What is your field/career?

[Mardoc]

anti-automation laws.

We've had Luddites for a good two hundred years.  Maybe someday they'll be right, but I'm going to need more than a theory before I believe in the obsolescence of work.

[darrelljs]

Machine Learning has been a step function in the capabilities of automated systems, Chess was solved with brute force but Go required something different. More step functions are required before labor is obsolete, but I believe its an "if not when" proposition. Subsistence may be easy to provide, but giving life meaning takes more. Not everyone has the DNA to be an artist, a scientist, an engineer...

Darrell

P.S. "Space" is the best answer I've heard yet to the what's question .

[TheHumanHydra]

anti-automation laws.

We've had Luddites for a good two hundred years.  Maybe someday they'll be right, but I'm going to need more than a theory before I believe in the obsolescence of work.

Mm, I certainly wasn't suggesting them, only a possible outcome in the case that unemployment becomes unbearable (my point of reference was the French Revolution, which was partially inspired by high bread prices). If such a case doesn't occur, then for sure, we won't need to make any changes.

[AdrienIer]

(my point of reference was the French Revolution, which was partially inspired by high bread prices).

High bread prices which were caused by low wheat production due to an important drop in temperatures caused by the eruption of an icelandic volcano. It's funny how you can link major world events with random natural disasters

[Mardoc]

Mm, I certainly wasn't suggesting them, only a possible outcome in the case that unemployment becomes unbearable (my point of reference was the French Revolution, which was partially inspired by high bread prices). If such a case doesn't occur, then for sure, we won't need to make any changes.

Fair enough.  I'll agree with the response to the hypothetical.

Anyway, I meant to respond to Adrien as well.  I don't want a UBI - but only because I believe that the world is such that we can't afford to pay it and have people stop working.  In the hypothetical situation where that changes, where automation really does produce so much that work becomes irrelevant, I would hope we'd land with a UBI instead of ensuring make-work.

[AdrienIer]

The idea is that UBI allows to share the workload between people (for example most working part time). Only high skill jobs would remain as they are now.
Of course this is a hypothetical far into the future

[TheHumanHydra]

(my point of reference was the French Revolution, which was partially inspired by high bread prices).

High bread prices which were caused by low wheat production due to an important drop in temperatures caused by the eruption of an icelandic volcano. It's funny how you can link major world events with random natural disasters

Huh, didn't know that. Thanks.

[Ichabod]

Machine Learning has been a step function in the capabilities of automated systems, Chess was solved with brute force but Go required something different.  More step functions are required before labor is obsolete, but I believe its an "if not when" proposition.  Subsistence may be easy to provide, but giving life meaning takes more.  Not everyone has the DNA to be an artist, a scientist, an engineer...

Darrell

P.S. "Space" is the best answer I've heard yet to the what's question .

RPGs (and games in general) are my solution. Go farm those mobs and pick those resources, that will take a good chunk of a day out (speaking from personal experience, which perhaps can explain my answer to number 2).

[Bacchus]

When talking of "how much labour is needed to fulfill the damn for work", remember that demand is limitless -- there is always stuff to do that could make someone's life better. That's just what the demand for work is. It will be exhausted not when we get really good at doing stuff with minimal labour, but when there is nothing left to do. This latter is possible, especially if people can be easily satisfied with basic goods, but more likely is that the demand continuously grows, as we discover wants that we never thought we had. And oh boy will AI create the ground for development for such new wants and tastes.

Also consider that for AI to solve anything, a bunch of work has to be done in advance in non-AI prone environments. You need energy, lines of communication, connected devices, and all that. The vast majority of the world will remain underdeveloped (laying cable in the savannah will be just as uneconomical with AI as it was before), and humans will be in demand there for a long time.

In the developed world, jobs will just move on. For all the disappearing vacancies for drivers, we will get vacancies for stuff that was prohibitively expensive before driverless cars. Take construction -- this work will be one of the last to be automated (circumstance-aware manipulation of a multitude of small physical objects at a full range of arbitrary points of a cube at a greenfield site is not easy), but logistics and materials manufacturing will be automated early, creating opportunities for buildings that were completely uneconomical before. US is covered with simply awful housing that nobody should live in, just upgrading that and moving people out of projects is a half-century task.

[Old Harry]

Nice job raising the level of debate THH. When RB declares independence from the internet you've got my vote for foreign secretary.

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. Just scraped through a Physics BSc.
2. Masters of Orion 2 might have had something to do with the scraping.
3. I run Excel training courses 3 days a week and look after a 3-year-old 2 (or 4 depending how you look at it) days a week.
4. Tickling mostly. Some getting knocked over and occasional tough questions about pivot tables.
5. Worked in Geographical Information Systems for a cyclepath-building charity. Giving our data to Google so they could muscle us out of the map provision market was a high point as we genuinely wanted them to show really good cycling info on their mapping. Seeing how they used it in the end was a low point.
6. Just off the coast of Dorset, or Hell.