A similar plan didn’t work out so well for France recently. France scraps 35-hour week in ‘bid to help business’
I wouldn’t consider all of that slowdown “bloat”. WindowsXP uses more resources, but does far more things than Windows95/3.11 that you would have been running on that 100 MHz laptop. The true measure of computing power is what you can do with it, not how fast it ticks - Apple learned this a long time ago and stopped labeling their PCs based on clock speeds. That trend is going to appear in the PC market fairly soon; AMD and Intel already started giving more vague names to their processors (my Athlon 3200+ actually clocks at somewhere around 2100 MHz).
But I don’t think things are going to expand much for computing in the near future. Voice and speech technology is still fairly poor all around (speech technology being more advanced, but simpler, and AT&T and others have made some good advances in speech recognition for phone systems), and the usefulness is questionable. The recent leasing of Honda’s robot as a secretary seemed a rather stupid and pointless publicity ploy to me that is already beyond its time.
Once we get up to 64-bit systems as standard… I suppose the next step will be standard dual-processor systems… but the next step beyond that is theoretical. Theoretical laser-based storage medium, theoretical base-10 chips, etc. THEN we can start talking about theoretical AI. Computing is still in its infancy.
That was a forced 35 hour week they are dropping though. At the end of the day the French still only work 1545 hours a year, which is 29.7 hours a week on average. Compared to the 70 hour workweek that the western world had up until the beginning of the 20th century that is still under half of number of hours spent working. Also children and housewives have more leisure time and do not do as many chores or help with agriculture as the did up until 100-200 years ago, so as a society we probably still only put in 1/3 as many hours as we used to. This pattern will probably just continue and maybe a 600 hour a year workyear will become normal when technology does everything for us.
And none of this is to even MENTION the incredibly and mysterious complexity of the human brain, which is entirely beyond what any computer system, theoretical or otherwise, is capable of. I suspect the first advances in AI will be neurological, in figuring out how our brain works, not technological.
I’m not buying the reduced work week, especially for low-skilled/low wage jobs, which is what we’re talking about here. Unless the Chinese and the Indians (and the rest of Asia) go along, they’ll put us out of business.
lee: Presumably because the capitalists also control the land and they are using it for other purposes and don’t appreciate you trying to squat on it.
Lemur866: Incorrect, resource costs will never drop to 0 because there is inherent scarcity in resources. Theres only so much land or fossil fuel or sunlight in the world.
Demorian: Your trying to refute the most extreme position and I agree that there are many dificulties, both philosophical and practical in replacing ALL labour with machines. But I’m not positing that. I imagine theres some percentage, lets say 10% of people who are simply mentally incapable of any job that requires any degree of freedom or responsibility. Today, these people are walmart checkers, fry cooks, telemarketers etc. I’m asking what happens once these jobs have been eliminated, they literally become worthless to society and how do we plan to deal with these people?
John Mace: People, whether they are from India or America still need food and shelter. Even an Indian can’t compete with a machine that can do their job 100x faster for 10x cheaper.
In his book [Future Shock](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-
/0553277375/ref%3Dpd%5Fsl%5Faw%5Falx-jeb-6-1%5Fbook%
5F2136024%5F1/103-0273631-4725415) discusses many changes that he foresaw back in 1970. Among them is exactly the one you have brought up here. Back then he thought that it would happen in the 1990s. He not only thought that we would all have more leisure time on our hands, but also said that we should make some people into “consumers”. They would have no other function except to consume. Get a copy and read it.
Of course, he was wrong and predicting things like this usually turns out to be wrong. :smack:
Eventually, China and India and all those other countries will demand the same level of affluence that is enjoyed in the West. These countries will not always be sources of cheap labor. Already we’re seeing the cost of labor rise in India and China as workers demand more than they currently have. As a result, some companies are moving their operations to Malaysia and Borneo; in a few years I suspect we’ll see them start to move to Africa. Eventually there’ll be nowhere left to move.
Oh, what delicious irony, that America invests so much into the economies of developing nations trying to make a quicker buck that we lose our advantage over them.
Most western European nations have developed extensive safety nets that work quite well. We should emulate them.
A point we agree on. I’ll be damned.
Not a huge portion at all. However, there is a distinction to be made between starving, i.e., going hungry and not being able to get food, and starving TO DEATH which is the same condition extended.
I DO think a huge portion of Americans starved at some point during the Depression. There was no safety net, there WAS a Dust Bowl. Many were also rendered homeless. Many families were broken up. It’s hard to view it as anything other than a catastrophic failure of capitalism. While all this was going on, the Vanderbilts and the Astors were giving dinner parties where their guests (only the BEST people of course) were given as party favors little pails of sand, through which they dug to find real gemstones. Lovely, eh?
You have my scenario right, although of course you have a cartoonish version of it. My reading of history is that the wealthy and powerful never give jack shit about the poor. The poor are disposed to bear misfortunes to an incredible degree, before they go into mass riots, etc. So I think that as production increases, a huge number of people will become economically unnecessary, and many of them may well become homeless and go hungry, though I think mass starvation will be avoided in the U.S. In Asia, believe me, there’ll be some mass starvation.
In the short term, I think outsourcing and such is heading the U.S. to a “race to the bottom” under free market capitalism, and believe me, Americans are NOT gonna like living on a bowl of rice a day with no money to purchase any material goods other than cheap radios and such. Mace and others think the fortunes of Asians are headed up and will meet us much farther from the bottom than currently exists in Asia. I am not so sanguine about that. One thing Asia appears to be able to create in quantity is excess people and poverty.
I do think you’re being snarky and I do not sense much in the way of respect in your words. That said, I haven’t taken any economics courses. I wasn’t aware that you needed to, in order to debate economics on a public message board. Of course, you are free to not respect my opinions based on my lack of formal training in this area, but since I don’t sense much of that in the first place, I figure it’s a small loss.
And oh yeah, it’s an argumentum ad hominem, and an argument to authority, two of your basic errors in logic. Have you ever studied rhetoric or logic?
I see your point. You are right of course, the rich guys really do need a market for their widgets to retain their wealth. I just don’t think the bulk of them are smart enough to see that point. I think history DEMONSTRATES this fact.
What I think would happen under the full automation scenario is that the range of products are going to devolve into two very bifurcated markets – products for the wealthy few, characterized by, say, jewel-encrusted lorgnettes, and products for the very poor masses, characterized by, say, cheap plastic rice bowls. The middle class range of products like fishing boats, high end electronics, single family homes, backyard barbecue grills, etc., will slowly disappear as the middle class is subsumed into the poorer classes. The wealthy will continue to make widgets for both markets very happily as America dissolves into a third world nation.
I think I answered most of these questions in the preceding paragraph. How and why do you think the wealth will prop up the middle class so they can afford high-end goods if their services and work no longer have value? Most free market capitalists will tell you they should not.
I hope you are right.
This would make an excellent SF story.
Now, as to the AIs, I don’t think you need to postulate the existence of AIs to have my scenario work. Robotic hands already work in factories, the big hitch right now is developing computer software that can understand what the various widgets are and how they need to go together so they can work the hands properly. The robots I’m thinking of aren’t those silly human simulacra that Honda and others do for publicity purposes. I’m thinking more of the sort of thing you see on the Food Channel show “Unwrapped” only even more efficient. That’s not SF, that’s just a predictable, incremental improvement over what we have now.
Irony? The idea that everyone becomes better off (richer) is the appeal of capitalism. Everyone with any economics knowledge at all expects the workers of China and India to start demanding higher wages, and to increase their quality of living. Far from irony, this is the core of the capitalist system.
Upon further consideration, I realize that my post does not contribute to the thread, and was a knee-jerk reaction. Please disregard my comments. I apologize if my presence contributes to hijacking the thread.
Well, since I’ve tried to apologize in advance, I would disagree with your ad hominem reasoning. Let me apologize again, that I do not mean any disrespect. And, yes, I’ve studied both rhetoric and logic. I asked you these questions because I wanted to know how much of an economic lesson I need to put into my responses (I didn’t want to sound patronizing). You seem pretty bright, because your arguments are not unreasonable, and you seem to grasp the concepts.
IMHO, you seem to have a great distrust of rich people (or at least the super-wealthy). It’s not unreasonable, especially since the media seems to glorify their excess, and such excess can seem inconceivable to most. However, just the basic understanding of running a business will make the business owners aware of running a market. The open market is a cruel mistress, particularly when your widget falls out of favor (loses demand). However, now that I re-read my statements in contrast to your quote above, I may be talking past you. What example do you have in history of the super-rich not seeing the need for a market? Without their markets, the super-rich become just as poor and dull as the rest of the shlubs.
Well, I definitely can see the first part of your paragraph as happening, but I disagree with the rest of it. What you describe in the beginning, up to the “middle range of products” part is often called the commodization of products. This is often the death knell of the high profit margin for the widget. Without going into a full blown discourse, this is when a widget becomes undifferentiated, that is, there is no difference between one thing and another, essentially. It can also be seen as when the competition has caught up to the original manufacturer in terms of production, such that if there are variations between product to product, those differences are wholly captured in price. For ex, if you want a better car, you’re going to have to pay a little more. (My gear head friends tell me that the only thing stopping your car from being the fastest, the best, the most whatever is if the technology exists (e.g. mach engines) and your pocket book). As a consumer, you want everything to be commoditized because the price of the widget will greatly disclose information about the relative worth of the widget (i.e. it costs more, ergo it must be better). Also, the more commoditized a product, the more it will be available to the masses.
No other type of economic system can produce this result better, faster, more efficiently than a capitalist economy. 20 years ago, everyone would have said that a computer was a luxury item. 60 years ago everyone would have said that the telephone was a luxury item. Before that, the car, the refrigerator, etc., etc. Not only are these products available to the middle class, the dirt poor have access to these things as well. One would pretty much have to be homeless to not have any of these things.
Even the luxury items you forsee will also fall the way of commodization. Are you arguing that it’s unfair that only the select super-rich can afford a two-day stay in a hard-light, 3D, holo-suite, while the rest of the masses must suffer with our 63", HD, plasma tvs?
Are you referring to these super-machines that will make labor obsolete except for the select few (or one) that own the machines? Those machines have a name, they’re called replicators. When that happens, the economy as we know it will break down. In fact, all economic systems that have any sort of supply-demand structure (in other words, all of them that we know), will be obsolete. At this point, wealth, in terms of goods and services, will have no meaning b/c goods and services are unlimited. I would show you a graph, but it would be incomprehensible. If you know what the demand and supply curve looks like imagine that D = infinity, and S = undefined, that’s not exactly what it will look like, but it will give you some idea.
Anyway, Lemur describes a better scenario of what happens. Prices fall to 0. Why would the capitalist produce anything if he cannot derive wealth from it? He might as well give it away. There is nothing the unemployed masses can give him, unless you believe in selling souls or something. But, there will always be markets. The capitalist economy is self-perpetuating.
mazinger, leaving aside the fact that your scenario is mine pushed to the extreme and presents a rather unrealistic solution, theres no reason to believe that automation can do anything to push resource costs down to 0. Just because robots can replace human labour doesn’t mean you still need an acre of land to produce so much corn.
If your rich and you want to use your land as a natural game reserve, and there are people who are poor and need corn, why would you grow corn? What could they give you in exchange for corn? Even if you only use the game reserve once a year, it’s still a better than giving it away.
I was just responding to the question. However, there is no reason to believe that labor costs will ever = 0, there will always be something that a human can do that a machine can’t do. But, suppose there is, then there is no need for labor. Briefly speaking, if there is no labor, then there is no market. The only thing stopping from the replicators from producing is any type of energy or material resources that are needed. I think all economists would agree that we would run out of resources in orders of magnitude in centuries before labor becomes obsolete.
Those poor people could probably not force you, market wise, to change your game reserve into a corn field. So, yes, there is no economic incentive from those poor people, at least in the short term. However, it is short-sighted to see those two groups relative to each other, without seeing it in context of the greater market. Eventually, realistically, the land owner is going to need something that the poor people can provide and when that happens, more than likely the price will be high. In the meantime, the poor people will have to get their corn from somewhere/someone else who has something that they want to exchange. If it is still unavailable, then the government will have to step in and redistribute (i.e. tax) – which I argue is a necessary function of the government anyway, e.g. et al, ease the transition between economic cycles.