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[SalmonGod]

Oh, and by the way: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays-technology-tomorrows-jobs-will-be-immenseand-no-country-ready

One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.

So there's an interesting statistic for you.

There is a coming age of mass joblessness. Not necessarily because of a lack of opportunity; there will be plenty in the high-end jobs that are left... but because a major portion of the population will be entirely disconnected from society's production, and lack the means to create anything of economic value without an education which is left out of their grasp. There's a storm brewing.

I think we're already seeing the beginnings of this, and it's only going to get much worse.  We've been leading up to it for a very long time.  There has been mainstream cultural recognition of this problem approaching for at least 40 years, in academics, books, films, and even fucking cartoons.  Yet somehow most people still seem to cling to capitalism like a religion.  When I say that the whole concept of a job is going obsolete, and it's becoming unsustainable for society to organize itself around them, the typical reaction is something like I just spoke an alien language.  I fully expect there to be some breaking point where the shit just hits the fan, because no one is making any effort to prepare.  There is definitely a storm brewing.  Occupy was the first glimpse of dark clouds on the horizon.

[Descan]

Quite frankly, I'm getting into Engineering just as much to have someway to LIVE in 20-30 years if we don't get our heads out of our asses and pay for basic income and public tuition, as much to do engineering.

*Of course, that's assuming we still have something resembling capitalism. Not guaranteed, but hey, if you're going to have capitalism in a society where most people don't (or can't, re: not enough jobs) then you might as well give most people enough money to make it actually WORK. Like putting fuel in the engine, it's not gonna run without something running through the pipes.

[Dwarf4Explosives]

About the automatic cars debate, I feel that the problem here is going to be people who apply the Bay12 motto of "any peaceful technology can be adapted into a much more amusing and violent one" to real life. Some people will just decide to buy an old car, strip out as much of the electronic stuff that can be used to trace them by the auto-drive stuff and then just go crazy. Hell, in that scenario even standing still would probably cause the automated car system to kill at least one person.

I agree with Tschusigumo. But why stop at being a mecha? All you really need for fast-switching, multiple-body processing is a central computer and some system to send signals (more reliably than just electromagnetic radiation-based versions, as you don't want someone to start broadcasting on a specific frequency and cause you to walk off a cliff by accident). That's basically the technological approach to the concept of a "soul".


Mostly, what humans can do better than robots is being absurd. We're a mess of several redundant systems left over from past usages and using several systems (both electronics and fluids), with no one having attempted a bug fix yet. To me, that means that what humans are better than robots is not science, but mad science. No robot would do the sort of stuff as we humans have done with DF.

Evolution isn't exactly the same process as innovation. Evolution is like water, it always flows downwards, but that doesn't mean it always finds the lowest point. It won't flow up the side of a basin to reach the floor, and in the same way evolution will rarely follow a path that is less well adapted in the short term, but can branch into something more well adapted in the long term. It is for this reason that we are full of all these biological redundancies and poor design choices as a species. I imagine your food creation method would be much the same, you would get a very refined dish, and it would change over time to suit shifts in cultural taste, but you would rarely, if ever see the kind of brand new innovation that is so indicative of human design.

Also, superfluids do flow up the sides of basins to find the lowest point. But you're right about evolution, and that's exactly my point.

[Frumple]

Haha, sure a robot would be able to mimic human behavior re: something like DF. It's almost as easy to program seemingly absurd action as it is to program something that looks reasonable. Probably moreso, really...

Look up that... hell, lemme see... yeah, something like this. A computer told to brute force something can very easily result in actions that are as or more absurd than anything a human can do on their best day. Give 'em the proper heuristic and they can eventually end up doing it with style and aplomb.

... really, it boils down the fact that we are machines. Biological machines made mostly of squishy stuff, but anything that can be done with "natural" materials can be done with "artificial" ones. It's a matter of figuring out how, and naught else. And when figuring out how to do something also tends to entail figuring out how to do it better in the process, well... anything we can do, bots can do better. Potentially. Not there yet, but in time.

[Tsuchigumo550]

I'm going into a technological art field for the same reason- robots aren't going to be designing games, TV shows, or anything like that any time soon. They can't choose who to film how, but they could come up with a basic plot arc, maybe.

I doubt chefs would completely lose their jobs. Let's look at Ghost In The Shell for a second.

Togusa stayed 100% human in a world full of cyber-brains, cyborgs, and machines. There would surely be people who would want something made 100% by a human, sort of how we have "free range" chickens and stuff like that. There would be moral debates, marketing and slander (Robots are cleaner than humans! Don't worry about sickness! / Cooked exactly as you would cook it!)

Furthermore, you'd have to be careful about menu selection. A robot could cook 100 different kinds of steaks, or one. Many people would eat at the restaurant where there are 100 options on how you want your steak done, however, if they are similar they may grow bored and want something new and go elsewhere, possibly to a human chef. One steak recipe gets old fast.

Governments could have something like Blue Laws, where one day out of every week or a week out of a month or whatever, mechanically prepared food is not sold at certain hours. If employment becomes a problem, something will break- the education system can only go so far, especially since employers never want to train you "waaah, why should we help anyone", so laws mandating an employer train employees for some amount of time may become the norm.

Let me put it this way. Capitalism will die when base labor becomes a robot's job. Capitalism works by having people do things for you- you're thing is special, it gets you money, you make the thing, hiring people who take some of your money, the government takes a fat stack from all of you, everyone makes enough money to live. This is how it works in a vacuum- when you add technological advancement, you destroy the base, meaning everyone has to enter the top rather than as a laborer, which is not possible.

Education will not succeed in getting enough people hire-able. Capitalism prevents people who don't do well in school from ever succeeding- "Why should I train this person? It's MY money."

---

And becoming a robot isn't going to be cheap, as well as seen as morally bankrupt- this person must be augmented to be accepted into a workforce and they can't afford the augmentation in the first place, so they take out a loan they'll never be able to pay off, because there's too much ability to loanshark in this scenario.

Hell, the only part I want to keep is my right arm. Even then, I'd love to augment it so that I can draw at the tiny-ass scale I can't stop using for some reason exceptionally well, as well as stop shaking all the time when trying to draw at said scale. Would I become mostly mechanical? Yes. Yes I would.

edit edit: guys I get ninjad so much in this thread, like, every time I post it's at least three ninjas. Ninjas must actually be robots sent from the future to guide us on the right path or something.

[Dwarf4Explosives]

My point is that humans are machines; very buggy machines. But really, the best way to take advantage of this is to be the human equivalent of a computer virus; don't just make yourself indispensable to the running of the status quo, make yourself indispensable to any progress as well.

About the loansharking, the best way to deal with that is for people to:
1: Take a loan to become augmented.
2: Use that money to make your own custom augmentations, taking care not to add or leave anything in that could let you be tracked.
3: Disappear completely (something that is already possible, thanks to the fact that any system is vulnerable to people not going along with it, i.e. being unpredictably buggy) and start over again, now a social class higher and with less need for loans.
4: Continue until you are in the social elite.

[Descan]

Capitalism, at it's core, is "I have made/can do something that people want to buy, and the money I make from that I can use to make more things to sell"

That's it. All you need is someone to sell things, and enough people with enough money to buy it.

Give people enough money (Right now I'd settle for "Enough to live", but if 50% of society cannot work, that is a little untenable) and they can buy it. You don't NEED to have those people work to make that money, all THEY need is the money, and all the seller needs is some way to manufactor/get their service out. If they have robots to do that, they don't need the workers.

[Helgoland]

Goddamn Americans thinking capitalism exclusively means the perversion they've been living in ever since the days of the devil the beast Ronald Reagan, let me make one thing perfectly clear: Capitalism pops up everywhere. Even in the Soviet nations, market forces were at work, determining black market prices or the necessary bribe for a certain favor. Capitalism (in a rather wide definition) is not exactly a system, it's a mode of human interaction, and one that's pretty much hardwired into us. You know all those zero-point energy freaks, claiming free energy would bring down capitalism? Yeah, they're nuts. As one thing becomes abundant, its price goes down to zero (as you can tell by the fact that you don't have to pay for breathing), but as long as there's scarcity, there will be stuff with a non-zero price, and thus some form of capitalism.
And specifically in response to that bolded bit up top: Base labor already has to a large extent become a robot's job - just compare the portion of society made up by farmers in, let's say, 1700, and that same portion now. Is capitalism dead?

[alway]

Evolution isn't exactly the same process as innovation. Evolution is like water, it always flows downwards, but that doesn't mean it always finds the lowest point. It won't flow up the side of a basin to reach the floor, and in the same way evolution will rarely follow a path that is less well adapted in the short term, but can branch into something more well adapted in the long term. It is for this reason that we are full of all these biological redundancies and poor design choices as a species. I imagine your food creation method would be much the same, you would get a very refined dish, and it would change over time to suit shifts in cultural taste, but you would rarely, if ever see the kind of brand new innovation that is so indicative of human design.

That's just a global optimization problem, described to the letter. Excellent solutions to those do exist in a myriad of forms. And it's actually usually exactly the reverse situation; humans require inspiration to create something new, and so you typically see slow modifications, while machines take their inspiration from the problem itself. Additionally, cooking is just chemistry with presentation; making it even easier to figure out what should work.

For example: http://idesign.ucsc.edu/projects/evo_antenna.html

In addition to being the first evolved hardware in space, the evolved antennas demonstrate several advantages over the conventionally designed antenna and over manual design in general. The evolutionary algorithms used were not limited to variations of previously developed antenna shapes but generated and tested thousands of completely new types of designs, many of which have unusual structures that expert antenna designers would not be likely to produce. By exploring such a wide range of designs EAs may be able to produce designs of previously unachievable performance.

[kaijyuu]

Err, capitalism is a very specific system.

What you described Helgo is economics.

[tahujdt]

Goddamn Americans thinking capitalism exclusively means the perversion they've been living in ever since the days of the devil the beast Ronald Reagan, let me make one thing perfectly clear: Capitalism pops up everywhere. Even in the Soviet nations, market forces were at work, determining black market prices or the necessary bribe for a certain favor. Capitalism (in a rather wide definition) is not exactly a system, it's a mode of human interaction, and one that's pretty much hardwired into us. You know all those zero-point energy freaks, claiming free energy would bring down capitalism? Yeah, they're nuts. As one thing becomes abundant, its price goes down to zero (as you can tell by the fact that you don't have to pay for breathing), but as long as there's scarcity, there will be stuff with a non-zero price, and thus some form of capitalism.
And specifically in response to that bolded bit up top: Base labor already has to a large extent become a robot's job - just compare the portion of society made up by farmers in, let's say, 1700, and that same portion now. Is capitalism dead?

Thank You. I cannot tell you how annoying it is to argue with other Americans who think that capitalism is specifically what we practice, but you probably already know.

Err, capitalism is a very specific system.

What you described Helgo is economics.

Yes, but capitalism is still a broader field than what most 'Muhricans think it is.

[Dwarf4Explosives]

I feel that the human advantage stems from the same source as their relative inefficiency: they don't focus on one task. They'll randomly combine concepts for reasons that have nothing to do with either concept, leading to radically new ideas. Sure, you can make an AI do that, but it would take a lot of work and people often have an aversion to doing stuff that helps in the short term, instead of the long term. And if a project takes away an advantage they have, well... The only way I can see that happening is that humans have an instinct that says "Hmmm, what would happen if I do this thing? I mean, I can predict what will happen, but what actually does?", which is also what causes humans to do stuff like making sticking their fingers up electric sockets, which is why we invented safer sockets, but what if doing so makes it harder for people to make things safer for themselves?

[Helgoland]

Err, capitalism is a very specific system.

What you described Helgo is economics.

Okay, let's not start a debat eabout semantics. What I meant was that capitalism is best described as a mode of operation in an economic situation in which the agent seeks to maximise his own gain. This definition allows us to apply what we know of capitalism to, let's say, traders in feudal societies, because the term does not refer to the whole system, but a significant part of it.

[kaijyuu]

Okay, let's not start a debat eabout semantics.

Hey, you're the one who initially tried to define it

[Helgoland]

Nope, I replied to a false implicit definition.

Anybody up for a meta-debate about semantics?