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The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com)
Alana Semuels writes via The Atlantic about the parts of America most susceptible to automation: Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation. A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt. It predicts that areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales will be most affected -- "places such as Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area may be the most vulnerable to automation in upcoming years, with 65 percent of jobs in Las Vegas and 63 percent of jobs in Riverside predicted to be automatable by 2025. Other areas especially vulnerable to automation are El Paso, Orlando, and Louisville. Still, the authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades.
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will be much better there with no to very low cost. Then that shit high risk pools that you may not have the funds to pay for.
If you do anything on your job which you can be automated, which is repetitive, those tasks will eventually be automated.
This does not automatically mean your job will be automated completely, but your job will change.
Or as Edsger W. Dijkstra said: higher level programming languages: People thought that those languages would solve the programming problem [make it easier]. But when you looked closely the trivial aspects of programming had been automated while the hard ones remained.
New things are always on the horizon
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will be much better there with no to very low cost.
Any time you want to be edumacated just visit google and search for something like "prison health care" and then cry and cry as you see prisoners not even receiving treatment for real afflictions, let alone the cosmetic surgery and shit people imagine that prisoners are receiving.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah. If we criminalizing things.
Yeah. If the do-gooders impose higher and higher sin taxes (say on cigarettes) and then wonder why a peaceful transfer of products turns violent as people inevitably try to avoid the onerous tax.
You want a smaller prison population? Do not criminalize everything. Limit as much as possible police enforcement to violence and theft.
The corner stone of a free society is the agreement that:
"I will not try to kill you and take your stuff If you don't try to kill me and take my stuff."
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Any "Objective Repeatable Task" is automatable.
Objective: The goal can be clearly defined in simple words. There are few input parameters to the problem that affect the output. The output is easily measured. The decision process for the input parameters has just a few steps.
Repeatable: The input parameters are similar and the outcome is similar.
Examples: Roofing. Laundry. Cooking. Manufacturing.
I just wonder how long it will take these people to realize that Trump is NOT getting their jobs back.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Once upon a time it took 100% of humans 100% of their time to stay a live and gather enough food. Then we started to specialize.
In 1987 2% of Americans farmed, and that's was the lowest number (total) since the 1800s. In 1820, when they were reported at less than 2.1 million, or about 72 percent of the American work force of 2.9 million. By 1850, farm people made up 4.9 million, or about 64 percent, of the nation's 7.7 million workers. The farm population in 1920, when the official Census data began, was nearly 32 million, or 30.2 percent of the population of 105.7 million, the report said. So we've gone from 100 to 72 to 64 to 30 to 2% of the population need to just make food to keep our species going.
How many people did horses 'automate'? If you look at the cumulative improvements at a single task how many people with sticks can a single tractor replace? Think of how many 'jobs' we could bring back if we outlawed tractors? It doesn't mean that a 'farmer' has gone away, it just means they do something different. An engineer in 2017 has had most of what an engineer did in 1917 'automated'.
Computers have been automating computer jobs since they were invented. Compilers are just "robots" that turn high level C into Assembly. I don't even write my own C any more, Simulink does a much better and consistent job at it. The autogenerated code may be a bit verbose but it's very explicit and bester right
You are referring to the days when companies still thought they needed domestic people to survive. Managers were still taught to nurture the domestic pool of talent that they had, because they were still key to a company's growth. Today a company isn't considered successful if it relies on domestic workers as part of its business plan. Huge fundamental shift there that people with the tired old 'buggy whip' argument don't understand.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So you're trying to make the claim that globalization has not changed the world's economies in any fundamental way. That companies are run the same way that they were 100 years ago, and boardrooms around the nation are equally as interested as employing domestic workers as they were before. That's a pretty hard road to take but I'm waiting for you to cite evidence to back you claim. For America's sake I hope that you are right.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You know what I'm tired of? People who have no sense of scale, like at all.
Yeah, yeah, there will still be niches where people will be needed, but that's just it, niches. In the past one large manufacturing plant could employ thousands, or even tens of thousands of workers. Where do you see all these little niche employers popping up in order to swallow all these people? And note, now the automation is no longer restricted to manufacturing. Now, in fact for quite a while, we've been automating services too, like banking, ticket sales, etc, etc. Where are the "surplus" people supposed to go, really?
Hand-waving does you no good, nor does denial. This is a real problem, and we'd better figure out how to solve it. Because the alternative is going to be really ugly. But then I guess that's what the real purpose for the apparatus which is being put in place to fight "terrorism".
Except before globalization, domestic workers were automatically the most competitive workers. Globalization has made domestic workers noncompetitive. So your statement supports my claim, not yours, if you are in fact the same Anonymous Coward.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Umm, TFA said "automatable by 2025". Note that it's not 2025 yet, and that "automatable by 2025" in no ways implies "automatable right now"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So, Homer Simpson?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No, I said nothing about globalization. That as you building some kind of straw man. The world "globalization" did not appear in my post.
I said that over the course of history, automation has not had the detrimental effect on employment that has been predicted time and time again. What in fact happens is that there are structural changes to society, but in the end society ends up better off with automation than without. At one time, over 90% of humanity were farmers. Automating farming did not result in 90% of people not having jobs today.
but even today, robochefs are still a novelty,
Denial denial denial! At one time automobiles were a novelty! Just as they have become indispensable to the needs to society, so too can improvements in robotics become indispensable to the fast food industry. You can't make the claim because it happened happened yet, then it won't. That's just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So you want to talk about 'the way things were' and yet refuse to look at anything that may have happened along the way that changed things in that time. So you have no idea whether you are making statements that are relevant to today or not. Got it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No, automation is a real observable phenomenon that's actually occurring, more and more so because it's often even more cost efficient than outsourcing. If outsourcing was not happening at all, automation would proceed at an even faster rate, because the benefit of replacing N highly paid western workers with a machine is far greater than replacing N workers of the same skill set working in some less developed country with a fraction of the pay.
No-one's been claiming that. Of course the concept of automation is not new, but the way automation can and is implemented has changed entirely with modern computers and data-driven manufacturing and production optimization.
A lot has been automated already, but it's nothing compared to what can and will be automated. The definition of 'low-hanging fruit' has also changed: data entry jobs were not too long ago considered impossible to automate. That's changed completely, and pretty soon the masses of people whose primary day-to-day work has been copying information from one place to another will be made obsolete by machines.
How many jobs can be automated now != how many jobs can be automated within the next couple of decades. If you told people in 1990 that in 30 or so years self-driving cars will start to emerge and threaten the jobs of drivers you'd have been laughed at by most. Similarly if you told them that call-.center jobs are being replaced by automated speech recognition and synthesis bots. Both are already happening, and are only going to keep going.
The up-front and maintenance cost by themselves are irrelevant. What mattes is how much performance you can get from the system per hour compared to humans. If said machine replaces 10 people working around the clock at 8 dollars an hour it will have paid for its acquisition in less than a year. After that at 40 000 a year it's massively cheaper than having all those people there.
You seem to be under the deluded impression that humans can somehow compere with increasingly efficient automation, even though said automation is the result of millions of hours of human engineering and designing with the specific intent of making computers that are more cost-efficient than humans at performing tasks..
It's not a meme, it's an undeniable reality of modern day life, and it doesn't have to mean the '1 % will grind us to paste', that only happens if we don't implement political changes that address the effects of increasing automation and decreasing employment, namely systems like basic income, changing taxation so that the 1 % making billions on their automated manufacturing will provide the rest of the society with money to be able to live and buy their products. Without consumers with purchasing power the consumer economy collapses which is not good for anyone, including the ultra-rich.
No, you seem more like someone sick from cognitive dissonance: on one hand recognizing the fact that increasing automat
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
You want a smaller prison population? Quit being a thug. Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
cut full time down to 32 hours short term with an road map to making it 20 longer term
Considering all the bad consequences of continued human population growth, the loss of all these jobs may be a blessing in disguise. We could issue the unemployed the bare minimum to keep them alive, block them from retraining or other means of becoming economic contributors again, accompany that with multiple, easily-accessible and inexpensive means to accelerate their deaths, and let nature take its course. Under those circumstances, many of these less-employable masses will be more willing to kill themselves and those that aren't willing to do so consciously will end up dying prematurely anyway. Come to think of it, we've already been doing this. We just need to globalize the trend and accelerate the rate of self-elimination. We get rid of some 4-6 billion unnecessary people in the next century -- no genocidal wars, thermo-nuclear winters, or global pandemics needed. What could go wrong?
A $50,000 robot uses maybe $5,000 in parts and electricity annually. Compared to a worker earning $50,000 a year and needs vacation time that robot can work 24 hours a day 6 days a week every week and be maintained by 1 guy(who does a dozen other robots too.
I sell the robots the best business case for robots is two fold. First while upfront costs are higher maintence and long term costs are way down, and a robot can scale production up and down as a business needs it to. This month you need 5000 parts daily. No problem. Next month you need 500 parts daily no problem.
Being able to ramp up and down according to sales is the future.
The future is a combo of 3D printing and just in time manufacturing keeping humans out of the production loop.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
so in the usa run up an 100K loan to get an masters. While an overseas guy's has and masters with only an 5k-10k loan that can be discharged.
It's time for a I-hate-technology politician to run for president. "I'll build a Turing Test center, and Google will pay for it!"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think he had an invisible /sarc at the end of his statement. :)
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Automation isn't the enemy it's a very helpful tool. Unfortunately, this tools is displacing people significantly faster than new job opportunities being created. The industrial revolution had this problem and many farmers faced near starvation while the rest were forced to survive working in factories. People seem to think it was a time of great progress but the truth is that it was a time of mass exploitation. We are going to have a similar outcome if we do nothing to prevent it. There are people who balk at the very idea of Universal Basic Income in a heartless manner because they do not grasp the breadth and level of widespread suffering that is coming. I hope that humanity has the wisdom to understand what is happening but I fear that our selfish tribalism is going to leave tens of millions to die.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Exactly, in all probability the automation revolution when it arrives in full force will completely upend the basic structure of our society. If not in 10 years then in 20 years or 100 years, makes no difference in the end. No one has any idea what this will ultimately mean or how to deal with it beyond vague guesses. Brings up fundamental questions about [deep stuff] that have never even made sense to ask before.
That or climate change/endless human stupidity stops progress before we get there and bring us back to stone age. Or possibly the great spiritual awakening occurs and we all learn to live in peace and harmony with nature. :D
Buggy whip manufacturer and mechanic are both primarily manual dexterity tasks, with an incremental intellectual knowledge. Training a hotel maid with limited language skills to do another task that will not be automated is a challenge. The Chef will likely become a personal chef or something related, at least at first... but there are a whole class of positions that will simply disappear. Call me introverted, but I will be happy to not have to wait in line to talk to anyone in order to "check in" to a hotel or rent/return a car.
I am an engineer, and hire primarily engineers. We try to get the top ~30% of our field, although some people turn out to perform closer to the 30th percentile. We try to keep them, if we can. They generally make 20% less that the 70th-90th percentile folks, which provides at least a little offset. So, what happens when the bottom 70% simply cannot find a job? (We get closer to that every day with increases in software, real-estate, benefits, and healthcare costs becoming a meaningful portion of total burdened costs.)
While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation.
This could only possibly be true if one utterly fails to recognize the difference between labor intensive manufacturing and capital intensive manufacturing. Labor intensive means that labor costs are a relatively high proportion of the total cost of the product. Capital intensive is the converse. The vast majority of job losses for labor intensive products (textiles, basic assembly, etc) are entirely due to production moving to low labor costs locations. For capital intensive manufacturing, automation is the big driver. US manufacturing has been capital intensive for several decades now so further job losses will often be due to automation.
Any time you hear a politician talking about "bringing back manufacturing jobs" they are almost always talking about bringing back labor intensive production. Problem is that unless US wages fall by a LOT, production of those products is never going to come back to the US. They will be made wherever labor costs are lowest and no amount of politician's promises will change that fact. The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage are long gone.
... and let nature take its course.
[...]
What could go wrong?
If you want to all survival of the fittest, you need to remember that people will fight to survive. That means you will see an uprising most everywhere and they will slaughter their oppressors. Heartlessly discarding people will bring the dogs of war to rip out your throat.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Maybe we should automate the task of writing articles & books about how automation is going to replace everyone.
I speculate there is a natural cap on automation since we are proven incapable of making them secure. All the recent IoT bots show what will happen: if you put in too much automation criminals will wreck it.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Exactly. Why haven't more "Masters of the Universe" realized this and taken more steps to prepare people for civilized transitions? They're over-optimistic about people's ability to make transitions on their own? They've read Bostrom's Superintelligence and decided against him that the singularity has only upsides? They're busy arranging their means of surviving the resource wars and other types of mass dislocation and violence that climate-change, automation, and accelerated income inequality are just starting to trigger now? Beats me.
One of my last jobs was a greenfield project for a new manufacturing facility. The old facility employed around 250 people making, moving, cutting and packaging, and shipping the products. This new factor was robot driven with these little robot carts that move the product from station to station where it then worked on by stationary robots. My job was to design a robust wireless network for the project and build out the the datacenter to handle the new software to run the whole thing. In the end, including front office staff the new factory employed 15 people to do the work of the previous 250 people.
How long until they close that other plant and retrofit it?
How about...
...we try to do both?
Why the hell do so many people believe every political issue has precisely two sides, and only one side has merit? In the real world we tackle difficult problems by relying on a number of solutions, and we care more about what works than about ideals.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I learned a lot about DRM from this website when I was much younger. It has only gotten worse since then, with DRM infesting not just DVDs etc but now John Deere tractors, which are hostile architecture black boxes preventing farmers from optimizing their super expensive machines. So there is no free software or open secondary market for GPS data gathered (i.e. something that would sense micro conditions and efficiently apply another tech). This is hugely dangerous to the human race at large since we are dependent on the tractors for survival. I would argue it ought to be one of the biggest deals to face. If something goes wrong with John Deere we skid right back to sticks rather easily.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/...
https://www.extremetech.com/co...
http://boingboing.net/2017/03/...
"Now, farmers find themselves in desperate straits. Not only does Deere gouge them on repairs ("$230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize [a user-swapped] part"), but the repair shops can be far away or busy, and thus a half-million dollar tractor can sit immobilized while a farmer frets about getting his crops in."
https://www.ifixit.com/Answers...
http://www.npr.org/sections/al...
http://freeknowledge.eu/campai...
Totally unacceptable situation here.
--hongpong.com
I doubt it. Even with food prep, even though things have advanced, if robot chef technology is good enough, it would have been moved to every fast food joint by now, but even today, robochefs are still a novelty, at best making a "custom" pizza.
It has gotten good enough in the past few years, and it is currently being moved to fast food joints. The transition isn't instantaneous.
I hear the future is going to be bad. Better setup a scheme to steal money from the people who earn it, just in case.
Who exactly do you mean with "the people who earn it"? The owner of a company that employs robots in their manufacturing? That company's shareholders? Its CEO's, CFO's etc that decide where to direct resources?
If so: what exactly did they do to produce useful output? Build those robots? No, some external manufacturer did that. Program & and repair them? No, some hired-in technicians do that. Put in the raw materials those robots work on? No, external supplier of said materials did that. Check end products as they ship? No, factory worker or also automated. And/or end user of said product does the checking... :-) Shipping itself then? No, external distributor does that.
The people that 'run the show' aren't doing the work themselves, only tell others how they want it done. If you look at most products from raw material to end user, few people even touch it anymore. But for the people who do, who profits the most from that? No, not farmer or producer of the raw materials. Or the truck driver. Nor the factory worker. It's middlemen at the top & their associates (who already have a lot of capital to begin with) that take the bulk of the proceeds.
This happens because our economic & political systems are set up to keep it that way. Which imho is the real problem that could use a fix. But I feel I'm not the only one there... As wealth inequality grows, that fix will come. If not in a peaceful manner, then in a violent manner. Or anything in between.
Bottom line: automation isn't a threat, it's a good thing. It makes that we can have the same things using less people-effort. But the fruits of that automation should somehow be more equally distributed across people.
And perhaps we should re-evaluate our methods to determine how useful / valuable people are to society as a whole. In my personal opinion: capitalism had a good run, but ain't quite it. There's no reason for a CEO to make 100x the salary of a factory worker. Given the current state of technology, there's ZERO reason for anyone on this planet to starve on the street.
I imagine that things are going to be very rough once automation _really_ starts cutting into employment in ways that haven't been seen previously. The ironic thing is that the "knowledge worker" is the target for this round, as most large-scale US factory work is offshored or automated by now. All that money people are paying to get themselves the education they need for a job is never going to be recovered if employees aren't receiving salaries to make it worth going in the first place.
I graduated high school in 1993, and even by then, everyone was being told that there was no longer a viable career path that didn't go through college. And this was in the Rust Belt city I grew up in, where just 20 years prior it was possible to guarantee a lifetime of work by joining a union's apprenticeship program and working in a factory for your whole career. I distinctly remember events at the end of high school that were basically send-offs into the "grown-up" world like the prom and a formal senior dinner -- as if to say that for at least a chunk of the graduating class, this was the last time they'd ever see the education system again. Wind the clock forward, and we're requiring college degrees for receptionists and the few factory workers that are left. So now we have a more educated workforce, who may no longer have anything to do that will allow them to make money, start families, buy things, etc.
I've done most of my career working directly for or contracting with large companies -- think companies big enough to have a huge corporate campus, parking garages, etc. Even in 2017, there really are a ton of corporate jobs that could go away in this next round of automation. Lots of jobs we IT people support involve taking input stacks of work, performing some sort of process on them, and putting them on the output stack. Look at how mega-corps lay people off in huge numbers -- HP/HPE just got rid of more than 30,000 people last year. I'm sure a lot of that was just idiotic MBA spreadsheet jockeying, but how many of those 30,000 people were doing one of these easily automated jobs? Each one of those 30,000 people probably owned a house, paid property/school taxes, some of them had kids, they bought cars, and basically contributed to society. Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
With no way for educated people to make money, what happens to the work-money-consumption cycle we've been used to for ages? Some people propose paying people regardless of their employment status, and I think that's one way to bridge the gap. But what happens on the other side? Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?
The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs hovered in the 17-18 million range for about 30 years, 1970-2000. NAFTA was signed in 1994, GATT/WTO treaty was signed in 1995. Five years later, the number of people employed in manufacturing in the U.S. started a precipitous decline, going from ~17 million to under 12 million in the course of the next ten years.
It's hard to believe that only 650k of those jobs were lost because of the trade agreements and the other 4.35 million were lost due to some huge wave of automation.
When you replace 100 people with automation, you don't get 100 robot repair jobs out of them. That's the whole point of automation.
Yeah, yeah, there will still be niches where people will be needed, but that's just it, niches. In the past one large manufacturing plant could employ thousands, or even tens of thousands of workers.
And people looking back at history seem to gloss over the number of niches that have always existed. How many niches existed at the height of steam power to keep a locomotive on the tracks and running?
With respect to the trades there wasn't just one type of woodworker unless you lived in a small town. A person that specialized in cabinet building would have a completely different set of tools and skillsets than someone that built homes. One person could probably do both but would do neither as well as the people well trained to do one.
100 years ago a small town doctor was the Ob, Surgeon, General practitioner and mortician. I'm amazed at the number of sub specialties my wife works with. You have people that specialize in pediatric nephrology. They spend their entire career ONLY working with kids kidneys. Other than med school they have none of the same training as a orthopedic sports surgeon. And for each of those doctors there are dozens more specialized supporting staff. Directly you have nurses and the such.
Indirectly you have the people that built the tools used in the specific industries. The medical hardware and tools that a surgeon uses are different than those that a nephrologist uses. There are hundreds if not thousands of engineers building, testing and working on each of the respective tools.
As the world becomes more diverse the number niche of jobs increases dramatically. It's not like you go to college, become one of 5 professions and do that. I'm one of 50 engineers at a single facility making a single product for a single industry and only 10% or so of my job may overlap with all of those other people. We have cleaning people that support the office building, mowers that mow the lawn, cafeteria workers, the guy that runs the on site gym, the marketing people to sell our product.
And this is for a boring every day product that you wouldn't think twice about. That single device in a single niche industry pays the salary of easily 1000+ people. Multiply that by every little thing out there and it adds up quick. So no, there aren't a TON of a single profession out there but the workforce is made up of a ton of little professions that add up.
That extends to the modern trades as well. I have friends that are plumbers and electricians. 90 years ago there may have been one type but you have people that specialize in residential vs industrial vs medical.
What do you have against Trump voters?
You are welcome on my lawn.
But transSEXuals!
robochefs are still a novelty, at best making a "custom" pizza.
Yeah, you're not aware of how automated food production is, are you? Sure, that hand-tossed, wood fired pizza you're getting is not going to be done by a robot anytime soon. But Tombstone and Red Barron pizzas haven't been hand assembled in decades. The same goes for all the processed food you find in the store. Bread, pasta, frozen dinners, anything that comes in a cardboard box, can, or jar probably has never been touched by human hands. The only exception is that some of the veg might have been picked by migrant workers.
Now, what does the vast proportion of the US population eat? All that stuff. Maybe you're like me and have the money, skills, and time to buy fresh ingredients and make stuff by hand, or go out to nice restaurants. But nobody is filling frozen burritos by hand, stuffing cheap sausage or hot dogs, or hand making 99% of the bread that gets eaten.
There is still a future of places where people are needed.
I'd like to know where/what that that is. Because everything I can think of our truck drivers, cabbies, food service workers, warehouse workers, service industry folks, and office drones doing instead of their jobs is also getting automated. What can't be done better and cheaper than automation and machine learning that can employ millions of people?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Sarcasm for sure. We really do need to reduce human population but I'm only in favor of doing it by preventing births, not by ending anyone's life or purposely depriving people of the opportunity for a better life, and not by selecting some favored subset of the human population for the privilege of reproducing. Abiding by those restrictions would make intentional population reduction extremely difficult. As environmental degradation accelerates the temptation to get rid of excess human beings by other means will increase. The people with the power to do this will certainly not volunteer to self-eliminate. We're in for a hell of a century.
Because for a great many of them, their goal isn't to help the people but rather help themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If you told people in 1990 that in 30 or so years self-driving cars will start to emerge and threaten the jobs of drivers you'd have been laughed at by most. Similarly if you told them that call-.center jobs are being replaced by automated speech recognition and synthesis bots.
and just for some perspective, if you had said we'd have a moon base by now, or working fusion reactors actually in the design phase / pilot phase you would have been believed.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
That's a good point... I recall reading something about how a while back congress was trying to keep the M1A1 tank manufacturing lines going, not because we needed more, but because if we did then ramping up would be possible versus if there weren't trained staff ready to go. (Well, and pork/jobs, too, but anyway...) With a robotic line, the overhead for them idling is going to be much lower. I hadn't considered that side before...
now as to this part:
Personally I do not dread the day when I don't have to spent a third of my day at work, but that's because I do not identify my self-worth with my profession, nor do I think employment itself is somehow the be-all-end-all state of human beings.
I also don't desire to spend ~55% of my waking time involved with my employment, but how does my life after displacement by automation compare with my life now?
Right now I am lower middle class (would be middle class, but divorce changed that).
If my job were to disappear, along with so many others, then it is reasonable to assume that attaining new employment will be profoundly more difficult (over 40, + presumed lack of jobs).
How do you propose society handles this issue? Note, I don't take task with you that it is happening, but what do we as a society do about it?
You mentioned basic income, okay, how do you implement that when the political body is proven corrupt (in the US at least) where the DNC forced their candidate choice via superdelegates, and the RNC is so head up ass that we ended up with Pence and President Golfer McGolf face in office? How do the people reclaim a government from that level of corruption?
I have the disturbing gut feeling that we're heading towards something that will make Arab Spring look docile; think French Revolution and watering the meadows of France with the blood of martyrs.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
We'll just move from being a service economy to being a robot service economy. Someone will have to supply the services to the robots. So most people will get jobs in the robot banks, robot pubs and restaurants, robot shops and giving massages to robots that are tired after a hard days roboting.
You don't need to actively prevent births. The easiest way to reduce the total human population is to spread prosperity. Every country that's undergone an economic revolution has seen their birth rate drop to near or below replacement levels.
World Bank Data on population growth
Overpopulation - The Human Explosion Explained
The concern is that past a certain point automation stops spreading prosperity and starts concentrating it in the hands of a small wealthy class.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
While you can land an industrial robot on a wooden pallet for $50,000, the minimum integration cost is going to be another $100,000 on top of that, once you get cell safety systems, guarding, tooling and auxiliary equipment in place. But yeah, otherwise I'm in complete agreement with you.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The people that 'run the show' aren't doing the work themselves, only tell others how they want it done.
Methinks you undervalue the role of a good leader/manager in developing logistics, forecasting demand, managing conflicting priorities, etc.
Do they deserve some 500x the pay of the average worker? Of course not. Do they deserve to be in the top percentiles for their company's workforce? yes.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Given that it is taking from too many at too fast of a rate and leaving way too many people in a long-term displacement, it is beyond time to pull the brakes.
You want automation, fine. Just make it a royal PITA to not bring in the displaced.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
He's the safety guy
[allegation that trade is less than automation]
Then hit both, hard. Their allegations only paper over trade-related losses with more prosperous regions.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
The average Clinton or Sanders voter, in a nutshell.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Once you include the displaced, the involuntarily retired, and unsuccessful new entrants, you get a number more in line with reality - especially with regions that have seen consistent decline.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
production of those products is never going to come back to the US, save for regulatory pain making it easier to manufacture in the US.
FTFY.
The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage can return with sufficient regulation.
FTFY.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Technology in the form of automation is making the future of employment uncertain, while at the same time continuously increasing the amount of death and suffering an individual can unleash against others.
That's Silicon Valley. If geology decided to rip a new one such that Silicon Valley (and the Bay) disappeared, while causing something to do similar with Seattle/Vancouver, we'd probably be in a better position to keep work versus losing it.
And to top it off the left is trying to currently trying to keep rolling back healthcare for millions of people with the ACA, while making access more uncertain as providers pull out.
The GOP is actually trying to bring healthcare back, not remove it. On the other hand, their opponents would rather have a law that diminishes access and lowers the quality of what jobs are left (29ers).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
and in the past an education was a trade / apprenticeship with university being for the rich kids.
Now days trades have been put down and HR's people don't like them university are still very theory loaded with high costs.
Herbert's Dune spoke of a large uprising against AI that crushed it completely. Centuries of progress went out the window just because someone couldn't use it responsibly.
If those behind AI/ML forget about or underestimate effects of the mass displacement of individuals, they may end up losing everything - where Ned Ludd not only wins, but does so gloriously on a global scale. If they depart from that path and start including humanity, especially the short/long-term displaced, they might live and see their creations survive.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
My job is to write code that can be used 24hrs a day forever by machines. These machines and computers are already taking the place of human workers, never need to sleep and don't falter when tired like silly humans. I guarantee that I will be replaced at some point by a script in the next 10 years. We meat sacks are screwed.
I am tired of the "blame the robots" thing.
It will stop when businesses stop writing off the displaced. Otherwise, it will continue and grow to an unstoppable pace.
Same thing with offshoring.
Humanity, and its ability to provide significantly compensated gainful employment, must be preserved at all costs.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
that will only hurt the middle class and cost the upper class nothing, only increasing the gap between rich and poor
unless you can magically mandate that everyone getting their hours cut gets a commensurate boost to their wages in which case you may as well do the sensible thing and just implement a basic income funded by an income tax which amounts to the same thing.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
And the number of tools dropped radically once microprocessors took over.
You don't need specialized cams and gears when software can move tools in any speed and direction that you want accurately and unerringly. You don't need 20 different drills an chisels when a machine can use a small subset in ways that would be inefficient or ineffective for a human.
What we are dealing with is no less radical than the agricultural revolution. Except in the case of farms, the factories were ramping up to fill the jobs that farm automation eliminated. What, pray tell, is ramping up to take the people that the factories no longer need?
You don't get it at all do you? All that you are mentioning, are things that already can be automated, or are being automated, or are already done by other people who have absolutely no problem at all increasing their production, by using more automation.
About the only thing you mention that ATM isn't possible to automate is the engineer, but for how long is that? And do you really think we could or even should re-educate everyone who loses their job to automation to be engineers? What do you think would happen to that particular jobmarket?
Building tools, servicing tools, servicing robots etc, all of that is already highly automated today, ffs, the manufacturing industry has had robots serving robots for decades already. Of course when automation strikes with full force, some more people will be needed in adjacent fields, but millions? Are you sure you've thought this through? Not in the least because what would it mean for the viability for automation, if it cost as much work to support it as nominatively is "saved" by using them...? Consider that automation is viable. I don't see that line going too well for you.
Finally I don't see the point at all with bringing up people moving lawns or working in the cafeteria, the gym etc. ALL of these are eminently possible to automate. At most you'd need some sort of surveillance which could look after the sites, or a whole cluster of them.
This is true to an extent, but the jig is up once a robot can be programmed to learn. CGPGrey said it best. Humans will become like horses. Employable mostly for recreational and ceremonial purposes, but replaced with machines for getting real work done. And in general, populations decreased precipitously after they were no longer as useful... Luckily this appears to be somewhat self correcting as wealthier populations tend to have less children and even an apparent negative growth rate.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Safety systems and guarding go away when you eliminate the need for humans to be in the plants anymore. You just lock the door and keep meat sacks away from the real workers.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
What's more, as large parts of the labor force are put out of work, even the educated worker will find his skills devalued, unless those who control resources start demanding a lot more creative work.
It's pure market forces: if there are fewer jobs out there, more people will bid on the work, driving prices down.
Already, despite huge increases in productivity per hour, the worker is paid 50% of the share of corporate productivity that the worker got in 1973. If labor had the same fraction as in 1973, labor would have 2x the purchasing power per hour worked.
The screwing of labor has started, is already severe, and it is going to get worse.
--PeterM
Yes, yes they do. Currently around 90 % of people gain their income primarily as wages. These people already gain the bulk of their money from corporations and the spend that money on products produced by corporations. The bulk of the money in circulation in the consumer economy alrteady moves from pockets of one major company to another via the hands of consumers.
If the 90 % of people are suddenly made obsolote as factors of production and they have no other source of income, the consumer economy as we know it will collapse. The companies will lose their ability to play the game they're currently paying if people have no money to spend.
If I run a company selling a product, I do not care if the money someone is using to buy said product comes from wages or income transfers. Put simply: if you abolish wages entirely and replace them with an equal amount of income transfers, the game is still as valid as it is now. That is, there is still just as much profit to be made for said companies as there is now, even if the money is moved from the corporations to the consumers in taxes instead of wages.
The alternative is that large consumer companies (think coke, walmart, mcdonald's, nike, adidas, car companies, etc.) ie. the bulk of the entire economy will collapse if there is no money for consumers to spend, which will make the situation worse for even the people that own the productive capacity, because owning vast automated factories meant to produce consumer goods does not benefit you one bit if 99,99 % of all potential consumers have starved to death.
Automation by its very nature means if we want to maintain economies in their current fashion we cannot continue to measure the worth of an individual in terms of productivity, because eventually all of us (including the very top managers in charge of overseeing production) will be outperformed by machines, and in that stage no-one should be paid anything if we keep using this metric.
This is not a realistic alternative. The idea that the 90 % (or more) of people who will be made unemployed by automation will just all start companies of their own and sustain themselves that way is flawed in mulltiple ways: first, without income they have no capital to start companies. Second, the vast majority of people do not posses the skills to run a company that's capable of efficiently competing with large corporations that can take advantage of sheer scale of production (and hence, automation) to keep prices low. Thirdly, even if all of them started companies, without income from labor, these companies still will not have any customers and hence no revenue. Good luck trying to start your own company with next to no money and trying to compete with multinational manufacturers. And as for the service side: it doesn't help if I start a bar if there are no people with money to spend in said bar.
The logistical chains involved in current global markets simply do not support the idea that we can suddenly transform our economies to such that 1 % are running multibillion dollar global megacorps, while the rest 99 % are all somehow running small corporations and no-one (or nearly no-one) is paid in wages.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The problem with short-hour workers is that there is more overhead in maintaining more people and keeping them on task. Payroll/management/benefits are all easier with 4 40 hour workers than with 8 20 hour workers.
So the 1% won't go for having more workers, because of inefficiency. The 1% also won't like paying their workers 2x as much per hour. And the 1% controls the political process.
--PM
Don't forget, weaponry and soldiers will be automated too. The power of the masses to rise up and defeat the political establishment by violence is either already in the past, or soon will be.
--PM
The coming age of automation need not have tragic side effects if our political system is revamped to encourage and support both automation as well as the unemployed. If we do not prepare all hell will break lose. That means things have to change right now and yet we have an administration dedicated to going backwards in social policies. The right wing is building the road to hell for all of us.
Florida requires convicts to pay for their jail or prison time. They make parole conditional upon those payments. They extend paroles until the bill is paid. In the end it is the same issue as an inmate on bail needing to hire a very expensive lawyer. A few new crimes will raise the cash to hire that lawyer. Now the inmates may need to commit crimes to make their parole payments. It is another half baked, right wing policy. And by the way you might now want the medical care that some Florida inmates receive. One of our local jails seems to be filled with people with serious medical issues. You can simply look at the inmate and see that some awful medical issue is at work.
With a 32 hour work week you need the same number of workers should available work reduce 20%. However, it makes more sense for a business to reduce headcount by 20% to reduce fixed costs. Now you have 20% fewer workers, quite possibly earning less (supply and demand) supporting people on UBI. Hence UBI is unlikely to get political support as those already squeezed by wage pressure are unlikely to support it unless it is neutral cost for them, which is not possible if supported by earned wage income tax, and there is such a short to medium term advantage to having low corporate tax that's unlikely to make up the shortfall.
Health care is horrible in prison- especially private prisons.
They simply define what you have as not being an issue and then they do not need to treat you.
And almost no pain medication for anything except OTC type stuff.
Enjoy your fantasy world.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Climate change won't stop progress. But it might lead to major wars that *do*.
And there won't be a "great spiritual awakening". I know you threw that out as a strawman, but some might take it seriously.
If the conservatives are saying 50% of the jobs may be lost in 50 years (yeah, there's no hard backup for those numbers...or for any other projections), then you can be sure that's an underestimate. This study seems to be looking on a much shorter timeline, and doesn't seem (based on the summary) to be including truck drivers, so it's also a low-ball study. There will still be jobs for truck drivers in 2025, but they'll be much scarcer than currently. Say half as many truck drivers (hah!), which means half as many hired for support services...presuming those services themselves don't experience increasing automation.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
but there are a whole class of positions that will simply disappear. Call me introverted, but I will be happy to not have to wait in line to talk to anyone in order to "check in" to a hotel or rent/return a car.
It's already getting like this in more and more places. For instance, one of my favorite chain restaurants is Panera Bread. What's great about these places is (at the corporate-owned ones, the franchises are behind) you don't have to talk to anyone to place an order. Instead, you go in, swipe your frequent-customer card on the kiosk (looks like a tablet computer), and place your order there with the touchscreen. Even better, the UI is far, far, far superior to talking to some dumb teenager: the kiosk will show you all kinds of options you didn't know were available, let you change the type of bread or the toppings, add things, change quantities, etc. You could get the dumb teenager to do this too, but only if you already know what to ask for. The kid isn't going to rattle off 20 different types of bread for you, and he has no way of showing you photos of these different breads.
After you've placed your order with the kiosk, you take your buzzer and go find a table. Then someone brings your order to you. That one brief contact is the only contact with staff you have to have at the restaurant. (And if you go to the bathroom and leave your buzzer on the table, you may just find your food already there when you return, so no human contact at all.)
Why rental car places haven't gone this way yet, I have no idea. They could have one human standing by for 4 kiosks, instead of making a bunch of people who just got off a jet stand in line for so long.
A sensibly implemented income tax funded UBI will provide a net gain (UBI received minus taxes paid to fund it) to everyone making less than the mean income, which is currently about 75% of the population and would only go up under the kind of automation crunch we're talking about. The bulk of the UBI will be funded by the people at the very top of the income curve (the ones who drag that mean income so far up above the mean in the first place), who are largely not wage workers to begin with, but rather making unearned incomes off rents and interest lending out their wealth. Those are the people who need to bear the burden of taking care of the people at the bottom, because they're the ones who can. The well-employed but still working-class people you're worried about being over-taxed by an UBI are the very same people I'm proposing the UBI in place of the hours reduction to protect. A straight hours reduction is going to hurt those people, the ones working full tilt to try to get over the hump, the most, to fund a benefit to people who need it even more sure, but at no cost to the people at the top who can afford it best, who thus ought to be bearing the burden instead of the people in the middle.
Someone currently working a 40h week at around $25/hr is making around the mean income right now, and under a sanely implemented UBI would see neither a loss or a gain to their income because of it. But if you reduce the work week by 20%, that person loses around $10,000/year income, some of which might be spread around here or there among the 75% of people making less than him who might see an increase in employment (if further automation to make up the slack isn't cheaper than that); and the actually rich people at the top who aren't wage workers to begin with see no change. So the middle is pulled down a lot, the bottom might get a little bump, the top gets off scot free, and the slope between bottom and top gets even steeper. An income tax funded UBI would have the exact opposite effect, making the slope from poor to rich shallower and easier to climb, by applying a center-ward pressure on everyone's income.
Having the bottom claw the middle down is exactly what the people at the top want.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The steam tractor and combine harvester slashed the agricultural work force.
But their productivity is nothing compared to the power of early computers in the 1960s. Just imagine running a bank or a tax office without *any* computers at all. Everything done by hand. And that is nothing compared to office automation today.
And yet, bureaucracies have grown dramatically, not shrunk. Because while the human capacity for food is limited but the size of the gut, there is no such limit on the desire for rules and regulations, processes and procedures...
So I foresee a brave new world where everybody becomes a bureaucrat at some level or other.
In the longer term (100 years) humans will be obsolete technology, so it probably does not matter anyway.
http://www.computersthink.com/
Congratulations; that's one of the most ignorant things I've read in nearly twenty years on Slashdot. If your parents reassured you that you weren't retarded... they lied.
Hey thug culture is not part of the gun / pro-second Amendment crowd. You're willfully ignorant if you think so.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Fast food is another prime target. Burger-and-fries cooking robots aren't that hard to build. Someday, Redbox will not be sitting next to a restaurant, but next to another red box with a big golden M on it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Just wait until the robots complain about humans taking away the good automation jobs...
You jest, but this was the subject of a Sci-Fi short. People were having trouble consuming all the output of the robot workers. Consumption was mandatory. Asceticism was a status symbol. Spoiler: they got the robots to use the products they were making.
That's why we kept making attack submarines after the fall of the Soviet Union, despite not actually needing them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Or not by law. Fire enough people and leave them without ways to make a living, and they won't just go away and quietly watch their children starve to death. If the capitalists are lucky, they'll find themselves heavily taxed to support others, because any other way will be much much worse for them. It will do an immense amount of damage to society, but when there are tens of millions who are being shoved to the gutters by society they aren't going to care. The mob may not be able to win against the government, but they can make sure the government can't win either, by making large areas ungovernable.
If you think this is unfortunate, then think of an alternative that allows people to earn enough resources for a halfway decent living. Removing regulations isn't going to do it, because the real problem is that, in this situation, many people aren't going to be productive enough, relative to robots, to earn a living. We don't have wide open frontiers anymore, with more land available as needed by killing more of the natives.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
When we get a critical mass of people who can't get paid for their work and don't have money to put at risk, we have a revolution. Ideally, this is political, resulting in heavy taxes and a universal basic income.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You still don't get it. Clinton was against the TPP, and is far less corrupt in every way than Trump.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I know that to someone who has never been in a plant before, what you say sounds reasonable, but to someone like me, who works with automation every day, your comment is just laughable. Yes, some time in the future we'll be able to manufacture a significant portion of our products in "lights-out" factories, but we are nowhere near that level of automation now, and even so, you still need to provide for routine maintenance. That means protecting those maintenance people, and that means just as much safety systems as we have now.
The problem is in MTBF (mean time between failures). A $100 proximity sensor in an industrial environment has a certain lifetime curve. These are good "non-contact" sensors we're talking about so they actually last a long time compared to older style mechanical sensors, but even so, they eventually stop working in one of several ways: they fail to turn on, or fail to turn off, or start to get slower turning on or off, or their detection range starts to get longer or shorter. A typical automation cell uses dozens of these sensors (plus lots of other equipment, but let's focus on proximity sensors for a moment). With dozens of these sensors one will fail every couple months, and it might not be the sensor - sometimes it's the wire, particularly if it's attached to a moving axis and has to bend over and over all day. Even high flex cables in expensive cable chains eventually wear out. Wireless sensors seems like a solution, but we've had those for years now, but the wireless technology is still a bit flaky in industrial environments so we only use those where running wires in really prohibitive. Plus you usually still need to have a power wire anyway, but at least you can power a dozen sensors over one wire. Anyway, these sensors in a typical cell fail once every couple months and need replacement.
Now to take that automation cell from 80 or 90% automation level to 100% automation level might take 5 or 10 times as much automation to deal with all the exceptional cases that we currently rely on humans to deal with, like grippers that wear out, or recovering from power brown-outs, or a bolt breaking, or having to grind off a burr that a human can do easily but a machine would have a very hard time with. We frequently come up with a problem that it's prohibitively expensive for a machine to handle and our solution is "detect it, stop the machine, and alert an operator to come over and deal with it." Now going from 80% automation to 90% automation might take 3 times as much equipment and sensors and so on, but going from 90% to 95% might take 3 times as much again, and so on. Your dream of 100% automation is generally out-of-reach in the real world. Plus, when you multiply the number of sensors by 3 or 10 you get 3 or 10 times as many sensor failures, so you end up needing more costly downtime for repairs. Not to mention you just multiplied the number of $100 sensors and $40 cables plus installation time by 10. At some level, you end up with diminishing returns, and there are lots of smart people working right now to push the limits of automation right up to the point of those diminishing returns. I'm one of those people, and I'm telling you that we're a long way off.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
production of those products is never going to come back to the US, save for regulatory pain making it easier to manufacture in the US.
FTFY.
Evidently you are unfamiliar with the story of King Canute. Regulatory pain has NOTHING to do with why labor intensive manufacturing has largely left the US. It is almost entirely about labor costs and labor costs alone. If 50% of the cost of a product is in labor then it is going to get made where labor is cheap. $15/hour US labor cannot compete with $1/hour Chinese labor on such a product even if you assume a massive productivity advantage that doesn't exist in the real world. You could have the most favorable regulations in the world and it still would make no economic sense to make the product where labor costs are high. This is economics 101 stuff and no regulations can alter economic laws like this.
US manufacturing is alive and well. That sector of the US economy is worth over $3 trillion by itself and growing robustly. But it is not going to be a source of massive jobs without an equally massive drop in average wages. If you want to put in regulations to bring labor intensive manufacturing back to the US then you are legislating millions of people into poverty wages. Doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.
The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage can return with sufficient regulation.
FTFY.
You again didn't fix anything though you did prove you don't understand even basic economics. If you put up huge trade barriers or other regulations to keep foreign products out you will cost FAR more jobs than you will ever save. You are driving up the price of cars for tens of millions of people to gain at most a few tens of thousands of assembly jobs. Regulations that try to prevent economic reality result in a situation like what you seen in Venezuela right now. Huge unemployment, huge inflation, and a massive economic depression. Some regulation is good like those to ensure clean air or quality roads - these protect resources we all need to use. Regulation that defies basic economics is doomed to failure.
The world your parents and grandparents grew up in no longer exists. To pretend we can recreate the circumstances of that time is both false and foolish. You can learn to live with today's reality or you can get passed by those who will.
Except they can't because forgoing the consumers takes away the vast majority of demand for their products. I mean, millionaires and billionaires sure do drink Coke, but without the consumer class there's no way coke's going to be able to continue selling the amounts it currently is. Same for all other everyday commodities. Demand matters, and the amount of demand is directly affected by the disposable income of consumers.
My point is that the vast amount of trade is done between consumers and multinational megacorps. Small retailelers reprsent a shrinking share of trade, so the idea that there's somehow enough demand for everyone made unemployed by automation to start thriving small companies is not realistic. What do you suggest all these people start selling that cannot be already acquired more cheaply from a larger manufacturer?
The point is that, as you yourself just admitted, even if the prices can be made lower, it's near impossible they can be made lower by small companies with very limited capital. I mean in order to compete with highly automated manufacturing you need to setup equally automated factories. This can be done, but as it often requires investments of hundreds of thousands or millions up-front,. it's not like someone who's been fired from a data entry or some other menial task due to automation can just setup their own soft drink factory and start competing with Coke and Pepsi.
But that large manyfacturers still ste their prices to be proftable, which means they can still be taxed. The whole point of this is that currently the price of a product involves a significant chunk of labor costs, and a smaller portion of taxes on top. As automation removes jobs and hence drives labor costs dowen, the tax can be increased without the market price of the good changing at all.
o just as a crude example, envision a product manufactured now, with the following cost-structure
Raw materials: 15 %
Manufacturing and storafe (including labor): 50 %
Marketing: 15 %
Taxes: 20 %
If this manufacturing process is completely automated the labor costs drop, how much depends on the type of product but the point is, if manufacturing costs drop say 20 % due to labor costs disappearing, you can increase taxes by anywhere up to that amount without the total price of the product changing.
Here's where you're wrong. As I said: in mid-to-long term thanks to increasing automation and advancing AI pretty much everyone will eventually be outperformed by machines. There is no job imaginable which a human level AI cannot handle more effeciently than people, after all that's the vbery reason these machines and programs are being constantly developed. Once this situation is reached, we'll produce everything more effeciently with machinery, at which point exactly no-one in advanced economies as an individual is producing anything.
Plenty of consumers in advanced economies already gain income without being producers in income-transfers because advanced economies recognize that letting unemployed people starve to death is not sensible or good for anyone. What's going to happen as I've b
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Under the circumstances you postulate, the 1-10% of the population that is working would have no difficulty in supplying the needs of the rest. If they couldn't, there'd be employment for the other 90%. Since everything would be highly automated, there'd be no way to start a profitable business if you didn't have money, which presumably the 90% don't have (the ones with money are in the 10%). If production were to be expanded, it would be through additional automation, not hiring any significant number of people. Moreover, in this scenario, anything the average person could do to be productive could be done cheaper by a machine, so there's no way any significant number of average people could get a job, no matter what. There would be people of unusual intelligence, creativity, perhaps physique, or some other talent or skill, and they'd be in the 10%.
The barriers to hunting, gathering, fishing, and farming are not a matter of taxes or regulation. They're a matter of private property and scale. There isn't anywhere near enough land in the US to support 300M hunter-gatherers, and a lot of the good spots are private property. Pretty much all the good farmland is private property. There'd be no way for the 90% to support themselves. Either they obey your morality and starve to death, along with their families, or they do something you disapprove of. Guess which will be the more popular choice.
Morally, I do not place property rights above the welfare of all. Property rights are a good thing, as is a certain amount of capitalism. Free markets are good when externalities are dealt with. It's good to concentrate on increasing total wealth rather than trying to equalize wealth.
With no government, there's no difference between the guy with a gun sitting on a pile of stuff vs. a guy with a gun who don't have anything else, and all the moral superiority in the world won't stop bullets. Whoever survives will then own the pile of stuff.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes