Elon Musk: Robots Will Take Your Jobs

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According to Elon Musk, we are all going to be on welfare after robots take all of our jobs. Eventually the robots will get tired of us leeching off them and just KILL US ALL!!

According to Musk, there really won't be any other options. "There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," says Musk to CNBC. "Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen."
 
HAHA. Perfect! He made his millions and millions and everybody else has to go on "basic income". Unbelievable.
 
HAHA. Perfect! He made his millions and millions and everybody else has to go on "basic income". Unbelievable.

Yep, it's called survival of the fittest. Don't stop learning and you won't have to worry about this happening to you.
 
HAHA. Perfect! He made his millions and millions and everybody else has to go on "basic income". Unbelievable.
Actually basic income could be a lot more than the average wage now if all jobs were automated that are possible to be automated. And for profit would be replaced with best sustainability and efficiency.
 
Yep, it's called survival of the fittest. Don't stop learning and you won't have to worry about this happening to you.
That's not how it works. Brain surgeons are smart, and they don't even make millions a year.

Only a handful of people in the world can be the billionaires, who have lots of very smart people working for them and doing most of the work after they have "made it".

I actually agree with "basic income" once we have reached a threshold for automation, as it makes sense for the fruits of humanity's creation to be distributed equally, versus the alternative of all that productivity being funneled to the handful of people that own all the robots/servers/etc. The basic income would mean everyone gets say $30K a year, but then you do your work on top of that to make more money.

So you don't have to worry about basic housing, food, etc. but you are still very much motivated to do some kind of work in order to elevate yourself.

After all, you're not really taking money from the hard working people and redistributing to the lazy at that point, but rather redistributing "robot" labor in a fair way.
 
The end is nigh, I tell you!!!
They found a back door to kill us with.
 
Yep, it's called survival of the fittest. Don't stop learning and you won't have to worry about this happening to you.

This doesn't apply to a consumer based economy. If large swaths of people don't have money to spend then who exactly is supposed to by all of the goods and services produced on the scale that the efficiency of automation is all about? How are the people who make and sell the robots supposed to make money if all the robots do is produce things that few could afford? And were not just talking about burger flippers but doctors, lawyers, even technical jobs that were once considered "safe".
 
Capitalism works, to a point. Now, scarcity doesn't really apply anymore. Food, housing, most medical care, can be generated for the human population. And the human mind has limits; the average populace aren't all going to be rocket scientists, AI experts, etc.

The only thing that holds us back is our monkey brains; how do we properly incentevize people to do these things? Right now our economic paradigm is: we have enough real stuff, cars, food, housing, etc, but we can't give it to people because they don't have enough fake money.
 
I don't believe this for a second. Robots can't even come close to doing what a person can. This is 100 years or more off. And that's not counting any calamity that might befall us first. Musk sure does say some stupid shit from time to time.
 
Probably the next step in monies evolution. Extra Credit just finished their 6 part series on the history of money and today money only holds value cause we agree it does. No longer is money tied to the gold standard. With automation and optimizations killing jobs, it's only natural that the next step is to have Basic Income. The alternative is to have people running around the streets breaking and steeling stuff to survive.

 
I don't believe this for a second. Robots can't even come close to doing what a person can. This is 100 years or more off. And that's not counting any calamity that might befall us first. Musk sure does say some stupid shit from time to time.

100 years? more like 20. Look at manufacturing, decimated by automation or export to other countries with vastly cheaper labor. Its to the point now that they don't build with quality, they build least cost with expectation they need to make another when the first fails. EV/Driverless cars, drones, smart bots in warehouses and hospitals, automated teller machines taking over front desk/reception personnel, trains driven by GPS.

As long as companies seek to remove human error, human laziness, human emotion and most important human cost (wage + benefits), robotics and automation will continue to be utmost priority.
 
snicker first we teach robots how to build cars, then we teach them how to play games... better to have them playing the video games than sending me spam or spamming trade chat of where to buy gold...

Though most machines are simply nothing more than a computer program doing the same exact process that someone wrote down. Making judgements on the spot in real time that is more complex and gets into deeper learning, yet explaining the concept of humanity or a soul, that is beyond a computer at this point and maybe forever. Art and music it is not random noise but to a machine it is. When someone in technology askes what is left if computer are doing the mkg, your realize they have no idea how limited a computer is compared to thinking person.

A thinking person can think for themselves and can be given a task and figure out how to do it effectively enough get the job done and done at a level of competence that many people do not find reason to work at that level. People are inherently lazy. Give them incentive to work hard and they work hard. The trick is figuring out what is incentive to everyone working for you. You can make a car using existing tech. You can make a cheap car using existing tech. Those two are none conflicting statements. You can make a expensive car with existing tech. Now you can make an expensive costing cheaply made car using existing tech. or you can make a cheap costing expensively made car using exsisting tech. That sounds like semantics but it really is the point. It is not what the raw materials cost but whole cost of the labor to turn those materials into car and if people will spend more than the cost of the raw materials for the end product. That is one way videogames are different. in a video game you pay more for raw materials then for the end product because many people are buying the raw materials for different reasons and benefiting more from the raw materials. In life a stack of i-beams or tank of gas is only good for what it can be used for. Meaning a stack of i-beams can be built into a home or office building and a tank of gas can fuel a car from point a to point b. You can drink the gas, it is not a good idea and you could use rope and lash the i-beams into a teepee... but ideally it makes a better wall lag bolted together with stone facing in front of it or plate glass.

Jobs people have are the process of creating something someone else does not have the skill or time to create. If the robot only creates one design, I have to pay someone or write the code myself to get it to do something else. An AI might be able to do that but the robot can not. We are more than the sum of our parts. Though personally the idea of collecting money to play video games, go swimming in the ocean and play a little volley ball on the beach instead of doing something that is route chore a machine could do... why is this a bad thing again? I say this laughing, people get bored if they do the same thing over and over again. I have done a lot of different things in life, from singing for type-o negative when he was stuck in prison for giving me a few other kids alcohol while on his first tour, to working for Pamela Jones on the sco case, to various different IT projects over the years. The width and breathe of life is vast a human can lift the hood of car and see a slightly wore out belt and say you need to replace that soon a machine could take an image do image analysis and have to figure out if the belt is dirty and or worn out, and might have to touch or cut it to have a certainly prediction. We see every thing we look at and file it away our id analysis the days event for pieces than never looks at them again unless something links to those memories. What we can do is take two pieces that are not related before we look at them and figure out if they are any similarities. The complexities to that exceeds what a computer can do like for years. But even if they do they still have to be programed. So programming, visual art and music, those are likely to be something a person excels at.

snicker as to the billionares. Ninety percent of the one percenters are trust fund babies, meaning they had someone offer then a huge unsecured loan, knowing they would have a trust mature in the future. As it is illegal to use the trust before it matures as collateral. Mine matured when I turned twenty five and I had dozenes of different groups try to put money against it hopying to take it and leave me with bad debt. The joke was on them everytime they did that I failed the early access to it. So I have to wait until I am forty when the entire thing is pulled from the executors of the trust lose control and I get it as one huge lump of tax liability. Most billionares made money using loans agaisnt their trust funds because that kind of money is usually not made in one generation. People like Bill Gates are different but he started selling something new. Sure he sold an os, not the computer but the early versions were for personal computers before that they were company machines or main frames. which lead to being in the home. All of those people in his start up made a lot of money. For all I know he started up with trust fund, people don't usually disclose that. But the point is that musk may have been a trust fund baby to get his startup cash that was not earn marked to end up in someone else's pocket or he may had made enough money and contacts to get enough of the company. I know a milion dollars came from nasa for space x prize for a working space ship... so yes I give him props for telsa and a so where are the space ships you were supposed build to before you won the space x prize? grin. But really he made his money likely from convincing jay leno that an electric car was cool.
 
Politically impossible. We are witnessing in Britain (with the rest of Europe to follow) and the United States what happens when the "elites" decide to implement policies that exclude the majority. John Locke wrote about the "Social Contract" between the rulers and the people. What Musk is suggesting would result in revolution and likely those like Musk would find their heads on a pike.

One of the few valid absolutes: communism always fails...
 
I don't believe this for a second. Robots can't even come close to doing what a person can. This is 100 years or more off. And that's not counting any calamity that might befall us first. Musk sure does say some stupid shit from time to time.

Self driving cars aren't the future, they're here. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States. That one industry alone being automated would increase the current unemployed total in the US by 44%. I'm not going to bother finding numbers for taxi drivers, chauffers, mail carriers, private parcel handlers, b2b delivery drivers, bus drivers, or the multitudes other transportation jobs.
 
Probably the next step in monies evolution. Extra Credit just finished their 6 part series on the history of money and today money only holds value cause we agree it does. No longer is money tied to the gold standard. With automation and optimizations killing jobs, it's only natural that the next step is to have Basic Income. The alternative is to have people running around the streets breaking and steeling stuff to survive.



Gold as money is just as much a psychological invention as is paper fiat money. There is no molecular or physical property that makes gold "money". Agree with you on Basic Income though.


Politically impossible. We are witnessing in Britain (with the rest of Europe to follow) and the United States what happens when the "elites" decide to implement policies that exclude the majority. John Locke wrote about the "Social Contract" between the rulers and the people. What Musk is suggesting would result in revolution and likely those like Musk would find their heads on a pike.

One of the few valid absolutes: communism always fails...

That's the issue at hand; sooner rather than later UBI will be for the majority. Median income in the United States has been stagnant for 45 years, growing at less than 0.1% per year, inflation adjusted. That's in large part due to automation and globalization, with automation playing a larger and larger role as time goes on. Even China, with their relatively cheap labor compared to the US, is starting to see automation become more cost effective than having human beings do it - and we expect to bring those jobs back to the US how exactly?
 
Self driving cars aren't the future, they're here. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States. That one industry alone being automated would increase the current unemployed total in the US by 44%. I'm not going to bother finding numbers for taxi drivers, chauffers, mail carriers, private parcel handlers, b2b delivery drivers, bus drivers, or the multitudes other transportation jobs.

Yeah, self-driving cars are going to put a LOT of people out of work. Sure the roads will be safer, but it's going to be a hard time in the transportation industry. Sure you could employ some of those people as backup drivers, or repairmen for the self-driving systems, but regardless there'll be a lot of people going without paychecks.
 
This concept is explored in an anime called "Psycho Pass" really interesting watch....
All food is produced by robots, delivered by robots, transportation is handled by robots. humans in this universe only do jobs that they feel like doing, or dedicate themselves to art or hobbies or whatever they feel like.
This type of environment isn't hard to imagine. It could be just a few decades off.
 
Yeah, self-driving cars are going to put a LOT of people out of work. Sure the roads will be safer, but it's going to be a hard time in the transportation industry. Sure you could employ some of those people as backup drivers, or repairmen for the self-driving systems, but regardless there'll be a lot of people going without paychecks.
There will be a hard transition time, but businesses will realize that they can't just put people out of their jobs, because eventually they'll have no customers to serve, because their customers are mostly the same people who they employ. The only natural evolution of the workplace is to reduce hours worked, and employ more people in the jobs that remain, that can't be automated. Gradually reducing the time needed to work for a living from 40+hours a week, to less and less.

I just don't see any other way in which the economy survives.
 
There will be a hard transition time, but businesses will realize that they can't just put people out of their jobs, because eventually they'll have no customers to serve, because their customers are mostly the same people who they employ. The only natural evolution of the workplace is to reduce hours worked, and employ more people in the jobs that remain, that can't be automated. Gradually reducing the time needed to work for a living from 40+hours a week, to less and less.

I just don't see any other way in which the economy survives.

The transition time is the problem, it's going to be very chaotic at a lot of levels IMO. The problem is the businesses aren't the same. State Local Area Transport Co can replace their trucks with self-driving trucks and fire all 10 drivers they have in a week. Their business won't be affected, because they just provide shipping services and their 10 drivers weren't direct customers. They just became MORE profitable because now they have 10 fewer employees to pay, so now maybe they lower their rates a bit and get even more business. The long-term effects when those 10 drivers buy fewer goods and slowly reduce the shipping orders won't be seen for some time for that one company. But when every company starts doing it, it has a huge effect, but every company will claim it's not their fault.
 
The transition time is the problem, it's going to be very chaotic at a lot of levels IMO. The problem is the businesses aren't the same. State Local Area Transport Co can replace their trucks with self-driving trucks and fire all 10 drivers they have in a week. Their business won't be affected, because they just provide shipping services and their 10 drivers weren't direct customers. They just became MORE profitable because now they have 10 fewer employees to pay, so now maybe they lower their rates a bit and get even more business. The long-term effects when those 10 drivers buy fewer goods and slowly reduce the shipping orders won't be seen for some time for that one company. But when every company starts doing it, it has a huge effect, but every company will claim it's not their fault.
Well either they go down claiming it's not their fault, or they start acting, and maybe everyone survives. If people don't have jobs, they buy less goods, in turn less goods need transporting, and the transport company suffers just as well.
Basic income as coined by Finland is what could help people weather the transitional period. If companies make more profit by automation, they in turn must pay more taxes, that could help pay the basic income for more people out of jobs. And if we get to a point, maybe there could be a top down decision that one person can't be employed over 24 hours / week. So companies need to hire more people, while only slightly reducing the wages. 20-25% should be acceptable. I'd gladly go for 3 day work weeks, if I get paid 75% of what I get now.
 
Self driving cars aren't the future, they're here. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States. That one industry alone being automated would increase the current unemployed total in the US by 44%. I'm not going to bother finding numbers for taxi drivers, chauffers, mail carriers, private parcel handlers, b2b delivery drivers, bus drivers, or the multitudes other transportation jobs.

It's barely scratched the surface and I'm still thinking self drive vehicles will have too many drawbacks to stay profitable. For the time being.
 
100 years? more like 20. Look at manufacturing, decimated by automation or export to other countries with vastly cheaper labor. Its to the point now that they don't build with quality, they build least cost with expectation they need to make another when the first fails. EV/Driverless cars, drones, smart bots in warehouses and hospitals, automated teller machines taking over front desk/reception personnel, trains driven by GPS.

As long as companies seek to remove human error, human laziness, human emotion and most important human cost (wage + benefits), robotics and automation will continue to be utmost priority.

Automation doesn't allow for adjustments to unusual situations. The current state of hardware and software still doesn't allow for real world exception handling. Sure those are currently functional but you expect it to be perfect and it just isn't it won't be. not for quite awhile, if ever.
 
Well either they go down claiming it's not their fault, or they start acting, and maybe everyone survives. If people don't have jobs, they buy less goods, in turn less goods need transporting, and the transport company suffers just as well.
Basic income as coined by Finland is what could help people weather the transitional period. If companies make more profit by automation, they in turn must pay more taxes, that could help pay the basic income for more people out of jobs. And if we get to a point, maybe there could be a top down decision that one person can't be employed over 24 hours / week. So companies need to hire more people, while only slightly reducing the wages. 20-25% should be acceptable. I'd gladly go for 3 day work weeks, if I get paid 75% of what I get now.

I don't think basic income will work without a huge change in basic human nature. We're a competitive species, not really a cooperative one (unless we're cooperating in a competitive way). 330 million people in this country...How many of them would HAVE to work to support basic income for all the people that don't work for one reason or another? What's the incentive for them to keep working if they don't have to?
 
I don't think basic income will work without a huge change in basic human nature. We're a competitive species, not really a cooperative one (unless we're cooperating in a competitive way).

I am inclined to believe that's more due culture than genetics
 
I don't think basic income will work without a huge change in basic human nature. We're a competitive species, not really a cooperative one (unless we're cooperating in a competitive way). 330 million people in this country...How many of them would HAVE to work to support basic income for all the people that don't work for one reason or another? What's the incentive for them to keep working if they don't have to?
You underestimate people very much. Maybe the current generation who is sick and tired of doing a menial job, they might not work. But people who have drive they'll work. People who like doing what they're doing they will work. It's not like rich people stop working, they continue working after the 20th the 100th even the 1000th million, they don't just stop working. There aren't many people who would completely stop working for a basic income that's no more than minimum wage. And the ones who would stop, well we're probably better off without them anyway.

I'd fucking love doing my work if I didn't have to do it all the time. Some aspects of it I love anyway. And if I had to choose between getting 40% of what I make now for doing nothing. And 80% of what I make now doing the same thing but for 3 days a week, I'd choose the latter.
 
You underestimate people very much. Maybe the current generation who is sick and tired of doing a menial job, they might not work. But people who have drive they'll work. People who like doing what they're doing they will work. It's not like rich people stop working, they continue working after the 20th the 100th even the 1000th million, they don't just stop working. There aren't many people who would completely stop working for a basic income that's no more than minimum wage. And the ones who would stop, well we're probably better off without them anyway.

I'd fucking love doing my work if I didn't have to do it all the time. Some aspects of it I love anyway. And if I had to choose between getting 40% of what I make now for doing nothing. And 80% of what I make now doing the same thing but for 3 days a week, I'd choose the latter.

Well, of course I agree. But would your employer? From a business standpoint, you're getting 80% of your pay for only 60% of the work you were doing before. What's in it for them to pay those rates? It's a business expense that's just gone up with no corresponding increase in business income.
 
Yep, it's called survival of the fittest. Don't stop learning and you won't have to worry about this happening to you.
The weak are stronger then the fittest by sure numbers. If you succeed in making "everyone" that poor they will rebel. They will not care how one earned being the fittest.
 
Well, of course I agree. But would your employer? From a business standpoint, you're getting 80% of your pay for only 60% of the work you were doing before. What's in it for them to pay those rates? It's a business expense that's just gone up with no corresponding increase in business income.
What is in it for them? Survival. And they would have no choice either way. As I said initially they might need incentive that prohibits them from employing people 40 hours a week. The extra profit from automation should take care of the increased costs. And services that absolutely can't be automated will be more expensive. It will cause some market shifts sure.
But if there is any other way to survive technological unemployment I want to hear it.
 
100 years? more like 20. Look at manufacturing, decimated by automation or export to other countries with vastly cheaper labor. Its to the point now that they don't build with quality, they build least cost with expectation they need to make another when the first fails. EV/Driverless cars, drones, smart bots in warehouses and hospitals, automated teller machines taking over front desk/reception personnel, trains driven by GPS.

As long as companies seek to remove human error, human laziness, human emotion and most important human cost (wage + benefits), robotics and automation will continue to be utmost priority.

When the "minimum wage" hike movement started gaining traction, your primary low-no skill jobs started being shifted to self-serve kiosk screens reducing the number of humans required to staff a fast food restaurant for instance. Those corporations are investing heavily in lowering their wage costs with automation. Minimum wage jobs are not a career. Hopefully, they help one develop solid work skills and habits and incentive to seek higher paying jobs with their improved skill sets. McDonald's and Chik-Fil-A do a really nice job of grooming talented employees into management roles and in some cases setting them up with their own franchise.

Automation is inevitable and like most evolutionary changes, will not be without pain. Learn to repair robots and basic machine learning and coding to delay your extinction. The Rich live in an alternate universe.
 
I don't think basic income will work without a huge change in basic human nature. We're a competitive species, not really a cooperative one (unless we're cooperating in a competitive way). 330 million people in this country...How many of them would HAVE to work to support basic income for all the people that don't work for one reason or another? What's the incentive for them to keep working if they don't have to?
Actually I wanted to add a few thoughts to this. It seems to me that there is no such thing as human nature, only human behaviour. Behaviour that is governed by the environment. Competition only happens if there is an incentive to be competitive. And studies have shown that competition actually hurts innovation and creativity. There was one particular study that made me come around, where two groups of students were told to write a paper about the same topic but one group was told that it is a competition and the works will be graded, the other group was told that it's not a competition. But the theme and the objective of the paper was the same. The results were quite interesting. The group thought that there is no competition wrote more creative papers, where they allowed themselves to explore their own ideas. The other group on the other hand wrote very rigid essays where they tried to guess what the grading teacher would want to hear from them about the topic, so the essays were more bland and conforming to a perceived standard.
 
What is in it for them? Survival. And they would have no choice either way. As I said initially they might need incentive that prohibits them from employing people 40 hours a week. The extra profit from automation should take care of the increased costs. And services that absolutely can't be automated will be more expensive. It will cause some market shifts sure.
But if there is any other way to survive technological unemployment I want to hear it.

That's a zero sum game for a business. They can automate, and then they have to limit worker hours and still only break even. Plus who's to say they'll need ANY personnel after they automate? Imagine it was a large assembly line that employed 100 people. They automate everything, and now they only need 3 people to maintain the machines. What do the other 97 people do? It's just not possible for a company to still keep them around doing nothing. The company can't afford to automate AND still pay "basic income" for 97 former employees who add zero value to the company now.

Actually I wanted to add a few thoughts to this. It seems to me that there is no such thing as human nature, only human behaviour. Behaviour that is governed by the environment. Competition only happens if there is an incentive to be competitive. And studies have shown that competition actually hurts innovation and creativity. There was one particular study that made me come around, where two groups of students were told to write a paper about the same topic but one group was told that it is a competition and the works will be graded, the other group was told that it's not a competition. But the theme and the objective of the paper was the same. The results were quite interesting. The group thought that there is no competition wrote more creative papers, where they allowed themselves to explore their own ideas. The other group on the other hand wrote very rigid essays where they tried to guess what the grading teacher would want to hear from them about the topic, so the essays were more bland and conforming to a perceived standard.

Competition drives innovation and creativity, it doesn't hurt it. It may be nice to inspire a more creative paper, but when you actually want to get things done, you need competition to provide focus and motivation. Every company currently in business in the world operates this way, I don't think a creative writing study will change that basic component of human nature/behavior. On the original topic, what's the incentive for any company to innovate or improve their products or processes? If there's no competition, then they will stagnate (i.e., see the Cable TV / Broadband industry). If there's a lot of competition, then products will improve, prices will drop and the consumer will generally benefit. (for example, the cell phone industry).
 
That's the issue at hand; sooner rather than later UBI will be for the majority. Median income in the United States has been stagnant for 45 years, growing at less than 0.1% per year, inflation adjusted. That's in large part due to automation and globalization, with automation playing a larger and larger role as time goes on. Even China, with their relatively cheap labor compared to the US, is starting to see automation become more cost effective than having human beings do it - and we expect to bring those jobs back to the US how exactly?
Automation will not be more cost effective if there is massive opposition. Governments cannot govern without the support of the population and the population will not support governments if they are denied participation in prosperity. What Musk is suggesting is more likely to result in violent revolution than a communist wonderland. By tomorrow night we will see if the winds of change reverses the tide of globalization and a robotic future. Better a peaceful revolution than a violent one...
 
Automation doesn't allow for adjustments to unusual situations. The current state of hardware and software still doesn't allow for real world exception handling. Sure those are currently functional but you expect it to be perfect and it just isn't it won't be. not for quite awhile, if ever.

Completely agree. Companies won't be 100% auto, they will still need a manager or overwatch to ensure function. Good example would GPS locomotives. They are driven and aligned by a operator in a NOC somewhere but still have an engineer onboard in case something goes wrong. However, that GPS allowed them to drop from the full team of engineers to a minimalist few.
 
Automation will not be more cost effective if there is massive opposition. Governments cannot govern without the support of the population and the population will not support governments if they are denied participation in prosperity. What Musk is suggesting is more likely to result in violent revolution than a communist wonderland. By tomorrow night we will see if the winds of change reverses the tide of globalization and a robotic future. Better a peaceful revolution than a violent one...

If we could have open and honest conversations about it, I would hope that a robotic future could be a peaceful one. Look at mankind - each increase in leisure time has allowed for those creative types to advance our species. What kind of creativity could we unleash if the majority of humanity wasn't shackled to a desk or a machine ~200 hours per month?
 
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