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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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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?
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.
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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
Be more careful when you're plagiarizing. :)
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.
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Well, you know, this money the government takes from us is used for something. A significant part is wasted of course, but most of it goes toward something most people would consider useful, even if it does not provide you with any direct monetary benfit. Like supporting the army, or interstate highways, or funding research, or even education (federal loans, for example). Also it is used to provide services to the poor, including paying welfare to those who don't work. And, you know, it provides even those of us who would never need welfare with a useful service. One reason is that otherwise we would have the world revolution that Marx promised us 150 years ago.
So those taxes may be necessary, because if it were left up to you, you would probably not be able to procure these services. Remember, Americans actually pay less taxes than most other people in the developed world.
Churchill may have said it best with, "We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." Karl Marx realized this as well, in stating, "There is only one way to kill capitalism -- by taxes, taxes, and more taxes."
"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money --- only for wanting to keep your own money."
"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]
"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." [Voltaire]
"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.
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.
What really scares me is how IGNORANT of ECONOMICS most Slashdot users are. You folks are generally pretty educated about technology and science, but you have no clue when it comes to economics.
We live in a world where the expansion of the free market has transformed a planet of people whose daily challenge was to feed themselves, into one where we see poverty going away rapidly. In 1950, only half of Americans had indoor plumbing. Now even some of the poorest Americans have microwave ovens and television sets, let alone indoor plumbing.
Not only has the super-rich West been moving forward. In 1970, the percentage of humanity living at under $2 per day was 40%, under $1 per day was 16%. By 1998, less than 20% of humanity lived under $2 per day, and less than 7% live on under $1 per day (all measurements in 1985 dollars).
We have a long way to go still. But thanks to economic liberalization in countries such as India and China, these numbers are expected to continue dropping.