El fin del trabajo

[pollo]

Relevante:
El coche de Google puede no llegar nunca a ser una realidad.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.single.html

En general es mucho más interesante este hilo de comentarios de Slashdot sobre la noticia de arriba.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/22/2130219/will-the-google-car-turn-out-to-be-the-apple-newton-of-automobiles

Si bien no voy a decir que jamás ocurrirá, lo que sí que parece claro es que la cosa está mucho menos avanzada de lo que mucha gente desea creer. Básicamente, se repiten punto por punto las objeciones que ya había comentado en su día. Uno de los ejemplos es que el coche no puede distinguir una piedra de un papel de periódico arrugado (e intenta esquivar ambos). Se dan también algunos otros ejemplos y se apunta a que el marketing puede haber inflado "un poco" las expectativas (por ejemplo cuando hablan de que tienen tantos miles de millas testeadas sin accidentes, se olvidan de decir que esas millas son en un reducido conjunto de carreteras).

Básicamente, es imposible que lidien con todos los casos ya que eso sólo ocurrirá cuando tengamos una IA hard real. Vamos, que si consiguen hacer un coche que los pueda tener en cuenta, el hecho de que el coche condujese solo sería lo de menos ya que el notición sería otro.

Esto es interesante, en el fondo se podrán robotizar las faenas repetitivas y con posibilidad de ser calculadas, pues la inteligencia humana tal y como la conocemos es imposible de programar o calcular. No tiene nada que ver inteligencia y algoritmos.

Es curioso el caso de Toyota que en los últimos años ha empezado a tener más averías por error de producción que antes. Se debe principalmente a la excesiva robotización de ciertas partes de la producción, ya que una máquina no tiene  la capacidad de análisis y observación de una persona, la solución a sido dar un paso atrás y des-robotizar las factorías.

Eso no quita que muchos trabajos serán robotizados , sobretodo los repetitivos y mecánicos.

Respecto a los coches autónomos hay demasiadas variables donde interviene la intuición humana para resolver el problema. Muy diferente es el tren por ejemplo, donde el hecho de ir por una vía continua resta muchas variables problemáticas a la conducción, pudiendo ser robotizada, de hecho en muchos países los metros ya están robotizados.

Y sin ir mucho más lejos, los aviones. Claro que las circunstancias de vuelo suelen se mucho más sencillas y acotadas (y en general siempre hay pilotos). Lo de la automatización en los aviones trajo ya polémica en su día, porque la falta de costumbre hizo que un piloto novato estrellara un avión saltándose el modo automático. El problema fue que el piloto creía que ocurría una cosa y la máquina insitía en otra, manteniendo el avión en el ángulo adecuado para no perder empuje. Si el piloto hubiese dejado hacer al sistema automático no habría habido accidente, pero el piloto no estaba acostumbrado a navegar manualmente precisamente por depender siempre del automático.

Este mismo problema se presenta en los coches autónomos.

[muyuu]

https://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber
via http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/



Largo, pero interesante.

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs - David Graeber

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

From Strike Mag

[sincriterio]

Bienvenido muyuu.

[muyuu]

Bienvenido muyuu.

Gracias... pero en realidad no me he ido a ningún lado :-) este año las vacaciones las he dejado para el final.

[muyuu]

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/amazon-reveals-robots-heart-epic-cyber-monday-operation/

[saturno]

A Day in the Life of a Kiva Robot

[muyuu]

Mejor lo de los robots 

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/03/business/chip-your-workforce/

[Saturio]

Una cosa que me da mucho miedito es la sociométrica aplicada al mundo del trabajo.

Hace unas semanas tuve ocasión de participar en un foro en el que unos tecnofans (no sé si auténticos o porque es lo que toco Y lo que venden sus compañías), hablaban maravillas del asunto.

Yo sólo veía en eso las galeras 2.0.

[burbunova]

Una cosa que me da mucho miedito es la sociométrica aplicada al mundo del trabajo.

Hace unas semanas tuve ocasión de participar en un foro en el que unos tecnofans (no sé si auténticos o porque es lo que toco Y lo que venden sus compañías), hablaban maravillas del asunto.

Yo sólo veía en eso las galeras 2.0.

tecnofans = tecno-gilipollas guais

Y lo dice uno cuyo magro salario viene íntegro de "darle a la tecla".

[muyuu]

Ya queda menos de un mes para ver trastos sin conductor por las calles del Reino Unido.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30316458

[Currobena]

Wanderer, un artículo para meditar sobre política, conocimiento, el fin del trabajo y el futuro de los robots y la Humanidad.

AI and the Three Revolutions Ahead Kimball Corson
 12/08/2014, Pago Pago, American Samoa 
AI and the Coming Revolutions for Which We Are Unprepared
 
 Rapidly advancing microchips, software and algorithms are developing as I write. The worm's eye view is they will make machines better. The super macro view from Stephen Hawking is humans will need to colonize other planets, because eventually artificial intelligence and robots will displace the human race.  I add, if we are lucky, and not destroy it. In between the worm's eye view and the macro long range view is the near future about which I write here.
 
 The near future is fraught with the coming peril of three distinct revolutions attending the transition from now forward. The first revolution is the Displacement Revolution. It entails displacement of most people from the production process and too largely from the economy. That is already underway. Only 47 percent of the working age population now has full time employment and the serious mechanization of production to replace humans is now only just beginning. The displacement is however lower bounded by the service economy which cannot be totally displaced. The service sector will slow but not likely stop the development of the second transitional revolution.
 
 The second transitional revolution -- the Revolution of the People -- is when people turn on capitalism and governments and there is great social and political instability and unrest which the first transitional revolution of Displacement created. This  second transitional revolution could and is likely to lead to blood flowing in the streets and much civilian detention. The government is prepared for both, but our representatives in government won't like it.
 
 The second Uprising revolution will likely also entail roving bands of people up in arms using guerrilla tactics to attack machines and the production processes that has not been off shored. Several outcomes are possible here. It can be long, messy and global, or short, much more sensible and limited. The outcome either way is capital, through governments, will have to share its profits and spoils with the people. It is a shake down, protection scheme. A resolution along these lines will eventually be forthcoming through government and perhaps a guaranteed basic income and high effective average tax rates.
 
 The third transitional revolution will be our Attack on Artificial Intelligence. It might overlap the second or Uprising revolution. It will determine whether we can curb the development of AI and stay in control or whether AI will begin to curb us and acquire control. Either we stay on top or AI gets on top. A middle ground compromise is unlikely, especially with our history of attacking machines and our likely AI perceived uselessness.
 
 The rub obviously is curbing the development of AI worldwide to keep it under control. That is more than problematic. Someone somewhere, by inadvertence or happenstance will give AI the upper hand. If we fail in our Attack on AI, as I suggest is likely, we are then into Stephen Hawking's scenario of human departure from the planet, unless, of course, AI decides it wants total control everywhere in which case we will face annihilation.
 
 This three revolutions forecast might well be our road map for the next 200 to 300 years.

http://www.sailblogs.com/member/thewanderer/?xjMsgID=340972

[2 años]

Robot de Lego controlado por un cerebro de gusano


http://www.gurusblog.com/archives/robot-de-lego-controlado-por-un-cerebro-de-gusano/15/12/2014/

[Cadavre Exquis]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/12/20/1618222/what-happens-to-society-when-robots-replace-workers

What Happens To Society When Robots Replace Workers?
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday December 20, 2014 @01:45PM
from the fewer-wrong-orders-at-the-drivethru dept.

"An article in the Harvard Business Review by William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone suggests: "The "Second Economy" (the term used by economist Brian Arthur to describe the portion of the economy where computers transact business only with other computers) is upon us. It is, quite simply, the virtual economy, and one of its main byproducts is the replacement of workers with intelligent machines powered by sophisticated code. ... This is why we will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value. Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century. ... Ultimately, we need a new, individualized, cultural, approach to the meaning of work and the purpose of life. Otherwise, people will find a solution — human beings always do — but it may not be the one for which we began this technological revolution."

This follows the recent Slashdot discussion of "Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates" citing a NY Times article and other previous discussions like Humans Need Not Apply. What is most interesting to me about this HBR article is not the article itself so much as the fact that concerns about the economic implications of robotics, AI, and automation are now making it into the Harvard Business Review. These issues have been otherwise discussed by alternative economists for decades, such as in the Triple Revolution Memorandum from 1964 — even as those projections have been slow to play out, with automation's initial effect being more to hold down wages and concentrate wealth rather than to displace most workers. However, they may be reaching the point where these effects have become hard to deny despite going against mainstream theory which assumes infinite demand and broad distribution of purchasing power via wages.

As to possible solutions, there is a mention in the HBR article of using government planning by creating public works like infrastructure investments to help address the issue. There is no mention in the article of expanding the "basic income" of Social Security currently only received by older people in the U.S., expanding the gift economy as represented by GNU/Linux, or improving local subsistence production using, say, 3D printing and gardening robots like Dewey of "Silent Running." So, it seems like the mainstream economics profession is starting to accept the emerging reality of this increasingly urgent issue, but is still struggling to think outside an exchange-oriented box for socioeconomic solutions. A few years ago, I collected dozens of possible good and bad solutions related to this issue. Like Davidow and Malone, I'd agree that the particular mix we end up will be a reflection of our culture. Personally, I feel that if we are heading for a technological "singularity" of some sort, we would be better off improving various aspects of our society first, since our trajectory going out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into it."

Saludos.

[muyuu]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/upshot/the-rise-of-men-who-dont-work-and-what-they-do-instead.html

At every age, the chances of not working have changed in the last 15 years. Teenagers are far more likely not to work. Older people are retiring later and working more. In the ages in between — the periods of life when most people work — the changes have been smaller, but they are still substantial.

In the late 1960s, almost all men between the ages of 25 and 54 went to work. Only about 5 out of every 100 did not have a job in any given week. By 2000, this figure had more than doubled, to 11 out of every 100 men. This year, it’s 16. (People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these figures.)

Of course, the economy was stronger in 2000 than it is today, with a lower official unemployment rate — the share of people not working and actively looking for work — than today. But for prime-age men, the rise in official unemployment explains only about one-third of the increase in not working.

The remaining two-thirds is made up of those who are not working and not looking for work. Every month, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics ask these men who are not in the labor force to describe their situation. Are they disabled, ill, in school, taking care of house or family, in retirement, or something else? Here are the trends within some of the larger of those categories:

School

About 13 percent of the increase in prime-age nonworkers, including a substantial fraction of the younger ones, comes among people who say they are in school.

To the extent that rising nonwork reflects more men graduating from school, that’s good news. Male high school graduation rates have risen 5 percentage points since 2000, and people with more education earn more and are less likely to be disabled later in life. But much of the school-related rise in nonwork, at least since 2007, appears to be less about staying in school than it is about not being able to find part-time jobs.

Some men in school say they would like to be working part time but they’ve given up looking for a job. Others may stop going to school entirely if they could find a job, or if the college wage premium were smaller.

Taking care of home or family

Men who identify as homemakers remain relatively rare, but they are about twice as common as they were in 2000.

Disability

About 20 percent of the new nonworkers say they are disabled, a category whose numbers have risen particularly for workers above age 50.

Once people have a disability and neither have a job nor are looking for one, it’s unlikely they will work again. Less than 10 percent of the prime-age nonworkers who say that they have a disability will be in the labor force one year later, according to a study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Instead, most of those who receive disability benefits will do so until they reach retirement age or die.

Retirement

Among prime-age workers, early retirement has increased slightly since 2000. Far more drastic changes have occured among workers 55 and older, who have been doing the opposite and putting off retirement.

The decline of traditional pension plans and rising education levels, which are associated with less physically demanding jobs, may both help explain why the elderly are working longer.

The full retirement age for Social Security benefits also began gradually increasing in 2000.



Some countries have developed policies that encourage older people to leave the labor force, so they do not “crowd out” younger workers. But studies across countries and time suggest that crowding-out may not actually be a problem. Economies do not appear to have a fixed number of jobs. When more older people are working, they are earning money that they will then spend in ways that may create more jobs for young people, for example.

Even if this is the case, though, the rise of elderly employment in recent years has not provided enough of a lift to put more young people back to work.

[muyuu]

Subsidios en EEUU (al alza):

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits