[p2p-research] Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Ryan Lanham wrote:
> On 12/9/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>> On your point: "As absurd as it would have seemed to me just last year, I
>> am with you." While everyone is different, could you mention if there were
>> any one big thing or a few specific things you saw (robot videos?) that were
>> most persuasive in changing your thinking on this? Was there any particular
>> facts or lines of argument or articles you saw that seemed more persuasive
>> than others? Or was it more a gestalt from an overall rain of facts or
>> examples?
> 
> It is definitely gestalt-ish.  But if there was one overriding factor, it is
> the fact that pools of labor are starting to develop in very libertarian
> nations (e.g. the US) where there is little or no hope of economically
> meaninful use of their skills.  That is, the system cannot find a way to do
> something useful with these folks (in systemic terms of useful).
> 
> I expect that number to reach 20-40% of most industrialized societies fairly
> shortly.  If capitalism continues, they'll either become a state burden or
> will be somehow disposed of.  This has been the case with the 3rd world
> where bodies have largely been warehoused.  Now it is happening even when
> people have an attractive passport.
> 
> In my opinion, much of the current housing and consumption bubble is driven
> by segments of society who realize, in the long run, they have no economic
> meaning to the system.  That number will increase...I watch it increase all
> the time.  We simply cannot keep pace with the skill demands of the modern
> world.  We don't wish to be poor.  Therefore, you either need new rules or
> mass slaughters.  I'm not convinced mass slaughter isn't the outcome...it
> often has been in the past, but we've reached a point where we are going to
> have large and growing classes who cannot participate meaningfully in the
> economy.

Yes, if you look at the unemployment statistics, they are skewed by degree 
of schooling (not that I think schooling is good for most people, but as a 
stand in for abstract technical skill and conformity to a high-tech society, 
it is one of the best indicators).
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/06/unemployment-rate-and-level-of.html

It is a shift in perspective to think about people in the non-industrialized 
world in the category of "warehoused" instead of "waiting for development". 
Interesting suggestion, especially as it relates to all sorts of 
justifications about Western hoarding.

But unemployment rates for different skills can vary. And there are often 
bogus explanations that assume silly things like this one from 2004 (the 
jobs in IT for most people they say are cyclical are not coming back for the 
most part, because more and more can be done by fewer programmers and 
administrators, including by just using centrally managed services offered 
by a few big companies or big social collectives of volunteers):
"Unemployment level of college grads surpasses that of high-school dropouts"
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_archive_03172004/
"Such a large and enduring increase in unemployment among those with college 
degrees is unusual, even in a recession.  One reason for the increase is the 
lasting impact of the bursting bubble in the information technology and 
financial services sectors.  This cyclical effect will ultimately fade as 
demand returns in these industries and absorbs excess capacity built up over 
the last boom.  But a new structural problem—the offshoring of white-collar 
jobs in services—may also help explain the fact that unemployment in this 
recession and weak jobs recovery has crept so far up the education ladder. "

Marshall Brain was the first person I read who was really explicit, step by 
step, about the link between automation and joblessness at all levels, 
especially in Manna. It had been said before for a long time, but he really 
seemed especially clear about it. And he makes clear an economic link in the 
sidebar here, written around 2002:
  http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
"""
The "Jobless Recovery" that we are currently experiencing in the U.S. is big 
news. See for example The Mystery of the 'jobless recovery':
   "Consider these facts: Employment growth at the moment is the lowest for 
any recovery since the government started keeping such statistics in 1939. 
The labor force shrank in July as discouraged workers stopped seeking 
employment. The number of people employed has fallen by more than 1 million 
since the "recovery" began in the fall of 2001." [ref]
   The Washington Post notes that we are now witnessing, "the longest hiring 
downturn since the Depression". [ref] The article also notes, "The vast 
majority of the 2.7 million job losses since the 2001 recession began were 
the result of permanent changes in the U.S. economy and are not coming back."
   There is no mystery -- the jobless recovery is exactly what you would 
expect in a robotic nation. When automation and robots eliminate jobs, they 
are gone for good. The economy then has to invent new jobs. But it is much 
harder to do that now because robots can quickly fill the new jobs that get 
invented. See the FAQ for additional information.
"""

His ideas have been amplified here: :-)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

Especially with your comments, it does seem like employment is where "the 
rubber meets the road" as far as post-scarcity trends. To me, I see the 
videos of laboratory robots and they are persuasive, especially as I have 
been watching them change slowly for the past three decades or so (all the 
way back to seeing 1970s videos on "NOVA" about Stanford's Shakey and MIT's 
SHRDLU simulation and some small robots there). But maybe those videos are 
just dismissed by others? Employment has long been a political issue in the 
politics of many countries, and it does seem that unemployment rates are the 
undeniable statistic (as much as they are fudged in various ways).

What I'm realizing, looking at the statistics, is that jobs have been slower 
and slower to come back after each recession. It used to be jobs were linked 
more closely with GDP, but now they are a "trailing indicator". And the 
amount they trail by gets longer and longer. So, right now, mainstream 
economists are saying jobs will come back in two or three years from now. 
But, recessions have been happening every five years or so now. The 
recession has been ongoing for almost two years. So, what happens when 
employment begins to lag enough so it overlaps the next recession? At that 
point, will jobs ever come back? I predict, if we don't see a more sudden 
shock (or riots), or if there is not a major social reform, that is what we 
might see over the next decade, even if there is an uptick in jobs in a 
couple years. Recessions are times when firms try hard to be more efficient 
as opposed to being more expansive. If firms start automating more heavily 
to become more efficient, using all the technology that is now available in 
the labs, many more jobs will be lost. If the technology is available to 
replace people more cheaply than to pay the people, under capitalism, the 
firms have to use it to survive. And it would be a good thing, as long as 
everyone shared in the benefits -- but under capitalism, short of high taxes 
and a basic income, the average person won't see the benefits of automation 
(just like for the last three decades in the USA the average worker has not 
seen their pay increase, although it is true some products have gotten much 
better at the same cost).

Marshall Brain paints the extermination scenario as one of two possibilities 
(the other is a basic income, or more accurately people's capitalism of a 
sort, because it only goes to owners of a company). Some might call this 
broad extermination evolution in action, although I'd not agree; to state 
the hopefully obvious, I think genetic diversity is good for all sorts of 
reasons, and, as with a recent post, humans have succeeded more by 
cooperation than selfishness. But if you look at Nazi Germany, they did 
succeed for a time in a pyramid scheme sort of way by taking those who could 
not work in the war factories and exterminating them (often by working them 
to death in concentration camps on trivial tasks, but also by direct 
executions). One aspect of the Nazi regime was to kill all the people in 
nursing homes or hospitals for the mentally ill, to free up the workers who 
were caring for these people to work in the war effort. And of course Jews, 
Gypsies, Gays, and others were killed and their property confiscated. In 
general, killing all these people, as well as then killing people in other 
lands and taking their resources, all promoted prosperity for the survivors. 
It's kind of like if someone were to heat their house by ripping boards from 
the walls and burning them. It works for a time, until the place gets drafty 
and the roof starts to fall in from lack of support. It's a pyramid scheme 
of the worst sort:
   "How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
   http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html

Of course, with robots, it's a little different. What's the pyramid scheme 
there? I guess one can assume that, with lagging feedback (a Keynesian 
concept) that as companies replace each worker, the newly unemployed person 
burns through their savings, credit, and short-term state-supplied 
unemployment aid to still purchase the products the robots are producing for 
a time. So, let's imagine an economy with one factory that makes everything, 
and one owner/manager, and one worker (who both buy everything they need 
from the factory). The owner/manager replace the worker with a robot, and 
for a time, the worker still spends savings and borrows money to buy 
products from the factory, and the owner/manager gets more profits, so it is 
a net positive in the short term for the owner. Then the worker runs out of 
money and starves to death and stops buying stuff after the funeral 
arrangements. At that point, the owner is paying himself or herself, and 
while they have less revenues, they still, by virtue of ownership, can pay 
themselves in product (or fiat dollars that are just turned around to buy 
product), and then we have Patrick Anderson's plan where people produce 
product for themselves and the factories are owned by the people who benefit 
from them. :-) Related:
"[p2p-research] Paying Investors With Product Solves the Paradox of Profit 
in Perfect Competition"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2008-March/000436.html

Of course, that's a pretty evil way to get to Patrick's scenario as it 
entails disposing of 90% to 99.9%+ of the population in some way. :-( And 
it's obviously not what he suggests or had in mind. :-)

But that is basically what the first part of "Manna" outlines.
  http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

The more "humane" way may just be for poor people to not have children, 
including by, as Marshall Brain outlines in Manna, putting contraceptives in 
their water supply. Historically, humans have regulated their birth rate 
based on local physical affluence. However, this transition to full 
automation is happening so fast this won't be possible. Also, rich people 
are sometimes personally selfish and don't have many children they raise 
themselves; in general all "affluent" industrialized countries are facing 
lower than replacement birth rates. And, I would suggest such a policy is 
really immoral anyway, given that "poor" people are only materially poor 
because of politics related to not sharing and by fiat declaring that all 
humans do not have a right to the commons, as well as by devaluing some very 
important skills like parenting and being a good neighbor and instead 
overvaluing some abstract skills (like writing reports and programs. :-) 
Related:
   http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not 
poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a 
relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. 
Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It 
has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between 
classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render 
agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter 
camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

So, in that sense, unemployment is a social construction. But the idea of 
"employment" is clearly a weak point in a high-tech economy:
  http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity 
of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the 
distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost 
automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only 
major mechanism for distributing effective demand — for granting the right 
to consume — now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of 
a cybernated productive system."

If there is one reason the trend has been as slow to play out as it has it 
is because, as Hans Moravec pointed out, the things that humans can do that 
relate to millions of years of pre-human evolution, basically navigation and 
hand-eye coordination, have been much more difficult to automate than 
expected. He wrote:
   http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers/1983/mit.txt
"The human evolutionary record provides the  clue. While  our  sensory  and 
muscle control systems have been in development for a billion years, and 
common sense reasoning has been honed for probably about a million, really 
high level, deep, thinking is little more than a parlor trick, culturally 
developed over a few thousand years, which a few  humans, operating  largely 
  against their natures, can learn [2] [8] [21]. As with Samuel Johnson's 
dancing dog, what is amazing is not how well it is done, but that it is done 
at all.
   Computers  can  challenge  humans in intellectual areas, where humans 
perform inefficiently, because they can be programmed to carry on much less 
wastefully. An extreme example is arithmetic, a function learned by humans 
with great difficulty, which is instinctive to computers. These days an 
average computer can add a million large numbers in a second, which is more 
than a million times faster than a person, and with no errors. Yet one 
hundred  millionth of the neurons in a human brain, if reorganized into an 
adder using switching logic design principles, could sum a thousand numbers 
per second. If the whole  brain were organized this way it could do sums one 
hundred thousand times faster than the computer.
   Computers do not challenge  humans in perceptual and control areas 
because these billion year old functions are carried out by large fractions 
of the nervous system operating as efficiently as the hypothetical neuron 
adder above. Present  day  computers, however efficiently programmed, are 
simply too puny to keep up. Evidence comes from the most extensive piece  of 
  reverse  engineering yet done on the vertebrate brain, the functional 
decoding of some of the visual system by D. H. Hubel, T. N.  Weisel and 
colleagues [11]. ...
   Later in this paper I express my confidence that sufficiently powerful 
general purpose machines will become available gradually during the 
professional lifetimes of most reading this."

However, that was written in 1983, and as Hans Moravec predicted, given 
Moore's law, almost thirty years later computers are more than a million 
times faster for the same cost, and now they can do better hand-eye 
coordination and so on, as in the video you linked to a while back:
"High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation" 
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

Or as shown in the DARPA Grand Challenges in terms of navigation. Or in 
other areas:
"[p2p-research] Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year 
future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

While these systems still have their limits, we can see the clear 
progression of such technologies over the past thirty years. Or, at least I 
can, because I hung around those labs decades ago (including in Hans' :-) 
and see the changes. I guess a big part of my conscious and subconscious 
mental capacity has gone to thinking about the issues that his insights and 
efforts (and those of others in such labs or elsewhere) have brought up. 
It's frustrating to me that others cannot more easily see this. But I guess 
it is even more frustrating to someone like Hans Moravec. :-) I guess it is 
hard to expect people who pay attention to other things to take that 
seriously trends that are slowly playing out and may take years of 
involvement to really appreciate. I'm sure some people might say that about, 
say, DNA research that I know little about.

Although, I'm not so sure I like Hans Moravec's "Mind Children" idea as the 
only good result of all this (the robots go into space and humanity 
essentially dies out. :-) Social networks and augmentation are other 
approaches. (Even as they still may lead to unemployment, since, say, one 
augmented surgeon might be able to do the work of 10 regular surgeons.) And 
there may just be a lot of value in an ecological diversity of mentalities 
and forms. The horseshoe crab in various similar physical forms has survived 
for 445 million years even as other creatures have evolved a lot around it.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab
We'll see.

Anyway, thanks for the reply. The question is now more, how can we move this 
emerging heavily automated society in a better direction than mass 
slaughter? And more in the direction of a p2p gift economy, a basic income, 
local subsistence with strong communities, or something else? Which just 
comes back to the point of the mailing list to encourage or facillitate P2P 
efforts. The only difference is coming back to the purpose of the mailing 
list from the sense of "TINA: There Is No Alternative" for 99.9%+ of the 
population than radical change of one form or another.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/