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.

Comments

Almost insightful..

[fadeaway]

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.

Re:Almost insightful..

[Lemmy Caution]

There's a certain level at which inflation would occur, but that's only if there's scarcity at the supply end. The concern is radical oversupply/overcapacity and underemployment, caused by mass redundancy and automation. It's sort of a game-theory no-win situation where no company would benefit from hiring anyone (because they have automated most of their functions) and thus there's inadequate wealth to generate demand. It's quite plausible, and it may even be a bit of what we have now.

Re:Almost insightful..

[Minna Kirai]

If the government were to seize money and then redistribute it, that's called.. oh I dunno..

ANY GOVERNMENT AT ALL.

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.

The only government which never redistributes wealth does NOTHING; they call that anarchy.

Re:Almost insightful..

[An Onerous Coward]

Actually, no.

Price inflation would happen. But it would be a huge equalizer. If we assume that $25,000 is the current household average, then giving every household another $25K will double the amount of money in the economy, hence we will assume the doubling the price of all goods and services (not the 250x increase you propose).

Now that everything costs twice as much, the person getting by on $10000 a year now has $35000, which amounts to $17,500 in pre-inflation dollars. In short, he just got a pay raise.

Meanwhile, the family which once earned $1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive, lowering their effective income to $500,000.

Further, whatever debts you owed could be paid back much more easily in an inflationary economy. If a loaf of bread really costs $500, then you could pay off all your student loans by baking thirty loaves of bread. Inflation has always been better for debtors than for creditors. Read up on the whole "gold standard" politics of the late 1800s. It's dry reading, but relevant.

Finally, you ignore the overall thrust of the article: He is proposing this plan because, in the world he envisions, there is a vast amount of wealth being created by robots, with all the wealth going to the owners of the robots. Average schmoes are locked out of that stream because they can no longer provide any services that the owners would exchange their wealth for, because a robot can do unskilled (and even low-skilled) labor better, faster, and cheaper.

America has never been a purely capitalistic government. The government has taken it upon itself to do things like divy up land, control imports and exports, build armies, and a host of other things rather than let "The Market" find its own solutions. Every regulation is an affront to the ideal of a purely capitalistic marketplace. This state of affairs is A Good Thing. Would we want to live in a world where Biggasse Corp could dump their toxic waste on the outskirts of Smelterville, MI because its residents were too poor to make it expensive to do so? Where any amount of pollutants could be flung into the atmosphere because the corporation doing the flinging didn't have to bear the costs that pollution imposes on the rest of us? There are places where capitalism works, and places where it doesn't. The entire point of the article is that we're about to run up against a situation where capitalism Does Not Work.

Re:Almost insightful..

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Obviously false, I don't know how you get this idea.

The demand/supply would still be the same (unless it were to rise so much as to bancrupt businesses, which I assume you won't let happen), so prices would remain the same.

The obvious proof : a lot of countries have minimum wages (a lot) higher than the us, and their economy didn't collapse.

Who can make predictions like that?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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.

Re:We are the world

[Trurl's Machine]

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).

History repeats itself?

[strider3700]

In the 1960s, the split was closer to 60/40, with 80% of the population making 60% of the income, and the richest 20% of the population making 40%. [ref] Between 1960 and 2000, the income split has gone from 60/40 to 50/50.

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.

Re:and lets pick out an obvious fallicy right now

[Lemmy Caution]

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.

Look at the past 20 years to predict...

[John Seminal]

How are we, as a society, going to respond to this robotic revolution? If we handle it properly, the arrival of robots could be an incredibly beneficial event for human beings. If we do not handle it properly, we will end up with millions of unemployed people and a severe economic downturn that will benefit no one.

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.

The Future:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The Future:

[TheSync]

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.

In the beginning there was man, and for a time...

[Myriad]

In the beginning there was man, and for a time it was good.
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!

Re:People will adapt

[tambo]

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

The Artistic Economy?

[meldroc]

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...

Re:The Artistic Economy?

[An Onerous Coward]

I defy you to prove that "Daredevil" was written by a human being, rather than a Markov chain-based movie script generator.

Seriously, I expect to see at least some creative pursuits go the same route as unskilled labor. Computers can already write passable music and play killer chess. Also, robots will be able to kick our butts when it comes to the replication of art. If you want a mural of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" on your building, you could hire a local artist to do it, or the Paint-o-matic 3000. A really good artist could easily outperform the Paint-o-matic (it would take three times as long), but a mediocre one couldn't.

Even if this Marshall guy's dystopian, "ninety percent of everybody thrown out on the street" world never pans out, I'm still left with the vague worry that there won't be anything useful and constructive for many of us to do. Posting to /. will skyrocket.

Re:People will adapt

[sydb]

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.

Too late

[Minna Kirai]

"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?

We already dont need all the people

[HanzoSan]

Which is why we have poverty, prisons, welfare, and the republican party.

Nobody really does anything anymore

[Jonas the Bold]

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.

Re:Nobody really does anything anymore

[Phantasmo]

Very few people actually make anything anymore.

You're assuming that the majority of humans living outside of the United States are not people.

For fuck's sake, we're living in an automated society - it's just that the robots doing all the work are people, given less care than most machines receive, worked to death, and barely making enough money to feed themselves, let alone their families!

For the love of God, if you care at all for the well-being of your fellow human, elect a government that will take away some power from big business. They're enslaving people - they know it, and you know it, too, except that you've been conditioned not to care.

Re:Nobody really does anything anymore

[asr_man]

Well said Eeyore the troll. Let's just all curl up and die.

The only insight I gained from your post was about your mental state at the time. It was not connected to reality. You got the higherachy all right, but WTF does it mean that nobody needs to do these jobs?

I need to live in a house. I need that truck to deliver the lumber. I need that lawyer to close. I need that person in the cubicle to setup my insurance accurately. I need that doctor to help when my family is ill. I need that businessman to provide me a job so I can pay for it all. And god knows I need those people in restaurants at the end of the workday when we're all too whacked out to cook.

Which is why we have problems with terrorism

[HanzoSan]

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.

Robotic Miners

[core plexus]

I've been thinking about having robotic miners for about 20 years, but one thing I think about is the loss of high-paying mining jobs to the local economies. Even in emerging countries mining pays many benefits. On the other hand, labor is very expensive, and most of the machines could easily be converted to automatic operation. Plus robots don't have a union, never need a smoke or piss break, or steal gold when they are supposed to be working. Think of the advances in sensors and computers within just the last 10 years. Raw resources, which we all require, could be had far cheaper than they are today. Likewise, exploration could be done by robots, especially using a UAV with sensors built in, like the Mars project I read about recently. Then, robots could follow up by collecting samples from targets located by the UAV and analyze them on the spot. This would eliminate bias, and reduce other errors and salting as well. We already use the software we need, and most of the hardware is off-the-shelf stuff.

I would welcome robotics in mining, but I have a job no matter what.

-cp-

We could have had this already by now...

[Murdoc]

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

The Paperless Office

[ansible]

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.

Goal-less productivity...

[rmdyer]

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

Re:Goal-less productivity...

[SunPin]

I hope your intentions are good. I will elaborate. Marx intended his economic work, i.e. Das Kapital, to reach industrial societies. The minute agricultural Russia declared themselves "Marxist revolutions", the whole project essentially fell off a cliff. Like Democracy, capitalism evolves. Marx wanted to identify the various stages of capitalism and how it related to industrial Europe and America. As I understand it, Marx was kind of unstable (genius and geek.) He felt like nobody was paying attention to his work and decided on the ridiculous marketing stunt of the 50 page Communist Manifesto. The fallout was severe. He attracted lunatics that discredited his entire life. It's much easier to read 50 pages of troll feed than it is to read a well-developed scholarly work like Das Kapital. He never recovered from it and "I am not a Marxist" was his famous statement on his death bed. Definitely look it up if you have the time.

Re:Well said, but there is more

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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!

Please cite your source...

[idontneedanickname]

The above is copy and pasted from Robotic Nation... Which is another piece written by Marschall Brain. It's linked at the top the of this article in fact.

Be more careful when you're plagiarizing. :)

Re:people aren't obsolete

[vidarh]

In fact the above was Marx' core argument for the inevitability of the failure of capitalism.

The key result of capitalism is competition. The only measurement of the success of a company under capitalism is profit. Driving up profit means increasing sales, which can only be done as long as consumption increases, or the total market increases (population boom, or expanding into areas you don't currently reach).

The moment these factors are all constrained (population doesn't increase, companies reach all possible consumers, and consumers are consuming as much as they can), the ONLY remaining way to increase profit becomes fighting over market share, or reducing cost. Fighting over market share also increasingly IS an issue of reducing cost, and hence prices, as there is only so much you can do with marketing and product differentiation if someone is dramatically undercutting you.

Cutting cost inevitably boils down to reducing the amount paid to other people, because all resources and materials you pay for ultimately involve paying people, whether it is wages, licenses, purchase of property or any other transaction (even when you pay a corporation, you are then indirectly enriching the owners of the corporation, if a foundation or trust the beneficiaries, if a government, the people)

The logical conclusion is a strong push to cut workforces and/or cut pay. Often the second is a result of the former: People in areas where work is short, or with skills that are becoming obsolete will lower their salary expectations.

However, at some point you reach a level where any reduction in cost lead to a reduction in consumption, at which point reduction in cost for one company will be increasingly hard to compensate by growth elsewhere.

Marx' thesis was that at this point, capitalism will continue to produce, and continue to cut costs, and drive consumptions among the people with capital to extreme excesses by promoting waste that people wouldn't normally consider, while more and more people are pushed into poverty by cost cutting measures.

Capitalists on the other hand, dismiss this, usually by assuming that overall consumption can continue to grow forever, hence always allowing for cost cutting to be compensated by growth in other markets.

Taken to extreme, a society where "workers" aren't needed, capitalism is unlikely to survive. How do you maintain a system based on private ownership of the means of production when it leads to immense poverty, and that poverty isn't "needed" because of scarcity?

It is hard to see a situation like that not eventually leading to growing popular unrest.

Incidentally, in "The German Ideology" Marx wrote [paraphrased] "if the revolution happens in a country with insufficient resources to meet the basic needs, the same shit will start all over again" - Marx always made it very clear that for a socialist revolution to have a chance to succeed, it must happen in a highly evolved capitalist economy, a country where a small elite have accumulated sufficient wealth that the needs of the population as a whole could be met by redistribution, and where the wast majority had been forced into poverty by the more and more extreme competition of capitalist economy.

He specifically named the UK, France and Germany originally, but in a later preface to the Communist Manifesto, he pointed to the US with it's rapid growth and expanding markets as more likely to mature to the sufficient level first....

Interestingly, he also specifically made it clear that he believed that a socialist revolution in Russia would be doomed to failure because of it's low level of development (it was a feudal dictatorship with a mostly agrarian economy).

You got it

[bmac]

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 big a watershed as leaving Agriculture behind

[benwaggoner]

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.

Re:Tax and Spend

[ornil]

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.

Re:Resdistribution

[Anonymous Coward]

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]

What has gone wrong

[fnj]

"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.

Re:Redistribution and largesse

[fnj]

It's called the earned income tax credit. Rather a misnomer as it has evolved, no? See, e.g., CNN Issue Brief On Earned Income Tax Credit

Re:I'm going to *so* get modded down for this, but

[eric76]

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%.

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.

Re:Won't happen

[bluGill]

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.

Time/Money Re:Nobody really does anything anymore

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Very few people actually make anything anymore.

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.

hmm. a few important flaws

[evilWurst]

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

alarmist crap

[ftzdomino]

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.

Goals?

[schnitzi]

Goal #1 - For the strongest possible economy, we need to create the largest possible pool of consumers, and those consumers need to have money to spend.

I thought the first goal was not to injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.