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Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where 'machines can make all the food and stuff' isn't a bad idea
(www.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sure, let the food industry do the processing conveniently in three days. Nobody needs these farmers anyway who work their usual six and a half...
/s
I think the idea would be to have machines replace people wherever possible and then have multiple people split the work time where it isn't. Why does one farmer have to work 24/7 if two could split the work and actually have a life outside of work?
I think ultimately this is going to become the crunch point. Because what kind of jobs can AI eventually take over (with appropriate robotics) in the mid-term future?
Now, when it comes to industrial and farm work. There's a LOT that is already semi-automated. One person can do the job with tech that might have taken 10 or more now. I can see this improving and if we ever pull of a more generalised AI approach, more entire roles could be eliminated.
My main point is, we're already at the point where the number of jobs that need people are considerably less than they used to be, this trend will continue. We know we cannot trust the free market and business in general to be ethical about this. So we should expect a large surplus of people with no real chance of gainful employment.
How we deal with that is important. Do we keep capitalism and go with a UBI and allow people to pursue their passions to top that up? Do we have some kind of inverse lottery for the jobs that do need doing? Where people perhaps take a 3 month block of 3 day working weeks to fill some of the positions that are needed? I'm not sure. I suspect we're going to go through at least a short period of "dark age" where the rich get MUCH richer, and everyone else gets screwed over before something is done about the problem.
Looks to me like Gates is looking ahead at this.
Sorry if that wall of text sounds pessimistic. Just one way I can see things going.
Disagree to that.
I say, you can trust the markets and businesses to always act as unethical as possible. And with 'possible' I mean a lot worse than legally possible.
I don't really see organisations as unethical. They usually don't act ethically, but that's not because as a whole they're unethical.
I see them more like insects. They generally react to stimuli and just do the same as the other insects/organisations, things that have been proven to work. They're also generally driven by one basic instinct, to make more money, and they do it at any cost. The drones (employees) are entirely disposable in this endeavour and if they can entirely remove them from the equation they will do it in a heartbeat.
Even those that perhaps do have some form of ethical streak and don't think they should dump all their employees for AI/robots? Well, good for them, but they'll be driven out of business by those that do.
When you think of a business or other organisation in this way, a lot of the weird things they do start to make a lot of sense.
That doesn't seem unethical to you??
'At any cost' usually means: by forgetting all kinds of laws and all kinds of ethics as well.
My point is, you don't see insects as ethical or unethical. I see organisations the same way. They're acting on instinct, and are just aiming to do what they exist for. Make money. Ethics don't even come into it. Now, peering outside in, you can try to cast society's ethical views on organisations. But, they generally don't even consider them (until they are forced to by local legislation, or that the route to making more money, or indeed not less money is to be seen to be ethical).
This is why there's more often than not a certain kind of person drawn to leadership positions.
You are saying that organisations don't need any ethics at all, but at the same time you refuse to call this "unethical".
For me this the point of EOD.
Nope. I think you're not really understanding what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that ethics do not factor into an organisation's decisions in the same way it doesn't for a colony of insects. They are ethically neutral in that respect.
At the same time, if you apply ethics looking from the outside in, of course you will cast their actions as ethical and unethical and many of their actions will be unethical.
I'm actually saying this is a bad thing, but is just a property of how an organisation, and especially successful businesses, operate. We're not going to change that, I suspect. As such we should expect businesses to exploit AI to the fullest ability, even knowing that removing most or all of their employees is bad for the employee, bad for the country (and the world), bad for the economy and ultimately in the future, bad for the business/organisation too. But they simply do not look that far ahead.
Honestly 10 to 1 is a low estimate. It's an absurd number like 100 or even 200 to 1 from what it once was with the right equipment.
I think it varies by industry/job position. It was a number out of thin air though, I'll admit.