coldfish wrote:I'm not nearly as negative as you are about AI and intellectual jobs. I used to do some industrial automation programming and I'm getting back into it. While the software can certainly do more, its actually harder . . . because it can do more. Robots can do countless more things than they used to, so we ask them to and it takes more people to manage them.
You're thinking of AI today and not what AI will be like in the future. AI in the future will be smarter than human intelligence. Anything you can train a person to do, an AI will do better, faster, and 24/7 at 100% productivity. The things which are intellectual will be done at better speeds, the things which require movement (clicking a mouse etc) will be handled instantly. Most white collar jobs that exist today will simply go away.
But going with your question, I'll go with service jobs. When the labor pool is free to do whatever and there is a mountain of cash sitting around, people will come up with new things to ask those people to do.
Besides the fact that there will probably be machines that replace most aspects of the service industry, the service industry is already fairly saturated and makes very low income. The creative industry is one thing that might take hold, but there's a high chance that AI rules that too.
I think this is an important point. You are a big investor. Do you *ever* have cash? Even when your holdings are in liquid assets, its really being held by a bank or something and they are loaning it out to someone who wants to buy something. If a company like apple starts making a ton of money, they hand it out in stock buy backs, dividends and give it to countries so they can hold short term debt instruments. No one holds cash and because it has to go somewhere, individuals can make money off it.
Sure, I generally agree with this, but where it will go is into financial instruments that will be held by fewer and fewer people.
The Ivanka Trumps of the world certainly screw with things but purely from an income standpoint for the other 99.9% of us, there is a very strong correlation between IQ versus income. The meritocracy isn't dead.
There's an even stronger correlation to having wealth and generating more wealth. Wealth is getting concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and it is done so at a systemic level where our laws are designed to benefit the wealthy.
If we have to, we tax wealth. If every apple share is throwing off $50k in dividends per year due to stock buy backs and incredible profits, we just take some of them and hand them out. We leave the same market based system in place and continually redistribute wealth through the tax code. There are downsides to this but if put in a corner we can.
But we won't ever do that, because the wealthy are the ones making the laws. We have done the exact opposite of this for 50 years, lowering repeatedly the amount of tax that the wealthy hold. The wealthy pay lower tax rates than the middle class because virtually 100% of their income is taxed at capital gains and we've shown that they have enough money that they can spend a relatively small portion to avoid taxes largely all together through a combination of means (many of which likely have questionable legality).
If we could get beyond the societal problem that we simply won't do this because it relies on the wealthy actually voting against their own interest and for the interest of the masses and the fact that people have found ways to work around the tax code fairly trivially as soon as the cost of doing so results in them saving more money, then you are still left with the fact that the uber wealthy (which we are creating) will simply become global citizens rather than US citizens.
I do agree that this IS the answer though, you have to find a way to box the wealthy into a corner and redistribute a portion of their wealth, but boy is it hard to see that ever happening in our country due to a wide variety of problems.
My kids are in high school and going towards college. I'm strongly pushing them towards high end computer science. If the robots are the masters, then control the robots. Outside of that, its anyone's guess. The big difference between the two of us is that I probably imagine a far rosier picture than you.
I think within the next 100 years we will have one of few basic outcomes:
1: Humanity will reach something as close to nirvana as it reasonably can. There will no longer be a need for anyone to work and almost everything will be provided for us. It may even be the case that this ends up largely just being like the matrix where we plug in and become part computer but experience whatever we feel like. It may be that we become partially digital and effectively immortal in this way as well. Even ignoring the VR / Cyborg part of this, there's a fair chance that we'll just be able to create 'enough' through automation of everything.
2: Humanity will annihilate itself (or cause something apocalyptical that ends up being close). Between nuclear power, climate change, the super AI threat, bio weapons, and resource constraint, there are more and more threats to our existence. If you go back to the 1970s, we effectively couldn't destroy the world, but over hte next 100 years the methods by which we might do that will ever increase, and eventually its possible that one of them will happen.
3: Humanity will basically align itself as gods/peasants, where the society in option 1 exists but only for a few, and everyone else has effectively nothing.
No matter what, I think society as we know it will be unrecognizable by today's standards. I think there is a reasonable chance that those alive today will live through the absolute peak of human existence.