The book The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future is about this transition, and the end result (assuming technology results in this scenario, of course). The book argues that, unlike the progress in the last 200 years, technology will eventually make many jobs obsolete without new, different jobs to replace them. Without jobs for everyone, there are very few consumers, and thus our system breaks down.
According to the book, the massive increases in productivity and drastically lower labor costs allow much higher taxes on businesses, ultimately resulting in business taxes on business comparable to the original labor costs. These taxes are then distributed back to the people, allowing them to be consumers. Hopefully this would be a gradual occurrence, as specific jobs and sectors were affected.
Tough to predict how our society will actually react to disruptive technological changes over the next 50-80 years.
So the “ultra-rich” are the capitalist owners of robot factories, yes? And these robot factories churn out every product imaginable, yes? And the ultra-rich are rich because they provide these products? And everyone else become welfare bums? Except, who are the ultra-rich selling products to? Each other? There are no consumers in this scenario. Therefore, how does owning a robot factory make you rich?
A guy with his factory churing out every product imaginable isn’t rich. Sure, he can make anything he wants. So what? What does he do with those piles of stuff? He can’t sell them, can he? What would he sell them FOR? What would he exchange his worthless piles of junk for, that he wants?
When the marginal cost of producing a product is essentially zero, then you can’t get rich manufacturing that product. It becomes free. It doesn’t matter if the product is diamond necklaces or digital watches or luxury cars or plastic toys or soybeans. In fact, the example of agricultural products is entirely analgous.
Back in the feudal era, what was the basis of wealth? Land. And why? Because serfs worked the land to produce agricultural products that everyone needed to live. Wheat, grapes, olives, wool, and so on were the basis of every aristocrat’s wealth. And the surplus food supported a small class of artisans and priests and so on. But the vast majority of workers were agricultural workers.
So suppose there is an agricultural revolution, and agricultural products can be grown at a fraction of the cost using a fraciton of the labor. What now? The feudal aristocrats become fantastically rich, and the former serfs now become beggars dependent on the scraps from the lord’s table? Is that what happened? No, what happened is that the amount of wealth you could generate from agriculture plummeted relative to the amount of wealth you could generate by manufacturing. We produced much more food than ever before and the food was worth less and less. The Earth has 7 billion people today, and never in human history has each person been so well fed.
So consider the poor capitalist factory owner. When the marginal cost of production drops and drops and drops, do the products of his factory retain their value? Of course not. The flood of manufactured products means that manufactured products become cheaper and cheaper, and eventually so cheap that you can barely give them away.
And we’re already beginning this process. Do the thousands of new factories in China make the factory owners fantastically rich? No. Oh, they make money, especially compared to the starving communist peasantry of a few decades ago. But ownership of a factory that makes goods for dirt cheap doesn’t make you rich, any more than ownership of a farm that produces a flood of cheap corn and wheat makes you rich.
But won’t the industrialists use the political process to keep the workers/former-workers-now-beggars enslaved? But to what end? The agricultural aristocrats tried to hang onto their privileges too, but when mass production knocked the floor out of the value of agriculture, how could they? Those who control valuable goods and services control society, not those who control formerly valuable goods and services. Yes, the people of the future will need manufactured goods, and there will be a flood of manufactured goods. But the people who control the factories that produce those goods won’t be rich any more than modern farmers are rich.
Go to any city in America, and if you stand in the right line, someone will hand you a free meal. People used to literally starve to death when they couldn’t find jobs and didn’t have land to work. Nobody starves nowadays, because the cost of food is so low that we just hand it out. Yes, we have so much food nowadays that the poor are fat and the rich are thin.
And so in the future, the guy whose giant house is stuffed with gadgets and gizmos and diamond necklaces and clothes and cars and fountains will be considered poor and crazy, just like the rich today don’t have giant pantries bulging with packaged snack cakes. The meaning and value of these things will be different.
And as for the value of information, well, the marginal cost of making another digital copy of information is already zero. The cost of making the information in the first place isn’t zero, but once we’ve already created it then copying it over and over costs nothing. And so basing a fortune on control of information seems pretty unlikely as well. You have to continually create new information to stay in the same place, because very soon the information is worth nothing, because the marginal cost of copying it is nothing.
Arjuna, that book looks fantastic–I have put it on my Amazon Wishlist at highest priority–thanks!
BrainGlutton, the idea of space colonisation “keeping the herd moving” is intriguing. Makes sense.
Lemur866, your whole post is very well observed. But isn’t the difference this time that in those other revolutions, there was still stuff that human labour was needed to do to keep the new orientation of society working? The labour force moved from farms to factories to service positions; but if those are all automated, what then? I can see a big expansion in people working in the arts, research, etc.; but what of the common folk who aren’t so intellectually oriented? What will they do? And do you see upheaval along the way, or just a steadily larger and larger percentage of the population living on welfare until at some point that seems obsolete and unnecessary?
I believe that great proponent of robotics Isaac Asimov thought a lot about these questions.
Many years ago I read an essay either by Asimov or by someone else who was discussing Asimov’s ideas on this. (Sorry, no cite, this was many years ago.) Asimov’s idea was that robots would take over most of mankind’s productive work, creating a mass leisure society. He envisioned that there would only a minimal amount of work requiring human hands. This would be done by a very small work force, perhaps working only a small number of hours a week. Pretty much everybody else would live lives of total leisure.
That small workforce of very-part-time workers, plus all the robots, would produce all the goods (and services?) that everyone might need.
I don’t recall anything said about how we would make the transition to such an economic model. But it might be plausible if it happened gradually, as the above description seems to imply. As robots become increasingly commonplace and productive, more and more people would work fewer and fewer hours (or not at all), but there would be enough goods produced to maintain everybody. As long as the robots and minimal work force kept the supply of goods adequate for everybody, prices would stay in line with what people could pay. A massively welfare-economy would evolve to provide for those who don’t work at all. This is the part that I think would be difficult to achieve. I think creating a massively welfare-based economy would be very difficult – or at least, it would require a major paradigm shift from the capitalist economy we have now.
The result will most likely be hyper-fascism. A small number of wealthy families will control this labor pool that have no rights and do whatever is necessarily to eliminate any threat to their new royalty system, IE eliminate the vast majority of the human population (99.9% or so).
So the hyper-rich slaughter billions of threatening unemployed people. And how are they hyper-rich better off after they murder everyone? OK, they have their automated factories that can produce whatever goods and services needed, so they don’t need the useless proles. And now what? They aren’t any better off. And now they aren’t hyper-rich anymore, are they?
Because to be “rich” you need to have a better standard of living than the guy next door. When the aristocrats kill off the peasants, they aren’t aristocrats anymore, even if they have the same luxuries as before. Now the peasants are dead, and everyone on earth is a hyper-rich owner of an automated factory. How is that different than just allowing the peasants to own automated factories?
Again, automated manufacturing means that the marginal cost of production drops to zero, which means that the value of owning an automated factory drops to zero. Take a look at how products are produced nowadays. Some guy or some firm comes up with an idea for a product. They set up a factory in China. The factory churns out millions of widgets. But how much wealth stays in China? The majority of the profit goes to the designers. And this is because the factory has no leverage. If the factory tries to claim a greater share of the profits, then the company will just find another factory in another part of the world to produce the widgets.
In other words, the factory itself adds almost no value to the product. Of course somehow somewhere the company needs a factory to produce the widgets. But since the manufacturing itself is dirt cheap and a small fraction of the cost of producing the widget, the location and owner of the factory doesn’t matter. The factory owners become the equivalent of day laborers who get orders to produce such and such and get paid a pittance, because there are plenty of other hungry factories who need the work.
I don’t see how a robotic laborforce equals robots taking over. If robots take over they will do so on their own accord, not by replacing manual human labor. We already have those to a certain degree.
Still raw materials and energy will be as scarce as they are now if not more. And the need for human interaction will rise with all these robots, so maybe there will be lots of jobs for ppl entertaining/catering others.
So in the end there will always be a reason to go make/earn a living, even if it is beyond the basic human needs and totally artificial. And then ofcourse there is the need for (personal) consumption. I don’t see a scenario where no human will think : “I want it, and I want it for me myself and I alone.” No robotic laborforce will ever be able to fulfill those wants and haves, and even if it did we’ll just create some new ones.
A certain number of the poor would be kept alive for use as prostitutes, artists, informants, ect. Mostly though you don’t want a large, conuming, polluting, potentially revolutionary population around. Being rich in this context will be to have one’s individual desires and ambitions multiplied many times by robot labor. Though many of this new humanity would not consider themselves rich but perhaps some kind of destined minority of perfect citizens in a grand new era of democracy and prosperity.
True enough, but a) they would be in a minority and b) they would do so by choice. If everyone is guaranteed house, feed and entertainment by the robots, then only those motivated to have more or do more would work.
Which, in my mind, is a different situation from having to work a job you mostly loathe because there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch and seeing other people getting free fucking lunches that **you **were just told there ainten’t.
The answer to this question is obvious to any engineer. Why would you design a factory robot to want to become human ? Because you can, and it would make the other engineers go “Cool !”.
Think of it like this. A couple of hundred years ago, most people worked in agriculture. Since most wealth was generated by the production of crops or livestock, it was a direct function of who owned the most land.
A hundred or so years ago, the Industrial Revolution created a new form of wealth. The ability to make shit and lots of it. People got rich by making lots of stuff or inventing new ways for people to make stuff. It also had the effect of transferring the work force from working on farms to working in factories.
In the past 50 years, it’s been about information. As technology and automation has made it easier to make stuff, the focus has shifted to figuring out what to make and how to make it more efficiently. Again, much of the work force has shifted from working in factories to working on the systems that run them.
It stands to reason that in the future, more and more decision making will be handled more cheaply and more efficiently by decision support systems. The company I work for makes software that analyzes data to tell salespeople who they should sell to. A lot of companies have systems that tell them when they should buy. How much longer until those systems are linked and you don’t even need salespeople at all?
So when the drudgery of working on farms, factories and IT development centers becomes a thing of the past, what would be the next step? With the ability to produce so much so quickly, society would likely be highly socialized. After all, what does capitalist cutthrough efficiency matter when you can cheaply produce more than most people can ever use?
But what would pass for currency in a society where wealth was no longer based on land ownership, production capacity, or even intellectual property? The only thing left is the ability to amuse and entertain the masses of interchangable carbon blobs sitting in front of their 3D vid walls eating massive piles of cheap food.
You wouldn’t teach kids to study math or science or even law or medicine. I would no more want my kids toiling in a data mine than my parents wanted me toiling in a coal mine. You would tell them to spend extra hours at the gym, tanning salon and laundrymat. Your “resume” would be the assorted clips posted on whatever future version of Youtube and Facebook exist.
The world of the future would look a lot like Idiocracy. The difference is that people wouldn’t have bred themselves stupid. They would just be stupid because there would be no reason to not be.
Future generations would look at Snookie and The Situation the way we look at Henry Ford or Bill Gates.
These responses are fantastic–beyond what I could have hoped. You guys deserve great credit as provocative thinkers. Kudos. I just thought of another sci-fi type scenario, though more of a truly hypothetical one, which I shall post forthwith.
What “threat”? Owning an automated factory will mean nothing. It won’t give you any power. This is like a medieval peasant imagining that the drivers of combine harvesters would be the most powerful people of the modern era. After all, they control the food! Think of the power!
Except the driver of the combine isn’t rich, is he, because anybody could do his job. The owner of an automated factory isn’t going to be rich, because the first thing someone’s going to build with their automated factory is another automated factory. Wait, second thing. The first thing will be a fully functional sexbot. The second will be another automated factory.
A magic factory that produces an endless cornucopia of goods and services would make you a wealthy man–today. A factory in the future that produces the exact same cornucopia, except there are millions of other automated factories would be worth nothing. What good is it? If can make you anything you want? Yeah, and so can any other factory. You can produce piles and piles of diamond necklaces? Yeah, and so can any other factory. Those diamond necklaces are worth nothing, because it costs nothing to produce them. The goods and services pouring out of your factory are worth nothing, and so your factory that can produce literally anything you can imagine is also worth nothing.
By that I mean, if you take a hammer and carefully smash your factory to bits, you won’t be any worse off than you were before. Yeah, you won’t have a river of manufactured goods pouring out any more. So what? You can get any manufactured good you can imagine for free, there are piles of them everywhere, or would be if robots didn’t follow around behind people scooping up their discarded trash and dumping it back into hoppers to be used as raw materials.
In a world where every material good costs nothing to produce, material goods are worthless. People who have ownership of factories that make these material goods will be as rich and powerful as people today who have all the air they could ever want. It’s the abundance of air that makes air worthless. Yes, you’ll die in minutes without air. On a planet where air has to be laboriously manufactured by hand, the people who controlled the air supply would control the world. On a planet with a blanket of air a mile thick, it’s ludicrous to speak of controlling the air.
Yes, there will be times and places where future people in a world of prosperity will have to work hard to make sure they have the material goods and services they need to live, just like there are times and places today where people have to work hard to make sure they have enough air. If you’re in a submarine, or a burning house, or climbing Mt Everest, or visiting the Moon, you have to laboriously carry your air with you. That doesn’t mean that the air barons rule the world.
Nah, there’s a lot of stuff that people need/want and robots can’t quite do besides Hollywood. Restauration, politics, religion, security, police, journalism, sex, science… just off the top of my head. Keeping the damn robots in check too, 'cause you know you can’t trust them. Shifty. Scheming, dead [del]eyes[/del]photosensors. Don’t like 'em.
Skill is its own form of currency. You maybe can cook a mean gumbo, but I sure can’t. All I can make is a slightly antagonistic mush with fish in it.
the owners of the combines and the land were very rich, but sure they didn’t actually drive them themselves, that’s peasant work. Whichever mechanism you use to control the means of production and therefore select for yourself as much benefit as is possible from it is only specific to time, place and culture, the result is the same and not that hard to understand.
How do you “control” the means of production when every good or service you can imagine comes pouring out of a magic box at the touch of a button? Actually, you have your robot butler press the button for you, no sense getting off the couch.
Yes, there will be things in scarce supply in the future world of the future, and the people who control or supply those things will be fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the Pharoahs, or the Gateses. But these fabulously wealthy masters of the future universe won’t be wealthy because they own worthless factories, any more than the megawealthy of today own vast agricultural estates. The objects won’t mean anything, the boxes that make objects won’t mean anything, and so the megawealthy of the future won’t concern themselves with worthless junk like material goods that any hobo can have.
This is why the spartan aesthetic of Star Trek makes perfect sense to me. Why would people who come from a society where any good you want can be materialized out of a magic box care about decorations or fine clothes or fancy silverware or fast cars? You want a diamond necklace just ask for one, and when you’re done you throw it away. And the fact that you can have one anytime you want one means you won’t ever want one.
It isn’t hard to see that the wealthy are those that control scarce goods and services. If goods are pouring out of robot factories, then those goods have little value relative to other things. We see the effects even today. 300 years ago a man who had a dozen suits of clothes was incredibly wealthy. How many pairs of shoes and pants and shirts do you own? Nowadays you can’t pawn your overcoat to buy food the way they do in old movies, because your old overcoat might sell for a few dollars at Goodwill but you’ll never find a pawn shop willing to buy your warm coat made of space age polymers for more than a few cents.
Just because you produce something that everyone wants and needs doesn’t make you rich. I can think of dozens of products that you use every single day and would die without, yet you pay a pittance for them. Again, supply and demand. It doesn’t matter that you’d die without air, the air is all around you and you don’t need to pay for it.
A future where the ultra-wealthy have a stranglehold on a few jealously guarded automated factories is about as plausible as a future where the ultra-wealthy declare that they own the air, and have installed choke-collars on everyone, and if you don’t pay your air bill the collar strangles you to death. In this scenario the wealthy don’t really own the air, they’re just able to kill you if you don’t obey their every whim.
And a world where there are automated factories that produce essentially free goods, yet the supply of goods is artificially limited by the powerful makes no sense, because what do the powerful get out of it? They don’t get more goods for themselves, they get less. A world with a million capitalist oligarchs who own everything and 7 billion beggars who own and produce and consume nothing makes no sense. An industrialist only has wealth when people buy his products. An industrialist who has no customers isn’t an industrialist, he’s a guy with a pile of junk in his backyard. There are billions of people who want the stuff, but have nothing the industrialist could want in return. Therefore since they have nothing of value to him, not even their slave labor, there’s no point in producing the goods. He shuts off his factory, closes the gates, and throws away the key, because his factory is now worthless. His “control” and “ownership” of this factory didn’t allow him to trade his goods for anything of value to him, and so his goods have no value and the factory has no value.
But can’t we imagine that a couple of body servants to the old industrialist breaking in to that worthless factory and turning it back on? After all, they’re utterly destitute, since no work they can do can compete with automation. So they could use clothing to cover their naked bodies, and some sleeping bags since they’re living on the streets, and maybe some shoes, and some food would be nice too. So this factory, valueless to the industrialist, has value to the neo-peasants. And what the heck, they keep the thing running full blast, because, get this, it costs them nothing to keep it running.
It works just like file-sharing. It costs you nothing if some random dude from Russia or Florida makes a copy of your copy of Justin Bieber’s latest. After all, you didn’t pay for it yourself, you copied it from some other random dude. The marginal cost to you of creating another copy is zero. This is the key concept. When the marginal cost of production is zero, you might as well leave the tap open for anyone, especially if never have and never had any hope of getting any return from that production in the first place.
There are people around the world who make a living writing. Yet here I am on the Straight Dope, writing for free, in fact I’m paying a tiny amount. And I’m not trying to restrict how many people read my inane ramblings, in fact, the more people who read what I write the happier I am. And this is because I know I could never ever hope to charge people for what I write. There are people who can, but I’m not one of them.
And so, when industrialists cast aside their worthless factories and give up their dreams of amassing wealth by producting worthless material goods, those factories will still be there, and could still produce worthless material goods that are vital to the survival of billions of people. It’s just that no one will be able to make money buy supplying those vital goods to those billions.
True–and a great post overall–but my one quibble would be that overcrowding could still potentially be an issue. That said, I’m still not sure that drastic level of genocide would be likely.
Ha, this made me literally LOL.
Kobol wrote a good list of things people would still get paid for. Then of course there’s entertainment, which I think was mentioned above. Being a land speculator might be a big one too, as people would be able to have any kind of house they like, but location, location, location will still be huge–either a scenic one, a central location, or something near cultural resources. I’d think being a concert promoter could be lucrative too.
What I wonder is whether these industrialists will be extremely frustrated that they don’t become the richest people ever (since as we’ve noted, there will still be things that have value even if it’s not material goods), or will just be glad to have created the means to enrich the whole world. It does sort of seem like it would be unfair if they find themselves without any money to speak of, not being able to go to the nicest restaurants or have a house on Lake Como, while the actual rich folks are pro baseball players, land speculators, pop singers, and the descendants of the Khardashians. If I were around when such a scenario came to pass, I’d be all for saying that the people who were responsible for creating these robots/factories should get a big fat check from the government every year making them fabulously wealthy. Although upon further thought, I suppose it’s likely they could make a lot of money giving speeches (another vocation for famous people that will probably survive).
I’ve underlined the stuff that I consider a subset of “entertaining people”.
Not that it’s a bad thing. Ideally technology should allow people to do more fun stuff and less boring, tedious, dangerous grunt work.
I thought it had more to do with the fact that were, you know, on board a space ship.
Obviously, there would be less clutter in Star Trek since you only really needed to keep items around for aesthetic or sentimental value. Anything else can be replicated when you need them. Except for maybe replicator repair kits.
All the captains in ST did have decorations and whatnot in their private quarters.
While I don’t absolutely disagree with classifying politics or religion as entertainment, I think many a stick-up-the-bum would. Politics is Serious Business, apparently
But yeah, I get what you mean, and I agree that it’d be a good thing if everyone could just write that one good book they have in them instead of filing data entries. Then just fuck around a lot. The issue I could see here would be the dreaded Roman decadence where, as the first world parties on like crazy because of the robot utopia, the starving masses from across the border sharpen their knives.
The robots can do a lot, but I don’t think they can quite do away with inequality entirely - there’s only so much land and resources to go around. I suppose we could always keep them away with armies of firespewing deathbots, but building firespewing deathbots is a Very Bad Idea. I’ve seen that movie.
