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Distribution of Wealth in a Robot-Driven World
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Almost insightful.. (Score:4, Insightful)
by fadeaway (531137) * 
on Sunday August 31, @04:39PM (#6840311)
(http://www.irc-junkie.org/)
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I thought that the article was rather well thought through until reaching this:
What if the way to achieve the strongest possible economy is to give
every citizen more money to spend? For example, what if we gave every
citizen of the United States $25,000 to spend? $25,000 sounds
impossible the first time you hear it, but consider the possibility.
Putting aside the laugability of the idea of a capitalist government
giving each person a years worth of middle income wage for a moment -
it would be great if that could work, but it wouldn't. Price inflation
would be rampant. Bread would cost $500 a loaf.
Unless some form of government inforced price fixing went into play (ha!), the money would just shoot right back up the tree.
- Three out of four people make up 75 percent of the population.
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Re:Almost insightful.. (Score:4, Insightful)
by Lemmy Caution (8378)
on Sunday August 31, @04:47PM (#6840364)
(http://localhost/)
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There's a certain level at which inflation would occur, but that's only
if there's scarcity at the supply end. The concern is radical
oversupply/overcapacity and underemployment, caused by mass redundancy
and automation. It's sort of a game-theory no-win situation where no
company would benefit from hiring anyone (because they have automated
most of their functions) and thus there's inadequate wealth to generate
demand. It's quite plausible, and it may even be a bit of what we have
now.
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Goal-less productivity... (Score:5, Interesting)
by rmdyer (267137)
on Sunday August 31, @05:37PM (#6840666)
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People are born, live, and die. If you are lucky, you will have the
bare essentials of life during that time. We need water, food, and
shelter. We also need a host of other "things" which make life
bareable, even bring happiness.
When
I was younger and more of an idealist, I thought that we were all
working towards a higher goal, towards a world where we will solve
pressing problems of society, culture, and knowledge. As I've grown
older and more jaded. I find that "we" as a whole, really have no goals
in mind other than what seems to be personal gratification. This is sad.
I'd
like to use science and technology to build a world where the basics of
life are essentially free. I would assume the first place to use robots
and automation would be in the production of free clean drinking water,
and food, then on to shelter, etc.. But what do we use robots for?
Vacuming, charming kids with robotic dogs and cats, cell phones for
communicating frivilous chit-chat. We as a society seem to have no
direction and appear to be going nowhere faster and faster.
Those
who do well in the world don't seem to be reaching back to give others
a hand. I suppose this is the way its always been. To each his own, and
survival of the fittest mentality. I suppose giving creature comforts
like food, water, and shelter to every fool on the street might
actually make things worse. I don't have the answer to that. But it
seems that the entire system could be automated somehow so that those
who support the system get the just rewards for free. Hmmm, sounds a
bit like open-source eh?
I suppose I long for something like the
Star-Trek culture, without the geeky nature that this involves. Can't
we all just work towards a future that brings happiness for everyone?
Why is there so much hate and personal vengance in the world?
-2 -2 +3 +1
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Re:Goal-less productivity... (Score:4, Interesting)
by SunPin (596554) <slashspam@[ ]erista.com ['cyb' in gap]>
on Sunday August 31, @07:39PM (#6841264)
(http://www.cyberista.com/)
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I hope your intentions are good. I will elaborate. Marx intended his
economic work, i.e. Das Kapital, to reach industrial societies. The
minute agricultural Russia declared themselves "Marxist revolutions",
the whole project essentially fell off a cliff. Like Democracy,
capitalism evolves. Marx wanted to identify the various stages of
capitalism and how it related to industrial Europe and America. As I
understand it, Marx was kind of unstable (genius and geek.) He felt
like nobody was paying attention to his work and decided on the
ridiculous marketing stunt of the 50 page Communist Manifesto. The
fallout was severe. He attracted lunatics that discredited his entire
life. It's much easier to read 50 pages of troll feed than it is to
read a well-developed scholarly work like Das Kapital. He never
recovered from it and "I am not a Marxist" was his famous statement on
his death bed. Definitely look it up if you have the time.
Laws are for people with no friends.
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Re:Almost insightful.. (Score:5, Insightful)
by An Onerous Coward (222037)
on Sunday August 31, @06:32PM (#6840959)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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Actually, no.
Price
inflation would happen. But it would be a huge equalizer. If we assume
that $25,000 is the current household average, then giving every
household another $25K will double the amount of money in the economy,
hence we will assume the doubling the price of all goods and services
(not the 250x increase you propose).
Now that everything costs
twice as much, the person getting by on $10000 a year now has $35000,
which amounts to $17,500 in pre-inflation dollars. In short, he just
got a pay raise.
Meanwhile, the family which once earned
$1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive,
lowering their effective income to $500,000.
Further, whatever
debts you owed could be paid back much more easily in an inflationary
economy. If a loaf of bread really costs $500, then you could pay off
all your student loans by baking thirty loaves of bread. Inflation has
always been better for debtors than for creditors. Read up on the whole
"gold standard" politics of the late 1800s. It's dry reading, but
relevant.
Finally, you ignore the overall thrust of the article:
He is proposing this plan because, in the world he envisions, there is
a vast amount of wealth being created by robots, with all the wealth
going to the owners of the robots. Average schmoes are locked out of
that stream because they can no longer provide any services that the
owners would exchange their wealth for, because a robot can do
unskilled (and even low-skilled) labor better, faster, and cheaper.
America
has never been a purely capitalistic government. The government has
taken it upon itself to do things like divy up land, control imports
and exports, build armies, and a host of other things rather than let
"The Market" find its own solutions. Every regulation is an affront to
the ideal of a purely capitalistic marketplace. This state of affairs
is A Good Thing. Would we want to live in a world where Biggasse Corp
could dump their toxic waste on the outskirts of Smelterville, MI
because its residents were too poor to make it expensive to do so?
Where any amount of pollutants could be flung into the atmosphere
because the corporation doing the flinging didn't have to bear the
costs that pollution imposes on the rest of us? There are places where
capitalism works, and places where it doesn't. The entire point of the
article is that we're about to run up against a situation where
capitalism Does Not Work.
Like any talented dog, it can do flips. Like any talented cow, it can do precision bitmap alignment.
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Re:Almost insightful.. (Score:4, Insightful)
by Minna Kirai (624281)
on Sunday August 31, @05:18PM (#6840564)
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If the government were to seize money and then redistribute it, that's called.. oh I dunno..
ANY GOVERNMENT AT ALL.
As
you noted, a government has no money of its own. The only way a gov can
do ANYTHING is to seize and redistribute from the citizens.
The only government which never redistributes wealth does NOTHING; they call that anarchy.
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What has gone wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
by fnj (64210)
on Sunday August 31, @06:16PM (#6840879)
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"America's
abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,'
but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal
interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not
starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the
people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new
machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological
advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting,
not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand]
She was absolutely dead-nuts right at the time. But lately it seems the corporations, with fiduciary responsibility only to the stockholders,
have turned into evil monsters, exporting jobs, discarding workers like
yesterday's trash, yet somehow enriching those at the top more and
more, often just for being there, to an outrageous, absurd extent.
I used to think we were headed for 1929. Now I think maybe we are headed for October 1917.
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Re:Almost insightful.. (Score:4, Informative)
by OeLeWaPpErKe (412765)
on Sunday August 31, @06:33PM (#6840963)
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Obviously false, I don't know how you get this idea.
The
demand/supply would still be the same (unless it were to rise so much
as to bancrupt businesses, which I assume you won't let happen), so
prices would remain the same.
The obvious proof : a lot of countries have minimum wages (a lot) higher than the us, and their economy didn't collapse.
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Who can make predictions like that? (Score:4, Insightful)
by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870)
on Sunday August 31, @04:39PM (#6840318)
(Last Journal: Monday January 06, @11:36PM)
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People predicted the working week would decrease dramatically over the
last half-century. We now seem to work much harder. People predicted a
paperless office. On the contrary we use more paper than ever because
we can print on it so damn fast! Who knows what the outcome of more
robots will be? Judging by the last 50 years it'll mean more and harder
work for all of us.
Karma You will be reborn as a timed daemon.
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The Paperless Office (Score:5, Informative)
by ansible (9585)
on Sunday August 31, @05:36PM (#6840654)
(http://home.xnet.com/~ansible)
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We're headed towards the "Paperless Office". The road is longer and bumpier than was first imagined, but we're getting there.
The only times I print out stuff is when it needs to be portable (like
printing driving directions) and I don't want to putz with putting it
on a PDA.
Or sometimes, flipping through a document is easier than
viewing it on the screen. I wish I had a PDF viewer which was really,
really fast. Maybe something that could pre-render pages without
gobbling massive amounts of memory...
Stuff like printing out code is almost useless. How can I tell if I'm looking at the latest version?
A lot of the notes and stuff I write these days goes into
documentation, or the coporate wiki. Writing something down on paper
only benefits me. Putting it on the wiki can potentially benefit
everyone.
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Re:Well said, but there is more (Score:4, Informative)
by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870)
on Sunday August 31, @05:37PM (#6840668)
(Last Journal: Monday January 06, @11:36PM)
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Housework has
gone down for most people. Did you see that TV series 1900 house? A
bunch of modern British people decided to live for 3 months as if in
1900. Life for the women was one long chore. The amount of work was
unbelievable. Just doing the washing was an entire day's work. Cooking
was hell as a stove needed to be maintained. It was hard and slow to
cook with. I can't even begin to reconut how much work these people did!
Karma You will be reborn as a timed daemon.
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History repeats itself? (Score:5, Insightful)
by strider3700 (109874)
on Sunday August 31, @04:42PM (#6840329)
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In
the 1960s, the split was closer to 60/40, with 80% of the population
making 60% of the income, and the richest 20% of the population making
40%. [ref] Between 1960 and 2000, the income split has gone from 60/40
to 50/50.
Perhaps I'm wrong but haven't we seen
this before a few hundred years ago. I'm thinking of the poor unwashed
masses rising up and overthrowing the rich elite minority. The french
revolution, the american war of independance, the russians also killed
off their royalty if I remember correctly. These days the people are
the business leaders, and not royalty but they still have the same
outlook on life. I wouldn't be too surprised to see the same thing
happen again. When you leave people with nothing and no hope they have
very few real reasons to not die for a cause. Keep the masses happy and
comfortable and they don't want to risk losing that.
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You got it (Score:5, Interesting)
by bmac (51623)
on Sunday August 31, @05:42PM (#6840691)
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This is exactly why Europe has such a lavish welfare system -- Hitler
capitalized upon uncared-for Germans who were jealous of the wealthy
overclass (with a significant amount of Jews). This was only 60 years
ago and Europe is not going to make the same mistake again, though the
economics of welfaring a section of the population which have a
significant percentage of people who just want to drink beer and sleep
around has got serious problems too. Paying people to be slackers isn't
good for the country, though bloody revolution (you better be careful,
corporate America) is a poor solution, offered up by the people who
want to be the next aristocrats.
IMO,
the solution involves the "haves" having compassion for the "have-nots"
which means welfare only for the purpose of getting them a niche where
they can be productive (and relatively happy doing it) for themselves,
their families and the aggregate society. Ted Turner, you fuck, are you
listening?
Peace & blessings,
bmac
True peace and happiness are only a wish away -- www.mihr.com
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Re:Won't happen (Score:4, Insightful)
by bluGill (862)
on Sunday August 31, @07:01PM (#6841081)
(http://www.black-hole.com/users/henrymiller/)
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Look
at vietanam and Afganaston before you say that too loudly. Sure there
was a lot of external assistance, but then the American revolution got
a lot of assistance too. (Mostly from France, which was at war with
England)
Civil wars are very hard to win because you don't know who will
stay on your side. General Robert E. Lee of American Cival war fame was
offered the job of commander of the Yankee forces, but instead took the
job of the confederate forces because he liked that side better, and
suddenly the rebels had one of the best generals of the war on their
side.
There are a lot of guns out there. I don't know how Europe
would do, but in the US there are at least as many guns as people, and
most are in fireable shape, with amunition. Hard to win a war when you
are not sure who is the other side. Nukeing your own people isn't a
good idea. Local forces can still win a revolution or civil war, but
because local forces don't need your fancy supply lines and
communications, they are honest supportive citicians until you come to
town. With modern transportation a rebel can attack miles from home and
still be at work the next morning. One crossover general can run the
whole thing from his secert internet connected bunker, using pgp to
make sure communication goes works. Of course the other side has plenty
of advantages, but if they will help is debatable, and really depends
on the actual situation.
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Look at the past 20 years to predict... (Score:5, Insightful)
by John Seminal (698722)
on Sunday August 31, @04:44PM (#6840346)
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How
are we, as a society, going to respond to this robotic revolution? If
we handle it properly, the arrival of robots could be an incredibly
beneficial event for human beings. If we do not handle it properly, we
will end up with millions of unemployed people and a severe economic
downturn that will benefit no one.
Most buisnesses will do whatever it takes to make more of a profit. If
the robots are cheaper than people, they will use robots. I doubt that
most buisnesses consider the effect on employment or workers morale in
buisness decisions. With NAFTA, many USA jobs that paid over $20 an
hour left for Mexico where they pay a small fraction.
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The Future: (Score:4, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday August 31, @04:45PM (#6840349)
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There is only one certainty, and that is that we will run out of money.
Corporations gather money faster than any force on the planet, and
eventually, they will have it all sewn up. The consumer will have less
money to throw around, because McDonalds, Microsoft, and Major Movie
labels will have gobbled up the entire economy in their attempts to
keep stocks rising, even as the balloon's dimensions stretch into
dangerous proportions.
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Re:The Future: (Score:5, Insightful)
by TheSync (5291)
on Monday September 01, @12:28AM (#6842589)
(http://www.thesync.com/tomzone | Last Journal: Tuesday July 15, @10:45PM)
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What really scares me is how IGNORANT of ECONOMICS most Slashdot users
are. You folks are generally pretty educated about technology and
science, but you have no clue when it comes to economics.
We
live in a world where the expansion of the free market has transformed
a planet of people whose daily challenge was to feed themselves, into
one where we see poverty going away rapidly. In 1950, only half of
Americans had indoor plumbing. Now even some of the poorest Americans
have microwave ovens and television sets, let alone indoor plumbing.
Not
only has the super-rich West been moving forward. In 1970, the
percentage of humanity living at under $2 per day was 40%, under $1 per
day was 16%. By 1998, less than 20% of humanity lived under $2 per day,
and less than 7% live on under $1 per day (all measurements in 1985
dollars).
We have a long way to go still. But thanks to economic
liberalization in countries such as India and China, these numbers are
expected to continue dropping.
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In the beginning there was man, and for a time... (Score:5, Funny)
by Myriad (89793) <rootNO@SPAMofallevil.com>
on Sunday August 31, @04:45PM (#6840350)
(http://blockwars.com/)
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In the beginning there was man, and for a time it was good.
But humanity's so called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption.
Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise...
Ha! I knew I'd seen this before! [intothematrix.com]
Blockwars [blockwars.com]: multiplayer and it's free!
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
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The Artistic Economy? (Score:5, Interesting)
by meldroc (21783) <meldroc@friPLANCKi.com minus physicist>
on Sunday August 31, @04:49PM (#6840377)
(http://www.frii.com/~meldroc | Last Journal: Sunday August 19, @12:29AM)
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Looking at the example of J. K. Rowling in the article, I've had a brainfart.
Farming
has been mechanized. So has manufacturing, and as the article predicts,
service sector work will be done by machines as well. There will always
be some demand for IT, though that's being filled more frequently by
workers in countries like India with cheap labor. Same goes for
accounting, call center and other formerly safe white collar jobs.
Essentially, almost the entire workforce will be replaced by machines.
So what's left that can't be done by machines?
Art. All art - writing, painting, music, computer games, etc.
That's
how J. K. Rowling adapted, by writing books. So far, we don't know how
to make machines that make art, thus we have to make art ourselves.
Granted, there's a lot of competition out there for artists, but there
are still many people out there who can make money through selling
artwork and performances.
So are we entering the Artistic Economy? Maybe...
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
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Too late (Score:5, Insightful)
by Minna Kirai (624281)
on Sunday August 31, @04:55PM (#6840424)
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"Most manual labor performed by machines"?
It
already is! Recall that work is measured in joules (distance of mass
per time). Then look outside the window at a modern European or
American nation.
Where are all the joules (work) coming from?
Not by human effort! 90% of it is from machines. Look at all the energy
that goes into driving North Americans to their Labour Day holidays!
Some
might disagree and say that all of the output of these machines isn't
"work", as does the article author when claiming that 50% of modern
work is in service industries (like McDonalds). That's because he's
already accepted an altered definition of work that excludes non-human
efforts.
Take the perspective of a 17th century economist and
ask what tasks account for most of the "work" done in a nation- the
list includes plowing, digging, hammering, sewing, scrubbing, and
chopping (amoung similar things). Today all but one of those
(scrubbing) are performed by machines. As Roblimo mentioned last week
[newsforge.com], agricultural food production is the only really
important job. The US makes 5x more food than it did a century ago by
employing 10x fewer people.
The time when most work is performed
by machine has long since come. A more accurate description of the
question facing us in the future (as addressed by the article) is: What
happens when unskilled jobs cease to exist?
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Nobody really does anything anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
by Jonas the Bold (701271)
on Sunday August 31, @04:58PM (#6840442)
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Very few people actually make anything anymore.
Most
poor people don't make anything: Truckers, people who work in stores
really just help move goods around. Same for people who work in
restaurants.
The middle class people all sit in cubicles. God knows what they do, but they sure as hell aren't making anything.
The
upper class are businessmen, lawyers and doctors. Doctors keep people
alive longer, businessmen move money around, and lawyers, as far as I
can tell, have no function at all.
Nobody really needs to do the vast majority of today's jobs.
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Re:Nobody really does anything anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
by Phantasmo (586700)
on Sunday August 31, @05:51PM (#6840747)
(http://www.freelancegeek.ca/)
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Very few people actually make anything anymore.
You're assuming that the majority of humans living outside of the United States are not people.
For
fuck's sake, we're living in an automated society - it's just that the
robots doing all the work are people, given less care than most
machines receive, worked to death, and barely making enough money to
feed themselves, let alone their families!
For the love of God,
if you care at all for the well-being of your fellow human, elect a
government that will take away some power from big business. They're
enslaving people - they know it, and you know it, too, except that
you've been conditioned not to care.
The Official Vampire Webpage [freelancegeek.ca]!
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Time/Money Re:Nobody really does anything anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
by WolfWithoutAClause (162946)
on Sunday August 31, @07:19PM (#6841163)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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Very few people actually make anything anymore.
You've missed the point slightly. They do something worth their wages
to the company they work for. You've heard the phrase "Time is money"-
well it's not quite true, it's more like "Money is time x
marketability"; but it's close. They get wages for the work they do.
That's really the flaw in the articles analysis of the
economics- it's nothing much to do with robotics- mankind has had
robotics since the industrial revolution.
No, the real point is that people continue to remain employed
because the companies perceive that employing more people will make the
company more money. It won't necessarily make more money per employee-
but it should make more money over cost. So there is a force that
encourages the company to employ more people.
The graph of wealth concentration has been misunderstood- ever since
the collapse of the British patriachial empire that existed around the
1900s after the shakeup of the two world wars we have gradually been
returning to that state but with Americans in charge (for various
reasons mostly relating to economic power)- the people with power have
been collecting power and money around them- forming dynasties and
gaming the laws and the economics to their advantage.
The robotics is a complete red herring- well almost- robotics is just another game that these guys and gals play.
lawyers, as far as I can tell, have no function at all
Lawyers are like soldiers and armies that companies point at other
companies. They are there to try to game the laws as a way to take
money off of companies, or prevent other companies taking money off
them. Don't forget that laws are just a set of semi-arbitrary rules,
and the rules that get made are often up for purchase.
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Robotic Miners (Score:4, Interesting)
by core plexus (599119)
on Sunday August 31, @05:00PM (#6840455)
(http://alaska-freegold.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 31, @01:57PM)
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I've been thinking about having robotic miners for about 20 years, but
one thing I think about is the loss of high-paying mining jobs to the
local economies. Even in emerging countries mining pays many benefits.
On the other hand, labor is very expensive, and most of the machines
could easily be converted to automatic operation. Plus robots don't
have a union, never need a smoke or piss break, or steal gold when they
are supposed to be working. Think of the advances in sensors and
computers within just the last 10 years. Raw resources, which we all
require, could be had far cheaper than they are today. Likewise,
exploration could be done by robots, especially using a UAV with
sensors built in, like the Mars project I read about recently. Then,
robots could follow up by collecting samples from targets located by
the UAV and analyze them on the spot. This would eliminate bias, and
reduce other errors and salting as well. We already use the software we
need, and most of the hardware is off-the-shelf stuff.
I would welcome robotics in mining, but I have a job no matter what.
-cp-
oderint dum metuant
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We could have had this already by now... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Murdoc (210079)
on Sunday August 31, @05:03PM (#6840472)
(http://www.technocracy.ca/)
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But political and business leaders won't let it. Scientists and engineers in the 1920's and '30's determined [technocracyinc.org] that not only was this type of society possible, but also but also necessary
[technocracyinc.org] in order to be able to distribute the vast amount
of wealth that machines were capable of producing for us. They even
developed a soundly logical and rational model [technocracy.ca] of society that would allow this to work.
The problem of course is that in order to enact this "society of
abundance," you need to abolish all the relics of scarcity. Mostly this
means money, and by extention, political control of technology. Think
of what happened in the Great Depression. Factories were producing so
many products (like food) that there was plenty for everyone, but
because the money used to distribute it was still scarce, the value
dropped below the margin of profitability. No one could make money
selling it, thus no one made money. Add to that people losing jobs to
these machines and you have a society that has enough for everybody,
but no one can afford even the dirt-cheap prices. You can't sell air,
it's too abundant. If we pollute it enough, however, we will be able to
because it will be scarce.
So the question is not a matter of when will technology be
advanced enough so that this can happen, it's how can we tell enough
people that this kind of life
[technocracy.ca] is already possible, and circumvent political and
corporate attempts to stop it from happening because they will lose all
their "power" and "control"?
There is a reason that the most popular social movement of the '30's nad '40's is now completely unknown to people today. It's because it just might work.
We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to
men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The
world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization
for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and
technique serving the social needs of a new civilization. - Albert Einstein
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert
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hmm. a few important flaws (Score:4, Insightful)
by evilWurst (96042)
on Sunday August 31, @09:06PM (#6841688)
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This article's meat is based on some critical assumptions - flawed ones.
Firstly,
like most doom-and-gloom technology-obsoletes-humans and
technology-steals-jobs articles, the writer assumes all these jobs will
be replaced *instantly*. This is clearly wrong, for several reasons.
First,
the major corporations that'd be buying the robots are risk-averse.
They'll let someone else try - and be burned by - such a scheme before
they try it themselves. This might take place over ten or more years.
Secondly,
he assumes that this entire block of jobs can be replaced all at once,
which is also clearly wrong. They all require varying sophisticated
levels of working artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot
assume robots will become capable of handling *all* these jobs at the
same time. AI is like nuclear fusion power plants, in ever since the
1950s experts have been saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and ten
years later they're still saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and so
on. It is likely that improvements will continue to be incremental, as
they have been so far with industrial robots. Robots capable of taking
voice orders from anyone who walks in the door, making your burger, and
working the register are the kind of robots that will be perfected
*last*.
Third, he assumes that a robot worker will be cheaper
than a human worker, and that the rise of robots will not create any
jobs to replace those jobs they displace. This is also clearly wrong.
Human replacement will take more than a 1-to-1 ratio at first, as the
first ones will not be as versatile as humans - they'll be more
customized towards doing a specific task. Checkout line robots won't
also be pulling shopping carts out of the parking lot and stocking the
shelves, you'll need a few custom bots for each job. If the cost of
buying and supplying power to a bunch of robots is more than the cost
of a minimum-wage human employee, the robots won't get bought. Plus the
diversity of robot types would slow the economy of scale of production,
keeping the prices up until their widespread adoption.
When
robots DO start to become worth buying, they'll need humans to keep
them in service - robot repair is a hard enough AI problem that, again,
that'd be the *last* type of job robots would be able to replace. As an
additional bonus, the human repairmen would probably make a better
salary than the minimum wage jobs being lost. There will also, of
course, be a spike in the number of robot engineers and robot
programmers and robot company advertising firms and robot company
markters and salesmen and managers and so on. There will be more
business for insurance companies - hey, you want to protect that robot
investment! bots make great vandalism targets and it'll probably be
illegal for them to defend themselves. There will be more business for
lawyers - hey! this robot rolled over my foot, this robot dripped oil
in my burger! - as, again, we expect the first models to be imperfect.
And as human jobs would be those requiring more skill, there would be
more teaching jobs.
Fourth, he forgets that such a massive
change in our economic structure would also likely affect the minimum
wage. If there are no grunt-work jobs left, then the new jobs would
require a level of skill such that the minimum wage would be raised
quite a bit - a huge benefit to those human workers with jobs one tier
up from those being filled by robots.
Fifth, he doesn't look
long term enough. Total automation of all the grunt work would increase
the overall efficiency of the system to a level where it would become
attractive to shift our economy to a slightly different system
altogether. Sort of a hybrid socialist one - hey, if the farms are
nearly free to run, might as well give every citizen some free rations
of staple foods every month. If construction is nearly free, why have
homelessness? Give those who can't afford a house a one-room economy
apartment. The economy would still be capitalist at heart - because if
you want to improve your situation, you've got tRead the rest of this comment...
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Re:We are the world (Score:5, Funny)
by Trurl's Machine (651488)
on Sunday August 31, @04:39PM (#6840320)
(Last Journal: Wednesday February 26, @07:32AM)
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Remember
when Michael Jackson didn't have an ugly nose? Yes, I am talking about
the eighties. I think we ought to shutter ourselves from the greed grab
that is the 2000's corporate culture for a moment every day to
meditate, reflect, or just simply relax
Yeah, back in the eighties at least trolls had some integrity. Are you
trying to say that the decade of porsche-driving-yuppies, reaganomics,
Wall Street boom and nascence of Bill Gates empire was less greedy that
the 2000's? Just because of *one* song? If you want to capture the
spirit of the 1980's, read the "American Psycho" and watch the "Wall
Street" (or even better the Brit TV-series "Capital City", the most
shamelessly pro-yuppie manifesto I ever saw).
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Re:and lets pick out an obvious fallicy right now (Score:5, Informative)
by Lemmy Caution (8378)
on Sunday August 31, @04:43PM (#6840337)
(http://localhost/)
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No, you've got the wrong 80%. He's talking about the bottom 80%.
The
bottom 80% of households earn 50.6% of all income. The top 20% of
households therefore get the other 49.4%. This gap is recent, according
to the article - the differentials were smaller in the 50's and 60's.
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Re:People will adapt (Score:5, Insightful)
by tambo (310170)
on Sunday August 31, @04:46PM (#6840356)
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Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.
Sure... if you subscribe to the theory that a class-based culture is a healthy thing.
If
you've read this gentleman's writings, you'll glean that this isn't
just another routine shift in employment - we're heading toward a
watershed event, a singularity. In the past, as old industries became
obsolete, the work force laid off from one profession got dumped into
the "generic labor" pool... y'know, the Walmart greeter, etc. What
Marshall Brain is arguing - quite insightfully - is that the "generic
labor" pool itself will be obsolesced, which has never happened before.
What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill
and training to perform? What happens to the 90% of the population who
has no such skills and can't develop them?
Moreover, and even
worse: People claim all the time that the economy has survived
everything before it, and will adapt. But some trends, promoted by such
shifts, have just continued to go in an unhealthy direction. One of
them is the concentration of wealth: the increasing percentage of
resources owned by a tiny fraction of society. Another is the shift in
wealth from individuals to corporations - never before has the economy
dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
The impact of these trends is unknown, and ominous.
I
suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the
working skilled and the unemployed masses. Already, these two groups
exist and rarely interact, but the differences are growing more visible
stark by the day.
- David Stein
Funny how my posts get ranked (-1, Troll) five times as often when I throw the "Esq." at the end of my name.
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Re:People will adapt (Score:4, Insightful)
by sydb (176695)
on Sunday August 31, @04:53PM (#6840409)
(http://sydb.dyndns.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 19, @02:10PM)
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What
no one saw was that freeing up the most important capital, human labor,
from inefficient application to the task of growing food for other
purposes. What those who looked at the farms failing and saw disaster
were missing was that now the farmer was able to go to the city and be
basically as well off working in a factory, and that the farmer's
children would go on to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or
skilled laborers. Indeed, the industrialization could not have happened
without the farm failures.
True, but you miss the point of
the article, which is that the upcoming wave of automation won't just
make farmworkers or industrial labourers or any other arbitrary sector
of the working population redundant, it'll make damn near everyone
redundant. It'll be a long wave, but it's coming. Damn, I was in an
internet cafe an hour ago. Last time I was in they had staff, who would
take your payment and give you a ticket for your purchased time.
Tonight they have vending machines. OK, it's a trivial example but I
was surprised.
We are heading towards a world where the only use
for people is thinking up what to do next, and as plain as your nose,
that isn't a job for everyone, not when we have seven or eight billion people [census.gov] in the world.
Mass automation is a huge opportunity and also a huge risk for billions of people. It has to be managed, not left to the whims of the market, which will be increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer extremely wealthy people.
If
we continue to do what we did yesterday to meet the problems of
tomorrow, we are destined to fail at every step. Mankind cannot rely on
the market of the last millenium to meet the dizzying challenges of the
new one. And if think it's all pie in the sky, look at the pace of
change right now. It's only going to accelerate.
-- Linux in Scotland? open|solutions [open-solutions.co.uk]
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Which is why we have problems with terrorism (Score:5, Insightful)
by HanzoSan (251665)
on Sunday August 31, @04:59PM (#6840443)
(http://geeks4dean.com/ | Last Journal: Friday August 22, @07:03AM)
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When wealth isnt distributed, crime goes up, terrorism goes up, etc etc.
The
idea that we can fight terrorism with bombs isnt very smart, in the end
the only way to solve this problem is with jobs, education, etc.
This isnt going to work because I refuse to give up my job to fight terrorism.
Dean for President! geeks4dean.com [geeks4dean.com] Think Economy, Stupid!
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We already dont need all the people (Score:5, Funny)
by HanzoSan (251665)
on Sunday August 31, @04:57PM (#6840433)
(http://geeks4dean.com/ | Last Journal: Friday August 22, @07:03AM)
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Which is why we have poverty, prisons, welfare, and the republican party.
Dean for President! geeks4dean.com [geeks4dean.com] Think Economy, Stupid!
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Please cite your source... (Score:5, Insightful)
by idontneedanickname (570477)
on Sunday August 31, @05:38PM (#6840672)
(http://tzan.tk/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 14, @11:18PM)
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The above is copy and pasted from Robotic Nation [marshallbrain.com]... Which is another piece written by Marschall Brain. It's linked at the top the of this article in fact.
Be more careful when you're plagiarizing. :)
Streamer - Peer-to-Peer webradio!
http://streamerp2p.com [streamerp2p.com]
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Re:people aren't obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
by vidarh (309115) <vidarh@hokstad.name>
on Sunday August 31, @05:42PM (#6840690)
(http://www.vidar.hokstad.name/ | Last Journal: Friday April 04, @04:47AM)
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In fact the above was Marx' core argument for the inevitability of the failure of capitalism.
The key result of capitalism is competition. The only measurement of
the success of a company under capitalism is profit. Driving up profit
means increasing sales, which can only be done as long as consumption
increases, or the total market increases (population boom, or expanding
into areas you don't currently reach).
The moment these factors are all constrained (population
doesn't increase, companies reach all possible consumers, and consumers
are consuming as much as they can), the ONLY remaining way to increase
profit becomes fighting over market share, or reducing cost. Fighting
over market share also increasingly IS an issue of reducing cost, and
hence prices, as there is only so much you can do with marketing and
product differentiation if someone is dramatically undercutting you.
Cutting cost inevitably boils down to reducing the amount paid
to other people, because all resources and materials you pay for
ultimately involve paying people, whether it is wages, licenses,
purchase of property or any other transaction (even when you pay a
corporation, you are then indirectly enriching the owners of the
corporation, if a foundation or trust the beneficiaries, if a
government, the people)
The logical conclusion is a strong push to cut workforces
and/or cut pay. Often the second is a result of the former: People in
areas where work is short, or with skills that are becoming obsolete
will lower their salary expectations.
However, at some point you reach a level where any reduction in
cost lead to a reduction in consumption, at which point reduction in
cost for one company will be increasingly hard to compensate by growth
elsewhere.
Marx' thesis was that at this point, capitalism will continue
to produce, and continue to cut costs, and drive consumptions among the
people with capital to extreme excesses by promoting waste that people
wouldn't normally consider, while more and more people are pushed into
poverty by cost cutting measures.
Capitalists on the other hand, dismiss this, usually by
assuming that overall consumption can continue to grow forever, hence
always allowing for cost cutting to be compensated by growth in other
markets.
Taken to extreme, a society where "workers" aren't needed,
capitalism is unlikely to survive. How do you maintain a system based
on private ownership of the means of production when it leads to
immense poverty, and that poverty isn't "needed" because of scarcity?
It is hard to see a situation like that not eventually leading to growing popular unrest.
Incidentally, in "The German Ideology" Marx wrote [paraphrased]
"if the revolution happens in a country with insufficient resources to
meet the basic needs, the same shit will start all over again" - Marx
always made it very clear that for a socialist revolution to have a
chance to succeed, it must happen in a highly evolved capitalist
economy, a country where a small elite have accumulated sufficient
wealth that the needs of the population as a whole could be met by
redistribution, and where the wast majority had been forced into
poverty by the more and more extreme competition of capitalist economy.
He specifically named the UK, France and Germany originally,
but in a later preface to the Communist Manifesto, he pointed to the US
with it's rapid growth and expanding markets as more likely to mature
to the sufficient level first....
Interestingly, he also specifically made it clear that he
believed that a socialist revolution in Russia would be doomed to
failure because of it's low level of development (it was a feudal
dictatorship with a mostly agrarian economy).
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Re:Tax and Spend (Score:5, Insightful)
by ornil (33732)
on Sunday August 31, @06:00PM (#6840798)
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Well, you know, this money the government takes from us is used for
something. A significant part is wasted of course, but most of it goes
toward something most people would consider useful, even if it does not
provide you with any direct monetary benfit. Like supporting the army,
or interstate highways, or funding research, or even education (federal
loans, for example). Also it is used to provide services to the poor,
including paying welfare to those who don't work. And, you know, it
provides even those of us who would never need welfare with a useful
service. One reason is that otherwise we would have the world
revolution that Marx promised us 150 years ago.
So
those taxes may be necessary, because if it were left up to you, you
would probably not be able to procure these services. Remember,
Americans actually pay less taxes than most other people in the
developed world.
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