Does it bother anyone that "frightenly ambitious" begins with search and email? Seriously? This is the pinnacle of our contribution to mankind - building search engines and to-do lists?
Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).
Search is another word for artificial intelligence.
Email means a universal way for people to communicate.
Lunar bases & flying cars aren't ambitious, they are just expensive.
Personal robots are here now in vertical spaces[1] and there are at least 200,000 cyborgs walking around now[2]. I think both these areas are worth working in, but I think you underestimate the ambition of a word like search.
OK, but "cleaning" is yet another word for artificial intelligence. I think you underestimate the power of economics. Can you imagine how many people are busy cleaning things?
I find it amazing that the difference between tasks like washing cloths and cleaning toilets is so small for humans and so huge for machines. We've had washing machines forever, but we're still cleaning our toilets manually.
And cleaning is just one of a large number of tasks that require similar kinds of intelligence. If robotics is able to close that gap, the world changes more profoundly and more quickly than ever before.
All of a sudden, most of the jobs performed by untrained people will disappear without replacement. The current thinking is that tasks that get automated are replaced by "higher level" tasks, but I think that's not actually what happened.
Automated tasks have largely been replaced by other tasks that are equally simple for humans but more difficult for machines. As a result, most people are still doing work that anyone can pick up in a week.
If that gap closes, we're in for a pretty difficult but ultimately wonderful transition. People have been crying wolf out of fear of this transition for hundereds of years. This time it's for real. Even if humans find new things that aren't yet automated, the transition will be too fast for at least a generation.
It seems like a lot of people disagree with you, but I agree with this viewpoint. That the Luddite fallacy will be a fallacy forever is a fallacy in itself.
I've said this before, but I keep repeating my viewpoint. At some point, we will have automated too many of the "useful" things to do for there to be enough work in the private sector for everyone. There are only so many cars, houses, gadgets and foods humanity needs, and the efficiency in producing these things just keeps growing. I'm not saying that we are headed for a dystopia where no one has a regular job - quite the opposite - but during a transition period a lot of people will be without work. Arguably this is part of the reason joblessness is so common in the US today. We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives, and hopefully contribute with some creative pursuit.
A lot of people will find this transition difficult, because a lot of people simply have no direction in life and just keep doing rote work. When the rote work gradually disappears, they will have to find something sufficiently engaging to do with their lives.
The really interesting question is whether this will further exacerbate inequalities or whether society will necessarily have to transition to a more "socialist" model if work no longer needs to be done.
"...at that time the economy of the United States will be going down and the next boat people will be Americans leaving America looking for work abroad."
Jacques Attali in his 1990 book "Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order"
Still quite relevant, though I'd alter the quote to say "virtual boat people" since jobs are turning out ot be anywhere where you have an internet connection.
"We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives"
Rather than a tax system that gives them pretty much no incentive to get a job (if you were essentially paid to do whatever you wanted to do, would you want to get a job?), it would probably be better to have government enforced jobs (IE: you want money from the government, you need to work for them until you find a regular job. Otherwise, you get nothing).
As I've said before, Norway has a de facto system that works like this already. Anyone that's deemed unfit to get a well-paying job gets a fixed monthly payment from the government.
What if you want more money than you can get through this system? Then you have to do work that pays. Money and status works relative to your peers, so there's an incentive to earn more if your peers are richer than you. I don't see that this is a problem if the society is wealthy enough.
You're line of reasoning is way off base. You're trying to shoehorn a scarcity-based economy into a post-scarcity society. The idea of "contributing" (the way its currently thought of) will have to go away completely. Private ownership is a social construct. In a post-scarcity world our ideas of private ownership will have to change. Society will simply not allow the owner of Acme robot company to literally own everything (because he has a monopoly on labor). A more communal-based society will necessarily spring up. No one will stand for a monstrously imbalanced society.
you want money from the government, you need to work for them until you find a regular job
So you're saying the government should hire all the unemployed? That sounds like a surefire way to make even more people unemployed in sectors that have to compete with the government's army of cheap laborers.
Eventually, far out into the future, the trends might actually reverse.
Fundamentally, robots are made out of expensive stuff, metal, earth minerals. It can be recycled, but it's expensive, and not 100%. Humans, on the other hand, a pretty cheap, we run on carbon, oxygen and water.
In the future, it might make sense for robots to do stuff they're best suited for (e.g. very hard, dangerous work in human-unfriendly conditions (e.g. spaceship repairs in outer space)). However, unless we discover a way of making robots dirt-cheap and 100% recyclable, it will probably be humans cleaning the ship from the inside, no robots.
Who knows what robots will be made of far out in the future, and remember that humans have to be fed for at least a decade before they can do much of anything. Also, earth isn't losing any material as far as I know but I admittedly know very little about physics and chemistry. Can metals degrade into a lower kind of unrecoverable state like energy can?
If you have an unlimited supply of energy, you can pretty much recover whatever. The only elements hopelessly lost are those that involve nuclear reactions.
Well, while you can in principle do something, an accelerator is a pretty blunt instrument. You're unlikely to have practical success putting Krypton, Barium and a few neutrons together into a Uranium nucleus even if it's theoretically possible. The phase space for the reaction is just not there. Chemistry has a lot more tricks for synthesizing molecules than just shooting them at each other.
Fundamentally, robots can be made out of less stuff than us, by virtue of being a mostly-empty lattice material at all levels, and won't need recycling as repairs happen on smaller scales until the repaired item is as close to new as you want.
Please. Stop. Bringing that old saw back while claiming that 'this time it is for real'.
Humans can do wonderful things when the alternative is to starve or lose their habitat. It is not different this time, it will not be different the next time, nor any time after that. Won't happen until we have a perfect AI which can do all jobs. Then, and only then, will humanity take a permanent vacation.
I'm not talking permanent. What is different this time is this:
a) The transition will happen more quickly because the kind of intelligence you need to clean a room is very broadly applicable. It affects almost all manual tasks at the same time.
b) Contrary to earlier transitions, there will not be many tasks left that untrained people can perform and that are similar enough to the old ones. A farmer can go work in a factory. Most cleaners will not become artists and entertainers within their lifetime.
I don't think humanity will ever take a permanent vacation. There will always be something that humans want from other humans and there will always be something to exchange as payment.
The same arguments were raised the last time something like this happened.
And while it is true that a farmer can go to work in a factory there is very, very little overlap between these two professions (could a factory worker go tend a farm and survive? Unlikely) -- just as there is little overlap between cleaning toilets and being a cashier in a shop.
Oh and cashiers are not going to be replaced by the same AI that can clean a bathroom, do the dishes and wipe the floor.
Good comment. This is definitely a huge issue that is going to need serious thought in the coming years.
We're going to need to do some more serious big thinking about more than "work", which is too narrow now. We need to figure how how we're going to "occupy" people in the transition from post-industrial/service/information technology society to a roboticized, post-scarcity, arts and leisure society. If handled poorly, "social unrest", mass protests, and outright violence may be become a regular part of the landscape, what with millions of always-idle, impoverished people just sitting on the sidelines, ignored. How long could this last? One hundred years, perhaps? That's a really long time to have constant social upheaval.
Sci-fi has dystopias full of rebellious robots, human vs. robot warfare, grappling with what it means to be sentient, etc. but have startlingly little that deals with a much more realistic question: what does a society where human labor is being made redundant look like in terms of day-to-day human behavior? Over the coming years, the consequences of mass automation and even "stupid" AI are going to come to a fore.
Ok, so what are things we're going to need to do? Encouraging the arts and music, competitive games, and various leisure activities, are probably a given (and not much encouragement is likely to even be necessary, since many will do these things on their own given the ability to do so.) The other piece of the puzzle is the one that's really going to need a great deal of thought: how do we support them, and just as importantly, how do we run an economy where 40, 50, 60 of the population does not work (and thus, under the current system, have no income)? The most obvious answer is to move towards a massive expansion of what we currently call the "welfare" state along with planned population policies (hard, but probably necessary.) The big difference? We'll be not just supporting jobless people, but the economy itself (we can call it econofare or something.) What kind of economy can you have with few consumers? Not much of one. It will require a completely different perspective, one where it's not a bunch of unfortunate (or lazy, depending on your perspective) jobless people, but a bunch of people we essentially pay to be consumers. Items which are scarce will need special handling for sure (hopefully things like food and shelter can be made superabundant sooner than later), but for everything else, it'll be all about simply keeping the flow of money going. The main policy prescription here is the tax-free guaranteed income, like they have in certain Scandinavian countries (someone else in these comments mentioned this.)
That all said, the two types of jobs I would put on "won't be automated anytime soon" list:
1) Jobs that exist to make others feel powerful/superior. Waiters, house-servants, massage therapists. They do have jobs that could certainly be automated, but you don't get the same feeling of "lording over" others with robots that you do with people. Robots /will/ do these jobs for many, perhaps even most people on a day-to-day basis, but there will likely still be people who pay for this as an "experience."
2) Interdisciplinary generalists (i.e., modern Jacks-of-all-trades.) This job isn't a single "job" at all, but a collection of jobs requiring the understanding and ability to synthesize knowledge from different (and sometimes disparate) areas. We will continue to automate parts of specific types of cross-discipline "tasks", but we won't be automating the big-picture viewers.
They're expensive because they're inefficient. To accomplish them efficiently is ambitious and elegant without a doubt.
A startup that can chip away at what makes these things so inefficient is going in the right direction. Looking for inefficiencies, such as with present day email, is a good way to find a direction.
Economics is still at its heart the study of the problem of scarcity. Economies, and all economic activity, attempt to alleviate or manage that problem.
This is a nit pick, but much economic activity these days is nothing to do with alleviating scarcity and everything to do with introducing artificial scarcity where it didn't previously exist. See e.g. Intellectual property.
I said it was a nitpick, but the post to which I responded did say "all economic activity".
Does it even matter? It matters if it means our fully automated jobless future is penury and starvation instead of the post-scarcity Culture we're looking forward to.
That was just a selection of ambitious ideas. I didn't mean to imply it was a complete list; I never imagined anyone would think I meant that.
I almost added a section on robots, but the talk was already long enough and I figured 7 was enough to illustrate my point that ambitious startup ideas are frightening.
I'm not understanding where you figured my point was that the list was not exhaustive enough; my point was you left out robotics and kept search and email in.
Robotics actually, is an area where something huge seems right over the horizon. I'd certainly bet on the next game changer coming from robotics before any equally revolutionary activity comes from search or email.
I don't necassarily disagree with what you do say about the two, I just don consider advances in these areas terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
You, diego, et al. seem to have difficulty coming to terms with the author. It is clear from the article that by "frighteningly ambitious" the author means problems people currently have which seem insane to take on. They are problems people have because the author has indicated that he has them or has discussed with others who have them. Search and email are insane to take on because if you succeed with search, you are decimating a company with market cap in the hundreds of billions; succeeding in email means disrupting one of the original Internet protocols which virtually everyone uses. Thus, these are frighteningly ambitious.
You instead see "frighteningly ambitious" and assume your own term which is in the realm of science fiction (cyborgs, personal robots, &c.). Robotics, incidentally, may be a frighteningly ambitious endeavor but only if you are considering something like autonomously scraping and repainting ships or actuation in camera pills: personal (autonomous) robotics won't happen in the near future (see iRobot Corp).
So, assuming the author's definition of "frighteningly ambitious", search and email are important because they are problems people have now. If search weren't a problem, Union Square wouldn't have funded DuckDuckGo, and more to the point, DuckDuckGo wouldn't be growing. (I also have the exact problems the author describes with Google -- for the past 2 years I've had a problem with Google.) If it hasn't been shouted by Fred Wilson and Paul Graham enough: they have pain from dealing with email. They would throw their money at you if you offered a way to make email less painful. Maybe instead of spending two hours every day with email they could spend one hour with new/email and they could have a spare hour a day with their kids -- how valuable is an extra 14 whole days a year to these guys? How many people hate spending so much time on email who have means? Probably enough to make it worth investigating the problem. For what its worth, I'm frugal as Franklin and I would actually pay for email (i.e I wouldn't accept any common free email service because they aren't even worth $0.00 to me for a variety of reasons).
Facebook and Google have improved the daily lives of billions of people. Tesla Motors' electric car? Very impressive and a lot of promise, but so far all it's done is increase the self-satisfaction of ~1000 people.
Look at Star Trek. Other than the spaceship itself the most impressive things are the technology the people use. The Siri-like computer interface, iPad-like computers, Skype-like communications technology, etc.
Facebook and Google have improved the daily lives of billions of people. Tesla Motors' electric car? Very impressive and a lot of promise, but so far all it's done is increase the self-satisfaction of ~1000 people.
If fossil fuels aren't going drive cars in the future its going to be something else. Fuel cells or Electricity.
If IBM had thought or if any body else would have thought how difficult it was to create computing power to derive any meaningful value. We wouldn't be having computers today.
And yet, Star Trek falls firmly into the social SF camp. The tech is incidental, left abstract or waved away with babble so that the personal interactions can proceed. Obsessing over the latest gadget incarnation wrapped in shiny branding is just the opposite, consumerism rather than tech which quietly enables.
The frightening part is the idea that you would be trying to disrupt seemingly invincible tech companies like google, which would be an insane business plan for a startup looking for a $50k kickstart investment.
But, I remember when google was first released. I thought the search engine market was already full with yahoo and alta vista dominating at the time. Who knew?!
What is it they say? It seems invincible until it suddenly doesn't any more.
But at any count what companies seem like or appear to do doesn't matter to your company. What matters is what they are and what they do. If they seem scary, good, that will only serve to keep others from trying to beat them -> less competitor for you.
Google offered to sell to Alta Vista (for somewhere in the 1-2 million range) if I recall correctly and they were turned down. Sometimes the giants don't see change coming.
you are vastly underestimating how much email has changed the world. if a better email can do for this generation what email did for the last one, i'll back it against anything on your list for sheer bang for the buck.
The lunar base and the flying cars are pointless if your goal is to improve people's lives instead of just satisfying egos.
And the personal robot is already being worked on, but instead of a single humanoid robot (which I always considered to be a bad approach), they're small and specialized.
"In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF
That's 54 jumbo jets a day.
I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.
That's an important problem. But my list was a list of startup ideas, not important problems generally. I'm not certain the problem of water supplies is best addressed by for profit companies (it might, but I'm not sure), so it doesn't make a good example to put on a list of startup ideas.
That's fair, but I think we, in this community, have a stigma that we work on trivial and superficial problems. There are far too many cat photo sharing sites like Color and not enough efforts like 1 Laptop Per Child. We have to be diligent in clarifying that.
Our goal has to be to make the world a better place, not simply to make a few of us more more money than we can spend.
One of the core problems the world faces going forwards is resource supply - water, food, fuel. It's long been predicted that the next large-scale war will be over water supplies; there are already a number of simmering conflicts that go back to access to water.
Why are we running out of resources? Significantly, because there's too many people for the resources we have.
Why do we have too many people? Explosive population growth over the past 100-150 years, particularly in the last 50. World population has gone up nearly 50% in 25 years.
What's historically been the best way of arresting population growth? War; kill lots of people. Hmm, not really an acceptable plan. What's the next best? Education, in particular female education.
Now, at its core I agree with your point that the list was under-ambitious. Well, let's refine that - only parochially ambitious. So let's go big. We want a sustainable, long-term end to hunger and world peace.
What do we do for that? Give a man to fish - teach a man to fish. Food parcels and free medicine are a sticking plaster - necessary in the short-term, insufficient in the long-term. Fair trade helps but alone is improving their position at the bottom of the supply chain. Get improved education and access to knowledge though and we enable a long-term culture shift that both better equips the presently impoverished for the future and attacks the root causes of the resource instability that currently so impoverish them.
Which is where projects like OLPC and the Indian tablets are so important, and where (if done properly), the startup idea to replace universities is the biggest and most important on the list. Take it all the way and it's not about knocking down Yale and Harvard; it's about world peace and an end to famine.
OLPC has been such a failure because it was designed without understanding or respect for the situation the people live in. I agree with you about medicines etc. being bandages and education being the most important thing. But I think when you veer into "universities" and "cheap computers" that things become sketchy.
Replacing universities doesn't help the developing world, not really, because the education would have to be tailored to them.
If you want to read a book about one of these problems (sanitation) and how aid efforts tend to go totally haywire for the same reasons OLPC does, read The Big Necessity.
The needs are more basic. People require self-sufficiency in the basics before having a tablet computer is going to help.
Agree with you on female education… especially also business education and entrepreneurial loans. In this vein, there is a great charity here: http://www.girleffect.org/question
And there is that Indian entrepreneur who developed affordable sanitary pads for women:
Note that this wasn't a charity effort, but a social entrepreneurship effort. And pads are important. Women are not just uneducated, they are hampered even when healthy.
Finally, many people in developing countries have a cell phone which they can use via SMS to determine market prices for their farmed produce etc., which is already a great boon.
I personally know some folks, who grew up in Africa, who are doing great & interesting things to serve these people where and how they are, not by assuming they need somebody to come in and "revolutionize" them. (Which will inevitably fail.)
The reason replacing univeristies will help the developing world (and why I still argue for cheap computers tailored for the needs of the developing world) is that it makes access to aducation that much easier. Yes they need primary rather than tertiary education, but tertiary's the easier market to start deploying in so use it as a beach-head and work down.
At present, why don't they get education? Is it that they don't want it? Aside from a few communities actively holding back education, by and large they know the benefit and want education. The present model doesn't work for them though; the communities are frequently rural and some distance from the provision of education, the families are operating in the subsistence economy and can't afford to release the children to education.
Technology can help attack this from two fronts. One, it enables distance learning at the time of the student's convenience. Education need not be directly opposed to family responsibilities this way, the two can be more easily dovetailed. Education can also more easily be tailored to individual needs; by removing the need for geographic concentration to provide the required training, more appripriate education can be delivered.
Two, education is a (potentially fundable) need on such a scale as to enable transformational economic change society-wide. So much of the economic disadvantage is down to lack of information and poor access to markets from the impoverished communities. An infrastructure to enable distance learning on a whole-society scale is just as able to provide general community information and revolutionise access to markets. Think eBay's had a tranformational effect on some businesses? Wait until you see what the same thing could do to third-world subsistence farmers.
Transform education through technology-based distance learning. The easiest starting point for that is tertiary education in the west, which shows high demand but poor utilisation of possible technological effects coupled with high costs from the incumbents. Then use that infrastructure to achieve the really transformational change, by educating the third-world poor.
No, they die because they are ignorant of sanitation and therefore don't have any. Have you read anything on the subject, or are you just assuming?
Secondly, there is certainly money to be made in solving the problem, if you're not a truly lazy thinker who bases his conclusions off what he hears in TV news soundbites:
Lastly, I'm sure that TOMS and Warby Parker would be interested to hear that there's no money in helping poor people gain access to shoes or glasses, as well.
My statement was not meant to be factual but rather indicative of a certain cynicism on my part about what I think the motivations behind people starting (the vast majority) of companies are. Sorry that wasn't clear.
Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).