For people of certain skin tones, this day has been around for a while now.
RickJay–which Third World nations have surplus food to trade?
Just asking.
It depends where you draw the line for “Third World,” but s it stands, not as many as you would like… because they’re flooded with subsidized food from the industrialized world. Why would you grow food for export if you can’t export it?
No, dammit. :mad: :dubious:
Malnutrition is a major Third World problem. Who has it to sell?
Yes, I suppose a glib comment deserves a glib response. It’s interesting to note, though, few in this thread know the skin tone, etc., of the others in the thread. Not that I would consider it particularly pertinent to the discussion.
But if I can grow a bag of tomatoes with 45 minutes of work, why can’t I trade (that is, sell) those tomatoes to my other fellow impoverished people?
That’s the thing you’re not getting. If a human being can work to feed himself, then his labor has value, because if he can grow food for himself and make a cardboard shack for himself, then he can grow food or make cardboard shacks for other people.
If a starving person can work as a subsistence farmer or hunter-gatherer, then the value of their labor is not zero.
You seem to understand this, because you say that you know that their labor isn’t worth zero…it’s just worth less than a robot’s labor. The robot will always work cheaper. But can’t you see that this can’t be the case, unless people are prevented from working as hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers? If humans are able to work as subsistence farmers, why can’t another human work as a blacksmith producing metal goods in return for food?
Yeah, a robot blacksmith will undercut him. HOW? The human blacksmith works for a bag of homegrown tomatoes. Therefore, the robot blacksmtih would be obligated to work for even less than a bag of homegrown tomatoes. But we’ve established that the homegrown tomatoes are always more expensive than robot grown tomatoes. Therefore the robot would refuse to work for a bag of homegrown tomatoes and would instead exchange his robolabor for a bag of robotomatoes. And therefore, the human blacksmith still has a job because he’s found a way to undercut the robot blacksmith. And so do all sorts of people.
And this is why the scenario won’t work. It’s entirely plausible for 80% of all work types done in 2008 to be automated in 2108, and no humans will do those jobs. Heck, it’s even plausible for 80% of people in 2108 to be unemployed as we would consider it. But those people won’t be unemployed because they’re starving in a gutter, they’ll be unemployed because selling their labor won’t be worth it for them…they’re better off sitting at home. If they were starving in a gutter it would be worth it for them to work, even if all they got after 12 hours of backbreaking labor was a crust of bread. But if they’re better off sitting at home, then they must be at least getting a crust of bread every day, somehow.
So what’s the flaw in my reasoning?
There’s nothing stopping you at all. And there plenty of places in the world that have these sorts of economies running. (Indeed, every nation’s economy is like that in some sense) The problem (actually, one problem) is that a lot of people don’t have the ability or skills to grow enough tomatoes (or whatever) to stay out of poverty.
I haven’t claimed that human labor has no value.
It’s not that it’s worth less, it’s that it costs less.
Some can and some can’t.
No we haven’t. In a competitive market, the price would be about the same.
Well, that would be a big problem. That would be poverty.
I’m very skeptical. According to this cite – Agricultural subsidy - Wikipedia –
the U.S. agricultural subsidy is about $16billion/year.
According to this cite – http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_8149197 – the cost of the Iraq war is $8 to $10 billion per month.
But anyway, if you want to start a thread on the issue, I will try to participate.
The Third World isn’t undernourished for a lack of arable land and farmers; it’s undernourished because of politics.
The people who’re dying in the Sudan aren’t dying because they magically ran out of food; they’re dying because they’re being murdered. I’ll grant that that is an extreme example, of course. In most of the Third World, there’s plenty of opportunity to farm grains and pulses and other basic crops; wheat, rice, soy and what have you. I mean, that’s how those people GOT there; India doesn’t have a billion people in it because it’s a bad place to grow crops. There’s opportunity to grow non-food crops as well - jute, cotton, hemp and what have you. But the First World won’t buy it, or at least in a lot of cases will not buy it, because they protect their own industries by propping them up with price controls, handouts, and protectionist barriers.
Try to imagine being a farmer who can never trade with anyone else. I’ll give you and your family - you can bring a few cousins and such, if you don’t have enough kids - a huge farm in Iowa, but for the next 20 years you must go it completely alone. You might do well this year, or you might do well for five years, but (1) you’re going to have trouble farming a complete diet by yourself anyway, and (2) the first year you have a bad year you’re going to die. If I allow you to trade, however, in good years you can trade excess crops and livestock for money. That money can be used to upgrade your capacity, and can be socked away to get you through the lean years. Or you can invest it to teach your kid a trade he can earn money on without having to farm.
But if you can’t trade, you are, sooner or later, screwed; you could never enhance your productivity, branch out from farming, or benefit from a bumper crop.
If you believe this to be true, how do you explain the fact that generation-X is the first generation to earn significantly less than their parents at the same age? (the study compared wages from now and 1974. We lag by 12% ) Even though we’re far more likely - by a factor of 50% - to have a college education than our parents did in 1974? Not just higher debt from our educations, mind, but earning less. If you account for both lower average earnings overall and better education which we’ve been assured ought to lead to greater wealth than not having them, what causes our wages to be lower if not changes in business practices like mechanization and off-shoring?
We’re having trouble now, so why do you believe it wouldn’t be much worse if we eliminated more jobs?
Again, I’m skeptical. Look at the case of Zimbabwe. The country booted most of its farmers and its food production dropped dramatically. How is that the fault of trade policies of the developed world? But anyway, it’s really a topic for another thread.
Bull.
Large scale mechanized farming is incredibly efficient. Modern pesticides cut crop losses dramatically. Look at Kansas, for Og’s sake! It produces more wheat, more corn* than all of Western Europe*, dammit!
Third World farmers use small plots of land, & are often bitterly opposed to innovation. Don’t hand me that stuff about how people will make the best economic choices, either. Agricultural societies are strongly hostile to change; been that way since Agriculture began in the Neolithic. Anti-European/American paranoia runs amok in Africa. Remember when Nigerian religious leaders organized boycots of vaccinations, because they suspected an American plot? How are we gonna help them? They still hate Europe for what was done 100 years ago!
Consider the insect problems that tropical nations have, & northern latitude nations don’t.
You assessments of the situation are far too simplistic. Take off the rose-colored Ray-Bans, Rick.
Sure it is. I’m curious, though, as to why it still needs billions of dollars in direct payouts from the governments that prop it up?
No, it does not. Darned if I know where you picked that up, but France, by itself, produces over 35 million tons of what a year; Kansas produces 10-12 million per year. France produces more wheat than Kansas produces of wheat and corn combined. Not that this has anything to do with the subject at hand.
You’re right. They have lots of their own problems, as I’ve said three times now. We should definitely continue to levy huge trade restrictions on them. That’ll help.
Of course my assessment is simplistic; I’m posting on a message board and was making a straightforward comment, not providing a master’s thesis. The first world is predatory in its trade relations with the Third World; it’s just the way strong nations deal with weak ones.
First of all, saying that there will always be productive work for humans is not the same as saying that salaries will always increase with every generation. I don’t know why you’re drawing this particular parallel at all.
Second, there could be lots of reasons why Gen X isn’t earning as much as the previous generation. In fact, you may have hit on one of the reasons in your own post: Gen X has a lot more people who went to college. That means a higher percentage of people in GenX stayed out of the work force for at least 4 years longer than their parents. Now, you’d think the college education would compensate for this, but not necessarily. If the value of college degrees has decreased because they’ve become the new norm, then college might not be as beneficial as it was in the past. Plus, if more people in the past who went to college studied medicine and engineering, and more people now study history and english and policial science and art, then I would expect college educations to have less impact.
But that’s just one possibiity off the top of my head. Another is that more women are employed in Gen X than in previous generations, and women earn less than men because they take time off of work to have babies and raise families.
It could also be the effect of oursourcing of some labor which hit Gen X particularly hard, or some other economic change that disproportionally affects that generation. For example, Gen X so far has gone through two recessions. So has everyone else, but Gen X was more vulnerable to them as they were the youngest cohort in the work force during the first one.
Overall, it doesn’t really have anything to do with this thread.
Your link’s broken. Or maybe, in some subtle way, that was the point.
Now I feel stupid.
This was posted a while back, but I just now slogged through the whole thread.
Besides all of the rest of the doom-and-gloom anti-capitalist predictions made by begbert2, this particular prediction particularly struck me as off the mark.
I work as an civil/environmental engineer. My current company apparently searched for a year to fill my position, and as it turns out, I’m leaving after only working here for a couple of months to work for a public utility. (Fewer hours, more pay, more stability, no travel whatsoever–pretty much a no-brainer.)
As you might guess, people in my industry are in high demand. So much so that companies in my industry hire many students who have NOT completed their educations as interns. They even hire people who have dropped out of school, or never went to college (though their upward mobility is limited).
Our interns do the same work that junior degreed engineers perform (though they are paid less).
With respect to unskilled workers, we currently hire unskilled office personnel for work as administrative assistants. No college degree required. Their main job is to answer the phone, which could easily be automated. However, people prefer to speak to a live person when they call the office, and we engineers are too busy to answer the phone, so we hire unskilled people to do this for us. One of these AAs was so effective that she got promoted to the position of Technical Project Coordinator, in effect, doing some of the same work that engineers do to take the load off of us.
Another example: We hire [initially] unskilled field personnel for work as construction inspectors. Inspectors rarely have a college degree. Whether a robot or a live construction worker is installing water and sewer mains, you need an inspector to ensure the work is being done properly. Inspection work was formerly done by junior engineers, but engineers are generally too valuable to waste on inspection work today.
I’ll cheerfully concede interning, with the realization that there still needs to be some method of educating the prospective intern to the limited level that wil make them hireable as an intern. What this would require would vary, I presume; the interning position I had desired only a year or two of education in the pertinent subject (computer programming), but I suspect medical interning would require a bit larger of a ‘leg up’.
I didn’t write the OP, so don’t blame me. By it, one presumes that unskilled labor is automated. Perhaps somebody’ll slap a female version of Dr. Sbaitso onto an expert system, I dunno.
Again, it’s not my OP. Don’t blame me.
And, “doom-and-gloom anti-capitalist predictions”? Heh, that’s pretty funny! Even putting aside that nobody with ten brain cells is actually predicting that this outrageously unlikely scenario will occur, in order to coax the “doom and gloom” scenarios to play out, you’d need either a tyrannical, non-influencable or -overthrowable government, that also has the same fanatacal dedication to the “the unrestrained free market must always be the best thing for everyone, like it was in the US before the advent of unions” mindset that I’m seeing from some people in this thread. And the might have to rescind all welfare too, given the expected low prices.
Heh, “doom-and-gloom anti-capitalist” 
Once again… Is there any evidence that it’s the ‘unskilled’ jobs that would be automated? Has there been a lot of automation in the home building business? How about fast food? Wal-Mart?
There seems to be this assumption that computers and robots would take away the jobs of poor and stupid people. I don’t see much evidence of this, outside of assembly lines. If I think about all the jobs that pay low wages (gardener, nanny, roadside cleanup, fast-food clerk, retail sales employee, and all the higher paying jobs that don’t require college degrees (the various trades), very few of them are vulnerable to automation, and not that many to outsourcing.
If you look at the kinds of jobs that computers and automation have been replacing (secretaries, accountants, bookkeepers, printers, draftspeople), it certainly doesn’t seem to be the poor.
But again, the underlying premise of this thread seems to be more tedious class warfare, so “the robots are going to hurt the poor!” fits the narrative.
The qualities of a job that make it susceptible to automation have little to do with education or salary, and more to do with the environment and nature of the particular task.
Until the recent past, the majority of stupid people worked in agriculture. As did the majority of smart people. Most of those jobs are gone. What if anything does this mean about the future? Possibly that automation will affect everyone.
Anyway, as I mentioned before, most jobs that are usually thought of as unskilled actually require a high degree of cognitive sophistication. We just tend to take those skills for granted since just about everyone has them.
Eliezar Yudkowsky pointed this out in one of his talks: It’s easy to think that there’s a huge cognitive gap between Einstein and the village idiot, but in an absolute sense, they are pretty close.
So in my opinion, it’s likely that if and when robots replace unskilled labor, they will quickly replace most forms of labor.