What happens after we automate all work?

In such an economy, it shouldn’t be necessary for anyone to work. If the machines produce everything, we won’t have to pay for it, right? We can all become artists or poets or hedonists.

We’ll work on creating and maintaining the machines that do the work.

We become the slaves of automation.

Idiocracy shows us the best example of our future. You should watch it. Everyone should.

Remember when the calculator was first introduced, at school we weren’t allowed to use calculators, we didn’t have computers we had to use our heads. Now just because intelligence is found by computers and technology, humans forget how to use their heads. We are doomed when we forget how to use our brains and let machines do our thinking.

@AmWiser I agree 100%. When I was in Public School (Grades 1–8) we weren’t allowed to use calculators at all and then when I got into High School (9–12) we got put into detention if we didn’t have a calculator and were penalized if we did the math calculations in our heads.

You can’t automate thinking. You can’t automate creativity. You can’t automate soul. You can’t automate love. You can’t automate human choices.

If all our material needs are taken care of, this will free humans to do what they really want to do. Entertainment will become ever more important, and content will have to be created. Everyone will be in the creativity industry in one way or another.

You might enjoy reading The Rational Optimist:

Anyone reading the news these days might be tempted to heap scorn on Matt Ridley’s thesis in The Rational Optimist: “The world,” he writes, “is as good a place to live as it has ever been for the average human being.” Yet Ridley here sets forth a compelling case that commerce, technology and innovation have made life better than ever before, and will continue to increase human prosperity.

As Ridley notes, over the first 50 years of his life, global income per capita has more than tripled, while lifespan and calories per capita have increased by a third, and child mortality has fallen to one-third what it was. All this while the global population has nearly tripled. More people, he notes, have been raised out of poverty in recent years than in all of human history. A multitude of additional statistics of ever-increasing prosperity fill these pages.

Covering the entire sweep of human history and human life from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Ridley locates a chief engine of this overall improvement in a continuing expansion of “catallaxy”—a term coined by economist Friedrich Hayek to describe spontaneous order created by exchange and specialization. Intelligence, Ridley predicts, will over time become more and more collective; meanwhile, innovation, order and work will become increasingly driven by “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” forces. “It will be hard,” he writes in the conclusion, “to snuff out the flame of innovation, because it is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon in such a networked world… the 21st century will be a magnificent time to be alive.”

The Rational Optimist is a contrarian trumpet blast for the notion that things are better than we think, and getting better all the time.

Now your in my backyard. When you have everything automated, you need people to fix and program the automation. I love it, it;s good for business.

It will be many years or never before we can build machines that fix themselves and don’t break down.

After we automate all current tasks, we will then begin work on automating the new tasks we imagine would be good to automate. :)

@wundayatta Given the absolutely abysmal record of predictions about what is technically impossible, I wouldn’t be too sure those things are beyond the reach of automation. The human brain appears to be a neural network working, at its basic level, on pure cause and effect. Granted it is an incredibly complex multiple-hidden-layer teachable neural network—but it is still ultimately a neural network. What we call a soul appears to arise out of it, not oversee its operations.

@CaptainHarley That sounds like a book worth reading. Thanks.

@ninjacolin As a former automation engineer, that gives me hope. :-)

Welcome.

@ETpro I didn’t say you couldn’t make artificial thinking or creativity, just not automatable. Having said that, I don’t think we will ever make true artificial intelligences. Yes, man-made neural networks can learn, and perhaps they will become increasingly complex fairly rapidly, but I doubt it will ever be enough to rival all the capabilities of a human mind.

.. and the….. SKYNET! DUN DUN DUN.

We explore the universe.

@wundayatta Time will tell, but I would place my bets on just the opposite, and that is based on my knowledge of the current state of the art in neural network research and AI development and the Law of Accelerating Returns as applied to technological growth.

@ETpro I’m not sure I want to live long enough to be proved wrong.

I think it matters what hardware the software runs on. Therefore, I don’t think digital thinking will ever be able to model (or be) biological thinking. In any case, I doubt if anyone would ever think that they wanted to emulate biological thinking. Anyway, to contradict my first statement, we should be so lucky as to live long enough to experience an information singularity.

@wundayatta At 66, I can not but agree heartily with that!

@mattbrowne Is correct.
Once we can escape the burden to physically scrabble in the earth in order to survive, we will start doing what we were meant to do which is find out what it is all about.

@josie Sounds like paradise to me.