Artificial Warning

An article about Artificial Intelligence crossed my consciousness last week.  It's called "Tech companies should stop pretending AI won't destroy jobs" and is written by Kai-Fu Lee.  This is a thought that I embrace whole-heartedly.

In it, he argues that soon at least half of all jobs will be better and more safely handled by AI.  That we are not ready for the dramatic social upheaval that this transition will cause.  That we should not look to previous economic revolutions (industrial, computer or otherwise) because the same sets of conditions do not apply: things are moving faster than those did, and the transition may not give rise to new forms of work.

For the most part, I agree with him.  AI and automation are going to cause incredible changes.  My first quibble is with the speed: some sectors will be changed much more rapidly due to the economic advantages automation provides.  My second is that Mr. Lee offers no solutions.

Amazon Go Shrinkage

Last week, Amazon opened its pilot 'cashier-less' retail store to the public.  It was announced over a year ago and I discussed it then.  Now, people outside of Amazon's own employee base have had an opportunity to experience it.  And mostly it has been positive.

Reviewers like the low (but not quite gone) employee interaction.  Most comment on the novelty of stuffing things into your backpack and walking out.  They all look at the grid of cameras suspended over the store and try and figure out what is actually going on (Amazon is not saying).  All of this is great.

Then they start talking about the implications.  As I don't live anywhere near Seattle, that's where I can jump in.

StarWorld

I've seen "Star Wars: The Last Jedi".  And I enjoyed it.  Which must mean that I'm not a 'real' Star Wars fan.

Maybe.  Maybe not.  What I find is that I'm a fan of things that  I enjoy and I'm willing to let certain things slide from a canonical stand point if it makes the story interesting.  Did Rian Johnson, the director and writer, make the right choices for Luke's character?  I enjoyed the journey that the character of Luke took through this one movie, so from that perspective, he did.  Is it consistent with the character of Luke Skywalker from episodes 4-6?  I suppose that I would argue that it is not, but then that was 35 years earlier in that character's life.  Who among us has stayed the same over even five years of our lives, much less seven times that long?  Certainly not me.

But that is not really what I want to write about this week.  Merely the setup.  I want to talk about another of the fan backlash issues: starship automation.  And this one involves spoilers.  So read on only if you've seen the movie or don't care.   But see the movie: it's worth seeing on a big screen.

No Jobs Are Safe

Hello, World!  I'm back after a brief hiatus that I spent remembering our troops by taking the Middle School Daughter Unit white water rafting (among other things).

But that's all over now and it's back to banging the what-do-we-do-when-the-jobs-are-all-automated drum.  The jumping off point is a website I discovered through Reddit, called:

WILL ROBOTS TAKE MY JOB

Working Towards No Work - Part 1

Two weeks ago, I wrote about why I think laws requiring a percentage of the work force to be human is a bad idea, using it to transition into a vision of a "Post-Work" world.  This week I want to continue on that theme and expand it a bit, focusing on the momentum towards it, the reasons why we need it and some thoughts on how to get there.

[
/Open (aside)

Last week, I did not write, but took the Middle School Daughter Unit camping.  Or, rather, her school did and I was allowed to tag along as long as I drove and fed the teachers leading the expedition.  We visited a Wolf Sanctuary and then went caving in lava tubes in and around El Malpais National Monument.  Visit both if you can, but definitely have a guide for the caves: it is easy to get lost.

/Close (aside)
]

Post-Work, not Post-Scarcity

Most people who talk about life in a fully automated society label it "Post-Scarcity".  This is not what I'm talking about.  Or at least, not yet.  To get to a full on Post-Scarcity world, we need to go beyond automation into the realm of matter reconstruction.

With work place automation, we are off loading the work to machines, but we are still dealing with the same resources.  The same amount of arable land to grow food, the same amount of water in the same occasionally convenient places.  All the automation does is help us maximize our use of those resources.  This is Post-Work.  The available resources are still limited.

For Post-Scarcity, we need to be able to build food, water and consumer packaged goods from things that are not food, water or goods.  Like breaking a rock down into its constituent atoms and then re-assembling them into other goods that are more useful to the people in the immediate location.  I'm not talking about vat-growing a steak.  Instead, this is building the steak atom-by-atom in the back of the restaurant, already cooked, on demand.  The current state-of-the-art for working on that scale has a long way to go, but is not outside the realm of 'eventually.'

Post-Work is a landing on the staircase that leads to Post-Scarcity, but does not get us all of the way there.

It is Inevitable, Mr. Anderson

With annoying definition pedantry things out of the way, let's talk about why work automation is going to happen (oh, let's!).  The reason is simple: the short, medium and long term gains for employers are just too high.

Robots don't sleep.  They don't need vacations.  They don't complain about work hours or have families or needs outside of the work place.  They have the potential to get sick (break), but their medical plan does not cringe at fire-and-replace if the repair cost is too high.  And that's for the high cost, physical world automation.  Many of us, myself included, will lose our jobs (if I had one) to software.  Then all of the ills of the mechanical world are tossed out (to be replaced by bugs and viruses, to be sure, but still more reliable).

Beyond the world of HR, automation adds one other significant factor: consistency of output.  We humans with our five imperfect senses cannot repeat tasks down to the millimeter consistently.  Those that can are considered savants or somewhere on the autism spectrum.  They are not sitting in the middle of the bell curve with the rest of us baseline humans.

As I said in my piece two weeks ago, those companies that automate quickly and completely will have a significant edge over those that do not.  If those companies find themselves in jurisdictions that attempt to force human labor on them, they will lobby against them, eventually moving to someplace that will allow them to operate as they want.

Next Week - I Promise

So, this rant is already subjecting all five of you who read this to a longer article than I think your patience can handle.  I'm going to push the rest of this to next week's installment.  The two topics left are:

• Why work place automation MUST happen (Hint: there are 7.5 Billion reasons and growing).
• How we make the transition to Post-Work with the least amount of pain (I don't have a clue, and this is the real reason it's getting pushed to next week).

Affirmative Automation

This week, I'm going to continue ignoring the repeal of Net Neutrality.  Instead I want to return to the concept of workplace automation.

Human Quotas

In particular, this article from The Guardian, US Edition, "Rise of robotics will upend laws and lead to human job quotas, study says."  The article in about a report from the International Bar Association on the rise of the robot workforce.  Despite the headline, the article spends little time talking about human quotas, instead documenting the rise of workplace automation.  Which is something anyone paying any kind of attention already knew about.

Despite the disparity between the headline and the content, the article does mention that the report does suggest that governments may attempt to regulate the job market, requiring that employers hire some number of humans.  In general, I think that this would be a colossal mistake.

Mismatched

(We're going to set aside the issues of building and maintaining automation for this article.  They are short term jobs that will also ultimately die to automation.  Eventually the robots will be building and maintaining themselves.)

The problem is that humans, as non-specialized tool users, will never be able to compete with task specific robots.  Those will always be able to do the task for which they are designed faster, more reliably and more cheaply than something like the jack-of-all-trades design that is the human body.

As that is the case, requiring humans to do similar work to the robots right next to them will reduce the competitive advantage of the company/country that enacts these quotas.  Other jurisdictions that allow their employers to go 'full auto' will have companies that can produce the same product cheaper and with higher quality, undercutting the quota companies and driving them out of business.  And then where will the humans work?

Why 'Work'

For me, the problem is the word 'Work'.  For the purposes of this rant, I'm going to define 'work' as the 'trade of free time for currency'.  Our current economy, at least in most developed economies, is based on the need for the population to work so that they can:

1. earn money so that they can 
2. spend money so that
3. other people can work so that they can
4. buy the things that the first people make/do.

We are all trading our free time so that we can buy things that other people make by trading their free time so that they can buy the things that we make.  This is the 'Business Cycle'.

(courtesy of the BBC)

But what if our "Needs & wants' were met without work because automation?  What would we do then?  That is the question that a fully automated work force starts to ask.

The Real Question

Work is supposed to reward effort with access to more and better resources through the middle many of currency.  We are supposed to be a meritocracy (a subject for debate).  But if there is no work to reward, then how do we know who is pulling their weight and who is just sitting around playing video games all day long?

This is the question that needs to be debated in the halls of power: how do we reward actions that our society deems meritorious?  It does not need to be money.  It could be Facebook 'Likes' (not to give the great and glorious Zuch any ideas to expand his already growing FB Economy).  It could be YouTube subscriptions or something like gaming achievements.  Maybe these could be used for access to higher tier goods and services... but that just swaps dollars and pounds for likes and achievements.

What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?

Maybe the real issue is not how we reward effort or creativity, but that we all feel that things like 'effort' and 'reward' need to exist.  I realize that competitiveness is baked into the human psyche after millions of years of evolution, but it may be time to start working those out of our minds.  Instead of doing things because there is an external reward, we should be doing things because the doing of those things is reward enough.  It is a nice thought.

In reality, maybe the first step is to actively start automating government.  When the lawmakers start to see their lives disrupted, something will happen.  Maybe quotas, maybe Universal Basic Income, maybe something else, but it will be a step towards a post-work human society.

What Are We Learning For?

This week was a fun week in the House O' Schmoid.  One of the Middle School Daughter Unit's teachers sent home an email that she was getting dangerously behind on a project.  I would not have freaked out too much if this had been the first time, but sadly... no.  This led to a series of conversations with teachers and grandparents and ex-wives and... eventually with the MSD herself.  Everyone agreed with the importance of education and learning how to learn.  Even the MSD.  Of course, after 'adulting', I spent some time thinking about what kinds of expectations I was setting up for her.

All I Wanted Was a Pepsi

We've all heard the 'what are you going to do with your life' speeches from various parents and counselors and therapists and institutional learning facilities.  That all of what we learn in school is going to be useful later when we have to earn a living.  And even the stuff that seems useless (the Pythagorean theorem is the usual whipping boy, but I've actually used that a few times a year), is useful in what it teaches around problem solving and the creation of good study habits.  And I certainly did my part to land all of that with the MSD.  But, in the face of mass automation of the work force and the potential of a 'post-work' society, are all of those worn parental speeches still valid?

I wrote about some of this last week around the context of the Superb Owl and concluded that highly specialized entertainment skills like those used in American Football might be safe from automation.  However, I was unable to come to any conclusion for the rest of us more average human specimen.  And then I see stuff like:

with its spacial awareness and fast reflexes and extra articulation and I start to wonder exactly what reasons can be fed to a twelve-year old that are truthful motivations.

What Jobs of the Future?

Higher level thinking jobs are turning out to be some of the first to go.  Watson is doing a better job diagnosing cancers than 'real' doctors.  And it's not the only one.  Banks are using bots to help with personal finance and to stop fraud, taking out both customer service and law enforcement with one set of automation.  That's on top of the heavy automation going into factory and menial service jobs.

(courtesy Fastcompany.com)

Going a step farther and looking at some of the jobs that are projected to be hot in ten years, and most of those are already well on their way to being automated.  Small plot farm bots exist.  Medicine at all levels, from nurse to surgeon to researcher, is quickly getting automated because it minimizes mistakes.  Even 'sex worker coach' is being replaced by waifu pillows and ubiquitous internet porn.

One Word: Repair

As a parent, it is hard to make a serious argument for focused life direction.  I've considered recommending that she finish high school and not go to college, but go to a trade school.  Something like plumbing or carpentry or becoming an electrician.  While there is a lot of automation going on in those fields as well, most of it is in new construction.  Not repair.  All of the pipes and wires and boards in our homes and offices will break.  And they will break in such a way that an automated, task specific contraption will not be able to fix it.  Or at least not at the same price as one of the hoards of out-of-work laborers.

Of course, those jobs are not sexy.  They don't have the panache of an athlete or movie star or Wall Street type (or internet blogger).  They are so not sexy that there is already a shortage in the skilled trades.  Which just means that those that can will charge more.  Thanks, Invisible Hand.

With all of that said, telling a pre-teen girl who is into drawing and guitar and wearing fedoras that she should be an electrician was not something I dropped into the 'get your work done' conversation.  Even those jobs (maybe, especially those jobs) require the critical thinking, planning and attention to detail that school work is supposed to help teach.

If it's properly funded and attracts the right teachers... but we won't need to worry about that because the teachers will all be Test Bots, Amazon Alexa and YouTube videos.

And with that, I'll head back to 'adulting'.

The Human Bowl

I apologize for not giving you your weekly dose of Schmoid last week, but I had the opportunity to go skiing at Alta, UT (my favorite ski area) which meant less time for writing.  With that out of the way...

Happy American Sports Advertising Day!

I recognize that you are reading this on a Monday and that either Boston or Atlanta is celebrating city wide an achievement accomplished by 53 players plus associated coaches.  But I'll set aside the Illusion of Awesomeness Transference (IAT?  I'll have to work on that) and see if I can pull something IoT related out of the Superb Owl.

(source image)

Blitz the Robot

And, look!  I can!  And it's about jobs!  Oh, joy!  Many of the jobs that were once thought to be safe from automation are now being threatened.  From Wall Street stock pickers to truck driver to fast food service jobs, automation is taking over.  Even artistic endeavors are coming under attack.  All of which begs the question:

Are there any jobs that are safe from automation?

That's where the Super Bowl comes in.  (Most) Sports are safe from automation.  While it is possible to build robots that can run and jump and throw and move better than humans, it would make the sports pointless.   Something that can perform actions flawlessly every time becomes boring to watch very quickly.  What makes sports worth doing and worth watching is that we can relate to the human on the field doing something incredible, know that we cannot do it and marvel at their achievement.  With the robot, it quickly becomes "Oh, of course it can do that.  It's a robot."  And with that, we all switch off the game and the ad revenue dries up.  It is the imperfect striving for the perfect that inspires us, not the perfect being perfect.

An example of this is Battle Bots, the TV show that pitted remote controlled motorized devices against each other in a gladiatorial contest.  While not truly 'robotic' (the machines were not autonomous), it did not take long for the designer/pilots to figure out that low wedge flipping bots were offered the highest chance of winning.  From there, it was a matter of who could build the most maneuverable bot with the lowest front edge to their wedge, get it under the competitor and put them on their back.  The crazy saws and hammers and flame throwers that looked fabulous in promos turned out to be almost useless.  So the show got boring.  So the show got cancelled.  Twice.

We Can't All Be Athletes

The problem is that only those that are really close to perfect are worth using to sell beer and cars and nachos.  Everyone else is only interesting if they are related to you in some way.  The entire city of San Mateo, CA did not shut down and throw a party every time Tom Brady played football in High School.  I'm guessing, based entirely on my own lack of giving a sh** during that portion of my life, that not even the whole school showed up.

So, for those of us that aren't good at sports, how are we supposed to live if all of the other jobs have had humans automated out of them?  As with all things, there's some good news and some bad news.

The Good News

The reason to automate most things is because it allows for them to be made/accomplished for less money.  That means that the goods and services provided should become cheaper.  We won't need as much money to afford the basics because those basics will be cheaper.

But who wants to live on just the basics?  There is some good news there, too.  Even the mid-level luxury items should come down in price, not just because their production has been automated, but because...

The Bad News

... we won't have enough money to afford them if they don't.  If robots take all of the jobs and jobs are how we are expected to make money and money is how we continue to manage our economy, then there won't be any money for people to buy anything.  It won't matter how low the price is, no one (except the highest level athletes) will have anything to exchange for those goods and services.

The Even Worse News

The worst part is that we need this automation.  Not for the luxury goods, but for the subsistence level stuff.  With 7.5 Billion people on this planet (and growing), humans alone can no longer grow enough food to feed everyone.  We cannot care for the sick and elderly relying on just ourselves.  Sanitation, public safety, transportation, shelter.  None of it can be made on the necessary scale to deal with the growing population without automation.  We need automated fertilizer systems for agriculture.  We need elderly care bots.  We need home construction bots.  There are simply too many of us to manage it any other way.

But...

There are other solutions, but they are so draconian that they are barely worth mentioning.  Who gets to decide who gets to have children?  Who gets to decide who gets to live where?  Who gets to decide who deserves health care and who does not?  None of those things are going to happen.  At least not easily or quickly or on the global scale necessary for any real change to happen.  And would we want to live in that world if we did?  Fewer people also means fewer ideas and thoughts and ... athletes striving for perfection.

I don't have an ultimate answer to this dilemma.  Universal Basic Income is a start, but where will that money come from?  Tax the manufacturers and their robots just so people can afford the things that the robots make?  That sounds like a vicious cycle that will not end well.  But it may be a necessary step to a post-monetary society.  Not socialist, necessarily, but something else where people are freed from the basic grind to find food and water and shelter and health.  Where they can strive for something more.

This is Schmoid, signing off to go strive for my own perfection.

Amazon Go-es After IRL Retail... Again

The biggest news in the IoT this last week was Amazon's announcement of their updated Brick-and-Mortar shopping experience: Amazon Go.  The major selling point is simple: check-in, grab what you want and leave.  There is no check out.  The system simply knows what you have picked up, bills your Amazon account and that's it.  It does all of this in real time while you are in the store.  There is no TSA-style sensor pad at the exit point to walk through, no scanning of bar codes or RFID tags.  It just knows.