Quote (Voyaging @ Aug 19 2016 02:50pm)
100 years or less, yes that would be a reasonable estimate, maybe as little as 50 years for 80% of the current human work is automated. But of course we can only guess.
Narrow AI is more than sufficient to self-direct a combine harvester, just as it already is with autonomous cars. Constructing new buildings will also be automated almost entirely outside of the design part.
I can't imagine what would spur on a reversion to an agrarian society.
Splitting the work is indeed one possibility.
Self driving tractors exist and work fine with 2 conditions:
They need to be brought to the field ( navigating roads isn't practical and I would argue it won't be for quite awhile)
There isn't unpredictable conditions in the field (low lying land that was dry last year and isn't now, non-uniform crop condition)
So at this point cultivating and seeding is done with gps guided tractors the driver just sits there and only steering to change direction at the end of each pass. Swathing and combining I think is a long ways from becoming automated like the simpler jobs in the field. Not to mention transporting grain from field to a bin on the yard or to market.
Same for building houses, nothing is curently automated unless you envision pre modulars built in a factory and transported to site.
Road construction , concrete work , water/gas/electrical lines , none of these are close. Let alone maintanence on such things.
Heathcare professions including hospitals , nursing homes and social workers? That's not even imaginable to be automated.
I can't see how you envision 80% of curent jobs to be done by automation.
Quote (Nathan @ Aug 19 2016 01:14am)
Most human labor is already obsolete. I don't know how you could strictly quantify this, but if you take it as looking in history at all the labor we've had to perform to fulfill our existence, we no longer have to do the majority of it.
A collapse of industrial society into agrarian society could happen due to global nuclear war or global natural catastrophe such as from excessive global warming or some sort of impact event. If things on Earth go "steadily" I don't see that happening though.
I think this will happen (which is literally communism, by the way) where the amount of work will be so low that it won't even be thought of as "work" or "having a job" anymore. Automation is already amazing and will continue to improve.
I'd disagree that the amount of labour in term of previous human history we curently do is much different. We used to do more work to meet our needs and less for wants. Now it's just switched , cars instead of horses , the car required much more labor to create. Bigger houses , roads to get to farther places, many trinkets and toys that all took labor to create and get to us. Hard to quantify though of course.
I don't think the work will ever(within our imaginable future) be that low. Always gonna be shittier work that requires less skill and therefore lower reward, and things that not everyone can do and therefore is worth more. We just might figure out that we could mutually benifit by not having half the people do all the work and split it up. If that's communism so be it.
This post was edited by remco6 on Aug 19 2016 05:50pm