For a Productive Society...

Mon, 2010-04-12 17:09

#2

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

Mostly service jobs. As we automate things, jobs move to the areas that are not automated yet or new jobs appear enabled by the automation. If robots (or indentured infugees) can dig ditches, the ditch digger is promoted to "local hydrology manager" - he directs the robots rather than dig the ditches himself. Thanks to the improvements of ditch digging, sensors and simulation a new job of integrating all the information about the ditches appear, a "watertable control officer" who work with the ecology, geology, robot swarms and water flows to keep things working. The big thing is of course services: marketers, bankers, waitresses, nurses, prostitutes, doctors, scientists, journalists, educators, information managers, administrators, computing, design, engineering, entertainers, accountants, space traffic controllers, paralegals, paramedics, reputation managers, investigators, bloggers, babysitters, artists, barristas, funeral directors, critics, brokers, lobbyists, therapists, guides, cooks, rep referees... A EP accountant is running a bunch of AIs or other infomorphs to check the accounts rather than directly doing it themselves, just like the cleaner or ditchdigger. Guides or cooks give that extra personal touch you won't get from the standard AI bot. AI ergologists figure out how to organize or work with AIs and other automation to get things done well. Note that a lot of jobs that once required significant training now can be done more simply using automation. Medichines and automated robodocs has made it possible for rather unskilled paramedics to get people with serious conditions treated - the real doctor gets her salary for understanding biomedicine, medical automation and patient-doctor interaction really well.

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Mon, 2010-04-12 17:57

#3

bakho

Re: For a Productive Society...

This is a tendency of future societies ('modern' if you will). The primary and secondary job sector diminishes, while the tertiary sector grows. In the advent of technology like we have in EP (primarily AIs and AGIs, advances in robotics and whatnot), the first two sectors will basically be fully automated, with a small need for actual workforce. More about this on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-sector_hypothesis

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The only principle t

Tue, 2010-04-13 11:43

#4

ahather

Re: For a Productive Society...

Arenamontanus wrote:
investigators, bloggers, babysitters, artists, barristas, funeral directors, critics, brokers, lobbyists, therapists, guides, cooks, rep referees...

something tells me the funeral director isnt going to have much of a job

Tue, 2010-04-13 12:28

#5

Decivre

Re: For a Productive Society...

ahather wrote:
something tells me the funeral director isnt going to have much of a job

He might, in a location with a large bioconservative presence.

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Tue, 2010-04-13 13:41

#6

King Shere King Shere's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

The funeral director could also have a booming career at a re-sleeving clinics, ensuring that discarded & decommissioned morphs gets a send off. Sort of like the ship decommission ceremonies. Regarding what the clanking masses & the Zeros do, I think they compete or complement worker drones. That many things that could be done with AI & AGI arent. But its hard to differentiate one worker bee from the other. Thus outsiders can think the robotic workforce that assist the fabber & assemblers are AIs, when its the clanking masses.

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Tue, 2010-04-13 15:05

#7

Decivre

Re: For a Productive Society...

King Shere wrote:
The funeral director could also have a booming career at a re-sleeving clinics, ensuring that discarded & decommissioned morphs gets a send off. Sort of like the ship decommission ceremonies. Regarding what the clanking masses & the Zeros do, I think they compete or complement worker drones. That many things that could be done with AI & AGI arent. But its hard to differentiate one worker bee from the other. Thus outsiders can think the robotic workforce that assist the fabber & assemblers are AIs, when its the clanking masses.

Also, the funeral industry might get absorbed into the morph brokerage industry, essentially being the precursor to it. The biggest difference is that rather than sprucing up a corpse for viewing by a family, they are sprucing up a mindless living body for sale to another customer. The other basic asthetics are the same. As for clanking masses, I think that they can be used as an alternative to total automation. True egos are capable of making flexible decisions that AI simply cannot. Moreover, they don't need to be paid because they are indentured to work off the purchase of their bodies.

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Tue, 2010-04-13 22:34

#8

nick012000 nick012000's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

King Shere wrote:
Regarding what the clanking masses & the Zeros do, I think they compete or complement worker drones. That many things that could be done with AI & AGI arent. But its hard to differentiate one worker bee from the other. Thus outsiders can think the robotic workforce that assist the fabber & assemblers are AIs, when its the clanking masses.

I doubt that; odds are that most of them will have put their own customizations on their synthmorphs. Custom paint jobs, cosmetic additions, clothes and trinkets, et cetera. If you see a synth wearing a wedding ring, it's a pretty big hint that there's a person inside it, and not a mindless AI.

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+1 r-Rep , +1 @-rep

Tue, 2010-04-13 23:26

#9

King Shere King Shere's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

Company dress code. Even today, those policies can be quite strict. Perhaps the company wants to fake that most of the production is a fully automated one (and not a sweatshop). Also, Its frequent that workers customize their (company) belongings, tools & enviroment. So even the AI inhabited synth could be painted. It gives its "living" colleagues a better relation to it.

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Thu, 2010-04-22 14:45

#10

The Doctor The Doctor's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

ahather wrote:
something tells me the funeral director isnt going to have much of a job

But if the funeral director also owns an industrial nanodisassembler and a couple of growth tanks, the funeral industry might become part of the morph construction and recycling industry.

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Thu, 2010-04-22 16:49

#11

JediSoth

Re: For a Productive Society...

The Doctor wrote:
ahather wrote:
something tells me the funeral director isnt going to have much of a job
But if the funeral director also owns an industrial nanodisassembler and a couple of growth tanks, the funeral industry might become part of the morph construction and recycling industry.

"Need a new morph? Crazy Eddy has you covered! We'll take your trade in, resleeve you as an infomorph while we recycle that old, worn-out morph into a brand spankin' new, state-of-the-art morph made to YOUR specifications! We'll resleeve any morph for 39,999,999.95!"

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Thu, 2010-04-22 18:31

#12

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

A good "carne vale" where you get rid of your old morph always involves a funeral director organising the last rites. At least that is how we do it on Ceres. Some jobs transmute in fun ways. The gossip and reviewer gets merged into a reputation monitor. A barrista with food nanofabbing can do so much more than a latte. The pimp starts to manage a pod-cluster while the prostitute goes on to become a hedonic engineer, designing pleasurable scenarios and making sure there is enough variation to keep customers titillated. The old pest control job becomes far more exciting and dangerous when pests can be all sorts of biomodded animals, plants and fungi as well as nanomachines, computer viruses, AIs and emergent phenomena.

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Fri, 2010-04-30 03:43

#13

standard_gravity standard_gravity's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

Excellent thread! Just to add something (apart from praise), I think many people in 10 AF will have a quite different attitude to working that what we are used to in AD 2010. A job is less of a necessary evil, and more of a way to express yourself, do something interesting and fun, or to help your neighbours/habitat. Also, given for example skillware and loooong life expectancies, people will swap careers as and when they feel like it.

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Fri, 2010-04-30 21:56

#14

browwiw

Re: For a Productive Society...

As a water and wastewater plant operator I'd like to believe that municipal services will still, at least be headed by transhumans. Purpose programmed AI could be created to created to monitor the process of municipal plant (be it drinking water or power generation), but such fundamental services would need a sentient supervising the operation...at least in a universe with TITAN engendered distrust of AI. That is a good point: a lot of jobs that could easily be done by AI are probably still done by transhumans because of distrust of pure AI.

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"Let’s face it: Most of us are just here to shoot stormtroopers." - Gary M. Sarli

Fri, 2010-04-30 22:49

#15

The Doctor The Doctor's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

Arenamontanus wrote:
Some jobs transmute in fun ways. The gossip and reviewer gets merged into a reputation monitor. A barrista with food nanofabbing can do so much more than a latte. The pimp starts to manage a pod-cluster while the prostitute goes on to become a hedonic engineer, designing pleasurable scenarios and making sure there is enough variation to keep customers titillated. The old pest control job becomes far more exciting and dangerous when pests can be all sorts of biomodded animals, plants and fungi as well as nanomachines, computer viruses, AIs and emergent phenomena.

Ghostbuster: a mesh operator who specialises in hunting down and eradicating adaptive malware which has gotten far too smart for anyone's good and poses a threat (for certain definitions of the term). I just had this mental image of a virus packing a couple of zero days finding it entertaining to open and close airlocks of a habitat without evacuating the air inside, leading to a slow but steady drop in atmospheric pressure inside.

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Sat, 2010-05-01 06:00

#16

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

browwiw wrote:
As a water and wastewater plant operator I'd like to believe that municipal services will still, at least be headed by transhumans.

At least at some level (since there is a need to have someone to blame if things go wrong :-) ). But these kind of systems are also much more important and complex in EP. They are literally recycling every molecule, and the survival of the habitat or dome is quite dependent on them working well. So there will be a lot more intelligences involved in the process, and I would expect the status of people involved would be correspondingly higher.

Quote:
That is a good point: a lot of jobs that could easily be done by AI are probably still done by transhumans because of distrust of pure AI.

Yes. Not just because they could go TITAN, but also because there is a need for somebody with a legal responsibility. In polities where AGIs are not people they cannot be trusted to be responsible.

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Sat, 2010-05-01 14:05

#17

browwiw

Re: For a Productive Society...

Arenamontanus wrote:
At least at some level (since there is a need to have someone to blame if things go wrong :-) ).

Don't I know it!

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"Let’s face it: Most of us are just here to shoot stormtroopers." - Gary M. Sarli

Tue, 2011-10-18 13:17

#18

Herbo

Re: For a Productive Society...

I didn't want to simply stack on a new thread to the pile so I'm necroing this thread to take it in the direction of: "What jobs in EP are bottom of the barrel and still require either biomorphs or synths instead of bots and AI's?" and the semi related question of "Which jobs are being shifted away from automation by AI's, AGI's and bots in a post-fall society?" As far as written examples off the top of my memory, Panopticon Vol 1 has a good outlay of where infomorphs and other transhuman influence is plugged in to security and observation networks but that doesn't really seem to be a "crappy job for the peasants." Don't get me wrong...being indentured for 40 years and plugged into a time dilated simulspace (likely with very few amenities) for days or weeks on end watching the same 15 street intersections has to be lame...but it doesn't suck. What have you guys come up with in your games for the ever useful "poor shitkicker NPC with just the worst (yet believable) job imaginable." In 2011 we have people that hand out porn fliers, dig through mountains of "recycled" computer parts, and twirl signs about matress sales for their full time bread-n-water. Not exactly an engaging series of professions...yet those jobs could be done easily by bots and AI's in EP...

Tue, 2011-10-18 16:02

#19

Re-Laborat Re-Laborat's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

You have some curious ideas about jobs that do/don't suck, IMHO. The informorph job you suggest would make most people go nuts in very short order. On the other hand, passing out porn flyers could be quite entertaining. Once you get over your own embarrassment, you're free to enjoy other peoples' reactions. On the other hand, consider working a decade in a *COUGH* soil-sample lab day in, day out preparing 'soil' (pig-by-product 'soil') samples and then running tests on them for various microbes. Now THAT is a **** job. Given that an AI can achieve effective 'professional' quality results in most cases (skill 40) one has to be careful about dodging that dance with the question 'just what are people good for now, anyway?'

Tue, 2011-10-18 17:49

#20

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: For a Productive Society...

Re-Laborat wrote:
Given that an AI can achieve effective 'professional' quality results in most cases (skill 40) one has to be careful about dodging that dance with the question 'just what are people good for now, anyway?'

To quote myself :-) • People prefer people to do certain jobs, whether that is prostitution or being a priest. • AIs cannot be trusted for certain jobs. Of course, there are some jobs that cannot be trusted to transhumans either. • People can do some things AI are weak at. AI has fairly low active skills, cannot take much initiative, and often do not understand social relations. • AI cannot be held legally responsible, and some contracts may require a transhuman as executor. • Sometimes people are cheaper than AI. Consider that a cheap infomorph indenture will cost you the price of a morph and some upkeep spread out over the indenture period (5-20 years for unskilled services). If you promise a desperate indenture a synth (High cost ~ 5,000 credits) and get him to work for ten years, then the cost per month is 42 credits. A device AI costs Moderate (~1,000 credits) - the indenture is pretty competitive. One bad job for infomorphs is to run characters in simspaces. Imagine something like being a Disney character for all day, forced to behave in an entertaining but unpredictable way...

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Wed, 2011-10-19 09:12

#21

Myrmidont

Re: For a Productive Society...

Quote:
One bad job for infomorphs is to run characters in simspaces. Imagine something like being a Disney character for all day, forced to behave in an entertaining but unpredictable way...

I would have thought the advantage of Infomorph game characters was their unpredictability. Sometimes the Orc runs, sometimes the Orc fights. Sometimes the Orc just wants a sandwich, or can be convinced to join you on your quest. The Orc also fights smarter, and with more experience (hey, if I was running the Orc, I'd try and keep him alive, and running the Orc every day means I know all the moves). Other employment areas could be 'creativity' ones. AIs might put together a decent ad campaign, compiled from the best aspects of previous ones, but a proper Transhuman might be needed to put together a [i]great[/i] one, using something completely original. AIs could also be a security risk, being easier to fool or subvert than an Infomorph or transhuman monitor. Consider that a bank might use infomorphs, any five randomly drawn from a large pool to monitor the hour's transactions for fraudulent activity. Even if one of them can't be trusted or has been subverted, the other four could raise the alarm. Nearly every one of them would have to be corrupt or subverted for fraudulent activity to pass through their screening. This kind of thing could be possible with time dilation in simulspaces. If AIs were on the job, then similarities in their nature could allow one to infect others with malevolent software, or glitches that cause one AI to let fake credit requests through might work for all of them (eg: someone with a backdoor or exploit for an AI).

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