LOL…but this raises a serious question. Would the industrialised world spread this technology to the less developed world, or just kind of put up a wall and let them fend for themselves?
It’s not like they’d deliberately spread technology because they’re nice people. It’s just that putting up a wall to keep goods that cost nothing and therefore have no value out of the hands of poor people seems like a lot of work. So worrying that third world people get a flood of free junk is like worrying that those bastards are breathing our air and not paying for it.
Again, things that cost nothing to produce have no economic value and therefore people won’t value them. Nobody will care if people get worthless junk.
I think massive unemployment and poverty will lead to massive riots. That will lead to increasingly violent and totalitarian means of control, until the government/replacement government concede to the demographics and create a welfare state.
Control of resources and means of production will be taken over by the government in order to create the welfare state. They will trade with other governments for resources that they don’t have.
The welfare states will probably resemble corrupt totalitarian oligarchies.
Places with no resources to trade will probably resemble Somalia.
That would be true if the OP concerned matter replicators or nano-production that could break anything into a pile of grey goo and build anything from it. But we’re “only” talking about nigh-infinite free labour here. For one thing, we’d always seem to be short on robot-building materials, for another all these neat goods the robots make for us are made of stuff. Can’t go around spreading all of our stuff !
I daresay the first world would possibly guzzle less stuff away, because with the robots doing all of the work and barely any need for money, workforce or army, our natality rates would plummet. Still, as I said, there’s still only so much raw materials, grazing land, ripe pastures and hallucinogenic sexbots to go around.
I don’t think I have seen the phrase “hallucinogenic sexbots” before.
Kudos.
Wow the title of this thread is really misleadjng. What you’re asking about is “how do you think the early transitional effects of a post-scarcity economy will be handled?” It’s got nothing to do with robots. I really think you should ask to have it changed.
I personally think we will see mass starvation in the hundreds of millions, possibly exceeding a billion will occur, mostly in Asia, because that’s where all the people are, and in Asia they have a LONG tradition of not giving a rat’s ass about average folk. But it will be bad in the US as well, you only need to look at the recent financial hi-jinks to figure out that our one percenters would gleefully watch the rest of us starve to death. Serve us right, we non-job creators!
I have no idea how African countries will manage a transition to post-scarcity, but I’m pretty sure it will be awful. South America, some countries awful, some not. Antarctica might be OK.
The thing is, post-scarcity won’t start with magic widgets that can make you rich. It will start with what we have now, big, expensive factories owned by large corporations managed by crony capitalists. They will become increasingly automated, as is the trend now, and eventually they’ll get that little software problem that involved getting video cams and robotic manipulators run by a computer to work as well at repetitive tasks as hands and eyes run by a human brain. Repetitive tasks put the ball very much in the computer’s court, I’d be surprised if they didn’t figure it out in the next decade or two. (It IS a surprisingly difficult problem, but nothing on the scale of true A.I., more like a very advanced expert system.)
When that happens, manual labor of all kinds will become obsolete. Just. Like. That. And the number of people required to produce goods is gonna become very, very small. But it will still take large amounts of capital for the machinery that extracts the goods, processes them, and distributes them. It just won’t take all that many people.
Of course with vast numbers of people economically displaced, the market for goods is going to get increasingly restricted, but it will take a very long for this to manifest on a global scale. After all, the American economy has been stagnant or worse since 2008 but the big corporations are rolling in cash by selling goods overseas – you know, the places they’ve been exporting American jobs. This will keep things going for a while in terms of having a market for mass produced goods and the one percenters will show the same fine compassion for displaced workers they have shown all along, which is to say, none. They will try to shift all the responsibility for coping with the effects of their economic activity to government, and accept none of the blame, just as they have done in the current economic debacle, and they will be aided by the howling masses of conservative one percenter wannabes, just as they are now.
As a result, it’s going to be very difficult to make the profound changes in our society that will be needed as we transition to post-scarcity, because the libertarians and conservatives are very weak on social cohesion. They will be fine with displaced workers going homeless and without health care, and possibly even food, especially if they are, well, kinda brown. But a lot of white people will be displaced too.
I suspect there will be mass riots and violence, certainly an increase in crime.
In Asia, Africa and South America, this will be much more pronounced, much more violent, much nastier. Europe, which has developed a pretty good social cohesion, might be able to avoid it entirely, or at least, have a very much milder transition.
After things settle out and everyone is either benefiting from post-scarcity economics or dead, things will be much nicer for human beings. But that will probably be little consolation for the dead and their loved ones … though they may also be dead …
The American Prospect’s website did a little piece on this same subject, although I’m not sure they examined the issue with as much thought and attention as we did, frankly:
If we’re talking about manufacturing more efficiently, there’s an upper limit to where that’s going to get us with the resources we have here on earth. Granted, I think the resources here are sufficient to maintain a stable population with minimal work in perpetuity, but since that situation won’t come about overnight, looking at the road by which we get there is a big deal - the arguments by Lemur866 only make sense to me if it happened overnight, and if costs actually got down to near-zero, which I don’t see happening without energy to matter conversion, if such a thing is even possible at any point in the future.
First, we see products get cheaper and cheaper, but at the same time less and less jobs are available. Manufacturing jobs mostly vanish entirely - at some point even slave labor would be less efficient than having the machine do it (in many industries that’s already the case, in the rest it will be eventually). Service and entertainment jobs are all that remains, and many of those start going to the robots too. Eventually, the cost of having a robot flip a burger and serve it to the customers is less than the cost of hiring someone. At this time, we’re still running on increased amounts of government welfare most likely, but there’s increasing resentment to that from all the corporation owners and higher ups.
Still, there’s a large number of jobs that still needs doing - business, science, and software engineering, and entertainment. Most of the robots still need people to write their initial programs for them and so on. These are the companies’ real customers at this point, since they’re the only ones still making more than welfare (which we’ll remember, is being taken from the companies in the first place - they’d rather keep it than give it away and then be given it back in return). Eventually, people write programs that can automate the entire business sector (technically, this may have been an even earlier step, but it still happens at some point or another). Some time after that comes the real trick - someone comes up with a program that can program other programs. Robots no longer need people to write their programs for them, that process is automated. Software engineering goes away as a sector of employment, we’re left only with the scientists and entertainers - these would eventually be replaced too, but societal unrest is likely to change things before that happens.
By this time, we’ve probably got 75%+ of the population unemployed, producing nothing, only consuming. Those who are still employed are resentful of them - they don’t want these people taking what they have. Why? Human nature. Logic suggests that everyone could have ‘enough’ easily by this point, but most people seem to want way more than ‘enough’. A multi-billionaire today has no need to increase their assets, yet they continue to do so. The same will apply at this point - those who are still making money will want to make more money, and they won’t want to give away their money to people who are completely useless to them. Since government is primarily made up of the rich, the government will be on their side. The idea will be that anyone can be a scientist or an actor/writer/other form of entertainer. Those who don’t do that are lazy, they don’t deserve as much welfare as they’re getting. Goods still have value, because we’re not creating them from essentially limitless energy, star trek replicator style, and although their value is low enough that everyone could theoretically have most things they want, those who are still earning money that’s being taxed and redistributed want to reduce what they’re paying.*
Welfare and taxes are slowly reduced, or perhaps money is devalued through intentional inflation - inflation that goes up faster than the welfare numbers. Prices go up since there’s more money in circulation, but the welfare remains the same numerically, so the masses of unemployed can afford less and less of the luxuries they want. Widespread unrest probably follows at this point. With increasing violence from the unemployed masses, stricter laws are put into place, and pretty much everyone still making money gets themselves a little army of private security bots to ensure their safety. Eventually, the unemployed will probably revolt. Unfortunately by this time, the security bots are far too advanced and commonplace for them to have a chance. Millions or even billions will probably die in unsuccessful revolutions - eventually the survivors would be either imprisoned or simply exiled to undesirable regions. Some of the earners would sympathize and perhaps even side with them, but it seems unlikely to be a large enough number to turn the tide in their favor.
The remaining earners would continue to exist as they do, their workload probably diminishing more slowly at this point. Eventually entertainers or scientists are replaced - hard to say which - when the robots are able to take over those fields. Programs will eventually be written to discern human tastes, and robots will be able to create entertainment based purely on the data they receive. It may not be as creative as some of what we have seen, but it will be satisfactory. Science too, will eventually be a robotic field, since it is primarily concerned with studying empirical data, something computers do well. New ideas will still have to be thought up by people, but they will be along the lines of ‘hey robot, I want a thing that can do <insert neat thing the human just thought of>’ and the machines will determine how to implement that request.
By the time entertainers and scientists are replaced, there will likely be minimal friction in simply allowing the robots to continue taking care of them. Besides which, everyone will have sufficient money to continue ‘paying’ for their upkeep for a significant amount of time, at this juncture. Land is the only thing that will still have value, and this will primarily go to those who owned and produced the robots throughout this entire transition. As population rises again, the land will be broken up into smaller and smaller chunks as it is divided among children, then grandchildren, and so on. And life will be good, at least until they run out of room and/or resources they can’t figure out a way to replace or do without.
*Again, for the same reason that billionaires today continue to acquire more wealth even though there’s no real need for it: someone who has 10 billion could stop earning money forever, and spend $273,972.60 a day for 100 years - with a more reasonable expenditure of $27,397.26 a day, the 10 billion would last a thousand years, or drop down one more decimal to $2,739.72 a day to make it last ten thousand years. Enough for them and all their foreseeable heirs - and inflation seems unlikely to take us to the point where that much daily expenditure will provide anything less than an ‘extremely comfortable’ lifestyle for centuries. Yet, people with billions keep trying to make more billions.
There’s a short science fiction story available online which deals with this issue:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The first four chapters are really quite scary, and then from there it veers into bizarre utopianism, IMHO. But this idea that most people will be considered useless and herded into welfare compounds as security risks seems frighteningly plausible.
The benefits also go to the people who figure out how to fix, spec and install the robots.
Those who still bet on making buggy whips do pretty poorly.
Do you think democracy will be history by this point? If 75%+ of the population is unemployed, whatever party that looks out for the interests of the unemployed should be getting 75%+ of the votes.
You’d think that, but an awful lot of poor and middle class people are voting against their ecoonmic interests right now. if it were merely a matter of economic interests, Republicans would be a tiny minority in Congress. Also, if Democrats weren’t idiots. And even if the unemployed DID elect 75% of legislators by voting their economic interests, that would be democracy. Democracy is when votes are counted and people are elected based on them. It’s not a matter of whether you like the outcome or not.
You seem to have missed the point. The people you describe will be a VERY small percentage of the population. Eventually, the one percenters will include not just the wealthy but everyone they employ. Gonna get nasty long before then, unless we develop strong social welfare nets and alternative methods of creating value. I personally do not expect that … even though it’s rational, human beings are not rational, especially where money is concerned.
Ok, but Republicans and Democrats do not differ much in their opinions on whether humans should try to be employed. The percentage of the population actually opposed to employment is currently too small to matter politically. In the hypothetical future with 75%+ unemployment, the platforms of pro-employed and pro-unemployed parties should be much more divergent than those existing today, so perhaps it is plausible that fewer people will vote against their economic interests.
I was responding to the current issue with the middle class, there are jobs like crazy we can’t fill in the industry that we would love to pay people money for.
I am quite worried as robotic cars produce yet another class obsolete workers and yes this will be an issue.
On a long enough timeline I would assume all human abilities will be capable of being replicated by robots, and not long afterward surpassed. My assumption is sometime within this century. Popular mechanics claimed bipedal robots capable of doing domestic work and having roughly the same physical functionality of a human should be in the 2030-2050 period. It doesn’t matter if it is 2025, 2050 or 2075, it’ll still happen.
I don’t think skills will count for much when the robotic revolution is in full swing. A robot will be able to mechanically perform virtually all (and most likely all) tasks a person can and could be programmed to develop and overwrite skills as needed. Plus the robot will be able to perform them at a far higher level of precision than a human could.
The robots will be able to fix, spec and install the robots at a higher level of precision and for a lower cost than a human worker.
I’m assuming robotics will follow a trend like computers, exponential growth in ability combined with rapid price deflation.
I suspect that a good number of them would vote against their own interests due to being convinced to do so. I would also suspect that the owners and producers would control the vast majority of media: consider that ‘entertainers’ are now one of the few earning groups, the majority of media would likely be skewed toward the interests of lowering their own taxes and reducing welfare for the unemployed - the press and the news providers would generally have a self-interested bias. So other candidates may exist, but they would get even less attention in the press, and therefore the public consciousness, than even minor parties like the Green Party or the Libertarian or Constitution parties do now. Add to that the fact that the rich will be able to very effectively ‘buy’ many of the politicians at this stage of development, and I find it unlikely that any significant portion of the government would actually be working for the good of the unemployed.
However, I don’t find it entirely impossible. Extremely unlikely, but not impossible. If the unlikely happened, I suspect there would eventually be a rather significant branching point where two options present themselves. One, the upper class (who are therefore in control of large quantities of combat-capable robots) attempt to seize control by force, at which point it would be hard to predict the victor - I don’t imagine the builders of such robots having intentionally sabotaged those they sold to the military, but the military would then be receiving no additional support or reinforcements from that point forward. It could go either way - this war would probably be relatively light on direct human casualties, since it would primarily be fought by machines. I don’t view the upper class as resorting to this out of intentional malignancy, but the concept of defending themselves and their property from a government which is trying to steal from them what they rightfully own.
Alternately, the upper class may not be willing to go so far to defend themselves as a whole (some definitely will, but if the majority of them don’t, then the government-controlled military would win handily), and government winds up continuing to increase taxes and regulations until they finally seize control of the majority of the means of production. In this circumstance, I suspect dividing the land would be much harder, and at some point, perhaps quite soon, strict population controls would be needed since the depopulation that happens through the rebellions of what I consider to be far more probable wouldn’t occur.
Interestingly, I think the long-term outlook in the ‘government helps the people’ scenario may be worse. With a much higher population, there’s no period where growth is possible, and strict authoritarian rules like population controls become necessary. I am unsure whether to speculate that the other comforts of life at this point would be enough to keep any major unrest from rising or not.
Would entertainers really be an earning group in this scenario? Even if robots are unable to produce any new entertainment of value, there’s enough entertainment already existing right now that any unemployed person with an internet connection can download more than they will ever need, for free. And with the majority of the population liberated from the need to work, there will be a lot more new amatuer-produced entertainment being passed around for free too.
Of course, news media is not exactly like most entertainment, so your point is plausible.
We need a few massive improvements in AI before that happens, computers are just machines and don’t do well in tasks that are not repeatable or easily defined.