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

[Ryan Lanham]

I have followed Marshall Brain's efforts on the web for a number of years.
I note your enthusiasm and will read some of the links.  I agree largely
with what follows...

Ryan


On 12/9/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
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