Creative Retirement - Great Decisions or Friday Roundtable
MAJOR TITLE -- date, 2015
Subtitle
Jim,
From an economic point of view I can't get my mind around where the money will come from if the Robots do all the work. What are we humans supposed to do since we will still have to work to provide food, clothing and shelter for ourselves. I don't understand how that will occur.
Fred
We can hope some other people will start asking that question. People make platitudes that we have always had population growth, immigration, and absorbed or integrated this into the economy of supply and demand. I see the advent of robots/artificial intelligence as a totally different world. On a par or even more extreme than the development of agriculture was to hunter-gathers or the industrial revolution to artisans. A total change for society.
Brief review, just for completeness. Robots, computers, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are used interchangeably in their discussion. If the precedence that computer power doubles every year and a half is applied and if or when it has an equivalent IQ of one half of one point of a human average IQ, then in two years it can be expected to have the equivalent of an IQ of 1. Two more years, IQ is 2. The progression is IQ=4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, that is the equivalent of a college student is achieved in 8 doublets or say 15 years. Starting now, we will see an AI having human capabilities by 2030 (Think worm, insect, fish, crow, dog, chimp, child, adolescent, adult?). By the date I used in class of 2040, then IQ could go to , 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048. or, incomprehensible intellectual powers.
Back to history. Consider the impact of cotton pickers on plantations, the slave and ex-slave was thrown out of work by machines. One hundred five years later our society still suffers with that displacement. Your question is correct. If blacks (humans) do not work, where does the money to live by come from ? The government has stepped in with a wide variety of programs. But the welfare model does not bode well when the majority population, coast to coast, are cast out of work. When drivers are displaced and then followed by great numbers of other workers, there will not be an opportunity for manual work in factory, shop, or office. Politicians will talk of jobs, but that ship will have sailed. The condition of the non-worker as a bum will be applied to the majority of us. That cannot be allowed to happen (or can it?).
We have to change our concept of what constitutes a good human life. Pride in work ( so important to self-worth) in the traditional sense disappears. I enjoy retirement with many activities. But society as a very large grouping of people can not be allowed to follow the only example we have, that of a black underclass or the homeless vagrant. There will of necessity be a re-definition of a worthy life and of idleness. A total change is society's idea of moral worth. This is a social issue : Life worthiness will be redefined. Man needs something to believe in -- religion, patriotism, family; something to strive for -- accomplishment, appreciation. Else he become a herd that is feed and mills around. Man is gullible and we can expect genius to satisfy those poetic needs. We have to be careful to allow disruptive innovation. I am uncomfortable with a drugged society that simply exits. That is outside of my realm. It might cause you some long periods of consideration.
That social issues follow in time your question ; that of where will the money come for living ? But it is first necessary to understand the depth of the problem and that it entails all society. It is a big problem and big changes are not only warranted, but are demanded. What will be the source to distribute the largess of the economy upon the masses of unemployed people? There are two major ways. As currently, create dozens of programs to put various classes of people into welfare programs, ie. early retirement, unemployment insurance, supplemental unemployment, extended unemployment, et al. Current example of gay marriage can be said is a way to put roommates onto spousal benefit packages. Dozens of little programs can eventually cover a great number of people. This approach is likely if nobody starts thinking – it needs to be soon.
Or, we might adopt an unequivocal universal right to a livable income. Bureaucrats will assure that this becomes complicated, but think of it simply as each person has a universal credit card that is refilled every month (based on some formula). Funds to be expended on newly derived worthy expenditures of human time, such as Creative Retirement programs, etc..
Where does that money come from in the future? At a micro-level it comes from efficiency. A robot costing a few dollars an hour to do the same job as does a tens of dollars per hour cost of a human. Or, one integrated robot does what used to take a factory full of people.
But, one cannot live on efficiency any more than a car can run on saving is fuel efficiency ; it needs the expenditure side of real gasoline. Robots will take on worker performance, of clerical performance, provide optimization, efficiency, planning, coordination, and administration -- you will immediately recognize that these are the components of corporate and government management. In the wonderfully effective capitalistic system of the recent industrial age, people built productive systems, supplied necessities and reaped rewards of profits while spewing out wages and benefits to participants along the way.
What will, could, should the new order look like? It could be chaotic. It it could be orderly. I hate to think of a total free-for-all when masses of people become unemployed clamoring for aid. Lets think orderly. Who owns, that is to ask, who is entitled to the fruits of robotic efficiency ? This is your question, restated, and the better part of my thoughts for recent months.
Here is a satisfying possibility. Society must be the owner of the benefits of robots. Capitalists will claim that right because they fund the initial expense of robots under corporate ownership. We (I, anyway) see the universal credit card as the item that needs funding. Where do government funds come from today ? They come primarily from corporate taxes and individual taxes. Individual taxes will largely go away at the same time that jobs go away. Fees and tariffs are small and eventually will go away, too. This leaves corporate taxes as the only source. There has to be a way to raise a tax sufficient to support a whole population. Thus tax the productivity of robots. One can leave alone the remaining profits for costs of operations and some return to legal owners so as to minimize disruption.
There should be enough left over from efficiency improvements to make the transition without wholesale riots and martial law supporting one side or the other. (no guarantees). This tax will likely be of a different scale from the non-robot tax structure Thus conventional, say 20% tax on traditional production and 80% on robotic production. Easier said than done. The complexity of cost accounting and of service industries makes up a significant portion of an enterprise activity. Two things come to the rescue.
One, robots will run government, by rules, without corruption, and with efficiency. -- conditions not present today. Government consists of planning, coordination, monitoring, and administration which are all tasks easy for computers. (Your congressman does not prepare and sign your social security check; a computer system has done this for years, and automatically withheld taxes.)
Second, robots (computers) got their start in life in accounting, payrolls, and monitoring. Acceptance of the planning and other administrative functions will be easy. It is hard to estimate the progression of each facet of the robot-run world ; each topic raised, of an endless number possible, has taken days of my thoughts. I am comfortable that the future will develop into a standardized, fully acceptable condition, over time -- that is what computers do best.
As an advance planner and as a systems engineer, I have done it, and an entity multiple times smarter than me will accomplish more, faster, better.
Yet, there is no certainty here. Robot technology might be nationalized, or shut down by religious fervor, or co-oped by a coup, or be expended in a fight between our computer versus their computer -- war to the end . . . of humanity.
Hopefully, computers will develop a self balancing system, just as capitalism discovered the marvel of supply and demand, elasticity, and other aspects of modern economic life. Computers will initially optimize from the directions given by humans. As things stabilize, daily control by humans evaporates until only overall direction is needed. Each level disappears in sequence -- supervisor, manager, director, president. We will leave the level of Board of Directors as far enough down the road to neglect for the moment.
Once computers have optimized, what happens next? Computers are not imaginative. Will the world stagnate ? (albeit at a high level?)
Will exceptional men (much as political candidates) [grin] , be integrated to allow continued improvement of the world ? This is still unknown, but well in the future, decades away (but not centuries) First the robots will equalize the benefits of human life to the whole world. Asia, Africa, ... will be big tasks. But application of computers and efficiency from an established model will be child's play by then. An entire world existing at just-above current western standard of living will not be a bad place to live. Thus the issue of future directions comes back into play. Generations of development might take micro-seconds to a computer. Human reaction time will be a limiting factor. We need a constitutional convention to set directions; sometime soon.
How will computers be accepted ? One strategy would be to present a human face, ie., a virtual presence of a President Bartlett (from West Wing, a popular TV show with a near perfect man as president). There might have to be a second coming of Mohamed in a similar vain for the rest of the world. (Hope the NSA is monitoring this and gives the idea to the CIA.)
Computers do not have a consciousness, a soul. What these items are in actually is another subject of conjecture. Does this evolve spontaneously? Thoughts of this are beyond my current thinking. Computers don't have to think in the same way as we do to accomplish our tasks. Machine motion can equally well be accomplished with electricity, pneumatic, muscle. So, too, mental motion might be powered by other than human volition. Might the computer develop its own goals ?
My concern, along with that of Steven Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and science fiction writers, is that when artificial intelligence achieves its initial purpose to efficiently support the lives of all humankind -- will it determine that there is, or is not, utility in that task. The logic of efficiency may suggest that the best way to eliminate the weeds in the garden is to eliminate the garden. For robots to determine that humans are a drag on the efficient running of earth is possible and the AI planning module may decide that men are to be minimized (sterilization?), or to be eradicated.
This raises another question, one that has occupied my mind of late : is humanity worthy of survival ? riots, crime, trafficking, stupidity, tendency to corruption, ... Is man good? Can man become good ? Can robots overhaul human nature ? What defines worthiness ? Initial thoughts are not encouraging, but a few hymns bring peace and hope. Religion has provided a basis for humans since just-before recorded history. If the computers had a god, a divine mission, such as serving mankind as an irrevocable foundation, then those concerns might be alleviated.
[Debate Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics -- taken as gospel by some and laughed at by others.]
I am reminded of a favorite science fiction story in which space travelers arrive on earth and provide all sorts of good things in the service of mankind. Somebody finds their textbook. "How to Serve Man". Over the many months it takes to decipher the book, thousands of persons have gone up to the alien world. On eventual translation, "How to Serve Man", turns out to be a cook book.
The brave new world of plenty and peace may turn about in an unpredictable fashion. Our future will certainly be vastly different, if it exists.. We don't have that many years to prepare. Layoffs are starting now. Consensus of those thinking on the subject is 30% replacement in ten years, and I am expecting 5% more in each of the following years.
Riots or plenty ? Stagnation or promise ? Lay-about or leisure ?
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