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Gates Warns of Software Replacing People; Greenspan Says H-1Bs Fix Inequity
dcblogs writes "Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan, in separate forums, offered outlooks and prescriptions for fixing jobs and income. Gates is concerned that graduates of U.S. secondary schools may not be able stay ahead of software automation. 'These things are coming fast,' said Gates, in an interview with the American Enterprise Institute 'Twenty years from now labor demand for a lots of skill sets will be substantially lower, and I don't think people have that in their mental model.' Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan believes one way to attack income inequity is to raise the H-1B cap. If the program were expanded, income wouldn't necessarily go down much, but it would go down enough to make an impact. Income inequality is a relative concept, he argued. People who are absolutely at the top of the scale in 1925, for instance, would be getting food stamps today, said Greenspan. 'You don't have to necessarily bring up the bottom if you bring the top down.'"
People in all societies get their ideas of what's necessary, and what's enough, and what to buy, by looking at the people around them and comparing it to their own situation. The don't use any kind of empirical or absolute measure, unless they're chronically hungry or in similar dire straits.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
All Greenspan wants to do is further shaft the US worker and help Big Business cut its costs even further. He's nothing more than a shill at this point.
So Greenspan rightly pointed out that inflation means the top 1% from the '20s would be in poverty now if their wealth hadn't been subjected to inflation.
Yeah. So what has that got to do with ANYTHING?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
And now Greenspan wants to start the class war in America? Does this man have no ability to think long term?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because that's the top. Not STEM.
I can't see the logic with this one. Off-shore even more well-paying jobs to low-cost replacements in third world countries? How does that fix income inequity? The H-1B visa is being perverted by big business. It was intended to bring skill workers to the US, presuming that at least some percentage of them would stay and add to the economic engine. In practice, these visas are used by shell companies to bring migrant workers here to train, then return to their off-shore operations centers, taking permanent positions with them. Greenspan is correct only in the theoretical use of the H-1B, not in it's actual practice.
When he talks about eliminating inequality by bringing the top down, he doesn't mean bringing down the 1%ers like himself and Gates. He's talking about bringing down all the skilled workers in the top 5-10% down to the level of unskilled workers. This doesn't actually reduce income inequality (it actually makes it worse), so he's full of crap. This has long been Greenspan's desire; it annoys him to no end that people who do things can aspire to salaries as high as lower-level banksters.
I thought he'd been laughed out of Washington DC following the mortgage securities fiasco.
former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan believes one way to attack income inequity is to raise the H-1B cap
Econ 101 - Supply and Demand. You just increase the supply and prices go down. So, what does Al think the 'bottom' is? H-1B visas for tech workers hit the middle class. The bottom is the fast food, dishwasher, gardener, etc. That's the people who wade across the Rio Grande. Fast food restaurants and farms don't go through the H-1B process for labor.
How about we import some lower priced talent for the executive offices? That'll fix inequality. Seriously, I've seena number of situations where corporations on the edge of failure were sold to foreign firms and are now being run quite profitably. Same factory, same tools, same unions. Better managers.
Have gnu, will travel.
+1
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The real solution is to move.
The jobs aren't where they were before... Look at the entire planet when you do a job search and see things in a new light.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What is this? "Read the headline and comment" day? Greenspan is saying that the US education system is broken, and needs to be fixed.
"We cannot manage our very complex, highly sophisticated capital structure with what's coming out of our high schools," said Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve."
He talks about having to expand the H-1B system if we don't actually address the problems in our education system here in America. Read the fucking article, people.
a few decades ago to shift some gravel or move some snow it took a crew of people with shovels. now, one guy in a skid-steer. dozens of people doing paperwork fixed by software. auto manufacturing relies on robots. technology kills jobs all the time. and technology is exponential, we can expect to remove huge swaths of jobs in the coming years. our economy is going to have to shift. we need robots doing everything for us but we need them to be in some way financed so that they can do the work without the bulk of the population dying of starvation. if that means rebellion against robocorp, or richman inc, then so be it :)
Fix Equty problems ..... there fixed that for you.
"Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan, in separate forums here, offered outlooks and prescriptions for fixing jobs and income."
...
One fucked up the software industry and the other fucked up the world economy, what an example
Greenspan is a sock puppet for the banking industry. He was outed when he basically said, 'Oops. I fucked up' after the derivative market collapsed in 2007. I thought he wouldn't have the balls to open his mouth again after that fiasco.
Have gnu, will travel.
Introducing more H1-B VISAs won't bring down the top. It won't put Wall St traders on smaller incomes. It won't put CEOs on smaller incomes. Tell me how a H1-B VISA will make it cheaper to have a head of the Fed. Tell me how the H1-B program makes it cheaper for the government to employ Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
But with so many unemployed, why is the H1-B scheme needed?
Why can't more people be appropriately trained and educated here?
There have been a _ton_ of advancements that become available when you have money. Medical Science has advanced to the point where we can do maintenance on the human body and improve it in general. This can be as simple as your kid's braces, or as complex as resurfacing your hip so you can walk without a cane in your 50s.
Also, what's "necessary" is defined by employers. If I'm going to function as an office worker I'm expected to have a car, cellphone, college education, etc. If I don't have these I become unemployable... I lose access to all of the benefits I described above.
Also, why in God's Green Earth are we talking about regressing to the 1920s? When did we give up on progress? When did poverty become an acceptable condition? When I was a kid we'd already sent a man to the moon. Keeping kids out of poverty seemed simple by comparison...
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It is NOT a problem in the current model at all. It is a problem only for those that are not willing to change or evolve their skills. Skill sets required change, some new ones will be required and many old ones will become less relevant. In a recent training course I was at there were a whole heap of infrastructure people trying to improve there development skillset (surprised me how many actually), these are people that can see the freight train coming and are altering there skills appropriately. Many more will simply find themselves out of work and wonder "what the fuck just happened?" and this is just in the IT space, every other work environment has the same situation. Evolve or Die!
Greenspan is right that taking the lid off of immigration will drive the top of the wage scale down, greatly reducing wage inequality.
Gates is right that there's one "job" that won't be automated: ownership.
I confess that I am assuming that Greenspan (who was never a dummy) is talking about wage, rather than income inequality. Otherwise I'm not sure how he expects a rise in immigration to do anything but accelerate the shift of income from wages to rents.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
In related news, Mr. Greenspan has no clue about inequity in stratified markets. If you push on the top, you just compress the layers into smaller layers, with the bottom filling until it can absorb no more. Then you get slums, riots, and chaos. The only way the market works is with a strong middle class with buying potential. Without that there is no market, and hence no profits or growth. Once that contract is broken, it's not a long way to the bottom for most.
}#q NO CARRIER
"If we're not going to educate our kids, bring in other people who want to become Americans," said Greenspan, in arguing for an increase of H-1B workers.
H-1B is not a path to citizenship, apparently by design. Green card holders can say "Screw you, I quit" without deportation, which is not what companies want when they reach for H-1B's.
In the context of income inequality, Greenspan put the H-1B program in his light: If the program were expanded, income wouldn't necessarily go down much, "but I bet you they would go down enough to really make an impact, because income inequality is a relative concept.
H-1B's are competing for the bottom. Executives don't bring in indentured servants to be their own replacement, nor are meaningful numbers being placed into "rock star" slots (rock stars can command perks like actual green card status anyway). H-1B's only drive down the wages of the bottom, not the top, exacerbating wealth disparity.
I'm pretty local. I'm stuck here because a) I only know one language and it's a bit late to learn (what with being an adult of only sightly above average intelligence) and b) not having tons of money.
:P, taking a break from a large code project to troll /. :) ). I made a lot of mistakes in life, but I also had a lot of things just fall apart around me through no fault of my own. I watched as 90 % of the IT industry was shipped overseas and nobody noticed or cared. Just like with the car industry. Now I'm watching what's left get automated away
I keep getting told that if I don't like being poor I should just stop being poor. Gee, that'd be nice, but I don't see anyone lining up to give me capital.... I've got ideas and I'm willing to work (I am in fact
I haven't once heard anything constructive come out of the "Don't be Poor" crowd. If you have real solutions I'd like to hear them. What are we going to do in 20 years when robots drive cars, make food, deliver packages and pick our fruit? What are we going to do with all these people we just don't _need_? If you're OK with letting them starve to death on Resevations (like America did with the Natives) and brutally oppressing them when they get out of line then fine, say it and be done. But stop pretending you have an answer that doesn't end with the entire planet looking like North Korea.
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Hail the rise of robo-communism, as capitalism is a dead end. If only we wern't told so much how evil communism is. Interestingly, true communism (never actully tried) requires a period of prosperus capitalism first.
Rocket Surgeon.
And cunts like you can just be murdered and robbed by those who get fucked over and can't get a new start. How's that grab you Mr. Darwin? You can't talk if I shoot your larynx out the back of your fucking neck cocksucker.
And that Greenspan and Gates are telling you about H1-B's is only half the story.
The other half of the story is that there aren't enough Green cards to give out for the H1-B's that are in line for them. So you end up with H1-B workers in essentially indentured servitude to their employer with no bargaining power driving down wages for everyone else.
Increasing Green cards for existing H1-B workers currently in the US will help the US economy a lot more than creating more indentured servitude.
A little background: The number of Green cards is set by Congress. In 1999 congress increased the number of H1-B's to 190,000 but left the number of employment based Green cards at 135,000. The rule of thumb is that you need 2.2 Green cards for every H1-B issued to satisfy demand (because H1-B workers normally come with spouses and kids). To satisfy demand, they should have increased Green cards to 400,000 when they increased the H1-B numbers to 190,000 - but they didn't.
This created a huge backlog of people waiting for their Green cards - including me. I am 31 years old, I did some math, I will be 62 by the time I get mine at the current rate.
The corporations LOVE the idea of creating more H1-B's but you don't hear a peep about increasing the number of Green Cards. They claim that increasing H1-B's will increase innovation and so on - but without a commensurate increase in Green cards, that is complete nonsense. Someone who has been stuck at the same job for decades can hardly innovate.
FYI: Congress is trying to increase the number of H1-B's without increasing the number again (to the magic 195,000 again) http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/2131 . Call your Congressman/Senator and tell him/her to vote against the bill unless it includes a commensurate increase in H1-B's. The Bill is HR-2131. http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/2131
People who are absolutely at the top of the scale in 1925, for instance, would be getting food stamps today, said Greenspan.
Has Greenspan blown the dust off his Rolodex lately? I can't think of anybody with the last name "Rockefeller" or "Vanderbilt" in 2014 that's hurting for cash.
I screwed up the last paragraph, it should have been:
FYI: Congress is trying to increase the number of H1-B's without increasing the number of Green cards again (to the magic 195,000 again) . Call your Congressman/Senator and tell him/her to vote against the bill unless it includes a commensurate increase in Green Cards. The Bill is HR-2131. http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/2131
We're idiot cultist who come up with jobs, sacrificing our lives to the god of capitalism, self flagellation and all. If machines do our jobs, we can just sit back and enjoy production of knowledge, culture and other things enjoyable, each to their own, it's ok warriors, time to put down your bootstraps.
I fear you maybe a little short sighted. Very smart AI is just around the corner (and i'm not talking ibm watson, i'm talking hardwired neuromorphic chips based on our own brains). There won't be much a human can do, that it wont be able to do better. I'm on the optimistic side, and think we will have human level ai in 10 years, but even if you are not, 25-50 years is easily more than enough time to complete it (think how far computers have come in 30 years). If the computer is as smart as a human it won't matter how many training courses you go to, the computer can complete them almost instantaneously, then work 24/7, possibly even at a faster rate.
Rocket Surgeon.
...or... ...you could just avoid the employers that bloodhawk keeps getting duped into working for!
Keep evolving, bloodhawk... Keep evolving.
Not everyone can evolve like you say. Some jobs will be gone and people will be left behind. What we do about those people is what needs to change. Right now they are left to fend for themselves because we accuse them of not seeing the writing on the wall so it is their own fault. But the people at the top are very smart, and they are actively working against the people at the bottom to increase their profits. If the people at Ford could replace their skilled manufacturers with robots that cost $250 grand a piece, they would hop to it in an instant. That could be a virtual overnight change in manufacturing in the entire country if robots could be made dexterous enough to replace humans. We are probably only a few years away from doing that. Those people cannot all be left to fend for themselves, and upgrade their skills to do something else. It is beyond scale that is possible.
In the New York Times Conservative columnist was opining last June that what the what the lower economic brackets really need is to develop a "rich inner life" and derive joy and satisfaction from whatever they have, rather than "focus on external wealth". if they are unhappy with their lot they have only themselves to blame.
That's right folks, the solution to extreme inequality is for the poor to learn to make themselves happy! Just as the solution for inequality for Greenspan is to compress the Middle Class downward, make those who aren't struggling a lot, struggle a lot more.
No, no don't look at the rich and super-rich! You're just making yourself unhappy - shame on you! Trust us you don't want, and shouldn't have a bigger share of the rewards of your labor, really those that have the most really need more of what you have
In other news, the New York Times had a front-page article comparing the health and longevity of two groups of Americans living close to each other - one wealthy and one poor. Guess what? The poor are in poor health and die sooner.
That's right. Inequality is killing people. Telling them to be happy ain't going to make them live longer, and making the upper middle class poorer won't do it either.
It is quite apparent the plutocrats have an army of sycophants ready bury us in platitudes to divert any attention from how the entire nation is rigged to their advantage.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
...humans spontaneously turn blue and go blank requiring they be poked in three places simultaneously to get them working again, your version of computing will never replace them.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
We do have the resources to feed, clothe and shelter everyone on this planet.
So what do you have to offer for that food, clothes, shelter, etc? Especially, if you're the sort that makes more problems that require food, clothes, shelter, etc. Labor for the stuff you want is a system that works. It gives the providers of stuff incentive to give you stuff.
Hoping that someone provides you with the resources you need depends on a morality or ethics system that might not always be there.
End H1-B Visas - you want to work in America, start working on becoming a citizen.
Forget about welfare to illegal immigrants - take the children born in the U.S., put them in orphanages, ship the parents back to their country - unless they have applied for citizenship, are working and paying their share, and the company they work for is paying for things like insurance, etc...
Erase the corporate tax-evasion loopholes - anything sold to U.S. citizens gets taxed before the money flows to the company.
No more off-shore shenanigans. This includes foreign corporations - all monies foreign or domestic for sales gets taxed before leaving our borders.
Switch to a national sales tax, for everything - no more income tax. Items bought from overseas get double taxed (on top of importation duties)
Finally, forget about taxing income from stocks / bonds. Switch to a pure sales tax.
Every time a stock is bought or sold, a solid 10 to 15% sales tax added to it.
No more long term, short term gains, just tax every sale of every stock to the billionth of a penny.
For futures of real items, make it so that buying the futures includes the costs of shipping and storing those items. No more making farmers pay for crop storage so someone else can sweep them up later at an incredible discount.
Stop scum-bags from feeding off the less-well-to-do. Make them pay more than their fair share since they've been welching on the economy for so many years.
Turn the tides against the top 10%, turn it around hard.
we will have human level ai in 10 years, but even if you are not, 25-50 years is easily more than enough time to complete it
That's what people have been saying for the last 50 years or more, and I don't think we're any closer now than we were back then.
How does this "true communism" you speak of differ from the one that's been tried, and has failed over and over and over?
All you lowly non-billionaires bow down in aww!
What a complete moron. I used to actually have at least a LITTLE respect for Greenspan, but seriously? Anyone who thinks this is a good idea must have such an advanced case of cranial rectal insertion that removal is likely to be impossible. On the other hand, my opinion of Gates has actually improved, just a little bit. Better planning for the future is always in order, and sticking with the same old paradigms for too long can eventually have significant consequences. You don't just turn the ship around overnight so people need to keep an eye on these things and push for little course corrections along the way.
That's what people have been saying for the last 50 years or more, and I don't think we're any closer now than we were back then.
Do you know what happened to the boy who cried wolf? His entire town was eaten because after the third or fourth time they figured there'd never be a wolf so there's no reason to prepare.
Labor for the stuff you want is a system that works. It gives the providers of stuff incentive to give you stuff.
It works as long as "providers of stuff" need labor.
The real problem with the "post scarcity" world is that labor is becoming less scarce than resources. Even if every last thing was made by robots, someone has to pay for the stuff the robots make it from.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
We've all seen this movie, we lost. :(
They didn't have a period of prosperous capitalism first, that lenin predicted they would need. There are two problems to face with commuism. First if your country and people are all poor, splitting up what little you have and sharring it equally just means a lot of people have next to nothing. Secondly if all people are equal, and paid equal, how do you convince some people their job is to clean toilets while other people are testing video games. A period of properous capitilism while the country builds industry and gets rich solves the first problem, the second problem is solved with robot toilet cleaners.
Rocket Surgeon.
Except that it is a problem. Soon, the only "skilled job" left that robots won't easily be able to replace (or will they?) will be as a prostitute. I sure hope you can "adapt your skills" adequately.
remember this is the same Bill Gates that helped pioneer the 'Perma-Temp" and the two-tiered employee systems.... The ones where the "good" employees have the great perks while the "grunts" don't even get to call themselves "employee" and get passed from shady temp agency to temp agency every 3-5 years.
The problem isn't upgrading skills, it's reducing the hours per week so more people can work full time and making a big culture shift away from the era of "work addiction" and 50+ hour weeks. Companies would rather pay Bill Gates 3/4 of your salary than pay another employee... he's been laughing and rolling in sacks of money for 3 decades because of that tendency.
I truly don't think these guys understand the economics involved. the per capita wages in most of the USA is in the $40k range from low to high depending on region. They are so disconnected from the idea of money as anything except a "score card" they have no concept of what regular people do with it.
Its an old saying that fussion is always 20 years away. That said we have had net gains in power with multiple fussion experiments now, and even a guy that claims to have produced lenr (low energy nuclear reactions) almost akin to alchemy because it turns nickle into copper. I can list all the successfull AI research and devolpment, but ultimately the only way to see who is right is to wait 10 years. To be fair the kind of AI they were talking about 50 years ago does exist today in stuff like siri, ibm watson, and driverless cars. What is going to happen over the next 10 years or so is going from simulation (ibm watson) to hardwired (neruomorphic processors) which will be much faster, cheaper and alot more energy effcient.
Rocket Surgeon.
"capitalistic" simply means "unfettered human cooperation", and it's the "unfettered" that's the problem; but your socialist rhetoric is about two hundred years out of date and every experiment ever done in it failed miserably. The problem isn't "capitalism", but that we have the wrong fetters: none for the greedy and powerful in the name of protecting the [true] needy and weak from their under-feet, all in the name of protecting the latter to restrain and impair their ability to compete--to join-together. Government stance: "it's for your own good don'tcha know...so break the rule and we'll fuck you."
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Most of the poor get richer slowly as technology raises their standard of living. Those controlling the system get richer much faster as they reap the same benefits, along with the majority of the usable output of the poor. Some kind of a despised, often disenfranchised class is maintained to focus the anger of the population away from those controlling the system. Almost everyone advances; the gap grows ever larger. It has always been this way; likely it will always be so.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
When has communism ever been tried on a national level? The core tenet of communism is that the people own the means of production - every "attempt" thus far that I can think of has had the government own the means of production. The only way those two concepts are compatible is if the people truly own the government. Are you prepared to state that has *ever* been the case, anywhere? Even in a government that wasn't claiming to be communist?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No one in the United States has problems with food, clothing, or shelter.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Soon, the only "skilled job" left that robots won't easily be able to replace (or will they?) will be as a prostitute. I sure hope you can "adapt your skills" adequately.
How's that going to help? The 0.1% can fuck up far more people than they can fuck.
They'd be fine with just the top 1% fuckables. So if they end up owning everything we'd be completely screwed unless they start collecting pet humans as a hobby or show of status. In which case we'd only be partially screwed - pets don't get reproductive or voting rights.
There is a problem though, in that the populations continue to rise, but the number of human beings needed to provide them essential services continues to fall. Certainly the model-T and buggy whips argument is valid, and many innovations open new markets into which reskilled people can enter. But that's a separate valid phenomenon which does not address the sheer reduction in needed people to provide most of the services you and I feel are needed to live our lives. When we build robots that can build houses, they will displace a huge portion of the construction industry. This will stimulate the market of jobs that support those robots: programmers that build house building algorithms, service technicians for the robots, etc. But not nearly as many of those jobs are needed as construction jobs, because they leverage of one programmer writing code for house building robots is enormous, for example. So the total number of workers needed is decreasing overall and the population is increasing. What has always happened historically in these situations, is wealth becomes concentrated in a small number of hands, and the remainder become impoverished: kinda like the dissolution of the middle class you are seeing right now... What's never happened in modern history is the implementation of essentially socialization where every has basic needs provided at minimal cost plus a discretionary productive capacity (an entitlement that allows you to buy fun stuff). There are many interesting solutions to all of this and they are very complex, and none has ever succeeded. Not to be doom and gloomy. We'll have to solve it if we are going to move forward, because the reduction of necessary labor is happening and has been for a couple centuries.
I would give a lot to meet you in a dark alley sometime...
What if he beat the shit out of you? Would you want your money back?
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The solution to inequality is to import poverty wages so the wealthy can further widen the gulf between their wealth and that of their employees?
I can pretty much guarantee you this will be one of the areas where robots could do an excellent job, far better than any human could. As to whether they will, that remains to be seen, but I must point out that the sex industry is already trying the idea on for size with RealDolls and so forth.
Let's say that we get to excellent automatons and high quality body manufacturing. Not even AI. Given that, we can have a robot sex worker that can focus on you, and only you, and really, really mean it. It can do it for an hour and go on to someone else, or it can do it for your entire lifespan without ever straying -- whatever you like, or can afford. It doesn't care about your other relationships and will treat you as #1 no matter how you stray or experiment. It won't be jealous unless you want it to, and it will participate if that's what you want. It can remain disease-free and safe. It's not going to have a period, be distracted, moody, greedy, angry, or have any kind of a problem if you get a phone call. It won't demand that you recognize its power, or fill your ear with talk of equality or fairness. It will have a repertoire of skills that will dwarf any human's. It isn't going to inevitably age or get ugly, although it could definitely change in any way you want it to -- hair, skin, body type, sex organs, lips, eyes, etc. such that it could be someone (thing) different every day of your life, and it's going to enthusiastically go along with your wildest kinks, only difference being that it will be better at them than you are, all to your benefit. It won't require gifts, child support, get pregnant, or stray. It won't get tired of you, it won't be duplicitous, it won't ever call a lawyer or a friend and violate your trust, it won't require a pre-nup, nag you about marriage, or threaten you with multi thousand dollar wedding dresses and even more expensive weddings. There will be no in-laws, and you will never come home to find a pocket dog with a face like satan, a yip pitched such that it could shatter glass, and a body like a wharf rat on your couch, complete with a brand new puddle of urine on your oriental rug.
The question most here aren't asking is, what does society look like when there simply aren't jobs to do? It doesn't have to be a bad thing. The narrative that "one must work to have dignity and/or happiness" is nonsense pushed into the psyche of the ignorant from above. The no-work situation is coming, no doubt about it: what it will look ilke will depend entirely on what the population can be made to put up with.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Bullshit, Very Smart AI is decades off. possibly 50+ years and I say that as someone that works in the space!
Microsoft is known to pay some experienced developers as little as $90k a year, and hire fresh ones out of college at $135k. And THEY talk about inequity. Fuck this shit.
nt
No. Doesn't follow. Effectively infinite resources await us nearby in space. Robots can mine and refine and manufacture whatever we need indefinitely from those resources. We're not there yet, but it is certainly an attainable goal from where we stand right now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I always think about this when someone wants everything to be equal - Thank you A. G. for quoting Rush so well So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights.
"The oaks are just too greedy;
We will make them give us light."
Now there's no more oak oppression,
For they passed a noble law,
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw.
Rush - "The Trees" Nothing like using more H1-Bs to bring down EVERYONE's living wage to make us all more equal. For my next magic trick I will tax the rich at 90% and watch our income tax receipts go to 0.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
... said Greenspan. 'You don't have to necessarily bring up the bottom if you bring the top down.'
Sounds like Greenspan is arguing for a CEO salary cap. I'd say 25 times the lowest paid contractor or worker in the CEO's organization cap on CEO pay would go a lot more toward lessening this income inequality.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
This sentiment is a little raw, but I agree with it.
I'm not a fan of the current one person deserves all the toys and everyone else is a loser game. Wealth is something that other people respect. If the overlords convince themselves that they don't have to offer anything in return, there is no social contract anymore only thuggery. About the 1% there are people a lot better at that game than those fucktards. Meaning if they get the world they want, the first order of business. will be the people they hire to keep us in line sticking a knife in their belly. Historically that's what always happens.
such systems have been just around the corner for 40 years now. What has changed recently to solve the problems inherent in such systems that they haven't been overcome in the preceding 40 years? interested to know as I left the AI research space about a decade back and even then our estimates were we would be lucky if we achieved true AI this century.
Want To Reduce Income/Wealth Inequality? Abolish The Engine Of Inequality - The Federal Reserve.
tldr; by printing excess money and loaning almost freely benefits the financial sector and speculators, but adds nothing to the real productive economy.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-28/want-reduce-incomewealth-inequality-abolish-engine-inequality-federal-reserve
I think it's time to start talking about moving past a capitalistic economy.
If you haven't noticed, we've been talking about it for over 150 years. Alternate economic systems have been attempted, even at large scale, without much success. What new things would you like to explore?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
ultimately utopia is when no one has too work, people do things to enhance their lives, be it art, philosophy, gardening whatever. with luck and capitalist driven technology we will eventually reach that tipping point, I am sure it will be messy in the transition and probably involve a lot of government intervention as we move from a wealth driven society into something else entirely, should be a hell of a ride though.
The only way those two concepts are compatible is if the people truly own the government.
I'm not sure the concept even makes sense. You can say "the people own the government" all you like, and it sounds nice, but sooner or later actual decisions have to be made, and (unless it somehow becomes practical for every person to vote on every issue every day), there will necessarily be certain individuals or groups who are chosen to make those decisions on behalf of everyone else. And that's where things start to go downhill, as those individuals or groups that get to make the decisions will be very tempted to use their position of influence to gain yet more power for themselves, until sooner or later they are effectively "the government" and you're right back at socialism (or worse, totalitarianism).
The problem with communism is it assumes that everyone (and in particular people who are given power) will usually act for the benefit of the community, rather than for personal gain. That assumption has been shown to be reliably false when tested on actual human beings.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No one in the United States has problems with food, clothing, or shelter.
Is this like Ahmadinejad saying there are no homosexuals in Iran?
Because the 600,000+ homeless people in the United States certainly have a problem with shelter.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You demonstrate complete ignorance of what a true state of desperation is. Any society that allows its citizens to become desperate has abandoned any chance at a peaceful existence, regardless of the delicious flavor of its rhetoric. Keep an eye on the constantly growing convicted felon class for profound examples.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Neruomorphic chips are going to be a big change. When we are simulating hundreds of neruons and synapses on transistors and memory it uses a huge amount of resources (transistors, silicon, memory) to do even a simple job like win jeopardy, once we are building millions of hardwired versions of these neurons and synapses (which has already started, essintally just a bunch of wires that can change resistance) it becomes much more accessible and much more powerfull.
Rocket Surgeon.
What a load of garbage. systems like Siri, Watson and driverless cars are little more than complex rules engines or expert systems. They are about as far away from AI as your average toaster is.
Not even close to right. If there are X people needing jobs and only X/3 jobs to be had, no amount of updating your skills will get the unemployment rate below 66%.
Forcing pay up and hours down until there are X jobs available will solve the problem.
We suffered through decades of your policy to keep the economy unstable to keep wadges low.
Now I have a quote from Dick Cheney:
Go fuck yourself.
I'm inclined to agree with you - and thus inclined to believe that no matter how much I like many of the principles that underlie communism, we're a long way from being able to actually attempt it (which was my original point to CommanderK) A *strong* democracy might be a reasonable facsimile to the populace owning government, but while there are a few interesting experiments in the world I don't think anyone's really succeeded in reliably bringing their government to heel so that it reflects the will of the people rather than that of the power brokers.
As far as I'm concerned that's step one towards communism - figure out how to get the government to truly serve the people. Once we've got that we can worry about the economics later, if it's still even a relevant question. In the meantime I'm going to give anyone advocating communism a swift kick in the groin as a wannabe fascist.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
is the beast's head of one microsoft way talking again?
Sure we are. Self driving cars were pure fiction then. Now they have actually been demonstrated. Back then, the idea of computers executing market deals autonomously was pure Sci-fi, now it's every day reality.
But far more common is computer augmentation. One guy with a spreadsheet today gets as much done as a roomful of people with adding machines back in the day. Mind you, he doesn't get paid like a roomfull of people.
neurons are NOT hardwired in the brain, this is the inherent weakness and problem that has not been solved nor is it close to being solved. neurons in a human brain constantly break and re-establish new and sometimes random connections. your so called neruomorphic chip does not solve this problem.
That has always been the problem for AI. As soon as it works, we no longer consider it to be AI, so they get no credit for the accomplishment.
Sock puppet!
He's no sock puppet; he's an insider leading fucking leading the charge.
So its more like the other way around.
No it isn't, we currently have no AI, nor are we close to having it. What we have is increasingly complex expert systems. We aren't even close to having systems that can adequately understand the nuances of spoken language let alone true AI.
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!
You should try leaving your gated community once in a while.
You can still hardwire it. You just set all of the wires at the start to be weighted to zero (high resistance) till the brain decides it needs the connection.
Rocket Surgeon.
Expert systems were considered to be very much the domain of AI until they started working.
Dogs have a non-zero intelligence and all they can say is woof.
And now Greenspan wants to start the class war in America?
Start?
While you've been watching TV and slurping Coke for the last 40 years, he's been out there winning it.
and that leaves you with exactly the same problem we have had for 40 years in modelling AI. the weighted models just don't work, they learn to a hard wired position, you can reset them and start again or you can make them increase and decrease the weightings, but you inherently have a broken way of modelling AI that has proven to simply NOT WORK.
So i don't want to get into a fight about the deffintion of AI; but if you showed someone from 50 years ago siri (able to understand your speach then give you an answer (some of the time)) and a toaster (can toast bread when you put in bread and press a button) i think they would be more impressed by siri's artificial inteligence.
working expert systems have been around for many many decades. I used to program in an expert system dev tool called AionDS back in the 80's. Decision and Expert systems were commonly worked on in the AI community but I don't know anyone that considered them AI even back then.
Yet if you showed someone 50 years ago siri on a cellphone, they would be very impressed with its inteligence. I'm not claiming siri is AI, and no one has said we have Holly from red dwarf or terminator skynet ready to go on the shelf, but we are now venturing into the start of proper AI. Especially in our work on nerual network programing and hardware, where we have built self learning systems that can think and remember the same way we do.
I think the point is, Siri is NOT able to understand your speech. It is able to do voice to text translation and then perform a search. That is not understanding speech, Siri has no more understanding of what you said than a toaster understands what people are putting in it. The problem is we have gotten so good at tech and have so much processing power and data mining capabilities nowadays that we can dress up technology that is little more than basic computer operations to appear intelligent. That is not to make light of the work done by google, Microsoft or Apple in processing search, it is pretty impressive what they have done, but it aint AI.
Right, because they were working by then. Look back further, the world existed long before the '80s.
Have a look at this timeline. YES! All of those things were once considered to be the domain of AI. Consider how each of those things that are commonplace today are no longer thought of as AI.
> 'You don't have to necessarily bring up the bottom if you bring the top down.'
Now, now, Mr. Greenspan. This sounds somehow... creepy.
sorry but neural network systems and programming has also been around for 30 or 40 years. It really is still in its infancy and if you think we are about to suddenly have an AI revolution in the next 30-50 years I think you should be ready for serious disappointment. We haven't even come close to designing true self learning machines beyond very basic well defined environments. WE have had an incredible increase in processing capabilities of computers though and this has allowed many industries to basically completely abandon AI as what they have been trying to solve with intelligence they are instead achieving with brute processing power, Look at Siri, Watson or Self driving cars. None of these systems rely on AI, instead they rely on large compute capacity and advanced Data systems such as GPS data, 3D vision Algorithms, huge databases and raw processing grunt to achieve what once was hoped could be done with AI.
But, all out socialism, communism and capitilism are bad ideas. The best is a combination... I'ved lived both in the USA and a "social-democracy" country in the EU (in both places for a siginificant about of time)... and I'd have to say I prefer the social democracy much better. We earn a little bit less than in the USA(maybe 5-10% less), but I have access to free colleges, MUCH better k-12, sick days and vacation for everybody, and and I can't forget, the health care is leaps and bounds better.
A crowdsourcing type aproach could be a possible solution. If anyone that cares enough about a paticular decision is given an oportunity to be a part of the decision making process, then they could out weigh the people just in it for them selves. Do you need to own the whole goverment or just the part that interests/effects you? For example i don't care what type of flowers are planted at our park or if school kids should have more or less holidays, but i do care about our next gen internet service.
Rocket Surgeon.
there will always be losers in the world and it will always be everyone else's fault but there own. thank you for providing that perfect example. This has how it has always been and most likely always will be, exists under every form of government and economic model that any society has come up with since the dawn of time.
The weighted model is how everybodys brain works, this is just replicating it on silicon. It works in simulation, its just you need a supercomputer to model a worms brain.
Rocket Surgeon.
we will have human level ai in 10 years, but even if you are not, 25-50 years is easily more than enough time to complete it
That's what people have been saying for the last 50 years or more, and I don't think we're any closer now than we were back then.
Yup. And the Apple Newton just proves that there is no future in tablets as well.
The fact that something has never been true does not mean that it never will be true.
By the same logic, we could close the gender gap by paying men 20% less.
Actually, part of the problem with AI experimentation these days is that I don't think they hardware things quite enough.
The human brain isn't a random network of neurons that gets trained into adulthood. If you take two random people and give them the same stimulus, they're going to use the same regions of the brain to respond to it, generally speaking. The part of your brain that recognizes faces is the same as the part of my brain which does this (well, several parts most likely).
So, while that might be the end-result of evolution, the engineering of our brains is clearly built into our DNA. There is some degree of flexibility around how it is wired as we grow, but if you have a stroke in the region of the brain that handles vision you're not suddenly going to regain your sight after 20 years of training and rewiring. You might very well have slight improvements, and you will certainly learn to cope using other senses and functionality that were unimpacted by the stroke.
I am not seeing anything in that timeline that disagrees with what he said? it seems more you have a difference in the definition of AI (one of you is looking for true AI and the other is looking for the appearance of AI) basically unless you change the meaning for AI to be, anything that can "appear" to be intelligent then it really is just a shell game. Systems have gotten infinitely more complex, yes someone from 50 years ago would be stunned and amazed at what we have now, but we are not much closer to true AI than we were 40 or 50 years ago. Yes we can make machines do most anything, but we have yet to work out a viable way to make one that can think. We can make them follow rules or mathematical models, we can make them translate there answers to text or even human like speech, but we haven't been able to instil understanding in a machine. To a machine everything is just maths, there is no intelligence or understanding, just a serious of equations that generate answers.
The solution to income disparity is redistributive taxation, particularly on the very rich, like Gates. It is certainly not to put further wage pressures on the few classes of workers, still earning a liveable wage in the United States.
That is an excellent point sir.
Rocket Surgeon.
How does this "true communism" you speak of differ from the one that's been tried, and has failed over and over and over?
I imagine it is sort of like the difference between the Newton and the iPad.
I doubt that outright communism will ever make sense, but I suspect that as technology advances the ideal economic model will probably be a lot closer to it than the capitalism of the past. What choice is there once technology advances to the point where there is no need to employ humans at all? Sure, that doesn't seem likely to be anytime soon, but what we see today is just one step farther along that path.
I think it's time to start talking about moving past a capitalistic economy.
If you haven't noticed, we've been talking about it for over 150 years. Alternate economic systems have been attempted, even at large scale, without much success. What new things would you like to explore?
Doing the same with modern technology? Attempting communism without robotics more advanced than even what we have today seems a bit like trying to market a smartphone in the 90s.
Communism and socialism is utter bullshit ... all books and information on that subject should be erased from history .....
Then you're not actually reading the timeline. AI is not a Scotsman. I am looking at the well known sub-field of computer science known as Artificial Intelligence. I am not the first to observe that anything from that field, once working well is no longer commonly considered to be AI.
1965 Edward Feigenbaum initiated Dendral, a ten-year effort to develop software to deduce the molecular structure of organic compounds using scientific instrument data. It was the first expert system.
Go ahead, look those guys up. Expert systems were very much considered AI when they were invented in 1965. By the '80s they actually worked and were no longer considered AI. Playing checkers USED to be thought of as AI. Not any more, probably because it works well and can be found in a child's toy.
We will never know if a computer has achieved what you call 'true AI' we can only observe it's behavior and guess. Certainly I have met people that lead me to wonder in the other direction. Philosophers have questioned our ability to know if sentience exists at all for that matter.
If you give it some thought, you'll realize that you don't actually have a good testable definition of what you consider 'real AI' at all. If I'm wrong, write that paper now, your Nobel awaits!
I suspect though, that you simply lack perspective. There was a time when grown adults commonly believed computers were thinking simply because someone (not them, of course, it took a high level wizard) could type something to the computer and it would type back an appropriate response. The field of AI had somewhat higher standards.
Gates is right that there's one "job" that won't be automated: ownership.
Don't be so sure. I can easily see big foundations or corporations owning everything. Basically they do have people managing the wealth, but they have to work within the foundations rules. And some rules just might be simple enough to automate away, and suffenly you have automated ownership. Might actually work out real nice. If said foundations kept people fed and warm.
While I may agree with your assertions, I believe the 50 years ago comment relative to the discussion. 50 years ago speech recognition was a fantasy on the level Siri performs.
many things were fantasy 50 years ago that we have today. that qualifies it as science fiction back then, not AI.
"Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan believes one way to attack income inequity is to raise the H-1B cap. If the program were expanded, income wouldn't necessarily go down much, but it would go down enough to make an impact. Income inequality is a relative concept, he argued. "
The income inequality that is hurting the economy is not that some highly skilled people are making 6 figures and many workers only make 5 figures. The economic drain toward the top is from low wages and high corporate profits moving all the wealth to people who make 8-9 figures off capital gains. Expanding the H-1B cap would make the actual rich richer, the upper working class poorer, and not do much for the lower working class.
Whenever people attack the rich somehow it always gets deflected toward the upper working class and this confusion needs to stop.
The weighted model is most definitely NOT how the human brain works, It is as close as we have come to modelling "some" cognitive patterns, but that is only a small part of the human thought process.. the human brain breaks apart connections and establishes new ones all the time and links memories and thoughts that have no simple mathematical equation that we have yet been able to fathom. The weighted model is atrociously bad at replicating this behaviour as hardware is simply not currently capable of the complex connection behaviour we see in the human brain and we are no where near having the hardware or software capabilities to fully replicate it.
Not sure how you got modded up as insightful, but here goes - http://www.h1bwage.com/index.php actual data on all H1B wages.
Go ahead, take a look. Put e.g. 2013 in year and say Google in the search. How many of these $250,000 a year are college level salaries?
You are either misinformed or lie on purpose. H1B is required by law to pay prevailing wages. Also, people do not stay on H1B for long, most are entitled to get a green card fairly quickly, so employers "grip" on these workers is overrated...
I do hope you are doing well in your position. However, one wonders what the statistics are for successful fiction writers in your particular nation. Rick Frishman stated that 5% of authors are capable of living off their writing proceeds, but I do not have any solid data on the subject. If we accept that figure, should the other 95% of writers just die?
I know its not AI, but 50 years ago if you showed it off to a bunch of AI researchers, and even told them how it worked, they would have considered it AI. Sure we know better now, that is because we are working on the 'real' AI ... or are we... we will get there one day though.
Yeah yeah yeah, and a bunch of tiny little switches and wires will never be able to run a simulation of the world, with realistic physics, which you can run around in and play against AI (warning the AI isn't actully sentient in this case), or against other human players which might be on the other side of world.
Rocket Surgeon.
Take jobs away from American high earners, give them to foreigners... so that American low earners don't feel so bad.
This country is screwed.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It really depends on your definition of AI. there is nothing inherently Intelligent about the way Siri works, you could implement a scaled down version at home with no knowledge of AI, it is just a giant Database that utilises voice/text translation and search. The capacity to store that much data would have probably amazed them just as much and the idea of so much computing power in the palm of your hand would have amazed them far far more. people seem to be confusing converting science fiction to science fact with AI. No one is claiming what we have today isn't astounding or almost unimaginable to many 50 years ago, but that doesn't make it AI and I doubt those looking at it with an analytical eye back then would call it AI either, the only part the borders on it is the natural language processing, but siri does that so badly that I don't think anybody would consider it AI (at least not good AI).
It's cute when balding obese white males that watch anime try to play tough.
"You don't have to necessarily bring up the bottom if you bring the top down.'"
I feel like inflation may disagree...
Maybe Gates and Greenspan should compare notes. If technology and automation is going to be replacing even more jobs 20 years out, then there really isn't a need for increasing H-1b visas as supply and demand will take care of wages. The more displaced workers there are, the lower wages become. Increasing H-1b visas only serves to hasten the US on the track to a two class system - rich and poor. In either vision, Gates or Greenspan, that is bound to happen. But even if they are both wrong, the current political climate is pushing the US that way.
Unemployment is a serious problem. We already have enough people competing for positions. Why not hire someone who already resides in the country? If we gave our OWN people the education they could fill all those high tech positions. But it's been seen as cheaper to import these workers from China and India with degrees so our own people get shafted more and more. The time has come to stop immigration except for farm workers only. Those positions can easily be filled by migrant workers with farm experience. Any high paying position should be reserved for someone born in the US.
You want a solution? Make college cheap for Americans and expensive whoever else wants an education here. Set up a system that does try to place people in jobs training problems if they were born in the US.
The inequity is not between people making 5x times average or over 100k.
The inequity is between average and corporate making 500x times that!
That's only under very basic and limited definitions of what constitutes a 'job'.
I'll tell you that in my country leftists and feminists managed to catalogue "Housewife" as a job, and you can retire with a state-paid pension, even though you obviously never contributed to social security. Note also that those champions of equality and justice also specificly ruled out "Househusband" as a job, because "they don't exist (and they shouldn't)".
In sum, never underestimate the socialist's ability to distort and corrupt the meaning of words. The solution has always been to subsidize select groups of their voters so that they get paid for doing nothing, while keeping the rest exploited.
That's because you assume that their definition of 'people' is the same than your definition of 'people'. That's a rookie mistake. For a communist, 'People' means the ruling party, and they don't hide it. Hugo Chavez even said clearly in his TV channel "I am a People, Carajo!"
The majority of software made today is so poor its not even funny. At the rate things are going it will be at least 500 years before we no longer need skilled workers. The majority of jobs now present for low level tech jobs who are not programmers should be eliminated entirely, and we should hire MORE smart people to do the work. The present CEO ethos is to hire incompetant people, give them work they cannot do, and blame them when things go wrong. We should instead be automating everything, improving the automation and focusing on fixing the environment, preventing GMO issues, developing space travel, eliminating disease, examining strings (inside quarks and leptons) and creating better TV shows and books (etc etc). Instead, we are firing more and more people and creating a huge wage gap and funneling very little money into critical projects. There needs to be an about face in the planning of CEOs of today as their magazines are entirely bass-ackwards and laughable. They do do a good job of keeping wallstreet happy but not their workers. The ultimate result of this idiocy will be war in the US like that occurring in Syria and the Ukraine today. This war is preventable if Greenspan can see the light and change his statements. Just read history books, and look at what he is doing.... Its obvious.
Training courses cost money. What if you don't have the spare money to pay for them?
It was bad enough Greenspan led us into the last recession. Now he wants to lower wages on the middle class and increase profits for the rich by increasing H1Bs. What an utter fool. Note to Greenspan, when people talk about inequality, that includes the uber rich.
1. Bring in more cheap foreign labor
2. Profit!
3. ???
4. Reduced inequality. For reals you guys, I promise.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you offered $1M/yr to anybody willing to pick oranges you'd have no trouble filling the jobs
Sure you would because there would be no company able to make an economic profit selling them. No profit = no company = no jobs. This piece of your argument is a strawman.
If you offer $5/hr then nobody is willing to do the job, apparently.
Probably true in most of the US at least. Wages have to be high enough to allow people to pay for necessities of life in the location they live in. However labor costs in Mexico for picking produce are close to $4/DAY so it clearly is not true everywhere.
Chances are if you offered $10-20/hr you'd have no trouble filling the post.
The average wages of a field worker in the US in 2009 was $10.07/hour. (The linked article's conclusions are badly flawed as I'll detail below but the data on wages appears to be close to accurate)
The price of oranges probably wouldn't change much at all - if they could get a penny more for them they already would be doing so.
The price certainly would change if by some means the price of labor went up across the board. However given that these are globally traded commodities we are talking about (you can get oranges from outside the US), it's kind of a moot discussion. Even if we established a higher minimum wage within the US, significant production would simply move to where labor prices are lower. Not all, but significant amounts. This creates a de-facto cap on the price of food products. The cost cannot simply be passed on to consumers even if the consumers were willing to pay more, which they demonstrably are not. (See Walmart) You can place trade barriers but then you are increasing the cost of living for everyone to protect the jobs of a very small group of people.
he guys who own the farm would just make less money.
You are incorrectly presuming several things including that the farm is profitable and that farmers who are profitable are making large profits. Not typically true. Farming is a HARD business that frequently is not profitable and even in the best of circumstances tends to have modest profit margins.
The best data I've been able to get indicates that if you buy an orange for $1, about $0.30 of revenue goes to the owner of the farm and about $0.10 goes to the worker who actually picked the fruit. (Labor costs make up 42% of variable production costs.) The remaining $0.60 goes to the distribution network and various other players including grocery stores. Now that doesn't say anything about profit, just revenue. The farmer has a LOT of cost to their operation so the profits after expenses are negative profit margins for about 2/3 of farms, especially among smaller farms. That means they have zero ability to raise wages - they are already losing money. Bigger farms are more likely to achieve profits and even higher net margins (often >20%) but the profit picture varies wildly by farm. But even among the profitable farms the farmer gets to keep somewhere between $0.02 and $0.07 of the $1.00 you spent on that orange. Many don't get to keep any profit at all.
So, bottom line, if you raise wages by 50% ($0.05 on that $1.00 orange) you will essentially wipe out almost all profit in farming. I'm all for paying higher wages if we can but it isn't as easy as many are making it out to be.
I hear complaints all the time from a friend of mine who is himself an immigrant and always sees patients who are birthright citizens, which he commonly complains about because he had to go through hell to get here the normal way.)
"Normal way"? Do you speak Cherokee by any chance? This is a country that was founded by and is composed of people who immigrated here without asking the existing residents their opinion on the matter. Anyone who complains about it now is pretty much a hypocrite because most of us have ancestors that came here without asking permission.
That is also ignoring acts of terror:
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with immigration and everything to do with drug cartels. Got any other BS arguments you'd care to make?
Anyways I don't really view it as my problem. I intend on expatriating myself...
Please hurry up and do so.
Gates predicting anything ought to cast a cloud over the anything.
That has actually been the case locally. Where I live their has certainly not been any 'recovery' and the cases of violent crime, assaults, and theft have sky rocketed.
Jobs have been steadily dissapearing in my area and the last big corporation (GE transportation services) is planning to 'significantly reduce' it's workforce and move production elsewhere. Some 300,000 odd people live in the city here and easily another 200,000 in areas around here. A ever growing number no longer have jobs and work is becoming increasingly scarce. When you cannot legally afford food for yourself or your family your going to turn to means illegal to do so.
'Retraining' is typically a myth. My state will 'help' dislocated workers by funding a 2 year program (usually an associates degree) which no longer gets you a decent job with the glut of bachelors degree holders. Most businesses (not talking IT here) don't care if you personally know XYZ skill they want, if you don't have someone else (school, another business, etc) willing to say 'yeah he knows XYZ' then they won't even look at you.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Let's face it, everyone has a list of things in the world that they'd like to see made better with automation. Coffee Barista not getting your drink fast enough? Briggo has you covered (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/briggo_coffee_robot_should_starbucks_replace_baristas_with_machines.html) . Are troop deployments in the middle east exacting a heavy human toll on your Armed Forces? Withdraw troops and send in the drones (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/25/uk-controlling-drones-afghanistan-britain). Haven't we always done this? Didn't we replace horses and buggies with the Model T? It's standard operating procedure. Gates is totally right; at this point in our societal evolution, it's almost inevitable that people are going to be left behind because programming and tinkering is just not engaging for them (much as I wish this were not the case at all). Some folks are just not intellectually curious about technology and what it can do - it's not easy to convince everyone to become engineers or programmers and even most of the ones we have today aren't really all that great at what they do.
Why is anyone still listening to Alan Greenspan? Didn't his anti-regulation, hands-off policies almost steer the American Economy off a cliff just a few years ago? For heaven's sakes, he went before the House Oversight Committee in 2008 and did a mea culpa of all things (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB122476545437862295). I'm desperate to know who honestly wants to hear him give advice on economics.
start banning student loans or make them income based for 20 years MAX.
and with income based you have to make say at least X2-X3 min wage (full time base) to have to start paying.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...that douche-bag no longer holds the office.
Alternate economic systems have been attempted, even at large scale, without much success.
Actually, we did succeed. What gets called capitalism today is significantly different from capitalism 150 years ago. For better or worse, we did move beyond capitalism.
We call what we have capitalism (or the closest thing to it) mostly for marketing reasons.
He wants to fix income inequality by reducing the income of the middle class? I must be missing something important.
How does this "true communism" you speak of differ from the one that's been tried, and has failed over and over and over?
People make this claim all the time, but true communism is really very nice, but breaks down when the communist society grows to more than about 100-150 members. Capitalism scales up much better, but of course people look at the fascistic, heavily interventionist system used in the US today and think it's an example of "failed capitalism". Of course it's not capitalism at all, but in fact has the same issues that Communist Russia did - people at the top controlling everything, and distribution of resources is based on friendships and political alliances instead of the economic system that is supposed to be doing the allocation.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
is so relative...when IT people making $100K/yr are just getting by...despite being in the top 10% of earners, it's amazing to me that most people are dealing with less.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Sometimes I think that the income inequality is being implemented actively as a policy to reduce green house gas emissions. make the middle class a poor as possible to reduce their consumption load. I would be curious to see a chart of the carbon footprints of the different income groups in the usa vs their economic output. An alternate theory is that maybe they know that there is a coming economic collapse and the wealth might as well be concentrated. I think there was a story written about survivors on a life raft where they had to kill some people early on because they knew there was no rescue and they were dependent on the ocean current to get them to land but it would take several weeks. that way supplies would last long enough for the few that did eventually did make it to land. With the wealth concentrated in a few, they can preserve a spark of civilization so when the dark times are over, they can teach the survivors that is wrong to eat human flesh, how to use a fork, and what wines go with which food.
One of my best friends is an anchor baby and was planned as one from the beginning some 30 years back. That problem is real and you're delusional if you think that's not still happening.
Start?
Have you been in a coma the last 20 years?
If you have to import your innovation it isn't actually yours.
"Communism can only function when there is enough stuff that no one has to work to have their wants fulfilled." That's an interesting thought, anyway.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The only potential solution I can think of is what some have called 'Computational Socialism'.
The way I see it, all power corrupts and that the government's role should be to provide for its citizens. If we accept the tenet that all power corrupts then we should make every attempt possible at removing people from the equation in government. The vast majority of functions a government makes are mechanistic and often require so many variables that no person could make a logical decision. These should be governed by algorithms that are clear and open source. Decisions made by the algorithm also provide 'proofs' for how the policy was created. It is the people's job to check and verify the proofs and use them as a basis for arguments one way or the other. Tweaking of the algorithms should be evidence based and with public support.
Get people out of government!
just print a lot more money and pump it in system, you could even use opportunity to buy some undervalued resources/buildings/whatever in name of goverment
David Brooks conservative?! LOL, are you serious? I don't give a crap what he calls himself. That man is no conservative.
Income inequality is irrelevant. Income is irrelevant unless if it compared against expenses in terms of buying power. Who cares what the top 1% make. BTW that is 3.12 Millions Americans and includes those making $250,000 year or more. Many of them small businesses that business AGI passes through the persons 1040. Love that top 1% line, shows that most people suck at math.
Who gives a rats ass about the super rich? Some are good and some are bad. Quit whining and do something about your own economic affairs and quit worrying about others.
We do have the resources to feed, clothe and shelter everyone on this planet.
And after we've redistributed all of that to everyone on the planet, what incentive is left to keep producing so much?
I think it's time to start talking about moving past a capitalistic economy.
Because we didn't start talking in 1917, and didn't talk about it again in 1991. Right? No worse problems introduced here!
How about you guys figure out a way to make a democracy that doesn't devolve into corporatism, and then we'll talk about giving democracy more power.
Yet this would absolutely have been called AI 20 years ago.
Sure, that sounds like it would work just fine, as long as you couple it with a reasonable set of individual rights to protect against tyranny of the majority. People would get a voice (ideally a veto right) regarding any decisions which negatively affect them, and the freedom to act as they wish otherwise. This system even has a name already: capitalism.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Of course Gates, and his laptop, are going to spew the same old propaganda. That is only to be expected.
The shame is: STEM workers have no voice, no place at the table.
The public can hear *one* side of this discussion, and that's it.
Lou Dobbs was one of the few reporters who had anything to say about the massive abuses of visa workers, and illegal immigrants; now he has totally sold out to Fox news.
If STEM workers want to save their careers, they need to organize, raise money, lobby, and speak out.
When he talks about eliminating inequality by bringing the top down, he doesn't mean bringing down the 1%ers like himself and Gates. He's talking about bringing down all the skilled workers in the top 5-10% down to the level of unskilled workers. This doesn't actually reduce income inequality (it actually makes it worse), so he's full of crap. This has long been Greenspan's desire; it annoys him to no end that people who do things can aspire to salaries as high as lower-level banksters.
Exactly - this is the hidden progressive agenda in the entire "income equality" meme, to get rid of the middle class. Think of every effort supported in the past 40 years that was an attempt to get the very wealthy to pay more of their "fair share". In the end, what gets implemented always makes the middle class worse off, and doesn't really affect the very wealthy at all. The latest was the attempt to "go after" all those fat cats supposedly hiding their money in tax havens overseas. Google is still using the Bahamas to retain their fortunes, and so are many others. But the laws they passed have certainly screwed over the middle class workers. Again.
People need to stop buying into this rhetoric that politicians are going to help the middle class. The middle class is the biggest threat to their power.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"Communism can only function when there is enough stuff that no one has to work to have their wants fulfilled."
That is a stupid, simplistic, and biased belief. In fact, many people want to work, and there is far more than enough for everyone on this planet, if only it is distributed more evenly. Nobody really has to work very hard in our modern world if certain things which shit on people's work are not done. But society is structured specifically to force or coerce people to keep running around on treadmills so that they don't run up and stick a torch or a pitchfork into a career criminal who's based their livelihood on abuse of others.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I doubt that outright communism will ever make sense, but I suspect that as technology advances the ideal economic model will probably be a lot closer to it than the capitalism of the past. What choice is there once technology advances to the point where there is no need to employ humans at all?
Capitalism isn't about labor, it's about capital—of which the capacity for labor is but one example. The advanced technology you speak of is another form of capital. If anything, the emergence of more advanced forms of capital requires a more capitalistic form of economy. More people will need to become capitalists, owning and managing the machines which do the work, rather than trying to market their own labor.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Yes, those annoying progressives, destroying unions and worker protections so the rich can make more money.
Yes, those annoying progressives, destroying unions and worker protections so the rich can make more money.
What have they done for us lately?
These new systems and the newer AI's will use humans as their "work force" simply fit a human with a Google Glass like interface allowing the AI to use visual and auditory instructions to direct the human through a task.
No more trade schools, no more education as they will be replaced with a simple icon set and spoken language..
Humans have dexterity, mobility, and are cheap and plentiful, so with 8 - 9 billion people and no jobs, you get to have an AI tell you to clean up the parking lot and toilets of the 1%.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That number includes people that stay in homeless shelters, which any homeless person can do unless they get kicked out for violence or drugs. Even homeless people that are not staying in homeless shelters are obviously finding some sort of shelter. Otherwise they would be dying like crazy. Even so, the point is any homeless person can find a homeless shelter or some other place to stay for free.
My original point in my response to the OP was that homeless people have all the basic needs they need to live even if they don't work or benefit society in any way. You could call them greedy for wanting more for doing nothing to benefit society. How much do they deserve for doing nothing?
Those greedy capitalists provide some sort of benefit to someone to get more money. If those damn greedy capitalists didn't improve society so far with all their damn inventions and improvements to make life easier nearly everyone would be impoverished by today's definition. Several hundred years in the future the standard of the current a middle class American will be considered poverty level again because those damn greedy capitalists will figure out ways to improve life for money.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
When I told my parents I was getting married, they painted an optimistic picture of my future: a happy family life, with my children growing up in a prosperous society. I believed it, because it seemed to be true. Now I have two teenage daughters and I advise them to not have children and prepare for a tough and frugal future. I believe it, because it seems to be true. How far we have fallen in one generation.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
I doubt that outright communism will ever make sense, but I suspect that as technology advances the ideal economic model will probably be a lot closer to it than the capitalism of the past. What choice is there once technology advances to the point where there is no need to employ humans at all?
Capitalism isn't about labor, it's about capital—of which the capacity for labor is but one example. The advanced technology you speak of is another form of capital. If anything, the emergence of more advanced forms of capital requires a more capitalistic form of economy. More people will need to become capitalists, owning and managing the machines which do the work, rather than trying to market their own labor.
The problem with this logic is what happens if people DON'T end up owning capital. People who don't own capital and who aren't employable will simply starve to death in a society that rejects socialism and effectively prevents crime.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
The idea has some potential, but I have two main reservations: First there's a great deal of the social experience which would seem to be extremely difficult if not impossible to codify algorithmically, and is thus intractable to computational analysis. The second is the old truism: To err is human, but to really %$#@! things up you need a computer.
One of my own thoughts on the matter is what you might call transferable direct democracy - give every citizen an anonymous vote on each bill, etc, and the option to let their vote be cast by someone else if they choose to abstain (which I would assume would be the usual case for most people). You can then anonymously transfer your vote to your pastor, a teacher, or even that guy at the bar that always seems to have something insightful to say about whatever is being discussed. The transferees (aka representatives) then have the option to cast those votes, or transfer them to someone else - but unlike with their personal vote, the way they cast their "vote pool" will be public knowledge to mitigate recurring abuse. The result I believe would be a semi-hierarchical vote-transferring system, with votes getting increasingly concentrated onto individuals with broad direct or indirect support, granting the representatives with the broadest appeal substantial political power. Importantly though that power can be revoked at any moment if citizens decide to anonymously transfer their vote to someone more worthy, or vote personally on a particular bill. Such a system could even be implemented within the context of a political party within a more traditional government, essentially "remote controlling" the vote of a representative.
The result would be a much-leveled political playing field where *anyone* can gather political power simply by convincing individuals to transfer their vote, rather than only being able to choose among those who've manged to secure enough political backing to get on the ballot, with others getting no power at all. It would also allow a much greater network of trust to flourish - each person can transfer their vote to someone they personally know and trust - Even assuming a miniscule fanout of about 10 supporters per representative, it's only ten steps to concentrate all the votes in the US into a single "consensus vote". And at each stage the representative's direct constituency is small enough that they can directly engage with the major "sub-representatives", discussing their desires and concerns, and those of the groups they represent. With a fanout of 30 or so such dialogs would still be pretty viable, and with only 6 steps between private citizens and nationwide consensus a viable nationwide discussion is potentially possible about really thorny issues.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't think he mentioned the word 'communism' at all.
If you went back to March 17,1964*, and sat down at the pub to have a drink with an average person on the street, or even the average person in the field, and asked them if they though a machine that listens to what you ask, searches the whole of human knowledge and can either provide you the answer, or a map to the location was intelligent, they would say yes. The problem is that we have better refined the question as it is being answered.
* Do not attempt to time travel to 1964 unless you are a WASP. This may be really bad for your health.
How are H1-B visas going to have any effect on the uppoer tier of society? It will just continue the death of the middle class and we'll be left with a society where you either live like a king or in poverty. I'm sure that's what he wants but I can't believe no one wouldn't be able to see through his stupidity.
Greenspan Lies.
Analysis shows most H1-Bs are being used to outsource US jobs to contractors from India and China.
The more worrying thing is they're now slurping up all the L1, L2, and other education waivers that real US universities and colleges need for real students just to employ wage farmers from other countries in America.
(obviously my personal opinion)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The human brain isn't a random network of neurons that gets trained into adulthood. If you take two random people and give them the same stimulus, they're going to use the same regions of the brain to respond to it, generally speaking. The part of your brain that recognizes faces is the same as the part of my brain which does this (well, several parts most likely).
There is some degree of flexibility around how it is wired as we grow, but if you have a stroke in the region of the brain that handles vision you're not suddenly going to regain your sight after 20 years of training and rewiring.
And then you have the things we are still learning about how these parts of the brain are used. There was an article here an slashdot a week or two ago where someone made a device that creates sounds from the images taken from a camera. Blind people were learning to navigate around rooms and objects and even learning to recognize people with the sounds created. Anyway, the interesting part was the parts of the brain that were active in decoding the sounds was the vision parts of the brain. So even though the input was coming through the ears, the fact that it was being decoded into visual data meant that part of the brain gets activated. We don't understand how our brain does than yet, so it will probably be quite a while before AI is that flexible.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
In what language and on what planet does "Capitalistic" mean "Unfettered human cooperation"?
http://media.merriamwebster.co...
Where did I ever suggest it will never happen? I was merely responding to the ridiculous claims that we are just around the corner of true AI that mimics the human brain. I am sure we will get there eventually, it just won't be this decade or the next and quite possibly not for a few more after that.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
For a start, if they understood that then they could start working toward it. Naturally, if they really have no capacity for earning money beyond the minimum needed to survive then they'll need help of some sort. Apart from that (rare) case, there is always some opportunity to set some savings aside. Over time, perhaps several generations, those savings add up. Also, the flip side of the technology-driven obsolescence of labor is dramatically lower prices. After all, the whole point of using machines is that they're cheaper than humans for the same tasks. That means you don't have to earn as much to support yourself.
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
It's not quite that simple. Capital doesn't just magically appear for each new person, you know. It's a scarce resource, like anything else. If everyone is entitled to sufficient capital to sustain them simply by virtue of being born, then you have to somehow limit births to what you can accommodate out of surplus capital. People tend not to appreciate that sort of interference in their personal lives, which means some of them will want to leave. If they are prevented from leaving then you have an authoritarian dystopia. However, if you let them leave then your system is no longer universal; those who are born outside become second-class citizens from the commune's perspective. If those who leave happen to prosper more than the commune (which is historically likely) then more will leave and the commune will fade away. If not, you still have the problem that there are more people than your commune can support, so you can't just invite the extras back into the fold.
A capitalist society will respect the rights of the communists living in it to join together for their own common good; the problem is more the reverse, as the communists, eschewing property rights among themselves, often fail to respect the property rights of those who choose not to join the commune. You're quite welcome to start up a commune along the lines of your ideal system of government, provided you accept its boundaries and don't force anyone to join (or stay). I think you'll find, however, that if you want it to last you'll have to impose some conditions; simply granting a full share to anyone born into the commune won't work over the long run for the same reason democracy stops working once enough people learn they can simply vote themselves money from the treasury. It's fine as long as you have enough people dedicated to the ideal of the commune and willing to put in the necessary extra effort voluntarily, but that never lasts.
A co-op which guaranteed a basic income to its members out of capital gains and/or dividends on shared investments would be an interesting and practical experiment. I think it would be necessary to limit the induction of new members, however. If the system works it could be gradually expanded over time.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
A data point for you...
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/031114-use-of-h-1b-alternative-279587.html
I haven't heard so much silver-spoon, coddled rich nonsense since the last RNC. Nice job.
So why is it that, under 'prosperous capitalism', toilet cleaners aren't paid much more than video game testers?
That is a stupid, simplistic, and biased belief. In fact, many people want to work, and there is far more than enough for everyone on this planet
I'd like to see your reasoning that shows there are enough people that want to work to support those who don't want to work. Because I don't want to work (on things that society cares about, anyway), and I would want to even less if I were a garbage man. So why do you think there will be enough people supporting the rest voluntarily?
But society is structured specifically to force or coerce people to keep running around on treadmills
If that bothers you, retire, or have your hours reduced.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, part of me wonders if they're not "vision" parts of the brain so much as "visualization" parts of the brain.
I know somebody who had a stroke and has a bunch of fairly specific impairments. The interesting thing is that the relationship between these impairments aren't ones you'd normally think of, but they make sense. For example, certain types of language deficiencies tend to also cause issues with short-term memory capacity. Aspects of processing language probably involve short-term memory, and one of the ways that you keep things in your short-term memory is to recite them to yourself in your head. So, a problem that makes it hard to communicate with others actually makes it hard to consciously think about things (in the sense of talking to yourself, or your deity).
Read up on the wikipedia entry on the cerebellum some time. For a long time it was thought of as the motor/balance part of the brain. It seems more that it is the part of the brain that actually operates like all those classical neural networks do - supervised learning. It makes sense that balance is something that would benefit from this type of approach (sensors are inputs, muscle movements are outputs, train for signals that tend to result in stability). People with damage to this area can move, but lose balance/coordination. That makes sense - the voluntary control is there, but that unconscious network-based auto-correction isn't there. It is used in other functions as well.
Part of me thinks that the brain is really just a collection of neural tissues where each region develops a particular structure, and then the connections between them are used to link areas such that particular tasks can be performed. Take a region that generates conscious movement, route it through the cerebellum, and the output is auto-stabilized conscious movement. During embryonic development some kind of fractal-like algorithm results in various parts of the brain having certain neural arrangements, and then the big picture of the brain is just linking them together. It is a bit like the "unix way" for grey matter - a little tar, a little awk, a few pipes, and you get something neat.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
For a start, if they understood that then they could start working toward it. Naturally, if they really have no capacity for earning money beyond the minimum needed to survive then they'll need help of some sort. Apart from that (rare) case, there is always some opportunity to set some savings aside. Over time, perhaps several generations, those savings add up. Also, the flip side of the technology-driven obsolescence of labor is dramatically lower prices. After all, the whole point of using machines is that they're cheaper than humans for the same tasks. That means you don't have to earn as much to support yourself.
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food?
Sure, food is cheap, but why would somebody who owns a farm bother to give you food if you have nothing at all to offer for it? He doesn't need your labor. Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
It's not quite that simple. Capital doesn't just magically appear for each new person, you know. It's a scarce resource, like anything else. If everyone is entitled to sufficient capital to sustain them simply by virtue of being born, then you have to somehow limit births to what you can accommodate out of surplus capital. People tend not to appreciate that sort of interference in their personal lives, which means some of them will want to leave. If they are prevented from leaving then you have an authoritarian dystopia. However, if you let them leave then your system is no longer universal; those who are born outside become second-class citizens from the commune's perspective. If those who leave happen to prosper more than the commune (which is historically likely) then more will leave and the commune will fade away. If not, you still have the problem that there are more people than your commune can support, so you can't just invite the extras back into the fold.
Agree on all points. A communistic society probably cannot allow free reproduction or emigration and remain functional for all the reasons you cite.
A capitalist society will respect the rights of the communists living in it to join together for their own common good; the problem is more the reverse, as the communists, eschewing property rights among themselves, often fail to respect the property rights of those who choose not to join the commune.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
You're quite welcome to start up a commune along the lines of your ideal system of government, provided you accept its boundaries and don't force anyone to join (or stay).
Thanks for your offer - you are clearly a generous man! :)
A co-op which guaranteed a basic income to its members out of capital gains and/or dividends on shared investments would be an interesting and practical experiment. I think it would be necessary to limit the induction of new members, however. If the system works it could be gradually expanded over time.
It would never work. Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
Exactly. It's much more macho (and socially acceptable) to threaten someone indirectly by supporting violent policies.
re: the sentence: Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan believes one way to attack income inequity is to raise the H-1B cap.
Perhaps he would like to be a part of one of the many families whose breadwinners are shoved out of jobs because American companies go abroad to hire folks -- often without even really bothering to look locally. That might give him a better idea of what out to be done with the H-1B visa program -- trash it.
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food? ... Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
No, I'm assuming that even in a society technologically advanced enough that almost everything is done by machines, there will still be ways you can make yourself useful enough to someone to earn what you need to survive. If nothing else, you can always grow your own food, build your own shelter—it's not much, but with knowledge of modern science and access to cultivated seedstock you'd still have an advantage over most humans throughout history. Of course, we're talking about the bottom 0.01% here, under the assumption that they don't have any marketable skills whatsoever and can't rely on charity or salvage to get by, none of which seems very realistic to me.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
It goes further than that. The commune has to do more than just force you to nominally join; it has to force you to contribute. Without, needless to say, offering positive incentives conditioned on your contribution, since that would go against the whole point of a commune. The commune essentially has to consider each individual's skills and labor property of the commune rather than the individual, with failure to contribute according to one's ability punishable as a form of theft from the commune. As I see it, a system where each individual is a slave to the group is no better than one with distinct slaves and masters.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
I'm glad to see that we're in agreement, then. I thought you were advocating a communist society.
Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
It wouldn't be up to them. The organization's charter would dictate its purpose as providing a basic income to as many people as it can afford, starting with those most in need, after targeting a particular rate of growth. A bit like a trust, really. The idea would be that you start with a some donated seed money, say $10M. That gets invested at a real return of, say, 7%. You want to target 6% growth, so that leaves 1% of $10M ($100k), which you split five ways to provide a basic income of $20k each for five individual members. Assuming conditions remain unchanged, after 25 years you could support up to 21 members. After a century, nearly 1700 members. After three centuries, 3.5 billion members. Of course, the real world won't be this tidy, and there is plenty of room for fine-tuning, but the basic principle seems sound.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
What Alan G is smoking is very, very expensive and requires the rest of us to drudge for him -and his ilk.
H1-b increases only depress the middle class and enrich the CEO class - as he well KNOWS! Off with his head...
(I actually heard a VC say that he votes democratic just to stave of the revolution. Of with his head too...)
"The peasants have no bread!"
"Then let them eat cake!" -M. Antoinette
gates is behind the curve again on the obvious..
i regularly automate manual processes done by humans that can be repeatedly done by machines, software and computer systems, cheaper, faster and more efficient. this has been ongoing since the dawn of time.
be well mr. gates.. the path to heaven is paid with best intentions found in hell.
Gates wants more charter schools and Greenspan has an epiphany.
30 hours per week = 25% more room for workers!
Thanks for your shill post. I hope you recover from your Stockholm Syndrome someday.
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food? ... Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
No, I'm assuming that even in a society technologically advanced enough that almost everything is done by machines, there will still be ways you can make yourself useful enough to someone to earn what you need to survive. If nothing else, you can always grow your own food, build your own shelter—it's not much, but with knowledge of modern science and access to cultivated seedstock you'd still have an advantage over most humans throughout history.
You can't grow food or build a shelter unless you have land to grow/build on. That is capital too.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
It goes further than that. The commune has to do more than just force you to nominally join; it has to force you to contribute. Without, needless to say, offering positive incentives conditioned on your contribution, since that would go against the whole point of a commune. The commune essentially has to consider each individual's skills and labor property of the commune rather than the individual, with failure to contribute according to one's ability punishable as a form of theft from the commune.
Agreed, though I don't think that a communist society must treat everybody COMPLETELY equally. You can have incentives to produce and still have what amounts to a communist society. Obviously there is a continuum between "pure" communism, EU-style socialism, and US-style socialism.
As I see it, a system where each individual is a slave to the group is no better than one with distinct slaves and masters.
Depends on who runs the group.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
I'm glad to see that we're in agreement, then. I thought you were advocating a communist society.
Who says I'm not?
That is unfortunately the crux of the problem. I think a US-style capitalist society is eventually going to progress to the point where everybody is slaves to a handful of super-wealthy, assuming that more than a handful of people are even allowed to live. On the other hand, communism requires totalitarianism, and totalitarian governments tend to turn into human meat grinders eventually (they're basically as good as the folks in charge - history tells us that dictators can sometimes be relatively benevolent but sooner or later you end up with a Stalin/Hitler/etc - rule by committee probably would help to moderate some of the negative extremes, but also the positive extremes as well and tends to result in lots of corruption).
So, I think the next 100 years are likely to be a big mess any which way...
Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
It wouldn't be up to them. The organization's charter would dictate its purpose as providing a basic income to as many people as it can afford, starting with those most in need, after targeting a particular rate of growth. A bit like a trust, really. The idea would be that you start with a some donated seed money, say $10M. That gets invested at a real return of, say, 7%. You want to target 6% growth, so that leaves 1% of $10M ($100k), which you split
I can't be replaced because I write fiction for a living. In English. I can write up to 12,000 words a day.
An AI capable of writing fiction that people would buy and read may well be less than 30 years away. Once it happens even James Patterson will play John Henry to the indefatigable writing automaton.
...and none of that will change a darned thing. Tech will continue to slowly enrich the poor, and the rich will reap those same benefits, while using the output of the poor to create an ever-widening gap. In other words, the poor get richer slowly, the rich get richer really, really fast.
Like any curve fed by human choices, the poor's enrichment in fine grain is a wiggly bastard, but look at the holdings of the US poor in 1700, 1800, 1900, and 2000 and tell me with a straight face there isn't a significant upward lift that is growing ever steeper. Do the same for the top tiers. Although the latter is hardly a curve... more like a vertical line. The top tier can own a spaceship, a submarine and a yacht as *toys*, it's beyond stunning where we are today. And in 2100? Can't even imagine it. In the meantime, the majority of the poor have shelter, refrigerators, tv's, cellphones, running water, streaming audio and video, nearly free entertainment, sanitation, computers, network access, ready access to all manner of comestibles, basic services from police and fire departments (although they're still screwed in court), immensely strong military protection, nice clothing... if you could show that to someone from 1700 and tell them that's a poor person's lot... their head would explode.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.