El fin del trabajo

[Dan]

Por cortesia de un amigo, que ha encontrado el ensayo de Bertrand Russel que ya se habia comentado aqui: "En defensa de la ociosidad".

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html


In Praise of Idleness

By Bertrand Russell

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
[...]

Siganlo en el link. 

[Xoshe]

Por cortesia de un amigo, que ha encontrado el ensayo de Bertrand Russel que ya se habia comentado aqui: "En defensa de la ociosidad".

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html


In Praise of Idleness

By Bertrand Russell

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
[...]

Siganlo en el link. 

Es un punto de vista que ha sido universal hasta que los calvinistas jodieron la marrana. Conviene aclarar que hay católicos que parecen hijos del mismísimo Calvino. Manu sin ir más lejos. ¡Las broncas que ese hombre me ha echado por decir lo que Bertrand Russel!

[wanderer]

Por cortesia de un amigo, que ha encontrado el ensayo de Bertrand Russel que ya se habia comentado aqui: "En defensa de la ociosidad".

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html


In Praise of Idleness

By Bertrand Russell

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
[...]

Siganlo en el link. 

Es un punto de vista que ha sido universal hasta que los calvinistas jodieron la marrana. Conviene aclarar que hay católicos que parecen hijos del mismísimo Calvino. Manu sin ir más lejos. ¡Las broncas que ese hombre me ha echado por decir lo que Bertrand Russel!

Los opusinos son a tal respecto la versión católica de los workoholics que tanto abundan entre los protestantes.

En mi juventud cayó en mis manos el ensayo de Russell, que me conmovió profundamente, aunque sólo reforzó algo que yo venía barruntando, y que soltaba de vez en cuando como boutade:

El Estado debería dejar de preocuparse por el pleno empleo, y lo que deberíamos buscar es el pleno ocio.

[Micru]

Dejo aquí un enlace al primer ensayo de RBU que se hizo en los 70 en Canada, Mincome:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

Es una lástima que no se realizen más experimentos durante un periodo de tiempo más largo, o seguimientos de los ganadores de concursos/loterías cuyo premio era un sueldo de por vida (Nescafé, ONCE). Aún mejor sería si se incluyeran un analisis del cambio de mentalidad y estilo de vida de los beneficiados, hijos, parientes, etc.

Incluso creo que muchas veces al hablar de la RBU nos olvidamos de escalas más grandes todavía, como podrían ser varias generaciones o el impacto que tiene en la natalidad, esperanza de vida, selección sexual de los beneficiados. Porque influir, influye, no hay nada más que ver el sistema de benefits de UK, con adolescentes quedándose embarazadas para cobrar un subsidio, entre otras cosas. Quizás estos problemas desaparecerían, pero desde luego aparecerían otros. Por ejemplo, qué pasaría si la mayor parte de la actividad económica pasara a ser sumergida para evitar contribuir, o si hubiesen movimientos migratorios por este mismo motivo (huyendo de o atraidos hacia).

Como ejercicio intelectual podemos imaginarnos conversaciones entre trabajadores y no-trabajadores si la RBU estuviese en marcha. El tener un ingreso seguro genera "entitlements" que en cierta medida hacen pensar en un sistema neo-feudal en el que todos son reyes. Aún con la contrapartida de tener que ofrecer un servicio social o participar en minijobs, ¿sería suficiente para suavizar rivalidades dentro de la sociedad? ¿Habría un aumento de crímenes de envidia?

Además es un error pensar que "el fin del trabajo" existe como tal, quizá sería más conveniente precisar que el trabajo que se acaba es el baja/media cualificación y que es imposible reconvertir a estas personas por los pre-requisitos de formación y capacitación (inteligencia?) cada vez más elevados.

Si me diesen a elegir, yo me quedaba con un sistema social mixto entre Idiocracy y Star Trek. Habrían zonas-paises reserva con RBU y zonas generadoras de riqueza subvencionando a los primeros, lo mismo que ahora pero bien hecho 
El problema está en que ésto sólo es posible a escala planetaria, con un pastoreo global, y ya sabemos de sobra los peligros que conlleva... la alternativa sería una transferencia de recursos voluntaria (spoiler: no va a pasar), o una transferencia de recursos con aranceles a la vieja usanza, que no se sabe muy bien si es peor el remedio que la enfermedad...

[Taliván Hortográfico]

Busquen "Mendigos en España" y "Mendigos y opulentos" de Nancy Kress. Ciencia ficción que trata el asunto de la división de la sociedad en dos castas de individuos: unos extremadamente productivos, y los normales, que, como no pueden competir, pasan a vivir de los primeros, lo que es menos idílico de lo que podría parecer.

Me asalta la inquietud de si ya les he recomendado estas novelas, incluso en este mismo hilo. Tengan paciencia conmigo, que la medicación me tiene un poco groggy. 

[Micru]

Busquen "Mendigos en España" y "Mendigos y opulentos" de Nancy Kress. Ciencia ficción que trata el asunto de la división de la sociedad en dos castas de individuos: unos extremadamente productivos, y los normales, que, como no pueden competir, pasan a vivir de los primeros, lo que es menos idílico de lo que podría parecer.

Me asalta la inquietud de si ya les he recomendado estas novelas, incluso en este mismo hilo. Tengan paciencia conmigo, que la medicación me tiene un poco groggy. 

Sin ser ciencia ficción, en China ya hay planes que van en ese sentido:
http://www.vice.com/read/chinas-taking-over-the-world-with-a-massive-genetic-engineering-program

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.

[muyuu]

The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
It's an awful catch-22: employers won't hire you if you've been out of work for more than six months

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-terrifying-reality-of-longterm-unemployment/274957/

Close your eyes and picture the scariest thing you can think of. Maybe it's a giant spider or a giant Stay Puft marshmallow man or something that's not even giant at all. Well, whatever it is, I guarantee it's not nearly as scary as the real scariest thing in the world. That's long-term unemployment.

There are two labor markets nowadays. There's the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional. That was the conclusion of recent research I highlighted a few months ago by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and a PhD candidate in economics at Northeastern University, and William Dickens, a professor of economics at Northeastern University, that looked at Beveridge curves for different ages, industries, and education levels to see who the recovery is leaving behind.

Okay, so what is a Beveridge curve? Well, it just shows the relationship between job openings and unemployment. There should be a pretty stable relationship between the two, assuming the labor market isn't broken. The more openings there are, the less unemployment there should be. If that isn't true, if the Beveridge curve "shifts up" as more openings don't translate into less unemployment, then it might be a sign of "structural" unemployment. That is, the unemployed just might not have the right skills. Now, what Ghayad and Dickens found is that the Beveridge curves look normal across all ages, industries, and education levels, as long as you haven't been out of work for more than six months. But the curves shift up for everybody if you've been unemployed longer than six months. In other words, it doesn't matter whether you're young or old, a blue-collar or white-collar worker, or a high school or college grad; all that matters is how long you've been out of work.

Help Wanted -- If You've Been Out of Work for Less than Six Months

But just how bad is it for the long-term unemployed? Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they'd been out of work, how often they'd switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks.

It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine.

The results are equal parts unsurprising and terrifying. Employers prefer applicants who haven't been out of work for very long, applicants who have industry experience, and applicants who haven't moved between jobs that much. But how long you've been out of work trumps those other factors. As you can see in the chart below from Ghayad's paper, people with relevant experience (red) who had been out of work for six months or longer got called back less than people without relevant experience (blue) who'd been out of work shorter.

Look at that again. As long as you've been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don't have experience. But after you've been out of work for six months, it doesn't matter what experience you have. Quite literally. There's only a 2.12 percentage point difference in callback rates for the long-term unemployed with or without industry experience. That's compared to a 7.13 and 8.95 percentage point difference for the short-and-medium-term unemployed. This is what screening out the long-term unemployed looks like. In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or longer.

This penalty for long-term unemployment is unlike any other. As you can see in the chart below, job churn is another red flag for employers, but not nearly to the same extent. Applicants who'd gone through five to six jobs but had relevant experience were still more likely to get called back than those who'd gone through three to four jobs but didn't. And they had about as good a chance as those who'd only held one or two jobs but weren't experienced. In other words, there is no job-switching cliff like there is an unemployment cliff.

Long-term unemployment is a terrifying trap. Once you've been out of work for six months, there's little you can do to find work. Employers put you at the back of the jobs line, regardless of how strong the rest of your resume is. After all, they usually don't even look at it.

Let's be clear. Ghayad's field study shows employers discriminate against the long-term unemployed. All of the fake resumes he sent out were basically identical. But firms ignored the ones from people who'd been out of work for six months or longer -- even when they had better credentials. Employers look at how long you've been unemployed as a better proxy for skills than anything else on your resume. In other words, more jobs-training probably won't help the long-term unemployed all that much. Even a stronger economy will only help them years in the future, rather than many years in the future.

It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed. The worst possible outcome for all of us is if the long-term unemployed become unemployable. That would permanently reduce our productive capacity.

We can do better, and we need to start doing so now. We can't afford long-term thinking in either the short or the long-term.

[Republik]

Me han dicho, pero no he podido contrastarlo,  que en Portugal en 2013 de un salario bruto de 70.000 anuales le llegan al perceptor menos de 2.000 netos, no sé tampoco en cuántas pagas. Esto ya es forzar los los límites y revela que el mayor problema de una RBU o esquemas similares (lo comparo no porque en Portugal la haya sino porque fiscalidades de ese corte o mayores serían precisas) es que, dado el coste de oportunidad de trabajar contra no hacerlo, las diferencias de renta entre los grupos por fuerza deberán crecer dejando un importante hueco intermedio que podría generar tensiones sociales de nuevo cuño cuando el invento se supone que está enfocado a aliviarlas.

[pollo]

Busquen "Mendigos en España" y "Mendigos y opulentos" de Nancy Kress. Ciencia ficción que trata el asunto de la división de la sociedad en dos castas de individuos: unos extremadamente productivos, y los normales, que, como no pueden competir, pasan a vivir de los primeros, lo que es menos idílico de lo que podría parecer.

Me asalta la inquietud de si ya les he recomendado estas novelas, incluso en este mismo hilo. Tengan paciencia conmigo, que la medicación me tiene un poco groggy. 

Sin ser ciencia ficción, en China ya hay planes que van en ese sentido:
http://www.vice.com/read/chinas-taking-over-the-world-with-a-massive-genetic-engineering-program

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.

Esto es muy poco inteligente. Probablemente lo que consigan sea algo bastante diferente a lo pretendido (en caso de que consigan aislar el gen de la "inteligencia" sea lo que sea esta).
¿Un país compuesto sólo por gente con una alta IQ? Receta segura para el desastre. En una sociedad que funcione bien tiene que haber de todo y un buen equilibrio. Lo más divertido es que cada vez es necesaria menor cantidad de gente inteligente para conseguir resultados efectivos, y que esto va a generar una cantidad inmensa de frustración (no puedes poner a alguien inteligente a no hacer nada, o a hacer trabajos repetitivos). Como poco, lo que van a conseguir es un atajo a una revolución.

Cuando acabe ocurriendo, recuerden que lo dije yo primero, aunque me temo que no viviré para ver las consecuencias de esta "brillante" idea. Más o menos igual de brillante que la de tener sólo hijos y rechazar a las hijas, que ahora provoca pagafantismo extremo.

[Xoshe]

Pollo
Efectivamente así es. Y hay un ejemplo bélico ya estudiado. El de las unidades SS en el frente del Este durante la II Guerra Mundial. Los alemanes pusieron a los mejores en diferentes unidades y quedó claro que así no funciona. Tiene que haber de todo. Seleccionar no es una opción, que dicen los anglos.

[Republik]

Pensemos que en cierto modo lo que ppcc brama contra las clases pasivas está emparentado con lo que se discute en este hilo: un pensionista del nivel más alto no cobra más que un guardia urbano de Priego de Córdoba, pero el hecho de que sin trabajar esté percibiendo más que un % elevado de asalariados ya genera suspicacias y propuestas para que vea rebajados sus "excesivos" haberes. Extendido el modelo a un mundo con 20% de trabajadores a los que se imputa "alta productividad" y un 80% de ociosos absolutos, determinar las rentas relativas y evitar tensiones ya sería en sí mismo un trabajo hercúleo.

Las famosas pensiones, mi abuelo se jubiló más o menos a poco de nacer yo y sobrevivió hasta los 90 años (mediados de los 90), como había sido funcionario de un nivel alto percibía la máxima pensión, que curiosamente a comienzos de los 80 equivalía a €56.000 anuales de hoy (esto ahora sería inconcebible) y ya en 1.993 eran €38.000 en dinero de hoy, solamente algo más que el importe actual de la pensión más alta posible. El truco fue sencillamente una congelación nominal durante varios años combinada con subidas inferiores al IPC, así, como la rana, el pensionista sin enterarse cede 1/3 de su poder adquisitivo en una década. Como además e cambió el sistema de cálculo y se impuso un tope absoluto, en pocos años desaparecieron las  nuevas pensiones de lujo sin que nadie protestara, bendita inflación que permite robarle a un depositante a tasas elevadas mientras que un impuesto sobre el saldo genera aullidos.

 Lo llamativo es que las pensiones, que al final responden a criterios objetivos sobre aportaciones previas (y ya llevan un componente redistributivo añadido), en sí mismas sean fuente de desavenencias, porque entonces ¿qué ocurriría con rentas que directamente son detraídas de quien sí trabaja para meterlas en el bolsillo de quien ni lo ha hecho ni lo hace?

Curiosamente nadie cuestiona que el seguro de desempleo, pariente de las pensiones y de coste actuarialmente ahora mismo muy superior, le conceda lo mismo a un parado de 51 años que previamente ha cotizado 25 por la base máxima (más de €250.000 de aportaciones al sistema) y a uno de 27 que solamente ha cotizado durante 6 por una base de €1.200 al mes (es decir, ha aportado unos €27.000 en total absoluto). Lo cierto es que resulta difícil comprender los mecanismos mentales y de control social que hacen tolerables unas opciones frente a otras cuando en puros términos de equidad la cosa tendría que estar más clara.

Es decir, como minimo habrá que hacer, como se dice más arriba, estudios largos sobre diversos colectivos agraciados con pagas vitalicias y su influencia en el entorno, incluso quizá se debería sortear cada año un número de "Nescafés" para hacer segumiento porque hay cosas en el comportamiento humano que no son racionales.

[Starkiller]

Pollo
Efectivamente así es. Y hay un ejemplo bélico ya estudiado. El de las unidades SS en el frente del Este durante la II Guerra Mundial. Los alemanes pusieron a los mejores en diferentes unidades y quedó claro que así no funciona. Tiene que haber de todo. Seleccionar no es una opción, que dicen los anglos.

Y luego ponían a un imbécil al mando. Es un poco el Spanish way xD.

En USA se lo montan mejor. Agrupan a los mejores en unidades que, por definición, funcionan de forma muy autónoma e independiente. Es posible que tengan un imbécil dándoles órdenes... hasta el momento en el que entran en radio silence, momento en el que se autogestionan. Marines, Navy Seal, cosas así.

Evidentemente, en Rank and File no funciona. Tienes que tener una buena masa de gente normal que acate órdenes por estúpidas que sean. Los "mejores" y "mas inteligentes" tienen una tendencia a no acatar órdenes de imbéciles muy peligrosa...

[wanderer]

Sin ser ciencia ficción, en China ya hay planes que van en ese sentido:
http://www.vice.com/read/chinas-taking-over-the-world-with-a-massive-genetic-engineering-program

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.

Conozco bastante bien la empresa en cuestión. China ha invertido verdaderas barbaridades en tecnología de las principales farmacéuticas que copan el sector de la Genómica. De hecho, en Dinamarca han abierto una sede trayendo un gran numero de las máquinas adquiridas recientemente, en unas instalaciones que segun me han comentado son bastante desmedidas.
Ni aun con esas parece estar yéndoles bien su en su andadura Europea, ya que la "marca China"  es la que es en lo referente a tecnología y es un campo bastante delicadito como para "producir en masa"...

En fin, a lo que venia. Micru, e acabas de acojonar mucho con esta noticia. Como los Chinos se pongan a tope con un proyecto de esa índole me temo de lo peor, ya sea en sentido "positivo" para ellos o en un desastre sociológico.

¿Hasta donde puede llegar la "planificación" de unas élites en un sistema tan hermético y en una sociedad tan autoexigente y disciplinada?

Pues yo creo que esto es un buen ejemplo de una de las tesis recurrentes de pipichichi, a saber: no hay mejor modo de ser ineficientes que ser eficaces en la direccion equivocada. El post de Xoshe lo ilustra a la perfeccion.

[NosTrasladamus]

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/robots-artificial-intelligence-jobs-automation

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?
Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.

Illustrations by Roberto Parada

This is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us.

Maybe you think I'm pulling your leg here. Or being archly ironic. After all, this does have a bit of a rose-colored tint to it, doesn't it? Like something from The Jetsons or the cover of Wired. That would hardly be a surprising reaction. Computer scientists have been predicting the imminent rise of machine intelligence since at least 1956, when the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence gave the field its name, and there are only so many times you can cry wolf. Today, a full seven decades after the birth of the computer, all we have are iPhones, Microsoft Word, and in-dash navigation. You could be excused for thinking that computers that truly match the human brain are a ridiculous pipe dream.

But they're not. It's true that we've made far slower progress toward real artificial intelligence than we once thought, but that's for a very simple and very human reason: Early computer scientists grossly underestimated the power of the human brain and the difficulty of emulating one. It turns out that this is a very, very hard problem, sort of like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. In fact, not just sort of like. It's exactly like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. If you want to understand the future of computing, it's essential to understand this.

Suppose it's 1940 and Lake Michigan has (somehow) been emptied. Your job is to fill it up using the following rule: To start off, you can add one fluid ounce of water to the lake bed. Eighteen months later, you can add two. In another 18 months, you can add four ounces. And so on. Obviously this is going to take a while.

By 1950, you have added around a gallon of water. But you keep soldiering on. By 1960, you have a bit more than 150 gallons. By 1970, you have 16,000 gallons, about as much as an average suburban swimming pool.

At this point it's been 30 years, and even though 16,000 gallons is a fair amount of water, it's nothing compared to the size of Lake Michigan. To the naked eye you've made no progress at all.

So let's skip all the way ahead to 2000. Still nothing. You have—maybe—a slight sheen on the lake floor. How about 2010? You have a few inches of water here and there. This is ridiculous. It's now been 70 years and you still don't have enough water to float a goldfish. Surely this task is futile?

But wait. Just as you're about to give up, things suddenly change. By 2020, you have about 40 feet of water. And by 2025 you're done. After 70 years you had nothing. Fifteen years later, the job was finished.


IF YOU HAVE ANY KIND OF BACKGROUND in computers, you've already figured out that I didn't pick these numbers out of a hat. I started in 1940 because that's about when the first programmable computer was invented. I chose a doubling time of 18 months because of a cornerstone of computer history called Moore's Law, which famously estimates that computing power doubles approximately every 18 months. And I chose Lake Michigan because its size, in fluid ounces, is roughly the same as the computing power of the human brain measured in calculations per second.

In other words, just as it took us until 2025 to fill up Lake Michigan, the simple exponential curve of Moore's Law suggests it's going to take us until 2025 to build a computer with the processing power of the human brain. And it's going to happen the same way: For the first 70 years, it will seem as if nothing is happening, even though we're doubling our progress every 18 months. Then, in the final 15 years, seemingly out of nowhere, we'll finish the job.

And that's exactly where we are. We've moved from computers with a trillionth of the power of a human brain to computers with a billionth of the power. Then a millionth. And now a thousandth. Along the way, computers progressed from ballistics to accounting to word processing to speech recognition, and none of that really seemed like progress toward artificial intelligence. That's because even a thousandth of the power of a human brain is—let's be honest—a bit of a joke. Sure, it's a billion times more than the first computer had, but it's still not much more than the computing power of a hamster.

This is why, even with the IT industry barreling forward relentlessly, it has never seemed like we were making any real progress on the AI front. But there's another reason as well: Every time computers break some new barrier, we decide—or maybe just finally get it through our thick skulls—that we set the bar too low. At one point, for example, we thought that playing chess at a high level would be a mark of human-level intelligence. Then, in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat world champion Garry Kasparov, and suddenly we decided that playing grandmaster-level chess didn't imply high intelligence after all.

So maybe translating human languages would be a fair test? Google Translate does a passable job of that these days. Recognizing human voices and responding appropriately? Siri mostly does that, and better systems are on the near horizon. Understanding the world well enough to win a round of Jeopardy! against human competition? A few years ago IBM's Watson supercomputer beat the two best human Jeopardy! champions of all time. Driving a car? Google has already logged more than 300,000 miles in its driverless cars, and in another decade they may be commercially available.



The truth is that all this represents more progress toward true AI than most of us realize. We've just been limited by the fact that computers still aren't quite muscular enough to finish the job. That's changing rapidly, though. Computing power is measured in calculations per second—a.k.a. floating-point operations per second, or "flops"—and the best estimates of the human brain suggest that our own processing power is about equivalent to 10 petaflops. ("Peta" comes after giga and tera.) That's a lot of flops, but last year an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was clocked at 16.3 petaflops.

Of course, raw speed isn't everything. Livermore's Blue Gene/Q fills a room, requires eight megawatts of power to run, and costs about $250 million. What's more, it achieves its speed not with a single superfast processor, but with 1.6 million ordinary processor cores running simultaneously. While that kind of massive parallel processing is ideally suited for nuclear-weapons testing, we don't know yet if it will be effective for producing AI.

But plenty of people are trying to figure it out. Earlier this year, the European Commission chose two big research endeavors to receive a half billion euros each, and one of them was the Human Brain Project led by Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He uses another IBM super­computer in a project aimed at modeling the entire human brain. Markram figures he can do this by 2020.

That might be optimistic. At the same time, it also might turn out that we don't need to model a human brain in the first place. After all, when the Wright brothers built the first airplane, they didn't model it after a bird with flapping wings. Just as there's more than one way to fly, there's probably more than one way to think, too.

Google's driverless car, for example, doesn't navigate the road the way humans do. It uses four radars, a 64-beam laser range finder, a camera, GPS, and extremely detailed high-res maps. What's more, Google engineers drive along test routes to record data before they let the self-driving cars loose.

Is this disappointing? In a way, yes: Google has to do all this to make up for the fact that the car can't do what any human can do while also singing along to the radio, chugging a venti, and making a mental note to pick up the laundry. But that's a cramped view. Even when processing power and software get better, there's no reason to think that a driverless car should replicate the way humans drive. They will have access to far more information than we do, and unlike us they'll have the power to make use of it in real time. And they'll never get distracted when the phone rings.

In other words, you should still be impressed. When we think of human cognition, we usually think about things like composing music or writing a novel. But a big part of the human brain is dedicated to more prosaic functions, like taking in a chaotic visual field and recognizing the thousands of separate objects it contains. We do that so automatically we hardly even think of it as intelligence. But it is, and the fact that Google's car can do it at all is a real breakthrough.

The exact pace of future progress remains uncertain. For example, some physicists think that Moore's Law may break down in the near future and constrain the growth of computing power. We also probably have to break lots of barriers in our knowledge of neuroscience before we can write the software that does all the things a human brain can do. We have to figure out how to make petaflop computers smaller and cheaper. And it's possible that the 10-petaflop estimate of human computing power is too low in the first place.

Nonetheless, in Lake Michigan terms, we finally have a few inches of water in the lake bed, and we can see it rising. All those milestones along the way—playing chess, translating web pages, winning at Jeopardy!, driving a car—aren't just stunts. They're precisely the kinds of things you'd expect as we struggle along with platforms that aren't quite powerful enough—yet. True artificial intelligence will very likely be here within a couple of decades. Making it small, cheap, and ubiquitous might take a decade more.

In other words, by about 2040 our robot paradise awaits.

[NosTrasladamus]

Segunda parte del artículo anterior:
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/robots-artificial-intelligence-jobs-automation?page=2

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?
Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.
AND NOW FOR THE BAIT and switch. I promised you this would be a happy story, and in the long run it is.

But first we have to get there. And at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs? This is the kind of thing that futurologists write about frequently, but when I started looking for answers from mainstream economists, it turned out there wasn't much to choose from. The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor market.Now is a particularly appropriate time to think about this question, because it was two centuries ago this year that 64 men were brought to trial in York, England. Their crime? They were skilled weavers who fought back against the rising tide of power looms they feared would put them out of work. The Luddites spent two years burning mills and destroying factory machinery, and the British government was not amused. Of the 64 men charged in 1813, 25 were transported to Australia and 17 were led to the gallows.

Since then, Luddite has become a derisive term for anyone afraid of new technology. After all, the weavers turned out to be wrong. Power looms put them out of work, but in the long run automation made the entire workforce more productive. Everyone still had jobs—just different ones. Some ran the new power looms, others found work no one could have imagined just a few decades before, in steel mills, automobile factories, and railroad lines. In the end, this produced wealth for everyone, because, after all, someone still had to make, run, and maintain the machines.

But that was then. During the Industrial Revolution, machines were limited to performing physical tasks. The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently.

In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early.

This isn't something that will happen overnight. It will happen slowly, as machines grow increasingly capable. We've already seen it in factories, where robots do work that used to be done by semiskilled assembly line workers. In a decade, driverless cars will start to put taxi hacks and truck drivers out of a job. And while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true. Nearly 50 years ago, when MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created a therapy simulation program named Eliza, he was astonished to discover just how addictive it was. Even though Eliza was almost laughably crude, it was endlessly patient and seemed interested in your problems. People liked talking to Eliza.

And that was 50 years ago, using only a keyboard and an old Teletype terminal. Add a billion times more processing power and you start to get something much closer to real social interaction. Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."

It's not hard to see why. Unlike humans, an intelligent machine does whatever you want it to do, for as long as you want it to. You want to gossip? It'll gossip. You want to complain for hours on end about how your children never call? No problem. And as the technology of robotics advances—the Pentagon has developed a fully functional robotic arm that can be controlled by a human mind—they'll be able to perform ordinary human physical tasks too. They'll clean the floor, do your nails, diagnose your ailments, and cook your food.

Increasingly, then, robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

This is a grim prediction. But it's not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.

Until a decade ago, the share of total national income going to workers was pretty stable at around 70 percent, while the share going to capital—mainly corporate profits and returns on financial investments—made up the other 30 percent. More recently, though, those shares have started to change. Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.



In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change. Let's take a layman's look at what that means.

The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy? First and most obviously, if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.

Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past. Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom. Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories. Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.

These trends are the five horsemen of the robotic apocalypse, and guess what? We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.

How alarmed should we be by this? In one sense, a bit of circumspection is in order. The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes. The decline in the share of workers who are employed, for example, is partly caused by the aging of the population. What's more, the financial crisis has magnified many of these trends. Labor's share of income will probably recover a bit once the economy finally turns up.

But in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.

How exactly will this play out? Economist David Autor has suggested that the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles. But in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.

That hasn't yet happened in earnest because AI is still in its infancy. But it's not hard to see which direction the wind is blowing. The US Postal Service, for example, used to employ humans to sort letters, but for some time now, that's been done largely by machines that can recognize human handwriting. Netflix does a better job picking movies you might like than a bored video-store clerk. Facial recognition software is improving rapidly, and that's a job so human there's an entire module in the human brain, the fusiform gyrus, solely dedicated to this task.

In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too. Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.

This is, admittedly, pretty speculative. Still, even if it's hard to find concrete examples of computers doing human work today, it's going to get easier before long.

Take driverless cars. My newspaper is delivered every day by a human being. But because humans are fallible, sometimes I don't get a paper, or I get the wrong one. This would be a terrific task for a driverless car in its early stages of development. There are no passengers to worry about. The route is fixed. Delivery is mostly done in the early morning, when traffic is light. And the car's abundance of mapping and GPS data would ensure that it always knows which house is which.

The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced by driverless vehicles within the next decade or two. What will they do when that happens? Machines will be putting everyone else with modest skill levels out of work too. There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
 

WHAT CAN WE DO about this? First and foremost, we should be carefully watching those five economic trends linked to capital-biased technological change to see if they rebound when the economy picks up. If, instead, they continue their long, downward slide, it means we've already entered a new era.

Next, we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.

Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them. And eventually computers will become pretty good CEOs as well.

Solutions to this will remain elusive as long as we resist facing the real change in the way our economy works. When we finally do, we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it." http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-markets-0

There's not much question that this could work, but would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest? Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.

Alternatively, economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end-of-labor-how-to-protect-workers-from-the-rise-of-the-robots/267135/ Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"

In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society. Somehow—and I'm afraid a bit of vagueness is inevitable here—an increasing share of corporate equity will need to be divvied up among the entire population as workers are slowly but surely stripped of their human capital. Perhaps everyone will be guaranteed ownership of a few robots, or some share of robot production of goods and services.

But whatever the answer—and it might turn out to be something we can't even imagine right now—it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.

So far, though, the topic has gotten surprisingly little attention among economists. At MIT, Autor has written about the elimination of middle-class jobs thanks to encroaching technology, and his colleagues, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT's Center for Digital Business, got a lot of attention a couple of years ago for their e-book Race Against the Machine, probably the best short introduction to the subject of automation and jobs. (Though a little too optimistic about the future of humans, I think.) The fact that Paul Krugman is starting to think about this deeply is also good news.

But it's not enough. When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see. A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there./quote]