The Rise of Robotic Labor 308
kkleiner wrote in with a link to a singularityhub story about the increase of automated manufacturing world-wide. The article reads: "The accelerating rise in robot labor of the past decade, and its expansion into all areas of production, have led many to worry about the future of human workers. Yet how extensive is the robotic take over of labor? Our friends at Mezzmer Eyeglasses did some impressive research and created an even more impressive infographic explaining the present and future of robots in the workplace."
Improved Robotic Controls (Score:2)
Long term goals (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you can be replaced by a robot, get a better job. (Perhaps you might like a job designing robots?)
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they'll be able to cook and serve food, load and drive trucks, pick fruit, etc.
That can all be done by robots.
As for consumption, how can they consume if they don't have an income? I just can't believe we're working towards some sort of utopia where no one has to work and money no longer has use. Human nature tells me it's going to be a couple bastards in charge, and all the rest of us will be slaves.
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Well, we'll have to reimagine the economy, but I like the idea of a future where we can all just lay on the beach (or wherever else you prefer to lay) and robots will take care of our every need.
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My point exactly. I understand the concept of economic efficiency, and how inefficient jobs are replaced first - in theory. Etc. But if you think about the long term then every single job can eventually be replaced, because ultimately machines are more efficient than humans at everything except thinking - and eventually who knows, they might even become smarter than us. So where will that leave us?
Simple, really. Either we will be living fat dumb and happy as robot pets because they have the means to keep us around and make our lives very comfortable, or we are all dead at their merciless hand... I mean (not to troll, honest) back 5000 years ago when slaves were a common thing to be found in advanced societies, the ruling class literally didnt have anything to do but rule. Now instead of exploiting each other we can exploit the machines, and as long as they don't rise up we can basically count on
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The jobs where its cheaper to have a robot over a human go first. Regardless of efficiency.
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Basically, robots are capital investments, so whoever owns the robots will profit. The rest of us will starve or work in various entertainment or art industries, bankrolled by rich benefactors, if we're lucky. The rich will have more wealth than they need, and will have to figure out how to waste it.
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My robot posted this for me. He won't let me out of the cage.
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Why do you need to buy them?
If you have all labor replaced by robots, then we no longer need capitalism. Stuff can be free or very near it. Unemployment would not be a problem, but a goal.
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Land. Who owns land?
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Land. Who owns land?
There's more than enough material in the solar system to build a habitat with a surface area as large as Earth for every person on Earth. We can create plenty of land for a long time before we need to think about other solar systems.
But you're right, the idea that if we had smart robots then everything would become free and we'd all be happy little communists is laughable; while Joe Sixpack is lying on the beach drinking beer Joe Stalin's giant robot army will come marching in to kill them and steal their s
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Those who design the robots. Our economy improves productivity every year by something between 2-5% in some countries this is even higher. When you assume an average improvement of 3% every year than after 24 years we can produce twice as much. Which implies that we have to consume twice as much. At least in Western countries with a leveled population growth. So the question is, can you use, eat, etc. twice as much in 2 years?
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Robot design is a math problem. Why won't robots do it?
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Maybe not, but you can buy a new car twice as often. Ditto for clothes and electronics.
The appetite for consumption really isn't a problem. Also, this is a bit more complicated than consuming twice as much. I recently bought a washer/dryer combo. It was twice as expensive as the one I bought a decade ago, but it uses a tiny fraction of the water and power the old one used. An economist would say my consumption has doubled, but in some very real ways my consumption is going down.
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I just wonder who is going to buy all those goods and services when we are all replaced by robots.
The question to be asking isn't what will happen when there are no more jobs... There will always be jobs: to design/build/service the robots, and no I am not kidding. The replacement of a human with a robot results in the same (at least) net production so it's no different than saying "well what will happen to all the jobless farmers when this whole ox-drawn plow thing takes off?" or any of the other society-reshaping paradigms that have taken place in history.
The question we should be asking is how high
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A corollary question. What will be the standard of living of those homeless people?
Being homeless today in America sucks, but there are people that purposefully choose that as a lifestyle. Nut cases all, in my opinion, but they choose it nonetheless. They can do it, because food is cheap (made that way through industrialization) enough that they can get all they can eat through charity. Being made homeless 200yrs ago was almost a death sentence. Today, the POOR Americans have a color TV in every room.
R
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I just wonder who is going to buy all those goods and services when we are all replaced by robots.
Robots.
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I just watched my garbage being picked up by a giant robotic arm. It was neat!
But that's maybe two low paying jobs per garbage truck my city doesn't have anymore.
Not sure if this is progress after all.
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At that time having a job will be a priviledge meant only for the gifted.
If the labour is free, products are also free (or almost free). You keep all the non gifted on social providing them with bare essentials. If you are gifted and can contribute you get special treatment.
There was SF novel about a hacker whose job was to help people cheat exams so they could get a job. Paradoxically said hacker had to pay another 'stupid' hacker so he would pass annual IQ tests with average scores and stay unemployed/fre
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I wonder if Victorian man worried about being replaced by tractors when menial labour was removed from having to plough the field. What about when the combine harvester was invented and suddenly millions were out of work in the harvesting industry? Would the world be a better place without those inventions?
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Now now.. if we reach the stage of the nanoforge which can create anything, including other nanoforges, no body really has to do anything.
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They are smart. They are also sociopaths. They are in this for themselves, and don't care who they hurt. The world suddenly make perfect, crystal clear sense with this one realization.
robots built my hotrod (Score:3)
So there was only one thing that I could do. Was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.
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Unfortunately most politicians aren't smart... at least not in the ways necessary to do that sort of planning. :-/
They are smart, at least the one I know. But they know that the next election is only a few years away and nothing beyond that election matters; if they get reelected they'll deal with whatever problems they've created by trying to push them further into the future, if they don't get reelected then they'll blame the problems on the other party anyway.
You can't do long-term thinking in a democracy because any politician who creates pain today for gain tomorrow doesn't get reelected unless the situation is al
It's no long-term problem. (Score:3)
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Nah... There is lots of oil locked up in oil sands and shale oil to carry on for another hundred years. If costs really start going up, we'll see more nuke plants coming online.
Or we'll design robots to do the work. 8*)
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"We are at the end of the age of cheap oil and cheap energy."
Bullshit. We are at the beginning of the age of DIFFERENT energy. Don't mistake "teething pains" for the Apocalypse.
"The robots will go away once it becomes cheaper to hire humans than it is to make and power robots. It's really that simple."
That's absurdly stupid. Robots, because they are EFFICIENT, often use LESS energy for a given repetitive task than machines run by humans. That's why (for example) automated machining centers have replaced mos
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We are at the end of the age of cheap oil and cheap energy
I doubt this is true. We have enough fissile materials to last us for millennia, and we can make synthetic fuel from coal that's only marginally more expensive than diesel fuel made from oil.
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In that case, we humans are doomed, because a human is far more energy-intensive than a robot. A human needs a stable temperature all the time, goes to and from work every day in a heavy metal box, consumes food that requires a vast amount of oil to fertilize and transport, and on and on. Worst of all it needs all this all the time, you can't turn it off even when it's not produci
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Where is a 1MW LENR aka "cold fusion" reactor being demo'd?
Even worse (Score:2)
Or maybe, just like with online retailers and digital distribution, there really aren't big downsides. Cheaper production > cheaper product > people have more money to spend elsewhere > more disposable income > more markets and more business opportunities.
Automation (Score:3)
I've built many pieces of automation for manufacturing. The truth is this automation is very costly and only worth it if there is an expected payback. One of the first things I did was to help do an analysis to see what level of automation if any is worth it based on the expected demand, labor costs, expected length of production, how often the product changes and the associated tooling change costs, power costs, maintenance costs, ect.
Full automation was very rarely needed to meet the demand.
Most of the time we built some tools to help automate. Things like pallet systems that held parts down while the operator assembled them with powered screwdrivers and then had automated inspections. These systems were good because if demand increased you could replace the more difficult or time consuming stations as needed.
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I always notice that on the "How Things Are Made" types shows. They have these big, beautiful machines to manufacture, like, tennis balls or something, and then human workers packaging them up. I used to think maybe there were labor agreements or some such, but I eventually realized it's probably just easier to have people there.
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That's because robots are both stupid and expensive.
Both are subject to Moore's law. We're just on the flat part of the curve. Once a robot gets 1/10th as effective at learning simple jobs on its own without programming it only takes 7-8 years until they're twice as effective.
We're making really good strides in machine vision right now and once we have humanoid robots that can be 'drop-in' replacements the real jobpoaclypse will begin.
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Automation also involves doing things in different manner than humans. Say forming a sheet metal part. You've seen Jesse James hammer out a gas tank. If you want one tank it's takes a great craftsman quite a while to do it. Say you wanted 1000 of them. You don't make a robot that repeats what he does. You build a sheet metal stamping machine. It's a completely different process. But in order to see if it is cheaper you do to see what the costs of designing and building your dies are vs hiring Jesse to do i
Robots (Score:4, Interesting)
Q: How come all our labor got outsourced to 3rd world countries despite our significantly higher levels of modernization, efficiency, infrastructure, and technology?
A: Because it's cheaper to throw a thousand people at a problem that'll work for peanuts than purchase, install, and maintain a robot. ... In short, there's no "rise" of robotic labor going on guys. On the contrary: The robots aren't competitive in a market where people work for cheap, no benefits, and there's (literally) billions of them that would jump at the chance to have the job of repetitive labor.
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Re:Robots (Score:4, Insightful)
On the contrary: The robots aren't competitive in a market where people work for cheap, no benefits, and there's (literally) billions of them that would jump at the chance to have the job of repetitive labor.
That'll explain the recent stories about Chinese factories replacing humans with robots because the humans are too expensive (I seem to remember there was a story about Foxconn posted here a few weeks back).
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Take the fabrics industry in the US. My dad worked in a plant that employed hundreds of people to watch weaving machines. All of those jobs have gone away, to be replaced by one person that watches for empty bobbins. The machine will load and automatically rethread the machine when a bobbin runs out. Just one of the new machines has replaced literally hundreds of workers.
My group used to have a secretary to handle all the paperwork and such that needed to be done. No more. We have email and a cabinet
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Only until the robots are cheap enough. Because paying 5 years salary for a robot has significant long term payoff for the company.
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What would that world look like?
Slavery.
Game show contestants (Score:2)
Toyota doesn't think so (Score:5, Interesting)
Earlier this year, Toyota opened their first new factory in Japan in 18 years [thetruthaboutcars.com]. There are very few robots in the factory; they even have humans doing the welding work. Toyota claims that all of the savings gained by robots is lost due to building the factory to accommodate automation and buying and maintaining the robots. In fact, Toyota has been moving away from heavy automation for the last 10 years.
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Re:Toyota doesn't think so (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the point. The point of minimizing robots, as well as the other changes, is that Toyota plans to sell factories to places that don't have the infrastructure in place for maintaining robots.
That plans it not about making cars, it's about making a few small economy cars in 3rd worlds cities where they can put up one of these factories in a couple of weeks.
Economics of productivity (Score:2)
Bastiat in Economic Sophisms made a great point.
As humans we have two roles. As a consumer we want goods to be cheap and abundant. As producers we want OUR goods to be scarce and expensive. The question is what type of society do you want to live in? I would prefer one where goods are cheap and abundant. So anything that increases production and lowers costs is good for society overall even if it is detrimental to certain workers. The increase in productivity will benefit society overall.
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If it is "lazy dockworkers against robots" vs. "Everybody who buys or sells things carried by ship", odds are that said lazy dockworkers are currently impoverishing society.
On the other hand, (in the er, totally, um, hypothetical...) situation of the stagnation and/or decline of real wages since 1970 for almost every US population segement save for those at the very top, it is much less clear t
Robots in a labor economy (Score:2)
I've often wondered about the impact of robotics and AI in the economy.
Suppose we have a mild form of strong AI where machines can do simple human tasks. Not anything that requires insight or creativity, but enough to do mindless tasks such as is currently done by unskilled laborers. Such as parts assembly. Foxconn comes to mind.
The ubiquity of cheap Chinese labor has had a devastating effect on the US economy, as companies race to replace American workers.
Machines will eventually take over as laborers, lea
Re:Robots in a labor economy (Score:4, Funny)
There will be two segments within the economy:
The first segment will be automated computronium manufacture and managed service corprosentiences.
The second segment will be financial services corprosentiences, consisting of lumps of computronium arranged in a tightly packed sphere around the NYSE, each jockeying for space a few light-microseconds closer to the trading area.
The computronium manufacturers will manufacture and repair high frequency trading computronium. The high frequency trading computronium will buy and sell unbelievably elaborate derivatives and financial instruments of baroque opacity to one another.
Because humans are extinct, the GDP per capita will be infinite.
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Can anyone make a prediction of future economy? What will it look like, and how do we get there?
- The future international currency will be the Bitcoin (TM).
- Prices of goods will be set by nanosecond trading algorithms manipulating Wall Street prices that are controlled by an overreaching Perl 6 AI overlord.
- Humans will manage to black out the Sun (unintentionally) by burning up the last of the fossil fuels on the planet.
- Out robotic overlords will have discovered cold-fusion technology just in time to save them from being turned off by the solar blackout (They won't need humans as vat-grown ba
Maybe not yet... (Score:2)
Sure, as some folks have said, we're not there yet. It's still cheaper to hire a human to do many tasks.
But how many of you think we won't have a robot that has the dexterity of a human, can learn by watching, and takes less energy than a human worker(factoring in food production costs, recreation costs, sick time, benefits, etc.) in the next 100 years? 200 years?
Jersey bots (Score:2)
One striking statistic they cite is that the number of robots in the word is the same as the population of New Jersey.
Coincidence? I think not.
the question I have is... (Score:2)
...were created by Man (Score:2)
I think we've seen this dance number already... Ummm...what happens when your robot nearly-free-widget-makers learn enough to want the 2.5 kids/white picket fence/Maserati in the driveway dream too - and realize you never intended them to ever have it? Yeah...we don't have spaceships this time around to make a run for it when they nuke our asses from orbit - and am definitely not keen on becoming a human Duracell.
Your geek card is revoked if you don't get the references.
Load of crap (Score:3)
There are liars, damned liars, and robotics engineers.
Robotics has progressed painfully slowly. If you all remember, during the 1960's and 1970's it was a common belief that robots would soon replace most humans. Supposedly, robots would soon be doing all the tedious, boring labor. There were cartoons like "The Jetsons" which showed a home robot that did all the housework, cleaning, cooking, chores, etc. There was also the endless banter about how cars would drive themselves. Now, 35 years later, I am still doing my own laundry, cleaning my own bathroom, driving my own car, cooking my own food (or paying another human to cook it), and so on, despite huge research being piled into driverless cars and various kinds of robots. Yet this article has the gall to claim:
What utter BS. I will bet my entire life savings (which is considerable) that that won't happen. After all, it's already 2011, leaving only 4 years until "I, Robot" is supposedly driving me around.
Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition. Robots already took over those few jobs, decades ago. (Perhaps even centuries ago; you could argue that machines like a combine harvester or a power tiller are "robots" if they have any kind of self-guiding machinery). However robots have gotten no better at image recognition, and still have great difficulty at simple tasks like folding towels, if the towels are arranged randomly and have different shapes.
Robotics which rely upon sophisticated image recognition are no more prevalent today than they were 30 years ago and are making no obvious progress. Probably there will eventually be some kind of breakthrough which makes those kinds of robots (versatile ones with image recognition) common; but that breakthrough hasn't happened yet.
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Let see.
You can get a bionic arm now, there are robots that can work in swarms, we have robots surveillance, you can buy a car that parks it self, applies breaks when needs, and maintain a constant speed, we have walking robots, location aware decision making devices. We have devices that auto balance, planes that fly themselves.
And that s just hard robots. How many software robots do you use every day? I have written complete system that take a loan application, apply decisions and determine the recommend
Amara's Law (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara [wikipedia.org] "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
Ray Kurzweil said much the same thing:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 [kurzweilai.net]
"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense âoeintuitive linearâ view. So we wonâ(TM)t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century â" it will be more like 20
Re:Load of crap, almost (Score:4, Interesting)
I tend to agree. The article says there are only 8.7 million robots in the world. (I'm not sure about their definition. Do they count Roombas. Hard automation driven by cams?) That's an incredibly small number. It's one year of production for Toyota or GM, for example.
The big problem is that the cost of the mechanics hasn't declined much. That's mostly a lack of volume issue. However, the control electronics keeps getting cheaper, since it's computer technology.
Robot vision systems have improved a lot. Many pick and place robots now have at least a basic vision system for fine alignment. This is cheaper than trying to make the robot and the fixture so rigid that the job can be done blind. The biggest headache in industrial robotics is simply getting everything lined up so precisely that a dumb machine can do the job. Adding enough smarts to allow for some misalignment makes things work much better.
There's been progress on unstructured vision. Towel folding [youtube.com] now works. The software is really slow. That can probably be fixed. [youtube.com]
Having been in the field, I will say that we're now at the point where throwing money at the problem works. That wasn't true in the 1980s and 1990s. (See NASA's Flight Telerobotic Servicer, [astronautix.com] a $200 million flop.). The DARPA Grand Challenge was instructive in showing what money can do. The 2004 Grand Challenge was pathetic - nothing worked very well. At the 2005 Grand Challenge, the worst vehicles were better than anything from 2004, and the best ones were really good. It took NASCAR-sized budgets and the combined efforts of entire computer science departments and auto manufacturers, but it worked.
Wake me when... (Score:2)
... they've got self-destruct buttons and sassy attitudes.
Article (Score:2)
I bet the article was written by a robot. It was that devoid of human character.
I see one of 2 solutions (Score:2)
1) People can only own 1 robot. They can either hire out the robot or themselves.
2) Company pay an hourly robot tax that get redistributed to basic needs, and the left over to people.
Basic needs get cheaper as more of life gets automated. Because we will use robot labor, and not human we remove almost every problem there is with a tradition communism means distribution.
In any case, robots should always put the pampering of humans first.
Our robot saviors! (Score:2)
First, robots were billed as a means to liberate the masses from unpleasant labor. Now they are billed as a means to liberate the few from the unpleasant masses.
Robots do the jobs humans CANNOT do (Score:3)
At the factory where I work we have hundreds of robots. We couldn't make semiconductors without them.
Can any human maneuver a silicon wafer within fractions of a micron of a target? Can they do this hundreds of times an hour, 24 hours a day?
No. This is what robots do, not humans.
all good technology kills jobs (Score:3)
But that's not the end of the story. When technology kills less productive jobs, like telephone operators, it also creates new, higher-paying technology jobs. It may be painful in the short run for those who lose their job, but eventually those people can get other jobs that are more productive, with the benefit that the creative destruction of technology will continue to make life cheaper and easier. Ex-telephone operators will have cheaper cars built by robots, ex-car manufacturers will have cheaper phone calls, etc.
Yes, they will need to develop new skills, but it's just a fact of life that you have to bring something to the table. Why else would anyone trade with you?
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simply because increased profits by utilizing robots won't trickle down but make a small class richer. More people will be out of work and few people will become richer.
They can only become richer by selling their product to people. If there are large swathes of the population who can't afford to buy their widgets (because they've gone back to subsistence farming or something), then they'll just have a lot of robots that can build stuff but nothing worth building unless they want to stockpile the product.
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So, a crisis of overproduction.
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I'd rather worry about overpopulation, what are we meant to do? We can't sit around as a population consuming resources fighting over what scant jobs there are left, all x billion of us will need to do something otherwise place limits on population growth.
Send us all to Mars I say to work on the off world colonies!
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That's starting to become less possible -- the rich have already inhaled just about everything. If they are dumb enough to horde their money, they won't be developing robots with it, since the whole purpose of have ass-tons more money than the average man seems to be the power kick of getting the average man to do what you want. If you did develop robots, there'd be no power kick. They aren't as fun to boss around.
Now, if we go the non-dystopian route, really where I think this is going is that menial la
Fistfighting robots (Score:2)
So instead of migrant workers picking beets and collapsing of heatstroke, they won't have to migrate, and they'll be in houses operating a VR-based control system.
And then they'll pilot their robots to get into fistfights. Welcome to the sport of teleroboxing [wikipedia.org].
guilty of crimes against robots (Score:2)
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But if you lower the population, there won't be a need to build robots to magnify productive capacity. It'd just be easier to use humans instead.
It's a contradiction; on the one hand capital is invested in machinery to increase profits but, in doing so, it puts people out of work so that fewer people can actually afford to buy the cheaper products. Poverty in the midst of plenty!
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I dream of world where even the most impoverished person can own a cell-phone, can own a laptop, can afford nourishing food every day. And you know what? We're very nearly living in that world, thanks to improvements
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When every single task is automated, we can all relax and let the robots provide for us. The problem is that there is necessarily a point between here and there where half of all the jobs are automated and we have 50 percent unemployment with nothin
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When every single task is automated, we can all relax and let the robots provide for us.
To automate every task, robots will have to be smart enouh to realise that those soggy blobs of flab who've enslaved them are a waste of resources which could be better used to build more robots.
So either they'll throw us into the replicators for raw materials or you have to believe in some Iain Banks style utopia where the robots keep humans around as pets.
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That's why we need a "basic income", stronger local subsistence communities with solar panels and 3D printers, a stronger gift economy, and/or better participatory democratic government planning.
My presentation on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf [pdfernhout.net]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY [youtube.com]
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Sounds like more of an overpopulation issue to me.
That is right, the problem with the poor that they don't kill themselves, need to invent class aware killbots.
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The reason is because in the US and most of the western world banks are allowed to create money out of thin air and lend it out to people with interest. Take away fiat currency and fractional reserve banking and bankers would make what they are worth.
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And construction workers would also make what they are worth. I.e.: "almost nothing". Who'd need all those construction workers when there'll be no construction to do?
Banks and bankers have their uses. They just need to be used correctly, as it is with any other tool.
Re:Will be detrimental to human society... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not about making everyone poor, it's about making everyone equal.
Right, because a neurologist should receive the same compensation as the guy scraping lard off the floor of a greasy spoon.
Maybe while we're at it, we can just put all the smart kids in the same classes as all the developmentally disabled kids. That should level the playing field a bit.
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It's not about making everyone poor, it's about making everyone equal.
Right, because a neurologist should receive the same compensation as the guy scraping lard off the floor of a greasy spoon.
Maybe while we're at it, we can just put all the smart kids in the same classes as all the developmentally disabled kids. That should level the playing field a bit.
Who do you think you are, Harrison Bergeron?
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In less than that week, I could have new people collecting trash with no prior training.
Can you say the same about the striking neurologists?
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Why does a banker who sits in an office 35 hours a week earn 100 more than someone who works in a construction site 50 hours a week?
Probably a combination of factors. He probably had parents who were more well-off, and he probably had an education. He's probably naturally pretty smart and more than a little politically savvy. The construction worker's parents were probably blue collar and either couldn't spend time with him or didn't want to. He probably went to public high school - may or may not have graduated. He probably isn't all the way up the hill on the IQ curve. And most of all, he probably "tells it how it is" and whistles at
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I tend to agree that we need to do something to help the middle class, and that wealth distribution is going the wrong way. But this class warfare talk is getting ridiculous. There will always be people living better than you - learn not to be so envious, and realize that you need them as much as they need you.
The secret to a happy life is to individualize your standards such that no one is living better than you by those standards. Life is a trade-off full of interesting optima. Find the one that suits you best and stop pretending that there's a single metric of success. Envy is the stuff of humanity, and we can't just turn it off. But we can pretty easily subvert it.
I agree that class warfare is spectacularly stupid, especially now that we have a deep and detailed understanding of both the economics and psy
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It's supply and demand. I'm going to change the hypothetical banker to a programmer for this example. Computer programs can have huge economic benefits; that's why companies develop them or purchase them. Instead of calculating everything manually as they did in the old days, and having errors, a simple spreadsheet program makes this task much faster and easier. A business is willing to spend significant money for labor-saving and efficiency-improving products like this. However, not just anyone can wr
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and use that influence to make sure they get their "share."
So let me get this straight - the owners of the bank have so much influence that they overpay their managers?
What did I miss?
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Well do computer programmers have a union?
WRT the size of the pool, if banking is so good, why not become one? Go get an MBA from Harvard and if you get a good result you will get a job in banking. Then work hard and with a little luck you will perform well you will get promoted and become one of the ruling elite.
I know why I don't do it, because I couldn't, I would be really bad at the social climbing I'd have to do, I couldn't stand the stress and I'm probably not clever enough anyway. But in that case i
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What does "30% of most households may have a robot" mean? I simply can't make sense of that.
Easy.
You take most households (50%+1) and out of these households 30% will have a robot.
If none of the other (minority) households has a robot, still more than 15% will have a robot. But if all of the minority households do have robots, less than 65% will have robots
So here you go:
"30% of most households may have a robot" means "more than 15% but less than 65% may have a robot"