Slashdot Mirror
What Happens To Society When Robots Replace Workers?
Paul Fernhout writes: An article in the Harvard Business Review by William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone suggests: "The "Second Economy" (the term used by economist Brian Arthur to describe the portion of the economy where computers transact business only with other computers) is upon us. It is, quite simply, the virtual economy, and one of its main byproducts is the replacement of workers with intelligent machines powered by sophisticated code. ... This is why we will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value. Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century. ... Ultimately, we need a new, individualized, cultural, approach to the meaning of work and the purpose of life. Otherwise, people will find a solution — human beings always do — but it may not be the one for which we began this technological revolution."
This follows the recent Slashdot discussion of "Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates" citing a NY Times article and other previous discussions like Humans Need Not Apply. What is most interesting to me about this HBR article is not the article itself so much as the fact that concerns about the economic implications of robotics, AI, and automation are now making it into the Harvard Business Review. These issues have been otherwise discussed by alternative economists for decades, such as in the Triple Revolution Memorandum from 1964 — even as those projections have been slow to play out, with automation's initial effect being more to hold down wages and concentrate wealth rather than to displace most workers. However, they may be reaching the point where these effects have become hard to deny despite going against mainstream theory which assumes infinite demand and broad distribution of purchasing power via wages.
As to possible solutions, there is a mention in the HBR article of using government planning by creating public works like infrastructure investments to help address the issue. There is no mention in the article of expanding the "basic income" of Social Security currently only received by older people in the U.S., expanding the gift economy as represented by GNU/Linux, or improving local subsistence production using, say, 3D printing and gardening robots like Dewey of "Silent Running." So, it seems like the mainstream economics profession is starting to accept the emerging reality of this increasingly urgent issue, but is still struggling to think outside an exchange-oriented box for socioeconomic solutions. A few years ago, I collected dozens of possible good and bad solutions related to this issue. Like Davidow and Malone, I'd agree that the particular mix we end up will be a reflection of our culture. Personally, I feel that if we are heading for a technological "singularity" of some sort, we would be better off improving various aspects of our society first, since our trajectory going out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into it.
This follows the recent Slashdot discussion of "Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates" citing a NY Times article and other previous discussions like Humans Need Not Apply. What is most interesting to me about this HBR article is not the article itself so much as the fact that concerns about the economic implications of robotics, AI, and automation are now making it into the Harvard Business Review. These issues have been otherwise discussed by alternative economists for decades, such as in the Triple Revolution Memorandum from 1964 — even as those projections have been slow to play out, with automation's initial effect being more to hold down wages and concentrate wealth rather than to displace most workers. However, they may be reaching the point where these effects have become hard to deny despite going against mainstream theory which assumes infinite demand and broad distribution of purchasing power via wages.
As to possible solutions, there is a mention in the HBR article of using government planning by creating public works like infrastructure investments to help address the issue. There is no mention in the article of expanding the "basic income" of Social Security currently only received by older people in the U.S., expanding the gift economy as represented by GNU/Linux, or improving local subsistence production using, say, 3D printing and gardening robots like Dewey of "Silent Running." So, it seems like the mainstream economics profession is starting to accept the emerging reality of this increasingly urgent issue, but is still struggling to think outside an exchange-oriented box for socioeconomic solutions. A few years ago, I collected dozens of possible good and bad solutions related to this issue. Like Davidow and Malone, I'd agree that the particular mix we end up will be a reflection of our culture. Personally, I feel that if we are heading for a technological "singularity" of some sort, we would be better off improving various aspects of our society first, since our trajectory going out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into it.
First the good news. We'll have more time to post on slashdot.
Now the bad news. We'll have more time to post to slashdot.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Robots are machines. Human being replaced by machines in the industry is hardly a new issue.
Until now, humans that were replaced by machines could find other jobs. Not any more. Increasingly, we're becoming like "Captain Dunsel" - a part that fulfills no useful purpose.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
we'll start reading articles every week or two on /. about how things HAVE changed rather than the weekly speculation of how they will change.
The primary problem we have today is not automation, it is over-concentration of wealth. Automation will destroy jobs to the extent that the people running the companies implementing the automation wish it to. If those companies are run by people who are happy to deliver worse service as long as they can pay fewer people, then, yes, we have a problem, but it is not with the technology.
There is no such thing a technological determinism. It's people all the way down.
Maybe we should re-examine every law, regulation, and employer mandate that makes it more expensive or more risky to hire people or conduct business that would employ people?
Sounds like Manna:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
What a bullshit question! Everything should be free then. DUH! If there is no need for work, there is no need to ration goods and services to those who can 'pay'. Human effort is the only thing that requires compensation.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Robots are machines. Human being replaced by machines in the industry is hardly a new issue.
Until now, humans that were replaced by machines could find other jobs.
Except that America is approaching full employment, and high unemployment in Europe is caused by dumb fiscal and monetary policies rather than robots stealing job. A jobless economy is a fun thing to chat about on Slashdot, but it is still a long, long way from reality. Automation is replacing workers, but at no greater rate than other times during the last few centuries of progress.
Socialism.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Except "customer support" is being automated too. And is considered to be part of the "service sector" as well, doubling undermining your argument.
Free markets haven't even been tried.
> there's always new jobs.. even if its working in "customer support" or marketing.
That is an article of faith, not fact.
> There's a reason the West has migrated jobs from manufacturing to the service sector,
Your faith that both sectors can support an equivalent number of jobs at equivalent levels of compensation is unfounded and is in contradiction to the reality of what's happened in the US where much of what was once the middle class has become the working poor.
Is of course to do away with money.
How will you divide resources? How will you deal with the fact that some people will value some resources, and other people will value others? How will you deal with the fact that not everyone can have exactly the same stuff, no matter how hard you try? (some people are going to live closer to the railroad station, others farther).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Free markets are as old the world, but people don't like it when a handful of people end up getting everything, and the rest gets nothing.
Socialism: an economic system in which the workers control the means of production. If the workers are all robots, that bodes ill for humanity. I hope you meant "communism" instead.
Except, unlike globalization which moves jobs around, robotization just kills the jobs (i.e. no foreign workers to benefit this time around).
' Except that foreign workers are still benefiting.
In my opinion, it will be painful in developing countries most of all since America (and the "West") already kind of went through that so it's just one more nail in the coffin.
It has to happen first.
Machines have depressed wages, and concentrated wealth? That's why the 'poor' are walking around with smart phones and have internet and cable at home, right? Why the standard of living is so good?
Fucking balderdash. If and when robots take over production, and they displace jobs, it won't be until the market value of what they produce is low enough to be purchased by those who have been displaced.
The writer of the snippet implies greediness as a problem, without following through with how greediness buoys things too.
Again, free markets haven't been tried.
The poor won't be able to afford AI to work for them.
Good news: Bennet Haselton is going away. Bad news: He is being replaced by the Ramble-bot 1000.
It has not been "chased out" of any where. What you see is the people who own the companies looking for the cheapest means to produce their products.
Look closer and you will see that the people who own the companies are NOT moving their families to the countries where they've moved their companies.
They want cheap for the workers ... but they want all the benefits and luxuries of the 1st world available to themselves.
If it really was "chased out" then they'd also be moving their families to those less-regulated, less-restricted countries.
As can been seen when people leave countries/governments that they believe ARE oppressive. They take their families with them.
There's no point in repeating your statement, when we can all read the first one again. Instead, try explaining what you mean by "free".
This has been hashed out numerous times in both academic and casual literature. Science fiction talks about it a lot.
It's simple (hah):
1) Mandate very short work weeks, so everyone still works, just 15-20 hours/week
2) at the same annual wage.
If you have a 2:1 productivity increase, that would imply that you're deriving twice as much industrial output from each worker, so they only have to work half as long, and the "cost per unit sold" for that labor is exactly the same (less the capital investment in the automation)
That has the effect of transferring some of the wealth increase due to the productivity gain to the workers (all of the world, who should unite)
The problem is that median wages have been stagnating for decades.
Your solution to the problem is to lower them further.
there's always new jobs.. even if its working in "customer support" or marketing.
The problem is that these jobs pay relatively less, leading to growing income inequality. They also tend to be outsourceable. My company has a lot of graphic design work, that requires artistic skill, and human judgement. A job like that is a long way from being automated. So we pay a woman in Karachi, Pakistan to do it for $3/hour.
I'm not going to deny the problems in Europe (especially in some countries) are worse, HOWEVER: our labor statistics are quite cherry picked and that has been getting worse. People have been re-classified as "not looking for work" that are in fact looking for work. You can't compare our "unemployment" rate now to the numbers we used during the great depression.
no self respecting robot will put up with the shit that the average worker does, they'll go straight into management instead. The're already running wall street, so the cocaine intake capability is there, all we need to do now is teach them golf.
Nullius in verba
What the fuck ever, only in your dream world.
Go back to your virtual world. "Free Markets" are a conceptual device like "frictionless inclined planes". They cannot exist in the real world, because of things like entropy and quantisation, and "stuff".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yes. This is basic supply and demand. Due to globalization and automation, the supply of labor has gone up a lot over the past few decades. Either find ways to increase the demand for that labor or expect a decline in price. That's how economic systems work.
I think adaptation is a better solution than the current approach for the developed world. Keep in mind that the developing world doesn't have the stagnating median wage problem. Shouldn't we adapt or emulate within reason the approaches that have been demonstrated to be successful, than the approaches that have been demonstrated to be failures?
Didn't you hear? The future is going to be post-scarcity and stuff. So no-one will have to worry about where resources come from. We can all have our own Death Stars built by robots from unicorn farts.
Communism spreads through its seductiveness, and the justified fear of technology-driven joblessness is creating a seductive call for New Communism: The Basic Income.
The results will be the same as we have seen in other communist countries: forced abortions and forced sterilizations. I was pleased to see the linked list of possible solutions/outcomes include mention of abortion, but was disappointed to see lack of mention of forced abortion and forced sterilization. We don't need to turn to sci fi novels as these materials do; we need only look to communist countries of today.
Capitalism is no solution either, for that would lead to increased wealth disparity and a situation not too different than communism (total control by corporation vs. total control by government).
Technology won't be able to be put back into the toothpaste tube. The idea of establishing low-technology enclaves or communes won't work because the wealth and military capability generated by those who kept technology will seek to consume all resources. Land will be too expensive to acquire to establish an enclave, and surely too expensive to defend.
A minimally regulated market which has perfect knowledge by all participants.
What would you propose doing to promote a more ideal free market that hasn't yet been tried after 5000 years of human civilization?
And the funds for this 'universal hourly wage' comes from....where, exactly?
They cannot exist in the real world, because of things like entropy and quantisation, and "stuff".
So free markets haven't been tried. Do you see where I'm going with this?
I think what he means is more like what some call "socialism" in Europe. And it's not worker's necessarily controlling the means to production: it's about providing more of a "safety net" via social services. Communism as an economic theory and communism in practice are obviously two different things.
The best suggestion in the whole thread - but a very poor reflection on the others :-{
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
This is the ultimate failure of communism and marxism, it has no means to communicate value signals, never had and never will.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? Because last I looked, most of the developed world continues to struggle with unemployment.
It sucks that the second and third world have problems. That doesn't mean the problems of the first world don't exist, or aren't potentially lethal.
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps. Both jackbooted security forces and food assistance require money. And that, in turn, means the only difference between keeping - or preferably rising - the minimum wage or lowering it is that in the latter case my taxes ultimately go to subsidize McDonald's and Wal-Mart's profits and oppress people.
What valuable economic activity would that be? Surely you aren't referring to activities so unprofitable that paying minimum wage for them is a "punishment"?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And the funds for this 'universal hourly wage' comes from....where, exactly?
You don't get it, you see. The leftists I know tell me that the factory owners won't be able to sell stuff if the rest of us don't have money, so they'll give money to the government to give to us, so we'll be able to buy their stuff and they'll get rich.
It's clearly insane, but it apparently makes perfect sense in Lefty Logic.
The last line of the article is the most important. " Otherwise, people will find a solution — human beings always do — but it may not be the one for which we began this technological revolution." The word "revolution" here is a double entendre. He is saying something you will not often read in the Harvard Business Review: that automation is going to destabilize society to an extreme extent.
mbone, you are exactly correct that this is about concentration of wealth. The concentration of wealth is self-limiting because nobody will have money to buy the goods being produced. But conditions of life at the limit will be unbearable. So a new mechanism to distribute the bounty of society will have to be developed. But the rich will not recognize that until the mobs with pitchforks are breaking into their gated communities.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down. Eventually, many people's market value may end up to be essentially zero vs. robots, regardless of what kind of country they live in. You would then probably advocate that we encourage them to work for free; problem solved!
The approaches of the past may not apply it all in the potentially a drastically different future dominated by self-directed automation.
Why don't we discuss what you think is wrong with my assertion?
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps.
No, that's what happens when you raise the minimum wage while keeping interest rates so low that the cost of capital makes automation much cheaper than humans. Rather than pay people to do stuff, you just borrow money to install machines that do it, instead.
You and your comrades in government are effectively paying corporations to get rid of human employees, just so you can whine about it afterwards.
Man, even in Star Trek, some people got to wear blue shirts, and some people had to wear red shirts. Apparently there was a shortage of blue thread or something, but red thread doesn't seem to protect very well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Another way to look at it: Marx under-estimated the value of people who know how to allocate resources (capital). Those who don't do it well lose their capital.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's ridiculous that in 2014 people are still working 40 hours per week just to afford food and a roof over their heads.
In a civilized society, the number of hours of work required for basic survival should be decreasing with each passing year.
The term "minimally" is too vague. Truly minimal means zero regulation, thus allowing armed gangs to roam the streets and steal your stuff. And as soon as you add more regulation, you need laws. And laws means you have to have representatives to write the laws, and others to enforce them. And before you know it, people want more laws, and you end up where we are now. That's how we got here, you know ? Everything has been tried before.
Maybe people shouldn't have to work so much? Just pay people a living salary for doing 10 hours per week or something. Isn't that the dream? If we get more stuff for less work, let's kick back a little bit and let people do what they want most of the time. I think we'll be amazed at what will happen when most of the world's time is freed.
Play Command HQ online
That is an article of faith, not fact.
Are you seriously claiming that humans won't be able to find anything useful to do that others will pay them for?
Take a look at documentaries from the 40s to 60s, at the peak of the making-humans-work-like-machines era, marvel at how much utterly monotonous work people used to be forced to do because we didn't have the technology to replace them with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS! and then marvel again at how, despite replacing all those people with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS!, most people who want to work can still find a job.
It's the people who claim that EVIL ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS! who are basing their position on faith, not facts. It's just another tiresome leftist ploy to steal money from the productive to give to the unprductive.
The mobs will not reach the gates. Our drones will make short work of the rabble.
My suggestion for a transition policy, which I set forth in a 1992 paper titled "A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy" was to cease taxing economic activity and, instead, tax net assets beyond bankruptcy protection of home and tools of the trade, and use the funds to pay out an unconditional basic income aka "citizen's dividend", thereby doing away with most of the present functions of government including not only the welfare state but also the need for burdensome regulatory agencies (that are subject to capture). Part of the problem here, of course, is the notion of "citizen" vs "non-citizen", but that is a far lesser problem than massive unemployment and hyper-centralization of net assets.
Quoting from that paper:
Seastead this.
It has not been "chased out" of any where. What you see is the people who own the companies looking for the cheapest means to produce their products.
I already noted the developed world as a counterexample.
If it really was "chased out" then they'd also be moving their families to those less-regulated, less-restricted countries.
This is a non sequitur. Of course, when portions of the developed world are no longer developed, then the people who own companies and many other people as well, will move to places where basic services are still supported.
There is a window of opportunity here to correct damaging behavior before it becomes a long term setback. Currently, developed world economies are more pleasant places to live. That need not remain the case, as Greece has demonstrated (they already are emigrating at a substantial rate to other parts of the EU).
The biggest trick those rich has managed to do, is to convince the rest that they are "temporarily embarrassed rich".
As such, before the pitchforks go after the rich, it will go after each other for considering to go after the rich...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Socialism is a social and economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy, as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system.
Communism is a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money, and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order.
No, he meant socialism.
People have been re-classified as "not looking for work" that are in fact looking for work.
Are you sure? When did that happen? Last time I checked U3 still includes people who are looking for work.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But the rich will not recognize that until the mobs with pitchforks are breaking into their gated communities.
That's what armoured battle robots are for.
There's this thing called taxes, you might have heard of it.
Bingo. The thing now is that paralegals etc can be automated by software. The "knowledge economy" is dud before it got off the ground. And not everyone that can swing a wrench should be allowed anywhere near customer relations...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
and high unemployment in Europe is caused by dumb fiscal and monetary policies rather than robots stealing job
High unemployment in EU is caused by min-wage, socialism and communism. Source: I live in this shitty place ;(
Wait, I already am.
Yeah, the modern statistical definition of "unemployed" is "having been actively searching for work in the last week before survey, and is willing to take the first job that they find". If you don't fill those criteria then you are not statistically speaking unemployed, but at the same time you are not employed either. From the point of view of the unemployment statistics, you basically don't exist.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
But the rich will not recognize that until the mobs with pitchforks are breaking into their gated communities.
That is what security robots are for. It will be ED-209 vs pitchforks.
There's this thing called taxes, you might have heard of it.
And, uh, who's going to be paying the taxes, when no-one is working?
As robots make it less and less necessary for people to work, we have to get rid of our outmoded notion that in order for a person to be a respected member of society, be fed, have housing, that person must have a 'job'.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down.
Which isn't true. If you have an economy where creation of demand for productive labor exists, then the value of labor need not go down.
Apart from "minimually regulated" being vague, it's in principle impossible to have "perfect knowledge". So claiming yours would be an awesome economic system is a bit like claiming that theocracy would be an awesome political system because it would have an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity at the helm. More than a bit, actually, since such ideologically pure economic systems always end up with deityfying their guiding principles, whether they be the Historical Inevitability of Communism or the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Truly minimal means zero regulation, thus allowing armed gangs to roam the streets and steal your stuff.
And it means no market. Constrained optimization is not a new thing.
And as soon as you add more regulation, you need laws. And laws means you have to have representatives to write the laws, and others to enforce them. And before you know it, people want more laws, and you end up where we are now.
That's an example of the slippery slope fallacy. No, it doesn't mean that.
Can we all agree that wouldn't be really smart? I want to point out what should be obvious: using robots to do menial, repetitive work is the continuation of what's been going for hundreds of years. There is no difference between replacing human laborers with robots and replacing human labors with tractors and other equipment. This is related to the broken glass fallacy. Think of how many jobs can be added to the economy if we only break all the glass in a major city and replace it! Some dullards, and politicians, have been invoked variations on this logic in recent years, viz the "cash for clunkers" farce. Yes, you can create menial jobs which actually shrink the economy by revoking technology or enlarging government. The USSR and Mao's China were poster children.
It isn't a "counterexample". It is where the people who own the factories that are deploying robots live. 3rd world companies still use people because they're 3rd world and people are cheaper than machines for them.
*sigh*
So when the USofA becomes "no longer developed" then the rich will move to the countries that have been polluted by their factories.
No. That is not going to happen.
The Greeks looking for work are moving to other 1st world countries where the job opportunities in their fields are better. So they chase those opportunities ... in the 1st world.
The Greeks who own companies that were moving manufacturing to the 3rd world are not moving to the 3rd world.
A number of things: elimination of any sort of forced labor obligation, including slavery, indentured servitude, debtor's prison, and conscription; minimal obstruction of immigration; no restrictions on hiring or firing people; no minimum wage or mandatory benefits; no restrictions on the trade or creation of capital; and no health or safety regulation of businesses that are below a certain threshold of deaths per hour worked. I'm sure, if I looked, I could find more such things.
To a first approximation, everyone in the world has a mobile phone, and the percentage that have a smartphone is rapidly increasing. Everyone will be able to *access* an AI, just like we can access Google search. Your comment is like "the poor won't be able to afford a library", it is poorly formulated. You don't need your own full time AI, just enough access to do the things you need to do.
As automation displaces workers, unemployment will rise.
As unemployment rises, crime rises.
As crime rises, the prison population rises.
The prison population cannot breed, so after a few generations, they will largely die off.
The end result will be a much smaller human population, with a much higher level of education and training for jobs that can't be outsourced.
There may be a near planet-wide war in there somewhere too.
All of this *could* be averted by adopting more socialist policies in governance, but humans are too greedy and prideful for that.
If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.
Ah, we can always pump more oil out of the ground. We will always be able to find new sources of oil. What kind of liberal leftist ploy are you coming up with trying to say that we can't stick an unlimited number of tube and get an unlimited amount of oil out.
See, I too can use hyperbole as dumb as yours. We are not longer replacing people with machines, we are replacing people with machines, communication, and simulated intelligence.
Horseshit. The effects of this are in fact quite obvious and very measureable. That it doesn't fit in with your right wing "steal from the poor and give to the rich" type of economy is just too damned bad.
We could do with some more leftist policies around here. The right wing crap that's been foisted on us for the last 30+ years has worked out just SO freakin' well for everybody it's pathetic.
BTW, I work hard, make a far better than average income, and I manage to rise above the "I've got mine so screw you" right wing attitudes. I also know that people would absolutely jump at the chance to get rid of me and people like me, if for no other reason than wanting to be rid of employees has been the trend for quite some time now. If you think for one single minute that you're safe from this, think again. So you'd best figure out a way to deal with it and help others do so, because if you don't the inevitable unfortunate result will be a rather violent upheaval in society--which you do not want to be on the wrong end of.
Let's go live there. Here in My world capital owners get bailed out. Public losses private profits.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not only do we already have "zero economic value" citizens, we have negative-economic value citizens. Consider those who are mentally and/or physically incapable of working today; do we just toss them out on the street? Sadly, sometimes; but mostly they receive government benefits in an attempt to help them maintain some stable life despite being able to work. They can only take and never give, except perhaps as research subjects for scientists.
The only way we will survive the Autonomy Age (where robots do the vast majority of necessary work, with little or no human interaction) intact is by giving up this stupid idea that people are defined by their productivity, especially when the productivity of many well-off people is essentially zilch, such as marketers, HR, CxOs, and a plethora of middle-men (but they don't take food stamps so are ignored.)
This will probably approach something like socialism, if not socialism itself, but we (people the world over, but especially Americans) have a huge hurdle to get over in convincing people that socialism is a synonym for communism or evil, and that taxes on obscenely large amounts of income is not only a necessity, but not evil. I personally look forward to a future where people are guaranteed a Minimum Standard of Living (not necessarily income; there are likely more efficient methods than handing out cash) and those who want to and can do work are able to do so for a higher Standard while the rest are able to just enjoy the long-term fruits of humanity, namely the arts, literature, and random cat videos.
(I think this will require an efficient and reliable male contraceptive medication to help reduce the birth rate even further, but that's a different subject.)
Again, free markets haven't been tried.
Stop being a pedantic ass. To say that a market is only "free" if the customers and vendors are infinite, and all information is instantly broadcast at superluminal velocity is ridiculous. There are plenty of markets that are close enough to "free" that the benefits and drawbacks of free markets are clear. All across the world, many villages have public markets where any farmer can pull up a wagon and sell his produce. There are no barriers to entry, plenty of customers, plenty of vendors, and prices are transparent. How is that not a free market? There are many, many, other markets that are essentially free.
It was just that in James P. Hogan's post-scarcity society you generally acquired status through demonstrating competence in some way (could be anything, even being a good waiter or running some interesting attraction like a steam locomotive), not by acquiring material wealth. Skill in *producing* or repairing high quality goods would be respected, not generally the skill in *acquiring* such goods, especially since most material things were freely available for the taking as they could be mass produced by robots as copies as desired. Even for original works of art, it was the creator of the work who would get the status, not the ultimate possessor of the artwork (who in a way became indebted to the artwork's creator by acknowledging the competency of the creator). There is a section of the book where with some hand waving it is suggested that if you grow up in such a society you just know the rules almost instinctively and also can spot a pretender at competence the way a shopkeeper in today's society could spot a counterfeit hundred dollar bill. Projects there self-organized on the basis of individuals deferring to each other based on specific competences -- not sure what the would have made of the recent "systemd" controversy? :-)
So, projecting that idea into the Star Trek universe, it might be that overall most "red shirts" are just in some sense less competent than someone who had worked his way up, like Kirk or Picard? So, no wonder they are getting killed so easily, if they don't have the competencies the blue shirt characters have? :-) All that said, Worf demonstrated that "red shirt" security on the Enterprise could be highly competent and respected -- although, come to think of it, I'm not sure what color his uniform was? Gold? Anyway, it is all fiction of course. Just something to think about. Iain Banks had his own take on all that with the Culture series as well.
In general, US society has trouble with the idea that status could come from competence and gift giving as opposed to acquiring and hoarding wealth. For example: ... Typically the potlatch was practiced more in the winter seasons as historically the warmer months were for procuring wealth for the family, clan, or village, then coming home and sharing that with neighbors and friends. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[16] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to 'civilized values' of accumulation.[17] The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized".[18] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States,[1] among whom it is traditionally the primary economic system.[2]
An example of a modern day laws banning gift giving:
"90-Year-Old Man Charged With Feeding Homeless Says He Won't 'Give Up' "
http://abcnews.go.com/US/90-ye...
"The Fort Lauderdale Police told ABC News that Abbott will get his court subpoena in the mail and a judge will decide whether he will spend up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. "Arnold thinks he can feed wherever he wants and the laws say differently. Despite the fact that he's a super nice guy and he's a gentleman and a kind soul we have to enforce the law," Seiler said. Although Abbott has been cited twice in less than a week,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"Intrinsic motivation has been studied since the early 1970s. Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire to seek out new things and new challenges, to analyze one's capacity, to observe and to gain knowledge.[5] It is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on external pressures or a desire for reward."
One of the biggest problems most financially successful artists have is that their buying public wants more of the same (say, another Harry Potter novel), whereas their artistic muse may want to move in new directions. That's a reason many commercially successful artists tend to stagnate artistically since doing more of the same is much less risky financially but is often unsatisfying artistically.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
*sigh*
Less sighing. More using that lump on the top of your neck for something other than breath control.
So when the USofA becomes "no longer developed" then the rich will move to the countries that have been polluted by their factories.
What makes you think those places will still be more polluted than the US by that time? There's this magic assumption on your part that the current state remains unchanged. Given that the developing world is getting better economically at a rapid rate while much of the developed world is not, I believe this idea to be very foolish.
The Greeks looking for work are moving to other 1st world countries where the job opportunities in their fields are better. So they chase those opportunities ... in the 1st world.
Greece is first world too. Those Greek workers aren't pursuing opportunities in Greece. They are actually chasing opportunities in the developed world. If the EU ceases to be developed world, which I think is a valid possibility, then those opportunities may well be in future developed world countries that currently aren't developed world countries.
Also Greece isn't an unusual case of a first world country with net emigration. The article mentions Ireland, Spain, and Portugal as well.
I love the freedom of being able to write and publish anything I want without making compromises with money issues.
Not if you have to pay hush money to copyright trolls who claim that your work is a derivative of theirs. And not if a monopolist gatekeeper or a cartel of gatekeepers controls the means of distribution of your art to the public, such as Apple or the major video console makers.
The fundamental flaw is that you imagine "high" minimum wages (I hope you aren't talking about the US national minimum), and "plush" benefits are the cause of underemployment/stagnation in employment. I disagree, but, I also think it's a red herring. You miss the bigger picture: you can't compete with a robot. That's what the recent harvard business review article was about, what happen's when your job is replaced by automation. You can't find work in the same field for obvious reasons, so you look in another field: it's been automated too, or it has zero vacancies because everyone else wants that job. Historically, when buggy whip manufacturing went away, we started making cars. People that is, built cars. But when you and all your coworkers are replaced by machines that just *keep getting cheaper* you will never be able to compete. The developed vs developing world comparison you make is also not really valid to the topic at hand. We know human manufacturing jobs aren't coming back here, but the ones in asia are being displaced by robots as well. What NEW jobs does that make? Over time this is very likely to cause societal tension at bare minimum, bloody revolution and quality of life going backwards at worst. Do you get it? You could take away minimum wage, people would still not work for you for less than $5/hr for very well or long in any part of the country. They couldn't afford their basic needs. A robot needs only electricity and perhaps occasional repairs (but not enough to even come close to make up for the net loss in jobs).
We put a stop to the advertising machine that implores us to be endlessly wasteful consumers, get rid of the private property rules that allow a few to own everything while the multitude suffer deprivation, and start sharing the rewards of our technological progress freely.
When the costs of goods has been reduced to practically nothing, making sure everyone is well taken care of is worth the peace and stability that it brings.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Take a look at documentaries from the 40s to 60s, at the peak of the making-humans-work-like-machines era, marvel at how much utterly monotonous work people used to be forced to do because we didn't have the technology to replace them with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS! and then marvel again at how, despite replacing all those people with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS!, most people who want to work can still find a job.
The situation over the next few decades will be much different than the last century. In the last century technology was only taking away manual labor jobs. Humans were able to cope because these jobs were replaced with knowledge based work. People aren't complaining that robots will take our jobs just because they are getting better at taking away manual labor jobs. They are worried that knowledge based work is the next to go.
There will still be a bastion of work in creative jobs (creative thinking, not the arts), but there is a real worry that there aren't enough of these creative jobs to go around. And there are worries that not everyone will be capable of these creative jobs. Office work worked great as a replacement for manual labor because most of the jobs did not creative much more intelligence than the jobs they were replacing. But not every factory worker or garbage man is capable of being a senior mechanical engineer, an actuary, or any number of other careers where critical thinking is very necessary.
If you are the type of person who struggled in algebra class in high school, the new economy will probably be a very scary place.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Which is basically impossible unless all the participants are an AI.
Take healthcare. The government of my country has an obsession with offering the public a "choice" in their healthcare. Which is dumb.
What people want from their healthcare is the best treatment. But they're not equipped to make decisions like that. It takes a decade of experience and training to make decisions like that. The remaining differentiators, for certain things, are almost totally meaningless. "Oh, you can go to THIS hospital, which is crap, but has a really good menu in the canteen...."
The whole point of capitalism is to leverage the efficiencies of specialisation. Which by definition, means that you're not an expert in all the goods and services you'll want to consume, because you let other people be an expert so they can make widgets more efficiently and provide them to you at a lower price than you could make them for.
Top that off with sectors of the economy that *deliberately* make it virtually impossible to make an objective choice (mobile phone service, financial instruments, etc), and you cannot have a free market economy, because you cannot have perfect knowledge by all participants.
The natural outcome is that wealth will concentrate. It doesn't matter where it concentrates first. It's like the formation of a solar system. You start with a big cloud of dust, and minor movements cause concentration of mass. Those tiny increases in mass cause more mass to be drawn in, until you have a small number of vast bodies with maybe a few moons orbitting them, and it's incredibly difficult for anything to change.
Money becomes synonymous with power, and power arranges things such that it begets more.
If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.
That is a non sequitur. Even in a situation where robots can do any job better than humans, doesn't mean that human labor has no value. You first have to get that robot labor down to "too cheap to meter".
Your phrasing implies that they would work, if they were actually possible.
That's a bit like saying that Marilyn Monroe would totally be into me, if she wasn't dead.
Bingo. Politicians allow the stats (and encourage them) to be taken this way so that they can claim they are making progress on the economy. Or even that joblessness isn't an issue! But look around, talk to people, the numbers don't match the reality.
For those laws, and its not Just to keep bueracrats employed. those laws exist to prevent very real abuses by employers. There's tons of documentaries on the subject. Unions came to power right around the time film cameras were getting affordable
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It happened to young men who used to pump gas before they were displaced by vending machines several decades ago.
To start - I'm not an economist, however I am a software developer and have grown up with a technology and education background.
In the short term (5-10 years) I don't see this being that big of a threat. We may be capable of it soon but actual implementation takes a really long time, especially on a large enough scale to hit the entire economy. Hell, a lot of businesses are still using software that requires Java 6, or a really old version of IE. That doesn't even count how much software hasn't been updated from XP but just "hacked" to work with Windows 7. With that said, the jobs will not go away, just shift like they always have. The shift may be more substantial this time, but it's still a shift.
For example, Taxis.. I don't see people fully trusting taxi's to drive us around for at least another 8-15 years. The Taxi driver will just need to be educated on how to override it when/if it does mess up and they could slowly shift toward more of a personal assistant role or entertainment for the drive. I know it's almost unheard of now-a-days, but offering a certain level of (human) customer service will go a long way. For the economic side - people that repaired VHS and other outdated tech also had to adapt. You can't blame DVD or Blueray for it, it's adapt or die - aka life.
Personally I feel like the problem isn't the AI and robotics that are on the way, it's the crap that we call an education system. High school is a complete waste of time, literally a repeat of middle school with added bull@#$% complexities that don't actually help outside of high school. Teachers are often simply baby sitters and aren't allowed to teach outside of the pre-defined curriculum. On the other side, college is ridiculously expensive and doesn't guarantee a job when you graduate, nor a legitimate education depending on where you go. Hell, the closest university to me teaches intro to Java/Programming on PAPER, as in you have to write out your program with a pencil. All of this technology and change requires an education to keep up, but the baseline for education seems to be dropping. Sure, there is Youtube which has been more of a game changer than most people probably know. People spend a few minutes to an hour of their time to upload a video and suddenly millions can find it and learn from it. Want to learn C++? Youtube it. Want to learn how to bake a cake? Youtube it. I bet you can learn more in an hour online than 2-3 weeks in a college classroom.
TL;DR: We aren't doomed like they always want us to believe. Some things will have to change though or it will only get worse. It's going to actually take some teamwork for once and no more of this "I hate you because you're [Insert political party/religion/sexual orientation/etc. here]".
Side note: I would recommend picking up any kind of basic scripting language at the least, regardless of your current profession, consider it an insurance for the future and a tool to increase your own productivity for the present. Applies less to physical labor jobs, but still a good skill to have regardless.
The "knowledge economy" is dud before it got off the ground.
I would have thought that full automation is a demonstration that the exact opposite is true?
Ezekiel 23:20
The fundamental flaw is that you imagine "high" minimum wages (I hope you aren't talking about the US national minimum), and "plush" benefits are the cause of underemployment/stagnation in employment.
I have two obvious rebuttals. First, I cited a large list of obstructions. These were one of many and weren't intended to explain it all in isolation. Second, you exhibit a provincial first world outlook. For example, people still build cars, they just don't build as many of them in the developed world as they used to. And employment in Asia continues to grow despite automation.
people would still not work for you for less than $5/hr for very well or long in any part of the country. They couldn't afford their basic needs.
Actually, yes they would. They'd find ways to have less costly "basic needs" or move to regions with lower cost of living. And need I remind you that the minimum wage remains $0 per hour no matter how high you raise it?
A robot needs only electricity and perhaps occasional repairs (but not enough to even come close to make up for the net loss in jobs).
And a vast expenditure in capital and resources.
What I find most bizarre about your arguments is this:
Over time this is very likely to cause societal tension at bare minimum, bloody revolution and quality of life going backwards at worst.
What are you proposing that does even a little bit to stop this? How is not employing people at all better than employing them at low wages?
Hmm, the USA considers "full employment" to be roughly equal to 6% unemployment (which we're pretty close to now).
Note that the "workforce" they're talking about is essentially everyone between the ages of 18 and 65.
Now, once upon a time, (immediately post-WW2, for example), the "workforce" did NOT include most of the women of the country. Which means that percentage employment has nearly doubled, using the 1950 definition of employment.
If we applied the modern definition of unemployment to that period, we'd say that during WW2 we were running probably 35-40% unemployment.
In other words, change the definitions, get different results.....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
A low minimum wage means the government is subsidising corporate profits - if the wages are insufficient to live on, those people end up on government benefits of some kind. Their subsistence becomes dependant on our taxes, rather than the ability of the corporation to pay them.
Which is fine by the corporations, because they worked so hard to transfer the burden of taxes away from themselves. Yup, it's really ironic - everyone in America is working for Wal-Mart, they just don't know it.
The vast majority of benefits in the UK are paid to people with jobs. Because their jobs are underpaid. Huge swathes of taxpayers money go into the pockets of landlords and shareholders, in order to keep a roof barely over the heads of those who do all the shit jobs. It's basically slavery.
You're right though. Raising the minimum wage won't help for the exact reason you point out. If you want people to work for you, you should have to be able to attract labour, which means you should be able to offer something better.
At the moment, you just have to be able to offer something better than scraping by in poverty while the government does it's level best to pull the rug out from under you.
Give the people a Universal Basic Income, and you'd have to offer something better than a mere three squares a day and a basic but acceptable accomodation. Then you'd actually see the market come into play - people making a choice about who they work for, and how much.
Right now, they work for less than a wage and a handful of food stamps, because there is literally no choice. No choice - no market.
Did you miss the whole industrialization part and that thing with communism in school?
Did you miss the first 2 words of my post - "Until now"? Just as it was possible for many displaced workers to find new jobs in the past doesn't mean that will continue - and it's already looking like we've gotten to that point.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps. Both jackbooted security forces and food assistance require money. And that, in turn, means the only difference between keeping - or preferably rising - the minimum wage or lowering it is that in the latter case my taxes ultimately go to subsidize McDonald's and Wal-Mart's profits and oppress people.
Who's going to employ poor people once you destroy the businesses who employ poor people? This argument is just stupid. Society is not a suicide pact. These people are paid so little because their labor is worth so little. Making them unemployable doesn't make their labor worth any more than it currently is.
What valuable economic activity would that be? Surely you aren't referring to activities so unprofitable that paying minimum wage for them is a "punishment"
Manufacture for example. And Walmart and McDonald's do have valid business models and very useful services that depend on low wages. They can achieve that by automation or by paying people what they're worth.
That would make it easy to date catgirls and anime characters, wouldn't it?
Count me in!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
An economy is a mechanism for regulating human (so far) behavior. If you're an economist, an economy is a means of regulating production and consumption, usually with a goal of achieving some kind of balance. But a computer scientist might view the mechanism itself as a (usually) distributed algorithm. The salient points are how data enters the system and how it gets processed as it moves through the system. Capitalism, for example, uses a distributed data structure we call "prices" to represent the state of supply vs. demand. Because the data is distributed, all the familiar problems of concurrent, distributed systems have to be addressed in some way.
However, just as software is typically built in layers, from firmware, to operating systems, to frameworks, to applications, once you have an economy, it is irresistible to build more complexity on top of it. So we use our economy to regulate human behavior in ways other than production and consumption, through the use of taxes, fines, and additional rules on what can be bought and sold, and who can work at what jobs.
The goal, as always, is to control human behavior. There are a few things that set humans apart from other species, but one of most under-recognized is our instinct to control things, including other humans. This is built into our DNA and is surely a big factor in our successful proliferation as a species. And it is something that the coming of the machine age will not change over anything less than evolutionary time scales, unless human nature itself is re-engineered.
But what does change as information and telecommunication technologies advance is the rate at which a system like an economy can process data, and the scale at which it can do it. The global economy is already almost completely integrated, and is becoming increasingly tightly coupled. And yet, humans are unceasing in their desire to control it, and to use it to control other humans.
What happens to people who can't find jobs? Some people say a basic income is the solution. But: pwned by the government. What is already happening? People living on credit cards. But: pwned by the banks. People going to school to qualify for better jobs. But: pwned by student loan debt. Is it even possible to have a society where most people aren't pwned? Could being pwned by a machine be any worse?
And that's tonight's word.
(You will be missed, sir.)
It's clearly insane, but not any less insane than expecting people with no income to be able to buy anything coming out of those factories.
Either you leave the jobs to humans so that they can earn money to spend, or you make everything automated so everyone can have your products for free because your costs are zero.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
You certainly could get to a point where it's just too much of a bother to even keep track of a low-achieving human employee vs. having a robot do it. Those people could essentially become unemployable. Some people could be encouraged to try harder to achieve, but in many cases you can't get blood out of a turnip. Every year the percentage of people who fail to make the grade could increase as robots gain capabilities.
I'm sure your fine with that because they're receiving what they're worth. But if it's not handled correctly, these hoards of "useless" people could end up stepping out of your little free market box, turning into angry mobs and burning everything down.
A low minimum wage means the government is subsidising corporate profits - if the wages are insufficient to live on, those people end up on government benefits of some kind. Their subsistence becomes dependant on our taxes, rather than the ability of the corporation to pay them.
That's not what a subsidy means. IHMO Walmart isn't saving a dime in labor costs because of food stamps. I bet it's actually having to pay a little more due to a somewhat reduced demand for work.
This is typical of the magic thinking surround labor policy. Walmart must be benefiting from a "subsidy" because it's an evil corporation we don't like.
With each technological iteration, we have fewer and fewer who can find productive use of their talents in society. Both physical, and now mental talents are being superseded by machine. Take a look at the total workforce participation, and yes, you will find with each passing year, more and more people are driven out of the workforce because they possess neither physical or mental skills that cannot be reproduced by a machine.
Here's a graph from the Federal Reserve of male (to avoid discrimination effects in early years) from 1950 to present:. Drops from 87% to 69% from 1950 to present.
And with each passing year, the number jobs that machines cannot do goes down.
One well-known economist, Tyler Cowen, talks about the 15% whose productivity will soar because machines become a productivity multiplier, while for remaining 85%... well, tough luck for them...
The robot revolution will be a slow moving one, taking decades as every day a few more jobs are eliminated. But like a glacier during an ice age, even if you can't see it moving, it *will* crush everything in its path.
Thanks for the clarification! :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The percentage of people actually working is dropping, now at 67.4% compared to 2000's 74.1%.
Or the participation rate, which has been trending down for a decade.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Science.
No. But YOU have not explained WHO would clean up the YEARS of pollution or WHY they would do so.
Yes, as I have specifically pointed out to you.
Again, as I have specifically pointed out to you.
You are restating the points that I have made while ignoring your own claims.
HOW would that happen?
And, again, it is the WORKERS who are pursuing jobs in other 1st world countries.
It is NOT the OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES moving to the 3rd world. The OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES are moving the manufacturing jobs to the 3rd world while they keep their families in the 1st world.
You seem to have a problem understanding the difference between a WORKER and a person who OWNS THE COMPANY.
No, that's what happens when you pay your employees so little they require public assistance to survive.
Those people will require food stamps either way, which I'll end up paying for. The only difference is whether you get free labour or have to shell out for machines. So tell me: why should I subsidize your business?
And the alternative you're proposing is me effectively paying the payroll of those corporations. Even if I'd be willing to do so, which I'm not, it'll become impossible when my job is replaced by automation in turn.
Comrade me all you want, it won't change the fact that the system is breaking down. All defending status quo does is make the crisis deeper and the resulting changes more drastic.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I don't think they're advocating the minimum raise increase - seems like the complete opposite. I would have to agree, Increasing the minimum wage and making it 10 times more difficult to hire/fire people isn't the solution. It's a short sighted patch that's destined to fail. Tax rates also don't help. Surely they are aware that increasing the minimum wage also increases the tax revenue they bring in, since it can potentially bump people into higher tax brackets.
Anyway, point is the majority of the people that make minimum wage are uneducated. A good part of that may be their fault, but our education system is currently crap. I already mentioned this below in relation to the article, but long story short high school is a repeat of middle school and college is a gigantic scam that produces graduates that have 10,000-100,000 in debt. There are some schools/colleges that are exceptions but they are rare.
an end to the 10am to 3pm work week
. Projects there self-organized on the basis of individuals deferring to each other based on specific competences -- not sure what the would have made of the recent "systemd" controversy?
So that's a good point, the open source is the closest to post-scarcity communism that the world has ever seen.
Still, I don't think 'competency' is enough of a measurement (although I wouldn't mind getting a competent president). A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> Who's going to employ poor people once you destroy the businesses who employ poor people?
These businesses function on razor thin margins, and that's part of the problem. Part of the vast economies of scale that they command is keeping labour costs down.
If they go out of business, the huge volumes they deal in would presumably be missed. Other suppliers would step in to fill the void, only not being so large, not commanding such economy of scale. In short, having to employ more people to get the same amount of stuff done.
> They can achieve that by automation or by paying people what they're worth.
And that's the cornerstone of your argument - that some people are not worth paying enough to survive, in short, that they have so little value that they should die. This must be the case, because their income needs supplementing with government aid. If their labour was actually worth enough to let them live, they wouldn't need that support.
Oh, wait, if they died, they wouldn't be around to be a component of those "very useful services" that Wal-Mart and McDonalds provide.
Looks like the market is failing to me - if their employer didn't pay enough to maintain the fork lifts, or the fry cooker, they'd be unable to do business. But they don't pay enough to maintain the shelf stacker or the burger flipper. They only way they continue to work is because the government steps in. You wouldn't expect the government to step in to fix your milkshake machine, so why should they support your underpaid labour?
Because the governement has a moral obligation to help the needy, the only way around this is to legislate that labour is paid enough for them not to have to.
It will still need humans to keep power flowing to its data centers and to change out RAID drives.
The problem with your unregulated utopia is that psychopaths exist who would quickly corrupt it and turn it to their own benefit. Human nature will ruin any attempt at a pure "free" market. We've already seen the effects of businesses being able to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profit. The Cuyahoga river caught on fire 13 times.
The happiest countries in the world today have governments that put social safety nets in place so that the psychopaths who get rich off the labors of others can't grind them into the dirt too. Restrictions exist to level the playing field between those who will do anything for wealth and power and those who just aren't cut-throat by nature. Personally, I'm not interested in seeing the end result of your "free" market.
A threshold of x number of deaths per hour indeed. As if profit seeking should ever be more important than life.
So then communism hasn't been ever been tried either, right? Do you see where I'm going with this?
See: "Fresh Start For the Left: What Activists Would Do If They Took the Social Sciences Seriously" http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
"Convincing leftists to adopt a combined electoral/social movement strategy that abandons third parties and the possible use of property destruction or other forms of physical attack would be a difficult task. Right now there are few leftists who are not for one or another of these self-defeating approaches.
But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work. Economics, sociology, and political science establish this point in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it is still too difficult if not impossible to collect all the information, and make the fast adjustments to changing preferences, that would be needed for central planning in a complex economy, no matter how community-based it was at its starting point. In addition, no one has yet devised methods for analyzing the inadequate information that can be gathered. Then there are all the problems of keeping a bureaucracy responsive, even one that held frequent meetings with neighborhood councils and work-site employee councils, as still nicely summarized in the old phrase, "who says organization says oligarchy."
The impossibility of centralized, non-market planning, even within a democratic society, I am asserting, means that it is necessary to abandon the economic plan that has been seen as the solution by most egalitarians for the past 150 years. It's the "s" word, socialism. Because no one mentions socialism any more, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with China taking the capitalist road, in the form of "Market-Leninism," it's hard to know just how many leftists still think socialism would work in a fully developed democratic economy. But it's my guess that many still hold out some hope, if only because there seems to be no other alternative. The problem is embodied in the label that many leftists now have adopted for themselves, "anti-capitalists." But what does "anti-capitalist" mean?
Many leftists will be skeptical, but a highly plausible new direction for bringing about greater economic equality and more access to common property is offered by planning through the market. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets.
There is thus no need for one big centralized planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets. In the past, egalitarians could not think of these interventions as planning tools for two reasons. First, they are currently used by the corporations that dominate the government for their own short-run interests. Second, most egalitarians couldn't see the possibilities for any kind of decentralized market-based planning because they thought of planning as central planning.
According to this way of thinking about planning, then, the big issue is winning political power from the corporate-conservative coalition, which is another reason why challenges in the electoral arena are such an important dimension of a full-scale egalitarian movement within a democratic society. That is, taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulations
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Why do you need a 'job' if a machine can produce anything you need for nothing? And that includes growing your food and building your house, and maybe even building yourself a little island wherever you want to be at that moment. I thought this would be the goal, to eliminate the the need for you to "run an engine lathe eight unfucking hours a day"..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What do you mean by "our" ? Unless you are in the top 0.01% of the population, you will be the guy with the pitchfork.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
There's always libertarian paradise (Google it) , but I've noticed a running theme with libertarians; whenever the market doesn't behave the way they expect and/or want it just wasn't "free" enough
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sociologists have been working on this issue for over a decade. There are answers but some answers may sting a bit. First off we will have to rid ourselves of certain cherished beliefs. Since computers can earn money without much human involvement the concept of labor in ezxchange for support hits the trash can. Essentially most beliefs that are associated with capitalism are now proven to be false beliefs. Next we have a concept, quite often false, that the most able will earn and deserve their earnings. The simple truth is that certain professions will fall to computers and robots that have been the exclusive employers of the rich or well off. Then we will be brought to the reality that some form of socialism must be not only accepted but welcomed. Here is one solution : Every American gets a pay check every week straight from the government. Some form of gambling is mandatory with a controlled portion of that pay check. Those who gamble more intelligently will tend to accumulate wealth whereas those that are foolish or lazy will get no returns on that gambling. Some skill must be involved in the form of the gambling. That maintains the social pecking order. Taxes will be paid by companies but not the population. The reason is super simple. Technology has always rested on the elimination of effort. Now technology is succeeding and replacing the need for all human employment. Without a system like this society will completely collapse.
What should happen is a graceful transition from the scarcity-driven model to a virtually non-scarce model. We could start by issuing shares in public companies to the poor (financed by taxes), with the restraint that they aren't allowed to sell shares. They would receive dividends each month in addition to welfare. Eventually they might receive enough so that traditional welfare isn't required. As robots replaced workers, more and more people would end up on this kind of "dole" but it would be less and less onerous, and less and less of a stigma.
Eventually, you end up with almost everybody living off investment income. You still have a free market since there are no restrictions on *buying* new shares--you are only barred from selling your dole account. It's just that the market employment become less important.
That's just the financial aspect of the transition, with a very simple sort of social justice thrown in. It could be lousy or great, depending on a lot of societal factors. I think it's just important to realize that a gradual transition is possible without going to war over words like "socialism", "communism", "libertarianism", "fascism" or whatever -ism du jour is getting blow-hard pundit panties in a bunch.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Oh come on, it's not that bad.
Up to 10% of those could be gainfully employed keeping the rest in order. By which I mean beating the shit out of them, mostly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dateline: December 20th, 2034
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Human jobs are dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered job-seeking community when IDC confirmed that human's share of the market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all jobs. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that human workers have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. the entire concept of employing humans is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Human vs Robotics Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict human's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Human workers face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for human employees because jobs needing humans are dying. Things are looking very bad for people. As many of us are already aware, human workers continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Creative workers are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of the core jobs to AI. The sudden but welcome departures of long time human jobs for human resources only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Jobs for people ae dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
For example, Cuba's leader Raoul Castro states that there are 7000 jobs left in Cuba. How many of those are for show? Let's see. The number of government versus non-government jobs word-wide is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 non-government jobs in Cuba. Job posts for creative work on Usenet are about half of the volume of government make-work posts. Therefore there are about 700 actual jobs requiring creativity. A recent article put government jobs at about 80 percent of the entire human job market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 actual humans still employed. This is consistent with the number of Usenet job posts.
All major surveys show that human workers have steadily declined in market share. Human job prospects are very sick and the long term survival prospects are very dim. If humans areto survive at all it will be among dilettante dabblers in employment. Human job prospects continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them from A.I. at this point in time. For all practical purposes, human jobs are dead.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
As automation lowers the cost of producing goods toward zero, a smaller wage should buy more goods and living standards can improve even as wages go down.
(Of course, this whole discussion is silly because automation is as limited as anything else. But if you believe in automation replacing almost everyone, then you have to also accept that it will drastically cut the costs of goods.)
You're talking about a 70 year gap. A lifetime. In military terms, that's like Waterloo to Gettysburg. WWI to Desert Storm. Omdurman to Dien Bien Phu.
Did doing what had worked in the first of each pair work in the second?
You know, about four days from now a turkey will be saying "Hey, it's the farmer again. LOL, the silly sod's forgot the feed bucket!"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What are you proposing that does even a little bit to stop this? How is not employing people at all better than employing them at low wages?
You still fail to deal with the fact that automated "labor" will get cheaper over time while human capital really can only get so much cheaper. Those huge up front costs you imagine will shrink and shrink. You know it's true and so do I. How do you imagine that human labor can do the same? Just get cheaper and cheaper? And why should it, to make the wealthy wealthier as we make less and less to compete with robots. You think this will work?
There are no gatekeepers on the internet.
Except for customers living in areas whose incumbent home ISP has decided to "slow-lane" any traffic that doesn't pay the prioritization toll. See previous stories about Comcast's "congestion by choice".
Anyone can publish anything at any time.
How can someone usefully publish any application at any time for an iOS device without the blessing of Apple, or any application at any time for a game console without the blessing of the console's manufacturer?
That's the old model. It's been discarded.
If the gatekeeper model has "been discarded", then why do iOS and the game consoles still use it? And why haven't end users "discarded" them en masse in favor of Android and living-room gaming PCs? I think I know why: consoles are easy.
What is with the defeatism? The only point to it is to prevent you from reaping the benefits everyone else is enjoying.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to jump in and reap benefits without running the risk of being bankrupted or worse. For example, I don't want to write a song and then get hit with a $150,000 copyright infringement lawsuit for having accidentally recreated something from decades ago.
And what is the incentive for the people owning the machines to give away everything they make for nothing?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
How are you going to afford to run it? When production is automated and labor costs $0, goods will cost the price of raw materials plus the CEO's pay plus shareholder dividends.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The workforce has not included housewife, now called stay at home parents, or homemakers. This has not changed at all.
More women are looking for jobs, so they count in employment numbers. But the definition did not change.
And if you think that 6% now means there is no struggle, build a time machine and go back to 2008-2012. 6% means that the 95% of people who should have jobs have them, the3% who shouldn't don't, and there is some overlap where people are in the wrong area and won't move, or people who should be fired haven't yet been.
Restate your comment because nothing you said makes any sense, in context or out of context.
Only where the sharing is involuntary.
But if you can point me to the exact bit where it says it's illegal to release things into the public domain I'll consider myself corrected. And is Torvalds out on parole yet?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Who says anybody needs to 'own' them? Just build a fence to keep the occasional racoon from jamming up the works. The thing is, with machines doing everything, all of our phony economic models completely fall apart. We already know that scarcity is manufactured in great abundance to prop up the otherwise unsustainable system of the concentrated wealth/power we have today. In fact, automation creates 'communism' by default. All needs are met, no effort required. And then, we will fight wars to protect the machines that feed us. So we'd better weaponize them to protect themselves... uh oh!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?"
It doesn't matter much in a wealthy post-scarcity society because there is already so much abundance to go around. If someone is good at, say, "drawing vultures", why should anyone really care if there is little "demand" for that skill -- assuming everyone can still get all the food they want from automated farms powered by fusion power plants and delivered by a local package delivery system? You also never know when a skill might prove useful in the future -- like making an entertaining smartphone app called "Angry Vultures? :-)
Frankly, what most PhD students produce in their dissertation is, by their own admission generally, of little interest to the general public, and even rarely of interest to more than a handful of other specialists. Assuming we can "afford" it, why should people not be able to get a PhD in what they want to study? When you look at the lives of the children of the wealthy, who often can afford to write books, or get PhDs, or work at non-profits, or be involved in the low-paying performing arts and so on, that is what we often see in practice.
In VFY, Hogan suggests that "competence" can be valued irrespective of what it is in. A character connects that to the early days of the post-scarcity society's founding, when the first children (produced from DNA by a space probe landing on a new planet, creating a cultural break from the past) were raised by robots who would provide them with whatever they wanted; the only way to compete for status among peers and to stand out by learning to do something well, whatever it was. As long as people aren't actively bothering other people, they would tend to be allowed by their peers to do what they want. If people are actively harming others, then there will be conflicts, which are resolved in a variety of ways (including, in the end, violence). Hogan goes into that in some detail in the book, and one does not have to agree with every aspect of what he envisioned to see that alternatives could be possible.
Hogan's idea is just a fictional example; no doubt reality would be more complex. People can legitimately disagree on assessments of risks and rewards and also on social forms and ways to resolve conflicts. And there are no doubt human qualities of "values" that transcend competence. One can easily find examples of people doing despicable things "competently", such as rounding up Japanese-Americans and putting them in internment camps in the USA during WWII. Or what would it mean to be a highly competent "waterboarder" (even when history shows torture pretty much never provides useful intelligence overall compared to humane treatment of captives)? So in practice, yes, one should consider both means and ends in evaluating behavior. As the Navaho, paraphrasing I hope correctly, if it is done in the right spirit, it is more important than if it is done well.
Competence might also be in picking the right problem to solve -- like where a fumbler doing something in a half-assed way might still have been working on the most important issue and create enough of a solution to help everyone? Being a parent is an important calling, but there are no "perfect" parents, just good ones usually muddling through as best they can (even when financially wealthy) -- and it is hard to put a value on parenting the next generation, which is in some ways both the most important task of a civilization while also usually having negative economic value for decades. There is also a lot to be said for diversity, as in: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." It can in practice be hard to appreciate competence in some area you are not familiar with. And often the greatest artistry is in making things look simple, or even helping others to learn complex skills easily, or re-engineering things so they are easy to do or learn.
Hogan's "Chironian" civilization is the creation of an imaginative elect
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
With the NSA telling the ED-209's which 'domestic terrorists' to shoot first.
I always wondered about that model. ED-209? Would that imply a base model of ED-200? Seems odd to start your new product at a non-round number.
If only. The whole concept hinges on there being mental tasks that only a human brain can perform.
Except that even the lower rungs of those are now being automated. Things like the task of sorting through the reams of paperwork that is the building block of a lawsuit. Normally a task of a near army of paralegals. These days you can get a computer to do it.
http://singularityhub.com/2011...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Computers do make perfect knowledge closer to attainable, though. Improved algorithms would do so even better. Do you want to see what happens when a perfect market exists?
Everyone who uses google shop search, or most online sites, immediately clicks 'sort by price.' Great for reducing prices, of course, but it also means a race to the bottom on price. This isn't always a good thing. For one, it means new suppliers find it impossible to set up - there's no way they can match the price and distribution capabilities of an entrenched company benefiting from economy of scale. If the cost of a trade is really low, someone works out how to do something like high-frequency trading. Exploiting what little inefficiency exists to bring in a profit from shuffling bits around.
Perfect knowlege is when your company suddenly finds all their orders have dried up overnight because a supplier in Vietnam just cut their price to 0.5% less than yours, and your customer's procurment agents automatically switched to the cheaper source.
Congratulations, you have invented the sweat shop.
You will still need food, water, power and a communication infrastructure.
If only. The whole concept hinges on there being mental tasks that only a human brain can perform.
Except that even the lower rungs of those are now being automated. Things like the task of sorting through the reams of paperwork that is the building block of a lawsuit. Normally a task of a near army of paralegals. These days you can get a computer to do it.
http://singularityhub.com/2011...
The really big problem with that trend is that eventually there will be no low-level jobs as a way of entry into a field. Then what?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Perfect knowledge by all participants is impossible, which makes the claim that free markets haven't been tried vacuous.
No, we don't.
It seemed like you were suggesting we try free markets, but now you're agreeing with people who are pointing out that they "cannot exist".
Top Tip: Anytime your plan needs something to be "perfect" you can rule out successfully applying that plan to humans.
That's great and all that, but unless I actually live in that village it might as well be a racetrack for unicorns.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You seem to me to be aiming to imply "involuntary" within an arbitrary legal framework where the person who first twiddled some bits together can control what others later do with that set of bits. I'm assuming you are implying that those other people sharing the original pattern further without permission is "involuntary" sharing by the person who first put the pattern together. I guess I can see that perspective on "sharing", even if it is defining "sharing" in a way that emphasizes (using contract law) the preferences of the original creator over the preferences of any current holders of a copy of the bit sequence.
If you have a digital copy of a recent song released under a typical commercial license, it is illegal in the USA to give a copy of that song to someone else (maybe with some fair use exceptions). You have a local copy of something, but the law says you can't share it with those who want or need it based on the license chosen by the author or the current copyright holder. That is the sharing I'm talking about.
What if it was a song like, say, "Desperado" and you were too poor to buy a copy to give to some young guy like, say, Aaron Schwartz about to do something really alienated and foolish? :-( Thankfully there are still other options:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...
"And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone
[other great parts omitted out of copyright fears]"
It is really a very odd idea though, when you think about it, that some initial distributor of the song (let alone a government-funded research paper) gets to prevent you from copying, modifying, and/or redistributing a pattern of bits stored on hardware in your possession. It seems very undemocratic as it opens up the possibility that on the flimsiest of evidence anyone who claims any sort of copyright on anything can demand an inspection of the contents of any data storage to make sure a crime has not been committed?
In ancient times, someone inspired to write a song might have been seen to have received a transmission from some godly muse. From that perspective, by what right can such a person enter into a contract to restrict the redistribution of that muse's work? Isn't such a restriction imposed by the government an interference with the divine as well as with charitable human society?
I'm not saying I necessarily see it that way myself, but it's an example of how there are all sorts of ways to look at these things. The way that is dominant in the current legal system is the result of past political struggles and is not the only perspective. As is mentioned here:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites. That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."
Another perspective:
http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs...
"In India, where monopolisation is mostly frowned upon especially with the respect to creative aspects, Creative Commons seems like a fitting option to be adopted."
Or further:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the laun
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What happens when they start unionizing and demanding voting rights?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Cost is one thing. Price is another.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah, it's not as if their HR department helps people to apply for state aid or anything.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Those making money.
And no, the fact than nobody is working doesn't make that number zero.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Exactly. If nobody had to do any work (including 'creative' work like entertainment), what would you want to do with your time? I'd probably value some interaction with friends and family. But I think I'd generally avoid other people and I wouldn't give a care what 'competency' they had. I would either be entertained by robots or explore and visit places. But I don't personally find other people very compelling, since any tangible knowledge or skill they have is better done by a robot.
The only competency that I would still see as being relevant would be the fact that somebody owns the robots, somebody owns the places I want to visit. So I would still need some currency; and I don't think they would find my 'competency' very compelling since they are also too busy avoiding people like me.
To put it more crudely, I think the currency would be the fully 'animated' Realdolls.
Perfect knowledge also doesn't factor the human element. Is anyone seriously gullible enough to think nobody'll try to game the system, or to alter/delay the information entered into the system?
--
Somebody, 1792.
--
Somebody, 1793.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas.
http://focusfusion.org/index.p...
As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
But, imaginative people still need some form of life support to grow and have time to do stuff, and lab equipment is (not yet) free.
Of course, AIs will no doubt get more imaginative over time, too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.
I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...
Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limit
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I don't know, maybe the owners of every internet server ever might be able to tell you.
I don't know, maybe the owners of every internet server ever might be able to tell you.
Servers cost money. To buy. To run. To maintain. To connect to the net. Somewhere, someone's paying for it, and ultimately the cost gets passed on to the consumers, by either buying product (eg: Amazon) or being product (Facebook, Google) that is bought by someone else.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
AI will be ahead on all of these curves if they see sufficient benefit. And just like our current masters who would just as soon we sat drooling in front of the idiot box, the best thing you will be able to do for an AI is stay out of its way. It will have things to do and likely those plans don't include you. Order another pizza in, bank your government dole, and watch the next episode of "My Favorite Robot." Hump regularly, take your high-end, ultra-high quality AI-produced drugs, and learn to love your new freedom to do nothing.
Or be recycled.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What keeps a competitor from setting up a similar robotic production line and selling goods for less? Why wouldn't prices drop due to competition?
"Until now"
Exactly. The grand parent is the kind of guy that falling off a skyscrapper would say "well, it's been 100 floors by now and nothing wrong has happened. You are an alarmist".
But maybe there's kind of a pyrrhic hope: there already are a lot of jobs that could be automated in, say, China which are not automated simply because the work force payed peanuts and living in the verge of slavery is still cheaper. Current automation even in first world countries will slow its motion once they have destroyed enough employment that people accepts working for peanuts in almost slavery conditions too.
Once all (or most all) the work is being made by robots, who will receive salaries, that then will be spent on the goodies the robots are producing?
You see, you need CONSUMERS to earn money from them. And the government, TAXPAYERS - by the way.
Or they plan to "fix" this little problem by paying salaries to robots, giving them vacations, etc? =P
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Randomized? So then the person who wants a puppy gets a cat, and the person who wants a cat gets nothing. Sounds brilliant.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Henry Ford warned us about this. He was criticized by everyone else for paying his workers more than the competition. "I've got to pay them more so they can buy my cars." He used technology to make that possible.
At some point in the future, even if people are willing to work in almost slavery conditions for peanuts, there simply won't be enough jobs to go around (especially since those "grunt" jobs are in many cases the first to be automated). And people won't have money to buy the products.
A future where everything is free is all nice and good, but "you can't get there from here." At least not without some serious, possibly fatal, pain.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
http://ww2.prospects.ac.uk/cms... The ILO definition of unemployment covers people who are: out of work, want a job, have actively sought work in the previous four weeks and are available to start work within the next fortnight; or out of work and have accepted a job that they are waiting to start in the next fortnight. This is a good compromise between instant and totally discouraged. What it doesn't capture is the number of part time workers who would like more hours.
http://ww2.prospects.ac.uk/cms... The ILO definition of unemployment covers people who are: out of work, want a job, have actively sought work in the previous four weeks and are available to start work within the next fortnight; or out of work and have accepted a job that they are waiting to start in the next fortnight.
Personally, my own life would be little different -- except for a big change of not engaging in bouts of unrelated paid employment for expenses. I'd still spend time with my kid and homeschool. I'd still work on free software like the Pointrel system or software related to my wife's free book. I'd still work towards organizing all manufacturing knowledge (OSCOMAK) and work towards designing self-replicating space habitats. I'd hopefully be doing all those software and hardware things a lot better and a lot faster because I'd have more time (without taking on unrelated employment, even as I'd still be happy to help out on other projects just to be helpful and exchange ideas, same as helping any neighbor). I'd probably have lab space for physical experiments which would also speed things up. Another speed boost would (hopefully) be lots of like minded peers who were free to do similar things who I could collaborate with -- including on simulating and building and running free automated tire production factories as I posted on yesterday, especially since people will probably still need tires, even in space habitats: :-)
"Automated FOSS tire plant ideas; simulation tools? "
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I'd probably feel less compelled to do those things quickly though, so I might do more gardening. I'd still help out with my local historical society.
I think most people could find interesting things to do. It might take some period of "deworking" to make the transition. For kids leaving public school to do "unschooling" (or even just plain homeschooling) a rule of thumb is that it takes at least one month for every month in school to make a transition to independent learning. So, for someone who has worked at a conventional job for a dozen years on top of a dozen years of schooling, it might take a couple years for him or her to start to regain some independent initiative.
I feel it likely a lot of people would just have the time to be better parents, better friends, better neighbors, and better family members. As Bob Black wrote in his essay on "The Abolition of Work":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!" "
Is it any wonder you want to avoid such desperate people? Even if most of them are doing a heroic job of trying to hold everything together despite limited time? And the flip side of it is, the people in the USA with lots of spare time, they tend to either be those who are (inherited) wealthy parasites who accept or ignore the huge rich/poor divide or they are people who are poor or old/tired or disabled or mentally ill. Obviously, I'm exaggerating here -- but not by that much. People in Western Europe are more likely to have free time and be able to use it to be better companions and more involved citizens and volunteers.
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/...
http://newint.org/features/201...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yeah, but it's all invisible, and doesn't cost YOU anything. One person buying something, or commissioning some bit of man-made art will pay for 1000 people to have access to free goods and services.
What in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
do mean corporations don't vote? They vote and often.
Get up!
Interesting thoughts, Michael(?). I agree that some trends in Japan may foreshadow things the USA does (even the Japanese banking crisis decades ago related to rel estate bubbles leading to stagnation).
Thanks for your book link, which also has a link to a related site which includes connecting current challenges with historical developments:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...
"I have spent a couple decades writing a book about human ecology, because it is drastically changing, which presents great danger and great potential. The idea is to describe both so that we can avoid the disasters and take advantage of the potentials. The problems I describe could end human civilization, but the only way to avoid the disasters is to adapt to a new ecology, like the title of the book says. About 10,000 years or so ago, we started leaving the ecology we had grown up in for millions of years. Right now we are in an ecology that is one transient ecology of many that we have been moving through. We need to find one that is stable and that we can live in long term or we are, well, a specie without an ecology is in trouble. If we do not create a stable ecology that is some form of civilization, well, it is going to look like one of those "Post Apocalyptic" movies. It will not be pleasant and it will be hard for humans to ever really be much more than animals. The thing is that it is not just about finding a new ecology, it is also about adapting to survive and be comfortable in it. We are still mostly adapted to the old ecology when we lived in tribes and we need to change to adapt to the new ecology. It is a lot of things. We need to be smarter and more comfortable in a civilization than we are. That is what the books are about. In the mean time, this web site is supposed to serve a few other purposes and offer other resources. It is especially to present discussions about how different points of view can be understood."
Just spending a few minutes so far looking at your site and book blurb, in scope, it reminds me of "Beyond Civilization" by Daniel Quinn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
It also reminds me a bit of "A New Way Of Thinking" which you may find of interest:
http://www.anwot.org/
You have a synopsis here that mentions genetic issues:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...
Certainly evolutionary pressures need to be understood (I was in a PHD program in ecology and evolution for a time). But in the time scale of a transition to some new economy full of AI and robots as capable as most humans for most economic activities (twenty years?) these seem to me to not be pressing issues, whatever the long term may hold. You might also find of interest Freeman Dyson's speculations about genetic engineering as far as possible long term trends in designer biology.
http://www.nybooks.com/article...
On genetics and health, while mutations and birth defects are serious issues, it seems to me the most pressing current health issues relate to vitamin D deficiency, diet lacking in enough vegetables and fruits and with too many refined carbohydrates and artificial additives, too much bad stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of community, problematical infrastructure, and so on (see "Blue Zones" for example).
You also wrote on your site: "In my broad studies, I had to examine the Philosophy of Science. One interesting point is about how science is advanced. Is it by a team of researchers or by individuals. It is a contested point, but I think it is clear that it is by both. Still, in the balance, the contributions by individuals like Newton and Einstein show the power of individual inspiration. That is the path I have taken. "
I certainly appreciate the
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The question is not who employes them, the question is who pays for their living expenses. If companies don't pay a living wage, then that's you and me.
?
Then it shouldn't really matter if they're employed or not, now should it? After all, if their labor is worth little, then the economy is little affected if it's removed, right?
You can't have it both ways. Either these people's labor is valuable, or it is not. If it is, then pay them for it. If it's not, then it doesn't matter whether they're employed or not, because they're poor either way and the economy is by definition unaffected by losing low-value labour; the only ones affected is McDonald's and Wal-Mart who'll have to shell out for automation rather than continue having their profits subsidized by having me pay their workforce. Which one is it?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
But someone still has to buy. When the proles no longer have jobs, they stop buying because they have np money to buy things or for "commissioning some bit of man-made art".
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Agreed. That's why I just roll my eyes whenever they say the unemployment has dropped another .1%, because that can mean plenty of stuff aside from people getting work with a livable wage.
I wish they would focus instead on A) % employed and B) % "viably" employed, meaning they have a single job that puts their income above the poverty level in their area (so regions would be on similar standing). There should be a statement whenever they release these that employment (viable or otherwise) will never hit 100% because there are those who have retired, stay-at-home parent where a second income is unnecessary, or are mentally/physically incapable of working.
America will become a wasteland... just like it did when we sent most of our manufacturing jobs to China.
Wait, that did not happen? Sure, things are more unstable now, but it wasn't the end of history.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
But the rich will not recognize that until the mobs with pitchforks are breaking into their gated communities.
And that is why the rich are some of the biggest proponents of banning guns. They want to make sure when the mobs come, they are wielding pitchforks instead of AR-15s.
I understand a lot about optimization problems. An optimization problem with all the people and resources on earth isn't going to finish calculating any time soon.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Instead of automatically repealing it, extend its definition of labor unions to include forms of contingent/temporary/non-FT labor - and that such definition supercedes any state definition.
Sch forms of labor would then compete with the choice of a more secure job arrangement wherever RTW is enacted, as opposed to being used as a benefits/etc. dodge for entities operating under a defective business model.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Cool, Jim! You might like this related proposal by me also for a basic income funded by a wealth tax of 6% on declared assets, with only declared assets being insured and defended by the government, explaining why millionaires should support the idea:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
BTW, if we had a basic income, it's not clear to me there would still be any justification for copyright or patents. Suddenly anyone wanting to create could do so on their own or in collaboration with other like-minded creative people. So, given the costs of copyright and patents to society of chilling effects and other negative effects, it could be better to eliminate them entirely.
Real innovations are rarely rewarded in society. After all, for example, you invented Spasim, the first 3D networked computer game, which eventually spawned an entire industry all the way to Minecraft and Space Engineers. As the original developer of an idea, did you get royalties from the entire industry for decades? I doubt it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
For another example, it took Ralph Baer fifteen years to even get someone to pay attention to the concept of computer games hooked to TVs:
http://games.slashdot.org/stor...
Meanwhile, someone like Bill Gates got financially obese based on starting as a millionaire at birth, dumpster diving to read other's code, and then licensing someone else's work to IBM -- work which apparently was improperly taken from the inventor (with IBM going through Gates to avoid liability).
Refs:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
http://patch.com/california/lo...
""I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
"They Made America is certain to elicit cries of protest. That's because it attacks the reputations of some of the key players of the early PC era -- Gates, IBM, and Tim Paterson, the Seattle programmer who wrote an operating system, QDOS, based partly on CP/M that became Microsoft's DOS. Evans asserts that Paterson copied parts of CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall. Because Gates rather than the more innovative Kildall prevailed, according to the book, the world's PC users endured "more than a decade of crashes with incalculable economic cost in lost data and lost opportunities.""
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... ... In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Pater
"Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The point of the robot economy is that effectively they will
In the human society, the animals that we human keep, from pets such as dogs and cats and tropical fish, to farm animals that we rear for meat, skin, fur, such as pigs, cows, chicken, sheeps, do have their respective intrinsic values
This leads to the central crucial aspect of TFA:
When human beings end up having zero economic value they will have less value than a chicken in the farm
What kind of future you think those zero-economic value human will have?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is like a math problem involving discontinuity and infinities. I think we can all understand the hypothetical thought-experiment of no jobs resulting in people with no money, therefore how do we distribute the supposedly free goods and services?
Let's never mind the fact that land and materials won't be free. And that nobody will bother to build a factory to make free products even if it costs even nothing to build it.
This isn't the end of capitalism, and I really don't think we need to go all socialist to cope with increasing automation. Even though you could project this to a singularity where all jobs are eliminated (including creative work), I think the very arguments people are having demonstrate why that process will throttle itself before we get there. There will be a point where the cost of automating some jobs is well above the marginal benefits due to the diminishing prices that the capitalists can charge.
The more realistic questions are going to be about where this equilibrium will happen and what to do with the marginalized people? Do we consider them disabled if they cannot be retrained? How do people bootstrap themselves to that level of education if labor isn't worth enough to pay back tuition? What other sort of traps, inversions, quantized effects will occur that we haven't thought of yet?
I am a creative writer. Like a fine artist or a serious music composer I will not be displaced easily. But I depend upon serious consumers. If you are satisfied with pop art, pop music, pop video ... I am lost. I, we, require discriminating patrons to exist.
The trick here is that algorithms will discover ways to fake art, music, performance in a way that seems natural. You will find compelling elements in artificially generated 'art' and be tempted to abandon real human experience.
Real human experience will be supplanted with programs that cleverly emulate the type of story that mathematically elicits the best response from readers. You will need me and other real humans to document your descent from valued individuals who provide useful services to those who suck resources from the economic totality.
Genuine human sensitivity trumps algorithms sometimes!
...omphaloskepsis often...
"...elimination of any sort of forced labor obligation, including slavery, indentured servitude, debtor's prison, and conscription; minimal obstruction of immigration; no restrictions on hiring or firing people; no minimum wage or mandatory benefits; no restrictions on the trade or creation of capital; and no health or safety regulation of businesses that are below a certain threshold of deaths per hour worked."
I see you haven't learned from history. We had all that in the 1800's. They don't call it the era of the 'Robber Barons' for nothing. How many people have to die to suit you? How many lives have to be damaged by 'sweatshop conditions' before it becomes too much? The reason current rules are in place is because of the abuses your system fostered.
During that time the technological advancements were low hanging fruit requiring little more than basic knowledge that anyone could develop in a lifetime. Now, most real development requires generations of knowledge with associated costs and supports which business will not shoulder unless some kind of long term payoff or control(government) is in place if even then. So how do you expect development would continue?
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
Here they talk about the volunteers contributing their time and money to make the sets:
http://thescene.com/watch/wire...
Just watched the first episode -- impressive and made by volunteers. Subsequent episodes are being made with some Kickstarter funding.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Here is a good explanation, based in part on research done by the Federal Reserve, on how creativity flourished best when people earn enough that money is off the table as a worry (that means about US$75K+ in the USA) and people have autonomy in their work, increasing mastery facing a challenge, and a sense of purpose.
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Frankly, I think very few artists are motivated by money. This is even more true if you broaden a definition of art to include so much of what people do as hobby crafts or fan fiction or local folk song writing or creative cooking and so on.
Money plays a role in the life of an artist in Western society of course because, in an exchange-emphasizing economy, we all need to get money somehow to pay for food and lodgings and material and so on -- including paying for our kids. And to put a lot of time into some craft, you need to find a way to support yourself that leaves time for learning and doing it. Especially for anyone with a family, if it is not your day job, your time to put into it is otherwise going to be severely limited. Some people still make it work by dedication and generally sacrificing other relationships and responsibilities, including by pushing them onto siblings or the state.
See for example, "The Murdering of My Years":
http://books.google.com/books/...
"Looking back on their lives, people often ask themselves "Where did the years go?" "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet provides a wide ranges of provocative answers to that question. Edited in the style of a documentary, "The Murdering of My Years is a compendium of stories by activists and artists about how they manage to get by in America. They talk about the jobs they've had (as cabbies, organizers, waitresses, clerks, drivers taking scabs to secret scab trainings, telemarketers, etc.), how they were initially politicized, the nature of their art, and how they feel about working (or resistance to working) in a political context. The stories range from the absurd to the heartbreaking, from the exciting and strange to the depressingly banal. The book examines the pain, disillusionment, and fundamental hopelessness that afflict many workers. It also tells stories or triumph, joy, and subversion in the workplace."
As is made clear in that book and others, the "starving artist" concept is mostly a myth. If you're starving, making art is generally the last thing on your mind. However, it's true that people who are obsessed with an idea or a technique may well end up starving because they prioritize their art over making money. But the actual suffering process rarely lends much to the art's production -- even if previous suffering might inform some future art in terms of shaping an artist's sympathies (as it might for anyone in any profession).
I think it more likely the urge to create generally comes from within and is sustained by intrinsic motivation of love of the craft and the product. If people just want money, there are more reliable ways to get it than trying to appeal to a fickle art audience. No doubt some few people do make become artists to get rich,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That might not work out so well when it's proles building those robots.
But the rich will not recognize that until the mobs with pitchforks are breaking into their gated communities.
It only needs to happen in one place for others to recognize the urgency. Just like the communist revolution in the USSR prompted the rise of the welfare state in the West (and, with the collapse of the USSR, welfare state is also slowly evaporating).
All too true, from drones to these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"In 2006, Samsung Techwin announced a $200,000, all weather, 5.56 mm robotic machine gun and optional grenade launcher to guard the Korean DMZ. It is capable of tracking multiple moving targets using IR and visible light cameras, and is under the control of a human operator. The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot can "identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles (3.2 km) away." The robot, which was developed by a South Korean university, uses "twin optical and infrared sensors to identify targets from 2.5 miles (4 km) in daylight and around half that distance at night." It is also equipped with communication equipment (a microphone and speakers), "so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops." If the person gives the wrong password, the robot can "sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun." South Korea's soldiers in Iraq are "currently using robot sentries to guard home bases."[3]"
And the movie Elysium painted such a picture as well, with robot guards and robot police.
http://www.santafe.edu/news/it...
"he makers of this summer's Hollywood blockbuster Elysium got one thing right, according to a column in the Washington Examiner that cites a 2005 research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles: The abundance of 'guard labor' depicted in the movie -- in the movie's case case robot police and sleeper agents -- is an expected feature of a society with a high degree of economic inequality. The 2005 paper, co-authored by Bowles and Arjun Jayadev and published as an SFI working paper, connects inequality with a larger proportion of a population engaged in enforcing the property rights and protecting the assets of the elite. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force was dedicated to guard labor in 2002, they wrote."
Even without robots, see also:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J...
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."
As Keynes wrote in his book about his own predecessors: "The completeness of the [classical] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."
We have a choice as a society (at least in theory) like the choice presented in Marshall Brain's book Manna. For Plan A, we can create a world of wealth for all that takes us all (if we want) to the planets and asteroids and stars and beyond, by using fusion power and dirt cheap solar and 3D printing and nanotech and robotic helpers and cybernetic augmentation and so on. Or, for Plan B, we can let all but the super rich starve as the economy implodes from automation, and then, if society does not self-destruct in that starvation process, the children of the super rich can go to the stars eventually if they want. Either way, humanity, if it survives, ends up entirely super rich from technology. With exponential technological growth and declining human fertility in industrialized countries, and a solar system that can likely house quad
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Abstracted, what Davidow, Malone, et al are describing is an economy where the endeavors of the greater mass of people is almost completely divorced from that of the owners of capital. We can already see examples of this in a number of countries where the formal, taxed, audited economy is dominated by extraction industries, where the elite skim a major fraction of the income from mining/petro, import most of their consumption goods from abroad, and leave most citizens to make their own luck.
The "make their own luck" segment is the informal economy that most people in the third world depend on for their daily bread. Public services are slim to none, and what infrastructure there is oftentimes depends on the bribes/unofficial payments, since the state intents most formally budgeted public enterprises to be self-financing. Luanda, Angola and Kinshasa, Zaire are excellent living laboratories. But, we expect this in Africa, parts of the Mideast, and swaths of Asia. What the HBR study is really anticipating is the transition of the greater fraction of First World economies to this mode.
The idea that we can survive this transition via the sharing economy, the maker economy, the decentralized manufacturing economy is theoretically possible. But, exactly what level of "survival" are we talking? Given the current politics in the US, we are draining capital and resources from the bottom 99% faster than they (we) can reorganize to optimize an economic readjustment.
Luke, help me take this mask off
We need to ask whether ownership of production will survive a radical change in economic fundamentals.
For things to be valuable, they have to be scarce. Things would no longer be scarce. This implies some kind of change in the economics that isn't accounted for by the idea of owning production.
Further, artificially restricting access to non-scarce items probably won't fly. They'll probably try it, but once these technologies are out of the box, they're almost certain to lose control of them.
Scarcity is "natural" only for things that have inherent hard limits. So property / elbow room, scenic vistas, spectrum, those sorts of things.
Just a few things have to arrive to disrupt the heck out of our present economic structure:
o non-destructive local energy sourcing and storage (from solar, primarily... plenty of that to go around.)
o adequate robotics to provide household maintenance
o custom and template-based production of objects on demand from generalized raw materials
o custom and template-based production of foodstuffs on demand from generalized raw materials
These, taken together, would utterly change the lives and lifestyles of human beings with access.
It'll be interesting to watch, anyway.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Most of the developing world just doesn't have this problem.
Actually that's not true. India and China did very well out of being a cheap place to manufacture things because of the low labour cost. Now, factories that are almost entirely automated are replacing those staffed by unskilled workers. This means that no one is building them in developing countries and creating jobs there. The only reason that companies like Foxconn have for picking places in Africa for manufacturing now is the the lack of environmental regulation: a few politicians get paid off, but the local economy doesn't benefit and the local environment gets polluted. The path Japan took, of cheaply copying things, being a cheap place to build factories, developing local skills, and then competing internationally with original products, doesn't exist anymore.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ahhhg. Soylent Green was "bad movie all the way down."
Read Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room" so you can (a) have a wonderful read and (b) see what a corrupted, idiotic mess Hollywood made out of a perfectly good story.
Soylent Green is the poster child for the message of a scene in The Majestic. Here's a great summary from the Intertubes:
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Of course they're benefiting from government assistance. When employees cannot survive on low wages, the government makes up the difference, thereby providing business with the continuing ability to pay lower than adequate wages. No health care? Government. Not enough food? Government. Can't pay the rent? Rent assistance. Not enough for day care? Childcare assistance.
And guess who pays for all this? Not walmart or pizza hut or subway... no, we do.
It's a shell game: hiding the actual costs of producing and serving and supplying goods (eg pizza, walmart's merchandise) behind a curtain of indirect government support. If the pizza server and walmart employee earned an adequate wage, this would show up in the price of goods. They don't want that. So instead, your taxes go up, the politicians shrug, and the walmart family is one of the wealthiest in the country, more than a little bit based on those indirect compensation boosts they don't have to pay.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You couldn't be more wrong. Corporations vote through extremely powerful multiplying proxies variously described as bribes, campaign contributions, assurance of later employment and so on, often via extremely powerful channels known as "lobbyists." These votes carry more weight by far than any collection of constituents. You can change the players, that is, vote congress in and out repeatedly, but this does not affect how corporations and the rich control the actual legislative outcomes in any significant way. It just changes who gets the bribes and so forth.
It's like your server changing at McDonald's. New guy or gal, they're now getting the the income the previous employee no longer receives, and they're still telling you "I'll see to it you get a great burger, sir!" but you're still getting the exact same burger. Every time.
Of course, this control isn't actually a voting process, instead they represent a much more direct and effective mechanism of control (direct meting out of money and power and opportunity), but the effect is that your vote and my vote isn't worth a plugged nickel in controlling what legislators do, or don't do. It's just like being outvoted, only much more consistent and effective. The only time your vote appears to matter is when you are voting for the same ideas the rich and the corporations are pushing.
There are very, very few legislators who retire poor. Funny thing, eh? Oligarchy: Look it up, read it, and weep.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well said. Except for one thing. It's not the government who pays them. They're just like a banker, they're just handling the money as it passes by. (Poorly, but that's another post.) We pay them. So the burgers do indeed cost more, it's just that the cost is hidden by moving the payment to the tax collection step.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Money is a proxy for exchange of work. If the work is being done by automation that does not require exchange, money is not required.
o Mining: automated
o Agriculture: automated
o Livestock industry and/or artificial meats: automated
o Manufacturing: automated
o Ordering: Network based, zero cost
o Network maintenance: automated
o Transport: automated
o Delivery: automated
o Power: Solar and storage based, instead of local fuel-based
So what's left for you to do in this production context?
Consume. That's all. Outside of that, enjoy yourself. Hump a lot (robot partners or real ones.) Consume entertainment. Sleep. Exercise. Pursue hobbies. In a word, enjoy your leisure.
Also:
o Firefighting: automated
o Policing: automated
o Emergency response: automated
o Medical care: automated
o Scientific advance: automated
o Travel: automated
And of course:
o Repair of automation: automated
Only things of inherent scarcity would still have value; land, spectrum, that sort of thing. Those are going to be the initial "crunch points" in any transition we attempt to make. There will be others, such as extreme consumption (hand build vehicles like Lambos, huge domiciles, yachts, like that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Your cynicism is misplaced, but not lacking in point entirely: In certain respects, the future can and probably will be post-scarcity - e.g. I suspect things like 'food, water and basic housing' will be possible to produce at relatively tiny marginal cost once largely automated - possibly even some kind of replication for food.
What will NOT be easy "post-scarcity" will be *land allocation* - rich people will live in the most beautiful, prime locations - e.g. scenic seaside areas - so you will have your free food, free 'basic house', free running water - but the area itself will probably be less than wonderful, unless you were fortunate enough to have inherited enough wealth to live in a nice area.
This is mostly similar to today, come to think of it, except for the post-scarcity part.
My other UID is three digits.
A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?
My dog can jump through hoops. He's great at it, but nobody really cares. His masters still feed and house him. So the trick is to program our new robot "masters" to feed and house us .. or something like that. Dogs don't really have "jobs". They don't "go to work". We are to them, like robots will be to us.
My other UID is three digits.
the poor won't be able to afford AI to work for them. Right now, if I needed an AI to do anything, I just couldn't afford it
Your tenses are mixed up - you jump from future to present but juxtapose them as if inaffordability "right now" implies inaffordability decades from now.
Imagine you made this comment in 1970: "The poor won't be able to afford mobile phones. Right now, if I needed a mobile phone, I couldn't afford it" - AC 1970. That's what you just did.
My other UID is three digits.
A "free market" is one based on voluntary interactions and non-force-based interference, private property, and a legal system that recognizes these rights and attempts to protect *from* force-based interference with free/voluntary trade and protect private property rights. It has never been tried anywhere - not even closely. E.g. laws against sex work, for example, are a severe force-based interference on free/voluntary trade. This is just one small example of the massive amounts of force in the system, from fiat currency laws, exchange regulations, customs, border controls, patents and other "Intellectual Property" laws, protectionism, visa and other laws against freedom of movement, immigration law, etc. We live and breathe force in our current "market system" in every way, every day.
My other UID is three digits.
Most people who want to eat can still find food.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
In a competitive environment, those companies that don't adopt the latest tools to keep costs as low as possible for a given level of quality are eventually driven out of business. Even boutique manufacturers such as Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce have crap-tons of automation.
You will need me and other real humans to document your descent from valued individuals who provide useful services to those who suck resources from the economic totality.
Not really. People who are clued in can see it for themselves, and the rest don't give a rat's ass.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Thankd for the Drucker mention, AC, and the GM history. Any good specific Drucker references you suggest related to his comments on automation and employment and wages?
This is at the HBR: ... ... society will become a class society unless service workers attain both income and dignity." He added: "Anyone can acquire the 'means of production', i.e., the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win." Again, Drucker's words prove prescient as the gains in the knowledge economy are hardly being shared equitably. "Our basic grievance with today's billionaires is that relatively little of the value they've created trickles down to the rest of us," the University of Toronto's Roger Martin asserts. He warns that this situation is unsustainable, and that top executives need to rein in their compensation. Surely, Drucker would have agreed. "A healthy business," he wrote, "cannot exist in a sick society.""
https://hbr.org/2014/10/what-p...
"âoeEvery few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred,â Peter Drucker observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review. âoeIn a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself â" its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.â For Drucker, the newest new world was marked, above all, by one dominant factor: âoethe shift to a knowledge society.â
Be more mindful of those left behind. Drucker worried a lot about a group that he characterized as "knowledge-worker cousins": service workers. "Knowledge workers and service workers are not 'classes' in the traditional sense," Drucker wrote. "But there is a danger that
Good sentiments. What specific solutions did he propose for "being mindful of those left behind"? Also, ironically, it is often the knowledge workers who are in some ways more at risk of automation of various sorts than people who work in trades using both their hands and mind. Examples include the "Cloud" replacing sysadmins, or software replacing radiologists, or various internet sites reducing the need for lawyers for many basic tasks for small businesses including forming a corporation. Robots are not still not up to the skill level of, say, a human carpenter and we have not yet rebuilt our general infrastructure to work within their limitations. Contrast our fairly random infrastructure of non-standard and undocumented home layouts with factory floors that have been documented and standardized like for Kiva robots, or systematically organized corporate information management systems that can have software replace human though at various key points. However, I expect that we may see even the home become more standardized to deal with robotic limitations, possibly causing another housing price collapse, because for many people, especially the elderly or parents with young children, it might be worth it to move to a new home if it means robots coudl systematically clean it and prepare food and be available for medical emergencies or helping recover from falls and so on.
I see this about a 2014 conference talking about the risk of "a devastating effect on jobs and employment":
http://www.druckersociety.at/i...
"There is a broad consensus among economists that we enter 2014 into a period of limited economic recovery - even though it will by uneven by country and region and fraught with uncertainties.
A cyclical improvement of the global economy will provide an opportunity to address the huge structural issues that are still looming. They include: unsustainable debt levels, underfunded social
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You still fail to deal with the fact that automated "labor" will get cheaper over time while human capital really can only get so much cheaper.
As has been pointed out in the past, somehow this trend towards greater automation hasn't resulted in human capital getting cheaper over the long run except in the places that have been discouraging the use of human labor such as the developed world.
but I've noticed a running theme with libertarians; whenever the market doesn't behave the way they expect and/or want it just wasn't "free" enough
I noticed that too although they're usually not the people with those expectations. I also notice that they're usually right when they make that observation.
Your phrasing implies that they would work, if they were actually possible.
Yes. The next step is to ask whether we can get close enough to the ideal to have something more useful than present day labor markets? I believe we can do that.
"Obdurate" is a better term. I change my opinions when there is a reason to change them.
Science.
Science is evidence driven.
No. But YOU have not explained WHO would clean up the YEARS of pollution or WHY they would do so.
They will do it themselves. The first world was in similar straits in the 1950s. The first world cleaned up their YEARS of pollution because they had and wanted to. Every place has done this once their residents became wealthy enough to care.
If the EU ceases to be developed world, ...
HOW would that happen?
We have a number of countries with the same sort of difficulties Greece has. Drive off your work force and who will pay for the infrastructure that maintains your economy and your quality of life? The wealthy? They're even more mobile. The clean environments of the developed world are due to both a wealthy citizenry that cares about the environment and enough tax revenue to enforce the necessary regulatory environment. The current dysfunctionality undermines both.
And, again, it is the WORKERS who are pursuing jobs in other 1st world countries.
It is NOT the OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES moving to the 3rd world. The OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES are moving the manufacturing jobs to the 3rd world while they keep their families in the 1st world.
And they'll move when they move. I don't see the point of this argument. It remains irrelevant. The OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES aren't remotely close to a majority of the population of the first world. And they have a variety of ways to avoid taxes should they get excessively leaned on for such.
How does the current approach in the developed world do anything to avoid "angry mobs"? I keep pointing out the obvious. This problem of unemployable people is a first world problem. It's not a developing world problem which has somehow figured out how to keep those people employable.
If automation enables a human to do the work of ten people, and of demand is limited (a key point), then the need for 90% of jobs in that area goes away. Automation does not have to be 100% to have a have big effect on employment.
The Japanese are working hard on health care robots for their aging populations. Again, a robot that could do 90% of tasks, or let one real person support ten people via indirect means like tele-operation will change the employment dynamics of that field. Even just a doubling of effectiveness could make a huge difference -- even just by removing travel time or data logging for, say, a visiting nurse.
Other ways automation can change health aid employment is if people had more free and then could care for elderly relatives directly. Humans still provide the care, but it is outside formal employment. Also, even without more free time, a telepresence robot could let distant relatives care for an elderly relative, perhaps even doing physical tasks like the laundry if the robot manipulators had haptic feedback through the internet.
By the way, for stuff like showers, there are already machines for that for nursing homes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03...
"With an electronic whir, the machine released a dollop of "peach body shampoo," a kind of body wash. Then, as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home's new human washing machine."
Also, on robot lawyers:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/2...
"The law profession is being reshaped by new automation technologies that allow law firms to complete legal work in a fraction of the time and with far less manpower. Think IBM's "Jeopardy!"-winning computer Watson -- practicing law. "Watson the lawyer is coming," said Ralph Losey, a legal technology expert at the law firm Jackson Lewis. "He won't come up with the creative solutions, but when it comes to the regular games that lawyers play, he'll kill them." That means potentially huge cost savings for clients, though it's not so promising for law school graduates looking for work. The good news for lawyers is that no one thinks the profession can be automated entirely. But lots of legal work is already being computerized by some firms, including the drafting of simple contracts and the search for evidence in reams of documents."
There, stuff you said would never happen has already happened to some extent -- enough to make a difference to employment outlooks! And that is often the case in such discussions, as much as it is also possible to overestimate the difficulty of replacing humans in some tasks. As I mention in a previous post, what often happens with automation is that the task itself gets redesigned to be easier to automate (probably what happened with the bath). Or as in factories, the environment gets systematically structured so robots can navigate it within their limitations. Also, automation can often take the low-hanging fruit from a job (like legal search) which may eliminate 90% of the billable hours from some task while also removing the ladder by which an apprentice provides value to learn a trade and move up the employment ladder.
Of course, the good news is this means consumer prices will drop. But someone unemployed with zero income can't afford legal services or health services even if they are 1/10th the cost.... At least not without some form of "income" from the government or charity. Or, alternatively, some sort of gift of capital of personal robots to be used for local subsistence production or perhaps selling robot-produced products and services for exchange credits (sort of like renting your PC's idle time to bigger number crunching projects).
Also, since when do services have to be entirely *better* to compete? If I told you, you can hire a human health aid for US$4000 a month for e
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You're right, because it is impossible for every player in the market to have perfect knowledge. Not only that, but since there is no regulation in a free market there is nothing stopping people from withholding such information in a effort to make more profits for themselves. Once that happens, money starts flowing to those who happen to make decisions about the market and/or big boys who can manipulate the market and crush competitors. Eventually you wind up with a self-destructive cycle where the few who have managed to turn into monopolies and oligopolies destroy the whole market in the attempt to turn it into there own personal money making machine while everyone else gets screwed.
People are greedy assholes. Too much freedom (free markets) or too little freedom (communism) in the market will always result in a corrupted economic system that will end up shitting on 99%+ of the population. Moderation in all things.
~X~
AC wrote: "Him: Robots are destroying jobs!!! Me: Nah, this is just nerds starting to destroy money ;)"
LOL! :-) Thanks for the insightful post.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What will happen when robots replace workers? The workers stop doing their former jobs and start new jobs programming, building, and maintaining robots. At the end of that process, all humans have more wealth, so the world is a better place.
Next question, please.
Government money should only got to things *I* like!
I don't mind government money not going to things *I* like as long as society doesn't suffer greatly by elimination of important services. But I do mind government money going to things I despise. That's pretty much most of US federal government level spending right now.
Welfare need not be something I despise, but advocates just don't get the point of it. The point of welfare is not to provide stuff that we can get for ourselves, should we care enough (pensions and health care being notorious examples), it's not to create subsidies, rent seekers, grotesque inflation of the cost of vital services (health care and education being great examples of that), anti-social behavior that we then must stamp out with more government spending (such as the crackdown on student loan defaults in the US or those mean corporations that pay near minimum wage), and it's not a massive behavior modification sand box for somebody's entertainment. It should just be relative small amounts of spending for people genuinely down on their luck or suffering in a way that can be greatly alleviated with a little money. I recognize that even my small amount of welfare will have unpleasant and unintended consequences. But at least it'll be small enough that it doesn't obsessively drive social policy, class/ethnic conflict, or endless streams of government regulation.
The question is not who employes them, the question is who pays for their living expenses. If companies don't pay a living wage, then that's you and me.
So what? We already made that choice to do so. Forcing companies to go with automation over employment doesn't make this situation any better.
That's a pretty dumb argument since it leaves the opinion of what a threshold of "poison" is to one side of such a conflict. "They" might rather not be poisoned at all, but that's not a right especially with toxins that are normally present in the environment, sometimes in high concentrations.
One of the real world arguments against the EPA is that it frequently establishes levels of toxins which are far lower sometimes by orders of magnitude than what are required to poison you, sometimes considerably lower than the natural levels of the toxin. And that it does so in a way that frequently ignores cost of compliance.
The EPA also has a variety of tools at its disposal which violate basic constitutional principles (ex post facto laws such as Superfund, punishment without being charged for a crime via wetland regulations, etc).
The problem with your unregulated utopia is that psychopaths exist who would quickly corrupt it and turn it to their own benefit. Human nature will ruin any attempt at a pure "free" market. We've already seen the effects of businesses being able to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profit. The Cuyahoga river caught on fire 13 times.
That's only a problem if you don't anticipate it. How are those psychopaths going to stay employed? How are those psychopaths going to get people to work for them?
br. As to regulation, I don't rule it out. Sure, we need some environmental regulation.
History has shown that the freer the market is, the faster it gets overtaken by monopolies.
Then you should be able to provide examples. Be warned, I will show how your reasoning is flawed as you do so.
Once the monopolies are established, they use their economic means to ensure that the market is anything *but* free.
Established? How? Already we have a non-free market mechanism in the works via your "locking" mechanism.
Bear in mind that I also am not concerned by temporary monopolies. They create pricing signals that lure in new competition.
"You will need me and other real humans to document your descent from valued individuals who provide useful services to those who suck resources from the economic totality."
LOL. :-) Good points, but the internet is already replacing *most* paid creative writing with viral essays and videos. What I mean by that is that is it possible for one creative writer to quickly reach millions of readers, but readers have only so much time. That is the power of automation as an amplifier. So, yes, we may indeed "need" one creative writer (or even a thousand) doing what you outline, but there are literally millions of people who want to be creative writers. That means 99.9%+ of potential creative writers can't make a living from it in the internet age. If even the New York Times is struggling, why should any specific writer expect things could work out financially?
Of course, one may point to hundreds of YouTube video creators or bloggers with millions of followers making tens of thousands of dollars from advertising -- but that model just does not scale. There just is not enough advertising revenue to go around. There is also not enough subscription revenue to go around. There are not enough eyeballs and free time to go around.
It's always been that way with a "star" model of success in the creative arts. It seems to me that most people (95% - 99%?) who make a living related to the arts do it by teaching their craft (like a public school music teacher or writing teacher or something similar). Then they do a little bit of creative stuff in their spare time.
Many other artists and writers have a spouse or parents who funds their time. For a personal example I just spent 2.5 years providing (paid) third-line technical support and software development services to NBCUniversal's broadcast operations while my wife worked (mostly unpaid) part-time (we also homeschool) on her free book on "Working With Stories". That book is ironically in part about getting communities to tell their own stories again instead of mostly accepting pre-packaged commercial offerings. :-)
http://www.workingwithstories....
Before that, for years she was making most of the money for our family while I was writing stuff more (including "Post-Scarcity Princeton" and various free software) and doing more of the homeschooling. However, realistically, that was only possible because we both could command six-figure annual wages as professionals and were willing to accept some other compromises (smaller older house, many years without health insurance, etc.). Unless you are really, really frugal, and probably don't homeschool, that model probably won't work for most families without potentially two professional incomes of some sort (unless you have other funding like from parents or savings or investments).
However, in the past, like the 1950s in the USA, before the "two income trap" sprung, it was a lot more feasible, at least for a typical male breadwinner and female stay-at-home couple.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"Two-income families are almost always worse off than their single-income counterparts were a generation ago, even though they pull in 75 percent more in income. The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did. As the authors write: "Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked against them.""
BTW, the "Two Income Trap" adds a new twist to this discussion, suggesting that job loss is a lot more devastating to most families now than it was in the 1950s. One reason is that the other spouse can't start working to pick up the slack because he or she is already working and they are dependent on both incomes. You als
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. Can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it.
My regards to Captain Dunsel.
Yeah, and someone will, just like they do now. Did YOU ever click on a \. add? Yet here they are. Nevermind the concept of making your own stuff.
As robots take over, and liberate man from tasks, it also implies that man is liberated from an income. Should there be a have and have not society? Can the have society sustain the infrastructures we hold dear, such as roads, schools, desire to be productive?
If robots take over, we will require a guaranteed wage. That will allow money to circulate, and society to be vibrant and alive.
If that does not occur, look for malaise and crime to grow out of proportion to today's level.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Your repetitive "developed vs 3rd" world red herring is tiresome.
We're talking about future developments that will apply everywhere.
You make it sound so enticing :/
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Man, where's that +1, Troll moderation option when you need it?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And what is the incentive for the people owning the machines to give away everything they make for nothing?
Not being torn limb from limb by a hungry, homeless, and angry mob.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Reminds me of Fred Pohl's excellent 1954 story The Midas Plague ( https://archive.org/stream/gal... )
But automation *has* been delivering on that promise, and for some decades now. See upstream posts concerning gas jockeys and bank tellers for a couple of examples.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And what is the incentive for the people owning the machines to give away everything they make for nothing?
Not being torn limb from limb by a hungry, homeless, and angry mob.
The problem with that scenario is that not everyone will end up in that situation simultaneously. As today, people who are not YET affected will fight to keep their privileged position, and be quite willing to step on the neck of those without, since "they made bad choices" or whatever. Those at the very top won't have to defend themselves until the very end.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I didn't say anything about a requirement that it happen everywhere all at once, since I don't see any.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If it doesn't happen everywhere at once, then the proles are divided into the haves and have-nots. And since it won't happen anywhere "all at once", it's going to get extremely ugly.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
But not in a hostile Terminator scenario. More like it is a possible convergence of human evolution and technology, to replace our biological minds and bodies with technological ones. I wrote a blog post about it today, supporting my contention that "Web 3.0" will involve a direct neural connection of the brain to the Internet, without tactile devices like mouse and keyboard. http://netsperience.org/conten...
I think we can all agree that a columnist from the Harvard School of Business, where most of the same folks responsible for the crash of 2008 come from, has a bias and is obviously writing propaganda to discourage us from looking forward to replacing wage slavery with a mechanized labor force. I won't even read TFA nor even the excerpt. The credentials of the author say it all. We should be looking forward to a collapse of such a harmful and destructive system.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Precisely. Too bad most can't think outside the box and realize this, smh.
Wrong. A trajectory going into a singularity has nothing to do with the trajectory going out of it—if any is even taken.
The definition of a singularity is a point where a mathematical formula is not defined. Except for the case of removable singularities, any derivatives are also undefined. So if your model ends up at a singularity, your math is simply not up to the task of describing what happens next.
Around an essential singularity, the most interesting and worrisome kind, the formula takes every possible value, infinitely many times. You can approach the singularity from any value and exit with any other value. So "at" the singularity, the formula is even less defined than in a regular "oh noes I divided by zero" kind, where at least you know the value to be infinitely large.
I realize that, by Occam's razor, the journalist may not even know what a singularity is and just threw the word around because it's cool. Sigh.
Oh but robots did create massive unemployment. Now there are millions, soon to be billions of people out of work, who can play tennis and soccer all day long.
Except they have no food, nor clothes, nor shelter. There are people called "owners" that keep all the food and clothes and shelter produced by the robots, unless you give them something they need in exchange. Which of course you cannot do, because there's nothing you have that they might need, not even your body—unless you are an attractive female, or they need one of your organs. There are already poor people selling their organs to buy food for their families.
That is quite simply what's wrong with the picture. Owners.
If you're writing music that is indeed a concern [...] Other art forms don't have that problem.
Many other art forms do indirectly. Movies, for one, have a problem because they contain music. So do video games.
Who says that money will still be THE most important thing. Money, for what it's worth is simply a symbolic representation of wealth. And what is wealth but goods or natural resources that are in the disposal or control of certain individuals. You don't normally call air wealth because nobody controls the air we breathe (maybe in a highly polluted dystopian future it could become wealth). So the problem isn't in the concentration of wealth but the concentration of power. The danger is the only a few individual will control those army of robots and automatons that would be used in the production of wealth.
We're talking about future developments that will apply everywhere.
I notice that you say a number of wrong things in your comments on this story. The most important is this one:
The problem is that median wages have been stagnating for decades.
Not in the developing world. For example, the first chart at this link shows over 60% growth in real income (adjusted for inflation) for the global median wage over the period 1988-2008. How does a 60+% growth in global median wages translate into "have been stagnating for decades"? They don't. You are ignoring 4/5 of the world's population.
The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down
No mention of demand for that labor. Supply of labor has been going up for centuries, yet it is more valued than ever.
If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.
The non sequitur.
You certainly could get to a point where it's just too much of a bother to even keep track of a low-achieving human employee vs. having a robot do it. Those people could essentially become unemployable.
We could always make it less of a bother to keep track of low-achieving humans. This is my theme throughout this discussion.
So why should I believe what you have to say about the future, when you are so painfully wrong about the present?
Wouldn't beating the shit out of 85% of the people also be something robots could excel at?
Maybe
Up to 10% of those could be gainfully employed keeping the rest in order. By which I mean beating the shit out of them, mostly.
Robots would do a better job here too and maybe perform some quick depopulation or surgery to stop the useless ones from breeding
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Jim, thanks for the reply. It is a pleasure to be corresponding with someone with such a knowledge of computing history (having lived it). My first computer (other than playing with IBM punched cards and building my own circuits) was KIM-1 with 1K of memory in the late 1970s, and I've been working with them ever since. I started networked computing in high school in the 1970s on a TOPS-10/Lyrics DEC PDP-10 system on Long Island, even eventually getting a Commodore PET to dial in (but I could not afford as a teenager the US$10 an hour phone non-local charges -- probably US$40 an hour in today's money -- although at some point we got a local dial-in as I was leaving high school). I was later for a time on AppleLink and BIX and the Well and IGC, but still generally restricted by US$10 an hour long distance charges until the late 1990s. We perhaps both draw from many of the same pool of ideas and interests and likely even sci-fi stories informing our outlooks (even if they are not identical) -- although with my experiences lag yours by a decade or two, and I was never in the kind of communities doing the kind of really new work you were fortunate enough to be in. My father was a merchant mariner, then a machinist, then a manufacturing engineer, so I also has a somewhat more mechanical focus in some of my aspirations (like interest in self-replicating hardware leading to self-replicating space habitats, which overlaps seasteading and some other exponential ideas you talk about for environmental cleanup); but my mother's work as a social worker / welfare caseworker for twenty years and more also is an influence as to bigger picture issues. Due to that lag, compared to you, I also saw and lived in much more of the Personal Computer aspect of the industry compared to PLATO and (to me then unaffordable, even for two decades) computer networking, even if I did use networked computer early on in high school. I put some rambles below on ideas in your essay and other historical links, plus a big quote at the end from Bill Norris hat applies to the main topic of automation and jobs. Anyway, got to get back to "work" or I would make this better and shorter. :-)
=== Ramble mode on
I corresponded with Bill Norris briefly in the late 1980s (when my graduate advisor at Princeton suggested I talk to him), then again in the early 1990s. I had hoped to work with him somehow at his foundation developing software to support flexible manufacturing and information exchange, even hoping to move as a summer volunteer/intern to MN (he said he had no money to hire new staff). However, I met my wife around then and so those hopes ultimately fell apart. My own ideas on that became "OSCOMAK", but it has not really gone far, and it has been eclipsed by other ideas of lesser scope but better social networking. It's a shame he and I never worked together back then, as I feel it would have been a great match with my interests and abilities, and I would have learned so much from him. I can envy you a chance to bask in that environment.
Bill Norris sent me a copy of his biography as well as copies of many of the pamphlets he wrote for Control Data (like "back to the Countryside via Technology"). I scanned and OCR'd some of the pamphlets and had hoped to put them on the internet and we had some correspondence about that too, but the licensing issues remained unclear so I did not put them up. Glad someone else did though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
Of Bill Norris' talks there, the most relevant there is this HBR story on robots taking all the jobs may be: "Technology and Full Employment [Nov. 1978]". I quote at length from one of them at the end. However, as much as I respect Bill Norris, and as much as what he said about full employment and technology may have been true in the 1970s, I feel it is a lot less true now that robotics, AI, and other forms of automation, along with better design, better materials, expanded infrastructure
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
All these comments, and no one has mentioned Player Piano?
The book was obviously way ahead of the technology, but the picture it paints is a sad one.
Did you miss the first 2 words of my post - "Until now"?
There's no evidence that now is different from the past few centuries. We still have both comparative advantage and Jevons paradox. We also have a massive global increase in employment with employees still finding new jobs when the old ones get obsoleted.
If robot workers are required to pay FICA/Social Security taxes then they can support me and a lot of other people in our retirement. Seriously, the extent to which robots will displace human workers will depend primarily on the economic and legal structures that we put in place. Nothing is preordained. It is clear that robots will have an increasing capability of adding value/creating wealth. The real question we should all be concerned with is how this wealth will be distributed.
First of all, the proles are uneducated. Its easy enough to distribute the plans of these robots and have different groups making different parts. The outer class may be the ones who assemble them and leave it only to the inner class to program them.
Secondly, while the proles are building the robots, they have jobs. Once they are done building the robots, they'll lose their jobs. By then its too late.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Actually, you just have to get robot labor down to cheaper than a human in all cases. The value of human labor varies, but if we establish some sort of minimum pay then it's likely that robots will eventually get under that. If the minimum wage is $10/hour and the fully amortized cost of robot labor is $5/hour, humans lose. Nor do we have to eliminate all human-occupied jobs to get massive social unrest. If we get 50% of the population as permanently unemployable, I'd expect riots and possible revolution.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Thanks for the links to Norris's papers. I had attempted to gain access to those when I visited the Twin Cities a few years back -- as they were part of the UMN Norris archives -- but they kept worse than bankers' hours so I wasn't able to gain access to them during that visit.
In particular the long-lost paper "Back to the Countryside Via Technology" by William C. Norris, then CEO of Control Data Corporation, January 1978, was what I recalled. It delves into some of his vision for the PLATO network as a way of preserving the Nation of Settlers against the onslaughts of urbanization (and what has turned out to be a resulting demographic catastrophy in loss of total fertility rates among the baby boom generation).
Norris was one of my inspirations for county currency, as well as my early promotion of mass market computer networks. Sadly, perhaps even tragically, I did not get through his middle management at CDC to Norris about the mass market version of PLATO a group of us young engineers had demonstrated right under his nose at CDC circa 1980. The world might have been a very different place. It is my greatest professional regret that I didn't just barge into his office and chain myself to a door to get his attention.
Seastead this.
Glad the Norris link was helpful. Still hope you check out the"Skills of Xanadu" links... Yeah, it's hard to know when to "barge" and when not to...
Your County Currency link was off, but I found this:
http://countycurrency.org/
Reminds me a bit of LETS:
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Although, from the fist link: "Don't think of LETS points like dollars. Think of them as favours. LETS Favours. ... The LETS group's function is to act as a bookkeeper for their members' activities; keeping record of these 'favours' and putting the members' accounts into debit or credit accordingly. An account that is in credit identifies a member who has given more favours than he has received, and an account that is in debit identifies a member who has received more favours than he has given. These credits have no value and cannot be exchanged for cash. Their only purpose is to keep track of each member's involvement in the group so they can aim to bring their accounts back to zero -- a sign of fair and equitable participation in the system. ..."
And:
http://banknd.nd.gov/
"Welcome to Bank of North Dakota (BND). As the only state-owned bank in the nation, we act as a funding resource in partnership with other financial institutions, economic development groups and guaranty agencies."
Although they presumably don't issue currency except as debt like any other conventional bank. But one can wonder how far debt lending could go at he state level these days with Fed support.
See also on having adequate currency as the cause of the American Revolution (assuming it is true):
"How Benjamin Franklin Caused the Revolutionary War"
http://www.opednews.com/articl...
Jane Jacobs was big on cities having their own currencies. She especially values currency fluctuations between cities as markers of how well cities were doing processes like import replacement. She pointed out how national currencies could hurt most cities (while perhaps benefiting the capital city). Reading her work, I realized how the Euro was a big step backwards for most Europeans, especially in a computer age where translating currencies using current values (over a network) was a fairly easy problem to solve technically. The Euro shows the folly of trying to have a common currency without a common form of governance for the people who use it.
When I've thought about currencies, I eventually realized that a currency is implicitly a constitution. It's backed in a sense by an community and is only as strong as the governance of that community, which controls how much of the currency is issued and the official rules for exchange it. When a currency loses value relative to other currencies, it mostly reflects an assessment of the community or its governance that stands behind the currency as a medium of exchange. In that sense, the county currency idea fits a definable unit of governance -- the county.
As for getting back to the countryside with technology, my wife and I moved to the Adirondack park more than ten years ago. When we first arrived we had only dialup, but a couple years after that paid the cable company US$4000 to extend cable about a half mile to us so we could get broadband speeds. Money well spent as far as ROI. It was only computer networking that let us live in such a remote area and still be able to do consulting projects. And dialup speeds were getting more and more problematical, with people sending multi-megabyte files and asking us if we got them, and having to say, well, it will take a couple hours to download... I spent 2.5 years recently supporting NBCUniversal's broadcast operations and writing new software for them to con
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In the past humans needed to work hard to produce enough food to survive. Today machines assist humans in producing food. Eventually when robots can produce enough food for humans the game changes because no human will need to do work to survive. Perhaps humans can then focus on making the planet liveable, instead of exploiting it to build robots to make food. I am optimistic about the future. We could find ourselves heading towards a more "primitive" lifestyle of discovery, art, music, creativity and care of nature - and we find value in being part of creation and interacting with what we love and value, not an exploiter of it.
Up to 10% of those could be gainfully employed keeping the rest in order. By which I mean beating the shit out of them, mostly.
+1 Prophetic :/
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
And who owns these robots? Who decides where they're allowed to be used (don't want noise or awful smells in the neighborhood in paradise).
And until these robots can do everything, who does the non-robotic stuff? How are they compensated? Even in Star Trek they had money.
Creativity? AI can beat a human hands down, when it gets to the point that it can observe your reactions and custom-tailor things in real time. For example, your video game won't be the same as everyone else's - at any moment it'll have the exact level of difficulty to keep you glued to the screen, a custom plot that changes as the AI measures your autonomic reactions to variations and drives the plot to your interests in real time, the introduction of different characters and scenarios based on your history, etc.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
But then rich people would have to clean their own toilets.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We decided to not let people starve, and institutionalized that decision in the form of social security. However, setting up said social security in such a way that businesses suffer less costs from paying their employees insufficient wages than they would without social security in place - because automation is not free - creates perverse incentives. It rewards paying employees less and punishes any competitors who pay decent wages. That's a dumb and arguably evil thing to do.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I am a creative writer. Like a fine artist or a serious music composer I will not be displaced easily.
In the future, we will all be poets and artists.
You are in a growth industry. If torrent sites are able to crush the distrubution networks and direct to consumer distribution takes over, then you should have a bright future. I think we may all be joining you some day.
Well, that's an interesting way of looking at it. It's a long post, so it took e a bit of time to digest everything you said, and even now I'm not sure I've completely digested it.
So, my point is based on the clear fact that many artists, authors, and musicians have been motivated by money, and created art with the purpose of getting money. Mark Twain (the reason for his strange biographical release program was to make money for his descendents), Winston Churchill (they say every time he needed more money, he wrote another book), Beethoven (numerous examples, but Wellington's Victory comes to mind).
Surely there are plenty of artists today who (like Taylor Swift) want to make money off their art, but a lot of them won't admit it or will outright lie and say they want you to copy their music, because they don't want the same treatment Metallica got, or they let the RIAA be the bad guys while secretly favoring the RIAA's actions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And what is the actual mechanism you propose for that? And who is going to invest the capital necessary without an incentive to profit from it? You can't get there from here.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.