We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?
After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own automation company, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the tech that we lack, it is the will. A culture change is needed in order to make people realize that a work-less society is:
- possible
- desirable
- is not going to make them poorer
It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider.
There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself.
Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things.
I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
> I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.
Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.
Sorry, but that sounds hilarious. If "a city wanted", it's still people who would need to ensure "to signal construction work". And people don't care. And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes. I'm sorry, but as an outsider, I would say the roads (usual roads!) in the US are in "perfect" condition only in California. In other states, it's the usual asphalt-with-cracks, which will turn into a hole when a heavy truck rides it thru the rainy/snow season.
Heck, majority of the world has problems with trash on the streets, and cities can't neither teach their people to not litter, nor clean up timely after them.
I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.
> Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
I believe there already are official maps and standardized signs in the developed world. I agree that incremental improvement is possible and desirable, I also think people are working on these things already. It is possible that signs could be redesigned to make them easier for machines to read but I'm not sure that's much of a bottleneck.
> Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them.
I see lots of effort to promote them, they just aren't technologically ready to perform at scale yet.
As seen in some test suites and CI/CD pipelines...
For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in making cheap furniture. Electronics are mostly also produced by machines, humans do the last stage assembly only (and it's mostly because labor in Asia is just cheaper than sophisticated robots required to perform assembly).
Clothes are more difficult from a robotics standpoint (mostly because, unlike wood, cloth is not rigid/does not retain shape, which makes it insanely tricky to manipulate), so we're not there yet. But, on the other hand, making of the cloth itself, which previously required an insane amount of labor, has been fully automated for a long time.
Basically, once you own a place to live in, you can easily sustain yourself with a very part-time minimum wage job. Make the job pay more and you'd need to work maybe a month in year. Most people don't do that because they want the comforts and pleasures brought by market enough to work extra hours for them (usually up to a full-time job).
Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society.
Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component in socializing. Food is more than just plain sustenance unless forced by natural or artificial circumstances.
Because we actually can’t do those things?
If I understand it properly the author suggests we should find the time to play with these things. Who knows what might happen? It will no doubt be interesting.
Our indevidual performance is certainly mind blowing in a play settings. I see "players" do what seems impossible to me every day.
Now consider this, can joy not be had in cooking? I can certainly tell you that I find cooking good food to be a very fulfilling task. Unlike engineering projects I can go from start to finish in under an hour. And it fulfills an immediate and visceral need.
I think that the argument for play is a good one. In engineering I encounter many people who engineer, not for the joy of it (which is spread very thin in many jobs anyway), but for the money. Now imagine if there was no quantitative social status (money) associated with engineering. You would see engineers self select purely on a basis of authentic interest rather than financial status seeking. Would that not bring more promising talent to the table?
Let me now attack the idea of automation from another angle; to claim that we should be able to automate all product is as outrageous as claiming that Atlas holds the earth up. How could we automate everything? Who makes the machine, and perhaps more importantly, who fixes them when they break. You cannot possibly convince me that you could make a machine to fix machines. Again, such a device would be in the realm of science fiction. In reality, even in the relatively controlled environments of factories things inevitably break in unpredictable ways, and there you are, back to needing humans to clean up the mess.
Now, automation does have a place; doing repetitive tasks. But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot.
Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work.
Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.
"But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot."
It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in various forms of freshness or preservation, who can produce something that tastes really good. Theres often a large amount of creativity, improvisation as well as fine motor skills and expert timing involved in the process. It would be a monumental, hugely expensive task to create a machine that could even produce something edible given the same constraints. This just seems so far fetched to me.
Isn't that the economic reality rather than "the goal"? And doesn't this also put an shade on your original argument that it is "the will. A culture change is needed"?
I haven't worked for 20 years but I work in certain automation, and from what I've deduced it is rather that the V in (100-V)% is quite high, and then there's W = a x V (a is an positive constant) that specify required labour, specialization & investment for automation; which is almost always lower in supply than "voluntary work available".
Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings.
> Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system.
> It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.
Probably because they wonder how those people are figuring out how to eat without contributing to the economy.
But I see an inconsistency in their feeling of injustice, because some people have to work a lot to get comparatively very little benefits from our largely automated economy. Anyone who works should feel like they live a luxurious life. Instead we see a lot of addiction and despair, despite lifestyles that consume huge amounts of energy.
Be careful what you wish for.
