It seems John Derbyshire has his own take on Halfsigma's blog post in his Takimag piece "The Dignity of Sloth".
After comparing the situation of gamers folding proteins for medicine to a Philip K. Dick novel, he gets to the meat:
So here we have these gamers solving a difficult problem in molecular biology. Did they know that’s what they were doing? It seems they did; though there was no reason—I mean, no technical necessity—for them to. With a little imagination, the problem could have been dressed up as a Dungeons & Dragons-type exercise. Then the gamers would have been so many Ragle Gumms, having fun solving a brainteaser competition—for prizes! Making a living at it!
And there you have the solution to the jobs problem.
The jobs problem—ah, yes: the problem of getting Americans back to productive work, right?
Wrong!
The real jobs problem is giving some meaning to the lives of the—what? forty percent? sixty percent? eighty percent?—of the adult population for which an artificial-intelligence economy (self-checkout supermarkets, self-driving vehicles, remote-control warfare) has no use.
...
Half Sigma goes on to suggest that we might be able to set up compelling computer games that, while pointless in themselves, manage to keep the left side of the bell curve off the streets. The cognitively oriented middle classes might be put to “work” playing games that solve isomorphic problems, like Ragle Gumm, or like those gamers who figured out the anti-AIDS enzyme. A small aristocracy of the super-smart would have real jobs.
Back when Philip K. Dick was writing Time Out of Joint, people were already talking about automation causing mass unemployment. In a world of smart machines, what is there for dull-witted humans to do? And then, in a world of really smart machines, what is there for even quite intelligent people to do? Everyone thought such a world would come to pass soon. As often happens, their expectations were not false, only a few decades premature.
Half Sigma points out a cute inversion: In the pre-modern world, a small aristocracy lived idle lives while the masses toiled; in our grandchildren’s world, a small aristocracy will have real, significant, important work to do while the masses are idle.
How will those masses squeeze some meaning out of their lives? If you thought the concept “dignity of labor” was a bit of a stretch, wait ’til we have to grapple with the dignity of sloth.
Interesting. One minor point: there are plenty of people in the Peace Corps who are not from especially well-off families. Well enough off to be college educated, sure, but it isn't exclusively trust fund babies (anecdotal: my poorest friend is in the Peace Corps, he grew up in one of the poorest places in the US). Also, the status issue isn't about the geographical location of the work (see Americorps) it's that the work is known to be underpaid relative to the market so the people who do it get credit for altruism.
ETA: Which doesn't mean the Peace Corps isn't about status, but equating status with class makes very little sense anymore.
I've spent some time thinking about these topics.
So it’s not too much of a leap of imagination to think that one day, the U.S. government will pay its citizens to do pointless virtual activities (but which, through clever programming, seem meaningful to the participants).
and
"The "masses" mostly waste away in cubicles doing makework.
Depending on what is going on at my job at any point in time, some mornings I have a difficult convincing myself that I don't already live in these circumstances. Make work is a profoundly important influence in large modern bureaucracies. Entire careers are based on developing new systems of make work to be done for the sole purpose of increasing the status of the executive who manages such a large organization. There is a whole corporate sub-culture that move from one make-work engineering effort to another.
I don't think that this is particularly likely to happen in the future.
The government paying people to do "pointless virtual activities" would happen either because they make a system for taxing people with real jobs to support those who can't get one, or there actually being a subset of profitable tasks which are easily gamified, but not easy for narrow AIs during the time that this actually happens.
It may happen that a large swath of people finds themselves unemployed, but that's a slightly different idea than what's presented here.
The way that humans currently live, we need to rearrange some matter. Are you talking about this happening after some sort of singularity scenario?
Nearly 30 years ago, Barry Jones, a rather brilliant Aussie bloke (he won big on quiz game shows, then went into politics and became a Minister for Science) wrote Sleepres, Wake, a book in which he predicted that work in the future will be a privilege of the most capable, while the various plodders will have to live a life of involuntary leisure. The book is extremely well thought out and well worth a read.
But IMHO it (and the OP article) neglects to consider the following alternative: the unskilled will continue to work earning wages which allow a fairly comfortable existence, while being ever-decreasing relative to the wages of the skilled. This outcome seems more likely considering the basic human nature, and looks in fact like what is coming to pass: the modestly-well-off have cleaners, lawn-mowers, gardeners, nannies, guards etc, soon these may be supplemented by cooks, shoppers, drivers, etc. I do not see a limit as to how far such a chain of personal assistants can reach.
the modestly-well-off have cleaners, lawn-mowers, gardeners, nannies, guards etc, soon these may be supplemented by cooks, shoppers, drivers, etc. I do not see a limit as to how far such a chain of personal assistants can reach.
Having human servants may be a status thing, but consider just how good machines might get at doing literally everything on your list in say 50 years time. Sure obviously some niches will remain, perhaps for a very long time. But will these really be so labour intensive that they will be enough to eat up most of technological unemployment?
Lets do some math here. To simplify lets just consider the bell curve distribution for IQ, to add another simplification to our model lets say basically anyone with an IQ below two standard deviations above the mean is obsolete for anything but the kind of service work you describe. How many servants would a high IQ person need to eat up to not have society arrive at a large fraction of unemployed? Is this a realistic number?
That's an interesting question to consider. Some numbers I pulled from Wolfram Alpha indicates that 97.72% of people are below two standard deviations above the mean, so you would need 44 jobs generated per person after rounding up.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/firstlady.asp would seem to indicate that as of today, that is a substantial amount of personal staff, but certainly not an out of the question amount.
I think what D_Alex might be getting at when he references a chain of personal assistants is that your personal staff can themselves have assistants. I.E, you can generate even more jobs by having one of your gardeners come home to his own chef, or one of your chefs might come home to her own freshly handled garden.
Another source of jobs is jobs that involve a fair amount of waiting and or response times. People are still having trouble meeting targets for things of that nature:
http://www.yourcanterbury.co.uk/news/ambulances_failing_to_meet_target_response_times_1_1022605
It is not impossible to slice response time targets in half. The main reason that's impractical is because we can't or are not willing employ the number of people necessary to do it or it isn't economical. If we essentially had functionally unlimited resources to employ people with, and some substantial number of people who just wanted jobs, there are a substantial number of places where we can try to hire people to try to guarantee faster response times.
This also applies to almost any position that currently involves waiting that isn't normally thought of as a first responder.
As an example, my family missed an appointment for getting drywall repaired and now we have to wait a week for another appointment. Let's assume drywall repair is hard to design a robot for (or if it isn't, pretend this is a more robot difficult task) If we could have a drywall repair guy fix our house the same day it got damaged, our life is certainly seems better then it was when I was noticing a damaged part of my house for more than a week. Why can't we do that?
A standard explanation would be that it's not economical to hire that many workers to boost repair speed for cosmetic repairs like that.
But if you're in a post scarcity society where you desperately need jobs, it seems like it should be economical to get these speeds better.
I missed the part where any of these writers said who would grow the crops and build the houses that are described as "basic human rights". Rights are claims of people against other people. Who are the other people?
...
"As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.
We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff."
The blogger comments this:
He makes it sound a lot better than it is. Most people lack the IQ to “write books” or “educate and inspire one another.” Of course, even the low IQ can solve problems, but the only problems they can solve seem trivial and ridiculously easy to those of higher IQs.
Anyway, there’s already slave labor in China making virtual gold playing World of Warcraft. So it’s not too much of a leap of imagination to think that one day, the U.S. government will pay its citizens to do pointless virtual activities (but which, through clever programming, seem meaningful to the participants).
Also, it’s humorous to note that the current mode of thinking is that poor people have to work and rich people live a life of leisure. But in the future, it’s likely that working at real jobs will be a luxury for the rich, and the masses will play computer games for a living.
anonmouse writes:
"The "masses" mostly waste away in cubicles doing makework. The elite do things like install mosquito nets in sunny third world locales"
I assume that anonmouse is referring to activities like the Peace Corps in which young people from well-off families do work in third world countries that would be considered menial low-wage low-status work if done in the United States.
This demonstrates two points.
(1) If people are convinced that a certain activity is high status or in some way “meaningful,” they will gladly do it no matter how objectively stupid it may be.
(2) We currently see jobs becoming a luxury for the rich. Only young people from well-off families can afford to “work” in the Peace Corps.
This actually is an amusing little scenario spiced with the familiar observation that charity isn't about helping people. Perhaps an example of how future dream time may be strange and interesting compared to our little portion of it, to which we are acclimatised.