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Distribution of Wealth in a Robot-Driven World
An anonymous reader sent another piece by Marshall Brain. He continues his examination of a society where most manual labor is performed by machines, idling a large fraction of the current workforce. See his previous piece for background.
it's not hard, picture a world where everyone is on welfare, with a minimum stipend, that allows for near 0 opportunity for anything beyond mundane existance, for some television to watch, and others just having trees and dust to contemplate.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I thought that the article was rather well thought through until reaching this:
What if the way to achieve the strongest possible economy is to give every citizen more money to spend? For example, what if we gave every citizen of the United States $25,000 to spend? $25,000 sounds impossible the first time you hear it, but consider the possibility.
Putting aside the laugability of the idea of a capitalist government giving each person a years worth of middle income wage for a moment - it would be great if that could work, but it wouldn't. Price inflation would be rampant. Bread would cost $500 a loaf.
Unless some form of government inforced price fixing went into play (ha!), the money would just shoot right back up the tree.
Can I be a geek and not read the damn sci-fi? I wanna develop sci-reality, not be confined to a section of a bookstore designed to keep nerds busy and not changing the world.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
People predicted the working week would decrease dramatically over the last half-century. We now seem to work much harder. People predicted a paperless office. On the contrary we use more paper than ever because we can print on it so damn fast! Who knows what the outcome of more robots will be? Judging by the last 50 years it'll mean more and harder work for all of us.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
80 percent of the households in America make 50.6 percent of all the income in America.
The richest 20 percent of the households, on the other hand, make 49.4% of the income.
so the folks that fall between 21 & 80% make 1.2% of the income in this country?
I'm pretty sure the author means that 1/4th of that 80% make 49.4 of the money that is 50.6% of the national income, but it could use a little clarity on that point.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Remember when Michael Jackson didn't have an ugly nose? Yes, I am talking about the eighties. I think we ought to shutter ourselves from the greed grab that is the 2000's corporate culture for a moment every day to meditate, reflect, or just simply relax
Yeah, back in the eighties at least trolls had some integrity. Are you trying to say that the decade of porsche-driving-yuppies, reaganomics, Wall Street boom and nascence of Bill Gates empire was less greedy that the 2000's? Just because of *one* song? If you want to capture the spirit of the 1980's, read the "American Psycho" and watch the "Wall Street" (or even better the Brit TV-series "Capital City", the most shamelessly pro-yuppie manifesto I ever saw).
Does this mean that I can smoke coke off of coke bills in twenty years?
I, for one
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Perhaps I'm wrong but haven't we seen this before a few hundred years ago. I'm thinking of the poor unwashed masses rising up and overthrowing the rich elite minority. The french revolution, the american war of independance, the russians also killed off their royalty if I remember correctly. These days the people are the business leaders, and not royalty but they still have the same outlook on life. I wouldn't be too surprised to see the same thing happen again. When you leave people with nothing and no hope they have very few real reasons to not die for a cause. Keep the masses happy and comfortable and they don't want to risk losing that.
At some point, you just don't need all the people. Then, shit will happen.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I went to McDonald's this weekend with the kids. We go to McDonald's to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald's, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play. On Sunday, this decades-old routine changed forever. When we walked in to McDonald's, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, "Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!" "McDonald's has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. Would you like to try it?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!"
The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, "We want to do it!" So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. It's a simple system. Then it was time to pay. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. So I fed my bills into the machine. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. The transaction is complete.
We sat down at a table. We put our number in the center of the table and waited. In about 10 seconds the kids screamed, "When is our food going to get here???" I said, "Let's count." In less than two minutes a woman in an apron put a tray with our food on the table, handed us our change, took the plastic number and left.
You know what? It is a nice system. It works. It is much nicer than standing in line. The only improvement I would request is the ability to use a credit card.
I will make this prediction: by 2008, every meal in every fast food restaurant will be ordered from a kiosk like this, or from a similar system embedded in each table.
As nice as this system is, however, I think that it represents the tip of an iceberg that we do not understand. This iceberg is going to change the American economy in ways that are very hard to imagine.
Most buisnesses will do whatever it takes to make more of a profit. If the robots are cheaper than people, they will use robots. I doubt that most buisnesses consider the effect on employment or workers morale in buisness decisions. With NAFTA, many USA jobs that paid over $20 an hour left for Mexico where they pay a small fraction.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
There is only one certainty, and that is that we will run out of money. Corporations gather money faster than any force on the planet, and eventually, they will have it all sewn up. The consumer will have less money to throw around, because McDonalds, Microsoft, and Major Movie labels will have gobbled up the entire economy in their attempts to keep stocks rising, even as the balloon's dimensions stretch into dangerous proportions.
But humanity's so called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption.
Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise...
Ha! I knew I'd seen this before!
Blockwars: multiplayer and it's free!
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.
Sure... if you subscribe to the theory that a class-based culture is a healthy thing.
If you've read this gentleman's writings, you'll glean that this isn't just another routine shift in employment - we're heading toward a watershed event, a singularity. In the past, as old industries became obsolete, the work force laid off from one profession got dumped into the "generic labor" pool... y'know, the Walmart greeter, etc. What Marshall Brain is arguing - quite insightfully - is that the "generic labor" pool itself will be obsolesced, which has never happened before. What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform? What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
Moreover, and even worse: People claim all the time that the economy has survived everything before it, and will adapt. But some trends, promoted by such shifts, have just continued to go in an unhealthy direction. One of them is the concentration of wealth: the increasing percentage of resources owned by a tiny fraction of society. Another is the shift in wealth from individuals to corporations - never before has the economy dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
The impact of these trends is unknown, and ominous.
I suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the working skilled and the unemployed masses. Already, these two groups exist and rarely interact, but the differences are growing more visible stark by the day.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Sounds like the Slashdot moderation system.
So service based industries where employees of companies communicate face to with customers are going to become robots communicating with people?
More than anything else, people just won't accept this. As mammouth as Walmart is, they made the right decison in deciding against automated checkout. I've used automated checkout on a few occasions when it was absolutely necessary, and hated it. "So I'm checking myself out, therefore eliminating the need for you to pay a cashier $6 an hour.... and I don't get a discount?"
Consumers, by and large, aren't going to accept robots as waiters and robots as cashiers and target sales people. Now, certain positions will become robots.... but the vast majority of people will continue to keep their jobs.
>Take retail stores as an example. In 2003 we are seeing the deployment of automated checkout lines in stores all across the U.S.
At a local store in virginia they have several automated checkouts and one person supervising all those. One time the machine was very uncooperative and I began hitting it because the person wasn't willing to offer any assistance. The hitting helped and I could go on.
Personally, I am not going to miss those people who aren't even doing their simple job. At least if a computer/robot is unresponsive I can imagine why. But if an employee acts like this then I get much more upset because they don't do what I pay them for!
I did have this sort of idea several years ago and I figured out that the only way the society can survive is to turn socialist.
There are two ways of making money:
Rent your self out (i.e. do work)
Rent your other assets (i.e. invest in/own companies)
Now what happens when the returns you get on these swing. The freedom of capitalism allows the value of labour and investment to change. When your company becomes unproductive it folds. This is the capitalist method of weeding out the ineffective companies and allowing the market to be run by better companies selling cheaper/better products.
The other swing isn't very nice at all. If the value of labour drops below the bread line then the population simply cannot survive and we weed out the no longer useful members of society. This happens in stages. The first areas are the primary and secondary industries where machines can most easily replace humans.
Only after I figured this out did I find that socialists economists have been talking about this stuff for generations. Marx was predicting that the revolutions will happen in the industrialised world first because the value of their labour would drop first. This hasn't happened yet because we have been very good at producing jobs and although the value of unskilled labour in the US etc. is too low the exploitation of east Asia allows the living costs to be driven down too. Unfortunately this is not a situation that will last forever. East Asia will want more money and they will want to find someone else to exploit.
Are we doomed? Technocrats assume that the change will be so slow that a balancing out of the problems will not affect us. Raising the unemployment benefit to a sustainable living level allows people to not need to work while keeping them as consumers.
In other words the future might be quite nice. If you want to work then you will get paid well. If you don't want to work, then you get enough money to live on and all produce is very cheap as its made by cheap to run machines.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Looking at the example of J. K. Rowling in the article, I've had a brainfart.
Farming has been mechanized. So has manufacturing, and as the article predicts, service sector work will be done by machines as well. There will always be some demand for IT, though that's being filled more frequently by workers in countries like India with cheap labor. Same goes for accounting, call center and other formerly safe white collar jobs.
Essentially, almost the entire workforce will be replaced by machines.
So what's left that can't be done by machines?
Art. All art - writing, painting, music, computer games, etc.
That's how J. K. Rowling adapted, by writing books. So far, we don't know how to make machines that make art, thus we have to make art ourselves. Granted, there's a lot of competition out there for artists, but there are still many people out there who can make money through selling artwork and performances.
So are we entering the Artistic Economy? Maybe...
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
He posts the same fucking article every day. And Gay Nigger, +3:Insightful? Come on people, use your brain, not your stupidity...
Someone has to build the robots, and then once we teach robots to build other robots, then someone still has to build the robot building robots. Then, once we teach some robots to build the robot building robots...
So I guess human labor will be needed until AI has reached a level comparable to human (or at least dog) intelligence, and that aint happening any time soon. Not in any of our lifetimes at least.
Also he may be underestimating the time needed to build useful general purpose (probably bipedal) robots. We do have some well built bipedal robots like ASIMO but they still cost over $20,000 and, although they may be stronger, I don't think they can do all the physical labor that a human is capable of.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
... shouldn't we be more concerned about the distribution of wealth in a world where all the work has been outsourced to India?
how long must we endure this kind of socialist horseshit?
Every person installs their own electricity generation system (solar power on their houses, cars, property, etc), then they sell the excess electricity generated to the companies with the robots making goods and providing services. With the money from the electricity, they can buy goods and services.
The only way the 40 hour work week will be done away with is if there are another series of huge strikes against the 8 hour day. Dropping "full-time" to 6 hours would do 2 things. It would decrease unemployment and it would cause such a shortage of labor that businesses would be forced to innovate more efficient manufacturing. The only way to have more automation actually cause people to work less is if the people work less first. Otherwise everyone will continue to assume that they have to work 40hrs/week.
Help I'm a rock.
Nice copy of an existing Slashdot comment. He could have at least fixed the URLs.
I just got kicked in the stupidity yesterday, and boy, did it hurt!
What no one saw was that freeing up the most important capital, human labor, from inefficient application to the task of growing food for other purposes. What those who looked at the farms failing and saw disaster were missing was that now the farmer was able to go to the city and be basically as well off working in a factory, and that the farmer's children would go on to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or skilled laborers. Indeed, the industrialization could not have happened without the farm failures.
True, but you miss the point of the article, which is that the upcoming wave of automation won't just make farmworkers or industrial labourers or any other arbitrary sector of the working population redundant, it'll make damn near everyone redundant. It'll be a long wave, but it's coming. Damn, I was in an internet cafe an hour ago. Last time I was in they had staff, who would take your payment and give you a ticket for your purchased time. Tonight they have vending machines. OK, it's a trivial example but I was surprised.
We are heading towards a world where the only use for people is thinking up what to do next, and as plain as your nose, that isn't a job for everyone, not when we have seven or eight billion people in the world.
Mass automation is a huge opportunity and also a huge risk for billions of people. It has to be managed, not left to the whims of the market, which will be increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer extremely wealthy people.
If we continue to do what we did yesterday to meet the problems of tomorrow, we are destined to fail at every step. Mankind cannot rely on the market of the last millenium to meet the dizzying challenges of the new one. And if think it's all pie in the sky, look at the pace of change right now. It's only going to accelerate.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
He apparently has something against Gay Black people that causes him to want them moderated down.
Robot's won't be smart enough to make important decisions. The author suggests a socialist system is needed where wealth is generated through advertizing on money, natural resources, etc. The question is who will want to spend the time managing all the robots if they have the option to sit on their ass all day and surfd the web or whatever? Countries like the USSR, N. Korea, Cuba, etc. have shown the govt. is incapable of making these decisions. You still need a reward system to motivate people to want these jobs and weed out the incompetent, which capitalism does naturally. By taking away natural resources from private owners, you are already eroding on this principle. If you decide farm land, oil fields, forests, etc. are all now owned by the govt., you are inviting disaster by eliminating competition in these areas, and causing these industries to stagnate. The Star Trek ideal of a future world wthout money, for instance, is impractical for these reasons, and the author, although not encouraging the elimination of money, is headed in that direction. Using the Star Trek example, who really wants to be the red shirt that has a boring job and will likely be killed when he can sit at home in his personal holodeck all day.
Vote for Pedro
You mean, say, a society where:
Interesting that in almost every case, the robotics work WITH and ENHANCE the capabilities of the humans that operate them. Not 'take over their jobs'.
The author also makes the asinine assumption that robotic labor is always better- cheaper, more efficient, and so on. Maybe he should take a trip to some third world countries, where for the cost of one robot, you could employ a hundred factory workers for years upon years.
Oh, and all these robots-take-over-the-world philosophers always seem to forget:
Just like computers, robots aren't foolproof, they're not magical, and they're not going to simply save your business a shitload of money. They come with their own entire set of other problems, often many times worse.
The very concept of "machines which just 'work'" goes against the way almost every business in the world tries to keep their revenue stream- by forcing people to buy parts, hire company repair staff, and/or simply replace machines.
Nevermind that we still haven't made machines that can even approach understand human language as well as a human can, read handwriting as well, or move efficiently over ground as well as a human can...
Please help metamoderate.
"Most manual labor performed by machines"?
It already is! Recall that work is measured in joules (distance of mass per time). Then look outside the window at a modern European or American nation.
Where are all the joules (work) coming from? Not by human effort! 90% of it is from machines. Look at all the energy that goes into driving North Americans to their Labour Day holidays!
Some might disagree and say that all of the output of these machines isn't "work", as does the article author when claiming that 50% of modern work is in service industries (like McDonalds). That's because he's already accepted an altered definition of work that excludes non-human efforts.
Take the perspective of a 17th century economist and ask what tasks account for most of the "work" done in a nation- the list includes plowing, digging, hammering, sewing, scrubbing, and chopping (amoung similar things). Today all but one of those (scrubbing) are performed by machines. As Roblimo mentioned last week, agricultural food production is the only really important job. The US makes 5x more food than it did a century ago by employing 10x fewer people.
The time when most work is performed by machine has long since come. A more accurate description of the question facing us in the future (as addressed by the article) is: What happens when unskilled jobs cease to exist?
You cannot take an article that proposes to dish out $25,000 to everybody and not mention the word inflation once seriously.
I know posts above have already mentioned inflation; and whatever the argument the author of this must still cover the issue to show that he understands the possible consequences of his plan.
to be one of the 500 wealthiest people.
Also, break up the 500 largest companies.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
Eventually being at the top will become a cat-and-mouse game, and with the head cut off the drive towards centralization of wealth and power will be effectively stopped.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
On one hand we get people claming that they like the personal contact, they want a clerk or cashier to talk to and help them out. I find the people who feel this way are usually older people, and they'll be out of the picture soon. Younger people are totally at ease with computers and prefer them to some extent.
I can't remember a time without ATMs. Now on the few days I have to actually stand in line to talk to a teller, frankly, it's a pain in the ass. I can easily see how your McDonald's experience would be similar. The thing that annoys me the most about dealing with a human at a cash register is that sometimes they screw up. When they get your order wrong, when they give you the wrong change, etc.
Which is why we have poverty, prisons, welfare, and the republican party.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Those who own the automation will prosper.
Very few people actually make anything anymore.
Most poor people don't make anything: Truckers, people who work in stores really just help move goods around. Same for people who work in restaurants.
The middle class people all sit in cubicles. God knows what they do, but they sure as hell aren't making anything.
The upper class are businessmen, lawyers and doctors. Doctors keep people alive longer, businessmen move money around, and lawyers, as far as I can tell, have no function at all.
Nobody really needs to do the vast majority of today's jobs.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
When wealth isnt distributed, crime goes up, terrorism goes up, etc etc.
The idea that we can fight terrorism with bombs isnt very smart, in the end the only way to solve this problem is with jobs, education, etc.
This isnt going to work because I refuse to give up my job to fight terrorism.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There are some times when I really would like automatic check out. say I'm in a store to just buy one item and there's a line around the block with people, carts full of crap, and the person at the register is filling out a check.
Sometimes I want people to help me, sometimes not. It would be nice to have the choice. I don't agree with replacing all the clerks by any means, but there are many a time when I just want to get in, get out, and I could ring myself up a lot faster, and I'd do it. I'm the type of person, that if there isn't a clerk bagging the groceries, I step in and do it myself.
I dont understand why the author went off on the tangent about the $25K-per-citizen. I mean, that is totally crackpot economics, since the author's plan would simply cause rapid price inflation. But anyway, what does this have to do with the robots???
I would welcome robotics in mining, but I have a job no matter what.
-cp-
Mass automation is a huge opportunity and also a huge risk for billions of people. It has to be managed, not left to the whims of the market, which will be increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer extremely wealthy people.
The great amounts of capital are not increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer extremely wealthy people. It increasingly owned by normal people, specifically through their insurances and retirement funds.
These discussions are interesting, but the more extreme predictions are worth taking with a grain of salt. The imminent arrival of an automated society where everyone is unemployed has been predicted for 200 years; yet unemployement has fluctuated around a few percent or a little more in the down cycle.
Tor
In the US, the ammount of housework per day has not gone down much in the last 150 years. This is despite the advent of vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, etc. Instead, we have found ways to use these inventions to change the way we do things, so that we can fill up our free time with the same old chores....
;-) Can we all retire early??
:-) Failure to pass without a medical/learning disability would put one on probationary status, and two successive quarters in a row might require suspension of some benefits.
Same thing regarding the work force. Sure, it is painful for the older population who may not have the skills to compete, but that is an argument for lowering the retirement age, IMO
The fact is that a robot-driven world will mean that MUCH more will be done, and that everyone's job will be that of information management (whether a corporate manager type, a researcher, or a technician). In general, I predict very little change to wealth distribution. After all what does an entry level computer technician make today compared to a McDonalds fry cook..... In my state it is only about 30% more, if that.... The differences will be:
1: More education will be required to find a job. This means that schools will take up a larger percentage of our economy and wages will go up to compensate.
2: Raw weath (savings, assets, etc.) distribution will probably be relatively unchanged, though the quantities accumulated would go up with productivity.
How do we get there?
What else would be necessary?
This may offend some people, but it is what I honestly think. Forget affirmative action-- it is based around an industrial age model, and will not be able to provide lasting benefit as the economy progresses. There are other, better, though costlier ways to ensure equal access to education:
1: Start programs aimed at donating used computers to low income families. Computers should be preloaded with an operating system, a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, etc.
2: Open branch campuses of local community colleges in the inner cities, and in low income areas. Pair these with community technology centers, where people can go to use computers, learn about technology (computer operation, repair, etc). and hopefully better prepare themselves for the new economy.
3: Have the federal and/or state government pay for full tuition through the first bachelor's degree. Masters and PhD's could be offered on a merit basis via teaching assistanceships, etc.
4: Require folks on welfare who do not have a bachelor's degree to take some classes
Why won't this fly?
1: Education is expensive and too many people see it as a luxury rather than something which is necessary for our continued economic development.
2: Cost, cost, cost. The current solution we have is far less expensive, although it doesn't seek to elevate *every member* of society to the point where everyone can participate in the information revolution. For this reason I say that our schools are about 30 years (maybe more) behind our current needs.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"An economic security system eliminates poverty. Under this system, every citizen in the United States receives the money needed to live a middle class existence, regardless of whether or not they are working. "
Hahah. Maybe I'll just not work then! I receive a middle-class income anyway, right?
So I guess human labor will be needed until AI has reached a level comparable to human (or at least dog) intelligence, and that aint happening any time soon. Not in any of our lifetimes at least.
I disagree. I think the Turing Test will probably be passed by a computer program between 2040 and 2050. And after that, we'll be living through the Singularity, where prediction gets difficult.
That's BS. Babies are cheaper to produce. And their life span in the most undeveloped countries is about 60 years. Who the heck would pay a fortune for the latest technological marvel if you can have a Mexican illegal immigrant do the same.
You make some good points, but I think the main problem with Michael's article is the shear amount of crack that he is smoking. Yah! Lets give $25K to everyone in the country, so everyone can be really happy and have nice middle-class lifes. In the opium laced utopia that he is currently inhabiting that makes sense, but here on planet earth we have a thing called inflation.
So what happens when you pump $25K x 300M = 7.5 trillion dollars into the economy? Do you think that the relative value of money does not decrease?
Now, don't get me wrong, he has one or two nice ideas in his list - particularly taxing extended copyrights. That one is a gem. But none of them are even with a few orders of magnitude of $7.5T.
An issue that he doesn't touch upon is what happens when the lower end of the gene-pool is freed from drudgery. Work is not just an economic activity, it also has a social function. Consider the collapse in living quality in communities where large numbers of men have been laid off of work, think of the fall of the coal industry in British northern industrial towns in the 80's.
What do you think the effect of releasing 80M people who don't have a high quality of education, have no great skills or abilities (his argument, not mine) and no ambitions from the workforce. Not just that, but giving them lots of cash and saying, here, go and enjoy your new life of freedom.
Does he really believe that a new Renaissance will result? Has he never seen Ibitha uncovered?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
But political and business leaders won't let it. Scientists and engineers in the 1920's and '30's determined that not only was this type of society possible, but also but also necessary in order to be able to distribute the vast amount of wealth that machines were capable of producing for us. They even developed a soundly logical and rational model of society that would allow this to work.
The problem of course is that in order to enact this "society of abundance," you need to abolish all the relics of scarcity. Mostly this means money, and by extention, political control of technology. Think of what happened in the Great Depression. Factories were producing so many products (like food) that there was plenty for everyone, but because the money used to distribute it was still scarce, the value dropped below the margin of profitability. No one could make money selling it, thus no one made money. Add to that people losing jobs to these machines and you have a society that has enough for everybody, but no one can afford even the dirt-cheap prices. You can't sell air, it's too abundant. If we pollute it enough, however, we will be able to because it will be scarce.
So the question is not a matter of when will technology be advanced enough so that this can happen, it's how can we tell enough people that this kind of life is already possible, and circumvent political and corporate attempts to stop it from happening because they will lose all their "power" and "control"?
There is a reason that the most popular social movement of the '30's nad '40's is now completely unknown to people today. It's because it just might work.
We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and technique serving the social needs of a new civilization. - Albert Einstein
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert
What I find interesting is that the author is mostly concerned about finding new ways for the Government to raise money.
No options in there for SPENDING LESS, only taxing more.
Making $60,000 last year, I was in a 33% tax bracket -- not counting Social Security and Medicare withholdings. That means, the government took over $19,800 of the money I made in Income Tax. They also took about $6,000 in Medicare and Social Security. That totals about $26,000. I received aboout $3,000 in a return, so that means the gov't took about $23,000 from me.
Damn, that is close to the $25,000 the author was talking about giving to every American. (hint hint)
A simpler soultion to raising more taxes, ad revenue, etc. would be to STOP TAXING INDIVIDUAL INCOME and provide an opt out for Social Security and Medicare.
While the poor are able too get all their Income Tax refunded to them, it would be better if it wasn't taken out to start with. Instant 20% (or so) raise!
Taxing corporations more would simply mean those corporations would pass the taxes on down and the consumer would end up paying them all anyway.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Seeings how people like downloading their music, movies and books for free off the web, I don't think your prediction has much hope of coming true. There will be tons of artists out there, probably even more than ever before, but they won't be making nearly enough money to make ends meet.
By freeing up human capital from making cars and clothing and other labor intensive tasks,
;-)
financial services, creative services, IT itself could be spawned.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find the term "human capital" offensive?
If you are talking about the plebs, I much prefer the term "human cattle".
http://jesus.everdense.com/
to robot design. Hmmm, must remember to make sure to tell the sw writers to include a no-terminator/no-matrix function to supress desires to destroy or enslave the human race (and put me out of a job).
Vote for Pedro
i can imagine a day where robots do a large majority of the grunt work. but if all these companies are firing their employees and buying bots, who are they going to sell their stuff to? unemployed people can't buy stuff. the ironic part of capitalism is that the consumer is protected merely because they are needed as consumers. people must have money in their pocket. and this guy is just afraid of the future like a thousand before him.
Right into the National Healthcare General Fund!
Anarchism on the other hand, where the goal is to reduce labour in favor for more creative work, robots would be a good option, even if they do cost more.
Whenever someone says "that's why capitalism is so great" they need to stop and think if what they are talking about is going to be better for society, or if it is going to make someone more money. Unless it makes more money, it ain't going to happen in a capitalist society because it's goals are indervidual profit, not benifiting society.
Or is my calendar wrong?
Remember the old diners? Where you walk in, sit down at a booth, and a smiling (or not) waitress takes your order? Then you rummage through the jukebox console hanging from the end of your booth, pick a couple of songs, and shovel a quarter in? Enjoy a couple of tunes whole you wait for your meal...
So the difference is now the console takes your order and your money - but it doesn't play music because that would disturb the others that may not like your taste. But that doesn't matter anyway, because you won't even be able to enjoy one song before your food gets shoveled onto the table by someone earning $5 an hour. So.. there are fewer fast food employees, which means even more profit for the clown. But what about the person who brings the food?
Will there be a throwback to the old days where you could leave change on the table knowing it would go to someone who did some actual work? Probably not, because YOU are the person placing your order AND busing your table. You are oblivious to the person doing the work, because she only brings you a tray and then wipes the table down with disinfectant AFTER you have left.
I am sure something else will come along to reestablish the balance. But I honestly don't see it happening before a bunch of people end up with their heads on sticks.
Wealth isn't distributed. Wealth is earned.
ya, I can't think at all today, can i?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
10 Million unemployed and pissed off people, out of work and looking for a leader! Soon my plan will be complete! Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Thank you, Mr. Gay Nigger, for showing us the benefits of Open Source ideals applied beyond software.
Not two days ago this same statement was posted by another slashdotter.
In many other forums, this would be considered plagiarism or trolling. However, you have gone the extra mile to:
1) Not change a damn word.
2) Not give credit to the original author.
Through these actions you've conclusively proven that you can increase your karma while barely raising an eyebrow.
Mr. Gay Nigger, I commend you! You a exemplary slashdotter in true form!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
okay, once in a while there's a truly funny troll :-)
Thanks dude, that was good.
The solution therein proposed is to:
I went on to describe market democracy:
As to what humans are good for:
Seastead this.
Republicans want 100% of the wealth while the rest of the losers get exactly 0%.
Expect lots of people to starve to death even in the world of robots.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Just one view of many ....
...) for a lifecycle, why would any member of the Capitalist Republic accept the burden/waste. Capitalist Republic members have the liph3 N |)34+h virtual-power that is granted by current human societies, laws, government, ... and proportionally enhanced and accounted for by wealth/possessions/positions.
... would just cost to damn much to benefit the greedy delusional megalomaniacs that would rule the world.
If the ruling class remains the wealthy greed motivated International Capitalist Republic, then there may be a war of extermination to diminish the global population of unneeded carbon based organic labor resources/units.
Robotic units will be self-replicating and relatively inexpensive to produce when total cost are amortized for a robotic unit life-cycle.
Human units are self-replicating, but considering support requirements (development, education, health, retirement,
The future potentially hold nothing of value for most humans. Sanctified Suicide, by the wealthy religious of the Capitalist Republic, will significantly assist in the reduction of excess human resources, because taking weak-wasteful others to heaven (with your explosive exit) as your slaves will be praised as granting sainthood and/or great rewards.
We do not have a society/culture that would use robots to improve the quality of life and human condition. Education, Learning, Survival,
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Look at the "common household tasks" that robots are attempting to control now: opening garage doors and vacuuming. Yippee. These robots of the future better be silent, unobtrusive, nimble, cheap, supremely safe, and utterly reliable or I'd rather leave it up to a housecat as to whether or not there are mice in the house. The true automation will come in communications and monitoring, where the entire house is a cell-phone, the plumbing tells you when it's leaking, and you can watch TV on any wall. Robots for decades to come are just going to be one more thing that can break down, potentially dangerously, considering that they are "deciding" to do stuff on their own. Until a robot can scratch it's own itch, so to speak, and effectively repair itself (or work seriously impaired), they will remain where they are: welding and haz-mat work.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
In recent times I have thought up a law that seems to be governinging all the savings that we make by doing our work more efficiently. It goes like this:
Savings which occur due to a more efficent production process are (partially) lost through an increase in marketing and sales activities.
This law seems to espescially hold in area's where goods can be diversified on the basis of quality, image, or some other intangible characteristic. It doesn't hold for clothespins, sand or anything else that doesn't have real distinguishable characteristics. That is also why I think the central point of the article won't hold. If machines do stuff more efficiently, then we will come up with other jobs for people to do.
Use Adsense for Charity
This guys solution to the problem is to introduce what he calls "extreme" taxes on the uber wealthy, re-introducting the money back to the public and the people who "earned" it.
Isn't this called socialism and hasn't it been proven by such great welfare states as France to be a complete disaster for the ecnomy that adopts it?
So, robots take over most jobs and our solution is to become a bloated welfare state that makes Europe look tame by comparison?
Next wack job with an economic theory please..
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
If you haven't noticed, when people are unemployed, they find other outlets for their time and energy, whether that's volunteer work, going back to school, or starting their own business.
All that is really needed to make a smooth transition is extensive amounts of education for a new set of jobs.
Consider: If the cost of food and manual labor services drops to near zero, then people will have MORE money to spend on other items. Therefore those industries when human abilities are still needed will GROW tremendously, and the consumption of travel, entertainment and other luxuries will become even more widespread than they are today. As has happened previously throughout the centuries, innovation will gain in value relative to craftsmanship(we don't see scribes or blacksmiths around much anymore except as a luxury service - we can manufacture what they used to do for us. Likewise with the move towards abstracted art - photographs can contain more realism than any painting)
This will in turn cause those businesses to expand, demand new jobs, etc. and therefore solve our problems, and while it might be a rough few years during the transition, people will eventually find the skills the new economy will require.
Of course, if humans become obsolete in all respects, that's another thing altogether...
Employees would never put up with Manna 1.0 (Computer Manager in the Autors story 'Manna')
Could you imagine being told how to take out the trash in minute detail EVERY single day? I think employees, even those in unskilled labor take some pride in being able to do jobs on their own...it isn't comforting to be told every step to washing the floor...it's patronizing. After the first day, I KNOW where we keep the damn mop.
That's when the Mayan calendar ends and computers/robots replace humans on Earth.
In the old days, cartoons were drawn by artists, frame by frame. Senior artists did the main frames and juniors did the "in betweening". Today, in-betweening is done by software. How long will it be until a single person can create a full-length animated movie? How long until the creation process itself is done by software?
I'm in one of the groups mentioned in this article as prime for robotic replacement. Reading it I couldn't help wondering what effect it might have on me. I'm a cycle messenger in london town.
Thinking about it, I suppose not robotic, but computer replacement threatens me most. We're protected by the archaic laws in this country that means that a great deal of legal work, things requiring signatures etc. cannot be done digitally where they may elsewhere in the world. Can't see that lasting forever though. There's also a lot of digital betamax, photo prints etc. media type stuff that needs to be carried that in the forseeable future 99% will be carried digitally. This leaves me with physical goods, a parcel where the good in its physical form (not some kind of data or legal acknowledgement, the amount of cheques I carry is actually shocking) is of value. Clothes for fashion mags, other parcels, swanky city types leaving their wallets in brick lane curry houses. This cuts down the workforce by 90% I suppose if I think of it, but what it does leave is the most skilled 10% to take up the work. I can't see a machine doing my job as far as actually riding about town goes, understanding a map on paper is one thing, riding on a road in real life with mixed traffic, pedestrians etc. is another. I also imagine most city roads to be like londons, that is pretty freeform and quite dangerous not to mention Londons notably insane geography. Maybe a sort of elite hardcore, maybe with an insular culture could be a factor of this new society. A relatively small computer clique who keep technology running globally, a small amount of skilled bikers to navigate the high density city areas (long distance transit seems more liable to automation with vehichle only motorways) and soforth. Small widley distributed groups of people with specific skills may become the way in this new society.
What this means I don't know, maybe you lot have something good to say about it.
Maybe Darwin isnt always right?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
What about work on the robot assembly line? Of course robots can be used on a simple assembly line, but who is going to build those robots. I think it would just be a continuous process of robot building, repairing, upgrading etc.
While skilled labor is always more desirable, I think there will be a need for armies of general labor for building millions upon millions of all different kinds of robots, some specialized, some general purpose. Eventually any particular industry may advance to the level of robots building robots building robots building robots, but that will take time for any particular industry.
All humans have a degree of intelligence far greater than any current or near future machine. So the workers who would have donated their brute strength will simply have to think for a living. They can do it. They will have to.
When the day finally comes (maybe in the next millenium) that machines have reached the intelligence of humans then that will truly be a kind of singularity. Although, even then someone will have to build them and keep trying to improve their intelligence even beyond our own.
Needless to say, by that point, and really even before, at least the general purpose robots will have become artificial people in a legal sense with all of the same rights. So you wouldn't be able to just buy the advanced AI models. You would have to pay them just like the biological humans.
I'm not sure what the advantage would be. They may be stronger and less vulnerable to certain kinds of damage (and more to others), but they can make mistakes, and it is unlikely they will have an endless energy supply. They may not need to "sleep", but they will probably need to quick charge or exchange their batteries from time to time.
Competing with robots for the same jobs does seem kind of disheartening, but robot building and repairing/debugging will always be needed and it seems like a much more interesting job than mopping floors or nailing two by fours.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
So shouldn't the remaining 5% of the population (like many of us here (wow, is that statement elitist or what!?)) try to do something for/with the others?
I've always felt that trying to eliminate the undesirable and banal jobs for which you need little skill and intelligence is good for society; of course, I consider myself in the 5%.
OK, so we won't allow them to work, because they would screw everything up then. What next? What else can they contribute to society? What do we do with those people who have by our decisions been reduced to mindless blobs and leeches to society?
it's not hard, picture a world where everyone is on welfare, with a minimum stipend, that allows for near 0 opportunity for anything beyond mundane existance, for some television to watch
Or would you rather not feed them at all?
This whole vision of a mostly workless society is the logical conclusion to a sentient species' destiny; however, it seems to contradict every human principle ever devised.
In conclusion: I, for one, welcome our new vagrant underlings!
(/me ducks projectile fresh produce)
My data from the research I've done states otherwise. Show me the distribution of wealth please on a piechart.
Its a proven fact that our salaries have not risen with inflation.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Just the topic of this article showes its bias. Most people with wealth, earned it. People who sit on thier butts and get welfare are the only ones who have it distributed to them. In the future, just like now, wealth will have to be earned, probably just in an easier way
Okay, the question is why get a $2 million+ robot to do something a person will do for minimum wage? Robotics(the physical bodies made for work) are nowhere near as interesting (or potentially earth-shattering) as true artificail intelligence would be.
Robots simply will not replace human workers in most jobs for quite some time, and when they do so, it will be in a gradual process, not the catastrophic "10 million left jobless" situation the author describes. They're way too expensive for normal labor right now, and the price is not likely to drop too steeply. What's more, look at how cheap human labor is - most of the things we buy are made for minimum wage or less, some of it a lot less. How the hell is some robot going to compete with that?
However, there are some interesting issues regarding AIs and the economy that aren't addressed in the article. If you've seen the Animatrix shorts "The Second Renaissance" Paart 1 & 2, there was an interesting story about how AIs rose to power by having superior prductivity and financial skills, and created their own nation with their wealth. The most important thing about that was the concept of AIs being allowed to own property, and make financial desicisons - we tend to think of even advanced AI as simple property, with no need to own other things or have money. However, I think it's likely that AIs will be used by financial institutions to handle stocks and investing and so forth in the near future - the data they have to interpret will be much more limited than even a turing test, being just numbers and statistics, and their decision-making speed will be an advantage against human brokers. It will be interesting to see if they go on to become legal owners of property from there - if non-person entities like a corporation can own things, why not an AI?
Does this mean wealthy plantation owners can indulge in luxury while their 100 robot slaves toil, underoiled, living in squalid shacks?
It looks to me like the struggle of the labor movement, all over again.
I cry for our robot brothers.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
The article is true in most respects except in its implied assumption the unemployed will just take the loss of home, food, security, etc without trying to somehow secure that anyway. Interestingly enough this concentration theory reminds me of old Marx who pretty much said the same thing with the addition that the workers would rise and throw over the system. Quite the opposite happened, the system rose up (commies, nazis) and took away peoples freedom.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
I believe the Terminator came before the Matrix, and it too, has the same concept.
Learn something new.
Now then, look at the first column, the bottom 20%. The upper income limit of the bottom 20% has increased by 33% from 1967 to 2001. On top of that, the average household size has been falling, so that money does not have to be spread around to as many people. Now obviously, the top 5% has increased at a faster rate, the lower limit on the top 5% has doubled in the same period.
The point I'm trying to make is that even though wealth has been concentrating more in the upper classes, the lower classes have been gaining as well! In fact, one of the reasons the wealthy are gaining faster has nothing to do with technology, it's because of feminism. Whereas 35 years ago, the wives of most wealthy men were housewives, today they're more likely to have high paying jobs themselves, being doctors, lawyers, what have you. In contrast, poor women have always had to work, simply as a matter of survival. Anyway, until we find a 10 year period where incomes fall for any age group, I think we can dismiss this as hysterical FUD.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Read the article.
Take a moment and THINK!
What the author is describing is the advance of machines to the point where people on the left side of the bell curve will be unable to compete with robots.
What new jobs will the people who lose their relatively unksilled jobs do?
"But am I certain that something will come along next to consume our collective labor"
The problem is that "our collective labor" is going to include ever more efficient macines.
Now, as a potential employer, why would I hire people to do this job when I can buy or lease a robot to do it for a heck of a lot less money - plus I won't have any nasty labor relations issues.(Remember that if I were to hire people anyways because I have some strange "humans first" mentality, I will soon be out of business becasue of my more rational and less compassionate competitor.)
I don't know if the approach suggested in the article will work - it sounds an awful lot like the approach Mack Reynolds came up with back in the 70s (with his "Guaranteed Basic" - which was a pretty dystopian society), but any approach that does not come up with some permamnent method of dealing with the folks on the left side of the bell curve will guarantee a non-viable society.
If you think you are on the right side of the bell curve, just wait - think about how long it will take for the machines to reach intellectual parity with you? with your children?
And if you think that engineering smarter kids (which I think is a good idea- just not a solution to this problem) will stave this off, consider:
How long to get from "Specialized Machine Intelligence 1.0" to SMI 7.0? (12-15 years using Moore's Law?)
How long to get from Natural Human Intelligence 1.0 to Enhanced Human Intelligence 6.0? I could see new human enhancements that double human intellectual capability coming out every couple of years ( call it WinPimp's Corrolary to Moore's Law), but how long does it take before our enhanced human comes "online" (ie enters the economy as a producer rather than just a consumer)? The machines will still have a massive economic advantage over humans. If we don't start dealing (and dealing properly) with the problem no, how will we deal with it in 15-20 years?
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
not that the democrats are any different
check out campaign contributions for a indicator
Salute our forth coming Robot overlords.
I know, its getting old, but it had to be said.
--C. alan
We're headed towards the "Paperless Office". The road is longer and bumpier than was first imagined, but we're getting there.
The only times I print out stuff is when it needs to be portable (like printing driving directions) and I don't want to putz with putting it on a PDA.
Or sometimes, flipping through a document is easier than viewing it on the screen. I wish I had a PDF viewer which was really, really fast. Maybe something that could pre-render pages without gobbling massive amounts of memory...
Stuff like printing out code is almost useless. How can I tell if I'm looking at the latest version?
A lot of the notes and stuff I write these days goes into documentation, or the coporate wiki. Writing something down on paper only benefits me. Putting it on the wiki can potentially benefit everyone.
People are born, live, and die. If you are lucky, you will have the bare essentials of life during that time. We need water, food, and shelter. We also need a host of other "things" which make life bareable, even bring happiness.
When I was younger and more of an idealist, I thought that we were all working towards a higher goal, towards a world where we will solve pressing problems of society, culture, and knowledge. As I've grown older and more jaded. I find that "we" as a whole, really have no goals in mind other than what seems to be personal gratification. This is sad.
I'd like to use science and technology to build a world where the basics of life are essentially free. I would assume the first place to use robots and automation would be in the production of free clean drinking water, and food, then on to shelter, etc.. But what do we use robots for? Vacuming, charming kids with robotic dogs and cats, cell phones for communicating frivilous chit-chat. We as a society seem to have no direction and appear to be going nowhere faster and faster.
Those who do well in the world don't seem to be reaching back to give others a hand. I suppose this is the way its always been. To each his own, and survival of the fittest mentality. I suppose giving creature comforts like food, water, and shelter to every fool on the street might actually make things worse. I don't have the answer to that. But it seems that the entire system could be automated somehow so that those who support the system get the just rewards for free. Hmmm, sounds a bit like open-source eh?
I suppose I long for something like the Star-Trek culture, without the geeky nature that this involves. Can't we all just work towards a future that brings happiness for everyone? Why is there so much hate and personal vengance in the world?
-2 -2 +3 +1
Really, I concur (look at the last 100 years) ... something big will happen within the next fifty years and cause my death at a very old age (not much wasted). Many can see this coming, but don't expect Capitalist to support changes those that rule never want change. The government won't notice until it is to late to address sanely, expect the government to respond to problems by significantly increasing whoops (RIAA, DCMA, TIA, PA-1/2) and tragedies (what did we do for the Enron and ... unemployed/retirees). What I see now, we are probably fucked (Okay, I am known for being paranoid and pessimistic (PP). I hope I am wrong, but it depends on US and EU making some major changes to help all humanity (Yep, we're fucked).
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Be more careful when you're plagiarizing. :)
If the government were to seize money and then redistribute it, that's called.. oh I dunno.. COMMUNISM.
No, that's called THE CURRENT US GOVERNMENT. They are just going about it in a half baked way. The Communists went about it with more dedication (still not complete, though; there were still plenty of privileged classes in the USSR) and failed abjectly. Will the US fail just as abjectly?
Think Howard Dean
Like missionary? http://www.realdoll.com/image/mai/mai08.jpg
Jeez, didn't you learn anything from AI? People will accept them just fine, as long as they're not too freaky to interact with. Just give 'em a while to get used to them. People said the same thing aout ATMs remember.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Did he mention, or factor in, anywhere that robots could dramatically reduce the cost of living as well?
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
First off, here's here's what people really do in the US.
Robots aren't going to make a dent in many of those categories any time soon. Production is already very heavily mechanized and automated. Except for clothing, few things are made by hand in volume any more.
The problem is that computers are still way too dumb. Computers and the Internet should have put a much bigger dent in the "office and administrative support" category than they have so far.
If the developed world really had to cut employment (say, to fight a WWII sized war), much could be done. The US is over-stored by a factor of two (how many malls are near you?). There's far more advertising and unnecessary product variety (there were only five different consumer VHS VCRs at peak, despite the number of different front panels) than is of any use. Forced standardization of business practices (there are only a few allowed forms of Medicare supplement policies, so direct price comparison is possible) would simplify business operations and reduce advertising.
None of this seems likely, unless, of course, North Korea makes their move.
This is exactly why Europe has such a lavish welfare system -- Hitler capitalized upon uncared-for Germans who were jealous of the wealthy overclass (with a significant amount of Jews). This was only 60 years ago and Europe is not going to make the same mistake again, though the economics of welfaring a section of the population which have a significant percentage of people who just want to drink beer and sleep around has got serious problems too. Paying people to be slackers isn't good for the country, though bloody revolution (you better be careful, corporate America) is a poor solution, offered up by the people who want to be the next aristocrats.
IMO, the solution involves the "haves" having compassion for the "have-nots" which means welfare only for the purpose of getting them a niche where they can be productive (and relatively happy doing it) for themselves, their families and the aggregate society. Ted Turner, you fuck, are you listening?
Peace & blessings,
bmac
True peace and happiness are only a wish away -- www.mihr.com
Wow, this really gave me a chill...
Managed? By whom? You?
"An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the values 0 and 1." -- 6.1.2.5, C99 standard.
What about work on the robot assembly line? Of course robots can be used on a simple assembly line, but who is going to build those robots. I think it would just be a continuous process of robot building, repairing, upgrading etc.
Robots in general production deployment are currently highly specialised. The human labour involved in building and repairing new robots cannot be carried out by todays robots.
But the human body as a repair and build machine is emminently replacable, given advances in joint construction, tactile feedback, and limited AI. There is no technical reason that the humans who build todays robots cannot be replaced with more generally functional robots. This will happen.
All humans have a degree of intelligence far greater than any current or near future machine. So the workers who would have donated their brute strength will simply have to think for a living. They can do it. They will have to.
All humans may have the capacity for doing thinking jobs, but they don't (currently) have the motivation or psychological makeup for it. Society is not geared up for producing a race of thinkers.
And when/if it does, what are they all going to think? You can't have everyone making decisions beyond their own personal activity. Are we all to become artists? Certainly we can't all become leaders. Nor can we all become scientists. The information management problem alone would be gargantuan.
Competing with robots for the same jobs does seem kind of disheartening, but robot building and repairing/debugging will always be needed and it seems like a much more interesting job than mopping floors or nailing two by fours.
As I said, those build / repair / debug jobs are emminently automatable.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Marx will yet have his day.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
anyone want to guess what's going to happen to a billion unemployed Chinamen? It might lead to class warfare in the US, but it will be apocalyptic in the manufacturing sector.
I've had enough of adverts, I really don't like this idea. Putting it on money!? On the side of nationally important monuments. I'm not sure what it does to the value of a nation, imagine big ben with a big "Coca Cola" printed on it. .. no! Money is integral to my life, money should be something that I earned, that belongs to me. If it has some brand all over it, it is now a way of putting an advert in my pocket .. and I have no choice over it (how easy is it to opt out of the cash economy?).
I've cried this before on slashdot, I need some space! Is there none left? Even to ignore an advert takes some processing by your brain. Should I have to be constantly alert for it. I thought the advantage of separating from the "state of nature" was so that I didn't have to be alert all the time. If I know there will be adverts in a magazine that is one thing. But public space
Please, stop!
As you noted, a government has no money of its own. The only way a gov can do ANYTHING is to seize and redistribute from the citizens.
Well, actually a government can own its own industry and thus generate its own wealth. The USSR did that. But that is arguably seizure, by seizing the marketplace.
The only government which never redistributes wealth does NOTHING; they call that anarchy.
You are right in a literal sense. But merely seizing money and spending it is not at the core of what is commonly called redistribution.
Largesse is.
When the government seizes money and doles out largesse to those it deems worthy, and NOT to those it deems unworthy, that is true redistribution for redistribution's sake. Right or wrong. Heck, the US government is now in the sorry state of handing out tax rebates to citizens WHO HAVE NOT PAID FEDERAL INCOME TAXES! But it doesn't have the integrity to call those payments what they are: Federal welfare payments.
Did you read the article, Gay Nigger? If Marshall Brain's robots ever come to pass, there will be no need for human capital. Productivity will approach infinity. Workers will be useless. That has nothing to do with IT jobs moving overseas and no analogy with the destruction of various trades in the past. Sure, new industries would be created, but they would not employ human workers and would benefit only the owners.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
"it's not hard, picture a world where everyone is on welfare, with a minimum stipend, that allows for near 0 opportunity for anything beyond mundane existance, for some television to watch, and others just having trees and dust to contemplate."
So I guess we'll be sending robotic jobs overseas too. Wonder if they'll unionize?
How long will it be until a single person can create a full-length animated movie?
Given what people are doing on animation sites such as Newgrounds, the answer is now. Right now, most of the Flash movies available there are two-minute shorts, but somebody with the dedication could certainly write a 90 minute script and animate it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"If you want to capture the spirit of the 1980's, read the "American Psycho" and watch the "Wall Street""
If you have to depend on FICTION to describe a decade then there must not be any real examples.
Honestly, I don't see robots as being as big a deal as the transition from an agricultural to an industry society! As the previous poster said, in the last century the jobs that 90% of people had had FOR THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION went away in a couple of generations. Now THAT'S a watershed.
Also, rapid change erodes static classes, it doesn't save them. If what the jobs look like change every generation, you'll have a lot more social mobility between generations. Class is already an extremely fluid thing in America, in a way that they really wouldn't be considered "classes" by a 19th century Brit, and definitely not by an 18th century Javanese.
My video compression blog
What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform?
It's already happened. Did you miss that whole industrial revolution thing?
never before has the economy dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
Hasn't it? I think you need to brush up on your history.
Everyone always says "It's different this time", but in the end, it always turns out to be the same old thing, only a slightly different incarnation. The monster corporations will eventually collapse, or break up, or become irrelevant, or maybe learn to play nice.
The economy is a resiliant ecosystem. Forces work to balance it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
is there noone left in this world cabable of writing articles shorter than 700 pages?
Government doesn't need to seize money they can just print more of it.
I think it's safe to say just about all governments have convinced themselves that's not a viable method of operating - else none of them would need to raise a cent of taxes. The end result of just printing money would be identical, save the elimination of tax collection expenses and tax preparation expenses - hence more efficient. Inflation would reduce the citizens' buying power, but not as much as it is currently reduced by taxes.
Does anyone know why they just don't do it the easy way, and lighten the load a little on the people?
I think what the author forgets is that the problem of scarcity of resources remains. There really is no such thing as a free lunch. If robots are seen as a way to replace more expensive human labor, the demand for robots will go up. Companies would outbid each other for robot related products and services, and what they would end up paying would be equal to the value of the labor they receive.
I would expect that in the end the overall cost of replacing all humans with robots would only be marginally cheaper than keeping the humans around. Cheaper, because the supply of labor would increase, much the same way as if there was a population boom.
The author assumes that there will be an unlimited number of robots in the future. Sure technology allows us to make better use of our resources, but the scarcity issue remains. There are a limited amount of raw materials that are economical to get (price will have to rise to make them viable). Also what will power these robots? The more robots, the more power required, what would happen to energy prices?
Taking the example of "hey! let's sell the backs of dollars to big companies for advertising!"
Well, money is simply a store of value, which can ALWAYS be reduced down to labor -- even if it represents a diamond or a big drum of oil found in nature, you still have to find the damned diamond or oil, extract it and haul the thing to the buyer. The scarcity of the resource in question increases the labor and thus the value. Pretty simple concept.
So, Coke exerts all sorts of effort (robotic, human and otherwise) to produce a couple billion bottles of brown water. They then take money (see above) and purchase the back of the paper used as money, which also takes, well, "money" to make in the first place, but that's getting circular (like the article's argument). That money, which cost magical invisible money to manufacture and was then partially rented by Coke with money, is then given to idle consumers who then give it back to Coke to purchase the bottles of Coke advertised on the back.
WHERE THE HELL IS THE 'VALUE' OF THE MONEY GENERATED?!?!
The main crux of this is that someone, somewhere will have to be educated in something not idle, but not necessarily pleasant and attractive (like engineering or medicine). If you are simply paid to sit on your duff, what is the incentive to spend a decade becoming an engineer to build better robots, or an astronaut or whatever? Hey, we'll pay you more. Voila, something of value has been created and within twenty seconds you have the exact same economic system we have now. How earth shaking.
Perhaps a more relevant historical comparison is between the assignats (money) the National Assembly printed up under King Louis and the $25K the author of the above article wants created (somehow) for every person.
Louis et al. created too much money. It became worthless. The number of assignats it took to buy bread went through the roof. The resulting hyperinflation made the masses _very_ miserable, and was an impetus for the revolution. People lost their heads.
I don't think printing up money for people to spend is always a good idea.
"Ignorance is not innocence, but sin." --Robert Browning
So what's left that can't be done by machines? Art.
Not after everything's copyrighted.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Then, once we teach some robots to build the robot building robots...
By then, robots will probably be Doing It(tm) to make more robots. I figured that you wouldn't recognize that robots can be made to carry instructions to reproduce more like them, seeing as how most Slashdot readers don't perform the analogous human activity often.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Whether or not you agree with his prediction that human employees will be replaced with robots, the guy's suggestions as to what the consequences could (or should) be are poorly thought out.
The author suggests that the government extract sources of income (and he gives some far-fetched examples) that would provide every consumer in the U.S with a salary of $25,000 a year...for doing nothing.
The author's main suggestion is that the U.S government should sell advertisement space on every possible surface it owns (dollar bills, road surfaces, etc etc). While he purports capitalism, he doesn't really understand it. As the supply of "Advertisement space" rises, the price of it will drop. If the U.S govt. made it so readily available, advertisers would no longer pay as much for it.
Additionally, the very idea of supplying every consumer with a fixed income check is not capitalism...it's socialism! There is never any free lunch in this world. See the Soviet Union, Cultural Revolution China, North Korea, etc, etc. With no incentive for work, no one will work. Having not earned the money, people will hate it.
With so much assured money in the system, prices will rise. The money won't go far enough...people will become poor. The only rich people will be people who produce things and sell them. People who get the checks in the mail will remain poor forever.
So, I don't think that's the answer, although it's been suggested before (Marx, Mao, etc, etc).
Favorite
The article didn't really address the fact that the rich will be super, super rich beyond the wildest imaginations of today's rich if this comes to pass. The arts could be a way to make a living, but I you'd make the money by finding a rich patron to sponser you. Today most successful artists become famous and lots of middle-class/poor people buy CD's/books/movie tickets, and the artist gets a small cut from each of them. If the middle-class and poor are destitute, you'd have to get money from the rich. If the rich are extremely rich, sponsoring an artist would be pocket change to them. That's the way artists made their living during the Renaissance and before.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
I was agreeing with the article up until the author started making nonsensical schemes.
Yes, robotization will approach 100%. Yes, the resources available to humanity will approach infinity. However, the obvious solution to this, contrary to the article, is a welfare system.
That's exactly what the welfare system was invented for. I am not in a position to comment on the quality of the US implementation, but, suffice it to say, other countries have made it work.
Unquenchable demand for farm hands and coal workers just isn't there anymore. Hell, the US cheats on its unemployment numbers by only reporting those people who are "looking for work".
With robotic exploitation of earth, the solar system, and beyond, there is no reason why welfare rates cannot be increased to a point where one can actually live on them. The future belongs to scientists, artists, elected officials, and *sigh* management.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
"What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?"
a ctbook/geos/ us.htmlc tsheets/f actvchip.html
The literacy rate in the US is 97%.
If you can read, you can learn, even without help from others.
For 97% of the population the only reason for not developing new skills is because of a choice not to.
Americans spend an average of 28hrs/wk watching television. I am sure that if they spend a fraction of that time undertaking some sort of training they will be able to acquire new skills. Yes, that is correct, in the future you may have to watch television for less than 28 hours each week to be competitive in the job marketplace.
sources:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/f
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Fa
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
an excessive labour pool is only a problem when there are 7 billion / 8 billion / 9 billion... people who need jobs.
Get rid of the people, and you then have a labour shortage.
Overproduction of labour was desired by industrial capitalism as it expanded the pool of labour. As most labour 100 years ago was fairly unskilled, the more labourers there were, the cheaper the labour, and the more profits availing the ruling class.
With a robotic economy, human labour is largely superfluous, and there is no longer any economic incentive to having children, in fact, it would be economically detrimental to have more kidz. Therefore the logical place to go is to Tax Children.
Since the reproduction of the species is critical, one doesn't tax one child. In fact, I would give a huge tax break to family with one child. With the second kid, the tax break disappears. With the third kid, the tax break reverses, and you would have to pay the equivalent of a single child tax break. With a fourth child you have to pay DOUBLE. Fifth - double again. Sixth - double again.
Would the rich have lots of kids? sure - if they want to - they can afford it. But the poor, who can least afford them, would be economically disinclined to have them. In this way, the labour problem takes care of itself over a few generations.
This, combined with a TRULY progressive income tax, such as that found i nthe USA ca. 1958, would work WONDERS for the economy if the proceeds were directly re-distributed.
If such re-distribution is not effected and REALLY SOON, I predict Bill Gates's head on a spade within ten years. and Ellison's. and Jobs. And the entire Rockefeller clan. And the duPonts. etc. etc. etc. which would be sad as it is so unnecessary.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Assume this kind of radical distribution.
Let's say society could give someone 10K a year for not working (relative to today's prices). That's it. You can't otherwise have a job.
So, given the choice, would you rather live on 10K a year, or have a job? You, yourself could live on 10K. You're talking a crappy apartment in a crappy place, but you won't have commute costs, you'll have time to cook your own food. Watch the budget, it's possible.
I think most people would still work, both to have a higher standard of living, and to keep busy.
My video compression blog
The article mentions giving away money for each citizen so that they could at least buy food. This is a sound idea, because when the basic imperative of gathering enough calories per day to maintain life is satisfied, a certain calm sets in, a person has a basis to try to do other things. But I wonder if there needs to be a separation of earned money (used for "luxuries" in a wide meaning) and supplied money, used for food, housing, electricity and network connectivity. Perhaps a parallel system needs to be created? It could use "credits" or "tokens" or whatever, which could only be used on certain basic items.
In any case, if something drastic isn't done, the public will demand that the use of humanoid service robots be illegalized (which leads to pseudo work and luddite-driven instability) or a small faction of society will take charge like in the dark times of history. Only this time their continued safety would be guaranteed by an army of amoral, highly efficient killing machines...
...we won't be creating the Federation, a place where people seem to think it's a great honor to be 3rd Ensign on some transport vessel in central nowhere for no compensation?
That being said, the lack of unskilled work is showing here too. Particularly University applicants are rising - typically something people do when they can't get work (good student loans and public universities etc. makes this a much more common option than in the US). Of course, that might be just now but I see the trend - places where there used to be unskilled labor either mechanize, flag out or go bankrupt due to high local wager costs. Sigh...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I like taxes. Taxes pay for roads and nice well-uniformed people to scrape up the entrails of the homeless when they get run over by my Hummer while I talk on my cell phone drinking a Frappachino. Taxes also provide infinitessimally small amounts of money to those people in the hopes they'll just stay out of my way. They also pay for those same nice uniformed people to arrest my butt for reckless disregard for human life and throw me into a cold, dark prison cell for the rest of my life should I decide other people's lives are worthless enough to mow them down. Should you avoid prison, but your capitalist schemes don't work out and you end up homeless, I'd prefer you not be allowed to opt out of social security or medicare as we'll all end up paying to either keep you alive or scrape your decaying entrails off the street. I like taxes.
robots ... never need a ... piss break
This is an artifact of how the machines generate their energy. Many types of machines generate forms of waste products in the process; for humans this is called "piss." Some waste products are solid or liquid, and somebody has to clean out the machine's waste compartment.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"I'll go find something human to do with my life."
Procreate.
It seems to me that the Roman empire already illustrated what the problem with this approach is. Does 'Bread and Circus' tell you something? The problem is that in the society where you don't have to work or do anything to survive most of the population just deteriorates to the subhuman level. You have to have something that would make us to overcome our natural laziness.
Who is going to make the robots?
Who is going to maintain and service them?
If robots replace humans, will output remain otherwise the same, will prices remain otherwise the same.
In summary, instead of having lots of people working as burger flippers, we will have lots of people making burger flipping robots.
I don't think things will be as bad as it makes out, and if it was, there wouldn't be any burger flipping robots, becase nobody would have the money to buy the burgers they make.
His grandfather earned it, and decided to give it to your friend. By his grandfather's standards, whatever they might have been, your friend earned the money. Maybe he cleaned the old goat's bedpan or fucked a pretty candy striper in front of him so he could watch.
Not robots, but the effect is similar.:P
(Excerpt from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Page 634784, Section 5a, Entry: Magrathea)
Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free.
Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward amongst the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged.
Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor - at least no one worth speaking of. And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on - none of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.
And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home of this industry was the planet Magrathea, where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's richest men naturally came to expect.
But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured into the night over smug little treaties on the value of a planned political economy.
Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into the obscurity of legend.
In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of it.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
He's Arguing for Communism. Nothing short of it.
There is NO proof:
A. Robots will be that advanced at that time. Are you going to trust Robots to drive Trucks on LA freeways?
B. Robots will take the jobs even if qualified. Some people like the "human" touch. By this logic, 100% of stores would be web only and all retail salespeople would be out of work. Or Everything would be vending machines.
C. The 70/30 share. You can't predict future wealth distribution. May I also ask is this before or after taxes?
D. Massive Unemployment. The Robots are not going to manufacture, design, sell, and fix themselves. IF money is saved in hiring Robots, those savings will be reinvested in someway, as long as you don't tax the hell out of investments.
Now, it's not that I don't like the idea of robots. You just can't expect them to be the miracle of science so quickly. Is this supposed to be publicity for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines?
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand]
She was absolutely dead-nuts right at the time. But lately it seems the corporations, with fiduciary responsibility only to the stockholders, have turned into evil monsters, exporting jobs, discarding workers like yesterday's trash, yet somehow enriching those at the top more and more, often just for being there, to an outrageous, absurd extent.
I used to think we were headed for 1929. Now I think maybe we are headed for October 1917.
Let's put a maximum limit, a cap, on the amount of net worth a person can have. Let's say for example. . . that everyone is allowed to have up to 30 million dollars.
If you have more than 30 million, what happens? You have to give it away. . . to anyone you choose. Friends, relatives, charitable organizations -- doesn't matter who, but you just can't keep it. There's nothing to keep you from earning more money, as much as you can bring in, but you then keep giving it away to other people as necessary keep your net worth under the legal limit.
This would force wealth to be spread around. No, not spread around evenly to everybody . . . but at least spread around moreso than we see today. It would clear out the class of "super-rich" at any rate.
Maybe we could draw lessons from the native American "potlatch" culture, for ways to create a society based on abundance and generosity -- where the way to impress people is showing how much you can give away, not how much junk you can collect.
A week ago, we found out that most tech jobs are being outsourced to India and other countries. While there is still a educated poor workforce in another country, the use of machines is not going to be that big of a threat. These Kiosks will only help companies use their work force to focus on customer service (ever found anyone to help you at Walmart?). If the general work force is depleted, perhaps more people will become Police officers and teachers. Maybe it will force our children to work harder in school.
Several times throughout history.
The latest being The South - pre civil war
A few wealthy landowners own thousands of slaves who pick cotton to survive.
Except that this time all labour will be performed by robots rather than human slaves.
You want to see what extremely low cost labour does to an economy? Look to history when slavery is popular.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Let me ask this - 20 or 50 years ago, how many people were trying to predict what things would be like in 2000, and how many of them were way off base? Of the people who were right, did anybody pay special attention to them at the time? People like this guy who make these predictions are almost certainly going to be wrong, although nobody can say why until the future happens... Why worry about this sort of thing when it's probably not going to happen that way.
This cross of robot utopia and american capitalism Brain proposes is nothing short of idiotic and demonstrates a remarkable lack of vision.
Why must he bring up such things as advertising on dollar bills, free-market economy, free choice, when these concepts cease to exist in a society where humans are as good as superfluous?
Think about it; when in say 50 years everything can be done robotically and computerized, what purpose do humans serve (another question might be what purpose does anything serve, but let's not get into that)?
Pretty much the only "solution" is to pacify and contain the bulk of the useless populace while preventing further expansion.
Boring malthusian hive-society ahoy!
I think that society is at its best when everyone has something constructive to do. Some of these undesirable jobs are the only jobs that some people can handle.
Having something constructive to do and being responsible is, for many people, possibly nearly everyone, the only thing that keeps them civil. It's no accident that the value of human life is cheapest in the areas with the greatest unemployement.
"I did have this sort of idea several years ago and I figured out that the only way the society can survive is to turn socialist."
Since we all are making observations, and giving opinions, here's mine.
Notice how much of our problems are related to our interdependence? How about we make people more independent?
Not completely independent, merely less dependent on each other.
Notice how many problems, either disappear, or become shadows of their former selves?
If you could opt out of Social Security and Medicare as programs, you'd still wind up paying the same taxes. They're social safety net programs, which keeps poor people from starving in old age or going without medicine. As a society, we're going to pay for those things one way or another. You could certainly argue for more efficient taxation schemes than payroll taxes for them, but we're going to, and should, wind up collectively paying for those kinds of programs anyway.
My video compression blog
Exactly how can anybody buy anything from them? Remember, buying is another way of saying "trade." (When I trade something with somebody else, its because I have something they want, and they have something I want. Money is just an abstraction of this concept.)
If this corporation owns everything, produces everything, and hires nobody, then unemployment globally is 100%, everyone is flat broke, and can buy nothing. If the products and services this corporation produces are to be transferred to the human population, it would have to be as a gift.
Obviously, this system would not resemble a capitalist economy. I just thought it would be enlightening to consider one extreme possible scenario.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
One iteresting problem that authors of these kinds of things forget is "if there is no money to take there is no money to make" If you have that many people out of work you will have no one to buy anything that robots provide. Cueently most economic models are circular. in order to spend money a consumer has to be able to earn it. in order to make money a company has to have consumers able to spend money. I feel another posable way to deal with the issues in the article would be for the goverment to produce products with robaot technonogy with all people as the share holders, Therefor when something is sold every one makes money to buy things
:)
Just a few thoughts on these issues
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
Exactly. Art can be automated. Who's to say AI or even dumb creativity algorithms won't be improving in the near future, along with everything else? There's a very good possibility that EVERY kind of job will ultimately be done better with automation. Science. Art. Even business. In which case, humans are no longer useful as labor at all and exist only to consume the fruits of the automated economy. Which they will in abundance. I believe there was something in that article about letting the people profit off the exploitation of natural resources - what better way of encouraging the people to allow exploitation?
In fact, the only usefulness to the economy that people would have is their investment level. As he rightly pointed out, it's the stockholders who reap the profits while the employees are paid a relative pittance for their efforts. The implications are obvious. The new economy would become based on dividend-paying stock directly, rather than money per se. Not a bank account, but a paying portfolio.
Although the automated economy could probably easily support everyone at a comfortable level, it probably won't, because the market forces will still be at play. As the economy transitions, the lowest-level workers will be left floundering while the ones that are next higher will quickly demand to be paid in stock to get on the bandwagon. Rich people/countries will stay rich and in all likelihood tend to get richer. The converse is true for the poor. The government/world could level it out a bit with taxation to support benefits, but without directly increasing the portfolios of the poor their fortunes will not improve. And since rich people run the government, it's unlikely to ever do anything to decrease their fortunes.
As for what people will do with all that spending power they didn't need to do anything to earn... well, look at the independently wealthy. They play around, get bored with it, and then play around in a somewhat more extreme fashion to relieve that boredom. Then repeat the process and move towards wholehearted debauchery. They practice a particularly vicious form of social politics (government, incidentally, being another thing automation could probably handle MUCH better than humans do, but never will thanks to politics). Most significantly, they buy/do things not because they are better (quality/value/entertainment) but because of who's name is on the label. They spend a lot of time sucking up and being sucked up to.
That's right. The economy will become fad-based and chance-based. A constantly shifting maelstrom of cults of personality, self-absorbtion, and petty games of domination. Gambling, especially of the stock market variety, will become a crucial means of economic mobility. People will become increasingly isolated, victims of their own success. Sport becomes even more significant than now. The value of life will decrease, leading to a rise in risky behavior and conflict. War may be waged over increasingly trivial things, with extinction and genocide becoming increasingly more accepted.
Until the day some disgusted AI or human gets sick of our shit and puts us all out of our misery, leaving the machines to their own devices and problems.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The more I realize that Marx was right. The American economy is quickly approaching the 'tipping point' where worker productivity gains create a workforce so small that there's not enough workers with wages to buy produced goods. The fundamental contradiction of capitalism - it's greatest strength (bent towards efficiency) drives it to it's greatest point of vulnerability (over-production = under-consumption).
Will there be people in 2100? Will they be real skinny? vote : the_real_38@yahoo.com
Technology will make it impossible. In the past you could give your peasents some cheap weapons and if you threw enough of 'em at the Military they'd succeed. With modern warfare (weapons, logistics, communications) you can easilly put down any such 'peasant' revolt. And with modern propaganda you can nip it in the bud.
The only solution I can is a non-violent revolt where the oppressed stop having children; doing away with the labor surplus and making labor valuable again. Or a plague/massive war. Either way we need to do away with the surplus population. People are too greedy and lazy to maintain that surplus with any degree of humanity.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'd like to see where he's getting his figures for the distribution of wealth in the USA. He significantly understates the concentration of wealth that already exists. It's not the top 20% or the top 10% that has the majority of the wealth...
n /C ourses/so11/stratification/income&wealth.htm
http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgso
The bottom 40% shares about half a percent.
The next 40% gets bit more than 15%.
That leaves 20% with with 86% of the wealth... yes, but...
Of that 20%, the lower half (which is where I suspect most of the readers of this article sit) gets a litle over 10%. We're not the "rich", we're just the ones with the closest thing to a fair share.
Of the remainder... well, to cut to the chase... 1% of the population controls 40% of the wealth in the country.
And I'm sure the lion's share of that goes to people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, not mere millionaires.
Several friends of mine and I are pretty much the best networking engineers (router jocks) and system admins around.
But we haven't been able to find work for years. We can't get high-paid jobs, because there aren't any.
And no one will touch us for low-paid jobs, and I quote: "We can't hire you because when another better paying job comes along, you'll leave".
WTF ? what other better paying job?!?
So we sit and watch our savings evaporate, lose our houses, cars, and families. And then what ?
the best job I can find right now pays $25k a year, and that doesnt pay the bills. so wtf ?
btw his artcile is wrong, it'll be maybe 10-20 years, unless opec changes to the euro, in which case it'll be over-night...
can somebody point me to a nice meanial $40k/yr job ? I dont even care if its data entry.
"There is no reason to expect that the economy will suddenly figure out a way to create high-paying, exciting, fulfilling jobs for these tens of millions of people displaced by robots. If the economy could do that, it would be doing it now."
Of course, this is assuming our economy won't be run by a bunch of super-genius robots.
Those put out of work by robots will go on welfare, or similar wealth redistribution systems. They will have cable TV, high speed internet, be able to afford 10 times their daily dietary needs. The drug industry will rise up to the challenge and soon each man, woman, and child will have three drug prescriptions each. And two cars per household.
And they will do better good for the economy sitting at home all day unemployed spending the redistributed wealth of the employed than they would by being in the job market.
We will have reached the apex of civilization, where capitalism will be so close to accomplishing its goal. An economy of plenty where almost no one has to work. We'll spend our days high as a kite, fucking like rabbits, and being entertained by moving images and sounds with a push of a button.
I can't wait.
All corporations are worth nothing without paying customers. Without Joe Sixpack and his credit cards, the US economy would grind to a halt.
But Joe won't spend a penny if he knows a robot will replace him at work. Once corporate income falls, the concentration of wealth become a concentration of people with excessive mortgages. All those super-rich 10% living off dividends will end up poor and broke.
Bring it on! Now if only we could find robots to replace lawyers we could be on the wat to Nirvana...
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
But the human body as a repair and build machine is emminently replacable, given advances in joint construction, tactile feedback, and limited AI. There is no technical reason that the humans who build todays robots cannot be replaced with more generally functional robots. This will happen.
Of course. Which leads to a new model or at least new training modules for an older model of robots. Every time you lay off a million people, you have to build another million robots (or something close to that). Who is going to build those robots? You simply can't get around the fact that those robots who are going to be replacing one set of robot building humans need to be built by humans at least until AI has reached a near human level of intelligence. We are not talking about simple machines here either. Every one of those robots will have a complexity probably comparable to a car. It will take a lot of labor to build one.
The "singularity" at issue here really only occurs when we have created robots which are not only as physically flexible as humans, but also roughly as intelligent as well. Until then we will always need a huge amount of human labor to design, program, build, repair, and upgrade millions upon millions of robots.
We are centuries away from that, but once we reach that point. They will become no different from people, just a sort of artificial species or another "race" of hominid with all the same rights that we have. At that point they could no longer ethically be used as slave labor and you probably wouldn't be able to legally "own" one, thus negating much of the advantage of having them in the first place. You would have to pay them at least as much as biological hominids and probably more. This issue is, I think, what prevents the "singularity" from actually occuring.
But, if we are immoral enough to use these artificial people for slave labor, they would not be a threat to us (unless they "rebelled", which may not be in their programming). If the entire society were run by robots, we would be the "overlords". We would be the royalty. We would not need to "do" anything. It would all be done for us by our nuclear-electro-hydraulic (or whatever) artificial hominid slaves, our race of Morlocks.
For us, this would be wonderful in a sense, a world as imagined by the Star Trek writers where money really wasn't needed, except that artificial slaves would be the ones saving us from it instead of replicators.
Any effort on our part would be completely voluntary. There would still be humans involved in the arts: movies, music, computer games, books, paintings, everything we have today that people like to create for its own sake. We may not trust our artificial slaves to act as police or judges either. Some subset of jobs will probably always be performed by biologic hominids.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
This guy is talking shit.
If labour is being replaced by capital (robots / robotic machines etc.), and that leads to increases in unemployment, then more advanced countries (using more machines / capital) should show a trend upwards in unemployment compared to less developed countries. This has not been observed, according to studies done by *economists*.
A second point, his pie charts showing income (in)equality are better done using a Lorenz curve. If your going to talk economics at least avail yourself of the tools and techniques that are available.
This is something I've been very interested in for a long time. I agree with the article's premise. This situation IS coming. It's a matter of time.
If it's a good thing or a bad thing depends on how we handle it.
This will end labour/capital as we know it. In fact, this may change how we view wealth and society.
The fact is, we will need to find some other way for contentment and to "keep score". Move away from a money-filled world to one where we have the time and the resources to try and achieve what we want to achieve.
The only problem is that I think that non-economic routes will need to be subsidized somewhere. In fact, in such a world, most pursuits will be rather non-economic.
This is the question the human race will need to answer.
A thought I've always had is that when the manual labor is performed by machines, then corporations will control all the wealth. It should come to pass, then, that all citizens *MUST* have the opportunity to buy into the corporate-centric economy. Otherwise, the economy will become very dystopian. Whether it's intentional or not, the corporations will assume the role of lords and the general population (i.e., those without a significant ownership stake in the corporations) will become serfs.
But look at this site for a very good analysis..o w&id=134 80
http://www.planetgameranger.com/?m=sh
And not just quantity, but quality and type! If you don't like people building a better mousetrap, go be a dirt farmer running Windows XP. Don't drag me into your personal hell.
Tie the top income tax rates and all capital gains tax rates to the unemployment rate. When employment is below some nominal value, say 5%, executives and stockholders would pay a reasonable, flat tax rate. As unemployment rates rise, the top-tier tax rates would increase and become progressive, thus penalizing the biggest earners.
The revenue from the increased taxes would be used to fund unemployment benefits, which should provide enough income to get by but not so much as to disincent people from working. Any surplus would be returned to lower and middle income taxpayers.
IANAE (I am not an ecomomist)
Yes it just so happened that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are the hardest working men in the world,
I mean Bill Works so hard, look at him in this picture working hard thinking of ways to profit off other peoples ideas http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/
We all know Mr.Gates works harder than the sweatshop workers of taiwan and china who work 12 hours for a dollar.
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Cars are made by robots. Children's toys are made by robots. Many of the products of today's consumption are made by robots. Bookkeeping and most transfer of money today is not done by a bespectacled scribe noting credits and debits in a ledger, but by computers. But are most of today's workers sitting at home with nothing to do? Hardly.
All but the poorest in the developed nations have a television, an asset that was unthinkably expensive a couple of generations ago. Even teenagers who work part-time jobs make enough to buy a car, albeit not a Cadillac, which is far more technologically advanced than our grandparent's automobiles. I stand in line at the grocery store behind folks who live on food stamps, and they buy quantities meat and cheese that our grandparents would consider luxurious. All of this mechanization and automation is making our products cheaper and making the poor in the developed nations richer (in terms of the goods and services available to them) than many of the middle class in developing nations.
So what will we see tomorrow? Much of what we see today, but moreso. Obviously we have deficiencies in what is considered capitalism today that need to be addressed, but I don't think the advent of robotic labor will produce a crisis. It will just make the issues that are already important today more pressing and relevant.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
It's upsetting that our economy is governed and explained by a horde of pseudo-scientists who cringe at the very idea of social good and who just can't bear this or that concept. Most economists have invested their feelings into a certain system and are doing their darnest to propagate it forever.
In USA we have rabid "capitalism" (only when it helps you, but, it's OK to have communism in form of patents, copyrights, etc.) foaming at the mouth economists and politicians.
How about this? Politicians have no business deciding what is economically right any more than a witch doctor (or a faith healing priest, for you biggots, who can't see the other side of the coin) has a right to determine how to heal a patient!
We made advancements in medicine by putting down our preconceptions about what's right and wrong and applying science. It is time to do the same with economics!
Why don't economists strive to elevate themselves to a scientific level where the good of all is the goal (altruism) and where all preconcieved notions are discarded. Gone is the notion that captialism is the only way. Gone is the notion that socialism is the answer. Let's use scientific method to find what is the best answer. And let's put in jail those who oppose science for their own greedy ends! Wouldn't we jail a doctor who amputated a limb to make money when no such thing was necessary? Why then do politicians, business leaders (richest elite) and pseudo-scientific economists get away with it? One of those crooks harms more people than a single bad doctor ever could.
Economics of today is really like alchemy of centuries past.
I can't believe that people actually plagiarize to gain stupid karma points from slashdot.
Laws are for people with no friends.
The use of robots in the field could revolutionise our society, and leave skilled hands and minds time to create. A second industrial revolution could take place. The huge city centered economy would start to become secondary to a vibrant rural economy. The complete reverse of the last 150 years.
Give all idle hands the chance to work for fun and our society will undergo fundimental change. Todays office centered city economies could become the economic waste lands. When a small business can do all the administration work cheaply and there is no need to support huge numbers of add ass city centered bureaucrats the economy will florish.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
One Expert I heard of said that robots should actually pay taxes.
Actually there should be a law that technology is due to the rise of cultural technique as a whole and the benefits of tech belong to all for large parts.
And then figure this:
Our Captialisim isn't real capitalisim. When I buy stuff I don't need myself and don't retail it right away it degrades in value. That goes for any goods in a capitalistic production market. Apples rot, Tech becomes obsolete, and information spreads and loses its value as it becomes common sense, a.s.f..
There is only one thing that doesn't follow the basic rules of capitalisim, thus causing all the trouble we're in that even Greenspan and Duisenberg can't fix alone.
That product is money. Money is the only thing that gains value when I don't redistribute it. There is only 2 ways to deliberately stop this uncapitalistic money gain that's causing all the trouble:
1: Start a war and eventually degrade the old currency and make a new one (the usual, unvoluntarily way)
or
2: Establish a law that applies negative interrests rates for resting money. Aka 'money-rot'.
That would be true capitalisim and money would have a very stable value. And the allover amount of money wouldn't magically grow by leaps and bounds as it is doing now.
It's basically what Keynes said and what the club of rome predicted 20 years ago. Where finished growing by now and need to adjust capitalisim back to a normal.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This same thing happens in the USA in ghettos. Look at gang leader, the gang leader goes to the poor community, flashes money around, talks a good talk, and suddenly has a million followers.
Think of the black panthers, luis farakhan, jesse jackson and others who basically go to poor communities, and talk and suddenly have a million followers.
Yes when you go to people who have nothing, and then find some devil, be it the white devil, or the american devil to blame it on, well its easy.
Hitler did this to the jews, the jews were the cause of all germanys problems, just like to certain republicans, its the blacks and hispanics who are taking all the jobs.
Every leader usually blames some evil people or group of people to gain support, George Bush even does this. "Those evil towel heads!! the axis of evil" etc kinda crap he says sure it gets the Americans to support him and blame all terrorism on the arabs.
Fact is, Bin Laden does what all leaders do, go to the people who have nothing, offer them a way out through heaven and religion, brainwash them into commiting suicide while at the same time convincing them to hate by telling them "Well its that evil white american man causing all these problems!"
And you know what, when Bush the White American male goes on TV and calls them all evil, well it just confirms it. When we drop bombs on them you know what, its like what the republicans do.
"Well, lets lock all those who live in the ghettos in the USA in prison, lets get rid of welfare, let them get jobs and work their way out"
Well this makes it easier for the gang leader to recruit and say "See! I told you the white man hates you, Look at what hes doing locking you up in prison and cutting all your programs!, join me and sell drugs, at worse you'll be in prison and at best you'll be rich!"
You see? Just follow the logic, its brainwashing.
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The government would also have robots working for them, so they could deploy those robots to provide basic goods and services for the people who don't have jobs.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
You've missed the point slightly. They do something worth their wages to the company they work for. You've heard the phrase "Time is money"- well it's not quite true, it's more like "Money is time x marketability"; but it's close. They get wages for the work they do.
That's really the flaw in the articles analysis of the economics- it's nothing much to do with robotics- mankind has had robotics since the industrial revolution.
No, the real point is that people continue to remain employed because the companies perceive that employing more people will make the company more money. It won't necessarily make more money per employee- but it should make more money over cost. So there is a force that encourages the company to employ more people.
The graph of wealth concentration has been misunderstood- ever since the collapse of the British patriachial empire that existed around the 1900s after the shakeup of the two world wars we have gradually been returning to that state but with Americans in charge (for various reasons mostly relating to economic power)- the people with power have been collecting power and money around them- forming dynasties and gaming the laws and the economics to their advantage.
The robotics is a complete red herring- well almost- robotics is just another game that these guys and gals play.
lawyers, as far as I can tell, have no function at all
Lawyers are like soldiers and armies that companies point at other companies. They are there to try to game the laws as a way to take money off of companies, or prevent other companies taking money off them. Don't forget that laws are just a set of semi-arbitrary rules, and the rules that get made are often up for purchase.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You are assuming specialized robots. That is Robot A will build only machine B. Robot C would only build robot A, to make machine B. In the real world robots don't have to be that spealized. Instead Robot A will build many machines, some of which produce goods, and some of which are robots like itself.
A metal lathe cannot be made without a metal lathe, but if you study lathe construction (history) you will realize that you can always build the next step of the lathe with the step you just completed. In modern construction lathes are built with completed lathes (and a lot of other machines), but the end result is a lathe that either is general purpose and can do anything a lathe [of that size] can do, or a special purpose lathe that builds one thing really well. Depending on what you need. Once you have a metal lathe you can build any tool. Likewise, once you have a robot factory you can build any robot, including a robot factory. (which would include the robots to build the factory, as well as the machine inside, all done without human intervention.)
Making this all work, and solving a lot of details that I used some handwaving to get around is a serious undertaking. When technology reaches the point where we can do this is something I decline to speculate on.
...welcome our robotic Overlords. Long live the robot!!!
Based on a population of 213 to give each person 25,000 dollars would cost 5.325 Trillion Dollars. Okay that's certainly doable. Double it and you've got the average high tech job salary. Not a impossible number either.
Consider the Stock Market it's a nice place. Frankly I've always considered a place of wonder. More money comes out of it than goes in. In this place given time one dollar can become 5 million dollars.
So what's the point of money anyways..
Goods and Services, Companies produce goods and provide services. Consumers pay for those goods and services but they also work at companies that provide goods or services.
If you get down to it money is not needed anymore. People could turn the robots loose on the drudgery that nobody really wants to do and move on to providing other services or goods. Imagine if all the auto workers were moved into housing production or highway building but each were not paid. In repayment for building the backbones and homes of our society things they need, (Housing, Food, Transportation, Healthcare, Items/Cloting) are provided becuase they're working.
Such a system is possible on a global scale if you can convince the Rich to give up all the things that really dont make them rich at all. Everyone could literally work a job of some sort and in return they get the necessities of life.
Human invention and productivity would reach new highs, governments would actually do things in the interest of the people, and maybe for once there would be peace in many of the third world countries when the strife and hunger are replaced by food, homes, and jobs.
Now maybe roads are a bad example becuase it's hot hard work. Robots will handle the drudgery. So these people can turn their attention towards schooling or early retirement for that percentage that have labored for so long. Children and the rest would be encouraged to learn math and sciences, to produce new compting hardware. Society would then finally be free to turn the engeries of the world into getting off this rock and onto the next one. As more and more things are discovered we may be able to extend life spans over hundreds of years instead of a mere hundred if you're lucky.
Where does he think the CEO puts the money? In a mattress?
No. It goes into investments which further power the ecomony and gets paid out was wages again. This is a far more efficient system that using government overhead to redistribute.
1) Housing costs are way out of whack. With all this mechanization and automation we should be able to build cheap housing, but good luck trying to get it past the local zoning fascists (fascism: private ownership, government control), the Realtor lobby, carpenters and other unions, general NIMBYism, and what not. The perpetual money machine that luxury home builders appear to be (check their stock charts) is theoretically impossible without the government intervention that is most definitely happening. Anyhow, with cheap(er) manufactured housing (something more durable than "mobile homes") people could afford to drop out of the (paid) work force from time to time if they so chose, or at least not worry about ending up on welfare.
/. saying "Damn, and I thought I was geeky...)
Problems with this idea? Sure. You're liable to have the ambitious, hard-working people segregate themselves from those less so. A lot of people won't live up to their potential without the pressure to work. But both of these things are already happening to some degree anyhow.
2) Genetic engineering. Another poster rightly asked what people on the left side of the bell curve will do. (Besides pr0n, if the spam I'm receiving is any indication. Geeze.) I think the genetic engineers will figure out how to fix that problem within a generation or two (blind guess). Yes, it's going to be messy politically, not to mention theologically, but it's going to happen. I'll pay good money to the genetic engineers after they've convinced me that it's reasonably safe, if only to fix my allergies and other quality-of-life things. The trick will be not creating a genetic monoculture in the process. It'll be interesting.
3) After #2 happens, colonization of space is pretty much inevitable.
(Brian imagines half of
There is a problem with this vision of the future.
Someone brought your change to the table. Having worked in fast food I think that is the first that should go. We already have change machines (ATMs do cash, others do coins), and counting cash is not only the easist way to steal, it is the easiest place for someone to make a mistake. The machines that dispense change rarely make a mistake. Even over a short two hour shift almost nobody ended up with a perfect till.
Having worked in fact food, I suspect that someone will always bring your order to you, though that would be easy to automate. (If you had gone to drive though it would be automated) People are wanted inside to make sure you are happy, even though they serve no purpose that couldn't be replaced.
If machines can produce goods and provide services so cheaply, then everything should be dirt cheap. Which means you'd need to work a fraction of the hours you work now to earn enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.
...
There will always be some element of work that people have to do, or paying customers will prefer that people do them. But in a robot-dominated workforce that would be a small percentage, say 10%. So what is needed is a system where people are employed 10% of the time, rather than 10% of the population being always employed and the other 90% unemployed -- everybody would be a short-term contractor rather than a long-term employee. With robots making everything so cheaply, we'd only need to work about 1 month a year to cover all expenses for the year. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to actually happen, as the top 10% will use their power to keep everything to themselves
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Incorrect. Exclusive use of Land, spectrum, and other natural monpolies is not property, it's Privilege.
The government passes a law that says you and only you can broadcast in Detroit at 73.1 FM; that's a privilege. You should pay money to compensate everyone else for their loss of freedom.
The government passes a law that says you and only you can build stuff on, and keep people out of, parcel 32-1019141; that's a privilege. You should pay money to compensate others for their loss of freedom.
Actually the American revolution was organized and led by people who of enormous wealth - Washington, Jefferson, the Lee and Randolph families, etc. So if you're right and history does repeat itself, I guess we can expect a revolution led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Ted Turner, backed by the (Sam) Walton, Rockefeller, and Kennedy families? Can't wait to see that.
No lines. Sure it was a surprize the first time he saw a light on with no line, so he went to the automated checkout. Once he figgured out how to use it (not hard) he prefers it. No cashier slowly scanning something when he is in a hurry. No waiting for someone else to find her checkbook after the order is rung up.
Human interact is lost, which depending on the checkout person might or might not be a loss. (many times they don't have good looking girls working, and I have found no other reason to choose one checkout over another)
Howard Dean is a socialist. He just loves to socialize healthcare. After that happens, the quality of healthcare became indistinguishable from private healthcare and covered even less people afterward in Vermont.
Ah, but by the time that a technocratic society would exist, what's that 70K would feel like 10K today. Bear in mind that theoretical 10K today, you'd live far better than 90% of humanity 150 years ago in material terms.
Basically, for this plan to work, a substantial number of people are going to have to be willing to live a far poorer lifestyle than average, in order not to have to work. The track record of people shows this isn't a very good assumption to make, especially for the Western cultures that would have to adopt this.
Personally, I can't imagine going this way. I'm a freelancer, and I enjoy what I do, and one of the ways I know I'm doing a good job is making money. In times when I haven't had work to do, all my dreams of writing a novel rapidly disintegrated into playing too much Harpoon and feeling sorry for myself.
My video compression blog
This is a global issue. The article was good upto the 25k part, but very biased to how the US works.
Europe has a very good social welfare system (the 25k per year) but doesnt work. people need a job for self worth. Didnt he read his own article?
As a single mother Rowling would have been on VERY good benefits. (house, cable tv, food, transport, healthcare, free access to sports facilities)
The "gotch" for single mothers is to get a job you need childcare. childcare is very expensive. You cant afford childcard on minimum wage. You cant get a job (trapped). children start school at 5 yrs and part time work becomes possible. Except you cant be part of the "flexable" workforce as your work hours must be fixed around school hours/holidays.
Not having a job just plain sucks.
ATLAS SHRUGGED.
First half of the article was almost bearable. I though that it was a definite improvement after the original Robotic Nation. But then he started suggesting reform ideas... If everyone in the States is so narrow-minded, it's going to be extremely funny to look at capitalism trying to reform itself into communism. Brain may be a smart guy, but when I started reading his ideas, like ads on dollar bills, I cannot help but laugh.
:) There are two main possible outcomes: :)
Soviet Union always tried to boost production levels. More coal, more oil, more tractors, more grain, more machines, more electricity, more everything. They knew very well that to build communism (instead of socialism) they needed high economic development. But the Soviet Union started too early. It was impossible to reach the necessary levels without advanced computers, telecommunications, and yes, robots. And the Soviet Union didn't have stamina to last more than 70 years.
Now the USA, the EU and other developed countries finally approach the necessary production capabilities. Brain is correct in his estimates. But where he is totally wrong, is that with high production capabilities communism is inevitable. No props will support the falling capitalism in a few decades. There is no way to revitalise it by cash injections fueled by ads or national lotteries.
1) Governments (or at least some forward-looking politicians) realise it and start the transition to communism.
2) Workers revolt.
Let's hope, for the sake of American citizens, that the government will be smart enough (and not very corrupt).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The article poinpoints a problem that I have absolutely been worried about for some time now -- that fact that robots, automation, will turn a large sector of employees out of their jobs and radically increase the concentration of wealth in our nation.
The sci-fi hope for new technologies has always been that it will "relieve humans of dreary jobs and increase leisure time". However, this has not turned out to be the case, and frankly it cannot, because the people who buy the technology (robot) will simply do without another worker after that point -- no businessman is going to pay a salary for work that someone isn't doing.
In different language, this has been talked about for quite a long time. Modernized business has "centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands" as one text put it in 1848 (namely, the Communist Manifesto). In truth, I've long thought that the Marxist criticism of capitalism is right on target -- even if the solutions it proposed were almost entirely unworkable.
In very much the same way, I find myself agreeing with the linked article's criticisms (robots will permanently displace masses of workers), and find its proposed solutions pretty much totally impossible.
(1) I agree that a big concentration of wealth is a bad thing for our society, but frankly I don't think most people are actually bothered by that very much at all. I think it's too abstract an issue for much political interest these days. (Is there much difference to the average voter nowadays if CEOs earn millions of dollars, or tens-of-millions of dollars? Any difference if the richest quintile own 40% or 60% of assets?)
(2) I don't think there's any way the U.S. public would accept cutting every citizen a check for $25,000 per year, or any amount. Our culture is adamant that pay without work is immoral. Right-wing rhetoric has really been precisely fine-tuned over the years to make any possibility of payments like that, or even discussion about it, sound totally absurd. The political environment today is marching directly away from social-program-type funding, not closer to it.
(3) I'm cynical enough to even be a bit skeptical that global income payments would be beneficial, psychologically, to the majority of people. As an example, most lottery winners wind up with ruined finances and marriages. The single anecdote of "Harry Potter" being the product of a welfare mother cannot be extrapolated to a universal creative renaissance. (I can't remember which SF book took it as a possibility, some Stephenson or Gibson novel, but I was skeptical of that when I first read it.) As someone else pointed out, government payments on this magnitude would also probably create skyrocketing inflation (much like college tuition).
(4) The possibilities of funding a global payment are, at best, just tricks to make an expanded social benefit not look like it. You can't disassociate checks to every citizen from money taken in by the government, as the article tries to argue. (a) Advertising on every dollar bill, road surface, and public space? Bleagh! (That's his #1 idea.) (b) What most resemble his "extreme income taxes" (like big inheritances) are right now being rolled back to zero in the U.S. (c) Lotteries, fines, and auctions are notorious for being sucked in to the general budget even when "earmarked" for specific expenses. (d) The most likely example is the Alaskan oil-payment fund, but I would think that too could evaporate as soon as some political interest wants it used for a different purpose, especially on a national stage.
(5) To complicate matters, I agree that lower-class service jobs can be automated, and that middle-class technical jobs can be outsourced offshore. However, I see no compelling argument that classic "esteemed" jobs like doctors and lawyers can be downsized in the same fashion.
So in conclusion, I totally agree that increased automation of service-sector jobs will work to increase unemployment and lower wages -- robots will no
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
That society is a zero-sum game. For every robot that takes a job, one worker will never work again. +1 and -1 come to zero. I gain, you lose, zero sum.
People who are displaced can always find another job. They can always improve themselves. The country has been built by rational, intelligent people. The robots were made by intelligence, not brute force.
There will always be a place in a HUMAN society for human workers. Even on star trek, based in the socialist future, has humans piloting star ships and making decisions.
People have the ability to improve themselves, to think, to be rational. Why bow down and worship the brute force of manual labor? Why be luddites and destroy technology and rational intelligence to move backwards towards manual labor?
Two words.
Soylent Green.
If I'm running a McD's or even a Walmart, I'm not going to replace my low-end cheap cannon-fodder workforce with expensive, balky robots together with their support personnel. There will always be a place in the economy for a device with all the intelligence of a human being, a modicum of youthful idealism, and the willingness to work for $5/hour. The device even takes itself home at night and does its own personal maintenance.
Marshall brain makes one major error. He assumes all gains in productivity go directly to the shareholders. If there is a large amount of available capital. (which there will be in Marshall's world.) Then when a business is hugely profitable or hugely inefficient competitors will enter the market and thus will drive down prices. (see walmart). So yes jobs will be eliminated. But also prices will be driven down making everything more afordable. So those who still have jobs will find that they are wealthier and buy more stuff (or work less) thus creating jobs.
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It seems to me that his argument boils down to "I am unable to see the future, and therefore we are doomed". What a load of drivel.
Let's see your research. Is your research published in a famous economics journal that I might be able to read at the local university? Do you have your research in pdf form for me to download? Do you have any research papers that I might purchase a copy of at cost? Please, I'm just dying to read your research.
It seems to me that the big limitations of the proposed workless economy is it's energy sources.
....as a totally unrelated aside, I'd like to see an analysis of the income distribution numbers that normalizes for population growth. Does the upward trend of income distribution simply mean that there are more people to be poor? Does the fact that the US uses such a high % of the world's resources per population just describe the fact that india can't seem to stop making more and more people to live on the sidewalk?
Can agriculture really be made laborless? How many people can you feed with robot farms? Or do we have two classes of people, berrypickers and artists?
And what about raw energy generation? We're already at the end of our rope with oil. How do you run 6 billion robots to serve 6 billion people? Somebody got a fusion plant handy? Cause I don't. And at what point to the environmental impacts of even fusion kick in? How much waste heat can the biosphere absorb?
The only way I can see a robot economy beginning to work is in the way Asimov envisioned so many years ago. In a world with 20,000 total human population, everyone can live like a king. In a world with 1 million total human population, everyone is a prince. In a world with 6 billion (8 billion...10 billion....12 billion) total population, everyone is a serf.
.
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If you think for one minute that either of those two men just sat on their asses and magically became rich, then you've got a whole lot of the world to learn about outside of your pampered college environment.
Oh yeah, and last time I checked, it just so happens that you were studying Computer Science. Funny, huh? They don't do a goddamn thing all day if it's not sitting on their asses. Bet that makes you feel really guilty.
So shouldn't the remaining 5% of the population try to do something for/with the others?
Do something with the population? There's a lot of people that would like to do something with a few populations in Asia involving a lot of radiation and heavy doses of explosives encased in metal. No one should ever have that kind of power over other people, but that discussion bleeds into abortion and euthanasia. Some see a distinction between killing an unborn or elderly or healthy person; we all have our things we live for and all draw the line differently at what we consider valuable to society, so it's questionable on whether that is for us to judge. When you see that sort of thing proposed, scream really loud before it is accepted, for otherwise you will surely be screaming while it happens to you.
I'm not just talking about your yearly flight to a foreign vacation and having to use public transport to commute (if at all), but your means of entertainment (computers, home entertainment, cinema, amplified music), foods that are available at modest prices (anything that isn't locally grown and distributed will become "exotic" and command a higher price - expect to eat less meat and more seasonal fruit n' veg) and lots more - including your free time (you probably won't be able to afford to run a fridge/freezer, so you'll need to shop more often for fresh food or grow your own, labour-saving devices such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners become too expensive to run).
And to anyone who says that we can start using alternate forms of energy (e.g. nuclear, renewables), yes, that's possible, but only if we build the necessary infrastructure whilst we still have sufficient hydro-carbon fuels, otherwise we'll only find it increasingly harder to do (try building/expanding a alternative powerplant without using powered machinery!)
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The article is absurd. If everyone's unemployed then how are the fat cats who own the robots going to make enough cash to keep the factories running? Who's going to buy their products if eveyone's on welfare?
The poster, probably, also thought that people wouldn't notice that all the links had turned into bits of text. [foobar.com] isn't a link people, and when it is in a comment it means that coment was stolen.
I've often thought about the impending wave of unemployment that will result from a mass-adoption of robotic automatiion in manufacturing, service, shipping, retail, etc. The only reasonable thing I can think of to do with the unemployed masses is to use them as human billboards. Hell, we're already doing it. We currently sell them shirts and mugs and stickers and all manner of products that help them advertise products, brand names, companies, etc. All that really has to be done is to reverse the flow of money. Pay THEM a salary to promote products aimed at the other 50% of human society that will still have jobs. All of their clothing, food, furniture, entertainment, personal transportation(from skates to skateboards to scooters to cars), and tools can be branded, and they can be used for periodic staged or spontaneous photo-ops. If anything, the market has already shown that "reality" programming can be very popular. Why not "reality" advertising? Who wants to see some damn actor in an ad hawking the latest, coolest thing, when you can see a whole slew of real people making use of these products(and pushing a number of other brands at the same time)?
And, if any of you think this would be demeaning, do you think it would be any worse than working 60-70 hours per week between McDonald's and Burger King?
The only downside to this is that genuinely ugly people will be less useful for these ad campaigns than attractive, fit, and healthy young people. Ugly people, the physically deformed, or older individuals that are not well-trained enough to get jobs will be in some trouble unless they can pitch products or services intended for ugly people with money. I guess they could do before/after ads for plastic surgery clinics.
But, in summary, the one thing that the soon-to-be-unemployed public will WANT is some legislation on the books protecting their right to "take their business elsewhere" if their patron corporation(s) give them a raw deal or stick them with shoddy products. All invididuals making a living by mass-advertising all day and all night should have the right to act as an ad contracter and sign on with the firm(or group of firms) that offers the most attractive line of products to advertise. This would promote competition as corporations/conglomerates/whatever would try to win the hearts and minds of the largest number of the most desireable ad contracters for advertising purposes. Contracts locking contracters into a specific line of products at a fixed salary for too long a time should be outlawed to give contracters more flexibility to work wherever they so choose, and legislation tailored towards giving contractors more leeway when filing greivances against their patrons in court should also be drafted to protect the new contracters of the future.
"I will not send American boys eight to ten thousand miles across the world to do a job that Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." -- Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson.
woops, grievances not greivances
An average farmer could be trained to do manual work at the factory. Some training was needed, but not very much. With robots, there might not be (that's what the parent and Brain argue) any job for those 50% (or 90%) of the people, simply because even the new jobs could be performed by robots. And you can develop new robots as fast as you can invent new jobs.
If we want to understand transitions between social orders, we need to check what Marx and Engels wrote (and also how scientists in Soviet Union, especially in late Soviet Union, elaborated on marxism). And they told that there will not be an upgraded capitalism, there will be a new socio-economic formation. It's called communism. BTW, the ideas of late communist scientists are somewhat similar to the transhumanist ideas. They both realised that we will soon have an "artificial nature" - the environment that provides stuff to humans, without much work on our part.
So robots (and then nanorobots + AI) ARE a bigger deal than factories and computers were.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Date: 2003-08-31
... Society as it is designed today wastes an unbelievable amount of human potential through mechanisms just like these.
.
hi Marshall Brain,
i have always enjoyed your howstuffworks.com tremendously.
recently in the past month i started to read your online diary and also your Robitc Nations series of essays. I cannot help but get a sense of a crank.
i have read many of your social or financial related articles from howstuffworks.com, such as the basic workings of banking, advertisement, money, stocks, leadership etc. So, i'm certain that you as an engineering geek is familiar with the basics of economics and corporations, as in contrast to the vast scientist type who are totally ignorant of social sciences.
however, your articles comes across as by an inciting crank. Your robotic nations series, for example, in general has the tone of an alarmist, as if you would benefit from an ensuing panic.
yours reads like a sophistry. An article on the surface seems to call for awareness of a potential problem, a problem that nobody can be sure of. But the content and style has many subtle flaws and imbued properganda.
as an example, i quote from your latest article:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
--begin quote
[best seller Harry Potter's author J K Rowling had problems subsisting and the book was rejected multiple times.]
At the very least, Rowling's story shows us that the economic theory underpinning our world contains an element of dysfunction. It should not be the case that highly creative people sitting on top of billion dollar ideas have to go on welfare (and reach "one of the lowest points" in their lives by doing so) in order to express themselves. By removing this dysfunction,...
--end quote
The situation of J K Rowling is an unfortunate one, and i would like to see our society change for this. However, your statement "Society as it is designed today wastes an unbelievable amount of human potential through mechanisms just like these." is outrageous and absurd.
Societies are not designed. And, it doesn't "waste" things. Waste implies a crition. Throwig away a burger is wasting. But taking my burger and drive to nearest city to give to a homeless is more wasteful. And, what you mean by the lurid "unbelievable amount of human potential"? It is said that all humans are unique and has vast potential. By your implication, no society could ever not waste an "unbelievable amount of human potential"
The situation where people involved with non-profit oriented artifacts (such as artists, writers, historians...) will often have a problem subsisting is indeed an unfortunate one. Artisans being artisan because they have not choosen to be a businessman, and probably not much interested in making money, and for these obvious reasons they are poor. This is just how things are, which we may call it "social physics". If we don't like it that way, we could then be aware of it and change our society. However, it is harmful to propergate the implication that there is an evil doer or collection of greedy businessman forcing artisans to their sorry condition.
In your last article you also mentioned Linux.
--Begin quote
The Linux phenomenon specifically, and the open source phenomenon in general, point in the same direction. Linux is one of the best operating systems on the planet, and it is free. It has been created by thousands of programmers who have donated their time and skills to the creation of Linux. What if we create an economy that encourages the creation of things like Linux? If people could make a living without being employees, we could unlock an unimaginable ocean of human creativity and human potential.
--end quote
This i find ridiculous. Linux is perhaps one of the best operating system on the planet for a computing professional who love free things, but it
Xah
xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html
There are still tasks robots couldnt do that humans can, you must remember that. now, maybe like mass production of things and checkout lines, that shit already needs replacing because I'm tired of sitting line line for 10 minutes while some fat bitch stands there with her eyes crossed, looking like a confused and scared wild animal becuase she isnt sure how to scan up a box of cheese. however, these retail stores still need people on the floors. and the cost of machines being able to do this would be too much, not to mention the unfriendliness when a customer needs help, no one would help, so only people who have certain positions in a job would lose jobs, or just get moved elsewhere in the store, big whoop, someone still needs to manage the place. and you gotta have people around to have that inviting feel. and for the mass production industry, oh well, that's like coal mining, there's no real future there. let machines do that shit. probably get better quality products. however, they need programmers and maintence works for these machines too, which would cost money, in the end, there will prolly be more money spent on the machines than human workers, just some things cant be replaced.. so there isnt any huge worry.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
The author of this article echoes many of the sentiments of this site.
Well, two things will happen:
Moreover, and even worse: People claim all the time that the economy has survived everything before it, and will adapt. But some trends, promoted by such shifts, have just continued to go in an unhealthy direction. One of them is the concentration of wealth: the increasing percentage of resources owned by a tiny fraction of society. Another is the shift in wealth from individuals to corporations - never before has the economy dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
Hmm, have you ever heard of the Dutch East India Company? I imagine as a relative proportion of the world economy at the time, that corporation was far larger than AOL-TW (which, by the way, is not that large of a company, compared with e.g. Wal-Mart). Besides, corporations are ultimately owned by individuals, and incidentally also provide a large chunk of the tax revenues that keep government running. (Same goes for the rich. The top 20% may have 50% of the world's wealth, but is also paying 70-80% of the world's income tax, and (more indirectly) also a similarly large proportion of other taxes too).
The key thing is not so much income inequality, but income mobility - how easily can an individual by dint of sheer achievement move up the income ladder? The example of the Harry Potter author in the article is a good example of this. Unfortunately we don't have much good data on income mobility, but it doesn't seem significantly worse than in the past, and may even be slightly better. Today's rich typically aren't coming from old-money families any more, but from the middle and even working classes.
I suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the working skilled and the unemployed masses. Already, these two groups exist and rarely interact, but the differences are growing more visible stark by the day.
I doubt it. Skill is a continuum, not a boolean variable. Technology tends to shift this continuum in one direction or another, but doesn't have any particular tendency to tear it apart.
Terry
Okay, whatever, right?
Well, here's how it'll happen in a capitalist society. Robots will perform the labor, when they are available, and replace workers. Those workers will have to go back to school to become educated for another job that robots can't perform at a lower expense. Very few labor jobs will survive the next decade.
Then computers will advance to the point of being capable of running AI that is as intelligent as the average American. It won't be very difficult to build within 20-30 years. Americans just aren't that smart. So after that time those of us who are employed for our ability to think will no longer be necessary. Then we'll have a majority of the population out of work, either relying on welfare or some form of socializm.
Eventually we'll all starve and die. Or we'll choose communism, or probably socialism since we're just too stupid to give up money. I'd laugh if you all joined unions and expected that to help. Hell, I'm laughing right now. It just seems so simple. Why don't you get?
OK, then let us drop the "with" part. What can we do for them?
If it wasn't clear in what I wrote, then it was clear in my head: murder and incarceration were out of the question, as was judging by race, religion, nationality, etc.
This was one of those "If I were in charge" deals. This is also why I'm not, nor should I ever be, in charge of anything of importance. I'd end up being a benevolent dictator, but a dictator still.
This article's meat is based on some critical assumptions - flawed ones.
Firstly, like most doom-and-gloom technology-obsoletes-humans and technology-steals-jobs articles, the writer assumes all these jobs will be replaced *instantly*. This is clearly wrong, for several reasons.
First, the major corporations that'd be buying the robots are risk-averse. They'll let someone else try - and be burned by - such a scheme before they try it themselves. This might take place over ten or more years.
Secondly, he assumes that this entire block of jobs can be replaced all at once, which is also clearly wrong. They all require varying sophisticated levels of working artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot assume robots will become capable of handling *all* these jobs at the same time. AI is like nuclear fusion power plants, in ever since the 1950s experts have been saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and ten years later they're still saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and so on. It is likely that improvements will continue to be incremental, as they have been so far with industrial robots. Robots capable of taking voice orders from anyone who walks in the door, making your burger, and working the register are the kind of robots that will be perfected *last*.
Third, he assumes that a robot worker will be cheaper than a human worker, and that the rise of robots will not create any jobs to replace those jobs they displace. This is also clearly wrong. Human replacement will take more than a 1-to-1 ratio at first, as the first ones will not be as versatile as humans - they'll be more customized towards doing a specific task. Checkout line robots won't also be pulling shopping carts out of the parking lot and stocking the shelves, you'll need a few custom bots for each job. If the cost of buying and supplying power to a bunch of robots is more than the cost of a minimum-wage human employee, the robots won't get bought. Plus the diversity of robot types would slow the economy of scale of production, keeping the prices up until their widespread adoption.
When robots DO start to become worth buying, they'll need humans to keep them in service - robot repair is a hard enough AI problem that, again, that'd be the *last* type of job robots would be able to replace. As an additional bonus, the human repairmen would probably make a better salary than the minimum wage jobs being lost. There will also, of course, be a spike in the number of robot engineers and robot programmers and robot company advertising firms and robot company markters and salesmen and managers and so on. There will be more business for insurance companies - hey, you want to protect that robot investment! bots make great vandalism targets and it'll probably be illegal for them to defend themselves. There will be more business for lawyers - hey! this robot rolled over my foot, this robot dripped oil in my burger! - as, again, we expect the first models to be imperfect. And as human jobs would be those requiring more skill, there would be more teaching jobs.
Fourth, he forgets that such a massive change in our economic structure would also likely affect the minimum wage. If there are no grunt-work jobs left, then the new jobs would require a level of skill such that the minimum wage would be raised quite a bit - a huge benefit to those human workers with jobs one tier up from those being filled by robots.
Fifth, he doesn't look long term enough. Total automation of all the grunt work would increase the overall efficiency of the system to a level where it would become attractive to shift our economy to a slightly different system altogether. Sort of a hybrid socialist one - hey, if the farms are nearly free to run, might as well give every citizen some free rations of staple foods every month. If construction is nearly free, why have homelessness? Give those who can't afford a house a one-room economy apartment. The economy would still be capitalist at heart - because if you want to improve your situation, you'v
Here's a greatly simplified example of five people and their yearly incomes, from lowest to highest:
Bob: $20
Tim: $40
Doug: $60
David: $80
Roy: $100
Now suppose that it was a banner year for the economy, and everyone's income rose 10%. The next year everyone's income would look like this:
Bob: $22
Tim: $44
Doug: $66
David: $88
Roy: $110
So, things are peachy, right? Not according to the newspapers or class warriors, because the gap between rich and poor increased. The gap between rich and poor, between Bob and Roy, went from $80 to $88.
Now, suppose that next year, despite no economic growth, Bob wins $500 from the lottery. Yee-ha! So now the income chart looks like this:
Tim: $44
Doug: $66
David: $88
Roy: $110
Bob: $522
So, things weren't so hot for the economy as a whole, but the poor did well, right? Again, not according to the newspapers or class warriors. Even though Bob got rich the gap between rich and poor increased again. The gap between rich and poor went from $88 to a whopping $478! How did that happen? Because Bob is now in the highest percentile, he no longer counts as poor, so his economic gains accrue not to the lowest income level, but to his new income level, now the highest. Note that Bob doesn't need to go up to the highest fifth for this effect to take place, he only has to reach the next economic plateau for his economic gains no longer to accrue to "the poor." In fact, the effect is far more pronounced with far more people.
The lesson, once again: The gains of the highest income brackets will always outpace those in lower income brackets because there's no place else for the income to go. This does not mean the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.
For more information on this subject, see the Michigan Income Study, which found huge levels of economic mobility in America.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I've always felt that trying to eliminate the undesirable and banal jobs for which you need little skill and intelligence is good for society; of course, I consider myself in the 5%.
There is no such thing as skill and intelligence. It is purely arbitrary and dependent on the environment. For example, a computer engineer is next to useless in most parts of the world (because there isn't even a computer industry in most countries). In contrast, teachers are not highly valued in say USA whereas they are very important in many other countries.
To further prove my point, consider a salesperson. Is that person valuable or not? Should a person be pushing products to you even if you don't want it? The answer is arbitrary.
How about an astronomer? To most people, an astronomer is next to useless. People do not value them and many people don't even consider them to be skilled in anything. Needless to say, a segment of the population would disagree...
The whole notion of skill and intelligence was propagated by the aristocrats in the 17th and 18th century to maintain a classist system where they benefitted.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
(I just sent this letter to the writter and thought I would share it with you all)
Dear Sir,
I have just read your article "robotic freedom" and felt I ought to reply.
I couldn't help but notice the similarities between your article and the beliefs espoused by a New Zealand (and global) political group known as "Social Credit"
The theories of Social Credit are almost 100 years old and here in NZ there hasn't been an active Social Credit political party for some time in government.
The interesting thing is that they espouse the idea of a "national income" much as you do in your article. They arive at the same conclusion as you do but by different means.
I would like to suggest to you two point that my personal observation of human society has led me to beleive,
1) that the current social welfare system enjoyed in New Zealand and other common wealth nations, is in fact an active "national income" scheme.
2) because of greed inherant in all humans, the national income will always be a extreme modest amount.
History teaches us that the serfs and common men of society always end up living on extremely low means. Those at the top willingly take from all the rest. And Greed ensures that those at the botom would trade places with those at the top and continue the same crime in an instant.
How do you propose to solve the problem of Greed and actually make your robotic system work? So that every man, women and child receives a fair income that is above substience level? And for whatever answer you give, what makes you think that it will be enough to hold the greed of people in check? and then to ask yourself, why doesn't your system work in third-world nations? (it wasn't so long ago that the western nations had extreme poverty in their lands, due to the same causes , the have's keep from the have-nots)
This is my question, as it is becoming more obvious today that the kings of old are simply being replaced by the merchants of new.
The power changes hands but the crimes remain the same.
Sorry for the "soap boxing"!!
Dear X,
No, I am not on drugs, but I was a "60s" teenager; So, maybe flashbacks are causing my hallucination.
What could be inducing your hallucination?
HAVE FUN
OldHawk777
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
They're living in a dreamworld, Neo. They think their unskilled jobs will be around forever and money will never be hard to earn. But what will they do if they're wrong?
Has capitalism failed them?
Firstly, will robots really be that cheap? OK, sure I can admit they will be cheap to purchase, but how about something like liability. Humans are responsible for their own actions (pretty much), but how about a robot? Who is responsible for the robot.
What will the insurace be after one of these waitress robots sticks a knife in a customer? Could end up being cheaper employing humans again.
Another thing that electronics seems to lack is redundancy and predictability. You can take a hammer to a human, and they will react predictably until they stop reacting at all. How about a computer, break a few things, and are the results predictable?
I personally think that capitalism will collapse within our lifetimes. In my opinion, a key determinant of revolutions is the size and strength of hte middle class. As long as the middle class is big and happy, everything will be stable. But if the middle class erodes and becomes working class or poorer, watch out...
Also, a lot of Latin American countries are on the verge of a revolution... this time, USA can't do anything...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Robots are already general purpose enough for our purposes. We don't need one that stands on two legs, six will do just as well for the few times wheels won't work. A robot factory built by robots would be designed for roboth maintance, and wouldn't have ladders that are hard for a robot to climb.
Don't assume that one robot would build the factory. In reality several different earth moving robots would prepare the ground. Then cement robots would take cement from a robot cement truck to prepare the floor. Then steel cutting robots wouild work with steal lifting robots (cranes) and welding robots to build the structure. Sure some of those tasks might be conbinded into several, but don't assume that either the robot works alone or with human, or human replacement robots. There is no need to assume human type robot to build something.
in other news, many job openings posted today for selling anti-robot insurance to the eldery...
yes! very nice post. good research, good points. thank you very much for it. I seem to recall some nice legal post from you in some other article, too.
The whole notion of skill and intelligence was propagated by the aristocrats in the 17th and 18th century to maintain a classist system where they benefitted.
A lot of my philosophical beliefs are still stuck in those centuries. I still believed in a deterministic universe up until two years ago. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to this day doesn't sit very well with me. I understand it well, but I don't fully believe it.
In other news...
Score:
bersl2 - 0
everybody else - 7
f you're such a goddamn genius, tell me again why you're not rich?
I can't comment on the circumstances of the individual you're directing this at but I'd have thought there's a fairly simple answer to your question:
intelligence != business acumen
When I first read this article it jsut didn't make any sense. I mean the 25000$ thing is just preposterous. At first it sound pretty much impossible to give that much money to everybody. But the more I think about it the more I think it might work. (everything but the idea of putting advertisment everywhere).
I don't know about 25000$ but there could be some kind of fund with an amount that is determined by what is possible to collect. I think it makes sense that the amount would naturally grow more and more when the country would make use of more and more automation and robots.
The only thing I wonder is how would this country perform in a global economy? Would people become lasy and less productive thus decreasing global competition, and could the robots compensate for this decrease in competition?
Please try to read a little more about this before making wild conclusions like this. When I say 70K I mean in today's US dollars. Since a Technocracy wouldn't actually use money, conversions will have to be made depending on when the statement is made.
And the wealth that would be available to us if we freed up machines to do useful works rather than wasting it on low load factors, inefficient processes, poor product quality, planned obsolesence, and other profit-maximizing ideas, would just plain be stagerring. One only has to look at the numbers. Here's a good look at what kind of production portential could be freed up, keeping in mind of course that it is not a full explanation of how it can be accomplished. You may also want to look at how Energy Accounting works. It's a well thought out idea.
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert
The author of the article states that people-powered service industries are prime targets for robotic replacement.
Bull crap.
Manufacturing is the ideal target for robotic replacement. Service industries are the LAST place. People don't want to deal with a machine, they want to deal with another person.
How many commercials have you heard where the main convincing argument is that you get to talk to another person, and not a computer recording.
The author also assumes that the economy won't adapt quickly enough to absorb the displaced workers. What does he think is going to happen? Robots, Inc. opens up next door and within six months every retail chain in the Nation is 100% roboticized?
This shows such an amazing lack of understanding on how technology is adopted as to make the author nothing more than a fool. Why anyone even listens to him is beyond me.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Therefore, he misses the key point in his analysis.
PRICES WILL ADJUST TO ACCOMODATE THE NEWLY AVAILABLE LABOR
Since everyone is both a worker and a consumer, losses in income from decreases in the wage are offset by gains from the fact that when labor costs fall then other prices that depend on labor fall as well. What counts is how much in the way of real goods and services you are able to consume in the end, not the monetary income that you earn.
Try a thought experiment. Assume that right now an unskilled laborer can earn a wage of $5 per hour in a service job, say flipping burgers. In equilibiruim, the worker must have chosen the $5 per hour job over some other job that pays less, say washing cars for $4.50 per hour.
A new robot comes along that can perform the job for $4 per hour. The worker is forced to either (1) accept a pay cut to $4 per hour for flipping burgers or (2) find another job at $4.50 per hour in an industry where robots cannot substitute for him or her, such as washing cars.
The worker may be better off. Counter-intuitive? Yes. The worker is making $0.50 less per hour, and he or she can be better off? Yes.
Why? The overall price level must fall, as the cost of burgers has fallen. Working 2,000 hours per year (unrealistic, but makes the math easier) the worker was making $10,000 per year but is now making $9,000 per year. However, the Consumer Price Index will also fall in such a situation -- from a level of 100 to a level of 85 (for example). The worker's new income level is equivalent to $9,000 *100/85 = $10,588.24.
This is admittedly a simplistic and optimistic example. There may be distributional changes as the change in the CPI will depend upon whether the fall in the cost of flipping burger represents a large or small part of consumption. Furthermore, there are second order effects involved because the cost of hamburgers factors into the production of other goods and services -- for instance, if a business traveller can now purchase meals at a lower price, then the eventual cost of a computer might go down as well.
The point is that the introduction of a new technology that displaces workers may or may not end up benefitting them in the end. You can't simply say that because a robot comes along and displaces a person from their job that the worker is definitively worse off. In fact, it is a proven theorem that if you allow transfers from people who don't lose their jobs to people who do, then the net impact of the introduction of labor-saving technology is unambiguously positive for all members of an economy. This is essentially unemployment insurance.
How does this work? In the worst case, all of the people who were flipping burgers are now unemployed and are earning zero. However, the output of goods and services is exactly the same as before. The people who still have jobs are now unambiguously better off by an amount that is equal to the total of what the buger flippers used to consume. That amount can be taxed and transferred to the now unemployed burger flippers, and everyone is at the same level of consumption as before. Everyone is at least as well off as before the introduction of the new technology, and the burger flippers are better off since they now have 2000 hours of extra leisure time per year. If even one of the burger flippers finds new productive work, then the economy as a whole is producing (and thus consuming) more goods and services than before, and the transfers can be adjusted so that everyone is able to consume more than before.
In fact, it has been shown that in actual situations it costs us more to save an obsolete job than it does to pay the worker to sit on his or her hands. Case in point, the U.S. steel industry. It has been estimated that for every steelworker's job saved through the imposition of tariffs and quotas, it cost consumers in the U.S. $110,000 per year. Since the average steelworker only made $50,000 per year, it would have been much cheaper to simply pay t
is nutcase partisan whores like this HanzoSan who think their monolithic political party are the one great savior. Just look how he spews anti-republican generalisations when in fact there are tens of different republican philosophies ranging from autoritarian to "compassionate" conservative, from neo-conservative to constitutionalist. HanzoSan thinks people are entitled to unlimited wealth distribution because he lives in a fantasy world where everybody starves and wallows in pure ignorance if they're not magically saved by academia. A real bottom-feeding populist sack of shit. He's inexperienced in manual labour and probably waved "hi" to one black kid when he was 15.
If we run the clock ahead to the future (20 to 50 years), we may find a world where a lot of robotics and microscopic nanobots are both grown (using nanotech), and employed everywhere, so that we are overrun by a sea of robots that do and make most items...probablly by then, however, we will also have the capability to boost everybody's intelligence to any level...then we may find that the more ruthless among us, use this new capability to try to dominate everyone else, or, we may find that since everyone is now about the same capabilities, a sort of deadlock now exists, since nobody can be an "eliteist" as everybody can now be as smart as everyone else...so we don't need this elitest culture we now have...
I haven't read your stuff but will in the future. Are you part of the technocracy stuff? BTW, I think something is wrong with your main page. It is horribly slow on Mozilla Firebird (it could be a problem on my end but I'm not sure)... Anyway...
Without reading much about your econopolitical system, what is there to prevent someone or some entity or some group from hoarding all the resources? What's to stop a select few from dictating things to everyone else? A quick glance seems like your system can be taken over by scientists or some technology-oriented individuals? Who selects the people that will make decisions?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
People have been predicting that robots will take over every task for at least 50 years now. A lot of people invested in robots in the 80's and their businesses failed. Robots are just too expensive or complex to program for a lot of uses. As far as manufacturing is concerned, we've basically gotten about as efficient as we can get with robots. Fully automated manufacturing cells are extremely expensive, not fault tolerant, can't respond to changes quickly, and still require maintenance and operators. An ASRS (Automated Storage/Retrieval System) is about as cheap as it's going to get. They require a lot of raw materials to make. As far as retail stores are concerned, we will most likely see them disappear before we see them become entirely automated. They are an extremely inefficient extra step. I doubt robots will *ever* catch on for burger flipping. A $400,000 robot will definitely require more than a full year's salary of minimum wage to maintain. Just like the ultra cheap and simple automats couldn't compete with human order takers. Unintelligent robots will be incapable of handling basic tasks in hotels, amusement parks, and airlines. They may be capable of handling construction work, but better economies of scale would be achieved by prefabricating larger units as has been the trend. I spent 8 months programming half million dollar robotic measurement machines, and based on that I don't think anything robotic will be cost effective or intelligent enough for these tasks for at least 30 years or so. In the 1950's they thought we'd have robotic maids by 1980. I'm still waiting. Some vacuum cleaner that can't even recharge on its own doesn't count.
Do we hate people so much that we would let them starve?
Is it because we don't understand the value of a person?
A human is unlike any other being known to exist. They are capable of learning how to create new things. This ability make them more valuable than all the things in the world. Because they made those things. Without them we'd have nothing. Why is this concept so difficult for people to understand. Why can't we move on to build a society that takes care of and encourages the human to create?
All people want to do it at one point in their lives. Children have wild imaginations. If we encourage that they could live out their dreams. Or we could have them live out our nightmare on CNN every night.
Its your choice.
This is 100% pure garbage.
The problem with the paper is it assumes several falsehoods and forgets a key truth:
1: It assumes that all wealth is constant. On the other hand as manufacturing capacity increases (due to the robots or other automation), wealth will increase as well. While the rich may be richer than they were in 1960, I guarantee that the poor are considerably richer than they were in 1960 as well. The United States must be the only contry in the world where fat people drive to the welfare office. (i.e. not starving and owning an automobile)
2: It assumes the classic "greedy CEO" problem. Yes, there are many greedy CEO's. We usually hear about them when the company goes out of business. I wonder why that is?
No CEO with any sense is going to push his own salary above a certain percentage of the company's profits. As far as the corporation is concerned, the CEO is a giant liability with a giant salary. A good CEO would keep his own salary relatively low and have most of his money in investments.
3: "Employees" are also "Consumers" This is the one item that the paper forgets. If all "Employees" are thrown out of work, then there will be no one with any money to sell the products to. (Likewise, "Employees" may also be "Investors")
This is also a weakness that many people forget. Anyone who says "(Legal) Immigrants cost us jobs" is a damn fool. Legal immigrants may compete with us in the job market, but they produce wealth (by their labor) and consume what is produced, contributing to total economic output. Anyone who says that population growth will hurt the economy is an even bigger damn fool because children are pure consumers, and if you have a glut of whatever, then you need more consumers.
Why not ask the superintelligent robots for a better economic model that will benefit humanity?
Also, this reminds me of a short story called "The Midas Plague" in which people were forced to consume in order to keep the 'productive cycle' running. In this novel it was a privilege to live in run-down housing and have very few material possessions; the very poorest people lived in huge mansions with large staffs of robots and had to continuously consume.
Not that this is a good solution, just an interesting story. I like my proposed solution better.
"How's the Cocaine, Mr. Delorean?"
"Good as Gold."
What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform? What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
Aha. Here's a proof by contradiction: one of the robot jobs is to educate people.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I know that on the surface it is easy to see similarities between the two, but please re-read the fable of the blind men and the elephant. If all you do is look at one part and make your conclusions from there, you're lost, my friend.
As for the important differences, there are many. The first would be that communism still works as an scarcity economy. It cannot distribute an abundance of goods an services produced by high technology to its people, just like every other scarcity system. It still uses money, and that is damning right there. Only a solid measurement like Energy Accounting can distribute such wealth without collapsing.
Second of all, all decisions in a communist state are made politically. Sure, some science might creep in there from time to time, but it is not the rule. In a Technocracy, all technical decisions are made by the Technate, which works no different than the technical portion of any technology company, by engineers and technicians rather than politicians, except that instead of the goals being profit and higher stock prices, they are for the benefit of society. Political decisions, ones that cannot be determined scientifically, will be handled in a easy and accurate democratic way. More on this process is explained in Step 2 of this presentation.
Again, I'll say that there is far more to it than this, and this is but an introduction that will hopefully interest people into looking into this further.
T.i.n.c.?
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert
7-8 billion people are 7-8 billion consumers, only a fraction of whom need jobs (children, the elderly, the disabled and many mothers do not work)
Population is the key. Robots are robots, they will be here to support a population. What population? My best wish is - Marsian population. What about Earth? It's going to be hairy here. And no one can do anything about it. Don't worry, you are not going to be in charge...
capitalism suxxors... you aren't going to fix it... There WILL be a revolution... capitalism will fall... Trying to fix capitalism is like trying to fix monarchy...
BTW, Keynes has thoroughly been dismissed by the modern day economist establishment...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the working skilled and the unemployed masses.
This won't happen--at least under the robot situation--because the unemployed masses will be greater than the working class. Under such a scenario, a revolution will result. Don't forget that larger numbers can overthrow minorities under any democracy-like system. The only reason it doesn't happen now is because the vast majority of people are middle class and not poor.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
The Prime Directive is an excuse to let 3rd world planets / countries wallow in their own filth. What sane group of people wouldn't make available (even for trade!) a cure for cancer pill just because they haven't invented a vacuum cleaner yet? Heck, their yardstick for advancement isn't even an idea, it's a physical invention. It's just sad.
Using generalisations would lend us to the notion that all Democrats are in favour of a populous vote on every single piece of legislation proposed. This is why HanzoSan is a complete and utter dreg.
I'm not sure I accept the author's view of human creativity. Sure, it'd be nice if it's true, but I sincerely doubt that there's a huge well-spring of good ideas gone undeveloped due to having to make ends meet. Sure, I've got a few of mine own, that if I had no survival worries, I'd be spending lots of money and time on right now. But I haven't been able to find a real job for three years. And I've been looking hard. Then, medical disaster struck, and my carotid artery popped near my temporal lobe. Argh. Three months of learning how to walk again, learning to use my right hand for everything (since my left has suffered a major loss of dexterity and control).. and I was left-handed. ARGH. Sorry for the incohate yelling, I'm just annoyed.
Oh yeah, and death to all of the overpaid executives!
Hear, hear. The robot argument devolves to the myth that if we just had 100% employment, everything would be great. There are plenty of jobs out there, but no-one seems to want to be a grass-blade straightener at the going rate. How could regulating robots, or raising the minimum wage, help this?
"Because racists refuse to bring their businesses to the inner cities."
Do you really think that racism is the MAIN or even ONLY reason that people refuse to locate businesses in south central. Nah, it has nothing to do with the crime rate, or the difficulty of finding educated employees to work there. Just think about it logically for a minute, it's a chicken and egg problem. Who wants to locate in an area like that? Unless the neighborhood improves, few people will want to do business there, and unless people are willing to step up and help the neighborhood, then it wont improve. The problem is really a social one, it's NOT that MOST business owners are bigots.
How about robots replacing human intelligence?
They predict that about 30 tflops is enough computing power for AI that could be as intelligent as a human. The software does not exist yet but with genetic programming or an act of God and pure human intelligence it is inevitable that we will develope AI. Once developed it can be replicated much cheaper and faster than a human.
If you are scared about what robots might be capable of doing in the next 10 years, imagine what they will be able to do in 20 or 30 years. Perhaps they won't be conscious, but they'll be able to do my job managing systems, researching the info off the 'net to learn how to fix them, among other things.
But by then we'll have other problems, like finding a job, that will be so much more important that wondering if we could have fixed the system before the bottom fell out from under it back in 'x9.
I'd like to add another point to this:
A lot of that mobility happens with age.
The richest ten percent are basically our *parents*.
Right now I make fuck all, and am probably in the bottom 20 or 30 percent. If I make six figures when I hit 50 or 60, I'll be in the top ten percent.
It's only natural: as your skills and your network of contacts make you worth more, your income goes up. And most people aged 18 or so are, economically speaking, worthless. They can't do anything useful, they don't know anyone, they're undisciplined, etc.
And I bring up the age issue because, without any help from the government, a huge transfer of wealth already happens.
Parents, the richest 10%, are always dumping money into children, the poorest 10%, so poor they don't even get measured.
All that wealth transfer happens on a totally voluntary basis.
I don't think it's possible that a Dean fan would have so many disjointed, non-sequitur ideas all strung together. I just can't figure out if he's been planted by the GOP, to beat in the 2004 election, or Senator John Kerry, to beat in the primaries.
"Liberal" is a term that originated here from Old French which has been perverted over the decades by these so-called neo-Liberals. Much in the same way the new neo-Conservative politicians like GWB are sending us straight to hell. wayward_son, my brother-in-arms against HanzoSan clearly recognises this distinction whereas you're Canadian and political terms can be and often are entirely different.
You need to provide an alternative. The robots cannot "take our jobs" if we BOYCOT robotically produced goods. Unite! Boycott the vending machines. Buy M&M's and twinkees from human vendors only. If you don't, you're AGAINST PEOPLE! You're against people, are you? On the other hand, you can realize that robots are a good thing and shut up.
Time is money?
Time == money?
How much time do you have in your life? Let's say you'll live 100 years. A good long life.
How much money do you make? Let's say you make $100,000. A good salery.
If time == money then you would be willing to trade 100 years of your life for $100,000,000.
Therefore a human life is only worth $100 million. Your life is only worth $100 million.
But I disagree. I think a human life is barely worth the price of a bullet. Get the point?
Life is precious, time is precious. Money is not.
I exaggerated, a human life would only be worth $10 million by my miscalculations. Much more affordable than previously expected.
I have an idea...
Lets require that all corporations pay their robots. The price will be less than what you would have to pay a human, but the money would go to the government (a robot tax) and would then be distributed to the folks that the company is no longer paying... everyone else.
The company still makes more money than before, and can work the robots harder/longer etc... and the economy isn't broken.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
The people on the "production" end of our economy barely make enough to support themselves as it stands. We'll probably end up just giving them the means to subsist, and providing them with some sort of mindless drivel work to occupy their time and give them a sense of belonging. In other words, we'll have many, many positions open for video store clerks.
Most will become pr0n stars, producers, editors, distributors.
A few will be called to the noble profession of espresso manufacture.
Those troubled few, clinging to the last vestages of the labor-lifestyle, will continue to debate the merits of Windows and Linux while occasionally confusing the former with an 8-bit NES.
I sure hope that isn't a death threat in a public forum.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The author suggest giving families $25k for every child. This would remove the current constraint on women-as-chattel cultures (in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant) which is desperate poverty (Caused by overpopulation) and in 20 years the vote would be controlled by churches with high-growth policies.
Population control and the tendency of women-as-slaves cultures to dominate democracies must go hand in hand with child based subsides.
I would rather have the money in the hands of a few people, than to turn over all control to a generation of (insert high-population growth culture here)
Education is what occurs when you restrict population growth. Quality of life requires education. Encouraging overpopulation is not self-destructive, but it will lessen the average quality of life. In a conservative to-each-their-own economy, it will lessen your quality of life the most. In the authors 25K per child economy, it will have the reverse effect - benefitting the man who's quiver is full at the expense of those less virile.
AIK
I think that society is at its best when everyone has something constructive to do.
Can I nominate doing lines of coke as a constructive prusuit? You know, to keep the dangerous stuff out of the hands, er, noses of little kids?
A subject today that is making a lot of news is the amount of outsourcing going on. Not only that, some people consider the amount of factories going overseas an actual threat to national security.
Do you want all the technology and technical jobs going to other countries? This seems to be a more immediate issue that robots taking over. But then again, maybe they have more in common than we know?
"There was a time when employees respected their jobs and were loyal to employers and a job was for life. However employees no longer have that so employers won't have it for them either"
You have it backwards. It was the employers who broke their part of the unwritten agreement. When they decided that money no matter what, was more important than the welfare of their employees. Everything we've seen since, has simply reinforced that fact.
Wow you're right, there is a big gap between bill gates and someone working at mcdonalds.
Come on, you can't compared the poorest person in existance to the richest in existance.
FINALLY!!!!
a meaningful, insightful, well thought out post that got modded UP amongst this sea of pseudo-communist BS that most slashdotters seem to love. kudos!
I thought lotteries worked by taking disposable income from citizens and then turning it into state funds.. kind of like a tax on those stupid enough to play more than a few times. Giving that money back to the people would just redistribute money the people were already spending.. which wouldn't really help people financially.
Meanwhile, the family which once earned $1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive, lowering their effective income to $500,000.
;-) ), it's not going to be spent on bread and milk and even cheap booze...
Not really, because a major part of that $1M is spent not on the same things that poor man's $25K would be spent, right? Even assuming that one actually burns through $1M a year in personal consumption (easier than I thought, only $2739/day
Paul B.
The author's suggestion of putting everyone on a $25,000 per year stipend means that there will be an effective increase in unemployment.
Europe lives this right now through its expanded unemployment systems, France is at 9.6%, Germany is at 10.6%.
While I think it is great that Harry Potter was written, it is most probably that a lot of those near 10% of French and Germans are probably not going to pen the next billion-dollar media event, and could probably use other mechanisms to contribute to their own well being and that of society.
And frankly, I know alot of people in the US who if they would be paid $25,000 a year would do absolutely nothing but drink and take drugs all day and play video games.
The other issue is that if you paid everyone $25,000 per year, it would change other prices in a free market economy. I still believe that the minimum wage is slightly inflationary, although this is offset by its effect of slowing wage growth for more senior service workers, and its effect on encouraging a black market for illegal alien labor (around here, you can drop by any 7-11 and pick up a crew willing to do labor below minimum wage). The "stipend" would make the minimum wage inflation and dislocation effect look mild in comparison.
The author does note that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme which will shortly begin to fail as the population age structure inverts. I suggest instead ending the payroll tax (the most regressive tax in the US), and allowing individuals to invest in themselves (through school) or in business investments (like stock) which would allow them to become part of the owner class, and build wealth. There are now several countries moving to a partially-privatized old age pension scheme including the UK and Chile.
I also suggest a highly liberalized temporary movement of natural persons (TMNP) to allow foreign workers to come work in the US and other rich countries legally. This would represent a tremendous expansion of wealth of the world's poor.
What would people put out of work by robots (or foreign workers) do? They'd have to figure out something, or someone smart would figure out something and hire them. Fortunately, people are better than robots at working out solutions to these kinds of problems.
Given this logic, there is a rule, which is the more jobs replaced by Robots, the cheaper a robot must be to compete with an out of work laborer. Given this, robotics will only advance during periods of high employment. And in some cases, the cost of maintenance of robots would overcome the cost of hiring devalued workers, and so we could see fits and starts where fleets of robots are abandoned when it is cheaper to hire people than to change the batteries.
This is what stock brokers call slippage. that is the difference in the value of a given labor market before you design and build the robot and the value of that market once robots are introduced. (in the case of stocks, the price goes up as you buy a lot of shares because you reduce the supply)
If coal miners are being paid more than they could possible live on, there will be high slippage because the coal miners if given no choice, will work for bread before starving. (let's ignore the fact that they will also create a huge market for security as displaced workers try to sabatage the bots)
This suggests that robotics will be constrained to either a. a minority of jobs by number (such as welding jobs where the number of job affected doesn't disturb the market catastrophically - ie enough to break the union) or b. low wage jobs with minimal slippage (the value of cleaning a floor is already as low as it could go).
The one place robotics could be applied benefitially is to education. It is hard to have to much education.
AIK
First senario: People have less of an incentive to work... Would you work as hard if you got an extra $25,000? Second senario: Prices go up. If everyone has an extra $25,000 what keeps gas prices from shooting up to $3.00? Honestly there are very few ways to successfully re-distribute wealth, but giving $25k to everone isn't one of them. Communism would be great except for the fact that there is no true value of the work you do.
How can you confuse that for a death threat? Are you stupid?
Human life, to some people, is worth more than the price of a smart bomb. Get the fucking point now, motherfucker?
Gahd!
It was said when the phrase 'paperless office' first became popular that:
"We will get the paperless office when we get the paperless toilet" - meaning never.
Well now they have paperless toilets in Japan (they wash and blow dry! lol) but I am unaware of any paperless office anywhere. By fiddling with fonts and using a very good monitor I have managed to get reading of the screen to a comfortable level but paper is still the best for large amounts. My wife even asks me to print out emails for her to save her having to walk to the monitor! LOL.
The paperless office isn't coming anytime soon but the paperless toilet may be here sooner than we expect.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
PS. You are why I disagree that human life is worth more than the price of a bullet. I hate people. Because they're so fucking stupid! If they want to kill themselves, let them! They deserve it!
Grow a fucking brain!
Think for yourself. Question authority.
You want the truth? Humans are the most valuable thing on the planet. Only you can't own them. But you wouldn't understand any of that, would you? Fucking moron.
Given Human Nature, specifically the tendency to respond to free time and food abundance to procreate, Welfare is not a sustainable model. In some cases, and for brief spurts of time, we have seen welfare levels high enough to meet western standards of living, but "welfare generations" have trimmed down long term welfare even here. The status of global welfare on the other hand has always been just enough to keep the wars localized, if the warring gets bad enough that civilized (population controlled) countries are affected, we rachet up the welfare a notch, but presumably only until the warring dies down. Iraq will be an example. how long will we pour money into that sinkhole after the global threat dies down - several pico-seconds or one election which ever is longer i suspect.
The lesson is that welfare or rather the lack of welfare is a default population constraint, without which, the demand will grow to consume the supply. People, like all other things biological, are programmed to grow given adequate resources. Add to this that some religions, mostly ones which treat women as chattel, encourage growth up to 5 times faster than average. Welfare in a democracy therefore quickly means the subordination of women as mere vote producing machines.
Idea, give every person alive today a single vote, and let them share it (divide it) with their kids if they choose to have them.
This guy needs to read up on economics. It's yet another scenario based on the erroneous assumption that there is a fixed number of available jobs in the world. There isn't.
Agriculture used to employ more than 80% of the workforce. In Western countries today it's more like 2%. Seventy-eight percent of the population is not out of work.
People argued against feminism because they thought if you let women into the workforce, there would be twice as many people for the same amount of jobs, so unemployment would top 50%. Didn't happen.
Some people still argue against immigration thinking that every new person who enters the country and gets a job must take it from someone else, so leave them unemployed. Doesn't happen.
Most people reading this forum are probably doing jobs that didn't exist 50 years ago. In 50 years' time, if robots are doing all manual labor, we'll be working hard at something else.
I should buy some cement.
the entire article was inside a HTML table to fix its width at 500 pixels (gah! why do people DO this?!). so I saved it as a file, edited out the table, and found some commented-out sidebars y'all might be interested in.
Adaptation is a painful process, as anyone who were forced to switch careers can attest. Even the so-called gradual shift in employment patterns can have dramatic changes to society. Look at what happened to cities when suburbanization happened. The trend of white flight took about 30 years, and until about 10 years ago most major cities (New York included) were in decrepit shape. A most extreme example of what happens when jobs leave and there is little to replace the lost jobs is the city of Lowell, Massachussetts. It was the milling capital of the world and an outright metropolis in its heyday (123,000 residents in 1920 census). Today no working mills remains, and it was so poor that the federal government decided to resettle 25,000 cambodians in the 80s because it was so CHEAP to do so - land cost were as cheap as buying arid land in the western deserts. Today it is still struggling, slowly turning into a distant suburb for Boston.
That's the current direction of the economy. Look at HP...who are laying off thousands, and giving millions in bonuses to Carly Fiorina. At some point, HP will be incapable of giving massive raises...that will be the asymptote of the world economy...when business faces a contracting customer base due to their own mass "cost-cutting."...Then, I believe it will begin to reverse itself, leading to a sustained period of hyperinflation and overemployment, or, perhaps, the economy will collapse inward on itself like a Greenspanian black hole. But at some point, as I said, companies will realize that there is no longer anyone to sell to, and Adam Smith's atrophied invisible hand will bitch-slap them all.
Not to address your main point -- but I noticed to wrong statements. First of all, Robert E. Lee took the job of the confederate forces, not because he liked that side better, but because he had family on that side, and his personal loyalties were there.
His feelings were that the South should have freed the slaves before the war. Technically, he was right. So he would have made a great Southern president.
But he made a lousy general. Tactician? Perhaps pretty good. Good at getting the troops emotionally involved? A genius. But he didn't value his men. For him, casualties were just casualties that had to be borne.
That's like a company not valuing money. Money is the lifeblood of companies: lose too much, and you die. Soldiers are the lifeblood of an army. Lose too many, and you have no maneuverability, no force, and so on.
So Robert E. Lee was a lousy general.
That said, his honor was one of the saving graces of the civil war. It allowed America to get past war, into something that, while not good, was a ton better than continuous war.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
OK, maybe I am missing something here...which is entirely possible.
XYZ Corp. makes widgets that everyone LOVES. They have an economically (and ecologically) sound business that employees thousands of people around the world. XYZ widgets are in high demand and are affordably priced.
(fast-forward 20 years)
XYZ Corp. lays off 95% of their workforce for even MORE productive robots. These robots make widgets, faster, better, and with less ecological impact. The formerly-employed people have no money to buy widgets and are forced to subsist at (or below) the povertly level. Thousands of people who once bought widgets are no longer prospective consumers.
If we magnify this scenario, many businesses lay off large numbers of human workers in preference for robotics. Idle, unproductive, and poor people now cannot afford to purchase products from the now-more-productive businesses.
If there is no market, how can there continue to be a product?
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
It's not at all clear that the average person will create, if not a masterwork, then at least something that people will on the whole consider worthwhile.
I recall a fellow where I used to live who, when I passed him on the street, would tell me at great length about what he was doing. It didn't take much listening before I realized that his "extensive research" was unlikely to turn up much, and that his connection to the world as we know it was very different from mine to say the least.
So...will all these people funded with $25K/year be churning out best-sellers or writing the Great American Program, or dementedly chasing windmills and pseudoscience... or, perhaps more likely, settle into a "bread and circuses"-enabled stupor?
What I see as the problem is not a mechanical problem, a political problem, or a social problem -- it is a moral problem. That is, in light of growing human misery, what is our response? It is to protect ourselves, even at cost to those who are in trouble, even at cost to justice itself. That is the wrong response, with its own parallel to the tragedy of the commons.
I do agree that what we're heading for is ominous. But I think that the book Hope's Edge gives an indication of what the successful response will be.
It isn't going to be communism, it isn't going to be fascism, and it isn't going to be revolution. None of those things bring any good with them.
It's going to by communityism. That is, people who have a farm, and *can* produce all their needs by themselves, are going to essentially hire those whom they can and whom they can support, and close their system to the outside world, as much as necessary to maintain their integrity.
Which means that side-by-side with factories churning out mindless automata for more factories and extreme poverty, you're going to see farms being run by horse-drawn plows, because the horses can eat what the farm produces. Tractors require fuel.
Now, at that point you're going to have the society itself having a choice. Some of the societies will raise property taxes through the roof. If that happens, understand that the overlords are not going to take a loss. If they do, they risk becoming "jobless" themselves, and finding themselves in the same dire straits that they put others. Therefore, prices will rise in hyperinflation, enough to keep the main majority of jobless people in extreme poverty. If need be, the overlords will turn to crime, and will have plenty of people who want money enough to work for them.
So raising taxes, or giving out $25k per person is *not* the way to go. All the moreso, because if taxes are raised, then these farms are bust, and then there is nothing for the society except escalating crime, a decreased value on human life, and a lack of further progress, because further progress will not pay.
Now, on the other hand, if the society instead encourages these farm enclaves by giving them more protection against their own defunct government, then these farm enclaves will grow in number, number of workers, and size. Those will then be able to maintain the workers and will help balance out the economy between robots and humans.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If someone sends me $1M worth of cheap booze, I promise never to post to Slashdot again.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I'm too lazy to read the article, but from what people are saying this sounds very much like the premise for the movie "Harrison Bergeron".
This article didn't answer the question that immediately occurred to me when I started reading it, namely:
What's the difference between a robot getting my job and some guy in India getting my job?
In spite of discussing the subject of cheap foreign labor, the author didn't explain why robots are fundamentally different. I also had a big problem with her scenario in which the workers are taken out of the picture and all of the money flows to the executives. If robots were to take away all the minimum wage jobs, I predict that the worst impact will be on those very same businesses. In my own experience the people who work at the low-paying jobs tend to also buy the most cheap crap. It doesn't make sense that companies like WalMart will be doing business as usual after putting a lot of their best customers out of work.
But then along comes the magic wand of handing everybody $25,000 to spend. I'll admit her ideas for raising that kind of money with things like advertising and lotteries are creative, but does she really believe that something which is basically a gigantic welfare scheme would fly in a country where we can't even get a national health system?
While we are fantasizing about saving the economy, let's look at a saner approach based on historical experience. The economic boom of the 1950's came about because of the shortages created during WWII. The government diverted industrial production to the military and bought enormous quantities of everything, which simultaneously created lots of jobs but also widespread shortages of consumer goods. They paid for it by selling War Bonds, in effect borrowing back the money. People had jobs and good incomes and not much to buy other than the necessities, so they throttled back their lives for a few years and either saved their money or invested it. The government managed all this strictly, by rationing goods and selling War Bonds. It was Big Brother to the extreme. But when the war ended and production switched back to consumer goods, people had tons of money to spend. The boom followed, and the ensuing taxation paid the tab for the war.
A war is only one way to create such a situation. Large, long-term public works projects might do the same trick, but the required ingredient is to create shortages and force people to save their money for a while. This wouldn't work unless the citizens were fully committed to the plan. For that they would have to be treated like Citizens as opposed to Consumers. The threat of terrorism comes to mind as a great driving factor, in fact it's almost tailor-made for the job. But our current government's approach so far has been, "Don't let terrorists keep you from shopping."
He begs the question and ignores key detals. This is a very general and idealistic approach that oversimplifies complex problems associated with implementing automation. It's taking several years and several billion dollars per task to automate processes on computers. Translating that to the physical systems would probably double or triple the price per process.
Workers will need to be trained to install the robots, some of those will stay on as maintenance crews. You will need regional managers for those maintenance workers. You will need district managers for those managers, and they will need to be tied in up the line to the board. End result is more tech jobs that receive 2-3 times minimum wage. Effectively negating efficiences gained from automation.
The power costs for the robots + maintenance + the refitting costs for a single site + new manager costs + off-site support = too much money.
This guy advocates selling EVERYTHING to corporations to finance all of this.
How would you feel if everything you loved and respected about your country were sold to the highest bidder?
You're off to join the noble Peacecorp. The fiscally bankrupt organisation that sends computer nerds and ROTC rejects overseas without a clue to boss around experienced farmers and tradesmen which will result in low product yields. Oh, and it's tax funded too? It's also going to pay for the college education of a bossy turd who has been isolated from the real world; someone who has been immersed in an imaginary culture of fear and starvation? Where can I volenteer more out of my pocketbook for this program? Tell me, HanzoSan. How much do you really interact with "the community"? You seem to post almost nonstop to slashdot. Do you spend your weekends at a soup kitchen? EEEHHHHH!! Spend your Saturday morning helping with Habitat For Humanity? Nah, you're too busy eating cereal in front of your computer, on slashdot, in your pajamas.
Money has utility only if it has a reliable value. This is why people liked the Gold Standard -- it was a value that was very hard to tinker with. It was objective -- one could weigh the gold pieces and determine the value directly. With fiat money, it's based on trust and future production (e.g., debt-based). The only thing allowing people to continue to accept paper/fiat money is a relatively stable value. In other words, free of inflation and deflation at too great a value (more that a few percent at most).
With respect, I see this oft-quoted (in one form or another) conventional explanation as mumbo-jumbo.
The idea that gold has some kind of magic inherent value, difficult to "tinker with", strikes me as just plain weird. Sure, gold has some utilitarian niche value (largely in the form of gold plating, where a tiny amount goes an amazing distance), but mostly its perceived value as a jewelry constituent is just a form of carnival trickery inflicted on the rubes. Who says gold is worth $35.00 per ounce, year after year? A governmental trust - a fiat, essentially. It has nothing more or less supporting its value than the paper money you criticize. Either one works to the extent you keep inflation at bay and get the preponderance of the people to buy into. Today a bag of potato chips is worth $1.00 or 1/35 of an ounce of gold. Next year, it's $1.05 or 1/33 of an ounce; whatever. Inflation has nothing to do with the medium of currency. It has to do with supply versus demand, and the total amount of currency.
You would do far better to use, say, platinum instead of gold. At least there is a very real, and non-substitutable, requirement for platinum in the operation of industry and life as we know it. But it is still not fundamentally superior to paper money.
And no, I don't think people will refuse to accept paper money if inflation rises above some arbitrary level of "a few percent at most". As if they had a real alternative. "Excuse me, Mr. Employer, I would prefer you to pay me in food, fuel, rent vouchers, and some precious metals." See just how far you get if you insist on your own arrangement. You get shown the front door, that's what.
There are plenty of instances in the recent past, if not the present, where inflation rose above anyone's idea of "a few percent" - multiple tens of percent, or even 100+ percent - for multiyear periods - and those countries did not abandon paper money.
LOL! I think what Robert A. Heinlein meant is that history marches on. There is no hint that he is the only one allowed/able to read it. The idea is simply that you'd best not count on being able to stop it.
So in the future almost everyone will be in a robot-controlled prison.
Google search for 'prison industrial'
You've never read an economics textbook, have you?
Er, actually I have. There are some glaring holes in your supposed explanation.
1) The government never lets you count its stache of gold. In fact no one is allowed to even view the gold in Fort Knox. Maybe you are a trusting fellow, so when they tell you they have x million pounds of it, you believe them.
2) I doubt the paper money was intended to have "the same value" as gold. That would be $35.00 per ounce (in historic times at least). I think you will find it has rather more value than that. A single bill weighing a small fraction of an ounce is worth, as one example $100.00. You don't like me using dollars as a measure of value? OK, an ounce of gold will buy 35 bags of potato chips, and the much lighter bill will buy 100 bags.
3) Who says inflation is a bad thing? Scarcely any economic authorities, you'll be interested to hear. Just about all of them agree that a small amount of inflation is necessary and/or desirable. Ponzi rules, it would seem.
4) Even if inflation is bad, how is seizing some of the people's holdings by printing money and thus causing inflation, worse than seizing some of the people's holdings by grabbing it in the form of taxes before they even see it?
You've just stated that you think a human life (presumably including my human life in this) is only worth a bullet immediately after describing how many millions you mistakenly thought I might be worth if I lived to an old age. Then you asked if I 'got the point'. That's a death threat, asshole.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That's still a pathetically limited example of an incumbent born of a long-gone era. Nice cop-out, cockbreath.
Here, let me explain this in more simple terms so your simple mind can understand it, m'kay?
Life is time, which is worth more than money.
In our history Americans used the butt of a gun to smash in the face of the enemy because a human life during that war was less valuable than the cost of a bullet. I don't remember which war, but I know I read that somewhere. It is a rather disguesting statement, do you agree?
There are times in our history when our actions say very different things than our words. We like to preach how valuable each child is, but do we put our money where our mouth is? We allowed a quarter million Americans die in Viet Nam because we had to fight communism. Can we honestly say today, after invading Iraq, that we value a human's life? We bombed their cities with smart bombs, depleted uranium and napalm. After sanctions killed over a million of them through starvation.
If we do value life I think we'd create the proper environment for it to live in. And that environment would not include money. Unless, of course, you can explain how money and time are in any way related.
Your arguement than time is money x marketability says that unless a human is marketable they are worthless. It says they are not worth the price of a bullet. I'm saying their time is worth more than you or I could ever fathom. Their life is worth more than we understand. Yet, economists agree with you.
So I give up. You're right. Fuck it. Let 'em...
Iraq is not socialist like Nazi Germany was not! Your ignorance is staggering. Iraq had a political and economic system known as Fascism, a heavy dictatorship which allowed private industry to exist provided that it was under tight government regulation. So, yes, it was quite socialist. Know how Saddam siezed all that money that was produced from sold oil? The money that was alloted for starving Iraqi children but never got to them? That was under *gasp* government control, was seized by the goverment, and spent on lavish palaces. If that's not Fascist socialism, I do not know what is.
The point is, there are lots of places to put ads on publicly-owned infrastructure and those ads would generate billions of dollars in revenue. If all that revenue adds up to $100 billion per year flowing into the central account, then each citizen of the United States gets a check for about $350 per year. Hey, it worked for NetZero, why not America? I can see it now: "Money was meant to be free!"
You're the one confusing money and worth. I'm only talking about money; and I totally agree they are not the same thing. I expect Ghandi was pretty poor; if so was he worthless? No.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I don't think it's possible! I mean, won't they need a DEBUGGER? "Hey, robot unit at IP fec1:ffff:100:f102::1 seems to be pushing other robots off that 200 foot skyscraper, can you log in here right away?"
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
No, that's a question of confirmation of your understanding. The statement immediately following that should clear it up for you. Here, let me repeat it:
Life is precious, time is precious. Money is not.
My statement:
But I disagree. I think a human life is barely worth the price of a bullet. Get the point?
Your statement:
You've just stated that you think a human life (presumably including my human life in this) is only worth a bullet
Is the value of a bullet, the monetary form, equivelent to the threat of a bullet? The cost of a bullet is like a $1, right? So me saying a human life is worth less than $1 offends you and makes you feel threatened, eh? I'm sorry about that.
Still, I wish you'd grow a brain.
1) We are about to run out of oil, all this requires a lot of energy.
2) We seem not to want to have children. No children no problem.
All a bit sad really.
In fact, the answer is obvious. Allow me to explain.
You see, what we do is establish a new electronic currency that is the currency of the welfare state. This new currency is radically different than anything Marx or any historical economic ponderer could ever have imagined because it is self-deflating. You can't save this currency. It must be spent within a few months or it will dissapear. This allows a welfare state without inflation. This is important because it is inflation which is the real scourge of socialist welfare states as we've seen over and over in South America, Africa and the various other macro-economic laboratories of the world.
Now, how is this pro-business? Simple, the only entities that are allowed to accept this electronic welfare currency are private businesses. In essence, it is corporate welfare that is filtered through the masses with an internal check on inflation. Any establishment abusing the system, especially by allowing people to translate the welface currency to hard cash to create illicit savings, is temporarily banned from accepting the electronic currency and thus loses market share. By providing a reward up front, you create a form of soft punishment by withdrawing the reward rather than actually having to resort to a punishment like jails that are a hidden tax on the system. This is a common technique in education and child rearing.
One thing that is totally incompatible with this system is policies that create black markets such as the war on drugs. These obstacles must be overcome first.
I for one welcome our new robotic masters
What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
We've been over this. They adapt, or die.
What's worse? Supporting millions of people who have nothing to contribute to the world on the backs of those who do, or forcing them to adapt or die?
Sorry, but there's a fatal flaw in the argument that we should keep these people around: they create more people. Sure, it may start off with 10 million unemployed. What happens when each of them have three children? That's thirty million unemployed (not to mention, the unemployed children resulting from employed people giving birth). Next time around? Ninety million. It's exponential, and the only thing you can do is delay the inevitable, at the expense of having the fate befall far larger numbers.
No comment.
Buahahaha! Agreed.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
I'm a person, even if posting AC. Person as in "people", and definitely not an American. I don't eat children or enjoy civil wars as a passtime. And, as you can see, I can even type! Imagine!
Now, can you please start treating non-Americans as human beings instead of salivating over their deaths, jerking off while you watch "cool" bombing footage of the newest US imperialist adventure on CNN. Prettypleez.
I would reverse the -1 mod on this dude, big time.
This is certainly an idea I've never heard of before. Why mod it down and try and push it outside the realm of discussion?
(For those not reading posts with a score of zero, he said "Make it a capital offense to be one of the 500 wealthiest people.
Also, break up the 500 largest companies.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
Eventually being at the top will become a cat-and-mouse game, and with the head cut off the drive towards centralization of wealth and power will be effectively stopped."
I propose not to make it a capital offense, but rather, when a company gets to be that big, simply break it up.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The parent is either a dolt or a troll. Which would you say, fellow Slashdotters?
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Inheritance is the exception that breaks the rule that you have to earn wealth.
There are one or two people in the world who are sitting on billions of dollars that will never circulate back into society. The royal family of England sits on tens of billions of dollars and never ever uses it to purchase anything at all.
A capitalist economy needs wealth in circulation in order to work properly.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Switch to communism heheheheh
A very simple way to think about this issue would be the following mental model: Imagine that there are two kinds of labor - skilled and unskilled. Production happens in "quanta" of (say) 1 skilled and 3 unskilled workers. The economy's workforce is in balance if wages are such that 25% of the workforce get an education (to become skilled).
Now, you can choose how to view the "robot case": If you look at this statically, you see a problem. The problem is of course that if robots substitute for unskilled labor, you have a huge imbalance that will push the wage difference up (to change the skilled/unskilled ratio). Furthermore, the period before the ratio changes, you get a lot of unemployment.
However, you can look at it as a terrific opportunity. Because the new "quanta" of production consist of one skilled worker + 3 units of robotic work, you can actually quadruple the production with the same workforce. If all your workers are skilled, you can have as many "production quanta" as you have workers, rather than one per 4 workers. Thus, GDP per capita increases by 300% and makes the inhabitants of the country rich.
According to classical economics, this will happen "automatically" after a period of adjustment, as getting an education will be critical to every worker's economic future. The period of adjustment might be brutal, though, as not-yet-skilled workers experience wage drops and unemployment. However, recent unemployement among university graduates in both the US and Europe indicates that the economies are already ahead of this trend, and that the skilled/unskilled ratio is too high, not too low in the labor pool.
In the very simple model above, one crucial part is missing: All those unskilled jobs that simply can't be performed by robots. As babyboomers get old, huge amounts of labor will go to care for them. The interpersonal element of caregiving precludes robots from these jobs (eventhough robots might make them more efficient/less labor intensive). The service industries will always need people (most people will prefer a person to wait their table or give them a massage). And so on, and so forth...
These "live people only" sectors will ensure continued demand for "manual" labor. As caregiving in particular is about to explode, it will most likely pick up much of the labor freed up by robots. Furthermore, it is likely that we overestimate the pace of introduction of robots (as we have overestimated the pick-up rate of almost every new technology). Thus, I don't share the dire outlook painted in the article. The future has a funny tendency to look after itself.
Simple: Fixing the machines. Sure, that may eventually happen too. But for now, it's a lot easier to create a machine that flips burgers than to create a machine that can fix a broken burger-flipper.
Along the same line of reasoning, I wouldn't expect to see robot plumbers or electricians for quite a while either.
Why is it that everytime some threatens to change the status-quo people like this come out of the wood work and talk about how millions of people will be unemployed, blah blah blah blah. Get freaking real, times changes, nations change, sure there are people displaced but all the damn horse and buggy makers moved on to other things when the automobile was developed. Same thing with McDonalds employees.
Trying to print enough money to give each citizen $25,000 would send the US economy straight into hyperinflation. We're talking about an amount of money equal to 75% of GDP - and countries have managed to trash their economies by printing a small fraction of that amount.
Even if we tried to do the responsible thing and financed the handouts with government debt, the sudden demand for loanable funds would drive up interest rates all around the world.
We'd have 7 trillion in new, high interest debt, which would double the federal debt load. Eventually, we'd need higher taxes to put that debt to bed (either that, or the U.S. goes into default).
As things stand today, we're having trouble financing a tax cut that's orders of magnitude smaller. Good luck...
One simple law forbidding human by robot replacement will do it. Nothing else can save our asses. Remember: this will be only the first wave, but the more unpredictable wave is where the artificial intelligence comes in, and jobs like lawyers (!) will be getting replaced. (seems funny almost like the travel to moon seemed once)
What is our target anyway - be rich or feel good? What if we can manage to feel great without being rich and let the robots work for us?
Governments charge a shadow price for quantities of pollution from companies. The government uses this income to pay for the "cost of pollution" such as clearing up the pollution, health problems arising from the pollution etc.. The idea is to charge shadow prices that are equal to the social cost of polution. There are costs to society assosciated with replacing the human workforce with a robotic workforce. Companies should be charged shadow prices for replacing human labourers with robotic labourers. Unemployment compensation can then be handed out to people that are unemployed. Let's assume that this model is implemented... Consider the extreme situation where almost all human labourers are replaced with robotic labourers (Some work will still require humans). Humans will receive reasonable unemployment compensation. All humans will be equally well off, except those that own business or that are employed. People that are employed will mostly be researchers or any profession where the customers prefer humans (Some people will always prefer human-interaction, like some people today still prefer not to wear clothes.). However society will have some problems, people will lose a sense of purpose. Sounds like utopia? In actual fact the robots will be the low paid "oppressed people" without rights. And you can be sure that there'll be people that protest for "robot rights"!! ;)
The article claims that the 2-3 rejections that JK Rowling received mean that the economy is 'flawed' in some way. But this is just a normal part of marketing a book, and that's a very small number for a new author. All it means is that editors have different tastes and opinions, and that different publishers have varying abilities to risk spending money on an unknown. I recall reading that the 'Wizard of Oz' got a couple rejections, and that 'A Wrinkle in Time' was turned down by more than a dozen publishers.
The positive aspect of the current system is that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of publishers, so an author can keep trying as long as he/she likes.
Socialist DRIVEL
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
I thought the first goal was not to injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
the author makes some interesting points, but makes a flawed assumptiion in assuming the inevitability of mass robotising of basic job types.
The introduction of robot labour on this scale depends on a rising supply of cheap electricity. As a lot of people in the USA are no doubt aware, this does not exist at the moment. There is no great technological leap taking place that would provide this kind of energy at the right price.
The only way that energy prices will falll significantly in the medium term is if the corporate landgrab in Iraq is successful and ensures a steady supply of cheap oil. After all, one would expect the new democratic Iraq to be forbidden from democratically remaining in OPEC.
Given that there have been more allied casualties since the "end of hostilities" than there were during the "war", I can't see the region becoming stable enough ensure a steady enough supply to affect global energy prices. Needing hundreds of thousands of soldiers to ensure supply immediately obliterates the economic advantage of having the oil in the first place.
Likewise, silicon may be cheap and plentiful, but important elements like tantalum are in ever-shorter supply, and are also mainly found in areas like central africa, also far from stable.
"Robots for everything" is a very sci-fi idea, but it will require equally sci-fi resources to accomplish. It is premature to start worrying about the economic impact of these developments for the low-waged. The investment required for mass-robotisation would bankrupt any economy that attempted it at the moment, in which case everyone's screwed.
It is also worthy of note that while mechanical robots have had a large impact on manual occupations in some industries (cars, etc), electronic tools have had an impact on middle-income employment as well. Low-cost computing allows the same amount of work to be done by a greatly reduced number of office staff. With growing complexity, computers will become able to replace an increasing number of white-collar staff too.
In order to exist and thrive, companies must have people who buy their goods. If 50% of the populace is unemployed, this breaks down. The rich cannot grow richer by trading with themselves alone, an economy must be robust from top to bottom. The main reason why the USA is the worlds largest economy is because it is the largest market. While the world worries about american overconsumption of resources, it is this same overconsumption that forms the foundation of the entire global capital system. If american citizens are unable to buy goods, then Wal-Mart and everyone else is in trouble, splendid robots or not..
Clearly strength is an illusory concept invented by cavemen to justify getting women.
Or could it be that strength a property of many systems that allow one to move something from one place to another, and that one system can be stronger while another is weaker, and that a system can be trained to operate well under a certain kind of load but not strong under a different kind of load, or after a different time of exertion? Could this be? And could it be that strength, in a flexible language like english, is also used to refer to whether any of the systems in the body are strong, a sort of maximum function?
If you believe that intelligence is the factor which requires humans to be treated with "rights" then you are right.
Personally I don't think intelligence is that factor. For me it is sentience, the ability to experience qualia, like pain and indignity, pleasure and pride.
Robots can't do that and I contend that no artificial creation will ever do so, because it is in the realm of the permanently mysterious.
As a related aside, it is also the reason I treat animals with more respect than most meat-eaters I know. They may be stupid in human terms, but I am convinced they are sentient. Systematically inflicting suffering on entire species of sentient creatures (i.e. factory farming and the "meat packing" industries) is surely orders of magnitude more immoral than putting non-sentient robots to work, whether "intelligent" or not.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Mod this guy up!
Unlike Joe Young Republican, the proud republican voter with the spelling and syntax problems some notes above, this guy has an idea which is not only not anyone in particular's dogma but is actually interesting in itself: skill and ability *are* contextual, the ability to make a Japanese sword from the iron ore on up is a tremendous skill requiring long study, talent and vast research and yet, it is just this side of useless unless you are in Japan.
The point about astronomers is just something from the grand category of 'sad-but-true.' If you don't believe it, walk up to a few people in a bar and ask them what the phrase, 'main sequence' refers to in astronomy.
He is by no means trolling and this response to him is, to my mind, quite surprising.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
First, Marshal talks about raising the 25,000, but it would already be available. Remember that with automation of the jobs the GDP stays the same, so that 25,000 the company paid Joe Smith is now just going to the shareholders. So the money would be there.
The only viable option of the ones he lists is the 'economic security system'. To make it work though, we should go further than a heavy high-income tax. After 2 or 3 million in net worth, there should be 100% tax. No one needs more than a few million to live and the US/world certainly needs that money. This would be tough to implement (a lot of people would kick and scream), but it's definitely achievable.
Another unaddressed problem, though, is that we can't just give away 25,000. In Prague there is a useless wall (called 'the hunger wall') that Rudolph II had people build so he could give them money. Giving people money for nothing creates a bad precedent. Theoretically we could all become artists and earn it that way, but it's more likely 90% would become entertainment junkies -- living merely to consume. This wouldn't create the kind of society anyone would want. To quote Bill Joy, "the future doesn't need us".
what have you been watching?
Most states in the U.S. now have state lotteries that flush money into state treasuries. If we create a national lottery, the proceeds would go into the central account and get distributed to every citizen of the United States.
Remember those paper towels in your highschool science lab? You know, the ones that do a really good job of moving water around without actually removing any? let's say that everyone baught a lotto ticket for $1. let's say 40% of the $ made goes to the winner(s). Everyone would get $0.60 back. That's the whole point to the lotto. It turns a small amount of wealth from a large amount of people to a large amount of wealth for a small amount of poeple. This would do the exact opposite of what the author wants:
Create one or two more wealthy people and make the poor ones $0.40 poorer. Swish. The only thing similar that turns a large amount of money from a small amount of people into a small amount of money for a large amount of people are fancy auctions (usually fund raisers to help poor, save blank, etc.). Makes more sense for a society filled with idle rich/dirt poor.
Ok, now that all of my whining is over with, I'lll whine about something different. This whole situation is ridiculus. If everything was automated, do you have any idea how large of a demand for non-automated services there would be? We're talking huge. If McDonald's, Burger King, etc. all went to automation, This would spark a whole new market for non-automated fast food. Ad:
"Real food. Real people. Eat at Friendly Burger."
Even if it costs more to eat at Friendly Burger (hope that's not a real name), the price would be justified because of the human interaction. Belive it or not, some people even go places just to have their order taken and chat with the person behind the counter. They're called "regulars." The reason why full automation in service-oriented tasks would never last is simple:
People like people better than machines. No one wants to be served drinks by a half-naked android. No one wants to be sold clothing by a tin can with no opinion of what's fashionable. No one wants to explain to a robot why they're pissed off about their soup being cold. What about security gaurds? What's to stop shoplifters? The camera? Ha! Shoplifters don't have images on file, you need to catch them red-handed. Give the robots guns? Lol. How hard would it be to get the tech specs on your waiter? How hard would it be to screw it up? Every store would at least need some type of human supervision because not every kid in NYC/LA/etc. has their prints on file, and no one wants to give robots the authority to detain anyone.
Automation will never eliminate anything, not even redundancy. Just change what's considered redundant. Just change everything.
You should check out the Fractal Robots web site!
The fractal finger tool completes the list of assembly machines needed to build any man made machine or structure with 100% automation. Everything from building space stations to managing nuclear accidents with 100% automation can be implemented with this technology. All previously intractable mechanical problems in robotics have now been solved with this new branch of robotics.
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
In a post Robo-Civil Rights society the lower class humans will be left to back-fill the burger flipping jobs again. I've realized that in a way this has already happened to me. My Roomba(TM) gets to stay in the air-conditioned comfort of my house when I have to go to work everyday so that I may pay the electric bill.
-- Probability does not dismiss possibility --
I know its convenient to state a fact and act as if it served your point, but you're dead wrong. You mention:
" the american war of independance,"
As the poor rising up to destroy the rich, but in fact, the american revolution was the wealthy rising up against taxes placed on them by the crown.
Or did you think that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, et al were sharecroppers? (snicker)
Due to the massive debt load, most people would use extra money to pay down debt.
So it actually would do nothing to fuel the economy.
Let knowledge spread and ignorance seas to be.
CIA Factbook 2002 (US):"Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households
In the first two paragraphs, i feel you missed an important complexity. Importing labor is good for those that import, and less good for the status quo, the voting population, and the future stability of the region.
.03% maybe)
(2) Even developed nations have huge populations of Women-Oppressors largely imported.
No Fire Safety law is going to prevent multi-family dwellings. (reduce by
Final point: immigration increases population - right fully agreed - at the expense of stability. Better really wold be for civilized countries to build robots and ship them to over-developed countries. And try to reverse the immigration trend thereby. This could improve regional stability, improve relations (by creating a higher quality of life in Iraq, we avoid war?) and wouldn't threaten jobs. Underdeveloped countries are already on foriegn aid, welfare, UN support, expatriot money-grams, and muslim international aid assitance, so the shift to welfare would go unnoticed.
You must be one of those people who think that companies have big vaults where they keep all their money. I guess you took Walt Disney's "Scrooge McDuck" literally.
The "money" in companies is really the value of their physical inventory (which may be nothing), or money in the bank (a little), or the value of their stock (a lot), or lots of other ways that companies accrue wealth.
But what do you think happens with that money? That's right, it gets reinvested. If you put it in the bank, the money is loaned to people who want mortgages and business loans. If you pay it out in dividends, it goes to people who then promptly spend it on goods and services. This tends to increase the velocity of money which is a key ingredient of generating wealth for "the masses".
Really, you are not well thought out.
"Insofar as women tend to thrive in customer-service people-time situations, I wonder what this will do to the future of gender politics?"
... uh visit other pimp's whores to spend the money?
You seem to be saying women will become whores, service men, and then give the money to their pimps, who, I suppose, will
I mean, somebody's got to milk the cow and bake the bread, right?
"Who's the more foolish; the fool or the fools that mod him up?"
When you quote star wars, its time to just kill yourself. Think about it.
Dear Marshall,
"Pick a number, and apply extreme taxation to folks earning over that amount"? You missed a couple of data points there:
1. 90% of the US popluation earns $92,500/yr or less, and the
*median* income is $28,300/yr. Sounds like $100k is the
level.
2. In 1972, the federal revenue stream came 16.67% from
individual income taxes, and 25% from corporate taxes.
Last year, it was 11% (and falling) from corporate taxes...
and 44% from individual income taxes.
3. JFK *lowered* the top income tax rate...from ->90% to 70%-
Notice the benefit the rest of us got from this?
Apply extreme taxation? Why not just go back to the tax code of the fifties, and add in cutting the work week and raising the minimum wage to something that you can pay for an apartment on?
Another posibillity is this: all publicly held corporations must pay, in addition to monetary taxes, shares of stock with the shares apportioned based on the percentage of the local economy to local, state, and federal governmental holding agencies that the company controls...and these are *voting* shares. Therefore, if it's a small company, but that has a company town, then the town owns 50% of the shares, and if it's a national (or multinational based in the US), then 50% of its shares are government-held, and half of those shares are apportioned out to the states and local governments where the company is based. No more shipping jobs overseas (or what we might call dumping cheap labor into the US market) this way, and the income goes into the permanent fund (like the Alaska fund).
Actually, I'm a bit irritated with you - I've been *trying* to start a public discussion on what I've refered to as the "post-Adamic" society (where we no longer earn our bread by the sweat of our brows, as it were) for a dozen years. I'm glad to see, though, that you've dragged it out of the closet.
********end of letter*******
And as for the libertarian slashdotters...
the US has been a pretty damn "pure" capitalist society most of the last century and a half, except when FDR instituted some serious controls...and the 90% of us made huge gains (but you won't ask your grandparents what the Great Depression and before was like, it would disturb your ideology with a reality check).
The other point y'all miss is that the libertarian world view can't work in a world where
a) there are way more people than money-paying
jobs, and
b) there is no scarcity.
mark
Start law classes at night school, or pick out the trailer park that you'll end your life in. Your choice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
No doubt Marshall Brain is a smart guy; butg it surprised me that he described the details of Rowling and the first Harry Potter book, but completely failed to connect the dots.
Rowling was a welfare mom! She took up writing out of desperation, because she needed to have a source of income to provide a better life for her kids. She did NOT do it because she felt some "artistic urge" to create something, she did it because of the immense economic pressure on her family!
Fast foward 50 to 100 years to the "robotic society"; Rowling would NOT have created Harry Potter, because she is now living a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, courtesy of the government. Is she going to hunker down in front of a computer to crank out an 800-page tome, or is she going to spend her days playing around on the local beach with her kids? Get real, Brain!
Didn't we learn this lesson in the last century? Socialism doesn't work, even if the robots are doing all of the work, because it removes almost all of the motivation for accomplishment.
Brain didn't say he had the perfect way out. He said we are going to have a huge problem.
In one way, his "solution" is trite, a repetition of what every utopian dreamer has proposed before. That is to free people from working for a living so they can exercise their creativity. You got a problem with that? Oh, yeah, we have to get from here to there. Oops.
But anyone under 30 today had better be very concerned about alternatives, because with 50% unemployment comes insurrection. No, it won't be like the militias would like, with Minutemen fighting skirmishes agains the black-clad UN minions. It will be like East LA, Watts, or Detroit on hell night. Gangs and clans fighting each other, burning and looting their own neighborhoods.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
Your "homeland" strawman is enough to make me puke. Their "homeland" is the United States of America. You're so full of shit. I never came from a "tribe" or a definitive sect, yet I'm not wasting away in a slum. By your logic, my humble, largely peasant anscestry is reason enough to lay around and have my wife collect welfare for. FACT: I know precisely zero about my heratige beyond my great grandparents. It doesn't work in Montreal where 14% collect welfare, when they're largely homogeneous and from a similar "homeland"; it doesn't work here. Bullshit strawman backed up by no logic. Maybe because of my Canadian "homeland" I've got the urge to work? What a load.
lots of little ideas are better than one big one? I can go along with that. History bears it out.
Communism - meaning Marxism, not Leninism/Stalinism, has some merits but needs a method of making corrections, which it doesn't have. Adam Smith may have had a single big idea, but his big idea was to let lots of people with small ideas loose to try them out. So far it seems to be the best idea.
Still, a massive shift in one of the fundamentals of our economy, exchange of labor for money, by making labor essentially worthless, will take a lot of little ideas and some time to compensate for. And you had better hope that it doesn't take too long, or the intervening upheaval could destroy some of the institutions that make it all possible.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
I didn't make that up about JK Rowling; she has said in interviews that the reason she wrote the first Harry Potter was out of economic desperation.
You've demonstrated a pretty large ignorance of macroeconomics with your little "supply side" spiel. That's is just berely less bankrupt than a general Neo-Keynesian economy. But I trust you know that, being the heavily self-educated genius that you are.
Electronics, Robotics, Genetics, Energy Research, Bio Research, AI Research, Pure Mathematics, Space Travel Research, Sub Atomic Energy and Matter Research, Systems Integration (Software), Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Teachings... The War Sciences (Weapons, Combat, Tactics, Strategies)... all of these types of professions will dominate the next millenia.
:)
The way I see it there will be less and less need for unqualified jobs. No more service sector. There will be no point in keeping humans in the manufacturing sector (we will still need Engineers, Architects, Designers). There will be need for a larger governing apparatus (more and more complicated laws will require even larger bureaucratic systems, but they can also be automated.) Medical sciences will become automated. Even lawyers will become automated
The way I see it, there will be only real professionals left to do mostly research and development of new theories. These people will make ALL the money in the world and the rest will be on Social Insurance. So, if your professional Software Architect for a Space Research program is making 10,000,000.00 dollars an hour, his taxes will be like 99.99% (he will still be rich ) but the rest of the 95% people with no jobs will be fed, and will have some form of housing and transportation provided to them.
The most important aspect of such a society of-course becomes the army and all the research that deals with the army. Space, Bio, Genetics, Nano Robots, Electronics, Weapons, Energy, Transportation, Sociology.
What will the rest do? Live in heaven doing nothing. Bible is not a historical document, it is science fiction.
You can't handle the truth.
robots have been possible for years. check jurisprudence... the philosopy of law. jurimetrics in particular. any judge can be replaced (including the supreme court) by a $200 PC and get 96% accuracey. This service os for sale . they use a political/economic/cultural matrix) This could be tweaked. the courts are clogged. Wanna INSTANT justice? cheap? NOT the $120 *million* a year illegal refugees are costing BC, for instence. (In legal aid fees alone) it's been possible since the eigthies. Like creating life in a lab by copyinh a gene-sequence... easy. they aren't doing it, thou. (locally) So in this brave new world you gotta be gretsy to even get in the door. so? That is what the web is for... to replace pap from commercial outlets. pat
packrat ; writer-informer. http://packrat.comicgenesis.com http://www.youtube.com/area163 https://www.smashwords.com/
these are the basic commodities (matter = form of energy). most people today are really selling their time. automation can give you more time, probably more information, but not more energy. damn, i'm way too theoretically ... IOW: where does all the energy for the robots come from? human hamster wheels ?
Under his plan, the federal government gives away over 6 trillion dollars per year. I forsee tons of jobs created... keeping illegal aliens from crossing the border for free cash! Communism or welfare nation, whatever you call it, it's already been tried and failed.
What we need is forced job training for anyone who takes unemployment or welfare for more than 6 months (or 3 if you have a high school education or less). If you barely have enough job skills to run a cash register, then you should be forced to live in a millitary style training facility where you will be trained to wield a nail gun, or arc welder, or drive a truck, or repair robots. Teach people landscaping skills or home design and repair. Teach people to cook again, so they don't have to eat out or buy MREs. Train people to run the robots.
I'm amazed at how often the gas station attendant can't even bother to keep the receipt printer at the pump full of paper. Job skills that low don't deserve minimum wage. I'm begging for the day when I can put in my own order at Taco Bell without having to let some moron screw it up first. The most interaction I want from the employees there is for them to say 'here's your food'. I'm glad I can go to the gas station or local WalMart and make my purchases without even making eye contact with a single employee. Having to wait in line to be serviced by some idiot with no job skills wastes my time. And I pay extra for it!
The poverty level in this country equates to being able to afford a small car, a two bedroom house, AC, cable TV and enough food and beer to make you obese. Alot of people aren't interested in working harder than that. As long as you keep raising minimum wage for their useless jobs, they will never try anything more mentally taxing than running a cash register.
OK, take these baseline salaries.
Bob: $20
Tim: $40
Doug: $60
David: $80
Roy: $100
Now, suppose that Bob and Roy get sick and each incurs 10 dollars worth of health care bills. Now you have:
Bob: $10
Tim: $40
Doug: $60
David: $80
Roy: $90
Now, suppose that the Bob and Roy both need to send their kids to school and that costs $5 a year:
Bob: $3
Tim: $40
Doug: $60
David: $80
Roy: $83
Well, looks like Bob is heading for homelessness while Roy still has enough to spend the summer in Hawaii licking his financial wounds. And, Bob ain't likely to win the lottery my friend.
I am so sick of hearing the charges of "class warfare" from the very people (and their apologists) who are getting rich at the expense of the poor and middle class who are the real engines of the economy. The fact is that there are a lot of poor and middle class people busting there ass, obeying the law, working two jobs, and trying to raise honest, decent children. And you know what, many of them are failing because the rich are constantly against anything that would provide a shred of hope to these people.
Fighting against the minimum wage, allowing corporations to pay $0 in taxes, fighting mass-transit, head start, social security, medicare - this is the REAl class warfare.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
As someone once noted, the typical "poor" person in the US or Europe today enjoys better nutrition, health care, clothing, shelter, and education than the typical member of the nobility in the 1200s did. Maybe we are dividing into "elite" and "peasants" and the difference is getting wider. If the standard of living for the "peasants" is high enough, does that matter?
The trend toward shorter work weeks ground to a halt in the latter part of the 20th century. it was common to work 60 hours a week on the farm or in manufactoring in the 19th century.
One cause is worker overhead costs for the employer. These arent much different whther the employee works 10 or 80 hours a week, so the incentive is more hours. This is a prevalent attitude in the software industry.
Another cause is the Calvinist work ethic in US society, every since the Puritans settled there. Many Europeans dont have this ethic, so they dot mind short 30-some hour weeks and 6-10 weeks of annual vacation.
Any ideas on how to move to a shorter work week?
Americans spend an average of 28hrs/wk watching television. I am sure that if they spend a fraction of that time undertaking some sort of training they will be able to acquire new skills. Yes, that is correct, in the future you may have to watch television for less than 28 hours each week to be competitive in the job marketplace.
;)
That's it! THAT is the answer!
Simple: We buy everyone a TiVo, and it raises GDP enough to not only pull the country out of a slump, but launches a new golden era of propserity! It is genius!
Ok, he says that the reason for the concentration of wealth in the top 20% is due to CEO pay increases. Since the top 20% constitutes on the order of 50 million people in the US, thats a lot of CEO's. In fact there are only a few thousand CEO's of major corporations and what they make doesn't have that much impact. The real reasons are (1) the accumulation of wealth over time since WWII by many families, who simply made good decisions on work, real estate and investing, (2) the large number of very small businesses that are doing well and making their owners rich, and (3) the extreme wealth of a very few at the top that skews the stats. non owner CEO's have nothing to do with it. They are only a fraction of the whole picture.
And guess what, the 80/20 rule always applies to whatever you want to look at.
IMHO, the corporations are the reason for it all. They are considered a legal entity with the same rights as human individuals. The corps make revenue in order to survive, 'be competitive' etc. If you think of it, every dollar this ficticious entity earns is the dollar that a low-income earner doesn't get. Since corporations are immortal, they accumulate wealth. Over 100's of years of this no wonder 20% of population make 50% of money.
I can't think of a economic reason for CEO compensation increase (obsene) except greed and take-all-you-can attitude. But I still prefer them (as they as humans) to corps.
"Do we love eachother? Will we ever want to?"
I hate strangers, unless the provide a material benefit to me. The only people I love are those that are related to me by blood, and then, only because we share DNA. My DNA must win and crush everyone else's.
Yours won't be a problem, BTW.
You spew anti-capitalist rhetoric without any sort of logic or fact to back it up. Let's temporarily ignore the fact that the US system is heavily regulated in many instances and is therefore not capitalist. I take issue with your idiotic statement that "A huge majority of capitalists are born capitalist." As if a poor man or a "poor" man cannot believe in the capitalist system at all. What I bet you're trying to explain is that the top 5% of capital holders inherit their wealth. This is a blanketly false assumption. In fact, upwards of 90% of that top percentile gained their own wealth in their lifetimes. Much of the careless earners will lose it in their lifetimes or have it squandered by its heirs. You have no facts to back up your absurd Marxist thought structure. Considering that you don't even know what a real capitalist, I would assume that you're a parasite like HanzoSan.
The movie had all the right elements, it didn't suck..it just was "there" like a turd.
Good articles. Thought-provoking. As you say, this ground has seen a few tracks before. Please let me offer a few suggestions that I believe would be helpful to you.
--
You are paying too much attention to money. Poor people don't care about money, they care about quality of life. Stuff, amusement, and opportunity. If everyone has enough of those things, what does it matter that it only cost $1000 per year per person? That's what higher productivity means -- everything gets cheaper.
Money is used to ration two things: Wealth and work. Wealth is land, natural resources, company ownership. intellectual property, and the future taxes of the federal government (aka cash). Work is everything people and their machines do to increase the value of their wealth.
The problem is how to ration the wealth and work when some large portion of the population has no wealth, and doesn't work. How do you take from the rich, and give to the poor? Especially when that will encourage the rich to take their toys somewhere you can't tax them? Or the borderline rich will decide that life as a poor person isn't so bad? When the rich people are all gone, who do you take from then? Try reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and see where this path leads.
Since you seem fond of taxing the rich, you may find it useful to look at the limiting case: If we took all the wealth of the US and redistributed it evenly to everyone, how much investment income would everyone get? You may be surprised how little that is. A good measure would be to take the total value of all companies in the US (the Wilshire 5000 index would be a good way to get this, again about $10T), then double it to take privately held companies into account. (As I recall this is very roughly correct.) Then multiply by 4% to get the typical long-term inflation-adjusted investment return. 4% of $20T is $800B, or roughly $2000 per person. So ALL profits from business in the US are $2000 per person per year. That includes the profits that are reinvested to make the economy grow. If it were redistributed and everyone spent it, that would halt all economic growth.
US GDP is about $13T, or $37k dollars per person per year in the US. That's the total US paycheck, divided by number of people, including children. Taxing the income of the rich also won't get you very far, because as you see, while they do get a boatload of money, there aren't enough of them to really matter. 100 people who get $100M per year is still only $10B, or 0.1% of the total US paycheck.
Local, state, and federal taxes currently consume roughly half (I think 56% = $7T) of every dollar earned. So there isn't a lot of fat left in the system. Productivity would have to triple if half of our country were unemployed, and we still wanted to be good to pensioners and those on social security. On the other hand, maybe with sufficient automation we will see productivity triple.
--
(This is a less important point.) Your articles seem to come across as treating robots as a problem similar to illegal aliens "stealing our jobs". I realize you didn't say that, and after looking at your bio I think it likely that you don't mean that (exactly), but it comes across that way. You appear to (inadvertantly) be using the language of a demagogue to argue that "robots taking our jobs" are a malign yet unstoppable force. The central economic tenet that you put forth is essentially correct, but your language leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
--
Your solutions are fairly socialist, or at least welfare-statist. You might want to read some Hayek and Friedman (Hidden Order is a good place to start, Amazon has it) to see how the free-marketers think. It's not so hostile to the poor as you might imagine. After all, since I depend on everyone else's work for my well being (and they on mine), it's better for me to live in a world of rich, educated people who have high-quality goods and services to trade. Or, the pithy saying: rich people make better trading partners.
Let's say you build a universal constructor (a machine that can build anything that can be built). Wisely, you first order it to build a copy. Then those two each build one.
Now you want free food, so your constructors build a greenhouse and farming robots. Raw materials aren't too hard to come up with since machines don't mind 'mining' materials from the huge landfills we have everywhere. Your neighbor wants in on the action. Assuming you're not greedy, you have one constructed and send it over. After all, it's not as if you have to earn a living.
Process continues.
Thus far, the process has always broken down over the fact that everyone has to make a living somehow, and it hasn't been possible to make the essentials absolutely free (only next to free). It breaks down because once it becomes free, there's no motive to make it anymore and we didn't have enough political will and understanding to convert it into a decentralized public good.
To make your lemonade example ACTUALLY produce free lemonade, you mush also produce the raw ingrediants for free, and have a small enough community so that appropriate sharing can take place. You also need a way to build the lemonade factory for free so that you can give one to the neighboring community rather than going to war with them.
Money and supply and demand are one way to divide resources. It does a decent job of it, but at the same time, it only functions if some percentage of the population draws the short straw. Economics being what it is, drawing the short straw too many times in a row nearly guarantees that you will continue to do so (and so will your children). The same is true for drawing the long straw. The net result is a perminant underclass.
The high price for the system is that eventually, the perminant short straws get fed up with the perminant long straws and expend their last breath (if necessary) killing them off so that their children can draw a long straw for a change. This usually happens about the time it becomes clear to the underclass that all the blather about equal opportunity for everyone is just propiganda to keep them working hard and not causing trouble.
The U.S. isn't immune to this, it's just that the last time it came around, it's upper class and the government had enough sense to make a few concessions before it turned into full scale class warfare (8 hour day, 5 day work week, social welfare programs).
We've had another big bubble, and now it's burst (again). The question is has enough been done to stop the cycle at this point or will we have a few more Enron scandals and see another depression?
Once 99% of the customer base carries a mobile (phone+PDA+GPS+wallet+tracking device ;)... etc.) with a high quality touch screen that can display pictures of the available options of the closest "sale bot", there is no longer a business need for artificial intelligence. I believe this is feasible in a few years time.
Simple. Tell them you're gay and what you have is the fag equivalent of a hickey. In this pro-homo society we live in, they'd probably throw a parade for you.
How do you give a faghomo an abortion? Give him a laxative!
I suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the working skilled and the unemployed masses. Already, these two groups exist and rarely interact, but the differences are growing more visible stark by the day.
Have you ever known a truly classless system to exist?
It is simply impossible. Egalitarianism has been nothing but a disaster for western civilization, and it is slowly destroying other civilizations as well.
Needless to say, there will ALWAYS be classes. You have the leaders, the skilled workers and artists, the soliders, and all the rest.
The only difference between today and yesterday, is the wretched masses are allowed to exist and procreate. We have a large part of the economy centered around supplying said persons with "goods" to keep them pacified.
Where once such persons were simply left to die, or perhaps enslaved, we now have millions upon millions of subhumans. They are roughly 3-4 times the mass of the average man from a half century ago, they are entirely uncultured, do not raise their children, yet their lives are centered around producing them.
History will remember these creatures only as a strange aberration in the history of humanity. But for the moment, these people are loved and cherished by most. After all, they ARE alive.
Sure... if you subscribe to the theory that a class-based culture is a healthy thing.
Maybe the problem is that capitalist-marxists like yourself define culture in terms of economic materialism. In the grand scheme of human existence, material prosperity is completely irrelevant. Egalitarianism has entirely destroyed culture. One only has to look at the US and the Soviet Union. The culture of both was the hopeless struggle to elevate life based on material prosperity. Instead, you get millions of lifeless consumers who are content to live in concrete boxes, eating crap, and reproducing on occasion. That is not life.
David Stein
Now we come to the real crux of the problem. You are a Jew. As such, it is no wonder you would think of the two class system as that is the Jewish worldview. You have Jews, God's Chosen People, and gentiles... The only real organizational system which can exist in accordance with Judaism is a system were Jews are at the top, and everyone else works to service the Jew.
Of course, that IS the system we have more or less. Whether through communism or Jewish controlled international finance, Gentiles donate huge quantities of their work to their Jewish masters.
We do know of course, the beginnings of this struggle against the cultural void created by internationalism and communism began not in the distant past. Here is a great book on the subject.
Arbeit macht frei
88/14
Compassion or a desire to save money, WHERE ARE THE JOBS COMING FROM?
Remember outsourcing? Remember automation? Service industries are the obvious next wave of automation, as I predicted back in the late 1980s. That's basically the last bastion of "warm body" jobs.
Oh, and makework jobs have been tried, too... there are welfare programs which have had the recipients collecting paper clips. Makes a few OK jobs for the "supervisors", teaches the targets nothing.
The problem here is that this is even more expensive and arguably less worthwhile than simply handing people money.
Punishing people for living in a society where there aren't enough jobs and never will be again is an answer only a Republican or Libertarian could love.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Let's add to this... what happens when most semi-skilled and even moderately skilled jobs (let's say grunt-level programmer) cease to exist?
However, we won't have to wait for machine vision technology for this to happen, we're getting a sneak preview via outsourcing already. "Cease to exist in America" is close enough for most Americans.
We're going to get automated fast food long before Marshall Brain expects it, the solution he foresees is a much more difficult one than the one that I expect to be adopted. Fast food could have been automated using the 286 generation of computers. I mention this specifically because it isn't all that difficult.
There are certain parts of janitorial work that. . . can't be automated fully, but whose human component can be made far more efficient than it is now. Would a business mind paying somebody $20/hour to operate a dozen semi-autonomous vacuum cleaners? (no, telecommuting from Bangalore is not an option for this)
People who want to get involved in making the service industry automation technology should concentrate on devices with humans in the loop, because that's where the "sweet spot" for cost-effectiveness is.
I'm hoping that the automation of fast food serves as a wakeup call for the world that we can't take for granted that there will always be unskiled labor gigs to "downscale" to if one's skilled professional job winds up in Bangalore.
Traditional visions of the labor force are becoming obsolete rapidly, and either our economic system adapts, or it will be destroyed from within.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Now we come to the real crux of the problem. You are a Jew.
Ah, the folly of assumptions.
I'm not Jewish. My stepfather is Jewish, and I inherited his name, but that's about it. I was raised Catholic, and promptly broke with that tradition when I started thinking for myself.
My ancestry is mostly German and British, and I'm now an atheist. This is probably a far cry from what you imagined, and I'm pleased to disappoint you.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Straight lassez faire capitalism will not work when 50% of the workforce doesn't have a job.
No, it can't. It wasn't designed for this kind of situation.
The stock market's going to do great, though.
Based on what consumer demand? A family can only consume so much on a day-to-day basis, of both consumables (food, etc.), electronic consumer items, and capital expenses (housing, transportation, etc.). In conventional capitalism, the surplus gets invested. What's to invest in if demand is static because the normal things that operate to increase demand no longer exist because the population that can afford to buy anything other than the most minimal necessities. The people at the top will be forced to choose between opening the system up to put money in people's hands or watch industrialized society go into permanent econonic stagnation with income distributions straight out of the Third World, and where people who look halfway solvent will need armed bodyguards to go shopping. (then, there will be the situation where... people take their forces of armed bodyguards and use them on each other, think of Renaissance Italy...)
However, watching the people running our system for their benefit, I don't have a lot of confidence in their making this kind of choice on any basis other than that of very short-term advantage.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Firstly, like most doom-and-gloom technology-obsoletes-humans and technology-steals-jobs articles, the writer assumes all these jobs will be replaced *instantly*. This is clearly wrong, for several reasons.
First, the major corporations that'd be buying the robots are risk-averse. They'll let someone else try - and be burned by - such a scheme before they try it themselves. This might take place over ten or more years.
A not unreasonable timeframe.
Secondly, he assumes that this entire block of jobs can be replaced all at once, which is also clearly wrong. They all require varying sophisticated levels of working artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot assume robots will become capable of handling *all* these jobs at the same time. AI is like nuclear fusion power plants, in ever since the 1950s experts have been saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and ten years later they're still saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and so on. It is likely that improvements will continue to be incremental, as they have been so far with industrial robots. Robots capable of taking voice orders from anyone who walks in the door, making your burger, and working the register are the kind of robots that will be perfected *last*.
No, a robot capable of driving a truck safely on public streets will be perfected last. The fast food solutions are sufficiently feasible that the only basis on which I'd discuss them is NDA on a "need to know" basis. I'll simply say that neither you nor Mr. Brain have properly analyzed the tasks required to turn packaged food products into repackaged fast-food meals.
Basically, until we've had a quantum jump or two in technology, the "sweet spot" in automation leaves a human in the loop for exception processing. You want robotic vacuum cleaners? Go build some, but unless you leave a human in the loop, your system is going to escalate in complexity and decrease in reliability to the point where it's unlikely o be cost-effective.
Third, he assumes that a robot worker will be cheaper than a human worker, and that the rise of robots will not create any jobs to replace those jobs they displace. This is also clearly wrong. Human replacement will take more than a 1-to-1 ratio at first, as the first ones will not be as versatile as humans - they'll be more customized towards doing a specific task. Checkout line robots won't also be pulling shopping carts out of the parking lot and stocking the shelves, you'll need a few custom bots for each job. If the cost of buying and supplying power to a bunch of robots is more than the cost of a minimum-wage human employee, the robots won't get bought. Plus the diversity of robot types would slow the economy of scale of production, keeping the prices up until their widespread adoption.
That's why the applications which will be automated first will be:
Think in terms of lots and lots of custom... not necessarily bots, but automation systems, both stand alone and systems. If you're thinking standalone in some context like a "big box" store, include provisions for networking / monitoring / remote control, even if they aren't obviously necessarily, and if you're one of the first ones at the party, think hard about open technological standards.
When robots DO start to become worth buying, they'll need humans to keep them in service - robot repair is a hard enough AI problem that, again, that'd be the *last* type of job robots would be able to replace. As an additional bonus, the human repairmen would probably make a better salary than the minimum wage jobs being lost. There will also, of course, be a spike in the number of robot engineers and robot programmers and robot company advertising firms and robot company markters and salesmen and managers a
Tech Public Policy stuff
The parent post to this really deserves to be modded up.
Last time I saw that point made was in the book Capitalist Fools, by Nicholas von Hoffman. This is a point that needs to be made in order to understand how modern businesses really work.
Are CEOs 10x as good as they were 20 years ago? Then why are they paid well over 10x as much? von Hoffman was the first I know of to make the point that companies are now run to provide maximum short-term profit to the CEO. CEOs don't work 20 years at companies anymore, with rare exceptions. Stockholder and CEO financial interests don't always coincide, otherwise we wouldn't get the Enrons and Worldcoms, and the dot.com boom would probably never have ended. I say that the boom wouldn't have ended because honest, ethical CEOs would have never started the companies with the most dubious business models.
If a CEO knows he's going to be gone in a couple or three years, his most rational strategy to maximize value is to do short-term things to reduce costs that'll boost profits temporarily in exchange for predictable long-term trouble for his replacement CEO. The public investors who weren't alert enough to sell when he did get screwed.
Outsource business and customer service functions knowing one is building future competitors who by the time they are ready to go into business for themselves, they will know his customers better than he does. Juggle the books. Lay off long-service workers to replace them with cheaper people... and the companies core expertise and institutional knowledge walks out the door with them. Cut back on long-term R&D.
So future company products and services aren't quite as good, and the company doesn't function quite as smoothly or efficiently. But that kind of decay takes a while to percolate through an organization.
By the time this starts making a visible difference (I've got an HP laser printer from 1987 that still works well. Are there any HP printers made today that'll be working 16 years from now?), the people who made the decisions will have long since cashed out.
When the consequences of outsourcing and technological unemployment become obvious, i.e. when we've got double-digit unemployment and it's obvious that the jobs are never coming back, the CEOs in power there are going to have to make some decisions with long term consequences as to how everyone in the world is going to be living, both by their own actions and through their 0wn3d politicians.
The decisions made by looking strictly within a quarterly timeframe are unlikely to be the ones which are going to be good for the companies, the nation, or the world even 5 years from when the decisions are going to be made.
How bad could this get? How would current unemployment/welfare systems cope with permanent 20% unemployment? How about 20% and rising? What happens to a consumption-based economy if people are forced en masse to reduce theirs to bare subsistence? Who is going to buy these cheaper (or same price but with increased profit) goods and services? Sounds like economic stagnation to me, which profits nobody in the long run.
These problems are not unsolvable. (try Kelso's "Two-Factor Economics") But nobody in a position to work on effective solutions has any motivation to care about them now and won't have any personal reason to care as of when these technologies are off-the-shelf. They're going to want to cash in on the trends and put their profits into either their new foriegn retirement homes or their new fortified US estates.
Read "Street Meat" by Harlan Ellison to get a picture of what the most linear projection of current trends are.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You are right but your point is irrelevant to the argument. Whatever the actual number of people requiring jobs, it's very large and it's going to grow quickly over the years.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the working skilled and the unemployed masses.
Nope. That's what everybody has thought every time this happens.
What will happen is that the large supply of unskilled laborers will produce a demand for them in the form of new jobs that couldn't have been done and wouldn't have been thought of, if there weren't such a large pool of laborers available.
Perhaps those of us who are educated will all be able to afford personal servants, such as maids and drivers. Perhaps some massive new construction projects will be dreamed up. Around here, there aren't enough people to work on the roads to keep up with the necessary expansion, and the county governments are actively trying to discourage growth as a "strategy" for keeping up. If there were a glut of labor to work on those roads, and an increase in productivity from automation raising the tax revenues to pay for it, they could put every one of those people to work expanding the roads.
I didn't say these things don't need doing, but with the exception of "organic vegetable growing", for which full automation is just about ready, all of the areas you discuss can be more efficiently done with humans in the loop supervising automated devices.
The problem with the status quo is that there is only incentive to create financial profit; our society must create economic incentives for companies creating *societal* profit.
Actually, the problem doesn't actually go that deep. All that I think needs doing is for CEOs to have an incentive to create companies with long-term value, which among other things, means companies that don't destroy the communities they are based in in the name of short-term profit. A change in the tax laws to defer compensation for CEOs for several years and base what they ultimately get on the performance of their companies several years after they take over would do it.
BTW, proper welfaring, IMO, involves creating work that benefits the community *and* the individual by advancing his education (which adds self-esteem) as well as providing a roof over his head.
I don't think it's for society to decide what to do with people surplus from the job market through no fault of their own. I think it'll be much more interesting if people decide what to do with themselves. Ever read Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon"? One of the stories deals with such a society.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It's right there in the name. Nazi stands for "National Socialist". Think about that next time you go around extolling the virtues of socialism.
Peacecorp was going to change that. Where his business sense would have failed him in the Merchant Marines and his poor physical condition were not up to snuff for the military, he felt Peacecorp would welcome him with open arms and take his student loan burden off his hands.
"Education equals genius. Genius is good for society. I'll show them, I'm going to buck the status quo. I'm going to make a difference, I'll show them what a poor kid from the ghetto is capable of." Dana thought to himself.
Dana had not shaven for five days, but his greasy facial hair never became very thick, even after weeks of neglect. It grew in a thin, spotty Fu Manchu pattern. Best described, his whiskers resembled soot smeared on his greasy jowels. He scratched at his armpit and pulled the tightening fabric of his pajama pants out of his groin and sighed with relief.
"Aaaah."
Dana was glad that the weekend had finally come around. His Computer Repair Fundamentals and Sociology classes were starting to really dig in. He blamed the teacher for sucking, and was utterly convinced that his superior intellect would reward him with first in his graduating class of 40. He was certain that the same outcome would happen if he got into MIT, but that would never happen. The rich bastards would never give him a fair chance on a level playing field. The MIT bastards hate nerds, just like everybody else. That was alright though, Dana already knew he was superior to most of them anyway. Their facilities were only useful to the superficial.
Dana loosened up a bit by putting some music on the 'juke. He got a free MP3 jukebox from his mother and slapped an "RIAA SUCKS" bumper sticker on the side of it. Dana was vehemently opposed to the ownership and licensing of intellectual property, especially music. Dana downloaded all his favourite Pink Floyd tracks off the internet and onto the jukebox, and this brought a small amount of joy to his empty life.
"Damn the man!" he exclaimed, raising a fist as his gut flopped out of his oil-stained ThinkGeek t-shirt.
Ice T and Fred Durst alone had practically paved the way to justified downloads of all music ever created and served up on KaZaa. And so, Dana sat in in front of his monitor listening to The Wall, waiting for a reply from Peacecorp.
His mother slipped in to his room briefly to set down a balogna and cheese sandwich in front of him while he fired up a beta version of Transgaming on his Pentium 166 with MMX.
"Mom, why don't you hate the RIAA?"
She shrugged, rolled her eyes and closed the door to his room on the way out.
"She forgot to cut off the crusts." Dana held back the tears and ate the sandwich anyway.
[montemplar] wuzzup hanz0?
A privmsg came up on his IRC client. Dana had adopted the "handle" HanzoSan after his Japan
Peacecorp was going to change that. Where his business sense would have failed him in the Merchant Marines and his poor physical condition were not up to snuff for the military, he felt Peacecorp would welcome him with open arms and take his student loan burden off his hands.
"Education equals genius. Genius is good for society. I'll show them, I'm going to buck the status quo. I'm going to make a difference, I'll show them what a poor kid from the ghetto is capable of." Dana thought to himself.
Dana had not shaven for five days, but his greasy facial hair never became very thick, even after weeks of neglect. It grew in a thin, spotty Fu Manchu pattern. Best described, his whiskers resembled soot smeared on his greasy jowels. He scratched at his armpit and pulled the tightening fabric of his pajama pants out of his groin and sighed with relief.
"Aaaah."
Dana was glad that the weekend had finally come around. His Computer Repair Fundamentals and Sociology classes were starting to really dig in. He blamed the teacher for sucking, and was utterly convinced that his superior intellect would reward him with first in his graduating class of 40. He was certain that the same outcome would happen if he got into MIT, but that would never happen. The rich bastards would never give him a fair chance on a level playing field. The MIT bastards hate nerds, just like everybody else. That was alright though, Dana already knew he was superior to most of them anyway. Their facilities were only useful to the superficial.
Dana loosened up a bit by putting some music on the 'juke. He got a free MP3 jukebox from his mother and slapped an "RIAA SUCKS" bumper sticker on the side of it. Dana was vehemently opposed to the ownership and licensing of intellectual property, especially music. Dana downloaded all his favourite Pink Floyd tracks off the internet and onto the jukebox, and this brought a small amount of joy to his empty life.
"Damn the man!" he exclaimed, raising a fist as his gut flopped out of his oil-stained ThinkGeek t-shirt.
Ice T and Fred Durst alone had practically paved the way to justified downloads of all music ever created and served up on KaZaa. And so, Dana sat in in front of his monitor listening to The Wall, waiting for a reply from Peacecorp.
His mother slipped in to his room briefly to set down a balogna and cheese sandwich in front of him while he fired up a beta version of Transgaming on his Pentium 166 with MMX.
"Mom, why don't you hate the RIAA?"
She shrugged, rolled her eyes and closed the door to his room on the way out.
"She forgot to cut off the crusts." Dana held back the tears and ate the sandwich anyway.
[montemplar] wuzzup hanz0?
A privmsg came up on his IRC client. Dana had adopted the "handle" HanzoSan after his Japan
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, translated to English MEANS National Socialist German Worker's Party, you mongoloid lummox.
Peacecorp was going to change that. Where his business sense would have failed him in the Merchant Marines and his poor physical condition were not up to snuff for the military, he felt Peacecorp would welcome him with open arms and take his student loan burden off his hands.
"Education equals genius. Genius is good for society. I'll show them, I'm going to buck the status quo. I'm going to make a difference, I'll show them what a poor kid from the ghetto is capable of." Dana thought to himself.
Dana had not shaven for five days, but his greasy facial hair never became very thick, even after weeks of neglect. It grew in a thin, spotty Fu Manchu pattern. Best described, his whiskers resembled soot smeared on his greasy jowels. He scratched at his armpit and pulled the tightening fabric of his pajama pants out of his groin and sighed with relief.
"Aaaah."
Dana was glad that the weekend had finally come around. His Computer Repair Fundamentals and Sociology classes were starting to really dig in. He blamed the teacher for sucking, and was utterly convinced that his superior intellect would reward him with first in his graduating class of 40. He was certain that the same outcome would happen if he got into MIT, but that would never happen. The rich bastards would never give him a fair chance on a level playing field. The MIT bastards hate nerds, just like everybody else. That was alright though, Dana already knew he was superior to most of them anyway. Their facilities were only useful to the superficial.
Dana loosened up a bit by putting some music on the 'juke. He got a free MP3 jukebox from his mother and slapped an "RIAA SUCKS" bumper sticker on the side of it. Dana was vehemently opposed to the ownership and licensing of intellectual property, especially music. Dana downloaded all his favourite Pink Floyd tracks off the internet and onto the jukebox, and this brought a small amount of joy to his empty life.
"Damn the man!" he exclaimed, raising a fist as his gut flopped out of his oil-stained ThinkGeek t-shirt.
Ice T and Fred Durst alone had practically paved the way to justified downloads of all music ever created and served up on KaZaa. And so, Dana sat in in front of his monitor listening to The Wall, waiting for a reply from Peacecorp.
His mother slipped in to his room briefly to set down a balogna and cheese sandwich in front of him while he fired up a beta version of Transgaming on his Pentium 166 with MMX.
"Mom, why don't you hate the RIAA?"
She shrugged, rolled her eyes and closed the door to his room on the way out.
"She forgot to cut off the crusts." Dana held back the tears and ate the sandwich anyway.
[montemplar] wuzzup hanz0?
A privmsg came up on his IRC client. Dana had adopted the "handle" HanzoSan after his Japanese cla
Peacecorp was going to change that. Where his business sense would have failed him in the Merchant Marines and his poor physical condition were not up to snuff for the military, he felt Peacecorp would welcome him with open arms and take his student loan burden off his hands.
"Education equals genius. Genius is good for society. I'll show them, I'm going to buck the status quo. I'm going to make a difference, I'll show them what a poor kid from the ghetto is capable of." Dana thought to himself.
Dana had not shaven for five days, but his greasy facial hair never became very thick, even after weeks of neglect. It grew in a thin, spotty Fu Manchu pattern. Best described, his whiskers resembled soot smeared on his greasy jowels. He scratched at his armpit and pulled the tightening fabric of his pajama pants out of his groin and sighed with relief.
"Aaaah."
Dana was glad that the weekend had finally come around. His Computer Repair Fundamentals and Sociology classes were starting to really dig in. He blamed the teacher for sucking, and was utterly convinced that his superior intellect would reward him with first in his graduating class of 40. He was certain that the same outcome would happen if he got into MIT, but that would never happen. The rich bastards would never give him a fair chance on a level playing field. The MIT bastards hate nerds, just like everybody else. That was alright though, Dana already knew he was superior to most of them anyway. Their facilities were only useful to the superficial.
Dana loosened up a bit by putting some music on the 'juke. He got a free MP3 jukebox from his mother and slapped an "RIAA SUCKS" bumper sticker on the side of it. Dana was vehemently opposed to the ownership and licensing of intellectual property, especially music. Dana downloaded all his favourite Pink Floyd tracks off the internet and onto the jukebox, and this brought a small amount of joy to his empty life.
"Damn the man!" he exclaimed, raising a fist as his gut flopped out of his oil-stained ThinkGeek t-shirt.
Ice T and Fred Durst alone had practically paved the way to justified downloads of all music ever created and served up on KaZaa. And so, Dana sat in in front of his monitor listening to The Wall, waiting for a reply from Peacecorp.
His mother slipped in to his room briefly to set down a balogna and cheese sandwich in front of him while he fired up a beta version of Transgaming on his Pentium 166 with MMX.
"Mom, why don't you hate the RIAA?"
She shrugged, rolled her eyes and closed the door to his room on the way out.
"She forgot to cut off the crusts." Dana held back the tears and ate the sandwich anyway.
[montemplar] wuzzup hanz0?
A privmsg came up on his IRC client. Dana had adopted the "handle" HanzoSan after his Japanese class
Peacecorp was going to change that. Where his business sense would have failed him in the Merchant Marines and his poor physical condition were not up to snuff for the military, he felt Peacecorp would welcome him with open arms and take his student loan burden off his hands.
"Education equals genius. Genius is good for society. I'll show them, I'm going to buck the status quo. I'm going to make a difference, I'll show them what a poor kid from the ghetto is capable of." Dana thought to himself.
Dana had not shaven for five days, but his greasy facial hair never became very thick, even after weeks of neglect. It grew in a thin, spotty Fu Manchu pattern. Best described, his whiskers resembled soot smeared on his greasy jowels. He scratched at his armpit and pulled the tightening fabric of his pajama pants out of his groin and sighed with relief.
"Aaaah."
Dana was glad that the weekend had finally come around. His Computer Repair Fundamentals and Sociology classes were starting to really dig in. He blamed the teacher for sucking, and was utterly convinced that his superior intellect would reward him with first in his graduating class of 40. He was certain that the same outcome would happen if he got into MIT, but that would never happen. The rich bastards would never give him a fair chance on a level playing field. The MIT bastards hate nerds, just like everybody else. That was alright though, Dana already knew he was superior to most of them anyway. Their facilities were only useful to the superficial.
Dana loosened up a bit by putting some music on the 'juke. He got a free MP3 jukebox from his mother and slapped an "RIAA SUCKS" bumper sticker on the side of it. Dana was vehemently opposed to the ownership and licensing of intellectual property, especially music. Dana downloaded all his favourite Pink Floyd tracks off the internet and onto the jukebox, and this brought a small amount of joy to his empty life.
"Damn the man!" he exclaimed, raising a fist as his gut flopped out of his oil-stained ThinkGeek t-shirt.
Ice T and Fred Durst alone had practically paved the way to justified downloads of all music ever created and served up on KaZaa. And so, Dana sat in in front of his monitor listening to The Wall, waiting for a reply from Peacecorp.
His mother slipped in to his room briefly to set down a balogna and cheese sandwich in front of him while he fired up a beta version of Transgaming on his Pentium 166 with MMX.
"Mom, why don't you hate the RIAA?"
She shrugged, rolled her eyes and closed the door to his room on the way out.
"She forgot to cut off the crusts." Dana held back the tears and ate the sandwich anyway.
[montemplar] wuzzup hanz0?
A privmsg came up on his IRC client. Dana had adopted the "handle" HanzoSan after his Japanese
Peacecorp was going to change that. Where his business sense would have failed him in the Merchant Marines and his poor physical condition were not up to snuff for the military, he felt Peacecorp would welcome him with open arms and take his student loan burden off his hands.
"Education equals genius. Genius is good for society. I'll show them, I'm going to buck the status quo. I'm going to make a difference, I'll show them what a poor kid from the ghetto is capable of." Dana thought to himself.
Dana had not shaven for five days, but his greasy facial hair never became very thick, even after weeks of neglect. It grew in a thin, spotty Fu Manchu pattern. Best described, his whiskers resembled soot smeared on his greasy jowels. He scratched at his armpit and pulled the tightening fabric of his pajama pants out of his groin and sighed with relief.
"Aaaah."
Dana was glad that the weekend had finally come around. His Computer Repair Fundamentals and Sociology classes were starting to really dig in. He blamed the teacher for sucking, and was utterly convinced that his superior intellect would reward him with first in his graduating class of 40. He was certain that the same outcome would happen if he got into MIT, but that would never happen. The rich bastards would never give him a fair chance on a level playing field. The MIT bastards hate nerds, just like everybody else. That was alright though, Dana already knew he was superior to most of them anyway. Their facilities were only useful to the superficial.
Dana loosened up a bit by putting some music on the 'juke. He got a free MP3 jukebox from his mother and slapped an "RIAA SUCKS" bumper sticker on the side of it. Dana was vehemently opposed to the ownership and licensing of intellectual property, especially music. Dana downloaded all his favourite Pink Floyd tracks off the internet and onto the jukebox, and this brought a small amount of joy to his empty life.
"Damn the man!" he exclaimed, raising a fist as his gut flopped out of his oil-stained ThinkGeek t-shirt.
Ice T and Fred Durst alone had practically paved the way to justified downloads of all music ever created and served up on KaZaa. And so, Dana sat in in front of his monitor listening to The Wall, waiting for a reply from Peacecorp.
His mother slipped in to his room briefly to set down a balogna and cheese sandwich in front of him while he fired up a beta version of Transgaming on his Pentium 166 with MMX.
"Mom, why don't you hate the RIAA?"
She shrugged, rolled her eyes and closed the door to his room on the way out.
"She forgot to cut off the crusts." Dana held back the tears and ate the sandwich anyway.
[montemplar] wuzzup hanz0?
A privmsg came up on his IRC client. Dana had adopted the "handle" HanzoSan after his Japanese c
There are lots of problems with creating a welfare state, including the fact that there are already millions of un or underemployed people in the world, who are desperately trying to emigrate to the wealthy countries like the US and Europe. I know, because I was one of them :-) As we've seen from our failed wars on drugs, crime and immigration, these trends are impossible to stop.
:-) No doubt the wealthy elite will catch on to this possibility; we may even witness the irony of Big Pharma trying to undermine some patents in that area to make sure that all those poor folk who can't afford the expensive longevity drugs have an endless supply of free birth control pills. More draconian schemes are not difficult to conjure up.
One solution to this problem is: birth control! Too many people, not enough jobs, and cheap automated production of pharmaceuticals? The solution is obvious
My new ultimate solution for all our problems is cheap space flight! We need to get off this damn planet fast, because it's clearly getting too small for our grand experiments. I haven't done the math, but it seems almost axiomatic that it's not possible to blast enough people into space to make a dent into an exponentially growing population, even with cheap robot labor cranking out lots of space planes. However, a combination of aggressive birth control and aggressive emigration into the solar system would seem like a plausible solution. The beauty of this approach is that people can experiment with all sorts of new socio-economic models on Mars, the Moon or in orbit, without jeopardizing the entire world economy or indeed the survival of the Earth's natural ecosystems in the process. Ultimately this would be the only form of "true" freedom that would be sustainable, because it seems that any political entity that lives long enough eventually contracts bureaucratic cancer or something like that. To truly implement Jefferson's notion of frequent revolution, you need to be able to distance yourself in space from the status quo, exactly as the founding Americans were able to distance themselves from their British forebears. Without that, we're doomed, because those with power and money will naturally be driven to retain it all cost!
Of course getting there would require an unprecedented amount of vision and leadership, not to mention incredible skill at managing the myriad technical, social and economic obstacles in our way. Extinction is however the only alternative: forget robots, space rocks, genocide or nukes; Yellowstone is a huge super-volcano and it's about due for another eruption! We're an incredibly successful but fragile species, and it wouldn't take much to wipe us out; there is some evidence that an earlier super-volcano almost did: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/evolution/.
Another option is to go the Voyager route, and blast the robots into the galaxy to spread our legacy and little bit of hard-won knowledge we've accumulated over our brief lifespan as a species. This has many advantages, including the fact that it's potentially easier to build self-reproducing space-faring robots than to build interstellar space craft that can sustain humans for thousands of years (not to mention the political difficulties the inhabitants would encounter with each other, unless they were all continuously drugged, or perhaps in embryonic form).
Who knows? We or our descendants will either figure it out, or vanish without a trace. In the mean time we get to agonize over our own demise. Such is the tragic destiny of being sentient (as opposed to being too dumb to care).
I am not talking about differences. Clearly people ARE different. Some can run faster, some can jump higher, some can lift more, etc. And these are just physical traits; same applies to other non-obvious traits. What I AM talking about is the VALUE placed on those traits. I am saying that the value should be equal and if you say it is unequal, it is purely arbitrary. You can be living in another society/system and that trait may be valued more or less.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
First, if you want to argue that the value of intelligence is not the same in all situations, that is fine, but it does not mean intelligence does not exist. I quote: "There is no such thing as skill and intelligence." To be very clear, even a correct argument that proved that there is no absolute value to intelligence or skill would not prove that either did not exist, any more than a correct demonstration of how gold is no use to a starving man proves gold does not exist.
Your post has no argument towards the notion that intelligence does not exist, let alone that skill does not exist. This was my original objection. Having said that...
It is also important to understand that a quantity which is not absolute is not a quantity which is meaningless. An iron bar weighs 300 lbs on Earth, 50 lbs on the Moon, and is weightless in space. Is weight meaningless? No. It can be defined as the size of the external force required to keep a body at rest in its frame of reference. Since the quantity is relative, the definition just includes what it is relative to. It's relative to where you're standing, so that's all the extra information you have to know.
Weight isn't a fictional term invented by ancient Greeks to keep the masses down, so to speak. It's a certain way of looking at how something is affected by other things. So is value.
A mathematician is valuable here and would not be valuable in a farming society. Does the fact that the mathematician would be useless in poverty-stricken Africa lessen her influence in her office in Chicago? When a chemist devises a new catalyst that will reduce the synthesis time for a plastic by ten times and make goods easier to produce for everybody, does it matter that the chemist would be useless alone on the Moon? The mathematician is valuable, the chemist is valuable. They're both skilled and intelligent. They are able to create change which affects other people.
Up to here we've dealt with logic and grammar. Let's get to the point you wanted to deal with. A potential thought is, "Ah, but the chemist's skill can be used to make dynamite, which is bad, so value is subjective and doesn't exist." This is an error in vocabulary and concept. Just because something is bad doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Valuable can mean "useful for a purpose." If you want to use valuable to mean "a good thing" you have to define your frame of reference, just as you would have to define it for the "useful" meaning. For "useful" you just say "useful for what." For "a good thing" you have the delightful task of explaining what good means. Guess what? That's what you really wanted to get at in your message.
You don't like that some people think "valuable" means good, and so you try to prove that value doesn't mean anything. It isn't that it doesn't mean anything at all ever. It's that to use valuable to mean good, you have to say what "good" is, and good is indeed a concept that humans made up. Without humans and without any god, there is apparently no good or bad. There are trees which are useful to toucans for shade and water which is valuable for cooling an elephant's back, and there are intelligent animals like monkeys and dumb animals like worms.
Humans filled in what they think good might be, and at one point humans decided that intelligence and skill might not only be useful, but also "good." This is a fiction. It isn't good to be intelligent in all situations. The second fiction was that because intelligence and skill are good, it is morally right that intelligent and skilled people be more privileged than others. This is what you object to, and this is what you need to attack. Why is this fiction a wrong fiction? It's important to understand that the idea that it is good for everyone to have equal privileges is also a fiction. All morals are. It