Or, maybe we could all just work fewer hours per week. Which would leave more time for, you know, living.
And that's not the first time we'd take such a step. I mean, before the industrial revolution it was common to work long hours and work on Saturday. Now many people only work 35 - 40 hours a week. We also reduced unemployment by prohibiting child labour.
Really? Seems to me like that will be the first thing to go, or indeed has already gone in many cases. We have a fraction of the farmers we used to have. The shipping container eliminated a huge number of longshoremen jobs. The housing trades could very easily go away if we start building homes in factories on any sort of scale. And so on.
Go watch Star Trek : and see what WE could do when folks don't need money. Why the F*** does it have to be a dystopian future? Really?
Agreed. Though to be pedantic, I do believe Star Trek's utopian world didn't begin until after most of humanity was destroyed in a nuclear-fuels WWIII.
I know it's fashionable to praise/crap on Apple for the headphone thing... but it was actually HTC who was first to do it on smart phones. My HTC Dream (the first Android phone) did not have a headphone jack.
What I care about is whether their service is efficient and affordable. Why again do I care about where they get their energy from?
Well most people have at least some standards for the methodology a company uses to service you. For example, I can't imagine too many people would order from a company--no matter how efficient and affordable--if their service required them to execute a puppy for every packaged shipped.
So the questions becomes, "where is the line between where the means and ends matter for customers?" Judging by the fact that we still eat mangrove-destroying shrimp by the truckload, and buy diamonds that fuel genocidal wars, I'm willing to bet that the line does indeed tend towards the side of, "don't give a f**k about the means" for a lot of people.
But just because you're on the "don't give a f**k" side of the line when it comes to Amazon's energy sources doesn't mean a lot of people aren't on the other side of the line.
There are advantages to pre-fabricated surfaces mass produced in a factory and quickly laid on site. The fact that they can put solar PV in the surface is just a bonus to reduce total cost of ownership.
The problem is this thing you call "a bonus" (adding a PV panel into the pre-fab surface) is not a small feat at all.
In the current state of affairs (technology available in this decade), it will require a tremendous amount of engineering, cost a tons of money, will require an enormous amount of compromises in order to pull of...
Not only that, but a road made of panels (solar or not) is going to suck for driving. Has OP ever actually looked at a road? The surface is not actually flat. There're all sorts of dips and rolls and such to go with the terrain. Asphalt/concrete goes with the flow and provides a smooth transition over all of these features. Panels will mean joints. That might be fine in a parking lot, but it's going to be hella crappy at 30 km/h+.
It'd make more sense to use piezoelectric roadways.
No, it f*cking would not. The energy for piezoelectrics has to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is from your car, which means reduced fuel efficiency. It would also make the roads way more complicated than they are right now.
That's a fallacy. It's not an either-or proposition. The road has to exist for other reasons. It needs a surface for vehicles to drive on.
What you are saying is basically the same as this: I installed solar panels on my house. Sure, I could have put them on the roof, but the siding on my walls has to exist for other reasons, so it made sense to use the solar panels as siding?
I say this as a non-user, so I acknowledge that I might be ignorant on the subject. But...
I never understood how/why Twitter (or really any messaging platform/app) is a business. I mean, tweeting does actually seem like a useful tool for certain communication needs, but I don't understand why it's handled through a single service. Why isn't the tweet simply a protocol, like email? People would then just build different clients/apps/platforms that utilize that protocol, just like we do with email.
Sure. And the pain for the replaced workers was probably pretty high, but in each case it was a small part of the economy, and changes were relatively gradual in the grand scheme of things.
I think we're on the cusp of an unpresidented [sic, lol] change right now. We're not talking about replacing one part of one industry at a time, we're facing the elimination of a huge amount of manual labour. And beyond that, we're facing the replacement of a whole swath of "intellectual" tasks. Sure, there will probably still be jobs at the top. But we don't need to lose all jobs before it becomes a huge factor in society. US unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009, and that was pretty much economic armageddon. Automation could easily cause a similar rate or higher.
And I should add that none of this is necessarily a bad thing. Society has always adapted, and I'm sure we will again. But we will make the transition a whole lot more pleasant if we think about it ahead of time and plan for it.
But the reality is that we are no closer to "AI" than we were in 1960. And the robots that might displace workers are incredibly lame. Robots are good for some tasks, like assembly line welding, but useless for other tasks like assembling Ikea furniture.
I've said this on other posts about automation... The statement that "robots can't do job 'x'" is always based on the assumption that the job/system will continue to be set up as it is now, for human workers. Yeah, a robot is going to suck at ripping apart a cardboard box, taking all the little hardware out of a plastic bag, and manipulating the tiny little allan wrench they give you. But that's because IKEA assembly is designed for humans. With automation, labour costs disappear, so instead of building furniture in Eastern Europe and designing for cheap shipping, maybe IKEA sets up regional factories and instead designs for robot assembly.
without the fear of losing benefits by *trying* to better themselves they will get a part time job, if only for a couple bucks extra spending money.
Yeah, that's a huge issue with current benefits systems. As it stands now, benefits are scaled back in line with income, so there's very little incentive to get back to work unless you can jump into a higher paying job (which many people who were on benefits don't have the skills to do). "I could make $20,000/year handing out at home on benefits, or I could go work 40 hours a week and make $25,000 a year."
Not all of this is labor elimination, but a *lot* of it is labor reduction.
Yes, that's a very good point. The need for UBI, etc. will come long before we eliminate all labour. Unemployment in the US peaked at 10 percent in 2009, and that was pretty much economic armageddon. Even if automation only replaces* 1-in-10 jobs in the near future, that's going to have huuuuuge effects on society.
*Yes, yes. New jobs to fix the robots and all that. But let's be honest, there are not going to be as many jobs fixing the robots as are going to be lost to self-driving long haul trucks. I have zero problem with this philosophically, but it's going to mean we can't just stick our head in the sand and assume the system as we know it now will work for a future labour market.
Im waiting on the automation that will fix my sink, toilet, and bathtub. Or the automation that will wire a house for electricity, maybe automation to build walls and frame a new house.
That isn't really a hard thing to imagine if you don't assume things will be exactly as they're done now. It's entirely plausible that our houses will be built in a robotic factory; no need for on-site framing. Or maybe factories will build modular rooms. Choose the rooms you want and they get locked together on-site into house. Then, when your plumbing goes, your bathroom gets removed and a new one plopped in.
Whenever I see someone say, "automation will be impossible because 'x'", generally the answer is that they're assuming things will be done exactly as they're done now in the system set up for human workers.
Did you know it's now possible to buy cheap vodka and OP rum, take it home, and drink as much as you like?
And this isn't a vending machine on the street. There'd be a human required in the bar, if only to refuse service to minors.
The difference is liability. At least where I live, bars are liable for their patrons. They are not permitted to serve visibly drunk patrons, and bars have certainly had license suspensions for doing so. If someone gets blackout drunk at a bar and then on the way home crashes their car into a school bus full of nuns, the bar can be held liable. Yeah, you can drink as much as you like at home, but then liability is on you, not the bar.
What you're describing is the 'status quo' of the executive office.
Yes, and the status quo has evolved to be that way for very good reasons.
The presidency is a position where you literally do not get to choose what you wear each day. Not because you are incapable of it, but because it's a waste of brain power. The human brain is only capable of making so many decisions a day before it gets decision overload. When you are the president, you need to save your decision-making powers for the important stuff, like whether or not to push the red button. Running the most powerful country in the world entails millions of potential decisions, so the system has evolved to filter out all of the muck at the lower levels. Trump may say there's no chain of command, but I think he will quickly find out* that the chain of command is absolutely essential.
*and there is of course the very likely chance that he already knows all of this, and is just spouting nonsense to the people who meet with him...
Yeah, like the wealthy (who control the congress and president) are going to allow that.
Well they're going to have a bunch of angry, unemployed, starving people burning down the gates, so they'll have to do something. Utopian outcome is UBI, dystopian outcome is killer robots putting down the masses. I'm 50/50 on which way things will go.
Except, does anyone know how long a modern solar panel like the one they'd be using lasts before it expires or degrades or whatever? Or even what the overall maintenance expense is?
Consumer panels are usually warrantied to 80% capacity after 25 or 30 years. I.e. they'll work for at least 25 or 30 years, but you can expect to lose 20% of generating capacity by that time. Inverters are more like 5-7 year warranty.
I would imagine a commercial plant, with professional management and maintenance, probably has a longer lifespan/
Because to me solar panels seem like a class AAA rated bond on steroid when it comes to ROI.
Yes, they will be very soon. The tech is reaching a point on the cost curve where it would be crazy to not build them purely based on cost. I suspect over the next 20 years we will see a huge surge in solar installations. They do, of course, pass some costs off to the grid operator in terms of more complicated grid management requirements, but even that is a problem that is actively being solved.
And where and who is that "basic income/Universal Social Security" that come in whether you work or not going to come from?
Automation. We are quickly moving towards an economy where production is not dependant on human labour. In other words, capital is self-sustaining. UBI would be skimmed off the "interest".
You don't get to tell the business how much money it can make.
Yes, but we do get to tell them how much they have to pay their employees. It's called a minimum wage law.
And if you want to make it all about cold-hearted calculations instead of respect for other humans, it's still worth it for us to support a living wage. People who don't have enough money for basic necessities are expensive to the system: drug abuse, crime, health issues, high birth rates... all of the problems that come from living in a life of desperation. Society pays for those things, so wouldn't it be better to just pay the cost of providing people with an acceptable standard of living?
From the summary it appears as if yes, there certainly was a clear winner: Getty Images. I guess you could argue that they didn't get the $120 they demanded from Highsmith, but they've managed to get all of the claims against them dismissed.
That assumes we're going to be farming animals in the future. Researchers are working on "growing" meat from stem cells. If they get to the point where it's scalable, I imagine we'll transition quickly to such an approach. Why feed a whole cow when you can just feed the steak?
Slashdot Mirror
Or, maybe we could all just work fewer hours per week. Which would leave more time for, you know, living.
And that's not the first time we'd take such a step. I mean, before the industrial revolution it was common to work long hours and work on Saturday. Now many people only work 35 - 40 hours a week. We also reduced unemployment by prohibiting child labour.
There will always be a need for manual labor,
Really? Seems to me like that will be the first thing to go, or indeed has already gone in many cases. We have a fraction of the farmers we used to have. The shipping container eliminated a huge number of longshoremen jobs. The housing trades could very easily go away if we start building homes in factories on any sort of scale. And so on.
Go watch Star Trek : and see what WE could do when folks don't need money. Why the F*** does it have to be a dystopian future? Really?
Agreed. Though to be pedantic, I do believe Star Trek's utopian world didn't begin until after most of humanity was destroyed in a nuclear-fuels WWIII.
I know it's fashionable to praise/crap on Apple for the headphone thing... but it was actually HTC who was first to do it on smart phones. My HTC Dream (the first Android phone) did not have a headphone jack.
What I care about is whether their service is efficient and affordable. Why again do I care about where they get their energy from?
Well most people have at least some standards for the methodology a company uses to service you. For example, I can't imagine too many people would order from a company--no matter how efficient and affordable--if their service required them to execute a puppy for every packaged shipped.
So the questions becomes, "where is the line between where the means and ends matter for customers?" Judging by the fact that we still eat mangrove-destroying shrimp by the truckload, and buy diamonds that fuel genocidal wars, I'm willing to bet that the line does indeed tend towards the side of, "don't give a f**k about the means" for a lot of people.
But just because you're on the "don't give a f**k" side of the line when it comes to Amazon's energy sources doesn't mean a lot of people aren't on the other side of the line.
How many of those who now survive don't become bankrupt in the process?
In civilized countries, with a half-decent social safety net, bankruptcy is not the penalty for surviving illness.
Millimetres. Inches. Pick one. Preferably metric.
You don't listen to much music, do you? There is an abundance of great music right now. Probably more this generation than any before it.
Yeah, Top-40 music is manufactured and "shitty", but that was always the case.
There are advantages to pre-fabricated surfaces mass produced in a factory and quickly laid on site. The fact that they can put solar PV in the surface is just a bonus to reduce total cost of ownership.
The problem is this thing you call "a bonus" (adding a PV panel into the pre-fab surface) is not a small feat at all. In the current state of affairs (technology available in this decade), it will require a tremendous amount of engineering, cost a tons of money, will require an enormous amount of compromises in order to pull of...
Not only that, but a road made of panels (solar or not) is going to suck for driving. Has OP ever actually looked at a road? The surface is not actually flat. There're all sorts of dips and rolls and such to go with the terrain. Asphalt/concrete goes with the flow and provides a smooth transition over all of these features. Panels will mean joints. That might be fine in a parking lot, but it's going to be hella crappy at 30 km/h+.
It'd make more sense to use piezoelectric roadways.
No, it f*cking would not. The energy for piezoelectrics has to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is from your car, which means reduced fuel efficiency. It would also make the roads way more complicated than they are right now.
That's a fallacy. It's not an either-or proposition. The road has to exist for other reasons. It needs a surface for vehicles to drive on.
What you are saying is basically the same as this: I installed solar panels on my house. Sure, I could have put them on the roof, but the siding on my walls has to exist for other reasons, so it made sense to use the solar panels as siding?
I say this as a non-user, so I acknowledge that I might be ignorant on the subject. But...
I never understood how/why Twitter (or really any messaging platform/app) is a business. I mean, tweeting does actually seem like a useful tool for certain communication needs, but I don't understand why it's handled through a single service. Why isn't the tweet simply a protocol, like email? People would then just build different clients/apps/platforms that utilize that protocol, just like we do with email.
Sure. And the pain for the replaced workers was probably pretty high, but in each case it was a small part of the economy, and changes were relatively gradual in the grand scheme of things.
I think we're on the cusp of an unpresidented [sic, lol] change right now. We're not talking about replacing one part of one industry at a time, we're facing the elimination of a huge amount of manual labour. And beyond that, we're facing the replacement of a whole swath of "intellectual" tasks. Sure, there will probably still be jobs at the top. But we don't need to lose all jobs before it becomes a huge factor in society. US unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009, and that was pretty much economic armageddon. Automation could easily cause a similar rate or higher.
And I should add that none of this is necessarily a bad thing. Society has always adapted, and I'm sure we will again. But we will make the transition a whole lot more pleasant if we think about it ahead of time and plan for it.
But the reality is that we are no closer to "AI" than we were in 1960. And the robots that might displace workers are incredibly lame. Robots are good for some tasks, like assembly line welding, but useless for other tasks like assembling Ikea furniture.
I've said this on other posts about automation... The statement that "robots can't do job 'x'" is always based on the assumption that the job/system will continue to be set up as it is now, for human workers. Yeah, a robot is going to suck at ripping apart a cardboard box, taking all the little hardware out of a plastic bag, and manipulating the tiny little allan wrench they give you. But that's because IKEA assembly is designed for humans. With automation, labour costs disappear, so instead of building furniture in Eastern Europe and designing for cheap shipping, maybe IKEA sets up regional factories and instead designs for robot assembly.
without the fear of losing benefits by *trying* to better themselves they will get a part time job, if only for a couple bucks extra spending money.
Yeah, that's a huge issue with current benefits systems. As it stands now, benefits are scaled back in line with income, so there's very little incentive to get back to work unless you can jump into a higher paying job (which many people who were on benefits don't have the skills to do). "I could make $20,000/year handing out at home on benefits, or I could go work 40 hours a week and make $25,000 a year."
Not all of this is labor elimination, but a *lot* of it is labor reduction.
Yes, that's a very good point. The need for UBI, etc. will come long before we eliminate all labour. Unemployment in the US peaked at 10 percent in 2009, and that was pretty much economic armageddon. Even if automation only replaces* 1-in-10 jobs in the near future, that's going to have huuuuuge effects on society.
*Yes, yes. New jobs to fix the robots and all that. But let's be honest, there are not going to be as many jobs fixing the robots as are going to be lost to self-driving long haul trucks. I have zero problem with this philosophically, but it's going to mean we can't just stick our head in the sand and assume the system as we know it now will work for a future labour market.
Im waiting on the automation that will fix my sink, toilet, and bathtub. Or the automation that will wire a house for electricity, maybe automation to build walls and frame a new house.
That isn't really a hard thing to imagine if you don't assume things will be exactly as they're done now. It's entirely plausible that our houses will be built in a robotic factory; no need for on-site framing. Or maybe factories will build modular rooms. Choose the rooms you want and they get locked together on-site into house. Then, when your plumbing goes, your bathroom gets removed and a new one plopped in.
Whenever I see someone say, "automation will be impossible because 'x'", generally the answer is that they're assuming things will be done exactly as they're done now in the system set up for human workers.
Did you know it's now possible to buy cheap vodka and OP rum, take it home, and drink as much as you like?
And this isn't a vending machine on the street. There'd be a human required in the bar, if only to refuse service to minors.
The difference is liability. At least where I live, bars are liable for their patrons. They are not permitted to serve visibly drunk patrons, and bars have certainly had license suspensions for doing so. If someone gets blackout drunk at a bar and then on the way home crashes their car into a school bus full of nuns, the bar can be held liable. Yeah, you can drink as much as you like at home, but then liability is on you, not the bar.
What you're describing is the 'status quo' of the executive office.
Yes, and the status quo has evolved to be that way for very good reasons.
The presidency is a position where you literally do not get to choose what you wear each day. Not because you are incapable of it, but because it's a waste of brain power. The human brain is only capable of making so many decisions a day before it gets decision overload. When you are the president, you need to save your decision-making powers for the important stuff, like whether or not to push the red button. Running the most powerful country in the world entails millions of potential decisions, so the system has evolved to filter out all of the muck at the lower levels. Trump may say there's no chain of command, but I think he will quickly find out* that the chain of command is absolutely essential.
*and there is of course the very likely chance that he already knows all of this, and is just spouting nonsense to the people who meet with him...
Yeah, like the wealthy (who control the congress and president) are going to allow that.
Well they're going to have a bunch of angry, unemployed, starving people burning down the gates, so they'll have to do something. Utopian outcome is UBI, dystopian outcome is killer robots putting down the masses. I'm 50/50 on which way things will go.
Except, does anyone know how long a modern solar panel like the one they'd be using lasts before it expires or degrades or whatever? Or even what the overall maintenance expense is?
Consumer panels are usually warrantied to 80% capacity after 25 or 30 years. I.e. they'll work for at least 25 or 30 years, but you can expect to lose 20% of generating capacity by that time. Inverters are more like 5-7 year warranty.
I would imagine a commercial plant, with professional management and maintenance, probably has a longer lifespan/
Because to me solar panels seem like a class AAA rated bond on steroid when it comes to ROI.
Yes, they will be very soon. The tech is reaching a point on the cost curve where it would be crazy to not build them purely based on cost. I suspect over the next 20 years we will see a huge surge in solar installations. They do, of course, pass some costs off to the grid operator in terms of more complicated grid management requirements, but even that is a problem that is actively being solved.
And where and who is that "basic income/Universal Social Security" that come in whether you work or not going to come from?
Automation. We are quickly moving towards an economy where production is not dependant on human labour. In other words, capital is self-sustaining. UBI would be skimmed off the "interest".
You don't get to tell the business how much money it can make.
Yes, but we do get to tell them how much they have to pay their employees. It's called a minimum wage law.
And if you want to make it all about cold-hearted calculations instead of respect for other humans, it's still worth it for us to support a living wage. People who don't have enough money for basic necessities are expensive to the system: drug abuse, crime, health issues, high birth rates... all of the problems that come from living in a life of desperation. Society pays for those things, so wouldn't it be better to just pay the cost of providing people with an acceptable standard of living?
"Neither Side a Clear Winner"
From the summary it appears as if yes, there certainly was a clear winner: Getty Images. I guess you could argue that they didn't get the $120 they demanded from Highsmith, but they've managed to get all of the claims against them dismissed.
That assumes we're going to be farming animals in the future. Researchers are working on "growing" meat from stem cells. If they get to the point where it's scalable, I imagine we'll transition quickly to such an approach. Why feed a whole cow when you can just feed the steak?