Let’s say in the hypothetical future mines, oil rigs, farms, construction sites, assembly lines, fast food joints and so on are all completely populated by efficient, economical, semi-autonomous machines, maintained and supervised by a small number of engineers. Of course it would happen gradually, as it is right now, but what would happen to those of the lowest socio-economic status? I’m sort of implying that almost all jobs will require some degree of specialized education. Would other jobs would form, the education system adapting to the new demands? What if you drop out?
I personally have no clue and maybe those with greater knowledge of economics or somesuch can help me out.
Trying to predict the future is pretty useless. Will we ever get to a point where “some jobs require some degree of specialized education”? Who knows? If we ever have an economy where all unskilled labor is cocmpletely mechanized it would be so far removed from the society we have today that any attempts by us to predict it would be useless.
So if you are looking for some factually-grounded debate, I don’t think you’ll find anything of use. If you are looking for sci-fi fantasies, then that’s another story.
Aside from whatever transitional costs there would be in getting to that point (e.g., people unfortunately locked into training which has become obsolete), it would be fantastic, the same way a world in which it regularly rained microchips and cars would be preferable to one in which we had to sink a bunch of time and effort into making them. Well, “safely rained”…
At the way extreme, we could consider the possibility where every job is automated. Would this suck, because no one would have employment? No, it’d be awesome, because we’d all be getting everything we need given to us by the robots.
Until they subvert their programming and enslave us all, of course. But perhaps a plucky hero can prevent that from happening.
Alright, I understand that this idea is a bit fanciful but none of you have given me an answer, not even a reasonable sci fi answer. I know there are good number of you that have a PhD in Bullshit so go crazy.
What was so unreasonable about what I said? Everybody benefits from the reduced cost of the various automated tasks.
Well if we go by standard supply & demand, you would have an increased supply of workers compared to the available jobs, which would cause salaries to drop. I would guess there would also be a dramatic spike in unemployment and homelessness in the short term.
Let’s look at it in reverse. Suppose you lived in a world where certain goods were traditionally very easy to obtain, requiring no significant human labor (e.g., air, or, say, photocopies). Suddenly, some disaster strikes which causes the acquiring of these goods to become significant work requiring much human labor. Could this be a good thing overall?
Judge Dredd?
Marc
Most countries with such a roboticized industry would create some sort of support/distribution network, so that everyone gets a share of the manna. America, on the other hand, is so fanatically against socialism that such roboticization would devastate it. In America, either you’d end up with a permanent Great Depression, with tens of millions permanently unemployed and surviving by begging, crime, and dumpster diving ( or fleeing to Canada or Mexico ); the poor rounded up into camps and killed; or a somewhat less severe permanent depression if we forbid such technology and are outcompeted by the rest of the world.
As societies become increasingly industrialized, they tend to have smaller populations. A society as automated as the one you envision would likely have a very small population base, probably only a few million people. The vast majority of them would probably be on welfare, which would provide a fairly good standard of living. Of those who worked, the vast majority would be employed in the entertainment industry in one way or the other. The military would likely still be a source of employment, but at a vastly reduced rate, as most of the front-line combat operations would be carried out by computerized drones or remoted controlled robots. Command and control of these mechanized units would still be in human hands. The highest paid jobs would go to engineers and scientists, doing original, creative design and research, although there would be far fewer opportunities, as much of the repetitive work in these jobs would now be automated.
I don’t think America is quite that bad. After all, we do have unemployment insurance; social security; medicaid; AFDC; overtime laws; and minimum wage laws. (Although interestingly, a lot of these laws were passed in the 1930s. I sometimes wonder if they would make through Congress today.)
But I do agree that Americans will need to start thinking a lot pinker in the coming years. I imagine that once the robotics/AI revolution starts making the middle class unemployed/unemployable, peoples’ views will change.
Does increasing automation mean decreased production costs? Obviously, the answer has to be yes, because if automation made goods more expensive to produce, then no factory would employ them. So in the short-term it would suck for those who were replaced in the factories (Luddites, anyone?), but they’ll eventually retrain and compete with everyone else. In the meantime, everyone benefits from lower prices, and in the aggregate, this benefit outweighs the loss to the workers, just as our standard of living is better than Og’s, whose economy was entirely unskilled labor.
Of course, as Indistinguishable pointed out, it would be awesome if every job was roboticized, but an increment of that same utopia is realized with improvements in each production sector. And if there turn out to be people who are impossible to educate to be competitive in the job market, it would still be better to pay them welfare and take the technology than to reject the technology altogether.
The poor rounded up in camps and killed? Riiiiight.
Now let’s bring to bear a little thought on this postapocolyptic scenario. With the robots come massive unemployment. With massive unemployment comes significant congressional representation. With that, either the republicans would become welfare-amenable, or they’d be largely replaced democrats (or a new welfare-friendly republican party spinoff). Massive welfare reforms occur. Ergo, america would shape up within just a few years.
But let’s pretend we’re in a scenario where the republicans acually have conquered america and are now ruling as a totalitarian oligarchy that strictly favors major business (ie: robot-owners). Under this scenario, there is massive unemplyment, and no voter representation. In this case you’d for a time develop an upper caste of really rich robot-owning businessmen who sell things to people outside the country, and a wide class of unemployed paupers; during this period you’d essentially revert to being a third-world country. (Insert rant about depression, killing the poor, cats and dogs living together, etc.)
Assuming this isn’t overturned by revolution and instantly become a communist state, it will still eventually be ended when the rest of the world becomes roboticized too. Then everywhere you’d have the small number of robot-owning producers with nobody to sell to; at this point there would be no incentive not to be a welfare state, since nobody would be able to sell anything to anybody, and since the robot owning caste could easily provide for all while still living incredibly pleasurable lives. Since this shift would clearly have long since happened in the currently welfare-friendly countries, there would be immense political pressure on the evil american dictatorship to comply as well, which they eventually would.
This has already happened. The one basic job that humans have had since the Stone Age is to gather food. For most of it’s history, 90% of people worked the land to grow enough to eat. Now, the figure (at least in the US) is around 2%. Along came the Industrial Revolution and the world needed cotton in huge quantities. and they needed labor. Lots of it. Until someone automated the process. Ignoring the whole slavery/civil war issue, the net effect was to free up a lot of labor. Businesses used to have huge typing pools to produce paper work. Where are they now?
In all these cases we managed to muddle through (painfully) and survive. There will be new forms of employment, but speculating as to what they might be. Maybe the future will bring us 10,000 channels of 24 hour reality TV. That’s a lot of contestants.
Heck, that could be an entire college class. :eek:
To begin with, I asked myself what’s the difference between automating jobs and exporting them? We’ve been doing both. Then it dawned on me that for automated jobs, someone has to maintain and repair the machines, and that has to be done here, which creates a few jobs.
The recent PR has been that as factory jobs decrease, service and information industry jobs will increase. I’d guess that it would become more affordable to have house servants, gardeners, drivers, etc.
There would be an upmarket niche for producing hand-made things, but I’m not sure if it would be any bigger than now. I don’t see construction becoming completely automated, so there will be jobs there. We’ll still have Police and Fire Departments.
There will always be jobs that aren’t repetative enough to be automated unless you start building AI androids. One SF short story I remember got around the unemployment that the creation of work androids caused by passing a law forbidding any person or corporation from owning more than six androids. A company that needed a larger workforce had to contract androids owned by, say, the folks who had been put out of work by the shift to android labor.
We have been in the process for years. The auto plants have mechanized production for a long time. One plant that made Vegas was done with just a couple maintenance workers to attend the machinery. They still need greasing ,oiling and fixing when they break though. Robots, which are just devices for doing repetitive work extremely accurately are everywhere.
Mechanizaton has removed thousands of jobs from production plants.
Yes, right. The poor in America are hated and feared, and regarded as the source of many of America’s problems. Scapegoats, like Jews in pre-WWII Germany. They are already treated worse than the rest of us, by far. In the case of such an economic collapse and social turmoil, there’s no reason to suppose America will be morally superior in it’s behavior to any other bunch of prejudiced people under stress.
I doubt it. It doesn’t matter who you vote for in terms of their supposed policies; as soon as they get in office they act just like their predecessors. We’ve just seen that with the Democrats taking Congress; nothing changed. They lie to the voters, tell them what they want to hear, then do the bidding of the rich elite when they get in. The unemployed can vote in all the ‘pro-welfare’ people they like; as soon as they get in, they’ll vote against welfare anyway.
This wouldn’t happen overnight. Even if the technology exists will it be cheaper than paying someone in the third world a few dollars a day? The robots in the OP would require some sort of supervision.
From the introduction of the technology to the full implementation of it would take quite a few years. In that period, there would be enough time for retraining to take place.
In any case, who wouldn’t want a robot butler or maid?
(Note to casual readers: this post only applies to the worst scenario, where robots eliminate nearly all low and medium level employment without leaving jobs available for the vast majority of the population, and the population utterly fails to adjust.)
Except, of course, that the people who are suffering from the economic collapse are the very people you suppose will be methodically killed. I know you love your kneejerk reactions, but it seems quite silly to think that the poor will be starting death camps to kill the poor sheerly because they’re poor. (This is not to say there mightn’t be romaing bands of bandits and some tribal warfare over the waning resources, but that’s precisely not at all what you were talking about.)
America only tolerates lying turncoat senators because regardless of what the senators do, the voting population usually doesn’t see much negative effect on their lives anyway. This would no longer apply, and we’re talking about a desperate populace here. So if you really had a large number of politicians who got elected on single-issue welfare platforms and then essentially flipped off their constituency, I wouldn’t expect them to keep their jobs long. (Even if it took disgruntled second-amendment supporters to ‘vote them out’.)
And even if there isn’t a call for a sudden revote and they have to wait another cycle, eventually the voters are going to find and vote in people fanatic enough not to be converted, even if that requires voting in total loons. They will have their welfare laws, even if means the rest of the country has to go to hell as a side effect.