Amazing dancing robots courtesy of Boston Dynamics

[uihawk82]

The robots of the old sci fi/comic series Magnus. Robot Fighter that my oldest brother handed down to me are here or almost here. Except Magnus supposedly took place far in the future.

Be entertained and watch the agility of these machines. And once again more jobs will be lost so young people better learn to invent and program these machines and be the masters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw

 

[okeefe4prez]

If job losses are all we have to worry about from robots that will be good. "Sir, your mask moved off of your nose a fraction of an inch. The penalty for such an infraction is .... skull crushing. Thank you for shopping at Costco and have a nice day."

 

[Luftgekuehlt67]

And once again more jobs will be lost so young people better learn to invent and program these machines and be the masters.

As technology continues to improve, we'll need fewer people involved in labor. As our society is currently structured, that's a problem. But, if we're willing to think creatively and open mindedly, it could be opening the door for a very nice quality of life at some point in the future (with a large percentage of the population working either very little or not at all).

The percentage of the population intelligent enough to learn programming, robotics, etc is static. Without getting into some kind of genetic engineering, the distribution of human intelligence is the same now as it was 1000 years ago and the same as it will be 1000 years from today. The number of jobs - maybe I should say the number of *good* jobs - available to those at the lower end of the intelligence curve will get slimmer and slimmer over the coming decades and centuries. I think we need to start taking the babysteps of decoupling people's livelihood from their labor even now.

Look at retail alone. It's contracting at a mind boggling rate. Not all those people are going to walk out of their last day at Macy's and step into a job as a computer programmer the following Monday. Maybe a few, but certainly not many. A few might get a job at a Amazon warehouse or maybe even a Prime delivery driver. But online is so much more efficient in terms of labor required, you aren't going to get a 1:1 replacement ratio. It'll get worse as Amazon (and others) increasingly finds ways to automate their warehouses and even their deliveries.

As I see it, you can look at this as very bad news for jobs...or you can look at this as the natural (and desirable) promise of technology being fulfilled: a world without work. How it actually plays out depends on how much courage we have to examine and challenge our beliefs about labor and money. We're going to have to become ok, even happy about, people "getting something for nothing".

 

[Fryowa]

As technology continues to improve, we'll need fewer people involved in labor. As our society is currently structured, that's a problem. But, if we're willing to think creatively and open mindedly, it could be opening the door for a very nice quality of life at some point in the future (with a large percentage of the population working either very little or not at all).

The percentage of the population intelligent enough to learn programming, robotics, etc is static. Without getting into some kind of genetic engineering, the distribution of human intelligence is the same now as it was 1000 years ago and the same as it will be 1000 years from today. The number of jobs - maybe I should say the number of *good* jobs - available to those at the lower end of the intelligence curve will get slimmer and slimmer over the coming decades and centuries. I think we need to start taking the babysteps of decoupling people's livelihood from their labor even now.

Look at retail alone. It's contracting at a mind boggling rate. Not all those people are going to walk out of their last day at Macy's and step into a job as a computer programmer the following Monday. Maybe a few, but certainly not many. A few might get a job at a Amazon warehouse or maybe even a Prime delivery driver. But online is so much more efficient in terms of labor required, you aren't going to get a 1:1 replacement ratio. It'll get worse as Amazon (and others) increasingly finds ways to automate their warehouses and even their deliveries.

As I see it, you can look at this as very bad news for jobs...or you can look at this as the natural (and desirable) promise of technology being fulfilled: a world without work. How it actually plays out depends on how much courage we have to examine and challenge our beliefs about labor and money. We're going to have to become ok, even happy about, people "getting something for nothing".

The whole thing is going to come down to how soon quantum computing becomes mainstream.

AI is at the limits of what conventional computing can do, and once quantum computing gets rolling that's where you're going to see AI become better at thinking than humans.

People can say all they want that climate change is the biggest threat and impactor to human civilization today, but that's got nothing on AI. Once machines can learn on their own without help of humans, they're going to expand their abilities at an exponential rate with zero slowing down. With powerful quantum computing, climate change might be solved in the space of a few months. Within the space of a few years humans won't have to work anymore because computing will be able to solve literally every problem we have. Machines will design new machines that can do a better, faster and more efficient job than we can even think of, because our measly brains and the computers we use now have such small limitations. Cancer will be cured in months. Weather predictions will be perfect going a long, long ways out into the forecast.

This kind of machine learning is so dangerous because 1) we don't have the brain power as relatively dumb animals to understand or think of all the consequences, 2) machines won't need humans anymore, and the growth of knowledge etc will be a runaway train in terms of how fast it doubles. Machines that can use quantum computing to learn can also use that computing power to discover better and more powerful ways of computing (thinking).

I get how that all sounds completely nuts, but there a re a whole lot of smart and well-respected scientists who do an awesome job describing the situation. Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom are a couple (of many) who have great books and interviews on the subject. Bostrom's book, "Superintelligence" is a great read and I couldn't put the thing down.

 

[uihawk82]

As technology continues to improve, we'll need fewer people involved in labor. As our society is currently structured, that's a problem. But, if we're willing to think creatively and open mindedly, it could be opening the door for a very nice quality of life at some point in the future (with a large percentage of the population working either very little or not at all).

The percentage of the population intelligent enough to learn programming, robotics, etc is static. Without getting into some kind of genetic engineering, the distribution of human intelligence is the same now as it was 1000 years ago and the same as it will be 1000 years from today. The number of jobs - maybe I should say the number of *good* jobs - available to those at the lower end of the intelligence curve will get slimmer and slimmer over the coming decades and centuries. I think we need to start taking the babysteps of decoupling people's livelihood from their labor even now.

Look at retail alone. It's contracting at a mind boggling rate. Not all those people are going to walk out of their last day at Macy's and step into a job as a computer programmer the following Monday. Maybe a few, but certainly not many. A few might get a job at a Amazon warehouse or maybe even a Prime delivery driver. But online is so much more efficient in terms of labor required, you aren't going to get a 1:1 replacement ratio. It'll get worse as Amazon (and others) increasingly finds ways to automate their warehouses and even their deliveries.

As I see it, you can look at this as very bad news for jobs...or you can look at this as the natural (and desirable) promise of technology being fulfilled: a world without work. How it actually plays out depends on how much courage we have to examine and challenge our beliefs about labor and money. We're going to have to become ok, even happy about, people "getting something for nothing".

Interesting thoughts by everyone. The idea of a guaranteed income/stipend, many social programs to cover the citizenry like universal healthcare, etc are what are needed to have just a decent social and economic fabric in this country and most countries.

Why do people in this country want or feel they need to make as much money as they can, to hold onto that money, to deny money to other people? We do this because we know we do not have a decent enough safety net, because we know most times our society will not care for us at even a basic level, so that leaves people scared and hoarding, etc.

If AI and robotics take away a lot of jobs then the wealthiest people who are the hoarders of wealth will need to step up to spread the wealth or be made to spread the wealth through higher taxation (haha good luck with that since we have so many poor people in this country who idiotically vote against their own interests by voting for people who only want tax cuts and cuts to social programs).

 

[Luftgekuehlt67]

Interesting thoughts by everyone. The idea of a guaranteed income/stipend, many social programs to cover the citizenry like universal healthcare, etc are what are needed to have just a decent social and economic fabric in this country and most countries.

Why do people in this country want or feel they need to make as much money as they can, to hold onto that money, to deny money to other people? We do this because we know we do not have a decent enough safety net, because we know most times our society will not care for us at even a basic level, so that leaves people scared and hoarding, etc.

If AI and robotics take away a lot of jobs then the wealthiest people who are the hoarders of wealth will need to step up to spread the wealth or be made to spread the wealth through higher taxation (haha good luck with that since we have so many poor people in this country who idiotically vote against their own interests by voting for people who only want tax cuts and cuts to social programs).

Well said!

I honestly believe at least part of the challenge is our collective capacity to understand what "rich" really means. There is, sadly, a large portion of the population for whom $1000 in a given month would represent a make or break proposition (whether that be an unexpected medical bill, a surprise tax return, etc). If you've spent your life immersed in more or less that state of financial well being, is it possible to really fathom what it would be like to have $1M in wealth? To us more comfortable middle class types, especially those living in major metro areas (i.e. high home prices), $1M in wealth isn't even all that much anymore, but what about $10M? $100M? $1B?

You reach a certain point where, for the vast majority of the population - even the relatively comfortable - it's funny money. Yeah, sure, you can conceptualize the number on a superficial level and do some idle fantasizing about what you'd do if you were that rich (where you'd live, your fleet of super cars, what charities you'd support, etc), but even that kind of idle fantasizing is a far cry from *really* having your brain around how much money the super wealthy have.

I like this visualization. At some point, we're going to have to get over our sympathy (?) for the mega rich. I have, that's for sure.

Wealth, shown to scale

Wealth inequality in the United States is out of control. Here we visualize the issue in a unique way.

mkorostoff.github.io

 

[SmokeTownHawk]

The whole thing is going to come down to how soon quantum computing becomes mainstream.

AI is at the limits of what conventional computing can do, and once quantum computing gets rolling that's where you're going to see AI become better at thinking than humans.

People can say all they want that climate change is the biggest threat and impactor to human civilization today, but that's got nothing on AI. Once machines can learn on their own without help of humans, they're going to expand their abilities at an exponential rate with zero slowing down. With powerful quantum computing, climate change might be solved in the space of a few months. Within the space of a few years humans won't have to work anymore because computing will be able to solve literally every problem we have. Machines will design new machines that can do a better, faster and more efficient job than we can even think of, because our measly brains and the computers we use now have such small limitations. Cancer will be cured in months. Weather predictions will be perfect going a long, long ways out into the forecast.

This kind of machine learning is so dangerous because 1) we don't have the brain power as relatively dumb animals to understand or think of all the consequences, 2) machines won't need humans anymore, and the growth of knowledge etc will be a runaway train in terms of how fast it doubles. Machines that can use quantum computing to learn can also use that computing power to discover better and more powerful ways of computing (thinking).

I get how that all sounds completely nuts, but there a re a whole lot of smart and well-respected scientists who do an awesome job describing the situation. Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom are a couple (of many) who have great books and interviews on the subject. Bostrom's book, "Superintelligence" is a great read and I couldn't put the thing down.

Stephen Hawking warned about the danger of AI and not having clear control of it from the start. If handled properly it could serve society well. But it could destroy the world if not careful.

 

[uihawk82]

Well said!

I honestly believe at least part of the challenge is our collective capacity to understand what "rich" really means. There is, sadly, a large portion of the population for whom $1000 in a given month would represent a make or break proposition (whether that be an unexpected medical bill, a surprise tax return, etc). If you've spent your life immersed in more or less that state of financial well being, is it possible to really fathom what it would be like to have $1M in wealth? To us more comfortable middle class types, especially those living in major metro areas (i.e. high home prices), $1M in wealth isn't even all that much anymore, but what about $10M? $100M? $1B?

You reach a certain point where, for the vast majority of the population - even the relatively comfortable - it's funny money. Yeah, sure, you can conceptualize the number on a superficial level and do some idle fantasizing about what you'd do if you were that rich (where you'd live, your fleet of super cars, what charities you'd support, etc), but even that kind of idle fantasizing is a far cry from *really* having your brain around how much money the super wealthy have.

I like this visualization. At some point, we're going to have to get over our sympathy (?) for the mega rich. I have, that's for sure.

Wealth, shown to scale

Wealth inequality in the United States is out of control. Here we visualize the issue in a unique way.

mkorostoff.github.io

Very good thoughts. I dont think hardly anyone should have sympathy for the very rich.

And there have been multiple headlines about how it is the rich who do not have a W2 type job where they get a check from their employer who are terrible at paying their taxes. The IRS and other accounting people just announces there is $4 trillion dollars of unpaid taxes out there and probably more. And much of this missing taxes was almost assuredly knowingly 'stolen' by rich scofflaws. Regular W2 wage earners find it very hard to cheat on their taxes.

The Congressional Budget Office just reported that $100 billion to modernize and rebuild the IRS would pay off handsomely by bringing in trillions of dollars. This has been going on for a long time. Gee I wonder why congress and presidents havent fixed this.

 

[HuckFinn]

The whole thing is going to come down to how soon quantum computing becomes mainstream.

AI is at the limits of what conventional computing can do, and once quantum computing gets rolling that's where you're going to see AI become better at thinking than humans.

People can say all they want that climate change is the biggest threat and impactor to human civilization today, but that's got nothing on AI. Once machines can learn on their own without help of humans, they're going to expand their abilities at an exponential rate with zero slowing down. With powerful quantum computing, climate change might be solved in the space of a few months. Within the space of a few years humans won't have to work anymore because computing will be able to solve literally every problem we have. Machines will design new machines that can do a better, faster and more efficient job than we can even think of, because our measly brains and the computers we use now have such small limitations. Cancer will be cured in months. Weather predictions will be perfect going a long, long ways out into the forecast.

This kind of machine learning is so dangerous because 1) we don't have the brain power as relatively dumb animals to understand or think of all the consequences, 2) machines won't need humans anymore, and the growth of knowledge etc will be a runaway train in terms of how fast it doubles. Machines that can use quantum computing to learn can also use that computing power to discover better and more powerful ways of computing (thinking).

I get how that all sounds completely nuts, but there a re a whole lot of smart and well-respected scientists who do an awesome job describing the situation. Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom are a couple (of many) who have great books and interviews on the subject. Bostrom's book, "Superintelligence" is a great read and I couldn't put the thing down.

I just won’t allow you to do that, Dave.

 

[Fryowa]

I just won’t allow you to do that, Dave.

You think it's actually a human moderating HN?