If you are younger than 40 you will lose a job to robot automation. Maybe you will lose your career.  There is no question about it. It is inevitable. The die is cast. As a society we have embraced a philosophy of needless automation. But what is the cost?

In a recent Brookings study it was found that 25% of jobs in the US will be affected by automation. The study was called: Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Affect People and Places. Some findings.

• Low-wage earners will be among the first to see their jobs disappear, since many of their tasks are routine-based.
• The disruption will hit certain people harder than others, including low-wage earners and men.
• Where a person lives in the country also determines the degree to which their job is likely in danger, according to the report.  The Midwest is especially vulnerable to technological disruption, because jobs there revolve heavily around manufacturing and agriculture.

The risks profile of people that robots will impact is pretty broad.

Food preparation and service	81%
Production operations	79%
Office and administrative support	60%
Farming/fishing and forestry	56%
Transportation and material moving	55%
Construction and extraction	50%
Installation/maintenance and repair	49%
Sales	43%
Healthcare support	40%
Legal	38%
Computer and math	37%
Protective services	36%
Personal care and service occupations	34%
Healthcare practitioners and technical jobs	33%
Life/physical and social science	32%
Management	23%
Community and social service	22%
Building and grounds cleaning	21%
Arts/design/entertainment/sports and media	20%
Architecture and engineering	19%
Education/training and library	18%
Business and financial operations	14%

 

How did we get here? What is the impact on workers? Opioids? Alcoholism? Depression?

And who is this having the worst impact on? Again – back to the study:

Young ethnic men seemed to be the hardest hit, but as you can see no one is spared.

Job loss is stressful. It can lead to major issues above and beyond the loss of income including:

• Professional identity
• Self-esteem and self-confidence
• A daily routine
• Purposeful activity
• A work-based social network
• Your sense of security

A loss of any or all these leads directly to succumbing to day drinking and night prowling.

According to research reported in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, unemployed people are twice as likely as employed people to suffer from psychological problems (34 percent to 16 percent). Blue-collar workers are more distressed by unemployment than those who’ve lost a white-collar job. Additionally, middle-aged men and women, especially those who are unemployed, experience the highest levels of psychological distress.

Its enough to make you want to add a little gin to your morning coffee.

 

 

 

 

 

So probably, civilization was organized by religion to regulate human reproduction and expansion of population. This along with establishment of standards of ethical behavior and consistency of ritual and doctrine allowed for a growth of mankind. This phenomenal initiated as tribal practices specific to regional mythologies and evolved into well established Dharma.

As the population exceeded control of religious organizations, government became necessary to set objectives for population. What was needed was a repressive organization to gather census data for taxation, public works and identification of resources for military excursion. These primitive nation states would eventually evolve into organizations capable of establishing economies of scale. As during the religious era, a reformation was necessary so was the establishment of a democracy to pacify the governed.

So what is the next step, will the network platform allow civilization to codified socially excepted behavior without repressive restrictions? Or will it allow a greater understanding of those behaviors to lead to greater manipulation? Will actuarial algorithms give us understanding of the wishes of the individual or discover triggers to repression of desire.

Each of those stages of human development have begun to solve a problem with the growth of civilization and evolved from strong control to benevolence. If this is the beginning of a third stage of civilization, would it occur if it wasn’t needed? So what is the disruptive civilizational expansion that we’re undergoing and what will it evolve into?

A significant amount of civilization energy is spent in acquiring and distributing resources. That is why there are markets and a monetary system. Economics is devoted to the distribution of the abundance created by the current civilization. Until now, production has been a reactionary phenomenon based on supply and demand. Soon it may be possible to have supply without demand. How will humanities relation to the supply chain change when the issues become wants and not needs. It may at first be disturbing for an expert system knowing what we need and want more than we do ourselves but eventually we will except this the same way we excepted clergyman telling us what was morally right and morally wrong to modify our behaviors.

The real challenge will be off loading our cognitive abilities. Although this has been one of the major functions of civilization, during this next phase, the changes are potentially more dramatic. Whether it was religion setting a rule against killing each other or government informing us we were going to provide for the common defense without any need for individual analytical analysis, civilization has systematically reduced the need for intellectual contemplation.

The objective of every organization is to reduce the intellectual requirements of the individuals involved and at its best to place decision making into the realm of objectivity.

A good question about “objectivity” is why more credibility is given regarding the opinions of members of specific social networks when it is possible to accurately draw predictions from the data available in documented behaviors of a sampling of the members? Instead of looking for algorithms to remove the biased of product reviews, why not conduct analysis of the actual behaviors of the individuals. If anonymized information from an individual’s banking shows that they have eaten at a restaurant five times and the restaurant is ten miles from their residence, then that is a more significant data point and if a bank should recommend that restaurant to other similar customers that is substantially more useful then the restaurant receiving five star reviews.

Then of course, there’s the issue of what’s good for humanity. I’m much more concerned in what my genetics tells me about seafood allergies then I am about what Leviticus says about eating shrimp. Consciousness could be defined as the conflict resolving function of awareness. If there is satisfaction with habits and beliefs, then there is no conflict, no need for awareness and no manifest consciousness. We do not question our map application on how to get to destinations or how to prevent delays. The fact that we are irritated when it fails is an indicator that we have excepted its superiority over our own abilities and become frustrated with failure. So as our understanding of reality outstripped the stories of religion, civilization had to organize with a story that expanded humanity’s needs. That organization was called government. Now we have to reorganize in a way to take advantage of this new connectivity. The term religion is a catalogue of organization. The same as all the systems of governance is a set of organizations. It is meaningless to try and name manifestations of a evolving category of a civilizational systems of organization. Just let it happen, we can name it later. —

I’m sitting in a clothing store while my wife shops writing this on my phone, wondering if AI or robots could ever solve this particular problem. But the people watching is good and I always wonder what people are thinking as they shop. If you haven’t done it, stop next time in a shop or a park or a grocery store and just look at people. We are a bizarre species and it is easy to see, if we take a minute, how companies manipulate the masses; attraction, branding, interest, etc…

My thoughts today trend to marketing, fake news, lies and other means of sway. Lobbying and marketing spend billions a year but even with that level of spend and some insights into big data, it is still a one eye-closed throwing darts type situation. When AI reaches its potential, it will be helping sway and control with precision like surgery with robotic arms and lasers.

I see a future more chaotic, not less. Evolution is messy. Eventually these next gen AIs will get so sophisticated that everything will be precision cuts to craft society and create movements exactly like the key-holders want it to be. The reason I believe this will lead to more mess and not less is simply that AIs will be controlled by different groups looking to assert power.

A second aspect is that human nature isn’t ‘agreeable’, we actually like the battle. We root for teams (football to politics), we align with causes to find meaning and how we define ourselves.

AIs aren’t smart enough now to pick this up about humans yet (they aren’t self-aware), but the key-holders are. And as they tune and train the AIs to take advantage, the ‘fake news’ from the 2016 election will look like baby play. The true masters of manipulation are like the House at a casino. To the player it seems like they are winning and losing, which is required to cement behavior via intermittent reward. However, it is all an illusion as the house knows the odds and knows that they can see the ‘game’ from a whole other perspective. To them, it isn’t a game, it is cash machine that spits out exactly what the odds predict.

In 10 years AI will be running the Casino for the power brokers and we will be the marks playing bit parts in the grand illusion of society free will.