If Most Low Skilled Jobs Go Automated..who Pays Taxes? (unemployment, drugs)

[CCbaxter]

Originally Posted by danielj72

I suspect corporations will pay most taxes in a world where automation has replaced much of the workforce. The big question is what will happen to our society? If half the population is unemployed, many being unemployable what happens. Our capitalist system will not work if half the population cannot work. If they are left in poverty they will revolt and destroy the nation and our society as a whole. Socialism? I suppose that is a likely result, especially since millenials want that now. Even if these folks are taken care of through socialist programs what will they do with thier time as robots do all the work? The uber smart and educated will likely be very wealthy, how will the other 50 percent really live? I'm not sure I want to see what a society that discards half its population in lieu of robots will look like. Taxes are just a small part of problem.

You see it as a negative, and it very well may be...but what if its not? What if we are opening the door to something great? We have the ability now to create our own cohorts and not simply be in groups dictated by proximity or work pods. We work to buy things, then we buy homes for a place to leave our things while we go to work. What if we were free of that? What if someone was doing something interesting 3 states away and I could just go there and participate? Then, when that was done I could go across the country to become involved in another project? No longer would we be bound by what is most profitable because the floor is established and we don't have to 'risk everything' to try a great idea.

[Wee-Bey]

Originally Posted by man4857

Performance of a single thread won't be doubling, but the # of computations you can do per second will. It'll all be pushed towards multicore architectures to artificially extend Moore's law. The GPUs of tomorrow might probably have over 10000 cores and still be of a reasonable size in 7nm, or maybe 5nm if we can get there.

But it's interesting times in the computing field that's for sure. Since multicore architectures are here to stay, RISC is the way to go, not CISC. lol

The problem with parallel execution either through simultaneous multi-threading or multi-core dies is heat and power. If you can't shrink much anymore and you want to keep boosting IPC (instr per clk) by adding cores or dies on a data fabric you are just multiplying your power consumption like crazy. That's as big or bigger of a problem for data centers. A perfect condensed example of that is HPC. I did some debug work with Cray for a while and discovered that thermals were their biggest consideration. You need massive IPC but also cool and power thrifty. It's really hard to satisfy all three of those masters.

I don't think that people who feel AI is this all consuming terror really realize what it means in terms of compute power and how expensive that is in so many ways. I think breakthroughs with AI are going to have to come in the software realm. Programmers and software engineers can't be lazy anymore and count on hardware to make their inefficient code work well.

[LINative]

Originally Posted by max210

Poors barely pay any taxes as it is. They mainly leech off of the middle, upper and the 1% class.

Maybe the non-working poor.

But the working poor should get our respect and support. As someone said earlier in this thread, it almost makes sense for some low income workers to quite and go on welfare, yet so many working poor keep working for low wages and little or no benefits. They are trying to avoid welfare and somehow hope to better themselves. I really admire people like that.

[CCbaxter]

Originally Posted by Phil75230

Or, we can simply say that Homo sapiens itself as we know it is obsolete and deserves outright extinction. Not active steps to exterminate us, of course, but have the robots to allow us to die of neglect - kind of like the Neanderthals (notwithstanding the 4% of Neanderthal in non-Africans) - OR if we manage to program empathy and compassion into the robots and AI, they'll set aside a "Homo sapiens preserve" for us. Maybe they'll gradually "provolve" (proactive evolution) Homo sapiens into cyborgs, and then, gradually replace our natural neurons for something electronic-based..so we can keep our consciousness living existence during the transition process. Eventually we can become essentially AI/robots ourselves, even as we might keep our memories of our personal living existence as sapiens

After all, if survivability and efficiently are the names of the game, then we must concede that AI and robots are stronger, faster thinking, and faster moving and overall simply more fit to survive than Homo sapiens. So the choices are to concede we deserve either:

(a)extinction, on account of our lesser ability to compete and survive
(b)placement into a "sapiens reserve" where we can't inconvenience the AI-robot population, or
(c)concede we have to be "upgraded" / "assimilated"* if we wish to continue existing as conscious beings.

OR we can admit that some things are indeed more important than mere survival and/or efficiency - like retaining the essence of what it is to be human (whatever that may be). (although that doesn't contradict point b).

Hey, were I a pure laissez-faire capitalist / Social Darwinist, this is what I would have to conclude - especially since humans are stupid enough to create an entity that can outcompete itself.

*Sci-Fi / Space Opera fans should immediately get this one.

So because we arent tied to work, we are no longer human? Were we not human anymore when we stopped riding horses and went to cars? When flying across the country in 4 hours became possible for anyone? When we stopped eating raw meat and used fire?
I think you give humans too narrow a definition.

[fibonacci]

Physicians
Pharmacists
Lawyers
Accountants
Stock Brokers
Tons of other finance


All under the threat of automation. It isn't just the $7/hr paid cashier at McDonald's you all like to beat up on. Many current lucrative jobs can and will be easily automated.

There is really no other way to avoid the destruction of the fabric of society, social order, and crushing poverty except through a universal income. It's mind warping, but that's the way the future is moving. It's either either that or civil war and bringing back a bartering based economy when people can longer work.

[Phil75230]

On a more purely serious note than my Post 81, I suspect one route is to either tax corporations heavily so they can support people not qualified to work in tasks AI/robots can't already do more efficiently; OR have the government (or some other entity) buy robots/AI and distribute them to (eventually) everyone, with the worse-off people getting higher priority.

In Early Modern times, land redistribution (direct or indirect) spread the source of wealth / "means of production" to a broader share of the population - which stimulated the economy because more people demanded more stuff (even the kings and other high lords needed only so many carriages to ride around in or castles to live in).

[Phil75230]

Originally Posted by CCbaxter

So because we arent tied to work, we are no longer human? Were we not human anymore when we stopped riding horses and went to cars? When flying across the country in 4 hours became possible for anyone? When we stopped eating raw meat and used fire?
I think you give humans too narrow a definition.

This is something far more fundamental than our diet and transportation. This has to do with core human abilities themselves - namely basic physical functions and even thinking itself, especially for the more routinized types of "high level" thinking. If we don't work (including thought-based work), how are we going to eat or find shelter?

[Wee-Bey]

Originally Posted by CCbaxter

I read an interview with an engineer who worked for (I think) Tesla. He said computers are 10 years or less away from writing their own code and not needing software engineers. Yes? No? Too short a timeline?

Yes and no and that depends on the sophistication of the code being auto-generated. We actually do that now to a certain degree but it's not Skynet $h1t. This last year I wrote a silicon debug tool that uses a rules-based language of my own creation that guides a piece of generator code to create assembly language tests that target specific micro-architectural features of the processor pipeline. Each resulting test is unique in its own right. There's no intelligent feedback loop in there though. I sit in that spot.

I can't see anything coming that will be a problem solver. That's imagination and AI will never have that. There won't be a component of an OS that goes "Hmmm I have a problem in this area or I could re-write my driver stack" ... and pop out comes some fundamentally new piece of innovative code. Just not happening. AI is NOT going to replace the human imagination and that's what a good software engineer brings to the table.

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by PCALMike

Many jobs wont be automated any time soon. This hysteria about automation is out of control.

Yes. The current concern over robots is vastly overblown.

Despite their advantages, there are equal advantages to hiring humans instead. Which is better all depends on the individual company, it's products, the demand for them, and many other factors.

One of the biggest advantages of a human workforce that robots can't match is its flexibility. Robots only become economical when they are running at their maximum capacity.

If that capacity is too small, they can sink a fast -growing company with their re-tooling and replacement costs. Humans are much quicker to train, and a human work force can learn to do many jobs equally well, so they can be moved around very easily to meet the demands of one part of production or another.

No line production works equally well all the time throughout the many processes of the line.

Many things that are very simple changes for a human require massive re-programming for a robot. And one robot with a glitch can screw up the production massively before the glitch is corrected.

That's not going to change very fast, if at all, for a long time to come.

[Roadking2003]

47% don't pay FIT today. You don't need to replace taxpayers who aren't paying FIT.