First, it is oversimplification. Robots don't eat jobs as in "there is nothing more to do for humans." The argument is that automation will decrease the wage share (labour share) and increase the share of capital (wage share has been in decline in OECD countries since early 70's.)
Secondly, history disagrees. Luddites had it right first. When industrialization started, automation reduced the living standards of workers for several decades. What turned things around was political struggle and unions. There was violence and people were shot at factory gates. Automation itself is not going to create utopia. There has to be political change in how we share profits.
Automation and Robots create new economic situation where the value and ratio between human capital and capital changes.
Krugman has written few easy to digest articles that explain why Anderseens first and second point are very problematic.
Yep, it is going to be pretty much Industrial Revolution 3.0.
The people that are too old to learn new skills are going to need to end up on social security [and capital will need to be taxed for it]. For everyone else, there will need to be a permanent safety net [basic income, continuation of existing welfare programs on a larger scale, or something like that] and heavily subsidized post secondary education for any skillset that is desirable in that new economy [which will have to come out of capital's share as well].
Otherwise, we'll just end up with more crime and bloodshed.
The system in place is intended to maximize profits for a ruling class. It was put in place when the feudal and the slave system was deemed inefficient.
The vassalage and chains were replaced by laws and religious dogma. “Thou shall not steal”, “Its against the law to steal”.
When we see rising in criminality its because some people are fleeing the system. Crimes are a symptom of lack of control of the actual economic system.
> Your job, and every job, goes to a machine. [...] This sort of thinking is textbook Luddism
The quick condemnation as "Luddism" is counter-productive because it allows side-stepping critical thinking about how new technologies may impact our life -- whether it is ultimately for the good or the bad.
The cry of luddism should be made cautiously, because it so often is accompanied by rose-color technological optimism.
Technology surely does hold the potential to make our lives better, and there are many ways in which it has, but when we talk about truly radical technologies that can utterly and irrevocably change the world and the way we view ourselves in relation to it (e.g. powerful AI), it is worthwhile to think long and hard before that game-changer arrives.
For example, I do agree that I'd like most jobs to be automated eventually, with the outcome of:
> The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.
Yet, I highly doubt that the default outcome of:
> Let markets work ( this means voluntary contracts and free trade) so that capital and labor can rapidly reallocate to create new fields and jobs.
Is going to be this sort of automation utopia where we're free from labor. More likely there will be a long and painful battle about implementing basic income or some other powerful social safety net; it will likely only be after increased poverty and misery that the safety net will be begrudgingly granted if the particular brand of captialism we currently embrace continues.
A more pessimistic outcome is that powerful AI arrives before we've really thought through the moral and ethical issues, and it possibly destroys us, or is developed and exploited by military interests to who knows what outcome.
> The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.
Some of those , like arts and philosophy and exploration and adventure would not generate an income, and would be done for free/fun.
Some others like science[1] and large parts of creativity[2] might be highly automated, requiring only a few experts.
Fields that aren't highly repetitive(like many types of programming) and things that require a human touch(which computers also seem to attack[3]) might be more resistant to automation.
In the crazy utopian world described, there would probably be a lot of accumulated capital struggling to get used productively.
My idea would be in the struggle to accumulate/protect capital, in a world where human materialistic needs are perfectly met. The money will flow into highly risky creative projects. Where the vast vast majority of projects are expected to fail, funded by highly diversified funds.
Virtually everyone would be expected to obtain/raise money working for these funds on creative projects. It would be considered the 'norm'.
Kickstarter for example could be beginning of this
First , the problem is that this won't happen in an utopian world, this will happen in our materialistic world.
We're quite far from that utopian world.That will take long political struggle. My guess is that when we're there , machines will probably surpass humans even in the arts.
Even if not,as far as i know ,the "youtube economy" i.e. people who earn full time salary on you tube is quite small. So i'm a bit pessimistic about it filling the economy.
"Even if not,as far as i know ,the "youtube economy" i.e. people who earn full time salary on you tube is quite small. So i'm a bit pessimistic about it filling the economy."
The point is that money making projects will be so rare, that people would have no choice but to put money into projects that have the remotest chance making money. Funds will fund millions/billions of projects on the basis of finding one superstar project. They would diversified on a massive scale. This would be better than letting money flounder.
That or a kickstarter model where people simply give money to projects that interests them.
Why will money making projects will be so rare ? people have a certain amount of attention=money and money to give to entertainment. That probably won't drastically change.
And from that pile of money, the industry has quite an efficient ways to find superstar projects. On the other hand, on the surface your way doesn't seem efficient or profitable , and it even goes against improvements we made in that process like using big data.
And with regards to kickstarter, i haven't yet though about how it and the future.
> A more pessimistic outcome is that powerful AI arrives before we've really thought through the moral and ethical issues, and it possibly destroys us, or is developed and exploited by military interests to who knows what outcome.
But it's not a very likely one. Spontaneous AI is almost impossible, primarily because we design and control the substrate. AI is very very hard, and when we get there, it will be very unlikely that it turns on us, or at least not for a millennia or two. This fear is a result of some seriously good sci-fi stories, but not a lot of logic or fact,
Once we get smarter than human AI, it can improve itself or make even better AIs, which make better AIs, and so on. It could very rapidly become far, far more intelligent than us. A being that powerful could do whatever it wants. Manipulate humans, hack the entire internet, design nanotechnology, etc. It's very unlikely that it would have human morality, and so wouldn't care about eliminating us to turn the Earth into a giant supercomputer, or just prevent us from ever creating competing AIs.
> The counterargument to a finite supply of work comes from economist Milton Friedman — Human wants and needs are infinite, which means there is always more to do.
I think one aspect of this that's often ignored is that while human needs might be finite, natural resources are not. I think a lot of the economic malaise felt in the west as of late has to do with simple resource constraints: our ability to simply grow the economy in order to compensate for jobs lost to automation and globalization is limited by the simple fact that the price of crude oil has looked like this over the past 30 years: http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-char....
Not only that, even if you only consider new needs as being in the entertainment sector (games, social networks, movies, etc.) there's the fact that attention is a limited resource: there's only so much minutes a person can dedicate in a day to apps and content. Even if everyone would start producing content, we'd face a situation where everyone is in competition with everyone else for users' attention, which is what is already happening in a smaller scale with the big names of the web and mobile.
"But with that access, with those tools in the hands of billions, it is hard to believe that the result will not be a widespread global unleashing of creativity, productivity, and human potential. It is hard to believe that people will get these capabilities and then come up with … absolutely nothing useful to do with them?"
This is an assumption that is, simply put, false. We have had the tools to do amazing things for a long time but we haven't done nothing amazing with them, we just adapted them to our existing realities. Technology didn't revolutionize our lives, it was slowly integrated into them and adapted to our previous lifestyles. Maybe the author should read this piece to get a dose of reality:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140110-technologys-greates...
A significant portion of growth is substitution. As oil/gas gets more expensive, alts will most likely go more mainstream and come down in price as economy of scale kicks in. I'm handwaving a bit - there are process issues, but as scale goes up so does the money for improving processes.
We already see this with solar panels in Hawaii.
But the principal reason people don't use more solar is that oil and gas are much cheaper now. Nat. gas in particular is quite cheap. And tracking gasoline prices ( as a proxy for oil costs ) from the early '80s to now, those prices generally did not keep pace with inflation.
I think that we're short on jobs mainly because of poor instrumentation in our monetary policy. Scott Sumner and the other Market Monetarists have built on Milton Friedman's work and believe that the wrong metric is used to steer monetary policy.
It might be uncharitable, but the Right seems to prefer a shortage of jobs in the service of the exceptionalism myth and because there's a fairly panicked fear of inflation. The Left seems to prefer the signalling to be gained from fiscal support. Sumner purports to explain the stagflation people use the memory of to drive the fear in terms of... monetary policy.
So the politics of Market Monetarism seem bleak. But there are examples of countries other than the US using a more MM approach and not having the same suffering.
I am USAian but I think it's foolish to think the US is immune to processes that work in other nations.
In economics, the term "needs" generally means very close to want "wants" means in general conversation, and probably not at all what you mean by "needs". (Its not as odd as it sounds, since "needs" actually is meaningless without reference to a purpose, and in economics the relevant purpose is approximately "to acheive a state in which no greater satisfaction is possible" -- often, in general conversation, the purpose for which "needs" are identified is unspecified and not all clear, making the meaning of any claim about needs highly ambiguous.)
It doesn't have to be strictly infinite in a mathematical sense for the use of the Lump of Labor Fallacy to be appropriate. See also Schumpeter, creative destruction, all that.
The evidence is that 40 acres and a mule was replaced by, say, textile mill work, then steel mill work, and then steel mill work was replaced by say, tech work. In each case, productivity rose and poverty declined for the participants.
I call this The Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Dissatisfaction.
I think, just like always on HN, that people who write these kind of posts and respond to them (agreeing) are not often in contact with 'the common man'. Like the Turing test 'news'; a lot of of people I know would be mistaken for a computer and if I would make a computer which acts exactly like they do, people here would call it a failure and not intelligent. I am convinced the singularity will come and we are all replaceable in the end, however I think before this there will come a (possibly long) time when machines will replace 80%(+) of the working population. There will be no jobs to replace those jobs as the humans doing them simply cannot do things which are vastly different. In the past, for instance with horse carriage to cars, you could see that operation of a car is related to that of a carriage. There is no such move to be made with people who put glue on four corners of the iPhone glass plate (in exactly the same place every time or get fired) and who are replaced by a more accurate and faster robots. Moves like this can be made with general practitioners (most local MDs are already replaced by machines; the only thing they do is search for your issues and prescribe what comes out or refer you to someone who might know) or the run of the mill lawyer or accountant who, in essence, bring nothing to the table already but the fact they have a piece of paper. A lot of people here can do a better job than these (especially MDs and accountants) with Google and their common sense and education. (Edit: I mean by this; these jobs need to be and will be disrupted but only the law/system is preventing that at the moment. There was talk of Watson somewhere with one nurse replacing (many) GPs at a time, but I bet that didn't happen yet because GPs like the status quo.)
I'm not bleak about the future as I do also think we'll need (and force) a more EU distribution of the wealth in the end, but there will be a quite hard period when that's not in place and 1 billion Chinese are out of a job...
Yeah, the impending problem is that sub 90 IQ people are rendered totally useless. That quarter of the population is already much less employable than it was just a generation ago. The social consequences of this process are already evident.
These elite IQ guys like Andreesen in coastal bubbles are totally out of touch with broader society. They really don't grasp that a huge fraction of the population is not going to be training up for the services and digital economy, because that's not realistically possible.
A 90 IQ is probably a decent rough measure at this point, because that's about what it takes to handle a cash register or a grill. And when the those jobs are gone, it will inch up, 91, 92, etc. But forget it. Look at the future this guy has concocted in his head:
The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.
...it's like he's never met anyone who didn't attend a top tier university. Here's reality:
The main fields of human endeavor will be copulating, hustling, consuming low-brow entertainment, eating, and the occasional lunatic running amok.
...and honestly, we're square on that path right now. There are huge numbers of people who are literally useless eaters. Go to a Wal-mart supercenter sometime. Huge big fat people buying candy, soda, potato chips, frozen meals--often paid by the public dole. I'm not even complaining. Unless you start a sterilization program (and we aren't) it's the unavoidable present and future.
While I don't share the pessimism or sense of superiority one might read into OP's post, I think their point remains (somewhat) valid.
There are many people who 'endeavor' exactly the way he describes, many more than I always wanted to believe. And many of them are quite intelligent, so it's not just about IQ.
While changing our approaches to education and the right motivation, in my opinion, can bring people much further than some of us are inclined to believe, this is a limited solution for all the grownups who live in the way OP describes.
The main policy point made in The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrnstein was about how important it is to provide people with a valued place in society. Without purposeful work and meaningful social integration you inevitably get the sort of degeneracy we see spreading. About six pages of The Bell Curve touched on race, so of course that and the ensuing screeching is all anybody remembers. The real social commentary in that book is turning out to be very prescient.
The point still remains though. There will be and are individuals who are unable to find work in their area. And not everyone is intelligent enough to run their own company and make it profitable.
Granted, you could remove that profitability floor with universal basic income.
I don't think IQ has anything to do with the simple problem that people train for and gain experience in specialized professions (a cost of years, maybe a lifetime), but can find themselves poorly paid or out of work when the supply and demand situation turns sour for them. You don't have to be stupid to find yourself unneeded and unable to realistically respond to market signals.
This is the best rationalization for maintaining the current structure that I have ever seen. I can almost buy it.
I don't think that our current leading-edge technology has really gotten enough penetration to see how it is going to change things. And I think that within two or three decades, the capability of those machines/AIs is going to increase by a very great amount.
It is almost of a leap of faith to have this worldview, but I have seen so many powerful AI wins recently (self-driving cars, Jeopardy bots) changes and advances in actual artificial general intelligence, that I think we are going to see "strong" AI within two to four decades.
Even if that doesn't happen, the leading-edge machine-learning and automation robotics is only starting to be deployed.
Within a few decades, I think there are going to be so many jobs replaced, the current structures will be inadequate.
And as more and more jobs are replaced by deep learning systems and/or better natural language processing, even before we get to "strong AI", I don't see how the structure is going to accommodate that.
The problem is that within not too many decades, I believe, almost _everything_ people do can and will be done better by AIs/robots.
So whether we can keep our jobs is not even really our main issue. What we really need to think about is, how can we stay relevant in a world where AIs that are twice as intelligent as people are common? The answer, I believe, is to incorporate those AIs within our bodies.
Ultimately to buy into that line of thinking really requires a significant change in your worldview, which is why I think a lot of these discussions aren't really fruitful. It comes down to your beliefs. (Everyone has beliefs, whether they are boring and reassuring, or "crazy" sounding like me.)
We are very far from merging with an AI, but what's probably going to happen during our lifetime in my opinion is the displacement of even skilled labor by AI/automation. This is definitely scary, considering how slow catching up have laws and regulations been throughout history. I am almost certain there will be a period filled with social unrest and some sort of crises.
Automation will undoubtedly take many jobs. Some technologies will create jobs, some will make the cost of living decrease and the standard of living increase. Restructuring society, the economy, and the government isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not impossible and could lead to a better quality of life for everyone.
A partial post-scarcity economy would offset the job loss, then there could be regulation that limits working hours to 30 or 20 per week which would be enough because goods and services would cost less (because of automation).
3D printers and "molecular assemblers" will allow for instant creation of goods, (print every part of a car if you had enough raw materials/trash).
There needs to be more planning for the government of the future. Maybe a world government would be good, maybe it wouldn't. Should every citizen be able to vote on every issue rather than have a congress? Obviously congress would never do away with themselves, so how would we go about removing them or a similar organization from the government if it became necessary in the future? Do citizens even have that power anymore?
What about more competition between states? Government should be as important to people as sports is. Anyone want to attempt gamification of government and online-voting?
By the way, for the "impossible to secure" argument against online-voting, who cares if it gets hacked? If someone hacks the voting systems then it should be easy to notice that the votes people made do not equal the total (because people would be able to verify their votes) and if it's bad enough then just fix the security hole, reset the votes, and try again.
>Regulation ensure that people have jobs, even if that means limiting the number of hours per week people can work.
Some kind of guaranteed basic income or national dividend is a more efficient way to ensure that people who haven't accumulated capital get treated humanely.
For things like that it might be best to limit federal regulation and let states decide those issues. This would allow for experimentation of these ideas that are too complex to correctly predict every variable.
There are numerous issues that need to be figured out for a Utopian future society, we're not even sure we want that kind of society.
> By the way, for the "impossible to secure" argument against online-voting, who cares if it gets hacked?
One of the biggest problems with online voting is coercion. If a bad guy can stand over you and watch you vote, he doesn't need to hack the computers. He just needs to threaten to hurt you (or your friends, family, etc).
Who are the bad guys that are intimidating online voters? Family? Friends? Better to make a halfway informed decision from the recommendations of the social groups you are a part of than just guessing because you favor a particular side (republican or democrat) which is unfortunately how most of America votes (my speculation).
Employers wouldn't try to coerce employees, they would be fined too heavily. There are just not enough "bad guys" to make a dent in the actual results of online voting, or am I missing something?
You could have a regulatory agency to oversee nursing homes to prevent fraud there, that's a relatively easy problem to solve.
I don't necessarily mean that vote choices would be identifiable publicly, but there would be a way to identify that all votes are associated with a real person and a way for people to ensure that their vote is correct and being counted in the total.
Yes, that seems to be a commonly envisioned "end game". Maybe at first we create virtual realities which are much cheaper and less dangerous to experience than the real thing. Then we find out that sensory inputs on that level only serves to trigger certain hormonal or brain chemistry reactions (hand waving), and then we can just all hook up to farms of machines that automatically make us experience an "optimal" brain chemistry on a permanent basis. A man-made Nirvana. Or, a benevolent Matrix.
Even ignoring that scenario: we might be talking diminishing returns, ie are you really going to be much happier with billions as opposed to millions of dollars, and if so, how much happier? Are you really going to want to work 40 hours a week and have the disposable income to go with that if you can already live 5X more extravagantly than we do today by working 10 hours a week?
The current system will just lead to a continued and ever more absurd growth in the service sector. In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then trickling down. It does sound absurd, doesn't it? But we're already getting there. Does your kitchen really need a marble counter top? No, but you want to feel important/worthy enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, and a luxurious lifestyle includes a marble counter top, so you get one. Replace "kitchen" and "marble counter top" with whatever you want to.
The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great example of this. High-end prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all for providing emotional support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate modern workers, in my opinion, and most of us will be following in their footsteps soon enough.
> In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then trickling down.
Your claim here is based on the utterly false dichotomy that says that helping someone's self image (cutting their hair) and improving their emotional state (saying nice things to them) are not useful.
These things are all useful, it's just that the ones you decry are higher up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's a good sign: it means that our lower needs are already being met so we can focus on higher desires and aspirations.
Personally, a world where most people spend their "work" helping other actualize themselves instead of scraping rocks out of mines or digging up food and barely subsisting sounds like a pretty good improvement to me.
> The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes)
As prices tend towards zero, it's no longer conspicuous consumption. The whole point of conspicuous consumption is to show your wealth by throwing it away. You can't be a conspicuous consumer of Taco Bell, and if automation leads us to a world where granite countertops cost as much as a fast food burrito, then choosing one is just a matter of personal preference and self-expression.
> and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers).
You say that like it's a bad thing, but you could also lump therapists, psychiatrists, counsellors, and many clergy-members in there too. What's so bad about a job that helps someone's emotional well-being?
Paying for someone to say nice things about you is pretty similar to paying to a prostitute to sleep with you ,and eating junk food instead of eating decent food.
We as a society should aim for more, and not diminish ourselves to satisfy the market.
>Your claim here is based on the utterly false dichotomy that says that helping someone's self image (cutting their hair) and improving their emotional state (saying nice things to them) are not useful.
I do think they're useful, it's just that a universal wage would be better. The useful/useless thing was just hyperbole. Sorry.
>As prices tend towards zero, it's no longer conspicuous consumption.
Then you get servants and an entourage. Point still stands.
> In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then trickling down.
To me, it will be more like the 0.001% who controls the robot-making-robots and their 0.099% sidekicks/enablers ripping off the 0.9% who control the robots doing actually useful stuff, and deflecting towards them the anger of the other 99% once the tricking down does not show up.
Oh wait... no need to have any robots in this tale.
>“But most people are like horses; they have only their manual labor to offer…” I don’t believe that, and I don’t want to live in a world in which that’s the case. I think people everywhere have far more potential.
Developing that potential requires significant investment and the outcome is highly competitive: we are already seeing a massive polarization of the labor force ('hollowing out'). Sure, the new economy creates well paid internet and creative jobs, but those are highly competitive fields where 2nd best just does not cut it. It went from something that any monkey could do (agriculture), to something that required some education (craftsmanship), to formal education (cashier), to requiring college (programmer) to requiring a certain elite education (investment banker), and so on. Society is becoming more and more polarized and instead of StarTrek it looks like we are heading for Metropolis.
> What would be the key characteristics of that world, and what would it be like to live in it? For starters, it’s a consumer utopia. Everyone enjoys a standard of living that kings and popes could have only dreamed of.
Does not follow. The robots will replace human work, but resources will still be important. So an excellent house might cost $10.000 in land and materials, but since you would have no job and no money you would not afford it. Meanwhile, someone who owns the robot factory and associated intellectual property, might decide 1 trillion dollars is a fair price to acquire the whole state of Maine and transform it into his personal golf course.
The end game of post scarcity capitalism is a completely feudal society where workers have no market value and are merely held as pets by the rich lords who want to.
Can someone point to me why everyone is so sure there will be robots?
Let me explain why I am asking. It seems to me that we already hit some sort of physical limit for the clock rates. We can't (easily) double clock rate of a CPU, so we add more CPUs. But programming multithreaded applications is more difficult, so it is more difficult to utilize this power.
Can't we hit similar limit for humans? Is there a limit on what humans can comprehend and build? Let's say one programmer can code 1 abstract feature-unit per day. There are limits. What makes everyone think that replacing humans with robots will require not 10^100 abstract units of features? Why no one considers that this problem may be just _too difficult_.
Partly because the robots we're talking about here don't necessarily have to be of the humanoid/strong AI type.
Bear in mind that rug weaving was considered too complex and intricate to be automated, until it was. Also bear in mind that humans used to build cars in factories, now robots do, and that the very term "computer" used to refer to something a human being did, rather than a machine.
The complexity of the necessary systems don't need to appear all at once, but can be built on top of, and feed off of, one another. You replace jobs piecemeal -- first the simple labor-intensive jobs, then complex manufacturing, then automate logistics. At some point, autonomous cars are delivering goods manufactured entirely by robots on behalf of autonomous corporations.
Eventually, as technology and AI improves, you could have creative works done entirely by machines, or almost entirely. Movies written, directed by, starring, composed, engineered and distributed entirely by AI, with books and music and toys and everything.
There's no evidence that it's too difficult, but plenty of evidence of things once considered impossible, which turn out now to be commonplace, or taken for granted.
There are many dimensions to it, but it boils down to the fact that for many people worship of Technology has replaced worship of more traditional Gods.
That being said, there is nothing inherently impossible to prevent robots from being deployed in large quantities. Not the kind of robots you see in SF artwork - capable of displaying human-like levels of agency, creativity, wit, etc - but dumb little machines that can repeat the same dumb little task once, and twice, and a million times without a single error. That has been done many times in the past with varying degrees of success. The problem is that is the increase in speed/accuracy of little task does not produce an economic return large enough to justify the automation, the automation will never get implemented.
As a matter of fact, if the total economic return of the little task is not large enough, the task will not get done either manually or automatically. Paul Graham has already written about how changes in perceived social value of a given line of work has rendered it obsolete with no need for technological disruption whatsoever.
So there are several thresholds in the set of all economic activities at any given time. Below the outermost threshold the task will be procrastinated away until the whole environment changes and makes it irrelevant. A little above that there is another threshold that makes a task impossible to make a living out off, but not unimportant enough to be ignored for ever... so you have a lot of unpaid labor done on the sides to take care of that (think domestic chores). Then there is the formal economy with several layers of skilled and unskilled labor.
At each layer, robots can eat a chunk of that... depending on the technical and economic feasibility. By example, we have Roomba robots to clean the floors because the task is relatively easy and can be solved for a price people is willing to pay. On the other hand, we do not have (yet) robotic spiders that pick up, wipe and put back every random trinket in your living room without breaking anything because the task is too complex (but might turn out to be solvable in the future). And we do not have refrigerator-stove hybrids with robotic arms that pull ingredients out of cold storage and cook homemade meals because even though the problem is relatively well defined the price would be so great that few customers would be able to afford those, and it will probably continue to be so regardless of advances in technology.
There was a research that has shown that in places in cs, software innovation contributed to far greater improvements than moore's law. There's no reason why software improvements should stop.
First this: "I would argue that 200 years of recent history confirms Friedman’s point of view."
Then this: "This is not a world we have ever lived in."
"We just know we will create an enormous number of them."
It's unfortunate to see even the mighty brains fall victim to rationalization. Dismissing anyone who is concerned the social impact of what's coming as Luddites hinted this was a output of an ideologue and not a philosopher, and it degraded from there.
There is absolutely no economic law that says the value of labor has to be greater than minimum wage, or even livable. Yes there is theoretically an infinite demand for labor, and unemployed people can always find some really low demand job or work for even less than the machines. But that isn't optimal for them. Goods might get cheaper, but not by much. The limiting factor isn't labor costs, we already have vastly automated a lot of industries and outsourced others to ridiculously low wage countries.
First, it is oversimplification. Robots don't eat jobs as in "there is nothing more to do for humans." The argument is that automation will decrease the wage share (labour share) and increase the share of capital (wage share has been in decline in OECD countries since early 70's.)
Secondly, history disagrees. Luddites had it right first. When industrialization started, automation reduced the living standards of workers for several decades. What turned things around was political struggle and unions. There was violence and people were shot at factory gates. Automation itself is not going to create utopia. There has to be political change in how we share profits.
Automation and Robots create new economic situation where the value and ratio between human capital and capital changes.
Krugman has written few easy to digest articles that explain why Anderseens first and second point are very problematic.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-phy...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-w...