Steven V Johnson wrote:
Seems to me the obvious simple-economics solution everyone ought to
Grok is three-fold: (1) lower over-all energy costs involved in
producing APWs, (2) increase over-all efficiency in the manufacturing
of APWs, and (3) redistribute employment amongst ALL able-bodied
workers.
That's a good idea for now, but eventually you
end up with an absurd situation in which an
automated factory grinds out APWs by itself, with
no workers, and whoever owns the factory gets all
the gravy. That's unsustainable. Even when you
approach that terminal situation things become
unsustainable, somewhere around the stage at
which there is only enough work left to give ALL
able-bodied workers a few hours of employment per
week. At that point the whole notion of work becomes ludicrous.
Many people identify themselves with their work.
Ask someone "who are you" and the answer is "a
programmer" or "a cashier." Many people define
their own self worth with work and the
contribution they make to society. I do not know
will become of these people, or what they should
substitute, but eventually society will have to
deal with this. Not in this generation, but probably in less than 100 years.
I have a few books and essays about this topic,
but I have not seen many that I can recommend.
People have not come to grips with it, even
though we have seen it coming for 150 years. I
first heard of this in Wilder's "Farmer Boy" when I was a child.
George Orwell wrote one of the best essay about
the nature of work that I know of, in chapter 12 of "The Road to Wigan Pier:"
<http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/11.html>http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/11.html
You can skip the opening paragraphs about the
nature of socialism, which I think are out of
date. Here is a marvelous paragraph:
"The function of the machine is to save work. In
a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery
will be done by machinery, leaving us free for
more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this
sounds splendid. It makes one sick to see half a
dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench
for a water-pipe, when some easily devised
machine would scoop the earth out in a couple of
minutes. * Why not let the machine do the work
and the men go and do something else. But
presently the question arises, what else are they
to do? Supposedly they are set free from 'work'
in order that they may do something which is not
'work'. But what is work and what is not work? Is
it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to
fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed
chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs,
to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats,
to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are
work to somebody, and all of them are play to
somebody. There are in fact very few activities
which cannot be classed either as work or play
according as you choose to regard them. The
labourer set free from digging may want to spend
his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano,
while the professional pianist may be only too
glad to get out and dig at the potato patch.
Hence the antithesis between work, as something
intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something
desirable, is false. The truth is that when a
human being is riot eating, drinking, sleeping,
making love, talking, playing games, or merely
lounging about--and these things will not fill up
a lifetime--he needs work and usually looks for
it, though he may not call it work. . . ."
* Jed Note: A backhoe. Small minded of me to point that out . . .
There are various books about the future of work,
such as Rifkin, "The End of Work." Rifkin makes
me ill but he makes some good points in this book.
A. C. Clarke anticipated this -- along with just
about everything else, in "Profiles of the
Future." Quote from chapter 13, describing the
effects of a "replicater" machine that can be
programmed to produce any material object:
"At first sight, it might seem that nothing could
be of any real value in this utopia of infinite
richesÂthis world beyond the wildest dreams of
Aladdin. This is a superficial reaction, such as
might be expected from a tenth century monk if
you told him that one day every man could possess
all the books he could possibly read. The
invention of the printing press has not made
books less valuable, or less appreciated . . .
When material objects are all intrinsically
worthless, perhaps only then will a real sense of
values arise. Works of art would be cherished
because they were beautiful, not because they were rare. . . .
It is certainly fortunate that the replicator, if
it can ever be built at all, lies far in the
future, at the end of many social revolutions.
Confronted by it, our own culture would collapse
speedily into sybaritic hedonism, folÂlowed
immediately by the boredom of absolute satiety.
Some cynics may doubt if any society of human
beings could adjust itself to unlimited abundance
and the lifting of the curse of Adam -- a curse
which may be a blessing in disguise.
Yet in every age, a few men have known such
freedom, and not all of them have been corrupted
by it. Indeed, I would define a civilized man as
one who can be happily occupied for a lifetime
even if he has no need to work for a living. This
means that the greatest problem of the future is
civilizing the human race; but we know that already. . . ."
People have anticipated the end of work for over
150 years, as I said. Some have feared it as
problem, others welcome it as an opportunity.
Still other people accuse both groups of crying
wolf. They say: 'We have been hearing for years
that machines will replace people, yet here we
are working long hours, as busy as ever.' I don't
buy that. First, as I said, we do not work as
long hours as we used to. Frank Znidarsic has a
valid point of course, but go back farther to the
19th and 18th century, or pre-modern Japan, and
you find factory workers and peasant farmers
worked unimaginably harder than most people do
today. They worked 14 hours a day in summer, all
but one or two days a month, from the time they
were 10 years old. They would fall to sleep
exhausted and hungry, and 8 hours later jump out
of bed and start running again. I know some
elderly farm women in Japan who used to live like
that. Now in their 80s they can outwork any
modern person, lifting, carrying, chopping up
mounds of food, doing laundry, spraying trees,
preparing hundreds of fish or 10 kg sacks of
onions, and literally running around all day long.
The other reason I don't buy that is that just
because a prediction was premature and has not
yet come true, that does not mean it will not
eventually come true. People predicted peak oil
at the beginning of the 20th century, and again
in the 1920s, and periodically thereafter. They
kept calling the peak too early . . . until
Hubbert called it 1970 for the lower 48 U.S.
states onshore oil. Wham! He hit it on the nose.
Look at the production curves and you can see
that discoveries of oil in the lower 48 ended
abruptly in the late 1930s, and production has
fallen by half. There is no more oil after this.
To be exact, it would take more energy to get out
the remaining oil than you can get by burning it,
so you might as well synthesize liquid fuel from
something else. Of course extraction can be
extended with technology, but not it will not be extended indefinitely.
Other predictions were premature but have largely
come about in recent years. The cost of telephone
calls has been reduced to zero; the Internet has
just about finished putting the Post Office and
newspapers out of business; Amazon.com sells more
electronic books than hardback books; and the
paperless office really is here. People laugh
about the latter, but inventory and order control
systems in retail stores, warehouses, factories
and auto-repair shops are electronic to an extent
that programmers at NCR and IBM back in 1975 could only dream of.
Artificial intelligence is well behind schedule.
Back in 1968 it was reasonable to think we would
have something like the HAL 9000 intelligent
computer by 2001. Reasonable, but wrong.
Over-optimistic. However, it would be foolish to
predict that hyper-intelligent, sentient
computers will never be built. Not even in 200
years? A thousand years? That's too bold. If
nature can make intelligent computers from living
cells (our brains) it is foolish to predict that
we will never learn to do something similar with silicon and other materials.
As it happens, we are seeing the emergence not of
artificial intelligence, but of useful yet
utterly fake intelligence, or what might be
called intelligence mimicry. Examples include the
translation capabilities of Google; voice input
programs such as Dragon Speak; and the new IBM
Watson super-computer that plays jeopardy
remarkably well. This mimicry may serve many
purposes in the decades ahead, or even centuries
ahead, but I predict that eventually something
closer to true intelligence will emerge.
I cannot predict whether machine intelligence
will ever resemble human intelligence, or whether
a machine will pass the Turing test. However,
there are many people, such as anti-cold fusion
fanatics, who would have difficulty passing the
Turing test, and perhaps in a few decades the
Watson super-computer will evolve enough to pass
it for an hour or so. Who knows?
- Jed
