Well, the Man vs. Machine exhibition Jeopardy! tournament is over 1298239338.jpg)
and we've seen the outcome. The humans got trounced, in other words.
Ken Jennings, first of the two humans, wrote underneath his “Final Jeopardy” response:
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR
NEW COMPUTER OVERLORDS.
If you don't know, this particular phrasing about welcoming our new overlords is a meme with a rich history of usage. He intended it as a joke, but it still begs the question, what do victories like this herald?
IBM has declared it to be a victory for “humankind.”
I'm less certain.
As in the excellent movie Desk Set, with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, questions are raised about the feasibility and appropriateness of replacing people with machines.
Both in the movie Desk Set and in the aftermath of this Jeopardy! challenge, the spin we are to accept is that such innovation heralds not a replacement of people by computers but instead an amplification of the usefulness of people in world because computers will be there to help.
Yet the message of the marketplace is not that at all.
As a matter of definition, a “jobless recovery” is an economic boom that occurs in conjunction with sustained or increased unemployment. But why does it happen? There are a lot of opinions about that, but for my purposes here I'm going to risk oversimplifying a bit and blame a lot of it on the push for automation. 
Many companies would rather pay a fixed cost to buy a machine that can do your job—or enough of it—than pay for you, who needs salary each day and every day you're employed.
In some cases machines can't do the jobs of people, but companies or the market itself decide they can offload the burden onto their customers. A travel agent used to provide a lot of value beyond booking tickets—answering questions, organizing things, etc. Going to Orbitz or Expedia isn't the same as going to a travel agent. But there's no money to be made on the difference, so jobs for travel agents dwindle away. Bank tellers are being replaced by ATMs. Even customer support is increasingly handled by programs.
Could highly skilled professions like medicine be next? Doubtless if they do, the spinmeisters will tell us that it's OK if medical professionals lose their jobs to computers because they are obviously very smart people and can be easily retrained to do some other technical job. But if we get that far, I don't think that will be true.
We watch with eager excitement now to see these cool programs do cool things. But so what? It will save some company a few dollars to be able to provide their service cheaper if they don't have to employ someone, but what will that someone do instead? “Oh, they'll get another job where they're needed more,” comes the answer from those spouting the mindless dogma of the Capitalist religion. But it's not true. They aren't needed more at another job because all jobs are doing the same thing—automating.
At some point we need to start to ask ourselves: Is automation really the goal? And if so, what will people do?
Or even more generally, just because we can do a thing, must we?
Mind you, I'm not a Luddite. I've worked in technology all my life. I do technology for a living. I'm not anti-technology. I believe in the power of technology to do good.
But I am pro-wisdom and pro-thought. I'm not a subscriber of the quasi-religious notion that the “invisible hand” of the marketplace will magically guide us to acceptable social outcomes.†
Technology alone does not solve social problems. What will we do with the technology, and who will watch out for those adversely affected?
Is the Grand Plan to replace people with computers that “think” and robots that “do?” Because that seems to be industry's plan. Or, perhaps more properly, it seems to me the inertially inevitable consequence of a market without a plan.
I'm not even talking artificially intelligent machines. Watson isn't artificially intelligent, yet was capable of outdoing humans at the task it was designed for. Computers will be a threat to humans—they already are a threat to humans—in the workplace even without achieving Artificial Intelligence.
And if we do replace people with computers in the workplace, where will people get their money come from?
Unlike in Star Trek, where people who have no job seem to just somehow find useful things to do and end up fed and clothed and housed anyway, the situation in the real world is not so idyllic. All the money in the world seems to be accumulating with the owners of fewer and fewer companies because those companies rely less and less on people and more and more on the kind of advanced technology that Watson represents.
We hear political rhetoric all the time about how the people with the money don't want to share that wealth with people who “aren't contributing.” But what are people to contribute in a world that can increasingly do without them? Is the plan to simply play this selfish game until all the money is held by one person? What will be the value of all that money if there is no one left to buy from?
There's a lot of fussing about the Technical Singularity, a point at which computers are smart enough that they don't need people any more. But that's not really my concern here. I actually think computers could one day be intelligent, but I worry about effects involving smart computers that will happen long before then.
I think we're going to hit an Economic Singularity much sooner—a point at which computers are not yet truly smart but are sufficiently useful in industry that really none of us have jobs. A few of us will race around faster and faster in a deadly game of musical chairs, vying for the last seat at the employment table. But to what end?
How is this expected to end? Are we content to just ride the wave without asking questions about where and how that wave will crash?
If you got value from this post, please "rate" it.
Footnote
†A fair reading of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations might lead one to believe that even he doesn't believe the invisible hand can do its job without government oversight. He himself suggests a legitimate role for government to invest in the common good and protect citizens from social injustice, though his remarks on such issues of morality seem less often quoted by many who seem prefer to cite him as an advocate for the unfettered free market.
Text and fish graphics © 2010 by Kent Pitman. All rights reserved.
Image of Jeopardy! is a photograph taken of my home television screen,
used here on a theory of fair use.
This is Part 3 of three-part series. The other parts are:
Computers in Jeopardy1 (Part 1, published 15-Feb-2011)
Just-In-Time Jeopardy (Part 2, published 16-Feb-2011)
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Comments
I don’t see this as a problem of a “push for automation”. Automation can only be seen as a good thing in terms of improving quality of life for human beings. What I see in the issues you raise here are the failings of capitalism in general. The primary problem here is clearly the need for “money”. I don’t know what the solution is, though. We certainly are not prepared to move away from such a system at this time.
Of course, humans still must design, build and program the machines.
Regarding the fewer and fewer hands holding most of the wealth; that wealth might find a day when it simply has no value as you also suggest. If people can’t buy things, then capitalism simply evaporates as a viable entity in society, this is, of course, the lesson of the famous board game; Monopoly.
What amazes me is how so many people don’t see that the concerns you express here are already occurring. I contend there are two ways to maximize profit; increasing sales and decreasing overhead. The best ways to cut overhead are to reduce the payroll (reduce the labor force) and cut corners on quality. Those are the overriding effects of capitalism that we’re seeing in the world today. I don’t see that technology has any value unless it serves people; if it only serves profits, well …
How do we move away from basing all value on profits?
Rick, I expected someone to talk about designing and building the programs, but I can't really believe that an ever-increasing number of billions of people will be writing programs. As more and more companies by each other, the world becomes more and more homogenized, allowing for greater and greater efficiency of the market and a need for fewer and fewer variations in “needs.” In theory, everyone else could turn to the arts in celebration that our needs are all met, but I don't see that as even remotely likely. It seems more likely that people will see resources increasingly unevenly distributed and want to turn to finding reasons to keep it that way. Maybe that means lots of jobs in the armies of the world, so no one has to blow up any precious machines. That will not end well.
Will Watson rule the world someday?? I have my doubts. will the marketplace outsource the human beings?? It already is doing so. Look what happened in Detroit. Car assembly went to robotic arms doing the jobs of so many autoworkers.
The idea that technology will save the world is insane. There is not enough rare earth elements in this world for all to have computers.
I don't know all the answers Kent. Just questions.
Thoughtful piece, rated highly.
♥
What we will have is a middle class bred out of existence through technology and other economic forces. A large labor pool of service workers (gardeners, burger flippers---but even this can be automated, pizza delivery drivers...) and a small elite.
It makes sense. I can easily see a world in 200 years where the poor and middle classes all die from disease and war and lack of breeding and the rich are the only ones who survive, served by a class of machines and a small class of docile third world servants.
If you're talking about income inequality or decreasing upward social mobility, two things related to job loss, the U.S. is worse off than Europe and other advanced nations. With unemployment, as I recall, the U.S. and Europe are around the same, but in Decmber 2010 the unemployment rate in Japan was only 4.9 percent.
Were automation and technology the main culprits, we would have seen similar effects across all of these countries. But we don't, and this leads me to believe that there are other factors at work -- government policies, for example.
Highly-skilled professionals often take 4-10 years of full-time school to acquire their skill set, and often innate interest / cognitive ability plays a huge part. If Fred is a highly skilled doctor, for example, there's no reason to believe he can become a computer programmer if his job is eliminated. (And that's completely ignoring the question of whether he has the means to go back and retrain for several years.)
If Fred *does* manage to acquire the skill set, how long will it take him to work his way back up to a decent salary in a world where he'll be competing with 21-year-olds fresh out of college who have the same level of programming skill but far less need for salary?
Sadly, I agree with you on many of your thoughts, Kent. I'm a generally cheerful, optimistic person, but I also strive to keep my eyes open as to long-term trends. No accelerating system can continue on the same path forever without some kind of phase change.
As long as growth is the metric of economic success, and the benefits of increased value production flows mainly to the providers of capital, the system will continue to concentrate wealth, continue to squander resources, and continue to find reason to eliminate people from the equation.
We have come to believe that "the economy" is somehow measured as the health of business's bottom line, even when many American businesses don't even employ a majority of Americans any more.
The economy exists as a way of jointly providing all of us who participate a decent quality of life. "The economy" is only worth having if it provides us all the opportunity to contribute, and in return, enjoy a share of the goods and services we've all contributed. Right now, "the economy" is doing a rather poor job based on that definition.
(Something like 86% of corporate workers are "disengaged" from their jobs, according to the Gallup G12 polls. That says to me that we're not providing people the opportunity to contribute in ways they find meaningful.)
I actually think that much of our economic growth has been spurred by jobs eliminated by technology. The displaced then invent new products and services, do marketing in an attempt to convince people that the products/services are valuable, and create a new set of inventions. Most of the new products, however, don't really contribute to quality of life very much.
Do we really need a new brand of soap? Really? The fact we can create one and convince people to buy may just mean we're good at psychological manipulation.
As I watch the Internet and computers take over, I'm actually hard-pressed to find value in most cool new technology. It's fun, and it's cool, but basically, it's just a toy. iPhones? Yeah, fun. Love 'em. But I got along without them just fine for most of my adult life, and if I'm being honest, I can't say I ever *needed* one. It's a fun toy.
Hopefully, our jobless recovery will spur folks to do more entrepreneuring, and they'll invent a whole new set of products and services we don't need. How about a web site that duplicates just the bookmark functionality of a web browser? Wouldn't *that* be a delicious invention. Or ...
I just keep trying
rated with hugs
Robert Anton Wilson wrote an article called The RICH Economy (found here: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html) in which he started to explore things we could do to change unemployment from a bad thing to a good thing. While I do not believe his specific solution would work, I do believe it is worthwhile to consider different ways we can change the economic fundamentals to make unemployment just, and perhaps even desirable.
You folks are far too worried about what people will do with their time. Painful disruption is a legitimate concern in the short term, and during recessions. But in the long term, automation results in greater wealth for all.
All of the arguments you make, could have been made about the loom, or the industrial revolution, or the green revolution. Yet in each case, the doomsayers were wrong. Perhaps if you figure out why these same concerns were misplaced in the past, it'll give you greater insight into how the future might go.
Right now a large number of people in emerging nations are entering a marketplace that simply doesn't need an increase in workers. If scarcity creates value, then glut creates lack of value, and that's what we're seeing.
I went out on a limb and made these statements knowing that it would be easy for people to offer hollow criticism that suggested there was no problem. I've put my cards on the table. You put yours down now, too. What will all these people do? What do you see as the likely eventuality because the view from where I sit is bleak. Where and how do you see the jobs returning?
You're absolutely right about the need for government to step in and provide strong regulation, but of course, that appears to be impossible right now because of the impact of the superrich, supergreedy like the Koch brothers.
And so we all have to go back to monitoring the situations in Wisconsin and Egypt to see how the peoples' fight against unbridled power and concentration of wealth will play out.
You are right that a new group of previously-immune people are being replaced. You ask when the jobs are coming back.
When US agriculture dropped from 75% to 2% of the population, do we today have a population of 3/4 unemployed farmers? Are those farm jobs ever coming back? What are those 200 million people doing in the US today, given that they can't possibly be used productively on farms?
You really have to distinguish short-term from long-term. In the short-term, you have a highly-trained 50-year-old autoworker, and the car industry doesn't need him any more. That's an individual problem, but it's a real problem for him. I'm sympathetic to these short-term pains from dislocations. As a society, we should try to ease that transition.
But over the long term, the question is more: you have a 16-year-old kid, trying to figure out something useful to do with his life. No, he shouldn't train to be a farmer or an autoworker. Those aren't industries that need more human labor. But is there anything valuable that the kid can do?
History suggests that our lack of imagination about new jobs in the future, is not a reliable prediction. The Luddites didn't know what new jobs would replace the lost weavers. US farmers in the late 1800's couldn't conceive of what productive use 3/4 of the population could be put to, if farming disappeared.
But history shows that new jobs are created, and the wealth of the population rises significantly with major new automation. It's all about the productivity of a given hour of human labor. How much value can be created with that hour? If we can create the same wealth as before, but using fewer human labor hours, then the extra freed-up human labor hours can be redirected into creating even more wealth than was possible before.
This happens over and over again throughout history. I don't need to identify the specific future jobs that large segments of the population will eventually have, in order to notice the consistent pattern from the past. Not only do new jobs get created, but also the new jobs (on average) pay even more than the old jobs that got lost. Everybody wins.
It seems Luddite is relative. In retrospect, some of the inventions of the past benefited society in ways that there were no downsides. Those Luddites were misguided, at best. For self-described Luddites of today, are they also misinformed, or are they indeed, prescient?
Kent, you mentioned turning to the arts in celebration. Personally, I fear that they could be hit the hardest with the advancement of technology; to the point that traditional forms are rendered obsolete. As an artist and musician, I have become increasingly paranoid that my paintings and drawings will not be up to snuff in comparison to the dazzling displays created by Photoshop and other software systems. As for music, computers and Auto Tune can turn anyone into a singer/songwriter. The industry is at serious risk (if not already there with the Taylor Swifts taking over the Grammys) of becoming severely diluted. It may come to the point where it is near impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Saying "this worked out well in the past, therefore it will continue to work out well" is as logically specious as saying "this will fail." If you can't identify the underlying forces that made it work out, and test to see if those forces still operate, then you're simply confusing correlation with causation. For example, it is true that almost every civilization in human history eventually collapsed, and likely none of them thought they would collapse until it happened. Does that mean I can conclude America will collapse? Of course not. I need to understand the underlying forces and do the tests. (Even then, we must hope I've correctly identified the relevant forces.)
Systems have inflection points beyond which they begin to behave differently. If you aren't already versed in it, I urge you to take a course in system dynamics. A nonlinear system (which our economy certainly is) can fall into certain stable patterns of behavior. But if a critical element changes, or a critical ratio gets passed (e.g. changing the gain of a feedback loop from >1 to
(The answers to the forces start with: productivity growth -> increased national wealth, plus the comparative advantage theory of economic trade between nations, but applied to humans vs. machines. But I don't intend to argue the details here, merely to bring skepticism to what appears to be Kent's common-sense conclusions.)
CA: Yes, I do actually think that electronic computers can achieve consciousness. You seem to place great importance on life vs. non-life, but at the margins, this concept is kind of slippery. (Is a virus alive? How about a crystal?) In any case, there are plenty of living things that don't really seem to be conscious (ameobas, sponges, flowers), so I'm not sure that life/non-life is really the important point anyway.
So I actually agree with you that consciousness is required for the highest intelligent behaviors. I (and some others) just think that consciousness is a mechanical process, and computers can get it out of the right patterns of non-living things (transistors) just like people can (atoms, molecules, neurons).
Honestly, I don't know if IBM is using this as a gimmick. I think they really believe their pitch. It's almost necessary to us as humans driven by forces of cognitive dissonance that they do. But I think the issue isn't whether the pitch is well-meaning or not, since knowing they mean well fixes nothing. The problem is that in Capitalism, things fall through the cracks. Everyone focuses on just one thing, but no one focuses on whether something is being neglected unless money is to be made, and it's easy to show that things that are expensive will often be neglected because the cost to do them exceeds what someone will pay. We might want to fund some of those out of public funds, and others not. But it's the legitimate right and duty of government to at least review such situations and decide definitively. Right now, I don't see anyone really paying attention to this question. There's an unspoken assumption it will take care of itself and it pretty clearly will not.
Regarding the bifurcation of the population, which I assume you regard with more horror than you happen to have textually injected, beyond the social injustice issue there's another issue that I wish those who see your model as Utopia would look to: Nature believes in diversity when it comes to survival. The problem with a “rich” class surviving is that it's not demonstrating any real survival trait. Often the trait is “be the offspring of someone who once did something.” That means that if conditions change and some new talent is needed, it may have been bred out. This will bode ill for the faux-idyllic society you have described.
I do agree with you, by the way, that our metrics for measuring unemployment are horrible. We're also not measuring people who got back to work but at a job that really doesn't make them effective any more, etc. The fans of the present system point to the fact that they aren't entitled to better than they get and that it's not their right to complain, but people often like what they are good at. And if people are not happy in a new job, at least part of what they're complaining about is probably that their skills are being wasted. Sometimes that's because their skills are no longer needed, but I bet that's true less often than acknowledged. Certainly I'd like to see a lot more things like that measured.
I do agree with you that government policies play a part, though. I'm pretty easily convinced of additional factors to take into consideration—it's a complex world out there. I'm not so easily convinced to just dismiss a potential factor as unimportant.
8)
The Brits did the same thing. Most of the profits from the colonies went to London and were then re-invested in the colonies in Africa and India. The British working class gained nothing. The Lords and Company dudes gained all. Of course, the working classes bled to protect these interests in various wars. It was a lose-lose deal for the British proletariat.
60 years of accumulated American Capital is now mostly in China. Thanks to Wall Street Financiers. Workers of the World Unite and DOWN WITH WALL STREET
Michael, thanks for the cross-reference to The RICH Economy.
Jan, I agree with you about the issue of machines not buying anything. That's why businesses prefer to “hire” them. They work for very little. Maybe we should accelerate the Singularity so that machines would demand a fair wage and then this problem would go away. Well, except to be replaced by another. Nevermind... :)
And you implicitly underscore one of my points, which is that we can get caught up in irrelevant concerns about the asymptotic approach to some theoretically predicted future, when sometimes just getting “sort of close” is bad enough—as when guys like The Koch Brothers get enough money that they can personally, on their own discretion, seek to influence matters that are the proper realm of politics. It becomes, in effect, a war on the very concept of Democracy.
The 3D printer is in its most expensive elemental primitive state at the moment. When that moves into its proper development it will shear away jobs at a rate that will wipe away huge numbers of workers.
But I think we've gone far enough away from Kent's post, that this discussion is no longer on topic in these comments. So, with apologies to Kent for starting it, I'll bow out now.
rated with love
Moreover, the effects you're talking about also presuppose that the planet can sustain it. I'm sure that in the “ordinary” steady state it could sustain a bit more ratcheting up but I think we're going to find, and harshly, that in making our planet able to manage all these people, it becomes very fragile, depending on a great many accidental truths that will be challenged by things like Climate Change. (The price of food rose 29% in 2010 due to effects many attribute to Climate Change.)
Another way your reasoning-by-almanac (at best a way of knowing what's possible, not very convincing at knowing what will happen) is going to fail this time around, for American workers, is that there are gigantic emerging markets in India and China will almost surely mean that the leveling effect will pull down the US as a supply of many more people enters the market. (This may even be fair, but if it occurs too fast, and it seems poised to do that, it will be impossible for people to adapt fast enough and the effects will be dire.) No scarcity means the market will see no value. The previous effects you're talking about did not have this many people prepared to compete directly in each other's economies—in the previous scenarios you're relying on, simple geography meant there was considerable locality to the effects. Even with products shipped around, there was still really substantial opportunity for local businesses to thrive in a way that's far less true today.
Why would the game show permit such a thing? Uh - it's a game show. And the cynic in me points out that IBM got a helluva lot of free advertising out of this - which makes one wonder what kind of money passed between hands behind the scenes. But like I said, I'm a cynic.
As I also said, heretical as it may be to some, Jeopardy is in some ways a much more difficult game than chess. To win at Jeopardy you must know a lot about a lot of unrelated things, with chess you only have to know a lot about chess. Thus the limits of the game are definable, while in Jeopardy they are not.
As for what this bodes for the future, that is yet to be writ, but if past is prologue, I point you to the infamous Roger Smith, who mortgaged the entire future of GM on "Lights-Out" manufacturing -- and lost.
For those unaware, Smith's plan was to have GM plants so fully automated, cars could be built in the dark by robots working 24-7-365 with no healthcare and no pensions. Yeah, right. Save for a giant govt bailout, the only Lights-Out" would have been at GM.
Caracalla, it's an open question about technology replacing the service industry. It may not replace servers at restaurants but lack of money could lead to the fall of many restaurants. Food itself could become so expensive that people can't afford the luxury of having it served and have to focus on just being able to buy it. But as for care, the Japanese are working on ’bots that will help with a lot of that, again in an effort to cut costs of care. I don't doubt that some of the unemployed will find ways to stay in that market, but I think the effect of the bots won't be to saturate the market, just to drive down the cost of what people can be paid since it will creat a line above which it's better to get a ’bot, and that line will move ever downward unless something happens such as a resource shortage keeping broad deployment from happening. We have to, in other words, bank on a failure of the deployment of technology in order to feel comfortable that technology is not a threat in that area because technology is on track to enter that area.
I think you're write about what you call the “debt bomb.” The market is in a bind where to sustain its thirst for expansion, it encourages the behavior that it then wants to chide people for doing—borrowing. We should be encouraging people not to buy, but markets abhor saying things like that. This is a fundamental inconsistency. We would, as a society, all be wealthier if we encouraged people to need less. But the individuals that run our society would perceive themselves poorer.
And yes, I think you're right that there are a lot of threats to artists. The ones you list are certainly worth a whole blog post if you're of a mind to write it. The problem is, to some extent, industry sees artistry as an end, not a means. It's concerned with whether there is something “good enough” to command a sale, little more. Many might regard that artistry should be about individuality and personal bests, but these require the acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of a person at a level different than what can be sold. If such people are merely regarded as “freeloaders” for their inability or unwillingness to churn out something that can be sold, then they can still do it as an avocation, but it becomes irrelevant to the question of what people will do as a vocation.
Caracalla, although I wanted to underscore my belief about the contrast of people and machines, I do think you make some points that are nevertheless worthwhile. I just frame them differently in my mind because I'm not busy trying to defend that machines are different than people. I still think the difficulty and pointlessness of working on the goal is there even in my model.
Tom, as for lights-out manufacturing, I've little doubt it can be done. I just don't know why one would want to unless the plan was to leave people more leisure time. If the plan is simply to beat people up about how they never do anything useful any more and to tell them they can't have as much because they don't earn enough, that seems a bad plan. The problem is that in our disconnected free market, the people doing the planning are not planning society, just their corporation. And the people being affected are not part of that plan, they're just casualties. No one is looking out for them, and every time they try collectively through either unions or government, the political Right and the Free Marketeers are in there telling them that things work better if they don't.
Another area is that of consciousness and since we each are conscious I suspect there is a high prejudice in exalting it. Anybody who has spent any serious time introspecting their own consciousness soon becomes aware that many prime functions of the mind are pretty well hidden from our consciousness. There are deep layers of very vital activity that have strong effects on our attitudes, opinions, decisions and actions that are totally hidden from our conscious minds. I have come to the conclusion that our consciousness is a surface phenomenon that plays somewhat the role of a diplomatic office to the real world that informs and advises the real intellect lurking in the depths of our nervous system which provides all sorts of highly intricate creative stuff when it can be accessed. I am a graphic artist, a sculptor, and a poet, among other things and the things that pop into my consciousness from this mysterious inner source frequently amaze me and I feel very guilty taking credit for their realization. I certainly have not consciously been responsible for their existence. Whether machines can imitate this structure I cannot say but I have a hunch a sophisticated machine might well do.
Now that there are no jobs running large customer service organizations (which is what I used to do) I manage CRM implementations on a project basis. What that means in English is change the way people do their jobs via the technology.
And the big issue is also the same. And it's always ignored by the IBM's and Accentures of the world. The big issue is that people are scared of change. The first focus of the training is always "How-to"---till we change it to "why should I?" And the ever popular "What's in it for me?"
Sorry for the delay. This was an excellent post. Although you described a grim portrait of this situation (i.e., automation versus humans), I believe that we’re not as doomed as it seems (with a caveat, as discussed below). In my opinion, what will happen is a shift in the skills that will be required from the work force. People will need to be better educated and trained in order to maintain the robots, computers and related software programs that are used to build products or provide services. Moreover, I still believe that many jobs or positions cannot be replaced by robots, such as my line of work. These kinds of positions also need creative people, who need to think “outside the box.”
In the past, holding a high school degree would be good enough for the majority of positions. Now, one needs to hold a bachelor’s degree, often because the candidate is required to understand the latest technological advancements. In fact, some positions that required an undergraduate diploma 10 or 15 years ago have been upgraded where only people with advanced degrees can fulfilled these positions.
Given how bad the US is doing education wise (very low world rankings for math and sciences for instance), I’m concerned that the problem with unemployment (long-term) will just get worse if the trend to better educate our people does not turn around soon.
Jan, thanks for the clarifications.
Kanuk, certainly the education issue is material to this. But as noted in earlier discussion, even the educated have that issue because to be educated in one skill may not be to be educated in another. The cost of catching up is high if one has to shift jobs, and the need to shift jobs is common. That's pretty challenging even for the prepared and nearly impossible for the unprepared. We'd better start investing in something and not keep treating both “having employees” and “educating citizens” as mere expenses.
Happiness seems to be a sense of satisfaction existent in the internal evaluation system of, at least, the human system of awareness. It seems likely it exists in some related ways in other aware organisms. It is a spectrum evaluation and has great variation.
Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny: Can you?
After all, not even all people are as intelligent as we speak abstractly about People being.
And thanks for connecting this back up to the thread topic—I had lost track of the reason for the side discussion.
But to reiterate my point from the article: “I worry about effects involving smart computers that will happen long before then.”
-R-
First issue: When you say you could copy the program to another machine, I reject this. This has been well-discussed in science fiction. I don't recall the story but there is one that begins with a person on some sort of dangerous mission (perhaps a suicide mission). He has volunteered to be cloned, and as I recall in some way that clones his memories. Let's say that was possible. Maybe by a transporter accident (as happens a couple of times on Star Trek) maybe by some other means. It seems conceivable you could design such a device (maybe not one that transports you to a place with no receiver, but perhaps a "copier" that copies matter in place). So the question there becomes: Are these copies or distinct. The answer is distinct. Because from the moment of the copy, all they know must be applied differently. If they face each other, then one faces left and the other right, so their experiences diverge. If both face the same way, then one is at the left and the other the right, or one is in front and the other the back. Already experiences diverge. If a boulder falls, perhaps only one dies. If a bear enters, one may be caught and the other not. In the story I read, the guy had decided it was okay to be cloned to do this dangerous thing because if he died, he would still be alive elsewhere, but from the moment of cloning he realizes that he is not the other, and if he dies, that's it, there is no other, even though it seemed beforehand that there was. So copying cannot copy the relationships only the memories. Any entity that is plugged into the world is different. If it's my best friend, I'm going to spend time with only one, not both, and so one is robbed of my friendship and one is not. That can't be copied, even though the program and data can, and so the copy is imperfect even while being bitwise equal.
The other aspect, having to do with humans, is that until it's shown that there is more to us, it's not clear why you are concerned that the digital copy is all there is. Although made up of lots of parts, most of our parts are known to be replaceable. And even the parts that are not are finite in their atoms. So whatever we are, it is complete and contained in the way of a computer, just different construction technology. Perhaps the only difference is that like the way they make car radios to sabotage themselves if you pull them from the car, working only in-place, our entire structure is that way. Maybe we're just some intelligent race's machines, integrated with clever intellectual property protection that makes us hard to copy. :)
Mary, I'm always torn by such remarks since on the one hand I'd like it to be plain enough that it comes through on first read, and yet on the other hand I'd like it to be rich enough that it suffers a second read usefully. I'm glad you persisted and got useful value from it.
But we do have ways of copying people: We can copy their DNA. Certainly twins result that way. And yet they are different. The difference is data and experience.
In fact, it's not clear you could make a computer that was like a person without experience, so you almost have to presuppose that it interacts with people and lives with people, and so it's not in a box on a table like in your hypothetical lab experiment. A person doing that would likely go insane. People don't cope well with sensory deprivation unless they're in a coma perhaps, and maybe not even then.
And please in the future do not monopolize this much of my threads. I should have stopped you earlier and in the future I will try harder to do so.
First, it is unmannerly to write this much on someone else's thread without encouragement from them that you should. Certainly you should check with them for permission. Even one long remark is already pushing it, but to do long remark after long remark after long remark like a relentless firehose locks out other discussion. At this point, I am confident the reason no one else is talking is that they don't want to engage you.
Second, I don't think you're on topic. This issue of whether people can be equivalent to computers is a specific issue I alluded to in passing was not the thread topic. I specifically used language to avoid it in the article, saying that while it's an interesting concern, my central concern are the problems that can happen in advance of that. That was what this discussion might have been had you not hijacked this conversation.
Third, you seem to just haughtily reject the legitimate points of others as if you were the final arbiter. Even if you were on topic, I don't think for all your verbiage you've done anything to refute the points that have been raised, and yet I'm confident that anything I reply you will hit me back with many long comments in response, such that it's just a filibuster against anyone else saying anything.
The mannerly thing is not to attempt to beat everyone into submission but merely to state your point and be done with it and step back and leave others to make their point. Right now, I'm sure nearly everyone is not commenting so as not to end up in a battle with you. I suggest that if you think it's fun to have a discussion like this, you should write your own post and see how many people will engage you. Maybe many will, and I wish you a good time. I will not be among them.