What is your field/career?

[Mr. Cairo]

1) What degrees and diplomas do you have?
2) Is there anything of note you specialized in during your education?
3) What is your current job and/or your career?
4) Is there anything of note you specialize in at your job?
5) Are there any past jobs you've done that are of interest?
6) What is your name, address, and credit card PIN?

1) BS Physics.
2) I was on the fencing team.
3) Programmer for a computer that runs CNC machines.
4) Lots of trigonometry and complicated geometry.
5) I worked one summer in a factory that built packing crates, which taught me how bad people are at math. Typical problem that several co-workers couldn't begin to solve: a 4' x 6' crate will be covered in 1/2'' plywood. How long should the cross members on the skid be so the plywood is flush?
6) Severian, Seekers for Truth and Penitence, the Claw of The Conciliator.

I fenced for my university during my undergrad too, what weapon(s)?

[Dark Savant]

They still exist, although the lack of angle trisectors is to be lamented.

I actually saw an angle trisector or two back in the day!  No cube doublers whatsoever, though.

I suppose it's a social thing.  I mean ... there's a lot of social stuff around pi (books, memorization, cranks); some stuff about, say, phi; and not much about e, considering its importance in actual math.

EDIT: To add something more personal, I think that the inaccurate use of words like "frequency" or "energy" must always be met with suspicion.

In math, I have enough trouble with people who don't understand probability and statistics -- there isn't a shortage of PhD scientists who do not understand what a p-value is!  Though really, it's not a big deal outside a professional environment.  I can just take their money at the poker table.  

Let's see ... physics, the obvious one there is stuff about quantum mechanics -- sometimes even from physics majors.

Biology and chemistry ... don't even get me started.  Much of that has to do with the way they're taught -- there are systemic flaws that go well beyond "that baseless tongue map".

The first online site I signed up to was Lord of the Rings related. Other variations of Mormegil, Beleg and Turin were already taken and to a 14(ish, not sure) year old it sounded pretty cool. By now I'm quite attached to it.

I originally wanted to stick to Tolkien too, but even 20 years ago that was impractical, so I adopted "random bad guys in old adventure games/RPGs".  (There's always one available.)

(I also interpret your username as the one from Ultima VII first.)

[Huinesoron]

The first online site I signed up to was Lord of the Rings related. Other variations of Mormegil, Beleg and Turin were already taken and to a 14(ish, not sure) year old it sounded pretty cool. By now I'm quite attached to it.

I originally wanted to stick to Tolkien too, but even 20 years ago that was impractical, so I adopted "random bad guys in old adventure games/RPGs".  (There's always one available.)

(I also interpret your username as the one from Ultima VII first.)

Well, sure, if you want to use actual character names (like a weirdo). If you just splice together two words from the Silmarillion appendix, though, you can carve out your own unique namespace pretty easily.

In all my years I have only ever encountered one other Huinesoron (Quenya, "Shade"+"Eagle"), and I think they were just trying to wind me up. My wife has a pretty good thing going with Celebestel (Sindarin, "Silver"+"Hope"), though there does seem to be a Celebestel Luthien around, too.

Or you use an English gloss, like TBS. A lot of them can be quite unwieldy (picturing a Galadriel fan going around as "Maiden Crowned with a Radiant Garland" here...), but the ones that work are nice and subtle ("Spirit of Fire", anyone?).

The mathematics of infinity, post-labour economics, Tolkienian naming schemes... what was the name of this sub-forum, again? 

[Bacchus]

To go back to economics, you can't "make labour unnecessary" in general, you can only make certain types of labour uncompetitive. Even that is uncertain though. Let's take accountancy as an example -- humans suck at adding up lots of numbers, copying them from column to column and all the associated tasks, which computers do very well. When IT came, did the number of accountants decrease? No, it exploded -- you could now keep stock of stuff that you didn't even have a hope for previously, so hiring an accountant became more lucrative, he could do more, the return on salary is greater.

Now, the idea is that an AI can learn higher-level accounting jobs, like testing entries against documents, finding anomalies or just interesting things, compiling reports, etc. Will this decrease the demand for accountants? No-one knows -- the question will be whether accountants can find how to use the AI as a tool to do even higher-level, or more intensive tasks. If they can, there could well be even more accountants. It's all about the scope of economically tractable problems -- robotization, or any capital improvement, can crowd out labour only within a given scope, but because there is no limit to problems humanity can face, labour can't really die off. If the scope of accounting problems remained constant since Renaissance times, for example, ten guys with laptops could probably service the entire world, but why would it stay the same?

[Huinesoron]

To go back to economics, you can't "make labour unnecessary" in general, you can only make certain types of labour uncompetitive. Even that is uncertain though. Let's take accountancy as an example -- humans suck at adding up lots of numbers, copying them from column to column and all the associated tasks, which computers do very well. When IT came, did the number of accountants decrease? No, it exploded -- you could now keep stock of stuff that you didn't even have a hope for previously, so hiring an accountant became more lucrative, he could do more, the return on salary is greater.  

Now, the idea is that an AI can learn higher-level accounting jobs, like testing entries against documents, finding anomalies or just interesting things, compiling reports, etc. Will this decrease the demand for accountants? No-one knows -- the question will be whether accountants can find how to use the AI as a tool to do even higher-level, or more intensive tasks. If they can, there could well be even more accountants. It's all about the scope of economically tractable problems -- robotization, or any capital improvement, can crowd out labour only within a given scope, but because there is no limit to problems humanity can face, labour can't really die off. If the scope of accounting problems remained constant since Renaissance times, for example, ten guys with laptops could probably service the entire world, but why would it stay the same?

The one big caveat to this is that if strong AI ever actually comes into existence - the sort that shows up in sci-fi, which is 'human but better' - then it could theoretically/probably do everything better. Of course, you then run into the question of whether it would want to.

But yeah. Right now, a good chunk of my job consists of 'look things up and see what we need to do'. It would be... relatively trivial to rewrite government regulations into a computer-readable form (heck, they're not exactly human-readable as it is!), but does that mean I could be replaced by a search engine? No, because the key is knowing what to look up when someone comes to me and says "We want to make this chemical from a different starting material, what do we need to tell the government?". That either requires a human-equivalent AI with massive interpretation abilities... or a person.

[Bacchus]

It is very difficult to discuss strong AI in earnest, because so much depends on the modalities of its existence -- where is it located, what is it connected to and how, just what does strong mean, what sort of computing power can it commandeer, how many are there and what's their interaction like?

However, what's NOT a problem is the AI being better than humans at everything. Because the amount of stuff to do is unlimited, whilst any AIs computing power is limited, there will always be stuff for humans to do. Yeah, the AI could have done that same stuff better, but it's busy doing more important stuff.

[Dark Savant]

Well, sure, if you want to use actual character names (like a weirdo). If you just splice together two words from the Silmarillion appendix, though, you can carve out your own unique namespace pretty easily.

I wonder if Arathorn is still around here? ... he's probably busy with his kids like a normal person, isn't he.

In all my years I have only ever encountered one other Huinesoron (Quenya, "Shade"+"Eagle"), and I think they were just trying to wind me up. My wife has a pretty good thing going with Celebestel (Sindarin, "Silver"+"Hope"), though there does seem to be a Celebestel Luthien around, too.

You're even allowed to mix Quenya and Sindarin, Boromir-style.

The mathematics of infinity, post-labour economics, Tolkienian naming schemes... what was the name of this sub-forum, again? 

I haven't really had a good off-work nerdchat in a while myself, heh.

Post-labor economics is hard to discuss because that's going to depend on how it works, and it'll probably take far longer than people expect.  I mean, a computer that could beat a human chess champion took, what, 30 years longer than expected?  And even in that case, people usually don't get why it's harder to program a computer to play go than chess (yeah the common explanation is wrong), as an example how hard it is to even discuss AI.

[TheHumanHydra]

I think the more proximate problem with robotics/AI is it killing low-skill, rote, or mechanical jobs, as is of course already happening. For any given field or character of work, there will always be some jobs that are profitless to automate, but will they be enough to meet the demand of the workforce?

I think an important thing to bear in mind about a hypothetical 'post-work' economy is that people will still work, just not all people, and/or on a reduced basis. There should be another sentence here to balance the paragraphs and provide a satisfactory conclusion, but I can't think of anything else to say.

[AdrienIer]

The problem is also that as long as salaries depend on work this is going to create a lot of misery. A possible solution to that would be a UBI high enough to sustain people but I'm sure a lot of people don't want that.

[TheHumanHydra]

The problem is also that as long as salaries depend on work this is going to create a lot of misery. A possible solution to that would be a UBI high enough to sustain people but I'm sure a lot of people don't want that.

For sure. That was the assumption in my last sentence. I assume that, if unemployment reached untenable highs, governments would be forced by popular action to implement UBIs or anti-automation laws.