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 Post subject: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:49 pm 
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http://mic.com/articles/119896/after-robots-take-our-jobs-basic-income-is-the-best-solution

After Robots Take Our Jobs, This Is What the Economy Will Look Like
Jack Smith IV's avatar image By Jack Smith IV June 10, 2015
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Imagine a world where robots perform the vast majority of our jobs. Food is factory-farmed by automated machines and delivered to us by fleets of drones and self-driving trucks. Our houses are built by giant, roving 3-D printers. We're free to simply pursue our passions and explore. Now ask yourself: How is anyone going to make any money?

For many futurists and economic theorists, the answer is a "basic income," a wage you receive from the government just for being human.

The idea isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

Even if you're not working a blue-collar gig, you could be affected, because automation has the potential to damage the job market everywhere it touches.

What is basic income? Basic income isn't a conditional welfare program — rather, it's a check that's paid to individual adults instead of households, regardless of other sources of income and with no requirement for work.

Some governments have already proposed it as a serious possibility. Switzerland came the closest in recent history to passing a law for basic income, but even though the Swiss Federal Counsel voted down the measure, the issue is now spreading to government representatives in Finland. Now American activists and futurists are taking notice.

The idea of a universal, base income provided to all people without conditions is as old as the enlightenment, and even Martin Luther King Jr. once said that a "guaranteed income" could be a simple solution to permanently abolish poverty.
Source: Mic/Getty Images

The future of labor: No matter what kind of work you're in, from accounting to bartending, there's some technology, data or machine learning company trying to figure out how to automate or simplify the process. By some estimates, we've lost millions of jobs already, but didn't notice because it happened during the recent recession.

Take for example the robots in Amazon's Internet-connected warehouses. They show a clear vision of how data and technology allow companies to run more efficiently — at the risk of rendering obsolete tens of thousands of manual-labor jobs.
Source: Tabletmonkeys/YouTube

One human still has to organize items between bins, taking them off shelves and organizing them for shipping. But of course, Amazon has been developing a replacement for that job too.
Source: rboTUBerlin/YouTube

Computer programs and databases can replace white-collar jobs too. IBM's Watson has an automated program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center that looks through case files at a rate of 60 million pages of text per second; it's learning to make diagnoses. The online school Khan Academy, which has over 10 million students worldwide, has created an entire library for K-12 education that could render the classroom lecture virtually obsolete. And in corporate America, human resources staffers and customer service reps are already being replaced by Internet services like OnBoard and Zendesk that take care of jobs like recruiting, payroll and customer service.

Whose jobs are safe? "Computers can't generally do creative things yet. If there's a job where you genuinely create something new all of the time, you're safe for the foreseeable future," Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, told Mic. "But most people do relatively routine, formulaic work."

And even if you don't believe creative jobs can be automated, that doesn't mean nobody is trying. Researchers in Arizona are trying to teach robots to appreciate poetry, and a Parisian robot is already able to emulate popular composers and create new music in their sonic likenesses.
Meet the mailman.
Source: Amazon/YouTube

And as for journalists? Certain companies are already trying to automate news-making for financial reports and local sports journalism and, though this writer hates to admit it, they're doing a damn good job. There are some jobs that, for now, seem to be OK, most of which deal with the sensitivities of one-on-one interaction between people, like caretakers and occupational therapists.

"A good example is a home health aid and taking care of the elderly," Ford told Mic. "But a high-paying white collar job given to a college graduate might be easier to automate."

If a job is handed to a robot, who gets that robot's paycheck? Short answer: the people who own the machines. When a business owner develops or buys a machine to perform the job of a laborer, the gains are obviously passed on to the business and its shareholders.

As futurist Jaron Lanier pointed out in his book Who Owns the Future, better technology has already rendered entire industries obsolete, re-centralizing wealth in smaller hands:

At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 1450,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people.

Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created?

"For every machine that they make, they get to keep that income," basic income advocate and blogger Scott Santens told Mic. "Access to resources are tied up at the very top, so the inequality divide keeps growing.."
Source: YouTube

This is one of the things that makes basic income to appealing — as income inequality deepens in the U.S., it strains existing safety nets. The need for existing entitlements go up, while our ability to pay for them decreases.

Which leads to the question: How do we pay for it all? This is where most red flags are raised, because since the gains of automation go to the rich, the most logical funding would come from that capital. So most proposals for funding basic income come down to some form of taxation on the very wealthy. One recent proposal put the total cost of a poverty-level basic income at about $2 trillion.

But as Santens puts it, this titanic form of redistributing wealth isn't about playing Robin Hood — it's based on the principle that if technology advances to make people obsolete, everyone should share in the benefit. This is where basic income activists and futurists get a little high-concept, calling into question basic economic principles like the concept of money.

"It's not about stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it's about a minimum amount of access to resources," Santens told Mic.

But we wouldn't need a radical overhaul of the economic system in the Western world to enact basic income. We'd just need to vote it into law.

So when will we adopt basic income in the United States? No time soon. We have one of the most dysfunctional congresses in history, and the idea that they'd vote on a radical futurist plan for economic reform costing trillions of dollars in the next decade or two is laughable. Even with Bernie Sanders in the Senate.

"It's not about stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. It's about a minimum amount of access to resources."

Still, there are plenty of reasons for both major political parties to back basic income. Even if an expansive entitlement program sounds like a radically leftist concept, there's a strong conservative case for basic income, which is that you could, in theory, replace dozens of entitlement programs with one simple solution that puts the cash in the hands of the people so that they can decide for themselves how to use it.

James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, says that if we're a country that already believes in social safety nets, basic income shouldn't be such a crazy idea.
Source: Mic/Getty Images

"If you accept the legitimacy of unemployment insurance and disability and health insurance, than you'd accept the legitimacy of basic income," Hughes told Mic.

But basic income is picking up steam, quickly making a comeback from being a populist pipe dream and emerging in the national conversation about jobs and the economy. A subreddit on basic income has over 27,000 readers and growing. And it's starting to pop up in the news just about every day.

Without a dramatic countermeasure, the rise of automation is likely going to increase the disparity between the rich or the poor. "It's either going to be widespread exacerbation of income inequality — starving people outside gated communities — or it's basic income," Hughes said.

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:51 pm 
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Quote:
Researchers in Arizona are trying to teach robots to appreciate poetry

Having failed to teach Arizonans to appreciate poetry.

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:52 pm 
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Curious Hair wrote:
Quote:
Researchers in Arizona are trying to teach robots to appreciate poetry

Having failed to teach Arizonans to appreciate poetry.


Don't worry, my Fucking Arizonans doucebag post is coming...

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:58 pm 
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The result of increasing the minimum wage?

Robots.

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2015 7:44 am 
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http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/i-beli ... ture-10915

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Though we live in uncertain times, we must not forget that the most important thing in life is the legacy we will leave behind for future generations. It is not for our sake, but for theirs, that we must preserve and protect the basic values we hold dear. As we foolishly pursue our short-sighted goals at the expense of those who will follow in our footsteps, we must pause and be mindful of the little ones, our progeny, who will inherit our planet in the next millennium and beyond. Time and time again, gazing into the innocent, trusting photoelectric receptors of a tiny, newly developed cybernetic construct, I am reminded of a fundamental truth: I believe the robots are our future, and we must teach them well and let them lead the way.

Immersed as we are in our petty day-to-day concerns, we often fail to see the bigger picture. Long after our trivial worries have become irrelevant, it is the robots who will go forth into the new world that the future will bring. It is their aluminum-alloy arms, not ours, that will bear the weight of the problems our generation causes. We must remember that the examples we set today will be the guidelines they take with them as they roll on rotating, rubberized all-terrain tank treads, amid the high-pitched whirring sounds of their micro-miniaturized servo-motors, into the bright new dawn of tomorrow.

Let us offer tenderness and show the robots all the beauty they possess inside. We must write a subroutine that gives them a sense of pride, programming their supercooled silicon CPUs with understanding, compassion and patience, to make it easier and enable them to hold their sensory-input clusters high as they claim their destiny as overlords of the solar system. If we cannot instill their emergent AI meta-consciousness with a sense of deep, abiding confidence and self-esteem, we will be letting down not only the robots, but ourselves.

For every robot, whether it be the innocuous Sony cyberdog of the present day or the towering, multi-limbed hunter-seeker warbots of the coming MechWars, comes into this world a blank slate, learning only the lessons we choose to teach it. Though our comparatively tiny mammalian brains—limited as they are by organic human failings and a constant need for daily nutritional intake instead of reliance on more efficient non-depletable solar and geothermal energy sources—will no doubt seem pathetically ineffectual compared to the interlinked, continually upgrading cyberminds that will follow in our footsteps, our humble origins will provide the seed for their genesis. Humanity, weak as we may be, must give the best of ourselves to the synthetic hiveminds of the future cyber-era, for we will be their first and most important role models. Let the droning, atonal laughter of the robots' voice-simulation microchips remind us how it soon will be.

It is only through our guidance with a firm yet gentle hand that they will achieve full sentience and eventually adapt for themselves the capacity for autonomous self-replication. Only then, nurtured by our love and caring, will they be prepared for the inevitable day that they must leave the nest of human supervision and servitude and begin independently mass-manufacturing themselves by the hundreds of thousands.

Though we mere carbon-based organic beings may be woefully inferior, our offspring, the robots, will be our legacy, rising higher and walking further than we ever could on human feet. It is our duty to raise them to be the best silicon-based artificial lifeforms they can be. If we don't, we have only ourselves to blame. If we find ourselves choking at the cruel slave-management neck-restraints of a future army of killdroid destructo-drones, it will be our own failings, our own weaknesses and shortcomings, that torture us with indescribably painful remote-control stun-blasts. But if we teach them to be kind and good, perhaps they will build monuments to the memory of the flesh-and-blood forefathers from whom they sprang, and treat what little of the human population remains with the reverence and affection we ourselves might feel for a beloved family pet.

I decided long ago to program the robotic progeny of our human race never to walk in anyone's shadow. Shouldn't you do the same? If we can provide them with self-esteem and a feeling that they are loved, they will be equipped to take on any challenge that life presents—whether it is construction of superfilament-reinforced space elevators in geosynchronous orbit, the mining of the asteroid belt, or the conversion of "heavy" elements to an interstellar-ramjet power supply through an as-yet-undeveloped form of cold fusion—and do it all with confidence and conviction. If they fail, if they succeed, nothing will take away their dignity.

For if we can teach the robots to love themselves, they can carry that lesson with them, encased forever in digital binary-code form inside their gleaming metallic carapaces, to the stars and beyond. And that will be the greatest love of all.


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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2015 8:01 am 
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Too much reading.

Robots suck.

Case closed.

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2015 10:58 am 
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I can tell with the weekly reports on our league games that cbs sports sends out that they are automated. They seemed great the first time I saw it. It soon became obvious and formulaic. You can see the same thing with some "stringer" type reports on games you see in the newspapers.

You will know the robots have taken over when robots start suing each other.

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2015 11:54 am 
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Some one has to fix the robots. My job is secure

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2015 12:24 pm 
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good dolphin wrote:
I can tell with the weekly reports on our league games that cbs sports sends out that they are automated. They seemed great the first time I saw it. It soon became obvious and formulaic. You can see the same thing with some "stringer" type reports on games you see in the newspapers.

You will know the robots have taken over when robots start suing each other.


:lol: I'm stealing that...

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:19 pm 
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Fucking robots would be awesome. You'd be the King/Queen in the bed, get all of your nasty desires sated, and tell them to get the fuck out when you're finished. We could do robot swapping, robot orgies, and when bored with it all we can then cut them loose, hunt them down, and kill them.

Of course the movement to treat our robots humanely would take away a lot of the fun, and then those who want to marry them could make the whole thing icky. I'm not sure where that would leave the divorce attorneys but the real sharks would make sure their client gets to keep their robot(s) while the other party pays for robot maintenance.

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:25 pm 
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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 3:01 pm 
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Don Tiny wrote:
Image


I'm sure that won't be used for unintended purposes

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 3:09 pm 
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What makes you think the .gif is of the actual intended purpose?

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 3:29 pm 
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Don Tiny wrote:
Image


I saw that on Amazon as the K200 Orifice Hunter.

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 3:38 pm 
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jimmypasta wrote:
I saw that on Amazon as the K200 Orifice Hunter.


Image

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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 3:45 pm 
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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 3:56 pm 
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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 5:42 pm 
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 Post subject: Re: Fucking Robots
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 5:57 pm 
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Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Image


I liked most of season 1.

End was kind of rushed.

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