I recently went to a tech conference where they talked about all the advances AI have made and how it’s likely that most human jobs will have disappeared within the next few decades due to automation.

How would that work? If nobody can work then nobody has any money. If they have no money then they can’t buy things. If they can’t but things then, it doesn’t matter how productive or cheap the goods get as a result of automation. Companies will have nobody to sell to and would go bankrupt. How would say, Amazon, or McDonalds function if 60 plus percent of its consumer base became destitute? There wouldn’t be all the exchanges of money and capital to make it work. It’s not just going to be one industry but a vast swath of humanity rendered unnecessary and without worth. But wouldn’t it probably hurt a lot of companies that are aimed at selling to a mass market?

There is only like 2 paths i could see.
1) Robot uprising
2) union uprising

Id assume if robot tech became so advance that the majority of people had no jobs then id assume it would mean everything would be dirt cheap enough to make a legitimate welfare country work. i which people whom still worked (such as doctors, lawyers, and the robot maintenance slaves) would be taxed an appropriate amount to allow everyone to have a livable allowance. optimistically allow those that dont work to explore non robot work like the arts.

but id assume that would fail miserably

 Desubot wrote:
There is only like 2 paths i could see.
1) Robot uprising
2) union uprising

Id assume if robot tech became so advance that the majority of people had no jobs then id assume it would mean everything would be dirt cheap enough to make a legitimate welfare country work. i which people whom still worked (such as doctors, lawyers, and the robot maintenance slaves) would be taxed an appropriate amount to allow everyone to have a livable allowance. optimistically allow those that dont work to explore non robot work like the arts.

but id assume that would fail miserably

Well we can’t all make money as Twitch video gamers?

I mean Iam an accountant and I ve started joking that Iam gonna end up writing that fantasy novel. I mean they showed a picture at the tech event of an accountancy practice next to a Blockbusters....

Yeah I think the state would be put under massive pressure to intervene and companies would lose the ability to argue that they are spreading wealth around the economy because, they won’t. I mean if it’s going to be bad in the West it will probably be even worse in countries like China or India.

Oh yeah what i said was mostly to apply to the USA and maybe EU

but god help them in the east if the robot uprising comes.

 Desubot wrote:
There is only like 2 paths i could see.
1) Robot uprising
2) union uprising

Id assume if robot tech became so advance that the majority of people had no jobs then id assume it would mean everything would be dirt cheap enough to make a legitimate welfare country work. i which people whom still worked (such as doctors, lawyers, and the robot maintenance slaves) would be taxed an appropriate amount to allow everyone to have a livable allowance. optimistically allow those that dont work to explore non robot work like the arts.

but id assume that would fail miserably

Aye, the first problem is economies of scale doesn't work in this situation. There is no incentive to produce goods cheaply because nobody can afford to buy anything because nobody works. Because nobody buys anything, the economy ceases to exist. Because there is no economy, there is no tax revenue. Because there is no tax revenue, there is no way the government can give people a basic income. And because there is no need to produce goods cheaply, there is no need for a robot workforce. So hyper efficient robots defeat the purpose of their own existence.

Doctors and Lawers aren't good examples of jobs that would still be around if there was no need to work. The people who have that experience, well they still have no personal incentive to continue to work because they don't need to to survive. And there would be no incentive for people in the future to become Lawyers and Doctors. Why do 10-15 years of additional schooling when there is no benefit in it for you? Same thing for the people who maintain the robots. What incentive do they have to do that work?

Now, if you solve the problem of necessary jobs not being filled by giving special privileges to anybody who does do them you create additional problems. Now you most likely have a massive pool of applicants who want these special privileges, but only a tiny amount who can actually be given them. This creates a disgruntled class of people who have/want to have the technical skills and privileges afforded to those who have them, but are denied them by the governing authority. This would most certainly lead to a revolution tearing down this Dystopia in short order.

Universal Basic Income also completely destroys the Middle class, and mostly destroys the Upper Class. Middle Class individuals will most likely not qualify for the UBI, meaning they'd still have to work. However, the work they do doesn't get them the full value of what their income says they get. They're only earning what they get above and beyond the UBI. So if the UBI for a country is set at $20,000/year. And a middle class person is earning $30,000/year. He is effectively only working for $10,000/year. All that effort he is putting into providing a better life for himself and his family is only worth $10,000. However, he could choose to simply not work at all and just receive $20,000 for free. So the real question is is it worth working a job for a paltry $10,000/year above what you could get for free? Probably not. Everybody would have to ask themselves this question, and most people would probably choose to simply not work and receive the free money.

Eventually, we'd have an economy where the only jobs that existed were ones which paid significantly above the UBI. However, these same jobs would also be taxed at insane rates to pay for that UBI, while still leaving enough take-home $ to keep the job attractive. Afterall, if nobody will work for less than $1,000,000 a year, but the tax rate on anybody bringing in $1 million is 70%, then nobody will work jobs that pay less than $3.3 million. But the tax rate on $3.3 million is probably more than 70% soooo...

It literally only works if the Government abolishes money entirely, but also forces people to do the few jobs the system needs to continue. Slaves in all but name. "You citizen! You have been selected to become a medical professional. You have no choice but to endure 20 years of schooling so you may become a Doctor. After this, you will not have the 24/7 leisure time that all of your other fellow citizens enjoy, but rather will have to report for duty at a medical facility for 30 hours a week. As everybody in this society is equal, you will receive no additional privileges for this in compensation so as not to create unrest"

Yes, capitalism will continue to function.

Essentially the same thing will happen that's happened every other time there's been an advance that's rendered jobs redundant, the economy will alter, there'll be growing pains, new jobs will arise either directly from the advance (robot maintainence and repair) or the changes in people's lives will bring about a revision in the value of commodities meaning careers that aren't viable now become so, and others become much broader as the demand increases.

Basically board game designers become the new rock stars.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Yes, capitalism will continue to function.

Essentially the same thing will happen that's happened every other time there's been an advance that's rendered jobs redundant, the economy will alter, there'll be growing pains, new jobs will arise either directly from the advance (robot maintainence and repair) or the changes in people's lives will bring about a revision in the value of commodities meaning careers that aren't viable now become so, and others become much broader as the demand increases.

Basically board game designers become the new rock stars.

If robots become intelligent enough they would be able to maintain themselves and perform all of the service functions that humans perform. That would literally just leave entertainment, the arts and basically anything where we want to see people. I mean they just did a documentary on an Amazon warehouse and it’s basically Jane who rubber stamps what the machine does and cleaning up when it goes past the orange line. How long will those be jobs?

I can certainly believe that because growing up in the 90s, something like an Alexa would have been unthinkable, science fiction, not for another 100 years and now Iam being told in all seriousness that there’ll be sentient AI in my lifetime. They will very likely be able to perform any job and would displace all labour.

The previous industrial revolutions never displaced that many people and new jobs weren’t immediately filled by automated units. It bears no comparison. The ludites complained about a drop in their role from craftsmen to low wage labororers slaving in factories. But at least they had jobs and could benefit from the drop in the cost of living from everything getting cheaper.

Yes, it will continue to function. Just like it did when we created any new technology that streamlined work.

"Muh robots" has been something the Socialists have leaned on for like 2 years now, and it's a tired old argument, IMHO.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Yes, it will continue to function. Just like it did when we created any new technology that streamlined work.

"Muh robots" has been something the Socialists have leaned on for like 2 years now, and it's a tired old argument, IMHO.

Firms developing the technology to market are not socialists. They were very honest that the role of accountants would change to being essentially an overseer who rubber stamps what the AI do as they work and having all the admin replaced by chatbots. All you need is a robot to figure out how to open the mail and put them into a scanner and that’s about it.

It’s streamlining work atm because they’re still experimental and rudimentary. You need all the IT people and watchers on hand because the systems keep failing, breaking or people just don’t know how they work. But the direction is going one way and that’s the displacement of human labour.

I’ve seen one debate where several technologists advocated the position that this would be a good change and it almost entirely relies on a naive assumption that once people are free from the menial tasks of life, much like when people stopped subsistence agriculture, you’ll see a flourishing of productivity in culture, art and this will somehow keep 60 percent of the population employed....

We can’t all make money making cat videos and writing novels....

In society where working stops being the norm, a productivist economy isn't possible anymore. If let's say 30% of the jobs available to people can be replaced or simply abolished thanks to better tools, automation and new technologies, the system can't really support itself. The "dangerous" part is when the work, even the hard work, of some people remains or becomes even more essential to maintain a society's living standard and a large portion of the population simply doesn't have the aptitudes take upon those jobs. If nearly nobody needs to work since almost everything is automated and rest can be compensated by small mandatory, weakly rewarded, periods of work, a stable form of economy can exist. The hard part is the transition from a society where everybody works like crazy and to a society where work is this occasional thing you do half for fun. In my opinion, a form of basic universal income provided by the "taxation" of automation productivity and that of the remaining working class is going to be necessary. The working class itself will make more money then the idle (or near idle) one despite having to pay taxes. Requirements for the idle class to invest some of their time in community work (like organising cultural events, help children in school, occasional support to the working class in some limited capacity) and maybe even in politics and governance (a more direct form of democracy and governance would be possible and even necessary at that point to maintain a free society). So basically you would have working machines, a rich class of administrator, enginneers, scientists and service providers and a idle, but politicaly more involved but poorer class. That's the best I can envision so far. Capitalism, socialism, representative democracy, productivism are all dependant on a number of factors and conditions to remain operational and efficient. The political and economical system of the next two centuries are probably going to be different to ou current ones and unseen in previous human history. You can expect the transition to take at least a few decades and be punctuated by episodic violence, reactionnary politics and even outright war, but changes will occur.

Please remember that dakka does not allow discussion of politics so please steer this conversation away from that area.

Thanks,
ingtaer.

Something is gonna have to give, somewhere.


Either A. we keep progressing technologically, and replace all labor with robots/programs, making 80% of the population reliant on government assistance.


Or B. we realize that things cannot continue and keep automation strictly for recreational purpose's and factory work.

Or C. we keep progressing, and replace labor with automation, and have a civil uprising from the 80% of the population who have become slaves to the system.

 Desubot wrote:
There is only like 2 paths i could see.
1) Robot uprising
2) union uprising

3) High taxation socialist government.

Increased automation doesnt kill employment it shifts it. Unions are not a problem, unemployment is. high unemployment leads to socialist governance. This might not be able to create many jobs as automation will be globalised and foreign robots will be cheaper than local humans, it can however lead to a dilettante society relying on service industry and what is left heads to the hard left (or right).

All I can say is I'm VERY glad I chose not to have children. I just don't see a good future for upcoming generations anymore.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Something is gonna have to give, somewhere.


Either A. we keep progressing technologically, and replace all labor with robots/programs, making 80% of the population reliant on government assistance.


Or B. we realize that things cannot continue and keep automation strictly for recreational purpose's and factory work.

Or C. we keep progressing, and replace labor with automation, and have a civil uprising from the 80% of the population who have become slaves to the system.

D. Those in power employ a small military to beat downe the masses, possibly use them for organ transplants or entertainment and as a way of terrorizing the necessary workers into acceptance a life a little less gakky than theirs. Basically a hunger games future.

This is essentially what would have to happen in Ayn Rhand's (SPIT!) "Atlas shrugged" world. The masses aren't going to just quietly starve, they're going after the "elite" and will either crush them or be crushed by them. In fact the hunger games would almost be a sequel to atlas shrugged.

No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Not without universal basic income support.

Or universal health care ... or you get the picture.

About as likely to happen in the western world as an Australian cricket team win without cheating ...

Azreal13 wrote:Yes, capitalism will continue to function.

Essentially the same thing will happen that's happened every other time there's been an advance that's rendered jobs redundant

Adeptus Doritos wrote:Yes, it will continue to function. Just like it did when we created any new technology that streamlined work.

It's not a comparable scale of change. Arguably, it's the most substantial shift since metalworking. It's not just a change that can streamline work, it's one that means that labour is no longer the basis for economics. The result might be the same, but it's not 'just another minor shift'.

I agree, it's not comparable to earlier advances in the workplace at all.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I agree, it's not comparable to earlier advances in the workplace at all.

I was watching a talk about this specifically in regards to the games industry/3D design work the other day, and it was genuinely bizarre. Like, the guy doing the talk was striking a very "Oh no it'll be fine, it's just like transitioning from 2D animation to 3D animation, it's still animation yeah", and then at the end he cheerily presents a slide with the predicted fallout of AI & machine learning on the field with a "So yeah, it's cool, only the boring menial repetitive work will be done by AI, extremely skilled people or people who do small-scale niche work that it's not worthwhile to automate will be fine", and people started clapping. And I'm like; why the feth is nobody standing up and shouting that the jobs supported by those "boring, menial, repetitive" tasks are like 80% of the fething industry?! But no apparently those people will just magically find higher level jobs at thousands of new micro-companies or something...

The real problems with the looming decimation of employment are unfortunately ones that're not easy to solve - ego, and inability to grasp scope. Everyone with a good job now thinks their work is just too vital and difficult and creative for a mere machine to do, or firmly believes that even if their job does get automated they can easily just retrain into something new. Hah, aye, if you want to see how the latter of those works in practice, have a wander through the socioeconomic wasteland of Britain's post-industrial regions sometime. Further, even the people capable of grasping how automation is going to impact their own industry seem to be utterly incapable of grasping that this shift is not going to occur to only their industry. Losing 80% of the workload in the games industry can be made to sound brilliant, because in the context of our economic system as it presently exists, that's just freeing all those wage-slaves to go off and use this wonderful new technology to make their dream games as small indie studios, right?

But the point is that context won't exist any more, because the shift would be happening in almost every industry.

Frankly it's getting to the level of climate denialism - predictions are made, and one by one they come true, and with every new validation the defenders of the status quo just shift their goalposts. "Socialism!" they cry, even as giant uber-capitalists like Musk and Bezos admit steps will have to be taken to prevent a collapse. "Alarmism!" they bleat, despite most people who're highlighting the issue merely insisting we acknowledge the problem and try to put together a workable solution rather than burying our heads in the sand and trusting Daddy Markets to figure everything out. Sadly we can't actually discuss any of the potential solutions here because that would be "political", so the Ostriches can continue to paint their opposition as unreasonable and we can't argue the point.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I agree, it's not comparable to earlier advances in the workplace at all.

I was watching a talk about this specifically in regards to the games industry/3D design work the other day, and it was genuinely bizarre. Like, the guy doing the talk was striking a very "Oh no it'll be fine, it's just like transitioning from 2D animation to 3D animation, it's still animation yeah", and then at the end he cheerily presents a slide with the predicted fallout of AI & machine learning on the field with a "So yeah, it's cool, only the boring menial repetitive work will be done by AI, extremely skilled people or people who do small-scale niche work that it's not worthwhile to automate will be fine", and people started clapping. And I'm like; why the feth is nobody standing up and shouting that the jobs supported by those "boring, menial, repetitive" tasks are like 80% of the fething industry?! But no apparently those people will just magically find higher level jobs at thousands of new micro-companies or something...

The real problems with the looming decimation of employment are unfortunately ones that're not easy to solve - ego, and inability to grasp scope. Everyone with a good job now thinks their work is just too vital and difficult and creative for a mere machine to do, or firmly believes that even if their job does get automated they can easily just retrain into something new. Hah, aye, if you want to see how the latter of those works in practice, have a wander through the socioeconomic wasteland of Britain's post-industrial regions sometime. Further, even the people capable of grasping how automation is going to impact their own industry seem to be utterly incapable of grasping that this shift is not going to occur to only their industry. Losing 80% of the workload in the games industry can be made to sound brilliant, because in the context of our economic system as it presently exists, that's just freeing all those wage-slaves to go off and use this wonderful new technology to make their dream games as small indie studios, right?

But the point is that context won't exist any more, because the shift would be happening in almost every industry.

Frankly it's getting to the level of climate denialism - predictions are made, and one by one they come true, and with every new validation the defenders of the status quo just shift their goalposts. "Socialism!" they cry, even as giant uber-capitalists like Musk and Bezos admit steps will have to be taken to prevent a collapse. "Alarmism!" they bleat, despite most people who're highlighting the issue merely insisting we acknowledge the problem and try to put together a workable solution rather than burying our heads in the sand and trusting Daddy Markets to figure everything out. Sadly we can't actually discuss any of the potential solutions here because that would be "political", so the Ostriches can continue to paint their opposition as unreasonable and we can't argue the point.

Since you mentioned an industry close to mine and misrepresented the impact of increased automation let me tell you what automation really changes in creative fields: 30 years ago, design tasks were completed basically by pen and paper and there was an upper limit to level of detail that could be achieved in a given amount of time. Then computers came and the level of detail that could be achieved in the same time shifted, but it did not made designers obsolete or dwindle in numbers, it upped the required level of detail per hour of work. Then things like content aware tools and other automatic workflow improvements happened and instead of spending an hour to free form select a motif I spend 10 minutes on it ant spend the rest of the hour on producing the image further - e.g blending it in with the background to a much better level than before - a standard level now would be a master level a decade ago. To keep it relevant to tabletop gaming forum - just compare how tokens looked like in Dark Millenium and how they look in Urban Conquest - the amount of time both took to prepare for print is pretty much the same. In reality, I can now make a lot more money per hour of work than I could do a decade ago.

There is also this totally unbacked idea, that any job can and inevitably will be cost efficiently automated and that we will achieve the ceiling in desired quality of products/services in all areas and rest there - in other words, that the automation fills in some kind of preexisting and enclosed space of available and necessary jobs. The opening question of this topic is flawed by this - yes, we don't know how a fully automated economy would look like, but we don't really have to ask this question, as we do not know how and if such level of automation can be achieved in the first place. And nothing really seems to back up inevitability of such conclusion.

One other example from a completely different craftsman field. My friend is a tailor, a quite "common seamstress" kind of tailor. 30 years ago her "career" would be in large clothing factory. But since then globalisation of markets moved this whole industry to the east and technological improvement made competing with large companies in making T-shirts totally unviable (and this area in itself is very resistant to full automation). But at the same time, this same globalisation caused reduction of cost of basic clothing and enabled people from even lower middle class to seek tailor made clothing, so now she can make a living making custom corsets and historical gowns, and because such tasks won't ever be automated or even upscaled, there is a whole lot of room for her fellow tailors to go down the same route - she is hardly alone in it.

Another example: increased availability and cost efficiency of power tools between steam powered workshops era and modern times is so huge, that entry level into carpentry dropped nearly to the floor level - you can start this line of work as soon as you have a garage and money for your first "single use and throwaway" level of tools. IKEA furniture is of course cheaper and mass produced in vast amounts, but I know of no one, who prefers laminated cardboard table over a sturdy wooden one once he can easily afford it. You can now make art noveau level of complexity furniture using hand held tools in fraction of time that was needed those 100 years ago, or use affordable CNC machining to start small scale serial production of those with relatively small investment.

If anything, the recent globalization made a come back of craftsman trades possible, and craftsman trades are not high level jobs, they were a mainstay of human economy for centuries.

From the top of my head, just looking around my apartment I can see a lot of fairly low skill level jobs that won't ever be automated - finishing works, plumbing, electrical works, central heating stove service and maintenance, making and installing built in furniture etc... Robotics is so far from being able to even remotely compete with human labor in those areas that it isn't even funny to contemplate automated services in those areas.

nou wrote:

There is also this totally unbacked idea, that any job can and inevitably will be cost efficiently automated and that we will achieve the ceiling in desired quality of products/services in all areas and rest there - in other words, that the automation fills in some kind of preexisting and enclosed space of available and necessary jobs. The opening question of this topic is flawed by this - yes, we don't know how a fully automated economy would look like, but we don't really have to ask this question, as we do not know how and if such level of automation can be achieved in the first place. And nothing really seems to back up inevitability of such conclusion.

One other example from a completely different craftsman field. My friend is a tailor, a quite "common seamstress" kind of tailor. 30 years ago her "career" would be in large clothing factory. But since then globalisation of markets moved this whole industry to the east and technological improvement made competing with large companies in making T-shirts totally unviable (and this area in itself is very resistant to full automation). But at the same time, this same globalisation caused reduction of cost of basic clothing and enabled people from even lower middle class to seek tailor made clothing, so now she can make a living making custom corsets and historical gowns, and because such tasks won't ever be automated or even upscaled, there is a whole lot of room for her fellow tailors to go down the same route - she is hardly alone in it.

Another example: increased availability and cost efficiency of power tools between steam powered workshops era and modern times is so huge, that entry level into carpentry dropped nearly to the floor level - you can start this line of work as soon as you have a garage and money for your first "single use and throwaway" level of tools. IKEA furniture is of course cheaper and mass produced in vast amounts, but I know of no one, who prefers laminated cardboard table over a sturdy wooden one once he can easily afford it. You can now make art noveau level of complexity furniture using hand held tools in fraction of time that was needed those 100 years ago, or use affordable CNC machining to start small scale serial production of those with relatively small investment.

If anything, the recent globalization made a come back of craftsman trades possible, and craftsman trades are not high level jobs, they were a mainstay of human economy for centuries.

From the top of my head, just looking around my apartment I can see a lot of fairly low skill level jobs that won't ever be automated - finishing works, plumbing, electrical works, central heating stove service and maintenance, making and installing built in furniture etc... Robotics is so far from being able to even remotely compete with human labor in those areas that it isn't even funny to contemplate automated services in those areas.

Your doing a fine job of critiquing an assertion that creative and craft industries are going to be wrecked by automation, but that's an assertion that nobody really makes and they're a relatively small market. The big things - bulk manufacturing, data entry, call centres, service industry etc - they're where the jobs are going to vanish.

Similarly, you're convincing when you say that robotics isn't about to become more effective than human labour at things like plumbing, internal wiring, boiler repairs, or building furniture in situ. Again, however, people don't really suggest that robots are about to replace people in performing dexterous tasks like in The Jetsons. It's software, production line robotics, and simple customer-operated machines that are argued to be about to annihilate work as we know it.

nfe wrote:

nou wrote:

There is also this totally unbacked idea, that any job can and inevitably will be cost efficiently automated and that we will achieve the ceiling in desired quality of products/services in all areas and rest there - in other words, that the automation fills in some kind of preexisting and enclosed space of available and necessary jobs. The opening question of this topic is flawed by this - yes, we don't know how a fully automated economy would look like, but we don't really have to ask this question, as we do not know how and if such level of automation can be achieved in the first place. And nothing really seems to back up inevitability of such conclusion.

One other example from a completely different craftsman field. My friend is a tailor, a quite "common seamstress" kind of tailor. 30 years ago her "career" would be in large clothing factory. But since then globalisation of markets moved this whole industry to the east and technological improvement made competing with large companies in making T-shirts totally unviable (and this area in itself is very resistant to full automation). But at the same time, this same globalisation caused reduction of cost of basic clothing and enabled people from even lower middle class to seek tailor made clothing, so now she can make a living making custom corsets and historical gowns, and because such tasks won't ever be automated or even upscaled, there is a whole lot of room for her fellow tailors to go down the same route - she is hardly alone in it.

Another example: increased availability and cost efficiency of power tools between steam powered workshops era and modern times is so huge, that entry level into carpentry dropped nearly to the floor level - you can start this line of work as soon as you have a garage and money for your first "single use and throwaway" level of tools. IKEA furniture is of course cheaper and mass produced in vast amounts, but I know of no one, who prefers laminated cardboard table over a sturdy wooden one once he can easily afford it. You can now make art noveau level of complexity furniture using hand held tools in fraction of time that was needed those 100 years ago, or use affordable CNC machining to start small scale serial production of those with relatively small investment.

If anything, the recent globalization made a come back of craftsman trades possible, and craftsman trades are not high level jobs, they were a mainstay of human economy for centuries.

From the top of my head, just looking around my apartment I can see a lot of fairly low skill level jobs that won't ever be automated - finishing works, plumbing, electrical works, central heating stove service and maintenance, making and installing built in furniture etc... Robotics is so far from being able to even remotely compete with human labor in those areas that it isn't even funny to contemplate automated services in those areas.

Your doing a fine job of critiquing an assertion that creative and craft industries are going to be wrecked by automation, but that's an assertion that nobody really makes and they're a relatively small market. The big things - bulk manufacturing, data entry, call centres, service industry etc - they're where the jobs are going to vanish.

Similarly, you're convincing when you say that robotics isn't about to become more effective than human labour at things like plumbing, internal wiring, boiler repairs, or building furniture in situ. Again, however, people don't really suggest that robots are about to replace people in performing dexterous tasks like in The Jetsons. It's software, production line robotics, and simple customer-operated machines that are argued to be about to annihilate work as we know it.

Not exactly - cloth manufacturing and furniture manufacturing examples were specifically presented as huge areas of industry, that largely resist full automation. Even car production, an often invoked example of mass, automated production lines, still require a lot of production line workers for assembly stage. Ones of the biggest production lines that exist nowadays, that of final assembly of mobile phones, are still 100% human labor. Automated call centers may be valid for relatively simple languages like english, but even with such languages a task very intuitive for humans - that of asserting positive/negative tone of sentence - is still evading grasp of any AI, and a lot of modern data sources rely on gathering and mining common language.

And to be clear - I'm not debating, that job market won't evolve or that number of total job openings will remain at the same level forever. What I argue is that discussing an extreme scenario of all but the most specialist jobs being wiped out by automation is futile, as this very likely won't ever happen and that exact extreme scenario is the topic of the thread.

However, what is IMHO worth discussing are those particular areas, that are at the brink of full or large enough scale automation. And the biggest one of those is transport and logistics field, especially because they are dominated by male workforce and with "gender wars" climate in the west we are in for a very bumpy social change just around the corner. Far before any serious talks about universal basic income and collective ownership of fully automated global production are even remotely necessary.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
One more thing to add here - this is something that western countries haven't really experienced on the comparable scale, so the fear of unknown may be substantially higher there than it is here. After transformation of '89 not one, not a couple, but pretty much every large scale production plant here collapsed, because they were all technologically obsolete and relied on over employment - that is a situation comparable to mass automation of certain areas we are discussing here. There was a huge problem of both total and structural unemployment during a decade that followed, but 30 years forward we actually have to import workforce because despite all that modern optimization of production we don't have enough hands to work and we are now at historical lows of unemployment (basically we are at the level of natural unemployment nowadays, even accounting for mass migration of our skilled and unskilled workers to the UK or Germany we have already exceeded those numbers in immigration). Are some of that jobs "trash tier" or without perspectives? Hell yes. Is there a problem with demand for higly skilled but low wage jobs and no adaptation of the market to correct wage expectations? Hell yes, But we do not have any hint of automation making people obsolete, far from it.

nou wrote:

Not exactly - cloth manufacturing and furniture manufacturing examples were specifically presented as huge areas of industry, that largely resist full automation.

Yes, but your examples to demonstrate the opposite are of specialist, niche, and expensive variants which categorically are not things people say are going to be automated. The big, low-mid range mass producers are.

Even car production, an often invoked example of mass, automated production lines, still require a lot of production line workers for assembly stage. Ones of the biggest production lines that exist nowadays, that of final assembly of mobile phones, are still 100% human labor.

I'm a little confused here. No one is saying these places have already been taken over by automation, but that they are at risk of (or present potential for, depending on your point of view) automation. The fact that one of the biggest areas of employment on the planet is a production line operation is the problem, not a refutation of the problem.

Automated call centers may be valid for relatively simple languages like english, but even with such languages a task very intuitive for humans - that of asserting positive/negative tone of sentence - is still evading grasp of any AI, and a lot of modern data sources rely on gathering and mining common language.

Sorry either I've been unclear or you've misunderstood me. I'm not saying that we're going to have conversations with AIs, I'm saying we wont be ringing at all because we'll do the entire operation online without speaking to anyone.

One more thing to add here - this is something that western countries haven't really experienced on the comparable scale, so the fear of unknown may be substantially higher there than it is here. After transformation of '89 not one, not a couple, but pretty much every large scale production plant here collapsed, because they were all technologically obsolete and relied on over employment - that is a situation comparable to mass automation of certain areas we are discussing here.

It really isn't the same. Mass collapse of large employers has happened everywhere at some point. This is of an order of magnitude that is not comparable. Literally billions of people are at risk of being replaced. If your job is based on repeated, simple actions or processing data according to consistent rules, you are at risk.

nfe wrote:

nou wrote:

Not exactly - cloth manufacturing and furniture manufacturing examples were specifically presented as huge areas of industry, that largely resist full automation.

Yes, but your examples to demonstrate the opposite are of specialist, niche, and expensive variants which categorically are not things people say are going to be automated. The big, low-mid range mass producers are.

Even car production, an often invoked example of mass, automated production lines, still require a lot of production line workers for assembly stage. Ones of the biggest production lines that exist nowadays, that of final assembly of mobile phones, are still 100% human labor.

I'm a little confused here. No one is saying these places have already been taken over by automation, but that they are at risk of (or present potential for, depending on your point of view) automation. The fact that one of the biggest areas of employment on the planet is a production line operation is the problem, not a refutation of the problem.

Automated call centers may be valid for relatively simple languages like english, but even with such languages a task very intuitive for humans - that of asserting positive/negative tone of sentence - is still evading grasp of any AI, and a lot of modern data sources rely on gathering and mining common language.

Sorry either I've been unclear or you've misunderstood me. I'm not saying that we're going to have conversations with AIs, I'm saying we wont be ringing at all because we'll do the entire operation online without speaking to anyone.

One more thing to add here - this is something that western countries haven't really experienced on the comparable scale, so the fear of unknown may be substantially higher there than it is here. After transformation of '89 not one, not a couple, but pretty much every large scale production plant here collapsed, because they were all technologically obsolete and relied on over employment - that is a situation comparable to mass automation of certain areas we are discussing here.

It really isn't the same. Mass collapse of large employers has happened everywhere at some point. This is of an order of magnitude that is not comparable. Literally billions of people are at risk of being replaced. If your job is based on repeated, simple actions or processing data according to consistent rules, you are at risk.

The topic is vast and language linear, so there are many confusions here. Some of modern industries (examples given - furniture making, assembly lines, clothes production) are still human labor based because they are too hard to fully automate at any reasonable cost despite all existing advances in automation that indeed affect other areas of production to smaller or larger extent. Not everything can be turned into fully automated soda bottles production lines. And none of those industries mentioned are at the imminent risk of being fully automated and those are not only examples available.

After '89 polish transformation total unemployment rates rocketed by about 15 percent points in just three years. That is comparable to succesfull and full automatization of a single large undustry. And as to "biggest area of employment being production line operation" - I don't have global data, but in Poland all production (that encompasses all kinds of production, be it low scale craftsman or high scale line assembly) comprises about 30% of all jobs (with just a little more than half of entire workforce in that area working in companies larger than 250 people), with services being the at nearly 60% and agriculture is the last 10%. Of those in services, most jobs in Poland are in education and health care. In light of all the hard data I really think I can sleep soundly and not be afraid of waking up in a fully automated world anytime soon.

And regarding call centers - it doesn't matter if you write or speak via phone, there must be a human being on the other side in most cases due to our failure at high enough level of automated natural language interpretation, which was my point earlier.

A side example - we are discussing this at a forum about a hobby that hinges on assembly of finely detailed plastic miniatures. This relatively simple but fully 3D process still exceeds the limits of even the most articulate industrial robots. And before you counterargue that this is a niche hobby - this kind of task is very representative to all sorts of human labor at assembly lines of all sorts of products. Basically, the dexterity and sensitivity of our hands and an opposing thumb, the very features that gave us our evolutionary advantage, are still prooving to be the most energy and cost efficient object manipulators available to humanity. And we have billions of them readily available for work in industry.

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

This socialist says "Bring it. "

Something worth thinking about is that most great animators start out by doing the in-betweening.

This is the job of drawing the 24 or so frames that fall "in between" the key frames which denote the important changes in an animation sequence.

If all the in-betweening ends up being done by robots, where are the lead animators of the future going to learn their trade?

The Japanese anime industry is already in trouble from this simply because so much of their in-betweening has been farmed out to cheap animation companies in Korea, and they aren't raising up their next generation.

I don´t know what will happen around the globe but I am sure what the response of the German public would be concerning to mass automation: Nothing. People who lose their jobs will simply lapse into depression and poverty. Once caught in this descending spiral there is very little hope to get back on your feet. Applying for other jobs with the same income you have just lost? Keep dreaming. Or summed up in Bill Paxton´s words:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY

nou wrote:

The topic is vast and language linear, so there are many confusions here. Some of modern industries (examples given - furniture making, assembly lines, clothes production) are still human labor based because they are too hard to fully automate at any reasonable cost despite all existing advances in automation that indeed affect other areas of production to smaller or larger extent.

Not everything can be turned into fully automated soda bottles production lines. And none of those industries mentioned are at the imminent risk of being fully automated and those are not only examples available.

No, not everything can be, but, as you noted yourself, in the lower to mid-range considerable portions of this production is already automated.

After '89 polish transformation total unemployment rates rocketed by about 15 percent points in just three years. That is comparable to succesfull and full automatization of a single large undustry.

But not comparable to the near-simultaneous automation of significant percentages of most industries.

And as to "biggest area of employment being production line operation" - I don't have global data, but in Poland all production (that encompasses all kinds of production, be it low scale craftsman or high scale line assembly) comprises about 30% of all jobs (with just a little more than half of entire workforce in that area working in companies larger than 250 people), with services being the at nearly 60% and agriculture is the last 10%.

I said one of the biggest employers. Globally, it is presumably second to agriculture. In the west I imagine it sits behind services and retail (specially if you count them as the same thing). Services are going to take a hammering too. Already are. All those people doing data input in banks, insurance underwriters, legal PAs, cashiers in supermarkets etc are already being reduced as software and technology is allowing fewer of them to do more work.

Of those in services, most jobs in Poland are in education and health care. In light of all the hard data I really think I can sleep soundly and not be afraid of waking up in a fully automated world anytime soon.

Worryingly (for me especially!), technology is already harming higher education jobs. Things as simple as video lectures. I don't think we're about to see robot teachers, but then, as I've said, it's not robots in the style of the Jetsons that are the threat to employment, it's software and machines carrying out simple, repeated actions.

And regarding call centers - it doesn't matter if you write or speak via phone, there must be a human being on the other side in most cases due to our failure at high enough level of automated natural language interpretation, which was my point earlier.

I'm still not being clear enough, it seems. I'm not saying you will converse with a machine via text instead of speech. I'm saying there will be no conversation via any medium. We're already close to dealing with all such matters via questions and drop down menus of answers. Which people prefer (in the anglophone world, largely due to the movement of centres to India and racism). It's going further that way and will continue to do so until all complaints and changes you used to speak to humans about are dealt with without a human on the other end doing anything at all. Customers directly dealing with their own problems. You know how you used to have to talk to someone in a mobile phone shop for an hour to change contract but now you log into the website and set it up yourself? More of that.

A side example - we are discussing this at a forum about a hobby that hinges on assembly of finely detailed plastic miniatures. This relatively simple but fully 3D process still exceeds the limits of even the most articulate industrial robots. And before you counterargue that this is a niche hobby - this kind of task is very representative to all sorts of human labor at assembly lines of all sorts of products. Basically, the dexterity and sensitivity of our hands and an opposing thumb, the very features that gave us our evolutionary advantage, are still prooving to be the most energy and cost efficient object manipulators available to humanity. And we have billions of them readily available for work in industry.

Again, you are talking about a creative process which no one thinks automation is anywhere close to replacing. I did explicitly reference simple but dexterous processes as being safe above in response to your examples of plumbers and electricians etc. Of course, in the case of GW, after the creation process, the production is completely automated.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

But laws like that are socialism...

 skyth wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

But laws like that are socialism...

No its not. Banning or limiting something isn't unique to socialism, or indeed any political-economic system.

A lot of the jobs in industry are already gone. The millions in the coal and steel industry have been lost, you’re talking about preserving the remaining shadow of a much greater workforce. Where did these people go? For many, no where, which is why so many areas of Wales and North England are so terribly deprived.

These days we hear about a car factory shutting, and losing a few hundred jobs, on the national news. Yet prior to Thatcher every valley near my parents had collieries and steel works employing ten thousand *each*, and they’ve all been swept aside.

The things that will remain are those that require creativity, real thinking, human skills and traits like empathy. I’m a school teacher, I’ll never be replaced with a robot in my lifetime, likely ever, because machines can’t genuinely empathise with children and can’t judge creative merit of children’s work and ideas.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I’m a school teacher, I’ll never be replaced with a robot in my lifetime, likely ever, because machines can’t genuinely empathise with children and can’t judge creative merit of children’s work and ideas.

It depends on the subject. Math could be taught in an entirely automated way. Anything involving analysis of written text like History or Language classes couldn't be automated of course.

Now it might not be a good idea to automate education, but certain subjects could be.

nfe wrote:

nou wrote:

The topic is vast and language linear, so there are many confusions here. Some of modern industries (examples given - furniture making, assembly lines, clothes production) are still human labor based because they are too hard to fully automate at any reasonable cost despite all existing advances in automation that indeed affect other areas of production to smaller or larger extent.

Not everything can be turned into fully automated soda bottles production lines. And none of those industries mentioned are at the imminent risk of being fully automated and those are not only examples available.

No, not everything can be, but, as you noted yourself, in the lower to mid-range considerable portions of this production is already automated.

After '89 polish transformation total unemployment rates rocketed by about 15 percent points in just three years. That is comparable to succesfull and full automatization of a single large undustry.

But not comparable to the near-simultaneous automation of significant percentages of most industries.

And as to "biggest area of employment being production line operation" - I don't have global data, but in Poland all production (that encompasses all kinds of production, be it low scale craftsman or high scale line assembly) comprises about 30% of all jobs (with just a little more than half of entire workforce in that area working in companies larger than 250 people), with services being the at nearly 60% and agriculture is the last 10%.

I said one of the biggest employers. Globally, it is presumably second to agriculture. In the west I imagine it sits behind services and retail (specially if you count them as the same thing). Services are going to take a hammering too. Already are. All those people doing data input in banks, insurance underwriters, legal PAs, cashiers in supermarkets etc are already being reduced as software and technology is allowing fewer of them to do more work.

Of those in services, most jobs in Poland are in education and health care. In light of all the hard data I really think I can sleep soundly and not be afraid of waking up in a fully automated world anytime soon.

Worryingly (for me especially!), technology is already harming higher education jobs. Things as simple as video lectures. I don't think we're about to see robot teachers, but then, as I've said, it's not robots in the style of the Jetsons that are the threat to employment, it's software and machines carrying out simple, repeated actions.

And regarding call centers - it doesn't matter if you write or speak via phone, there must be a human being on the other side in most cases due to our failure at high enough level of automated natural language interpretation, which was my point earlier.

I'm still not being clear enough, it seems. I'm not saying you will converse with a machine via text instead of speech. I'm saying there will be no conversation via any medium. We're already close to dealing with all such matters via questions and drop down menus of answers. Which people prefer (in the anglophone world, largely due to the movement of centres to India and racism). It's going further that way and will continue to do so until all complaints and changes you used to speak to humans about are dealt with without a human on the other end doing anything at all. Customers directly dealing with their own problems. You know how you used to have to talk to someone in a mobile phone shop for an hour to change contract but now you log into the website and set it up yourself? More of that.

A side example - we are discussing this at a forum about a hobby that hinges on assembly of finely detailed plastic miniatures. This relatively simple but fully 3D process still exceeds the limits of even the most articulate industrial robots. And before you counterargue that this is a niche hobby - this kind of task is very representative to all sorts of human labor at assembly lines of all sorts of products. Basically, the dexterity and sensitivity of our hands and an opposing thumb, the very features that gave us our evolutionary advantage, are still prooving to be the most energy and cost efficient object manipulators available to humanity. And we have billions of them readily available for work in industry.

Again, you are talking about a creative process which no one thinks automation is anywhere close to replacing. I did explicitly reference simple but dexterous processes as being safe above in response to your examples of plumbers and electricians etc. Of course, in the case of GW, after the creation process, the production is completely automated.

I really think you are overly worried here and you over estimate the autonomy of automation in production of even low end products. In my example about citadel miniatures I wasn't talking about creative part of the process of assembling miniatures, but about the level of dexterity required to manipulate complex 3D objects in 3D space. Mobile phones assembly line requires exactly the same dexterity, that is why mobile phone or any other small but complex item production lines won't get automated anytime soon. It is similar on the other side of the dexterity/mobility spectrum. I don't know if you are aware how large scale vehicle (like buses, trams or trains) assembly lines are organized: there is a "template workstation" with all necessary rigs, holds, platforms and tools built in at exact places at which workers must hand wield the frame or mount any external parts to it. Then entire inside of the bus/tram/train is mounted in place by human workers. Those "template workstations" are in turn built entirely via human labor and typical industry tools. Small vehicle construction has more automated lines, but human workers are still needed where universal mobility and dexterity matters. It would require fully fledged sci-fi androids to replace human workforce entirely in such areas of production as shipyards, vechicle assembly, building/road construction, utility construction, meat production etc - everywhere where universal dexterity is key we won't see a shift to full automation in any forseeable future.

Another thing you egzagerrate is the time period needed to shift production from human labor to fully automated, especially on the scale of billions of human workers - those are milions of tonnes of high end machinery that you need to produce from raw materials to installed end product even if you invent a way to fully automate such tasks as mobile phone assembly. It won't happen overnight and we will have time to adapt as we currently have.

As to automated work in retail - you underestimate the global level of human stupidity and emotional instability when it comes to daily routines and interactions - I doubt we will ever shift to fully automated retail because of this fundamental human drive to social interaction on even basic level. And there are other caveats of e.g. workplace computerization. In many areas it actually takes longer now than it took 20 years ago to service a single consumer (e.g. train ticket handling), but the scope of service possible service has widened. That you can buy a ticket online via your mobile phone? Untill everyone switches to those you have to double up on on board validation. We have one of the most modern banking systems in Poland and you can pay via proximity cards virtually everywhere, but it did not removed the necessity for cash registers and physically handling cash by cashiers. Virtually everyday I stumble upon cashiers having to help elderly to count money or recheck some prices or other unprogrammable exceptions requiring mobility and/or human brain power. This is another area in which automation reduces workforce, but does not and will not remove the need for human workforce entirely.

It works as long as the robots only replace relatively unskilled labour. With additional education, the people in those positions can generally still move up to more skilled labour positions instead.
Problems will start to arise however when robots continue to become more and more advanced and become able to replace people in more skilled labour positions as well. There is a hard limit on how much Humans are able to improve themselves and move up to the more demanding new positions that are being created. Robots do not suffer from such a limit, they can be improved indefinitely. Taken to its logical extreme, almost every single person is going to be losing his or her job some time in the future. Obviously, capitalism can't work in such a situation, it will have become irrelevant by then.
But unregulated automation is going to lead to problems long before that. As more and more positions are automated, the underclass of people that can no longer keep up and remain competitive in the job market is going to grow. When this underclass grows too large, revolution (and the end of capitalism with it) becomes a certainty.
To prevent this, it is going to become necessary for governments at some point in the future to either introduce limits to automation or to create an alternate economical system in which this underclass can find a place.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I’m a school teacher, I’ll never be replaced with a robot in my lifetime, likely ever, because machines can’t genuinely empathise with children and can’t judge creative merit of children’s work and ideas.

It depends on the subject. Math could be taught in an entirely automated way. Anything involving analysis of written text like History or Language classes couldn't be automated of course.

Now it might not be a good idea to automate education, but certain subjects could be.

Irrespective of the the subject, you're still going to need somebody to keep the little gaks in line. Now, in the technical subjects one could replace the teacher with a much cheaper supervisory role while a machine did the actual teaching, but the combined cost might make a teacher still the preferable option.

Or we get full blown AIs which replace teachers both in a social and functional sense. But by that point, we've effectively made our own species redundant.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
A lot of the jobs in industry are already gone. The millions in the coal and steel industry have been lost, you’re talking about preserving the remaining shadow of a much greater workforce. Where did these people go? For many, no where, which is why so many areas of Wales and North England are so terribly deprived.

These days we hear about a car factory shutting, and losing a few hundred jobs, on the national news. Yet prior to Thatcher every valley near my parents had collieries and steel works employing ten thousand *each*, and they’ve all been swept aside.

The things that will remain are those that require creativity, real thinking, human skills and traits like empathy. I’m a school teacher, I’ll never be replaced with a robot in my lifetime, likely ever, because machines can’t genuinely empathise with children and can’t judge creative merit of children’s work and ideas.

That is another misconception - those manual workplaces did not vanish - they have been outsorced to countries, where coal and steel industries operate exactly the same as they did years back in UK, but are more cost optimal. Lift a tax-free air fuel de-globalizing worldwide logistics a bit, wait for far east asia to "catch up" on development and living expectations and many of those forgotten jobs will return to the west - this has already started to happening.

It looks like many posters in this thread are not aware, that the global gross product per capita is around Polish average wage and many jobs that you are seeing vanishing from developed countries are not vanishing because of automation but because of globalization of job markets and cost effective global logistics...

nou wrote:


I really think you are overly worried here and you over estimate the autonomy of automation in production of even low end products. In my example about citadel miniatures I wasn't talking about creative part of the process of assembling miniatures, but about the level of dexterity required to manipulate complex 3D objects in 3D space. Mobile phones assembly line requires exactly the same dexterity, that is why mobile phone or any other small but complex item production lines won't get automated anytime soon. It is similar on the other side of the dexterity/mobility spectrum. I don't know if you are aware how large scale vehicle (like buses, trams or trains) assembly lines are organized: there is a "template workstation" with all necessary rigs, holds, platforms and tools built in at exact places at which workers must hand wield the frame or mount any external parts to it. Then entire inside of the bus/tram/train is mounted in place by human workers. Those "template workstations" are in turn built entirely via human labor and typical industry tools. Small vehicle construction has more automated lines, but human workers are still needed where universal mobility and dexterity matters. It would require fully fledged sci-fi androids to replace human workforce entirely in such areas of production as shipyards, vechicle assembly, building/road construction, utility construction, meat production etc - everywhere where universal dexterity is key we won't see a shift to full automation in any forseeable future.

I'm sorry, I really think you are repeatedly misreading what I'm saying. You keep returning to simple operations that require dexterity which I have specifically stated, twice, is not under thread of automation in the near future.

There is an important difference, however, between an unpredictable simple operation that requires dexterity and a predictable simple operation that requires dexterity. Plumbing is the former and isn't going to be automated any time soon. Almost all non-bespoke manufacturing is the latter and is at risk of automation.

You are essentially making the arguments that people did about machines replacing manual looms - a process which required considerable dexterity and vast practice to be able to do efficiently. How much cloth is still produced on manual looms in the developed world? At a guess, a fraction of a percent, and all of it for high end or traditional products.

You also appear to be reading 'automation' as 'not a single human involved'. No one claims this to be the case, only that a severe decrease in human labour will be facilitated.

Another thing you egzagerrate is the time period needed to shift production from human labor to fully automated, especially on the scale of billions of human workers - those are milions of tonnes of high end machinery that you need to produce from raw materials to installed end product even if you invent a way to fully automate such tasks as mobile phone assembly. It won't happen overnight and we will have time to adapt as we currently have.

I've not said anything about timescales. No one thinks this will be overnight. Most predictions of mass change put it at a few decades.

As to automated work in retail - you underestimate the global level of human stupidity and emotional instability when it comes to daily routines and interactions - I doubt we will ever shift to fully automated retail because of this fundamental human drive to social interaction on even basic level.

Again, no one predicts total automation in any industry anything like soon.

We have one of the most modern banking systems in Poland and you can pay via proximity cards virtually everywhere, but it did not removed the necessity for cash registers and physically handling cash by cashiers.

And again, no one predicts complete automation. In most supermarkets here, cashiers have halved or more. You have one person overseeing banks of self-service counters, many of which are card only. Hell, there are pubs here that don't accept cash. Pubs!

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

Capitalists: "you're all fired, I have robots to replace you and paying your salaries doesn't help me get even more obscenely wealthy".

Socialists: "this is broken, the state should ensure a minimum standard of living even if the taxes mean that the wealthy are slightly less obscenely wealthy".

The unemployed masses: KILL THE SOCIALISTS.

Makes sense to me. I mean, it actually does make sense in a world where a major party can win power by simultaneously arguing that a 70% tax rate for the top bracket is unacceptable socialism and that the 1950s (where the top tax rate was 90%) are an ideal that our society has fallen from.

nfe wrote:

nou wrote:


I really think you are overly worried here and you over estimate the autonomy of automation in production of even low end products. In my example about citadel miniatures I wasn't talking about creative part of the process of assembling miniatures, but about the level of dexterity required to manipulate complex 3D objects in 3D space. Mobile phones assembly line requires exactly the same dexterity, that is why mobile phone or any other small but complex item production lines won't get automated anytime soon. It is similar on the other side of the dexterity/mobility spectrum. I don't know if you are aware how large scale vehicle (like buses, trams or trains) assembly lines are organized: there is a "template workstation" with all necessary rigs, holds, platforms and tools built in at exact places at which workers must hand wield the frame or mount any external parts to it. Then entire inside of the bus/tram/train is mounted in place by human workers. Those "template workstations" are in turn built entirely via human labor and typical industry tools. Small vehicle construction has more automated lines, but human workers are still needed where universal mobility and dexterity matters. It would require fully fledged sci-fi androids to replace human workforce entirely in such areas of production as shipyards, vechicle assembly, building/road construction, utility construction, meat production etc - everywhere where universal dexterity is key we won't see a shift to full automation in any forseeable future.

I'm sorry, I really think you are repeatedly misreading what I'm saying. You keep returning to simple operations that require dexterity which I have specifically stated, twice, is not under thread of automation in the near future.

There is an important difference, however, between an unpredictable simple operation that requires dexterity and a predictable simple operation that requires dexterity. Plumbing is the former and isn't going to be automated any time soon. Almost all non-bespoke manufacturing is the latter and is at risk of automation.

You are essentially making the arguments that people did about machines replacing manual looms - a process which required considerable dexterity and vast practice to be able to do efficiently. How much cloth is still produced on manual looms in the developed world? At a guess, a fraction of a percent, and all of it for high end or traditional products.

You also appear to be reading 'automation' as 'not a single human involved'. No one claims this to be the case, only that a severe decrease in human labour will be facilitated.

Another thing you egzagerrate is the time period needed to shift production from human labor to fully automated, especially on the scale of billions of human workers - those are milions of tonnes of high end machinery that you need to produce from raw materials to installed end product even if you invent a way to fully automate such tasks as mobile phone assembly. It won't happen overnight and we will have time to adapt as we currently have.

I've not said anything about timescales. No one thinks this will be overnight. Most predictions of mass change put it at a few decades.

As to automated work in retail - you underestimate the global level of human stupidity and emotional instability when it comes to daily routines and interactions - I doubt we will ever shift to fully automated retail because of this fundamental human drive to social interaction on even basic level.

Again, no one predicts total automation in any industry anything like soon.

We have one of the most modern banking systems in Poland and you can pay via proximity cards virtually everywhere, but it did not removed the necessity for cash registers and physically handling cash by cashiers.

And again, no one predicts complete automation. In most supermarkets here, cashiers have halved or more. You have one person overseeing banks of self-service counters, many of which are card only. Hell, there are pubs here that don't accept cash. Pubs!

Looms are not a valid example, as those were the first automated production processes and we already know, that automation has it's limits. Cashiers in Poland actually increased in absolute numbers, because lower demand on cashiers per shop increased the total number of shops - moreover, cashiers are in so short supply these days, that there is a steady increase in wages and benefits in that group and that they are now earning more from the first day than entry level teachers. Predictable and repeatable dexterity is exactly what is used in car manufacturing and after initial shift to robot-aided lines we don't see that much of further progress. Instead new technical development focuses on exoskeletal improvement of work safety and reducing human injuries, because human workforce is so valuable in this industry. Again, the original post is about total automation. You and I basically dismiss the idea and are now arguing the exact extent of possible practical and cost effective automation and differ only in our perspectives on where exactly this line lies - you are convinced that it is rather further from where we are now, I am convinced that it is rather closer to where we are now and that is pretty much it.

I must say, it was a pleasure to discuss something on Dakka in a civilized manner for a change, so thank you for that! However I lost a bigger part of my saturday already and it's high time for me to leave this thread. Cheers!

Re: dexterity: I work in a field where 0.1mm distances are huge and tiny parts have to be precisely aligned and assembled. Guess who does all of the actual work: machines. The only thing humans do, once the engineers/techs have set up the production line, is carry boxes of parts and materials between machines and press the start button. Humans dont have that job because of dexterity, they have it because a robot would cost more than a minimum-wage temp worker. Get the cost of that robot down and the humans are gone.

 Peregrine wrote:
Re: dexterity: I work in a field where 0.1mm distances are huge and tiny parts have to be precisely aligned and assembled.

But enough about your sex life...

 Peregrine wrote:
Re: dexterity: I work in a field where 0.1mm distances are huge and tiny parts have to be precisely aligned and assembled. Guess who does all of the actual work: machines. The only thing humans do, once the engineers/techs have set up the production line, is carry boxes of parts and materials between machines and press the start button. Humans dont have that job because of dexterity, they have it because a robot would cost more than a minimum-wage temp worker. Get the cost of that robot down and the humans are gone.

Do you actually know what dexterity means?

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

Capitalists: "you're all fired, I have robots to replace you and paying your salaries doesn't help me get even more obscenely wealthy".

Socialists: "this is broken, the state should ensure a minimum standard of living even if the taxes mean that the wealthy are slightly less obscenely wealthy".

The unemployed masses: KILL THE SOCIALISTS.

Makes sense to me. I mean, it actually does make sense in a world where a major party can win power by simultaneously arguing that a 70% tax rate for the top bracket is unacceptable socialism and that the 1950s (where the top tax rate was 90%) are an ideal that our society has fallen from.

Nope. The order is,

1) Robots become the most efficient means of production.

2) The unemployed masses are duped into socialism because they are told its the only way to survive.

3) Unemployed masses realize socialism is even worse than Capitalism because they lose all their freedoms, and the system won't function anyway because free stuff isn't actually free.

4) Socialism is annihilated in a revolution and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs.

The last step is a check on unregulated capitalism so that it doesn't destroy itself by eliminating both its workforce and customers. Socialism is also exposed for the farce it really is. You'd think after destroying dozens and dozens of countries people would have realized its a bad idea.

You also know damn well that people wanting to return to the 1950s are not including the tax rates in that desire.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

Capitalists: "you're all fired, I have robots to replace you and paying your salaries doesn't help me get even more obscenely wealthy".

Socialists: "this is broken, the state should ensure a minimum standard of living even if the taxes mean that the wealthy are slightly less obscenely wealthy".

The unemployed masses: KILL THE SOCIALISTS.

Makes sense to me. I mean, it actually does make sense in a world where a major party can win power by simultaneously arguing that a 70% tax rate for the top bracket is unacceptable socialism and that the 1950s (where the top tax rate was 90%) are an ideal that our society has fallen from.

Nope. The order is,

1) Robots become the most efficient means of production.

2) The unemployed masses are duped into socialism.

3) Unemployed masses realize socialism is even worse than Capitalism.

4) Socialism is annihilated and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs.

The last step is a check on unregulated capitalism so that it doesn't destroy itself by eliminating both its workforce and customers. Socialism is also exposed for the farce it really is. You'd think after destroying dozens and dozens of countries people would have realized its a bad idea.

You also know damn well that people wanting to return to the 1950s are not including the tax rates in that desire.

Logic problem there, in such a scenario (read robots do everything) literally all premises have changed. Ergo your logical lead that "socialism is exposed for the farcé it is" is literally not verfyiable and a statement that has no foundation whatsoever.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

Capitalists: "you're all fired, I have robots to replace you and paying your salaries doesn't help me get even more obscenely wealthy".

Socialists: "this is broken, the state should ensure a minimum standard of living even if the taxes mean that the wealthy are slightly less obscenely wealthy".

The unemployed masses: KILL THE SOCIALISTS.

Makes sense to me. I mean, it actually does make sense in a world where a major party can win power by simultaneously arguing that a 70% tax rate for the top bracket is unacceptable socialism and that the 1950s (where the top tax rate was 90%) are an ideal that our society has fallen from.

Nope. The order is,

1) Robots become the most efficient means of production.

2) The unemployed masses are duped into socialism.

3) Unemployed masses realize socialism is even worse than Capitalism.

4) Socialism is annihilated and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs.

The last step is a check on unregulated capitalism so that it doesn't destroy itself by eliminating both its workforce and customers. Socialism is also exposed for the farce it really is. You'd think after destroying dozens and dozens of countries people would have realized its a bad idea.

You also know damn well that people wanting to return to the 1950s are not including the tax rates in that desire.

Logic problem there, in such a scenario (read robots do everything) literally all premises have changed. Ergo your logical lead that "socialism is exposed for the farcé it is" is literally not verfyiable and a statement that has no foundation whatsoever.

The evils of socialism are already crystal clear. Venezuela, China, all former Soviet bloc countries, European Thought Police, etc... Thats all the verification needed.

Of course, everyone concentrates on automation ruining manufacturing employment, but in most developed nations outsourcing already did so much damage to the field it's hardly worth worrying about. Information management, on the other hand, is still a HUGE employer of people in the developed world... and much of it could be automated NOW, if businesses only figured out that they could.

Let's face it. If your job consists of gathering information for your boss and/or passing information (orders) from your boss to subordinates, you are replaceable right now. The VP/Ops can get the information delivered to his e-mail by a computer program, and use that e-mail to directly communicate with anyone in the organization he needs to communicate with. You're just grit in the gears now. And once business wakes up to this fact, your career goes bye-bye.

The fun part is, these are jobs paying well above average in most cases. No few are six-figure jobs. When they go, that's going to be a very significant chunk of the total economy gone with them.

And what will they be replaced with? Artisan manufacturing? Fine arts? YouTube Channels? I'd be most people in those jobs do not make what middle and upper management does, most middle- and upper-management personnel won't have the right skills or talents for such jobs... and there won't be anything like the demand for people to do those jobs once those middle- and upper-management payscales disappear so there's fewer people who can pay for those products.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

Capitalists: "you're all fired, I have robots to replace you and paying your salaries doesn't help me get even more obscenely wealthy".

Socialists: "this is broken, the state should ensure a minimum standard of living even if the taxes mean that the wealthy are slightly less obscenely wealthy".

The unemployed masses: KILL THE SOCIALISTS.

Makes sense to me. I mean, it actually does make sense in a world where a major party can win power by simultaneously arguing that a 70% tax rate for the top bracket is unacceptable socialism and that the 1950s (where the top tax rate was 90%) are an ideal that our society has fallen from.

Nope. The order is,

1) Robots become the most efficient means of production.

2) The unemployed masses are duped into socialism.

3) Unemployed masses realize socialism is even worse than Capitalism.

4) Socialism is annihilated and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs.

The last step is a check on unregulated capitalism so that it doesn't destroy itself by eliminating both its workforce and customers. Socialism is also exposed for the farce it really is. You'd think after destroying dozens and dozens of countries people would have realized its a bad idea.

You also know damn well that people wanting to return to the 1950s are not including the tax rates in that desire.

Logic problem there, in such a scenario (read robots do everything) literally all premises have changed. Ergo your logical lead that "socialism is exposed for the farcé it is" is literally not verfyiable and a statement that has no foundation whatsoever.

The evils of socialism are already crystal clear. Venezuela, China, all former Soviet bloc countries, European Thought Police, etc... Thats all the verification needed.

European Thought Police? What the Hell? In what kind of world are you living?

You should try coming back to reality. It is far from perfect but it seems to be a nicer place than wherever you find yourself currently.

The evils of socialism are already crystal clear. Venezuela, China, all former Soviet bloc countries, European Thought Police, etc... Thats all the verification needed.

They turn the friggin frogs gay!!!!!!

Ok seriously, the situation then, workers forced to work for authoritarian regime.

Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, it can't. A massive unemployable population means that the state either accepts socialism voluntarily, or the new state formed after the unemployable masses rise up and execute the capitalists accepts socialism.

Or the more likely 3rd option. The people rise up and execute the socialists, destroy the robots, and pass laws heavily regulating/banning mass automation.

Capitalists: "you're all fired, I have robots to replace you and paying your salaries doesn't help me get even more obscenely wealthy".

Socialists: "this is broken, the state should ensure a minimum standard of living even if the taxes mean that the wealthy are slightly less obscenely wealthy".

The unemployed masses: KILL THE SOCIALISTS.

Makes sense to me. I mean, it actually does make sense in a world where a major party can win power by simultaneously arguing that a 70% tax rate for the top bracket is unacceptable socialism and that the 1950s (where the top tax rate was 90%) are an ideal that our society has fallen from.

Nope. The order is,

1) Robots become the most efficient means of production.

2) The unemployed masses are duped into socialism.

3) Unemployed masses realize socialism is even worse than Capitalism.

4) Socialism is annihilated and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs.

The last step is a check on unregulated capitalism so that it doesn't destroy itself by eliminating both its workforce and customers. Socialism is also exposed for the farce it really is. You'd think after destroying dozens and dozens of countries people would have realized its a bad idea.

You also know damn well that people wanting to return to the 1950s are not including the tax rates in that desire.

Logic problem there, in such a scenario (read robots do everything) literally all premises have changed. Ergo your logical lead that "socialism is exposed for the farcé it is" is literally not verfyiable and a statement that has no foundation whatsoever.

The evils of socialism are already crystal clear. Venezuela, China, all former Soviet bloc countries, European Thought Police, etc... Thats all the verification needed.

European Thought Police? What the Hell? In what kind of world are you living?

You should try coming back to reality. It is far from perfect but it seems to be a nicer place than wherever you find yourself currently.

This also, next i hear that i am a lizardmen Controlling the Rothschilds and Jews from my phareonic place of switzerland.

(no seriously people belive that crap, that is a active conspiracy theory going around)

 Grey Templar wrote:


The evils of socialism are already crystal clear. Venezuela, China, all former Soviet bloc countries, European Thought Police, etc... Thats all the verification needed.

Yes, the failure of countries like Sweden and Switzerland and China are all well-known...

 Iron_Captain wrote:

European Thought Police? What the Hell? In what kind of world are you living?

You should try coming back to reality. It is far from perfect but it seems to be a nicer place than wherever you find yourself currently.

People in England have literally been arrested for just stating their opinions on Facebook. They may be despicable opinions, but they should be allowed to have them.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/uk-politics-uncovered/uk-police-arrest-man-for-offensive-facebook-post-about-migrants/890222007758302/

That is Thought Police.

 Vulcan wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:


The evils of socialism are already crystal clear. Venezuela, China, all former Soviet bloc countries, European Thought Police, etc... Thats all the verification needed.

Yes, the failure of countries like Sweden and Switzerland and China are all well-known...

Well China is terrible to it's people, in the name of socialism (actually it more like authoritarian coorperatism but that is another discussion)

Switzerland is not social, not liberal but konkordant, economicaly speaking we are not socialist, but we tax more via specific institutions that are social security.
So kinda difficult to put us in.

As for sweden, the states allright, I would spread the migrants around more but then again i am swiss and therefore everything needs to be decentralized. EVERYTHING, even Migration.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.

Sure, it sounds good on paper. The problem is that the socialism state can only function through taxes. You've still got to pay the few people who are working, but those are also the only people you can tax. And there is also no incentive for people to even do those few jobs because the can just have all their needs provided for free. Why work and have your pay taxed out the wazoo when you can just do nothing and have all needs taken care of?

So because the system doesn't work, the system collapses and you have starving masses rioting in the streets.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.

Sure, it sounds good on paper. The problem is that the socialism state can only function through taxes. You've still got to pay the few people who are working, but those are also the only people you can tax. And there is also no incentive for people to even do those few jobs because the can just have all their needs provided for free. Why work and have your pay taxed out the wazoo when you can just do nothing and have all needs taken care of?

So because the system doesn't work, the system collapses and you have starving masses rioting in the streets.

Wrong, the state can be run as a buisness that has the robots do slave labour for the wellfare system.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

European Thought Police? What the Hell? In what kind of world are you living?

You should try coming back to reality. It is far from perfect but it seems to be a nicer place than wherever you find yourself currently.

People in England have literally been arrested for just stating their opinions on Facebook. They may be despicable opinions, but they should be allowed to have them.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/uk-politics-uncovered/uk-police-arrest-man-for-offensive-facebook-post-about-migrants/890222007758302/

That is Thought Police.

So we have no official statement beyond a citation for a talking too, no punishment, only threats.
Secondly Twitter and Facebook adopting german law and policing themselves is not thought police but companies policing their own platform so again you are stating something without foundation.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I’m a school teacher, I’ll never be replaced with a robot in my lifetime, likely ever, because machines can’t genuinely empathise with children and can’t judge creative merit of children’s work and ideas.

It depends on the subject. Math could be taught in an entirely automated way. Anything involving analysis of written text like History or Language classes couldn't be automated of course.

Now it might not be a good idea to automate education, but certain subjects could be.

Hahaha. If it was that easy for children to learn maths you could give them a book. Crikey, the idea that you could teach maths effectively, but somehow not history of course, through an automated process is laughable.

The point is that the skill of teaching is far more than merely imparting knowledge, that’s why you need people and not books and computers in a class. And those teaching skills are beyond a machine, any AI that could empathise with children and be able to manage them emotionally would have to be hyper advanced to the point where none of humanity are needed any more.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.

Sure, it sounds good on paper. The problem is that the socialism state can only function through taxes. You've still got to pay the few people who are working, but those are also the only people you can tax. And there is also no incentive for people to even do those few jobs because the can just have all their needs provided for free. Why work and have your pay taxed out the wazoo when you can just do nothing and have all needs taken care of?

So because the system doesn't work, the system collapses and you have starving masses rioting in the streets.

Wrong, the state can be run as a buisness that has the robots do slave labour for the wellfare system.

They'd still have to have an incentive for people to do the few jobs that do exist.

1) You pressgang people into service, forcing them to undergo years of schooling to be able to do the job they've been assigned. This builds resentment in whoever is forced to do this.

2) You offer better social perks for people who volunteer for these tasks. This builds resentment in the portion of the population who don't get accepted.

Either way, you end up with the system collapsing. In the first case, these slaves can simply withhold their expertise and your robots suddenly stop working. In the 2nd case, the individuals who feel slighted are very numerous and can take over with sheer numbers.

Also, how would you put down such a rebellion? Your soldiers will have little incentive to be soldiers and fight for you. Why have a job that puts you at risk when you could just spend your entire life doing fun hobbies?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I’m a school teacher, I’ll never be replaced with a robot in my lifetime, likely ever, because machines can’t genuinely empathise with children and can’t judge creative merit of children’s work and ideas.

It depends on the subject. Math could be taught in an entirely automated way. Anything involving analysis of written text like History or Language classes couldn't be automated of course.

Now it might not be a good idea to automate education, but certain subjects could be.

Hahaha. If it was that easy for children to learn maths you could give them a book. Crikey, the idea that you could teach maths effectively, but somehow not history of course, through an automated process is laughable.

The point is that the skill of teaching is far more than merely imparting knowledge, that’s why you need people and not books and computers in a class. And those teaching skills are beyond a machine, any AI that could empathise with children and be able to manage them emotionally would have to be hyper advanced to the point where none of humanity are needed any more.

I didn't say it was a good idea. Just that it could be done.

Of course in the event that we replaced most of the workforce with robots, we wouldn't need to teach math anymore. Not to the masses anyway.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.

Sure, it sounds good on paper. The problem is that the socialism state can only function through taxes. You've still got to pay the few people who are working, but those are also the only people you can tax. And there is also no incentive for people to even do those few jobs because the can just have all their needs provided for free. Why work and have your pay taxed out the wazoo when you can just do nothing and have all needs taken care of?

So because the system doesn't work, the system collapses and you have starving masses rioting in the streets.

Wrong, the state can be run as a buisness that has the robots do slave labour for the wellfare system.

They'd still have to have an incentive for people to do the few jobs that do exist.

1) You pressgang people into service, forcing them to undergo years of schooling to be able to do the job they've been assigned. This builds resentment in whoever is forced to do this.

2) You offer better social perks for people who volunteer for these tasks. This builds resentment in the portion of the population who don't get accepted.

Either way, you end up with the system collapsing. In the first case, these slaves can simply withhold their expertise and your robots suddenly stop working. In the 2nd case, the individuals who feel slighted are very numerous and can take over with sheer numbers.

Also, how would you put down such a rebellion? Your soldiers will have little incentive to be soldiers and fight for you. Why have a job that puts you at risk when you could just spend your entire life doing fun hobbies?

At this point i am actually convinced that you don't want to understand, when ALL Jobs are done by robots, there does not need to be any incentive anymore, and even if, don't you think you'd find a random person who'd do it voluntarily? Heck you could randomize and chosen people via lot, like athens did.....

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.

Sure, it sounds good on paper. The problem is that the socialism state can only function through taxes. You've still got to pay the few people who are working, but those are also the only people you can tax. And there is also no incentive for people to even do those few jobs because the can just have all their needs provided for free. Why work and have your pay taxed out the wazoo when you can just do nothing and have all needs taken care of?

So because the system doesn't work, the system collapses and you have starving masses rioting in the streets.

Wrong, the state can be run as a buisness that has the robots do slave labour for the wellfare system.

They'd still have to have an incentive for people to do the few jobs that do exist.

1) You pressgang people into service, forcing them to undergo years of schooling to be able to do the job they've been assigned. This builds resentment in whoever is forced to do this.

2) You offer better social perks for people who volunteer for these tasks. This builds resentment in the portion of the population who don't get accepted.

Either way, you end up with the system collapsing. In the first case, these slaves can simply withhold their expertise and your robots suddenly stop working. In the 2nd case, the individuals who feel slighted are very numerous and can take over with sheer numbers.

Also, how would you put down such a rebellion? Your soldiers will have little incentive to be soldiers and fight for you. Why have a job that puts you at risk when you could just spend your entire life doing fun hobbies?

At this point i am actually convinced that you don't want to understand, when ALL Jobs are done by robots, there does not need to be any incentive anymore, and even if, don't you think you'd find a random person who'd do it voluntarily? Heck you could randomize and chosen people via lot, like athens did.....

Sure, hinge your entire society around hoping that someone will volunteer for free. Even if people are chosen at random, the people who didn't get chosen will not like that. You might be able to find a few people who would enjoy working on the robots, but it wouldn't be enough.

I ask you. If you were in a society that gave you all the food you could need, shelter, clothing, as well as free entertainment. Would you be happy if a guy in a suit suddenly showed up one day and said "Hey, you've been chosen by lottery. You gotta go to Robot school and learn how to fix the Toilet Maintenance Robots! You can't play Grand Theft Auto:19 for 16 hours a day anymore. But we'll give you some better food vouchers!"

Would you be happy about that? Heck no you wouldn't. Time would be about the only thing worth anything anymore, and they'd be forcing you to lose a bunch of it to do something you don't want to do.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.

Sure, it sounds good on paper. The problem is that the socialism state can only function through taxes. You've still got to pay the few people who are working, but those are also the only people you can tax. And there is also no incentive for people to even do those few jobs because the can just have all their needs provided for free. Why work and have your pay taxed out the wazoo when you can just do nothing and have all needs taken care of?

So because the system doesn't work, the system collapses and you have starving masses rioting in the streets.

Wrong, the state can be run as a buisness that has the robots do slave labour for the wellfare system.

They'd still have to have an incentive for people to do the few jobs that do exist.

1) You pressgang people into service, forcing them to undergo years of schooling to be able to do the job they've been assigned. This builds resentment in whoever is forced to do this.

2) You offer better social perks for people who volunteer for these tasks. This builds resentment in the portion of the population who don't get accepted.

Either way, you end up with the system collapsing. In the first case, these slaves can simply withhold their expertise and your robots suddenly stop working. In the 2nd case, the individuals who feel slighted are very numerous and can take over with sheer numbers.

Also, how would you put down such a rebellion? Your soldiers will have little incentive to be soldiers and fight for you. Why have a job that puts you at risk when you could just spend your entire life doing fun hobbies?

At this point i am actually convinced that you don't want to understand, when ALL Jobs are done by robots, there does not need to be any incentive anymore, and even if, don't you think you'd find a random person who'd do it voluntarily? Heck you could randomize and chosen people via lot, like athens did.....

Sure, hinge your entire society around hoping that someone will volunteer for free. Even if people are chosen at random, the people who didn't get chosen will not like that. You might be able to find a few people who would enjoy working on the robots, but it wouldn't be enough.

I ask you. If you were in a society that gave you all the food you could need, shelter, clothing, as well as free entertainment. Would you be happy if a guy in a suit suddenly showed up one day and said "Hey, you've been chosen by lottery. You gotta go to Robot school and learn how to fix the Toilet Maintenance Robots! You can't play Grand Theft Auto:19 for 16 hours a day anymore. But we'll give you some better food vouchers!"

Would you be happy about that? Heck no you wouldn't. Time would be about the only thing worth anything anymore, and they'd be forcing you to lose a bunch of it to do something you don't want to do.

Yes, because i have a sense of duty, unlike you it seems.
I did the same when the army conscripted me and made me a Füsilier, i would survive managing a bunch of scraprheaps aswell.

Edit: and you want now to know why i'd do it? Because i live in a halfdirect democracy ergo i get to say how it is run. I am basically the sovereign and I govern myself in conjunction of the whole collective society.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Yes, because i have a sense of duty, unlike you it seems.
I did the same when the army conscripted me and made me a Füsilier, i would survive managing a bunch of scraprheaps aswell.

Good for you, but your attitude is not going to be shared with the vast majority of people. Another reason Socialism doesn't work, it assumes that people will all have a sense of duty like that and just go with the flow. But thats not human nature. Human nature is that we are all selfish little jerks looking out for number 1. When you've got options between doing a crap job and having everything you ever wanted, and doing nothing and still having everything you ever wanted, you're going to want to do nothing.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Yes, because i have a sense of duty, unlike you it seems.
I did the same when the army conscripted me and made me a Füsilier, i would survive managing a bunch of scraprheaps aswell.

Good for you, but your attitude is not going to be shared with the vast majority of people. Another reason Socialism doesn't work, it assumes that people will all have a sense of duty like that and just go with the flow. But thats not human nature. Human nature is that we are all selfish little jerks looking out for number 1. When you've got options between doing a crap job and having everything you ever wanted, and doing nothing and still having everything you ever wanted, you're going to want to do nothing.

I edited my last comment, read that.
I never said i'd do it for nothing key is Motivation.
If I live in a society with direct democratic elements i become the government, i have comparativly to you more rights via voting alone, those come with more duties, it's a tradeoff.

 Grey Templar wrote:

I ask you. If you were in a society that gave you all the food you could need, shelter, clothing, as well as free entertainment. Would you be happy if a guy in a suit suddenly showed up one day and said "Hey, you've been chosen by lottery. You gotta go to Robot school and learn how to fix the Toilet Maintenance Robots! You can't play Grand Theft Auto:19 for 16 hours a day anymore. But we'll give you some better food vouchers!"

Would you be happy about that? Heck no you wouldn't. Time would be about the only thing worth anything anymore, and they'd be forcing you to lose a bunch of it to do something you don't want to do.

I think I'd be fine with carrying out socially necessary labour, yes. It likely wouldn't have to be eight hours, five days a week because you could definitely get away with having two shifts of four hours for two people in a society where every need is fulfilled. Profitability and cost of labour are irrelevant, after all. Heck, it could be as little as four hours of work, three days a week. I'd get to do somethng useful and I currently have way less free time than I'd have in this scenario. Videogaming for every waking hour makes you depressed anyway.

Now, of course, a bunch of people would answer "no" to this question for whatever reason. But more than enough people would answer "yes". Having direct responsibility for something useful and getting to do it is a pretty big boost to confidence for a typical human.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Good for you, but your attitude is not going to be shared with the vast majority of people. Another reason Socialism doesn't work, it assumes that people will all have a sense of duty like that and just go with the flow. But thats not human nature. Human nature is that we are all selfish little jerks looking out for number 1. When you've got options between doing a crap job and having everything you ever wanted, and doing nothing and still having everything you ever wanted, you're going to want to do nothing.

Actually, it is human nature to be cooperative and to do things for others because it benefits others. "Crap jobs" such as cleaning and maintenance are really only "crap jobs" because they pay nothing and those who do it are overworked. Being a janitor or a municipality goblin and spending your days picking up trash, sorting through garages, putting up signs and generally doing things that are direct improvements on life in general is very rewarding work. Bringing order and improvement to the world is very satisfying.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Yes, because i have a sense of duty, unlike you it seems.
I did the same when the army conscripted me and made me a Füsilier, i would survive managing a bunch of scraprheaps aswell.

Good for you, but your attitude is not going to be shared with the vast majority of people. Another reason Socialism doesn't work, it assumes that people will all have a sense of duty like that and just go with the flow. But thats not human nature. Human nature is that we are all selfish little jerks looking out for number 1. When you've got options between doing a crap job and having everything you ever wanted, and doing nothing and still having everything you ever wanted, you're going to want to do nothing.

I edited my last comment, read that.
I never said i'd do it for nothing key is Motivation.
If I live in a society with direct democratic elements i become the government, i have comparativly to you more rights via voting alone, those come with more duties, it's a tradeoff.

Just because you got a say in the government doesn't mean you'll be happy with everything the government does or forces you to do.

Even if you voted in favor of forced conscription by lottery to service the Toilet robots, you will probably reconsider your position if you end up being the poor sod who gets chosen to service the Toilet robots.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

I ask you. If you were in a society that gave you all the food you could need, shelter, clothing, as well as free entertainment. Would you be happy if a guy in a suit suddenly showed up one day and said "Hey, you've been chosen by lottery. You gotta go to Robot school and learn how to fix the Toilet Maintenance Robots! You can't play Grand Theft Auto:19 for 16 hours a day anymore. But we'll give you some better food vouchers!"

Would you be happy about that? Heck no you wouldn't. Time would be about the only thing worth anything anymore, and they'd be forcing you to lose a bunch of it to do something you don't want to do.

I think I'd be fine with carrying out socially necessary labour, yes. It likely wouldn't have to be eight hours, five days a week because you could definitely get away with having two shifts of four hours for two people in a society where every need is fulfilled. Profitability and cost of labour are irrelevant, after all. Heck, it could be as little as four hours of work, three days a week. I'd get to do somethng useful and I currently have way less free time than I'd have in this scenario. Videogaming for every waking hour makes you depressed anyway.

Now, of course, a bunch of people would answer "no" to this question for whatever reason. But more than enough people would answer "yes". Having direct responsibility for something useful and getting to do it is a pretty big boost to confidence for a typical human.

A confidence boost is only going to go so far for motivation.

Videogaming for every waking hour makes you depressed anyway.

Insert any leisure activity of choice.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Yes, because i have a sense of duty, unlike you it seems.
I did the same when the army conscripted me and made me a Füsilier, i would survive managing a bunch of scraprheaps aswell.

Good for you, but your attitude is not going to be shared with the vast majority of people. Another reason Socialism doesn't work, it assumes that people will all have a sense of duty like that and just go with the flow. But thats not human nature. Human nature is that we are all selfish little jerks looking out for number 1. When you've got options between doing a crap job and having everything you ever wanted, and doing nothing and still having everything you ever wanted, you're going to want to do nothing.

I edited my last comment, read that.
I never said i'd do it for nothing key is Motivation.
If I live in a society with direct democratic elements i become the government, i have comparativly to you more rights via voting alone, those come with more duties, it's a tradeoff.

Just because you got a say in the government doesn't mean you'll be happy with everything the government does or forces you to do.

Even if you voted in favor of forced conscription by lottery to service the Toilet robots, you will probably reconsider your position if you end up being the poor sod who gets chosen to service the Toilet robots.

No i don't.
I would hurt my own power by that lack of belief in my right choice for that vote.
Secondly: i imagine a system were everyone has to do the Job atleast once. So that no one can claim unfair treatment.

Edit: so no Vietnam style lottery were the rich could get away.
No one gets away that IS the base requirement.
Would it annoy me?
Probably but considering since everyone has to do it or had to do it i am fine with it.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Even if you voted in favor of forced conscription by lottery to service the Toilet robots, you will probably reconsider your position if you end up being the poor sod who gets chosen to service the Toilet robots.

Toilet robots sound pretty rockin', actually. Just ask any kid what they think about garbage trucks, or any waterworks engineer or plumber what they think about sanitation.

 Grey Templar wrote:
A confidence boost is only going to go so far for motivation.

How about the respect and admiration of your peers? You're doing necessary work, after all. Besides, you're hugely underestimating what a great motivatior "feeling good about yourself" is. The feeling that you have accomplished something, that your day has mattered, is one of the most powerful there is. Never experiencing it is broadly considered an illness and a massive societal problem.

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Even if you voted in favor of forced conscription by lottery to service the Toilet robots, you will probably reconsider your position if you end up being the poor sod who gets chosen to service the Toilet robots.

Toilet robots sound pretty rockin', actually. Just ask any kid what they think about garbage trucks, or any waterworks engineer or plumber what they think about sanitation.

 Grey Templar wrote:
A confidence boost is only going to go so far for motivation.

How about the respect and admiration of your peers? You're doing necessary work, after all. Besides, you're hugely underestimating what a great motivatior "feeling good about yourself" is. The feeling that you have accomplished something, that your day has mattered, is one of the most powerful there is. Never experiencing it is broadly considered an illness and a massive societal problem.

That also works, frankly, same situation with our NCO 's generally not many want to do it since it will lead to a longer more in depth training but if you have done it you are generally regarded as a bit above the rest.
Of course only so long you were not a prick torwards your non human non Animal Füsilier underlings.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Robots do not suffer from such a limit, they can be improved indefinitely.

I think this is a fun area to explore and very relevant to this thread. We hear many statements along the lines of the above; but what evidence are they based upon? How can we test their veracity?

There is this general assumption that mechanisation and robotics will continue to improve continually and endlessly; that it will become ever more intelligent/capable, that new innovations will carry on spitting out fresh new components which do the jobs of the older ones marginally better ad infinitum.

But.....says who? How do we not know that there we aren't heading towards a 'hard limit' beyond which we won't be able to improve the processors of computers? Why do we assume that there's a code we'll be able to devise which will mimic sentience sufficiently well to replace people? Where does this unbridled faith in the apparently infinite potential of technology to achieve absolutely anything come from?

The fact that we've managed to innovate as far as we have is really no guarantee of anything at all. Thinking critically/logically, there must be an end point at which we cannot proceed any further, after all. Where there are no more large discoveries to be made, no great advances in material sciences and engineering left to occur. Why do we presume that this 'hard limit' is going to be at the level of some sort of post-scarcity society? And not say, a hundred years from now?

People in the West in this day and age are raised with the unquestioned assumption that because technology has changed our lives so radically and quickly in comparison to those of our immediate ancestors; that it will continue to do so indefinitely. It's virtually a faith at this point. 'Donate some money, and we can beat -medical condition here- forever'. But...can we? Is it possible that there are diseases we can suffer from which no technology will ever fix? A degree of sentience no machine will ever mimic? Engineering challenges that will forever be out of our reach to execute?

As a corollary; what would that mean for society once we hit that 'hard limit'?

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Yes, because i have a sense of duty, unlike you it seems.
I did the same when the army conscripted me and made me a Füsilier, i would survive managing a bunch of scraprheaps aswell.

Good for you, but your attitude is not going to be shared with the vast majority of people. Another reason Socialism doesn't work, it assumes that people will all have a sense of duty like that and just go with the flow. But thats not human nature. Human nature is that we are all selfish little jerks looking out for number 1. When you've got options between doing a crap job and having everything you ever wanted, and doing nothing and still having everything you ever wanted, you're going to want to do nothing.

I edited my last comment, read that.
I never said i'd do it for nothing key is Motivation.
If I live in a society with direct democratic elements i become the government, i have comparativly to you more rights via voting alone, those come with more duties, it's a tradeoff.

Just because you got a say in the government doesn't mean you'll be happy with everything the government does or forces you to do.

Even if you voted in favor of forced conscription by lottery to service the Toilet robots, you will probably reconsider your position if you end up being the poor sod who gets chosen to service the Toilet robots.

No i don't.
I would hurt my own power by that lack of belief in my right choice for that vote.
Secondly: i imagine a system were everyone has to do the Job atleast once. So that no one can claim unfair treatment.

Edit: so no Vietnam style lottery were the rich could get away.
Now one gets away that OS the base requirement.
Would it annoy me?
Probably but considering since everyone has to do it or had to do it i am fine with it.

The only people who could set up a system like this will be the rich and powerful. They're definitely going to be creating loopholes they can game and take advantage of. Thats why this ideology is so dangerous. People naively believe that everybody involved will be 100% altruistic. Except it is 100% guaranteed that they will game the system for their own benefit.

Heck, you can just game the system by playing dumb and making it seem that you have no capacity to perform any job the state could require of you.

These robots would be insanely complex systems that would require years of schooling to do even basic maintenance. Thats not something you could easily train even a small chunk of your population how to fix. How are you going to sell the idea that everybody should go through a bunch of technical schooling to perform a couple hours of work a week when your only line is "Its for the good of society!" All of the jobs in this society would be like that. Highly technical jobs that would require a lot of training. You're not going to be able to have a fair system of work distribution. You'd have to have a lottery to determine who gets the education, which would be a negative thing for the people doing it, and then a further lottery for who is going to do the job for X time period.

 Grey Templar wrote:
How are you going to sell the idea that everybody should go through a bunch of technical schooling to perform a couple hours of work a week when your only line is "Its for the good of society!".

But everyone is "society". You are, your friends are, your parents are, your cousins, relatives, anyone you can think of are all part of "society". Humans are social creatures who to a great degree define themselves by who they know. When undergoing technical training is obviously, unquestionably for the good of society then people are going to want to do that. It's not a small thing. What makes "It's for the good of society!" an effective piece of mockery is when it's said in reference to something that's actually pointless or only of benefit to a very small group. So using it in cases where it's true and not just a line doesn't work. You're talking about a scenario in which people are fed, clothed and housed, treated for illnesses and accidents, have plenty of spare time and where the only work that exists to do is crucial to supporting the system, and forbidding people from using that as an argument for why the system should be continued.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Yes, because i have a sense of duty, unlike you it seems.
I did the same when the army conscripted me and made me a Füsilier, i would survive managing a bunch of scraprheaps aswell.

Good for you, but your attitude is not going to be shared with the vast majority of people. Another reason Socialism doesn't work, it assumes that people will all have a sense of duty like that and just go with the flow. But thats not human nature. Human nature is that we are all selfish little jerks looking out for number 1. When you've got options between doing a crap job and having everything you ever wanted, and doing nothing and still having everything you ever wanted, you're going to want to do nothing.

This was the situation in ancient Rome. The corn dole provided basic sustenance, so the citizenry often didn't work. The thing is with an automated society we could actually live like that. Before dilettante society had to work on the backs of a servant class, with robots there is no need for that. a society with automated infrastructure and industry and a low employment rate is actually viable. It is just not something we relish seeing right now.

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
How are you going to sell the idea that everybody should go through a bunch of technical schooling to perform a couple hours of work a week when your only line is "Its for the good of society!".

But everyone is "society". You are, your friends are, your parents are, your cousins, relatives, anyone you can think of are all part of "society". Humans are social creatures who to a great degree define themselves by who they know. When undergoing technical training is obviously, unquestionably for the good of society then people are going to want to do that. It's not a small thing. What makes "It's for the good of society!" an effective piece of mockery is when it's said in reference to something that's actually pointless or only of benefit to a very small group. So using it in cases where it's true and not just a line doesn't work. You're talking about a scenario in which people are fed, clothed and housed, treated for illnesses and accidents, have plenty of spare time and where the only work that exists to do is crucial to supporting the system, and forbidding people from using that as an argument for why the system should be continued.

Again. Most people are not going to think that way. They're only thinking about "How does this benefit me?". And undergoing this vast difficult technical training is not going to have tangible personal benefits for them from their perspective. They're not going to care that it all fits together in this vast machine. All they are going to see is that this is taking away from their leisure time.

They may understand on an intellectual level that it all does work together, but they're not going to be able to see or touch or taste it on a personal level. Thats why people will work for 8 hours a day 5 days a week in the current capitalist system, because they get a tangible payout for those 40 hours a week. They get a paycheck that they use to buy food, shelter, clothing, leisure, etc.. This robot centered Utopia provides no such direct payout. They'll get no paycheck for fixing the robots. They'll just get the same benefits that they would have gotten had they not done anything to the robots. They'll see their neighbor who failed the robot repair exams who never has to go fix robots, but still reaps the benefits.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
How are you going to sell the idea that everybody should go through a bunch of technical schooling to perform a couple hours of work a week when your only line is "Its for the good of society!".

But everyone is "society". You are, your friends are, your parents are, your cousins, relatives, anyone you can think of are all part of "society". Humans are social creatures who to a great degree define themselves by who they know. When undergoing technical training is obviously, unquestionably for the good of society then people are going to want to do that. It's not a small thing. What makes "It's for the good of society!" an effective piece of mockery is when it's said in reference to something that's actually pointless or only of benefit to a very small group. So using it in cases where it's true and not just a line doesn't work. You're talking about a scenario in which people are fed, clothed and housed, treated for illnesses and accidents, have plenty of spare time and where the only work that exists to do is crucial to supporting the system, and forbidding people from using that as an argument for why the system should be continued.

Again. Most people are not going to think that way. They're only thinking about "How does this benefit me?". And undergoing this vast difficult technical training is not going to have tangible personal benefits for them from their perspective. They're not going to care that it all fits together in this vast machine. All they are going to see is that this is taking away from their leisure time.

They may understand on an intellectual level that it all does work together, but they're not going to be able to see or touch or taste it on a personal level. Thats why people will work for 8 hours a day 5 days a week in the current capitalist system, because they get a tangible payout for those 40 hours a week. They get a paycheck that they use to buy food, shelter, clothing, leisure, etc.. This robot centered Utopia provides no such direct payout. They'll get no paycheck for fixing the robots. They'll just get the same benefits that they would have gotten had they not done anything to the robots. They'll see their neighbor who failed the robot repair exams who never has to go fix robots, but still reaps the benefits.

Frankly in such a society i bet 99% of the robots could fix each other without human interference. I'd imagine that you would not have to do much and could fill the gap with volunteers.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
How are you going to sell the idea that everybody should go through a bunch of technical schooling to perform a couple hours of work a week when your only line is "Its for the good of society!".

But everyone is "society". You are, your friends are, your parents are, your cousins, relatives, anyone you can think of are all part of "society". Humans are social creatures who to a great degree define themselves by who they know. When undergoing technical training is obviously, unquestionably for the good of society then people are going to want to do that. It's not a small thing. What makes "It's for the good of society!" an effective piece of mockery is when it's said in reference to something that's actually pointless or only of benefit to a very small group. So using it in cases where it's true and not just a line doesn't work. You're talking about a scenario in which people are fed, clothed and housed, treated for illnesses and accidents, have plenty of spare time and where the only work that exists to do is crucial to supporting the system, and forbidding people from using that as an argument for why the system should be continued.

Again. Most people are not going to think that way. They're only thinking about "How does this benefit me?". And undergoing this vast difficult technical training is not going to have tangible personal benefits for them from their perspective. They're not going to care that it all fits together in this vast machine. All they are going to see is that this is taking away from their leisure time.

They may understand on an intellectual level that it all does work together, but they're not going to be able to see or touch or taste it on a personal level. Thats why people will work for 8 hours a day 5 days a week in the current capitalist system, because they get a tangible payout for those 40 hours a week. They get a paycheck that they use to buy food, shelter, clothing, leisure, etc.. This robot centered Utopia provides no such direct payout. They'll get no paycheck for fixing the robots. They'll just get the same benefits that they would have gotten had they not done anything to the robots. They'll see their neighbor who failed the robot repair exams who never has to go fix robots, but still reaps the benefits.

Frankly in such a society i bet 99% of the robots could fix each other without human interference. I'd imagine that you would not have to do much and could fill the gap with volunteers.

And what happens when you end up with not enough volunteers? Or not enough people who volunteer have the necessary technical skill to do the repairs?

Are you going to force people at gunpoint to fix the robots? Whose holding the guns anyway? If you need these people's skills so badly, you can't afford to actually carry out your threat of shooting them, because then nobody will know how to fix them. And then we end up with a post-apocalyptic scenario real quick.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Again. Most people are not going to think that way. They're only thinking about "How does this benefit me?". And undergoing this vast difficult technical training is not going to have tangible personal benefits for them from their perspective. They're not going to care that it all fits together in this vast machine. All they are going to see is that this is taking away from their leisure time.

The mistake you're making here is that you're assuming that the most myopic possible American is the baseline for all human behaviour.

 Grey Templar wrote:
They'll see their neighbor who failed the robot repair exams who never has to go fix robots, but still reaps the benefits.

I posit that this will not be a problem, because while they don't have to go fix robots they don't get to go fix robots.

 Grey Templar wrote:
and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs

IOW, a totalitarian state is given full control over the entire economy, micromanaging every detail of production according to some arbitrary standard of "too much automation" and companies are required to hire redundant workers as a service to society rather than because they are required for an optimal business plan. That might not be socialism, but only because you're talking about a Soviet-style planned economy instead of a modern socialist democracy.

You also know damn well that people wanting to return to the 1950s are not including the tax rates in that desire.

Well yes, I know that it's primarily about wanting to return to an era when racism was socially acceptable, it's just funny to see people complain about how high our taxes are when they're as low as they've been in the past 100 years.

 Ketara wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Robots do not suffer from such a limit, they can be improved indefinitely.

I think this is a fun area to explore and very relevant to this thread. We hear many statements along the lines of the above; but what evidence are they based upon? How can we test their veracity?

We have a rough idea of how productivity is improving:

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2018/06/23/the-gap-between-wages-and-productivity/

Sure, productivity might theoretically instantly stop increasing at any point in the future but maybe we should worry about it once there are actual indicators of that happening? As it is now we have all kinds of technological improvements (all the time and in all kinds of industries) that are slowly but steadily making humanity overall more productive even if you can't see an instantly double digit increase in productivity in any one factory.

All that additional value that was created with that productivity could be funnelled into taxes and social services, safety nets, higher wages, less working hours, or any other similar feature but what we got instead is ever increasing wealth inequality. If you are not already rich then you should be asking for higher taxes so that at least some of that wealth that was created in the last decades from the increase in productivity ends up in your hands at some point and doesn't just flow upwards. If the rich had to do it all on their own (without you working for them) then their increase in productivity as individuals wouldn't be worth billions. Why give most of your increased productivity to the already rich? That's not in your interest.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs

IOW, a totalitarian state is given full control over the entire economy, micromanaging every detail of production according to some arbitrary standard of "too much automation" and companies are required to hire redundant workers as a service to society rather than because they are required for an optimal business plan. That might not be socialism, but only because you're talking about a Soviet-style planned economy instead of a modern socialist democracy.

Nothing about limiting automation requires a totalitarian regime or a planned economy. It just requires a regulatory organization which enforces standards regarding how much a process can be automated. It could even be a relatively simple set of guidelines. Such as "At least X% of your machinery has to be incapable of doing anything without human input". No requirements about how many humans you need to have, just requirements that you have X% of your equipment be non-automated.

You can still have a mostly capitalist system with this type of regulation. Heck, we have regulations today that are far more invasive and strict than this in other areas.

 Ketara wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Robots do not suffer from such a limit, they can be improved indefinitely.

I think this is a fun area to explore and very relevant to this thread. We hear many statements along the lines of the above; but what evidence are they based upon? How can we test their veracity?

There is this general assumption that mechanisation and robotics will continue to improve continually and endlessly; that it will become ever more intelligent/capable, that new innovations will carry on spitting out fresh new components which do the jobs of the older ones marginally better ad infinitum.

But.....says who? How do we not know that there we aren't heading towards a 'hard limit' beyond which we won't be able to improve the processors of computers? Why do we assume that there's a code we'll be able to devise which will mimic sentience sufficiently well to replace people? Where does this unbridled faith in the apparently infinite potential of technology to achieve absolutely anything come from?

The fact that we've managed to innovate as far as we have is really no guarantee of anything at all. Thinking critically/logically, there must be an end point at which we cannot proceed any further, after all. Where there are no more large discoveries to be made, no great advances in material sciences and engineering left to occur. Why do we presume that this 'hard limit' is going to be at the level of some sort of post-scarcity society? And not say, a hundred years from now?

People in the West in this day and age are raised with the unquestioned assumption that because technology has changed our lives so radically and quickly in comparison to those of our immediate ancestors; that it will continue to do so indefinitely. It's virtually a faith at this point. 'Donate some money, and we can beat -medical condition here- forever'. But...can we? Is it possible that there are diseases we can suffer from which no technology will ever fix? A degree of sentience no machine will ever mimic? Engineering challenges that will forever be out of our reach to execute?

As a corollary; what would that mean for society once we hit that 'hard limit'?

The flip side of this way of thinking is something called "technological singularity" - if you combine unlimited potential to improve with exponential growth you basically reach a limit of our current comprehension of possible progress in matters of (low) decades. But there are actually no examples of unlimited exponential growth anywhere in nature and every exponential growth period ultimately ends up in a spectacular collapse. Just something to chew on as a side dish to the socialism vs capitalism back and forth that goes on in this thread at the moment.

I think we would continue the transition to a very heavy service related economy much like what the US already has.

People will look more toward health care, education, the arts, and research and development. At this point I would be skeptical that robots would generate original thought to invent or innovate new concepts and designs.

More or less I foresee robots working along side humans to provide both the muscle and database without the creative design or imagination. The amount of factory jobs vs service jobs are already skewed in developed countries as it is.

Just a few opinions.

Obviously Socialism is the idealistic future of mankind.

If we are to continue progressing as a race, some point In the future, we will have to swap over to a socialistic system completely.


This requires a few things for it to feasibly work however.

A. You need some form of non-corruptible government. Most likely in the form of an AI far in the future after we mostly kill ourselves off.

B. A dire reason for everyone to get along. Extinction level event in which we must all cooperate or be no more.

C. A reduction in, or at least a controllable amount, of the human population. This can be done in a few ways (either having smaller self-sustained communities who never leave their communities, or in the case of space travel, fleets consisting of only so much space).




Until we get to this point, Capatilism will still be the "best" way to promote growth in our race, since we are all (i.e. 95%) all greedy humans.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs

IOW, a totalitarian state is given full control over the entire economy, micromanaging every detail of production according to some arbitrary standard of "too much automation" and companies are required to hire redundant workers as a service to society rather than because they are required for an optimal business plan. That might not be socialism, but only because you're talking about a Soviet-style planned economy instead of a modern socialist democracy.

Nothing about limiting automation requires a totalitarian regime or a planned economy. It just requires a regulatory organization which enforces standards regarding how much a process can be automated. It could even be a relatively simple set of guidelines. Such as "At least X% of your machinery has to be incapable of doing anything without human input". No requirements about how many humans you need to have, just requirements that you have X% of your equipment be non-automated.

You can still have a mostly capitalist system with this type of regulation. Heck, we have regulations today that are far more invasive and strict than this in other areas.

You absolutely end up with a Soviet economy because your terms are so vague and varied across manufacturing processes. You have to define "automation", "human input", etc, for every single factory and business. Otherwise what is stopping me from, for example, having the human input be one person once per day pressing the start button? To deal with that sort of thing you have to have Soviet-level state control with a goal of maximizing employment over profit and efficiency.

Mario wrote:
Sure, productivity might theoretically instantly stop increasing at any point in the future but maybe we should worry about it once there are actual indicators of that happening?

If you think I'm discussing productivity, there's been a communication failure. I'm not talking about an ability to extract more milk with less moo. I'm talking about the point at which technological improvements and innovation slow down because we've reached the capacity of what we are physically capable of creating on our plane of existence.

Think of it in terms of the space elevator concept (which me and Perry bandied about in the last space thread). Although we have a material now which is technically physically capable of constructing it, the fact that an atom out of place reduces the strength sufficiently to destroy its viability as a space elevator renders it impractical. We briefly discussed how we'd need to wait for another more suitable material to be developed; but that's the crux. What if it never is developed? What if there's no amazing new scientific breakthrough that is physically possible which gives us the material we need of sufficient tensile strength, because no such material exists or ever could? The space elevator becomes impossible, forever.

In the field of robotics alternatively, we assume that we'll be able to program a robot capable of taking over every job we can do at some stage. But what if robotics is fated to stumble in a decade or two, because there are no more substantial physical advances capable of being made in processor power? And that renders it impossible to make robots capable of replacing humans in the workplace en masse in the way imagined elsewhere in this thread?

Everyone is sitting here assuming that human ingenuity will continue to magically conjure up ever better and more efficient alternatives to present technology, but we have absolutely no idea just how many remain. Everyone is just making assumptions about how much further we can go. It could be we have another thousand years of continual innovation before we hit that 'hard limit', or a hundred. And nobody really knows whether 'pseudo-sentient multifaceted robots which can replace everyone's jobs' are ultimately going to be within the boundaries of 'what is physically possible'.

nou wrote:
The flip side of this way of thinking is something called "technological singularity" - if you combine unlimited potential to improve with exponential growth you basically reach a limit of our current comprehension of possible progress in matters of (low) decades. But there are actually no examples of unlimited exponential growth anywhere in nature and every exponential growth period ultimately ends up in a spectacular collapse. Just something to chew on as a side dish to the socialism vs capitalism back and forth that goes on in this thread at the moment.

The logical corollary of the 'no examples' argument would be that we're aware of no other species that has learnt to manipulate their physical environment in the same way we have. Our rate of technical progress and scientific understanding has increased more in the last fifty years than in the hundred before it, and that hundred moved far far faster than the two hundred before that.

If we keep speeding up at this rate, who knows? We might hit our 'hard limit' of what there is to discover within a century or two. In the field of material sciences, for example, there's only a finite number of elements and ways of combining them at the end of the day. Which means the fact that a 'hard limit' exists is a mathematical certainty. Who can say how close to it we are?

 Ketara wrote:

nou wrote:
The flip side of this way of thinking is something called "technological singularity" - if you combine unlimited potential to improve with exponential growth you basically reach a limit of our current comprehension of possible progress in matters of (low) decades. But there are actually no examples of unlimited exponential growth anywhere in nature and every exponential growth period ultimately ends up in a spectacular collapse. Just something to chew on as a side dish to the socialism vs capitalism back and forth that goes on in this thread at the moment.

The logical corollary of the 'no examples' argument would be that we're aware of no other species that has learnt to manipulate their physical environment in the same way we have. Our rate of technical progress and scientific understanding has increased more in the last fifty years than in the hundred before it, and that hundred moved far far faster than the two hundred before that.

If we keep speeding up at this rate, who knows? We might hit our 'hard limit' of what there is to discover within a century or two. In the field of material sciences, for example, there's only a finite number of elements and ways of combining them at the end of the day. Which means the fact that a 'hard limit' exists is a mathematical certainty. Who can say how close to it we are?

Our rate of progress is the exponential part. The part of exceeding our comprehension comes from the very nature of exponential functions - at some point they progress so fast, that they are practically vertical. We cannot fathom a reality in which human knowledge doubles daily or on per hour basis and that is a logical conclusion of ever speeding progress that already doubles every 15 years. That is why I fundamentally agree with you - there always exist some hard limit for exponential growth. And I'm not talking only about biological species - we do not know about any instances of endless exponential growth - even cosmological inflation had an end to it. The last perfect illustration of how exponential growth leads to inevitable collapse is last years Bitcoin bubble. The only way to go past the exponential era unharmed is if it slows down to some kind of asymptotic growth.

Grey Templar wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

European Thought Police? What the Hell? In what kind of world are you living?

You should try coming back to reality. It is far from perfect but it seems to be a nicer place than wherever you find yourself currently.

People in England have literally been arrested for just stating their opinions on Facebook. They may be despicable opinions, but they should be allowed to have them.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/uk-politics-uncovered/uk-police-arrest-man-for-offensive-facebook-post-about-migrants/890222007758302/

That is Thought Police.

Scotland. Not England. And an article lifted from Breitbart that doesn't follow up on anything that happened. Top evidence!

Additionally, using England (or even Scotland, which is closer) as an example of a socialist could only be made by someone who thinks that the US is any kind of baseline.

Grey Templar wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
How are you going to sell the idea that everybody should go through a bunch of technical schooling to perform a couple hours of work a week when your only line is "Its for the good of society!".

But everyone is "society". You are, your friends are, your parents are, your cousins, relatives, anyone you can think of are all part of "society". Humans are social creatures who to a great degree define themselves by who they know. When undergoing technical training is obviously, unquestionably for the good of society then people are going to want to do that. It's not a small thing. What makes "It's for the good of society!" an effective piece of mockery is when it's said in reference to something that's actually pointless or only of benefit to a very small group. So using it in cases where it's true and not just a line doesn't work. You're talking about a scenario in which people are fed, clothed and housed, treated for illnesses and accidents, have plenty of spare time and where the only work that exists to do is crucial to supporting the system, and forbidding people from using that as an argument for why the system should be continued.

Again. Most people are not going to think that way. They're only thinking about "How does this benefit me?".

Evidence?

Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
and heavily automated production is banned so that humans can still have jobs

IOW, a totalitarian state is given full control over the entire economy, micromanaging every detail of production according to some arbitrary standard of "too much automation" and companies are required to hire redundant workers as a service to society rather than because they are required for an optimal business plan. That might not be socialism, but only because you're talking about a Soviet-style planned economy instead of a modern socialist democracy.

Nothing about limiting automation requires a totalitarian regime or a planned economy. It just requires a regulatory organization which enforces standards regarding how much a process can be automated. It could even be a relatively simple set of guidelines. Such as "At least X% of your machinery has to be incapable of doing anything without human input". No requirements about how many humans you need to have, just requirements that you have X% of your equipment be non-automated.

 Ketara wrote:
In the field of robotics alternatively, we assume that we'll be able to program a robot capable of taking over every job we can do at some stage. But what if robotics is fated to stumble in a decade or two, because there are no more substantial physical advances capable of being made in processor power? And that renders it impossible to make robots capable of replacing humans in the workplace en masse in the way imagined elsewhere in this thread?

The difference is that, unlike the space elevator case, we're talking about incremental improvements to existing technology rather than speculating about something we don't even know is possible. Again, looking at the company I work at mass replacement of humans isn't that far off. We know we can build a robot that is capable of removing parts from a machine and moving them to the next one, it's just currently cheaper to hire a minimum-wage unskilled temp worker to do it. So all we need for those people to be replaced is for the well-established trend of current technology becoming cheaper over time to continue. Once the existing robot becomes cheap enough (or the humans become more expensive via, say, increasing the minimum wage) those jobs are gone forever. Same thing with a lot of other situations, the job is doing routine processes of the sort that robots are good at and the only obstacle is waiting for the price to come down a bit more.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

European Thought Police? What the Hell? In what kind of world are you living?

You should try coming back to reality. It is far from perfect but it seems to be a nicer place than wherever you find yourself currently.

People in England have literally been arrested for just stating their opinions on Facebook. They may be despicable opinions, but they should be allowed to have them.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/uk-politics-uncovered/uk-police-arrest-man-for-offensive-facebook-post-about-migrants/890222007758302/

That is Thought Police.

There is a difference between having an opinion and stating an opinion.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
There is a difference between having an opinion and stating an opinion.

And an even bigger difference between stating an opinion and posting threats/hate speech/etc. I don't think it's at all a coincidence that the article (from a 100% unbiased and objective source) doesn't post the original content so we can evaluate whether or not it should have been shut down. For all we know it could have been " these immigrants, we need to kill all of the s" and the police were 100% justified in arresting the person who posted it.

 Peregrine wrote:

The difference is that, unlike the space elevator case, we're talking about incremental improvements to existing technology rather than speculating about something we don't even know is possible.

Are we? Perhaps you specifically were (without re-reading the thread I couldn't say); but the overall premise of the thread is robots taking 'ALL' the jobs. Not just some. The lot. And it's that concept (or anything close to it) that I'm addressing here.

I think we can both agree that robots being able to perform any and every function better than a human can do for cheaper is far beyond a mere re-application of existing technologies. Incremental advances and refinements only take you so far. It would require extremely considerable advances; both from a knowledge perspective and a material sciences one. Certainly farmoreso than the question of the space elevator (which really isn't that far away as compared to previous jumps in material sciences over the last two centuries).

nou wrote:Our rate of progress is the exponential part. The part of exceeding our comprehension comes from the very nature of exponential functions - at some point they progress so fast, that they are practically vertical. We cannot fathom a reality in which human knowledge doubles daily or on per hour basis and that is a logical conclusion of ever speeding progress that already doubles every 15 years. That is why I fundamentally agree with you - there always exist some hard limit for exponential growth. And I'm not talking only about biological species - we do not know about any instances of endless exponential growth - even cosmological inflation had an end to it. The last perfect illustration of how exponential growth leads to inevitable collapse is last years Bitcoin bubble. The only way to go past the exponential era unharmed is if it slows down to some kind of asymptotic growth.

So what do you imagine would be the logical consequence of it in the field of technology (in the broader academic sense)? Speculating broadly, there would inevitably be a levelling off as actual invention gave way more to innovation (it will take some time to re-consider/refine everything from several angles and squeeze every last bit of knowledge juice and utility from discoveries made). But what does it mean for society when it hits?

The improvements don't even have to be incremental.

IBM have this week unveiled the System One Q, a commercially available (eventually) quantum computer.

It's in a 9' tall glass cabinet, it needs a lot of space much like early conventional computers, but if the development of quantum follows the evolution of binary, we could be seeing home machines, and then handheld devices as normal before the next century.

Once that tech becomes more robust and portable, AI and robots will make a massive (quantum?) leap forwards.

Money = production.

Productions goes up - money goes up.

Capitalism basically just decided those at the top get the majority of the money. A modified capitalism is required where those that produce make money but so do those who don't (because we don't need them to produce anymore). You can still have an incentive based system where those that produce make more money but those who can't can still surive and have happy lives.

Money isn't just a concept that helps us decided how we divid up the pie.

 Azreal13 wrote:
The improvements don't even have to be incremental.

IBM have this week unveiled the System One Q, a commercially available (eventually) quantum computer.

It's in a 9' tall glass cabinet, it needs a lot of space much like early conventional computers, but if the development of quantum follows the evolution of binary, we could be seeing home machines, and then handheld devices as normal before the next century.

Once that tech becomes more robust and portable, AI and robots will make a massive (quantum?) leap forwards.

Breaking down your sentence, you started with the unknown; namely 'if the development....we could'. But then that turned into 'Once that tech becomes'. In short, you went from uncertain hypotheses to a declarative statement of certainty. It begs the question, what if the evolution of quantum doesn't progress the way you anticipate? Or what if it does, but there's no further step beyond that?

The substance of my observation (in case it isn't entirely clear, judging by people's responses) isn't so much to argue about where the exact 'hard-point' of human technological invention can be drawn. It might well happen before robots are able to fully replace us, or it might not, that's impossible to say. Given we're talking at least a century plus in the future, you'd have to be an idiot to try and speculate seriously on that score.

No, my observation was merely that everybody treats the continued technological progress of mankind as a certainty; that invention will follow invention, that groundbreaking discoveries on a regular timetabled basis are mere inevitabilities. But both logically and mathematically speaking, that assumption is deeply flawed, and in a way, it is just as interesting to speculate what it means for society if robots can NEVER fully replace humans. If our advancements level off, and there always needs to be someone cleaning other people's toilets. What happens to our dreams of egalitarian utopia then?

Well obviously this entire discussion is based on assumptions of what will happen.

A giant asteroid could wipe us all next week.

It's probably best to confine the discussion to what we can see happening based on what's already occurred, what's happening now and it's relationship with what came before.

Quantum computing was theory only very recently, it has now advanced to the point where working units will be available to anyone with the cash and desire to own one.

We have an existing paradigm to describe how computing tends to develop, and so it seems that at this point a reasonable assumption that having reached a significant milestone on the same journey, it will proceed in a similar way. But nothing is certain, hence some of my language.

We already have, or at least can see on the road map, most of the tech needed to make most of the ideas discussed a reality, so to attach "if it happens" to many of them would be redundant and is probably already assumed by most posters.

If there's a hard limit to mankind's progression, I'd posit it's well ahead of most of the concepts discussed here.

Personally I'm less worried about all jobs being replaced so much as what Paragrine describes being the norm: Skill based jobs being filtered out and replaced with menial ones that pay less, resulting in a lower quality of life as people compete for jobs that could barely live on to begin with.

 Azreal13 wrote:

We already have, or at least can see on the road map, most of the tech needed to make most of the ideas discussed a reality, so to attach "if it happens" to many of them would be redundant and is probably already assumed by most posters.

If you honestly think that we already have the road map and most of the tech required for robotics to feasibly replace all of mankind in all jobs; I think you're wildly over-optimistic to the point of complete delusion. I don't say that to be offensive (honest, I'm not trying to be snarky or chuck out bait here), but because it just completely doesn't match up at all with even the current intense requirements of the quantum computing which you're proffering as a potential solution.

Nobody has yet built a computer capable of true artifical sentience or self-awareness (which is what would be required as a bare minimum to replace all humans in all jobs). Nobody even knows how to produce that effect as of yet. And that's literally the first step. Even if we assumed that the quantum computers now within reach are capable of doing the job, do you know what the intense cooling requirements of those things are? What their electricity requirements are? How physically large they are? The vast difficulties around keeping 'noise' out even in specially constructed custom buildings?

To try and contain all of that into a machine the size of a human brain which can operate autonomouslyin an external environment (requiring further advances still in battery technology, shielding, etc) would require theoretical and engineering advances that are about as far away from us right now as the equipment used back in the 1880's is from what we use today. At the least. And that's all making a massive assumption that quantum computers can do the job. What if they can't? What if the ones that could are either physically impossible, or would be restricted to building sized machines?

We have absolutely no idea at this stage if there'll be Star Wars droids wandering around in a hundred years, or if we'll hit a technological barrier so fast we'll get whiplash in eighty.

There don't need to be enough robots to replace all human workers, just to replace enough human workers to create a huge pool of permanently unemployed people and allow employers to set the terms of employment to burn out the "lucky ones" for unlivable wages.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Personally I'm less worried about all jobs being replaced so much as what Paragrine describes being the norm: Skill based jobs being filtered out and replaced with menial ones that pay less, resulting in a lower quality of life as people compete for jobs that could barely live on to begin with.

Looks to me like we're almost there already, except the menial jobs are also going away.

 Ketara wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:

We already have, or at least can see on the road map, most of the tech needed to make most of the ideas discussed a reality, so to attach "if it happens" to many of them would be redundant and is probably already assumed by most posters.

If you honestly think that we already have the road map and most of the tech required for robotics to feasibly replace all of mankind in all jobs; I think you're wildly over-optimistic to the point of complete delusion. I don't say that to be offensive (honest, I'm not trying to be snarky or chuck out bait here), but because it just completely doesn't match up at all with even the current intense requirements of the quantum computing which you're proffering as a potential solution.

Nobody has yet built a human brain-sized computer capable of true artifical sentience or self-awareness (which is what would be required as a bare minimum to replace all humans in all jobs). Nobody even knows how to produce that effect as of yet. And that's literally the first step. Even if we assumed that the quantum computers now within reach are capable of doing the job, do you know what the intense cooling requirements of those things are? What their electricity requirements are? How physically large they are? The vast difficulties around keeping 'noise' out even in specially constructed custom buildings?

To try and contain all of that into a machine the size of a human brain which can operate autonomouslyin an external environment (requiring further advances still in battery technology, shielding, etc) would require theoretical and engineering advances that are about as far away from us right now as the equipment used back in the 1880's is from what we use today. At the least. And that's all making a massive assumption that quantum computers can do the job. What if they can't? What if the ones that could are either physically impossible, or would be restricted to building sized machines?

We have absolutely no idea at this stage if there'll be Star Wars droids wandering around in a hundred years, or if we'll hit a technological barrier so fast we'll get whiplash in eighty.

Who's to say we need to make something the size of a human brain? Why do robots need to resemble humans at all? I suspect it would be possible for many jobs to have the robot's "personality" networked rather than have everything be stored in the machine itself. A robot never needs to leave the environment necessary to perform its job. We already have quantum computers that don't need special rooms etc, that's the signicance of the IBM machine I mentioned. Well, at least nothing special beyond your typical office server room at least.

But the point remains that this is a theoretical conversation, and saying "what if it doesn't happen" essentially just undermines the central conceit of the whole discussion. You could go back and quote every single post and counter it with "what if that doesn't happen?" It's pretty much a given that it might not, and discussing it is kind of redundant.

 Azreal13 wrote:

Who's to say we need to make something the size of a human brain? Why do robots need to resemble humans at all?

The line was 'ALL' jobs. That means that they need to look like people (if they're going to replace counsellors, sex workers, teachers, and all other jobs which might require in depth human interaction).

But the point remains that this is a theoretical conversation, and saying "what if it doesn't happen" essentially just undermines the central conceit of the whole discussion. You could go back and quote every single post and counter it with "what if that doesn't happen?" It's pretty much a given that it might not, and discussing it is kind of redundant.

If 'What if it doesn't happen' is all you're getting out of my posts, then communication is probably eluding us here. No worries.

 Ketara wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Robots do not suffer from such a limit, they can be improved indefinitely.

I think this is a fun area to explore and very relevant to this thread. We hear many statements along the lines of the above; but what evidence are they based upon? How can we test their veracity?

There is this general assumption that mechanisation and robotics will continue to improve continually and endlessly; that it will become ever more intelligent/capable, that new innovations will carry on spitting out fresh new components which do the jobs of the older ones marginally better ad infinitum.

But.....says who? How do we not know that there we aren't heading towards a 'hard limit' beyond which we won't be able to improve the processors of computers? Why do we assume that there's a code we'll be able to devise which will mimic sentience sufficiently well to replace people? Where does this unbridled faith in the apparently infinite potential of technology to achieve absolutely anything come from?

The fact that we've managed to innovate as far as we have is really no guarantee of anything at all. Thinking critically/logically, there must be an end point at which we cannot proceed any further, after all. Where there are no more large discoveries to be made, no great advances in material sciences and engineering left to occur. Why do we presume that this 'hard limit' is going to be at the level of some sort of post-scarcity society? And not say, a hundred years from now?

People in the West in this day and age are raised with the unquestioned assumption that because technology has changed our lives so radically and quickly in comparison to those of our immediate ancestors; that it will continue to do so indefinitely. It's virtually a faith at this point. 'Donate some money, and we can beat -medical condition here- forever'. But...can we? Is it possible that there are diseases we can suffer from which no technology will ever fix? A degree of sentience no machine will ever mimic? Engineering challenges that will forever be out of our reach to execute?

As a corollary; what would that mean for society once we hit that 'hard limit'?

I sure hope so, and I hope it happens soon.

 Ketara wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:

Who's to say we need to make something the size of a human brain? Why do robots need to resemble humans at all?

The line was 'ALL' jobs. That means that they need to look like people (if they're going to replace counsellors, sex workers, teachers, and all other jobs which might require in depth human interaction).

But the point remains that this is a theoretical conversation, and saying "what if it doesn't happen" essentially just undermines the central conceit of the whole discussion. You could go back and quote every single post and counter it with "what if that doesn't happen?" It's pretty much a given that it might not, and discussing it is kind of redundant.

If 'What if it doesn't happen' is all you're getting out of my posts, then communication is probably eluding us here. No worries.

Do they need to look like humans to do those jobs? I mean teachers and counselors already conduct remote sessions over Skype etc. There isn't a huge leap to the face in the screen being artificial. Maybe sex workers need to look human (depends on the human I guess, the local Anne Summers has plenty of stuff that only looks like bits of a human) but again, no need for the "brain" to be contained in the physically form. Can easily network to the cloud, much like we already have with the variety of smart assistants.

Equally, if you can delineate the difference between "what if there's a hard limit beyond which technology cannot be advanced" and "what if none of this happens" beyond some semantics and specific cases, we'll probably be more on the same page.

There's a major component to this issue which no one has addressed: demographics. Automation would not be quite such a foregone conclusion if the populations of industrialized nations weren't shrinking and growing older. The pool of native born, working age people in first world nations like Japan, the US and European countries is not going to be enough to meet labor demands in the near future, especially as the current population grows older and gets out of the workforce. In our system of global neoliberal capitalism this is very bad as gdp growth, credit and an an appreciating real estate market are the financial drugs we've become addicted to, and a withdrawal from those things would be nearly fatal and wipe out trillions of dollars of value for investors. Part of the reason there's such a big push for immigration in industrialized nations is because people know this and are rushing to replace the aging population to meet (or even create) those demands. I wouldn't be so certain that this system won't find a way to sustain itself at pretty much any cost, because the landlords who we all rent everything from these days have everything to lose from letting gdp or real estate growth falter.

If liquidity can be maintained through automation then it will be, and we will go on with this weird late stage capitalism until the debts finally get called in somehow and it collapses. Automation itself is only part of the equation though because they need to increase housing demand and consumption otherwise the markets crash and they lose everything. So even if robots take up the slack as far as labor goes, everything will be done to preserve the current system no matter how little it makes sense in the long term. Robots won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back because the camel is already dead and zombified and the real question is how long its desiccated corpse can crawl around until it finally decays.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Situation in scenario: worker can't even work anymore, ergo the state intervenes because he has a duty torwards the small, and look at that, he could just use this new cheap labour of robots to do anything at minimal cost, making socialism possible for the first time.

Sure, it sounds good on paper. The problem is that the socialism state can only function through taxes. You've still got to pay the few people who are working, but those are also the only people you can tax. And there is also no incentive for people to even do those few jobs because the can just have all their needs provided for free. Why work and have your pay taxed out the wazoo when you can just do nothing and have all needs taken care of?

So because the system doesn't work, the system collapses and you have starving masses rioting in the streets.

There's going to be starving masses rioting in the streets when there's no jobs for people to earn pay with, and under capitalism it's not only right to let them starve, but necessary to reduce the surplus of labor and increase it's value.

Grey Templar wrote:Nothing about limiting automation requires a totalitarian regime or a planned economy. It just requires a regulatory organization which enforces standards regarding how much a process can be automated. It could even be a relatively simple set of guidelines. Such as "At least X% of your machinery has to be incapable of doing anything without human input". No requirements about how many humans you need to have, just requirements that you have X% of your equipment be non-automated.

You can still have a mostly capitalist system with this type of regulation. Heck, we have regulations today that are far more invasive and strict than this in other areas.

Let's assume that you manage to limit automation and we still have a "free and open" capitalistic system (according to your ideal scenario). What do you think the people with the money will do? Will they abide by those regulations and build those factories like your laws would postulate or will they just build their factories in the next country over there where such a regulation doesn't exist? And what then, a trade war? That should be fun.

Ketara wrote:

Spoiler:

In the field of robotics alternatively, we assume that we'll be able to program a robot capable of taking over every job we can do at some stage. But what if robotics is fated to stumble in a decade or two, because there are no more substantial physical advances capable of being made in processor power? And that renders it impossible to make robots capable of replacing humans in the workplace en masse in the way imagined elsewhere in this thread?

Everyone is sitting here assuming that human ingenuity will continue to magically conjure up ever better and more efficient alternatives to present technology, but we have absolutely no idea just how many remain. Everyone is just making assumptions about how much further we can go. It could be we have another thousand years of continual innovation before we hit that 'hard limit', or a hundred. And nobody really knows whether 'pseudo-sentient multifaceted robots which can replace everyone's jobs' are ultimately going to be within the boundaries of 'what is physically possible'.

Ah, okay, got it. To that I would say that before that happens we'd probably already have enough other problems that will cause us to restructure society to be less capitalistic when it comes to fundamental survival needs (food/shelter). From what I remember even now we make more food that we need but due to the need to "make profit" on something that's so fundamental to survival we have a rather uneven distribution (first world countries are throwing away huge amounts of food (I think it was about 50+%), and third world countries lack food). Similar issues exist for housing where a lot of housing is empty but we also have homeless people. If those issues were to get a lot worse than they are now, we (meaning: everyone) would probably slowly reduce those inefficiencies to create a new (and more socialised) equilibrium because the profit motive is extracting value by creating suffering on the side of poor people.

Ketara wrote:Are we? Perhaps you specifically were (without re-reading the thread I couldn't say); but the overall premise of the thread is robots taking 'ALL' the jobs. Not just some. The lot. And it's that concept (or anything close to it) that I'm addressing here.

I think we can both agree that robots being able to perform any and every function better than a human can do for cheaper is far beyond a mere re-application of existing technologies. Incremental advances and refinements only take you so far. It would require extremely considerable advances; both from a knowledge perspective and a material sciences one. Certainly farmoreso than the question of the space elevator (which really isn't that far away as compared to previous jumps in material sciences over the last two centuries).

I think the idea that robots will take all the jobs would really need some sort of technological singularity (more SF than reality at the moment) but as long as incremental progress is happening, it means that automation will keep eliminating working class jobs (for the most part). And you don't need to eliminate 100% of those jobs to create a situation where a country gets into real problems. I can't remember what the exact number was (or what the baseline was, I think the article I read was about US numbers) but I think it was something along the lines of an additional 10–15% of long term unemployment would cause real damage to the economy and tax situation of a country.

The unemployment numbers everywhere look better than they actually are due to what counts as you being unemployed. Too many people don't have sufficient savings or are a mild problem away from disaster. Add more unemployed people and a reduction in social safety nets and services and you don't need robots to replace 100% of us to get a serious problem. They just need to nibble away at enough of our jobs. In a way, a 100% replacement would actually be good because it would mean we wouldn't need to work at all and it would instantly question the viability of capitalism at this point. It would mean we have really cheap supply of what ever we want. I think the dangerous part of automation is that it could have a subtle destabilising effect over time without us really noticing it that much and prolonging the suffering of huge amounts of people just because we stuck with what we knew instead of rethinking how our society should deal with those issues.

The economies of developed countries have all already shifted more towards a service economy (and are slowly (and partly) moving towards the unstable version: the gig economy) and everybody else is catching up fast (salaries in China have also made significant chunks of automation viable over there). Inequality keeps rising, taxes get sidestepped by those who actually have money, and jobs for a regular person are not as plentiful as a few decades ago. The question is: What's the next shift after industrialisation and the shift to a service economy? And with service economy being such a wide reaching term will there even be a shift? Will it all be about millennials occasionally sending each other some money via Patreon and GoFundMe so they can pay rent?

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
More or less I foresee robots working along side humans to provide both the muscle and database without the creative design or imagination. The amount of factory jobs vs service jobs are already skewed in developed countries as it is.

True, but how many people have any talent for creative design? I imagine a fair number of gamers could manage, but could Joe Six-Pack, whose work consists of repetative actions and whose entertainment consists of vegetating in front of the T.V. with a beer?

And with the vast increase in communications capability we've created even now, why would you WANT any but the handful who are the very very best at it doing that work in the first place?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Personally I'm less worried about all jobs being replaced so much as what Paragrine describes being the norm: Skill based jobs being filtered out and replaced with menial ones that pay less, resulting in a lower quality of life as people compete for jobs that could barely live on to begin with.

I have bad news for you.

It's already happening, and has been for quite some time.

Ask accountants what happened to the profession in the eighties, when the PC hit the workplace...

Heck, it goes back way farther than that. A skilled tailor used to make big bucks making (for example) a suit of clothes. It was so expensive that few people could AFFORD more than two outfits. Now, much of the work is mechanized, there are few dedicated tailors left (although they still make big bucks)... and what you have is a bunch of seamstresses in third-world sweatshops making less per month than American minimum wage per HOUR.

 Ketara wrote:

nou wrote:Our rate of progress is the exponential part. The part of exceeding our comprehension comes from the very nature of exponential functions - at some point they progress so fast, that they are practically vertical. We cannot fathom a reality in which human knowledge doubles daily or on per hour basis and that is a logical conclusion of ever speeding progress that already doubles every 15 years. That is why I fundamentally agree with you - there always exist some hard limit for exponential growth. And I'm not talking only about biological species - we do not know about any instances of endless exponential growth - even cosmological inflation had an end to it. The last perfect illustration of how exponential growth leads to inevitable collapse is last years Bitcoin bubble. The only way to go past the exponential era unharmed is if it slows down to some kind of asymptotic growth.

So what do you imagine would be the logical consequence of it in the field of technology (in the broader academic sense)? Speculating broadly, there would inevitably be a levelling off as actual invention gave way more to innovation (it will take some time to re-consider/refine everything from several angles and squeeze every last bit of knowledge juice and utility from discoveries made). But what does it mean for society when it hits?

That highly depends on the exact stage of knowledge "end of progress" or collapse of exponential growth happens at, so probable answers are many, to many to even briefly name all of those, there is a whole section of futurology and philosophy dedicated to answer such questions and resolve Fermi Paradox - which is ultimately what this thread is all about.

If it happens after practical quantuum computation but before we get rid with stock market economy, then capitalism will end in Flash Crash magnitudes larger than the one in 2010 or fully blown economic wars, we will be thrown into barter trade for a short while and then restart capitalism from scratch somewhere at XVIII-XIX century levels (because despite what all socialist and communist say, the biggest strenght of capitalism is that it is an emergent property of trade and happens spontaneously with complex enough trade net).

If it happens before practical quantuum computation, then growth economics model will collapse due to both demographics strain (as Luciferean rather aptly pointed out) and lack of necessity of replacing products with newer generations of those same products due to only small innovations not being enough to justify replacement. It is much harder to predict what happens afterwards, but the most probable result is a global conflict that resets us back a century or two and we restart capitalism again...

If by any chance we manage to avoid collapse scenario, then we will find ourselves in stagnation and slow decay reality and that will in relatively short time lead to resource wars and in effect only delay collapse and restart scenario.

But what has to be said in such futurological context, is that we probably face a much bigger problem of post-antibiotic era much sooner than we face "post-technological advance era". Post-antibiotic era inevitably reduces global population rapidly and restores it to XVIII-XIX levels, changes model of habitation back to sparse and ends the whole women emancipation trend that started with penicilin.

The common denominator of all those scenarios is that stable level of human advancement and sustainable economy is more likely to look like XVIII century than like XXX century we imagine today. I don't believe in any Orwelian like dystopias of global oppresive state nor in communist utopias of "greater good" oppresive state as "ends of history", as both are fundamentally incompatible with human species and both are not naturally stable. There might be a way to alter human species behavior due to pharmacology and other biological manipulation means and end up somewhere close to Huxley's vision, but that would be a trully best case, one in a million chance result.

And IMHO we will never even reach Type I level on Kardashev scale.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I recently went to a tech conference where they talked about all the advances AI have made and how it’s likely that most human jobs will have disappeared within the next few decades due to automation.

How would that work? If nobody can work then nobody has any money. If they have no money then they can’t buy things. If they can’t but things then, it doesn’t matter how productive or cheap the goods get as a result of automation. Companies will have nobody to sell to and would go bankrupt. How would say, Amazon, or McDonalds function if 60 plus percent of its consumer base became destitute? There wouldn’t be all the exchanges of money and capital to make it work. It’s not just going to be one industry but a vast swath of humanity rendered unnecessary and without worth. But wouldn’t it probably hurt a lot of companies that are aimed at selling to a mass market?

The more "robots/technology" we have, the more jobs we'll have.

How do I know this? All of human history. Right now, in America, at this very point in time, there are more jobs available than people within the borders.

So, when work hours were reduced by technology some 100ush years ago, there were people screaming the new robots are taking away the jobs. What happened, though? Because people worked less hours, two entirely new industries opened up - restaurant and vacation industries.

People had free time to enjoy life, so they took vacations and ate out. Two things that didn't exist for all of human history for roughly 95% of humanity.

Should I even bring up the internet? How this technology, run by servers and robots, "employs millions of bloggers, entertainers, journalists, marketers, etc..."

Let me put it this way - if anyones idea of "perfect humanity" is less robots, all you have to do is pass a law that forbids farm robots and machines. With that one stroke of a pen, you have now employed the entire planet back to working 7 days a week, starving and dying on farms.

I mean, I can being up countless examples.... You now have millions of artists able to draw, play music, write poetry and make a living doing so, when in the past, it was only a handful of families in nearly life long employ of aristocrats. Today, anyone can start a band online and sell their music for a good profit, when only 10 years ago, you had to struggle, and before then, you had to deal with the two of three large music publishers who ran your future through record deals.

More robots, the better for humanity. Why? Humans are thinking animals, not beasts of burden. We flourish when we have free time to plan for our future, not when we die on a farm by age 10 of a tooth ache like some beast of burden.

 BuFFo wrote:

Today, anyone can start a band online and sell their music for a good profit, when only 10 years ago, you had to struggle, and before then, you had to deal with the two of three large music publishers who ran your future through record deals.

Sure, today anyone can sell their music online. But make a profit? Unless you have a sufficient fanbase you're not going to actually make enough money to survive without having another job. Best case it's a hobby that pays for itself and gives a little extra spending money, but very few can actually make it their full time job.

It is highly unlikely that you could transition to having 90%+ of your population employed as entertainers and have them all making enough money to sustain themselves. Afterall, if everybody is an entertainer, who is being entertained? You still end up with a situation like we have today, where very few actually make it big in the industry and most people who try end up not getting much of a following(and thus a source of income).

As it is today, there are too many "Artists" of all types for our overall society. Most people who try to make it big, or even just enough to be professionals, will find no demand and a crowded job market. There are only so many spaces for musicians to play at live venues for pay, and only so much $ to pay them with. There are only so many art galleries, and only so many people willing to buy art. There are only so many sports teams and only so many spots they can take. There is only so much demand for video game designers.

For every person who is good enough to be able to make a living creating their Artwork, there is going to be several people who weren't good enough. Or who might have been good enough, but all the spaces were full and nobody would buy their stuff.

More robots, the better for humanity. Why? Humans are thinking animals, not beasts of burden. We flourish when we have free time to plan for our future, not when we die on a farm by age 10 of a tooth ache like some beast of burden.

Look, nobody is suggesting that we should go back to the dark ages. We're just saying that there is such a thing as too efficient. Eliminating work entirely is completely uncharted territory, and outside of wishful fantasy writing it doesn't exist. And everybody who has tried to move towards a completely collective society has utterly failed, so why do people keep trying?

 Vulcan wrote:

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
More or less I foresee robots working along side humans to provide both the muscle and database without the creative design or imagination. The amount of factory jobs vs service jobs are already skewed in developed countries as it is.

True, but how many people have any talent for creative design? I imagine a fair number of gamers could manage, but could Joe Six-Pack, whose work consists of repetative actions and whose entertainment consists of vegetating in front of the T.V. with a beer?

Forgetting robots entirely, the purpose of a socialized economy where everything is publicly owned is the maximization of every individual’s potential.

In the wartime economies of the tens, thirties, and forties, massive numbers of people were either in the military or employed in war industries. However people were fed clothed and housed to the standard of a capitalist economy, and in the countries that weren’t under siege as Britain and Germany were, austerity was largely voluntary. The total number of working hours needed to provide for the population was absolutely nowhere near the total working hours available.

All of this was still happening with the inefficiencies of capital accumulation and capitalist overproduction.


We have similar conditions in peace time, where many people do meaningful work 40+ hours a week but have limited time for recreation, education, or raising children and doing house work or home improvement, but many other people do marginal or no work, and also don’t have the money for those other things.


Now imagine that instead of everyone either working 45 hours a week to provide, or doing war work, or living in destitution, everyone worked 14 hours a week and spent the rest of the time painting their elderly neighbors’ house, jumping off a rope swing into the swimming hole, or taking chemistry courses.

Many of the better firefighters at my old combination department were in senior positions in management, finance, and engineering. They did the job 18+ hours a week because they craved stimulation and meaningful work, and their parasitic levels of remuneration allowed them to swan in and out of their offices and spend time on their hobby job because their car was always fixed and they didn’t have the same problems and stresses as the “joe six packs” who “vegetate” because of some apparent moral inadequacy instead of you know, having been gak on by capitalism.

If you have a PhD you should drive a garbage truck six days a month and if you drive a garbage truck you should get to race rally and stock cars when you feel like it. Nobody’s the boss of you.

 Grey Templar wrote:
And everybody who has tried to move towards a completely collective society has utterly failed, so why do people keep trying?

Because it's the only option once capitalism and greed create massive numbers of unemployable people. In a capitalist system there is no choice with automation, you either automate your manufacturing to reduce costs or you get out-competed by your rivals who did and you go out of business. The fact that they'll eventually wreck the system isn't much comfort when your company is bankrupt right now. So once capitalism has created this disaster the question is how do you resolve it. And there are two possible options: socialism, or violent overthrow of the capitalist system followed by socialism. Because the people who are permanently unemployable aren't going to peacefully starve to death, they're going to take the wealthy s with them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ketara wrote:
Are we? Perhaps you specifically were (without re-reading the thread I couldn't say); but the overall premise of the thread is robots taking 'ALL' the jobs. Not just some. The lot. And it's that concept (or anything close to it) that I'm addressing here.

The literal interpretation of the thread is not particularly interesting because well before robots take over 100% of the jobs they will have taken over a large enough percentage to cause massive social change, the same sort of social change that would accommodate a world where they get 100%. The relevant question is what happens when they take a large, but not total, share of the jobs and the number of available jobs becomes much smaller than the total population. Can capitalism survive in a world of permanent 75% unemployment? We'd better answer that question, because that point is not as far off as some people think. And getting there is a matter of incremental improvements on existing technology.

I remember that one time in the 90's when capitalist industry managers said "Hey, lets completely eliminate our customer base!"

Oh, that didn't happen? Probably right, because a capitalist economy operates off of three tenets: supply, demand, and profit. If there's no demand, no profit is to be made, so no supply will be created. Pretty basic. On the same tenet, however, no supply will be made if there's no profit. BOTH of those conditions are created with complete automation.

The popular thought on here is that the manufacturing industry will keep happily pounding out products while simultaneously getting most of their income fleeced by the government to give to people so they can buy the products being produced. In most cases, the people producing their goods will wind up losing money in the process. You've just eliminated any incentive to produce goods.

Then what? Government seizes means of production and starts hammering out goods to give away out of the kindness of its heart? That gives me a good laugh. If you thought poverty was bad NOW...


Removed - BrookM

 Just Tony wrote:

The popular thought on here is that the manufacturing industry will keep happily pounding out products while simultaneously getting most of their income fleeced by the government to give to people so they can buy the products being produced. In most cases, the people producing their goods will wind up losing money in the process. You've just eliminated any incentive to produce goods.

No one is arguing that. Suggesting that automation will take over most manufacturing jobs is not synonymous with suggesting that manufacturing will continue to operate in exactly the same way and at exactly the same rates as now.

Removed - BrookM

This shames you.

 Just Tony wrote:
I remember that one time in the 90's when capitalist industry managers said "Hey, lets completely eliminate our customer base!"

Oh, that didn't happen? Probably right, because a capitalist economy operates off of three tenets: supply, demand, and profit. If there's no demand, no profit is to be made, so no supply will be created. Pretty basic. On the same tenet, however, no supply will be made if there's no profit. BOTH of those conditions are created with complete automation.

Being the native of a former company town, nah, they not only did this they ran off the cliff like they were leading disney's lemmings.

Xerox and Kodak? Remember them? The idiots who let the entire digital age walk out of their labs and not develop any of it themselves? And then stopped developing their most popular units because they weren't making enough off indivdual sales and thusly lost any brand recognition they once had. Refused to adapt to changing market trends because they knew better... seriously I can go on for weeks, I got to grow up under the "Are my parents still employed" cloud for my entire childhood. Lucky enough they managed until I was out of college.

If capitalism is so easy... what the hell happened to the middle class?

Can you overthrow the wealthy once automisation is at 100%?

Good luck defeating their robot armies, fleshling! And even if you win remember that the rich guy owns the media and can write off their attempted social cleansing as an AI uprising and blame the robots.

It is my theory that in the 40k Men of Iron apocalypse it wasn't the machines that rebelled. Instead it was the wealthy using their robots to try eliminate the jobless poor.

 BuFFo wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I recently went to a tech conference where they talked about all the advances AI have made and how it’s likely that most human jobs will have disappeared within the next few decades due to automation.

How would that work? If nobody can work then nobody has any money. If they have no money then they can’t buy things. If they can’t but things then, it doesn’t matter how productive or cheap the goods get as a result of automation. Companies will have nobody to sell to and would go bankrupt. How would say, Amazon, or McDonalds function if 60 plus percent of its consumer base became destitute? There wouldn’t be all the exchanges of money and capital to make it work. It’s not just going to be one industry but a vast swath of humanity rendered unnecessary and without worth. But wouldn’t it probably hurt a lot of companies that are aimed at selling to a mass market?

The more "robots/technology" we have, the more jobs we'll have.

Then it should be easy for you to start listing the jobs we'll have that robots wont be able to do.

no, I dont think capitilism will survive full automation, but something akin to a monetary system will unless we come up with another system that actually works in its stead.

It will transform into something like caste society, mayber returning to aristocracy. Or alternatively, capitalism will mutate into communism. But it is not clear how those who are now own all the wealth will allow it.

 Freakazoitt wrote:
It will transform into something like caste society

Interesting conclusion. Why?

mayber returning to aristocracy. Or alternatively, capitalism will mutate into communism. But it is not clear how those who are now own all the wealth will allow it.

Aristocracy isn't a political or social system - it's a demographic that still exists. Do you maybe mean feudalism?

 Freakazoitt wrote:
It will transform into something like caste society, mayber returning to aristocracy. Or alternatively, capitalism will mutate into communism. But it is not clear how those who are now own all the wealth will allow it.

Easy, kill of all the poor and the remaining rich share their means of production between themselves and voila! Communism for the rich

Reminds me of that book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism

Interesting conclusion. Why?

As far as can be judged by what is happening in the world, all freedom, democracy, liberalism comes to an end. There comes a rigid hierarchical system, where there are people of the lower class and the highest. And the whole economy belongs to the upper class. All laws exist for the upper class. All technologies are developed for the upper class.

Aristocracy isn't a political or social system - it's a demographic that still exists. Do you maybe mean feudalism?

Feudal = aristocrat. Some aristocrats remained because the bourgeois did not manage to chop off their heads.

Easy, kill of all the poor and the remaining rich share their means of production between themselves and voila! Communism for the rich

Sounds very anti-utopic. But poor people can revolt and try to destroy elite and their robots? Maybe they will sabotage robots turning them into killing machines

 Freakazoitt wrote:

Interesting conclusion. Why?

As far as can be judged by what is happening in the world, all freedom, democracy, liberalism comes to an end. There comes a rigid hierarchical system, where there are people of the lower class and the highest. And the whole economy belongs to the upper class. All laws exist for the upper class. All technologies are developed for the upper class.

That isn't a caste system but ok i see what you mean.

Aristocracy isn't a political or social system - it's a demographic that still exists. Do you maybe mean feudalism?

Feudal = aristocrat. Some aristocrats remained because the bourgeois did not manage to chop off their heads.

Feudalism is not synonymous with aristocracy and the bourgeoisie didn't chop the heads of aristocrats. The bourgeoisie had their heads removed by proles. Unless the terms used to mean something different during the French Revolution and bourgeois didn't always mean an oppulent and affluent class. Again, I see where you're going, it's just the terms that confused me.

 Just Tony wrote:
I remember that one time in the 90's when capitalist industry managers said "Hey, lets completely eliminate our customer base!"

Remember that time when capitalist industry managers said "we don't need these employees, but lets keep paying them anyway so that maybe we can get back some of their paychecks from sales of our products", and didn't immediately realize that paying someone $X so that maybe they'll give you back part of $X in exchange for goods/services is less profitable than just keeping the entire $X and firing the employee? Yeah, I don't think that ever happened. If sales to your own employees are a significant percentage of your revenue you're almost certainly doing something very wrong and your company is about to die.

(Granted, we did get kind of close in the US car industry, where union contracts made it almost impossible to fire anyone and employees got paid to sit at home, but that nearly killed the industry and fixing that mess required throwing out the union contracts in favor of something more reasonable.)

Oh, that didn't happen? Probably right, because a capitalist economy operates off of three tenets: supply, demand, and profit. If there's no demand, no profit is to be made, so no supply will be created. Pretty basic. On the same tenet, however, no supply will be made if there's no profit. BOTH of those conditions are created with complete automation.

You are making the mistake of assuming that capitalism works as some kind of unified whole, and that companies will agree to keep people employed to create customers for each other. In reality company X doesn't give a if replacing all of their workers damages the customer base for companies Y and Z, they can improve their profit numbers for the quarter by slashing labor costs and let someone else worry about paying workers and creating customers. And if company X doesn't do this one of their rivals almost certainly will, putting company X out of business. It's the prisoner's dilemma, even if there's some theoretical perfect world for everyone the selfish incentive to cheat is too powerful and you can never reach the ideal outcome.

The popular thought on here is that the manufacturing industry will keep happily pounding out products while simultaneously getting most of their income fleeced by the government to give to people so they can buy the products being produced. In most cases, the people producing their goods will wind up losing money in the process. You've just eliminated any incentive to produce goods.

So let me get this straight: if you can only make $1 million profit per year instead of $10 million because of taxes you'd rather make $0 per year and close your factory? Doesn't sound like rational behavior from a profit-focused capitalist system.

That isn't a caste system but ok i see what you mean.

I'm saying, (I think) they will try to turn it into cast system, so they can cut off from the lower people. Like Rotshilds marrying only Rotshild. Same as nobles married only nobles, so peasants had no chance to step upper. Or, as example - Harry Potter "If you are not of special ancestry, then you will not become great".

Feudalism is not synonymous with aristocracy

Prices, dukes, lords, knights - all feudals. What's the difference?

bourgeoisie didn't chop the heads of aristocrats. The bourgeoisie had their heads removed by proles. Unless the terms used to mean something different during the French Revolution and bourgeois didn't always mean an oppulent and affluent class. Again, I see where you're going, it's just the terms that confused me.

They could not always cut their heads off, but always changing the system from feudal to bourgeois was accompanied by blood and an attempt to shift the aristocracy from the elite/rulers role. But now new aritocracy is formed and some changes are coming

 Freakazoitt wrote:

Feudalism is not synonymous with aristocracy

Prices, dukes, lords, knights - all feudals. What's the difference?

That one is a system of social organisation and one is a demographic. It's like saying millionaires and capitalism are the same thing. Sure, one is usually at the top of the other, but they're not the same thing and the former can exist outside of the latter. There are still thousands of aristocrats in Europe but there's no feudalism.

bourgeoisie didn't chop the heads of aristocrats. The bourgeoisie had their heads removed by proles. Unless the terms used to mean something different during the French Revolution and bourgeois didn't always mean an oppulent and affluent class. Again, I see where you're going, it's just the terms that confused me.

They could not always cut their heads off, but always changing the system from feudal to bourgeois was accompanied by blood and an attempt to shift the aristocracy from the elite/rulers role. But now new aritocracy is formed and some changes are coming

I think you've misunderstood me. You said the bourgeoisie beheaded aristocrats but the bourgeoisie were the aristocrats. I'm not sure what you are referring to when you talk about changing a system from feudal to bourgeois - the latter isn't a system, it's another demographic.

There are still thousands of aristocrats in Europe but there's no feudalism.

They are remnants of feudal era. I heard, in UK new lords are still nominated. But, it not provided with land and slave-peasants, so mostly it's just tradition.

bourgeoisie were the aristocrats

But they are traders, owners and artisans without special origin and they did not have rights under the old regime. So, they are not aristocrats (people with special rights of their origin).

 Freakazoitt wrote:

There are still thousands of aristocrats in Europe but there's no feudalism.

They are remnants of feudal era. I heard, in UK new lords are still nominated. But, it not provided with land and slave-peasants, so mostly it's just tradition.

They still aren't synonymous. Yes there are still new Lords in the UK. They aren't awarded lands but they do get lifetime membership (and associated expenses) of the House of Lords.

bourgeoisie were the aristocrats

But they are traders, owners and artisans without special origin and they did not have rights under the old regime. So, they are not aristocrats (people with special rights of their origin).

They were (and are, if you believe bourgeois is still an appropriate term) overlapping groups. And they were beheaded by a group that did not overlap with them.

You just muddled terms. It's fine, you don't need to argue your way out of it.

EDIT: In any case, we're talking off-topic semantics. I don't really buy a return to feudalism nor a caste system as a result of automation - at least not until we've reached our far future dystopian hell.

 Peregrine wrote:
So let me get this straight: if you can only make $1 million profit per year instead of $10 million because of taxes you'd rather make $0 per year and close your factory? Doesn't sound like rational behavior from a profit-focused capitalist system.

I mean... that's exactly the logic that killed my local companies so he's certainly not wrong in it's what they believe.

But funny how they never seem to notice or care that such a low marginal tax rate massively rewards the corporate raiding and active destruction of long term value in exchange for personal liquidity. Higher tax rates mean it's less rewarding to the individual to liquidate corporate value and actually causes better long term behavior within capitalism.

That said, if we're legitimately talking about a largely post scarcity world in terms of needs, why are we still discussing capitalism? Capitalism is all about who gets to eat, when that's no longer the question we're going to be faced with managing society at large so we don't force ourselves back into that situation. We need to consider post capitalism, what comes next and how much does it take from what we know. Or do we totter on pretending that we can't help those people because there isn't enough profit in it?

An aristocracy is a government of a hereditary class of nobles -- the aristocrats.

A number of European countries still have hereditary nobility but they aren't actually in control of the government because we've all transitioned to representative democracies of various shades.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
An aristocracy is a government of a hereditary class of nobles -- the aristocrats.

A number of European countries still have hereditary nobility but they aren't actually in control of the government because we've all transitioned to representative democracies of various shades.

Articles matter.

Broadly, the aristocracy is the highest class of individuals in a class-based society whereas an aristocracy is when these people hold power.

That said, obviously the UK is no longer an aristocracy but certain aristocrats do continue to inherit and hold meaningful political power (whilst others have symbolic political power, and others have neither).

What tends to happen in Britain is that people who achieve high positions of political power get co-opted into the aristocracy, e.g. Lord Mandelson, etc, in the various Honours lists.

It's arguable if this gives these individuals more power than they already have thanks to their history and connections. It certainly gives the Prime Minister a power of patronage.

However I'm getting a bit off the topic of robotisation.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
I remember that one time in the 90's when capitalist industry managers said "Hey, lets completely eliminate our customer base!"

Remember that time when capitalist industry managers said "we don't need these employees, but lets keep paying them anyway so that maybe we can get back some of their paychecks from sales of our products", and didn't immediately realize that paying someone $X so that maybe they'll give you back part of $X in exchange for goods/services is less profitable than just keeping the entire $X and firing the employee? Yeah, I don't think that ever happened. If sales to your own employees are a significant percentage of your revenue you're almost certainly doing something very wrong and your company is about to die.

(Granted, we did get kind of close in the US car industry, where union contracts made it almost impossible to fire anyone and employees got paid to sit at home, but that nearly killed the industry and fixing that mess required throwing out the union contracts in favor of something more reasonable.)

Oh, that didn't happen? Probably right, because a capitalist economy operates off of three tenets: supply, demand, and profit. If there's no demand, no profit is to be made, so no supply will be created. Pretty basic. On the same tenet, however, no supply will be made if there's no profit. BOTH of those conditions are created with complete automation.

You are making the mistake of assuming that capitalism works as some kind of unified whole, and that companies will agree to keep people employed to create customers for each other. In reality company X doesn't give a if replacing all of their workers damages the customer base for companies Y and Z, they can improve their profit numbers for the quarter by slashing labor costs and let someone else worry about paying workers and creating customers. And if company X doesn't do this one of their rivals almost certainly will, putting company X out of business. It's the prisoner's dilemma, even if there's some theoretical perfect world for everyone the selfish incentive to cheat is too powerful and you can never reach the ideal outcome.

The popular thought on here is that the manufacturing industry will keep happily pounding out products while simultaneously getting most of their income fleeced by the government to give to people so they can buy the products being produced. In most cases, the people producing their goods will wind up losing money in the process. You've just eliminated any incentive to produce goods.

So let me get this straight: if you can only make $1 million profit per year instead of $10 million because of taxes you'd rather make $0 per year and close your factory? Doesn't sound like rational behavior from a profit-focused capitalist system.

You tried this false equivalency crap the last time this discussion happened. You are completely misrepresenting what I'm saying. IF there is no customer base at all, then NONE of the manufacturers will be producing anything. At all.

I think it's time to give you a better explanation.



In the beginning, the concept of property came to be, and with it came the concept of wealth and wealth disparity.

From that moment, the drive of people in general has been to pursue property and the acquisition of wealth. The only question was: how do we get wealth and property? Well, if someone else OWNS that already, you can either A: exchange goods or services for said wealth and/or property, B: flat out take their stuff, usually killing them in the process, C: Use governmental taxation to take it and trust the government to redistribute that wealth evenly across the populace, or D: convince them that they nobly need to simply give their stuff out for free to the world directly.

Capitalism is option A, and is also the only one in this process that actually GENERATES wealth, and is why even the highly vaunted "socialist" governments like those found in Scandinavia use it to generate the wealth they seek to spread around.

Option B is the tenets behind communism and the forty seven different versions of anarchy, apparently. These generate no wealth without a violent regime to keep the workforce "motivated" to contribute, and the lower classes don't see that wealth at all.

Option C is what the new blood US liberals are pushing, and the same thing that's killed more than a few economies. European countries flit around the periphery of this, but are closing in on it with due haste. In this, wealth is still generated, but pressure on the manufacturers and the wealthy coupled with other nations that DON'T operate like this tend to draw the manufacturers away so that suddenly you are generating LESS wealth, and eventually NO wealth.

Option D exists solely in the minds of people who think it's the responsibility of the wealthy to carry them through life, and shouldn't even really be considered as "the feels" is about as far from any governance/economic model as you can get.


Of those options, automating all or nearly all of the workforce would make ALL them untenable. You wouldn't plumb someone's apartment complex without compensation solely because it's the "nice" thing to do, nor would you do that much work for the pay equivalence of 4 hours behind a gas station register. Take THAT principle, and extrapolate it out on a larger scale. Instead of plumbing a house, insert producing shoes or some other necessary commodity. Eliminate the motivation for producing the shoes, and nobody will produce the shoes.


NO manufacturer wants their base gone, so they are quite unified in keeping things running to where there's a profit to be made. Robots may one day be good enough to eliminate the workforce (A LONG way off, there are still far too many jobs that a robot can't manage to do) but it would do no good to implement it wholesale. Without someone to buy the goods, nobody will be incentivized to produce the goods. Since goods nowadays are componential in nature, you're looking at SEVERAL steps in the chain to make one item. NOBODY in that chain would benefit from wholesale automation. It's a pipe dream to use for leverage to attempt to utilize Option D above, and it falls flat.

There's nothing I love more than 'how dare you misrepresent what I'm saying about capitalism! Here's a caricature of communism mediated through the lens of Joseph McCarthy'

Communism is a caricature.

...err.

.. no politics folks.

Ut sementem feceris ita metes