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Time to look around and invest in them

Sure, if one actually has money to spare for investment.

Eventually large companies will start seeing the fall in sales from any growth in unemployment. When that happens to a severe enough point, they will need to reassess their salary and bonus structures as they are huge financial draws against the company.

Look at small businesses. When sales are down, who is the first person to not get paid? The owner, who also runs the place. He's the one who needs the place to succeed, and it can't run without employees, and those employees won't work without pay.

Large companies need to realize that downsizing shouldn't be firing people to cover gaps in profit, but rather downsizing salaries based on exactly how much money one needs to live.

My mother worked as an insurance broker for a mid sized firm here in CA. When the economy tanked, their business slowed down a lot. As such, every person on salary in the company took a 10% loss in wages. From the CEO to the front desk girl. You know how many people were fired? Zero. They could have very well fired someone to cover a good portion of the loss, but instead they wanted to keep their employees for when things turned back up.

This is how large companies need to run. Instead of firing 200,000 employees, take 10% off the entire payroll. Now the 10% from those employees isn't often huge, perhaps a few thousand dollars a year. But what about that CEO who by himself makes 2 million a year? Right there you saved $200k, from a single employee. Will that CEO lose his house over that kind of hit? Not likely. And when downsizing payroll, management should be the first ones on the list. Manufacturing can carry on without the VP of special projects. Manufacturing can't carry on without the VP of pulling products out of the molds and refining them for sale.

Businesses need to realize that management is where a huge portion of their money ends up, and a lot of that management can be done without or with less.

Now, none of that has anything to do with automated housing. Yes construction workers will lose their jobs. So did a crap ton of farmers 100 years ago, and a crap ton of auto employees in more recent years. Those industries survived, society survived, and life moved on.

I maintain that the number of people living in absolute squalor due in no part to their own decisions far outweighs the number of people who will be browsing Craigslist for a new job.

Production and manufacturing are moving towards automation. That doesn't mean that new jobs are being created. How many data entry jobs were there 100 years ago? 50? 25? Customer service jobs? IT jobs? The job market is shifting away form manual labor into service. Starbucks will always be around to hire college kids and what not. But those who need work because their career was automated have plenty of other options, many of which are entry level. Data entry requires almost no experience, and can be learned quite quickly compared to any construction field. The pay is less, but then so is the risk, and the conditions are insanely nicer.

People will adapt out of necessity as they always have.

They already are. Their solution? Cut more jobs and increase productivity.

Much like communism, capitalism doesn't work by itself. It never has. It never will.

Sheesh. Starting to sound like technology is bad.

No, Melissa is still pissed off at all capitalists since she was fired from some fast food franchise or something.

It gets old.

 Melissia wrote:

 Kovnik Obama wrote:
What new social class?

Those who own the machines.

Not really a new class though. THey're just one that is getting more and more power.

Still waiting for Shuma's answer, because I think it's more amongst the line of the technocratic class.
After all, like you say, there's little difference betwen the class that owns the machines and that which 'owns' the workers. Beside issues like unions and such.

If I crank up a company I try to get in as many robotic gadgets I can in order to remove as much human helpers that I can. So profits for me and less Unions I have to deal with --->insert evil laughter<---

Just don't let those robots form a union.

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

 Melissia wrote:

 Kovnik Obama wrote:
What new social class?

Those who own the machines.

Not really a new class though. THey're just one that is getting more and more power.

Still waiting for Shuma's answer, because I think it's more amongst the line of the technocratic class.
After all, like you say, there's little difference betwen the class that owns the machines and that which 'owns' the workers. Beside issues like unions and such.

Well, those who own the means of production own the means of production, no matter what those means are.

Thats easy. Flip a switch, reprogram...make sure its the right program and not "take over the world" program and back in business.

Also you have to ensure that they cannot reprogram themselves or that an outside force cannot do so.

 Melissia wrote:
Also you have to ensure that they cannot reprogram themselves or that an outside force cannot do so.

Which is why if I had some kind of robot workforce, they'd only be networked locally, separated from any terminal with access to the internet. And of course no wifi.

That way the only method of reprogramming would be to physically be in the building at a local terminal. Which I'd make underwater. At the end of an EMP tunnel. You know, so the robots can't get to it.

Down a deep hallway with magnetic walls.

That's making it an awful lot difficult for the sex robots to perform their duties.

KO........its not that kind of factory

 Jihadin wrote:
KO........its not that kind of factory

... yet

Squid...stop peeking into my folder titled "Take over the world the easy way"

Did I mention my line of the New Street CLeaners I'm working?

Less of the remarks directed at individual posters' motivations, more with scenarios out of The Future Soon.

Thought there was something real to watch....but its all "virtual".....

 1hadhq wrote:


Thought there was something real to watch....but its all "virtual".....

Not all of it is virtual... towards the end there are working components and such...

Great....Mist of Pandora releasing this 25th....and Janthkin advertising a bit of WoW.....bad bad MOD I broke my WoW addiction and now your tempting me again....bbbbaaaddddddd MOD

It annoys me how every twit and their mother puts Jonathan Coulton to World of Borecraft videos.

Coulton deserves better.

 Melissia wrote:
It annoys me how every twit and their mother puts Jonathan Coulton to World of Borecraft videos.

Coulton deserves better.

Seconded.

That's just brilliant, I thought printing organs was the best thing a 3d printer could do. But a fully automated robotic house builder that can be launched to the moon, or mars, to start building a colony is just awesome.

nomotog wrote:

 ShumaGorath wrote:

nomotog wrote:

 ShumaGorath wrote:

nomotog wrote:

 ShumaGorath wrote:

 Aerethan wrote:
I didn't say it would make 1 billion jobs. I said it could provide HOUSING for 1 billion people who don't have it or the means to acquire it, which to me is a bigger concern than what Bob is going to do for a living from now on.

The world is not currently surviving very well. Unemployment is ~10% or higher for more than half the planet and middle class medium wage jobs in America have been dramatically reduced in number. Mcdonalds and starbucks can't employ everyone on earth and they don't pay a liveable wage. Technological unemployment is real.

It's disappointing to lose your job to a machine, but the benefits to society outweigh the losses to construction workers. For everyone else anyway. It's not going to be long till everyone loses their job to machines though.

Which makes me question if the benefits are outweighing the losses to society. Technological unemployment has a very real chance to cause a societal collapse. Total labor automation is something the human race has never dealt with before.

I'm not worried. That much. Society is resilient, Capitalism even more so. Things will change, but we are built to handle change.

I question how capitalism, an economic system predicated on the idea of distributed workloads and no social class system survives the creation of a class system and an environment where work isn't done by laborers.

Maybe you used too many big words, but I don't understand why you think it will brake down?

Human nature. The drive to automate and replace laborers to stay competitive is a modern expression of the capitalist efficiency that created the first assembly line. The British empire and America is a wonderful test case for the model that will likely take root in every nation on earth. Manufacturing labor started out cheap as agrarian workers moved into cities, as they assembled and their productivity grew so did wages. Eventually the rise in wages allowed for something new, technological unemployment through things like the steam engine. For a century increased productivity and wages led to increased demand which allowed factory and natural resource workers to move fluidly into new fields while further mechanical automation replaced the jobs that they left. This continued globally roughly until computers and robotic automation arrived and began replacing skilled laborers in fields that were previously somewhat untouchable.

For a time (80s, 90s) the growing tech fields bloomed and allowed for factory, textile, and resource heavy industries to automate without an overall loss in productivity because IT fields exploded and absorbed the workers. During the late 90's though, refinement in computer systems and the internet began to automate office work. Those workers who were made redundant left to the exploding service and financial industries (this was occurring during the 80's and 90's, but it's really being felt now). Unfortunately, economies don't really work off of just these two industries, especially when the financial industry is rapidly automating (and is wildly corrupt). The creation of computerized automation coincides with the begin of the hollowing of the American (and global) middle class and the widening of the modern wealth gap.

As industries streamline by eliminating laborers for automated systems those people are forced into less skilled and worse paying jobs which are then being automated as technology makes it cheap enough to automate them. This is a continuous downward pressure on wages as technology is becoming increasingly cheap and capable while humans remain human. People have to be payed less to compete with ever cheaper and better machines. There isn't really a bottom to this, eventually there will be no workers. Just the owners of machines that self operate. At this point the global economy will have already broken down as the tipping point for when people can no longer afford to exist in a capitalist system coincides roughly with when government social safety systems (and democratic governments themselves) collapse.

There is already a fairly visible class system in America thanks to it's vanished social mobility (due primarily to our higher education structure and the lack of good paying factory work). The poor can't become unpoor because opportunities don't really exist, the middle class is being split as people move up or down (mostly down), the rich class is growing as the laws in the west and the logic of modern capitalism make it very hard to lose wealth once it's attained and the super rich are attaining a global reach and freedom from national boundaries or the control of law that they've never really had before. This is happening in most developed countries.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jihadin wrote:
Time to look around and invest in them

These machines cost somewhere between your yearly salary and one hundred times your yearly salary. You would also need to be able to afford a place to put them and the raw capitol required to run them. You then need a pre established market and a supply chain. you specifically can't invest in this future. Nor can I. This form of automation is one of the reasons businesses are consolidating into global multinationals. It's something small businesses can't do and can't really compete with.

This really sucks. I mean, conceptually it's really cool, but.

In my experience, the difference between a criminal drug addict and a functioning one is the availability of decent paying, semi-skilled work.

In other words, the guy breaking into your car is probably an unemployed drywaller.

feeder wrote:
This really sucks. I mean, conceptually it's really cool, but.

In my experience, the difference between a criminal drug addict and a functioning one is the availability of decent paying, semi-skilled work.

In other words, the guy breaking into your car is probably an unemployed drywaller.

The video covered this, it would do something to replace the jobs it takes by expanding the architecture/CAD fields. The new potential will lead to droves of architects and engineers working to push the limits of this tech further, constantly expanding new fields. Like the video said, it's similar to the industrialization of agriculture.

 Squidmanlolz wrote:

feeder wrote:
This really sucks. I mean, conceptually it's really cool, but.

In my experience, the difference between a criminal drug addict and a functioning one is the availability of decent paying, semi-skilled work.

In other words, the guy breaking into your car is probably an unemployed drywaller.

The video covered this, it would do something to replace the jobs it takes by expanding the architecture/CAD fields. The new potential will lead to droves of architects and engineers working to push the limits of this tech further, constantly expanding new fields. Like the video said, it's similar to the industrialization of agriculture.

The video lied and agriculture used to be the job of 7 in 10 people in the united states, now it's something like one in eighty. The video just didn't want to alarm people so it made gak up. It doesn't expand the architectural field at all since it's not adding additional architectural work and one person can CAD a house in a week (they do, 3d mock ups are a standard part of modern architectural engineering), it takes 15 six months to build one.

Hhhmmm better invest in those house building bots.