It's more evolutionary then that. The corporations never planned the whole thing, but they have a distinct desire for certain benefits that may only be had in this way, and so they have done tiny things for years and years, like a river creating a canyon due to the natural gravitational pull of a certain direction, their direction is greater profits, the canyon is their coffers, and all our money is being washed into it bit by bit as they wear down more and more regulations and legal rights to increase the efficiency of their inevitable direction.
Like a river down a hill for 30 years creating a ditch, then a canyon, they wear aware everything that keeps the buying power in the citizenry bit by bit with no more conscious planning of it than a river plans to create a ditch.
He's not talking about communism at all, he's just saying there may be ways to construct an economy wherein no one has jobs; no one has work they *must* do, and suggesting people think about how a world like that might actually function. He's not prescribing any one new approach, just that we should look at new approaches (wherein we all get to frollick instead of work).
My mistake, I was remembering household not individual. The average household (or is it median? whatever..) is like $40k/year, or at least in the 30-50 range, I don't remember off hand. Either way the point stands even if my numbers aren't all there heh
I haven't seen it mentioned but, everyone seems to be forgetting the biggest part of these things: You want production continueing for 24 hours a day? That's 3 employees at 8 hour shifts. This thing never sleeps. It's not replacing one job, it's replacing three. Chinese workers cost a lot more than $.30/day and they are starting to use robots, and think about the fact that one robot working 24 hours a day replaces more than just 1 worker so you're saving the cost on multiple employees PER robot.
It has intelligent sensors capable of telling if it uses tools correctly for things like fine manipulations. Plus it can have guaranteed repetitious correctness in the execution of those fine manipulations. I'll bet equipped with an appropriate toolset by it's side, it could actually be programmed to do this.
You forgot about all the jobs lost working the shipping lanes when those products are no longer boated over here, easily more than 1k lost there to make up for the 1k made here. Joy to the world indeed!
That's called a vending machine. They're perfectly capable of doing what a barista does, but because of human perceptions of vending machines, they don't produce a tenth of the sales for their owners.
Every job automated.. Man, I can't wait for the first robot comedian, I'll be he's going to be a crack-up. He'll probably just display cat-videos on his tv-face and call it neo-post-neo-modernist sarcastirony.
What jobs exactly? Baxter-Oiler? If that's a problem, they'll just have baxter oil himself every 3rd Oblogon he puts together, or hook him up to a continuous feed of oil. Automation doesn't create jobs, sorry. Even the word computer originally referred to someone who did computing for a living, that job no longer exists.
I'm sorry but machine's *will* come with knowledge included. It's just a hard-drive ya twit. And with their advanced AI they'll improve upon our knowledge without external interference needed.
Why does everybody not grow their own food right now? Lots of work sound like not so much fun? Oh, right, that's what the robots are for. Mechanized agriculture will single handedly solve world hunger. Everything else about the singularity you can toss out if you so wish, but this one truth is definite. Unquestionably, agricultural automation will make crop work so minimal in 50-100 years that scaling up production bandwidth is just as simple for agriculture as adding a 2nd server behind a load-balancer is. At that point we can effectively throw out all of the GMO garbage and though yields are lower for organic, they just add a new node to make up for it. In this way the world will be fed.
As for canada, if we got the robots they'd welcome us:D besides, its' the least densely populated country on earth, they likely wouldn't even notice. It's not like migration to or from canada presently takes much more than walking across the border and renting a flat, won't even need to show a job visa, who needs a job when you've got a robot growing your food for you?
I'm so dead tired of hearing people mischaracterize social security. Let's get one thing straight right now: It's not a savings account, it's not a 401k, it is not any form of account where you have cordoned off money that you put in and is held for you.
It's insurance. Retirement insurance to be fair, they run the actuary tables and adjust the costs such that they're betting more people won't live to retirement than are paying in, if more people reach retirement than there are payers then just like any other insurance their bet loses and they go bust. I'm not calling it insurance to villainize it, I think it's perfectly good insurance to have, it insures that in the unlikely event that you survive with your marbles to retirement age, you won't have to continue working. Without it, only the wealthy would be able to survive past that age because work kills old people, fast. You pay health insurance for the unlikely event that you are injured, you pay retirement insurance for the unlikely event that you retire, and it pays out more than you paid in over the term that it's paying you *because* it's insurance: Pooled money. Not a savings account for you, not your personal 401k, but a company that you are paying, who maintains a pooled amount of money and tries it's best to pay out fairly without paying out too much so that it goes bust.
You all should be glad it's public, a private version would be for-profit and charge a *hell* of a lot more, especially because it would have a smaller pool since not everyone would be forced to use it. The result: Lots of people would make it over retirement and work to death in misery of old age because they couldn't afford to pay for this insurance their whole lives, and the wealthy well they retire early already so they wouldn't bother paying for this kind of insurance anyway.
I'm not talking about reality as we know it, I'm referring to the post-singularity reality as people imagine it being based on a world wherein efficiency is basically 100%. The idea being a machine will do everything for you, up to and including finding materials for components, creating components, constructing a full self-replica from those components, and furthermore to have AI capable of making this process more efficient all on it's own without our intervention.
Reality however is not that this supposed singularity would ever happen, I'm just trying to dispell the magic people imagine about a world where 100% production is automated (this would include production of automation which is the point in which people presume we reach the "singularity")
Think about this, with the singularity one business owner could spend $500 on a cheap robot which is smart enough to create 2000 more robots, but if that were the case what are those robots worth? 1/2000th of $500? They're identical to the original in completeness, their ability to with no work from the individual duplicate value makes all value based on relativity 100% moot because efficiency is then 100% (100% efficiency being effectively a perpetual profit machine like a perpetual motion machine, economies make no sense without efficiency loss).
Ignoring the fundamental breakdown of the concept of economy altogether though, inspect the situation further. What if those 2000 robots go farm and with no work from the original man make 15,000 loaves of bread a day, so now that one original robot is equivalent in value to 15,000 loaves of bread a day, now tell me when one individual can with such ease create an income of 15K*$2/day, how much does the guy with no robot (or job because they won't exist) make? The average person makes $30k/day now, and therefore the average price of a loaf of bread will become ridiculous because of the amount of fluidity in the economy, now our poor bipolar fellow with no robot or job can't eat except from the bread-lines, which will be large because the efficiencies become significant enough as to support large bread-lines and demotivate peopel from doing things they don't want to do so they join the bread-lines. Great, now the one guy who does work and runs the bread-lines, he's an alright guy, but his son is a straight up maoist, somebody speaks ill of him and this guy wants to make an example. Closes the bread-line, now 45k people who relied on his bread-line every day need to find something else, unless as he says; someone kills that fellow who spoke ill of him. The one guy who works basically commands the servitude of the countless who don't have the robots. It becomes an economic equalizer akin to a colt.45 in 1230 just based on the level of difference it creates between those with it and those without it.
Wrong. The accurate statement is that what did come to pass is efficiencies beyond our wildest dreams where each individual employee creates in 2 days the GDP that took his counterpart 2 weeks to create, however the management see's no reason to allow the employee to keep the same portion of that GDP he kept in the 50s, if they did that then the employee would only work 2 days a week and the employer would be out significant profits that can be reaped by keeping the employee there 5 days. This is why the rich now are so much richer than they were in the 50s, they're producing tons more than their 50s counterpart did, while keeping a significantly larger share of the production's revenue than the 50's employers did. The efficiences have gone up causing enormous GDP-per-employee gains, yet employee pay has only kept up with inflation.
On the other hand, this may be due to the fact that in reality inflation is somewhat controlled by the majority of the population, so if the majority of the population worked 2 days a week, the guy who worked 3 would be *loaded* making 50% more than the average wage at which point the majority would say "hell, one more day a week and I can go from 40k/year to 60k/year!" but then someone works 4 days a week... Economics are nebulous and this is why they're much debated, but simple fact is there's no way a bunch of robots doing all the work ends up with a liesure life for the populace; the singularity is a lie, if we no longer have work to do that just cements 100% the income divide by making the disparity so significant. The efficiencies talks about by the singularity are so large that those who are reaping their benefits will have magnitudes more wealth than others to an extent that if you aren't on the beneficiary side of those efficiencies you won't be able to afford bread. The efficiences of the singularity would effectively make money wholesale without value. I wonder what we would value then... Robots maybe will be the new currency... There's a weird thought.
Hah don't have to pay anything at all. Clearly you've never seen a medical bill. Get real, it's more accurate to say, you don't get to choose whether or not you pay due to insurance, so why is the health establishment going to bother? They make an absolute killing already, they have no interest in risking any of their huge profits on projects that don't have guaranteed measurable yields such as all IT projects; predictability is near none. So they stick with the predictably enormously rising prices they keep charging for health care. 81 billion dollars a year? HAH. Drop in the bucket. To that industry billions are as good as pennies.
Just a note, my sister in law eats less than me and is far more active, but was extremely overweight (she was obese since childhood) so doctors finally decided she needed a gastric bypass.
I presume that's what you're talking about when you refer to the surgically altering yourself so you can gorge. I have since learned some interesting things, for instance: she can't more than 3oz of anything at a time for the rest of her life. This includes water so she gets 3oz of sustenance every 3 or 4 hours (I don't remember the time period) to the point that she has been suffering migraines from dehydration because the small amount she's intaking is simply not allowing for enough water and food, if she has more water rather than food she finds herself feeling very weak from malnourishment (the doctors tell her both the dehydration and weakness are completely common as her body adjusts).
Just sharing this because from what I've learned, it turns out this surgery doesn't allow one to just gorge themselves and is anything but an easy weight loss solution, effective but definitely not easy. Plus she had to diet even more and exercise for 6 or 9 months leading up to the surgery before they would even do it, where the result is a permanent diet for the rest of her life. It'll be worth it for her and her family to have her healthier but as I said, this is no miracle cure with no consequences.
Reminds me of IBM's trajectory through a fair portion of the last decade, they ended up finding stable footing, just in a completely different space than they were before they fell down so hard: As a leading outsourcing contractor. They'll gladly give you overpriced contractors of any sort you want; except North American. They make good money in this practice no less, and have started growing again. HP I suspect will find a corner of it's company that has remained profitable regardless of the shitstorm it's executing onto itself, and just retreat into that corner and continue to grow from there like IBM did. My curiosity is, what version of HP will come out of this? Be interesting to find out.
Truly, this is internet gibberish in it's natural state. Undisturbed by the arguing of trolls or muting of moderators, magestically wafting across phone wires, cable lines, and forever through the air in a radio frequency being read and misunderstood by all who see it, whilst making observers ponder the meaning of truth when statements without any meaning at all can be made. Perhaps the OP is right, perhaps we should all just occasionally bundle together english-like but apparently arbitrary statements to proclaim passionately, as if imbued by the thoughts of the millions of internet kids before us and to spread forward through time this truly beautiful and inane practice of making no sense, to ensure it lives forever. If ever this kind of almost-sense stops being spread by AC, I'll make sure to pick that torch up and carry it myself until I see a new generation willing to keep the flame alive.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more evolutionary then that. The corporations never planned the whole thing, but they have a distinct desire for certain benefits that may only be had in this way, and so they have done tiny things for years and years, like a river creating a canyon due to the natural gravitational pull of a certain direction, their direction is greater profits, the canyon is their coffers, and all our money is being washed into it bit by bit as they wear down more and more regulations and legal rights to increase the efficiency of their inevitable direction.
Like a river down a hill for 30 years creating a ditch, then a canyon, they wear aware everything that keeps the buying power in the citizenry bit by bit with no more conscious planning of it than a river plans to create a ditch.
Or an ai with internet access browsing nih published articles
He's not talking about communism at all, he's just saying there may be ways to construct an economy wherein no one has jobs; no one has work they *must* do, and suggesting people think about how a world like that might actually function. He's not prescribing any one new approach, just that we should look at new approaches (wherein we all get to frollick instead of work).
Well played. The troll is strong with this one.
My mistake, I was remembering household not individual. The average household (or is it median? whatever..) is like $40k/year, or at least in the 30-50 range, I don't remember off hand. Either way the point stands even if my numbers aren't all there heh
He meant buy it, and get it a job flipping burgers, then garnish 100% of it's wages for your own personal enjoyment.
I haven't seen it mentioned but, everyone seems to be forgetting the biggest part of these things: You want production continueing for 24 hours a day? That's 3 employees at 8 hour shifts. This thing never sleeps. It's not replacing one job, it's replacing three. Chinese workers cost a lot more than $.30/day and they are starting to use robots, and think about the fact that one robot working 24 hours a day replaces more than just 1 worker so you're saving the cost on multiple employees PER robot.
It has intelligent sensors capable of telling if it uses tools correctly for things like fine manipulations. Plus it can have guaranteed repetitious correctness in the execution of those fine manipulations. I'll bet equipped with an appropriate toolset by it's side, it could actually be programmed to do this.
I use amazon for almost all shopping, as far as I'm concerned robots already deliver that stuff, I just look out my door and it's sitting on my step.
Which is more than can be said for AC! Boom!
You forgot about all the jobs lost working the shipping lanes when those products are no longer boated over here, easily more than 1k lost there to make up for the 1k made here. Joy to the world indeed!
That's called a vending machine. They're perfectly capable of doing what a barista does, but because of human perceptions of vending machines, they don't produce a tenth of the sales for their owners.
Every job automated.. Man, I can't wait for the first robot comedian, I'll be he's going to be a crack-up. He'll probably just display cat-videos on his tv-face and call it neo-post-neo-modernist sarcastirony.
What jobs exactly? Baxter-Oiler? If that's a problem, they'll just have baxter oil himself every 3rd Oblogon he puts together, or hook him up to a continuous feed of oil. Automation doesn't create jobs, sorry. Even the word computer originally referred to someone who did computing for a living, that job no longer exists.
I'm sorry but machine's *will* come with knowledge included. It's just a hard-drive ya twit. And with their advanced AI they'll improve upon our knowledge without external interference needed.
Why does everybody not grow their own food right now? Lots of work sound like not so much fun? Oh, right, that's what the robots are for. Mechanized agriculture will single handedly solve world hunger. Everything else about the singularity you can toss out if you so wish, but this one truth is definite. Unquestionably, agricultural automation will make crop work so minimal in 50-100 years that scaling up production bandwidth is just as simple for agriculture as adding a 2nd server behind a load-balancer is. At that point we can effectively throw out all of the GMO garbage and though yields are lower for organic, they just add a new node to make up for it. In this way the world will be fed.
:D besides, its' the least densely populated country on earth, they likely wouldn't even notice. It's not like migration to or from canada presently takes much more than walking across the border and renting a flat, won't even need to show a job visa, who needs a job when you've got a robot growing your food for you?
As for canada, if we got the robots they'd welcome us
I'm so dead tired of hearing people mischaracterize social security. Let's get one thing straight right now: It's not a savings account, it's not a 401k, it is not any form of account where you have cordoned off money that you put in and is held for you.
It's insurance. Retirement insurance to be fair, they run the actuary tables and adjust the costs such that they're betting more people won't live to retirement than are paying in, if more people reach retirement than there are payers then just like any other insurance their bet loses and they go bust. I'm not calling it insurance to villainize it, I think it's perfectly good insurance to have, it insures that in the unlikely event that you survive with your marbles to retirement age, you won't have to continue working. Without it, only the wealthy would be able to survive past that age because work kills old people, fast. You pay health insurance for the unlikely event that you are injured, you pay retirement insurance for the unlikely event that you retire, and it pays out more than you paid in over the term that it's paying you *because* it's insurance: Pooled money. Not a savings account for you, not your personal 401k, but a company that you are paying, who maintains a pooled amount of money and tries it's best to pay out fairly without paying out too much so that it goes bust.
You all should be glad it's public, a private version would be for-profit and charge a *hell* of a lot more, especially because it would have a smaller pool since not everyone would be forced to use it. The result: Lots of people would make it over retirement and work to death in misery of old age because they couldn't afford to pay for this insurance their whole lives, and the wealthy well they retire early already so they wouldn't bother paying for this kind of insurance anyway.
I'm not talking about reality as we know it, I'm referring to the post-singularity reality as people imagine it being based on a world wherein efficiency is basically 100%. The idea being a machine will do everything for you, up to and including finding materials for components, creating components, constructing a full self-replica from those components, and furthermore to have AI capable of making this process more efficient all on it's own without our intervention.
Reality however is not that this supposed singularity would ever happen, I'm just trying to dispell the magic people imagine about a world where 100% production is automated (this would include production of automation which is the point in which people presume we reach the "singularity")
Think about this, with the singularity one business owner could spend $500 on a cheap robot which is smart enough to create 2000 more robots, but if that were the case what are those robots worth? 1/2000th of $500? They're identical to the original in completeness, their ability to with no work from the individual duplicate value makes all value based on relativity 100% moot because efficiency is then 100% (100% efficiency being effectively a perpetual profit machine like a perpetual motion machine, economies make no sense without efficiency loss).
.45 in 1230 just based on the level of difference it creates between those with it and those without it.
Ignoring the fundamental breakdown of the concept of economy altogether though, inspect the situation further. What if those 2000 robots go farm and with no work from the original man make 15,000 loaves of bread a day, so now that one original robot is equivalent in value to 15,000 loaves of bread a day, now tell me when one individual can with such ease create an income of 15K*$2/day, how much does the guy with no robot (or job because they won't exist) make? The average person makes $30k/day now, and therefore the average price of a loaf of bread will become ridiculous because of the amount of fluidity in the economy, now our poor bipolar fellow with no robot or job can't eat except from the bread-lines, which will be large because the efficiencies become significant enough as to support large bread-lines and demotivate peopel from doing things they don't want to do so they join the bread-lines. Great, now the one guy who does work and runs the bread-lines, he's an alright guy, but his son is a straight up maoist, somebody speaks ill of him and this guy wants to make an example. Closes the bread-line, now 45k people who relied on his bread-line every day need to find something else, unless as he says; someone kills that fellow who spoke ill of him. The one guy who works basically commands the servitude of the countless who don't have the robots. It becomes an economic equalizer akin to a colt
Wrong. The accurate statement is that what did come to pass is efficiencies beyond our wildest dreams where each individual employee creates in 2 days the GDP that took his counterpart 2 weeks to create, however the management see's no reason to allow the employee to keep the same portion of that GDP he kept in the 50s, if they did that then the employee would only work 2 days a week and the employer would be out significant profits that can be reaped by keeping the employee there 5 days. This is why the rich now are so much richer than they were in the 50s, they're producing tons more than their 50s counterpart did, while keeping a significantly larger share of the production's revenue than the 50's employers did. The efficiences have gone up causing enormous GDP-per-employee gains, yet employee pay has only kept up with inflation.
On the other hand, this may be due to the fact that in reality inflation is somewhat controlled by the majority of the population, so if the majority of the population worked 2 days a week, the guy who worked 3 would be *loaded* making 50% more than the average wage at which point the majority would say "hell, one more day a week and I can go from 40k/year to 60k/year!" but then someone works 4 days a week... Economics are nebulous and this is why they're much debated, but simple fact is there's no way a bunch of robots doing all the work ends up with a liesure life for the populace; the singularity is a lie, if we no longer have work to do that just cements 100% the income divide by making the disparity so significant. The efficiencies talks about by the singularity are so large that those who are reaping their benefits will have magnitudes more wealth than others to an extent that if you aren't on the beneficiary side of those efficiencies you won't be able to afford bread. The efficiences of the singularity would effectively make money wholesale without value. I wonder what we would value then... Robots maybe will be the new currency... There's a weird thought.
... that will slow your down.
and eventually kill you! Muahaha! I mean, what?
Hah don't have to pay anything at all. Clearly you've never seen a medical bill. Get real, it's more accurate to say, you don't get to choose whether or not you pay due to insurance, so why is the health establishment going to bother? They make an absolute killing already, they have no interest in risking any of their huge profits on projects that don't have guaranteed measurable yields such as all IT projects; predictability is near none. So they stick with the predictably enormously rising prices they keep charging for health care. 81 billion dollars a year? HAH. Drop in the bucket. To that industry billions are as good as pennies.
Just a note, my sister in law eats less than me and is far more active, but was extremely overweight (she was obese since childhood) so doctors finally decided she needed a gastric bypass.
I presume that's what you're talking about when you refer to the surgically altering yourself so you can gorge. I have since learned some interesting things, for instance: she can't more than 3oz of anything at a time for the rest of her life. This includes water so she gets 3oz of sustenance every 3 or 4 hours (I don't remember the time period) to the point that she has been suffering migraines from dehydration because the small amount she's intaking is simply not allowing for enough water and food, if she has more water rather than food she finds herself feeling very weak from malnourishment (the doctors tell her both the dehydration and weakness are completely common as her body adjusts).
Just sharing this because from what I've learned, it turns out this surgery doesn't allow one to just gorge themselves and is anything but an easy weight loss solution, effective but definitely not easy. Plus she had to diet even more and exercise for 6 or 9 months leading up to the surgery before they would even do it, where the result is a permanent diet for the rest of her life. It'll be worth it for her and her family to have her healthier but as I said, this is no miracle cure with no consequences.
Reminds me of IBM's trajectory through a fair portion of the last decade, they ended up finding stable footing, just in a completely different space than they were before they fell down so hard: As a leading outsourcing contractor. They'll gladly give you overpriced contractors of any sort you want; except North American. They make good money in this practice no less, and have started growing again. HP I suspect will find a corner of it's company that has remained profitable regardless of the shitstorm it's executing onto itself, and just retreat into that corner and continue to grow from there like IBM did. My curiosity is, what version of HP will come out of this? Be interesting to find out.
Truly, this is internet gibberish in it's natural state. Undisturbed by the arguing of trolls or muting of moderators, magestically wafting across phone wires, cable lines, and forever through the air in a radio frequency being read and misunderstood by all who see it, whilst making observers ponder the meaning of truth when statements without any meaning at all can be made. Perhaps the OP is right, perhaps we should all just occasionally bundle together english-like but apparently arbitrary statements to proclaim passionately, as if imbued by the thoughts of the millions of internet kids before us and to spread forward through time this truly beautiful and inane practice of making no sense, to ensure it lives forever. If ever this kind of almost-sense stops being spread by AC, I'll make sure to pick that torch up and carry it myself until I see a new generation willing to keep the flame alive.