The Laborless Society

Although I've enjoyed everyone's comments in the thread, at it's heart the plan we're discussing makes no sense from a technological or economic standpoint. Why don't we just call it "the philosophy of a sci-fi utopia?"

Technological

First of all, this seems to require an astonishing and possibly impossible level of creativity from machines. Machines do not think like people at all. They can only react to things they have been programmed to prepare for. Even if you try to design things to "learn," they need to be preprogrammed to observe and learn from it. And all current "learning" methods (neural nets, etc.) require very careful coding and training.

Sure you build welding machines and then repair machines, but when a freak tornado comes by and throws the welder down a hole, will the repair machine know to look for it? And if it does, will it be able to get down the hole? Will it be planning a way to get out of the hole? How can you design something that can react to scenarios it's creators would have never thought of beforehand? And do so safely and reliably and in a way that will not accidentally hurt property or humans? It is a massive amount of work (and of code, and of built-in wealth) to do this. It sounds like you have to do this for almost every machine, though - if you don't, then you're stuck having humans watch and guide and repair machines, which sounds like "boring" work to me.

And never mind trying to make a psychologist robot (that's rich!); you can't even make a good experimenter robot. Design of experiment is a very complicated, creative process. You have to know enough about the situation and the world at large to design controlled, repeatable tests that hold as many variables as possible constant. You have to use judgement to decide how many factors to test and to what level of detail. You have to make a "soft" call between different equations of fit for your data.

Economic

Stage 1 makes no sense. In addition to being almost impossible (see above), you set special rewards for people who remove their own jobs. Like the fry cook at the Burger King is going to be able to handle that. Like the logger has access to that kind of hardware in his spare time. Also: who says you can only build a machine that does your job? What if you find a way to change how society works so your job isn't necessary? Biological or procedural changes ftw.

This whole idea of the other stages is self-contradictory: we're supposed to be enlightened enough to not care about money enough to give everyone plenty to survive on. And yet, use money as a way to encourage people to be creative or "invent" themselves into obsolescence?

Why does education wait until stage 4? Stage 1 requires massive education. In stage 2 and 3 people are supposed to be out of jobs in droves. Somehow these jobless wraiths will not be bored, humiliated, and depressed, like what happens in real life today. Because they're not welfare recipients - they're shareholders!

The plan assumes that rich societies should channel their wealth into automating work and raising the standards of living of their own unemployed people. But countries do not exist in a vacuum. Wouldn't other people emigrate into the free hand-outs country? Should people with such awesome wealth be putting everyone on middle class while others live on $1/day?

If no one is working the menial, dull jobs, where is the impetus to improve them? If there are robots out there mining diamonds in the arctic, and no human being is really working in this field, or looking at it, how are we going to realize there's a better way to do the job? Actually - do we even care anymore? If the job's being automated and we have insanely self-sufficient automatons do we care it takes 10 robots to do the job of 3? And ok, maybe you say "make a robot that designs new diamond robots." How will we make sure that this robot designs things in a way that's acceptable to the community at large? Maybe the designer robot comes up with a method that completely devastates the environment, or breaks our morals in some other way, but there's no human ethics informing it's actions.

Lastly, economics is the science of allocating scare resources. Unfortunately, this author lives in a fantasy world where almost everything is done for us and all of our needs are met. Is that even economics anymore? It seems to me we should be debating the philosophy of happiness in paradise - which this thread assumes exists, and will be maintained for the entirety our somehow-extended lives.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I hate making quote-response posts that go on forever, so I'm just going to cherry-pick what's interesting.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

<<In response to a comment about immigration and the rest of the world>>

I don't follow. Presumably as one society becomes automated, others would follow their example, and the process of immigration and naturalisation would be dependant on factors set by society. A robotics engineer, for instance, would be given more priority for immigration than some guy who will open a Qwik-E-Mart.

Or do you mean that it's somehow immoral for some countries to be fully automated while others aren't? Immorality doesn't factor into any of this. Whether or not the members of a nation want to export the surplus of the automated industry is up to them.

I meant both issues. That
a) If a single country or small block of countries achieved this, other people would be desperate to get into that country (Mexico anyone?), and they wouldn't all be desperate to start designing the new urinal cake changers
b) Would it not be infuriating and disgraceful to the rest of the world, for people to die for lack of drinking water while we are soaking 1000s of manhours into eliminating the "watches other robots work McDonald's" jobs?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

<<In response to the thought that designer robots may make solutions that compromise human morals or the environment>>

Again, this is where the Law of Robotics comes in. The first law of Robotics states that no robot can harm a human or allow a human to come into harm. This law supercedes all other laws. Therefore, even if the robot does come up with a way to extract diamonds more efficiently, if that extraction creates a negative impact on the environment, which then leads to human suffering, then the robot will not consider it an acceptible choice.

I have to agree with Mikey: it is impossible enough to create some kind of intelligent, adaptable robot that can work with almost no supervision for days at a time. Even designing a burger-flipping robot would take an insane amount of testing. If you want to start making robots that will be dispensing medical advice, or acting as law enforcement, it's even worse.

It is fine to try to make safe machines, but the more autonomy you try to push onto them the more situations they have to be able to reliably and robustly understand and navigate. It sounds impossible to make these robots operate without constant human supervision, and making them able to take voice commands from anyone just in case they start acting outside scenarios they were programmed for - which really opens the door to pranks.

But to say "the law of robotics comes in" on making complex value judgements on the results of human decisions on the environment, something humans have no way to calculate much less repeatably judge, is pretty out there. These machines can only be prepared to protect us in situations they understand properly.

Originally Posted by BlueMikey

So who gets to tell the robots what to do and how to do it? When you get into important positions, like law enforcement, the athiest will be mad if the Christian gets to make the RoboCops and vice versa. Unless you distribute algorithms, in which case you might have robots that aren't as good as others or you have this bizzare society of robots in which writing enough algorithms for them is so complex that it is completely impractical.

I think having robots make laws is fine, if people can put normal political tools to work (voting, lobbying, etc.) and just have the robots be automating the legal legwork and making non-controversial decisions after offering them to complaints and challenges from the public at large. An internet democracy...could be very responsive if it were secure.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

Aha! And thus you've struck on the greatest incentive for creative and scientific development of them all: the acquisition of greater resources. An automated industry cannot maintain itself indefinitely with the resources available to us, which means that developing the resources of outer space becomes a necessity.

Getting things into and out of space is pretty damned difficult, to put it lightly. Unless we all suddenly agreed space elevators are viable?

Originally Posted by Gecko3

A lot of people will do as little as they can get away with most of the time (yes, I know, this isn't everyone, but I bet you that your coworkers and fellow students probably don't do everything that they're asked to do either)...I know I'd stop doing anything other than surfing the web or playing games if I didn't have school and two jobs to worry about, screw everyone else, I want to enjoy this free time. I'm sure a lot of people would feel the same way if this happened, not working and getting paid for it. If the people who used to have jobs until robots took over continued to get paid for not working, I don't think they would object at all to this idea being implemented. But of course, they get fired/laid off, and a few people get to make more money, while those workers don't get any of it.

Valid points, but...don't you think you'd get a little bored surfing the web and playing games for your entire life? Won't you start craving a job just to feel a little useful and a little socialized?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

"Things" won't make people happy, but I gotta agree with B, giving people the option of opting out of the Office Space culture isn't a bad thing.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.