Ah yes, Bill's essay on the dangers of the future. The first time I read it I was struck not by the message but by the tone. Similar to the tone someone uses when they buy their first (and perhaps only) gun in the USA and, realizing how straight forward it was, they realize that anyone could just walk up to them and shoot them because well they could easily get their own gun.
The world is a big and generally ambivalent place. It has been in our (by which I mean humans) power to render it uninhabitable for over 50 years now, and yet still we haven't. We may at some point, but so far so good.
But as adults, you have to choose. You can choose not to drive on the freeways, knowing that at any time you could be mowed down by a drunk driver or someone texting, or you can go into it with your eyes open and your precautions in place. It is important to know that you can be killed while driving in order to respect what needs to be done (and not done) when you are behind the wheel of a car. If you don't respect that, you die.
So it is with the world at large. And the great "information hiding"[1] campaign not withstanding, its important to know how technology can kill you so as to know when it is likely to.
I do believe at some point we'll be able to talk to machines directly with your brain. We do that today with sound and visual images, eliminating the ears and eyes in the path is a matter of understanding the API. A friend of mine, points out that the first person to become part of a computer will be able to out perform everyone else, if they are not a nice person they will prevent others from getting the same advantage.
But what is their advantage? They can make more money than you and me? Lots of people already have that. They can write code faster? better? Sure there are meglomaniacs, we need to watch out for those folks and shut them down, but there are bad drivers too.
We can run away, but it doesn't change what is. The older you get it seems the more you recognize the futility of that.
[1] Somewhere in the mid-90's it occurred to people you could just learn all this stuff that was dangerous and they have been on a mission ever since to carefully remove information from the system. The trick is to do it slowly and carefully to avoid the Striesand effect, but it continues to this day. Chemistry sets are a good exemplar.
I sometimes think that if Theodore Kaczynski was a fictional character in a Hollywood movie, he would be the hero, like a Neo...
Of course it would help if he looked like Keanu Reeves... and David Gelernter would have to be evil and played by James Woods or something. The shack in the woods in Montana didn't help either...
With my only credentials being that I once had a single email exchange with Bill Joy, I'd have to disagree and say that the future needs us more than ever.
Machines are not taking over humans. They are taking over boring tasks, leaving the ever more interesting ones to us. Nanotech and the like are completely devoid of meaning without human input. And where is nanotech these days, anyway?
The big question is , what are these interesting jobs and where are they going to come from?
Intellectual output can be much more easily and freely copied than physical labour (e.g software,music etc) so do we really need billions of mediocre scientists/programmers/artists or just a few million good ones who's work everyone else can reap the benefit from?
Nurse plus: most family doctors could be replaced by a friendly nurse and a big computerized database of symptoms and diseases and a relatively simple program to tell her which tests to perform and when to refer the patient to a specialist.
When you locked yourself out of your house you don't need a fully trained locksmith, you just need a guy who can open the lock which is easy with a modern tool.
In general there are a ton of jobs available through deskilling, guildbusting and creative thinking.
The big question is , what are these interesting jobs and where are they going to come from?
My 22nd blog post (of a 23-part series that was supposed be 22, before it was supposed to ~7) is covering that question.
The core concept in a lot of my writing recently has been Convexity, which is when the difference between excellent work and mediocre work matters much more than the difference between mediocrity and noncompliance. In engineering we call this the "10X" effect.
[snip]
Where is there room left for humans?
1. High-end service work. [...] Wealthier people might pay a huge premium for the [high-quality] work they can get from a person as opposed to the [reliable] work done by computers. Then, the payoff function is a convex filter applied to this performance measure, y. Even though it's service work, the "little bit extra" that comes form human involvement makes it convex work on the real market.
2. Creative arts (probably). I doubt that we'll ever see computers that can do this as well as we can. Of course, they'll take on more of the grunt work and eventually be used to supply inspiration, but I think there will be a human edge, in writing novels and composing symphonies, forever. At least, that'll be true at the high end. Of course, there'll be auto-generated trash romance novels in a decade, if there aren't already.
3. Research, science, and programming. These [cheap] reliable machines don't descend from the sky. People have to solve scientific problems, hardware engineers have to build the machines, and software engineers must program them. There's also a place for executives and project managers in that process, as well: bringing coffee so the people doing actual work don't have to break flow to get it.
4. Leadership. People use "leadership" as a euphemism for the rapidly evolving and someday-soon-subordinate set of activities we call "people management", but there will always be a place for people who can actually lead on their own merits. The above (1-3) require not only it, but the most important subcategory (perhaps the only actually important one) of leadership, which is...
5. Education and teaching. This is what I call "hidden convexity" because the wages for these professionals are despairingly concave, but the impact is not merely convex, but fully exponential. One of the most important Buddhist meditations-- and it requires no supernatural beliefs to do it-- is on the kindness of others, as a way of understanding interdependence, and it often comes back to teaching. That is the most important thing we do.
Of course, all of this work has something in common. It's convex. Small differences in performance (including noise factors) have major impacts. A few people do those jobs very well and gets lots of rewards, and most get very little. This is why Convexity is such a major economic problem (I contend, the defining problem of the 21st century). The convex world has no hope of sustaining full employment. Would you hire a 17-year-old who just learned Python to write your core machine-learning infrastructure? Hell no, but you'd hire the 27-year-old he turns into after ten years of hard work. Who will pay for that, though? How's he going to eat while he gets there? The convex economy can't support the learn-while-you're-economically-useless-on-your-parents'-dime regime. Learning has to be lifelong, because the world changes so fast, and that also means people will need to be paid while they do it.
The education example is interesting because it's the only one of those which tends to be heavily unionised in most western countries at least. So that probably explains why the wages are concave. It's also one that benefits greatly from physical proximity, so there will be a demand for a fairly high number of teachers because they don't "scale" as well.
Although MOOCs may change that a bit.
Based on what I have heard from friends who are teachers, getting paid more as a teacher is usually done via being promoted to a leadership position (i.e headteacher etc) which has more to do with politics than teaching skill. Or getting seniority with experience (measured in years) which does not necessarily correlate with skill either.
This means that teachers who teach well do so because they are intrinsically motivated to teach rather than for the money but of course they do need some money to eat.
I wonder if this could be applied to other fields.
For example, would you rather be paid a guaranteed fixed lower middle class wage to hack on open source projects all day with a 0% risk of starvation but equally a 0% chance of getting rich but you do get a pay rise after 5 years and another after 10 years.
Or would you rather work for peanuts at a startup with a 1% chance of becoming a multi-millionaire?
And would there be difference in how motivated you were to do your best work in either scenario?
These machines are powerful levers, but they still need movers, and there's no evidence that they'll become sentient or develop ulterior agendas. We'll just develop more convincing abstraction layers and delegating a greater share of the unpleasant, repetitive work.
Can you just write a book already michaaelochurch? Or rather, just compile your blog writings into one [1]. I've been meaning to read everything you've written in your blog... but I think I think I keep pushing it because I generally don't like reading long things on a computer screen.
[1]: patio11 had good things about to say about the publisher he worked with, perhaps they could also work with you too.
It's still a serious issue for those who aren't engineers or programmers. There is a net benefit of automation, but realistically in our current economy, unemployment isn't that great.
And of course in the long run even those jobs can be replaced once we have intelligent machines. Though that would create a completely different world than this one.
(My take on this kind of thing is foremost to acknowledge that it's not enough to make an argument that an existential risk scenario is implausible. Given the stakes, it's not even enough to make a seemingly airtight argument that it's impossible. We should be funding very serious thought on existential risks, including crazy-seeming ones. Y'know, just in case.)
The world is a big and generally ambivalent place. It has been in our (by which I mean humans) power to render it uninhabitable for over 50 years now, and yet still we haven't. We may at some point, but so far so good.
But as adults, you have to choose. You can choose not to drive on the freeways, knowing that at any time you could be mowed down by a drunk driver or someone texting, or you can go into it with your eyes open and your precautions in place. It is important to know that you can be killed while driving in order to respect what needs to be done (and not done) when you are behind the wheel of a car. If you don't respect that, you die.
So it is with the world at large. And the great "information hiding"[1] campaign not withstanding, its important to know how technology can kill you so as to know when it is likely to.
I do believe at some point we'll be able to talk to machines directly with your brain. We do that today with sound and visual images, eliminating the ears and eyes in the path is a matter of understanding the API. A friend of mine, points out that the first person to become part of a computer will be able to out perform everyone else, if they are not a nice person they will prevent others from getting the same advantage.
But what is their advantage? They can make more money than you and me? Lots of people already have that. They can write code faster? better? Sure there are meglomaniacs, we need to watch out for those folks and shut them down, but there are bad drivers too.
We can run away, but it doesn't change what is. The older you get it seems the more you recognize the futility of that.
[1] Somewhere in the mid-90's it occurred to people you could just learn all this stuff that was dangerous and they have been on a mission ever since to carefully remove information from the system. The trick is to do it slowly and carefully to avoid the Striesand effect, but it continues to this day. Chemistry sets are a good exemplar.