Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

[GRG55]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

By saying less than 40 hrs is a failure... yes.

But my whole point is that the 40 hr goal is an arbitrary number. Right? I mean, is there any data out there that says 40.5 hours is better? Or 39.5 hours?

It's an arbitrary construct. That's my conclusion.

Your highlighted statement above is equally arbitrary...and fails the test of logic...

[chr5648]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

Yes, but the real value of necessities have come down. In 1974, the basic things .. food/shelter/clothing .. you needed a $30 per hour job in order to pay for that stuff.

This is why the real value of minimum wages have come down. Because the real value of those things have come down.

Yes increasing the money supplly is inflationary .. but productivity enhancements are deflationary.

Really, it's very straightforward. Our deficits are making us beholden to china/oil exporting companies. We need to bring those deficits down. How do we do that without lowering our standard of living and living like people in China? We automate everything and get the robots to do the work.

Unfortunately, once robots do all the work, what do we do? We work less hours..

The japanese are well aware of this and are doing it as we speak. Everything is being automated.

Whoever said 'deficits don't matter' was right. Just look at the 10-year and 30 year yields. THEY HIT HISTORIC LOWS. .gov is borrowing at RECORD low rates. The deficits aren't impacting us YET. But in the future they will.

If you make 'robots' do things, less work and income for people.

Stop trying to save the the current system, a reset is needed.

[blazespinnaker]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

That will not work -- still highly inflationary, and the banks will collect the fees from the card holder, or the taxpayer. The tax burden HAS to be transferred from the wage earners (people who work for a living, which includes small business owners) to the rentiers and FIRE (people who "make their money work for them")

When one thinks of the Federal Government, we have to think of government spending as the creation of money, and taxation as the destruction of money. This is not the case with state and local government, where the spending has to come out of taxation.

Yes, Rajiv you said a transaction tax was deflationary .. which I agreed, so I suggested negative interest rates deal with the deflationary impact of a transaction tax.

A transaction tax would also put a tax burden on FIRE, similar to what you want.

[blazespinnaker]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

Whoever said 'deficits don't matter' was right. Just look at the 10-year and 30 year yields. THEY HIT HISTORIC LOWS. .gov is borrowing at RECORD low rates. The deficits aren't impacting us YET. But in the future they will.

If you make 'robots' do things, less work and income for people.

Stop trying to save the the current system, a reset is needed.

This is exactly the mentality which is ruining the country. People want to maintain their standard of living but they don't realize the only way to do that is to increase productivity.

The reason that yields are at historic lows is because the world is pegging their currency against the USD, meanwhile the US is exporting all of its wealth instead of building up its own manufacturing base.

However .. the US can *not* build up its manufacturing base and maintain the standard of living because the inflation would be extreme (tarrif wars, etc) the only way to do it is via automation and alt energy. But then we do that .. nobody has a job anymore, not americans or the Chinese.

So what do we do? We reduce the work week so people all over the world can share what little real work is left.

[neoken]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

So what is the logical conclusion of further automation? Will productivity gains help offset the inevitable growing number of unemployed?

I have a friend who translates for a living. When she first started out it was her books and her brain. Now there are software tools that help her translate more than twice as fast. She's learning as much about the tools as she is learning languages. She's learning to stay on top of things, but she is worried about where this leads 10-20 years down the line.

I see the same thing happening in my field. Half of my time is self educational. At what point will I not be able to keep up?

I would not be surprised if 20+% unemployment became the norm.

[gnk]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

Your highlighted statement above is equally arbitrary...and fails the test of logic...

EXACTLY!!

Yes, it's arbitrary - but that's the whole point!!

Every society has its sacred cows... (ours the 40hr workweek as one of them) yet no one asks how did they become sacred in the first place? Why?

If we can all agree that we can't define the 40 hr workweek as "optimal," then IMHO, it's open for honest debate - not knee jerk judgements. Thus, there are two arguments here:

1) Is the 40 hr workweek necessary today? How did the workweek become 40 hrs? Why? Those kind of questions. We define the issue at hand.

2) Is it necessary? Should it be lengthened, shortened, or left alone? This requires analysis, not a knee-jerk conservative reaction like "What are you lazy?" or "That's how it was, that's how it should be!!" (By the way, I'm not accusing you of this personally. I'm just saying that many people don't like change, and prefer to abide by old constructs without questioning them.)

And PC makes a good point - obviously there are limits. But so too, has the workweek changed thru the ebb and flow of history. Apparently, before becoming the current norm, the 40 hr workweek had a lot of critics. But the fact that it exists today doesn't make it immune to questioning, IMHO.

Just my two cents.

[blazespinnaker]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

So what is the logical conclusion of further automation? Will productivity gains help offset the inevitable growing number of unemployed?

I have a friend who translates for a living. When she first started out it was her books and her brain. Now there are software tools that help her translate more than twice as fast. She's learning as much about the tools as she is learning languages. She's learning to stay on top of things, but she is worried about where this leads 10-20 years down the line.

I see the same thing happening in my field. Half of my time is self educational. At what point will I not be able to keep up?

I would not be surprised if 20+% unemployment became the norm.

Exactly neoken .. this is it *exactly*. Unfortunatley, unless we keep up with the automation our living standards will not improve.

The future is going to be split more and more between those who have lots of money, advanced knowledge workers and everybody else.

Very few *REAL* jobs (ie, providing things people actually need) left for the "everybody" else category.

Reduce the work week and we can share those jobs. And contrary to what GR55 says, those types of jobs will easily be traded around like poker chips.

[c1ue]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

This is exactly the mentality which is ruining the country. People want to maintain their standard of living but they don't realize the only way to do that is to increase productivity.

Your jingoism is ongoing.

There have been clear increases in productivity in the past 2 decades - yet there have equally not been clear increases in real wages.

So the issue clearly is not productivity - there is some other factor or factors interfering.

I have a friend who translates for a living. When she first started out it was her books and her brain. Now there are software tools that help her translate more than twice as fast. She's learning as much about the tools as she is learning languages. She's learning to stay on top of things, but she is worried about where this leads 10-20 years down the line.

I see the same thing happening in my field. Half of my time is self educational. At what point will I not be able to keep up?

The examples are true, but how much has productivity increased in harvesting fruits and vegetables?

How about productivity in transporting of goods?

Productivity in driving a public transportation/school bus?

Productivity in child/senior care?

Productivity in K-6 education?

Productivity in stocking store shelves?

Productivity in driving to work?

Productivity in fixing plumbing/electrical/structural elements?

There are innumerable more examples - yet some or all of these activities are vital to society and to communities.

The whole point of a healthy society isn't that everyone can be rich, it is that someone can perform a necessary service to society without becoming poor.

[blazespinnaker]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

Sorry, which is it, has there been clear productivity increases or not?

You say there clearly has been, then you list a bunch of things where you think there hasn't.

For those areas that haven't, I wouldn't be surprised to see minimal real wage increases.

We need to embrace automation for those areas. Put our faith in robots. Then we'll see significant real wage increases.

[c1ue]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

Sorry, which is it, has there been clear productivity increases or not?

You say there clearly has been, then you list a bunch of things where you think there hasn't.

There have been some productivity increases, but these were minimal compared to the productivity of 1 bankster spinning at a computer.

So again, which contributes more to society?

The point of the exercise was that saying one type of activity which increases productivity as arbitrarily measured, vs. another which equally or more contributes to overall society, but which productivity CANNOT significantly increase because it is inherently high labor/low leverage and therefore the latter should see negative real wages is a good indication that the entire system is skewed.

For those areas that haven't, I wouldn't be surprised to see minimal real wage increases.

We need to embrace automation for those areas. Put our faith in robots. Then we'll see significant real wage increases.

I volunteer you for the guinea pig in the robot buses for your kids, the robot trucks driving on the road you share, the robot caregivers watching after your elders, and so forth.

I personally would prefer to see a society which more values those roles for which FIRE-based "productivity" increases are not endemic.

[blazespinnaker]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

There have been some productivity increases, but these were minimal compared to the productivity of 1 bankster spinning at a computer.

So again, which contributes more to society?

The point of the exercise was that saying one type of activity which increases productivity as arbitrarily measured, vs. another which equally or more contributes to overall society, but which productivity CANNOT significantly increase because it is inherently high labor/low leverage and therefore the latter should see negative real wages is a good indication that the entire system is skewed.



I volunteer you for the guinea pig in the robot buses for your kids, the robot trucks driving on the road you share, the robot caregivers watching after your elders, and so forth.

I personally would prefer to see a society which more values those roles for which FIRE-based "productivity" increases are not endemic.

I already do these things. I use software to teach my kids, video skype to check in on my parents, and I telecommute.

[don]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot

By BENEDICT CAREY and JOHN MARKOFF

LOS ANGELES — The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion.

The two hit it off quickly — unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism — and the boy is imitating his playmate’s every move, now nodding his head, now raising his arms.

“Like Simon Says,” says the autistic boy’s mother, seated next to him on the floor.
Yet soon he begins to withdraw; in a video of the session, he covers his ears and slumps against the wall.

But the companion, a three-foot-tall robot being tested at the University of Southern California, maintains eye contact and performs another move, raising one arm up high.

Up goes the boy’s arm — and now he is smiling at the machine.

In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots like this one: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, as in the case of the boy, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns.

So far, the teaching has been very basic, delivered mostly in experimental settings, and the robots are still works in progress, a hackers’ gallery of moving parts that, like mechanical savants, each do some things well at the expense of others.

Yet the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.

Researchers say the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming the sort of infinitely patient, highly informed instructors that would be effective in subjects like foreign language or in repetitive therapies used to treat developmental problems like autism.

Several countries have been testing teaching machines in classrooms. South Korea, known for its enthusiasm for technology, is “hiring” hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates and is experimenting with robots that would teach English.

Already, these advances have stirred dystopian visions, along with the sort of ethical debate usually confined to science fiction. “I worry that if kids grow up being taught by robots and viewing technology as the instructor,” said Mitchel Resnick, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “they will see it as the master.”

Most computer scientists reply that they have neither the intention, nor the ability, to replace human teachers. The great hope for robots, said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, “is that with the right kind of technology at a critical period in a child’s development, they could supplement learning in the classroom.”

Lessons From RUBI

“Kenka,” says a childlike voice. “Ken-ka.”

Standing on a polka-dot carpet at a preschool on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, a robot named RUBI is teaching Finnish to a 3-year-old boy.

RUBI looks like a desktop computer come to life: its screen-torso, mounted on a pair of shoes, sprouts mechanical arms and a lunchbox-size head, fitted with video cameras, a microphone and voice capability. RUBI wears a bandanna around its neck and a fixed happy-face smile, below a pair of large, plastic eyes.

It picks up a white sneaker and says kenka, the Finnish word for shoe, before returning it to the floor. “Feel it; I’m a kenka.”

In a video of this exchange, the boy picks up the sneaker, says “kenka, kenka” — and holds up the shoe for the robot to see.

In person they are not remotely humanlike, most of today’s social robots. Some speak well, others not at all. Some move on two legs, others on wheels. Many look like escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys.

They make for very curious company. The University of Southern California robot used with autistic children tracks a person throughout a room, approaching indirectly and pulling up just short of personal space, like a cautious child hoping to join a playground game.

The machine’s only words are exclamations (“Uh huh” for those drawing near; “Awww” for those moving away). Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that some living thing is close by. That sensation, however vague, is enough to facilitate a real exchange of information, researchers say.

In the San Diego classroom where RUBI has taught Finnish, researchers are finding that the robot enables preschool children to score significantly better on tests, compared with less interactive learning, as from tapes.

Preliminary results suggest that these students “do about as well as learning from a human teacher,” said Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. “Social interaction is apparently a very important component of learning at this age.”

Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms.

“The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children,” said Corinna E. Lathan, chief executive of AnthroTronix, a Maryland company that makes a remotely controlled robot, CosmoBot, to assist in therapy with developmentally delayed children. “It’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen.”

The RUBI team hit upon a solution one part mechanical and two parts psychological. The engineers programmed RUBI to cry when its arms were pulled. Its young playmates quickly backed off at the sound.

If the sobbing continued, the children usually shifted gears and came forward — to deliver a hug.

Re-armed and newly sensitive, RUBI was ready to test as a teacher. In a paper published last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Joensuu in Finland found that the robot significantly improved the vocabulary of nine toddlers.

After testing the youngsters’ knowledge of 20 words and introducing them to the robot, the researchers left RUBI to operate on its own. The robot showed images on its screen and instructed children to associate them with words.

After 12 weeks, the children’s knowledge of the 10 words taught by RUBI increased significantly, while their knowledge of 10 control words did not. “The effect was relatively large, a reduction in errors of more than 25 percent,” the authors concluded.

Researchers in social robotics — a branch of computer science devoted to enhancing communication between humans and machines — at Honda Labs in Mountain View, Calif., have found a similar result with their robot, a three-foot character called Asimo, which looks like a miniature astronaut. In one 20-minute session the machine taught grade-school students how to set a table — improving their accuracy by about 25 percent, a recent study found.

At the University of Southern California, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with children with autism. In a pilot study, four children with the diagnosis spent about 30 minutes with this robot when it was programmed to be socially engaging and another half-hour when it behaved randomly, more like a toy. The results are still preliminary, said David Feil-Seifer, who ran the study, but suggest that the children spoke more often and spent more time in direct interaction when the robot was responsive, compared with when it acted randomly.

Making the Connection

In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.

No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.

In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins to track what the robot is looking at, to the right, the left, down. The machine has elicited what scientists call gaze-following, an essential first step of social exchange.

“Before they have language, infants pay attention to what I call informational hotspots,” where their mother or father is looking, said Andrew N. Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-director of university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. This, he said, is how learning begins.

This basic finding, to be published later this year, is one of dozens from a field called affective computing that is helping scientists discover exactly which features of a robot make it most convincingly “real” as a social partner, a helper, a teacher.
“It turns out that making a robot more closely resemble a human doesn’t get you better social interactions,” said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego. The more humanlike machines look, the more creepy they can seem.

The machine’s behavior is what matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very subtle elements can make a big difference.

The timing of a robot’s responses is one. The San Diego researchers found that if RUBI reacted to a child’s expression or comment too fast, it threw off the interaction; the same happened if the response was too slow. But if the robot reacted within about a second and a half, child and machine were smoothly in sync.
Physical rhythm is crucial. In recent experiments at a day care center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.

“The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up,” said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, “you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with.”

One way to begin this process is to have a child mimic the physical movements of a robot and vice versa. In a continuing study financed by the National Institutes of Health, scientists at the University of Connecticut are conducting therapy sessions for children with autism using a French robot called Nao, a two-foot humanoid that looks like an elegant Transformer toy. The robot, remotely controlled by a therapist, demonstrates martial arts kicks and chops and urges the child to follow suit; then it encourages the child to lead.

“I just love robots, and I know this is therapy, but I don’t know — I think it’s just fun,” said Sam, an 8-year-old from New Haven with Asperger’s syndrome, who recently engaged in the therapy.

This simple mimicry seems to build a kind of trust, and increase sociability, said Anjana Bhat, an assistant professor in the department of education who is directing the experiment. “Social interactions are so dependent on whether someone is in sync with you,” Dr. Bhat said. “You walk fast, they walk fast; you go slowly, they go slowly — and soon you are interacting, and maybe you are learning.”

Personality matters, too, on both sides. In their studies with Asimo, the Honda robot, researchers have found that when the robot teacher is “cooperative” (“I am going to put the water glass here; do you think you can help me by placing the water glass on the same place on your side?”), children 4 to 6 did much better than when Asimo lectured them, or allowed them to direct themselves (“place the cup and saucer anywhere you like”). The teaching approach made less difference with students ages 7 to 10.

“The fact is that children’s reactions to a robot may vary widely, by age and by individual,” said Sandra Okita, a Columbia University researcher and co-author of the study.

If robots are to be truly effective guides, in short, they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.

Learning From Humans

“Do you have any questions, Simon?”

On a recent Monday afternoon, Crystal Chao, a graduate student in robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was teaching a five-foot robot named Simon to put away toys. She had given some instructions — the flower goes in the red bin, the block in the blue bin — and Simon had correctly put away several of these objects. But now the robot was stumped, its doughboy head tipped forward, its fawn eyes blinking at a green toy water sprinkler.

Dr. Chao repeated her query, perhaps the most fundamental in all of education: Do you have any questions?

“Let me see,” said Simon, in a childlike machine voice, reaching to pick up the sprinkler. “Can you tell me where this goes?”

“In the green bin,” came the answer.

Simon nodded, dropping it in that bin.

“Makes sense,” the robot said.

In addition to tracking motion and recognizing language, Simon accumulates knowledge through experience.

Just as humans can learn from machines, machines can learn from humans, said Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech who directs the project. For instance, she said, scientists could equip a machine to understand the nonverbal cues that signal “I’m confused” or “I have a question” — giving it some ability to monitor how its lesson is being received.

To ask, as Dr. Chao did: Do you have any questions?

This ability to monitor and learn from experience is the next great frontier for social robotics — and it probably depends, in large part, on unraveling the secrets of how the human brain accumulates information during infancy.

In San Diego, researchers are trying to develop a human-looking robot with sensors that approximate the complexity of a year-old infant’s abilities to feel, see and hear. Babies learn, seemingly effortlessly, by experimenting, by mimicking, by moving their limbs. Could a machine with sufficient artificial intelligence do the same? And what kind of learning systems would be sufficient?

The research group has bought a $70,000 robot, built by a Japanese company, that is controlled by a pneumatic pressure system that will act as its senses, in effect helping it map out the environment by “feeling” in addition to “seeing” with embedded cameras. And that is the easy part.

The much steeper challenge is to program the machine to explore, as infants do, and build on moment-to-moment experience. Ideally its knowledge will be cumulative, not only recalling the layout of a room or a house, but using that stored knowledge to make educated guesses about a new room.

The researchers are shooting for nothing less than capturing the foundation of human learning — or, at least, its artificial intelligence equivalent. If robots can learn to learn, on their own and without instruction, they can in principle make the kind of teachers that are responsive to the needs of a class, even an individual child.

Parents and educators would certainly have questions about robots’ effectiveness as teachers, as well as ethical concerns about potential harm they might do. But if social robots take off in the way other computing technologies have, parents may have more pointed ones: Does this robot really “get” my child? Is its teaching style right for my son’s needs, my daughter’s talents?

That is, the very questions they would ask about any teacher.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/sc...?ref=education

[c1ue]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

I already do these things. I use software to teach my kids, video skype to check in on my parents, and I telecommute.

Can your teaching software teach ethics? How about human societal interaction?

Can your video skype change the diapers on an Alzheimer's patient?

Can your telecommuting pick fruit? Assemble a car? Stock a grocery/store shelf? Repair a road? Build a bridge?

I am continuously amazed by those who think that merely because they make money, that that is all there is to society.

This attitude is exactly what you find in the bankster. In the housing bubble real estate agent/mortgage broker. In the .com huckster.

For them: In Pecunia, Honor.

I disagree.

[chr5648]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

What we need to do is stop subsidizing the Chinese military and bring all that productivity home via automation.

You must mean the chinese and the rest of the asian countries are subsidizing the US military, asians are the largest foreign buyers of US bonds.

[chr5648]

Re: Alt energy, Robots, and reduced work weeks

The reason that yields are at historic lows is because the world is pegging their currency against the USD, meanwhile the US is exporting all of its wealth instead of building up its own manufacturing base.

Inferring that premise would mean alot of evidence would be needed and this thread so far has very few material facts.

The only statement that I am will to infer from a 3% yield on a 10 year bond is that people believe that 3% is the best rate of return they can get. (theoretically risk free). Essentially people don't believe they can beat a 3% return with a comparable risk.

PS. the bond market is huge, to move yields takes alot of money, so for rates to rise there will have to be massive changes in growth rates and the future expectations of the economy.