I can't help thinking about the Cavalese cable car disaster. Where some hot shot marine pilots cut the cable to a cable car carrying twenty people at a height of 300 feet in Italy. They were supposed to be above 2000 feet, claimed to think that they were at 1000 feet, and were acquitted of manslaughter in a US court. Of course, at least one of them later got 4 and a half months for burning the recording of the incident. It seems to me they should have been convicted of manslaughter. I vaguely remember at the time hearing interviews claiming that flying under the cables as close as possible was actually a game the pilots would play. I can't find anything on that now though.
In any case, having military aircraft playing war games, with blanks or not around civilian infrastructure just seems like a recipe for disaster. It's really irresponsible. Firing blanks while doing it seems a little suspicious as well. It seems like it's intended as a show for the people on the ground rather than for increasing realism for the helicopter crews. For starters, how well can the helicopter crews even hear the guns firing? I'm assuming that they're using some sort of simulated system to figure out where the imaginary shots are going, why do they need the sound of firing on top of it, and can't they just play simulated sounds over their headsets? Can anyone out there comment on how much the firing of the guns from a helicopter affects its flight? If it does to a significant degree, do blanks provide the same experience? For that matter, are blanks part of typical helicopter training exercises when they're _not_ being held over civilian areas?
Then we are not discussing a problem with robotics technology, but the rise of a nasty political system. Do you believe that robotics make this political system inevitable?
Worries about a nasty political/economic system arising (or rather, persisting from the current day without adapting to changing circumstances), as advanced labour-replacing technology arises has been the entire point that I've been trying to get across this entire conversation. I don't believe that robotics makes this system inevitable. I believe that, given sufficient stability and technological advancement (without which, we're headed for a cliff anyway), labour-saving technology which will replace almost all humans in almost all remotely necessary jobs is virtually inevitable. I also think that most traditional ways of thinking about economics are going to fail to serve most of the human race once that happens. I also think that most of the people in charge are, like you seem to be, hidebound to the point that they will fall back on denial of reality once it starts snowballing. One way or another, interesting times like that are likely to lead to mass human suffering on a large scale.
The observation is that automation and technology have increased standards of living and allowed even advanced technology to be distributed to the common man.
I think the example of iPhones seems more supportive of the point I was making about how the real advanced technology for actually making commodities like iPhones isn't going to be very available to the average person. How many people do you know who own a chip fab? The real advanced technology isn't available to the common man. Nearly everyone is merely a customer, not a producer when it comes to advanced technology.
Also, the examples of the past and present you're providing aren't really all that relevant. I've never denied that technology and productivity have changed over time.
This is the opposite direction to get to your anticipated dystopia. You're looking at a falling object and concluding that it will achieve escape velocity (aka going up)... somehow. You dismissed the light-speed car, but you didn't understand the analogy - if you don't account for all the forces involved correctly, you can end up with absurd (and wrong) conclusions.
Ok. I'm looking at a falling object... Another strawman analogy (one that seems to work on the premise that achieving escape velocity is the same thing as going up). Claiming that I don't understand the analogy of the light speed car is yet another fallacious statement. You're playing at lecturing down to me as if I were a child. It's transparent and poor rhetoric. We each seem to believe that the other doesn't understand the forces involved in our scenario of rapidly advancing technology. Of course, you're the one whose claim requires forces that will somehow act to protect the masses from negative consequences from large-scale social and economic upheaval. From my point of view, you've failed to identify those forces. As far as I can tell, those forces consist only of your own confidence that things will turn out the way you hope.
Quote me where I said that, or where that was implied by my arguments. Strawman.
I will admit that "the invisible hand of the market" was a bit of a strawman in that it was just a stand-in for whatever unnamed magical thing you believe makes my scenario, where massive structural employment and a glut of human labour on a buyers market possibly leads to a very bad time for a large number of people, outright impossible. Here are some relevant quotes from you, however:
The doomsday scenario ignores economic feedback loops that prevent itself from happening.
I'm disagreeing that your scenario even happens in the first place.
You've said over and over again that you don't think
I think it's meant as an energy storage medium though. Rather than a complex pressurized hydrogen gas system in a car, for example, you would have one tank for silicon nanoparticles and one for water (I don't know if you need a third tank to store the precipitate or if you can just dump that into the water tank). You produce hydrogen as needed and then, when you are out of water or silicon nanoparticles, you go to a filling station, flush out the precipitate and fill up with more water and nanoparticles. Then the precipitate either gets recycled as more nanoparticles or just gets used in concrete or something, depending on which is more energy and resource efficient.
Requiring energy to make the fuel isn't necessarily a problem as long as it's a reasonable amount of energy and as long as you don't have to use some ridiculous amount of nanoparticles relative to water. That may turn out to not be the case, but if it is, and there's a way to make the nanoparticles through an electrically powered process, we might have finally found a practical way to store electric power for portable use to replace fossil fuels. That's all very optimistic to draw from a short, light-on-detail press release of course.
For even more wild optimism, let us say that you can take the reaction products (minus the oxygen and hydrogen of course) and reverse the process using heat or electricity and get back silicon nanoparticles suitable for re-use. Then the filling station doesn't need to dispense nanoparticles, it just has to dispense water and electricity.
Of course, it's a long way from a small demonstration of the principle to a working system. It's funny, if this does develop into a new technology, the car running on it will still need a starting battery (also maybe to operate a heater to jump start the reaction) and the best choice for that will probably be a standard automotive starting battery whose basic technology hasn't changed in 150 years.
These back and forths are getting entirely too long, so I'm focusing on just 2 points.
Agreed on that.
Jobs not being zero sum means that your core problem of "robotics replace jobs, reducing overall number of jobs, leaving a lot of people with no possible job" is a faulty prediction.
I've never held that jobs are locked at some set number, just that there are bounding conditions. One of those bounding conditions is the rate of growth. I'm also just sick of the term "zero sum game" being applied here. It doesn't actually apply, even if I believed what you seem to think I believe about the job market, the term still wouldn't apply.
For robots to reduce the overall number of jobs, a robot taking a job must permanently make another human unemployed at some ratio (1:1, 100:1, take your pick). This is zero-sum thinking - because you're thinking that there's a finite number of jobs that can ever be filled.
No. We always seem to be talking at cross purposes here. There doesn't have to be any "permanently" about it for it to be a problem. It just has to be a length of time sufficient to be a problem. Also, I'm not saying that there are a finite number of jobs that can ever be filled in the long term, but I am saying that humans do have a finite number of pressing demands that need to be met, and that trade relating to those needs is the most important trade and that all other trade is superfluous. If a very small percentage controls the vital trade and a very large percentage is only left with the superfluous end, then supply of the superfluous is high. If the demand isn't also very,very high, there can be a problem.
As my earlier posts have demonstrated, jobs are not zero-sum. For your doomsday to take place, the overall number of jobs must decrease, but jobs not being zero-sum means that robots displacing humans in jobs is insufficient to create the result you're thinking of.
No. The number of jobs does not need to decrease. The number of jobs is almost irrelevant. The middle class right now have far fewer jobs per capita than the poor. Many of the poor work at more than one job, usually at least two. Generally, even if they get a full work week of hours in both jobs, they still will not earn as much as a middle class working with one job. The overall number of jobs does not need to decrease, just the value of the labour of a specific segment of society.
Consider this helpful thought experiment - Every robot needs maintenance; as the number of robots filling menial human tasks increases, the amount of robot maintenance needed also increases. You can make robots to maintain the robots, but those robots need maintenance as well - and you've increased the complexity of the system. In engineering, complexity increases failure rate exponentially. (System uptime is dependent on all links not failing) Failure needs fixing, or you have a pile of non-working robots. All of this maintenance is "want", and translates into human jobs. Human jobs scales with the number of robots.
Quite a few fallacies in this paragraph. First is the: what robot repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot... fallacy. The answer is that a small number of specialized robots repair (or dismantle for recycling) a large number of other robots and themselves (perhaps with the assistance of some more specialized robots). When they can't do the job, it's back to the automated factory. It's a closed loop, or at least closed enough that a very small amount of human labour can keep a massive robot labour force operating.
Then there's the fallacy about complexity increasing failure rate exponentially. That's nonsense. Modern bearings for wheels are much more complex than the traditional shaft through a hole of yesteryear and far more reliable. Modern engines are much more complex than
I would have to say that continual change isn't a pattern. It's just things happening. If half the people work doing job X, then job X is eliminated and those people move on to jobs Y and Z, things aren't the same just because those people are still employed. Abstractions are useful, but they're not the real thing. You can pass through hundreds of cycles that each seem so similar to the last that it seems like it's a law of nature that those things are similar, then the pattern can change abruptly. North can be north for all of human history, then the poles can flip.
There has been technological change for 200 years, and while it has caused numerous problems, overall it has increased the standard of living. Why is it not OK now? Why do you think we're going to run out of jobs now, when we didn't run out of jobs with improvements in manufacturing, farming, etc.?
I'm not saying it's not OK now per se, just that it may not be ok at some point in the future. Optimism is great, but in the real world, there really are bounding conditions to things. For example, where do you stand on the theory of peak oil? Do you optimistically assume that we can just keep expanding yields forever because there's always been more and more and more to pump in the past, or do you accept that there's a finite (or at least, slow enough at replenishing that the replenishment rate is well below our needs) amount of oil we can pump out of the ground and that we will eventually hit the peak (or maybe we have already)?
I'm of the opinion that humans are extremely lucky that seasons don't last longer than human lifetimes. Otherwise, we would squander the good harvests, assuming that winter will never happen, then be surprised and starve when it does. Actually, I don't even need hypothetical super-long years to make this point. There are plenty of places with bad harvests every five years or so at random where people still don't prepare for the bad times, assuming that the good times will never end.
The really depressing thing is that the technology I'm talking about here should be a good thing. I certainly look forward to the technology itself. I just think that the human race will collectively bungle the opportunity when it first arrives.
We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem
What labor problem?
The one we've been discussing...
Your projected problem, not to be confused with a current or likely problem.
I never said it wasn't hypothetical, just that it's a worrying possibility and that my pessimism about human nature makes it seem distressingly likely to me. Based on that possibility, I'm recommending contingency planning. You're the one who seems to have declared it absolutely impossible, which seems to me to be a remarkable position to take. Remarkably indefensible as well, considering that events that cause mass human suffering are practically routine in human history.
In any case, I find it remarkable how you suddenly forgot what labour problem I was talking about. Hypothetical it may be, but we've been discussing it all this time.
Usage of these things are reduced?
I should have been more clear "those things" referred to long-distance passenger travel by sea and horse transportation. The link about bicycle production was interesting though. I wouldn't assume that increased production and sales of bicycles necessarily means increased usage, however. I was interested by the chart though. Adjusted for population increase, the graph of automobile sales is nearly flat. I would have expected it to be steeper.
It doesn't merely make me uncomfortable, I despise it. National socialism introduced the world to industrialized mass murder. It's all rooted in how the socialist perceives the link between a gov't and the people. An "elite" who sees of the mass of humanity as useless "meat" is one that has no qualms about sending them to the glue factory. "for the greater good"
Oh please. You're seriously going to pin the crimes of the Nazis on socialism? I take you've never heard of the Night of the Long Knives. Right-wing populist strong-man despots are not the same thing as socialism, no matter what they call their political party. I'm trying to talk about government providing basic services to make sure that citizens aren't abandoned when events beyond their control hit them, and you're equating that to mass murder? I can assure you that the fundamental principles of the type of socialism I'm talking about involve compassion for fellow human beings.
People are not horses. A horse is property; but humans aren't. Humans create jobs; horses do not. (Human ownership of horses creates jobs, but it is the human creating the job, not the horse).
Pen them in enough and people won't be able to create jobs either. How many people actually have the power and ability to create viable jobs today? Once upon a time, people could acquire a simple tool and go into business. You could, for example, get yourself a long saw, dig a saw pit, name yourself the Top Sawyer and find yourself a partner to be the Bottom Sawyer and you were in business sawing planks. Then someone invented the circular saw and saw pits couldn't compete, to go into business for yourself, you needed to build a sawmill and man it with even more employees. Today, the productivity of a modern sawmill blows those old sawmills out of the water, but if you want to start one, you're going need immense resources. You'll also need to have spent decades in the industry yourself to know the ins and outs and have a hope of competing. This is because it's a mature industry. In a mature industry, unless you can magically acquire experience, and massive amounts of capital, you're powerless to create a job for yourself. In mature industries, and mature economies, people looking for employment mostly have to find an employer who is hiring. People may not be horses and they may not be property as much any more (although various forms of virtual indentured servitude seem to have made a comeback), but they're still tho
Yogis also believe that the human body has a limited number of heart-beats
I don't think Yogis _also_ believe that. I think Yogis believe that and the idea has gotten lodged into our cultural meme-trap and non-scientific "studies" like this one pop up every few years to try to "prove" it and get splashed around as pop-science. It's annoying because it's not really substantial enough to disprove. Our tissues wear out, the heart is made of tissues and it wears out. There's an approximate amount of time this takes, as well as an approximate amount of time we live and an approximate number of times our hearts will beat in that time. There's no deeper meaning or principle involved in this. There certainly isn't any specific, set, number of heartbeats we're magically assigned at birth or conception, or whatever.
But, if humans develop immortality, won't your people come along and blow up the ship we're carrying the secret (and the person who developed it) on? Then you'll just tell us: "You are not ready for immortality." Then I'll just have to say "Whatever. Anyway, we're going to order some pizza, but we all want different toppings. What do you want?" and you'll get all huffy and maybe violent and say "NEVER ASK THAT QUESTION!"
The one we've been discussing, where robots are doing all the real labour and humans, for the most part, can only find employment doing demeaning and uncompetitive make-work or can't find employment at all.
None of what you said here contradicts my point, which is that all those technologies still exist, and are still in use, often side-by-side.
But it doesn't contradict my point, which is that usage of those things is greatly reduced. I haven't argued that employment for humans will vanish, just that the majority won't be able to find jobs and that, without a proper framework to deal with that, many of those people could end up falling through the cracks (death, prison, some sort of homeless shadow existence). The problem with that is, you can just stop counting the people who fall through the cracks and claim that the employment rate isn't that bad. History is full of non-events where history didn't really notice people dying in the gutters but, for some mysterious reason, the census was down by a few million people the net time they ran one.
They may be obsoleted in the future, but that's not a criss, either. When cars replaced horses as a primary form of transportation, there was no "horse overpopulation" crisis. The economics took care of itself as supply followed demand and price signals triggered changes in society.
Exactly, there was no horse overpopulation crisis. The economics took car of itself and the surplus horses were sold to make dog food and glue, and thereafter, no-one needed as many horses any more. Very few new jobs emerged for horses. So, why, in your view, are horse jobs so fundamentally different from human jobs? Why must jobs for humans necessarily always grow elastically as they're pushed out of niches, but jobs for horses won't? I know part of your answer will be the adaptability of humans, but do you really think that there are no bounds to that?
Socialism is not the only system that can prevent starvation. A system designed around an average person being "useless" from birth to death is one that strips away his humanity, and is more likely to result in mass human murder than any of the other political systems.
Any system that doesn't have a socialist element is virtually guaranteed to lead to starvation to some. Some free-market capitalist ideologues recognize this and even celebrate it as a desirable form of Social Darwinism. Look at the Objectivists. The simple fact is that markets and economics in general are just abstractions. Looking at things from such an eagle-eye view obscures the details of what happens to people on the ground. You have to have some sort of solution to stop the powerless from being ground up.
I'm not saying that socialism is the only solution. Of course, I may be using a definition for socialism than you are. Technically, I consider infrastructure maintenance, public education, public safety, any form of public welfare, public health (including FDA, CDC, etc.), any sort of stewardship of national economic health, etc. to be forms of socialism. Frankly, I can't think of much about government that I wouldn't classify as a form of socialism, it's all just a matter of degree to me. The function of government and/or civilization basically boils down to "let's get together and help each other out".
If socialism makes you uncomfortable, consider other systems like making everyone a shareholder in the corporations that hold the robots and resources, reaping dividends. That would still boil down to socialism, but it would have a different name, which seems to make some people more comfortable with it.
You're extremely uncomfortable with the majority of the human population being turned into helpless, useless flatlanders by a socialist system that just hands them everything they need. Believe me, so am I. I'm just more uncomfortable with those same people simply dying or being forced i
When you do it over and over and over again, sure. When you do it once so that you do it more cost effectively every time in the future, it's an investment. Bear in mind, I'm talking about working around things like general purpose utility and mobility. You work around those things by developing good, repeatable, procedures and set paths. It's the same over-riding rule you use when maximizing human efficiency, you develop good procedures and eliminate the need to constantly adapt. It's repeated over and over and over again by business administration types that the secret of success of many successful businesses is good process. They work on it until they get it right, then they repeat it over and over again. The other element humans have that robots don't is cheap ubiquity. Through economies of scale, and with robots built, shipped, installed, repaired and eventually recycled and replaced by other robots, you can have that with robots too.
We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem. Niche robots are enough as long as we have enough types of niche robots.
Re:Cars/bikes/aircraft - your hypotheticals ignore the physics of it. Cars aren't going to be simpler than bikes, and aircraft aren't going to be simpler than cars. Going fast enough to go airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with a ground vehicle, and lugging around an engine imposes costs you don't have with a human powered vehicle.
And yet many people use cars over bikes, even when a bike would make more sense. Going fast enough to stay airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with sea vehicles like boats, and yet we still don't travel long distances by boat much any more. The costs of lugging around an engine doesn't presently stop most people from doing it. You're kind of arguing against reality as it is now with this. The niches occupied by these things were once occupied by other things, like horses, that were essentially obsoleted so that you don't see them around much any more.
You're trying to imagine the economy of a post scarcity world, which we are most definitely not in, and which we won't be in for a long time. I say let the post scarcity society worry about it when they get here; they're post scarcity and will have the resources to handle it.
I like to be prepared for predictable eventualities. The kind of people who end up making the vital choices in situations like this have historically been pretty bad at making them in time to prevent harm from being done. Societies tend to take a reactive stance shrugging off things that cause great harm to many of the societies members. I would prefer to avoid that sort of thing.
This "solution" creates helpless people. You are not doing them any favors, and if anything, it's cruel to create dependence where it was not there before. Imagine a 20 year old who still wears diapers and needs to be fed baby-food - that is what your "safety net" will produce - and it'd be considered child-abuse if done by a parent to an actual child.
The solution doesn't create the helpless people, it just stops them from starving to death in a world that doesn't give them any other options. At our population density, they can't fall back on hunter/gatherer behaviour. In a world that won't employ them at a survivable level, they will already be helpless. It's part of the social contract of civilization. Civilization takes away some survival opportunities, but it's supposed to exchange them for better ones.
This is the point of our disagreement - you think that there is a class of people, whom are a majority, who are going to need a nanny state to take care of them forever. I believe the average person can be self-sufficient, and that absent a nanny state's interference, the average person will learn whatever he needs to take care of hims
It wouldn't need to be that slow. 5000 kilograms is a lot more than I would be able to lift on Earth, but it's not some unimaginable amount. I can easily deadlift 50 kilograms in Earth gravity to a height of 1 meter without that much strain and let's call full extension of my arms 2 meters (can't actually be bothered to measure it right now). So, I can provide at least 9.8 m/s^2 acceleration to 50 kilograms, which means that I can provide at least.098 m/s^2 to 5000 kilograms and reach 1 meter in about 5 seconds, then reverse my pull and reach full extension after about 10. I would probably be a lot more careful about it in an actual orbital facility and go more slowly, but I don't think the sideways force would be as bad as you're worried about. There shouldn't be any reason that I shouldn't be able to counteract it. It would obviously be transmitted through my strapped down feet though.
There's no reason we won't be able to someday achieve a closed loop with robots doing the mining, refining, manufacturing, maintenance and eventual recycling of themselves. Design improvements can still be the domain of humans but, once they're at a certain point, improvements aren't necessary for them to replace most human labour.
I think it's a little unwise to simultaneously believe that everything will keep changing and, at the same time, it will all stay the same and follow the patterns of the past. There's plenty of evidence that, even now, we're starting to run out of jobs, or at least to run out of good jobs.
Robots not being a replacement for humans is a physical observation. Just compare the feature lists. The economic conclusion is that this is sufficient evidence that robots do not replace humans.
Ignoring for a moment that we're talking about the expanding capabilities of robots and not just their current capabilities, the feature list of robots is enormous if you include the set of all possible robots. Currently what humans mostly have going for us is our general purpose nature, our mobility, and our cheap ubiquity. In many applications, you can work around the need for those things.
Consider how bikes and cars and airplanes co-exist. All are transportation technologies. The existence of one good does change the use and prevalence of the other goods; but in the case of robots, the limitations of robots compared to a human being guarantees that humans have a competitive advantage even if robots can be used as burger flippers. This would change if there was a self-replicating robot that could think, learn, modify its design, and run on table scraps; that robot doesn't exist. (yet?)
Those technologies you mention have largely replaced horses. These days, they're almost entirely used only for purposes of recreation or for tradition or simply as pets when once upon a time they were important capital equipment. As a result, the number of horses relative to the number of people is greatly reduced today compared to even a century ago. The market didn't find sufficient jobs for horses to maintain their populations.
Sufficient advances in aircraft tech could lead to ubiquitous VTOL craft that replace cars. Bikes are either recreation or exercise or used by those who don't have or can't drive or eschew cars. Airplanes eliminated long-distance passenger sea transport (no-one takes cruise ships just as transport). The limitations of robots _are_ human limitations. They represent our skill at problem solving and we're good at problem solving. We almost certainly can and will solve the problems of using robots to fulfill any specific job function. The robot itself doesn't have to equal all the capabilities of a human being, we just distil what we need of our own abilities into them. Most food service consists of a lot of individual, simple, problems cemented with a larger process. Automating it means solving those simple problems.
"Jobs are not zero sum" is an economic claim, and is trivially proven by the fact that computer programmers did not exist before the invention of computers, but is currently a major career field. For jobs to be zero-sum, there must have been a bunch of computer programmers in the middle ages that we've never heard about. (Secret society running the world?)
Jobs may not be zero sum, but the job market is not infinitely elastic either. There are certain things that people need and want. Once they're provided, you can't just suddenly give people a bunch of new wants, no matter how hard the marketing people try.
Your concern about a society where there are only a few high paying jobs is based on an assumption that there are no new jobs to replace the older ones. Again, jobs are not zero-sum. New jobs can and do pop up, and the adaptability of a human being means that humans will fill those jobs at first, even if we can later design robots to do them. Note that each new robot type deployed requires a lot of design AND testing; this makes them expensive to use and makes human employees more desirable; it also generates a lot of human jobs. (Some of which are not that difficult; just tedious)
It's not based on that assumption, it's based on the assumption that pretty much the only truly high-paying job is robot/resource owner with a thin managerial layer then the vast mass of humanity who have to somehow provide value to the tiny percentage of people who directly control all of the real wealth. There can be any number of jobs, they just won't have any
You were right about the mass a 55 lb sat could bring back, of course. There's no food reason a smaller device couldn't bring back many times its own mass. Realistically these cubesats won't, of course and the devices that follow them almost certainly won't be able to bring back much for a while. But there's nothing in principle that stops them from being able to move around very large masses in low gravity. Even here on Earth, the principle is easily observed with relatively small tugs moving around very large boats.
No, purely economic feedback loops are sufficient. The doomsday scenario ignores economic feedback loops that prevent itself from happening. Namely, that robots can't actually replace humans, and that jobs are not zero sum.
And you believe that "robots can't actually replace humans" and "jobs are not zero sum" are purely economic? What does economics have to do with whether a machine can functionally replace a human being in a job? As for jobs not being zero sum, they may not be, but they have to hold up to the principles of supply and demand to have any value. As all of the actual physical production, delivery, logistics and other facets of all necessities and conventional luxuries are taken over by machines the jobs that are left are either only for highly skilled geniuses (and even they can be cut out by the uncaring owners of the means of production) or are increasingly abstract and removed from any traditional human activity. Those jobs will have low demand and very high supply.
I don't think this necessarily will lead to disaster, but my faith in human nature strongly suggests that it will.
Technology can obsolete certain types of jobs, but every new technology also creates new jobs. Where were the fast food restaurants and burger flipper jobs 200 years ago? They didn't exist. They came into being after industrialization built the transportation network that could combine the necessary food ingredients, and population density created demand for a quick and relatively cheap food restaurant. (then came franchising and globalization that allows you to find a McDs almost *anywhere* now)
"every new technology also creates new jobs" sounds more like an article of faith than a serious scientific result. It's also meaningless without quantities. Do the new jobs created replace the old jobs lost? Also, abstracted out to an eagle-eye view of the overall market, it ignores the actual human realities. How many people died in the gutter? How many people survived but were financially devastated? How many people went from expert labour back to menial because their skills were no longer relevant? I am the last person to argue against technological progress, but it's vitally important to recognize the human cost as it occurs. Basing our reasoning on articles of faith from a discipline as ridiculously insubstantial as economics is clearly a bad idea.
All of those jobs creating fast food or prepared foods were jobs that someone was already doing somewhere (traditionally by a "non-working" partner who stays at home). Eating is one of our most basic survival needs. Beyond that we have various needs along a spectrum towards and beyond luxuries onward to more abstract things which tend to lack anything approaching universal appeal. Once machines are producing everything along that spectrum all the way through the luxury segment, the remainder has very dubious demand and, since providing that remainder is the only large job segment left, very high supply. There's no magical ground invisible hand market fairy dust that can change that.
As goods get cheaper and more available to the general population, this is an improvement.
I agree.
Civil unrest, or a revolution "against the machines" is going to destroy the system that makes these automation gains possible. If you have to rebuild your civilization from scratch, that is not an improvement. Replacing broken windows is not an economic gain.
I also agree with this as well. What I'm saying is that markets are statistical abstractions and people, and the details of their lives, are reality. Technological progress will end up negating most people's usefulness in the labour market, and we have to be prepared for that otherwise bad and completely unnecessary things will happen to people.
Wow. I'm so totally in the wrong on that one. I even still have the tab open in firefox for that article, unread. I misread things and thought the 30% you posted was a reference to the efficiency of gasoline engines against solar panels. I apologize for that. Clearly I deserve to be slapped around with a cluestick for a while.
Anyway, you're absolutely right, there are far more efficient ways to build solar power plants than photovoltaic. They're useful to produce extra power on rooftops, and parking areas, etc. where you can't necessarily build something like in the article. They're also useful in discussion as a baseline solar technology. If you can demonstrate that solar cells would beat some other technology in performance/cost/etc. then something like the parabolic concentrator system you linked to would do an even better job.
Yeah, but it might turn out that the only people who need to be employed are a few directors and producers, with everything else being done by the machines.
I certainly agree that we face an energy crunch. If we get our act together, we should be able to reach some stable point, however. With the right mix of technologies, we should be able to get sufficient power to run our civilization with solar power. I don't think new dedicated solar panel plants are necessarily the way to go to collect that power, although they're certainly a good idea on many existing structures. The technologies I'm talking about that would replace most jobs should also improve our power usage. For one thing, no need to commoditize labour and ship it overseas, leading to extra shipping, if the labour is robots (except of course for the inevitable political reasons where the robots are tariffed and taxed to preserve jobs).
In this case however, there are many running costs skipped by the article. The robot handles food which sponsors the growth of many kinds of bacteria and moulds and would need to be cleaned frequently.
Which is different from living, breathing, sweating, bleeding human beings?
Raw meat held in a warm humid environment, even a couple of hours is a problem (think of the supply tubes and streaks left behind). At a minimum the machine would need to be cleaned out and rinsed every four hours.
You solve the problem of raw meat in a warm humid environment by not storing the meat in a warm, humid environment. This problem exists for human workers working with meat as well. A properly designed robotic system keeps constant, precise track of how long the meat has been out, what temperature it is, what the humidity is, etc. It knows exactly when the meat is going to go bad and what state it's expected to be in currently. It could even be fitted with all kinds of scientific instrumentation to keep far better track of hygiene than any minimum wage worker ever could. Also, machines don't make excuses, so management can't pretend that the machines are just making excuses when they're overworked. If the machine is kept too busy to keep up, then it's too busy to keep up and it doesn't fudge its reports, and it also doesn't get ignored with the excuse that it's just lazy and not working hard enough.
As for cleaning and rinsing every four hours, do you really think that's something a machine can't do? A machine can not only be rinsed and cleaned, it can be sterilized. Try doing that to a human being. Also, have you ever been anywhere that serves food? Have you seen how many parts of those places are _never_ cleaned? Then there are the ones that are cleaned by a minimum wage worker just going through the motions. Like someone mopping the floors who is really just spreading the same muck a little more evenly over the floor. A machine either does a process wrong or right. When you've got the process right, it tends to stay right. Fast food places are all about process and consistency. Nothing does process and consistency like a machine.
Then of course a worker takes a sicky, you get a replacement, here, well you have to fix the worker and it depends what broke down and how far away your fixer is. Then there is vermin detection and keeping them out of the works, a 'ratburger' might become all to real. Basically when closely looked at, some forms of automation, until far higher technological solutions are available, simply more higher cost labour to implement, than the labour they eliminate.
Replacing a machine is a matter of logistics, just like replacing an employee. Modularity of the systems is key. The advantage machines have over humans is that when you have a system made up of machines, you can know reliably whether a machine will or won't be available as a replacement. You can't say that for humans.
As for vermin detection, there's no reason machines can't be better at that than humans. For one thing, spaces built for machines to work can be designed in ways that leave much less room for vermin to hide and travel. A robot workspace can be virtually sealed. For another machines can be equipped with sensory capabilities humans don't have to detect vermin. I'm not saying it's all easy to implement in one go, I'm saying that it can be done, and once you've perfected it, it can stay perfect.
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I can't help thinking about the Cavalese cable car disaster. Where some hot shot marine pilots cut the cable to a cable car carrying twenty people at a height of 300 feet in Italy. They were supposed to be above 2000 feet, claimed to think that they were at 1000 feet, and were acquitted of manslaughter in a US court. Of course, at least one of them later got 4 and a half months for burning the recording of the incident. It seems to me they should have been convicted of manslaughter. I vaguely remember at the time hearing interviews claiming that flying under the cables as close as possible was actually a game the pilots would play. I can't find anything on that now though.
In any case, having military aircraft playing war games, with blanks or not around civilian infrastructure just seems like a recipe for disaster. It's really irresponsible. Firing blanks while doing it seems a little suspicious as well. It seems like it's intended as a show for the people on the ground rather than for increasing realism for the helicopter crews. For starters, how well can the helicopter crews even hear the guns firing? I'm assuming that they're using some sort of simulated system to figure out where the imaginary shots are going, why do they need the sound of firing on top of it, and can't they just play simulated sounds over their headsets? Can anyone out there comment on how much the firing of the guns from a helicopter affects its flight? If it does to a significant degree, do blanks provide the same experience? For that matter, are blanks part of typical helicopter training exercises when they're _not_ being held over civilian areas?
Then we are not discussing a problem with robotics technology, but the rise of a nasty political system. Do you believe that robotics make this political system inevitable?
Worries about a nasty political/economic system arising (or rather, persisting from the current day without adapting to changing circumstances), as advanced labour-replacing technology arises has been the entire point that I've been trying to get across this entire conversation. I don't believe that robotics makes this system inevitable. I believe that, given sufficient stability and technological advancement (without which, we're headed for a cliff anyway), labour-saving technology which will replace almost all humans in almost all remotely necessary jobs is virtually inevitable. I also think that most traditional ways of thinking about economics are going to fail to serve most of the human race once that happens. I also think that most of the people in charge are, like you seem to be, hidebound to the point that they will fall back on denial of reality once it starts snowballing. One way or another, interesting times like that are likely to lead to mass human suffering on a large scale.
The observation is that automation and technology have increased standards of living and allowed even advanced technology to be distributed to the common man.
I think the example of iPhones seems more supportive of the point I was making about how the real advanced technology for actually making commodities like iPhones isn't going to be very available to the average person. How many people do you know who own a chip fab? The real advanced technology isn't available to the common man. Nearly everyone is merely a customer, not a producer when it comes to advanced technology.
Also, the examples of the past and present you're providing aren't really all that relevant. I've never denied that technology and productivity have changed over time.
This is the opposite direction to get to your anticipated dystopia. You're looking at a falling object and concluding that it will achieve escape velocity (aka going up) ... somehow. You dismissed the light-speed car, but you didn't understand the analogy - if you don't account for all the forces involved correctly, you can end up with absurd (and wrong) conclusions.
Ok. I'm looking at a falling object... Another strawman analogy (one that seems to work on the premise that achieving escape velocity is the same thing as going up). Claiming that I don't understand the analogy of the light speed car is yet another fallacious statement. You're playing at lecturing down to me as if I were a child. It's transparent and poor rhetoric. We each seem to believe that the other doesn't understand the forces involved in our scenario of rapidly advancing technology. Of course, you're the one whose claim requires forces that will somehow act to protect the masses from negative consequences from large-scale social and economic upheaval. From my point of view, you've failed to identify those forces. As far as I can tell, those forces consist only of your own confidence that things will turn out the way you hope.
Quote me where I said that, or where that was implied by my arguments. Strawman.
I will admit that "the invisible hand of the market" was a bit of a strawman in that it was just a stand-in for whatever unnamed magical thing you believe makes my scenario, where massive structural employment and a glut of human labour on a buyers market possibly leads to a very bad time for a large number of people, outright impossible. Here are some relevant quotes from you, however:
The doomsday scenario ignores economic feedback loops that prevent itself from happening.
I'm disagreeing that your scenario even happens in the first place.
You've said over and over again that you don't think
It interacts gravitationally. What it apparently does not do is emit or absorb light.
I think it's meant as an energy storage medium though. Rather than a complex pressurized hydrogen gas system in a car, for example, you would have one tank for silicon nanoparticles and one for water (I don't know if you need a third tank to store the precipitate or if you can just dump that into the water tank). You produce hydrogen as needed and then, when you are out of water or silicon nanoparticles, you go to a filling station, flush out the precipitate and fill up with more water and nanoparticles. Then the precipitate either gets recycled as more nanoparticles or just gets used in concrete or something, depending on which is more energy and resource efficient.
Requiring energy to make the fuel isn't necessarily a problem as long as it's a reasonable amount of energy and as long as you don't have to use some ridiculous amount of nanoparticles relative to water. That may turn out to not be the case, but if it is, and there's a way to make the nanoparticles through an electrically powered process, we might have finally found a practical way to store electric power for portable use to replace fossil fuels. That's all very optimistic to draw from a short, light-on-detail press release of course.
For even more wild optimism, let us say that you can take the reaction products (minus the oxygen and hydrogen of course) and reverse the process using heat or electricity and get back silicon nanoparticles suitable for re-use. Then the filling station doesn't need to dispense nanoparticles, it just has to dispense water and electricity.
Of course, it's a long way from a small demonstration of the principle to a working system. It's funny, if this does develop into a new technology, the car running on it will still need a starting battery (also maybe to operate a heater to jump start the reaction) and the best choice for that will probably be a standard automotive starting battery whose basic technology hasn't changed in 150 years.
These back and forths are getting entirely too long, so I'm focusing on just 2 points.
Agreed on that.
Jobs not being zero sum means that your core problem of "robotics replace jobs, reducing overall number of jobs, leaving a lot of people with no possible job" is a faulty prediction.
I've never held that jobs are locked at some set number, just that there are bounding conditions. One of those bounding conditions is the rate of growth. I'm also just sick of the term "zero sum game" being applied here. It doesn't actually apply, even if I believed what you seem to think I believe about the job market, the term still wouldn't apply.
For robots to reduce the overall number of jobs, a robot taking a job must permanently make another human unemployed at some ratio (1:1, 100:1, take your pick). This is zero-sum thinking - because you're thinking that there's a finite number of jobs that can ever be filled.
No. We always seem to be talking at cross purposes here. There doesn't have to be any "permanently" about it for it to be a problem. It just has to be a length of time sufficient to be a problem. Also, I'm not saying that there are a finite number of jobs that can ever be filled in the long term, but I am saying that humans do have a finite number of pressing demands that need to be met, and that trade relating to those needs is the most important trade and that all other trade is superfluous. If a very small percentage controls the vital trade and a very large percentage is only left with the superfluous end, then supply of the superfluous is high. If the demand isn't also very ,very high, there can be a problem.
As my earlier posts have demonstrated, jobs are not zero-sum. For your doomsday to take place, the overall number of jobs must decrease, but jobs not being zero-sum means that robots displacing humans in jobs is insufficient to create the result you're thinking of.
No. The number of jobs does not need to decrease. The number of jobs is almost irrelevant. The middle class right now have far fewer jobs per capita than the poor. Many of the poor work at more than one job, usually at least two. Generally, even if they get a full work week of hours in both jobs, they still will not earn as much as a middle class working with one job. The overall number of jobs does not need to decrease, just the value of the labour of a specific segment of society.
Consider this helpful thought experiment - Every robot needs maintenance; as the number of robots filling menial human tasks increases, the amount of robot maintenance needed also increases. You can make robots to maintain the robots, but those robots need maintenance as well - and you've increased the complexity of the system. In engineering, complexity increases failure rate exponentially. (System uptime is dependent on all links not failing) Failure needs fixing, or you have a pile of non-working robots. All of this maintenance is "want", and translates into human jobs. Human jobs scales with the number of robots.
Quite a few fallacies in this paragraph. First is the: what robot repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot that repairs the robot... fallacy. The answer is that a small number of specialized robots repair (or dismantle for recycling) a large number of other robots and themselves (perhaps with the assistance of some more specialized robots). When they can't do the job, it's back to the automated factory. It's a closed loop, or at least closed enough that a very small amount of human labour can keep a massive robot labour force operating.
Then there's the fallacy about complexity increasing failure rate exponentially. That's nonsense. Modern bearings for wheels are much more complex than the traditional shaft through a hole of yesteryear and far more reliable. Modern engines are much more complex than
I would have to say that continual change isn't a pattern. It's just things happening. If half the people work doing job X, then job X is eliminated and those people move on to jobs Y and Z, things aren't the same just because those people are still employed. Abstractions are useful, but they're not the real thing. You can pass through hundreds of cycles that each seem so similar to the last that it seems like it's a law of nature that those things are similar, then the pattern can change abruptly. North can be north for all of human history, then the poles can flip.
There has been technological change for 200 years, and while it has caused numerous problems, overall it has increased the standard of living. Why is it not OK now? Why do you think we're going to run out of jobs now, when we didn't run out of jobs with improvements in manufacturing, farming, etc.?
I'm not saying it's not OK now per se, just that it may not be ok at some point in the future. Optimism is great, but in the real world, there really are bounding conditions to things. For example, where do you stand on the theory of peak oil? Do you optimistically assume that we can just keep expanding yields forever because there's always been more and more and more to pump in the past, or do you accept that there's a finite (or at least, slow enough at replenishing that the replenishment rate is well below our needs) amount of oil we can pump out of the ground and that we will eventually hit the peak (or maybe we have already)?
I'm of the opinion that humans are extremely lucky that seasons don't last longer than human lifetimes. Otherwise, we would squander the good harvests, assuming that winter will never happen, then be surprised and starve when it does. Actually, I don't even need hypothetical super-long years to make this point. There are plenty of places with bad harvests every five years or so at random where people still don't prepare for the bad times, assuming that the good times will never end.
The really depressing thing is that the technology I'm talking about here should be a good thing. I certainly look forward to the technology itself. I just think that the human race will collectively bungle the opportunity when it first arrives.
We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem
What labor problem?
The one we've been discussing...
Your projected problem, not to be confused with a current or likely problem.
I never said it wasn't hypothetical, just that it's a worrying possibility and that my pessimism about human nature makes it seem distressingly likely to me. Based on that possibility, I'm recommending contingency planning. You're the one who seems to have declared it absolutely impossible, which seems to me to be a remarkable position to take. Remarkably indefensible as well, considering that events that cause mass human suffering are practically routine in human history.
In any case, I find it remarkable how you suddenly forgot what labour problem I was talking about. Hypothetical it may be, but we've been discussing it all this time.
Usage of these things are reduced?
I should have been more clear "those things" referred to long-distance passenger travel by sea and horse transportation. The link about bicycle production was interesting though. I wouldn't assume that increased production and sales of bicycles necessarily means increased usage, however. I was interested by the chart though. Adjusted for population increase, the graph of automobile sales is nearly flat. I would have expected it to be steeper.
It doesn't merely make me uncomfortable, I despise it. National socialism introduced the world to industrialized mass murder. It's all rooted in how the socialist perceives the link between a gov't and the people. An "elite" who sees of the mass of humanity as useless "meat" is one that has no qualms about sending them to the glue factory. "for the greater good"
Oh please. You're seriously going to pin the crimes of the Nazis on socialism? I take you've never heard of the Night of the Long Knives. Right-wing populist strong-man despots are not the same thing as socialism, no matter what they call their political party. I'm trying to talk about government providing basic services to make sure that citizens aren't abandoned when events beyond their control hit them, and you're equating that to mass murder? I can assure you that the fundamental principles of the type of socialism I'm talking about involve compassion for fellow human beings.
People are not horses. A horse is property; but humans aren't. Humans create jobs; horses do not. (Human ownership of horses creates jobs, but it is the human creating the job, not the horse).
Pen them in enough and people won't be able to create jobs either. How many people actually have the power and ability to create viable jobs today? Once upon a time, people could acquire a simple tool and go into business. You could, for example, get yourself a long saw, dig a saw pit, name yourself the Top Sawyer and find yourself a partner to be the Bottom Sawyer and you were in business sawing planks. Then someone invented the circular saw and saw pits couldn't compete, to go into business for yourself, you needed to build a sawmill and man it with even more employees. Today, the productivity of a modern sawmill blows those old sawmills out of the water, but if you want to start one, you're going need immense resources. You'll also need to have spent decades in the industry yourself to know the ins and outs and have a hope of competing. This is because it's a mature industry. In a mature industry, unless you can magically acquire experience, and massive amounts of capital, you're powerless to create a job for yourself. In mature industries, and mature economies, people looking for employment mostly have to find an employer who is hiring. People may not be horses and they may not be property as much any more (although various forms of virtual indentured servitude seem to have made a comeback), but they're still tho
Yogis also believe that the human body has a limited number of heart-beats
I don't think Yogis _also_ believe that. I think Yogis believe that and the idea has gotten lodged into our cultural meme-trap and non-scientific "studies" like this one pop up every few years to try to "prove" it and get splashed around as pop-science. It's annoying because it's not really substantial enough to disprove. Our tissues wear out, the heart is made of tissues and it wears out. There's an approximate amount of time this takes, as well as an approximate amount of time we live and an approximate number of times our hearts will beat in that time. There's no deeper meaning or principle involved in this. There certainly isn't any specific, set, number of heartbeats we're magically assigned at birth or conception, or whatever.
And red dwarfs have such long life spans that, if we're right about the age of the universe, none have died yet (of old age, anyway).
But, if humans develop immortality, won't your people come along and blow up the ship we're carrying the secret (and the person who developed it) on? Then you'll just tell us: "You are not ready for immortality." Then I'll just have to say "Whatever. Anyway, we're going to order some pizza, but we all want different toppings. What do you want?" and you'll get all huffy and maybe violent and say "NEVER ASK THAT QUESTION!"
What labor problem?
The one we've been discussing, where robots are doing all the real labour and humans, for the most part, can only find employment doing demeaning and uncompetitive make-work or can't find employment at all.
None of what you said here contradicts my point, which is that all those technologies still exist, and are still in use, often side-by-side.
But it doesn't contradict my point, which is that usage of those things is greatly reduced. I haven't argued that employment for humans will vanish, just that the majority won't be able to find jobs and that, without a proper framework to deal with that, many of those people could end up falling through the cracks (death, prison, some sort of homeless shadow existence). The problem with that is, you can just stop counting the people who fall through the cracks and claim that the employment rate isn't that bad. History is full of non-events where history didn't really notice people dying in the gutters but, for some mysterious reason, the census was down by a few million people the net time they ran one.
They may be obsoleted in the future, but that's not a criss, either. When cars replaced horses as a primary form of transportation, there was no "horse overpopulation" crisis. The economics took care of itself as supply followed demand and price signals triggered changes in society.
Exactly, there was no horse overpopulation crisis. The economics took car of itself and the surplus horses were sold to make dog food and glue, and thereafter, no-one needed as many horses any more. Very few new jobs emerged for horses. So, why, in your view, are horse jobs so fundamentally different from human jobs? Why must jobs for humans necessarily always grow elastically as they're pushed out of niches, but jobs for horses won't? I know part of your answer will be the adaptability of humans, but do you really think that there are no bounds to that?
Socialism is not the only system that can prevent starvation. A system designed around an average person being "useless" from birth to death is one that strips away his humanity, and is more likely to result in mass human murder than any of the other political systems.
Any system that doesn't have a socialist element is virtually guaranteed to lead to starvation to some. Some free-market capitalist ideologues recognize this and even celebrate it as a desirable form of Social Darwinism. Look at the Objectivists. The simple fact is that markets and economics in general are just abstractions. Looking at things from such an eagle-eye view obscures the details of what happens to people on the ground. You have to have some sort of solution to stop the powerless from being ground up.
I'm not saying that socialism is the only solution. Of course, I may be using a definition for socialism than you are. Technically, I consider infrastructure maintenance, public education, public safety, any form of public welfare, public health (including FDA, CDC, etc.), any sort of stewardship of national economic health, etc. to be forms of socialism. Frankly, I can't think of much about government that I wouldn't classify as a form of socialism, it's all just a matter of degree to me. The function of government and/or civilization basically boils down to "let's get together and help each other out".
If socialism makes you uncomfortable, consider other systems like making everyone a shareholder in the corporations that hold the robots and resources, reaping dividends. That would still boil down to socialism, but it would have a different name, which seems to make some people more comfortable with it.
You're extremely uncomfortable with the majority of the human population being turned into helpless, useless flatlanders by a socialist system that just hands them everything they need. Believe me, so am I. I'm just more uncomfortable with those same people simply dying or being forced i
Work around is more work, which is a cost.
When you do it over and over and over again, sure. When you do it once so that you do it more cost effectively every time in the future, it's an investment. Bear in mind, I'm talking about working around things like general purpose utility and mobility. You work around those things by developing good, repeatable, procedures and set paths. It's the same over-riding rule you use when maximizing human efficiency, you develop good procedures and eliminate the need to constantly adapt. It's repeated over and over and over again by business administration types that the secret of success of many successful businesses is good process. They work on it until they get it right, then they repeat it over and over again. The other element humans have that robots don't is cheap ubiquity. Through economies of scale, and with robots built, shipped, installed, repaired and eventually recycled and replaced by other robots, you can have that with robots too.
We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem. Niche robots are enough as long as we have enough types of niche robots.
Re:Cars/bikes/aircraft - your hypotheticals ignore the physics of it. Cars aren't going to be simpler than bikes, and aircraft aren't going to be simpler than cars. Going fast enough to go airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with a ground vehicle, and lugging around an engine imposes costs you don't have with a human powered vehicle.
And yet many people use cars over bikes, even when a bike would make more sense. Going fast enough to stay airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with sea vehicles like boats, and yet we still don't travel long distances by boat much any more. The costs of lugging around an engine doesn't presently stop most people from doing it. You're kind of arguing against reality as it is now with this. The niches occupied by these things were once occupied by other things, like horses, that were essentially obsoleted so that you don't see them around much any more.
You're trying to imagine the economy of a post scarcity world, which we are most definitely not in, and which we won't be in for a long time. I say let the post scarcity society worry about it when they get here; they're post scarcity and will have the resources to handle it.
I like to be prepared for predictable eventualities. The kind of people who end up making the vital choices in situations like this have historically been pretty bad at making them in time to prevent harm from being done. Societies tend to take a reactive stance shrugging off things that cause great harm to many of the societies members. I would prefer to avoid that sort of thing.
This "solution" creates helpless people. You are not doing them any favors, and if anything, it's cruel to create dependence where it was not there before. Imagine a 20 year old who still wears diapers and needs to be fed baby-food - that is what your "safety net" will produce - and it'd be considered child-abuse if done by a parent to an actual child.
The solution doesn't create the helpless people, it just stops them from starving to death in a world that doesn't give them any other options. At our population density, they can't fall back on hunter/gatherer behaviour. In a world that won't employ them at a survivable level, they will already be helpless. It's part of the social contract of civilization. Civilization takes away some survival opportunities, but it's supposed to exchange them for better ones.
This is the point of our disagreement - you think that there is a class of people, whom are a majority, who are going to need a nanny state to take care of them forever. I believe the average person can be self-sufficient, and that absent a nanny state's interference, the average person will learn whatever he needs to take care of hims
It wouldn't need to be that slow. 5000 kilograms is a lot more than I would be able to lift on Earth, but it's not some unimaginable amount. I can easily deadlift 50 kilograms in Earth gravity to a height of 1 meter without that much strain and let's call full extension of my arms 2 meters (can't actually be bothered to measure it right now). So, I can provide at least 9.8 m/s^2 acceleration to 50 kilograms, which means that I can provide at least .098 m/s^2 to 5000 kilograms and reach 1 meter in about 5 seconds, then reverse my pull and reach full extension after about 10. I would probably be a lot more careful about it in an actual orbital facility and go more slowly, but I don't think the sideways force would be as bad as you're worried about. There shouldn't be any reason that I shouldn't be able to counteract it. It would obviously be transmitted through my strapped down feet though.
There's no reason we won't be able to someday achieve a closed loop with robots doing the mining, refining, manufacturing, maintenance and eventual recycling of themselves. Design improvements can still be the domain of humans but, once they're at a certain point, improvements aren't necessary for them to replace most human labour.
I think it's a little unwise to simultaneously believe that everything will keep changing and, at the same time, it will all stay the same and follow the patterns of the past. There's plenty of evidence that, even now, we're starting to run out of jobs, or at least to run out of good jobs.
Robots not being a replacement for humans is a physical observation. Just compare the feature lists. The economic conclusion is that this is sufficient evidence that robots do not replace humans.
Ignoring for a moment that we're talking about the expanding capabilities of robots and not just their current capabilities, the feature list of robots is enormous if you include the set of all possible robots. Currently what humans mostly have going for us is our general purpose nature, our mobility, and our cheap ubiquity. In many applications, you can work around the need for those things.
Consider how bikes and cars and airplanes co-exist. All are transportation technologies. The existence of one good does change the use and prevalence of the other goods; but in the case of robots, the limitations of robots compared to a human being guarantees that humans have a competitive advantage even if robots can be used as burger flippers. This would change if there was a self-replicating robot that could think, learn, modify its design, and run on table scraps; that robot doesn't exist. (yet?)
Those technologies you mention have largely replaced horses. These days, they're almost entirely used only for purposes of recreation or for tradition or simply as pets when once upon a time they were important capital equipment. As a result, the number of horses relative to the number of people is greatly reduced today compared to even a century ago. The market didn't find sufficient jobs for horses to maintain their populations.
Sufficient advances in aircraft tech could lead to ubiquitous VTOL craft that replace cars. Bikes are either recreation or exercise or used by those who don't have or can't drive or eschew cars. Airplanes eliminated long-distance passenger sea transport (no-one takes cruise ships just as transport). The limitations of robots _are_ human limitations. They represent our skill at problem solving and we're good at problem solving. We almost certainly can and will solve the problems of using robots to fulfill any specific job function. The robot itself doesn't have to equal all the capabilities of a human being, we just distil what we need of our own abilities into them. Most food service consists of a lot of individual, simple, problems cemented with a larger process. Automating it means solving those simple problems.
"Jobs are not zero sum" is an economic claim, and is trivially proven by the fact that computer programmers did not exist before the invention of computers, but is currently a major career field. For jobs to be zero-sum, there must have been a bunch of computer programmers in the middle ages that we've never heard about. (Secret society running the world?)
Jobs may not be zero sum, but the job market is not infinitely elastic either. There are certain things that people need and want. Once they're provided, you can't just suddenly give people a bunch of new wants, no matter how hard the marketing people try.
Your concern about a society where there are only a few high paying jobs is based on an assumption that there are no new jobs to replace the older ones. Again, jobs are not zero-sum. New jobs can and do pop up, and the adaptability of a human being means that humans will fill those jobs at first, even if we can later design robots to do them. Note that each new robot type deployed requires a lot of design AND testing; this makes them expensive to use and makes human employees more desirable; it also generates a lot of human jobs. (Some of which are not that difficult; just tedious)
It's not based on that assumption, it's based on the assumption that pretty much the only truly high-paying job is robot/resource owner with a thin managerial layer then the vast mass of humanity who have to somehow provide value to the tiny percentage of people who directly control all of the real wealth. There can be any number of jobs, they just won't have any
It's going to be hard to outsource middle managers, as personal interaction is so big a part of their jobs
If the people they manage are replaced by machines, it's actually going to be pretty easy to replace them.
You were right about the mass a 55 lb sat could bring back, of course. There's no food reason a smaller device couldn't bring back many times its own mass. Realistically these cubesats won't, of course and the devices that follow them almost certainly won't be able to bring back much for a while. But there's nothing in principle that stops them from being able to move around very large masses in low gravity. Even here on Earth, the principle is easily observed with relatively small tugs moving around very large boats.
Synergy?
Well, this smbc comic addresses that, except that it's stored in bacterial DNA.
No, purely economic feedback loops are sufficient. The doomsday scenario ignores economic feedback loops that prevent itself from happening. Namely, that robots can't actually replace humans, and that jobs are not zero sum.
And you believe that "robots can't actually replace humans" and "jobs are not zero sum" are purely economic? What does economics have to do with whether a machine can functionally replace a human being in a job? As for jobs not being zero sum, they may not be, but they have to hold up to the principles of supply and demand to have any value. As all of the actual physical production, delivery, logistics and other facets of all necessities and conventional luxuries are taken over by machines the jobs that are left are either only for highly skilled geniuses (and even they can be cut out by the uncaring owners of the means of production) or are increasingly abstract and removed from any traditional human activity. Those jobs will have low demand and very high supply.
I don't think this necessarily will lead to disaster, but my faith in human nature strongly suggests that it will.
Technology can obsolete certain types of jobs, but every new technology also creates new jobs. Where were the fast food restaurants and burger flipper jobs 200 years ago? They didn't exist. They came into being after industrialization built the transportation network that could combine the necessary food ingredients, and population density created demand for a quick and relatively cheap food restaurant. (then came franchising and globalization that allows you to find a McDs almost *anywhere* now)
"every new technology also creates new jobs" sounds more like an article of faith than a serious scientific result. It's also meaningless without quantities. Do the new jobs created replace the old jobs lost? Also, abstracted out to an eagle-eye view of the overall market, it ignores the actual human realities. How many people died in the gutter? How many people survived but were financially devastated? How many people went from expert labour back to menial because their skills were no longer relevant? I am the last person to argue against technological progress, but it's vitally important to recognize the human cost as it occurs. Basing our reasoning on articles of faith from a discipline as ridiculously insubstantial as economics is clearly a bad idea.
All of those jobs creating fast food or prepared foods were jobs that someone was already doing somewhere (traditionally by a "non-working" partner who stays at home). Eating is one of our most basic survival needs. Beyond that we have various needs along a spectrum towards and beyond luxuries onward to more abstract things which tend to lack anything approaching universal appeal. Once machines are producing everything along that spectrum all the way through the luxury segment, the remainder has very dubious demand and, since providing that remainder is the only large job segment left, very high supply. There's no magical ground invisible hand market fairy dust that can change that.
As goods get cheaper and more available to the general population, this is an improvement.
I agree.
Civil unrest, or a revolution "against the machines" is going to destroy the system that makes these automation gains possible. If you have to rebuild your civilization from scratch, that is not an improvement. Replacing broken windows is not an economic gain.
I also agree with this as well. What I'm saying is that markets are statistical abstractions and people, and the details of their lives, are reality. Technological progress will end up negating most people's usefulness in the labour market, and we have to be prepared for that otherwise bad and completely unnecessary things will happen to people.
Wow. I'm so totally in the wrong on that one. I even still have the tab open in firefox for that article, unread. I misread things and thought the 30% you posted was a reference to the efficiency of gasoline engines against solar panels. I apologize for that. Clearly I deserve to be slapped around with a cluestick for a while.
Anyway, you're absolutely right, there are far more efficient ways to build solar power plants than photovoltaic. They're useful to produce extra power on rooftops, and parking areas, etc. where you can't necessarily build something like in the article. They're also useful in discussion as a baseline solar technology. If you can demonstrate that solar cells would beat some other technology in performance/cost/etc. then something like the parabolic concentrator system you linked to would do an even better job.
Yeah, but it might turn out that the only people who need to be employed are a few directors and producers, with everything else being done by the machines.
I certainly agree that we face an energy crunch. If we get our act together, we should be able to reach some stable point, however. With the right mix of technologies, we should be able to get sufficient power to run our civilization with solar power. I don't think new dedicated solar panel plants are necessarily the way to go to collect that power, although they're certainly a good idea on many existing structures. The technologies I'm talking about that would replace most jobs should also improve our power usage. For one thing, no need to commoditize labour and ship it overseas, leading to extra shipping, if the labour is robots (except of course for the inevitable political reasons where the robots are tariffed and taxed to preserve jobs).
In this case however, there are many running costs skipped by the article. The robot handles food which sponsors the growth of many kinds of bacteria and moulds and would need to be cleaned frequently.
Which is different from living, breathing, sweating, bleeding human beings?
Raw meat held in a warm humid environment, even a couple of hours is a problem (think of the supply tubes and streaks left behind). At a minimum the machine would need to be cleaned out and rinsed every four hours.
You solve the problem of raw meat in a warm humid environment by not storing the meat in a warm, humid environment. This problem exists for human workers working with meat as well. A properly designed robotic system keeps constant, precise track of how long the meat has been out, what temperature it is, what the humidity is, etc. It knows exactly when the meat is going to go bad and what state it's expected to be in currently. It could even be fitted with all kinds of scientific instrumentation to keep far better track of hygiene than any minimum wage worker ever could.
Also, machines don't make excuses, so management can't pretend that the machines are just making excuses when they're overworked. If the machine is kept too busy to keep up, then it's too busy to keep up and it doesn't fudge its reports, and it also doesn't get ignored with the excuse that it's just lazy and not working hard enough.
As for cleaning and rinsing every four hours, do you really think that's something a machine can't do? A machine can not only be rinsed and cleaned, it can be sterilized. Try doing that to a human being. Also, have you ever been anywhere that serves food? Have you seen how many parts of those places are _never_ cleaned? Then there are the ones that are cleaned by a minimum wage worker just going through the motions. Like someone mopping the floors who is really just spreading the same muck a little more evenly over the floor. A machine either does a process wrong or right. When you've got the process right, it tends to stay right. Fast food places are all about process and consistency. Nothing does process and consistency like a machine.
Then of course a worker takes a sicky, you get a replacement, here, well you have to fix the worker and it depends what broke down and how far away your fixer is. Then there is vermin detection and keeping them out of the works, a 'ratburger' might become all to real. Basically when closely looked at, some forms of automation, until far higher technological solutions are available, simply more higher cost labour to implement, than the labour they eliminate.
Replacing a machine is a matter of logistics, just like replacing an employee. Modularity of the systems is key. The advantage machines have over humans is that when you have a system made up of machines, you can know reliably whether a machine will or won't be available as a replacement. You can't say that for humans.
As for vermin detection, there's no reason machines can't be better at that than humans. For one thing, spaces built for machines to work can be designed in ways that leave much less room for vermin to hide and travel. A robot workspace can be virtually sealed. For another machines can be equipped with sensory capabilities humans don't have to detect vermin. I'm not saying it's all easy to implement in one go, I'm saying that it can be done, and once you've perfected it, it can stay perfect.
Incidentally, ratburgers are already real.