From: Alfio Puglisi (puglisi@arcetri.astro.it)
Date: Mon Sep 01 2003 - 05:01:00 MDT
On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Samantha Atkins wrote:
>That seems illogical. Automation without AI made certain forms of fairly
>manual repetitive tasks be uneconomical if done by humans. Computation
>greatly increased the number of tasks that humans are not competitive in.
>Increasing AI in our automation may well eventually produce AI that is more
>intellectually capable than any human being. At that time I would expect
>most tasks to be assigned to non human labor. The only exclusions would be
>certain types of service jobs. And there will be only so much demand for
>those, almost certainly not enough to employ everyone.
>
>[...]
>
>Now it is certainly a very open question what, if anything, should be done in
>such an eventuality. It is also an open question to what extent we are
>already experiencing this effect.
I'm fairly certain that we are. Human societies have the ability of
inventing new, previously meaningless jobs to keep people employed.
As technology advances, more and more people are kicked out of farms and
industry, thanks to the better automation. Most of those people, until
today, found jobs in the service industry.
Now, the service industry is about to be automated away much like the
factories: as AI gets better and better, previously intellectual-like
tasks get targeted for replacement by a computer.
What people do then? Look around you - our society is supporting lots of
people who are "working" without producing anything tangible: athletes,
actors, artists, musicians. They have always existed, but now their
numbers are much higher than before. What they produce? Entertainment. Why
are they paid for that? Because well fed people, free from the quest for
next day's lunch, will seek entertainment. Someone will find it doing
something, someone else watching something. Most people will be a
combination of the two: they will pay to watch a good show, and be paid
to make theirs. I use the word "show" in a very broad sense here:
researchers and inventors fall in the same category, but I fear that good
enough AI will replace them too :-)
The change from a "worker-consumer" society to a "showman-spectator" one
will not take change until most material needs will be satisfied for a
negligible amount of money (or whatever equivalent comes out). I think
nothing short of advanced nanotech can satisfy that requirement, so it's
still quite far from us. But the first signs are already here.
Ciao,
Alfio
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