Removed weird double post
I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I love my roomba and it isn’t taking away anyone’s paid job.
Umm…in many countries, agricultural mechanization has lead to severe social responses, as land is “consolidated”–i.e.: seized–often with only token payment.
Violence is a very common way to achieve this. Genocidal violence against ethnic Native American groups in Brazil & Mexico has taken place in modern times, for this very reason.
Throughout history, the people in charge have shown little concern for those not in charge.
Systematic genocide might not happen, but forcible confinement to a euphemistically named “welfare centre”, with eventual death by malnutrition or violence is indeed possible.
Yeah, we’ll all become Gypsies 
I know I shouldn’t do this. But anyway…
I’m curious, Der Trihs…who exactly hates and fears the poor? The super-rich? The middle class? The super rich don’t care about the poor one way or another. They don’t hate them, and they certainly don’t fear them, they’d have to believe there was some possibility of a Madam DeFarge style mass lopping of heads for them to fear the poor, and that ain’t about to happen any time soon.
So it’s gotta be the middle class that hates the poor? Except what’s the difference between the middle class and the poor? Who exactly are the poor you’re talking about? Black people on welfare? Meskins that are gonna take yer job? That’s not class hatred, that’s race hatred and xenophobia. Different thing.
Or do they hate and fear working class whites? What’s the difference between poor working class whites and middle class whites? Whose hatred is whipped up against who? Do the middle class doctors and lawyers and office workers hate and fear beer-swilling NASCAR types? Is that what you mean by “poor”? Or are the NASCAR types middle class and they hate and fear some other group? Yeah, but who?
And in any case, in the scenario above, the middle class will all lose their jobs anyway, so how are they gonna hate and fear the poor now that they’re unemployed and homeless? They’re the new poor. So the super-rich are gonna hate and fear the poor and have them all killed off? Why? Why should they care?
If the poor are a majority, then they can’t be a hated and despised minority, can they? Why would the super-rich want to kill off the poor? If they kill the poor, then they’re not super-rich any more, are they? They’re just ordinary people who happen to have a lot of stuff, but the stuff is meaningless unless your social status is based on how much more of it you have compared to everyone else. Kill off the everyone else and then you’re not a Master of the Universe anymore.
:rolleyes:
Do you have a cite for this? I can’t think of any modern day genocide having occurred in either country especially as part of a land grab.
I recall a story about a Ford exec who was showing off his plant’s new automation machines to a UAW rep. The exec asked, “So how are you going to unionize these machines?” The rep replied, “How are you going to sell them Fords?”
I guess I need some explanation of this quote. Is the idea that the Ford exec will not be able to sell his Fords because the potential market for them will just be his former workers, who will now be unemployed?
What Der Trihs said.
Ford is given credit for building the assembly line and the middle class. These executives have destroyed the middle class. There were a lot of decent paying jobs for someone without great education but willing to work hard. They bought cars and houses,played golf,went out to restaurants. The Chinese ,Indians etc will not be paid enough to buy cars.
First cite–from the International Tribunal On Genocide In Central America
http://www.cwis.org/fwdp/Americas/itcaplan.txt
News article, written in a paper aimed at some of the folks getting killed.
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096413365
More will be provided if needed.
As food for thought, you might want to think about the fact that, even as tens of millions of jobs in agriculture, simple labor, assembly lines, and other unskilled tasks were taken over by technology or improved production practices, the U.S. currently has an extremely low unemployment rate - much lower than the historical average for the last 50 years. And during that time, the working population has increased by over a third.
What makes you think that the next batch of job dislocations would be any different?
Humans are a resource. They have value. Replacing a job with automation (or outsourcing) frees up that resource so that it can be made productive elsewhere. And moving a human from a low productivity job to a higher productivity job is the only thing which increases wages in the long run.
So the answer is: as automation and outsourcing increase, Americans will still find jobs, only these jobs will pay more. That is, unless government gets in the way and either stops the jobs, or turns the dislocated into a permanent underclass with welfare and other social programs that disconnect the workers from the incentives that would cause them to retrain, move, or otherwise do what they have to do to reconnect with the work force.
I asked this question a while back and didn’t get many intelligent responses so I’ve been pondering over it. If you want to know what will happen, just look around you, it’s already happened. We live in a society of unimaginable riches compared to 50 years ago. The average house size has doubled and comes with far more amenities, we’ve reduced the amount we spend on essentials and drastically increased our spending on entertainment and leisure. And these increases have been happening across the board, on an objective scale, a 20th percentile family today has a higher standard of living than an 80th percentile family from the 50’s.
So has this lead to the welfare utopia promised us by futurist writings? Hell no, what’s been most striking is that we’ve paid almost no attention to this mind boggling increase in living standards because our standards increase with our affluence. To us, it’s normal to have more bathrooms in our houses than people. It’s normal to be eating cherries from Chile and drinking organic milk. We never think of voluntarily reducing our consumption to the level of an affluent 1950’s person and using the excess to help the poor because that’s Somebody Else’s Problem. It the future, it’ll be normal to own a private plane despite ruinous energy prices and normal to have a mansion larger than those shown on MTV and we still won’t be helping the poor because it’ll still be Somebody Else’s Problem.
Coupled with this is that the rise of the information age is only going to exacerbate the long term trend towards greater income inequality. Income is, as a rough measure, derived from how much value you produce multipled by what percentage of that value you can capture. Our tribe-evolved minds intuitively recoil at the idea that the CEO of Walmart could be worth millions of times more than the janitor because absent of technology, even the best hunter could only catch a little bit more food than the worst hunter. The information culture means that now, whether the CEO makes a good decision or a bad decision is several million times more important than whether a janitor does the same and so they are paid accordingly and this difference is only going to get larger.
So what does that mean for the future? In America, we already have depressed regions where the unemployment rate is 50% or higher. On the other end of the spectrum, we have areas like Silicon Valley or ski resorts in Colorado where the cost of living is already an order of magnitude more than average. The future is already here and nobody in this thread has noticed it yet because it’s already so ordinary. The poor aren’t going to be rounded up into camps, rounding them up would imply we care enough about them to exterminate them. Instead, the poor are simply going to be neglected as they’ve always been neglected until suddenly, the curve gets too steep and you become one of the poor, and then you’ll be screwed.
But it isn’t as bleak as all of it sounds. Despite all else, the rising tide has lifted pretty much all boats. The poor now have better health, more stuff, less work and more freedom than they did in the past. Income inequality has jumped up and down and has only now matched it’s peak in the 1920’s. Being poor certainly doesn’t suck on an objective level, but you try telling that to the poor today.
Because yes, historically we’ve adapted to new technology by progressively moving up the value chain. But there’s no reason to think that will continue happening indefinitely. Inevitably, we’re going to hit the limits of human cognitive ability and what happens then? How many jobs can you get now without a high school education? without a college degree? How many years of progress remain before we start hitting the point where people not inherently smart enough to go to high school or college have nowhere else to turn? This is not a facile problem.
No, no no! Labour is not just another resource, we managed to conclusively kill that idea in the 50’s and I’m sick of arguing with Libertarians who haven’t gone beyond 1st year microeconomics on this point. Even if you take the stock standard, neo-classical viewpoint, labour markets contain a whole slew of unique features which need to be taken into account. Add in to that, everything we’ve learned from behavioural economics, sociology and game theory and talking about labour markets becomes hugely tricky unless you’ve actually studied the field. Unfortunately, the labour economists seemed to have formed this close, incestuous grouping and I’ve talked to economics PhDs who’ve never really dealt with labour economics and go on to make grossly unfit theories. All I know is I’m grossly unqualified to talk regarding this field and anybody who doesn’t preface their statements with how grossly unqualified they are to make them, probably is.
The difference is that it’s possible – even likely – that eventually machines will be superior to humans, or some subset of humans.
Right now, the lowest skilled worker can still do things that no machine can do, for example process natural language.
What happens when machines are superior to a low skilled worker in every important respect? Why would anyone hire such a worker?
Genocide is a word with a rather specific meaning. Merriam Webster defines it as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group”.
Your first article only references Central America of which Brazil is most definitely not a part. It seemed to be a call to set up a tribunal to investigate genocide. However, the article is 21 years old. One should note that most of those countries were in civil war at the time and were quite busy killing each other for political reasons. Also this article makes many allegations but seems rather light on the facts of when these alleged genocidal acts occurred. Anyhow, since your original assertion referenced Mexico and Brazil, please cite some news articles that support your contention that genocide has occurred in these countries during the modern age. It would be nice if your cite had some factual information within as opposed to generalized allegations which don’t seem to detail any specific event.
The second article talks of energy genocide. Much of the article deals with groups living under that most brutal of totalitarian regimes, our icy neighbor to the North, Canada.
It seems like there’s some sort of upper limit on what a person can purchase, even if it is a rather soft and fuzzy one. To create the items which make up that limit takes a certain amount of man-hours. As productivity increases (our robots here) you’d reach the point where we can make far more then humans could reasonably consume. To me it looks like it would cause a death spiral in the employment numbers. I can’t imagine it would take everyone by surprise, it seems so obvious. I don’t think it’s so far off either. I’m 33 and I expect to live into such a time. My concern is what how all those people are going to keep themselves from being bored out of their skulls. Would alcoholism, drug use and suicide statistics go through the roof?
I wonder if you could measure that. Take all the things in the home of a family at various points in history and see how many man-hours of labor went into creating everything. My guess is it would remain pretty steady as we move from a few things with long construction times to lots of things with little construction time. Then factor in productivity gains and see at what point the things might begin to go wonky. It would be a rough estimate but I’d be interested in seeing the results of such a study.
The scenario where people no longer desire any further possessions, no matter how interesting a product one may produce, is incredibly far-removed from life as we know it. You may as well say “What happens when humanity has God-like power over the Universe? We’ll all be unemployed!”
Realistic simulated environments would be one form of entertainment that has near infinite possibilities. Eventually nanobots or some mad stuff like that will be make it safe to be a mad alcoholic/drug abuser.