We’ll have useful AI by 2025 and full AI by 2045. This will either transform the world or destroy it. Flip a coin. However, regardless of how the end point turns out, the transition period is going to be pretty brutal for the 90 percent of the population that occupies the middle classes and below.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Remember, I wrote,
As for the issue of human obsolescence, I do think that we will see a trend toward more and more leisure. This will raise all sorts of questions of who deserves to have what provided for them. Right now, we say that people aged 67 or so deserve Social Security and Medicare. And people who can command only low wages (already obsolete in some sense?) deserve Medicaid and food stamps. And kids who can get in deserve the leisure aspects of college. My guess is that we will struggle quite a bit over the next forty years to adapt the social bargain concerning leisure.
Overall, there is a lot of similarity in our predictions. In particular, I agree with him that some of the long-predicted gains in medicine will finally come true.
And the AI will probably come about, not due to the efforts of an MIT research effort, but because of a seemingly innocuous engineering need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUX4cL1AP28 (Lack of context may hinder a bit, but I think it gets the point across)
Kling: ” Right now, we say that people aged 67 or so deserve Social Security and Medicare.”
Who is “we”? Politicians have sold SSec to the public as a wonderful, paid insurance plan administered by a wise government. In fact, it is an insuance scam which is not fully funded. People have not agreed to provide government charity to the old. They think they are paying for their own retirements and unduly trust the government. This will all unravel with great suffering, but the political scam artists will be dead or retired by then. In all, a very successful political operation.
( http://www.politico dot com/news/stories/0412/75603.html )
Social Security Trustees: We’re going broke
04/25/12 – Politico by John C. Goodman
What the current value of the unfunded liability means:
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[edited] The latest report of the Social Security and Medicare trustees shows an unfunded liability for both programs of $63 trillion, about 4.5 times the U.S. gross domestic product GDP.
[$20.5 trillion of that is from Social Security, $42.5 trillion is from Medicare, and Medicaid is on top of that, but not the responsibility of these Trustees]
The unfunded liability is the amount we have promised in benefits, looking indefinitely into the future, minus the payroll taxes and premiums we expect to collect. It’s the amount we must have in the bank today earning [3%] interest for these entitlement programs to be fully funded.
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So, those programs would be paid for, if we collect the current Social Security and Medicare taxes, AND if we had a fund in 2012 holding $63 trillion in cash (current resources) paying us 3% interest.
4.5 times US production in 2011 was 25 times total private savings (5% overall savings rate). It would take 25 years of all US savings to pay for the Social Security + Medicare shortfall, again not counting Medicaid health subsidies for the needy.
Orwell had similar thoughts in ‘The Road to Wiggan Pier’ (ch 12). He saw Socialism and machine-civilization intimately intertwined:
“The first thing to notice is that the idea of Socialism is bound up, more or less inextricably, with the idea of machine-production. Socialism is essentially an urban creed. It grew up more or less concurrently with industrialism, it has always had its roots in the town proletariat and the town intellectual, and it is doubtful whether it could ever have arisen in any but an industrial society. Granted industrialism, the idea of Socialism presents itself naturally, because private ownership is only tolerable when every individual (or family or other unit) is at least moderately self-supporting; but the effect of industrialism is to make it impossible for anyone to be self-supporting even for a moment. Industrialism, once it rises above a fairly low level, must lead to some form of collectivism. Not necessarily to Socialism, of course; conceivably it might lead to the Slave-State of which Fascism is a kind of prophecy. And the converse is also true. Machine-production suggests Socialism, but Socialism as a world-system implies machine-production, because it demands certain things not compatible with a primitive way of life. It demands, for instance, constant intercommunication and exchange of goods between all parts of the earth; it demands some degree of centralized control; it demands an approximately equal standard of life for all human beings and probably a certain uniformity of education. We may take it, therefore, that any world in which Socialism was a reality would be at least as highly mechanized as the United States at this moment, probably much more so. In any case, no Socialist would think of denying this. The Socialist world is always pictured as a completely mechanized, immensely organized world, depending on the machine as the civilizations of antiquity depend on the slave.”
He also saw the resistance to being overtaken by machines by people as a barrier to the spread of world-wide Socialism.
Thomas Sowell made an interesting observation in his most recent appearance on ‘Uncommon Knowledge’. Observing the change in the differential in income from the young the highest earning years, as well as the movement of those high years to older age groups, he saw it as a signal that the attributes of youth, strength and endurance are losing value as machines take over work. Skills and experience are more valuable and increasingly so. This may also explain the increase in advanced degrees as a way for the young to artificially upgrade skills and experience.