Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour

kkleiner writes "No longer will they say, 'He's going to end up flipping burgers.' Now, robots are taking even these ignobly esteemed jobs. San Francisco based Momentum Machines makes a robot called the Alpha that can churn out 360 gourmet burgers per hour. The company plans on launching the first ever burger restaurant chain with a cook staff made entirely of robots. You think Americans are obese right now? Just wait."

Comments

Mmm-mm!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

That is a tasty burger.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Ruede]

looks tasty ^^

Re:Mmm-mm!

[jonnythan]

You mind if I have some of your tasty beverage to wash this down?

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Cryacin]

And now, enjoy our new Soylent burger. Made from the people, for the people.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Anonymous Coward]

"That is a tasty burger."

Is it?

I wonder how well it does with "hold the salt" or "lighten up on the mayo."

At least it won't spit on your burger

Re:Mmm-mm!

[gmhowell]

You mind if I have some of your tasty beverage to wash this down?

What?

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Alien Being]

Bloomberg says you're allowed one gulp or two swallows. He didn't state his personal preference.

Re: Mmm-mm!

[Tablizer]

Hamburger corporations are people too.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[jonnythan]

SAY WHAT AGAIN.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[todrules]

Probably a lot more accurate than a person, as long as it's entered correctly. If the order-taker can adjust things like light this, extra that, or hold the mayo, then the robot can also adjust how much they put on. Not that difficult.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[ixidor]

Do they speak English in WHAT ?

Re:Mmm-mm!

[zafayar]

WHAT ??

Re:Mmm-mm!

[hairyfeet]

I'm sure it will have a little touchscreen where you input exactly what you want and it'll come out exactly as ordered, every single time.

I'd also like to point out I've been calling this one for a couple of years now as there will soon be no point in hiring people to do most of the low end jobs, the machine never gets tired, never calls in sick, doesn't get benefits or days off, in the end we are ALL John Henry working ourselves to death trying to beat the machine but the machine WILL win in the end.

This is why I truly believe capitalism, like every other ism before it, is doomed. you are playing musical chairs with fewer and fewer ending up with a seat. Even in China where workers are cheap as dirt and there isn't any workers protections to speak of a million workers are gonna be replaced by robots and this is just ONE company.

At the end of the day capitalism can't work if the only ones able to get any capital are those with enough of a fortune to begin that they can buy their own automated factories, what happens to those millions upon millions who weren't lucky enough to be born into wealth? Are you gonna pay them to sit at home and consume? Create megaprisons to house them all? As the record student loan defaults show you simply can't educate your way out of this, so what now?

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Jade_Wayfarer]

Well, there are two established points of view on this problem - idealistic and cynical. Idealistic view says that after a while it would cost almost nothing to produce food, clothes, even housing for every living person, so it would became a part of the guaranteed social minimum. Luxuries (informational also, like newest music, books and other art) would cost real money, which would be available to small, but active part of humanity, but most of the people would be pretty happy with what they can get for free.

Cynical view says that only a tiny fraction of all people would still be entitled to more and more luxurious style of living (maybe even smaller than 1% of population), and their status would be reinforced through ever rising army of robotic workers, policemen and even soldiers. Maybe they'll keep a small batch of second-class citizens - high-level engineers, scientists, entertainers, servants and so on. Everyone else - well, tough luck, there's no more free resources in this world, and you don't have any money to pay for anything, including basics like food and living space. Death camps or even processing plants are going to solve this little problem quite effectively.

I think in the short run we'll have something in between - world elites are still like to show that they care for the "common folk", but in the long run - who knows? What's interesting is that dystopian future has more promise for us as a species - it's easier to move to the new frontiers when you just can't stand home any longer, than when your life is an endless holiday. So in order to eventually colonize other worlds we may have to rely more on people's greed, stupidity and other "bad traits", than on people's rationality and goodwill. Anyway, only time will tell how it will all work out in the end.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[drinkypoo]

I think in the short run we'll have something in between - world elites are still like to show that they care for the "common folk",

Who are these people? World elites like to look like they care, but that's not the same thing.

So in order to eventually colonize other worlds we may have to rely more on people's greed, stupidity and other "bad traits", than on people's rationality and goodwill.

If we make it easier to get on the ark than to rise up, I guess that might happen. Idiocracy is looking more and more likely.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Jade_Wayfarer]

Actually, I was trying to say the same - for me "to show how are you doing something" is not at all equal to "to do said something". And the moment these people would feel that they can cut out the costs of that show - poof! It's gone. Hell, in such future the world of "Transmetropolitan" would look like a slightly chaotic Utopia.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Big Hairy Ian]

Bearing in mind that Walmarts uk outlets (Tesco's) have just had to apologise to the public for selling beef burgers that were 28% horse I find your idea of Soylent burgers not entirely unappetising. :)

Re:Mmm-mm!

[karbonforms]

ASDA actually.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[MatrixCubed]

Say 'what' again. Say 'what' again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more god-damned time!

Re:Mmm-mm!

[rwise2112]

That is a tasty burger.

Me, I can't usually get 'em myself because my girlfriend's a vegetarian which pretty much makes me a vegetarian.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Too bad. No pussy eating.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Now describe to me what Marsellus Wallace looks like!

Re:Mmm-mm!

[cayenne8]

Hmm....that's one of those Big Kahuna burgers, isn't it?

Re:Mmm-mm!

[cellocgw]

Me, I can't usually get 'em myself because my girlfriend's a vegetarian which pretty much makes me a vegetarian.

Two solutions:

1) get a new GF who's not wacked.
2) Introduce current GF to bacon. One bite and she's hooked for life.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Krishnoid]

Like in this story, a good read.

Re:Mmm-mm!

[Jade_Wayfarer]

Yeah, I've read it, liked the plot, but it's still a very schematic story that lacks really interesting characters (of course, that's even good for this kind of story - easier to identify oneself with the main character). But Vonnegut's "Player Piano" hit me much harder when I've read it - I think that ending of the book contains one of the most frightening insights into the human nature. Given such chance we would destroy ourselves gladly, meeting our slow, but inevitable extinction with a smile. Well, let's hope that some new frontier emerges before everyone who is not happy with our current direction is... excluded from the equation.

Ah, winter makes me pessimistic...

Re:Mmm-mm!

[PoolOfThought]

So there's still that bit of mystery meat, huh?

Couch Potato

[Jetra]

With no more entry level positions, maybe we can finally take over the world by using our free time to build death rays.

Re:Couch Potato

[killkillkill]

And someone is still going to have to load the cows onto the conveyor.

That's nothing

[93 Escort Wagon]

I saw SpongeBob SquarePants serve up thousands of Crabby Patties in just a few minutes!

Re:That's nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

But he left off the pickles

HE LEFT OFF THE PICKLES!

Re:That's nothing

[93 Escort Wagon]

Wait a minute, there they are - UNDER YOUR TONGUE!

Incidentally, I've apparently wasted my life.

Fatter?

[PlusFiveTroll]

Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.

Re:Fatter?

[FunkSoulBrother]

Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.

Oh sure it will, there is almost certainly some percentage of fatties that are partially kept in check by the shame of ordering multiple day's worth of food from a skinny teenager. Once you're ordering from an nonjudging robot it will be much socially easier to ask for 3 burgers and 2 orders of fries.

It will be like the guys that would never set foot in a physical porn shop, but have no problem purchasing it online.

Re:Fatter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it.

Because it's always fun to laugh at fat americans.

Re:Fatter?

[dj245]

Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.

That's the story of the industrial revolution, which started in the late 1800s. Better quality, higher-paying jobs requiring higher skill take the place of unskilled or lightly skilled labor. I don't see this is as screwing the little guy. I see it as creating a better job and eliminating tedious and unpleasant tasks from society.

Of course, with this development, we might start questioning why we need quick-serve restaurants, or quick-serve restaurant managers, or quick-serve cashiers at all. We could probably replace the whole lot with vending machines within 10 years. We could probably replace them all today if we tried.

Re:Fatter?

[hermitdev]

Don't worry - we'll still need someone to clean the bathrooms. Haven't seen a robot for that, yet.

Re:Fatter?

[LynnwoodRooster]

You need to expand your knowledge-base.

Re:Fatter?

[atomican]

and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine

Nah. Eventually someone will come up with a robot that can perform maintenance on the burger robot, removing the human element completely. As for the maintenance robot, another robot will take care of that robot, and so on.

Eventually humans will be removed entirely from the design and manufacturer of said robots once they are designed with the appropriate skills. Once this happens, we'll all die in a nuclear holocaust as Skynet is born. All because of a simple burger robot.

Re:Fatter?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.

No, this was just an opportunity for the author to jump on the American self-hate that's in vogue right now.

Re:Fatter?

[vlm]

Oh sure it will, there is almost certainly some percentage of fatties that are partially kept in check by the shame of ordering multiple day's worth of food from a skinny teenager. Once you're ordering from an nonjudging robot it will be much socially easier to ask for 3 burgers and 2 orders of fries.

Ask a parent about food hyperinflation. Suddenly, in just a couple years, although nothing has changed on the menu, "a burger for lunch" has changed price from $5 when I was single to $20 because everything I buy is multiplied by family size, and there's no way in hell sibling X is going to eat a PB+J if sibling Y is eating a cheeseburger. Not just drive-thru but ditto chinese takeout, pizza delivery place, the sub sandwich place, the deli, etc.

Also there's a shortage of skinny teenagers now.

Re:Fatter?

[drinkypoo]

For takeout that makes sense, for somewhere with an eating area, you still need the "maid-bot" to come along.

No you don't. You simply eliminate the eating area and let the city suffer the externalities, discounting the price to encourage customers to come to your vendomat anyway. The people throw the trash on the ground, the city pays to have it picked up, profit! The worst thing they might do to you is force you to use biodegradable packaging. After all, you aren't the one doing the littering.

Re:Fatter?

[vlm]

Ah the story from late 1800s to now is there were always "Better quality, higher-paying jobs" available. The difference is now those are shrinking too, just as population and demand are exploding.

Frankly, you can't have a stable society where the only jobs available are for the cognitive elite, like the typical /.er. You need to give the lowest 95% or so of society "something" to do, because they're too dumb to lead themselves and they'll probably find something exciting to pass the time, like revolution. Even if you pay them off by taxing the heck out of the remaining 5% with a job, they're gonna get greedy / angry. And the "american dream" WRT education and having a job hasn't been beaten out of them yet, although the opportunities are all gone.

Re:Fatter?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

You know your markets!

What's your position on topless women in MMORPGs?

Re:Fatter?

[Talderas]

The roomba doesn't clean piss and semen off the walls and ceiling. For the moment, wall and ceiling washers are safe.

Re:Fatter?

[punkr0x]

I would imagine the robot would make burgers cheaper, and the lines would move faster, meaning more burgers for your average lazy american!

Re:Fatter?

[dubbreak]

You need to expand your knowledge-base.

I remember the first time I saw a self cleaning toilet (in France). I have yet to see one in Canada or the US.

Where I live we just picked up on open air public urinals to prevent street urination (only a few hundred years late if compared to other countries). Self flushing but not self cleaning (gotta keep the unionized city workers in work).

Re:Fatter?

[JimFive]

discounting the price to encourage customers to come to your vendomat

It's called an automat
--
JimFive

The Luddite Fallacy

[mfwitten]

Read about it and understand it.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be revised a bit.

It no longer holds true that when a job is replaced by technology the populace is free to shift to new jobs; as jobs gets more and more specialized, the cost of training (we're speaking years for a degree level training) will no longer be absorbed by the market.

Corporation will only invest on younger people because they cost less, have an open mind and have a longer life ahead so they will return more for the training given.

While it is indeed true that eventually the jobs will shift to new venues, those won't absorb previous worker, will only absorb new one entering the market. On the long term the effect is the same (job shifting) but the difference of the modern approach in the short term is this buffer of unemployed, overspecialized middle aged man that the society doesn't know what to do with.

The fallacy is still a fallacy, but we have to consider the timescale at which it operates because a society can't wait a generation to heal.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[thaylin]

That is not what it assumes. First you assume that there is a decrease in the number of consumers, that is not true, and even if there was a price decrease will still lead to a shift in demand from those that still have jobs, which is vastly more then lost them. That extra revenue will lead to expansion and so forth.. If you had read the wiki it points it out in this paragraph

If a firm's technological innovation results in a reduction of labor inputs, then the firm's cost of production falls, which shifts the firm's supply curve outward and reduces the price of the good (limited by the price elasticity of demand[7]). The widespread adoption of the innovator's technology could lead to market entry by new firms, partially offsetting the displaced labor, but the main benefit to the innovation is the increase in aggregate demand that results from the price decrease. As long as real prices fall (or real incomes rise), the additional purchasing power gives consumers the ability to purchase more products and services. With technological innovation, these are often products and services new to the consumer, such as better health care or wireless communication devices and services. This increase in aggregate demand leads many economists to believe that technological change, although disruptive of individual careers and particular firms, cannot lead to systemic unemployment, but actually increases employment due to its expansionary effect on the economy.[8]

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

The thing about that though is the question of what economic activity arises for people to participate in for employment. We're already living in an age where most of the useful labour is done by a relatively small percentage of the population. Most of the rest works in various types of service job. Robots like this can replace human workers in entire large segments of those service industries. Sure there are other service jobs, but there are a lot of them that really are of the replaceable with a simple shell script variety. With a little more machine intelligence, the majority of them probably are replaceable that way. Eventually, there won't be any low or no-skill jobs left. Even the jobs fixing the machines will be done by machines. The simple fact is that most people aren't high-skilled labour and even those who are highly skilled or are very, very good at their jobs often can't compete with a custom designed machine (shades of John Henry). The truth is that the new economy jobs that gradually replace the old ones are worse and worse and the typical labourer is going to have to sell their labour on what is increasingly a buyers market.

The problem is that farming, mining, manufacturing, food service, retail sales, warehouse jobs, delivery, construction, etc. can all conceivably be replaced almost entirely by machines. The owners of the machines, farms, mines, factories, restaurants, stores, warehouses, delivery companies, construction companies, etc. will then be the only people producing the tangible things that the consumers truly need, while the majority of the consumers will be working in service jobs producing intangibles that people don't really need.

In other words, we are in danger of transitioning to post-scarcity technology without transitioning to a post-scarcity economy. That leaves most people, at best, working themselves to death in completely unproductive, pointless jobs.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

So lets say labor costs me $10 per widget, and I sell it for $20. I revamp my tools and eventually get labor costs down to $5. Knowing people were willing to buy it for $20, what incentive would I have to change the sale price to $15? Will I drop the price so more people can afford it? or will I continue selling it for 20 and be happy making higher profit off my current target market? Will dropping the price matter at all for a person with no job and still cant afford it at any price?

Reading the luddite fallacy article, I see the argument that somehow the efficiency will neutralize the effect of less labor because the cost savings will make products more affordable. To a degree I can see that as true, but I don't think it's going to scale perfectly. $5 in labor savings is not going to be $5 in savings to the consumer.

And what happens when companies become large enough that they can set the price no matter the market conditions? What incentive would such a company have to modify prices of goods to evenly balance out problems inflicted by labor shortages?

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Snotnose]

Came to say this, you said it better. 2 more points. The burgers will be more consistent with robots making them. Second, you can have a lot more variety in your menu. Want a fish sandwich with horseradish, bbq sauce, sweet pickles, and hold the tomato? There's an app for that.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

It also doesn't account for when every entry level job is replaced by automation and "magic-hand-waves" in saying:

In some cases, freeing up of the labor force allows more people to enter higher-skilled managerial jobs and technologically-specialized jobs, which are typically higher paying. Therefore, fears of unemployment due to automation are generally dismissed as just another instance of the Luddite premise, which has proven fallacious time and again over many decades.

So "some" cases is enough to clear all fears.. gotcha.. and " management of what exactly? When the robot overlord automation of labor is complete do the robots really need managers and just how many managers will they need?

Where is this magical increase in overall starting education to prepare these people for these other types of positions coming from?

Luddite Fallacy indeed.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[thaylin]

Several things. If labor costs are 5, and that is the only cost of the widget, as you seem to be suggesting and you are selling it for 20, then more then likely another vendor will start in the industry and sell it for less, forcing you to sell for less to compete. Or you study economics and realize that the highest price you sell your item for is not the price that will generate you the most profit, it is all part of the curve. If you are selling 100 now, making 1500 in profit, but the curve support you selling 200 at 15, making making 2000 profit, what are you going to sell the item for?

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[crdotson]

It sounds good, but I have heard this argument many times over the years. Supermarket scanners didn't cause the downfall of western civilization. What's different this time?

I would argue there are plenty of jobs that simply cannot be done by any machine (barring strong AI). Most entertainment jobs, as an example, and that segment of the market keeps growing. Human desires are practically infinite. I don't see getting to post-scarcity any time soon, but let's hope it happens.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[thaylin]

If you are making a product at a quarter of what you are selling it for that opens the door for competition. In addition selling an item at a higher price does not necessarily generate more profit. If you are selling that item for 20 and selling 100 of said item making 1500 in profit, but lowering the price to 15 will sell 200 at 2000 in profit what are you going to sell it for?

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

In other words, we are in danger of transitioning to post-scarcity technology without transitioning to a post-scarcity economy. That leaves most people, at best, working themselves to death in completely unproductive, pointless jobs.

As likely as the grey goo scenario. Your doomsday scenario is likely missing out on some feedback loops that prevent it from happening.

People are more adaptable than machines, and thus have a higher value than them. Machines can be specialized to do some jobs more efficiently than humans, but they aren't good enough to replace humans in every possible role. There will always be work that a human can do more economically than a machine.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[hermitdev]

People are more adaptable than machines, and thus have a higher value than them.

Yet machines are more dependable and predictable than humans. The machine will do exactly what programmed to, reliably, faster and with fewer errors than a human doing the same task. Yes, the machine breaks down from time to time and requires maintenance. But, it doesn't work an 8 hour shift, doesn't take sick days and doesn't go on strike. Automation generally reduces costs and increases reliability and reproducibility. While reduced costs in production doesn't necessarily translate to lower prices to the consumer, it does allow maximizing profits. When a competitor does come along and undercuts your price, you now have wiggle room to lower price and remain competitive and profitable. Personally, I wouldn't lower prices given a lower production cost unless I was either facing competitive pressure or trying to gain market share.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[rtb61]

In this case however, there are many running costs skipped by the article. The robot handles food which sponsors the growth of many kinds of bacteria and moulds and would need to be cleaned frequently. Raw meat held in a warm humid environment, even a couple of hours is a problem (think of the supply tubes and streaks left behind). At a minimum the machine would need to be cleaned out and rinsed every four hours. Then of course a worker takes a sicky, you get a replacement, here, well you have to fix the worker and it depends what broke down and how far away your fixer is. Then there is vermin detection and keeping them out of the works, a 'ratburger' might become all to real. Basically when closely looked at, some forms of automation, until far higher technological solutions are available, simply more higher cost labour to implement, than the labour they eliminate.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Eskarel]

The problem which reality is showing us(though no good economist, especially right wing economists ever let pesky things like reality get in the way) is that the automatic relocation of even new workers doesn't work the way that economic theory says it should. People who work in what would be traditionally called Blue Collar roles are not always in those roles because of any lack of education or opportunity. In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role, plenty of people seem to feel the same way about the non assembly line areas of food service.

In short, labor is not fungible. Not only is someone who has trained as a machinist for twenty years going to magically transform into someone working in HR overnight, but it appears that a person who if a machinist job was available would have taken that job for twenty years won't successfully become an HR drone simply because that is the job that is available. Everyone has different skills and different personalities, and just because you or I are comfortable working in an office in front of a computer doesn't mean that everyone is, and that's not even taking into account whether someone who would be comfortable doing that kind of job is able to access the education and training necessary to excel in it.

We on Slashdot tend to have a somewhat biased view of the world, we are, for the most part, information workers in a world where information work is expanding and our opportunities are a darned site rosier than many, but imagine for a moment if you were forced to do construction or work in a restaurant(or if you do those things imagine being an IT worker). It's not just about skills it's about what people are good at and can live with doing.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[mhajicek]

At some point, any job that most people can reasonably train for will be accomplished more economically by automation. These people will then be either destitute or on the dole.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

There will always be work that a human can do more economically than a machine.

On the other hand, you likely can't argue that there will always be more of those jobs than there are humans to fill them.

Those jobs are becoming more scarce. The number of humans who need such jobs are becoming more numerous.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[dryeo]

Supermarket scanners didn't cause the downfall of western civilization. What's different this time?

Actually supermarket scanners and all the related technology is causing the downfall of western civilization. The governments are currently buffering it by borrowing and forcing low interest rates but remove things like food stamps, welfare for all able bodied people and lower unemployment insurance and social security down to the levels that balance with the input, eg only collecting UI for a few months. Also remove the make work that the government heavily borrows for and western civilization will crash.
Just because we're living on our credit cards does not mean everything is fine.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[maxwells_deamon]

As time goes by we see more and more pressure by the 1 % to make sure that the unemployed do not continue to be able to eat regularly

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Eskarel]

The theory is the usual "Free Market Fallacy" wherein the cost of entry to every industry is effectively zero so if you don't drop your price to $15 someone will enter the market who will. The issue of course is that the cost of entry into most industries is far from zero and so the $15 guy never enters the market and the price remains at $20. Potentially existing competitors could drive the price down, but race to the bottom doesn't really work for existing players unless they believe they can pick up and maintain a substantial enough increase in market share to make up for the loss in profits over time.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Murdoc]

Well put sir. It sounds like you might be familiar with Technocracy? If not, you may find it interesting, since they are saying the same thing you are (and indeed have been for about 80 years).

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[BasilBrush]

That is not what it assumes. First you assume that there is a decrease in the number of consumers, that is not true, and even if there was a price decrease will still lead to a shift in demand from those that still have jobs, which is vastly more then lost them. That extra revenue will lead to expansion and so forth..

You seem to have forgotten what the product is. If cheaper burgers means greater demand, then people become even more obese than they already are, and even more of them become unable to work.

Technology unemployment cannot be solved by ever increasing consumption.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

There's quite a few people responding to this comment that, I feel, drastically underestimate the impact that robots will/are making on our lives.

Lots of the arguments revolve around things like "Technology X didn't end the world so this won't either" or "There will always be things humans can do better".

Lets take the first argument. Sure, technology X didn't end the world, but that was just one technology amongst many thousands that are gradually introduced over time. No one of them will be so invasive that it is instantly felt, except by the people directly impacted by them. But over time as pretty much all manufacturing tasks are eaten away, the effect will be felt. Big time.

Now for the second argument. The statement that there will always be things humans can do better may be technically true, but belies a lack of imagination when used in this context. Namely, if you were to say: "There will always be manual labour jobs humans can do better", you would be wrong. Robots have made massive progress recently, specifically in the areas of humanoid motion, dexterity, and also in artificial intelligence and reasoning.

We can safely assume that robots will continue to improve in these areas until such time, as they match, and then exceed our ability. The only area which we can have reasonable doubt is in artistic capability. If you take progress as it has occurred so far, and extrapolate to the future, you can, I think, reasonably imagine a time when robots will take care of all tasks except for those in the artistic/entertainment sphere.

This will of course have massive consequences on almost every facet of our lives. Possibly in a good way, in that work might no longer be mandatory for most humans, and we could live in a happy, prosperous, cashless and labour-free environment.

Conversely, those who already have control, power and money might lament their irrelevance and skew the process in their favour with very unpleasant results. There's no way to be sure what will happen. But I hope I'm alive to find out when it does.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Johann Lau]

That extra revenue will lead to expansion and so forth..

Bullshit. It might just as well lead to hookers and cocain, or fugly boats made of aluminium.

the main benefit to the innovation is the increase in aggregate demand that results from the price decrease

This assumes decreased costs get passed on as decreased prices, which is also pretty much bullshit.

This increase in aggregate demand leads many economists to believe

Sure. People will eat more burgers because they're cheaper... it makes perfect sense! Or maybe, just maybe, "many economists" are just trained imbeciles playing for time while the naked emperors tighten the leashes.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[PlusFiveTroll]

>Lots of the arguments revolve around things like "Technology X didn't end the world so this won't either

Those same people would probably say something like "Nuclear weapons didn't end the world so lets build MOAR NUKES!", even though the terrible danger they put us in. If something doesn't kill us the first time, we will try, try, try again till it does.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[PlusFiveTroll]

Unless that manufacture bribes the government to create IP laws allowing this 'Company X' sole distribution rights to widget Y for an ever extending period of time. In which if you want widget Y you either pay company X whatever they want for it or hope you can grey market one of them from a shady Chinese distributor.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Rockoon]

. In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role, plenty of people seem to feel the same way about the non assembly line areas of food service.

Plenty of people work jobs that they hate at every level in every industry, so if people that love to be short order cooks eventually have to find work that they don't like, then should we really get worked up over it?

Anyways, my guess is that most short order cooks don't like it to begin with, and are only doing it because they believe that their other options are worse (a belief that is probably also rarely true.)

Society benefits from a supply of increasingly efficient services and technology, and in general it is the ordinary man that has benefited the most from these increases in efficiency. A rich man didn't have to wash their own clothes by hand several hundred years ago, and now nobody has to. A rich man didn't have to go down to the local river or well to fetch some water for their bath several hundred years ago, and now nobody has to.

Nearly every aspect of our lives is greatly enhanced by the increases in efficiency that have come before us. The cycle may very well end some day, but another increase in efficiency will not be the signal of it happening. Another increase in efficiency is a signal that its still not happening.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Jade_Wayfarer]

Yep. I still find it very amusing that some people truly believe in some abstract "economic laws", sidestepping the question of human nature completely. Truth is that behind every business there are real people making decisions - top-level managers, their powerful friends and accompli... I mean, acquaintances and so on. And most of these people are only thinking in terms of personal status and gains. Exceptions are too rare to make any real difference. With powerful tools like laws, paid media and robotic workers (maybe even automated police force?) who needs to follow ancient rules of "free market" and "honest competition"?

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[Rockoon]

Unless that manufacture bribes the government...

Don't blame the manufacturers for what the politicians are selling. It is the perpetuation of beliefs like yours that prevent us from kicking out the corrupt government and reducing the power and influence of its actors.

That $3.8 trillion dollar federal budget amounts to a spending of $33043 per household, and thats just the federal budget. States spend another $13043 per household, and local governments spend another $13913 per household. Thats a total of $59999 per household being spent right now this year, while the median income is $52762. It is this fact that puts lobbyist at the doorstep of politicians, because the government is a bigger consumer than the people.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[TheLink]

What happened is the farmers were able to feed more and more people - thus the food prices remained affordable.

In the USA a single farmer can feed about 155 people. Maybe that figure can keep going up. But if the supply of other goods go up the farmer may start charging more for his produce. There are just so many Farmville coins a farmer will want in return for his real farm goods. Whereas if you have to eat, you have to eat.

OK perhaps someone makes a robot farmer - in which case the other humans to human farmer ratio goes up. But the robot farmer doesn't want your music, iphones etc. The robot farmer's owner might but a farming monopoly would be even easier at that point and monopolies can get ugly. Especially if the population grows and the amount of food produced does not meet the growth in demand.

Another thing: the banks might own the farm, the human farm owner and the robots indirectly - via the loans.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[TheLink]

This increase in aggregate demand leads many economists to believe that technological change, although disruptive of individual careers and particular firms, cannot lead to systemic unemployment, but actually increases employment due to its expansionary effect on the economy

OK just pretend the workers in China, Vietnam, India etc are robots and taking the low end "robotic" jobs from the US workers. How well is that working out for the workers in the USA so far? Things generally getting better?

So if the workers in China themselves are replaced by robots things will get even better for the workers in the USA?

Maybe things might get better for the workers in China[1] but I don't see such a rosy picture for the US low end workers.

[1] As a recent story shows workers in China can do much of the job of a worker in the USA for a fifth the cost: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/16/software-developer-outsources-own-job

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[vlm]

At some point, any job that most people can reasonably train for will be accomplished more economically by automation. These people will then be either destitute or on the dole.

Short term solution is pointless "services". You can't automate "life coach" or "massage therapist" or "exotic dancer" or any number of "pay for human contact" jobs. Eventually the economy will bifurcate into the "real world" economy of material production and the "service" economy where no one really does anything but trade among themselves for pointless services.

Its a very important point that long before its impossible for a mere human to be trained for those jobs, it'll be uneconomic because of credentialism and the educational-industrial complex. So the goal is to graduate with a sheet of paper and a mortgage sized debt that will take 30 years to pay off, assuming you actually get a job in your field instead of being the 50% or so not employed in their field after graduation or free intern work. Oh and you'll only be employable for a couple years due to ageism because a cheaper unemployed new grad can do the same job for less pay... Anyway the problem is if you need a new career every decade due to technological change, and a new career takes 4 years training and $150K, and you have 50% odds of no pay off at all because of unemployment or 50% odds of a typical $40K/yr starting salary for six years until that tech is eliminated and you have to start over again, then society wide (no anecdotes please) the average cost of training per decade is $150K and the average gross pre-tax income over the same decade is 6 years x 40 grand x 0.5 of people employed in field = $120K. $120K $150K. Whoops.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[deimtee]

Have you watched the improvement in CGI over the last few years? I would argue that it won't be more than another decade or two at the longest and we will be getting new movies starring the best actors of the last hundred years.
And about a week after that, incredibly talented actors you've never heard of who don't actually exist.
At the moment, the uncanny vally limits this, but I expect them to cross it fairly soon. And then a whole lot of entertainment jobs go west.
Load the script into the computer, interact with the narrow AI for a while "directing" it and then come back the next morning to a fully rendered, indistinguishable from live, completed movie.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[crdotson]

How about -- "Actually automated looms and all the related technology is causing the downfall of western civilization." There, now you're a true Luddite instead of a neo-Luddite. :)

Strong AI is the only thing that I can think of that is truly a game changer and makes the Luddite argument possibly valid after two centuries of being incorrect. But strong AI leads to the singularity (if you believe that theory) and we really don't have ANY idea of what's on the other side.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[crdotson]

That's true -- the number of actors might go down, but a person still has to write the scripts, make the CGI work, etc. Robots won't be able to do all of that without (as I mentioned) strong AI.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Most entertainment jobs, as an example, and that segment of the market keeps growing.

The reason that's a problem is that, unless you embrace a post-scarcity philosophy where people are granted some sort of living wage as a human right, having ninety percent of the human population working to entertain one another doesn't work. They all have to compete to entertain the remaining 10% and the profits from that need to be spread out among the remaining 90%. It's the problem of supply and demand. There's going to be a limit on demand. As for human desires being practically infinite, that's not really true, but some of them are quite large. Of course, what that means is that 90% of the population has to work as cheap sex workers for the remaining 10%. Not exactly ideal

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

The thing about the Luddites is that the problem they saw was not an imaginary one. A fair number of textile workers really did starve to death from losing their jobs. Just because the market corrects itself over time does not mean there isn't a human cost in life and suffering. Social reforms such as unemployment insurance and welfare were what was needed, not destroying the machines, but if people just quietly died in ditches, we probably wouldn't have gotten the social reforms. The same thing continues to be true today.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

You can be entertained by two dancing girls instead of one, or ten, or twenty. The best part is, if you happen to have come out on top and own the robots doing the producing, that if you have twenty dancing girls instead of one, they each know that they're easily replaceable and will work for less and put up with a lot more.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Frankly, with the kind of scripts Hollywood has been churning out lately, the AI might not need to be all that strong. We just need to develop an engine that can parse some Austen or Shakespeare, maybe throw in _Cyrano de Bergerac_, change the setting and characters a bit (setting and characters working in marketing, magazines or TV production seem to be really popular) and voila, a good 50% of scripts right there. For that matter, the backlog of perfectly good scripts (relative to what actually gets produced) floating around Hollywood could last for a good hundred thousand years or so.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

On the other hand, you likely can't argue that there will always be more of those jobs than there are humans to fill them.

Supply and demand. There is a finite supply of these machines that can replace human labor. On the other hand, jobs are not a zero sum game.

Abstract the machines as an extension of the engineers/technicians who design/build them. What the "problem" boils down to then is that you have an "engineer" who is say 1000x more efficient at burger production than a McD burger flipper. Even with that lopsided ratio, the burger flipper still has a comparative advantage in doing *something*, such that it is advantageous to *both* to trade. If they have something of value to offer each other, the doomsday scenario where the person currently working as a burger flipper is completely obsoleted by technology does not happen. (His current job may become obsolete; but there will be *something* that he can do over the machine)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

The primary feedback mechanism I can think of that would prevent this is widespread civil unrest. Of course, if the military and police robots are good enough, that might be short circuited. Otherwise, the fallout from the civil unrest would probably be for us to end up with some other worst-case scenario. Probably pointless make-work for people to earn a pittance at. Have you met people? Most people's strongly held beliefs about what's in their best interests are crazy.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

But who keeps the machines working? Humans. Who designs the machines? Humans. Who improves the machines? Humans.

Until we invent robots that are flat out superior in humans in all aspects (not possible in the near term, probably impossible in the long term), we are in no danger of being replaced by technology.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

In this case however, there are many running costs skipped by the article. The robot handles food which sponsors the growth of many kinds of bacteria and moulds and would need to be cleaned frequently.

Which is different from living, breathing, sweating, bleeding human beings?

Raw meat held in a warm humid environment, even a couple of hours is a problem (think of the supply tubes and streaks left behind). At a minimum the machine would need to be cleaned out and rinsed every four hours.

You solve the problem of raw meat in a warm humid environment by not storing the meat in a warm, humid environment. This problem exists for human workers working with meat as well. A properly designed robotic system keeps constant, precise track of how long the meat has been out, what temperature it is, what the humidity is, etc. It knows exactly when the meat is going to go bad and what state it's expected to be in currently. It could even be fitted with all kinds of scientific instrumentation to keep far better track of hygiene than any minimum wage worker ever could.
Also, machines don't make excuses, so management can't pretend that the machines are just making excuses when they're overworked. If the machine is kept too busy to keep up, then it's too busy to keep up and it doesn't fudge its reports, and it also doesn't get ignored with the excuse that it's just lazy and not working hard enough.

As for cleaning and rinsing every four hours, do you really think that's something a machine can't do? A machine can not only be rinsed and cleaned, it can be sterilized. Try doing that to a human being. Also, have you ever been anywhere that serves food? Have you seen how many parts of those places are _never_ cleaned? Then there are the ones that are cleaned by a minimum wage worker just going through the motions. Like someone mopping the floors who is really just spreading the same muck a little more evenly over the floor. A machine either does a process wrong or right. When you've got the process right, it tends to stay right. Fast food places are all about process and consistency. Nothing does process and consistency like a machine.

Then of course a worker takes a sicky, you get a replacement, here, well you have to fix the worker and it depends what broke down and how far away your fixer is. Then there is vermin detection and keeping them out of the works, a 'ratburger' might become all to real. Basically when closely looked at, some forms of automation, until far higher technological solutions are available, simply more higher cost labour to implement, than the labour they eliminate.

Replacing a machine is a matter of logistics, just like replacing an employee. Modularity of the systems is key. The advantage machines have over humans is that when you have a system made up of machines, you can know reliably whether a machine will or won't be available as a replacement. You can't say that for humans.

As for vermin detection, there's no reason machines can't be better at that than humans. For one thing, spaces built for machines to work can be designed in ways that leave much less room for vermin to hide and travel. A robot workspace can be virtually sealed. For another machines can be equipped with sensory capabilities humans don't have to detect vermin. I'm not saying it's all easy to implement in one go, I'm saying that it can be done, and once you've perfected it, it can stay perfect.

Incidentally, ratburgers are already real.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

I certainly agree that we face an energy crunch. If we get our act together, we should be able to reach some stable point, however. With the right mix of technologies, we should be able to get sufficient power to run our civilization with solar power. I don't think new dedicated solar panel plants are necessarily the way to go to collect that power, although they're certainly a good idea on many existing structures. The technologies I'm talking about that would replace most jobs should also improve our power usage. For one thing, no need to commoditize labour and ship it overseas, leading to extra shipping, if the labour is robots (except of course for the inevitable political reasons where the robots are tariffed and taxed to preserve jobs).

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[crdotson]

Also true. But it doesn't have to be good, just good enough for people to buy it and keep others employed. :)

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

No, purely economic feedback loops are sufficient. The doomsday scenario ignores economic feedback loops that prevent itself from happening. Namely, that robots can't actually replace humans, and that jobs are not zero sum.

Technology can obsolete certain types of jobs, but every new technology also creates new jobs. Where were the fast food restaurants and burger flipper jobs 200 years ago? They didn't exist. They came into being after industrialization built the transportation network that could combine the necessary food ingredients, and population density created demand for a quick and relatively cheap food restaurant. (then came franchising and globalization that allows you to find a McDs almost *anywhere* now)

As goods get cheaper and more available to the general population, this is an improvement. Civil unrest, or a revolution "against the machines" is going to destroy the system that makes these automation gains possible. If you have to rebuild your civilization from scratch, that is not an improvement. Replacing broken windows is not an economic gain.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[JimFive]

innovation results in a reduction of labor inputs [...] market entry by new firms, partially offsetting the displaced labor

These phrases imply that labor is reduced, but not eliminated, in the production process. If fast food labor is eliminated then opening new fast food restaurants does not offset the displaced labor.

the firm's cost of production falls, which shifts the firm's supply curve outward and reduces the price of the good [...]the main benefit to the innovation is the increase in aggregate demand that results from the price decrease

This part of economic theory makes the assumption that the demand curve is not disjoint. If there is a large pool of wealthy customers and a large pool of poor customers but not many customers in between then there is no incentive to reduce the price (the benefit of reducing the price enough to pick up the poor customers does not make up for the lost revenue from the rich customers buying at a lower price). In the dystopian scenario in which all low skill jobs are automated we end up with a large unemployed class and a large wealthy class with a small or non-existant middle class.
--
JimFive

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[JimFive]

Second, you can have a lot more variety in your menu. Want a fish sandwich with horseradish, bbq sauce, sweet pickles, and hold the tomato?

Not really. If the restaurant stocks those condiments then you can do that whether it's automated or not. Automation is not going to make it more financially practical to stock little used condiments. In fact, it may make it less practical as food costs will be a larger portion of operating expenses if labor is eliminated.
--
JimFive

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Yeah, but it might turn out that the only people who need to be employed are a few directors and producers, with everything else being done by the machines.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

No, purely economic feedback loops are sufficient. The doomsday scenario ignores economic feedback loops that prevent itself from happening. Namely, that robots can't actually replace humans, and that jobs are not zero sum.

And you believe that "robots can't actually replace humans" and "jobs are not zero sum" are purely economic? What does economics have to do with whether a machine can functionally replace a human being in a job? As for jobs not being zero sum, they may not be, but they have to hold up to the principles of supply and demand to have any value. As all of the actual physical production, delivery, logistics and other facets of all necessities and conventional luxuries are taken over by machines the jobs that are left are either only for highly skilled geniuses (and even they can be cut out by the uncaring owners of the means of production) or are increasingly abstract and removed from any traditional human activity. Those jobs will have low demand and very high supply.

I don't think this necessarily will lead to disaster, but my faith in human nature strongly suggests that it will.

Technology can obsolete certain types of jobs, but every new technology also creates new jobs. Where were the fast food restaurants and burger flipper jobs 200 years ago? They didn't exist. They came into being after industrialization built the transportation network that could combine the necessary food ingredients, and population density created demand for a quick and relatively cheap food restaurant. (then came franchising and globalization that allows you to find a McDs almost *anywhere* now)

"every new technology also creates new jobs" sounds more like an article of faith than a serious scientific result. It's also meaningless without quantities. Do the new jobs created replace the old jobs lost? Also, abstracted out to an eagle-eye view of the overall market, it ignores the actual human realities. How many people died in the gutter? How many people survived but were financially devastated? How many people went from expert labour back to menial because their skills were no longer relevant? I am the last person to argue against technological progress, but it's vitally important to recognize the human cost as it occurs. Basing our reasoning on articles of faith from a discipline as ridiculously insubstantial as economics is clearly a bad idea.

All of those jobs creating fast food or prepared foods were jobs that someone was already doing somewhere (traditionally by a "non-working" partner who stays at home). Eating is one of our most basic survival needs. Beyond that we have various needs along a spectrum towards and beyond luxuries onward to more abstract things which tend to lack anything approaching universal appeal. Once machines are producing everything along that spectrum all the way through the luxury segment, the remainder has very dubious demand and, since providing that remainder is the only large job segment left, very high supply. There's no magical ground invisible hand market fairy dust that can change that.

As goods get cheaper and more available to the general population, this is an improvement.

I agree.

Civil unrest, or a revolution "against the machines" is going to destroy the system that makes these automation gains possible. If you have to rebuild your civilization from scratch, that is not an improvement. Replacing broken windows is not an economic gain.

I also agree with this as well. What I'm saying is that markets are statistical abstractions and people, and the details of their lives, are reality. Technological progress will end up negating most people's usefulness in the labour market, and we have to be prepared for that otherwise bad and completely unnecessary things will happen to people.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[PoolOfThought]

Hmmm... not sure I want to take economics or policy advice from a wikipedia page that asserts that demand is somehow driven by the price. That assertion, that pricing drives demand, makes me automatically think to myself "what else is that page totally wrong about?". Modifying prices may certain cause more quantity to be purchased (called quantity demanded), but the actual demand hasn't changed. The price TELLS you the demand, it doesn't cause an "increase in aggregate demand that results from the price decrease".

Basically the page mfwitten recommends says "Yeah, people will lose their jobs, but stuff will be cheaper, so those people might still be able to afford it even if they get worse jobs and more people that couldn't afford before it became cheaper will now be able to do so. Therefore, Win win win... don't be scared of the machines".

It might be right. I actually tend to agree that it will all be alright in the end and that we should automate damn near everything we can. But the argument presented on that page isn't convincing anyone other than those who think that price drives demand, and that group of people can probably be convinced of just about anything.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

And you believe that "robots can't actually replace humans" and "jobs are not zero sum" are purely economic? What does economics have to do with whether a machine can functionally replace a human being in a job? As for jobs not being zero sum, they may not be, but they have to hold up to the principles of supply and demand to have any value. As all of the actual physical production, delivery, logistics and other facets of all necessities and conventional luxuries are taken over by machines the jobs that are left are either only for highly skilled geniuses (and even they can be cut out by the uncaring owners of the means of production) or are increasingly abstract and removed from any traditional human activity. Those jobs will have low demand and very high supply.

Robots not being a replacement for humans is a physical observation. Just compare the feature lists. The economic conclusion is that this is sufficient evidence that robots do not replace humans.

Consider how bikes and cars and airplanes co-exist. All are transportation technologies. The existence of one good does change the use and prevalence of the other goods; but in the case of robots, the limitations of robots compared to a human being guarantees that humans have a competitive advantage even if robots can be used as burger flippers. This would change if there was a self-replicating robot that could think, learn, modify its design, and run on table scraps; that robot doesn't exist. (yet?)

"Jobs are not zero sum" is an economic claim, and is trivially proven by the fact that computer programmers did not exist before the invention of computers, but is currently a major career field. For jobs to be zero-sum, there must have been a bunch of computer programmers in the middle ages that we've never heard about. (Secret society running the world?)

Your concern about a society where there are only a few high paying jobs is based on an assumption that there are no new jobs to replace the older ones. Again, jobs are not zero-sum. New jobs can and do pop up, and the adaptability of a human being means that humans will fill those jobs at first, even if we can later design robots to do them. Note that each new robot type deployed requires a lot of design AND testing; this makes them expensive to use and makes human employees more desirable; it also generates a lot of human jobs. (Some of which are not that difficult; just tedious)

Humans who can't adapt are somewhat SOL, but life is harder if you're stupid; and a moral society will take care of them because it recognizes the innate worth of a human being and that the helpless should be helped. This question, however, is independent of technology. (And technology can provide opportunities for those who used to be completely helpless.)

"every new technology also creates new jobs" sounds more like an article of faith than a serious scientific result. It's also meaningless without quantities. Do the new jobs created replace the old jobs lost? Also, abstracted out to an eagle-eye view of the overall market, it ignores the actual human realities. How many people died in the gutter? How many people survived but were financially devastated? How many people went from expert labour back to menial because their skills were no longer relevant? I am the last person to argue against technological progress, but it's vitally important to recognize the human cost as it occurs. Basing our reasoning on articles of faith from a discipline as ridiculously insubstantial as economics is clearly a bad idea.

If that were true, that means there are some technologies we must delay or destroy, otherwise it would devastate society.

You might argue this applies to nuclear weapons, but that is a weapons technology designed to inflict maximum harm. The technology we're discussing is one designed to produce goods at a higher quality and lower cost. Society will be destroyed by cheaper goods? What hist

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[crdotson]

True! But that's the way farming (and many other industries) has gone, but we haven't run out of jobs yet. I don't think the current unemployment problems are due to neo-Luddite attributed causes (we've had unemployment like this before and it has gotten better, which wouldn't have actually happened if we had run out of jobs).

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[deimtee]

I don't think any robots at all will be involved.
"Directors" are going to morph into a new job where they sit at a screen and direct virtual actors. Computer generated SFX and location shots will be there instantly.
The vision a director will require will change, more emphasis on telling a good story, less on the ability to visualize based on incomplete scenes.
Also, continuity will be easy, no cost to switch scenes will mean just working through the script linearly. The computer will remember everything.
No need for the ability to massage the egos of prima-donnas or deal with the unions. Massive cost reductions all round.
The vision of the movie industry in the future is a few guys in a room with a big screen, directing a computer.
Movies will still vary just as wildly in quality. You are going to get individuals who save up, rent a "studio" and produce something equal to "The Room".
You are also going to get incredible movies, made by obsessed individuals who buy the equipment and spent years making their vision come true.
And everything in between.
And almost all of it will be on the net.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Robots not being a replacement for humans is a physical observation. Just compare the feature lists. The economic conclusion is that this is sufficient evidence that robots do not replace humans.

Ignoring for a moment that we're talking about the expanding capabilities of robots and not just their current capabilities, the feature list of robots is enormous if you include the set of all possible robots. Currently what humans mostly have going for us is our general purpose nature, our mobility, and our cheap ubiquity. In many applications, you can work around the need for those things.

Consider how bikes and cars and airplanes co-exist. All are transportation technologies. The existence of one good does change the use and prevalence of the other goods; but in the case of robots, the limitations of robots compared to a human being guarantees that humans have a competitive advantage even if robots can be used as burger flippers. This would change if there was a self-replicating robot that could think, learn, modify its design, and run on table scraps; that robot doesn't exist. (yet?)

Those technologies you mention have largely replaced horses. These days, they're almost entirely used only for purposes of recreation or for tradition or simply as pets when once upon a time they were important capital equipment. As a result, the number of horses relative to the number of people is greatly reduced today compared to even a century ago. The market didn't find sufficient jobs for horses to maintain their populations.

Sufficient advances in aircraft tech could lead to ubiquitous VTOL craft that replace cars. Bikes are either recreation or exercise or used by those who don't have or can't drive or eschew cars. Airplanes eliminated long-distance passenger sea transport (no-one takes cruise ships just as transport). The limitations of robots _are_ human limitations. They represent our skill at problem solving and we're good at problem solving. We almost certainly can and will solve the problems of using robots to fulfill any specific job function. The robot itself doesn't have to equal all the capabilities of a human being, we just distil what we need of our own abilities into them. Most food service consists of a lot of individual, simple, problems cemented with a larger process. Automating it means solving those simple problems.

"Jobs are not zero sum" is an economic claim, and is trivially proven by the fact that computer programmers did not exist before the invention of computers, but is currently a major career field. For jobs to be zero-sum, there must have been a bunch of computer programmers in the middle ages that we've never heard about. (Secret society running the world?)

Jobs may not be zero sum, but the job market is not infinitely elastic either. There are certain things that people need and want. Once they're provided, you can't just suddenly give people a bunch of new wants, no matter how hard the marketing people try.

Your concern about a society where there are only a few high paying jobs is based on an assumption that there are no new jobs to replace the older ones. Again, jobs are not zero-sum. New jobs can and do pop up, and the adaptability of a human being means that humans will fill those jobs at first, even if we can later design robots to do them. Note that each new robot type deployed requires a lot of design AND testing; this makes them expensive to use and makes human employees more desirable; it also generates a lot of human jobs. (Some of which are not that difficult; just tedious)

It's not based on that assumption, it's based on the assumption that pretty much the only truly high-paying job is robot/resource owner with a thin managerial layer then the vast mass of humanity who have to somehow provide value to the tiny percentage of people who directly control all of the real wealth. There can be any number of jobs, they just won't have any

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

I think it's a little unwise to simultaneously believe that everything will keep changing and, at the same time, it will all stay the same and follow the patterns of the past. There's plenty of evidence that, even now, we're starting to run out of jobs, or at least to run out of good jobs.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

There's no reason we won't be able to someday achieve a closed loop with robots doing the mining, refining, manufacturing, maintenance and eventual recycling of themselves. Design improvements can still be the domain of humans but, once they're at a certain point, improvements aren't necessary for them to replace most human labour.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

... In many applications, you can work around the need for those things.

Work around is more work, which is a cost.

The time to actually be worried about the economic scenario you posit is when robots are Human 2.0, capable of doing everything a human can do in the same compact package.

We're not even close. I don't believe it's possible, but even if it is, there's too much new tech that needs to be developed- and that is because a human being is an amazing complex system.

Re:Cars/bikes/aircraft - your hypotheticals ignore the physics of it. Cars aren't going to be simpler than bikes, and aircraft aren't going to be simpler than cars. Going fast enough to go airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with a ground vehicle, and lugging around an engine imposes costs you don't have with a human powered vehicle.

They're competing technologies, but each has a niche that isn't going away any time soon. In the same way, humans have niches that a robot do not occupy, and will not occupy barring some miraculous new technology. (if that pops up, worry about it then)

Jobs may not be zero sum, but the job market is not infinitely elastic either. There are certain things that people need and want. Once they're provided, you can't just suddenly give people a bunch of new wants, no matter how hard the marketing people try.

You're trying to imagine the economy of a post scarcity world, which we are most definitely not in, and which we won't be in for a long time. I say let the post scarcity society worry about it when they get here; they're post scarcity and will have the resources to handle it.

In the meantime, we are living in a scarcity world, and it's premature optimization to rewrite society for a post-scarcity world when we are not in one yet. I don't mind exploring it as an idea, but I do mind this idea that we need to start putting in new rules and giving people a lot of power to handle a not-yet-problem that may never even be a problem. Building the wrong system for the wrong problem is a bad idea; and some wrong systems in the past have taken a very heavy human toll.

No, it just means that we need some sort of safety net in place, and to recognize that the majority of people are going to end up living forever in that safety net. It requires a form of socialism, not matter how much of a dirty word that is to some people. Providing everyone with some sort of basic living wage would seem to be the required eventual outcome.

This "solution" creates helpless people. You are not doing them any favors, and if anything, it's cruel to create dependence where it was not there before. Imagine a 20 year old who still wears diapers and needs to be fed baby-food - that is what your "safety net" will produce - and it'd be considered child-abuse if done by a parent to an actual child.

This is the point of our disagreement - you think that there is a class of people, whom are a majority, who are going to need a nanny state to take care of them forever. I believe the average person can be self-sufficient, and that absent a nanny state's interference, the average person will learn whatever he needs to take care of himself.

So, do you actually have the biographies of all the whalers and the ice delivery men and the lamplighters, and all the other people whose jobs went away due to the new technologies and the appliances they enabled? The fact that society survives does not mean that individual people do. Some people fall through the cracks. As I keep saying, I'm fine with these social changes, as long as we recognize they're coming and take action, on a human time scale (in other words, a lot faster than most current social services, who seem to be organized on the principle that people can go months without food) to seal up those cracks, as enormous as they may get.

I do not have those bi

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Work around is more work, which is a cost.

When you do it over and over and over again, sure. When you do it once so that you do it more cost effectively every time in the future, it's an investment. Bear in mind, I'm talking about working around things like general purpose utility and mobility. You work around those things by developing good, repeatable, procedures and set paths. It's the same over-riding rule you use when maximizing human efficiency, you develop good procedures and eliminate the need to constantly adapt. It's repeated over and over and over again by business administration types that the secret of success of many successful businesses is good process. They work on it until they get it right, then they repeat it over and over again. The other element humans have that robots don't is cheap ubiquity. Through economies of scale, and with robots built, shipped, installed, repaired and eventually recycled and replaced by other robots, you can have that with robots too.

We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem. Niche robots are enough as long as we have enough types of niche robots.

Re:Cars/bikes/aircraft - your hypotheticals ignore the physics of it. Cars aren't going to be simpler than bikes, and aircraft aren't going to be simpler than cars. Going fast enough to go airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with a ground vehicle, and lugging around an engine imposes costs you don't have with a human powered vehicle.

And yet many people use cars over bikes, even when a bike would make more sense. Going fast enough to stay airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with sea vehicles like boats, and yet we still don't travel long distances by boat much any more. The costs of lugging around an engine doesn't presently stop most people from doing it. You're kind of arguing against reality as it is now with this. The niches occupied by these things were once occupied by other things, like horses, that were essentially obsoleted so that you don't see them around much any more.

You're trying to imagine the economy of a post scarcity world, which we are most definitely not in, and which we won't be in for a long time. I say let the post scarcity society worry about it when they get here; they're post scarcity and will have the resources to handle it.

I like to be prepared for predictable eventualities. The kind of people who end up making the vital choices in situations like this have historically been pretty bad at making them in time to prevent harm from being done. Societies tend to take a reactive stance shrugging off things that cause great harm to many of the societies members. I would prefer to avoid that sort of thing.

This "solution" creates helpless people. You are not doing them any favors, and if anything, it's cruel to create dependence where it was not there before. Imagine a 20 year old who still wears diapers and needs to be fed baby-food - that is what your "safety net" will produce - and it'd be considered child-abuse if done by a parent to an actual child.

The solution doesn't create the helpless people, it just stops them from starving to death in a world that doesn't give them any other options. At our population density, they can't fall back on hunter/gatherer behaviour. In a world that won't employ them at a survivable level, they will already be helpless. It's part of the social contract of civilization. Civilization takes away some survival opportunities, but it's supposed to exchange them for better ones.

This is the point of our disagreement - you think that there is a class of people, whom are a majority, who are going to need a nanny state to take care of them forever. I believe the average person can be self-sufficient, and that absent a nanny state's interference, the average person will learn whatever he needs to take care of hims

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[mysidia]

In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role

Everyone has to have a Plan B; at least until/unless they invent such a thing as "Job Obsolescence insurance," to cover the risk of becoming unemployable in your favorite job, due to changes in economic client. That's just the way the economy works -- anyone's kind of job might be irrelevent tomorrow, and have to vary to a slightly different role to survive, it's just part of the business risk involved in being an employee.

Same as anyone... the more varied the job skills, experience, training, and knowledge you acquire, the better.

And especially.... leadership skills, and management experience; which doesn't necessarily mean working in an office.

OK, maybe not that useful in the "robot apocalypse" ; imaginary end of the economy scenario, where most of the labourers can be replaced by robots (and therefore, not need anyone to manage them, either)

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem. Niche robots are enough as long as we have enough types of niche robots.

What labor problem?

And yet many people use cars over bikes, even when a bike would make more sense. Going fast enough to stay airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with sea vehicles like boats, and yet we still don't travel long distances by boat much any more. The costs of lugging around an engine doesn't presently stop most people from doing it. You're kind of arguing against reality as it is now with this. The niches occupied by these things were once occupied by other things, like horses, that were essentially obsoleted so that you don't see them around much any more.

None of what you said here contradicts my point, which is that all those technologies still exist, and are still in use, often side-by-side.

They may be obsoleted in the future, but that's not a criss, either. When cars replaced horses as a primary form of transportation, there was no "horse overpopulation" crisis. The economics took care of itself as supply followed demand and price signals triggered changes in society.

The solution doesn't create the helpless people, it just stops them from starving to death in a world that doesn't give them any other options. At our population density, they can't fall back on hunter/gatherer behaviour. In a world that won't employ them at a survivable level, they will already be helpless. It's part of the social contract of civilization. Civilization takes away some survival opportunities, but it's supposed to exchange them for better ones.

Socialism is not the only system that can prevent starvation. A system designed around an average person being "useless" from birth to death is one that strips away his humanity, and is more likely to result in mass human murder than any of the other political systems.

In a landscape where there's nothing you can do to be self-sufficient, how do you expect people to do so? They won't be able to put down pegs delineating a plot of land they will farm. They won't be able to hunt in the wilderness. They won't be able to mine. They won't have any capital to buy their own land or mineral rights or production facilities. Understand, I don't think this is an absolute certainty, but I think it's pretty likely. I'm not arguing for a nanny state, I'm just arguing for a state that doesn't let members slip over the edges and down into the abyss.

You're assuming the problem you want to solve with socialism. I'm disagreeing that your scenario even happens in the first place. Industrialization didn't do it. New specialized robotics isn't going to do it either.

Not mass starvations, just lots of little personal tragedies. These days we actually have social services for people living hand to mouth to fall back on when they suddenly lose employment, but not so in the good old days. Poorhouses and prisons were often stops along the way, but quite enough people managed to die in the gutters. The point was that upheaval, even when the broad results are positive, has casualties. We should do what we can to prevent those casualties and not just callously chalk it up as the price of progress.

Citation needed. Is this what you assumed must have happened, or do you have biographies and histories detailing these tragic circumstances? Life is full of little tragedies, and you have to show that technology generated more tragedies than the status quo.

In my view, the real Luddite Fallacy is the notion that the Luddites were simply an expression of fear of technological progress. They were just part of the scattered beginnings of the labour movement. Their real concern was the abuses of the workers by owners. Long hours in dangerous conditions for lower wages in a time of increasing cos

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

What labor problem?

The one we've been discussing, where robots are doing all the real labour and humans, for the most part, can only find employment doing demeaning and uncompetitive make-work or can't find employment at all.

None of what you said here contradicts my point, which is that all those technologies still exist, and are still in use, often side-by-side.

But it doesn't contradict my point, which is that usage of those things is greatly reduced. I haven't argued that employment for humans will vanish, just that the majority won't be able to find jobs and that, without a proper framework to deal with that, many of those people could end up falling through the cracks (death, prison, some sort of homeless shadow existence). The problem with that is, you can just stop counting the people who fall through the cracks and claim that the employment rate isn't that bad. History is full of non-events where history didn't really notice people dying in the gutters but, for some mysterious reason, the census was down by a few million people the net time they ran one.

They may be obsoleted in the future, but that's not a criss, either. When cars replaced horses as a primary form of transportation, there was no "horse overpopulation" crisis. The economics took care of itself as supply followed demand and price signals triggered changes in society.

Exactly, there was no horse overpopulation crisis. The economics took car of itself and the surplus horses were sold to make dog food and glue, and thereafter, no-one needed as many horses any more. Very few new jobs emerged for horses. So, why, in your view, are horse jobs so fundamentally different from human jobs? Why must jobs for humans necessarily always grow elastically as they're pushed out of niches, but jobs for horses won't? I know part of your answer will be the adaptability of humans, but do you really think that there are no bounds to that?

Socialism is not the only system that can prevent starvation. A system designed around an average person being "useless" from birth to death is one that strips away his humanity, and is more likely to result in mass human murder than any of the other political systems.

Any system that doesn't have a socialist element is virtually guaranteed to lead to starvation to some. Some free-market capitalist ideologues recognize this and even celebrate it as a desirable form of Social Darwinism. Look at the Objectivists. The simple fact is that markets and economics in general are just abstractions. Looking at things from such an eagle-eye view obscures the details of what happens to people on the ground. You have to have some sort of solution to stop the powerless from being ground up.

I'm not saying that socialism is the only solution. Of course, I may be using a definition for socialism than you are. Technically, I consider infrastructure maintenance, public education, public safety, any form of public welfare, public health (including FDA, CDC, etc.), any sort of stewardship of national economic health, etc. to be forms of socialism. Frankly, I can't think of much about government that I wouldn't classify as a form of socialism, it's all just a matter of degree to me. The function of government and/or civilization basically boils down to "let's get together and help each other out".

If socialism makes you uncomfortable, consider other systems like making everyone a shareholder in the corporations that hold the robots and resources, reaping dividends. That would still boil down to socialism, but it would have a different name, which seems to make some people more comfortable with it.

You're extremely uncomfortable with the majority of the human population being turned into helpless, useless flatlanders by a socialist system that just hands them everything they need. Believe me, so am I. I'm just more uncomfortable with those same people simply dying or being forced i

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

The one we've been discussing, where robots are doing all the real labour and humans, for the most part, can only find employment doing demeaning and uncompetitive make-work or can't find employment at all.

Your projected problem, not to be confused with a current or likely problem.

But it doesn't contradict my point, which is that usage of those things is greatly reduced. I haven't argued that employment for humans will vanish, just that the majority won't be able to find jobs and that ...

Usage of these things are reduced? http://www.worldometers.info/bicycles/>

Look at the graph halfway down the page, we're building more bikes and cars, which reflects more usage, not less. Your assumptions about what is currently happening contradict reality. This should be a hint to you that your perception is faulty. If your perception of the *present* is faulty, your predictions about the future may also need some re-examination.

... Frankly, I can't think of much about government that I wouldn't classify as a form of socialism, it's all just a matter of degree to me.

You define all government activities as socialism. I define socialism as gov't control of the economy, to be contrasted to a free markets. (Where the gov't sets the rules, but does not try to control the outcomes) My definition leaves some gov't activity outside the scope of socialism (such as diplomacy, policing, and legislation).

No, there's no perfect free market, but it is the free-est markets that have created the most wealth for humanity.

If socialism makes you uncomfortable, ...

It doesn't merely make me uncomfortable, I despise it. National socialism introduced the world to industrialized mass murder. It's all rooted in how the socialist perceives the link between a gov't and the people. An "elite" who sees of the mass of humanity as useless "meat" is one that has no qualms about sending them to the glue factory. "for the greater good"

People are not horses. A horse is property; but humans aren't. Humans create jobs; horses do not. (Human ownership of horses creates jobs, but it is the human creating the job, not the horse).

This comes back to assumptions - you assume some limited supply of jobs. Again, jobs are not zero sum. Jobs come from human want, and human want is a limitless pit. Compare the richest guy you can find with the poorest guy you can find. The difference in their possessions is "want". Multiply that by however many billion people to get a rough guess of how much work needs to be done before that human want starts to be filled and there might not be new jobs. (And the rich guy still wants more! Want is unlimited, and jobs scale with want)

The society you imagine where all humanity's wants are satisfied without a corresponding amount of human jobs is a post-scarcity society - by definition, this is a a society with nigh INFINITE resources. In that world, all of our economic theories no longer apply, because our economic knowledge is all based on the distribution of scarce goods.

Since that society has so many resources, there's simply no point in worrying about it. The rich could casually throw away their semi-used goods and "the poor" (who are without want since everything is practically free) can scoop up the refuse and live like kings. The problem you imagine contradicts itself.

I don't have to show that technology generated more tragedy than the status quo. That's putting words in my mouth. I've said that these changes cause upheavals which tend to cause tragedy for some. My theory is that it is possible, without treading carefully, for a very large upheaval to cause a lot of tragedy.

I do not accept your imagination as historical evidence.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[crdotson]

The patterns of the past are continual change and technological improvement, and the pattern now is continual change and technological improvement. Change is involved, and the same pattern is involved. I don't think those two things are contradictory.

I think the best argument for the idea that "this time is different" is that the rate of change is increasing, so that it's harder for people to adapt. However, I don't think that a lot of the previous changes happened over the span of generations (so that people retired or died off and simply weren't replaced in those jobs). People have lost their jobs to technological advances consistently for the past 200 years. Perhaps there's some 'tipping point' where the rate of change and the rate of job loss increases to a point where people can't adapt -- maybe you can handle being automated out of your job once or twice in your working life but not ten times? Certainly if it happened every month you couldn't adapt that often, but I don't see anyone making that argument.

There has been technological change for 200 years, and while it has caused numerous problems, overall it has increased the standard of living. Why is it not OK now? Why do you think we're going to run out of jobs now, when we didn't run out of jobs with improvements in manufacturing, farming, etc.?

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem

What labor problem?

The one we've been discussing...

Your projected problem, not to be confused with a current or likely problem.

I never said it wasn't hypothetical, just that it's a worrying possibility and that my pessimism about human nature makes it seem distressingly likely to me. Based on that possibility, I'm recommending contingency planning. You're the one who seems to have declared it absolutely impossible, which seems to me to be a remarkable position to take. Remarkably indefensible as well, considering that events that cause mass human suffering are practically routine in human history.

In any case, I find it remarkable how you suddenly forgot what labour problem I was talking about. Hypothetical it may be, but we've been discussing it all this time.

Usage of these things are reduced?

I should have been more clear "those things" referred to long-distance passenger travel by sea and horse transportation. The link about bicycle production was interesting though. I wouldn't assume that increased production and sales of bicycles necessarily means increased usage, however. I was interested by the chart though. Adjusted for population increase, the graph of automobile sales is nearly flat. I would have expected it to be steeper.

It doesn't merely make me uncomfortable, I despise it. National socialism introduced the world to industrialized mass murder. It's all rooted in how the socialist perceives the link between a gov't and the people. An "elite" who sees of the mass of humanity as useless "meat" is one that has no qualms about sending them to the glue factory. "for the greater good"

Oh please. You're seriously going to pin the crimes of the Nazis on socialism? I take you've never heard of the Night of the Long Knives. Right-wing populist strong-man despots are not the same thing as socialism, no matter what they call their political party. I'm trying to talk about government providing basic services to make sure that citizens aren't abandoned when events beyond their control hit them, and you're equating that to mass murder? I can assure you that the fundamental principles of the type of socialism I'm talking about involve compassion for fellow human beings.

People are not horses. A horse is property; but humans aren't. Humans create jobs; horses do not. (Human ownership of horses creates jobs, but it is the human creating the job, not the horse).

Pen them in enough and people won't be able to create jobs either. How many people actually have the power and ability to create viable jobs today? Once upon a time, people could acquire a simple tool and go into business. You could, for example, get yourself a long saw, dig a saw pit, name yourself the Top Sawyer and find yourself a partner to be the Bottom Sawyer and you were in business sawing planks. Then someone invented the circular saw and saw pits couldn't compete, to go into business for yourself, you needed to build a sawmill and man it with even more employees. Today, the productivity of a modern sawmill blows those old sawmills out of the water, but if you want to start one, you're going need immense resources. You'll also need to have spent decades in the industry yourself to know the ins and outs and have a hope of competing. This is because it's a mature industry. In a mature industry, unless you can magically acquire experience, and massive amounts of capital, you're powerless to create a job for yourself. In mature industries, and mature economies, people looking for employment mostly have to find an employer who is hiring. People may not be horses and they may not be property as much any more (although various forms of virtual indentured servitude seem to have made a comeback), but they're still tho

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

I would have to say that continual change isn't a pattern. It's just things happening. If half the people work doing job X, then job X is eliminated and those people move on to jobs Y and Z, things aren't the same just because those people are still employed. Abstractions are useful, but they're not the real thing. You can pass through hundreds of cycles that each seem so similar to the last that it seems like it's a law of nature that those things are similar, then the pattern can change abruptly. North can be north for all of human history, then the poles can flip.

There has been technological change for 200 years, and while it has caused numerous problems, overall it has increased the standard of living. Why is it not OK now? Why do you think we're going to run out of jobs now, when we didn't run out of jobs with improvements in manufacturing, farming, etc.?

I'm not saying it's not OK now per se, just that it may not be ok at some point in the future. Optimism is great, but in the real world, there really are bounding conditions to things. For example, where do you stand on the theory of peak oil? Do you optimistically assume that we can just keep expanding yields forever because there's always been more and more and more to pump in the past, or do you accept that there's a finite (or at least, slow enough at replenishing that the replenishment rate is well below our needs) amount of oil we can pump out of the ground and that we will eventually hit the peak (or maybe we have already)?

I'm of the opinion that humans are extremely lucky that seasons don't last longer than human lifetimes. Otherwise, we would squander the good harvests, assuming that winter will never happen, then be surprised and starve when it does. Actually, I don't even need hypothetical super-long years to make this point. There are plenty of places with bad harvests every five years or so at random where people still don't prepare for the bad times, assuming that the good times will never end.

The really depressing thing is that the technology I'm talking about here should be a good thing. I certainly look forward to the technology itself. I just think that the human race will collectively bungle the opportunity when it first arrives.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

These back and forths are getting entirely too long, so I'm focusing on just 2 points. This does not mean I agree with you on the other points, just that it is too time consuming to do a point-by-point rebuttal.

Point 1: Jobs Not Zero Sum.

I am so tired of that phrase. What meaning is it even supposed to have in the context of the job market? Not being a zero sum game is not remotely the same thing as boundless.

Sure. Along with want, let's not forget that jobs scale with magic fairy dust and unicorn kisses. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there's a scale from necessities out to wild, fantastic, impractical desires. The buying power is always going to belong to the necessities, needs and basic luxuries. ...

Jobs not being zero sum means that your core problem of "robotics replace jobs, reducing overall number of jobs, leaving a lot of people with no possible job" is a faulty prediction.

For robots to reduce the overall number of jobs, a robot taking a job must permanently make another human unemployed at some ratio (1:1, 100:1, take your pick). This is zero-sum thinking - because you're thinking that there's a finite number of jobs that can ever be filled.

As my earlier posts have demonstrated, jobs are not zero-sum. For your doomsday to take place, the overall number of jobs must decrease, but jobs not being zero-sum means that robots displacing humans in jobs is insufficient to create the result you're thinking of.

Consider this helpful thought experiment - Every robot needs maintenance; as the number of robots filling menial human tasks increases, the amount of robot maintenance needed also increases. You can make robots to maintain the robots, but those robots need maintenance as well - and you've increased the complexity of the system. In engineering, complexity increases failure rate exponentially. (System uptime is dependent on all links not failing) Failure needs fixing, or you have a pile of non-working robots. All of this maintenance is "want", and translates into human jobs. Human jobs scales with the number of robots.

We also have real life experience that automation does not destroy jobs - the simple proof is that with the increased amount of automation over the past 50 years, unemployment (in the US) has still stayed around the single digits despite population growth. There are more jobs despite increased productivity. The average worker is far more productive than his counterpart 100 years ago, and this has made him [i]richer, not poorer[/i]. (There are political factors that can make him poorer, but you can't blame those on technology).

Point 2: The "perfectly" automated world is post-scarcity AND has "nigh-infinite" resources.

What contradiction? Are you talking about that infinite resources nonsense? That was your strawman, not my argument. I think that the "assumptions" I'm making about the possible and probable future of technological progress are pretty good. My pessimistic assumptions about human nature in such a situation are based on pretty sound historical and current evidence. I would say that you, for example, are a pretty good example that, if my scenario does come to pass, there will be people denying it's happening as it happens, sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting "la la la, I can't hear you". If it does happen, I wonder, what evidence would you accept as proof that it really is happening?

How does the robot displace the human worker? By being cheaper. If robots are to displace the majority of human workers, they must be more productive than even the cheapest worker.

This means robots must be terribly productive; to the point that they can produce goods terribly cheap. Terribly cheap goods represents huge increases of standard of living - give a beggar $1, and that would be enough in robot-workers world to buy enough goods to live like a king. That's how prod

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

These back and forths are getting entirely too long, so I'm focusing on just 2 points.

Agreed on that.

Jobs not being zero sum means that your core problem of "robotics replace jobs, reducing overall number of jobs, leaving a lot of people with no possible job" is a faulty prediction.

I've never held that jobs are locked at some set number, just that there are bounding conditions. One of those bounding conditions is the rate of growth. I'm also just sick of the term "zero sum game" being applied here. It doesn't actually apply, even if I believed what you seem to think I believe about the job market, the term still wouldn't apply.

For robots to reduce the overall number of jobs, a robot taking a job must permanently make another human unemployed at some ratio (1:1, 100:1, take your pick). This is zero-sum thinking - because you're thinking that there's a finite number of jobs that can ever be filled.

No. We always seem to be talking at cross purposes here. There doesn't have to be any "permanently" about it for it to be a problem. It just has to be a length of time sufficient to be a problem. Also, I'm not saying that there are a finite number of jobs that can ever be filled in the long term, but I am saying that humans do have a finite number of pressing demands that need to be met, and that trade relating to those needs is the most important trade and that all other trade is superfluous. If a very small percentage controls the vital trade and a very large percentage is only left with the superfluous end, then supply of the superfluous is high. If the demand isn't also very ,very high, there can be a problem.

As my earlier posts have demonstrated, jobs are not zero-sum. For your doomsday to take place, the overall number of jobs must decrease, but jobs not being zero-sum means that robots displacing humans in jobs is insufficient to create the result you're thinking of.

No. The number of jobs does not need to decrease. The number of jobs is almost irrelevant. The middle class right now have far fewer jobs per capita than the poor. Many of the poor work at more than one job, usually at least two. Generally, even if they get a full work week of hours in both jobs, they still will not earn as much as a middle class working with one job. The overall number of jobs does not need to decrease, just the value of the labour of a specific segment of society.

Consider this helpful thought experiment - Every robot needs maintenance; as the number of robots filling menial human tasks increases, the amount of robot maintenance needed also increases. You can make robots to maintain the robots, but those robots need maintenance as well - and you've increased the complexity of the system. In engineering, complexity increases failure rate exponentially. (System uptime is dependent on all links not failing) Failure needs fixing, or you have a pile of non-working robots. All of this maintenance is "want", and translates into human jobs. Human jobs scales with the number of robots.

Quite a few fallacies in this paragraph. First is the: what robot repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot... fallacy. The answer is that a small number of specialized robots repair (or dismantle for recycling) a large number of other robots and themselves (perhaps with the assistance of some more specialized robots). When they can't do the job, it's back to the automated factory. It's a closed loop, or at least closed enough that a very small amount of human labour can keep a massive robot labour force operating.

Then there's the fallacy about complexity increasing failure rate exponentially. That's nonsense. Modern bearings for wheels are much more complex than the traditional shaft through a hole of yesteryear and far more reliable. Modern engines are much more complex than

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

To state my position again, I'm worried that we will reach a point where we have post-scarcity capable technology, but artificially imposed scarcity combined with a structurally-imposed inability for people to work around the system of technology leading to virtual slavery, or mass poverty.

Then we are not discussing a problem with robotics technology, but the rise of a nasty political system. Do you believe that robotics make this political system inevitable?

As for the slave 2000 years ago imagining owning an iPhone, no they couldn't. Neither could a King in that time (although both the King and probably especially the slave almost certainly could and did imagine having some way of communicating with people instantaneously at long distances). So, yes, modern communications technologies have become widespread and relatively affordable. I don't think that proves any part of your argument.

The observation is that automation and technology have increased standards of living and allowed even advanced technology to be distributed to the common man.

This is the opposite direction to get to your anticipated dystopia. You're looking at a falling object and concluding that it will achieve escape velocity (aka going up) ... somehow. You dismissed the light-speed car, but you didn't understand the analogy - if you don't account for all the forces involved correctly, you can end up with absurd (and wrong) conclusions.

Says the one arguing from the position that the invisible hand of the market will prevent human suffering.

Quote me where I said that, or where that was implied by my arguments. Strawman.

It's also funny being lectured on human suffering when your beloved solution of socialism is the biggest murderer of human beings in the previous century. National and international variants treated humans as meat and industrialized murder.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Then we are not discussing a problem with robotics technology, but the rise of a nasty political system. Do you believe that robotics make this political system inevitable?

Worries about a nasty political/economic system arising (or rather, persisting from the current day without adapting to changing circumstances), as advanced labour-replacing technology arises has been the entire point that I've been trying to get across this entire conversation. I don't believe that robotics makes this system inevitable. I believe that, given sufficient stability and technological advancement (without which, we're headed for a cliff anyway), labour-saving technology which will replace almost all humans in almost all remotely necessary jobs is virtually inevitable. I also think that most traditional ways of thinking about economics are going to fail to serve most of the human race once that happens. I also think that most of the people in charge are, like you seem to be, hidebound to the point that they will fall back on denial of reality once it starts snowballing. One way or another, interesting times like that are likely to lead to mass human suffering on a large scale.

The observation is that automation and technology have increased standards of living and allowed even advanced technology to be distributed to the common man.

I think the example of iPhones seems more supportive of the point I was making about how the real advanced technology for actually making commodities like iPhones isn't going to be very available to the average person. How many people do you know who own a chip fab? The real advanced technology isn't available to the common man. Nearly everyone is merely a customer, not a producer when it comes to advanced technology.

Also, the examples of the past and present you're providing aren't really all that relevant. I've never denied that technology and productivity have changed over time.

This is the opposite direction to get to your anticipated dystopia. You're looking at a falling object and concluding that it will achieve escape velocity (aka going up) ... somehow. You dismissed the light-speed car, but you didn't understand the analogy - if you don't account for all the forces involved correctly, you can end up with absurd (and wrong) conclusions.

Ok. I'm looking at a falling object... Another strawman analogy (one that seems to work on the premise that achieving escape velocity is the same thing as going up). Claiming that I don't understand the analogy of the light speed car is yet another fallacious statement. You're playing at lecturing down to me as if I were a child. It's transparent and poor rhetoric. We each seem to believe that the other doesn't understand the forces involved in our scenario of rapidly advancing technology. Of course, you're the one whose claim requires forces that will somehow act to protect the masses from negative consequences from large-scale social and economic upheaval. From my point of view, you've failed to identify those forces. As far as I can tell, those forces consist only of your own confidence that things will turn out the way you hope.

Quote me where I said that, or where that was implied by my arguments. Strawman.

I will admit that "the invisible hand of the market" was a bit of a strawman in that it was just a stand-in for whatever unnamed magical thing you believe makes my scenario, where massive structural employment and a glut of human labour on a buyers market possibly leads to a very bad time for a large number of people, outright impossible. Here are some relevant quotes from you, however:

The doomsday scenario ignores economic feedback loops that prevent itself from happening.

I'm disagreeing that your scenario even happens in the first place.

You've said over and over again that you don't think

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

I don't believe that robotics makes this system inevitable.

Does robotics even make this political system more likely? Because that's yet another hidden assumption you've snuck into this discussion. (assuming the rise of a political system that imposes artificial scarcity)

Also, the examples of the past and present you're providing aren't really all that relevant.

I pointed out that robotic automation is 80 years old, and it's "not relevant"? If robotic automation is not relevant to robotics, what is?

Would you like to slap a timeframe on your predicted future, by the way? 100 years? 200 years?

Ok. I'm looking at a falling object... Another strawman analogy (one that seems to work on the premise that achieving escape velocity is the same thing as going up). Claiming that I don't understand the analogy of the light speed car is yet another fallacious statement. You're playing at lecturing down to me as if I were a child. It's transparent and poor rhetoric. We each seem to believe that the other doesn't understand the forces involved in our scenario of rapidly advancing technology. Of course, you're the one whose claim requires forces that will somehow act to protect the masses from negative consequences from large-scale social and economic upheaval. From my point of view, you've failed to identify those forces. As far as I can tell, those forces consist only of your own confidence that things will turn out the way you hope.

Wow. Where to even begin?

1. A strawman fallacy is one where I make up an argument and claim that it is your argument. When it happens, it means I misrepresented what you claimed. I made an analogy, whether good or bad, it's not a strawman. Categorical error.

2. "Going up" was meant to clarify that the escape velocity vector was in the opposite direction of "falling down". Are you trying to say that the analogy doesn't make any sense, or are you trying to say that it isn't applicable to your argument? I'm going to assume the latter, but you criticized an irrelevant aspect of my analogy, which does not demonstrate understanding.

3. If you are good at accounting for different forces, you have not demonstrated it in our discussion. For example, you said increased complexity increasing failure rates was fallacious. It is not - unless you want to claim that simple systems are more likely to fail than complex systems.

Your example of ball bearings compared different technologies; the new technology provided the reliability increase, not the complexity of the system. Complexity in of itself is not a desirable thing, it means more pre-requisites, costs, and more points of failure- but it is often necessary for improved capabilities and performance. You conflated the benefit of a new technology (+ force) with the downside of complexity (- force), crediting complexity for the overall net gain. Wrong.

Technology can reduce the downsides of complexity, but complex systems are just overall more fragile. A robotic eco-system is going to be an incredibly complex system; and assuming it can and will be perfected is a large leap of faith.

Next, let's look at how well you understand my points:

You've said over and over again that you don't think my scenario can happen, and you seem to have two separate arguments. One is that robots doing human jobs is impossible in the first place.

Nope. I claimed that robots are only capable of doing a subset of human jobs. Robots are doing some human jobs now, where it is economical. I thought you understood me when you brought up how robots are built to fill niches, but apparently you didn't. Robots can displace humans for some jobs, but they cannot replace until they can match the versatility of the human package. (this includes cognitive ability)

ATMs displaced tellers, they didn't replace. In the

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Does robotics even make this political system more likely? Because that's yet another hidden assumption you've snuck into this discussion. (assuming the rise of a political system that imposes artificial scarcity)

Once again, rather than arising: "persisting from the current day without adapting to changing circumstances". In other words, we already live in a system adjusted to current circumstances. If circumstances, such as labour-saving technology, change faster than the system can adapt, no new system is required for there to be problems. It's not a hidden assumption I've snuck into the discussion, it's what I've been saying the entire time since I wrote: "we are in danger of transitioning to post-scarcity technology without transitioning to a post-scarcity economy" in my first post in this thread.

I pointed out that robotic automation is 80 years old, and it's "not relevant"? If robotic automation is not relevant to robotics, what is?

They weren't particularly relevant because we're talking about a potential future, not the past, and those examples don't include changes as extreme as our hypothetical example. They are relevant to the overall discussion of structural unemployment though.

1. A strawman fallacy is one where I make up an argument and claim that it is your argument. When it happens, it means I misrepresented what you claimed. I made an analogy, whether good or bad, it's not a strawman. Categorical error.

It certainly seemed like that was what you were doing when you wrote:

You're looking at a falling object and concluding that it will achieve escape velocity (aka going up) ... somehow.

and

you're performing static analysis on a dynamic problem. If you ignore friction and air resistance, a car with constant acceleration can approach light speed. In reality, friction and air resistance prevent a car from getting anywhere close to light speed.

it seemed a lot like you were trying to present your analogy, then act as if I were arguing against that analogy rather than what we're actually arguing about. The analogies were completely superfluous. Stating that I didn't understand the examples in your analogies was just insulting. I understand them fine, I don't understand what contorted logic actually makes them analogous to the discussion at hand. Maybe if you could explain that in some satisfactory manner, I wouldn't think that they were just straw men.

2. "Going up" was meant to clarify that the escape velocity vector was in the opposite direction of "falling down". Are you trying to say that the analogy doesn't make any sense, or are you trying to say that it isn't applicable to your argument? I'm going to assume the latter, but you criticized an irrelevant aspect of my analogy, which does not demonstrate understanding.

I'm certainly not going to argue with you that "going up" vs "escape velocity" was an irrelevant part of your analogy. Trouble is, I think your entire analogy is irrelevant. If you could clarify what parts of our argument is the "falling object", what "falling" means in this context, and what the "escape velocity" means in the argument. Just so you know, "aka" is short for "also know as". Escape velocity is not "also known as" "going up", but that's a really minor nitpick compared to the silly analogy.

3. If you are good at accounting for different forces, you have not demonstrated it in our discussion. For example, you said increased complexity increasing failure rates was fallacious. It is not - unless you want to claim that simple systems are more likely to fail than complex systems.

Your example of ball bearings compared different technologies; the new technology provided the reliability increase, not the complexity of the system. Complexity in of itself is not a desirable thing, it means more pre-re

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

If circumstances, such as labour-saving technology, change faster than the system can adapt, no new system is required for there to be problems. It's not a hidden assumption I've snuck into the discussion, it's what I've been saying the entire time since I wrote: "we are in danger of transitioning to post-scarcity technology without transitioning to a post-scarcity economy" in my first post in this thread.

Technology change is driven by human ingenuity. The system's ability to adapt is driven by human ingenuity. Claiming that humans can drive technological change faster than humans can adapt to it is questionable - if humans start failing to adapt, the economic and political systems become unstable, which slows down technological change.

There are negative feedback loops that make this system stabler than you imagined.

They weren't particularly relevant because we're talking about a potential future, not the past, and those examples don't include changes as extreme as our hypothetical example. They are relevant to the overall discussion of structural unemployment though.

An extreme change that you had to assume. I'll admit that if you want to imagine a fantasy world, reality does not apply. But if you want to treat the fantasy world as a possible future of our reality, you must deal with reality's factors.

it seemed a lot like you were trying to present your analogy, then act as if I were arguing against that analogy rather than what we're actually arguing about. The analogies were completely superfluous. Stating that I didn't understand the examples in your analogies was just insulting. I understand them fine, I don't understand what contorted logic actually makes them analogous to the discussion at hand. Maybe if you could explain that in some satisfactory manner, I wouldn't think that they were just straw men.

We both know you're not arguing there is such a thing as a light speed car, we're discussing a robotic dystopia. Treating your robotic dystopia as a "light speed car" is a metaphor, which is analogy.

Calling my metaphor a strawman argument is wrong categorization, because no one is going to confuse a light speed car for a robotic dystopia. Strawmans are misdirection, arguing against what you did not say, and confusing you or the audience as to what your argument is. A clear analogy is misdirection only if you have no clue what you're arguing about. If the analogy is inapplicable, it's a false analogy, not a strawman. Using the wrong label is a wrong understanding.

Trouble is, I think your entire analogy is irrelevant. If you could clarify what parts of our argument is the "falling object", what "falling" means in this context, and what the "escape velocity" means in the argument. Just so you know, "aka" is short for "also know as". Escape velocity is not "also known as" "going up", but that's a really minor nitpick compared to the silly analogy.

Use of AKA was wrong. My bad. I should have used IOW or e.g.

"Falling" is a "negative" force. "Going up" is a "positive" force. There is an object we're applying these forces to. "Escape velocity" is an endstate for the object, which requires the application of a lot of net "positive" force. Throw a baseball upwards by arm, it will not achieve escape velocity, there is insufficient "positive" force to overcome the "negative" force of gravity. But use a space rocket to push the baseball, and it can achieve escape velocity.

Similarly, you point to robotic automation as a "positive" force that takes us to the dystopian endstate. Our human society is the "object". I've been describing various "negative" forces that work against robotic automation bringing us to a dystopian endstate. To prove that the dystopia is likely,, you must show that there is enough "positive" force to overcome any "negative" forces involved.

Furthermore, by lookin

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Technology change is driven by human ingenuity. The system's ability to adapt is driven by human ingenuity. Claiming that humans can drive technological change faster than humans can adapt to it is questionable

Ingenuity is not homogeneous across the entire human population. Some people have a lot more of it than other people, and there are all sorts of preconditions to exercising it. Change of all sorts, including the technological variety, is constantly outpacing people's ability to adapt to it. Collectively, we catch up in the end, but that ignores the actual individuals who get left behind.

if humans start failing to adapt, the economic and political systems become unstable, which slows down technological change.

Yes, exactly. The economic and political systems become unstable. That's more or less re-iterating my point again. You seem to be looking at this from an eagle eye view and seeing smooth curves on a graph, abstracting out all the actual human details.

There are negative feedback loops that make this system stabler than you imagined.

And there are human-level details of this feedback that make this stability less placid than you imagine.

An extreme change that you had to assume. I'll admit that if you want to imagine a fantasy world, reality does not apply. But if you want to treat the fantasy world as a possible future of our reality, you must deal with reality's factors.

The assumptions you require are more extreme than those required for my scenario. You've argued for historical precedent, but the historical precedent seems to be accelerating technological change. Even steady technological growth could lead to my scenario. All that needs to happen is for job-replacing technological growth to outpace the social and economic changes required to support the population under the new conditions. My _opinion_ is that humans are messed up enough that we stand a good chance of blindsiding ourselves, but I don't require it as some absolute law of reality. Your view that my concerns are completely impossible contains the most extreme assumptions of our two differing opinions.

We both know you're not arguing there is such a thing as a light speed car, we're discussing a robotic dystopia. Treating your robotic dystopia as a "light speed car" is a metaphor, which is analogy.

It's an analogy when you're using it to actually illustrate your perspective. When you start saying that I'm arguing X about it while you're arguing Y and you haven't even provided any actual details on how your analogy actually is analogous to the topic at hand, it veers off into straw man territory.

Calling my metaphor a strawman argument is wrong categorization, because no one is going to confuse a light speed car for a robotic dystopia. Strawmans are misdirection, arguing against what you did not say, and confusing you or the audience as to what your argument is. A clear analogy is misdirection only if you have no clue what you're arguing about. If the analogy is inapplicable, it's a false analogy, not a strawman. Using the wrong label is a wrong understanding.

That's at least a semi-convincing argument, that the example is so ridiculously far from what we're discussing and so irrelevant to the conversation that there can't be any confusion. Of course, most straw man arguments actually are like that (not so extreme, but often so blatantly obvious that they should never work and cause immediate disgust with the person using the argument), and the seem to work well enough that people keep using them. I admit that I tend to have a knee-jerk response to anything that looks like a straw man argument as a result.

Use of AKA was wrong. My bad. I should have used IOW or e.g.

Fair enough. Attacking it was admittedly overzealous pedantry on my part.

F

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

I will admit, although I still can't share your optimism, this discussion has made me think more about the issue....

Thank you. *Something* got through, if only that the robotic dystopia isn't as "obvious" as you think it is.

... I still certainly think it's something to worry about, but for the time being, I've broadened my views about the possibilities a bit. Frankly, even your denialism is a little encouraging in some ways. People can build entire economies on that sort of blind faith if enough people believe in it.

Aren't we a sore winner.

Then again, you won because you assumed away everything that might threaten your conclusions, so there's not much to be proud of there. Come to think of it, that type of behavior is "denialism", isn't it?

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Thank you. *Something* got through, if only that the robotic dystopia isn't as "obvious" as you think it is.

It would be nice if something had gotten through on your end as well, but I get the impression that you're still being pretty close-minded about the possibilities. In the end, I can't not recommend contingency planning for different possible scenarios. Assuming a perfectly smooth "natural" transition during a massive paradigm shift just because it's always happened that way in the past seems short-sighted. It seems especially short-sighted when it hasn't really happened all that smoothly before in the past.

Then again, you won because you assumed away everything that might threaten your conclusions, so there's not much to be proud of there. Come to think of it, that type of behavior is "denialism", isn't it?

I suppose you could say that I "assumed away" non-existent laws of nature and complexity that you more or less made up. The only thing I'm really denying is that my scenario is impossible.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

It would be nice if something had gotten through on your end as well, but I get the impression that you're still being pretty close-minded about the possibilities.

I haven't changed my perspective because you never showed any understanding.

I think I have successfully identified the assumptions you are operating under, and furthermore have identified how these assumptions assume away relevant counter-forces. You insist that they do not apply, when I have to deal with them as part of my job. Insisting that your theory of the world trumps my reality is simply unpersuasive.

Rather than insisting the non-existence of something that plainly exists, you should have been approximating the magnitude of the forces involved, and providing a mechanism by which negative feedback is dwarfed by the positive feedback. That you don't seem to understand these concepts tells me that you don't have the level of technical training or experience I have on these subjects.

... The only thing I'm really denying is that my scenario is impossible.

Assume a naked human being on the moon. What happens next? He suffocates and die.

Is it impossible for a naked human being to end up on the moon? Not quite - but there's absolutely no economic reason why anyone would spend that much money to do it. Politically, there's not much reason either. Is it a likely scenario that humanity needs to derive an answer for? Nope. Is there a chance? Sure, if you want to put it that way.

So yeah. Assume a robotic dystopia. I agree, your assumed robotic dystopia sucks. But because you have consistently failed to understand my objections or their relevance, you have not persuaded me that it's even remotely likely.

To persuade a different mind, you have to be able to adopt their perspective and explain why they are wrong from their own reference points. You've consistently failed to understand my reference points.

Me, I've decided it's impossible to get any further with you because your primary reference point isn't based on the constraints of reality. You win. Celebrate!

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

Sorry, I take back "never showed understanding".

Rather, it's that you haven't shown me a superior understanding, which would behoove me to adopt it.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

I haven't changed my perspective because you never showed any understanding.

Well, at least you had the good grace to modify this in a short follow up. I certainly don't think you showed any superior understanding of the problem either, but simple fact of doing a lot of thinking about a problem can broaden ones perspective (it's also possible for it to wear ruts into patterns of thought, however). It's a pity the discussion hasn't broadened yours.

I think I have successfully identified the assumptions you are operating under, and furthermore have identified how these assumptions assume away relevant counter-forces.

The way you put this strongly applies that you're only evaluating my arguments with the goal of confirming your own biases. You start by assuming that my opinion, which differs from yours, must differ due to some incorrect assumption. Your underlying assumption, of course, appears to be that you are never wrong.

You insist that they do not apply, when I have to deal with them as part of my job. Insisting that your theory of the world trumps my reality is simply unpersuasive.

I'm sorry, when you said you were an engineer, I just figured electrical, or civil, or mechanical, or maybe train. I hadn't realized you were actually involved in temporal engineering and worked daily with parallel universes and looking into the future. Seriously though, I'm not quite sure how social reactions to technology change is a force that a typical engineer would make use of in their job.

And, once again, you're the one making the extraordinary claim that your theory of the world trumps _ALL_ and that alternatives are impossible. If you're the kind of civil engineer who believes in things like 100 year flood lines as static and doesn't understand that all that wonderful drainage that you and your fellow engineers have put in changes that flood level, it makes things a lot more clear.

Rather than insisting the non-existence of something that plainly exists, you should have been approximating the magnitude of the forces involved, and providing a mechanism by which negative feedback is dwarfed by the positive feedback. That you don't seem to understand these concepts tells me that you don't have the level of technical training or experience I have on these subjects.

You really do come off as lacking significant self awareness, you know? What that plainly exists am I insisting on the non-existance of? You seem to be the one insisting on the non-existence of things such as historical widespread suffering due to structural unemployment. Except for absolutely linear properties for things such as job growth and technological development, I can't think of anything that I'm saying does not exist in this discussion. I have considered the forces involved, and my approximation of them doesn't seem to lead to a good place for a lot of people. I understand these concepts just fine. It seems to be a bit of an arrogant streak that causes you to think that I don't.

Assume a naked human being on the moon. What happens next? He suffocates and die.

Is it impossible for a naked human being to end up on the moon? Not quite - but there's absolutely no economic reason why anyone would spend that much money to do it. Politically, there's not much reason either. Is it a likely scenario that humanity needs to derive an answer for? Nope. Is there a chance? Sure, if you want to put it that way.

Errr... Is this another strawman^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h analogy? How does this properly relate to either of our positions? The scenario I'm talking about isn't like a naked human on the moon. First of all, there's no mystery cause for my scenario. For non-mystery causes, for your analogy, a large organization would have to spend a large amount of effort and resources to do it for no good reason whatsoever. The effort and resources for developing robot labour would have

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

I think I have successfully identified the assumptions you are operating under, and furthermore have identified how these assumptions assume away relevant counter-forces.

The way you put this strongly applies that you're only evaluating my arguments with the goal of confirming your own biases. You start by assuming that my opinion, which differs from yours, must differ due to some incorrect assumption. Your underlying assumption, of course, appears to be that you are never wrong.

Errr, no. Identifying your assumptions was a step towards understanding your perspective. That we disagree at all is due to different assumptions. Identifying those is necessary to understanding.

I find it interesting how you interpreted "I assumed you were wrong" from a sentence that merely meant, "I took a careful look at your PoV".

And, once again, you're the one making the extraordinary claim that your theory of the world trumps _ALL_ and that alternatives are impossible

You're the one who's predicting the future. I'm pointing out factors that make your prediction inaccurate.

Based on your inability to grasp my points, I'm concluding that your prediction does not consider the factors I'm bringing up, and so the future will not happen as you say. What I'm doing isn't extraordinary at all. I'm applying skepticism.

Claiming that skepticism is an extraordinary claim is itself an extraordinary claim. (The "extraordinary claim" rule is stupid anyways - who decides what's "ordinary"?)

You really do come off as lacking significant self awareness, you know? What that plainly exists am I insisting on the non-existance of?

You claimed that the relationship between complexity and failure doesn't exist. Which is why everyone tries to build as complex a widget as they can, because it obviously has not effect on the end result.

You seem to be the one insisting on the non-existence of things such as historical widespread suffering due to structural unemployment.

Strawman. At most, I claimed that technology does not contribute to structural unemployment. The existence of the computing industry supports that claim.

I disputed your use of imagination as historical proof that past technologies caused people to starve and die in the gutter, that they were unable to adjust to the obsolescence of another technology and its impact on their jobs. It's possible, but you have no business treating it as historical fact unless you use historical proof. And no, the Napoleonic wars are not a "new technology".

Except for absolutely linear properties for things such as job growth and technological development, I can't think of anything that I'm saying does not exist in this discussion. I have considered the forces involved, and my approximation of them doesn't seem to lead to a good place for a lot of people. I understand these concepts just fine. It seems to be a bit of an arrogant streak that causes you to think that I don't.

... Technological development is not linear. It's been exponential. Job growth is not linear, as it has tracked the non-linear growth of the world's human population (which makes sense if jobs are a function of human demand). Neither of those things have "absolutely linear properties". Don't you get tired of being corrected?

The forces you haven't considered are the ones I'm bringing up, but you insist they do not exist. Fine. They don't exist. Just don't expect to persuade me that yours is the enlightened conclusion.

Errr... Is this another strawman^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h analogy?

Yes, it is an analagous hypothetical situation analysis. I was using it to illustrate how artifiical hypothetical situations can be.

Just as an FYI, "denialism" implies that I secretly agree with you, but am denying it due to irrational factors. I do not secretly agree with you. Applying "denialism" to a vague future prediction is even more asinine. The history is fixed and fact; the future, not so much.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Errr, no. Identifying your assumptions was a step towards understanding your perspective. That we disagree at all is due to different assumptions. Identifying those is necessary to understanding.

Perhaps if it hadn't come right after your statement that I had never shown any understanding I wouldn't have taken it that way.

You're the one who's predicting the future. I'm pointing out factors that make your prediction inaccurate.

We're both predicting the future. You're dancing around saying "impossible" by saying "inaccurate", but you're predicting a future that you insist _cannot_ contain the scenario I've put forward.

Based on your inability to grasp my points, I'm concluding that your prediction does not consider the factors I'm bringing up, and so the future will not happen as you say.

As much as you would like to redefine my disagreeing with your points as an intellectual failure to understand you, saying it doesn't make it so. The factors you're talking about seem to mostly consist of your absurdly simplistic complexity rule and your few historical examples which only really hold in their historical context and weren't really as rosy underneath as you seem to think. I conclude that your objections make little difference to the possibility of my scenario. There are no magic rules that prevent joblessness and suffering, if they just automatically cut in to prevent these things from happening, then we wouldn't be arguing about them, because I wouldn't even be aware of the concepts of unemployment or poverty.

What I'm doing isn't extraordinary at all. I'm applying skepticism. That is an extraordinary claim. Claiming that skepticism is an extraordinary claim is itself an extraordinary claim.

Yes yes. Black is white, white is black. Adherents of mysticism can go around all day calling themselves skeptics of rationality. Uninformed dullards can call themselves skeptics of carefully considered science. We can both call ourselves skeptics of each others claims. The point is that I'm talking about a possible future and you're insisting that it's impossible without demonstrating any valid principle that makes it so.

(The "extraordinary claim" rule is stupid anyways - who decides what's "ordinary"?)

Well, that's not always easy to define. One example of something that's "ordinary" is large numbers of people becoming disenfranchised in some way and failing to survive on a pretty steady basis. That never happening again would be a good example of something extraordinary.

You claimed that the relationship between complexity and failure doesn't exist. Which is why everyone tries to build as complex a widget as they can, because it obviously has not effect on the end result.

I never said the relationship doesn't exist, I just said that your model of it was ridiculous, and it is. People don't try to build as complex a widget as they can, but they certainly add parts to their designs all the time that make them more reliable. I've given plenty of examples that are obvious exceptions to your stated rule. In the face of obvious exceptions to your theory, you either need to demonstrate that the exceptions somehow aren't really exceptions, or you have to modify your theory to account for them, or you need to scrap the theory and try a new one, or you could narrow the scope of the theory, keeping it valid, but only for a certain class of problems.

Strawman. At most, I claimed that technology does not contribute to structural unemployment. The existence of the computing industry supports that claim.

I don't remember you claiming that. I had thought you were claiming that structural unemployment from changing technology was brief and followed by new job growth. That wasn't really all that out there, except for the way you were positive that there was some unnamed f

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

factors you're talking about seem to mostly consist of your absurdly simplistic complexity rule and your few historical examples which only really hold in their historical context and weren't really as rosy underneath as you seem to think. I conclude that your objections make little difference to the possibility of my scenario. There are no magic rules that prevent joblessness and suffering, if they just automatically cut in to prevent these things from happening, then we wouldn't be arguing about them, because I wouldn't even be aware of the concepts of unemployment or poverty.

Negative feedback must seem like magic to you then. With that sentence, you've again demonstrated a lack of understanding of my PoV, despite your repeated insistence that you do. It's not magic; it's your lack of understanding that makes it seem like "magic".

I don't remember you claiming that. I had thought you were claiming that structural unemployment from changing technology was brief and followed by new job growth.

I didn't claim it directly, but if you inferred it from other things I said, I wouldn't disclaim it.

As for your attempt to re-phrase my claim - If it's brief, it's not "structural". Your ability to throw out nonsensical labels is amusing. But you did get closer this time. Technology can disrupt; there is a time period of chaos and oscillation as society adapts, but I claim, and recent history has shown that the end-state of increased productivity has been increased prosperity.

If you can explain to me how this picture relates to the italicized sentence, I will concede that you understand my PoV. (if you want to try to research the topic; it's linked from the PID controller wiki page)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Change_with_Ki.png

But if not, don't fret. I've already conceded that you win. Anyone who disagrees with your viewpoint must simply be in denial.

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Negative feedback must seem like magic to you then. With that sentence, you've again demonstrated a lack of understanding of my PoV, despite your repeated insistence that you do. It's not magic; it's your lack of understanding that makes it seem like "magic".

You've provided me with some happy nostalgia there. I once took a video course and spent a large amount of time working on analog feedback effects. Pointing a camera at a screen displaying the output of the camera and using the right combination of angle, distance, focus, brightness, contrast, etc. and placing various objects in front of the screen allowed me to create interactive video artifacts that would grow or shrink, or pulsate, or shift back and forth between multiple states and positions. I was particularly happy with the persistent interactive light blot that you could reach out to with a finger and drag around the screen. I still have the tapes of that stored around here somewhere. I really need to get those into digital form. If I recall correctly, they're on broadcast quality betamax though, so it might be a pain to find the equipment to convert them.

Between that sort of experience and other experiences with feedback effects and emergent properties in electronics and purely digital systems, I think I have a reasonable background in such systems. Certainly enough to say that your blind faith that any feedback effect is going to kick in fast enough, or at all, in changing conditions is magical thinking.

I didn't claim it directly, but if you inferred it from other things I said, I wouldn't disclaim it.

As for your attempt to re-phrase my claim - If it's brief, it's not "structural".

Firstly, I didn't say it was brief, I was saying that you were saying it's brief. You then said that you wouldn't disclaim it. Whatever. Secondly, it's structural unemployment if it has a structural cause such as a large local employer moving, widespread crop failure, sudden lack of a resource critical to an industry, or changing technology obsoleting a particular job or industry. There's no precise definition about the duration, just a vague understanding that it tends to last longer than some other forms of unemployment

Your ability to throw out nonsensical labels is amusing. But you did get closer this time.

Cute, but you have to realize that you're mis-representing me. When I say that you're claiming that unemployment is brief, it's not the same thing as me claiming that unemployment is brief. If you're not mis-representing me on purpose, then you must simply be failing to comprehend some pretty straight-forward sentences.

Technology can disrupt; there is a time period of chaos and oscillation as society adapts, but I claim, and recent history has shown that the end-state of increased productivity has been increased prosperity.

This statement is, overall, correct. I haven't actually denied this anywhere. My entire point, which I've stated and restated, has been that the period of "chaos and oscillation" has real human costs that you're ignoring. Poverty below a certain threshhold is not a sustainable condition. Half the population could die and you might not notice because the economy is doing well and unemployment has gone down. If you're averaging prosperity across the population, 1 billionaire and a thousand people eating garbage is prosperity. Your obsession with the "end-state" is frighteningly close to the idea that the ends justifies the means. Surprising coming from someone who is so adamantly against systems that treat people as mere meat.

If you can explain to me how this picture relates to the italicized sentence, I will concede that you understand my PoV. (if you want to try to research the topic; it's linked from the PID controller wiki page)

This is another one of those things where you're going to say that disagr

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[SillyHamster]

Certainly enough to say that your blind faith that any feedback effect is going to kick in fast enough, or at all, in changing conditions is magical thinking.

Blind faith? I repeatedly refer to historical examples to justify my understanding and expectations; this included exponential technological improvement. That's evidence based faith. My "faith" may be wrong, but it's not blind. Yet another wrong label.

The existence of negative feedback is not in of itself proof that the system will be stable or that the equilibrium is good; but if you're going to dismiss negative feedback without analysis, then I know your predictions are based on feelings instead of thought.

Firstly, I didn't say it was brief, I was saying that you were saying it's brief. You then said that you wouldn't disclaim it. Whatever. Secondly, it's structural unemployment if it has a structural cause such as a large local employer moving, widespread crop failure, sudden lack of a resource critical to an industry, or changing technology obsoleting a particular job or industry. There's no precise definition about the duration, just a vague understanding that it tends to last longer than some other forms of unemployment

Cute, but you have to realize that you're mis-representing me. When I say that you're claiming that unemployment is brief, it's not the same thing as me claiming that unemployment is brief. If you're not mis-representing me on purpose, then you must simply be failing to comprehend some pretty straight-forward sentences.

I said I wouldn't disclaim the sentence you didn't recall me saying, which was, "I claimed that technology does not contribute to structural unemployment." If there's no precise definition for structural unemployment, then there's the source of the misunderstanding. I've been using it in the sense of "unavoidable `permanent' unemployment".

If you're going to use an ill-defined word to summarize my position, there should be no surprise that I'm not going to agree with your summary. I know you think that that technology causes non-brief structural (permanent) unemployment. Don't confuse my disagreement with your summary of my position with an insistence that you adopt my position.

I'll take back "nonsensical" - the word doesn't have a nailed down definition, so the confusion was over different definitions, not mis-use of the word.

This statement is, overall, correct. I haven't actually denied this anywhere.

Your prediction of a robotic dystopia where the masses are poor requires this trend to reverse direction. Complete robotic automation would be a huge technological improvement over now; but everyone having no job and starving without the benevolent socialist state is a huge downgrade over now. The relationship between technology and prosperity must flip if you think technology is a force towards your robotic dystopia.

This is another one of those things where you're going to say that disagreeing with you is just failure, I can tell.

You keep telling me that you understand my points. If you understand me, you can summarize my position and have me agree that the summary is 100% correct. That is a simple and practical way to demonstrate understanding.

A failure of understanding is demonstrated when the summary is completely unrelated to the original points. You've done that several times, but I'm more interested to see if you can if you try.

So, how does this relate to your italicized text. I'm tempted to just say it doesn't and leave it at that, but I'll persevere. It best relates to your example if it's being applied to a society with a heavily controlled command economy that forces whatever is being measured in between certain values (and does it through a stupid brute force method). Here's a hint, the market-based economies you're fond of don't come with setpoints. You may

Re:The Luddite Fallacy

[tragedy]

Blind faith? I repeatedly refer to historical examples to justify my understanding and expectations; this included exponential technological improvement. That's evidence based faith. My "faith" may be wrong, but it's not blind. Yet another wrong label.

I think the term blind faith was appropriate there and I'm going to stick with it. If you were saying that these self-correcting situations _could_ happen while pointing at past examples, that would be one thing, but you were saying that they _will_ happen as a matter of absolute certainty.

The existence of negative feedback is not in of itself proof that the system will be stable or that the equilibrium is good; but if you're going to dismiss negative feedback without analysis, then I know your predictions are based on feelings instead of thought.

Oh come on, be serious! I know you haven't done any actual analysis of the kind you seem to be demanding from me. If you have, you've certainly kept quiet about it.

I've been using it in the sense of "unavoidable `permanent' unemployment".

Absolutely permanent unemployment isn't the way it's usually meant. If you're talking about a particular sector of employment that gets completely obsoleted (Dodo bird hunters, for example), then it does mean permanent unemployment for that particular sector, I suppose. Basically, it boils down to employment caused by external factors taking a big bite out of a labour market.

I know you think that that technology causes non-brief structural (permanent) unemployment

I think that it can cause long-lasting structural unemployment. It's not permanent since the unemployed are eventually no longer counted in the labour market one way or the other. You don't seem to care by which method they're no longer counted in the labour market, while I think it's of critical importance.

Your prediction of a robotic dystopia where the masses are poor requires this trend to reverse direction. Complete robotic automation would be a huge technological improvement over now; but everyone having no job and starving without the benevolent socialist state is a huge downgrade over now. The relationship between technology and prosperity must flip if you think technology is a force towards your robotic dystopia.

I just have to repeat myself over and over again on this, don't I. I think complete robotic automation in and of itself would be great. The productivity it would enable and the way it could free people from pointless drudgery to pursue more worthwhile endeavours is something to strive for. I'm just concerned that people are too short-sighted and mean-spirited to allow that to happen without provoking disaster. History is full of horrors two-strikes and you're dead (first strike is just some savage physical punishment, a little slavery and a branding) vagrancy laws and situations like the Irish Potato Famine. No-one would ever set a bunch of robots to digging holes just to fill them back in because it would be non-sensical. Meanwhile, they would happily set people to do the exact same thing to teach them "the value of hard work" (that value being payment insufficient to ever escape the situation).

There's no need for any relationship between technology and productivity or even (average) prosperity to flip. The majority of people just won't have any personal claim on any of the benefits of that technology and will have to rely on the benefits trickling down to them. Unless something amazing can be found that regular people can do that the automated technologies can't _and_ that actually has high demand, then the majority of people could end up, at best, as some sort of neo-serfs.

And ... I'm not going to give you a very good grade on that test. I rigged the test in asking you to read my mind, but you've said that you understood what I'm talking about, even as you failed

Look at the pictures

[Bobfrankly1]

Nothing says appetizing like a burger popping out flanked by greased chains...

Re:Look at the pictures

[esldude]

Is that worse than wondering where your food preparers hands have been since they were last washed? And though adjacent to the burger, they didn't come into contact with it. Plus there are food grade greases used in such devices that are safe around food preparation like this.

Re:Look at the pictures

[PlusFiveTroll]

Yea, the OP doesn't realize that every damn thing that he eats out of a 'box' has traveled through some kind of clanky high speed stainless steel greased chain machine. You'd have thought that ./ readers would have watched How it's made or something similar.

Re:Look at the pictures

[Bobfrankly1]

Yea, the OP doesn't realize that every damn thing that he eats out of a 'box' has traveled through some kind of clanky high speed stainless steel greased chain machine. You'd have thought that ./ readers would have watched How it's made or something similar.

Darn you, I WAS living in blissful ignorance!

Hamburger vending machines!

[bobthesungeek76036]

There is a God!!!

Re:Hamburger vending machines!

[mysidia]

Given that this machine is supposed to ground the meat and have to cook it, it would mean that each burger would take at least a few minutes to produce. That's a very deep pipeline operation with a few minutes of latency.

Not if you call ahead, or rather... launch the app, and buy the burger.... then you just come to the machine to pick up your order :)

Wow:

[Hartree]

That'd even keep Wimpy fed!

A robot making hamburgers with an xbox?

[mark-t]

That can't be right.... Did I misread the headline?

Re:A robot making hamburgers with an xbox?

[mat8913]

That's quite possible considering the temperatures the xbox can get up to.

Re:A robot making hamburgers with an xbox?

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Step1: Eject Disk
Step2: Insert Beef Patty
Step3: Wait for red ring of perfection.

Re:A robot making hamburgers with an xbox?

[The Wild Norseman]

That's quite possible considering the temperatures the xbox can get up to.

Yup, that's an Xbox burger, but if you're in the mood for a true flame-broiled burger, you're eatin' at Dell's!

Ok.. but

[houbou]

Any plans on recycling cooks into their supervisors? gourmet burger? who is the chef? quality control? it's the way of the future, just hope it figures out how to ensure that the human factor/equation isn't on the losing end.

Re:Ok.. but

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, I'm sure the GOP will come up with a plan involving cooks, the machines and recycling, but I'm not so sure supervisors will be involved unlless they vote Democrat...

Re:Ok.. but

[PlusFiveTroll]

The cooks will be recycled in to burgers!

Soylent Green, Now in gourmet flavor at your local dispenser.

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[webmistressrachel]

"How do you make "gourmet" horseburgers?"

You don't. Just catch a police horse. Not only will it be tasty, it belongs to the Crown. How can you get any more gourmet than that?

The moment in V for Vendetta when EV realises she's eating REAL butter... stolen from the Chancellor's supply train, of course...

ps Disclaimer: Do not touch police horses. They are your friends! ;-)

It takes EBT right?

[istartedi]

It takes EBT, right? Otherwise how will the humans that used to flip the burgers eat? Hopefully they don't make a robot that stands in the middle of the street, accosts you on Muni, and begs for change. If they do that, then humans really are sunk... except for those of us who know how to fight the robots. That's it. I'm signing up at robot fighting academy tomorrow. (ZZZZZZZZZzeep!) Wait, it's somebody from the futue. uh-huh, uh-huh, really? No. Yeah? OK. well, I guess.

Hey, Slashdot? Disregard the above. You'll understand later.

Re:It takes EBT right?

[webmistressrachel]

Since we are all bound by the Temporal Prime Directive, I'm sure we will. I'm sure we will.

(turns to TARDIS...) "Doctor? Shall we?" (door slams)

Next Time... On Slashdot...

Zombies! OMG Zombies (fade to black...)

Re:It takes EBT right?

[LMariachi]

You know that CalFresh (EBT Food, aka food stamps) benefits can't be used to buy prepared hot meals unless you're homeless, right? And any assets you might have, borrow, or earn -- say from a job flipping burgers -- are deducted from your already paltry CAAP (EBT Cash) benefits. But by all means, go ahead with the ignorant poor-bashing. After all, what are they gonna do, mildly annoy you with their temerity of sitting on the sidewalk?

Re:It takes EBT right?

[istartedi]

Yes. That was all bloody outright serious. The inclusions of robot fighting and time travel were your two biggest clues.

Re:It takes EBT right?

[LMariachi]

The robot fighting and time travel parts made sense.

It's truly the end

[OhANameWhatName]

.. of employment in America.

Re:It's truly the end

[b4dc0d3r]

Because my IT job is going away? The janitors who have to clean up the waste created by the robots, or their consumers? Sanitation crews? Education?

How about the end of the McJob, and the replacement of it by people who go out and make jobs, like they used to before global conglomerates held the keys to being unable to afford your family?

You, and the people who up-modded you, need to read every comment above yours, and most of the ones below, and get back to me on this unemployment thing.

The last time we had major unemployment, it was because large companies decided not to hire people for financial reasons. Instead of hiring people who would be able to afford products, in the style of Henry Ford, they out-waited their competition to keep production prices low and margins slightly higher for the shareholder.

Before that, it was because we were between wars. And before that, it was because a major part of the food growing country was one giant dust bowl. So what exactly was your point?

Re:It's truly the end

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

It says a lot about a culture when someone laments the removable of menial minimum wage jobs requiring no skill and claims it a negative impact on society. Maybe that culture should aim just a little higher.

at least we have health Care

[Joe_Dragon]

at least we have health Care as long as you don't vote gop as under them no work go to er or go on the jailcare plan.

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[webmistressrachel]

ps riddle I might know a guy who know a guy who can source "long pork" - well if the gourmet horse is a police horse can you imagine what gourmet long pork comes packaged in? 10 points for the 1st person with a userid shown to post the correct (rather morbid) answer...

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[webmistressrachel]

pps 10 extra points for low userID AND famous troll username :-D

"slow down cowboy!"

Come on, I've earned my "naughty" posts recently, I'm posting at 2, let me submit please /.!!!

Where this is going...

[Chemisor]

Time to reread Manna. The cooks, the manager, the cleaning staff, and finally you, until nobody has any work or any money.

Re:Where this is going...

[GRAYS4ND]

Good. Maybe then we'll have an education, birth control, and government reform that resembles reason.

Re:Where this is going...

[SillyHamster]

Time to reread Manna. The cooks, the manager, the cleaning staff, and finally you, until nobody has any work or any money.

Therefore, ban robots - or we'll end up with no jobs and no hamburgers!

Re:Where this is going...

[Jeremi]

The cooks, the manager, the cleaning staff, and finally you, until nobody has any work or any money.

Well, the owners of the robots will presumably have most of the money at that point, as everybody will be buying goods and services from them.

And then it's just a matter of nationalizing the machines (which is doable since the plebians will still represent the vast majority of votes, even if they are out of work), et voila, free food and basic commodities for all (at least until the necessary natural resources are depleted!)

Re:Where this is going...

[Nefarious Wheel]

We need then, of course, is robots that can use hamburgers as fuel.

Re:Where this is going...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but alas, the paradise can't be achieved. The population is growing old and sick and everybody will be needed to take care of the senior citizens.

That is, until the robots can take the elderly to the shower and change their diapers. Some AI will be needed to chat with them as well.

Re:Where this is going...

[i kan reed]

The book he links addressed that point. Specifically that the concentration of wealth would also concentrate political power. We already see this in the U.S.

Re:Where this is going...

[Forty Two Tenfold]

But Manna promotes communism! In the purest of forms!

Re:Where this is going...

[Forty Two Tenfold]

everybody will be needed to take care of the senior citizens.

Or...

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[webmistressrachel]

ppps apk launching distributed crapflood of HOSTS in 5,4,3,2,1...

Done before, several times

[Animats]

Automatic burger machines date back to the 1950s. Back then, everybody ate the same thing, so assembly-like type systems were useful. American Machine and Foundry built an automated fast-food outlet in the 1960s, but it wasn't cost-effective. McDonalds tried this out back in 2003.

It's not that it's technically difficult. It's that the volume required to make it profitable is higher than most fast food outlets can sell.

Re:Done before, several times

[ickleberry]

Sure it could probably be done with 1800's steam technology. Didn't Doc Brown have one for his eggs and toast in the morning?

Re:Done before, several times

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be that the cost of the technology required to do this has dropped, thus making it feasible to do it with a lower volume.

Re:Done before, several times

[fatphil]

I'm sure Wallace and Grommit did.

Re:Done before, several times

[Scarletdown]

I'm sure Wallace and Grommit did.

Peewee Herman did too, if I remember right. I think his looked like Abraham Lincoln. (Disclaimer...haven't seen that movie since it originally hit the theaters, so my memory may be faulty.)

Re:Done before, several times

[ikaruga]

Yeah, automated production lines are great for factories and centralized production centers. The problem is that, since every thing is cooked locally, each fast food restaurant would need a production line, which cost tens of thousands of dollars.Plus if you count maintenance and administration staff you probably reduce only 2 or 3 employees from 8~15 depending on the size of the restaurant. Plus you going to need a higher level of skill as well.
However, while for business these robots may not be efficient, a general purpose robotic arm cooking robot could be of big help for people like me, who hate cooking and kitchen work, but still want to eat healthy.

Re:Done before, several times

[drinkypoo]

It's not that it's technically difficult. It's that the volume required to make it profitable is higher than most fast food outlets can sell.

That sounds like nonsense to me — on that basis, McDonalds should already have automated its employees away, because they have so very many locations. People want to see people slaving away over hot grease, it's that simple. McDeez does have a couple of fry robots in operation though, or at least used to. Someplace in SoCal... I'm not really a McDeeznutz expert.

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[webmistressrachel]

pppps longest thread where I talked to myself EVER... I wonder how many posts it gives you and whether it can be used to create a huge variation on the page-widening troll? Don't worry, I won't try.

I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

How sanitary is the process? Who does the cleaning? As a low-level who works in the industry, even I feel some concern regarding the safety of people's health. Sure, obesity isn't healthy, but neither is bacteria from a burger cooked a week ago (unless you don't mind a parasite feeding on your insides).

Also, conveyors need some form of lubrication to continue working, and a single burger's grease isn't even enough to coat a 10-inch cast-iron skillet, let alone an entire conveyor system. That means it will need a way to self-lubricate in a production setting or one robot's job will involve wasting a considerable amount of Crisco to ensure a decent amount of lubrication.

And of course grease will splatter at some point. Who cleans the robot?

Re:I wonder...

[aXis100]

Just autoclave the whole thing and then use food grade lube on the chains. Easy as.

Re:I wonder...

[PlusFiveTroll]

Did you know that just about all the cheap prepared food you can find in a supermarket is already made by machines in a production line? This is not some new experimental technology in any other sense except that they are trying to make a low-cost machine that can be cheaply installed in a large number of establishments.

The OP just goes to show that most people have no idea where their food comes from and what it has been in before it goes to their mouth. Hell a huge portion of it is processed in ways and methods that you would not suspect 'food' was being made till the end product was finished. It also explains why we're getting fat. All the water and fiber is taken out of our food, and all that's left is starch and fat.

Re:I don't see how this would make us fatter.

[camperdave]

It's not about the fast food joints. It's about the burgermaker machine installed in the lobby of my apartment building and late night cravings.

FINALLY!!!

[sackofdonuts]

Although the food at most fast food restaurants isn't that great sometimes one gets the urge to get a greasy burger. But then you go and see who is working the grill or fryer and your appetite goes away. Robot food service....Yes!!!

haha fat Americans

[skitchen8]

That's the funniest joke I've ever heard, how original. What are your feelings on British people's teeth and french people's armpits? Jesus fuck, if you don't know what humor is don't use it. Can we all just collectively agree we get it now, all Americans are fat?

Re:haha fat Americans

[BasilBrush]

It's no joke. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity

And the countries that follow the USA on the Obese-o-meter, mostly got there because of the US export of fast food outlets to any country that can afford them.

Re:haha fat Americans

[skitchen8]

Is there anyone that doesn't know this? Is there some sort of use behind every single non-American posting this with every single story that even remotely involves food? I'm an American, and I'm not obese, but I am sick of hearing about how obese I am. Believe it or not, just because a majority of people are something doesn't mean that all of them are. I realize that is hard to believe though, after all the internet says different and everything on the internet is true. Also, you're referencing data from 2003 and assuming that in the last 10 years absolutely nothing has changed. Good call, moron.

Re:haha fat Americans

[BasilBrush]

Is there anyone that doesn't know this?

Absolutely.

Is there some sort of use behind every single non-American posting this with every single story that even remotely involves food?

Who says they are all non-Americans. There are many Americans ashamed at their countries obesity stats.

I'm an American, and I'm not obese

The extent to which you're offended by a simple, true stat makes me think you're more than a little concerned about your weight.

Believe it or not, just because a majority of people are something doesn't mean that all of them are.

That would be why the stat I linked to is 30.6% not 100%.

I realize that is hard to believe though, after all the internet says different and everything on the internet is true.

You're quite irrational, aren't you.

Also, you're referencing data from 2003 and assuming that in the last 10 years absolutely nothing has changed.

2005 actually, because that's the stats Nationmaster happens to have. If you're imagining there's being any large scale reduction since then, you'll be sorely disappointed. But feel free to do your own research.

Good call, moron.

Bad time of the month?

Why not 365?

[AndyKron]

You still need someone to keep filling those tubes up, and clean all the mold and slime out of them before the health dept. shows up.

most jobs do not need degree level and even then

[Joe_Dragon]

most jobs do not need degree level and even then you have people with the degree level with big skills gaps.

We need more hands on training and need to back of the idea of a 4+ year degree.

Oxymoron

[Kaenneth]

I would consider "Gourmet" and "Mass produced by Machine" to be mutually exclusive; no matter how good the food is.

It's like a "Limited Time Offer" that's always available, "Exclusive Benefits" for anyone with a pulse, etc.

Re:Oxymoron

[Scarletdown]

I'm sure they will eventually come up with some system to declare robots as gourmet certified, which will justify a higher price per bot vs. uncertified bots, despite them doing the exact same thing.

Now, would you like to try our BIG ASS FRIES?

Re:Oxymoron

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I would consider "Gourmet" and "Mass produced by Machine" to be mutually exclusive; no matter how good the food is.

Compared to the fast food thingy? Why not? Although, I think that

it enables the restaurant to spend about twice as much on ingredients as they normally would – so they can buy the gourmet stuff.

is a little too much optimistic, I'd say they will keep the ingredients the same and simply enjoy higher profits.

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[Macgrrl]

ps riddle I might know a guy who know a guy who can source "long pork" - well if the gourmet horse is a police horse can you imagine what gourmet long pork comes packaged in? 10 points for the 1st person with a userid shown to post the correct (rather morbid) answer...

Would it come packaged in a limousine? You can't get much more gourmet than that, unless you were thinking chefs' whites.

combine it with lab meat

[retchdog]

``premium burgers prepared fresh for you on-demand, from only the finest bio-slurry. our meat is synthesized, interwoven with premium lipids, exercised, and grilled before your eyes without the interference of filthy meatbags. the best burger you've tasted, every time — that's science!"

Indoor vending?

[UpnAtom]

Basically like fast food, only with CCTV instead of owners.

Obligatory SNL Quote

[AnalogDiehard]

"Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger!"

"No Coke, just Pepsi"

Burgers are never flipped at McD or BK

[kriston]

Burgers are never flipped at McDonalds or Burger King. McDonalds uses a dual-surface grill, contacting the beef from top and bottom. Burger King uses a broiler with flames on the top and bottom.

No flipping burgers. Note this for future reference.

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[lannocc]

wait where am i? I thought you said mage-widening troll!

Come the robot revolution

[Arancaytar]

And you will be the burger.

Re:Come the robot revolution

[mysidia]

And you will be the burger.

Naw... robots don't need to eat; and burning organisms is not an efficient fuel source. It's more like... come the robot revolution... humans will be the pest; just in the manner as humans consider insects and various rodents pests.

Leading to robots deploying hominicide sprays. Probably made up of toxins that wipe out 99% of humans, while leaving harmless wildlife untouched.

Re:Come the robot revolution

[Arancaytar]

Simply burning organisms might not be, but leaving them to rot would be inefficient too. They would likely develop a way to convert us to biofuel.

360?

[Tablizer]

"640 hamburgers otta be enough for anyone" -bill g

"gourmet" burgers?

[__aaltlg1547]

Hamburgers mass-produced by a robot are "gourmet" hamburgers?

Burger Cantina

[CanEHdian]

You Don't Get Served By Their Kind In Here!

You can always go there if you want a burger served up by a human instead of a droid!

Robots : Super Jumbo Jets

[mbstone]

Gourmet Burgers : More Comfortable Coach Seats

High presure water

[rsilvergun]

replaces blades and never needs cleaning. Go look up how McDonald's French Fries are made. There will be perhaps a few parts that need maintenance, but you're talking 1 guy replacing 10.

Re:High presure water

[b4dc0d3r]

How am I supposed to know when I found the reference that you have chosen to believe?

Or to put it another way - if you can't be arsed to find a reference when you know what you are looking for, why would anyone else?

If you provide a reference, or at least a good pointer, I can decide if your citation is decent. If not, I assume it's like this:

1) Plant potatoes
2) Harvest potatoes
3) Have people think you mis-spelled potatoes
4) Peel them as well as you can
5) Slice them with lasers, which gives them the crusty bits
5) Soak them in oil until they surrender
6) Sit them under heat lamps until they aren't so soggy
7) Serve them to fat people

I've not worked in fast food, I have only the vaguest idea how anything is done behind the counter, except for mis-counting change.

I saw some of the alternatives

[rsilvergun]

and I still don't see how you can prevent the haves from using what they have to get more, and repeating the cycle until they have everything. The other solutions either ignore the problem or boil down to socialism in everything but name.

Yes we'll survive

[rsilvergun]

but it doesn't mean it'll be any kind of life worth living. Do I have to remind you what life was like prior to the 20th century...

Re:Yes we'll survive

[SillyHamster]

but it doesn't mean it'll be any kind of life worth living. Do I have to remind you what life was like prior to the 20th century...

Goods becoming cheaper due to new technology GUARANTEES a higher standard of living, not a lower one. If you can buy two burgers for the same cost as one burger now, you've GAINED, not LOST.

City living prior to the 20th century sucked compared to now, but there were still advantages and gains over the farm life of that period. (notice that farmers CHOSE to move into the city to take advantage of the opportunities there)

Cheaper burgers are not going to ruin human life. If you seriously think it will destroy civilization as we know it, I suggest studying economics more carefully, particularly on how resources are not a zero sum game. Cheaper goods bring more opportunities, not less.

Re:Is this a robot?

[PlusFiveTroll]

How is an automated factory a robot? The ingredients are fed into a hopper and move along constrained pathways and processed automatically just like in the typical factory. A robot would be some humanoid setup with far less machinery and far more intelligence.

Why must robots be humanoid? Sometimes making a robot less humanoid reduces the needed complexity and speeds up or simplifies the process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-n1lKDI6eQ

The robotic food 'machinery' out there is pretty crazy.

this is why you do not want amnesty for illegals

[WindBourne]

Basically, if we provide amnesty to all of the illegals, most of them are uneducated. However, they will want more money which will mean that they are too expensive to keep in those positions. However, an increase in the cheap labor will cause a number of jobs to go away and be replaced by robotics. This burger robot will no doubt be picked up by McD, BK, Wndys, etc. IOW, we will be laying off 1 million ppl who were originally illegals. It does not sound like much until you realize that that is just under a 1% jump in unemployment. And to be able to compete, other jobs will have to be automated. That will mean that we will see an increasing number of previous illegals dependent on gov. subsidies.

Now, assuming that there were 10 million illegals, of which 7 million were working, then this kind of hurts. HOWEVER, the previous amnesty from reagan showed us that it is roughly 3x the number of ppl. IOW, 20-30 million illegals, with 14-21 million working. As they are put out of work, that will mean upwards of 10% just for these ppl in addition, to any other unemployment groups (which would be at least another 5%).

360? Is that all?

[chrismcb]

360 in an HOUR??? Is that all? What a slow poke. I don't even need to make a John Henry reference. I could beat this machine, with one hand tied behind my back.

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome our new robotic overlords

Re:most jobs do not need degree level and even the

[vlm]

In turn, we also need to back off the expectation that all experience adds value - part of the source of all the age-discrimination complaints is that older workers are generally not willing to take a new-hire level compensation despite their experience not being overly applicable.

We've long since done that. Pay raises are usually at or below the real world inflation rate, sometimes even at or below the made up govt numbers, so both standard of living and cost of production (assuming you aren't in the small fraction that get promoted) always falls over a long enough period of time.

Re:But do they serve horseburgers?

[webmistressrachel]

No, nil point, try again. ;)

great tag

[cellocgw]

Just posting to say whoever put the 'flamebait" tag on a story about flipping burgers is a master of double entendre!

Minimum wage.

[RightSaidFred99]

This is why minimum wage is a silly concept, especially when they try to morph it into some ridiculous "living wage". At some point you make it cheaper for McDonald's to pay for more automation, hire one IT/tech guy to manage the robots at 3-4 McDonald's in an area, and fire half the employees instead of being forced to pay $12 an hour for menial labor and also to pay health insurance costs.