We are not replacing tools or labor here.  We are actually replacing the PEOPLE and their entire skill sets.

When Joe is replaced by a machine, Joe will need to be cross-trained.  But Joe's skill sets, his genetic maximum capability, is going to be lower than what the machine can do.  And the machine can be cross-trained and upgraded faster than Joe can learn a new job.

Joe is not just unemployed.  He has become UNEMPLOYABLE.

To put this in the simplest terms:

The horseless carriage is coming.  And we are the horses.

The Basic Income Guarantee is indeed the solution.

We invented the machines to work.  Let them.  It's time the human race moved forward.

To what?  A basic income guarantee to those displaced workers would be no guarantee of preventing civil unrest, etc.  As always, the powers that be [both corporate and government] would set it a just on on just below the poverty line, thus creating a new group of have nots who are accustomed to a much better standard of living.  While many may not resort to a life of crime to help make ends meet, the crime rate would still soar because crime always rises as more and more people become impoverished and are forced into desperate circumstances.  That's how ghettos form, further separating the haves from the have nots and placing even greater strain on law enforcement and the judicial system.

The answer is not to displace millions upon millions of workers, but sadly that's not how the corporate world would play it, reaping even greater profits by employing a mechanised workforce it doesn't have to pay.  Thankfully, I'll be long gone by the time this AI threat comes to pass, as will my children and their children's children, though I do mourn those future generations whose lives will be adversely affected by 'progress'.

It's probably wishful thinking anyway.  90% of what used to be the workforce is now 15% and the other 75% are providing goods and services people couldn't even dream of.  For all we know, all the unemployable duds who can't keep up with robots will end up playing video games for a living to teach learning AI strategy and tactics for military applications, or efficiency optimization for economic functions.  The great unknown is the great unknown, our hubris can't dictate it.

Very Rumsfeldian, there, psycho...

Great, millions of fat, slovenly 'former' workers playing games all day everyday, just what the future needs  Instead of evolving, the human race would devolve and become an economic drain just eating up resources. 

It would only end badly.

Eloi.

Daiwa

reply 44

Very Rumsfeldian, there, psycho...

He may sound Rumsfeldian, but to me he's channeling Bastiat.

High praise.

Another reason AI should not be replacing the workforce is hookers.  Venting one's frustrations with a flesh and blood hooker is natural and would feel that way, whereas going to a robotic AI one would not be natural.  Moreover, it wouldn't be right for a machine to be saying: "That'll be a 100 bucks, please."

Not only that, the rich and wealthy would get models that look like the female terminator in Terminator 3 and feel natural, while the poor get Arnie look-a-likes with all that chrome and tungsten underneath a synthetic skin.... and feeling like a bucket of bolts.  Nope, it wouldn't pay to be poor in the future

Shoot, given that scenario, and needing to get some dirty water off my chest, I dunno that I'd wanna be rich, either.

The real problem with robotic hookers is that pretty girls would actually have to work their way through college, instead of "working" through it.

To get a degree in...

Wait for it...

Gender Studies!

Somehow I don't think many of the women stripping through college are wasting their time getting a degree in gender studies.  They'd need to be too dumb for college to start with if they could still convince themselves of the value in it while practicing it's ideological destruction by wrapping losers around their fingers and milking them of every dime they've got in our great white patriarchy...

Seriously what would the difference be between a blow up doll and a robot.

Well, I've never been able to grasp the attraction to any of that stuff, but I imagine that for anyone who'd do a rubber doll to start with, one that talked back and whatnot is either a serious detraction, or a pretty big plus, depending on how royally screwed in the head they are.

Yup, the academic staff would have to give real grades...  in the absence of a bit of 'fleshy encouragement' to stamp their papers with an A+.

Same would go with college football players, etc... they'd get true grades that'd show 'em up for the meatheads alot of 'em really are.

See, this proves my point that AI should not be developed to take the place of human activities.  Just look at all the problems it would cause.  You'd have hookers and strippers without college degrees to fall back on when 'the body' gets too old or worn out.... and you'd have former college football stars... er, meatheads becoming senators and the like, politicians without an education or qualifications.

Oh wait!  Former college football stars have done.... are already doing that.

BTW, no offense to former football stars was intended... and NONE should be taken.

Seriously!  Have you seen what's inside a Terminator? 

Besides, I doubt too many men would wanna 'engage' with something that looked anything like Arnie.

As for the blow-up doll, I don't see the fascination there, either.  I'd always worry about getting too vigourous, puncturing it, and it flying out the window with me still firmly 'attached'.

50 years from now, starkers' posts will be used as the training set for the dirty old man AI 

I've discussed this in several of my blogs here.  Try the one on a general solution to poverty (33K hits and 204 mostly intelligent and serious responses).  Or look back a few years to the blog I did on a guaranteed fixed dividend here in the U.S., closely paralleling the Swiss proposal. (The Only Real Solution - November, 2008) http://philosborn.joeuser.com/article/329574/The_Only_Real_Solution

This keeps displaying in Chines饿 

hedetet

reply 57

50 years from now, starkers' posts will be used as the training set for the dirty old man AI 

Hehe, I wonder if they use the same old raincoats to open up and 'flash' unsuspecting women... female AI.

And what would the 'offensive member' look like... a bolt or screw, which would somehow seem appropriate; something like a dildo; or facsimiles of the real thing, using former porn stars thingwybobs as models.  I say former stars cos by then AI would have taken over that industry as well.... cos why should humans have all the fun.  I mean, being sentient and all, they'd want 'sentient' rights, lurks and perks, wouldn't they.

See Comment #58, which somehow got mangled - no doubt an evil AI..

Ahem.   I've written two major blogs that got into this issue:

One recently on a general solution to poverty worldwide, in which I proposed a fairly small global dividend, an equal amount to every human on the planet, just to equalize the books on social justice and to keep a billion people from starving and give them some basic working capital to start producing. $500~$1000 annually per person everywhere.

One on an equal lump sum payment to every U.S. citizen to offset the losses to the lower end of the income scale due to massive predation by crooks who were profiting at the high end.

Hopeless people who are now artificially excluded from much of the market due to predatory political/economic/military policy will not be any happier when their efforts to becoming self-supporting are further undercut by robots taking over all the drudge jobs...  Unless they see that it will actually profit them personally.

Right?  So the Swiss referendum idea was pretty close to the mark - leaving some fairly minor questions* as to implementation unresolved.  It could work nationally or internationally, but long-term best worldwide.  If everyone at least has the bare basics guaranteed by a national or world dividend (think Alaska), then those people who were previously hopeless would have a starting point to building a life.

It's either that or a likely world war, with robots on all sides.  Guess who will survive?

*There was the issue in the Swiss deal as to whether everyone got exactly the same amount.  I say YES, because one of the great benefits of a flat dividend is that it takes much of the politics out of the  picture.  You're not voting to advantage your groups against everyone else.  Instead, the only vote - direct or via some representative process - would be on the decision as to the raw size of the dividend, and that should be subject to rational analysis, with some disagreement of course.  But I and probably most people would be happy to see a dividend that didn't kill the golden goose. 

Let the robots and their wealthy corporate owners take all the jobs and make all the money, so long as I get a share based on me being a member of a species that provided them with the basic environment and capability to do so.  Not to mention the contributing share of the Earth's ecosphere.  Would the robots have ever evolved by themselves?  Look around the solar system.  Where are they?  They OWE us.  Just a fact.