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.

Work is What You Make of AI

Last month I got all on a kick about how automation is going to take our jobs and that that is a good thing.  There has been some more press on this topic so I want to continue kicking it around.

The first article for my shouting-into-an-empty-house discussion is from the BBC: How long will it take for your job to be automated.  This is about an Oxford study that asked 352 scientists how long various jobs would take to be automated.  This is a better information than the one that the Will Robots Take My Job site used.  And it offers up a time frame that is more heartening for those that are hip deep in the status quo: 120 year before 50% of all jobs are automated.  Hold on to that thought.

The second article is about Eric Schmidt, Google Founder and Techno Spouter (of course I'm jealous, people ask his opinions instead of me trying to force them down any ear that will listen).  In it, Mr. Schmidt puts forth the idea that A.I. will create more jobs that can't be filled instead of destroying them.  His reasoning is that automation will make workers more efficient, more productive, but that humans will still need to be part of the process.  He cites a McKinsey study that says that 5% of current jobs can be automated with today's technology for his reasoning.  It's a very together-we-are-stronger statement, but it has a few holes.

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

No Working at Home

After my extended diatribe on automation and the 'Post-Work' society over the last few weeks, it has occurred to me to question the role of home automation in this transition.  After all, this blog started because of my interest in smart home technology and the promise of consumer level IoT.  So how does a connected home fit into this transition?   How does having a automated light switches and thermostats and shelf-top voice assistants help get us (me) towards a 'Life Well Lived'?

Working Towards No Work - Part 2

I know that there were plenty of opinion worthy news events over the last week related to connectivity, privacy and the internet.

• The FCC wants to 'free' the internet up for corporations by removing neutrality rules.
• Open ports in many Android apps create smartphone hacking opportunities
• Turkey is blocking Wikipedia because ignorance is bliss for those you rule.
• Federal Spy Agencies are not automating fast enough to overcome recruiting obstacles.
• Google Home can now recognize different users.
• And Amazon wants to spy on you in the bathroom.

But the hell with all of that.  I want to continue my tirade/rant/dream of a Post-Work economy.  For those of you who have not read last week's post (Working Towards No Work - Part 1) or the one from three weeks ago, here's a brief summary (though not in the order in which they appeared in the two cited posts):

• Automation is coming and will disrupt the work place according to this report from the International Bar Association.
• No work is really safe from this (including c-level management)
• Setting quotas for living workers will merely push corporations to jurisdictions that don't require them.
• It is going to happen because it reduces labor costs which in turn gets the things we want to market at lower costs, which will increase demand, which will drive more automation.
• But if all jobs are automated, then how will we earn money to buy the things that the robots make?
• We must rebuild our economy on a different platform from capitalism/consumerism.  Maybe around the notion of 'A Life Well Lived', not 'A Life of Work.'
• This is not Post-Scarcity.  That requires unlimited resources.  Resources are still limited by location and our inability to restructure mater on the fly.  Automation only helps us make the most of the resources that are available and get them where they are needed.

We MUST Automate

Forget, for a moment, about automation on the personal or micro-economic scale.  Heck, don't even think about it on the enterprise or single national entity scale.  Instead, to understand the imperative in the above sub-heading, I ask you to think on the fully macro-economic scale.  The getting-to-stage-1-civilization scale.

With that in mind, the issue is all about resource management.  There are more and more of us humans on the planet every second of every minuted of every hour of every day.  The current estimate has us at 7.5 Billion people with an additional 145 joining every minute (250 emerging and 105 shuffling off per minute, for a net of 145).  We'll be at 10 billion sometime around 2060.  How the F-Sharp are all of those people going to eat? drink? WORK?

Ten Billion is a significant number because it is one strong estimate about how many people the earth can support.  Much of this is based on the eating of meat, a particularly inefficient food source, but we'll set that aside because you and I both know that the human race won't stop at 10B pop.  We'll keep going and going, expecting things to just work out.  For the Powers That Be to 'do something'.  And those Powers only have so many options:

• Population Control.  Yeah, because that worked so well for China.  Stopping people from pro-creating is not going to get anyone elected or keep them in power.  If we try to stop it, that will just move all of the sex behind even more doors.  The kids will still be born, and once they are born, no one in any first world country is going to kill them because they are excess population.  Personally, I believe that some level of this must eventually take place, but god help the poor soul who tries to make it happen.
• Invasion/Genocide.  This may work on a national scale, but not on a global scale.  With no more lands to conquer, your people are still going to breed.  It is also the most likely to galvanize the rest of the world to stomp on you.  Again, not a workable solution.
• Find Another Earth.  Lots of people are working on this, but the tech to make it workable in the next couple of centuries, much less in the next couple of decades which is when we'll need it, is not going to be there.
• Be More Efficient.  Ultimately, this is the only answer.  We have to use what we have better.  Fewer Bugattis and more bananas.

Ah!  I can hear you thinking over the internet, "We'll put all of those people to work making food and moving water and building shelter!  That'll fix it all!"  Well, not really.  The more people work, the more they consume.  Also, humans are great multi-function machines, but they can not match the productivity of purpose built automation.  We need all of the production and distribution we can get if we are going to have a chance of feeding and housing everyone at even the most basic levels.

Maps?  Where We're Going We Don't Need Maps

The tricky part of all of this is getting from where we are now to where we need to be.  Here in the US of A, much of our identity is tied up in what we do to earn money.  Where we fit on the social ladder is connected to how much money we have.  Who gets what goods and services and at what quality is all based on the amount of money we have.  If no one is working (if no one CAN work because they can't compete with robots), then no one is earning money and no one is buying anything.  How do we measure our self worth?  How do we know who gets the good stuff?

The short answer to that last bit is that no one gets the good stuff because there won't be any more good stuff.  To deal with a 10B+ population, the good stuff has to go away and everyone gets the basic stuff.  There simply will not be room in the production schedule of something like a Bugatti.  Not when making one will deny food, water and shelter to lots of people (though many argue that something like that already takes place.  Communists).

The long answer to all of those questions is that we need to rethink our self worth without money or economic power.  Those cultural touchstones need to be replaced with something else.  The suggestion from that International Bar Association article that launched all of this three weeks ago is to define a Life Well Lived.  That our schools and other institutions need to focus on out-reach and helping.  Giving and sharing and healing.  Doing good works for their own sake, not for any potential reward in either this life or the next.  Charity in the noblest, most caring, least pitying sense of the word.

To make that shift is not something that will happen in a decade or two.  It will require multiple generations and the dedicated good works of people who already do this: nurses, teachers, (most) public safety employees, etc.  Most of them are underpaid and doing it because it is a 'calling'.  Something that they must do to live not in the world, but with themselves.  We need more of these people.  We need to instill this into our children and grandchildren.  And that is the real trick.

I am not one of these people.  I have struggled to find a purpose in life.  Something to which I can truly, unabashedly dedicate my time and energy.  The closest I have come is to raising my daughter.

And that is where I will start.  Have started.

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).