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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.
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).
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.
No, you've got the wrong 80%. He's talking about the bottom 80%.
The bottom 80% of households earn 50.6% of all income. The top 20% of households therefore get the other 49.4%. This gap is recent, according to the article - the differentials were smaller in the 50's and 60's.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Which is why we have poverty, prisons, welfare, and the republican party.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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 would welcome robotics in mining, but I have a job no matter what.
-cp-
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
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/
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.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
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.
And this is the best of all possible worlds, where Bill Gates is the best of all possible people and the 12 year old in a shoe factory in Indonesia is one of the worst.
Wealth is generated. And then goes where it goes in ways that may have little to do with what we consider "earning" it.
The old wisdom that work is good for you is mostly bullshit; a mantra that the mostly socialised government constructed so they could controll the masses. The truth is that whats good for the economy are good for you. As long as we can have sustained economic growth over a long period of time (200 years+)that wil be good for the economy and then for most people.
So more robots will be A Good Thing(TM); they will make it possible to automate repitive work and increase productivity. That would be good for most bussiness whom can pass the savings down to the workers at the consumer level. Several industry surveys and economic teories supports this.
Let's face it most people would like to not work in such a boring job, and its only pure arrogance to be against such a development. I can allready hear the some wellmeaning well educated techies; "Save the Wal-Mart jobs help thhose people from getting sacked"
Truth is that most workers are lazy people who would could want nothing better than a year or to off before they get their next job.
Unless we want to go back into some socialist form of economy the only way to the increase wealth is to increase productivity and its pretty deterministic that sooner or later those people at Wal-Mart just need to get replaced.
Separating those that produce the good and those whom makes most of the money is a good thing. Not because we like it but because its the best for the economy; if you look at historic growth rates you will see that the fastest growth came when this happened. During the 19th century, the 1920's, 1940-65 and the 90's. Most bussinesse will benefit by this and this will help distribute the wealth in the right direction. But of course some worker unions will try too turn back time by issuing toll barriers that actually hurts bussiness and by supporting regulations that limits the flow of capital non-developed countries to the US.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
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)
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
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
Housework has gone down for most people. Did you see that TV series 1900 house? A bunch of modern British people decided to live for 3 months as if in 1900. Life for the women was one long chore. The amount of work was unbelievable. Just doing the washing was an entire day's work. Cooking was hell as a stove needed to be maintained. It was hard and slow to cook with. I can't even begin to reconut how much work these people did!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Be more careful when you're plagiarizing. :)
There are definite problems to overcome. The initial outlay of capital expenditure to create and maintain those robots will greatly outweigh the cost of labour. This means that for the first few years until the use of robots becomes economically efficient that there will be a large rate of unemployment and no benifit to the consumer.
Even when the potential benefit to the consumer exists, it doesn't mean that giant corporations are going to leave their profit margins the same for the sake of lowering the cost of their product to the consumer.
Why do that when they can show growth and increased profit margins to their shareholders?
You can never leave out the human factor, whether it is driven by politics or economics, or plain human emotion. When an OPEC nation finds another trillion barrels worth of oil in the ground, do the prices go down? No. They cap it and claim a shortage and artificially inflate the prices of crude.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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...
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.
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]
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.
"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.
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?
"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.
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.
Look at vietanam and Afganaston before you say that too loudly. Sure there was a lot of external assistance, but then the American revolution got a lot of assistance too. (Mostly from France, which was at war with England)
Civil wars are very hard to win because you don't know who will stay on your side. General Robert E. Lee of American Cival war fame was offered the job of commander of the Yankee forces, but instead took the job of the confederate forces because he liked that side better, and suddenly the rebels had one of the best generals of the war on their side.
There are a lot of guns out there. I don't know how Europe would do, but in the US there are at least as many guns as people, and most are in fireable shape, with amunition. Hard to win a war when you are not sure who is the other side. Nukeing your own people isn't a good idea. Local forces can still win a revolution or civil war, but because local forces don't need your fancy supply lines and communications, they are honest supportive citicians until you come to town. With modern transportation a rebel can attack miles from home and still be at work the next morning. One crossover general can run the whole thing from his secert internet connected bunker, using pgp to make sure communication goes works. Of course the other side has plenty of advantages, but if they will help is debatable, and really depends on the actual situation.
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!"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?
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.
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
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
Sorry to be off topic to the thread, mods, but shut the hell up, Anon Coward. Your posts become more and more incoherent with each click.
AlturasForums.com
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.
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.
It all made sense until he starts talking about filling my entire world with even more advertisements than exist already! We build machines to free us from slavery and the best we can come up with is some sort of marketing landscape? Of course it will be difficult to break the molds of the past but there are now more options than even Sci-Fi can imagine.
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
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
In the United States, people don't get their right to own things from the government. Instead, the government gets all of it's power and authority delegated to it from the people.
You are confusing how government today appears to function with the reality of how it was supposed to work. It's attitudes like this that lead to people thinking that being allowed to keep some of their own property (lower taxes) is somehow a "gift" from the government.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.
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
I don't know what you are reading but work is good for you is a CAPITALIST argument. If anything, socialism calls more minimizing work (hence the stereotypical view that socialists are lazy and don't do anything). Capitalists are the ones that are against reduced work weeks, etc.
I disagree. Capitalism provides a reward for working hard, because it knows people are inherently lazy - it's efficient. Socialism provides equal reward no matter how hard people work - so, people don't, and national productivity stagnates. Instead, you get a whole lotta propaganda to brainwash people into working.
That said, in my experience people tend to need *something* productive to do in order to stay sane; the question is what. a lot of people want to spend their time persuing less profitable things such as art, music, non-commericalisable science and research. it's difficult to do this under pure capitalism, so we have university grants, artist benefits, etc, instead (well we have the AB in New Zealand)
content management for designers
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!
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."
I for one welcome our new robotic masters
That would fit nicely into something human to do.
Reason.
KFG
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.