So lets say a nation goes the luddite route and rejects all the upcoming AI and robotics advances that will increase productivity and reduce the need for labor. They would do this because they want to make sure people are put to work.
So there are technologies that can increase productivity and drastically decrease the cost of labor, but this nation refuses to use them. What happens?
I would assume they would not be competitive on an international level, because other nations which do have automation will have higher productivity, higher quality and lower costs to their goods and services. So there wouldn’t be much of an international market for what they sell. Also if buyers are able to buy from foreign sellers, they will because they will be cheaper than domestic sellers.
So assume this nation decides to make as much of its economy domestic as possible, with large incentives to be as economically self sufficient as a nation as possible. Virtually everything people need to consume to lead a western lifestyle is produced domestically.
What would happen? I wonder if nations will try this as automation slashes jobs this century.
If a nation tried this and it did work, would the nation just be stuck in perpetual statis? People would have jobs, but there’d be no economic growth because there are no productivity advances (like a nation perpetually stuck in 1950 with 1950 standards of living in the modern world would look to us today)?
They might revert to the 18th century, just possibly to the 19th, and get along well enough.
They’ll need enough cropland to feed themselves with horse- or oxen-drawn ploughs, and no modern fertilizers. They’ll be subject to diseases the outside world can treat.
They’ll have a small renaissance of story-telling and musical composition, as they are cut off from the cultural heritage of the outer world. The results might actually be delightful; a shame we’ll never know them!
It can work if you make sure that there is zero trade with other countries. It might not be pretty, but people can and do get used to it.
Knowing when Sunrise and Sunset occur would become more important.
What exactly is the point of renouncing automation to “protect jobs”?
So, you can’t have a dishwashing machine, because that takes away jobs from humans with scrub brushes. You can’t have clothes washing machines, because that takes away jobs from humans with washboards and elbow grease. You can’t have trucks, because that takes away jobs from humans carrying goods by horse cart. You can’t have horse carts, because that takes away jobs from humans carrying goods by wheelbarrow. You can’t have wheelbarrows, because that takes away jobs from humans carrying goods in baskets. You can’t have baskets, because that takes away jobs from humans carrying goods in their bare hands.
What exactly is the point? If you want to have pointless jobs for people to do, why not just make them dig holes and then fill them back in, Cool Hand Luke style? And while they’re doing pointless work for no reason at least their clothes will be freshly laundered every day by machine, their dishes when they eat dinner will be cleaned by machine, the food brought to the chain-gang will at least be produced on farms with combines and tractors.
It would be a lot simpler and cheaper to do it this way.
Or maybe just have the machines produce the goods, and not require humans to do pointless backbreaking labor for no reason to earn those goods?
Why would they revert that far? Assuming this is a western nation with tens of millions of people and a large landmass with lots of natural resources, they should be able to develop the domestic infrastructure to meet virtually all of their domestic needs with domestic labor. One would assume.
Granted some things you’d have to buy from overseas (raw materials you can’t produce domestically and/or can’t produce alternatives to). Other than that, why wouldn’t a nation just maintain at roughly modern levels of economic progress and just stagnate there?
The rest of the world would keep advancing, but wouldn’t that nation basically be stuck in a time warp, never growing or expanding in technology?
The black market would flourish. Let’s say, just as a test case, that the government allows the manufacture and sale of the first iPhone, but not any smart phone more advanced than that. People would want the more advanced smart phones, so some people would buy the more advanced phones when they travelled abroad, while smugglers would bring better phones into the country and sell them illegally.
There’s nothing theoretical about this; it happens all the time. Argentina, for example, puts up barriers to manufacturing and selling many tech products. (Not because they’re luddites, but because the government is socialist-leaning.) The result is that things which you can’t buy legally in Argentina, flow in from its more free neighbors like Chile and Uruguay. One can even find examples in the United States, where outlawing marijuana (in most places) and heroin has not made those things vanish, but only created a profitable criminal industry.
“What happens” is that at some point a more advanced country defeats their less advanced army and takes them over. Being politically isolated, militarily primitive and weak relative to your neighbors is not a sustainable state of affairs if you intend of maintaining the integrity of your borders.
You’re more generous in your assumptions that I was. I was looking at “a nation” akin to Ghana, or Nepal, or Uruguay, or Slovakia, not having the benefits of millions of people nor a large landmass with resources.
Yes, definitely, if the nation were Canada, or Brazil, or India, or Australia, they would do pretty well in total isolation.
They might advance…but slowly. Again, depending on their size and their resources. They wouldn’t have the global scientific network we enjoy – no Large Hadron Collider – but they might be able to build a good mountaintop telescope.
Most such countries fall into one of two categories:
(1) Their neighbors also have very little military might.
(2) Everybody knows that attacking the otherwise-tempting target would bring a response from the US.
A country with a sufficiently diverse set of resources could continue to advance all on its own. After all, the Earth is just a finite sub-set of all land (and potentially all reasoning entities) and yet it continues to develop and advance. Potentially, a single country - like the US - could even outpace the rest of the world.
But if you’re actively refusing to advance technology as well, so that you don’t have to worry about any sort of post-scarcity economic dilemmas or whatever, then yeah, your best case is that you’re going to live in stasis.
Of course, for all we know, this might be the top. Future technological advance might provide theoretical advantages, but still have demerits that fundamentally throw everything so off kilter that the end result is negative. See, for example, what has happened now that food is so cheap and heavily processed down into just its macronutrients. There might be some points in the technological ladder where it is better to stop. It might be that humanity can’t handle post-scarcity in a rational and safe way. It could be that the singularity takes us all out.
But, we also have no real reason to believe that technology can’t solve those issues - even if it means genetically re-engineering ourselves to be capable of existing in those situations.
First of all a shout out to Lemur866 for a great post.
Now, in response, many of the goods you buy today rely upon parts made all over the world. Those parts are fabricated using sophisticated machines that also involved importing parts from all over the world.
Cut off all those links and it’s a case of reinventing the wheel for everything: figuring out how to make the parts to make the machines that you can use to make the parts to assemble into finished goods if only you knew how.
In some ways the task is made harder by starting with 21st century tech. If you started with a society in 1900 they could feasibly take apart many things and figure out how to make them. And of course there was far less trade.
ETA: For this reason I think Sage Rat’s response is too optimistic. The US for example imports of things that either we don’t know how to make or cannot make to the same standard. Sure we could figure it out but all industry’s screwed in the meantime.
Independence, self-reliance, lack of advanced technology in everyday life leading to jobs that are automated elsewhere being done by hand here, presumably an exception for the military to have advanced tech…
But most countries which have had an autarchich regime have had it more as a matter of “nobody will make deals with us” than because they didn’t need anybody. The political speeches from the corresponding Generalísimo might say “we don’t need them!” - the reality once ‘they’ started talking to us again give that the lie.
Actually it’s worse than that as North Korea engages in billions of dollars of trade with its neighbours every year. And benefits from automation (indirectly, through buying chinese goods if nothing else).
The OP scenario is much more extreme than this.
