We do need to fix it today. We need to change our attitudes today. We need to stop thinking of work as the be-all and end-all of human existence and start finding another basis on which to value our fellow human beings, so that if and/or when the robot job holocaust occurs, we’ll have the right value system for dealing with it. It will also help us with constructing an adequate social safety net.
So … you don’t think robots and automation are capable of taking over most human economic activities? Or you just think it will occur only in the distant future?
Like when the machine job holocaust occurred. A fact you refuse to acknowledge.
But, seriously, do you not have friends and family? It’s really not a mystery to most of us how to value someone in a way that doesn’t refer to their job.
(My emphasis.) I gave a cite that showed no such thing is happening.
I’m not sure why Marshall Brain is any more informed than me (hey, I’m a software engineer too). Anyway, so you’re guessing ~2030 before we start having problems. If we’re still both posting to the SDMB in 2030 we’ll see who’s right.
“Friends and family” do get my resources of course, but they are not, formally speaking, paid positions. Would that it were so! I’ve got a LOT of relatives in Georgia.
Technology and automation will certainly automate many of the necessities of life, and we will need to convert to a mostly service economy that is still subject to regular market forces but is not a product of human necessity, but rather human fancy.
How the capital will be distributed among the population to fund this shall we say, more whimsical economy, is yet to be determined.
Anyone who thinks a specific prediction 15-25 years in the future has any hope of being correct more than sheer random chance doesn’t much know the history of predictions, which are, almost universally, hilariously wrong. Frankly, Mr. Brain demonstrates not a whit of understanding of economics or history but it wouldn’t matter if he did. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen - specifically - in 2030, beyond things like “the Sun will rise in the east” and “water will be wet.”
Much of our economy TODAY is largely whimsy - we’re that rich. “Poor” people by Western standards lack for no necessities of life; we are so preposterously rich that poor people disproportionately eat too much food, a fact that would have been unthinkably bizarre to almost all human being who’ve ever lived.
People always, always, always find something to do if they live in a functioning state. They always will. It’s a general rule of the human experience. If robots make physical things super cheap, people will trade art or advice or sex or therapy or better robots. They’re write love letter for each other like the guy in “Her” and actually pay good money for it.
Plus, if everything is “super cheap”, you don’t need much money to live well. If everything cost 1/10 of what it does today, you could live pretty well off $5,000 a year. The main problem I see with that scenario (other than it being science fiction) is that our tax code is based largely on income tax, so tax revenue would plummet. But then, since everything is “super cheap”, maybe government expenditures could be “super low”. Now, that would be SUPER COOL!
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
We do need to fix it today. We need to change our attitudes today. We need to stop thinking of work as the be-all and end-all of human existence and start finding another basis on which to value our fellow human beings, so that if and/or when the robot job holocaust occurs, we’ll have the right value system for dealing with it. It will also help us with constructing an adequate social safety net.
[/QUOTE]
I disagree with both assertions. We don’t need to fix it today, since it’s not broken today and we don’t know what, if anything WILL be broken down the line. Frantic speculation on what MIGHT break and how it will be broken and how to ‘fix’ it are all just speculation.
Basically, to me you’d be like the guys who wanted to ‘fix’ the huge issue of agricultural worker displacement from a century or so ago…I mean, what will we do with all those farm workers going from 90+% of the work force to less than 5%?? We need to ‘fix’ that asap! Except we didn’t. We didn’t need to ‘fix’ the displacement of workers from a cottage industry system to industrialization and mass production/assembly line work either, nor the displacements from a horse drawn economy to one that relied on the motor car, nor any of the other disruptions that were just as society changing as this one you are worried about today. As has been noted, this has already been happening for decades now, hell more than a century really, and what we have done is adapt. We will continue to do so.
I think automation has been and will continue to make inroads into various manufacturing and service sector jobs…we simply don’t need a large unskilled workforce to do that sort of work anymore. Capable of ‘taking over most human economic activities’? No, that’s not going to happen any time soon, if ever, depending on what you mean by ‘taking over most human economic activities’. I think that eventually the manufacturing sector will be like the agricultural sector today…a few people will be doing the work of supervising the automated processes, doing maintenance and innovating new technologies and techniques, and the overall production will just keep going up and up and costs going down and down. This will also happen in other sectors, such as food service industries (waiters, as well as workers at fast food places) and things like check out clerks…you’ll have a few people where before you needed a bunch.
What will all those people who currently work on assembly lines turning nut A into bolt B for 8 hours a day do, or the waiters/waitresses or check out clerks or burger flippers or any number of other mind numbing and soul crushing jobs do as this happens? No idea, as if I could predict the future I’d be a billionaire on a beach with scantily clad love muffins pealing me grapes while fanning me with those palm frond thingies, and not chatting on a message board with you. I have given some possible pie in the sky alternatives, but, again, it’s like if we lived a hundred or so years ago and tried to predict where all the farmers, buggy whip makers and horse shit shoveler’s were going to find jobs in the next few decades or the next century. We couldn’t conceive of what they would actually be doing, or maybe we could see the edges of what they MIGHT be doing but couldn’t really wrap our heads around it as real, thus concluding that we’d be in serious trouble since the above would be a significant percentage of the working population in the US at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Yet, here we are…all those farmers, horse drawn workers, shit shoveler’s and the like aren’t still out on the streets begging from hand to mouth because there is no work for them.
The thing is, as we transition to this sci-fi world that has Evil Captor so worked up, it’s going to happen over time…decades. It’s not going to be sprung on us all at once. During that transition period we will have plenty of time to change things like the tax code when it stops making sense to do it the way we did in the past. Our government is flexible enough to change as society has changed…it’s happened many times since the founding and will happen again as we move forward.
I already said that. But I believe that never before has it been possible to produce vast wealth with virtually no human labor, and that changes things.
You’re right: it’s been flat since the late 80’s. Thanks.
IMHO, what’s happening is that manufacturing jobs are fleeing to Asia. Later, it’ll flee again, to automation. Regardless, what IS a well-run Western democracy? Germany?
No, because I already did. I’m a big fan of capitalism, as I stated early on and keep repeating. I really love my computers, cell phones, musical instruments, my car, etc. etc. So, why does this system that works so well for consumer items fail so miserably for the things I mentioned, like broadcast media and places of natural beauty?
This economy might not need any more consumers than the “haves”, but meanwhile they’ll own nearly everything (because they can, and if they can, they will.)
IMHO the only force against it is democracy.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story about that, Player Piano. It didn’t work out so well. I’m not criticizing your post, just pointing out that things aren’t simple. I think it’s a big problem and there are no simple solutions. Any lasting solution will require a redefinition of who we are and what we value, as Jared Diamond says in his book “Collapse”.
Right. Or maybe, they’ll just be left to deal with what little they can scrape up. Were it not for Democracy, this is the most likely outcome IMHO. Because the big difference between past and future: in the past, technology leveraged human labor. In the future, it’ll make it irrelevant.
I hope you’re right, but I bet you’re wrong.
I remember reading a great bit by Heinlein. I wish I could remember the specifics, but he basically said that the study of history should teach us to prepare ourselves for big surprises. He made a great list of big frigging surprises, too. It’s foolish to point to the past and say “It never happened before” while ignoring the differences between then and now. It’s equally foolish to go off the deep end and fix a problem that may develop but hasn’t yet. But we have to be open to the possibility and pay attention to the clues, without having already decided in our minds.
I think this is exactly the kind of thing that it’s important to keep an open mind about.
Do you think rents will fall, John? Energy costs may well drop if solar does as well as some think it well, but land is finite and banks and rich people own most of it.
[QUOTE=Learjeff]
Right. Or maybe, they’ll just be left to deal with what little they can scrape up. Were it not for Democracy, this is the most likely outcome IMHO. Because the big difference between past and future: in the past, technology leveraged human labor. In the future, it’ll make it irrelevant.
[/QUOTE]
Again, this is exactly the same outlook that the Luddite’s had. It’s really a recurring theme. From their perspective, the new technologies of mass production and assembly lines made individual human labor irrelevant, while in the past, cottage industry and crafts masters leveraged human labor and made it important.
I disagree that the vast majority of humanity will be ‘left to deal with what little they can scrape up’…to me, this is a standard sci-fi trope used by bad sci-fi writers. Myself, I simply think that human labor will not mean what it means today in the distant future when we get magic robots. Like I said, there are people who make more money than I do having Twitch channels and playing video games and commenting on them. That isn’t ‘work’ as my parents generation understands the term, or even as most of my own generation understands, yet someone (a lot of someones) are willing to pay money to watch someone play a game and talk.
It’s foolish to point out that this exact same tired subject has come up literally for centuries, and that each and every time it has the dystopia hasn’t happened and the fears were unfounded? And it’s smart to consider that because it hasn’t happened it might happen this time?? What’s different THIS time?
You do not appear to know what a “Luddite” is. They would only be Luddites if they then argued that technological process should be halted.
So what do the economists who ran this study say?
[QUOTE=The article Evil Captor linked to]
“The remaining jobs will be increasingly creative and increasingly social,” said Osbourne, the Oxford researcher who says 47 percent of jobs are at risk. “I actually think it will be better for society, because these are tasks that we tend to do in our spare time as hobbies, and as we are more displaced by machines it will leave these more fundamentally human tasks to perform.”
[/QUOTE]
I also would like to know what it means to be “at risk”. These guys are using an algorithm to predict the probability of jobs being automated. Does “at risk” mean there is a 25% probability of a certain job being automated or a 95% probability?
But one thing is for sure-- it makes for a good, sensationalist headline!!
You should probably have read the next paragraph then:
“Less competitive” is econo-speak for “lower.” When everybody and his or her cousin has been reduced to survival through the equivalent of selling arts and crafts projects on Etsy, I think we’ll probably have a VERY good idea what “less competitive” mean … it’ll make what Wal-Mart now pays entry-level workers look goooood.
I have given some possible pie in the sky alternatives, but, again, it’s like if we lived a hundred or so years ago and tried to predict where all the farmers, buggy whip makers and horse shit shoveler’s were going to find jobs in the next few decades or the next century. We couldn’t conceive of what they would actually be doing, or maybe we could see the edges of what they MIGHT be doing but couldn’t really wrap our heads around it as real, thus concluding that we’d be in serious trouble since the above would be a significant percentage of the working population in the US at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Yet, here we are…all those farmers, horse drawn workers, shit shoveler’s and the like aren’t still out on the streets begging from hand to mouth because there is no work for them.