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The point is, what are all these robots and AIs for?

What is the use of productivity increasing mass production for human consumption without there being a "consumption force" to absorb the production?

To be blunt, what is the point of a robot factory that can build 1,000,000 cars a year, if there aren't people to use the cars?

It's really the prisoner's dilemna. People are doing things that appear good for themselves but when everyone does them causes it to be worse for everyone (including themselves).

 skyth wrote:
It's really the prisoner's dilemna. People are doing things that appear good for themselves but when everyone does them causes it to be worse for everyone (including themselves).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

 Verviedi wrote:
I see two paths.

1. Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant, and funnels massive quantities of wealth into the pockets of those who own the robots. The rich refuse to surrender this wealth, and an enormous permanently unemployed, impoverished underclass is created. Late stage capitalism is in fully effect.

2. Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant. The state passes effective legislation to equally distribute the capital created by robots amongst the populace, and general standard of living goes up. Capitalism is slowly phased out due to abundance of machine-created wealth.

Actually, both options look like this,

Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant. The Ruling classes(those who maintain and control the robots) pass legislation to distribute capital among the populace under the guise of egalitarianism, but only enough for subsistence while keeping the bulk of the wealth for themselves. The underclass are kept occupied with cheap entertainment but live in relative squalor compared to the wealthy.

There is no utopia to be created. Either way, you end up with whoever controls the Robots being the hyper wealthy living in immense luxury with an impoverished underclass who do nothing but eat and make use of the cheap entertainment meant to keep them occupied and not actively revolting. The only choice is weather your dystopia is skinned as Capitalist or Socialist.

Gosh, I'm really looking forwards to that!

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Verviedi wrote:
I see two paths.

1. Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant, and funnels massive quantities of wealth into the pockets of those who own the robots. The rich refuse to surrender this wealth, and an enormous permanently unemployed, impoverished underclass is created. Late stage capitalism is in fully effect.

2. Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant. The state passes effective legislation to equally distribute the capital created by robots amongst the populace, and general standard of living goes up. Capitalism is slowly phased out due to abundance of machine-created wealth.

Actually, both options look like this,

Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant. The Ruling classes(those who maintain and control the robots) pass legislation to distribute capital among the populace under the guise of egalitarianism, but only enough for subsistence while keeping the bulk of the wealth for themselves. The underclass are kept occupied with cheap entertainment but live in relative squalor compared to the wealthy.

There is no utopia to be created. Either way, you end up with whoever controls the Robots being the hyper wealthy living in immense luxury with an impoverished underclass who do nothing but eat and make use of the cheap entertainment meant to keep them occupied and not actively revolting. The only choice is weather your dystopia is skinned as Capitalist or Socialist.

How does owning robots make you super wealthy if the vast majority of the population is dependent on payouts for subsistence level living? How to the super wealthy keep making money from robots with no consumers to buy whatever the robots manufacture?

I see 2 options, either automation becomes so inexpensive, efficient and widespread across industry sectors that it forces the economy to change and no longer be consumption based due to all the displaced workers and income reduction

Or

Automation on an extreme level (near total replacement of human workers) is only practical and cost effective in a few industry sectors allowing business in those industries to become monopolized by whomever automates the most the fastest and those corporations profit immensely based off the profits earned from consumption driven by employees in other sectors that are still reliant on human labor. This causes a shift in education and govt programs to try to rebalance things between the shrinking tax base of the employed, the growing number of unemployed and the small number of the super wealthy ownership in automated industries. The success of that balancing determines of the future remains as something akin to current business as usual or if we turn into Bladerunner or Dune or Ready Player One style dystopias.

In this case, wealth isn't income from people buying what the robots make, its the stuff the robots make. Wealth is just a term for any object with value.

The wealthy are the ones who control the output of the robots. They give up just enough to keep the filthy peasentry in line while keeping the rest for themselves.

Prestor Jon wrote:
What amount do you want the UBI to be? You're the one that said that UBI payments needed to replace "old middle class jobs."

And you made the assumption that it had to be at the same rate of pay, because these people cannot be worse off. That's your assumption.

Here's how this shakes out - people who end up on UBI will be worse off. They'll be better off than today's welfare benefits, but they'll be closer to that than to current middle class living standards. People who are still working will be considerably better off, and the people who own the factories and AI services will be vastly better off.

You may read that and think 'well that sounds horrible why would we want that?'. And you'd be right. This is not the future that people want. UBI is not a utopia, it's a policy to offset a possible horrible future where most people have been made redundant by the AI driven economy. It's preferable to the 'no UBI' future, where people still don't have jobs but they also don't have any money, and the rich have even more money.

Where does all of that money come from? You can't take it all out of companies like Netflix.

I have literally explained this twice now. I'll go for a third time, please just fething go with me on this.

There's a pie, its called GDP. It's the sum total of everything produced in the country in the year. Everything in that pie gets split between all the people in the country. Now that pie can get bigger or smaller, typically year on year is gets a little bit bigger, and sometimes recessions can cause the pie to get smaller, but what we're talking about here is substitution, replacing one form of input, labour, with another form of input, capital (robots and AI), while leaving overall production the same as before. So there's no impact on the overall size of the pie, its just a question of how it gets split up.

So consider David goes in to work on Monday morning and in his cubicle there's now a robot sitting there, drinking coffee and complaining about Mavis in accounts and doing everything that David would normally be doing on a Monday morning, except getting paid. So where did David's wage go? It didn't disappear from the economy. Because part of it went to pay for the maintenance of robot, but the rest either went as a bonus to David's boss for getting rid of David, or to shareholder's as greater profit allocations. That's just a mathematical thing - profit is revenue minus expenses. Whatever you reduce expenses by automatically shifts to profits, as a simple issue of arithmetic.

So by definition the amount of lost wages from the economy must be equal to the increase in profits of all companies. So there simply is no issue with there not being enough money to pay for transfer payments for people who've been replaced by AI and robots. There are lots of cultural issues, and proper incentive issues, and special interest issues, all of which could make a UBI impossible. And of course none of this may come to pass, we may find like in the past technology works overall to increase labour productivity rather than replace it, so none of this may be necessary at all.

But if it does prove to be necessary if the demand for labour disappears, then whatever issues UBI will have, whether or not it could be funded is not one of them.


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Prestor Jon wrote:
A Negative Income Tax, essentially UBI, was proposed back in the 1960s and it failed to garner support.

The difference is that the future economy is potentially going to be wildly different to the economy of the 1960s.

The labour participation rate has been in decline for a long time now. Mostly due to demographic reasons but there are signs on the horizon that there will be huge reductions in jobs due to technology. And not just low wage jobs, but middle and high income jobs are now being replaced by tech for the first time. We've been replacing labour with machines for centuries, of course, but the difference this time is there is no certainty that there will be new jobs in new fields to maintain the overall level of employment.

So back at the start of the industrial revolution, the fields were enclosed and surplus labour pushed off the farms, those people found work in the new industries in the expanding cities. But that worked because freeing up that labour and it moved in to new areas of resource extraction and processing those resources. Coal production expanded and produced new goods. But what happens tomorrow when a bank sweeps 20,000 people out of its processing staff? Resource extraction is pushing against very steep marginal costs, so unless we find new forms of low cost resource extraction* that labour doesn't move to a new economic sector, instead it is simply removed from the economy.

If the participation keeps dropping, and companies don't even lay people off but just don't expand employment with the economy, then what happens when we reach 55% participation? Or what about 50%, when half the people in the country aren't working? If this happens, and its possible, when do you start looking at totally different economic structures, like UBI?



*Which is possible, and represents the technological fix to this issue. Its basically the hope that solar power generation will continue its current price plunge for another decade or so, and so energy becomes a near zero cost.


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 Kilkrazy wrote:
The point is, what are all these robots and AIs for?

What is the use of productivity increasing mass production for human consumption without there being a "consumption force" to absorb the production?

To be blunt, what is the point of a robot factory that can build 1,000,000 cars a year, if there aren't people to use the cars?

Assuming there's no UBI or some other thing to give the bulk of the population some portion of the economic production, then the robots stop making mid-priced cars. They shift to high end, bespoke super cars with insane levels of finishing. They start building spaceships for space vacations for the mega-rich. The small cache of commercially successful artists stop doing 30,000 seat stadium, and start doing 30 seat performances with tickets at $50k a piece.

Basically the economy shifts from providing base goods for millions to providing ultra-high end goods for a few.

The rest of us just suck it up, and start eating rats off sticks. This is also more or less what the future will be if the UBI or other similar process is set very low.


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Prestor Jon wrote:
How does owning robots make you super wealthy if the vast majority of the population is dependent on payouts for subsistence level living? How to the super wealthy keep making money from robots with no consumers to buy whatever the robots manufacture?

Because what is produced is shifted. If you have capital that that can produce $1bn worth of stuff, instead of making $1bn worth of cars, and selling them and making $100m profit to spend on rich people stuff, instead you make $1bn worth of rich people stuff like rockets for space tourism and gold plated toothbrushes. You trade this rich people stuff with the other rich people, or you use it to make stuff directly for yourself.

Well, since everyone seems to "see" this future of Oligarchy uber alles; what is one to do about it, eh?

 Easy E wrote:
Well, since everyone seems to "see" this future of Oligarchy uber alles; what is one to do about it, eh?

Well, you could artificially limit the creation of labor saving devices. Require that you employ X quantity of humans to make a particular product. Outright ban certain industries from automating themselves.

Besides that, you can't do anything to stop this.

Raise the black flag.

sebster wrote:Assuming there's no UBI or some other thing to give the bulk of the population some portion of the economic production, then the robots stop making mid-priced cars. They shift to high end, bespoke super cars with insane levels of finishing. They start building spaceships for space vacations for the mega-rich. The small cache of commercially successful artists stop doing 30,000 seat stadium, and start doing 30 seat performances with tickets at $50k a piece.

Basically the economy shifts from providing base goods for millions to providing ultra-high end goods for a few.

That's a bit like GW shifting from a gaming company (for the masses) to a collector company (for people willing to spend a lot of a few models). The only problems with that idea is that even the super rich (who might end up with even more money) don't have unlimited space (they have to put all the stuff they bought somewhere) or time. After the xth expensive dinner with acrobats you might want a simple burger and all the "luxury experience" providing companies are competing against each other for a very limited pool of customers.

The rest of us just suck it up, and start eating rats off sticks. This is also more or less what the future will be if the UBI or other similar process is set very low.

That also the moment where you can get rich by investing in guillotines. History has shown that once the population has noting to lose it's the powerful who tend to lose their heads (if they can's divert that anger).

 Easy E wrote:
Well, since everyone seems to "see" this future of Oligarchy uber alles; what is one to do about it, eh?

1) It isn't just about oligarchs or concentration of wealth. It's more to do with productivity increasing without new natural resources inflows. So instead of people being pushed off the farms and going to work in coal mines and new coal powered factories to produce all new products, now people get replaced by AI and robots and have no new industries to go in to.
2) There's still plenty of hope it won't happen. It might not. It was predicted previously, famously by Keynes, and it didn't happen.
3) If it does happen, it is possible that we will respond to reduced demand for labour by having people work less hours each. But that'd be a reversal of current trends, and I just don't think we are anywhere near ready to do that as a society. Status is too tightly connected to material wealth right now.
4) So a UBI is the more likely option, as it ensures people will have enough to live on, without disrupting our precious meritocracy assumptions. But even that's got a hell of a lot resistance culturally, and so its most likely form will probably be pretty skimpy.
5) On a personal level, I think it's wise to assume that if the issue does happen, the response will be pretty mediocre, and so it is smart to future proof yourself by making sure you've got a healthy share of income producing assets. Save and invest, and then even if there is no end of labour, or society's response is positive and fair, then you'll still have a nice nest egg. And if the worst happens, well you want to be on the side with assets, not the side without. Saving isn't possible for everyone of course, but if you are in a position where you can really save, then you'd be smart to do so.


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Mario wrote:
That's a bit like GW shifting from a gaming company (for the masses) to a collector company (for people willing to spend a lot of a few models). The only problems with that idea is that even the super rich (who might end up with even more money) don't have unlimited space (they have to put all the stuff they bought somewhere) or time. After the xth expensive dinner with acrobats you might want a simple burger and all the "luxury experience" providing companies are competing against each other for a very limited pool of customers.

Sure, but if that's where the money is, that's where the business will be. I don't disagree that much of the money will be squandered on novelty and wildly overpriced nonsense, but that happens now with the mega rich.

That also the moment where you can get rich by investing in guillotines. History has shown that once the population has noting to lose it's the powerful who tend to lose their heads (if they can's divert that anger).

Human history is defined by the overwhelming majority living in poverty. There were revolutions, but they are remembered because they were notable events, most of the time these systems were stable.

I read a little while back that people with nothing don't revolt. It's people who fear they're about to lose something who revolt. Which is to be fair the big hope that this kind of system might be overcome, even democratically it might cause the rise of new parties with new radical policy sets. But that in itself is no solution necessarily - what policy set will this new radical party be bringing in?

 sebster wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
Well, since everyone seems to "see" this future of Oligarchy uber alles; what is one to do about it, eh?

1) It isn't just about oligarchs or concentration of wealth. It's more to do with productivity increasing without new natural resources inflows. So instead of people being pushed off the farms and going to work in coal mines and new coal powered factories to produce all new products, now people get replaced by AI and robots and have no new industries to go in to.
2) There's still plenty of hope it won't happen. It might not. It was predicted previously, famously by Keynes, and it didn't happen.
3) If it does happen, it is possible that we will respond to reduced demand for labour by having people work less hours each. But that'd be a reversal of current trends, and I just don't think we are anywhere near ready to do that as a society. Status is too tightly connected to material wealth right now.
4) So a UBI is the more likely option, as it ensures people will have enough to live on, without disrupting our precious meritocracy assumptions. But even that's got a hell of a lot resistance culturally, and so its most likely form will probably be pretty skimpy.
5) On a personal level, I think it's wise to assume that if the issue does happen, the response will be pretty mediocre, and so it is smart to future proof yourself by making sure you've got a healthy share of income producing assets. Save and invest, and then even if there is no end of labour, or society's response is positive and fair, then you'll still have a nice nest egg. And if the worst happens, well you want to be on the side with assets, not the side without. Saving isn't possible for everyone of course, but if you are in a position where you can really save, then you'd be smart to do so.

My point is all thsi Doom and Gloom nihilism is a bit.... premature. All this Nihilism is not a great way to move society/civilization forward. After all, if it is all pointless anyway then why do anything?

Your comment in the other thread about the Children of Men applies in this thread just as much.

My coworker watched a video presentation made by our company about our healthcare options and suggestions on how to pick the proper one for yourself during the annual enrollment period. It listed "helpful suggestions" on how to cut personal healthcare costs. In it, one of the suggestions was "talk to your doctor about obtaining free samples of prescription drugs."

I literally now have to assume that the expectation that we should be doing this is baked into our healthcare plans now.

It seems an odd notion given that US healthcare is built around the principle of profit.

I dunno about that. We bulid everything around the principle of profit, from government to charity to infrastructure.

I think it's far odder that more people aren't really disturbed by it.

I mean it's odd to expect the doctor who makes some of his money by selling you drugs to give you them for free.

Oh yeah, for places that have their own pharmacy, I could totally see that.

Over here, most of the doctor's offices I've been in don't have their own pharmacy. I know of a couple of them that have, particularly the "urgent care" style places, but otherwise the prescriptions are usually electronically forwarded to a pharmacy of the patient's choice. This could be a walmart or grocery store, or a smaller drug and beauty type place like a walgreens or CVS. The latter two have drive through services similar to a bank teller.

To the best of my knowledge though, most doctors still would have samples laying around. I got handed a week or so worth of antidepressant samples probably 8 or 9 years ago because I offhandedly mentioned something along the lines of that I'd "been a little bummed out lately" when he asked me how I was doing. The actual reason I was in there because I had the flu and a really high temperature.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I mean it's odd to expect the doctor who makes some of his money by selling you drugs to give you them for free.

It is the same method as a street pusher....give you a taste and then.... welll you know the rest.

 Easy E wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I mean it's odd to expect the doctor who makes some of his money by selling you drugs to give you them for free.

It is the same method as a street pusher....give you a taste and then.... welll you know the rest.

Actually, given the kinds of horrible things some drugs do when you stop taking them, yeah, in a lot of ways it is.

My thyroid meds are that way, and I'm pretty sure almost all anti-depressants usually have some pretty crazy side effects when you stop them.

In the UK one nickname for them is "wobbly eggs".

 sebster wrote:

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Prestor Jon wrote:
How does owning robots make you super wealthy if the vast majority of the population is dependent on payouts for subsistence level living? How to the super wealthy keep making money from robots with no consumers to buy whatever the robots manufacture?

Because what is produced is shifted. If you have capital that that can produce $1bn worth of stuff, instead of making $1bn worth of cars, and selling them and making $100m profit to spend on rich people stuff, instead you make $1bn worth of rich people stuff like rockets for space tourism and gold plated toothbrushes. You trade this rich people stuff with the other rich people, or you use it to make stuff directly for yourself.

But rich people stuff is only rich people stuff because it is rare and valuable? What is the point of having a gold plated toothbrush if you can just have your robots churn out gold plated toothbrushes by the shipload? And if you only need a few gold plated toothbrushes, then why bother having expensive robots at all instead of the way cheaper process to just ask a goldsmith to make you a fully customised exclusive gold plated toothbrush?
When it comes to elite goods, mass production simply doesn't work. Mass produced goods can not be elite goods. And if you don't need mass production, you do not need robots. Elite goods are exclusive, and if exclusive is what you want humans will be able to do that more cheaply and effectively than robots.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
But rich people stuff is only rich people stuff because it is rare and valuable? What is the point of having a gold plated toothbrush if you can just have your robots churn out gold plated toothbrushes by the shipload? And if you only need a few gold plated toothbrushes, then why bother having expensive robots at all instead of the way cheaper process to just ask a goldsmith to make you a fully customised exclusive gold plated toothbrush?`

I don't know about yours, but MY gold plated toothbrush is better because the gold was procured by artisinal economists from free-range bespoke middle classers, delicately squeezed enough into having their gold deposited into pawn shops, and then reclaimed by tenement lords for the electroplating process, which is actually done by the latest in ergonomic Japanese robots.

It's entirely cruelty free and valid when you consider that no one else's feelings matter but my own.

Gold? Pah!

My toothbrushes are platinum-iridium-uranium alloy.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Gold? Pah!

My toothbrushes are platinum-iridium-uranium alloy.

The radiation really helps to give your smile that extra glow.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Gold? Pah!

My toothbrushes are platinum-iridium-uranium alloy.

The radiation really helps to give your smile that extra glow.

It helps, but the real trick is that Undark brand toothpaste.

I don't brush my own teeth with them.

 Easy E wrote:
My point is all thsi Doom and Gloom nihilism is a bit.... premature. All this Nihilism is not a great way to move society/civilization forward. After all, if it is all pointless anyway then why do anything?

Your comment in the other thread about the Children of Men applies in this thread just as much.

Fair point. And to make it clear, I don't think this is an inevitability by any means. I think it is a possibility, and one that should be discussed so that we adapt appropriately if it does happen.


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 Iron_Captain wrote:
But rich people stuff is only rich people stuff because it is rare and valuable? What is the point of having a gold plated toothbrush if you can just have your robots churn out gold plated toothbrushes by the shipload? And if you only need a few gold plated toothbrushes, then why bother having expensive robots at all instead of the way cheaper process to just ask a goldsmith to make you a fully customised exclusive gold plated toothbrush?
When it comes to elite goods, mass production simply doesn't work. Mass produced goods can not be elite goods. And if you don't need mass production, you do not need robots. Elite goods are exclusive, and if exclusive is what you want humans will be able to do that more cheaply and effectively than robots.

You've gotten confused and ended up thinking all automated manufacturing is mass production. That's not true. 100 foot mega yachts involve extremely high levels of machine production, but they're not mass produced.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

But rich people stuff is only rich people stuff because it is rare and valuable?

No, it's because it's expensive; not always the same thing. For example, the $9,999 iPhone app that did nothing, but was a way to show that you were so rich that you could literally throw away ten large and not care about it.

Or having a £100,000 Maclaren. Utterly pointless - a Vauxhall Astra is likely to be more useful 99.9% of the time, but having an Astra parked outside your house doesn't advertise your wealth. Prior to that it was having a country estate, a London townhouse, etc.