Riiiiight.
None of this makes any sense. It’s incoherent. Self-contradictory.
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Either you have enough wealth to purchase robotic goods, or you don’t.
1a. If you do have sufficient wealth to purchase robotic goods, you obtained it through (a) welfare, (b) in trade for labour of some sort, or (c) as a return on some sort of investment (ownership of capital, whatever). -
We are apparently supposed to assume that most/many people do not have sufficient wealth to purchase robotic goods, or that this is at least possible. Simultaneously, we are supposed to assume that cheap robotic goods are insurmountable competition for a typical person. People can’t find jobs because anything they could conceivably do a robot can do cheaper.
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For the purposes of discussion, we shall leave aside 1(a) as it is an arbitrary, artificial solution to the market failure in 2. We shall also leave aside 1(c) as we are to suppose that capital wealth has all been concentrated in the hands of an elite few.
But 2 just doesn’t make any sense. I’m trying to imagine the plight of these people. Let’s suppose that there is no wealth distribution whatsoever, so they’re not just living off the welfare of others, they’re absolutely destitute. So I’m stuck, I can’t afford any of the phenomenally cheap robotic goods, because there’s no work I can do that anyone will pay for, since the robot would be cheaper. Right. So what should I do? I have no shelter, no food, nothing. Well, what I should do is subsistence agriculture. Find myself a little plot of land (clearly I can afford this, so I’ll have to be a squatter), grow vegetables, and build my own shelter. Is this allowed? I am, in effect, selling my own labour to myself in exchange for filling my own personal needs.
I would submit that if even this is not allowed, if I cannot even labour to fill my own needs, that the problem is not market failure due to the devaluation of labour by robots, but is rather political oppression of the many by a powerful few who prevent the many from engaging in any productive activity by force. A society like that could develop, but this isn’t particularly interesting. It’s just straightforward oppression.
Okay, so I can grow my own food, and build my own shelter. My labour may not be worth anything to anyone else, but it’s worth something to me, as it allows me to fill my own most basic needs. I can’t sell my tomatoes to anyone else, since robot tomatoes are cheaper, but I at least won’t starve. But now what prevents me from bartering my tomatoes with my neighbour, who has likewise taken up subsistence farming in exchange for help repairing the thatch on my hut? Neither of us can afford robotic goods, but we can help each other out, right? This is allowed, isn’t it?
I would submit that if this sort of basic bartering is not allowed, that once again it must be due to it being prevented by force by the robot-owning elite. But then again we’ve just devolved to garden-variety oppression.
So okay, I can provide for my own needs, and I can barter with my neighbour. But wait, that’s all the market is.
So it turns out that if everyone loses their jobs to robots, there’s even more work to go around, because all these broke unemployed people have to go back to subsistence farming - which is hours and hours of backbreaking toil just to meet one’s basic caloric needs.
All this flies completely in the face of all our past experience with mechanization. In the past, every time an industry has mechanized the labour that used to be involved in that industry has been picked up by some other sector of the economy. The economy used to be mostly agriculture, along with the building of homes, basic tools, and clothes. That’s all the goods most people got. We then liquidated most of the employment in agriculture, and all that labour didn’t sit around doing nothing - it started producing heretofore unproduced goods and services - things that had previously been luxuries. And so we got cars, and larger homes, and appliances, and all manner of amenities. And then the auto industry mechanized, and that labour moved on to unemployment, and we got gaming consoles and wide-screen TVs and amazing new telephones that you can carry around and have with you wherever you go. At no point have actual employment levels, i.e. the percentage of working age persons holding down jobs, fallen. They’ve actually increased. It’s just that the goods and services produced by that labour have shifted away from the mechanized sectors of the economy into previously unproduced stuff. Oh, maybe it hasn’t been those particular people. The guy who lost his job on the line in Flint when GM closed down the old plant isn’t someone who’s now making iPods. But the labour force as a whole has shifted that way. Every time the machines take over a job and make that old good cheaper than a person could, the person can move over and make something else that people couldn’t used to afford but now can because that mechanized thing is now cheaper.
Why should we expect this to stop, when it’s been a commonplace occurrence ever since Og invented the wheel and put the porters out of work?
Oh, but you say that in the hypothetical there are no conceivable economic areas to shift to, because the robots can do anything cheaper than people can? Well cool. Then there is no scarcity whatsoever, and everything is free. Or, in your apparently preferred scenario, there is artificial scarcity produced by the unwillingness of the robot owners to trade goods to others at their market-based value, i.e. for free. Because if robots can successfully compete with the subsistence farmer bartering his tomatoes in exchange for some thatching, they must be giving those tomatoes away. Because my neighbour has no money, has nothing except his thatching prowess to barter for my tomatoes. If I can’t successfully compete with the robot tomatoes for that thatching, they must be giving them away.
Let me repeat that. If my labour has zero value because the robots do everything cheaper, then the robot labour has zero value (since it can’t have less than zero value). If the robot labour has zero value, then their products are free. If I can’t sell my labour at any price, then either the market isn’t free, or the robots are giving it away. Period. So I can either find gainful employment, or I don’t need it because everything is free. Or else the robot-owning elite are preventing me from engaging in economic activity by force.
Exactly. If someone is starving because any job they can do a robot can do cheaper, how does that work? Even a homeless guy who lives under a bridge works, it’s just that he doesn’t work for cash. He scrounges for newspapers for bedding, he crawls through dumpsters looking for discarded food, he moves his body under the bridge when it’s raining so he doesn’t get soaked. A subsistence farmer who grows everything he eats and makes his own tools and clothing and house works like a dog, even if he never exchanges goods and services with another human being.
So if an unemployed person’s labor is totally worthless, that means that everything that person can do could be done more cheaply by a robot. But that postulates robots that scrounge dumpsters for food, who can do it more cheaply than a homeless guy. But you can’t get cheaper than free, so that dumpster-scrounging robot would have to be giving away that food, right? Otherwise, it would be worth it for the homeless guy to scrounge himself, and we’ve postulated that he can’t scrounge for himself.
I honestly can’t see how it works that an impoverished farmer whose labor is worthless could happen. Surely if he’s starving, working to grow tomatoes is worthwhile to him, unless tomatoes are free. Even if tomatoes are really really really cheap, if we postulate that it doesn’t matter how cheap they are he can’t afford them then it must be that the robotomatoes are more expensive TO HIM than tomatoes he grows himself, no matter how much labor it takes to grow a tomato. And if ~80% of the population is unemployed and unemployable due to automation, they’re in the same boat! The robot tomatoes, no matter how cheap, are all more expensive to the unemployed than tomatoes they grow themselves. OK, they all grow tomatoes…but they can’t trade them, because one of our axioms is that robotomatoes will always be cheaper than human-grown tomatoes. But that’s contradictory.
If one unemployed starving homeless guy grows tomatoes because he can’t buy robotomatoes with money he doesn’t have, he can trade homegrown tomatoes with the unemployed starving homeless guy down the street for homegrown cucumbers. His tomatoes are suddenly worth something! Except, we postulate that robocucumbers MUST be cheaper for him than human grown cucumbers, except they can’t be, because he can’t afford any robogoods. It doesn’t matter how many home grown tomatoes be produces, robotomatoes will always be cheaper, except none of his neighbors can afford robotomatoes but they can somehow trade their meagre produce for his tomatoes. Even if no robocapitalist would pay a penny for those tomatoes, starving people would. In fact, starving people means those tomatoes are actually very valuable, not cheap!
And so we’ve proven that if we postulate that robot workers will always be cheaper than human workers, then the robots have to work for free, because humans will always scratch the soil with a stick in an effort to feed themselves, and that work will have value to them, and it will have value to their also starving neighbors who can’t afford cheap robot produced goods. If no one can afford them, the robot goods aren’t cheap but expensive.
Or to put it in stark terms, consider the plight of a starving prostitute standing on the streetcorner offering a blowjob in exchange for a crust of bread. But no one will give her a crust of bread in return for a blowjob. That means either that crusts of bread are incredibly valuable, or blowjobs are nearly worthless. Robohookers give better blowjobs than human prostitutes, and they perform for less than the cost of a crust of bread, that is, free. Either that or, since everyone is starving, they prefer to keep and eat those crusts of bread themselves. Which means bread is damn expensive. But why aren’t robobakers selling bread cheaply? If a prostitute is willing to trade a blowjob for a crust of bread, surely a human baker would be willing to trade an hour of bakery work for the same crust of bread? How cheaply do robots work if they work for less than the price of a crust of bread? That is, they must work for free.
There is at least one conceivable type of situation in which increased efficiency/automation of production fucks most people over; it’s very far fetched off in theory land. Still, for the sake of “mathematical” completeness, allow me to mention it, if only to dismiss it. As Gorsnak and Lemur866 have been pointing out, it’s going to be the sort of situation where people are somehow unable to obtain their needs for themselves by just ignoring the robot economy. So, for example, we can imagine some disaster striking the Earth making it impossible to grow or gather food anywhere; goodbye subsistence farming, hello death of the human race. For the sake of simplicity, let’s suppose the world population was also reduced to two archetypes: Mr. Rich and Mr. and Mrs. Poor. Before disaster struck, Mr. Rich happened to acquire all of the world’s gold. Mr. and Mrs. Poor have nothing but their plucky, can-do spirit. As it stands, all three of them are gonna starve.
Now, for the sake of the human race, let’s introduce the discovery of neo-alchemy: a labor-intensive process whereby, with half a day of vigorous work, a pair of workers can spin gold into enough food to feed one lavishly, or three modestly. Mr. Rich decides he’d rather be lazy then gluttonous, and allows Mr. and Mrs. Poor to spin his gold, on the agreement that they’ll share the resulting food. Life is good.
Suddenly, one day, Mr. Rich discovers the science of neo-neo-alchemy: now, all it takes to spin gold into food is a slight movement of the pinky finger. He can have his sloth cake and eat it too. He fires the Poor couple, who are now useless to him, and spins his own food, eating gluttonously rather than modestly. Mr. and Mrs. Poor, in the meanwhile, starve to death, since it’s impossible for them to find any means of supporting themselves without access to Mr. Rich’s gold. Oh, what a shame the discovery of neo-neo-alchemy was; if only science had left well enough alone.
I hope the contrived nature of the necessary scarcities in this example shows its sparse applicability in our world: in our world, Mr. Poor and his comrades would be able to ignore Mr. Rich and go on farming their own food, building their own houses, putting on their own entertainment, and so on, making their own entirely functioning, none-the-worse-for-wear economy, content to ignore Mr. Rich for as long as he’s unwilling to offer them goods at an attractive price.
Correction: we ignore 1(a) because we can all agree that a welfare economy would work fine, give or take any who don’t want to even discuss welfare economies. If you want do discuss welfare economies, fine: we can nod in agreement that they’d work until our necks break. Of course, not everyone seems to want a welfare economy or think one is necessary, so we spend some time discussing the other possibilities as well.
Correction 2: we leave aside 1(c) because persons with access to income in the robot society are all going to do fine. Therefore, there’s no point in discussing them overmuch, unless you disagree that such persons would do fine. Until you or somebody else does, I’m not going to debate with the empty air about them.
Correction 3: You oversimplified 1(b), perhaps intentionally for simplicity. Suffice to say, it’s actually composed of three separate subgroups: those whose jobs were never replaced by robots (arbitrarily guessed at being 20% of the population, those who lost their jobs to robots but were able to find other paying work that robots couldn’t do (arbitrarily guessed by me as being something less than the remaining 80% of the population, though there is disagreement on this point), and the third group, those who lose their jobs to robots and are unable to find work that can cover their essential costs (like food and shelter). This last group is who I’ve been talking about specifically, and you seem to be talking about them specifically as well, so that’s fine.
2 of course applies to this third subgroup of 1(b), and them alone.
Unless, of course, you live in a country where land isn’t free, squatting is illegal, and seeds and tools don’t appear spontaneously out of midair. You know, an oppressive country like our current one.
But for the moment we’ll assume that you are an excellent planner and retain your land (and avoid having to pay property taxes), buy tools, seeds, a simple shelter and a supply of food with your remaining savings, and able to ration your supplies enough to survive until the first round of crops come in. Everyone has that much foresight and restraint, so we can expect this of everyone.
Or you just squat on the land and steal stuff to use and live on until your crops come in, fending off the robot policemen with your leet martial arts robot killing skillz; whichever.
Hmm, I wonder how much bartering you can get away with before somebody decides to come collect sales tax from you?
But regardless, you might be able to set up your own little commune, an independent state within the larger state for as long as it decides to utterly ignore your existence. I accept that this is a viable way for some percentage of group 1(b) (subgroup three) to survive.
I don’t accept that many societies like this will be able to form, if for no other reason that it’s rather a lot of hard work (and the wait for that first crop could be a long, hungry time, too). If this is the only recourse that there people have, then lots of these people are probably going to die. (Of course, one presumes that the goverment and/or wealthy folk would extend welfare benefits before that occured, assuming the government isn’t populated by persons commited to a ‘the market is infallible’ ideology.)
For those few with the land, tools, supplies, physical ability, persistence, fortitude, and ability to avoid tax laws, sure.
Have you read the prior posts in this thread? They hypothetical closes of a heck of a lot of occupations down all at once while opening up relatively few other positions, and no unskilled entry-level positions. As far as I can tell it’s explicitly designed to create a situation where those who lose their jobs aren’t going to find other jobs waiting for them to take, and where this is happening on a massive, never-before-heard-of scale. This has never happened before, so references to historical mechanization are worthless.
But tell you what; the OP is sufficently vague that maybe the jobs are slowly eliminated one by one over the course of two hundred thousand years, and where maybe only 20% or 10% or 5% of the population even loses their jobs to robots anyway. (Maybe most jobs are “skilled”.) I’ll tell you what; all those hypothetical scenarios where things would just go on as normal, where your historical examples would apply? I concede them all; you win them. They’re not what I’m taking about.
Well, as I didn’t say that there were no jobs, this is a strawman. There are people with jobs and money, and the robots are producing things at a high enough price that their owners are making a profit, but at a low enough price that no human-manned competitor can undercut their prices. So they’re not giving the stuff away. So what you’re left with here is an excluded middle that explicitly doesn’t apply to the subgroup of people we’re arguing about. Better luck next time.
This has now reached the point where the discussion is really no more meaningful than “So, how will the economy work if the world’s hit by a fifteen-mile-wide asteroid and only the rich can afford underground shelters?,” with the answer to every post being “No, I don’t buy it, in my scenario everyone is screwed.”
Apparently there is no response to begbert’s robotalypse except his own conclusions, so why bother discussing it?
But again, the postulate that there are *no *unskilled entry-level positions must mean that robots can do lots of jobs for free.
Isn’t offering oral sex on the streetcorner an unskilled job? Again, if robots can provide blowjobs cheaper than women facing starvation on the streets, then robots are pretty much giving oral sex out for free. If robots can provide food cheaper than workers facing starvation in the streets, then robots are giving away food for free.
If robots are providing the unemployed with free blowjobs and free food, we could call that welfare I suppose, but it’s just as much welfare as providing the plutocrats free blowjobs and free food.
And lets look at why people starve. Why did the famine in, say, Ethiopia happen? Because people lost their jobs? No, because the war forced people to abandoned their farms for fear they’d be shot by the various factions. Since they couldn’t farm, they started starving. The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t scratch a living out of the soil, the problem was that some assholes would have killed them if they tried it.
So the hypothetical where the rich roboplutocrats send robocops and robosoldiers to destroy the pathetic farms and cardboard shanties of the newly unemployed isn’t exactly realistic, is it? If they do that, it’s because they’re sadists, not because they make more money if the homeless starve to death because they can’t even scavange the dumpsters.
The only way human labor can be worth zero is if robot labor is worth zero.
And what I’m hearing from you is “I refuse to discuss any scenario that doesn’t fit my preconceptions, regardless of whether it’s the scenario under discussion or even the one that the thread it explicitly about. If I see anything that disagrees will my preconceptions, it will be met by me answering as though it were the scenario that I imagine it to be, rather than the one it is.”
Well, in the rare case where somebody doesn’t fall back on the “but, but, but, this has never happened before!” line, they occasionally point out things I’ve overlooked in my reasoning. For example, we now have little communes engaging in subsistence farming scattered about the rural areas of the country, serving the needs of some of the former wage workers.
The real question is, why do I bother answering you?
I think begbert has a good point.
Here’s an analogy from the present day:
What is the marginal cost to Microsoft to provide somebody with a copy of Windows? Just about zero. And yet Windows is not free or even close to free. Because Microsoft has a monopoly and sets its prices accordingly.
Similarly, if robots are controlled by a monopolist, goods and services might not be free, even though there is little or no marginal cost to the monopolist to manufacture goods and provide services. So, without government intervention, it’s certainly possible that some people might end up unemployed and unable to share in the robotic bounty.
It’s seems unlikely that such a situation would last, though. If other people develop competing robots, it will drive prices down to cost. Also, it is likely that the government would step in and redistribute our newfound robotic wealth.
Ubuntu is free.
I guess I’m just trying to picture it. OK, two former software developers, now reduced to poverty. Living under bridges, scavenging for a living.
One spends all day gathering bits of broken branches, scraps of wood and paper. After backbreaking work all day, all he’s got to show for it is a tiny little pile, just enough for a small campfire.
The other spends all day hunting rats with a homemade slingshot. After hunting through the sewers and back alleys, he manages to bag two rats. But that’s it.
So they are sitting there under a bridge at the end of a long day. Then the guy with the two rats has an idea. “I’ll trade you one of my rats, and we’ll cook both of them over your campfire and get warm!”
Except the first guy refuses. “I don’t need your rat. You can’t compete with the robot rat catchers. I already traded a few scraps of paper for a rat of my own, I don’t need yours”. And then the second guy realizes that his proposed trade was silly, because there’s no way the first guy can compete with robot paper gatherers…he’d be better off trading his rat to a robot paper gatherer, and then he’d get even more burnable scraps than the first guy could possibly provide.
Except, wait. These guys are totally destitute, and there’s no work that they can do that a robot can’t do better. So there’s no way the first guy could gather paper and trade it to a robot for a rat, because a robot paper gatherer would outcompete him. So he doesn’t have a rat. And there’s no way the rat catcher could trade his rats to a robot paper gatherer for paper, because he can’t compete against robot rat catchers.
So it turns out that the rat catcher and the paper gatherer CAN trade after all, because their labor is worthless. So they happily trade, and both get warm, and both get a few bites of rat. Lucky them that their labor was worthless, otherwise they would have traded away their surplus production to robots, and wouldn’t have it available to trade with each other.
You’re quite right to be cynical about this notion. There are much better ways to achieve the same ends, and the groundwork is already being laid.
You “educate” the poor to believe that their condition is largely their own fault, that people of their own socioeconomic class are succeeding wildly because they are innovative and energetic and go-getters and such. You publicize the few such success stories you can find as widely as possible.
Meanwhile the vast majority of the poor are characterized as lazy slackers with a sick culture that promotes laziness and slackitude. You make the poor feel as worthless and useless as possible, and allow them to quietly starve to death in their homes.
Their daughters will also feel worthless and useless and the more attractive ones will prostitute themselves (the poor ones, too, but no real market there considering how many attractive ones will be prostituting themsleves) to the wealthy for pocket change, if only to keep themselves and their lazy slacker families alive. Everybody but the rich and their whores of various stripes (“entertainers” another poster described them as) dies. Profit!
Some young poor people will doubtless turn to crime and such, they’ll be fought as the enemies to all good people (including the poor) which will justify great repression, hastening the death of more poor people. Profit again!
Oh, what a wonderful world we will live in!
I get the feeling we aren’t all living in the same one.
So what?
Well, I was being flippant. But since you ask.
In your analogy, “Windows” represents the monopoly that robots have on labour, or on the products of labour.
What reason is there to think in this robotic hypothetical that the robots have a monopoly on labour? The only way this could be the case is if the hoi polloi were prevented from selling their labour by force. Because otherwise, the masses can sell their labour for whatever the market will bear (which in the hypothetical is supposed to be at or near zero, but the point stands). The moment that the robot owners jack up the prices of their goods, the labour of the masses regains its value - the robot owner wants an ounce of gold for a bushel of tomatoes, but I’ll sell you my tomatoes in exchange for a loaf of bread and a jug of milk. In a free market there’s no way to have a monopoly on labour unless you physically prevent those not in your employ from selling their own labour. But that, again, would simply be garden-variety oppression. The discussion is supposed to be on the economic impact of astonishingly inexpensive labour, not on whether someone with a robot army can oppress a nation.
The fact remains: if the market is free, then if I cannot sell the products of my labour at any price because of robotic competition, then the robots are giving it away for free. Which means everyone has as much of everything as they want - no scarcity of anything. Otherwise, I could sell my labour producing something scarce and in demand.
Not exactly, it’s the monopoly that a hypothetical Bill Gates has on robots (or robotic labor)
The problem comes when the robot owner wants a small price for a bushel of tomatoes or a loaf of bread. Small enough to break human competition, but large enough so that a lot of people end up poor.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from going out and producing your own goods and services. For example, if it would take 1 hour of labor to get the money to buy a bag of tomatoes, but only 45 minutes of labor to grow or gather the tomatoes yourself, then you may as well be a hunter/gatherer or farmer. And there are many people in the world who do this. But those people tend to be quite poor.
Again, I’m talking about a monopoly on robotic labor. Anyway, in a free market there will be people whose labor is valued very low by the market and who end up poor. That’s why we have minimum wage laws - so that people at the bottom won’t be screwed quite as badly.
The fact is that situations can arise where economically, society is better off as a whole, but a subset of the population gets screwed economically.
If it’s only a monopoly on robotic labour, then he can’t use the monopoly to price himself above his competition (human labour). Really, this isn’t much of a monopoly at all.
And this is self-contradictory, as has been explained repeatedly. If you can’t see why, I’m done trying to explain it.
You’ve got it 180 degrees wrong. The monopolist will under price human labor. That’s why a lot of people lose their jobs.
It’s not self-contradictory, and even today there are plenty of people in the world who live in poverty because their is little or no market demand for their labor.
I just wanted to address this point. Much of the world’s poverty is due not to a lack of demand for that labour, but because the labour is artificially prevented from use by political barriers of varying types:
- Third World farmers owe much of their impoverishment to First World governments that spend billions of dollars subsidizing large domestic agricultural corporations; the United States spends more money on farm subsidies, most of it given to big agribusiness, than it does on the Iraq war. Those subsidies and other trade restrictions keep Third World farmers out of much of a market they could make a profit in; basic foodstuff sales.
It goes beyond farming; it’s not commonly realized, but the industrialized world is utterly ruthless in its trade dealings with the Third World; since we hold all the cards as a result of history, there’s not a great deal they can do about it. Genuine free trade would benefit the Third World, but the industrialized world, despite what you hear, has never been interested in real free trade; our version of it tends to be “we’re free to trade in your country, maybe set up shop and ship cheap stuff back to our consumers, but you, not so much in ours.” And almost every First World government is guilty of this, to varying degrees; I’m not just picking on the USA.
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The nation-state system and border control prevents free flow of labour. I know it’s politically volatile, but the fact is that the relative ease with which Mexicans can cross the U.S. border reduces poverty; it allows labour to move towards the demand. If all the Mexicans who opted to move to the US had been prevented from doing so, both countries would be worse off; Mexico would havea surplus of labour, and the United States would have a deficit of labour. That border aisde, throughout the world a lot of labour is artifically prevented from moving around because of borders.
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And of course you have outright political oppression and government interference in the lives of their own citizens.
It’s not so much that we have surplus labour, but that it’s heavily underutilized. As has been pointed out, human beings are a resource. Africans could build decent economies but are prevented from doing so, in part if not mostly, by politics. Their governments are corrupt, the borders illogical, and their trade relations with the rest of the world restricted by other countries’ politics. The plight of poor people is not simply a case of a lack of resources; it is, to a large extent, a case whereby we are WASTING resources due to political inertia, stupidity, greed, and in some cases outright malice.
I apologize as this has been a step away from the topic, but it was worth noting.