Well, that’s an easy one to debunk then. Here, check out the chart showing the productivity verse wages. Notice it has, in fact, grown, just less fast? I think what you MEAN is that it hasn’t grown as much, which is true, though you must know that you are looking at broad data there which includes a wide spectrum of jobs, so it’s kind of meaningless. Basically, though…yeah. Productivity has gone up but wages haven’t. Reason? Easy…automation and expert systems. Why SHOULD wages go up, across the board such that a median would be meaningful? Why should, say, someone working in a manufacturing sector make as much or more today as they did in the 60’s? Is their labor more vital today than it was before wrt productivity and production? Answer…no, it’s less vital today, as much of the work is being done by automated tools and systems.
But even if your claim was true, it doesn’t demonstrate what the OP is asking. Let’s say that wages have, across the board, stagnated in the US since the 60’s. Has there been consummate across the board standard of living decrease? No. Are more people in poverty in the US today than in the 60’s? No. And even if those answers were ‘yes’, which they aren’t, what about the rest of the world? See, that’s the thing…the US is just a country. In the rest of the world (and the US actually), poverty has dropped noticeably in this time period. And guess what…the capitalism you were complaining about is actually the reason why. It wasn’t a socialist revolution in China that has allowed them to go from 90% of their people below the abject poverty line (which is currently $1 a day) to 90%+ above that line, it was their adoption of capitalist markets. What’s actually holding them back and fucking them is the communist baggage and system, otherwise they would be rocketing by the US and Europe.
That’s because AI eliminating all jobs is fear-mongering bullshit nobody who has a grasp of history takes seriously. “AI” as a term is too broad to be useful anyway: Some specific techniques have already changed jobs, but whether those techniques qualify as “AI” or not is up to marketers to decide, not the people who actually understand them.
Can you debunk the argument that practioners of AI have in that this time is very, very different?
There’s more compute power put into AI - millions of times as much. Many,many new algorithms. Various methods that could lead to rapidly self improving capabilities for AI systems to do jobs that humans are paid to do. This time is not the same as the past when AI claims were from a small field with only modest investment.
I had a similar reaction to the Black Mirror episode ‘Metalhead’. Probably because the robots looked like the Boston Dynamics prototypes (intentionally) and weren’t humanized in any way with clever one liners.
No one thinks sentient robots are going to take ALL jobs. Automation threats to replace or transform MANY jobs. We already have prototypes of self-driving cars. If you drive for a living, it’s not hard to imagine your job being eliminated in the not too distant future. Certainly AI or machine learning or whatever you want to call it threatens a lot of jobs in law, accounting and other knowledge worker industries. Even if it doesn’t completely replace those jobs, it certainly threatens many of the low level jobs that served as an entry into those professions.
There’s a whole universe of science fiction out there where the universe is a happy place where there’s no disease, we all have flying cars and jet packs, and the worst problems are about on a level with a long-running soap opera. Granted most of these works are about as deep as the [URL=“Futurama (New York World's Fair) - Wikipedia”]1939 World’s Fair Futurama exhibit](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=874479), but that’s because a happy story is usually boring.
If you want an example of a good story where AI is an unambiguous benefit to mankind, how about I Sing the Body Electric, which also happens to be the happiest Twilight Zone episode ever.
I think the most interesting science fiction is where society is advanced and may even seem “utopian” by our standards. But there is still conflict and problems. Every advanced technology has the potential to be a double-edged sword, creating great benefits, but also unintended negative consequences. Much in the same way our society would seem advanced by the standards of 100 years ago. Yet we still have many of the same problems with war, political conflict and resources.
Probably the least interesting sci fy are the ones where everything is “perfect”, but there is some contrived dystopian mechanism, usually designed to make a statement about our own world.
Older scifi did tend to be far less dystopic than nowadays, and usually featured more egalitarian societies. True, older fiction usually does deal with social conflicts and private frustrations of some kind, but nobody has to struggle for their physical existence. Contrast that with more recent offerings like the Hunger Games, wherein a small elite lives in opulence while everyone else spends their waking hours scratching to survive. Or the stories where civilization has collapsed entirely and the survivors are limited to hunting and gathering, and skirmishing with their neighbors.
I think the main thing is it is just easier to write dysopias.
Conflict and obstacles familiar to us make for more straightforward storywriting, and, if it’s a movie, you can set some of it in an abandoned factory or ghost town, say, for peanuts.
Positive futures need big imaginations and big budgets.
Well, the wage/productivity gap means that America and Americans are producing more goods and services than they ever have, at any point in history. But virtually all of the benefits are going to just the elite few percent. XT will jump in and basically say that because the productivity boost is often from forms of automation, and thus because the extra “work” being done is performed by a machine that the company owns, the worker didn’t bring, they aren’t entitled to squat. This is the situation that led to mass labor uprising in the US, and labor union movements, and of course the Communist revolution - because that’s how it was in the robber baron era.
So it’s easy to draw the trend into the future and imagine a world where it’s all darkness and slums everywhere except for a few elite areas where the owners of all the world’s land and all the world’s IP live. These owners don’t need more than a small number of exceptionally skilled workers - every task below a certain level of skill is done by a machine. Mass labor uprisings/communist revolutions need not happen if the elite can just click a mouse and order up millions of killer robots with superhumanly accurate aim and reflexes and collective tactical experience.
And the things we depend on such as fossil fuels turn out to have a dark side, and an apocalypse seems at least superficially possible to a science fiction author. We might overheat the planet to the point that a runaway reaction happens, where methane freed from frozen deposits heats the planet further, which frees more methane, and the planet becomes mostly uninhabitable.
No, it’s not really the situation that lead to communism. But yeah, you are right…that is kind of what I’d say. Basically, the increase in productivity has been due to investment, not due to the laborers, so I’m unsure why you think the laborers SHOULD benefit. Just because? And, of course, ‘laborers’ is a broad category. What you are mainly talking about is manufacturing jobs. And, yeah, they are dwindling, as automation and expert systems allow 1 guys to do the jobs of 100 and actually be more productive. That trend isn’t going to stop, and trying to hold onto those jobs AND give an ever increasing salary and benefits is a losing proposition. It’s been tried…and it always fails. If you try it and use protectionism then what ends up happening is your companies become increasingly uncompetitive down the line until they fail. Then everyone is out of work AND you have lost the companies and revenue too. Woohoo…lose/lose!
The thing is, that not all labor categories in the US have been or are stagnant wrt increases in wages. Not even all manufacturing jobs have been stagnant. That argument only works if you attempt to make ‘labor’ a broad, across the board thing (and ignore the fact that even then wages haven’t actually been stagnant since the 70’s, and during that time purchasing power has increased as goods and services have expanded AND are cheaper at the same time).
And yet, contrary to your incorrect assertions here, that isn’t the trend. It seems to be what people THINK is happening, and what they expect is happening, but it isn’t what is actually happening.
A better argument for the gloom and doom side would not be to focus on capitalism, which, sadly (for your side) has brought more people out of poverty than in all of human history, but to focus on the very real threats wrt climate change and the environment. THAT is the one thing that could throw a monkey wrench in the whole progress thing, and give us that good dystopian future you and many of the sci-fi guys seem to crave.
Exactly. THIS is a real threat. The one about how capitalism is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands and that this means more and more people become poorer and poor across the globe just isn’t backed up by the data. Just the opposite, even though it’s true that rich people are getting richer…but across the globe, people are moving up as well and there are fewer people, as a percentage of the population who live in absolute poverty world wide than at any time in history. Why folks ignore this is beyond me, as it’s one of the great achievements of our (human) society. But there IS a dark side, and that might bite us on the ass in the near future.
Personally, I’m hopeful that our technology will pull another rabbit from the hat, after we have some nasty medium terms effects, but that eventually we’ll move past those too…but it might not happen.
Ok, then explain entire countries like Germany or Norway or Sweden - half of Europe. They are economically competitive enough to stay first world countries, and wealth is far more evenly distributed. There’s higher minimum wages, socialized healthcare, socialized education, and mass transit…
Sure, their GDPs per capita are lower…but more of the benefits are going to the people who actually live there.
This is a place where exactly what you claim to want is happening. These refineries are close to fully automated, requiring only a skeleton staff to operate, and taxes are extremely low. So you have a situation where tons and tons of wealth is being created - and nobody but the shareholders of the company, which are for other reasons mainly the extremely wealthy, benefits at all.
Once we figure out how to automate all factories, all mines, all trucking, all farming, all construction, all retail restocking, clerking, and cleaning, and all warehousing - all straightforward extensions of demonstrated machine learning techniques - well by your own opinions, since now robots are doing all these jobs and the humans who did them before don’t have any skills to offer - they are too old to learn or never had the talent for more sophisticated roles - they shouldn’t get squat.
I guess part of my feelings on this are that realistically, the people who end up owning all the patents and all the land were not the only contributors to the human race that got us to this point. And the whole argument against some redistribution of wealth is that if we take money away from productive people, we are dis-incentivizing them from working. Except, in a world where robots are able to produce all the essentials for human life with no human labor - it just requires land and IP mainly - who are we taking the wealth from? Basically we’d be redistributing some of the goods produced by the robots, taxing them from the shareholders of the IP/land/etc.
When it’s a situation like this - where the rich are essentially squatters collecting rents on land they grabbed first, or IP they bought early - well, you see how a communist revolution makes a lot of sense, but a socialist wealth taxing scheme that isn’t so drastic also makes a ton of sense.
Um…man, I really hate to break this too you, but Germany? Norway? Sweden? Pretty much ALL of Europe is using capitalism. Sorry man. They are no more socialist countries using a socialist economic system than the US is. And about those first (and second) world countries, with few exceptions? Yeah…those all are capitalist economic systems too. Even China, which is one of the big reasons why so many poor people moved from abject poverty to just poverty type poverty…yeah, they actually DO have a socialist system and still use a lot of socialist economics as well, but the parts that are working? Yeah, those are capitalist too.
Places that don’t use capitalism at all are pretty much economic hell holes. Places that use a lot more socialist economic systems than capitalist ones are, well, Venezuela and the like.
Sorry, not going to watch the video. You could give a summary, but I’m not into it tonight. But I’ll assume it’s about some manufacturing company where most of the workers have been laid off or something, and the evil capitalists are raking in the money while the poor workers get shafted…or something along those lines. And, sure, that happens…it happens a lot, in places like China, though ironically, they are shifting their labor to higher end (because workers wages are rising and they are less competitive on the low end now) and moving manufacturing to automation or to places like Vietnam, where labor is cheaper.
Basically, manufacturing jobs are endangered and will, fairly soon, be extinct in all but the cheapest countries. That’s just the way things are. This doesn’t, however, seem to mean what you think it means, i.e. there won’t be any jobs and just a few wealthy people who have all the money while everyone else starves in some sci-fi dystopia…kind of like what this thread is about. Instead, humans will do something else with their labor, sort of like how we’ve done this for the last several centuries, despite the gloom and doom folks saying the end is nigh, woe is us.
Well, no. By my opinion, we will be SO much better off once we finally shed doing those dirty, dangerous and mind destroying jobs, freeing up labor to do better things. What will people do? No idea…if I knew, I’d basically be rich and earning 10% on a beach in the Caribbean eating lobster AND cracked crab! But your argument is similar to those predicting gloom and doom because of the industrial revolution which will take all our jobs and no one will have any work, those damned dirty machines! The thing is, today a large percentage of the population is doing work that even 30 years ago couldn’t have been predicted. It’s like the fact that at the turn of the 19th century in the US over 95% of the people worked in the agricultural sector, or in some job that supported agriculture in some way. Today it’s less than 2% in the US. Yet, we don’t have 93% unemployment. Why? Based on what seems to be your train of thought and extrapolating it to what you are saying about our future, we should. But we don’t.
Good grief. Seriously, the 19th century is calling and they want their meme back. But go on waiting for that communist or even socialist uprising! They have worked out so well, I’m sure folks are dying (literally) to go back and try it again. 'Cause all the other times it’s failed miserably is no indication that this time…THIS TIME!..it’s gonna work!
Those European countries use capitalism, yes, but with far, far more rules and benefits for workers than the U.S. has. You know this. If we managed to drive automation to the levels I mention, those countries would share some of the new wealth with all their people, instead of giving it all to just a few. You know this. You know they have extensive social programs and high taxes.
If you can’t even acknowledge basic facts that any educated adult in the USA at all should know, I am not sure how we can engage further.
Which has nothing to do with anything being discussed. The key thing is that they all use a capitalist economic system…just like the US does. And just like the US, they use social programs through taxes to soften that capitalism to the extent their citizens require. Where the bar is set differs, but there is a bar in each case.
Certainly. And despite whatever that is above, clearly you do too. I’m unsure why you are even arguing anything else, to be honest, since you clearly DO understand this. My question would be, why bring up Germany, Norway and the rest as if they were economic socialist nations…or even political socialist nations. They aren’t. They are social democracies that use a capitalist economic system…just like the US is. Again, they set the bar differently, but it’s basically the same model.
Perhaps they would. Of course, in the US, we also have mechanisms for this, though as noted our bar isn’t where their bar is. But the thing about such a bar is…it’s movable. Over the last 100 or so years the bar for this has moved substantially in the US, and I have no doubt it will continue to do so based on the voters.
But let’s say that in the US we never move the bar and everyone is out of work on the streets with only a few rich people at the top…I see this as pretty unlikely but let’s go with it. So, if that happens, then I guess my question is…why do you think the rest of the world will be this futuristic dystopia? I mean, based on what seems your own logic here, shouldn’t just the US and maybe a few other countries unable to change with the times by dystopian hellholes? Shouldn’t those other countries be paradises or something along those lines?
shrug Don’t engage me further. It won’t hurt my feelings. We aren’t really here to debate your ideas about communism and communist or socialist takeovers, but why people always think the future is always ‘worse’. I’ve pretty much shown why I think this is based on flawed data and presented a few videos to demonstrate where I’m coming from. I’ve even given caveats that COULD lead to a worse future, such as climate change and global warming. I think your vision of everyone being out of work and relying on the state to squeeze the rich for funds so that the people won’t starve is…unlikely. I think that uses will be found for idle labor, just as they have in the past, but that the jobs people will be doing in the future will be ones we wouldn’t even think of as jobs…or think of at all. People in the future will look back at our manufacturing jobs of today or in the past the same way we look back at old black and white photos of grimy children or obviously beat down and used up adults grinding away for 16 hours a day and they will say ‘man, that sure sucked. Glad we don’t do that sort of thing anymore!’. Then they will immediately get on the equivalent of this message board to say how bad things are for them, how the world is going to hell in a hand basket and how things were so much better in the past.
Science fiction is suppiosed to make you feel a bit uncomfortable. Sci-fi often asks the question “How would people change if we were to totally change this aspect of technology?” The situation the characters are put in is very different from what we are used to and so it’s unsettling.
To just pick on one example, take the Black Mirror story “The Entire History of You.” In the story, most people have implants in their brains that records what they see and hear 24/7 and allows them to play it back not only to themselves, but to anyone else they choose. A world with that technology is not, in any objective sense, worse than the one we’re in - but the entire thing strikes me, and I think most people, as deeply weird.
Indeed, and I’d take it even farther: China isn’t Socialist. At all. It has a very state-controlled Capitalism to go with a very state-controlled society, but state control isn’t all of what Socialism is. China has private ownership in a market economy, and the fact they layer a bunch of theory over it to make it politically palatable to old shits who want to believe that they’re still following in the path of Sacred Chairman Mao doesn’t change the fact Shenzhen is one of the most Capitalist places on Earth.
Unlike Socialism, Capitalism isn’t a fixed ideology. Lassiez-Faire Capitalism is, Anarcho-Capitalism is, but… guess what? Those things are bullshit theory just like the “Socialist Market Economy” supposedly going on in Beijing. Capitalism is what happens when the government allows private ownership of goods, investment, and competition in a market economy, which it then regulates and taxes to varying degrees. It’s more of an epiphenomenon than a planned system, and it can be tinkered with and remain Capitalism, and remain a free market overall.
Therefore, Capitalism can be regulated and brought up to snuff without magically becoming Socialism. Capitalism plus Income Tax is Capitalism. Capitalism plus OSHA is Capitalism. Capitalism plus Unions is Capitalism.
If you disagree… well, you’re just using Capitalism and Socialism as halo terms and/or snarl terms, purely for their emotional effect. Nobody else is obligated to take that seriously.
I do disagree. China is nearly the exact opposite of the examples given. Germany, Scandinavia etc., those are examples of capitalist economies with a touch of economic socialism. They, generally, have market economies that are heavily regulated, and in some instances the government takes direct control or intervention or even command economies in very vertical sectors. China, on the other hand, has basically a command economy across the board, controlled at every level by the CCP, with some capitalism (of the crony variety) bolted on to basically make it work. Whether anyone takes this seriously or not is, of course, their choice, but that’s basically the truth, regardless. One has but to look at how the Chinese (I.e. the CCP) control their stock market, manipulate each and every market, control (directly or indirectly) their companies and everything from the top down. None of those other ‘socialist’ countries listed do anything nearly as much. I’ve seen ranges for Chinese economic socialism ranging from 60% to 80%, while at best those countries listed rate something like 20% economic socialism.
So would the U.S. be considered 10% economic socialism?
Reading your definition - you’re acknowledging that other countries do it differently, that the present “bar” in the U.S. means that if near-complete automation comes a lot of people are going to be shafted but this has not yet happened - I will accept your premise. You’re defining “socialism” as 100% government control of the means of production, where presumably only a few countries have come close. (technically if there’s a capitalist black market the country in question would not be 100% socialist, right?)
I guess you’re right, when and if mass unemployment due to the latest machine learning technique starts to really actually happen, the most likely outcome would be existing government programs, such as federal level unemployment benefits or social security, would be expanded in scope. So not just the elderly would get social security, and the tax for it would have to be a wealth tax, not an income tax, since in such a world there would be few workers and most of the income would be in the form of capital gains to the owners (of large almost fully automated businesses).
Still, today this is already beginning, and yet a significant chunk of voters are blaming foreign Chinese competition or illegal immigrants, not automation. Both are clearly factors but may not be the primary cause.
