I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy.
I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the decisions that need to be made.
I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils.
I have concerns about this myself, but I don't find that video remotely convincing.
CGP Grey went through the analogy of horses and the history of technology to emphasize the line of thinking that the invention of new technology will lead to the creation of new jobs is a fallacy and false.
In the past, new technological changes lead to the demise of horses. There were no "new" jobs that horses could fulfill. So it will be with humans.
Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Horses have never created their own jobs using their own ingenuity. We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses. Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services. Or social structure does not depend on horses feeling a sense of meaning in their lives.
We didn't react to horse unemployment by finding new things for horses to do because, aside from the horse owners, we did not value the employment of horses and the horses did not create new jobs for themselves because... they are horses.
Without necessarily disagreeing with the conclusion, the analogy comes off as extremely silly.
I do in fact agree that we need to think about what society we are building as we approach machines that rival humans on all levels, so it's frustrating to see a video that pretends that the employment of horses is at all similar to the employment of humans.
> Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world.
Dark as it may seem, many people would say the same about most human consumers in this country. Looking at the most successful creations in the past century, most are made by corporations. While people have been spearheading those efforts so far, the whole novel creation process would be automated if and when it can be. (The "if" in this case is weather or not you believe in "the singularity")
> We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses.
.. but a society of horses sure would. We, as a society of humans, are worried about the future of human jobs. Our human society and social structure is in for one hell of a shock, but the world will move on.
> Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services.
And our economy barely relies on humans anymore. As long as there is something with money to spend, the economy doesn't really care. Look at the banking industry. Look at all these B2B partnerships.. who cares about humans in those relationships? Robots are getting better and better at deciding how to spend money.
Is the analogy really that silly? I love it because it helps wake people up to the reality we live in: we are the horses in this new age, growing ever more irrelevant. The world economy couldn't care less about humans.
This is getting depressing. I'm gonna go listen to "Dog Days are Over" by Florence and the Machine...
Uh, it's only depressing if you agree with the nutjob elitists that think everyone else is a horse that needs their constant guidance to do something with their life.
Do you have any idea how the banking industry and B2B operations work? People. Lots and lots of people. Way less automation than low-margin retail junk, which itself is way less automated than most people think it is.
You have it exactly backwards: It's not that the economy is run by robots that are not interested in you. Robots are not interested in the economy, but the economy is very interested in you -- money is just a way of keeping score.
Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your complaints are mostly irrelevant.
The analogy is itself a fallacy. The jobs that were displaced were not those of horses, but of horse breeders, trainers, keepers and drivers. The horses in this story were not the laborers but the tools. Those people, unlike horses, could retrain to do a different kind of job which was in-demand. Horse traders could become car salesmen. Horse drivers could become car drivers. The replacement of horses by cars led to an increase in jobs, not a decrease.
he actually directly addresses this by stating the standard argument that low skill/resolution jobs are replaced by higher skill/resolution jobs.
The issue is not that there will not be new jobs, the issue is that the automation of these new jobs is accelerating - so people cannot adapt fast enough to be able to competently take these new jobs as their old jobs become obsolete.
He starts the video exactly the opposite -- he pointed out that all humans used to be involved in food production and now almost none are and briefly summarized thousands of years of history of humans creating new things to do when the old things became unnecessary. That's a long timescale of course... on a shorter timescale I can't think of many jobs that existed 100 years ago that still exist today, at least not as a significant percentage of the current job force. Of course then he says "but this time it's different" before he starts on all the poor, and I think dishonest, logic.
So then, yes, he listed a lot of jobs that will go away, insinuated it's basically all of them (with which I agree, but no argument was made), and then took the strawman "well maybe you think creative jobs won't go away" and then defeated that strawman by incorrectly assuming creativity is limited to artists, poets, directors, and actors and said "there can't be such a thing as a poem and painting based economy", which I think is what you are referring to. That's just as dishonest as the horse analogy. It assumes without argument that creative people won't look at the new robotic world around them and find new things to create, or at the humans around them eager to work and find new ways to utilize them, all with the assistance of AIs and robots.
He addressed this by talking about how there really aren't being created many new kinds of jobs, and that the large bulk of employment these days are in professions that have had a long history already.
In the video, the analogy between horses loosing out to cars and humans loosing out to AI is false. Humans are the ones building the AI. Horses however did not build the cars. Its a very important distinction we are not at a liberty to dismiss.
You're missing something. Horse-like animals actually did develop cars. They only had to evolve into humans and build up a technological base before they could do it.
Over a very long period of time, animals developed cars. Now that same development process is remarkably faster, and robots are being developed. The horse analogy is perfectly valid.
Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your nitpick is therefore irrelevant.
I did not say the analogy is not representative. I said its wrong. Now if horses were building cars and being worried about their future, I'd say fine. But its not the case. Here horses are not in the same position at all as humans. So its not helping to "compare and contrast", its building up a wrong mindset, wrong premise.
It is never made explicit in the video but imagine that corporations are the current dominant super-organism on which the economy depends. Humans are only designing and building cars because corporations have no better way of getting that job done. Thus, humans are used by corporations just as horses were used by humans before the corporation became the dominant economic species on the planet. Corporations may not always need humans to survive.
Just as cars replaced horses for the benefit of human masters, robots may replace humans for the benefit of corporate masters.
You may still disagree with the analogy but I think this is at least the proper analogy to be arguing about.
I really hope we dont let the bottom half of our economy fall before we strive for the restructuring we will need. Because when we let stuff fail, billions or trillions in value will vanish with it.
As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 minutes to read the following counterpoint.
Self-service checkout – “What used to be 30 humans is now 1 human overseeing 30 self-service check outs” – At all the grocery stores I’ve been to in my area, there are still ~30 human-staffed checkout lanes and 4 – 6 self-service machines, which replaced maybe two rows of check outs and still employs a human for oversight. However, these self-service checkouts allow the stores to operate 24/7, because after 10:00 they are the only lanes open. Now the store is open longer so it can make more money, whereas before they closed at 10:00. More money for the store means perhaps a whole new store opening, employing more people than would have otherwise been employed without self-service lanes.
Self-driving cars – “They are not the future, they are here and they work” – For narrow definitions of "here" and "work". There's a big difference between being developed in a lab and driving up and down the coast in sunny Cali, and being deployed to millions of consumers around the globe in multitudinous climates. He lists some things self-driving cars do better than humans, but fails to mention that self-driving cars lack the complex decision making, cognition, and communication abilities that are required in every-day driving. Self-driving cars are low hanging fruit for roboticists because we have a set of rules governing transportation, and that’s prime material for automation. Take the rules, code them up, done. Problem is, the rules are broken constantly, and in a way that driving a million miles up and down the west coast won’t solve (How many miles exactly has the Google car driven in snow?). Self-driving cars will come, but as long as there are still human drivers and weather, they will not live up to the hype they are currently generating. Take it from someone who actually engineers these types of robots.
Law Bots – He claims that bots will replace the bulk of lawyering because they can sift through a million e-mails quickly. And what happens when the bot is done? The lawyer gets back to work. It sounds to me like the bot is making the lawyer more efficient. Instead of spending weeks going through e-mails, he can use a computer to help him, and do his job more efficiently. So maybe we need fewer lawyers? The only reason we needed more in the first place was because of the amount of e-mail and electronic documents created by computers. To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous.
Doctor bots – He says that knowing the reaction of every drug between every other drug is beyond the scope of human capability… sounds like a great job for robots then! Again, this is an instance of a robot augmenting the capabilities of a human, not replacing one. He goes on to say that the doctor bots will be able to read the latest research, understand it, and then go on to implement the knowledge. First, one has to wonder how the research is being generated if human doctors are being replaced by robots. Second, as long as we’re assuming an AI advanced enough to read a research paper, generate inferences and implications based on that research, and act on that new knowledge, we might as well assume that all disease has also been cured, eliminating the need for doctor bots in the first place.
Creative bots – Finally, and most egregiously. Creativity is right up there next to sentience in the totem pole of AI capabilities, and is well into the realm of science fiction. The (only) example he gives, Emily Howell as a source of machine creative music is a complete joke. Here’s what the inventor of the bot has to say about it:
> Professor Cope argues that Emily Howell’s music is still predominantly created by humans. “Computers are not separate things,” he said. “The computer is human-made. The program itself is human-made. The music in the database is human as well. There’s so much about this that is human. There’s just a lot more humans involved in making this than usual.”
Emily Howell is a program designed by a human to output a specific kind of music. It may be music that has not been written before by any human, but it is not creative. In the end, the music is the result of an algorithm, designed by a human. In my view, a creative machine is one that performs a task, on purpose, it was not programmed to perform.
So those are the big problems I have with what he showed. What is even more aggravating is what he left out. What about robots that do things humans can't do. What about a robot that can fit into a 1/2" pipe, or one that can fly (we call them drones), or one that can go into a nuclear reactor or the bottom of the sea. Those robots are taking away 0 jobs, and create hundreds (if not thousands) of jobs for those that design, engineer, manufacture, repair, sell, program, manage, and use those robots.
Finally, robots are great at replacing some tasks that can be automated, but not so great at others. We've had robot receptionists for a while now. They are so terrible, that having a human receptionist is now a competitive advantage for some businesses. I think the general point that this video misses, is that robots are terrible at interfacing with people. Any human-facing occupation, even if it has aspects that can be automated, will probably still exist no matter how pervasive robots become in our lives. When robots can interact with humans well, we're probably talking about a future that is too far out for us to accurately predict.
> To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous.
I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of the video. The video doesn't say, "hey, we need to turn off these computers because they'll make us obsolete."
He's arguing that we'll inevitably use computers to solve a problem created by computers, and that a lot of people will be unemployable as a result, and that's something we need to think about as a society.
The video doesn't suggest any concrete solutions at all. (Basic income/negative taxation seem like obvious candidates; walking back technology itself is probably not a good candidate, though some people will certainly try.)
Regarding the doctor bot portion, I found the claim that knowing the reactions of a cascade of drugs is beyond the scope of human capability to be an absolutely ludicrous position to take. That right there is a huge portion of internal medicine. Pharmacists, nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists, etc. all spend years learning these matrices before even entering practice. Maybe knowing the totality of all drug combinations is difficult, but it ignores the fact that most—if not all—drugs are prescribed under known, common patterns, often now with the assistance of programs to make sure they don't accidentally prescribe something that will interact poorly with other meds. Medical professionals end up specializing and work with only subsets of the matrix anyway, but I really doubt a robot will ever be able to replace a doctor in this area, let alone all of medicine. If recent history is a decent guide, robots and software will only augment a doctor's capability to work accurately and efficiently.
With the creativity bot, I also wondered about this. With creativity, a bot creating sound based on rules isn't a musical genius, let alone "creative." They're a performer. They'll have difficulty 1) creating new genres of music and 2) creating music that is popular or meaningful to people. Technical performance and creativity are two very, very different things. We tend to think of the rule breakers as the geniuses of creativity. Hard to do that when the act of telling a machine to break the rules is itself a rule. How boring.
Lastly, we've found that a robot that plays Jeopardy! against humans to be an interesting gimmick, but nobody would suggest a game show where robots continually compete against other robots. Who would find it entertaining?
He's not saying that robots are going to take literally every job ever. Only the majority of them.
I believe I read that stores don't encourage self-checkouts very much because having humans around significantly decreases shoplifting. This may be less necessary if we get better AIs for monitoring security cameras.
I've never read anything about self-driving cars being impossible in bad weather, only that no has done it yet. Machine vision systems are not as vulnerable to this btw and that has been improving in leaps and bounds over just the last 10 years.
Lawyers still searched through documents tediously before computers. It was probably even harder then, not easier.
It's at least theoretically possible create a robot that can diagnose and prescribe treatments for a patient just like a doctor. All the video claimed is that they can do statistics and search the relevant research a lot better. Which is definitely true, and see IBM's Watson.
Arguments about what "creativity" means are never useful or productive. But AI that generates music well already exists and is going to continuously get better.
I don't consider a self-checkout lane to be a "robot" in any sense. It's a customer doing the job of a once trained employee. If you've ever been behind someone new to one of these things, they're slow and annoying experiences.
The main reason for them is reducing workers necessary during slow sales periods (like overnights, or weekday mornings).
And anyway, the job wasn't replaced by a robot in this case. The job was replaced by a customer.
No they aren't robots but tech that as a consequence reduce the number of employees.
In Sweden there has been quite a big reduction in number of people working at the checkouts. And even if they are freed up to do other things in the stores, there has been a net reduction in number of employees.
Yes, "robot" isn't the point. "Non-human" is the point. Non-humans replacing humans probably began with animal domestication technology and has accelerated dramatically since then. Once a non-human replaces a human, the switch tends to be permanent, so all human jobs will eventually be replaced unless technology stops progressing (only if there's a global holocaust) or if humans can forever invent new jobs (that humans do better than non-humans) at a rate that matches the takeover of old jobs by non-humans.
Since the takeover is apparently accelerating, humans aren't significantly improving, and non-humans are, it's going to be a difficult race.
One thing that strikes me as peculiar about the self-service checkout argument creating more wealth is that it assumes that the store would not have received the revenue if they weren't open at the time. Perhaps this might work in certain urban areas, but even still some places culturally abhor the idea of shopping for anything 24/7. I've heard that Germany doesn't have that many stores open very late because the purchase can probably wait until the next day and people would both plan their days better and allow for more leisure time away from chores and work accordingly. Assumptions about consumer behavior should be researched and tested first especially when entering new markets.
Also, let's not forget that we now have a human needing to supervise these 24/7 bots. Graveyard shift work in any industry regardless of pay is not a pretty thing to witness with really high turnover rates and the health ramifications for encouraging it are probably not positive in the aggregate. Of course, we could employ remote workers to oversee machines in their regular time, but this usually results in the loss of the on-site job and the creation of lower-value jobs in developing markets due to geographic limitations for one of the obvious end results.
But good criticisms overall about the robot revolution alarmists on many common arguments. I can't help but agree given I'm a strong AI skeptic given what I've learned about AI through research and the tendency of the AI community to overestimate itself on achieving human-like behaviors grossly for decades with no exception while so much progress (and more importantly for continued investments in modern economies, immediate value) has been achieved with weak AI. The comparison that's most accurate is that we achieved human flight, but nobody would say that an airplane is "superior" to a bird's capabilities. A Jetsons like future has been dreamed of in various capacities since human being realized they could make machines to do work, but the nature of work just adapts with all of these inventions.
> I've heard that Germany doesn't have that many stores open very late because the purchase can probably wait until the next day and people would both plan their days better and allow for more leisure time away from chores and work accordingly.
Its about if even one store is open late, then every store has to be. Because people go where the store is open. The closed store will absolutely lose those sales.
Some people go where the store is open. I have a Safeway near me that's open until midnight, but it would have to be something of unusual urgency to make me go there late in the evening. Generally I just wait and go to my preferred supermarket a day later.
In the UK we do have shops with only self service checkouts (convenience stores, not the larger supermarkets, so far).
Receptionists are an odd case, as telephone access to people has either been removed (use a web interface), or goes direct to where you want. Redesigning the interface.
Law bots will only change if the law changes to be more computer friendly.
I don't think you and Grey are in disagreement. The content of the video is generally correct and points to where things are going, not specifics of implementation.
The presenter isn't attacking robotics, but outlining the increases in capabilities.
I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the decisions that need to be made.