There's a feature here that everyone who uses iPhones should learn. When the iPhone sends it as an iMessage, it tells you in multiple ways. It says "iMessage" in the background of the text box you are typing in. The message you send shows up in a BLUE bubble. If you don't want to send as iMessage, but as SMS text instead, then AFTER you send it as an iMessage, touch the blue text bubble you just sent, and an option bar will show up above the message, which includes the option "SEND AS TEXT". Select that to make your phone re-send the message as a text message. The text bubble will turn GREEN to indicate it was sent as text instead of as iMessage.
At any point in time, not just at the equator, the plane could have made a turn, to create a perfect mirror image path reflected around the line between the plane and the satellite, and it would produce the exact same satellite data, as if they kept going straight. So there's no way to rule out that such a turn happened. However, since it's highly unlikely the person controlling the plane would have been aware of this satellite or it's location, they would not have done such a move on purpose. So then we are looking at what the odds are, of a course change made for other reasons, would produce a perfect mirror image turn. The odds of a course change randomly fitting a mirror image of this straight line path are very low. The odds could be calculated. But it's likely in the range of 1 out of 100 I would guess. As such, the satellite data could be fitted to a most likely straight-line constant speed path and that would give them two possible routes. The northern route however, I assume, would have taken the plane into multiple airspaces were it would have been spotted on multiple radar systems, including military systems. And likewise, into areas, where evidence of a crash would likely have been found as well. No such data from any of the northern route stations were found, leaving the southern, straight-route path as the statistically most likely by a strong margin. Combine that with debris that are consistent with a plan crash, and we have a very high probability that the plane flew a straight line path likely on auto-pilot, to the southern indian ocean and then ran out of fuel and crashed. But, this announcement is clearly just an attempt by the Malaysian government to resolve the pressure they are getting, instead of the needed careful and wise continued search for answers.
I first bought from Radio Shack back in the 60's when there wasn't even a local store. I bought bags of surplus electronics from them by mail order. I was very excited when they first came to town in the late 60's, and have been a big supporter of them for all these decades. I spent a bit of money buying VEX robotics hardware from them a few years back just as they were getting out of that product line. At one point not too long ago, there were more Radio Shacks than McDonald's. I doubt that's true now.
They are a useless hobbyist store now and have no hope of competing with the on-line electronics and hobby websites or the big computer/hobby stores like Frys, Micro Center, or Best Buy and only seem to make money selling phones, kids toys, and batteries. I don't see any path forward for them other than to continue to be a phone resellers. The Maker-market is huge and expanding with hobbyists getting into all sorts of cool things like robotics, and 3-D printing, but Radio Shack just doesn't have the type of staff and stores to keep up with those specialty markets. They have too many stores, with too little expertise to really fit that specilty geek market.
They are just one more brick and mortar that has no place in today's on-line world. I'm surprised they have lasted as long as they have.
There is no limit on the work that could be done. Even if machines did 100% of the work done by humans 150 years ago, we'd still have plenty to do.
That's correct. Finding work is not the problem. Finding a good paying job is. The good paying job, is today's dinosaur. It will soon be extinct. A Basic Income created by sharing a percentage of the wealth of the machine economy, is tomorrow's source of income for the people. The Basic Income, however is already needed today.
"What to do" is not the problem. The problem is everyday people having the cash to pay for the work being done by the robots.
Just because there is work to do, does not guarantee that we will be paid enough for that work, to buy food, let alone a good average life style in society. It's this inequality of the value of our work, that is the social problem we must address today, and tomorrow.
The value of goods and services are measured by their importance to the people.
Food is highly important. Shelter is highly important. Clothing is highly important. Transportation is highly important. Health care is highly important. Entertainment is not so important. When the robots do all the important work, then the robots get the lion's share of our cash. This means most the cash flows to those few people that own the most successful machine corporations -- the elite capitalists. The rest of us then spend our time perfecting our skills as techno comedians on SlashDot. We have lots of work to do to try and get our post to the top of the heap, but yet the work we do, does not pay enough to feed ourselves. In fact, it pays so little we don't even get paid!
As robots replace humans for the important work, there will always be some less important work left to be done, but we will not get enough social credit for that work, to give us a fair share of the output of food, shelter, clothing, and iPhones, being produced by the the robots. This problem is already well developed in society. Few people today can produce work valuable enough, to feed themselves. if not for our minimum wage laws, and other social programs, more than 3/4 of society would probably already be in a situation where their work is of so little value, they couldn't feed themselves by working and that number grows larger every day due to advancing technology. Only 63% of the US population over the age of 16 works. That's down from an all time high of 67.3 in 2000. That means only about 47% of the total population currently works as part of the economy. And that stat is now in free fall in the US. Most the rest live off the work of others (wives, children, the elderly). And most that "work" we all live off of, is not in fact done by humans at all, but mostly by our machines. Pushing the "start" button on a machine is not "work". It's machine tending. The machines do most the actual productive work today.
To fix this, we must share more of the work output being produced by the machines than we currently share. The growth in inequality shows the fact that we have failed to expand the sharing as needed. The amount of sharing we do, must increase in parallel, and keep increasing, with the displacement of humans from the workforce. We have been doing this sharing for 100's years in the form of government services and welfare paid for by progressive taxes. But we have fallen far behind. The solution however is not to get the government to collect, and spend even larger amounts of money in our name, but to just directly redistribute wealth, from the top, to the bottom, and let the PEOPLE spend the money, instead of the government spending the money for the people. Create a Basic Income Guarantee, that is the people's fair share of the wealth being produced by all the technology of the world, from all the natural resources of the world, then, let everyone work as they choose, for any additional income they can produce. And though some may choose to only do volunteer work that produces no addition documented income, l
The idea of a Basic Income is far wider and older than just what is happening in Switzerland and the EU. It's building popular support all around the world.
In the US, it goes back to Thomas Paine and his 1795 publication of Agrarian Justice.
The state of Alaska has had a working Basic Income since the 80's. Every person in the state gets a check every year of around $1000 as a Basic Income. Brazil and Iran both have a type of Basic Income in place today.
There's a petition at whitehouse.gov right now if you want to sign it and gain support for the idea in the US:
In the late 60's in the US 1200 economists signed a petition and sent it to congress advocating a Basic Income. It was debated in the house but ultimately failed to gain traction. The idea has been around for a long time, and it keeps coming back. It's needed more today, than at any point in the past.
There are always people quick to call it stupid (as we see in this thread), but those people clearly don't understand the larger complexities of economics, sociology, and the problems we face in the world today. Economic Inequality is the world's single worst problem today. All other social problems such as poverty, health, crime, and war, are all fueled, driven, and created by, economic inequality. Even the very attitudes we see in this thread ("Oh fuck that. Produce or die.") is directly created by economic inequality. Though the world is rich enough to create a safe, healthy, peaceful, and easy life, for all 7 billion of us, where no one needs to struggle, or feel insecure, we have failed to do that. People live in constant fear because we have no security. And it's the economic inequality that creates and drives that fear. No matter how rich any person is, they always end up fearing they will lose their wealth and power because there are always people below them who are suffering to remind them how bad life can get.
No matter how much, or how little one has, they always fear losing it. And it's that fear that makes them say things like "Oh fuck that. Produce or die.". They fear that someone will try to take away the little they have, so that statement is really written to mean "I'm so scared of losing the little I have, that I have to speak out and kill any ideas of letting someone else take something away from me".
The rich that have so much more than we do, act as reminders of how much we have "failed" to be "productive" in society, and the poor that have so little, remind us that there are always wolves nipping at our heels. This effect keeps everyone in constant economic fear. The larger the total inequality in society, the larger the stress and fear it creates all across society. It creates as much stress at the top of society, as the poverty does at the bottom of society. The inequality turns society into a a big dogfight where there is constant pressure to climb higher and push others down, before they push you down.
Inequality continues to get worse, and worse. In the US, inequality is at a 80 year high worse than it was back in the great depression. This is because of technology. Technology creates wealth, which is should be good, but at the same time, it creates greater levels of inequality. The wealth of technology, always tends to flow to a minority. It does not naturally trickle down. Technological wealth trickles up. We have offset 100's of years of advanced technological wealth, by building these large welfare states. But despite how large the welfare states have become, they are still not enough to fix the growing inequality. Higher taxes for the rich and more government services for the poor will help offset it, but it won't fix it. Technology is getting to
Micro fixes to macro problems always creates more problems that it fixes. Companies will find ways to compensate CEOs that skirt the laws.
Overall social inequality is the macro economic problem that must be fixed, not just CEO salaries.
The correct way to address overall inequality, is with the other approach the Swiss will soon be voting on, which is a Basic Income for all citizens. That is the correct macro solution to the macro problem of inequality. That will fix CEO income relative to the average worker income, as well as all other forms of inequality, The US needs this far more than the Swiss do. Our inequality is far higher, and the social problems created by inequality are far worse in the US.
There's a petition at whitehouse.gov in need of more signatures to bring this problem to the atention of the American People. Please check it out and consider signing it.
People must stop arguing the wrong point. This is very important and people must get this right. The problem with technology is not that it kills jobs. It doesn't kill jobs. In a free market there is always work to be done, and there's always a price the market will pay to have that work done.
The true problem with technology is inequality.
Technology drives inequality, and it is inequality, which is the foundation of all our current social problems. So where some people are having their wages driven down by technology, other people are having their income and wealth driven higher. But this does not balance out over time giving everyone an equal chance to get wealthy from technology The wealth concentrates into the hands of a few and the more technology we create, the more concentrated the wealth becomes. This is nothing new that just now showed up with the digital revolution. It's a trend that has been growing worse for 100's of years now.
Technology, is primarily a tool for creating MORE wealth in society, which is the good side of technology that we all love. It is why GDP keeps growing exponentially higher year after year. But technology has an evil side as well. The evil side of technology is that it is also used as a tool by whoever owns the technology, to take wealth away from others. It's this power of technology to steal wealth from people, that is what we must address.
When the textile workers of the early 19th century lost their jobs to the new machines, what happened? Lots of skilled workers were all making about the same amount of money weaving cloth by hand before the new technology showed up. But then automated looms were invented, and all these textile workers LOST their income. 1000 skilled textile workers, might have been replaced by a 500 people who manufactured the new automated equipment, OWNED the textile mills, and staffed the low skill, low paid jobs for the people who tended the new machines (operators). So we see a situation where there was a lot of equality of pay, across a large population of workers, shift to a small population, with high inequality of income, depending on what role they played. But the most wealth, shifted to whoever OWNS these new machines. Wealth shifted from the people who used to do the work, to the machines that took over the work.
This is very important concept to understand. Humans are just meat robots, that have for thousands of years, done most the work with their hands. We humans were the "machine of choice" for getting work done - for the protection of goods and services of value. But as our technology advances, other machines have slowly replaced our job functions, and those other machines become the "machine of choice" for that jobs. When a weaver is replaced by an automated loom, the money in society that once went into the pocket of the weaver, now goes into the pocket of the person who OWNS the new machines. The machines become tools, that allow the people who own the technology, to take money o9ut of the pockets of the weaver, and put it into their own pockets.
Every technology ever created follows this same pattern. It boosts total wealth in society, but at the same time, it shifts some wealth, from one group of people, to another.
What is happening over time, is the the creation of wealth is shifting from the old machines (meat robots), to the new machines, automated looms and all the other technology that is producing wealth today, like computers and robots. The wealth of society (the wealth produced by the machines), is assigned to whoever owns the machines. We humans own our own bodies, so any wealth we produce with our own hands, goes to us. But when we create machines that produce wealth, the wealth doesn't go to whoever made the machine, the wealth goes to whoever OWNS the machine. Sometimes the person that makes the machine is the one that ends up owning it, but more often than not, it's not true. Wealth production, and wealth itself, has for a long time now, been
Yes, the money goes to investors, instead of workers. The world shifts a little farther away from the people who own human bodies (workers), and towards the people who own the machines. Every new technology, shifts wealth creation a little father away from labor, and and little closer to capital investments. Money is increasingly made by what we own, more so than by what we do. When full human like robots come to be in the next few decades, it will push human labor totally out of the market, and make all wealth production an issue of capital investments.
The problem with capital investments is that it shifts all wealth, into the hands of a few -- just like the game of monopoly does - for the same reason - because the game is so structured so that labor income ($200 for passing go), is insignificant, compared to investment income (you landed on my hotel and owe me $4000).
Technology shifts wealth production from the fairly equal form of human labor (we all own a human body for life we can lease to the job market), to the highly unequal form of investment income (monopoly game -- one guy wins it all)
To cope with this shift, and keep society functioning, and fair, we will have to add more socialism into the mix. We will have to force the winning investors, to share a cut of their wealth with the population. What they get to keep for themselves, is their reward for doing a good job of investing. We tax the entire economy, and distribute the money as a Basic Income to all the people. This tax should be understood as a Capitalist Inequality tax that the people force the businesses to pay, for the right to operate their inequality producing "game" in their country. The tax, is what offsets the inequality, created by the operation of capitalism in the country.
How do we really define "provides a basic level of acceptable living"?
By looking at relative living standards in society. By looking at inequality.
When the poor are forced to live a lifestyle that is many times less than the average or median family, then we have a serious problem in society.
It is true that technology hasn't typically destroyed jobs, because of the cycle of creative destruction. But what it is very much doing, and has been doing for a long time, is eroding the value of human labor on one end, and inflating the value of capital on the other. This drives inequality higher and higher, as we keep adding more technology. The technology is both saving us, by creating wealth, but destroying us, by shifting the wealth away from labor, and towards capital investments. Where as labor generated wealth is fairly well shared -- each of us owns one, and only one, human body to sell into the labor market -- capital wealth is not shared. The best investors, are able to buy a growing hoard of top wealth producing assets.
To cope with this shift of wealth away from labor, and towards capital, the world is going to have to introduce more forced wealth sharing into the system -- more socialism. The best way, and what has been in the works for 100's of years is the idea of a Basic Income. This is best understood as a business tax, applied to the entire economy, which is then distributed to the people evenly as monthly checks. It's the people saying to the capitalists, "If you want to operate your inequality producing business in this country, you are going to have to pay us a cut, for that right".
We don't have enough automation to implement universal welfare at this time. The majority of people still need to work in order to produce enough to sustain society.
Only about 65% of the US population is currently in paid work of any type and less than 50% are working in full time positions. The majority of people certainly don't need to be working in paid positions (let them work at home and raise kids instead, or work at school and learn). This is not the 18th century when 90% of the population was farming just to feed everyone. Only about 2% of the population is working to feed the world now. A good number of people working aren't needed by the economy and work only because they must in order to survive, and many work in minimum wage, part time jobs typically that they hate. I would estimate that nearly half the current work force could be removed, and still not have any substantial effect on GDP. Because of technology, most the really productive and important work that generates most the GDP, is done by only a very small percentage of the work force. The rest are just cheap filler that is not needed that our economic system is forcing to work.
If we converted all the current welfare payments of the US government into a universal welfare, we would have about $1K per year for every person in the country. We can afford that level of universal welfare with no changes to the tax structures. If we roll in other current government redistributions such as pensions, healthcare, and social security into a universal welfare, we are getting up to around $10K per person for everyone in the country, for life.
$10K per person, is around 5% of the US GDP and is very affordable and very workable for a Basic Income Guarantee as a way to create a very badly needed universal welfare in the US. If it causes 10% of the current workforce to drop out of the paid workforce, it will have no significant effect on GDP or GDP growth, but it will have a massive effect on the quality of life for people across the country.
If some choose not to work, it only helps to raise the wages for those that do choose to work.
Lower the work week to 32 hours and abolish the distinction between part time and full time employees and increase minimum wage to a scale that follows the cost of basic food, utilities, shelter and transportation (it would be around $18 an hour if it had been). More people working less and having more time for family or other hobbies that actually make life worth living.
A far better way to implement that idea, is to create a Basic Income Guarantee to better share the wealth and offset the inequality of technology. Then throw away minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and labor laws that force overtime pay, so as to free up workers and businesses to negotiate any deal they want, be it 40 hours, 80, or 0 a week.
It's a personality thing, but for me, I can't be productive when I work alone at home. Having people around me stimulates and motivates me. I need the random office interaction to maintain my sanity. I also think for many creative projects group interaction is highly important. I need the office environment.
But some types of work, and some types of people, work much better when they can be isolated and focused. These types of workers, need to be given more options for working at home.
When people worked at home before the industrial revolution, it was normally piece work - you got paid based on what you produced, so there was no need to monitor or manage them. Any office work that can be paid like piece work moves to the home very nicely. Wage work and salary work doesn't translate as well unless the manager has a large amount of trust in the worker which tends to be the exception and not the norm. And if the manger lets one person work at home, but not others, it's gets very sticky trying to say "I trust Sally to work at home, but you Bob, I don't trust, so you must come in so I can watch you!". It opens a can of worms that most companies just end up staying away from which is why we don't have see more telecommuting in salaried office workers and might never see unless our technology is able to create a virtual office environment where manages can keep an eye on people, and walk around and have casual random chats with them as needed.
Yes, that is my point as well. The end game we are headed for is one where human contribution to the production of things of value, is nearly zero. In that case, wealth inequality as a reward for being productive makes no sense at all. As you say, it would be mostly an incentive for being luckily. But more often (and the real danger), it's an incentive to be mean and ruthless and uncaring - to be socially irresponsible. But this is not just an issue for the future. It's an issue already effecting us today. Wealth distribution across our society is becoming more a matter of luck (and a matter of cheating), than hard work, every day, and we should be offsetting that trend today. It's not something we should wait until it's totally luck before we act. And of course, we are doing things already - lots of them. All our government social programs are there for the purpose of sharing the wealth of our society for the "unlucky". But many of our programs are inherently inefficient and are wasting resources that do not need to be wasted. They are highly inefficiency because they are administered by our government - who must set up large offices of over paid low productive workers to decide who is "unlucky" enough to get aid, and to decide how much aid they should get. We can greatly improve much of that, by giving everyone and exactly equal share of "aid" whether they are lucky or unlucky. That removes all the burden from the government, of complex administration tasks, and gives everyone in the country the same stable foundation for life, to build on. Instead of creating an atmosphere of "aid to the needy", it creates an atmosphere of equality across the entire society. When we pay the tax, we no longer are left with the feeling that we are helping only the "needy" or the "lazy", because the money goes to everyone equally, including our own children, and family, and friends. The tax is not to help the needy, it's to help everyone equally. And when people receive this "aid" it no longer comes with any sort of social stigma of "worthless looser". No one need feel "bad" for accepting the aid, since everyone in the society gets the same aid. It's a far better way to deal with the inequality created by technology, than the trillions we currently spend on social aid programs. And far more important, it's a program that will continue to work, all the way to the end game, where humans are contributing nothing to the production of value.
I'm talking about the endgame as well. And I agree completely, that in the long term, life is getting better for people, and continues to do so. And I don't expect the long term trend to change. My complaint, is that we are dealing with a medium term speed-bump right now, that we need to fix. I think it will get fixed, but I think the more we can raise awareness of the issue, the faster the change will happen. To get over this speed bump, people need to let go of this belief that humans must work for a living and that people only deserve what they are able to get, by "working hard".
The one thing I am fairly sure about is that poor people in the future will be better off than poor people now regardless of the state of wealth distribution.
I agree that is generally true. Many of our poor today are better off than the kings of yesteryear - at least in the developed nations like the US. In other parts of the world, that's not so true. However, to even suggest this fact makes it OK to allow wealth inequality is deeply wrong, and deeply disturbing.
If the wealth inequality was created because the rich were really working that much harder, then you could argue it existed as a choice. That is, the poor choose to be poor, and if they wanted to be rich, all they had to do was work as hard as the rich. But that's not true. It's not even close to true. Most poor work far harder than the rich. They tend to have multiple jobs, with everyone in the family working. They get up early, to catch a bus to work, because they can't afford cars or can only afford one car for a family group. Being poor is seldom a choice.
Mark Zuckerberg is very smart, very creative, and works his butt off. And as a result, he managed to make so much money, that when you spread his money over his entire (still short) life, we find his current wealth is more than if he had been making a million dollars a day, every day of his life since he was born. That's not "rich". That' s insanely unfair rich. I know lots of very smart, very hard working and very creative entrepreneurs that have tried as hard as Mark did to get rich. I don't know Mark well enough to know how hard he's worked, but lets assume these other hard working people I know worked only 80% has hard as Mark. But yet, they end up with a wealth more in the range of "only" a few million dollars. And we compare these, to some other Americans, that work even harder, and end up making less than $50K a year.
Economic status simply is not a choice in our society. Wanting to be rich doesn't make you rich. Working hard to be rich, and giving up everything else in life to become rich, doesn't make you rich. It's a complex mix of luck based on genetics, family history, environment, with only maybe 5% really being left to "choice" and "hard work". If you don't work hard, you will be poor for sure, but working hard, is no guarantee for getting rich. In an ideal society, we would like "rich" to be a choice. Anyone that wants to be rich, should be able to make it happen, if they are willing to give up the other things life to get it. But we aren't anywhere near that society, and due to advances in technology, we are getting further and further away from that society, instead of closer to it.
We have the power to fix this, and if we choose not to, it's our own fault. But yet, most people continue to choose not to due mostly to outdated social beliefs left over from the past when staying alive actually was very hard and where everyone had to work hard just to survive a short life. But we are way past those days now and it's time more people woke up to that fact. There is no reason to allow one creative individual to make $1,000,000 dollars a day, when other people working their ass off, can't make more than $100 a day (or in other parts of the world $1 a day). But yet we live in a society today that allows this to happen, and most people don't even question it. And we live in a time where this is currently getting worse, instead of better, due to technology advancing, but yet can be easily, and quickly fixed, by implementing a tax to fund a Basic Income Guarantee.
I'm just trying to get people to wake up to what's going on and think about these things instead of ignoring them.
The little guy does not need to compete with the corporation with all the best robots. The little guy just needs access to a good robot. The fact that the little guy can make his own stuff if he wants to, even if it is more expensive than if the corporation made it, places an upper bound on how much the corporation can charge.
Yes, that's true. But the economies of scale will mean he will always be able to buy it (a lot) cheaper pre-made from the large corporations, than to have his own robot make it. Unless, some technology emerges which shifts that balance substantially. For example, if we have low cost instant Star Trek replicators which was about as hard to use a Microwave. But despite how sexy the _idea_ of 3D printing is, the reality is, and will remain, a very different story for a long time into the future (long past the singularity most likely). So this means, having a robot in he future, will be no more useful (cost wise) than someone having their own manufacturing shop today - they can still go buy the things they need, far cheaper than what it costs to own and operate their own manufacturing equipment. No matter how cheap a person can do it with his one general purpose smart robot, the economies of scale will remain true - the savings created by making 10 million phones will allow the per phone cost to be a tiny fraction of what someone can every build their own for from scratch.
So the issue, is if you can't get a job, and have NO income to buy stuff with, owning your own robot is not going to make things better for you - it will make it worse, because it will cost more for you to buy a robot, and have it make something for you (like food), than it would to buy the food at a local shop. If someone can find a used robot in the trash for free, and can steal access to electricity, and find enough stuff in the trash to have his robot make stuff with, then they might use that route just to survive. But it's the same thing as someone being homeless today and surviving by living off what they can find in dumpsters. Whether it's possible to live like that, is not the question. Why, when society as a whole, has such huge amounts of automation, would we allow a small minority, to control all the resources, while others lived off their trash? (even if their trash included some working AI robots).
The little guy also has the option of undercutting the big corporations if the corporations are overcharging. If they are using their economies of scale to bring the price below average joe, but still high enough to make a profit, then that's a good thing.
Yes manufacturing is expensive. All of our machines are CURRENTLY built by other machines but they are still expensive. This is true in an absolute sense, not in a relative sense. CNC machines didn't even exist 100 years ago so the cost of building one back then was the cost of advancing technology to be able to build CNC machines and then the cost of building the first one. Now the cost of building them, while still pretty expensive, is the cheapest it's ever been and getting cheaper.
Your desire to focus on the idea of things "getting cheaper" is missing the point. While things get cheaper like this, it means living off the trash of the wealthy becomes easier. But it will NEVER justify why we would allow a society to exist, where there are such huge amounts of wealth inequality where many have to live off the trash of the rich, while others get a share of the total wealth which is a million times larger?
There will always be something that is expensive to build in any time period. But the human labor required to build all things is constantly decreasing.
Yes true. The human labor required to build things will not just decrease, it will hit zero this century. And long before it hits zero, society will be highly disrupted by the effects of labor costs decreasing - it's already being effected. Labor costs is a major component o
It may seem that since buying one robot allows you to have it make more robots for you, that the little guys will have a clear advantage over large corporations or the super rich, because all the little guy needs, is the money for the first robot, and then some raw material and energy - which at least today, is very cheap, compared to typical finished products. This is what some people get so excited about with the promise of 3D printing. But it's not that simple. Most manufacturing is automated today. But yet, no "little guy" can take advantage of it. Anyone today can buy a CNC milling machine, and use it to make himself a CNC lathe, and a then make himself an automated production line to build himself an iPhone. But to do that, will take the guy years, and 100's of thousands of dollars, and it requires a large amount of workshop space to do it. If there are robots as intelligent and as physically capable as humans, that only cost say $10,000, then you could buy one (or a few) of them, and then buy all the other tools, and workshop space, and ask the robots to get to work and build you an army of robots. But you still have to pay for all the workshop space, and raw materials, and energy while these machines work for the next few years for you - which adds up to an investment of 100's of thousands of dollars. The tools, space, raw materials, and energy costs, will be far too high for any common man to afford - and way beyond what someone that can't find a job, would be able to do.
But what if you wanted to do this to start your own business, and them make money to pay for it all? That sounds good, until you realize while some little guy is trying to start a business with 5 robots, the buy guys already have 100,000 robots working in a huge manufacturing and R&D facility creating and building new products faster, and cheaper, than any small shop with 5 robots could every catch up with. There are always economies of scale to complete against, and the more technology we have to work with, the larger that "scale" becomes. The little guy can't complete with the big guy, until the little guy manages to match the same economies of scale - which requires investments of billions.
In the early 1900's, when the auto industry was staring, lots of "little guys" got into the business. The industry was young enough, that a little guy with a good idea could be competitive without huge capital investments. But today, you can't start a new auto company out of your garage and be competitive with the big players. To mass produce a new car, takes millions in investment to match the economies of scale the large players get to leverage.
Technology, in general, allows the scale of industry to expand. Each new invention, like the telegraph, or telephone, or fax machine, or the internet, or railways, or trucks, and interstates, and shipping, allows businesses to grow into larger mega organizations that have greater economies of scale then the little guys they are replacing, and as they do, they slam the door on the little guys every catching up. Today, the way it works, is new industries are launched by innovative little guys, which then quickly expand into mega corporations, if they manage to hit the mark. The little guy can only succeed, if they can find a way to create a new market. That requires innovation and invention. And for now, humans do that best. But before long, machines will be more inventive, and innovative than any human. And the big corporations, will have 100,000 invention machines, each 10 times the "smarts" of the best human, exploring and testing alternatives for new market ideas. No human can out-in ovate these new machines. And no little guy, will have the capital, to build himself an army of innovative machines to out-smart the army of R&D robots.
However owns the best robots, and puts them to use in the best way, will literally have the power to rule the world - and the solar system. And any little guys, the 99% will be left with a hopeless life living off what s
That's true. The problem is not creating jobs. There is always something that needs to be done, that a human could do. The problem is creating jobs that pay enough to allow a human to get a fair share of the total wealth.
The real problem which automation creates is better understood as wealth inequity, not job loss. As more of our economy is based on machine "labor", instead of human labor, then more wealth is created by capital investments in machines, instead of by investments in human labor. The wealth goes to whoever owns the machines. Wealth created by investments however is never shared evenly in a capitalistic society. Wealth creation by investment, works the same as the Monopoly board game - all the money flows to the person that makes the best investments (and who has the best luck as well). But as the money flows to the "winners", they buy control of everything. They buy control of the land, they buy control of energy, they buy control of all valuable natural resources, and they buy control of the government - they take over the entire game.
What has kept the game somewhat "fair" in the past is the value of human labor. We are each born as the sole owner of a highly valuable resource in the economy - a human body we can "sell", for a life time. That value we are each given at birth is what has kept the balance of power between labor and capital somewhat fair. But the further technology advances, the more the balance of power is shifting to capital - to the investors, and the more the game of "life" we play in our capitalistic society becomes unbalanced. The wealth shifts to the lucky few that made the best investments, and they use their early wins in the game, to take control of the entire game.
As labor declines in value, and investment income increases, it creates growing levels of wealth inequity in this way.
The more inequity grows, the more the winners, start to believe they are god's chosen people, and "deserve" what they have achieved. The more it makes them believe the poor, are just lazy losers that don't have a right to live. This destroys our democracy. Power and wealth start to tear down the democracy, by electing puppets, that appoint Supreme Court judges that declare corporate money is allowed to "vote" for example.
When all work becomes automated - and it will in only a small number of decades, we should be approaching a time where all humans are allowed to stop working - to retire and live a good life. It's what we have been working towards since forever - machines so advanced, that humans no longer have to work at all. But unless we make some fundamental changes to offset the growing wealth inequality, it won't happen. It won't happen, because the wealthy, will take control of all resources, leaving growing numbers of poor working under slave camp conditions just to get enough to eat. The poor can't grow their own food, because they won't have enough money, to buy land, to grow it on. They can't hunt or fish, because they won't have enough money, to buy access to a hunting ground, or a lake to fish in - it will be behind locked gates of the rich. If this goes too far, we will have a revolution.
Capitalism is not the problem here. We need capitalism to continue to efficiently allocate resources to the production of goods and services - even if machines are doing all the work to create the goods and services. The money is the control signal that keeps the system efficient without central control. We don't want to give that up. But what is broken, is how we share all this wealth our economy is producing. We can no longer share it based on how much labor humans contribute, because human labor is becoming devalued and getting phased out. We can not share it only based on investment, because investment wealth is a winner take all game. We must instead, transition to a mixed socialistic capitalistic system where investment wealth is partially shared, to offset the decline in l
It seems to me the issue is screen location. For it to work well as a touch screen, it must lay flat on the table in front of you, like your keyboard. Not upright like a PC or laptop screen. If we have to hold our arms up for hours to manipulate the screen, of course it's going to hurt.
For touchscreens to work well in a desk environment, we must arrange them as the desk surface and have workable arm rests as part of the configuration.
The moral decisions have to be addressed, but for cars, it's really not a hard problem. The one rule of "don't hit anything" is all you need to program into the system. The current self driving cars are very good at following that rule - much better than any human driver so accidents rates and fatalities are expected to go way down as we switch to self driving cars. The car companies are just as likely to find themselves in legal trouble for selling a car with no self-driving features once the drunk owner ends up killing someone.
The real hurdle will be public acceptance of the cars, not the technology, not the cost, and not the legal issues. People won't at first trust the cars, even if they are far safer. But in time, and with experience, the public will come to accept them and even demand them.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a classic example of computer creativity at work:
NASA Evolved Antenna
There's a feature here that everyone who uses iPhones should learn. When the iPhone sends it as an iMessage, it tells you in multiple ways. It says "iMessage" in the background of the text box you are typing in. The message you send shows up in a BLUE bubble. If you don't want to send as iMessage, but as SMS text instead, then AFTER you send it as an iMessage, touch the blue text bubble you just sent, and an option bar will show up above the message, which includes the option "SEND AS TEXT". Select that to make your phone re-send the message as a text message. The text bubble will turn GREEN to indicate it was sent as text instead of as iMessage.
Actually the delays got progressively longer. http://science.slashdot.org/st... So, this equator effect did not happen.
At any point in time, not just at the equator, the plane could have made a turn, to create a perfect mirror image path reflected around the line between the plane and the satellite, and it would produce the exact same satellite data, as if they kept going straight. So there's no way to rule out that such a turn happened. However, since it's highly unlikely the person controlling the plane would have been aware of this satellite or it's location, they would not have done such a move on purpose. So then we are looking at what the odds are, of a course change made for other reasons, would produce a perfect mirror image turn. The odds of a course change randomly fitting a mirror image of this straight line path are very low. The odds could be calculated. But it's likely in the range of 1 out of 100 I would guess. As such, the satellite data could be fitted to a most likely straight-line constant speed path and that would give them two possible routes. The northern route however, I assume, would have taken the plane into multiple airspaces were it would have been spotted on multiple radar systems, including military systems. And likewise, into areas, where evidence of a crash would likely have been found as well. No such data from any of the northern route stations were found, leaving the southern, straight-route path as the statistically most likely by a strong margin. Combine that with debris that are consistent with a plan crash, and we have a very high probability that the plane flew a straight line path likely on auto-pilot, to the southern indian ocean and then ran out of fuel and crashed. But, this announcement is clearly just an attempt by the Malaysian government to resolve the pressure they are getting, instead of the needed careful and wise continued search for answers.
I first bought from Radio Shack back in the 60's when there wasn't even a local store. I bought bags of surplus electronics from them by mail order. I was very excited when they first came to town in the late 60's, and have been a big supporter of them for all these decades. I spent a bit of money buying VEX robotics hardware from them a few years back just as they were getting out of that product line. At one point not too long ago, there were more Radio Shacks than McDonald's. I doubt that's true now.
They are a useless hobbyist store now and have no hope of competing with the on-line electronics and hobby websites or the big computer/hobby stores like Frys, Micro Center, or Best Buy and only seem to make money selling phones, kids toys, and batteries. I don't see any path forward for them other than to continue to be a phone resellers. The Maker-market is huge and expanding with hobbyists getting into all sorts of cool things like robotics, and 3-D printing, but Radio Shack just doesn't have the type of staff and stores to keep up with those specialty markets. They have too many stores, with too little expertise to really fit that specilty geek market.
They are just one more brick and mortar that has no place in today's on-line world. I'm surprised they have lasted as long as they have.
There is no limit on the work that could be done. Even if machines did 100% of the work done by humans 150 years ago, we'd still have plenty to do.
That's correct. Finding work is not the problem. Finding a good paying job is. The good paying job, is today's dinosaur. It will soon be extinct. A Basic Income created by sharing a percentage of the wealth of the machine economy, is tomorrow's source of income for the people. The Basic Income, however is already needed today.
"What to do" is not the problem. The problem is everyday people having the cash to pay for the work being done by the robots. Just because there is work to do, does not guarantee that we will be paid enough for that work, to buy food, let alone a good average life style in society. It's this inequality of the value of our work, that is the social problem we must address today, and tomorrow.
The value of goods and services are measured by their importance to the people. Food is highly important. Shelter is highly important. Clothing is highly important. Transportation is highly important. Health care is highly important. Entertainment is not so important. When the robots do all the important work, then the robots get the lion's share of our cash. This means most the cash flows to those few people that own the most successful machine corporations -- the elite capitalists. The rest of us then spend our time perfecting our skills as techno comedians on SlashDot. We have lots of work to do to try and get our post to the top of the heap, but yet the work we do, does not pay enough to feed ourselves. In fact, it pays so little we don't even get paid!
As robots replace humans for the important work, there will always be some less important work left to be done, but we will not get enough social credit for that work, to give us a fair share of the output of food, shelter, clothing, and iPhones, being produced by the the robots. This problem is already well developed in society. Few people today can produce work valuable enough, to feed themselves. if not for our minimum wage laws, and other social programs, more than 3/4 of society would probably already be in a situation where their work is of so little value, they couldn't feed themselves by working and that number grows larger every day due to advancing technology. Only 63% of the US population over the age of 16 works. That's down from an all time high of 67.3 in 2000. That means only about 47% of the total population currently works as part of the economy. And that stat is now in free fall in the US. Most the rest live off the work of others (wives, children, the elderly). And most that "work" we all live off of, is not in fact done by humans at all, but mostly by our machines. Pushing the "start" button on a machine is not "work". It's machine tending. The machines do most the actual productive work today.
To fix this, we must share more of the work output being produced by the machines than we currently share. The growth in inequality shows the fact that we have failed to expand the sharing as needed. The amount of sharing we do, must increase in parallel, and keep increasing, with the displacement of humans from the workforce. We have been doing this sharing for 100's years in the form of government services and welfare paid for by progressive taxes. But we have fallen far behind. The solution however is not to get the government to collect, and spend even larger amounts of money in our name, but to just directly redistribute wealth, from the top, to the bottom, and let the PEOPLE spend the money, instead of the government spending the money for the people. Create a Basic Income Guarantee, that is the people's fair share of the wealth being produced by all the technology of the world, from all the natural resources of the world, then, let everyone work as they choose, for any additional income they can produce. And though some may choose to only do volunteer work that produces no addition documented income, l
The idea of a Basic Income is far wider and older than just what is happening in Switzerland and the EU. It's building popular support all around the world.
In the US, it goes back to Thomas Paine and his 1795 publication of Agrarian Justice.
The state of Alaska has had a working Basic Income since the 80's. Every person in the state gets a check every year of around $1000 as a Basic Income. Brazil and Iran both have a type of Basic Income in place today.
There's a petition at whitehouse.gov right now if you want to sign it and gain support for the idea in the US:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/establish-basic-income-guarantee-all-americans-similar-what-being-proposed-switzerland/jFbgDZ4h
In the late 60's in the US 1200 economists signed a petition and sent it to congress advocating a Basic Income. It was debated in the house but ultimately failed to gain traction. The idea has been around for a long time, and it keeps coming back. It's needed more today, than at any point in the past.
There are always people quick to call it stupid (as we see in this thread), but those people clearly don't understand the larger complexities of economics, sociology, and the problems we face in the world today. Economic Inequality is the world's single worst problem today. All other social problems such as poverty, health, crime, and war, are all fueled, driven, and created by, economic inequality. Even the very attitudes we see in this thread ("Oh fuck that. Produce or die.") is directly created by economic inequality. Though the world is rich enough to create a safe, healthy, peaceful, and easy life, for all 7 billion of us, where no one needs to struggle, or feel insecure, we have failed to do that. People live in constant fear because we have no security. And it's the economic inequality that creates and drives that fear. No matter how rich any person is, they always end up fearing they will lose their wealth and power because there are always people below them who are suffering to remind them how bad life can get.
No matter how much, or how little one has, they always fear losing it. And it's that fear that makes them say things like "Oh fuck that. Produce or die.". They fear that someone will try to take away the little they have, so that statement is really written to mean "I'm so scared of losing the little I have, that I have to speak out and kill any ideas of letting someone else take something away from me".
The rich that have so much more than we do, act as reminders of how much we have "failed" to be "productive" in society, and the poor that have so little, remind us that there are always wolves nipping at our heels. This effect keeps everyone in constant economic fear. The larger the total inequality in society, the larger the stress and fear it creates all across society. It creates as much stress at the top of society, as the poverty does at the bottom of society. The inequality turns society into a a big dogfight where there is constant pressure to climb higher and push others down, before they push you down.
Inequality continues to get worse, and worse. In the US, inequality is at a 80 year high worse than it was back in the great depression. This is because of technology. Technology creates wealth, which is should be good, but at the same time, it creates greater levels of inequality. The wealth of technology, always tends to flow to a minority. It does not naturally trickle down. Technological wealth trickles up. We have offset 100's of years of advanced technological wealth, by building these large welfare states. But despite how large the welfare states have become, they are still not enough to fix the growing inequality. Higher taxes for the rich and more government services for the poor will help offset it, but it won't fix it. Technology is getting to
Micro fixes to macro problems always creates more problems that it fixes. Companies will find ways to compensate CEOs that skirt the laws.
Overall social inequality is the macro economic problem that must be fixed, not just CEO salaries.
The correct way to address overall inequality, is with the other approach the Swiss will soon be voting on, which is a Basic Income for all citizens. That is the correct macro solution to the macro problem of inequality. That will fix CEO income relative to the average worker income, as well as all other forms of inequality, The US needs this far more than the Swiss do. Our inequality is far higher, and the social problems created by inequality are far worse in the US.
There's a petition at whitehouse.gov in need of more signatures to bring this problem to the atention of the American People. Please check it out and consider signing it.
Petition: Establish a basic income guarantee for all Americans, similar to what is being proposed in Switzerland.
People must stop arguing the wrong point. This is very important and people must get this right. The problem with technology is not that it kills jobs. It doesn't kill jobs. In a free market there is always work to be done, and there's always a price the market will pay to have that work done.
The true problem with technology is inequality.
Technology drives inequality, and it is inequality, which is the foundation of all our current social problems. So where some people are having their wages driven down by technology, other people are having their income and wealth driven higher. But this does not balance out over time giving everyone an equal chance to get wealthy from technology The wealth concentrates into the hands of a few and the more technology we create, the more concentrated the wealth becomes. This is nothing new that just now showed up with the digital revolution. It's a trend that has been growing worse for 100's of years now.
Technology, is primarily a tool for creating MORE wealth in society, which is the good side of technology that we all love. It is why GDP keeps growing exponentially higher year after year. But technology has an evil side as well. The evil side of technology is that it is also used as a tool by whoever owns the technology, to take wealth away from others. It's this power of technology to steal wealth from people, that is what we must address.
When the textile workers of the early 19th century lost their jobs to the new machines, what happened? Lots of skilled workers were all making about the same amount of money weaving cloth by hand before the new technology showed up. But then automated looms were invented, and all these textile workers LOST their income. 1000 skilled textile workers, might have been replaced by a 500 people who manufactured the new automated equipment, OWNED the textile mills, and staffed the low skill, low paid jobs for the people who tended the new machines (operators). So we see a situation where there was a lot of equality of pay, across a large population of workers, shift to a small population, with high inequality of income, depending on what role they played. But the most wealth, shifted to whoever OWNS these new machines. Wealth shifted from the people who used to do the work, to the machines that took over the work.
This is very important concept to understand. Humans are just meat robots, that have for thousands of years, done most the work with their hands. We humans were the "machine of choice" for getting work done - for the protection of goods and services of value. But as our technology advances, other machines have slowly replaced our job functions, and those other machines become the "machine of choice" for that jobs. When a weaver is replaced by an automated loom, the money in society that once went into the pocket of the weaver, now goes into the pocket of the person who OWNS the new machines. The machines become tools, that allow the people who own the technology, to take money o9ut of the pockets of the weaver, and put it into their own pockets.
Every technology ever created follows this same pattern. It boosts total wealth in society, but at the same time, it shifts some wealth, from one group of people, to another.
What is happening over time, is the the creation of wealth is shifting from the old machines (meat robots), to the new machines, automated looms and all the other technology that is producing wealth today, like computers and robots. The wealth of society (the wealth produced by the machines), is assigned to whoever owns the machines. We humans own our own bodies, so any wealth we produce with our own hands, goes to us. But when we create machines that produce wealth, the wealth doesn't go to whoever made the machine, the wealth goes to whoever OWNS the machine. Sometimes the person that makes the machine is the one that ends up owning it, but more often than not, it's not true. Wealth production, and wealth itself, has for a long time now, been
The problem with capital investments is that it shifts all wealth, into the hands of a few -- just like the game of monopoly does - for the same reason - because the game is so structured so that labor income ($200 for passing go), is insignificant, compared to investment income (you landed on my hotel and owe me $4000).
Technology shifts wealth production from the fairly equal form of human labor (we all own a human body for life we can lease to the job market), to the highly unequal form of investment income (monopoly game -- one guy wins it all)
To cope with this shift, and keep society functioning, and fair, we will have to add more socialism into the mix. We will have to force the winning investors, to share a cut of their wealth with the population. What they get to keep for themselves, is their reward for doing a good job of investing. We tax the entire economy, and distribute the money as a Basic Income to all the people. This tax should be understood as a Capitalist Inequality tax that the people force the businesses to pay, for the right to operate their inequality producing "game" in their country. The tax, is what offsets the inequality, created by the operation of capitalism in the country.
How do we really define "provides a basic level of acceptable living"?
By looking at relative living standards in society. By looking at inequality.
When the poor are forced to live a lifestyle that is many times less than the average or median family, then we have a serious problem in society.
It is true that technology hasn't typically destroyed jobs, because of the cycle of creative destruction. But what it is very much doing, and has been doing for a long time, is eroding the value of human labor on one end, and inflating the value of capital on the other. This drives inequality higher and higher, as we keep adding more technology. The technology is both saving us, by creating wealth, but destroying us, by shifting the wealth away from labor, and towards capital investments. Where as labor generated wealth is fairly well shared -- each of us owns one, and only one, human body to sell into the labor market -- capital wealth is not shared. The best investors, are able to buy a growing hoard of top wealth producing assets.
To cope with this shift of wealth away from labor, and towards capital, the world is going to have to introduce more forced wealth sharing into the system -- more socialism. The best way, and what has been in the works for 100's of years is the idea of a Basic Income. This is best understood as a business tax, applied to the entire economy, which is then distributed to the people evenly as monthly checks. It's the people saying to the capitalists, "If you want to operate your inequality producing business in this country, you are going to have to pay us a cut, for that right".
We don't have enough automation to implement universal welfare at this time. The majority of people still need to work in order to produce enough to sustain society.
Only about 65% of the US population is currently in paid work of any type and less than 50% are working in full time positions. The majority of people certainly don't need to be working in paid positions (let them work at home and raise kids instead, or work at school and learn). This is not the 18th century when 90% of the population was farming just to feed everyone. Only about 2% of the population is working to feed the world now. A good number of people working aren't needed by the economy and work only because they must in order to survive, and many work in minimum wage, part time jobs typically that they hate. I would estimate that nearly half the current work force could be removed, and still not have any substantial effect on GDP. Because of technology, most the really productive and important work that generates most the GDP, is done by only a very small percentage of the work force. The rest are just cheap filler that is not needed that our economic system is forcing to work.
If we converted all the current welfare payments of the US government into a universal welfare, we would have about $1K per year for every person in the country. We can afford that level of universal welfare with no changes to the tax structures. If we roll in other current government redistributions such as pensions, healthcare, and social security into a universal welfare, we are getting up to around $10K per person for everyone in the country, for life.
$10K per person, is around 5% of the US GDP and is very affordable and very workable for a Basic Income Guarantee as a way to create a very badly needed universal welfare in the US. If it causes 10% of the current workforce to drop out of the paid workforce, it will have no significant effect on GDP or GDP growth, but it will have a massive effect on the quality of life for people across the country.
If some choose not to work, it only helps to raise the wages for those that do choose to work.
Lower the work week to 32 hours and abolish the distinction between part time and full time employees and increase minimum wage to a scale that follows the cost of basic food, utilities, shelter and transportation (it would be around $18 an hour if it had been). More people working less and having more time for family or other hobbies that actually make life worth living.
A far better way to implement that idea, is to create a Basic Income Guarantee to better share the wealth and offset the inequality of technology. Then throw away minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and labor laws that force overtime pay, so as to free up workers and businesses to negotiate any deal they want, be it 40 hours, 80, or 0 a week.
It's a personality thing, but for me, I can't be productive when I work alone at home. Having people around me stimulates and motivates me. I need the random office interaction to maintain my sanity. I also think for many creative projects group interaction is highly important. I need the office environment.
But some types of work, and some types of people, work much better when they can be isolated and focused. These types of workers, need to be given more options for working at home.
When people worked at home before the industrial revolution, it was normally piece work - you got paid based on what you produced, so there was no need to monitor or manage them. Any office work that can be paid like piece work moves to the home very nicely. Wage work and salary work doesn't translate as well unless the manager has a large amount of trust in the worker which tends to be the exception and not the norm. And if the manger lets one person work at home, but not others, it's gets very sticky trying to say "I trust Sally to work at home, but you Bob, I don't trust, so you must come in so I can watch you!". It opens a can of worms that most companies just end up staying away from which is why we don't have see more telecommuting in salaried office workers and might never see unless our technology is able to create a virtual office environment where manages can keep an eye on people, and walk around and have casual random chats with them as needed.
It's only sad that they force this on the children.
I think it's time for a new bill that defines intelligent design as child abuse.
Yes, that is my point as well. The end game we are headed for is one where human contribution to the production of things of value, is nearly zero. In that case, wealth inequality as a reward for being productive makes no sense at all. As you say, it would be mostly an incentive for being luckily. But more often (and the real danger), it's an incentive to be mean and ruthless and uncaring - to be socially irresponsible. But this is not just an issue for the future. It's an issue already effecting us today. Wealth distribution across our society is becoming more a matter of luck (and a matter of cheating), than hard work, every day, and we should be offsetting that trend today. It's not something we should wait until it's totally luck before we act. And of course, we are doing things already - lots of them. All our government social programs are there for the purpose of sharing the wealth of our society for the "unlucky". But many of our programs are inherently inefficient and are wasting resources that do not need to be wasted. They are highly inefficiency because they are administered by our government - who must set up large offices of over paid low productive workers to decide who is "unlucky" enough to get aid, and to decide how much aid they should get. We can greatly improve much of that, by giving everyone and exactly equal share of "aid" whether they are lucky or unlucky. That removes all the burden from the government, of complex administration tasks, and gives everyone in the country the same stable foundation for life, to build on. Instead of creating an atmosphere of "aid to the needy", it creates an atmosphere of equality across the entire society. When we pay the tax, we no longer are left with the feeling that we are helping only the "needy" or the "lazy", because the money goes to everyone equally, including our own children, and family, and friends. The tax is not to help the needy, it's to help everyone equally. And when people receive this "aid" it no longer comes with any sort of social stigma of "worthless looser". No one need feel "bad" for accepting the aid, since everyone in the society gets the same aid. It's a far better way to deal with the inequality created by technology, than the trillions we currently spend on social aid programs. And far more important, it's a program that will continue to work, all the way to the end game, where humans are contributing nothing to the production of value.
I'm talking about the endgame as well. And I agree completely, that in the long term, life is getting better for people, and continues to do so. And I don't expect the long term trend to change. My complaint, is that we are dealing with a medium term speed-bump right now, that we need to fix. I think it will get fixed, but I think the more we can raise awareness of the issue, the faster the change will happen. To get over this speed bump, people need to let go of this belief that humans must work for a living and that people only deserve what they are able to get, by "working hard".
The one thing I am fairly sure about is that poor people in the future will be better off than poor people now regardless of the state of wealth distribution.
I agree that is generally true. Many of our poor today are better off than the kings of yesteryear - at least in the developed nations like the US. In other parts of the world, that's not so true. However, to even suggest this fact makes it OK to allow wealth inequality is deeply wrong, and deeply disturbing.
If the wealth inequality was created because the rich were really working that much harder, then you could argue it existed as a choice. That is, the poor choose to be poor, and if they wanted to be rich, all they had to do was work as hard as the rich. But that's not true. It's not even close to true. Most poor work far harder than the rich. They tend to have multiple jobs, with everyone in the family working. They get up early, to catch a bus to work, because they can't afford cars or can only afford one car for a family group. Being poor is seldom a choice.
Mark Zuckerberg is very smart, very creative, and works his butt off. And as a result, he managed to make so much money, that when you spread his money over his entire (still short) life, we find his current wealth is more than if he had been making a million dollars a day, every day of his life since he was born. That's not "rich". That' s insanely unfair rich. I know lots of very smart, very hard working and very creative entrepreneurs that have tried as hard as Mark did to get rich. I don't know Mark well enough to know how hard he's worked, but lets assume these other hard working people I know worked only 80% has hard as Mark. But yet, they end up with a wealth more in the range of "only" a few million dollars. And we compare these, to some other Americans, that work even harder, and end up making less than $50K a year.
Economic status simply is not a choice in our society. Wanting to be rich doesn't make you rich. Working hard to be rich, and giving up everything else in life to become rich, doesn't make you rich. It's a complex mix of luck based on genetics, family history, environment, with only maybe 5% really being left to "choice" and "hard work". If you don't work hard, you will be poor for sure, but working hard, is no guarantee for getting rich. In an ideal society, we would like "rich" to be a choice. Anyone that wants to be rich, should be able to make it happen, if they are willing to give up the other things life to get it. But we aren't anywhere near that society, and due to advances in technology, we are getting further and further away from that society, instead of closer to it.
We have the power to fix this, and if we choose not to, it's our own fault. But yet, most people continue to choose not to due mostly to outdated social beliefs left over from the past when staying alive actually was very hard and where everyone had to work hard just to survive a short life. But we are way past those days now and it's time more people woke up to that fact. There is no reason to allow one creative individual to make $1,000,000 dollars a day, when other people working their ass off, can't make more than $100 a day (or in other parts of the world $1 a day). But yet we live in a society today that allows this to happen, and most people don't even question it. And we live in a time where this is currently getting worse, instead of better, due to technology advancing, but yet can be easily, and quickly fixed, by implementing a tax to fund a Basic Income Guarantee.
I'm just trying to get people to wake up to what's going on and think about these things instead of ignoring them.
The little guy does not need to compete with the corporation with all the best robots. The little guy just needs access to a good robot. The fact that the little guy can make his own stuff if he wants to, even if it is more expensive than if the corporation made it, places an upper bound on how much the corporation can charge.
Yes, that's true. But the economies of scale will mean he will always be able to buy it (a lot) cheaper pre-made from the large corporations, than to have his own robot make it. Unless, some technology emerges which shifts that balance substantially. For example, if we have low cost instant Star Trek replicators which was about as hard to use a Microwave. But despite how sexy the _idea_ of 3D printing is, the reality is, and will remain, a very different story for a long time into the future (long past the singularity most likely). So this means, having a robot in he future, will be no more useful (cost wise) than someone having their own manufacturing shop today - they can still go buy the things they need, far cheaper than what it costs to own and operate their own manufacturing equipment. No matter how cheap a person can do it with his one general purpose smart robot, the economies of scale will remain true - the savings created by making 10 million phones will allow the per phone cost to be a tiny fraction of what someone can every build their own for from scratch.
So the issue, is if you can't get a job, and have NO income to buy stuff with, owning your own robot is not going to make things better for you - it will make it worse, because it will cost more for you to buy a robot, and have it make something for you (like food), than it would to buy the food at a local shop. If someone can find a used robot in the trash for free, and can steal access to electricity, and find enough stuff in the trash to have his robot make stuff with, then they might use that route just to survive. But it's the same thing as someone being homeless today and surviving by living off what they can find in dumpsters. Whether it's possible to live like that, is not the question. Why, when society as a whole, has such huge amounts of automation, would we allow a small minority, to control all the resources, while others lived off their trash? (even if their trash included some working AI robots).
The little guy also has the option of undercutting the big corporations if the corporations are overcharging. If they are using their economies of scale to bring the price below average joe, but still high enough to make a profit, then that's a good thing.
Yes manufacturing is expensive. All of our machines are CURRENTLY built by other machines but they are still expensive. This is true in an absolute sense, not in a relative sense. CNC machines didn't even exist 100 years ago so the cost of building one back then was the cost of advancing technology to be able to build CNC machines and then the cost of building the first one. Now the cost of building them, while still pretty expensive, is the cheapest it's ever been and getting cheaper.
Your desire to focus on the idea of things "getting cheaper" is missing the point. While things get cheaper like this, it means living off the trash of the wealthy becomes easier. But it will NEVER justify why we would allow a society to exist, where there are such huge amounts of wealth inequality where many have to live off the trash of the rich, while others get a share of the total wealth which is a million times larger?
There will always be something that is expensive to build in any time period. But the human labor required to build all things is constantly decreasing.
Yes true. The human labor required to build things will not just decrease, it will hit zero this century. And long before it hits zero, society will be highly disrupted by the effects of labor costs decreasing - it's already being effected. Labor costs is a major component o
It may seem that since buying one robot allows you to have it make more robots for you, that the little guys will have a clear advantage over large corporations or the super rich, because all the little guy needs, is the money for the first robot, and then some raw material and energy - which at least today, is very cheap, compared to typical finished products. This is what some people get so excited about with the promise of 3D printing. But it's not that simple. Most manufacturing is automated today. But yet, no "little guy" can take advantage of it. Anyone today can buy a CNC milling machine, and use it to make himself a CNC lathe, and a then make himself an automated production line to build himself an iPhone. But to do that, will take the guy years, and 100's of thousands of dollars, and it requires a large amount of workshop space to do it. If there are robots as intelligent and as physically capable as humans, that only cost say $10,000, then you could buy one (or a few) of them, and then buy all the other tools, and workshop space, and ask the robots to get to work and build you an army of robots. But you still have to pay for all the workshop space, and raw materials, and energy while these machines work for the next few years for you - which adds up to an investment of 100's of thousands of dollars. The tools, space, raw materials, and energy costs, will be far too high for any common man to afford - and way beyond what someone that can't find a job, would be able to do.
But what if you wanted to do this to start your own business, and them make money to pay for it all? That sounds good, until you realize while some little guy is trying to start a business with 5 robots, the buy guys already have 100,000 robots working in a huge manufacturing and R&D facility creating and building new products faster, and cheaper, than any small shop with 5 robots could every catch up with. There are always economies of scale to complete against, and the more technology we have to work with, the larger that "scale" becomes. The little guy can't complete with the big guy, until the little guy manages to match the same economies of scale - which requires investments of billions.
In the early 1900's, when the auto industry was staring, lots of "little guys" got into the business. The industry was young enough, that a little guy with a good idea could be competitive without huge capital investments. But today, you can't start a new auto company out of your garage and be competitive with the big players. To mass produce a new car, takes millions in investment to match the economies of scale the large players get to leverage.
Technology, in general, allows the scale of industry to expand. Each new invention, like the telegraph, or telephone, or fax machine, or the internet, or railways, or trucks, and interstates, and shipping, allows businesses to grow into larger mega organizations that have greater economies of scale then the little guys they are replacing, and as they do, they slam the door on the little guys every catching up. Today, the way it works, is new industries are launched by innovative little guys, which then quickly expand into mega corporations, if they manage to hit the mark. The little guy can only succeed, if they can find a way to create a new market. That requires innovation and invention. And for now, humans do that best. But before long, machines will be more inventive, and innovative than any human. And the big corporations, will have 100,000 invention machines, each 10 times the "smarts" of the best human, exploring and testing alternatives for new market ideas. No human can out-in ovate these new machines. And no little guy, will have the capital, to build himself an army of innovative machines to out-smart the army of R&D robots.
However owns the best robots, and puts them to use in the best way, will literally have the power to rule the world - and the solar system. And any little guys, the 99% will be left with a hopeless life living off what s
Creating jobs is easy
That's true. The problem is not creating jobs. There is always something that needs to be done, that a human could do. The problem is creating jobs that pay enough to allow a human to get a fair share of the total wealth.
The real problem which automation creates is better understood as wealth inequity, not job loss. As more of our economy is based on machine "labor", instead of human labor, then more wealth is created by capital investments in machines, instead of by investments in human labor. The wealth goes to whoever owns the machines. Wealth created by investments however is never shared evenly in a capitalistic society. Wealth creation by investment, works the same as the Monopoly board game - all the money flows to the person that makes the best investments (and who has the best luck as well). But as the money flows to the "winners", they buy control of everything. They buy control of the land, they buy control of energy, they buy control of all valuable natural resources, and they buy control of the government - they take over the entire game.
What has kept the game somewhat "fair" in the past is the value of human labor. We are each born as the sole owner of a highly valuable resource in the economy - a human body we can "sell", for a life time. That value we are each given at birth is what has kept the balance of power between labor and capital somewhat fair. But the further technology advances, the more the balance of power is shifting to capital - to the investors, and the more the game of "life" we play in our capitalistic society becomes unbalanced. The wealth shifts to the lucky few that made the best investments, and they use their early wins in the game, to take control of the entire game.
As labor declines in value, and investment income increases, it creates growing levels of wealth inequity in this way.
The more inequity grows, the more the winners, start to believe they are god's chosen people, and "deserve" what they have achieved. The more it makes them believe the poor, are just lazy losers that don't have a right to live. This destroys our democracy. Power and wealth start to tear down the democracy, by electing puppets, that appoint Supreme Court judges that declare corporate money is allowed to "vote" for example.
When all work becomes automated - and it will in only a small number of decades, we should be approaching a time where all humans are allowed to stop working - to retire and live a good life. It's what we have been working towards since forever - machines so advanced, that humans no longer have to work at all. But unless we make some fundamental changes to offset the growing wealth inequality, it won't happen. It won't happen, because the wealthy, will take control of all resources, leaving growing numbers of poor working under slave camp conditions just to get enough to eat. The poor can't grow their own food, because they won't have enough money, to buy land, to grow it on. They can't hunt or fish, because they won't have enough money, to buy access to a hunting ground, or a lake to fish in - it will be behind locked gates of the rich. If this goes too far, we will have a revolution.
Capitalism is not the problem here. We need capitalism to continue to efficiently allocate resources to the production of goods and services - even if machines are doing all the work to create the goods and services. The money is the control signal that keeps the system efficient without central control. We don't want to give that up. But what is broken, is how we share all this wealth our economy is producing. We can no longer share it based on how much labor humans contribute, because human labor is becoming devalued and getting phased out. We can not share it only based on investment, because investment wealth is a winner take all game. We must instead, transition to a mixed socialistic capitalistic system where investment wealth is partially shared, to offset the decline in l
It seems to me the issue is screen location. For it to work well as a touch screen, it must lay flat on the table in front of you, like your keyboard. Not upright like a PC or laptop screen. If we have to hold our arms up for hours to manipulate the screen, of course it's going to hurt. For touchscreens to work well in a desk environment, we must arrange them as the desk surface and have workable arm rests as part of the configuration.
The moral decisions have to be addressed, but for cars, it's really not a hard problem. The one rule of "don't hit anything" is all you need to program into the system. The current self driving cars are very good at following that rule - much better than any human driver so accidents rates and fatalities are expected to go way down as we switch to self driving cars. The car companies are just as likely to find themselves in legal trouble for selling a car with no self-driving features once the drunk owner ends up killing someone. The real hurdle will be public acceptance of the cars, not the technology, not the cost, and not the legal issues. People won't at first trust the cars, even if they are far safer. But in time, and with experience, the public will come to accept them and even demand them.