Ooooh, good idea, then we won’t have any more J.J Abrams ripoffs.
This seems so contrary to typical conservative deregulatory mindset. I can’t imagine many conservatives agreeing with this.
Depends on what sort of conservative we are talking about. I could see several types of conservatives going for this whole hog.
Yeah, but conservatives today have more to do with George Wallace than Barry Goldwater.
I don’t know. The current model is cranked by hand, but Babbage designed it to run on steam. That sounds like automation to me.
As an aside, one of the reasons that Babbage never completed the engine is that standardized parts weren’t yet available. Every screw in the machine had to be specifically designed and then manufactured by hand.
Sometimes I think that some people think that if you just got the right group of grannies together, they could knit anything. But there are some things that you just can’t knit.
And it the other direction, water is collected from every house* with piping and pumped to a wastewater treatment plant. Those WWTPs are automated. Try getting clean water if you shut those babies down.
- Almost every house - rural areas with the right kind of soil can use on-site septic tanks.
Where do the tariffs stand for the conservative deregulatory mindset?
BTW, that’s how we ban automation and survive the competition – just keep raising tariffs until our hand-crafted automobiles and cell phones can compete on price with the stuff made more efficiently. Has there ever been 10,000% tariffs? 100,000%?
Potential snark aside, this is kind of how I imagine an automation ban would work in practice. I guess I should be clear that I am not wholeheartedly endorsing the idea, but I am intrigued by it given that it is coming from such a prominent right wing pundit. Depending on the extent to which the automation-induced unemployment apocalypse actually materializes there will definitely be more broad receptivity to this general argument.
I imagine how such a ban would work would be to take a look at the forecasted numbers of people put out of work by a given automation technology and weigh those numbers against the costs of retraining those people and/or providing them with monetary compensation via UBI. If the numbers of potentially displaced workers are so great on the former side of that equation, then the technology that displaces them would be banned.
And in terms of how employers would compete internationally against countries who do not ban a given automation technology, the obvious answer is that such employers would have to find other ways to compete that do not involve automating a large part of their workforce. How that would work in practice is beyond me, though.
The two biggest jobs I hear about being automated away are (1) cashiers - which you can already see happening in the form of that shitty self-checkout technology at Walmart and other stores and maybe that tech will improve over time - and (2) truck drivers, which would be a hugely disruptive change given that truck driving is one of the few professions that can deliver a six-figure income without a college degree. That’s a lot of angry people who would lose substantial incomes to robots and I don’t know how that would play out!
Touching on this I also think the next industry that be hit with automation is the medical industry. I can see robots replacing gp for simple medical visits and sorting simple medical issues.
Surgeons are able to do surgeries remotely, anesthesists jobs can be replaced by machines imo… And so on.
Plus the government has a huge vested interest in reducing the human numbers in this industry to save millions of dollars.
But in the end if we really look into this there is really no job that is safe from automation. It all just comes down to economics really.
And, you definitely shouldn’t automate away doctors and lawyers, because they spent so much time and took out giant loans to get their degrees. You shouldn’t automate away computer programmers because they worked so hard to get their degrees and would probably be terrible truck drivers.
The most important thing is to protect my job, of course. Whatever I do should not be automated.
Well I don’t see the Royal Navy cruising up the Seine any time soon ; although now that you mention it with the looming hard Brexit crash perhaps we shall soon be regrettably forced to set up a new Continental System to stave off the hordes of refugees :).
the problem with this is that it doesn’t look at the increase in production and quality of life that comes about.
If it takes 10 people a day to make a widget, and you make a machine that pumps out a widget an hour with one operator, you could say that you eliminated 9 jobs, but you could also say that you supplied the market with over a hundred more widgets a week, at a lower price. Most people that are against automation are not looking at that side of the equation.
Then pick something that cannot be automated, or at least is hard enough to automate that it isn’t going to be the low hanging fruit as our technology improves.
Keep in mind as well, that more widgets on the market likely mean more jobs in sales or distribution of them. So you really have eliminated less than 9 jobs.
Or more commonly, now that people are free to not make widgets, they can make other stuff. So now you still have the jobs and the widgets, but whatever else they can now make.
And of course, if they can now make things that make other things, like machine tools or better steel or whatever, everyone can now make more things, which means there could be even more jobs and more things.
The purpose of the difference engine was to automate the production of mathematical tables. So Tucker the Schmucker would ban them too.
Remember, the Orange Asshole seems to think that if Apple moved its manufacturing to the US it would hire as many people as in the Chinese factories. Actually the factories would be so automated that there would be a few engineers and technicians and people supervising the line.
Not to mention that modern circuit board can’t be built without automation. A lot of the discrete components are way too small to be placed by hand.
A better solution would be to ban Tucker Carlson.
I second that motion…can we ban him AND Trump, perhaps? Maybe we could automate Trump…I mean, I’m fairly sure even the stupidest machine ever could send out the tweets and crap that guy does. Not sure if we could make a robot that ugly though…
That’s what they said about reloading thread spools in textile mills too. They had a solution, why can’t we do the same?
Just hire people with really tiny hands?
Well, we did just talk about automating Trump out of a job…