Is there any room for non-geniuses in the future?

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CatParty said:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/newly-discovered-eighth-grade-exam-from-1912-shows-how-dumbed-down-america-has-become
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...By Michael Snyder...
 
KatsuKitty said:
The only thing a machine cannot replace, at least in our current understanding of computability theory...are strong problem-solving aptitudes. Eventually, the only people who will even be capable of employment are geniuses in the top one percent of the IQ pool.

Where does this lead the real ninety-nine percent:
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Isn't it the 20%/80% rule?

However, if such a proportion of people were really weeded out from the general work environment like that, it might somehow turn out to be better than right now; you do not work and are living off of the automated system. You essentially have nothing but free time on your hands. I expect that such an era will result in an explosive resurgence in the creative art fields. The music library at the time will double in a quarter of the time it took to create the library we have now. All new sub-cultures will boom into & blip out of existence overnight. It will literally be the only commodity worth trading in because it's the only thing machines won't be made to do. We would collectively reach the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

On the other hand, I can easily see it becoming a dystopian society that is, as you fear, much more unrealistically demanding on the general public than ever before. I can see it being the case that people are treated more as livestock than as human beings. You regularly donate plasma & blood to make ends meet, you donate organs when desperate, prostitution is rampant, drug abuse becomes common, ect.
 
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MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
Isn't it the 20%/80% rule?

However, if such a proportion of people were really weeded out from the general work environment like that, it might somehow turn out to be better than right now; you do not work and are living off of the automated system. You essentially have nothing but free time on your hands. I expect that such an era will result in an explosive resurgence in the creative art fields. The music library at the time will double in a quarter of the time it took to create the library we have now. All new sub-cultures will boom into & blip out of existence overnight. It will literally be the only commodity worth trading in because it's the only thing machines won't be made to do. We would collectively reach the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

On the other hand, I can easily see it becoming a dystopian society that is, as you fear, much more unrealistically demanding on the general public than ever before. I can see it being the case that people are treated more as livestock than as human beings. You regularly donate plasma & blood to make ends meet, you donate organs when desperate, prostitution is rampant, drug abuse becomes common, ect.
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I think that the more likely scenario is that the general public will get some sort of support from government if only because of fear of revolution otherwise. There may be a large proliferation of arts but it likely will be less satisfying than traditional jobs and drug use will probably become significant in this underclass. There is no reason to think that creativity will be very substantial in the low intelligence underclass so it probably will just be an explosion of fanfiction and tumblr art and none of it will be commercially viable such to raise the status of the artists.
 
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"Is there any room for non-geniuses in the future?"

The world needs Ditch Diggers too, ya know.
 
Falling on the nurture, rather than nature side, of many key debates, I seriously doubt this will be in an issue in quite the way that is predicted. People are generally not naturally smarter than others, with perhaps a tiny, tiny, few exceptions who do not tend to exceed their peers anyway in any kind of serious field. Indeed, rarely have powerful or influential people been the ones who have been "proven" to be more intelligent (if such a thing can even be said to definitively exist.) The ones who triumph in any kind of dystopian robot society are still the ones who are popular, even if dumb as rocks. Honestly, I think the notion that people in STEM fields will somehow become the only valued, worthwhile people is (and pardon my immaturity) propaganda by hopeful nerds who have always dreamed that they would finally be on top. But the oligarchs, aristocrats, and robber barons of our day will always insure that their children are better educated, their children inherit the key companies and industries, and their children have all the power. That will be, at the end of the day, what matters for the rest of us. This problem could easily correct itself if enough emphasis is put on the right kind of education. The problem with it now is that education is terrible at communicating those ideas and instilling those aptitudes which it needs to in order to prepare people for this kind of society which it is predicting. Perhaps it is that way by design, perhaps it is that way by incompetence or corruption. In either case, it will still take at least another hundred years to weed out the need for most of us, and the wealthy, who were never technically needed will still find a way to press on regardless of their actual value as they always have. The poor may be individually screwed, but that was always the case with or without robots. Poor people on their own never tend to matter, and were always replaceable. The person working at Wal-Mart could be replaced with another person or another robot, but his situation won't change much. We could say we are entering a future in which all poor and uneducated people will be replaced with robots, and that would be terrible for them, but they have enough problems as it is already (some of which robots might even be able to solve!)

Honestly, tl;dr I think the future is a mixed bag in which humans will continue to function in the same way, with the same people on top and on bottom, as it has always been. There will always be some kind of need or use for us, because most people would not purposely design a system which invalidates their existence. If anyone does design a system which invalidates 80% of the population, it won't be the ones who are better at math that thrive, it will be the clever ones who are capable of manipulating the ones who are good at math.
 
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Hrm, quite an interesting posed question you put here.


Well, let’s consider. First thing’s first in spite of automation there are more jobs going than ever before. This is because various economies have shifted from being primarily industrial “making things” to that of the service economy. There is nothing to say that these jobs would vanish, and indeed it’s likely a need for these jobs and services would increase.

More finesse and creative parts of the industrial process still elude us and don’t seem to be finding a solution any time on the horizon

Creative problem solving in some industrial processes actually requires those men and women that you deride by having a lower IQ. Numerous labour saving machines have been designed by the men and women working at the “sharp end” of these highly automated car plants, none of whom are sitting there with a PHD in Mathematics.

While maths is about the purest form of science, it can actually be pretty terrible because typically, once a problem is ‘solved’ we rarely revisit it and this can leave to chaotic collapses every so often.


Furthermore, people have tried some of the more “automated” systems.

People loathe speaking to a robot when having to use a customer service phoneline and this is unlikely to change any time soon. What the loss of those minor jobs could lead to instead, is a rise in the number of customer service reps ready to take a call, thus keeping people in employment.


I also don’t see delivery bots actually working out too well compared to the more traditional methods of delivery. The prototypes in use at the moment include gps to tell the location, and a speaker system to allow an operator to try and talk to the perpetrator or inform them local law enforcement has been despatched.

People will find it a lot easier morally to steal from a bot because “nobody got hurt” than someone who could fight back.


That being said, a lot of the folks who posit that more rigourous STEM training etc will come about have a lot of history to point to.

Understanding via education has grown considerably since compulsory education has been a thing, and IQ tests have to continuously move in order to define what we consider a genius because human beings keep getting better each generation, people hovering at an average of 100 may have fallen into the top 10% category 20-30 years ago, with IQ tests being so mathematics heavy this kind of bodes well for those advocates.

The more we continue the more likely it is we will create more easier to understand programming languages, the base code will always have to be handled by 1% of super geniuses, but things such as configuration, installation and maintenance would be handled by “lesser beings” and the more we push automation into every day life, the more we will need these people when it inevitably goes wrong.

In other words, expect the service economy in extremis. There will be plenty of jobs that we find automating doesnt work out too well in spite of us trying, or in spite of humanity’s flaws we’d prefer the man to the machine.

One example of this I can cite is we have actually had the technology for aircraft to take off, fly and land since the late eighties, mature enough that we could have ceeded most of our civil aviation to this system over the past thirty-odd years, indeed the majority of our flights are handled by these automated systems.

Would anyone trust a crewless aircraft carrying hundreds of people?

Not really.
 
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