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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.
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
"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.
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Very few people actually make anything anymore.
Most poor people don't make anything: Truckers, people who work in stores really just help move goods around. Same for people who work in restaurants.
The middle class people all sit in cubicles. God knows what they do, but they sure as hell aren't making anything.
The upper class are businessmen, lawyers and doctors. Doctors keep people alive longer, businessmen move money around, and lawyers, as far as I can tell, have no function at all.
Nobody really needs to do the vast majority of today's jobs.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
When wealth isnt distributed, crime goes up, terrorism goes up, etc etc.
The idea that we can fight terrorism with bombs isnt very smart, in the end the only way to solve this problem is with jobs, education, etc.
This isnt going to work because I refuse to give up my job to fight terrorism.
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But political and business leaders won't let it. Scientists and engineers in the 1920's and '30's determined that not only was this type of society possible, but also but also necessary in order to be able to distribute the vast amount of wealth that machines were capable of producing for us. They even developed a soundly logical and rational model of society that would allow this to work.
The problem of course is that in order to enact this "society of abundance," you need to abolish all the relics of scarcity. Mostly this means money, and by extention, political control of technology. Think of what happened in the Great Depression. Factories were producing so many products (like food) that there was plenty for everyone, but because the money used to distribute it was still scarce, the value dropped below the margin of profitability. No one could make money selling it, thus no one made money. Add to that people losing jobs to these machines and you have a society that has enough for everybody, but no one can afford even the dirt-cheap prices. You can't sell air, it's too abundant. If we pollute it enough, however, we will be able to because it will be scarce.
So the question is not a matter of when will technology be advanced enough so that this can happen, it's how can we tell enough people that this kind of life is already possible, and circumvent political and corporate attempts to stop it from happening because they will lose all their "power" and "control"?
There is a reason that the most popular social movement of the '30's nad '40's is now completely unknown to people today. It's because it just might work.
We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and technique serving the social needs of a new civilization. - Albert Einstein
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert
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
Be more careful when you're plagiarizing. :)
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).
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
Honestly, I don't see robots as being as big a deal as the transition from an agricultural to an industry society! As the previous poster said, in the last century the jobs that 90% of people had had FOR THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION went away in a couple of generations. Now THAT'S a watershed.
Also, rapid change erodes static classes, it doesn't save them. If what the jobs look like change every generation, you'll have a lot more social mobility between generations. Class is already an extremely fluid thing in America, in a way that they really wouldn't be considered "classes" by a 19th century Brit, and definitely not by an 18th century Javanese.
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Well, you know, this money the government takes from us is used for something. A significant part is wasted of course, but most of it goes toward something most people would consider useful, even if it does not provide you with any direct monetary benfit. Like supporting the army, or interstate highways, or funding research, or even education (federal loans, for example). Also it is used to provide services to the poor, including paying welfare to those who don't work. And, you know, it provides even those of us who would never need welfare with a useful service. One reason is that otherwise we would have the world revolution that Marx promised us 150 years ago.
So those taxes may be necessary, because if it were left up to you, you would probably not be able to procure these services. Remember, Americans actually pay less taxes than most other people in the developed world.
Churchill may have said it best with, "We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." Karl Marx realized this as well, in stating, "There is only one way to kill capitalism -- by taxes, taxes, and more taxes."
"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money --- only for wanting to keep your own money."
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand]
"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." [Voltaire]
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand]
She was absolutely dead-nuts right at the time. But lately it seems the corporations, with fiduciary responsibility only to the stockholders, have turned into evil monsters, exporting jobs, discarding workers like yesterday's trash, yet somehow enriching those at the top more and more, often just for being there, to an outrageous, absurd extent.
I used to think we were headed for 1929. Now I think maybe we are headed for October 1917.
I think that society is at its best when everyone has something constructive to do. Some of these undesirable jobs are the only jobs that some people can handle.
Having something constructive to do and being responsible is, for many people, possibly nearly everyone, the only thing that keeps them civil. It's no accident that the value of human life is cheapest in the areas with the greatest unemployement.
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!"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.