Actually, it’s from the first “Lije Bailey” novel by Asimov. There was a whole planet with something like a 10,000:1 ratio of servant robots to humans. Which apparently we’re right on the verge of becoming.
What’s the ration now on Earth, and how have you determined that we’re on the verge of the ration in that novel?
And what do you mean by “on the verge”? Sometime in the next 1,000 years?
Humor alert, JM. Humor alert.
I guess in this loopy thread I should have smilied my post, especially when making my own tangential arguments. Here: 
OK. To be fair to me, that was NOT the most outrageous claim being offered in this thread, so it wasn’t obvious it was meant as humor. You’ll have to try a lot harder next time. 
The biggest lawls will be when doctors and lawyers start getting replaced en masse.
I’ve seen people say in such a future people will be free to pursue intellectual pursuits, art, stuff like that. Except in such a future the robots will be better artists than any human. They could be designed to make the most appealing novels, paintings, whatever, so your stuff would be like macaroni art in comparison. But I guess that never stopped anyone before.
99% of what is currently on TV might as well have been written by robots. Not very advance robots, either.
One thing the OP got wrong – there isn’t going to be a “Workers” revolution. There won’t be enough of them. There may be an “idlers’ revolution”, because I firmly believe that something from 80-90% of jobs that exist now won’t in another century or two. I can’t claim to have any evidence of this though, just a sense that this is how technology is progressing.
There are a few possible results:
- A civil war between the rich (with a paid and/or drone army) and the poor, resulting in a drastic depopulation of the poor, followed by mandatory population controls to keep the poor from multiplying again and posing a threat later.
- A civil war between the rich (with a paid and/or drone army) and the poor, resulting in a complete over throw in the social and political order, followed by some form form of socialism or communism that guarantees everyone some basic necessities of life including food clothing and shelter.
- A gradualist political reform process that moves us toward the second outcome without a violent revolution.
I dearly hope for option 3, but I’d guess the odds are about 45/45/10 for options 1 2 and 3.
This represents a completely unsupported by specific facts personal opinion.
But all kidding aside, your joke actually makes a good point, if inadvertently; most of our work in the home has been replaced by machines, at least in the First World, and in so doing has destroyed untold millions of jobs.
In my relatively modest home I am in possession of a clothes washing machine, an electric dryer, a dishwasher, a microwave oven, a regular oven/range, a computer, and a vacuum cleaner, all of which replace dozens of hours of grueling manual labour that existed before those things were invented. While one might simply assume that makes my life easier, such machines have put a huge number of people out of work. In the nineteenth century it was normal for middle-class-and-above households to have to hire servants to wash and dry clothes, clean house, and care for children. Even a single but professionally employed man like myself with a young child would have paid people to clean his home, do his laundry, cook many of his meals, and care at home for his child. Today I do not need to pay for any of those things to be done, because of my array of amazing machines that make those things an order of magnitude easier to do and eliminate the need for paid labor to do them. (Poor people just lived together and suffered, mostly the women.) At one point something like 35% of the adult female population of the United Kingdom were employed as domestic servants, so great was the demand.
Robots - that’s all washing machines and such are, just simple robots - eliminated probably 99% of that employment. People still have servants, but very few people actually have full time servants and a tiny number of people have more than one. (I’ve known a few people with full time nannies.) Most such work is purchased in very small amounts - my parents, who’re a bit old, have a lady come in for three hours every two weeks to do the heavy duty cleaning stuff.
But wait, there’s more; another technology eliminated even more labor for women at home; birth control. Birth control allowed women to more easily reduce the number of children they had to care for, and there’s nothing more labor-saving than that, plus of course you’re less likely to need nannies.
So massive unemployment as a result of all this technology, right? Well, no. That never happened. We don’t have 35% unemployment among women in the UK. More remarkably, the advent of such technologies made it easier for women to leave the home and flood into the marketplace to do jobs previously done, traditionally, by men. So massive unemployment, right? Nope, didn’t happen. We just became more productive.
People will always find something to do. Boyo Jim, with due respect, I think your scenario is absolutely, one hundred percent certain to not happen. It totally defies an actual examination of the history of precisely the same phenomenon happening over and over again.
Can one of the mods move this thread to CS? It’s gone off the rails and into the realm of SciFi, with an emphasis on the “Fi”. Actually, more like SyFy.
For those not in the US, we have a SciFi cable channel that shows mostly crap stuff and they recently changed their official name to SyFy, which is as weird as most of their content.
What do you think is the next big sector to be eliminated by machines? I’d think as self check out improves it would devastate cashier jobs, but it doesn’t seem to have really taken off. Even though you can have just one employee watching multiple self check out lanes.
Message Board Moderators. That could easily be automated.
This is pretty much what I’m assuming.
A relevant article from the Economist.
A few highlights:
Still digesting most of it, but I agree with their main argument that past may no longer be prologue. Our society and economy are continuing to go through major structural and institutional changes due to the “Second Machine Age”, just as upsetting as the first industrial revolution was. And the mechanisms for dealing with that will require far more than just ‘market’ solutions.
The market did not end the Great Depression - the New Deal did. Major policy changes in how securities were issued and traded, how financial institutions were allowed to act, and strong welfare reforms and programs, created the conditions that allowed us to recover and then achieve high growth rates through fifties and sixties (when tax rates were much higher also).
I think an important point above is that the majority of gains go to the owners rather than the workers. Marx proposed the simplistic solution that workers should simply be made the owners - “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. His methods were off, and his means of implementation made the ‘cure’ worse than the disease. But the general idea is still sound - workers should receive equity as well as income.
Martin Ford discusses this same issue also and presents a strong argument in his book, The Lights in the Tunnel, that we should start providing an incentive-based income to supplement wages, along with increased job-sharing, and no longer tie essential services such as healthcare to employers.
Rather than a basic income, I would like to see a ‘basic dividend’. Every adult receives a share of total profits of the enterprises in their economy. Rather than individual 401K or IRA accounts, everyone gets a basic social retirement account funded not through payroll taxes, but from profit sharing (equivalent, but not quite taxes since the money is going to individuals, not governments). An incentive can be that you only receive a share until you ‘retire’. Once you opt to collect, you stop getting a share (or a full share at least). (Devil is in the details, and I still doing the exorcism.)
But I think a major cultural change that needs to happen sooner than later (and I see plenty of people who are doing so for a variety of reasons) is ending mindless consumption, and pursuing higher incomes just to have more stuff - whether material goods, or better services such as vacations, fine dining, box seats, etc. That path was never sustainable, and it is about to bite us on our ass if we continue on it much longer. We may even be past the point of no return. But, for myself, I can only operate on the assumption that we have not. The alternative is too bleak.
Instead of pursuing higher incomes, I see people pursuing more meaningful incomes - i.e. how high a standard of living can I achieve using the least amount of resources possible. What are the most meaningful activities I can pursue that have the least environmental impact, but greater cultural, spiritual or intellectual impact?
When need to start implementing policies that reward sustainability, and punish growth for the sake of growth. A financial services tax would be a great step in that direction.
Yes, people will always find something to do. But most of what they do will have no value in a “free market”. We can’t all sell our artwork to each other.
Always with the rich and poor. Everything defined as a class struggle. The rich do the hiring, the poor do the labor. So when labor is no longer necessary, the poor will suffer because the rich no longer need them.
Gah. The vast majority of jobs are created by, and for, the middle class. The owner of the corner grocery store or gas station is probably not a member of the 1%. Nor is the owner of the landscaping company that employs five people, or the guy who owns a renovation business that employs a dozen tradesman. And if he is technically part of that class, he’s certainly not a robber baron or a captain of industry.
I have created jobs for people. In most cases, the people I employed made more money than I did, because I was trying to keep a small business alive and paying myself almost nothing to keep it afloat. My brother in law owns a small music store that employed half a dozen people, and he’s flat broke and was even at the peak of the business. My mother owned a grocery store that employed two people, and she would have qualified for welfare on the income she received from it.
And yes, this argument about technology destroying jobs has been going on for centuries. As have the fallacies about improving the economy by ‘creating jobs’ where they don’t need to be.
Here’s a quote from a speech made by William Aberhart, a former Premier of my Province, in 1935:
That quote has been misattributed numerous times, but it goes to show that the same old fallacies are still with us.
This ‘consumer economy’ thing is past its shelf life. Even if you believe in Keynesian stimulus at times of slack consumer demand, it would only apply under those conditions.
Besides, I can flip that around on you: “This is a producer economy - because if we don’t produce anything, the consumers will have nothing to buy.” How is that any less true than your statement? I understand why the left dearly wants to believe that improving the economy is as simple as throwing money at consumers - it’s a handy rationale for the redistributionist policies they favor. But it’s nonsense.
What makes a good economy is a lot more complicated than just throwing money at consumers so that they buy stuff. An efficient, well functioning economy is one in which the productive capacity of a country is aligned with its needs, where information regarding supply and demand efficiently flows to those who can make use of it, where the productive capacity of the population is discoverable and is applied to the things people want produced. It’s also about people having the flexibility and freedom to discover new things, to create new markets and products that consumers want.
Consumers consume a lot of iPhones, but they wouldn’t have them to consume if we didn’t have wealthy people like Steve Jobs, who had a vision and had the resources available to bring it to life and distribute it to the masses.
Indeed, which is why so many of us will do something other than make art.
Oh, dear. Yes, I can see how that might be distressing. Shall we dispense with “class” and move to something less Marxist? How about “economic affinity groups”, make it more Facebook?
There’s always prostitution. Well, until someone makes a sexbot.
I wonder what jobs are ultimately robot proof. Politician, at first? Key decision makers probably won’t want to give up their positions and let machines call the shots, but maybe they’d lose to those companies who do. Models and actors, maybe. Athletics. I’m curious about jobs where people unload their problems or gossip. Will people be totally weirded out about chatting with a soulless but incredibly advanced interactive AI construct, or would they be cool with it? Making robots more approachable is a whole field but the results still seem like a horror show to me.
The future could be different. I’m not sure anyone has denied that in absolute terms. That article has better arguments, or at least cites better arguments. But of course, I could come up with counterarguments for everything in it. This could just be rationalization on my part, but the article itself admits that Keynes was worried about exactly the same sorts of things. He was wrong, just as so many other people have been wrong, but the argument doesn’t die.
The old arguments about automation destroying jobs have never gone away. They remain perfectly preserved, as if fossilized in amber. So why would the counterarguments ever change? “This time is different!” Well why? Why can’t this particular dynamic be the same, since it’s based in economic forces that we understand fairly well?
At least they do have some new stuff. An improvement. Their biggest new argument: real wages have been stagnant for a while. Yes. True. But that same time period conforms fairly well to a billion Chinese entering the labor markets. That’s the sort of thing that would depress wages for a while, I would think. But that effect won’t last forever. Their wages have been growing loads, 10%ish a year. Richer Chinese are going to have stronger demand, and that will (eventually) result in more higher-wage US jobs. There are going to be major industries in the US that will make themselves filthy stinking rich solely by catering to international demand of that sort. Trade isn’t just competition. It’s cooperation. We don’t just buy their stuff. By buying their stuff, we give them an opportunity to buy more of our stuff. The richer they are, the richer we become. US inequality is increasing, sure, but world inequality is actually going down. It’s reasonable to believe that real wages will strengthen again, in measurable ways, after more of the developing world becomes properly developed.
Rather than the typical essay-form speculation about automation, I want to see a concerted effort to address these sorts of confounding factors directly. There should be specific reasons, and a time frame. There should be more meat on those bones if this is a genuine dynamic.
Real wages is something, I’ll give them that, but then I want to know why world inequality is decreasing if the capitalists are so talented at substituting away from labor. Because it actually looks like they’re substituting away not from labor, but from expensive US/European labor, and in doing so, they’re making developing-world labor much more expensive. (And not incidentally, eliminating severe poverty at the fastest rate this earth has ever seen.) After they’ve made China properly rich, this should be much harder. I personally expect real wage gains to make better progress in the US when China’s median income is close to Japan’s rather than being below Mexico’s.
That is a more specific prediction from me than anything I’ve seen from them. Maybe I’m wrong, but my rationale is pretty solidly based in stuff that has a lot of history behind it.
(A second more technical note on those real wage figures is that they’re going to be somewhat less reliable in the digital age. I mean, hell, I used to spend gobs of damn money on movies. Now I just Netflix for an absurdly low monthly fee and get things streamed, or get a disc in the mail. I cycle through more movies than ever before, at lower cost than ever before. This is potentially a huge difference in the real wage for people of similar habits… but this sort of thing is not going to show up in any official calculation. Every single increase in quality of that kind, especially for digital services that are offered at no charge or very low charge, is going to distort real wage measures for the subset of people who rely on those services. Officials try to compensate for some of that, but it’s hard to do in an honest and fair manner. My main point: I’d like to see discussions of real wage stagnation which address this sort of stuff head on.)
I’ve seen that attributed to Milton Friedman. I had no idea it went back to the 30s.
Another one I’ve seen attributed to Agatha Christie (no idea if it’s true):
For the sake of argument let’s assume that this is happening: education moves online because it is more economical. You rightly point out the downside of this but you haven’t explored the upside. In such a move a college education becomes cheaper. Since you have a daughter in college you know how expensive it is. When it becomes cheaper more people can afford to go and/or they have less debt. Cheaper education would make it easier for people to switch careers or have multiple degrees, increasing their value. Maybe this leads to more Zuckerbergs or Elon Musks. So while those in acadamia may get hit hard the overall market gets better.
Or look at your own industry. You can do more construction for less money than, say, 20 years ago because you are more efficient. This means that more people can afford your cheaper services. Maybe this allows someone to build a new restaurant or health clinic. Have you done a job that would have been unthinkable 20-30 years ago?
I was recently reading a short history of the sewing machine. Singer is given credit for bringing the sewing machine to market but there were inventors who had built machines much earlier but they burried their plans because local laborers got wind of the inventions and near rioted. Now we realize what a waste that was but back then people were worried about machines replacing people and they didn’t know where the new jobs would come from.