Wow... whatever you're smoking, kudos, it must be great stuff, because you are clearly hallucinating. You simply can't keep blowing 1950s smoke up 2012 realities. It not only makes you look anachronistic, people wonder if you've been in an extended coma. People are working on machines that will replace human beings in the work force. As technology advances, those machines will make more and more people go away to do something else. There was a time when a person had to calculate a whole bunch of values for different mathematical functions, so they could put that information in appendices at the back of books, saving engineers countless hours, particularly if they needed calculations with more places than they could bang out on their slide-rules (don't ask, its ancient history.) Now computers do all that stuff in seconds. I don't care how little someone is willing to be paid per hour, nobody will hire them for that job. With profound breakthrough in neural networks, semantic engines and budding AIs, the time that human beings have at the top of the intellectual food chain is limited at best. Ultimately machines will do everything perhaps save a couple tasks that may still best be done by human beings that are heavily augmented (there may in fact be quantum behavior at the root of human intuition and insight that may take a while for machines to duplicate and master.)
There will be no jobs. All gone. There will be no manufacture per se. Molecular assemblers of different sizes will crap out anything your heart desires. Of course there will be the cost of the atomic feedstock and IP needed to create your widget. Those will still have value. Economic and political system as you currently know, hate or love them, will go bye bye. They won't make any sense in the context of an advanced technological world. Will it happen over night, probably not. but I'd be surprised if the children of the next century even vaguely understands what you're talking about in your post. Of course, crazed bands of greedy knuckle heads my try to hamstring the future by turning IP into an idiotic turf war and pissing contest combined. They may try to legislate the future out of existence, or shape in their own whack-a-doodle image. Won't be the first time that Luddites or Greedy Bastards messed with the future (probably won't be the last either.) Doesn't matter, the future is coming and it won't be stopped, though it could be sent it a dark and horrifying direction. So perhaps rather than promoting Henry Ford, perhaps there's someone alive and breathing who is actually at work inventing a future you might want to hang your intellectual hook on. Good luck with that.
I don't fear computers. I fear how computers will be used by men devoted to fear, avarice, control and blind ambition. If I could build a Watson, that was fully educated in the humane use and development of humanity, I would replace the greedy, self serving, gas bags that litter the streets of D.C so fast, it would cause a clap of thunder by the vacuum of their missing bodies.
I pray that we marry the minds of our deepest thinkers with those of our deepest humanitarians and grow a generation a machines more committed to our potential greatness than we are ourselves. That would be a golden age.
I too am an engineer and a futurist. I see a lot of different trajectories that humanity might take and many of them scare me. The real problem isn't advancing technology, its that advancing technology accelerates and amplifies the current trajectory of society. If we were on a trajectory that honored and respected humanity, and promoted the advancement and dignity of the human spirit (yeah I know what's that), I'd say "to infinity and beyond..."
We aren't that place. Today's culture, is greedy, self obsess, entitled, selfish and ignorant. Amplify that trajectory and you get technological last man standing. The trend is inescapable. Robots will eventually do all labor that is currently done by human being with the exception of some augmented human beings (who will be more machine that human anyway... can you say Borg?) If we don't start making accommodations for billions of people who will be excluded from any possibility of participating in a global economy, they will be squeezed out of existence, and the blow-back of that pressure will have profoundly dark and unpredictable repercussions.
As an engineer, it is time to start applying the very same thinking and design creativity to designing a culture capable of not only surviving a transcendent technological explosion, but one that could channel it, guide it, empower it, and in the process serve the greatest ambitions of humanity and what it means to be human. Or we can continue to be guided by our fears, and superstitions and ignorance, and what we will reap will be unimaginably dark.
Even if in the interim, you are right, there isn't a single one of these jobs that won't be done by robot in the near future. In fact with powerful new expert systems based on infant AI technology like Watson, even management and logistics are going to be jobs handled by robot. In fact, the writing is already on the wall. There are already powerful new robots writing concertos, painting and doing poetry. In the next year or two, most news stories may be written by robot. There is no job that won't eventually be done by a robot, or perhaps a heavily augmented human being.
You need to consider the implications of this. A vanishingly small group of people with virtually unlimited wealth and power, and a huge population of people with little or no material wealth. This is really easy... connect the dots, they're close together.
Comparing a cotton gin to a 3D Printer is like comparing a rock to a Space Shuttle. Robots will replace human beings at every level. There will be no job a robot can't do better, faster, with greater quality. That will include thinking jobs, creative jobs, management jobs... all jobs. There will be no human jobs. There will be business owners and corporate boards who control businesses and they will be wealthy beyond imagining. Godlike in their abundance and power. The rest of us will be "Restructured" pretty much out of existence. Clearly you don't get the science, or the economics or even the social implications going on. Your quaint sociopolitical religion is so completely insufficient to address this issue that you might as just grunt and huff at the computer. The future shatters your ideology, then blows its dust quietly beyond all reckoning.
It doesn't have to be this way. There are very bright people who have come up with all sorts of ideas about how we could humanely deal with the vast majority of human beings. There will almost certainly be people who are first adopters and who will heavily augment themselves, but calling them human will be a bit of a stretch. They will have jobs. Drop the prehistoric economic meme, it is ridiculously passe, and fails to deal with ANY of the looming realities that face humanity. By all means remain conservative, With any luck, the machines will create theme parks that future augmented humans can visit and you'll be a fascinating attraction.
Nope, sorry, design and development is more heavily automated every hour, and soon machines will take that job over completely. In short, in a shockingly short time, you'll either be a board member, or one of the billions of unemployed folk. No jobs, no more. all robots front to back, top to bottom. Perhaps you might consider donating body fat for the production of a high quality robot lubricant. Good luck with that.
This only works if you get sufficient raw atomic stock to manufacture the necessities of life for free. Otherwise, No jobs, No economy, and no way to sustain yourself. As we divide everything by '0' we get stranger and stranger answers.
First of all, Communism is "State" owns EVERYTHING, and citizen gets what the state gives them. What China is doing today has no more to do with Marxist Communism, than what Reagan was doing in 1980. Communism died with Mao.
The cost he refers to, is the fact that as more and more resource, wealth and power get's tied up in corporate systems, what remains for the rest of humanity diminishes by orders of magnitude and the access to the essentials of life will ultimately come at the whim of corporations, ultimately oppressing humanity. That would in fact be a cost. If you've been sleeping since 2008, you might have noticed a little bit of of that already going around.
How about leaving some of the necessary resources of life accessible to human beings vs the commodity bots trading and selling our futures half a globe away... what ISM is that? How about Localism? or Humanism? or maybe even Moralism? You seem to have a red hot poker stuck someplace dark about having some clod in government say what you can and can't do, but put that same Bozo in a three piece suit and make him a CEO and now all that black is white. By all means, share with me your logic?
Finally, somebody who's awake!!! Yes... You're future is going to be delightful... as long as your bank account has a number with 9 or more significant zeroes behind it. Otherwise it will suck to be you. Find a nice defensible island, bring 50 of your closest friends. Install the solar and the water purification systems now, you won't be able to afford them later. Get ready for the party, it should be a knee slapper!
If it happened all at once, yeah sure. Try on this thought experiment. You disappear the middle class and begin cutting social services at all levels of government. The first to go will be the sick and the elderly. Criminalize the mentally ill and the folks who try to circumvent the system. Create a powerful system of surveillance and invent all kinds of new crowd control technology including pain rays, remote controlled drones, you know the works. As your prisons begin to fill, privatize them and put the people there to work, keep growing the prisons to get larger and larger populations under control. Keep tightening the noose a little at a time. Get folks to fight neighbor against neighbor. As people lose their savings, homes, retirements, they begin to look at the few remaining with those things with envy and anger. So they go after teachers and firemen, because they still have pensions when the private sector is forces to subsist on beans and franks or worse dog food. All the while the economy is resizing, changing to meet the changing population and demographics. Do it slow, over what say 50 years. Starting say in 1980.
All the while, the ones in power, the ones with everything, keep squeezing society out like a tube of toothpaste, one sklitch at a time. Finally, its all robots, growing food, and rubbing feet, and making certain that everything in the gated community is just lovely. As the last bit is squeezed from the tube and the last folks outside the preserves go the way of the dodo, the army of robots cleans the world to a shiny polish and that remaining 144,000 enjoy heaven on earth. And everyone lives happily ever after.
You clearly don't understand where robots are headed. Most robots are large, single duty, heavy duty machines on assembly lines. That's changing. With 3D assembly, an inexpensive, flexible use robot that can do MANY things, in fact, virtually infinite many things, suddenly puts the robot where you would ordinarily put people and soon in places people can't go. Robots will do it faster, cheaper, more repeatably, with little or no waste. People can't possible compete with what's coming.
Think of as a Chinese puzzle box. You don't get in all at once. You slide this piece to the right, then you move this other piece up, then over which allows the next piece to move. All of which get's you to where you ultimately want to go, inside the box. Let's look at a different problem. Its 1980, you're very wealthy, from 5 generations of very wealthy, and you see the world going towards a dark place. You consider the possibility it could even threaten the future of your family's wealth and power... Jebus forbid! So you need to fix what's going wrong. There are too many people. There is going to be shortage of resources. This will lead to war, famine, possible global pandemics as folk venture further and further into rain forests and the viruses that live there. So how are you going to manipulate the system to reduce the population, concentrate the wealth, hijack global governments and economies and make absolutely certain that you and yours are going to remain safe behind an impenetrable wall of power and resources. Welcome to 2012. Any questions?
Friend, we've been nailed to rails for 30 years, go look at the tax rates, go look at the changing composition of federal taxes. go look at where wealth has accumulated, go look at where the debt now lives. Go look at the global growth and influence of the corporation over the 30 years. Government and Corporation have become one. Some sign of the very things you propose should have shown up 20 years ago. What has shown up instead, is that the wealthy now own the game and all the pieces on the board. Go look at the news headlines today. Poverty has reached the highest rate in the United States since 1965 and the entire middle class is in grave danger of sliding into an economic abyss.
The DOW soars while humanity suffers. Business is doing just fine, only its sick. Because its made of people and the people aren't doing very well. The only one's truly making out are at the very top.
If... scratch that, when machine replace all of us in the work force (and that day is coming faster than you can possibly imagine), and they are generating unimagined wealth, who will benefit from that wealth. You or me? I don't think so. The future is writ big, and the hand on the quill is the privileged hand of a wealthy man. Unless you are already a billionaire, and I don't know, you may be, I think we'll be sharing a spot in line at the carbon recycling center. Or have you any bright ideas of why those who hold power so tenaciously now will be so generous later as to risk 7,000,000,000 unnecessary carbon units to walk around and cause trouble? I've climbed high and I see where your road leads friend. There may well be a heaven of technology with a resurrected Ayn Rand there to greet you, but the community is gated and the price to get in is going to shock you, and the place outside won't be fit for a dog.
Y'all have this religion around the "Free Market" but you won't even grant that human beings "game" the systems in which they play. That's what we do. We lie and cheat and steal, and if we can wiggle the machine without hitting tilt, you better believe we do it. You're a programmer. Shame on you. You understand the process of reducing problems to stronger and stronger linguistic metaproblems, refactoring and symbolically refining ideas to powerful fulcrums upon which to rest huge abstractions. Create any free market and people will game it. Its what we are. You're living in a religious bubble, and your ignoring physical reality. The only way to fix this is putting back in the checks and balances, applying effective zero sum games that manage the worst in being human with just enough wiggle room to allow us to express the best. The 2012 Atlas hasn't shrugged. He's crushed the world to dust, taken the wealth and bought Olympus with it. Wake up!
We are looking at the end of all isms. The real problem is that technology amplifies. Our society has always been geared towards plutocracy, but as each new technological explosion shocks what's possible the forces grow ever more extreme. We can still put compassion and equality back in the equation, be we are fast approaching a social event horizon, the passing of which will determine either a future worth lining in, or one so terrible, that its darkness barely allows description. I for one prefer the prior, but that would require that we all stand up and demand better.
You don't know what you're talking about. A robot recently had its concerto performed to a large public gathering. In the very new future, most of the news articles you read will be written by robots. There are scientist busily working at how human being functions at the cellular level in their brains and are busy building machines to duplicate that behavior. We will all to soon be dealing with a whole raft of machines that pass the Turing Test on all levels.
There isn't a job that human beings currently do, that a machine in 20 - 40 years won't do better. That's all jobs that human beings can do. The only human beings who will compete with those machines will be people who are so heavily augmented, that calling them human will be a serious semantic contortion. I wish this were science fiction, but you don't even have to dig, to see the research in all these areas is very well along indeed, and just like the genome project that they first predicted would take a 1000 years, got completed in 6, and can now be done in a day, the distance from here to there is shockingly short. You my friend are not even vaguely prepared for whats coming. The truly pitiful part, is that you have so much company.
Yes, but poverty during the 60s had reached levels that society deemed was unacceptable (significant populations of people in the deep south dying from starvation), so Johnson instituted a social security net, a series of programs designed to address profound poverty and prevent people in the richest nation in the world from enduring unacceptable hardship. That's the net of which I speak, and the poverty that came before it.
You aren't getting the picture... wages will drop to "0". When a machine moving 300 mph, can do a human's job for $0.0004 per hour, explain to me what kind of job you're going to hire people for at $0.0003 per hour, and how they simply won't be laid off when the next machine upgrade renders them all obsolete. As for all those evil programs... don't worry, you're about to get your way. The folks who want to starve government to death, have done a magnificent job. National. State and City governments are going insolvent all over the planet, or haven't you been reading? All those social programs will go away soon enough when there is no more money to support them. Everything will be privatized... the magic panacea of folks who don't seem to notice the apples in their mouths and the sprigs of parsley up their nethers. That's not a bathtub SlingBlade, that's a roasting pan.
See there was this magical time about 60 years ago, when businesses actually provided these crazy things call PENSIONS. When you worked, your company invested a little in your future, so when you wanted to retire, you had some certainty, that you won't die cold and miserable on the streets. The TAX rate back then, was over 95% for those making millions, and they still got rich, lived great lives and the average Joe owned a house, sent his kids to college, and the wife stayed at home raising the kids. Debt was unheard of. Now the wealthy have us burning down the state capitols, because "HOW Dare they give those greedy union worker pensions, they should starve in their dotage like the rest of us!" And you clowns can't even hear how pathetically ridiculous you sound. You've let people with wealth and power rob you of even your last shreds of dignity, and now we turn on one another for the last crumbs of human decency. I can't even begin to tell you how appalled I am by watching this. Stop swerving. Look over the hood and see your final destination. The road we're on takes us someplace where there is no middle class. You and I are among the expendable 99.9% Please for the love of Jebus, get a clue.
You make the mistaken presumption the wealthy will try to preserve an excessive populations... My guess is once the average weight of the 99% reaches 400 lbs through cheap, fast food, they'll render us all down as a new fuel source... sort of like Nazi Germany will the benefit of being green. I read a letter by a freed slave to his master, who wrote him and asked him to come back and save his failing plantation. Eloquent, and surprisingly humorous in a biting acerbic way. Point is, our master is a lunatic. He is thoroughly ungrateful, and he means us harm. You best sort out how you're going to deal with his ill intent, because he has every intention of to pitting neighbor against neighbor. To paraphrase Franklin "We must hang together or we'll surely hang separately."
There is a profound difference between being a snob, and being informed. That average America High School graduate can't find Iraq, the place we've been fighting for the last decade, on an unmarked map of the Middle East. In fact, a significant number of them can't find their own frigging country on an unlabeled world map. We've been training the last two generations to respond in a Pavlovian fashion to our owner's commands through little boxes in our living rooms, on our desks, and in our pockets. Why do you think Rupert Murdoch just bought up a bunch of newspapers in the United States? He's going take their names, move them to the internet, design then to regurgitate his zombie control signal (as is currently being broadcast on FOX) and we'll lose a trillion more collective IQ points.
Education doesn't make you a snob. It teaches why bovine fecal matter is in fact bovine fecal matter. This doesn't work to the benefit of those who want a docile and compliant mouth breathing society of sheep ready and waiting to be sheered.
SO, let's make education above the bare minimum completely unaffordable for the average Joe... OH my goodness look at the recent tuition rates and the elimination of grants and scholarships... and by all means, the ones that understand the power of education, lets make certain they never get out from under the thumb of the wealthy by imposing endless debt on them... the interest rates for school loans will soon be in the credit card range. What part of any of this is unclear to you? Talk to smart people. Learn what you should be concerned about. Asteroids? Not so much? Rising climate change, absolutely, do something now, but we're boned over the next century no matter what. The wealthy and powerful fixing the population problem by extincting 90% of us? BINGO, give the boy a free cigar! That one. That's the one you should be looking at. People with too much money and power, with no clear understanding what's possible for humanity, making unilateral decisions about the future of humanity, based on information from the 80s, before the capacity to even understand what technological miracles might be available by 2050. That is our biggest threat, and speaking for a lot of smart people, its where I personally would put a great deal of my unspent clocks right about now. Of course you could always go to a Monster Truck show instead.
Automation will ultimately replace everyone... there will be no job a robot can't do better, faster, more accurately and more repeatably, than a human being. AI will replace people in thinking jobs, and cheap mechanical muscle will replace people everywhere else (DARPA is investing in the next generation of robots as we speak.)
The benefit of all this amazingly powerful and inexpensive labor COULD go to the general population, who could be issues stock at birth, whose growing dividends would keep them in flat screen TVs and hot dogs until dotage, while those few creative folks who wanted more could create art which the rest would consume and so they could afford life extension and beach front homes. That would be the hope, the utopian plan.
Perhaps you've been in coma for the last 30 years... In simple fact, the United States has the largest "Poor Population" since 1965 (the date of the invention of the social security net) and the number is growing fast. You can check it out for yourself over on Google News, its one of today's headlines. The wealth has all been shoved into the vanishingly small ultra-ultra-rich, and the middle class is falling off the table. The advent of displaced work, through exploding automation means the incredible wealth generated will make the already obscenely wealthy godlike, and the rest of us should get ready for that Ethiopian Diet, I here its gonna be the new craze in the Midwest... sporting about a 100 lbs of ugly fast food lard? We can fix that real fast. No soup for you!
I think bankers are now referring to the 99% as "The Expendables". All the new crowd control technology, the use of remote controlled and robotic drones. Buying at Target is quick gaining a new and dark meaning. My friends, we wrest back the helm of state, or we suffer what comes next, all indications so far suggest the people pushing the buttons are neither compassionate nor skilled at sharing. To hell with Skynet, its the Richnet that makes my hinny pucker.
I stand corrected, the only flight to happen on 9/11 was delivering antivenom to Miami. The Bin Laden family however was flown out of the U.S. on a 747 from Miami on 9/19 while all other air traffic in the country was in full lock down and the FBI new the plane had be chartered by Osama Bin Laden. The White House managed all authorizations. You can read more about it here.
There you go, a legal filing with an obviously bogus patent (a patent with obvious prior art, that can't stand up under reasonable examination) should disappear the patent, force the one filing the suit to cover all court and legal costs for both sides, and if any harm is done to the business sued, result in triple damages against the filing party.
I'm think its time for game players everywhere to create inflammatory content of the officers of these patent trolling companies performing unnatural acts with the religious leaders of radical Muslim states. Provide addresses, place of employment, and a lot of derogatory uses of the prophet's name and likeness. Stir up a real hornets nest and then toss them into their respective yards. Play a game called "Spin the Fatwa". Let's invite these pigs to a luau as the guests of honor.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... whatever you're smoking, kudos, it must be great stuff, because you are clearly hallucinating. You simply can't keep blowing 1950s smoke up 2012 realities. It not only makes you look anachronistic, people wonder if you've been in an extended coma. People are working on machines that will replace human beings in the work force. As technology advances, those machines will make more and more people go away to do something else. There was a time when a person had to calculate a whole bunch of values for different mathematical functions, so they could put that information in appendices at the back of books, saving engineers countless hours, particularly if they needed calculations with more places than they could bang out on their slide-rules (don't ask, its ancient history.) Now computers do all that stuff in seconds. I don't care how little someone is willing to be paid per hour, nobody will hire them for that job. With profound breakthrough in neural networks, semantic engines and budding AIs, the time that human beings have at the top of the intellectual food chain is limited at best. Ultimately machines will do everything perhaps save a couple tasks that may still best be done by human beings that are heavily augmented (there may in fact be quantum behavior at the root of human intuition and insight that may take a while for machines to duplicate and master.)
There will be no jobs. All gone. There will be no manufacture per se. Molecular assemblers of different sizes will crap out anything your heart desires. Of course there will be the cost of the atomic feedstock and IP needed to create your widget. Those will still have value. Economic and political system as you currently know, hate or love them, will go bye bye. They won't make any sense in the context of an advanced technological world. Will it happen over night, probably not. but I'd be surprised if the children of the next century even vaguely understands what you're talking about in your post. Of course, crazed bands of greedy knuckle heads my try to hamstring the future by turning IP into an idiotic turf war and pissing contest combined. They may try to legislate the future out of existence, or shape in their own whack-a-doodle image. Won't be the first time that Luddites or Greedy Bastards messed with the future (probably won't be the last either.) Doesn't matter, the future is coming and it won't be stopped, though it could be sent it a dark and horrifying direction. So perhaps rather than promoting Henry Ford, perhaps there's someone alive and breathing who is actually at work inventing a future you might want to hang your intellectual hook on. Good luck with that.
I don't fear computers. I fear how computers will be used by men devoted to fear, avarice, control and blind ambition. If I could build a Watson, that was fully educated in the humane use and development of humanity, I would replace the greedy, self serving, gas bags that litter the streets of D.C so fast, it would cause a clap of thunder by the vacuum of their missing bodies.
I pray that we marry the minds of our deepest thinkers with those of our deepest humanitarians and grow a generation a machines more committed to our potential greatness than we are ourselves. That would be a golden age.
I too am an engineer and a futurist. I see a lot of different trajectories that humanity might take and many of them scare me. The real problem isn't advancing technology, its that advancing technology accelerates and amplifies the current trajectory of society. If we were on a trajectory that honored and respected humanity, and promoted the advancement and dignity of the human spirit (yeah I know what's that), I'd say "to infinity and beyond..."
We aren't that place. Today's culture, is greedy, self obsess, entitled, selfish and ignorant. Amplify that trajectory and you get technological last man standing. The trend is inescapable. Robots will eventually do all labor that is currently done by human being with the exception of some augmented human beings (who will be more machine that human anyway... can you say Borg?) If we don't start making accommodations for billions of people who will be excluded from any possibility of participating in a global economy, they will be squeezed out of existence, and the blow-back of that pressure will have profoundly dark and unpredictable repercussions.
As an engineer, it is time to start applying the very same thinking and design creativity to designing a culture capable of not only surviving a transcendent technological explosion, but one that could channel it, guide it, empower it, and in the process serve the greatest ambitions of humanity and what it means to be human. Or we can continue to be guided by our fears, and superstitions and ignorance, and what we will reap will be unimaginably dark.
I'm sorry but the Walmart effect seems to work the other way.
Even if in the interim, you are right, there isn't a single one of these jobs that won't be done by robot in the near future. In fact with powerful new expert systems based on infant AI technology like Watson, even management and logistics are going to be jobs handled by robot. In fact, the writing is already on the wall. There are already powerful new robots writing concertos, painting and doing poetry. In the next year or two, most news stories may be written by robot. There is no job that won't eventually be done by a robot, or perhaps a heavily augmented human being.
You need to consider the implications of this. A vanishingly small group of people with virtually unlimited wealth and power, and a huge population of people with little or no material wealth. This is really easy... connect the dots, they're close together.
Comparing a cotton gin to a 3D Printer is like comparing a rock to a Space Shuttle. Robots will replace human beings at every level. There will be no job a robot can't do better, faster, with greater quality. That will include thinking jobs, creative jobs, management jobs... all jobs. There will be no human jobs. There will be business owners and corporate boards who control businesses and they will be wealthy beyond imagining. Godlike in their abundance and power. The rest of us will be "Restructured" pretty much out of existence. Clearly you don't get the science, or the economics or even the social implications going on. Your quaint sociopolitical religion is so completely insufficient to address this issue that you might as just grunt and huff at the computer. The future shatters your ideology, then blows its dust quietly beyond all reckoning.
It doesn't have to be this way. There are very bright people who have come up with all sorts of ideas about how we could humanely deal with the vast majority of human beings. There will almost certainly be people who are first adopters and who will heavily augment themselves, but calling them human will be a bit of a stretch. They will have jobs. Drop the prehistoric economic meme, it is ridiculously passe, and fails to deal with ANY of the looming realities that face humanity. By all means remain conservative, With any luck, the machines will create theme parks that future augmented humans can visit and you'll be a fascinating attraction.
Nope, sorry, design and development is more heavily automated every hour, and soon machines will take that job over completely. In short, in a shockingly short time, you'll either be a board member, or one of the billions of unemployed folk. No jobs, no more. all robots front to back, top to bottom. Perhaps you might consider donating body fat for the production of a high quality robot lubricant. Good luck with that.
Now if its cheaper to melt down a robot, and he's actually doing useful work, imagine what's going to happen to all those jobless folk.
This only works if you get sufficient raw atomic stock to manufacture the necessities of life for free. Otherwise, No jobs, No economy, and no way to sustain yourself. As we divide everything by '0' we get stranger and stranger answers.
First of all, Communism is "State" owns EVERYTHING, and citizen gets what the state gives them. What China is doing today has no more to do with Marxist Communism, than what Reagan was doing in 1980. Communism died with Mao.
The cost he refers to, is the fact that as more and more resource, wealth and power get's tied up in corporate systems, what remains for the rest of humanity diminishes by orders of magnitude and the access to the essentials of life will ultimately come at the whim of corporations, ultimately oppressing humanity. That would in fact be a cost. If you've been sleeping since 2008, you might have noticed a little bit of of that already going around.
How about leaving some of the necessary resources of life accessible to human beings vs the commodity bots trading and selling our futures half a globe away... what ISM is that? How about Localism? or Humanism? or maybe even Moralism? You seem to have a red hot poker stuck someplace dark about having some clod in government say what you can and can't do, but put that same Bozo in a three piece suit and make him a CEO and now all that black is white. By all means, share with me your logic?
Welcome to the "Surplus Population", repeat after me "E X P E N D A B L E". The carbon recycling units are in the back, please take a number.
Finally, somebody who's awake!!! Yes... You're future is going to be delightful... as long as your bank account has a number with 9 or more significant zeroes behind it. Otherwise it will suck to be you. Find a nice defensible island, bring 50 of your closest friends. Install the solar and the water purification systems now, you won't be able to afford them later. Get ready for the party, it should be a knee slapper!
If it happened all at once, yeah sure. Try on this thought experiment. You disappear the middle class and begin cutting social services at all levels of government. The first to go will be the sick and the elderly. Criminalize the mentally ill and the folks who try to circumvent the system. Create a powerful system of surveillance and invent all kinds of new crowd control technology including pain rays, remote controlled drones, you know the works. As your prisons begin to fill, privatize them and put the people there to work, keep growing the prisons to get larger and larger populations under control. Keep tightening the noose a little at a time. Get folks to fight neighbor against neighbor. As people lose their savings, homes, retirements, they begin to look at the few remaining with those things with envy and anger. So they go after teachers and firemen, because they still have pensions when the private sector is forces to subsist on beans and franks or worse dog food. All the while the economy is resizing, changing to meet the changing population and demographics. Do it slow, over what say 50 years. Starting say in 1980.
All the while, the ones in power, the ones with everything, keep squeezing society out like a tube of toothpaste, one sklitch at a time. Finally, its all robots, growing food, and rubbing feet, and making certain that everything in the gated community is just lovely. As the last bit is squeezed from the tube and the last folks outside the preserves go the way of the dodo, the army of robots cleans the world to a shiny polish and that remaining 144,000 enjoy heaven on earth. And everyone lives happily ever after.
You clearly don't understand where robots are headed. Most robots are large, single duty, heavy duty machines on assembly lines. That's changing. With 3D assembly, an inexpensive, flexible use robot that can do MANY things, in fact, virtually infinite many things, suddenly puts the robot where you would ordinarily put people and soon in places people can't go. Robots will do it faster, cheaper, more repeatably, with little or no waste. People can't possible compete with what's coming.
Think of as a Chinese puzzle box. You don't get in all at once. You slide this piece to the right, then you move this other piece up, then over which allows the next piece to move. All of which get's you to where you ultimately want to go, inside the box. Let's look at a different problem. Its 1980, you're very wealthy, from 5 generations of very wealthy, and you see the world going towards a dark place. You consider the possibility it could even threaten the future of your family's wealth and power... Jebus forbid! So you need to fix what's going wrong. There are too many people. There is going to be shortage of resources. This will lead to war, famine, possible global pandemics as folk venture further and further into rain forests and the viruses that live there. So how are you going to manipulate the system to reduce the population, concentrate the wealth, hijack global governments and economies and make absolutely certain that you and yours are going to remain safe behind an impenetrable wall of power and resources. Welcome to 2012. Any questions?
Friend, we've been nailed to rails for 30 years, go look at the tax rates, go look at the changing composition of federal taxes. go look at where wealth has accumulated, go look at where the debt now lives. Go look at the global growth and influence of the corporation over the 30 years. Government and Corporation have become one. Some sign of the very things you propose should have shown up 20 years ago. What has shown up instead, is that the wealthy now own the game and all the pieces on the board. Go look at the news headlines today. Poverty has reached the highest rate in the United States since 1965 and the entire middle class is in grave danger of sliding into an economic abyss.
The DOW soars while humanity suffers. Business is doing just fine, only its sick. Because its made of people and the people aren't doing very well. The only one's truly making out are at the very top.
If... scratch that, when machine replace all of us in the work force (and that day is coming faster than you can possibly imagine), and they are generating unimagined wealth, who will benefit from that wealth. You or me? I don't think so. The future is writ big, and the hand on the quill is the privileged hand of a wealthy man. Unless you are already a billionaire, and I don't know, you may be, I think we'll be sharing a spot in line at the carbon recycling center. Or have you any bright ideas of why those who hold power so tenaciously now will be so generous later as to risk 7,000,000,000 unnecessary carbon units to walk around and cause trouble? I've climbed high and I see where your road leads friend. There may well be a heaven of technology with a resurrected Ayn Rand there to greet you, but the community is gated and the price to get in is going to shock you, and the place outside won't be fit for a dog.
Y'all have this religion around the "Free Market" but you won't even grant that human beings "game" the systems in which they play. That's what we do. We lie and cheat and steal, and if we can wiggle the machine without hitting tilt, you better believe we do it. You're a programmer. Shame on you. You understand the process of reducing problems to stronger and stronger linguistic metaproblems, refactoring and symbolically refining ideas to powerful fulcrums upon which to rest huge abstractions. Create any free market and people will game it. Its what we are. You're living in a religious bubble, and your ignoring physical reality. The only way to fix this is putting back in the checks and balances, applying effective zero sum games that manage the worst in being human with just enough wiggle room to allow us to express the best. The 2012 Atlas hasn't shrugged. He's crushed the world to dust, taken the wealth and bought Olympus with it. Wake up!
We are looking at the end of all isms. The real problem is that technology amplifies. Our society has always been geared towards plutocracy, but as each new technological explosion shocks what's possible the forces grow ever more extreme. We can still put compassion and equality back in the equation, be we are fast approaching a social event horizon, the passing of which will determine either a future worth lining in, or one so terrible, that its darkness barely allows description. I for one prefer the prior, but that would require that we all stand up and demand better.
You don't know what you're talking about. A robot recently had its concerto performed to a large public gathering. In the very new future, most of the news articles you read will be written by robots. There are scientist busily working at how human being functions at the cellular level in their brains and are busy building machines to duplicate that behavior. We will all to soon be dealing with a whole raft of machines that pass the Turing Test on all levels.
There isn't a job that human beings currently do, that a machine in 20 - 40 years won't do better. That's all jobs that human beings can do. The only human beings who will compete with those machines will be people who are so heavily augmented, that calling them human will be a serious semantic contortion. I wish this were science fiction, but you don't even have to dig, to see the research in all these areas is very well along indeed, and just like the genome project that they first predicted would take a 1000 years, got completed in 6, and can now be done in a day, the distance from here to there is shockingly short. You my friend are not even vaguely prepared for whats coming. The truly pitiful part, is that you have so much company.
Yes, but poverty during the 60s had reached levels that society deemed was unacceptable (significant populations of people in the deep south dying from starvation), so Johnson instituted a social security net, a series of programs designed to address profound poverty and prevent people in the richest nation in the world from enduring unacceptable hardship. That's the net of which I speak, and the poverty that came before it.
You aren't getting the picture... wages will drop to "0". When a machine moving 300 mph, can do a human's job for $0.0004 per hour, explain to me what kind of job you're going to hire people for at $0.0003 per hour, and how they simply won't be laid off when the next machine upgrade renders them all obsolete. As for all those evil programs... don't worry, you're about to get your way. The folks who want to starve government to death, have done a magnificent job. National. State and City governments are going insolvent all over the planet, or haven't you been reading? All those social programs will go away soon enough when there is no more money to support them. Everything will be privatized... the magic panacea of folks who don't seem to notice the apples in their mouths and the sprigs of parsley up their nethers. That's not a bathtub SlingBlade, that's a roasting pan.
See there was this magical time about 60 years ago, when businesses actually provided these crazy things call PENSIONS. When you worked, your company invested a little in your future, so when you wanted to retire, you had some certainty, that you won't die cold and miserable on the streets. The TAX rate back then, was over 95% for those making millions, and they still got rich, lived great lives and the average Joe owned a house, sent his kids to college, and the wife stayed at home raising the kids. Debt was unheard of. Now the wealthy have us burning down the state capitols, because "HOW Dare they give those greedy union worker pensions, they should starve in their dotage like the rest of us!" And you clowns can't even hear how pathetically ridiculous you sound. You've let people with wealth and power rob you of even your last shreds of dignity, and now we turn on one another for the last crumbs of human decency. I can't even begin to tell you how appalled I am by watching this. Stop swerving. Look over the hood and see your final destination. The road we're on takes us someplace where there is no middle class. You and I are among the expendable 99.9% Please for the love of Jebus, get a clue.
You make the mistaken presumption the wealthy will try to preserve an excessive populations... My guess is once the average weight of the 99% reaches 400 lbs through cheap, fast food, they'll render us all down as a new fuel source... sort of like Nazi Germany will the benefit of being green. I read a letter by a freed slave to his master, who wrote him and asked him to come back and save his failing plantation. Eloquent, and surprisingly humorous in a biting acerbic way. Point is, our master is a lunatic. He is thoroughly ungrateful, and he means us harm. You best sort out how you're going to deal with his ill intent, because he has every intention of to pitting neighbor against neighbor. To paraphrase Franklin "We must hang together or we'll surely hang separately."
There is a profound difference between being a snob, and being informed. That average America High School graduate can't find Iraq, the place we've been fighting for the last decade, on an unmarked map of the Middle East. In fact, a significant number of them can't find their own frigging country on an unlabeled world map. We've been training the last two generations to respond in a Pavlovian fashion to our owner's commands through little boxes in our living rooms, on our desks, and in our pockets. Why do you think Rupert Murdoch just bought up a bunch of newspapers in the United States? He's going take their names, move them to the internet, design then to regurgitate his zombie control signal (as is currently being broadcast on FOX) and we'll lose a trillion more collective IQ points.
Education doesn't make you a snob. It teaches why bovine fecal matter is in fact bovine fecal matter. This doesn't work to the benefit of those who want a docile and compliant mouth breathing society of sheep ready and waiting to be sheered.
SO, let's make education above the bare minimum completely unaffordable for the average Joe... OH my goodness look at the recent tuition rates and the elimination of grants and scholarships... and by all means, the ones that understand the power of education, lets make certain they never get out from under the thumb of the wealthy by imposing endless debt on them... the interest rates for school loans will soon be in the credit card range. What part of any of this is unclear to you? Talk to smart people. Learn what you should be concerned about. Asteroids? Not so much? Rising climate change, absolutely, do something now, but we're boned over the next century no matter what. The wealthy and powerful fixing the population problem by extincting 90% of us? BINGO, give the boy a free cigar! That one. That's the one you should be looking at. People with too much money and power, with no clear understanding what's possible for humanity, making unilateral decisions about the future of humanity, based on information from the 80s, before the capacity to even understand what technological miracles might be available by 2050. That is our biggest threat, and speaking for a lot of smart people, its where I personally would put a great deal of my unspent clocks right about now. Of course you could always go to a Monster Truck show instead.
Automation will ultimately replace everyone... there will be no job a robot can't do better, faster, more accurately and more repeatably, than a human being. AI will replace people in thinking jobs, and cheap mechanical muscle will replace people everywhere else (DARPA is investing in the next generation of robots as we speak.)
The benefit of all this amazingly powerful and inexpensive labor COULD go to the general population, who could be issues stock at birth, whose growing dividends would keep them in flat screen TVs and hot dogs until dotage, while those few creative folks who wanted more could create art which the rest would consume and so they could afford life extension and beach front homes. That would be the hope, the utopian plan.
Perhaps you've been in coma for the last 30 years... In simple fact, the United States has the largest "Poor Population" since 1965 (the date of the invention of the social security net) and the number is growing fast. You can check it out for yourself over on Google News, its one of today's headlines. The wealth has all been shoved into the vanishingly small ultra-ultra-rich, and the middle class is falling off the table. The advent of displaced work, through exploding automation means the incredible wealth generated will make the already obscenely wealthy godlike, and the rest of us should get ready for that Ethiopian Diet, I here its gonna be the new craze in the Midwest... sporting about a 100 lbs of ugly fast food lard? We can fix that real fast. No soup for you!
I think bankers are now referring to the 99% as "The Expendables". All the new crowd control technology, the use of remote controlled and robotic drones. Buying at Target is quick gaining a new and dark meaning. My friends, we wrest back the helm of state, or we suffer what comes next, all indications so far suggest the people pushing the buttons are neither compassionate nor skilled at sharing. To hell with Skynet, its the Richnet that makes my hinny pucker.
I stand corrected, the only flight to happen on 9/11 was delivering antivenom to Miami. The Bin Laden family however was flown out of the U.S. on a 747 from Miami on 9/19 while all other air traffic in the country was in full lock down and the FBI new the plane had be chartered by Osama Bin Laden. The White House managed all authorizations. You can read more about it here.
There you go, a legal filing with an obviously bogus patent (a patent with obvious prior art, that can't stand up under reasonable examination) should disappear the patent, force the one filing the suit to cover all court and legal costs for both sides, and if any harm is done to the business sued, result in triple damages against the filing party.
Call the law T-RAID, T-RAID kills trolls dead!
I'm think its time for game players everywhere to create inflammatory content of the officers of these patent trolling companies performing unnatural acts with the religious leaders of radical Muslim states. Provide addresses, place of employment, and a lot of derogatory uses of the prophet's name and likeness. Stir up a real hornets nest and then toss them into their respective yards. Play a game called "Spin the Fatwa". Let's invite these pigs to a luau as the guests of honor.