The problem is that the value produced by the robots goes to profits earned by the people owning the robots
This is only true if competitors don't also install robots. If everyone automates, the profit margins are competed away, and the added value goes primarily to consumers.
where do the "consumers" get the money to buy that "added value'" if there are no jobs available because the robots do all the jobs?
Of course, this is only true if we have free markets. Removing barriers to competition is the real solution, not slowing the adoption of automation.
The main barrier to competition is the fact that as labor costs drop to zero, and all of the cost of a business is the machinery (which in economic terms is capital), it's expensive to enter a new business. The larger businesses drive out smaller businesses (due to economy of scale) and they price out new competitors (who have to pay the start-up costs).
This should have been covered in your economics 101 class, by the way.
that is, the rich people.
The biggest owners of capital in America are pension funds. So if you have a 401k or an IRA, that means you.
Fine. So, old people with retirement funds are a large portion of the rich people I'm talking about. As a member of the technoclass, you are so insulated in your bubble that you don't even know that not everybody has a retirement fund?.
People not rich enough to own stocks, IRAs, or pension funds are out of luck,.
That changes nothing in any of my statements.
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period.
It pretty much destroyed farming as an occupation that provides jobs for most laborers. Right now, farming is under 1.5% of employment in the US. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...
As long as there are other jobs to which the people who were once needed to work on farms can switch to, that's fine.
What happens where there are no other jobs? What happens after that?
Your comments aren't wrong, but nothing in what you write changes the problem, or even addresses the problem.
You seem entirely focussed on prices. Yes, prices, go down with automation. That's not the problem being addressed.
...
Most companies barely make any profit and often run in the red.
Irrelevant. In the long term, companies that don't make a profit vanish and you can ignore them.
Sure there are companies that are magnificently profitable, but they can only do that if they have secured their market share and don't run the risk of competitors undercutting their prices and stealing their customers.
You just hand-waved away some critical pieces of economic theory here. An industry in which most of the product is made by robots, and the labor cost is low, is one in which there is a very high barrier to entry for new competitors, along with high economy of scale. In classical economics, both of these are situations that makes for a "natural monopoly": the companies who already have invested in the robots have a strong advantage over any start-ups, and in the most highly-automated businesses, new businesses can't enter the market at all... without government support.
For various reasons, this is not a good thing either... but that was not the point I was making.
Automation reduces total labor required to deliver products and thus drives down prices.
Prices are not the issue being discussed.
Reduces mind you, not eliminates, robots after all are expensive for a reason - they are very labor intensive to produce.
So, you have confidence that robots will eliminate jobs, but won't eliminate the jobs making robots.
Sorry. They will.
All you are really doing is shifting labor a step up in supply chain, instead of having people make products, you have people making machines and their parts that make products.
You're handwaving away the problems. First of all: no. The people making machines and their parts will also have their jobs taken away by robots. Sorry, but when the robots get good enough to take away most of the jobs, they aren't going to stop at just the bottom level.
The result is that there reaches a point where almost no labor is required for making stuff. The need for labor drops to very low, and there is a vast oversupply of labor, the result of which is that wages are driven down. You can say this is good, because the cost of labor drops toward zero... but what do the displaced humans do?
As a result, all of us get to afford more stuff.
Wait: who is this "all of us" you refer to? The cost of "stuff" drops, but not to zero. The number of people employed, however, drops to very low-- you don't need people to make stuff. There is no employment available for most of the humans, You say "all of us get to afford more stuff," but if you're unemployed, how can you "afford more stuff"-- in fact, how do you afford any stuff.
The answer is, you can afford stuff if you have a share in owning the machines that are making the stuff. If not... you're unemployed and have no prospects for employment.
As automation makes labor more productive, it is good up to a point. The point at which there are no longer any jobs available for the majority of workers, however, is a point at which we need to rethink a social system that is based on economics that assumes anybody with a work ethic can find a job. How does the system work when there aren't jobs for people who want them?
"This marks the first and only demo mission that Crew Dragon will fly without humans on board."
Almost.
Next flight, without crew, is the in-flight abort test, where they launch, but shut the rocket down at about Mach one and let the excape system pull the capsule away.
http://www.parabolicarc.com/20...
Finally, the beginning of delivery of the implicit promise of Apollo. Late, and not by the government that implied human space travel would become commonplace,
It is worth reminding people here that this launch, and this capsule, was developed under a NASA contract (And NASA had funded the development of both Falcon-9 and Dragon before the Crew Dragon project as well).
Not to take away from SpaceX, but just a reminder that this was an example of NASA and industry working together.
instead of a ****-waving political exercise and cancelled at step 1. Money was of course, an issue, and as usual, private enterprise - and not one yet totally involved in crony capitalism, managed to deliver what the government and their heavily subsidized old-school aerospace contractors could not.
More specifically, this was an example showing how government contracts can be done right.
(The booster landing, on the other hand, was NOT a NASA contract-- that was SpaceX all the way. )
All possible congrats, props, general hip hip hurray and so forth. Just wish I didn't have to wait from childhood until too old to fly for this.
The problem is that the value produced by the robots goes to profits earned by the people owning the robots-- that is, the rich people.
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period. You can't work your way up from working class to middle class to ownership class, because there is no path upward. If you aren't a member of the class that owns the robots, you live on whatever dole the people who own the robots choose to give you.
Dude... the number of forced-vax nazis on this thread who espouse literal-Nazi policies makes it an apt comparison.
Godwin's law. Hitler!! They're like Hitler!!
bullshit.
If you want to do a Hitler comparison, they are the reverse-Hitler. Hitler was "we are going to kill all of you, men, women, and children alike". The pro vaccination people are "we are going to save your childrens' lives, even if you don't care."
And all this violently angry butthurt is over... measles? Measles! I had measles as a kid. Every kid I knew got the measles. It was a _mildly annoying_ ailment. Not in the same ballpark as polio - not even in the same league.
You might check these "facts" with reliable sources. It's correct that medical training in the 1760s was less rigorous than it is today, but nevertheless, yes, he did get a M.D. at St. Andrews, interned in surgery, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society long before doing the smallpox research he's famous for.
Oh, and his 1788 paper on the Cuckoo is now widely regarded as being the first study of the remarkable life cycle of the bird.
Why don't one of you explain what medical qualifications Jenner had, when he 'discovered' 'vaccination'? Oh wait - he had none.
Huh? Edward Jenner earned his M.D. from University of St Andrews in 1792 and did his internship in surgery and anatomy at St George's, University of London. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work in zoology in 1788, eight years before his famous work on the Smallpox inoculation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
He [Hitler] was a Johnny-come-lately imitator to book banning politicians. That list starts in the mid 1500's about a year after moveable type was invented.
The list starts with the burning of the Library at Alexandria.
Another great contribution form Islam, the religion of peace, to world culture!
Quite a feat, really, since the burning of the library of Alexandria occurred at the Siege of Alexandria in 48 BC, about six hundred years before Muhammad was born.
You do realize the measles outbreaks are coming from all the third-world illegals flooding through our porous borders, right?
The actual evidence shows not.
Source of the measles is primarily U.S. travelers who visit other countries and bring measles home:
Most notably, from Israel, where a significant Orthodox population does not believe in vaccinations; but also from France (the 2011 outbreak) and from the Philippines (the 2014 outbreak).
https://www.contagionlive.com/news/travel-associated-measles-outbreaks-on-the-rise-in-us
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html
They stopped using Thimerosal in pediatric vaccines in 2000.
Check again. Thiomersal was used in Pandemrix.
Never approved in the U.S..
If you want to avoid mercury exposure, don't eat fish.
Also, I don't eat fish.
Too bad for you. Turns out eating fish is healthy.
https://universityhealthnews.com/daily/nutrition/benefits-of-eating-fish/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/11-health-benefits-of-fish#section5
Herd Immunity is un-vaccinated people being protected by vaccinated people. The idea is that if there are enough immune people around that the virus can't exist. So, how does that explain vaccinated people getting sick? Because that is what anti-vax people are getting blamed for.
Wrong. There are babies who are too young to be vaccinated yet, and there are babies who for some reason such as having compromised immune systems can't be vaccinated.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. Welcome to our brave new world where it is 'common sense' to ban everything that doesn't fall in the 'consensus'.
The word "ban" is nowhere in the article.
Your argument seems to be that any discussion whatsoever of what is sold by Amazon can have no purpose other than resulting in a call for banning books. Therefore, even if banning books is not mentioned at all, you will react as if it was a proposal to ban books.
By attempting to shut down discussion of something that you think might lead maybe to somebody expressing an opinion you don't like... you are the example of what you criticize.
Wow, it's amazing how fast slashdotters jump from a post saying "Amazon is a major source of anti-vaccine propaganda" to "they want to ban books! Hitler banned books! They're Hitler!"
You managed to Godwin the discussion by post number two. Chill a little, dude.
They do suffer from confirmation bias, however. If my model says there will be no warming, and everyone else's model says there is warming, I "fix" my model until it agrees with everyone else.
Less than you think.
What you are ignoring is that scientists get famous by proving the existing theories wrong.
A group that found a flaw in the current understanding of the greenhouse effect would instantly become the most famous atmospheric scientists in history... and every single one of them knows it.
The trick, however, is you have to find a flaw, and prove it's real. Asserting "oh, I think it's wrong, I can't say why" doesn't work. Finding the flaw turns out not to be easy-- a thousand people have been looking for one for fifty years now, and so far the understanding has withstood all attacks.
Feynmann likes amusing anecdotes. The actual history of electron charge measurements maybe sort of shows a progression like that, but not nearly the neat progression like Feynmann suggests, in fact, the very next measurement published, Backlin 1929, was within the error bars of the correct measurement.
Graph here:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/WtmU...
I looked at that google link. It gave a whole page of links saying that we won't experience a runaway greenhouse effect.
Good to know.
Here's Scientific American (from the google links you gave) https://www.scientificamerican... [a runaway greenhouse effect would require]: "about 10 times more carbon dioxide than most experts estimate could be released from burning all available fossil fuels."
Here's that Technology Review article you mention: "almost all lines of evidence lead us to believe that it is unlikely to be possible, even in principle, to trigger full a runaway greenhouse by addition of noncondensible greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”
Even James Hansen, the least conservative analyst, says that a runaway greenhouse effect would require we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, including the tar sands and tar shale (which would put us WAY beyond anything anybody is predicting in the way of CO2 emissions.)
I didn't bother reading the Stephen Hawking quote. He said a lot of quotable things, but he is not an atmospheric scientist.
Where is the control Earth without humans against which to verify these models?
Atmospheric models (known as "global circulation models" in the actual community) have to be able to model the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and Titan, not just Earth.
The fundamental physics-- absorption, scattering, convection, radiation-- is the same.
(Also the gas giant planets, although the data set for these is a little more sparse.)
No, that's the good thing about hundreds of independent research groups on six continents making measurements and running models: they don't all use the same set of assumptions and the same data.
Slashdot Mirror
The table in the parabolicarc site I linked says that the separation (and subsequent breakup of the booster) is at Mach 1.5 to 2.5.
The problem is that the value produced by the robots goes to profits earned by the people owning the robots
This is only true if competitors don't also install robots. If everyone automates, the profit margins are competed away, and the added value goes primarily to consumers.
where do the "consumers" get the money to buy that "added value'" if there are no jobs available because the robots do all the jobs?
Of course, this is only true if we have free markets. Removing barriers to competition is the real solution, not slowing the adoption of automation.
The main barrier to competition is the fact that as labor costs drop to zero, and all of the cost of a business is the machinery (which in economic terms is capital), it's expensive to enter a new business. The larger businesses drive out smaller businesses (due to economy of scale) and they price out new competitors (who have to pay the start-up costs).
This should have been covered in your economics 101 class, by the way.
that is, the rich people.
The biggest owners of capital in America are pension funds. So if you have a 401k or an IRA, that means you.
Fine. So, old people with retirement funds are a large portion of the rich people I'm talking about. As a member of the technoclass, you are so insulated in your bubble that you don't even know that not everybody has a retirement fund?.
People not rich enough to own stocks, IRAs, or pension funds are out of luck,.
That changes nothing in any of my statements.
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period.
Too late. The McCormick Reaper already destroyed all the jobs.
It pretty much destroyed farming as an occupation that provides jobs for most laborers. Right now, farming is under 1.5% of employment in the US. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...
As long as there are other jobs to which the people who were once needed to work on farms can switch to, that's fine.
What happens where there are no other jobs? What happens after that?
You seem entirely focussed on prices. Yes, prices, go down with automation. That's not the problem being addressed.
...
Most companies barely make any profit and often run in the red.
Irrelevant. In the long term, companies that don't make a profit vanish and you can ignore them.
Sure there are companies that are magnificently profitable, but they can only do that if they have secured their market share and don't run the risk of competitors undercutting their prices and stealing their customers.
You just hand-waved away some critical pieces of economic theory here. An industry in which most of the product is made by robots, and the labor cost is low, is one in which there is a very high barrier to entry for new competitors, along with high economy of scale. In classical economics, both of these are situations that makes for a "natural monopoly": the companies who already have invested in the robots have a strong advantage over any start-ups, and in the most highly-automated businesses, new businesses can't enter the market at all... without government support.
For various reasons, this is not a good thing either... but that was not the point I was making.
Automation reduces total labor required to deliver products and thus drives down prices.
Prices are not the issue being discussed.
Reduces mind you, not eliminates, robots after all are expensive for a reason - they are very labor intensive to produce.
So, you have confidence that robots will eliminate jobs, but won't eliminate the jobs making robots.
Sorry. They will.
All you are really doing is shifting labor a step up in supply chain, instead of having people make products, you have people making machines and their parts that make products.
You're handwaving away the problems. First of all: no. The people making machines and their parts will also have their jobs taken away by robots. Sorry, but when the robots get good enough to take away most of the jobs, they aren't going to stop at just the bottom level.
The result is that there reaches a point where almost no labor is required for making stuff. The need for labor drops to very low, and there is a vast oversupply of labor, the result of which is that wages are driven down. You can say this is good, because the cost of labor drops toward zero... but what do the displaced humans do?
As a result, all of us get to afford more stuff.
Wait: who is this "all of us" you refer to? The cost of "stuff" drops, but not to zero. The number of people employed, however, drops to very low-- you don't need people to make stuff. There is no employment available for most of the humans, You say "all of us get to afford more stuff," but if you're unemployed, how can you "afford more stuff"-- in fact, how do you afford any stuff.
The answer is, you can afford stuff if you have a share in owning the machines that are making the stuff. If not... you're unemployed and have no prospects for employment.
As automation makes labor more productive, it is good up to a point. The point at which there are no longer any jobs available for the majority of workers, however, is a point at which we need to rethink a social system that is based on economics that assumes anybody with a work ethic can find a job. How does the system work when there aren't jobs for people who want them?
"This marks the first and only demo mission that Crew Dragon will fly without humans on board."
Almost.
Next flight, without crew, is the in-flight abort test, where they launch, but shut the rocket down at about Mach one and let the excape system pull the capsule away. http://www.parabolicarc.com/20...
Then comes the first flight with crew.
Finally, the beginning of delivery of the implicit promise of Apollo. Late, and not by the government that implied human space travel would become commonplace,
It is worth reminding people here that this launch, and this capsule, was developed under a NASA contract (And NASA had funded the development of both Falcon-9 and Dragon before the Crew Dragon project as well).
Not to take away from SpaceX, but just a reminder that this was an example of NASA and industry working together.
instead of a ****-waving political exercise and cancelled at step 1. Money was of course, an issue, and as usual, private enterprise - and not one yet totally involved in crony capitalism, managed to deliver what the government and their heavily subsidized old-school aerospace contractors could not.
More specifically, this was an example showing how government contracts can be done right.
(The booster landing, on the other hand, was NOT a NASA contract-- that was SpaceX all the way. )
All possible congrats, props, general hip hip hurray and so forth. Just wish I didn't have to wait from childhood until too old to fly for this.
Agreed.
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period. You can't work your way up from working class to middle class to ownership class, because there is no path upward. If you aren't a member of the class that owns the robots, you live on whatever dole the people who own the robots choose to give you.
Dude... the number of forced-vax nazis on this thread who espouse literal-Nazi policies makes it an apt comparison.
Godwin's law. Hitler!! They're like Hitler!!
bullshit.
If you want to do a Hitler comparison, they are the reverse-Hitler. Hitler was "we are going to kill all of you, men, women, and children alike". The pro vaccination people are "we are going to save your childrens' lives, even if you don't care."
And all this violently angry butthurt is over... measles? Measles! I had measles as a kid. Every kid I knew got the measles. It was a _mildly annoying_ ailment. Not in the same ballpark as polio - not even in the same league.
Read this one: https://io9.gizmodo.com/read-r...
To be currency, the value has to be stable.
Maybe some day some cryptocurrency will be stable, and will be usable as a currency. But right now? Nope.
Oh, and his 1788 paper on the Cuckoo is now widely regarded as being the first study of the remarkable life cycle of the bird.
try: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Why don't one of you explain what medical qualifications Jenner had, when he 'discovered' 'vaccination'? Oh wait - he had none.
Huh? Edward Jenner earned his M.D. from University of St Andrews in 1792 and did his internship in surgery and anatomy at St George's, University of London. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work in zoology in 1788, eight years before his famous work on the Smallpox inoculation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
He [Hitler] was a Johnny-come-lately imitator to book banning politicians. That list starts in the mid 1500's about a year after moveable type was invented.
The list starts with the burning of the Library at Alexandria.
Another great contribution form Islam, the religion of peace, to world culture!
Quite a feat, really, since the burning of the library of Alexandria occurred at the Siege of Alexandria in 48 BC, about six hundred years before Muhammad was born.
You do realize the measles outbreaks are coming from all the third-world illegals flooding through our porous borders, right?
The actual evidence shows not.
Source of the measles is primarily U.S. travelers who visit other countries and bring measles home:
Most notably, from Israel, where a significant Orthodox population does not believe in vaccinations; but also from France (the 2011 outbreak) and from the Philippines (the 2014 outbreak).
https://www.contagionlive.com/news/travel-associated-measles-outbreaks-on-the-rise-in-us
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html
They stopped using Thimerosal in pediatric vaccines in 2000.
Check again. Thiomersal was used in Pandemrix.
Never approved in the U.S..
If you want to avoid mercury exposure, don't eat fish.
Also, I don't eat fish.
Too bad for you. Turns out eating fish is healthy.
https://universityhealthnews.com/daily/nutrition/benefits-of-eating-fish/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/11-health-benefits-of-fish#section5
Herd Immunity is un-vaccinated people being protected by vaccinated people. The idea is that if there are enough immune people around that the virus can't exist. So, how does that explain vaccinated people getting sick? Because that is what anti-vax people are getting blamed for.
Wrong. There are babies who are too young to be vaccinated yet, and there are babies who for some reason such as having compromised immune systems can't be vaccinated.
These are the people at risk.
Whataboutism is replying to a comment or argument with "but, what about [something completely different]."
Just because what you said was a non sequitur and absurd does not make it reducto ad absurdum..
...Also, I will certainly never get a vaccine shot with aluminium or mercury in it.
They stopped using Thimerosal in pediatric vaccines in 2000.
If you want to avoid mercury exposure, don't eat fish.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. Welcome to our brave new world where it is 'common sense' to ban everything that doesn't fall in the 'consensus'.
The word "ban" is nowhere in the article.
Your argument seems to be that any discussion whatsoever of what is sold by Amazon can have no purpose other than resulting in a call for banning books. Therefore, even if banning books is not mentioned at all, you will react as if it was a proposal to ban books.
By attempting to shut down discussion of something that you think might lead maybe to somebody expressing an opinion you don't like... you are the example of what you criticize.
You managed to Godwin the discussion by post number two. Chill a little, dude.
They do suffer from confirmation bias, however. If my model says there will be no warming, and everyone else's model says there is warming, I "fix" my model until it agrees with everyone else.
Less than you think.
What you are ignoring is that scientists get famous by proving the existing theories wrong.
A group that found a flaw in the current understanding of the greenhouse effect would instantly become the most famous atmospheric scientists in history... and every single one of them knows it.
The trick, however, is you have to find a flaw, and prove it's real. Asserting "oh, I think it's wrong, I can't say why" doesn't work. Finding the flaw turns out not to be easy-- a thousand people have been looking for one for fifty years now, and so far the understanding has withstood all attacks.
See this issue in action while Millikan et al calculates the electron's charge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Feynmann likes amusing anecdotes. The actual history of electron charge measurements maybe sort of shows a progression like that, but not nearly the neat progression like Feynmann suggests, in fact, the very next measurement published, Backlin 1929, was within the error bars of the correct measurement. Graph here: https://i.stack.imgur.com/WtmU...
I looked at that google link. It gave a whole page of links saying that we won't experience a runaway greenhouse effect.
Good to know.
Here's Scientific American (from the google links you gave) https://www.scientificamerican...
[a runaway greenhouse effect would require]: "about 10 times more carbon dioxide than most experts estimate could be released from burning all available fossil fuels."
Here's that Technology Review article you mention: "almost all lines of evidence lead us to believe that it is unlikely to be possible, even in principle, to trigger full a runaway greenhouse by addition of noncondensible greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”
Even James Hansen, the least conservative analyst, says that a runaway greenhouse effect would require we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, including the tar sands and tar shale (which would put us WAY beyond anything anybody is predicting in the way of CO2 emissions.)
I didn't bother reading the Stephen Hawking quote. He said a lot of quotable things, but he is not an atmospheric scientist.
Where is the control Earth without humans against which to verify these models?
Atmospheric models (known as "global circulation models" in the actual community) have to be able to model the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and Titan, not just Earth.
The fundamental physics-- absorption, scattering, convection, radiation-- is the same.
(Also the gas giant planets, although the data set for these is a little more sparse.)
No, that's the good thing about hundreds of independent research groups on six continents making measurements and running models: they don't all use the same set of assumptions and the same data.
Low clouds act differently from high clouds. (Among other things, they tend to be liquid water droplets, not ice particles.)
The thick cloud deck on Venus is much lower than equivalent altitudes to the stratosphere.
(and, in any case, they are H2SO4 clouds, not water ice clouds. Different properties.)
Whether atmosphere will go to 1200 ppm, I have no idea. I can't predict human behavior.
You can't? Humans are the most eminently predictable of species, in aggregate.
Maybe we'll get another world war, crippling economy and energy infrastructure, leading to dramatic drop in output.
Nope, too much to lose now.
That was an argument which was being made before the first world war: there wouldn't be a war, because everybody had too much to lose.
Turned out to be wrong.
Wars happen even when both sides lose by having a war.