The Real Zack Morris

Find the Solution, not the Problem

As the world struggles through the Great Recession, I’m constantly amazed by the proposals that people put forth. Take for example recent attempts to reform social security and medicare, programs that (regardless of opinions for or against them) people have paid into their entire lives. Rick Perry describes them as Ponzi schemes.

So there’s problems with entitlements and the country is too poor to make good on its commitments. Congratulations guys, thanks for pointing that out. Progressives like Thom Hartmann point out that this is a kind of framing, that the country is not really much poorer than usual but that by stating things this way, it subtly shifts the conversation towards more radical solutions. Nobody wants to lose their retirement, but if they hear “I’m sorry, there’s just no money”, fear kicks in and they tend to try to make the most of the situation, which puts them in a position of weakness. If this was business, they’d just call their lawyer and sue the retirement company for breach of contract.

Getting us out of this mess is tricky, so let’s take the smaller problem of fixing the post office. This is the first article I’ve read in a long time that hits the nail on the head. The problem isn’t lack of entitlement money, it’s lack of the need for jobs that were assumed to be around forever to pay for future generations. The world is becoming automated. Punch card operators felt the same sense of foreboding but we still paid for their retirement, because it was the right thing to do.

This is an old scenario that’s been repeated over and over from prehistory, through the fall of Rome, through the transition from feudalism to industrialization, through slavery and the civil rights movement, and finally through the transition to the information age. As technology improves, there is less and less of a need for the suffering we know as work.

Let’s embrace it.

I remember when the Dot Bomb hit in 2000, I thought to myself “maybe things will finally change and we’ll move past this age of subjugation and oil.” I couldn’t imagine that we’d put off the pain for another decade by inflating the housing bubble and spending trillions on oil wars. Notice how the solution to that recession was more of the same.

I indirectly participated in the housing boom from 2001-2003 by moving furniture and delivering appliances to the people who migrated to Idaho during that time. After that job at its whopping $10/hr, I learned the important American lesson that the harder you work, the less you make. That’s true whether you are the lowliest assembly line worker in China or a mob-based military industrial complex like the USSR. You have to work smart to get rich. America hasn’t worked smart since 1999, although I can feel prosperity on the horizon once again with the Startup Bubble.

Now that we are finally attempting to solve the jobs crisis for real, which way will we go? Will we race to the bottom against other countries or will we go for a moonshot? If we were flipping coins, they would have come up tails for the last 30 years. If we were at a casino, the situation is akin to the little old lady who has been sitting at the same losing slot machine finally giving up and going home. I know which machine I’d play, statistics be damned.

We are on the cusp of a payout so big there has been nothing like it in human history.

I’m talking about automation. Real automation, the kind people used to write books about and see at World’s Fairs. Not this mamby pamby “information technology” that everyone is so excited about. What good is an infinitude of 99 cent apps when you don’t even have a job to buy one? That’s false prosperity. And it’s been paraded around and heralded for far too long.

No, I’m talking about the automation of problem solving. About intelligent machines and algorithms that can answer questions that used to only be answered by humans. About solving the problem of solving problems. A universal problem solver. Google is the biggest game in town, and may even eventually create a kind of artificial intelligence, but it’s child’s play compared to the revolutionary technology we’ll see this decade, probably from some kids in a basement somewhere.

Just watch, before the decade is out, you’ll be speaking with computers as if they were people. You’ll still know you are talking to a machine, but it won’t matter. And imagine the millions of jobs that people do now that will disappear overnight. Insurance claims adjusters? Gone. Call centers? Gone. (Thank god). Computer programmers? Maybe not quite gone, but growing increasingly marginalized the more distant into the future we look.

If programmers will feel the squeeze, then no job is safe. Believe it.

This is what’s known as the singularity, and even though it’s a few decades off, we’ve stepped over the threshold into uncharted territory and there is no going back.

The funny thing is that all this talk of entitlements will be a moot point in 10 or 20 years. Advances will come so fast that medical costs for things like obesity, diabetes and heart disease will amount to a few dollars for a pill, trivially reimbursed. Our biggest problem with retirement may eventually be boredom.

I have all of the tools I need right now to make a rudimentary AI like IBM’s Watson. Just give me a few hundred laptop computers in a cabinet and a dozen brute force algorithms (oh and a few hundred thousand dollars and a handful of geeks) and we’ll give you something so convincing that you’ll trust it for some of the most important decisions in life.

But wait, it turns out I don’t need a million dollars, or a few hundred laptops. Give me an open source program running distributed over a few thousand idle computers. It took them just 15 years to go from Deep Blue to Watson. It will take a fraction of that time to go from distributed programs playing chess to answering any question posed to them. Certainly less than 10 years. Perhaps 5.

If you are still skeptical, remember the human factor. Once people see the latest greatest thing, all other endeavors of the past go out of business. Imagine what it would have been like to run a harness shop in 1900. You’d probably have bigger worries than entitlements, like, “how will I earn a living to feed my family next year if everyone keeps buying these darn horseless carriages?”

Sound familiar?

We embraced automation in industry but we resist automation when it comes to information. Our apprehension and reaction seem to be proportional to our fear. When production is higher than it’s ever been, when there are more billionaires than ever, people are worried they can’t find a job. How sick is that?

We should all be enjoying the fruits of these synthetic labors. For now, higher taxes on corporations are the only way to reap the benefits. Stop thinking about them as disincentives or job killers, because frankly job numbers are in a long decline now and will never recover past this point in history. That’s a GOOD thing! It means less drudgery, less soul sucking and selling out. They would have declined naturally anyway starting in 2000 if we hadn’t stopped investing in research in America. And by the time we pass 50% unemployment, we’ll have redefined the term “job” anyway and people will be ok with the increase in leisure time as long as basic needs are met.

But we can’t let people starve. The best solution I’ve heard so far is to raise taxes on corporations and millionaires by at least 10% and just distribute the money evenly over everyone, like they do in Alaska with oil money, and slowly increase the amount each year as automation creates more and more wealth. We need to be providing food and shelter to everyone by the mid 2020s or it will lead to anarchy. I’d frankly rather see a future like Blade Runner (for all its imperfection) than Mad Max.

Just remember that not everyone will be out of work. There will always be some intriguing activity to participate in, and some jobs will remain safe. Jobs like truck driver, bartender, shrink, teacher, doctor, lawyer, politician and prostitute will be performed by humans for the near future, both out of tradition and because those are the jobs that exist on Star Trek.

But it’s time to start thinking about getting out of any job that can be performed by a robot costing less than $100,000. Off the top of my head, some of these might be landscaper, farmer, assembly line worker, painter and even stock trader. There’s no money in sci fi, just obligation. In the future people will get paid to deliver, not to move piles of atoms or numbers around. Manual labor and middlemen are becoming anachronisms.

The cost of technology falls by about half every couple of years, so this scenario is inevitable. As in, it would be harder now to stop it from happening than to start it. I almost wish the government would make artificial intelligence illegal, just so the hackers would jump on it and bring it sooner. I should probably be careful though, because with the current shortsighted politicians in charge, I may just get my wish.

I have a lot more to say on this issue but will save it for future posts. It’s going to be a rough couple of years as politicians try making every wrong decision until they eventually make the right one. We just have to survive long enough for the inevitability of the situation to sink in with the majority.

Comments

  1. inmycountryyouarealegend reblogged this from zackarymorris and added:
    guy doesn’t really seem...he’s talking about,
  2. zackarymorris posted this
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