I think the main problem in this case is stagnation of intelligence. If robots are doing all the work including the science we lose a lot of understanding about the world and how it works. At first we may be able to guess what our robots are inferring from their data, proving mathematically, and the new physics principles they’re applying, but if they’re literally doing all of it it will became very difficult, very fast, to be able to understand all of the fun secrets of the universe they’re unraveling before our eyes. I don’t have many concerns about the economy and such, I’m sure it would work itself out, I’m mainly worried about the fact that higher learning and critical thinking would become somewhat obsolete. I suppose people probably made that same argument about calculators, but I think in a case as far reaching as the proposed scenario it’s a more legitimate worry.
The missing piece in this discussion is productivity. Right before the Bubble, there was a lot of discussion in the IT rags around a HBR article on the missing productivity from IT. That productivity came in with a bang. Productivity went up by over 2% last year IIRC, which is a very solid increase - and which pretty much negates claims that our problem is that our workers are lazy.
What our problem seems to be is that this productivity increase is not finding its way into paychecks where it can increase tax revenues and consumption, and thus reduce unemployment. This increase is for American workers, by the way.
If we can, as we have in the past, funnel some good part of productivity improvements back to workers, I think we’ll be in good shape. If companies keep it for CEO pay and to assuage their voracious shareholders, we might continue to have a consumption problem.
The thing is, it’s a compounding process, just as technology is in general. People have seen it coming, but it’s coming faster and faster, and in ways that we didn’t really see coming. That said, no one should really be scared of it, but people should be aware of the state of technology and how it might affect their careers in the foreseeable future.
Regardless, I look forward to such a future, where jobs of necessity are largely eliminated, and hopefully along with them superfluous jobs that don’t actually produce any real product or service.
For lack of a better analogy though, I still have a hard time seeing any sort of money-based economy working in such a world. If our needs can be met almost entirely with automation and, thus, at a bare minimal cost, and with so many artists creating for passion, scientists for a thirst of knowledge and bettering mankind, etc. What real purpose would money even serve anymore?
Sure, I don’t see that sort of world coming within my lifetime, but I can envision a world where eventually automation makes products so inexpensive that, by the sheer virtue of volunteerism and/or altruism, that it wouldn’t eventually become essentially free. And, of course, as technology improved more and more, it would only get cheaper and easier to do that. And, of course, once you actually can do away with a money-based economy, you lose all the overhead of maintaining it with banks, taxation, markets, and all that stuff.
I think humanity will always be curious, and even if we do reach a point where computers can do all of our science for us, I am of the opinion that we’ll never be able to completely divorce the human element from it. I think we’ll still need human creativity and intuition to guide the development of mathematics and science. We’ll still need humans to decide what problems are the most interesting or important and how to assign those resources.
Beyond that, even in fields where things can be fully automated, there will still be people interested in doing it out of their passion for the work. These are the people who truly would do their jobs even if they weren’t getting paid. I have a hard time imagining that such a time would come where humanity is not curious, so that even if we do reach a point where computers can do all of our mathematical and scientific advances for us, people will still be interested in understanding these things.
Most importantly though, while a lot of innovations is iterative, it isn’t always. For instance, as I understand, the concepts of General Relativity were leaps and bounds beyond where anyone else was, where usually scientists build in small steps upon the work of others. I can’t really see a computer coming across such a concept other than by sheer random chance, muchless understand the importance of such an insight. Yet humans seem to be able to make these sorts of leaps.
This is precisely the problem. Productivity continues to increase, but it’s not reaching the people en masse. This creates a consumption shortage which worsens the economy and further forces companies to cut costs to maintain profits, which means fewer jobs, or even more productivity with less reward. I think we’re close to a tipping point, if we haven’t already crossed it, where this perpetuating cycle will spin out of control.
Yes, the future is a horrifying place.
They already are. You don’t produce your own food, fetch your own water, or gather wood to burn. That’s done by a tiny fragment of the population. The dichotomy between necessity and luxury is artificial and has been for hundreds of years in the west.
People can live without running water, electricity, insulated houses, doctors, or telephones. But we see lack of those as sign of abject poverty.
Pretty much what sh1bu1 is saying. These threads always make me think that if there were message boards like this in the 19th century we’d have zombie threads exactly like this periodically raising their heads, with posters long dead, and even their children or grandchildren getting a bit long in the tooth. 
People are looking at today as if we have discovered everything to build that will ever be built, and that the sum total of jobs today (in every field today) is all there will ever be…so, obviously, as automation (continues) to rear it’s ugly head there will naturally be less and less jobs until, ultimately, no one works at all and everyone (except The Rich™) are poor, out of work and has nothing.
As was mentioned, a 100 years ago a large percentage of the population (over 90% IIRC) who worked did so either directly or indirectly in the agricultural field. Today is less than 5% (less then 1 or 2% depending on your definitions). What happened to all those folks who worked in the fields, and why aren’t we starving to death? And why isn’t food astronomical in price? Why isn’t there mass unemployment? Answer those questions and really look at where the labor went (and how the unemployment numbers changed in that time period) and it becomes less of a mystery. Jobs that didn’t exist 100 years now occupy a large percentage of our work force. And an individual becomes more productive, the goods and services he or she works on becomes more widely affordable.
So, what will happen when computers and robots take over the rest of manufactured production? Well, aside from the fact that humans will most likely always still be in the loop (as they are today), it will mean that the labor will shift to something else. What will it be? Gods knows (though I think it will be towards niche oriented specialized work, or artisan work, or design…something that specifically requires a human touch, or perhaps prefers a less automated one)…it would be like looking around in the 19th century at the jobs disappearing due to mass production and wondering what people were going to do. You could speculate on ‘magic’ technology that would create labor sectors unknown at the time, but it would be pure speculation. And the Luddite types would happily point out that you were handwaving and bringing up magical solutions that couldn’t possibly work, while real working people would become more and more poor and out of work, etc etc.
Technology is increasing so rapidly at this point that it’s hard to gauge where we’ll be even 10 years from now, let alone 100. Hell, bio-sciences are developing so rapidly that there are probably people who post on this board who might actually live to see what things are like 100 years from now. If so, be sure to revive this thread as a zombie and discuss the subject again. Be sure to update it with whatever is currently in vogue for the gloom and doom of the workers (and peasants) of that time as well. 
-XT
It will be some time before technology replaces human employment to a level greater than we see now. Automation is still expensive to create and maintain, and it’s not very flexible. But at some point, machines will begin to completely replace humans. When automated factories can produce wheat farming equipment, and that machinery can be computer controlled and maintained by machines, very few people will be left in the process of growing wheat. Those farmers would not likely find employment elsewhere because that level of technology will mean truck drivers, warehouse workers, and most other factory workers will be replaced by machines, and the same will happen to many jobs. There is some point at which there is not enough for people to do that they can be paid for under our current economic system. Greed might make this a difficult transition point, but if people have any political power at that time, some means will be found.
Eventually, machines can fulfill all basic needs, and much more than that as well, and then employment as we know it now will evaporate.
I mentioned the resource issue previously. That’s an awful lot of machines that have to be made out of something, using an awful lot of energy. If the availability of resources become scarce, humans will still maintain an edge, even when the machines are stronger, and the computers smarter, than we are.
The other side of this is the super-Luddite revolution where the populus pushes the buttons their super-conductor powered, automated pitchforks and axes, and destroy all the other machines. Then we start over again.
Here are two views from sf on how to deal with this problem. The first is the Mack Reynolds model, where every person gets issued stock in the economy as a whole, and can consume based on dividends from that stock. If you are skilled enough to work, and successful, you can get preferred shares, and make more. There is incentive to work, and a floor income to encourage consumption, and no welfare - at least no more than coupon clippers get. That is the government channels productivity improvement model.
There there is the Jetsons model, where George is pushing a button at Spacely Sprockets, and clearly is not doing anything a computer couldn’t do better. He, and probably most everyone else, gets a chunk of money made by super productivity of automation in the guise of a job. No obvious government involvement, but we can assume that Mr. Spacely and other capitalists have figured out that firing everyone and letting the machines do it without human assistance (no matter how unnecessary) is going to cause a problem.
Take your pick.
Jane is hot, no question which one I’d choose.
I wonder if this is scary *, but somehow I remembered that someone had mentioned before that when one’s job can be automatized and you are no longer needed that it can be said that you were George-Jetsoned, I wondered if I imagined the term, looked at Urban Dictionary, no luck, but then I found that it came from Doper **Horseflesh **in 2002!
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2308716&postcount=20
*Scary in the sense that I could remember that obscure term from a single mention from years ago!
I don’t know exactly what this question means.
Firms choose the combination of labor and capital that maximizes their profit. In competitive conditions, the attempt at making moolah leads to an efficient outcome. In non-competitive conditions, it often (though not always) leads to the most efficient outcome that’s practically attainable. But until we reach the moment that machines can build and maintain machines more efficiently by themselves, with little or no human supervision, we’re never going to be dealing with the “maximum proportion possible” done by machines. There’s no reason to maximize machine work. Until work can be done almost exclusively by machines, there will always, always be a trade-off between sweat and grease. Even with the very good technology we have now, machines still have decreasing returns to scale, at which point it makes sense to substitute in workers for efficiency’s sake.
As far as wages go, people are paid their marginal product in the whole neoclassical competitive picture of things. Again, even when this isn’t true, it’s a handy approximation to start with. But what does tech do? Why, it tends to increase productivity. Which means you could expect to see wages eventually rise as the market responds to try to find the most profitable outcome (thankfully, somewhat related to the most efficient outcome).
The fact that the exact point of trade-off shifts over time with developing technology does not mean that we won’t have a future trade-off. The proportion of capital in our economy will continue to increase, but that doesn’t mean we will be maximizing capital. Even with better tech, there will be a point when we will be fully able to create more machines to do more work, and we will simply decide that it ain’t worth it. There will again be a new, better, more efficient trade-off between work that should be automated and work that shouldn’t be. And just as they have in the past, markets will adjust to the new trade-off over time. Some jobs will disappear that we weren’t expecting to disappear. New unexpected jobs will appear. That’s the way of things, and will continue to be the way of things, unless civilization as we know it collapses, or a technological “singularity” comes about, where our machines can take care of themselves, without any real need for tinkering from us. However, we have exactly zero way of knowing when such a sea change could occur.
According to some documentaries I have seen on this subject, that singularity situation is likely to lead to people being used as batteries for some stupid reason. But I suppose a robo-commie paradise is also possible. That one’s up in the air.
That’s not true. Other scientists, like French mathematician Poincaré were on the right path to figure out relativity. See here
I can’t think right of any scientist who would have been truly irreplaceable, but if there are any, their discoveries were probably as random as what you apparently expect from computers
Reported as spam. I think this is spam - it’s quite weird.