists have little incentive to automate their work, just like the teachers. But it only delays automation, it won’t prevent it. Imagine a piece of software that can monitor your anxiety 24/7 and provide help when needed?
Entertainers: I like Hatsune Miku. She is absolutely great. Watch her sing and dance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYn2-vVsI8U).
Prostitution: I bet many Japanese men (and women) would pay good money for a night of sex with Hatsune Miku. The fact that you can’t get diseases is a strong incentive.
As for the political implications, I think that they are far reaching and more immediate than most people think. We have to collectively come up with solutions. Alas, most people are totally oblivious to the strong trends.
But after reading your post, I think programmers are probably safe for a while!
@John
A good teaching program can only be good if there are good teachers that help create the software.
I am sure that in the seventies, people would have said that a good information retrieval system can only come about if librarian help create the software.
Then the Web (created by a Physicist) and Google (created by Computer Scientists) came about.
My point being that it is not clear that “teachers” will make themselves obsolete.
you’re really saying is that the forces of capitalism will eventually cause someone to give in to the siren call of money and help create the program that will replace them.
It is less about money than the freedom to tinker.
What about therapists? A computer could be easier to confide in, but might there be something to human interaction / affirmation in helping with psychological issues? Especially for those feeling alienated by an automated world?
Or entertainers? Is the theater going to be robots wearing people masks (e.g. “The Darfsteller” by Walter Miller)? Would anybody care how much a pitching machine’s slider breaks?
Prostitue? The sexbot is an old sci-fi standby, but I can’t imagine there won’t be some who prefer a human’s touch.
Plus there are some weird economics that start to come into play if you decide against killing all unnecessary humans. I consume roughly the same amount of resources spending my day idly by a pool or sorting envelopes. Even if a computer can do that 10,000 times faster, the energy to create and sustain me have already been allocated, where the sorting machine can ethically be turned off or not built.
But minor points :), overall I agree that we’re well on our way to automating most jobs.
Yes, maybe in the long run. But in the meantime, there is still a lot of problems to be solved. I think it is an exciting time to be a programmer!
http://lemire.me/archives/2010/07/13/general-versus-domain-intelligence/
Gives a 404. Otherwise I love the post. Very provocative and it will be interesting to see the disruption of knowledge work in the 21st century just as manufacturing was disrupted by automation in the 20th.
@Adam
Sorry. The correct link is
http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2010/07/13/general-versus-domain-intelligence/
Hi Daniel,
Nice article!
I’ve been thinking of this issue for a while since I started my PhD in Machine Learning. It looks like things will only be more extreme as we move towards hard AI. The solution, in my opinion, is to get rid of the financial system based on scarcity all together, or follow a mixed economical system (scarcity for resources which are distributed in an egalitarian way, and abundance for everything else). The P2P Foundation has a lot of interesting alternative models, including Ripple pay for P2P money, P2P governance, P2P manufacturing, and so on. I think this will shape the next phase, since traditional top-down money is defined as exchange of human labor, it has no future in automated/AI world.
However as we approach this realization collectively as a species, things will be economically harsher for most.
I used to worry about whether we will mobilize ourselves in a timely manner before the solution is clear to everyone, but then my adviser pointed me at Bernard Lietaer’s work on complimentary currency systems, which can serve as an interim solution.
Underlying all of this is that computers really aren’t better at any of this stuff. A good teaching program can only be good if there are good teachers that help create the software. Same goes with every other profession. When you say certain professions are only delaying the inevitable, what you’re really saying is that the forces of capitalism will eventually cause someone to give in to the siren call of money and help create the program that will replace them. The computer itself can’t do diddly.
Your train of thought / theme is one that has been stuck with me for a long time.
While I think, you are right and we/ human mainly stick to not automating certain jobs / processes because of superstition/incentive/… or facing to acknowledge that we are in fact not the crown of achievement in every respect, I find it hard to arrive at that point when those jobs we consider now as “need general intelligence” will be replaced.
That is, I suppose a redefinition of values, incentive, true meaning of fulfillment, purpose of life has to be established – which can hardly be provided by today’s elite.
@Lorenzo
I would be happy to have my “job†being reduced to 1/10th of the work I have to do once I have survival guaranteed, and no need to worry for the future
As argued by Vleben in the Theory of the Leisure Class (available for free on the Gutenberg Project site), most of our work goes toward aquiring “status”, not “survival”. (This is true, at least, in countries such as the USA.)
If you want to achieve a high status through work, then you must work far more than just what is required for survival.
I don’t need to save for my kids education because it will be free
Schooling and degrees remain costly because they belong to the industrial society.
Fortunately, education is already available cheaply. Spend a few years on MathOverflow and Wikipedia, and you can become a very good mathematician without setting foot on a campus. Moreover, you can already get certified (through MathOverflow badges) as a good mathematician.
The models are here, but it takes courage to let go of the old.
Dear Daniel,
Interesting post as usual. I stumbled upon your blog by chance, and I found we both share similar views on a myriad of additional topics including this one. It is just anectodal evidence but this makes me think that in the tech/educated/internet-savy community the matter of machines subsuming humans’ jobs is becoming more and more evident to the point where it is no longer a matter of ‘if’ or ‘when’ will this happen, but of ‘how’.
So how are we going to do it? Either we embrace this change, and reconsider the whole job == money == (purchasing power) equation, or we will be left with some nice rioting. I know it’s “never that simple” (c) but given that the two forces at play here have both exponential growths, we might be caught completely unprepared by the velocity of such a sudden change. Market and interest combined together push for an exponential growth; technological change is (again, anectodally) following that pattern as well. Certainly there are places where the Internet is controlled/old/slow/not available/much less important than bare survival, but this is largely irrelevant for now. They will catch up at some point. Perhaps we’ll “outsource” to countries where power or cooling are cheaper because of latitude, instead of outsourcing where the cost of labour is cheaper.
I would be happy to have my “job” being reduced to 1/10th of the work I have to do once I have survival guaranteed, and no need to worry for the future (i.e. I know I don’t need to save for my kids education because it will be free, as well as my health care, etc.). In a way if ‘software’ could automate my daily job in the parts I do not like doing, well, I’d be happy. And I probably would end up doing what I like most anyways. But we’ll see.
As anyone who has experienced that form of direct democracy known as “governance by referendum” will tell you, the only thing worse than having politicians running things is having random voters doing so. Everyone thinks they know what the solutions to various problems are, but few have even the slightest idea how things really work, or how much money the government sounds on it’s various activities.
Auto grading of calculus is already here, and commonplace. It’s fair to middling, using technology like Maple to recognize equation input, it’s moderately picky about format, order of terms, etc.
“sounds” should be “spends”. Love that iPad typo correction.