People argue that the owners of the robots will amass wealth and then sit on it like Scrooge McDuck, leaving everyone else to starve and live in poverty.
So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
The robots will create wealth for the people that don't own robots. If they can't afford this wealth the robots will never be created in the first place. It's no different than any other automation technology.
When you refer to capital owners, it has a historic context related to land and farms and large amounts of money. Robots, on the other hand, aren't necessarily going to cost lots of money. If everybody can own a robot, nobody has to worry about being employed.
The real issues won't change though. Those people who are considered rich will be rich because they own land in nice areas, or have a military-backed monopoly on natural resources.
The first issue is due to population size, and the second issue is an eternal issue of war that can't be avoided.
that would never happen because someone owns the robots and rich people can afford more robots than poor people and rich people aren’t rich people if poor people aren’t poor
I spoke to someone recently who believes poor people will be gradually killed off as the elites who control the robots won't have any use for them (the people). I don't share such an extreme view (yet), but I can't quite rule it out either.
Okay, then they will clean and maintain the robots. Those were just simple examples.
The government doesn't create wealth or prosperity and even if robots replaced the majority of jobs, the money to run and maintain the robots would have to come from somewhere.
Billionaires like Musk love the idea of basic income because it puts him in charge (he will never have to get basic income) and makes slaves out of the rest of us (if your only income comes from the government, they get to make most of your life decisions for you).
It's really just communism re-packaged when you think about it. A system where there are really only a couple of people with all of the power (IE: Musk) and they get to set all of the rules for the rest of us.
Many people from the communism days of Soviet Russia loved their life because they didn't actually have to worry about where their next dollar came from and jobs were assigned automatically.
I don't understand why everyone says only rich people will own machines. Once robots become that good to replace humans everywhere, they will also be able to produce more robots, thus making themselves incredibly cheap. So everyone, even on social payments, would be able to get a robot to produce the goods and services they need.
But the tiny proportion of very rich people can never get enough and therefore what will actually happen is we'll end up with an army of robot servants making the rich people richer and more comfortable, while the rest of us fight over the scraps.
I don't think that I am confusing things with value, but perhaps I did not explain my meaning well enough.
The problem with cheap AI and robots is not that people will not want to create things for each other and do stuff - sure they will still want to make stuff.
The problem is that hardly anyone will pay them for doing stuff, and therefore it will be impossible for them to make a living. So, the non-rich people (who don't own the robot corporations) would not be able to afford food and shelter.. (and they'll die as a consequence)
Unless government or benevolent fellows decide to help the destitute population and provide for them, which I don't really see happening as the plutocrats would probably treat the poor just like white slave owners in the US used to treat their black slaves, or like people treat cows. Even though resources will be abundant and it won't take much effort or sacrifice to help us, they would rather spend their resources on building faster spaceships or go ride space slides or ski on Mars or something.
Should robots appear tomorrow and replace 99.95% of the workforce do you really believe the robot owners will be altruistic enough to provide charity to the displaced workforce?
The attractive people who are out of work will end up in the sex industry. The rest will go to protection zones, ghettos, and will be sterilized to prevent reproduction, and possibly starved depending on how things go.
Society is not shock resistant and needs time to grow into things. Look at oligarchies and tell me socialism, capitalism, and communism are really any different beyond the rhetoric.
How many dev shops said they are agile when they were clearly waterfall?
No matter what you call it the ruling class will always call the tune and the poor and middle class will dance.
A "modern servant" scenario (if you will let me summarize it as such) might work when robots make, say, 50% of people redundant. But what about 90%? 99%? 100%?
Another thing: In a fully automated, yet capitalist society, wealth will be concentrated in the hands of even fewer people than right now, because we will come to a point where no one will offer robots for sale anymore, so no one can become rich except by heritage, and rich people will fail and become poor at a certain rate (because that's how capitalism works).
This process leads to a financial singularity in which 10 people own all the money in the world (and all the robots). I see two likely scenarios then:
1. Since one rich person (and their family) cannot possibly use a billion servants, a lot of the poor people will not be able to make a living and die.
2. The poor people agree to not care about the meaning of these green slips of paper anymore and seize the robots.
Come to think of it, #1 is actually more likely if the robots are intelligent enough to protect themselves against being seized.
The upper class will get smaller and richer, as they now control the robots, the middle class will disappear into grinding poverty, as they're now competing for jobs against robots.
I'm probably gonna stop after that. I don't have a degree in economics, but I always find these "everything will be free, everybody will be pretty and live 300 years" predictions kind of hard to buy.
How will the rich make any profit? The premise underlying this conversation is that the labor of the non-rich humans is completely worthless. Robots do everything they can do for less money.
So the rich may swoop in, use robots to produce goods for their own consumption, and then leave. But how does this prevent non-rich humans from producing goods for other non-rich humans? The rich have no incentive to compete with those human producers, since the consumers have nothing of value to buy with.
You seem to be suggesting that the rich will direct their robots to fulfill the needs of non-rich humans for no personal gain. Is that correct?
Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"
The answer is that everyone is going to own different robots. The whole point is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that could create enough economic production for his whole life.
There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks.
I used to worry about robots a lot more, but I don't really anymore. The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things.
The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI. I can't predict its motivations.
Edit: You guys fundamentally don't get it because you don't understand that I'm arguing about economics.
> This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.
People are going to, at the very least, own their own means of production. Look at it from an economics standpoint, at the margin, why would I buy a chair rather than get my semi-intelligent android robot to cut down a tree, plank it, and build it. The chair would have to be essentially free. Then who cares who owns the means to production. At the margin I could always revert to having my personal robot build it.
Furthermore, I would argue that most of the computers that make most of the value in the world are owned largely by everybody. I have a computer that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on, and it will be the same with robots. People with vision will direct machines of greater sophistication towards and end they desire.
Whether you own something or rent it is always going to be a economic decision. I own my Macbook Pro and I installed Ubuntu on it, but even if I was renting it, that doesn't change the fundamental nature of what I'm saying.
I used to think that we were marching towards this awful grey future where 99.9% of people were going to be treated like cattle and ultra-corps were going to be running the world with all their machines. Most people talk like this is what's coming, and, barring AI, I no long think this is the case.
Edit2: I wrote my first edit when I had negative points, now it seems to have positive points, which is why I opened up the edit with "you guys don't get it".
I don't see how that scenario makes any sense. If the rich and upper middle class could maintain such lifestyles by themselves + automation then why wouldn't others have access to it?? Will the robots refuse to work for the poor?
If there has to be poor people in order for there to be rich people, let’s make robots be the poor people.
The best endgame we can probably hope for is for there to be a sustainably small number of really comfortable, happy humans on this planet, and an army of robot servants/AI to keep us all fat and happy.
More relevant is: what if only the wealthy own all the AI and robots? They already own all the trees, but they don't own the people necessary to harvest them and make stuff out of it. With strong AI, they will also own all labout, all production capacity, and all ability to maintain it; they won't need anyone else anymore. Middle and working class people will have become obsolete.
Unless we change our economy to have a more equal distribution of wealth before we get there.
The point of it is that our technology is far outpacing our own capabilities, and pretty soon you'll have to literally become a robot in order to compete for basic income. Instead of allowing only the 1 percent of the rich people to own everybody else, we'll have them pay for everyone to live comfortably so they can do good works, while the rich continue to have their robots do all the work. Everybody wins.
Well, robots _will_ put people out of work; I am wholeheartedly for this.
However the difference, is that in the utopia inside my head, we start taxing the rich/corporations and provide UBI to people, our goal should be to mechanise/automate everyone out of jobs where possible and allow them to do whatever they want to with their lives.
The sad truth of the world is smart people invented a machine that can make 10,000 widgets per hour instead of 1 per hour by hand, but did that mean the price of widgets went down? No, and all of the benefits of this machine were reaped solely by a bunch of parasites in suits and ties, who contribute nothing to the world.
Not that I agree with them :)
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