The Robots are coming, and if they replace everything that they're capable of replacing over the next 15-20 years, we're going to hit 65% unemployment.
That isn't an exaggeration.
I've been working on a breakdown, but as per usual, my post was far too complicated and dealt with far too many issues for me to be able to break it down simply into a coherent, concise post.
CGP Grey, the youtuber, was able to crystallize all of these issues into a perfect, 15-minute discussion of the new economy developing before our eyes.
The following is a summary of CGP Grey's video. All of these points are his ideas, and the summary works better than a transcript here. The automation of the 70-90s is archaic. General Purpose robots are now coming. They're here. We have just developed the first general-purpose robot, Baxter. Baxter is capable of doing just about any physical job a human can, but much slower. If I taught Baxter how to make my tomato sauce, Baxter could sit in my kitchen and make tomato sauce all day and night. For months, until he inevitably needed some kind of repair.
As long as I kept making sure he had the raw materials, he'd never need to stop making tomato sauce. I could then take said tomato sauce, freeze it, and sell it at farmers markets for a huge markup.
Purchasing Baxter costs less than a part-time employee's yearly pay at minimum wage.
The people who invented Baxter have the economic goal of achieving near-universal general purpose robot ownership within the next 5-10 years.
Grey draws a comparison between General Purpose bots and the General Purpose computers we're typing on.
The moment that Cheap-Ish general purpose computers appeared, it took about a decade for nearly every American home to acquire one. Again, paraphrasing Grey, baxter is not the apex, baxter is the Xerox Alto. He's the first of what's coming.
Grey uses the example of the self-check out at a grocery store. Where you once had 30 people, you now have one person supervising 30 machines. Even though people steal all the time, by mis-labeling goods (quinoa is more expensive than millet), or by labeling one expensive item as "onions" and then purchasing it by weight, or by weighing their avocados with their saffron, and putting them both in the bag at once, it is still less expensive for a company to eat those losses than it is to pay 30 cashiers.
And that's just idiot bots.
No one believes the phrase "better technology makes better jobs for horses." That's absurd. When the automobile and the tank appeared, the main two jobs of Horses, warfare and transport, were no longer necessary. We replaced the horse with air cavalry, and armored cavalry. Helicopters and Tanks. The horse population has since massively declined, because we don't actually need as many horses anymore.
When you replace the word "Horses" though and create the phrase "better technology makes better jobs for humans" we all suddenly believe it.
This is absolutely false.
"As mechanical muscles pushed horses out of the labor market, mechanical minds will do the same to humans. Not immediately, not everywhere, but in large enough numbers and soon enough that it's going to be a huge problem if we're not prepared."
"And we're not prepared."
You may think that you couldn't possibly be replaced by a robot, "but technology is getting better stronger and faster at a rate that technology can't match."
Grey points out that as the car showed the end of the horse, so now does the self driving car show us "the shape of things to come."
"Self driving cars aren't the future. They're here, and they work."
And they work better than human drivers.
Globally, that's 70 million jobs, gone. Those jobs are over. They are never coming back. From pilots, to train engineers, to truck drivers, humans are no longer needed in these professions.
And as Grey points out, the unions aren't going to prevent it. In fights between workers and technology designed to replace those workers, guess which side has never once been victorious.
The workers. They never, ever win these fights. Never once. And there are too many forces arrayed against them for them to ever win such fights.
Smart bots are coming. If you read a newspaper, and read an article with no listed author, you've probably read an article written by a robot, and then minimally edited by a human.
That's because we're teaching robots how to learn. No programmer can teach a bot to write. But they can teach a bot to learn to write. And the bot can trial-and-error their way to success much faster than a human can.
And this can be applied to all sectors of the economy. The age of the robotic CEO is coming. If a robotic mind can manage human wealth better than a feebleminded human can, then the board is going to fire the CEO and replace him with an omniscient AI that never sleeps, even if the upgradable AI in question is a supercomputer that costs $50 million a pop.
That's still cheaper, over five years, than paying a CEO 12 million a year.
The Kochs are likely to fire management teams, and replace them with AI bots, if it's in their economic interest to do so.
The value there isn't even going to be the hardware. The hardware can be upgraded, and it's likely that a CEO-bot would be able to manage it's own hardware upgrades.
The value is in the robot's learned, on-the-job experience, which it can share with other bots networked to it. So the board doesn't just own one CEO bot. They own a CEO-bot that can replace the CEO's of every company that the boardmembers own, saving themselves millions of dollars in bonuses and stock options every single year. Because the bot only costs the electricity it takes to run the bot.
And if you think that bots can't replace CEOs, look at wall street.
The floor of wall street is a TV set. The actual trading work is already done by Robots that taught themselves how to trade. And those robots are trading with other robots who taught themselves how to trade.
Nobody but TV personalities work the pit anymore. And that's just today. This technology is getting faster and better all the time.
This ends my minimal summary of CGP Grey's work. It's mostly him, with a few of my responses, but everything between the video and this line of text is either Grey's ideas or extrapolated from Grey's ideas. I give all credit in the preceding section to CGP grey.
The following is my work. I'm going to talk about what this means for police, military and government work, and the steps we need to take as humans to get ready for the future.