The power structures will never allow it. The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now. We will simply end up with a a planetary ruling class that lives opulently while the other 99% live in abject poverty.
I think your view of our democratic institutions is a bit too rosy. I'm pessimistic that they'd withstand the social upheaval that might occur with a smart-enough AGI. Even now it seems like many people prefer authoritarian rulers -- or at least they think they'd prefer that, as long as the ruler is a part of their political tribe. They'll be in for a painful surprise later, of course.
And that’s not even factoring in the automation of highly targeted yet dynamic political content (not just ads but the consumed content itself) in order to charge/persuade the target to vote for the paying party
"The power structures" want people to need to work so they have to work for them. Better to keep you occupied with the rat race than have you spending time advocating for political reform.
Which is why work expands to fill all available time. They want you to have a job, because what they don't want is what you might do if your time was your own. For some subset of "they" that represents the most malicious pricks.
The thing that happens if they win is that everybody still has a job even if they're not doing anything useful. Which in a lot of ways is what's happening already.
You can live a life of leisure, as envisioned say 100 years ago right now* if you want.
Of course you'd need to be ok with 1920's level of housing (tiny farm house, no sewer or running water), education (stop at 8th grade) and healthcare (no effective antibiotics or cancer drugs).
You could replicate that sort of life today with a plot of cheap land ($3,000 per acre) and $5,000 per year (save $100,000 USD).
Frugality opens up a lot of lifestyle options. Although even given the $7000 a year, this person seems to have a lot of capital in a sense of goods, education, health, and relationships.
That said, there are a few nuances here.
Self-education is now cheap through the Internet (e.g. watching YouTube videos on how to do math or how to fix things). However compulsory education laws make that problematical for children (although there are homeschooling regulations in the USA that can be navigated, homeschooling is illegal in some parts of Europe). The credentialing arms race also means a lot of corporate-type or professional jobs are closed to people who skip college -- even as there are still other opportunities including subsistence production or small-scale entrepreneurship.
Many common antibiotics are cheap due to mass production. But antibiotics can have complicating side effects from wiping out healthy gut microbiota -- which may perhaps include cancer and depression because part of the immune system and part of neurotransmitter production are involved with the gut. Some other cures for things based around herbs are increasingly forgotten and also require access to a large enough area to roam in to find the herbs.
Most (not all) cancer can be avoided through a whole foods diet and active lifestyle. Such a diet and lifestyle is generally cheaper than the mainstream (especially if you have your own garden). See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's G-BOMBS approach as one example:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/237/g-bombs-the-anti-cancer-f...
But, since it is not all, some people in such communities will, as you suggest, die of things treatable in the mainstream. Also, since the people joining such communities presumably have already been eating ultraprocessed food for most of their lives, they are at higher cancer risk than if they had grown up that way (same with other chronic health risks like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and more that are mainly byproducts of Western lifestyle and Western medicine). So, there are these additional background risks for someone going from the mainstream to the alternative -- but the alternatives may struggle under the weight of treating an influx of chronically sick people. (Of course, many mainstream cancer treatments only prolong life for at best a few months at a great cost in suffering and money, but that is a different issue.)
For good or bad, zoning regulations and pressure from neighbors restricts much of what people can do with their land. And cheap land tends to have issues (biting insects, lack of good water, distance from jobs, distance from markets, poor soil, swampy flooding, fire dangers, distance from other people, and so on). So such "cheap" land may actually be quite expensive in health costs and travel costs and labor costs and accepting various increased risks. The book "Life After the City" explores some of these issues.
Decades ago I read an article (in Westchester Magazine?) on someone who learned "primitive" skills for living in the woods. When asked why he did not go and live by himself in the woods using his skills, he replied that it takes a village to live well in the wilderness. So, an overall issue here is that if you want to live well cheaply (which includes some healthy social interactions for most people), you ideally need to be part of a community with related values.
But communities can have problematical dynamics -- especially when surrounded by another culture that is wealthier and more exciting in various ways. That is why, say, the Pilgrims left the Netherlands. The Pilgrims were tolerated in Holland after the left England where there were discriminated against. But they saw their children and other community members starting to adopt Dutch ways, and the older members also encountered other issues fitting into Dutch society. So some of them decided to go to what was then the remote wilderness in North America -- where they could enforce their restrictive norms on their children and neighbors without being surrounded by enticing "Supernormal Stimuli" and "Pleasure Trap" alternatives (both quoted items being names of books on those topics).
https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/the-pilgrims-in-leid...
Of course, many of the Pilgrims died, and the ones that did not survived in part due to the compassion of the Native Americans (as well as plundered Native graves and so on). And their original collectivist vision of land ownership fell apart in the face of massive hard work and starvation and freeloading in that context. But that is another story.
"Who Were The Pilgrims? This Is The Story You Didn’t Learn In School"
https://allthatsinteresting.com/pilgrims
So, if you really want to be as happy as possible with such an alternative lifestyle, a big challenge is finding a lot of other people who want to live like in the 1920s, and actually willing to do that full-time, and all go to the same place, and somehow can afford to buy the land the community needs. And that is all a big challenge, especially since many (not all) alternative communities tend to fall apart over issues of equity or exploitative social/sexual relationships and so on. Some examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_commu...
While not identical in beliefs, some people have quipped the Pilgrims were essentially the Taliban of their day. And in a way, it makes sense, because to leave behind your home as a community takes some common set of core beliefs and strong social bonds which are often associated with extreme religious sects.
To an extent, the Amish are somewhat like this as far as being tight knit religious-based communities which are apart from mainstream US society. But they still emphasize hard work and related material affluence -- and also happily selling goods and services to the lazy "English" all around them. So the Amish are not quite a community of leisure -- even if many people may find happiness in that life.
So, given that, the Amish are far from what Marshal Sahlins describes in "The Original Affluent Society" of hunter/gatherers who have lots of leisure time since most of the food they need does not take that long to acquire and is done often in a way people think is fun or at least engaging.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
Unfortunately, hunter/gatherers are living in a productive landscape were generally displaced by militaristic bureaucracies wielding mass-produced "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (like how the first century of the US Army was mainly about being used to displace Native populations):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
Which circles back around to why cheap land to live frugally in community is generally not desirable land.
I do think modern technological advances do make new alternatives possible. "OSCOMAK" is a project I came up with decades ago to help support communities of any size to develop whatever infrastructure they desire (but admittedly it is still more an idea than a realization):
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
"The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas."
And like with the Pilgrim/Taliban, :-) I can imagine such tools most useful for a dedicated community trying to "live off the land" in the desert, ocean, Antarctica, or outer space (Moon, Mars, Asteroids, etc.). Those are all "cheap land" (with no or low taxes) in the sense of being generally far away and generally not pleasant places right now due to lack of one thing or another --- including unfortunately other people to form a community with.
See also the book "Retrotopia" by John Michael Greer for more ideas, including how to have "zones" of infrastructure and taxation at different levels that people can choose from.
An alternative to increase leisure though extreme frugality and living apart from society is to upgrade the mainstream society we have, such as with a basic income; improved subsistence with gardening robots, 3d printers, and solar panels; better collaborative decisions making in democratic government; and a stronger gift economy (like sharing information essentially for free via the web like HackerNews for example makes possible).
I'm one of the weirdos who can happily live on around €10k/year.
But I'm well aware that I can only afford to live so cheaply because the economies of scale of everyone else spending so much. My laptop could only be built because a million other people would buy one too; the factory could only be built because it also serviced several other computer manufacturers; the mines for the raw materials can only stay open because their stuff isn't only used for computers.
If everyone was like me, the roads wouldn't get paved.
> Self-education is now cheap through the Internet (e.g. watching YouTube videos on how to do math or how to fix things). However compulsory education laws make that problematical for children (although there are homeschooling regulations in the USA that can be navigated, homeschooling is illegal in some parts of Europe). The credentialing arms race also means a lot of corporate-type or professional jobs are closed to people who skip college -- even as there are still other opportunities including subsistence production or small-scale entrepreneurship.
I've just had a very visceral demonstration of how bad this free education is.
I reached a 2500 day streak in Duolingo after repeatedly completing the entire skill tree and watching the gold disappear as the tree was grown, have also been using two other apps daily and intensively for years, have been watching and listening to free podcasts and YouTube videos about the German language most days… and after 5.5 years living in Berlin still only managed to score an A2 on an official language test.
Great point on what would happen to mass-produced items like laptops if everyone moved to remote cabins in the woods to live cheaply.
And yes, a drawback to educating yourself via videos or reading (or even by taking some tests) is that it is relatively passive. A hands-on aspect is essential to a lot of skills, like learning to write by writing, learning to use machine tools by machining, learning to do chemistry by mixing chemicals, and learning to use a language by speaking it in important contexts. And setting up such contexts is one value of good educational settings (either in or out of schools).
As a parent who home-schooled from K-12, definitely the lack of easy access to some settings where various skills could be practiced was a limitation. We tried to make up for it as best we could in other ways.
Some learning can happen virtually to an extent, like virtual chemistry sets (even as they don't convey the visceral feel of working with glassware and liquids and such).
There is also an project at RPI for people to learn Chinese in a virtual Chinese setting with characters who speak Chinese:
https://research.rpi.edu/about/signature-research-thrusts/me...
"Students learn to speak Chinese through the Mandarin Project’s virtual reality, synthetic intelligent characters and gamification."
It is also harder to learn a language when the people you are talking to want to learn or practice yours and so are motivated to speak your language to you. So as a consolation prize, maybe you have helped some Berliners become better English speakers? :-)
Age may also have to do something with language learning -- but not as people expect. When people are young, they are often less embarrassed by making mistakes, and are full of enthusiasm for something new, and they way they are taught is usually point and name and speak and question. Adults tend to try to avoid mistakes, may have other more interesting or important things to do, and also may end up in boring textual drill-and-practice rote learning situations. Those are some of the reasons it is harder to learn languages (especially a first foreign language) as an adult.
A related funny XKCD on simulation and learning (where Kerbal Space Program makes a seemingly difficult learning challenge fun when done in private and also has no significant consequences for mistakes so you can play around with ideas like a kid again):
"Orbital Mechanics"
https://xkcd.com/1356/
Some people are just also better than others at languages for whatever reasons.
Also, sometimes immersion in a context for a length of time just makes the difference. One of my German teachers in High School talked about studying abroad in Germany when younger and speaking only German where they were, and they said they felt a real turning point was when they had their first dream in German. I'm guessing maybe you must be in a situation where you can still speak English or whatever your native language is at work and at home, and so speaking German just is not that important to your daily life?
Anyway, wishing you some dreams "auf Deutsch" if you want them. :-)
> The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now.
Not if everyone wants to maintain their current standard of living. Imagine working 50% less hours, but also having to live off 50% of your current total compensation. Some here could probably manage that, but most would probably prefer not to.
Now if you want a whole "society of leisure", you'd have to impose that same lifestyle choice across all of society by government fiat. Its easy to see why that hasn't happened.
Not really a realistic view of the western economy. Or economics.
Things like 'compensation' are fluid, fairly arbitrary and largely unrelated to the industrial complex. It's whatever we decide it is, pretty much.
Automation is in full swing, has been for twenty years and is only accelerating. Ignore that at your peril. Everybody will continue to have toasters, computers, cars even when we've automated most of us out of an industrial/manufacturing job.
How do I know? Because that already happened. Instead of tens of thousands of people on assembly lines, we have tens of engineers and managers overseeing automation. If it hasn't happened in some cherry-picked example, it will very soon.
We have to plan something for the majority of us to do, some way to participate in the resulting economy, without just throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard!"
So much to say on this subject, that doesn't fit in an HN text field. There's a long history of thought on this subject, and the comments here indicate most folks are still on the first page in their thinking.
Perhaps you could link to some information on this "long history of thought on this subject" because to me everything you just wrote sounds like nonsense.
The idea that we can just double people's compensation and thereby double our total economic output (because compensation is "whatever we decide it is") is so wrong headed I don't even know where to begin. Maybe that's a misunderstanding of your position, but I don't know how else to interpret what you just said.
Right now we have a lot of jobs that are extremely low efficiency, if not outright net negatives. These are the sorts of jobs that markets tend to eliminate, because the company that gets rid of them can charge lower prices than the one that doesn't. But that doesn't work when the job exists as a result of regulatory rules, or the company is a monopoly not subject to competitive pressure.
What does work is to improve the efficiency of the regulations. For the ones that are net negative you can just get rid of them. For the ones that are net positive but still poorly constructed, you can reduce their overhead.
This doesn't increase economic output, it reduces waste. Then you can work half as many hours for the same money, or the same number of hours for twice as much, not because anything more is being created but because people are spending half as much time on useless tasks. If they then spend that time doing something productive, output would increase, but that's a personal choice. If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats? Some people would, which is fine, but some people wouldn't.
Sure, if you can somehow find a way to double the efficiency of labor then you can either double your standard of living or half your number of hours. We've already done that multiple times since the industrial revolution. That's why modern first world society is so rich compared to the past.
And there are certainly significant inefficiencies created due to government regulation, though probably not enough to double our productivity even if you did have the knowledge and political capitol fix all those issues perfectly. It is also worth noting that sometimes regulations, though costly and inefficient, can still be nice things to have. Building codes undoubtedly make housing significantly more expensive, but I'd still rather live in a society with expensive housing where I don't have to worry about the floor collapsing on me than a society with cheap housing where I do. There's a balance there obviously, but my point is sometimes the extra expense can be worth it even if its not "net positive" in a purely economical sense.
> If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats?
I think you'd be surprised. There are so many things we consider necessities now that would be considered luxuries 100 years ago. I see no reason why things won't continue to move mostly in that direction as technology improves.
I know a lot of people who earn enough that they could match my standard of living working only 10 hours a week. They mostly don't, and instead spend the extra wealth on things like larger houses, fancier cars, exotic vacations, etc.
> And there are certainly significant inefficiencies created due to government regulation, though probably not enough to double our productivity even if you did have the knowledge and political capitol fix all those issues perfectly.
Keep in mind that a lot of these rules are multiplicative. Zoning rules limit the amount of new housing construction and increase construction costs because now you have to e.g. replace a 10 story building with a 20 story building, bulldozing the 10 story building, instead of replacing a single family home with a 10 story building to add the same number of units. Professional licensing apprenticeship requirements limit the supply of licensed tradesmen, increasing construction costs. These multiply together: You have to do more construction and the construction has a higher labor cost.
Then housing costs more, so you have to pay higher salaries for the same cost of living -- including to tradesmen, which makes construction cost even more, multiplying the effect again. But not just tradesmen, also the salaries of compliance bureaucrats needed by any other form of regulation, and the cost of commercial real estate for their offices.
Double is, if anything, an underestimate. These costs are quadratic.
> Building codes undoubtedly make housing significantly more expensive, but I'd still rather live in a society with expensive housing where I don't have to worry about the floor collapsing on me than a society with cheap housing where I do.
The building codes from decades ago were sufficient to prevent buildings from collapsing. Since then they've been accumulating cruft. Many of these individual requirements each add hundreds to thousands of dollars to the cost of a new house in exchange for a marginal safety improvement with a negative expected value.
And then you don't even get the safety improvement, because making new construction prohibitively expensive causes people to continue to live in old houses that weren't subject to the new requirements anyway. All you do is make housing more scarce.
> There's a balance there obviously, but my point is sometimes the extra expense can be worth it even if its not "net positive" in a purely economical sense.
"Net positive" is the measure of if it's worth it. You have a measure that can prevent a 1 in 1000 chance of $50,000 in damage but it costs $1000. You're spending an average of $1,000,000 to prevent $50,000 in damage. It's not worth it.
> There are so many things we consider necessities now that would be considered luxuries 100 years ago. I see no reason why things won't continue to move mostly in that direction as technology improves.
Most of these things are things that didn't previously exist, like cellphones or computers. Now you need one because it has replaced certain ways of interacting with people and institutions and the old ways are no longer available.
But let's suppose the definition of necessities expands over time. It used to be food and shelter, then we added medicine and transportation, then we added internet. Maybe tomorrow we add a personal robot or something else. But what if all of those things together cost $10,000/year? Would everyone choose to work full time if the surplus was solely to purchase luxury goods?
> I know a lot of people who earn enough that they could match my standard of living working only 10 hours a week. They mostly don't, and instead spend the extra wealth on things like larger houses, fancier cars, exotic vacations, etc.
There are also people who sell their startup and then choose to retire in their 20s or 30s. Different people make different choices.
It seems to me like we're mostly in agreement. I agree regulations can have compounding negative effects, though whether that's enough to account for a potential 2x improvement in overall economic output is something I would still dispute without any hard numbers to back up that claim.
I also think you've misunderstood my point about regulations. What I'm saying is that sometimes regulations can serve as a sort of "luxury good", where even if they're a net negative economically (like in your example of the uneconomical safety improvements) the quality of life benefits can still make them worth the cost in a society that's wealthy enough to absorb those costs.
I'm not saying that's always the case. Sometimes the costs clearly aren't worth it even factoring in subjective benefits. Just that its another thing to consider.
I also agree that there's probably a certain point where people would start to value their time more than what we today would consider "luxury goods". Just that that point is probably a lot further out than you might expect, because what's considered a luxury is relative to the cultural standards of the society you live in. Some people do chose to retire in their 30s, but I know a lot more people who didn't do that even though they probably could have.
Everybody loves to calculate worker productivity, like it's the 1800's and we're hand-making buggy whips. No, its a large industrial machine turning out goods like clockwork.
Paying people is arbitrary. We pay somebody to spend time fixing a conveyor belt, and pay them nearly nothing. Some guy sits in an office doing nothing, but he owns the factory so he gets all the profit from that factory forever, yet has little or nothing to do with it's operation.
It's arbitrary, a direct result of some choices we made about our economic system. Those choices have quit working for most of us - a tiny percent (way less than 1%) have managed to jigger the rules so they skim off of every transaction. The end result of that kind of feedback loop is, they have all the money and we continue to work hourly for peanuts.
We can just decide to change it. Doesn't require magic or even much imagination.
That's a very mid-1800s position to take, given you're complaining about "calculating productivity like it's the 1800s" — owners getting rich from reinvesting the profits of labour is one of the big things that Marx was cross about.
> We can just decide to change it. Doesn't require magic or even much imagination.
Many have tried. What's the quote?
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” ― H. L. Mencken
Some attempts have been more successful, some less successful, but the governments which think economics is easy have done the worst, regardless of if they were Communist or Capitalist.
To support your point that we we make choices among alternative, see this document I put together circa 2010 with about 50 alternatives -- some good, some obviously bad -- we can use to address the socio-economic changes needed to maintain healthy human communities in the face of increased automation:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
It covers a bit of the history which you alluded to earlier in a previous post, such as the "Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964. But the root of all this thinking go way back -- whether to the original communal Christians in the face of the Roman Empire, various Utopian communities (including ones inspired by Charles Fourier) to Marxism, Socialism, Luddites, resistance to "Enclosure Acts", Henry George, Elizabeth Magie (her educational cautionary Landlord's Game ripped off in part as dystopian Monopoly), Bucky Fuller, Bob Black ("The Abolition of work"), Ursula K. Le Guinn, James P. Hogan, Paolo Soleri / Arcosanti, Marshal Sahlins, Amory & Hunter Lovins, John and Nancy Jack Todd of The New Alchemy Institute, Martin Ford, and many more. Not all the alternative ideas worked out or even got started for all sorts of reasons, but there are a lot of alternatives are out there.
See especially:
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dictionary-of-alternatives-978...
"'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism', is the orthodoxy of the twenty-first century. All too often, ordinary people across the world are being told that the problem of organization is already solved, or that it is being solved somewhere else, or that it need not concern them because they have no choices. This dictionary provides those who disagree with the evidence. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."
Indeed, I was in a way surprised (and yet also hopeful) in reading all the comments here in that many people are slowly rediscovering all these ideas for themselves as the issue grows more pressing.
Essentially, I have been dealing with "AI/Robotics Anxiety" for about forty years, and collected many ideas for coping with it along the way. I'm working in a broader document more specific to that which I may put up on my website at some point.
Ironically, while I won awards for robotics projects before attending Princeton as an undergrad, and my undergrad work at Princeton in AI and cognitive psychology helped inspire WordNet which led to Simpli and the core of Gogole AdSense, it was maybe conversations with Jeff in passing at Princeton about the potential to use robots in commerce and space exploration --- which I doubt he remembers -- that might have had the biggest impact of my career to-date in a robotics sense given Amazon and its emulators. Not to take any credit away from George or Jeff in terms of their specific vision, hard work, improvisations, and persistence in the face of adversity, and also to accept that a place like Princeton can be a Brian-Eno-style "scenius" where ideas bounce around and transform as they are reflected on and refined by different people with different perspectives.
https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/
"There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others."
But I am a bit sad about the results so far though, given how robotics, AI, and other automation are turning out to do so much damage in practice to so many people's lives when used from a scarcity-oriented mindset. It was always my intent -- especially having read so much sci-fi like Isaac Asimov robot stories, "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, and also James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and also his "Voyage from Yesteryear" -- that way more positives than negatives would come out of the abundance that robotics, AI, and other automation (including information technology) can provide.
A related video parable I made on such themes circa 2010:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
As with my sig (first sent in an email to Marvin Minsky) of "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity", I have realized -- as Einstein suggested about nuclear weapons or Lewis Mumford about technology in general or James P. Hogan essentially says through his novels -- it takes change of heart and mindset to realize the benefits of what is possible using automation without otherwise creating a terrible human calamity.
An example of things going wrong is creating problematical working conditions when automation is used to make humans work like micromanaged robots centralizing wealth for a few people. Related US DOL citation for Amazon essentially for not automating enough:
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osha/osha20230201-0
As I've reflected on, if you get up in the early morning in the dark and turn a light on in the kitchen, the light may seem so bright you can't look at it even as it even as it makes it possible for you to get your day started. And by the time the sun comes up and lights your entire home and landscape, you may forget the kitchen light is even on because it is no longer noticeable relative to the surrounding broad illumination. Gary Kildall no doubt faced that with CPM. So that is kind of how I see the comments overall on the story. The sun is coming up as millions of people are starting to think about robotics, AI, and other automation and its likely near-term effect on themselves and society, and all the "bright lights" from decades past are just not noticeable from all the ongoing thinking and chatter. And that is maybe a good thing -- even if there are still ideas from then which might be useful now and will either be remembered, reread, or rediscovered.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
- HEADLINE: Working HD Active Protection System for newer Thinkpads
- DESCRIPTION: Around the time of the release of the Thinkpad W530, Lenovo had changed the way in which the HDAPS system was done on Thinkpads. In the past, the tp-smapi* packages and the hdapsd daemon made using Thinkpads with rotating platters excellent, but the newer models now receive errors, and there's some notion that maybe the kernel has some kind of support for APS systems now. It's quite frustrating to know I've sacrificed protection by having a newer model while we wait for SSDs to become as trustworthy as our HDDs.
- No Affiliation
These articles give the worst impression of Ada possible. It's not the it's a specialized language for the military, but a language created to cleanup the DoD's software nightmare of the 70s, which is not unlike the software nightmares of today. It just happens that they had a pretty good grasp, even at that time, of what helps make good software easier to write, large software projects easier to manage and maintain, and strong ideas about how much a language should intervene if the programmer is doing things that look pretty dumb.
Ada has a neat OO system (not like the Javas or C++s), built-in state-of-the-art tasking (since 1983!), ranged types (one of the things I can hardly bare to live without), but also simple things like switches that aren't useless and just a general appreciation for what a discrete type can allow you to do. It has generics, too, though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages. Have you seen that new Java 8 date time stuff? It's playing catch up to Ada. Ada's numerics are, hands down, the best facilities of any mainstream language.
Most importantly, it's probably already available for your Linux distribution because it's a part of the GNU Compiler Collection, which means that it's on the commercial OS you've settled for, as well.
An out of print book that I always recommend to those who are interested in playing with Ada is John English's "The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming". Enjoy.
It's a seriously nice language --- it feels like a mature, well-thought-out C++ without a lot of the craziness and ancient edge cases. There are moments of sheer brilliance: the pointer scoping semantics mean that it's actually _syntactically invalid_ to leak pointers from an inner stack frame to an outer one. Its tasking and concurrency support is amazingly good. Having proper nested functions are amazing. The type system, while no Haskell, is easily good enough to say things like 'bounded array of tagged unions with length not known at compile time', with both compile and run-time error detection. And all this produces code that performs on a par with a modern C++ compiler!
Here's a multithreaded Mandelbrot renderer what I wrote: http://ideone.com/a1ky4l Note that each thread is a scoped object nested inside a function, communicating with each other via strongly typed and named messages --- startup and shutdown synchronisation happens automatically...
That's not to say there aren't warts; the OO system is pretty painful, with some annoying hidden requirements (e.g. you have to define a class' methods adjacent to the class structure itself, otherwise the compiler gets confused; if this is a requirement there should be explicit syntax for it). Having case insensitive identifiers is a complete failure. Exceptions are just plain clunky. There are a number of syntactic weirdnesses where the language got expanded beyond the original syntax' ability to cope. But the big omission is that there's no garbage collector, even though the language was obviously designed to have one. It would be so, so much nicer to write real code in if it had one.
Ada really deserves to be better known than it is.
There is at least one error in your "About Ada" section. The language was not designed by the Department of Defense, though it did meet specifications laid out by DoD called the Steelman. The language was designed by Jean Ichbiah and his team at CII Honeywell-Bull for a competition held by the High-Order Language Working Group, a group within the DoD. Four languages were submitted: Red, Yellow, Blue and Green, of which Green won and became Ada.
I did the first couple years of my undergrad (starting 1990) in Ada. I liked the generics, although the lack of inheritance was peculiar for an OO language. As a Pascal programmer in high school, Ada was pleasant and familiar, but I quickly lost interest when I discovered Eiffel. Eiffel felt like what Ada should have been from the beginning.
I've not written a single line of either post-graduation.
Sadly both suffered from enterprise prices by the compiler vendors.
Although Ada seems to be quite well in high integrity systems. At least that is my perception from the, now regular presence, at FOSDEM and European safety conferences.
Ada had OO from Ada 95, though it doesn't look anything like the OO in most mainstream languages of today. In Ada 95, tagged types were introduced which were based on Ada's powerful record types and Ada 2005 introduced interfaces in a style similar to Java. Java and Ada have both taken plenty from each other over the years.
Edited because I was misleading about the introduction of OO.
"It's not the it's a specialized language for the military, but a language created to cleanup the DoD's software nightmare of the 70s, which is not unlike the software nightmares of today."
The nightmares aren't like each other, they are the same nightmare, just with the spooge scraped into slightly different piles.
Further, a language won't clean it up; that's going to take something seriously different. In fact, I suspect the spooge is irreducable past a certain point. I believe it is the nature of the problems.
That being said, Ada is a significant improvement over many others, in many cases for the reasons you describe.
"though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages"
A non-free resource that I found very helpful in learning Ada was "Ada for Software Engineers" (http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781848823136). Although it covered Ada 2005, not Ada 2012, it otherwise has excellent coverage of the Ada feature set, with a focus on programming-in-the-large.
I've been working on a development team for several years as a contract worker. I'm looking for a better arrangement while I continue my university education pursuing degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics.
Most of my experience in the upper levels of the web stack, but I'm very much interested to attack other areas of the stack, development process, documentation, etc., open source tools and open source platforms.
With my current hat, I've been working to connect backend to frontend and developing the frontend using typical, but not remarkable web tech. I'm especially interested in participating in high-quality development processes with great people.
I've developed APIs, managed conversion of a project from long-lived HTTP to websockets, improved backend database libraries, written great technical documentation, and more. My strongest backend language is Ada which is a reflection of the kind of qualities I value in software and processes.
My interests are across the board including (but not limited to) full-stack for web, Android and Windows mobile apps, data science and visualization.
I creating reliable software by using safe languages as much I can with high test coverage and excellent documentation. A current project is a standards-based, web front-end and associated back-end code for a call center contact management system written in Ada, adding new features and updating and rewriting existing code. Also, create a complete RESTful API and more modern, more extensible interface from the ground up.
I've developed solutions in many languages on both front- and back-ends using languages like Ada, Java, C and PHP on the back-ends and standards-based HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the front-end using well-known tools like jQuery, Prototype.js, SASS, LESS, Bootstrap and a host more along with custom written tools when necessary.
Recently I converted a display that updates in realtime from a Mozilla technology that never caught on, long-lived HTTP requests, to WebSockets working through bugs in the third party library's implementation and working with the vendor to get them fixed quickly.
I am an Ada developer, but I think it is objective to say that anyone who opposes a language because there fingers will have extra work probably doesn't belong in this field. If you consider the development process as a whole—research, planning, development, verification, etc.—those extra keystrokes add an exceptionally marginal amount of time to the development process, but reduce time so much more by making the code more intuitive to read. Don't let me lead you to believe that Ada's words make it intuitive; that would be disingenuous, but the syntax has been formed since its inception to be readable by developers and non-developers alike. This is an important distinction with something like Java, neverminding that you don't have to explicitly instantiate generics in Java. One of the key objectives of Ada is code that is especially intuitive to non-developers. There's a lot going on in the language. I hope this helps.
I use Ada everyday developing a predictive dialer and contact management system for call centers and it's web-based front-end. Interest has been steadily growing since I started with the language in 2006. One, possibly useless, indication is that the #ada channel on freenode used to hover in the single digits and now regularly hovers around 70. People regularly enter the channel asking how to get started.
AdaCore, who are the chief stewards of the official GCC Ada frontend, GNAT, have been publishing weekly "gems" that are extremely informative for years.
Ada is quite a long way from COBOL. Having just completed its latest revision about a year and a half ago, Ada is very much cutting edge. Ada 2012 is hardly a maintenance revision like you may find for COBOL; it adds tons of new stuff like contracts and substantial improvements to concurrency and SMP support. Ada 2012 was too long after it's previous revision, Ada 2005, which was standardized in 2007, and was quite more substantial than even 2012.
