I wish, we will not create world with robots as shown in movie Elysium. I wish we could create a world with universal basic income where warehouse slaves are replaced with robots and people can do something better than picking orders in constant fear of being too slow.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's a real risk. For example, Saudi Arabia, which practices UBI [1] and otherwise transfers a lot of oil wealth to citizens, also is pretty low down on ratings of citizen freedom. [2] Many observers see it as Saudi royalty buying political compliance.
Given that the US is now on the list of backsliding democracies [3], and given the era in US politics where government money was used to cement political loyalty [4], any sort of serious UBI plan has to have a plausible story of how it won't end in anti-democratic corruption or worse.
That's relatively hard to corrupt, in that it's a federal program with clear numeric criteria drawn from a system that is robust because it's a big slice of government revenue.
Also, as far as popularity goes, at least in the US there's a strong allergic reaction to The Wrong People getting government money. So the mortgage tax credit is seen as fine and reasonable, but "strapping young bucks" getting food stamps is a deep outrage. So I think UBI won't become truly popular until politicians can find a way to get enough control over who gets it such that only the right people (wink, wink) get it.
They can still strike, which throws a spanner in the works of production. So they have some leverage. But who cares if people on UBI strike? What, will they stop watching TV for a day?
This is why UBI is the capitalist solution to a post-scarcity world; it still places capitalists at the top of the pyramid as the owners and beneficiaries of capital. The solution we should be striving for in a post-scarcity world is democratic ownership of capital like robots, so that we may all share in the fruits of their labor.
Yes, I agree the people who build the robots should share in the wealth of the things they create. I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.
> Yes, I agree the people who build the robots should share in the wealth of the things they create.
Good! I hope you also agree share people who actually produce the goods are entitled to bigger share?
> I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.
I assume "people who create robots" will be tiny minority, so what you are describing is exactly what OP said: bunch of people who create nothing vote to seize the robots (from their creators) and redistribute it (to themselves). All through democratic means, of course!
You can do lots of things that aren’t violent. You can convince them, first of all. Why isn’t that an option? Or we can compensate them. We can use social pressure. We can use the justice system. We can pass laws. There are plenty of options aside from violence.
And how does one argue for that future without immediately being labeled a communist/socialist seeking to nationalize the (robotic) means of production?
Sidestep and don’t engage with any labels. In my experience 99% of people who throw that word around as a pejorative can’t articulate what socialism is and how it upsets them. If you avoid any overt labels and stick to substantive topics, it’s very possible to have deep conversations with such people where they reveal they agree with some socialist ideas without even knowing it.
A current fully-automated restaurant uses 46 different types of robots [1], costs $29M USD [2] to deliver a 600 seat venue serving a 200 dish repertoire. The opex costs on that alone are going to draw out the capex payback quite a bit, before even getting into how the startup cost was around 5-10X conventional restaurants' startup costs. There isn't a Moore's Law for robots and their opex costs that lets us wait around for 10 years and then start innovating at 1/10th cost basis.
Someone please correct me where I'm going wrong here, because with my investor hat on, I can't make the numbers pencil out in these pop press robot-replacing-labor scenarios. In continuous manufacturing, high-risk environments, and all that sort of existing problem spaces, sure, but general Moravec's Workforce type activities, the numbers are nowhere near adding up for me.
I can only speculate, but the 40 robots does not like to cost more than $4M: https://cobotsguide.com/2016/06/universal-robots/ The software can be reused in 2nd restaurant reducing the cost dramatically. And then buying another 10 set of robots reduce unit cost by another ~30%.
In the video, they showed a conveyor system with lots of elevator stations, and pull-up dumb waiter stations. Conveyor systems with precise controls like that in general get spendy in a BIG hurry. I also see they don't show how the cleaning robots work; that would be news to me if there is a generalized cleaning robot that does as well as a fast food bus person. I can believe a huge chunk of change was dropped on real estate alone, but there were some pretty specialized robots in that video instead of the universal robots you were pricing out.
I'd like the pricing story to change, as I know a ton of households would pay for a general cleaning robot for their homes.
How can you not think this is great? Freeing humans from menial tasks is the way forward. Remember when people (mostly women) would spend hours washing? Machines and automation freed them.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
"most people can end up miserably poor" == "ever-increasing inequality"
Which begs the question - is the misery of poverty due to the lack of access to important goods or services, or because of the relative wealth standing?
Poor people can't afford to live. This leads to all kinds of shit we should have -as a species - eliminated decades ago; kids with Rickets, parents that skip meals so their kids can eat, foregoing heating so they can eat, working 3 jobs just to pay the rent, having zero healthcare. And that's just in developed countries.
Poor people don't care that they will never own a Ferrari (or even a car newer than 15 years old, ever). They care about the basics, food, water, shelter.
Once we don't have people in developed (and undeveloped) countries living without adequate food or being one bad week or accident away from homelessness we can come back to see if they are just simply jealous.
So if misery of the poor and inequality largely aren't the same, there might be a path where inequality increases while the quality of life of the poor also increases?
Globally, at least, we appear to be well along that path. The number of people living in extreme poverty has declined precipitously over the last few decades [0].
Philosophically, why is inequality an inherently bad thing? If the poorest among us universally had the standard of living of today’s millionaires, why should we be bothered by the existence of trillionaires or quadrillionaires?
For me, it comes to a differential in political power. The greater the magnitude of inequality, the easier it is for the quadrillionaires to put the plebeian millionaires back into abject poverty.
> Philosophically, why is inequality an inherently bad thing?
As you said, it's because money begets control of other people's lives. If the only thing you could do with money is live in luxury, then hardly anyone would care about it but wealth can be used to:
1. Ensure your plans never fail because you continually inject money into the equation. And by that ensure that other peoples plans always fail because they run out of money first.
2. Stymie actions and actors that you dislike. (and revenge on your enemies)
3. Materially, improve the lives of your children.
Automation solves problems that can be addressed by people in poverty.
Automation funnels that money away from people in poverty to property owners.
There is no support today, nor is any on the horizon, for people poised to be displaced by automation (in the US).
Combine all of these, and you're going to end up with a class of people with an inability to meet their basic needs, and with no support from the government. This historically doesn't end well.
Then those are problems to solve with social policy. Solving poverty by walking technology backwards isn't a solution. Technology is too powerful. Whichever society would be the first to renounce technology would also be the last because everyone else would say "Oh, that's why we like washing machines and self-driving cars".
And let's just say we lived in a unified society somehow. The net suffering of all peoples could only be alleviated by progressing technology forward and proper social policy. Removing one doesn't help solve the problem.
Remove all automation we already have and civilization goes to zero immediately. We already have a ton of automation. And yet, the jobless rate is at record lows, despite the pandemic.
Basic unemployment rates are at 4.6%, which is not an all time low. A 20 year low would be Oct '19, which was 3.5%
Also, if you dig beyond the basic rates (for example, into the "not in the labor force, but want to be"), you will see that it's around 6M, whereas the 20 year low is closer to 4M.
I'm not advocating for removing automation. I'm warning that rolling out the automation of even more jobs is going to cause societal problems. Perhaps I'm hoping the right person will read this and start doing something about it, since I'm not that person.
The point is it’s not 99%, even though 99% of the population from 100 years ago would be unemployable today due to automation. Technology and culture change each other
Sure, eventually, culture will shift, and new classes of jobs will be created.
But that's not happening right now (see earlier comments about social legislation), and it won't in anything resembling "in time" to prevent more people from losing their jobs with no reasonable replacements (i.e. above-poverty line wages) in sight.
> As someone who works flat-out to increase automation every day, I certainly hope the unlucky will be OK, but I am also convinced that they will be
It's easy to think that our actions have no consequences, or more accurately that "someone else" will take care of the consequences of the actions we take. And the more we say it to ourselves, the more we believe it.
Your central thesis is that more automation = bad, at least in the short term, and should therefore be halted. I've got a problem with that.
- Why is the amount of automation we have good, and more is bad? That's an "I've got mine" approach. You're essentially saying that you're happy with your gadgets (dishwasher et al) and with the current price level and variety of consumer goods and no further improvement is needed.
- Who decides where the line between enough and too much is? A rich Westerner? Or an African without lights, running water, or a washing machine, who works by manually recycling garbage?
- How did we deal with the massive changes automation has already made to society? We're vastly better off now, why shouldn't we continue?
I don't think people are saying fewer robots are the solution. What I hear is words of warning, to be mindful of how the resulting gains and "freedom" are distributed. The goal of is (or at least should be) to reduce suffering, not merely reallocate it.
Manna[1] is a good short story that talks about these two potential futures. I agree that in particular, it seems more likely that the unemployment welfare hellscape might be more likely, unfortunately.
Even if machines produced all goods, that still doesn’t imply post-scarcity. Some things are inherently scarce: front row tickets to a show, reservations at a hot restaurant, or a certifiably original piece of art.
It really depends on who owns the robots. As it is now, the richer you are the more robots you'll be able to afford and the less labor you'll need. When labor isn't in demand anymore and most people don't have robots, then most people won't have income anymore, forcing them into poverty and revolution. Robot police and military could make successful revolution impossible.
I think robots will follow a pattern similar to cars, tv's, kitchen machines, computers and such. First only a few can afford them, but in time prices come down and functionality goes up.
Washing machines didn't eliminate all demand for labor. It was pretty niche like most applications so far. And yeah, most of the world still doesn't have them, so those positive feedback loops have been there the whole time.
any large scale, long running space colonies will need huge effort of robots that don't mind the hostile environment, without much much more advanced robots space colonization is a dream and so the end of life as we know it is certain (just wait for a big enough asteroid or a near supernova).
My washing machine does a lot better job than I could. My oven is much more reliable at heating than I am at building campfires. My computer is much quicker at maths than I am. My TV is cheaper than going to the theatre.
Automation is great when it works well, we just forget about it when it does, so we generally only recognise the bad.
Try using multiple soap packets and rinse-aid. Works wonders.
Good thing we have mostly automated production of soap packs, so they’re cheap, plentiful, and almost as good as the handmade ones our caveman ancestors used
I really want to shout out Maytag for pushing woman's rights forward. Without all that haphazard laundry out of the way, they never would've garnered equal pay or saw themselves as equal in the workplace.
Please.
To think there are only positives in this change is a naive approach of the future. Sure, there will be some benefits but we are in for a world of hurt if we maintain our current social structures (at least in the US) and decimate the working population.
Labor saving home appliances, changes in family size, and convenience foods are a pretty big deal for how people of any gender spend their time. Time spent cleaning has decreased, and been replaced with other activities. Parenting has changed a lot and become much more intensive. One did not cause the other, but our modern lives absolutely co-evolved with appliances.
Any progress is great progress here. I am looking forward to a day when I can buy a robot that can do laundry end to end, from taking to the laundry machine, transferring to the dryer, to folding the clothes!
We have ever increased the number of bullshit jobs that produce nothing. They don't even do anything to pretend they do something. David Graiber talked at length about this issue.
On the left wing, people like Andrew Yang, are proponents of UBI. The right wing is scared of UBI because if we do UBI, those bullshit job holders might just stay home. That will be a disaster in so many ways.
Flipside, lets not do UBI and instead do automation. We put all these bullshit job holders out of a job. It's exactly the same disaster, possibly even worse.
Lets now propose the government makes only themselves the only legal owner of any commercial robot. So Ford has to rent the robots from the government. That rent money goes to paying the bullshit job holders. It's the same disaster.
It's not just economical or political disaster. It's even mental health. There's a very large number of people whose entire self-worth derives heavily from their job. Pay them to stay home and they'll be depressed at home.
I think Keynes is someone who figured out first. The 40 hour work week needs to die. The best solution any government can do is stop changing minimum wage but start decreasing the threshold for overtime. We need to pressure the 40 hour work week down. Which is happening to some degree. Many countries have pressured down to ~37 hours. This is where we must go to solve the problem.
the problem with all of these robots is that they can't go where humans go. Humans and animals can basically travel on any terrain. they have to be on flat surfaces and so the floors need to be made for them. That means they can't go on stairs, uneven surfaces, dirt, grass, docks, rocky surfaces, etc. If this is solved, it opens up so many more opportunities.
That's why you start with indoor robots. Because of the ADA, they should be able to go anywhere that a person with a wheelchair can go... which is pretty much all the places in our public life. Yes, they won't go off-roading, but that's okay as a starting point.
For sure. And the other solution is facilities built for machinery first, not humans. As an example, pretty much any factory floor is designed on this principle.
The interesting question to me is how much household design will shift. Both the rise of the automobile and the decline of household servants have shifted architecture.
This feels a little hyperbolic - did we read the same article? I'm looking at a GIF of a robot pushing a chair a few inches, and fail to see how it could come across as "an insult to life itself." What provokes such a strong reaction for you?
As someone who knows very little about this space, the concept of using a virtual world to rapidly train on various tasks seems fascinating. I had a similar reaction upon hearing how GTA V was used to help train a neural network for self-driving cars a few years back.
People's opinions are in many circumstances driven primarily by the current zeitgeist. Less reasoning and more reflection and amplification of large scale moods.
GP mentions in a sibling comment that they've been working with computers for decade, as if that's a long time. Some of us have been at this for many decades, long enough to see the zeitgeist shift and things really change. The current tech backlash mood started sometime in the early 2010s and really kicked into high gear in the mid 2010s. GP has never really known a world that wasn't overtly negative towards tech.
I think that's pretty minor compared to the stuff they already do, such as tracking how we use certain pieces of software and sending telemetry data to 3rd parties.
For the sake of a good discussion, could you introspect a bit and see if you can find a reason why it might make you feel that way? I think this is a really fascinating discussion worth talking about.
I mean, this is demonstrating things the now dead PR2 demonstrated a decade ago, and even then it was nothing new. Since then there have been a string of startups just like this one that have come and gone.
We'll see if something with an arm has as much success, but so far not much as evidenced by the graveyard of companies that have been trying. One will crack the code soon, maybe this one.
