Each person in society has two roles - to produce stuff, which is what we’ve been talking about, and to consume stuff. We can build robots to produce things, but the 1%, no matter how hard they try, can’t consume all the robots make. Those against that evil welfare had better figure out how to get the people they want to take payments away from either a job or money to buy stuff to keep the economy running. Even if they spend it on hookers and blow, blow sellers and hookers are both producers.
This problem is not new - Mack Reynolds and Frederik Pohl were writing stories about it over 50 years ago.
We seem to be talking past one another. Things are different now because the combination of computer software and robotic devices are eventually going to be able to do anything humans can do, better and cheaper than humans can do it.{?QUOTE]
This is exactly what people said fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, and 200 years ago; they said “machines” or “robots” instead of “computers,” but same thing. They didn’t understand that humans can do many more things than they were doing now.
The part where you have even an ounce of evidence, precedent, logic or common sense demonstrating that what you’re saying is true. From what I can tell your position is completely invented from thin air and a viewing of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
No, only for the last 150 years or so.
If the obscenely wealthy separate themselves into their own little robot-served society, what, pray tell, would stop everyone else from carrying on trading products and services? If the world’s top tenth of a percent transported themselves to a robot-served colony on Mars tomorrow, how would the rest of us be any worse off? Seeya, Mark Zuckerberg. If he’s not engaging in commerce with me, I don’t care where he is or what he’s doing.
Agreed, if robots and automation can provide for all out necessities and wants, for the most part (there may be jobs for a few million or even tens of millions of people worldwide) then consuming will be the job for most people, because the rich are going to want to stay that way and if no one can buy their products, they won’t. That’s why I think the rich will eventually lead the charge for Basic Income, and a very generous one so regular people can buy tons of geegaws and whatnots, once the scales created by libertarianism and conservatism fall from their eye of the rich.
Things will be very good for everyone, once that occurs. It’s the transition I fear. Those scales will take time to fall, meanwhile, tons of needless human suffering, and very possibly, death, I suspect.
AKA:
Big Brother
Inner Party (top 1-2%)
Outer Party (around 18%)
Proles (remaining 80%)
It was George Orwell’s belief that mankind always tended to form this social hierarchy regardless of what form of government or economic system it tried.
The Outer Party (equivalent to our upper middle class) tended to have it the worse. While the Inner Party (1%ers) had all the actual power and the Proles (middle and working classes) lived in blissful ignorance, it was the Outer Party that was under constant scrutiny to conform, lest they loose their meager advantages.
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
I don’t think you’re getting my point. Eventually there will be no way for the majority of people to earn money at a job. They won’t just get paid less, they won’t be doing more menial labor, they’ll starve. Eventually machines will produce virtually everything and only the engineers will have jobs, and at some future point they won’t be needed either. That is if there is no change to our socio-economic structure, but there will be because at some point the people will destroy the machines and kill their owners, or take control and institute a socialist system where people don’t have to be productive to provide for themselves.
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Oh, I get your point. It’s the same point that has been made for hundreds of years now. I suppose it’s possible, in some sci-fi future that literally every thing will be made by magic robots or nano-assembly/dis-assembly. It will be like agriculture. 100 years ago something like 90+% of US workers worked in the agriculture sector…today it’s less than 5% (I think it’s actually somewhere between 2-3%, but I can’t be bothered atm to find an exact number). All those workers in the agricultural sector aren’t starving on the streets, and all the menial laborers in however many years until we get the magic tech won’t be either…they will be doing something else. Perhaps they will be making money playing games on-line…or giving commentary on people playing games…or creating content in a virtual world. These things are happening today, and they are actually gaining speed. Maybe in the future people will be paid to go on trips with for VR simulation, or maybe the machines that magically make all the products will need VR operators with haptic neural interfaces to do their magic, which will require workers. Maybe the new economy will be completely virtual and online and people will be do ‘work’ that, today, wouldn’t seem like work at all. After all, a large percentage of the jobs today wouldn’t have seemed like ‘work’ to those 90+% of agriculture workers a hundred years ago.
The point is that all this dystopian future stuff hasn’t happened yet, despite people making nearly the exact same argument you and others have tried to make in these threads. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future, to be sure, but I don’t see any reason it should or has to happen in our own future…and the fact that while manufacturing jobs continue to decline in the fact of more and more automation we also have an emerging online world of commerce, business, information, data, and games that is just starting tells me that it’s yet another cycle of farmers and craftsmen being displaced by industrialization replaced by post-industrialization replaced by virtual workers and new labor sectors we can’t even dream about yet or that today look like small vertical jobs done by only a very few. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ironically, as I said, I expect 100 years from now there will be two people having the exact same discussion, and the same old quasi-Luddite points will still be being brought up as people fret that the technology is rendering the large labor sector of online gaming and commentary, along with online virtual reality content a dying sector, and whatwillwedowhatwillwedowhatwillwedo!!!
This isn’t really part of the discussion but I’ll add this: according to the Heritage Foundation spending on welfare at federal/state/local levels has continued to increase with no decrease since 1980. This handy chart puts it in an easy graph and you’ll see that it keeps increasing.
Can you give me an estimate on when you think this will start happening? 10 years? 20 years?
Given that the chart covers 1929-2000, you would have wished that they gave per capita numbers. Population more than doubled over that period after all. Still you can see that since 1980 medical expenses ballooned. That’s tied to medicare for the elderly and health care inflation. Ironically Big Guv is better at cost control than US private sector approaches.
Other charts in your presentation are also loaded. Number 2 shows some of the demographics of mean tested welfare spending. But medicare isn’t mean tested. So why show it (unlabeled) in chart 3, but not chart 2? Why doesn’t the word “Medicare” appear in the text at all?
A: Heritage is in the bamboozling business. They aren’t serious analysts. They want to give the impression that welfare goes to those other people (wink, wink) and not the reader.
It may be colored but it’s not bamboozling (unless you have a link that shows that welfare has gone down since 1980). I thought it was pretty solid evidence that welfare spending has not gone down starting in 1980, contrary to Evil Captor’s claim.
I’m saying you shouldn’t link to clownish operations. Get a real citation. And your webpage was highly bamboozling for reasons I described earlier.
You had narrower goals though: fair enough. Evil Captor’s claim was unsubstantiated. I’m not going to claim this is the final word, but one measure of the safety net would be AFDC/TANF spending per recipient. That controls for population and focuses on a part of the welfare state that while proportionately small is what people often think of when you say “Welfare”. That measure peaked around 1978, declined through 2000, and leveled off before the Lesser Depression.
If you want to discuss total inflation adjusted per capita spending on all federal social welfare programs since 1980, that I agree has increased because of health care costs. But that’s something closer to a tax burden than it is to a safety net for the unemployed.
Stop. You may not like the Heritage Foundation but it is a serious and well-established think tank. That said I will gladly accept good stats from a left-wing think tank.
You got after me for linking a graph which totals only mean tested welfare which is, as I understand it, the majority of welfare spending. And then you counter with the stats of a single program. That doesn’t feel consistent.
I think we’ll both agree that Republicans dislike welfare more than Democrats but at worst the evidence seems to say that all welfare spending has at least stayed flat since 1980 and has probably increased.
Ok. I think we can agree on the large statement and disagree on the details.
Oh I will accept the stuff from AEI, the Manhattan Institute or Hoover. I’ll even take a look at a Cato report. Heritage though are a collection of bozos.
I attacked the website’s misleading presentation and backpeddled a bit when you made it clear that you were addressing an uncited claim. When I said that my fact wasn’t the last word I meant it: it was a stat that shed light on the safety net claim though.
Underlying this are some undefined terms. If the US had stable medicaid and medicare policies during the 1980-2000 era (during a period of double digit health care inflation), but cut cash payments to single mothers with children, would you consider that a worsened safety net? Arguably it is and arguably it isn’t depending upon how you elaborate upon the argument. I’d want to see a set of charts, ones that control for both inflation and population growth and discuss different aspects of the safety net, rather than just whine about it. You can do that in a serious and conservative manner, but not at Heritage.
Yes, humans CAN do many more things than they are doing now. And we WILL be doing many more things than we are doing now. The question is, will those things be the basis for being paid? For example, many people like to comment on message boards, play video games and sing and dance. Will those become actual paying jobs employing significant swathes of the human race? Probably not, for most, because jobs that involve participating in what are essentially recreational activities tend to be VERY small economic niches. See: movie star, pro football player, cheerleading, acting, being a rock star, etc.
Most jobs involve doing things that need to be done, but which most people would not devote eight hours a day, five days a week to without some serious inducement in the form of money. Things like driving a truck, or frying burgers and fries, or staffing a retail sales department, or working on a construction site, or running a spreadsheet, or working in a factory overseeing a machine that makes widgets … basically, stuff that nobody WANTS to do all that much, but which someone with money wants done.
This is how the bulk of people make the money they need to have to survive in a capitalist economy. And as you have pointed out repeatedly, it’s not the agrarian manual labor that was what 90 percent of human beings did, once upon a time. The unifying thread isn’t that what we now call “work” is more interesting or better than agrarian labor, it’s that it’s what people because they can get money or other means of subsistence for doing. And yes, the range of things people can do for money has definitely broadened since the industrial revolution.
But here’s where you and I appear to differ. I think automation and robotics combined have the ability to do practically anything human workers currently do, or will be able to do in the future, and you don’t think that’s the case.
This article in the Atlanticsummarizes the situation very nicely: basically, automation is carving away jobs at the top and the bottom. (I liked to part 3 because it makes the case most strongly of any part of the the three-part article, and it also has links to the other two parts.)
Like you are going to have a choice. The wealthy already own just about everything worth having: land, minerals, energy sources, manufacturing plants, etc. That’s the other major side of the puzzle: most people just own their own bodies and time and the little patch of land they live on (many of the poor and the middle class don’t even own that). Even if the One Percent go to Mars, Earth will still be shipping its wealth to Mars, because they own Earth. But that’s sort of silly side issue. It won’t happen, because for some (though not all) of the wealthy, their wealth comes from selling things to us regular folks whom they don’t need to work for them.
Republicans may not publicly advocate for unregulated capitalism, but they fight any regulations they can as hard as they can. They’ve certainly been working hard enough at gutting Dodd-Frank, for example. So although there may be no formal call for unregulated capitalism, there’s definitely an agenda for it among the Washington servants of the plutocracy.
Yes, magic robots, which of course totally don’t exist. Real robots DO exist. Deal.
The one thing you can be sure of is that people with haptic neural interfaces will be be much more productive than those without, which means … less employment. And of course, it’s not a given that such people will be needed.
Also, man will never be able to fly, because he never has! … oops … the future happened …
So you don’t see a general trend of software and robotics replacing more and more human workers and making the human workers that remain more and more efficient thus requiring fewer and fewer human workers? Because the authors of the books and article I cited in my response to RickJay sure do. All that needs to happen is for the rate of robotic replacement to match or exceed the creation of new jobs, after that point, it’s nothing but bad news because the rate of robotic replacement will do nothing but accelerate.
No, they do not. And they have not.
There is a simple and obvious solution to the problem that will make life better for everyone: a generous Basic Income. I’m not worried about what to do, I’m worried that, should the automation crisis I and others fear will occur, occurs, people will be too blinded by ideology to implement it. I fear that a LOT.
Yes. Progressives and 20th-century libertarians could unite behind such a program, which might involve, instead of direct income, single-payer health care, public housing programs, expanded food stamps, and funding for child care. Unfortunately, 21st century hyperlibertarians like SDMB’s own Stone or Farnaby wouldn’t support such a deviation from their Dog-eat-Dog models.
Are you seriously arguing that the social safety net we have here in the US is adequate to handle massive unemployment? Hell the Republicans don’t even want to get minimum wage up to a living wage, they always want to cut off unemployment benefits, and they would like to get rid of Obamacare, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. And they keep getting more and more political power, they hold both houses of Congress and have a majority of the Supreme Court. If the Dems didn’t have the Presidency they’d be totally shut out of the federal government. Republicans have also made gains in state government. We are not going to see a lot of help from the government for the foreseeable future.
This is where things get slippery. The time element is hard to predict. Marshall Brain thinks we will have 50 million unemployment by 2040, about ten years after the advent of autonomous smart robots around 2030. I think that software will also close down more job avenues. Fifty percent unemployment by 2050 has been cited by other.
Of course, the hurting will be intense well before we hit 50 percent. At the height of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was 25 percent.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
So you don’t see a general trend of software and robotics replacing more and more human workers and making the human workers that remain more and more efficient thus requiring fewer and fewer human workers? Because the authors of the books and article I cited in my response to RickJay sure do. All that needs to happen is for the rate of robotic replacement to match or exceed the creation of new jobs, after that point, it’s nothing but bad news because the rate of robotic replacement will do nothing but accelerate.
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Of course I see the trend. I just don’t come to the same conclusion of where it’s leading us as you do.
And yet you are worrying about the same things that have literally been worried about by people like you for freaking centuries. So, yeah, they really do.
You are trying to fix a ‘problem’ that hasn’t even happened yet based trends that have been worried about for nearly 2 centuries now. If you don’t see how ridiculous this is (and leaving aside your ‘obvious solution’ to this ‘problem’ being fairly old school socialist thought) then I don’t know what to say except I’m glad folks like you aren’t in charge today and weren’t in charge when this ridiculous anti-tech fear stuff first reared it’s ugly head.
To answer you though, I don’t think this is something we need to fix today, and that in the end the solutions to whatever displacements happen will come from the displacements themselves, just as they have every other time this has come up in the last 200 odd years.
