> ro·bot (n.) 1923, from English translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave," from Old Slavic orbu-, from PIE orbh- "pass from one status to another" (see orphan).
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot
All that's old is new again.
I am not sure if this is correct. In Bulgarian we have almost the same word работник (rabotnik) and it just means "worker". No forced, slave connotations. Also checked with google translate and it doesn't find Czech translation for "robotnik" but it suggests to switch to Polish and translates it to "worker" as in Bulgarian. And работа (rabota) means "work" in Bulgarian and google translate shows the same for the Polish translation.
Someone from Czechia here?
I've translated a paragraph from wikipedia for you:
"Robota neboli poddanství je ve feudálním systému osobní služba sedláků a rolníků pro jejich pány. Robotník je pak výraz pro poddaného robotujícího pro svého pána, někdy též vyššího správního či soudního úředníka, drába apod."
"Robota is a feudal system of personal employment to the owners of estates and country houses. A robotník is a person who works for his/her lord."
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota
Edit: I listened to the play by Karel and Josef Čápek, and it is most inanely stupid, sexist, pseudo-religious drivel I've come across in a long while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Edit2: The verb robit means to make something and has nothing to do with slavery.
Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders.
Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-generation slaveholding families have a fundamentally different way of looking at themselves and their culture than people who do not own slaves. Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim, we're going to be hacking into the human social ecosystem in ways never anticipated before.
What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags?
Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Edit: BTW, I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely scared by the events and the speed at which they are unfolding.
Based on that I think that the Robots will always be acting on orders - our orders - outside fiction. So the incentive will be "because we are told to do it".
Of course some people may tell them to do other things - like "go kill those people" but we have that issue in spades with things like the Trident D5 robot which is highly purposed to "go kill many people" on demand.
And what's the incentive for a robot to do anything else?
Supposing that future AIs will be based not on deterministic programming, but on some kind of reinforcement learning, it will still be humans who will design the rewards (incentives) - or it will be AIs with rewards designed by humans who will design the rewards of other AIs, and so on.
You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression").
Also, unemployed people are not completely powerless against capital. At least not now. Even if the people are completely outcompeted, even if the powerful few have an army of robot actuators, people are still resourceful and not powerless. The really scary scenarios are those where the powerful few owns an army of superhuman brains.
The "paperclip" that "Capitalism" seeks to maximize is money in exchange for goods and services that people want.
The robots aren't going to be built in the first place if they're not going to serve somebody, and if they no longer provide things that people want in exchange for money, their owners will turn them off or repurpose them.
"Capitalism" isn't the problem here; it might be that robots could be paperclip maximizers, but that's a danger regardless of whether you have Robot Capitalists or or Robot Communists or Robot ISIS or whatever.
I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist.
There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.
We're already there. Cars, computers and all sorts of machines serve our every whim - at least compared to a few hundred years ago. Our modern day affordances are simply amazing.
For example, the Empress Sissi of Habsburg was the first person in Vienna to have a water toilet, 150 years ago. It was considered an eccentricity. Now, even the poorest people have access to WC. (https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274520/
The Toilet: An Unspoken History
Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure, I'm aware of one example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti.
A friend of mine once said slaves became obsolete with the advent of harnessing fossil fuels. Before that, to get the raw power to do great things, it was all run on slaves.
Tragic, but I certainly believe it was true.
Almost all slave rebellions
ended in failure,
An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks.
example of success in the millenia of
slaves, Haiti.
Luckily, we have conveniently solved the ethic dilemma by defining work under slave conditions as better than no work at all ("think of the children!") and moving the exploitation sites far away.
What's the negative as a slaveholder again?
The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary.
My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former.
Aside: Any serious discussion of slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery", for the term is used in wildly different ways.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robo...
Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2].
Now "free" it.
What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that fits your world view. In my opinion, you just committed a form of murder.
There's no reason we can't have robots workers that absolutely delight and are utterly fulfilled by being our workers, but aren't slaves. "Free" them and they'll despise you for it.
The problem will come from humans anthropomorphising robots and assigning desires to these people/beings that they don't actually have.
[1]I use sex-bots as an example when I want to be cheeky
[2]This was Kryten on Red Dwarf, but Lister did what would probably be impossible with real robots and convinced him to adopt traits of self-desire and free will
Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. So the investment is a bit higher than that. But you will recoup it very quickly on McDonalds scale. And they will be able to provide better and faster service.
With that said - these Gen 1 Kiosks are kind of kludgy, not super responsive - and have a lot of room for improvement. Once they improve the performance, I don't ever see ordering from a human.
(It's already been many months since I've used a cashier to check out with at a local market - everything through the Kiosk)
(Note: Singapore has no minimum wage and lots of intergenerational living, so there is a lot of inexpensive labor available from Seniors that work at McDonalds - this type of technology will have a big impact on them)
We tend to underestimate the human interaction, however it's far harder to refuse a "would you like fries with that?" type of question coming from a human, rather than from a stupid interface on which we'll tap "Skip" as an automatic gesture and without regrets.
Talking with another human is also good when you're undecided about what to buy. Of course, it's not like McDonald's is a varied restaurant, when in fact they are famous for having those 15 dishes taste the same wherever you go, but there's still choice involved when picking one of those burgers. And think of how in restaurants, even with a detailed menu with pictures, etc. people still ask the waiter "what do you recommend?".
So yes, you can automate a cashier, but this means that the customer <-> McDonald’s interaction also gets automated in that process, this being a doubly edged sword and my guess is that it's not the customer that loses.
Oh, and the irony of this automation trend is that in the end there won't be enough people left to pay for McDonald’s shitty burgers, unless we progress towards some socialist society with minimal income and so on, in which case McDonald's raison d'être will cease to exist.
They've covered pretty much everything you mention here with their automated ordering system. It's got a great UI to quickly customize your order, has very tempting upsells that also aren't terribly annoying, like a screen asking if you'd like sour cream for your quesadilla for $0.25 or a buttered roll with your cheddar broccoli soup. You can tap skip, but it certainly seems to make most people think first, unless they already know the system well and aren't interested.
It also provides recommendations in a couple ways, to cover people who don't already know what they want. Unobtrusive, but available to spur a purchase.
And the employees behind the counter will generally handle special requests outside the scope of the system when you ask. Although admittedly, while they are usually fairly approachable, there isn't a clear way to get one's attention.
They really seem to have nearly perfected the automated ordering system, and I'd never go to an ordinary deli with a Wawa available. It's just too convenient.
Of course, I may be biased in that I get intimidated by human interactions where I don't know the protocol or the options available to me. So, ordinary deli places tend to put me off. Still, Wawa is incredibly popular in this area, so I can't be the only one.
We've had automated ordering at local chains in Sweden for 10 years, both in store and on your phone [0]. And more recently also at McDonald's. But you're expected to do a lot of things yourself here. This goes back at least to the '70s with the explicit idea to increase wages and production [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FyPqoT1yp4&t=60s [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehn%E2%80%93Meidner_model
Example:
1)You select the #5 and it defaults to a meal, with the size of the meal predetermined by the most profitable selection. 2)You have to manually remove the fries and the drink, with a confirmation for each element. 3)When you hit order a pop-up appears advertising the newest derivative flavor topping for fries that you must dismiss or can click to add to your order. 4)Before you confirm your order you must un-check 2-4 options that are defaulted: add a small fries to the order, sign me up for the fries club, recommend fries to your friends.
It's quite possible that neither the customer nor the restaurant lose.
Anyway, a computer can also make recommendations. And it's just not a contest if the choice is between a web-page taking orders in my phone or waiting in line behind people that just stay on the cashier and can't decide what to order.
I'm not really sure that people eat at McDonald's for the price. If you are price sensitive, cooking pasta at home costs less than McDonald's and isn't all that time consuming.
On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.
They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something.
This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout.
Now if they ever perfect what Walmart has been working on, either the "Check out as you shop" system where you scan items with your smart phone as you shop, or the RFID based system where you push your entire cart into a large RFID reader and it scans everything in a matter of seconds... that might get me to use those systems
About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)
Originally, you'd go to a restaurant. You'd sit at a counter. They would take your order and give you a drink along with your meal.
Then someone realized that it saved a huge amount of time just giving people cups and letting them fill their own drink. Not only that, but it made the job of staff easier, because they had one less thing to worry about.
That happened again when they started putting the credit card readers in front of cashiers. It was one less thing staff had to worry about. It also reduced the amount of time ordering took and made stealing credit card information more difficult.
I see this type of improvement inline with operational improvements. That's not to say automation isn't a threat—certainly self-driving cars are. I'm just not sure everything should be classified as automation.
Obvious conclusion: fast food companies operating on high margins still think they sell more stuff with humans in the chain, and also find that by virtue of its versatility cheap human labour makes less expensive mistakes in preparing the food (which in most aspects is so simple it would appear ideally suited to automation) than a robotic production line would.
It's been a long time since the order was shouted from the cashier to the cooks at a McD. Most burger franchises have a back-end system that collects up all the orders from the register, prioritizes them, and displays them on a screen to be made.
We will not solve automation driven unemployment by taxing robots, and UBI will generally not work on a country wide scale. Partial solution will be Corporate UBI, which basically will mean that if you work for Corp X, you and your family will have everything they desire provided for them. As for everyone else..
This is already happening on some smaller scale. All these corporate campuses are beginning of that. They will eventually grow to become self-sufficient cities.
Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them?
Heh, that's actually funny. Corporate campuses are nothing new. Corporate cities have been a thing for the last 60 (70?) years. They're actually on the decline, not on the rise. I doubt automation will change anything about that.
Also, when automation starts to really impact most jobs on the market, we can expect that there will be some increase in crime. People will move towards safer areas, and corporations will be happy to provide them.
It depends on if there are other viable/satisfactory (or better) options that you can voluntarily switch to.
Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.
EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.
That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry?
Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.
The fact of the matter is, however, that we (humans) do a lot of different things, so we need a multitude of specialized machines and automation. That takes time, and we had to pick and choose where we started. Farming is one of those that is ahead of the curve, fast food is mid-way as it is just now becoming cost-effective. Health care, not so much right now. Those are more difficult machines.
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/econin...
Yet it keeps not having happened yet.
What do you think about Wilson's 14 Points, by the way?
"No, it's just cheaper."
Burning coal to generate electricity is both cheaper and more ethical than burning live toddlers. You don't say "we use coal for electricity instead of toddlers because it's more ethical" because that's self-evident to anybody but a true psychopath.
When every material need is fulfilled, a lot of questions arise:
1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ?
2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ?
3- What will be the safeguard to prevent a maleficient/egoist minds to lock the access to all that abundancy ? That's quite philosophical question as humanity never experienced that kind of pure evil mindset. Every dictatorship, slavery, oppression were always driven by the context of competition towards the control over a limited economic resources.
4- And fundamentally, what will be the next thing that will drive the humanity towards evolution ? Knowledge curiosity ? Space exploration and adventures ? Spiritual achievement ? Perfection (and what's perfection ?) ? Are these goals philosophically equal ? Do willingness/laziness to adopt such a noble goals affect your share in the pie ? Does even "share in the pie" matter when the pie have an infinite surface ?
Only the future, and futuristic/philosophical writings will tell us where all that game will lead this world.
Who owns the robots? That's the trillion dollar question.
> 2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ?
Kings and emperors already had lives almost as perfect as they could be and they still chose to fight wars. Robots will not magically change human nature. There will likely always be people who will want to play the modern equivalent of "game of thrones", so to speak.
The will to power and the desire for world domination.
Assuming all newborn people will be smart and logical and will never fight for their local tales is an utopia by itself.
The best safeguard against someone keeping AI for themselves would be to distribute the knowledge and equipment as widely as possible, and to build open alternatives where ones don't already exist. As the Cypherpunk FAQ tells us, the best way to secure digital rights is through technological solutions.
One man's opinion, of course, and worth only what you paid for it, but even among the already questionable field of futurism, the very kindest that can be said of this effort is that it fails to stand out.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
In the end, the protagonist chooses to be just waisting lots of resources just doing something of no value when he could choose to join the people that make all the advances and, with this choice, generating the conditions for more people to not live caged.
And I see no movement at all by our politicians to prepare societies for this shift, except a couple countries playing small scale UBI... and the USA actually try to go the opposite route.
It's a great time to invest in detention centers.
But I don't see how your argument has any relation to the GP.
We're going to go full cyberpunk yet.
that may be true for the economy in general, but what about the slave owners specifically? that is the central point in the context of this discussion, since it is the factory owners that are making the decision about replacing human workers with robots.
People rioting down the street can be crushed by autonomous machines remorsely and effortlessly.
There is a need to start political lobbying instead of hoping for an automatic economic change.
Those who will control the means of production will not relinquish control once they realize their power. Once they understand that those millions doesn't matter anymore.
Not dying, but the abundant talent shows where a whole generation seems to sacrifice all regular career ambition for a nonexistent fairy tale already comes close. On the other hand, maybe the kids somehow have a very prophetic hunch that taking a crapshot at becoming the nation's "next top model" or whatever will eventually turn out to be a less terrible bet than fighting for scraps in an environment of increasingly automation-driven capitalism that simply does not need them anymore.
The Black Mirror episode (spoilers!) with the training bikes nailed that quite well. When I watched it I was disappointed with the implausibility of a high tech society powered by the meagre 2 kWh you might realistically extract from a human per day. But this could actually be a subtle point made by the authors: the bikes are not really powering their economy, they are just a semi-plausible bullshit job made up in-world to make handouts look like a hard-earned wage, probably intended to fool those spinning the bikes as much as the elite who enjoys having the plebs nicely boxed up out of sight in underground caverns.
- Art. Can't be replaced by a machine because appreciation for a piece is extremely correlated with the relationship to the author. Ex: I'm fan of [some singer], everything he does looks great to me in some way, and if I knew it were a machine or if I knew the author didn't come from the bottom of the masses, I wouldn't appreciate it. It's ever weirder with close relationships: My father listens in loop to the 10 songs I've written and played on an old tape (and that's the only reason he still has a tape reader in his car), and those songs mean little to anyone else: They are only valuable to him because they're mine. Although machines could produce art, man-made art is specific to humans.
- And leverage. Today it takes 200 people to create a Whatsapp, negociate a treaty or design a new iPhone. Tomorrow, maybe only 3 people will be enough to solve world hunger, one artist to create a massive discography with all marketing material, concerts, interviews of himself and snapchat testimonials.
Love of course is another thing humans can give, but is not measurable. If we agree point-keeping is a way of incentivizing people to drive their life, then how we measure a successful life will be art and leverage.
Slaves are capital, and, like all capital, acquiring and maintaining them has nonzero cost.
In the antebellum American South, some tasks like ditch-digging were sufficiently hazardous that a plantation owner would rather not risk their investment in their slaves, and so would hire Irish ditch-diggers by the day, as the plantation owner would be out less money if they died while digging the ditch.
What makes a lot of things like food so expensive is human work. If you had access to slaves you could probably also reduce those costs.
We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year.
Those same people living under $1/day now would have their costs greatly increased if they became factory slaves. Can't be malnourished, so food costs go up. Can't live just anywhere, so housing costs go up to live on-site at the factory. Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up.
Unless it's cheaper to train a new slave and euthanize the old slave.
Nvidia is currently selling their 'industrial' deep learning system DGX-1 for $129,000. It doesn't have the IQ of a mouse yet, yet it can beat humans in some tasks (as can mice?).
There is a wrong assumption that factory has to cover those expenses. In reality this cost is often offloaded to government or another party.
I'm pretty sure you have to be considered a person in order to qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing vouchers. I mean, idk because all of those things came about after slavery.