Welcome to Post-Singularity.
BTW, the robots can repair themselves.
Maybe this makes more sense to me because I retired a couple of years ago. So I don’t work for a living now. There’s a model for a post-scarcity economy - imagine a society where everyone is retired. A lot of people are going to want to work anyway but anyone who wants to can just sit at home or do whatever leisure activity they feel like.
I take issue with one point in the OP’s linked article:
That’s bull. *Most *people worked for their feudal masters.
In theory, nothing that can be done by a human can’t be done by a sufficiently advanced machine. After all, that’s what we are! But what happens when humans are still needed in a few jobs? Lets say that we need a team of a thousand engineers to monitor the robots in Futureville, with a population of 2 million. Again, there’s no reason robots can’t repair one another (that’s what humans do!), but for now, that’s the one job that humans absolutely have to do. If everyone automatically gets a comfortable life, how on earth do we motivate a thousand people to do that job? Do we pay them millions of dollars? What do they buy with it if everything is free? Some people will volunteer for the job because they enjoy it, but what happens when the robotic sewer workers break down at three in the morning? Who goes out to fix them, and how do we get them to agree?
Ah. Understood. In that case, I agree, I think there will be a general trend away from the need for employment, but I suspect it will bottom out before it reaches the u/dys/topian scenarios, for a whole load of inter-related reasons - for example, a society with increasing unemployment may not be wealthy enough to build and maintain robot slaves - so it’s self-limiting, in some ways.
I’m not seeing the connection between robot workers and comfortable life for the general population. As far as I can tell, higher and more efficient automation has historically tended to concentrate wealth in the hands of the owners and corporations while raising joblessness and unemployment levels, and lowering wealth, among most of the population.
Compare the OP of this thread with that of this one, almost exactly a month ago: [url=Billionaire Investor Explains: Workers Are Screwed - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board]Billionaire Investor Explains: Workers Are Screwed
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. The exchange that prompted that one is:
I don’t understand how we will transition from high unemployment because of automation = most people losing wealth and dying from lack of _______ (which is what is happening now) to high unemployment because of automation = everyone living in luxury.
I think this is a really great and fundamental question.
That’s why we have Yoshimi.
Three thoughts:
- I don’t see a long-term trend away from full employment. (That’s directional; I’m aware that we rarely have full employment, however one would define it. But excepting the Great Recession, there doesn’t seem to be a move towards higher unemployment rates in the West.)
Sure, more stuff can be automated; whatever we’re doing now to produce a given set of goods and services will be done by fewer people in the future. But unless we’re getting into a ‘lump of demand’ fallacy, where there’s a ceiling on what people will purchase and consume, it would seem that that would produce richer people, who would find more stuff to spend money on, who will employ more people doing things that we didn’t used to employ so many people to do, or never had anyone doing at all.
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Another simple antidote is to do worldwide what Europe has largely done: reduce the work week and increase vacation time. If (in the USA, for example) you have people working 48 35-hour weeks a year instead of 50 40-hour weeks, that’s a 16% decrease in the number of hours worked, which means that you need 19% more people to do the work. If we have a problem with finding gainful employment for the same number of people, phasing in a change such as this would be an easy way to take up the slack.
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In the USA, at least, there’s clearly a lot of public-sector work that just isn’t being done because the public sector is being starved of resources. Which is obviously a political thing: if we’re producing more wealth from less labor, we’re fundamentally richer as a society. Meanwhile, our bridges are crumbling, many of our water and sewer systems are ancient, we’ve got a power grid that doesn’t work very well, we’ve got crummy public transportation in most places, we could have fast intercity rail connecting cities that are in that ‘close enough to drive but too much of a hassle to actually do it, and definitely too close to fly’ range, but we don’t…in short, there are a ton of goods and resulting services that we could produce that would make our lives better and would spur further economic activity, that we have the wealth to produce, but we don’t.
Overall, I’m just not seeing a problem here.
Out of curiosity do you think ancient hunter gatherers would have considered the process of going on hunting expeditions, foraging all day and then laboriously processing the products of this effort into food (not to mention clothes etc.) ‘work’? or ‘entertainment’?
Living has never, ever, been free.
My view on it is that we are at something of a crossroads. In the near term it is possible that many of low-skilled jobs that previously provided employment for the majority of the West will become ‘obsolete’ (off-shoring is a temporary phase I think, automation will catch up when labour prices in places like China start to increase). Knowledge based work is a long way behind.
And if that happens, as it has already partially happened in the West due to off-shoring, what will we do with all of the people who no longer have employment or the means to get employment? Many people find it difficult to live life without the structure and routine of a job, especially if you lack the financial means to use your time in more enjoyable ways.
They wouldn’t really have put such discrete labels on it. But ask yourself this: does a dog enjoy going out hunting? (or think about how a lot of dogs react when they know they’re going out). Why do many humans like hunting so much they do it for pleasure? At the same time they’re getting a lot of exercise while doing it.
Most of humans’ food still came from foraging though, and despite the picture often maintained in the modern world of them often starving… most of the time they had more delicious raw organic food than they could possibly eat. This situation can still be seen in the wild today with other primates who haven’t been infringed upon by humans, primates who have had their ecology upset by them don’t count, and they rarely go hungry.
Almost all mammals have a sense of territory and a sense of property, “this is my bone, get your own”, that is where people get feelings of and see the sense of property rights from. However it is a totally unnatural and artificial concept that people should own thousands/millions of acres of property and refuse to allow anyone else on it. In a proper ecological system… this wouldn’t have worked because that amount of land would be impossible to maintain by one individual or even a group. However now people do own that amount, and will call you a criminal if you dare to walk on it.
The individual shoemaker or baker ma have been a common thing in the middle ages. The problem is,as products and processes become more complex and the scale is much larger, it requires a larger team to accomplish this task. Even in classical times there were sailors who worked for a ship-owner merchant (or consortium) as employees; or as sevants in the manor o palace (another large enterprise). Perhaps the issue was reversed - until recently, we did not have the wealth, legal structure, and organizational tools to manage large corporations efficiently. It’s only with modern technology - giant cloth and rubber factories, assembly plants - and our odern transport system that Nike can compete with a local shoemaker.
I don’t see the rich spending us out of this, or if they do I don’t think it will be a good thing. The rich don’t spend their money as efficiently as the poor since they have lower marginal utility for money than the poor do. Sure the rich will be able to use their capital to produce things for themselves to consume but that leaves those who only have labor to sell up a creek. This brings us to the state of affairs in France 1788.
This sounds like the best idea since it attacks the problem at its source. Ideally an economy of increased productivity would be identical to the economy as it was before, but with more free time. Unfortunately I’m not sure how we get there from here. From a workers perspective no one wants to see their hours cut unless they are are going to be compensated with higher wages so as to maintain their standard of living. And wages would take some time to catch up to the reduced work force. From the employers perspective it is more efficient in terms of training and benefits to have a smaller workforce that works longer hours. Also since the reduced supply of labor would mean that wages would increase, taking money out of profits, they aren’t going to go for it. Still after even if there are minuses in the short term IMHO this is the best strategy for the long term
Another good idea at least in the short term. However in order to make it work you would need to tax the wealthy (who have gotten all of the benefits of the increased productivity), and fund major public works projects which will get you called a Communist. Good luck in this political climate. In the long term eventually all of the infrastructure will be pretty much up to snuff and then you have to decide what to do with the public workers. Although I suppose you could generate make work projects just to keep people employed but that seems like a waste. So for the long term I like your second solution best.
That’s only valid for small populations in resource rich locations. Try gathering food when you live in a city of 4 million people, where there is snow on the ground for 4-5 months out of the year.
People didn’t suddenly forget how to gather enough food in a few short hours a day. The population grew to the point where foraging couldn’t support it. Some moved to less ideal locations, some planted crops, some starved until there were few enough people that the land could once again support them.
Yes, and that’s why I advocate for population control… I think that the one child policy in China is a good idea.
I always thought my Economy teacher in high school was right.
He told us that technological obsolescence was impossible because machines that replace human labor need maintenance. So even if humans lost jobs on the car assembly line they could move into the robotic maintenance field instead.
I was very naïve.
Later in my life my life, my uncle lost his job in a factory and from there he was forced to take jobs as a janitor because he didn’t have the education to get job elsewhere.
The argument can be made that although my uncle lost his job to a machine, he still reaps the benefits by paying less for goods produced by those machines. However, losing his factory job caused a huge decrease in wages and he lost his house. He now lives with my grandmother and is clinically depressed.
I am not against progress, but we can’t expect unskilled labor to just magically migrate into more advanced fields. We don’t offer enough resources to help those who are having trouble finding work get better education to get better jobs.
But like most of you in this thread, I simply feel like our economic model is outmoded. I think it’s fine to provide ‘incentive’ since there probably are some people who won’t contribute to society without a reason to do so, but some of the richest people in the world aren’t exactly ‘contributing’ much either.
There is a problem with post-scarcity society that is hard to address, and that is incentive. On the one side you have lazy people who readily admit that they are lazy and need an incentive. On the other side you have the naïve who think that there would be enough people willing to work to improve society without direct compensation.
I’ve always liked the idea of a gamified economy. That you would not be able to buy goods for your work, but you would get Humanity Points. And there would be an international scoreboard and those who wanted to get recognition would strive to be near the top… but in order to do that you would need to cure cancer or develop immortality serum.
Perhaps there would be different scoreboards that one could strive to be on top of. Maybe scoreboard for individual professions and further segmented among locales. Maybe entire groups could join together to increase their individual scores by building homes for people or producing technology.
Of course, the idea is to remove the concept of wealth (having more than someone) and change that to a concept of humanitarianism (helping others). The more you do for others, the more recognition and praise you receive from that community.
Think about how many people actually PAY to spend hours WORKING in games like World of Warcraft… months and months to obtain a ‘virtual good.’ I am telling you, humans are simple enough that a scoreboard could replace millions of dollars in wealth. Maybe those on top of the scoreboard also get a special legendary sword for their in-game avatars.
I may be one of the naive ones, but I am not sure I agree with this. I think a lot of people’s laziness can be attributed to the current capitalist economic system that values competition over mutual aid. Given the right environment, I don’t think people would just plateau because there was no incentive to make things better. In fact, with more freetime I think we could make even bigger advancements. There are a lot of brilliant people who are full of great ideas, but don’t have the time or resources to bring those ideas to fruition.
No worse than paying for useless pieces of junk known as “antiques”.
This subject overlaps with the Job-Creator thread. The problem we face is that individuals by themselves are generally incapable of being productive enough to live a modern lifestyle. A farmer could eke a living out of the soil, but it won’t be enough to pay for cell phones, internet, and healthcare, among other things. The only reason people are more productive in jobs is through coorperative efforts. This leaves the minimal jobs going to the lowest bidder. Many minimum wage employees now aren’t really productive enough to meet their wages, only regulation keeps the rate that high. We are going to have to face the process of employing everybody, or paying enough to non-working people to keep them from killing us and taking all our posessions.
In that scenario the robots would be doing the research into building better robots, curing diseases, space travel, etc. Robots aren’t going to be limited to menial tasks, they will be far better at academic and scientific pursuits than we are too in the medium term future (40 years or so from now as a WAG).
It wasn’t free, it took hours of labor to obtain it. Not only that but the process of obtaining food could be dangerous due to hunting animals that fight back, eating poisonous plants and animals, having accidents while hunting, etc.
If I work for an hour and net $10, I can buy a ton of safe, varied food for that. Not only that but the food has had all the toxins removed from it since modern food is heavily regulated for quality control to remove all the poisons and pathogens (or the poisonous foods don’t even make it to market, nobody sells toxic mushrooms in the grocery store). The kinds, safety and amount of food I’d get for an hour of labor in the wild is terribly inferior to what I can get for an hour of compensated labor, then going to the grocery store.