Not right now, but on a long enough timeline I don’t see how it couldn’t happen. Like I said, it doesn’t matter if it is 2025, 2050 or 2075.
Robotics and AI will go up in quality and down in price as time passes, and eventually it’ll be cheaper, more productive and more efficient to have robots install and maintain the robots over humans.
Then there’s The Monitors, based off of a Keith Laumer novel. Basic plot outline is listed in the link, so I won’t spoil it here.
This. If the pessimism of some in this thread were entirely warranted, we never would have had the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, etc. We’d still have massive numbers of the poor living in tenements that looked like the ones Jacob Riis photographed, and working at factories out of Sinclair’s The Jungle, with no such thing as OSHA inspectors or a minimum wage. Strikers would still get shot en masse by Pinkerton detectives or the National Guard. Etc.
There are always backlashes, retrenchments, etc.; but the overall sweep of history, if you “zoom out” and look in half-century increments, has been toward providing more rights and more of a safety net for those on the lower socioeconomic rungs of the ladder.
You know, there are other countries in the world besides the United States. Even supposing a linear extrapolation of current trends that would make Karl Marx proud, is the enslavement and massacre of the unemployed also going to happen in Japan? In Switzerland? In New Zealand?
This is the model you are predicting:
Ever increased automation resulting in fewer and fewer jobs
The unemployed soon become a majority
Higher taxes to pay for welfare for the enemployed
The rich become increasingly upset at higher taxes
Except this doesn’t make sense.
Automated production means cheaper goods. That’s why you automate, if goods can be produced more cheaply by human labor you wouldn’t automate. As goods get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper through automation, “the rich” who own the factories that produce the goods and the software companies that produce the software that replace human workers become less and less rich, because they can’t charge a premium for their products.
This is the essential fact that people can’t seem to understand. Cheaper production doesn’t mean more wealth for the producers, it means less relative wealth, because the relative value of the thing produced becomes less.
If tomorrow someone invents a process to create diamonds by the bucketfull, will that person become super-wealthy? Probably, but diamonds would become worthless. And even if the first person to monetize diamond mass production gets rich, how about the second and third and fourth and fifth? Mass produced diamonds become a commodity, and the marginal profit is driven to zero.
Products become cheaper, and cheap products cost less money, which means you make less money when you produce them. And if you try to keep your margins high, someone else will open a robot factory or robot accounting firm, and undercut you. When it becomes super-cheap to produce goods and services by robot, how do you prevent “the poor” from owning cheap automated systems that can produce whatever the poor need? Why can’t an unemployed ex-factory worker nevertheless possess enough capital to have whatever he likes?
Distribute cheap automated systems and it becomes impossible to make money producing goods and services through automation, because anyone who wants anything producable by automation can get it. And this makes factories and automated systems worth zero, which means you can’t even get rich selling the masses automated factories.
Even if some areas of the world try to prevent “the poor” from owning worthless junk like automated fabricators, is this going to happen everywhere? If robots/fabricators/AI are servicing and maintaining and producing the robots and fabricators and AI that produces everything, then there’s no there there.
Are “the rich” really going to send killbots to massacre “poor” people who dare to own a fabricator? OK, maybe this happens in some places. Those places become the North Koreas of the world. Whole countries have gone off the deep end before. And so?
I’ve worked in IT for fourty years, and my observation is that jobs are not lost by greater automation, they just change. The job becomes integrated with the technology being used.
Lemur, good post. Adrian, I think that might understate things a bit. What about, for instance, linotype operators? Or, I don’t know what this was called, but my grandfather was a civil engineer back in the 1930s-1950s, working on big government projects like bridges and dams. He said they used to have roomfuls of human calculators (not what he called them but that was the gist) with slide rules and lots of blackboards and scratch paper, that he would call upon to crunch numbers for him. Now we still have engineers, but that roomful of jobs is gone, replaced by computers. And at some point the engineers will be obsolete too.
Sure, we keep having at least some jobs left when these functions are consolidated, but increasingly what is left are computer operators telling the computers what they want done (more and more like George Jetson, sitting there pushing buttons). And each of those computer operators is, with the help of the computers, fulfilling a role formerly filled by at least several (or maybe even dozens, or scores) of people.
We could in fact already have gotten to a point of mass unemployment, due to this much greater level of productivity, if people were still settling for having as much “stuff” as they did a few decades ago. But instead, we still employ most people and use the greater productivity to supply ourselves with way more stuff than our ancestors dreamed of. That seems to have some kind of saturation point, though: already, the storage industry has boomed in the past decade or two as people ran out of room even in their increasingly large houses to put all their stuff. (Flashing back to George Carlin’s famous routine here.)
It could be that we will continue to have high percentages of the population “employed”, but at increasingly trivial jobs where they spend most of their time playing games, watching LOLCATS videos, and goofing off with their fellow employees.
Nice username/post combination. 
Heh, true enough, heathen earthling.
Ambrosia, that was quite an interesting read; thanks for posting the link. The guy does not really have a literary talent per se; but the futurist ideas he presents are–despite the pedestrian prose–very intriguing, well developed, and plausible (particularly, as you say, the first part of it).
I’ve been meaning to start a thread along these very lines…
We can, and probably will (in the next couple of centuries), get to a point where the vast majority of humans are no longer necessary to produce the goods and services that drive today’s economy.
Personally, I think we’re already seeing a preview of the battle lines to come, in the form of the debate over maintaining and increasing, or slashing and removing, the so-called “social safety net”.
We as a society are going to have to decide the answer to a question. Do human beings in and of themselves have an inherent value to society that deserves support , regardless of whether those humans do (or ever will) contribute the the material wealth or productivity of society?
To answer the question “Yes” means a massive re-ordering of society including a redistribution of wealth on a scale never before even seriously suggested in the US. There would be massive resistance to it, even from among those people who are displaced out of the economy by automation. You could call this the “Star Trek Vision” – whether or not we ever develop the technology to expand through the galaxy.
To answer the question “no” means, at best, the near elimination of the middle class, massive ghetto-ization of an underclass the size of which dwarfs anything most people ever imagined, and the slow die-off of much of the population. The only people still around will be those who own most of the stuff, a relatively small cadre of professional technocrats, and some artists who find patronage among the former two groups. It would be a kind of neo-feudalism.
Honestly, I don’t have a single fuckin’ clue how this is going to get resolved.
This has been happening over and over again for thousands of years.
Improvements in agricultural allowed the rise of human society, we just find new things for those people to do.
The plow allowed people to spend learning to write etc…and yes, really accountants and writers and teachers are the “doing nothing” population if you think about where we were in a substance agrarian world.
Despite the common dream I haven’t seen anything that shows that most humans want to be idle and I know personally it doesn’t work for me.
These “robots” and this automation, it is not a black box, there are lots of humans who are required to make it happen. The fact that less humans are required to do existing work doesn’t mean that all possible work is being done.
We as a species are a very creative creature, finding new things to work on is accelerating due to the ability to share information instantly and world wide.
The fact that we haven’t figured out how to convert human labor workforce, which was cheaper than mechanical solution without issues does not change the fact that there are many areas we still need human talent.
But I guess it really depends on if your scope is for us as a nation or as a species. One of the aspects of this cheap automation is that it is very possible to decentralize production also.
I have a 3d printer that was built from parts that are available any place in this world.
With free software I can use a $3 line laser from a saw, a lazy susan and a webcam I can copy many items in my living room. It may not look as pretty but it can be functional.
There are growing worldwide communities that are sharing the “things” that they make so you can print them for yourself.
Almost everything required to make this printer can be bought at your local hardware store. If you can source the plastic (which can be from recycled material).
As a country we have a problem, but that is in converting our workforce to one that meets the new needs of a global world, it will be tough for us if we fail to do so but for the world well they are just getting started.
So IMHO, change…yep it’s coming but doom and or utopia are just as far away as ever.
Unless having a flipping 3d printer and instant access to the world body of knowledge was your idea of utopia…which is kind of what I think mine was in the 80’s
The early generations of robots require human upkeep. All the robots in manufacturing plants require humans to maintain them. Even in the industrial revolution I think that manufacturing saw the labor force decline by 70% or so in various industries.
However as time passes our machines can do more and more of our labor, and do it better than us. If by 2050 we have bipedal robots that can physically perform all the actions of a human (and we know enough about the brain to build software that gives them the ability to do most thinking tasks), the robots cost 50k and are as smart as a human, where do we go from there? By 2100 the robots will probably be dirt cheap and far more talented than humans. Our technology advances rapidly while our biology is stagnant. Cell phones went from being a luxury item on the coasts in wealthy nations to a tool that the poorest people in Africa can afford in 30 years. In 100 years our machines will be light years more advanced than they are now and we will be exactly the same. In 500 years we will be the same biologically, our technology will have grown by leaps and bounds. Sooner or later virtually all the physical and mental ‘work’ we do will be done cheaper and better by our inventions.
Manufacturing isn’t the only area affected. The service industry, professional industries, the arts, etc. will see advances in robotics and software that will start to replace humans since machines will be cheaper, better and more reliable. And yeah we will get pushed into different jobs that require us to use our hands and our minds, and our inventions will be able to do those jobs better and cheaper than us too.
Well, I could see one way that the country could go, not likely :dubious:
To be honest, a place like Detroit might be an interesting test scenario.
‘nationalize’ all the property. Tear it down in sections [there are large areas that are totally empty and would work.] Take the opportunity to update the infrastructure, put in a combination of single family, duplex, small rowhouses and an occasional apartment house, the usual needful stuff [hospital, schools, police and firehouses and shopping, and a selection of empty lots for churches to opt to build, and greenspace/parks] and ‘issue’ them to families sort of like council housing in Britain was originally. If we are all going to end up on the dole, might as well take the opportunity to actually make rambling badly laid out cities with rotting infrastructures better.
[ I used to own a house in Craddock, one of the US’s first planned communities. It was a combination of single, duplex and small apartment houses, with a centralized town square sort of shopping area, churches, schools and municipal buildings. ]
Only as an industry overall. There’s always going to be a small number of people who make a living dealing with well osbolete technology. For example, look at the people who supply Civil War or Wild West re-enactors. They’re making a living supplying stuff that’s functionally 150 years old.
An interesting and thought-provoking OP. I can’t hope to add the same depth of worthy response as some other posters here have, but I think the OP’s scenario would play out different in different countries and it would be nice to explore the scenario in an non-US context.
I enjoy Lemur866’s posts, and find them very thought provoking. But they are basically thought experiments, and refer to situations that could not exist in reality. Even a perfectly functioning, fully automated manufacturing system which operates without human input couldn’t rovide an unlimited amount of goods for consumption, because some resources remain scarce.
Humans can obtain free oxygen from the air, simply because bazillions of automated factories manufacture it for us. But oxygen is the mosr abundant element in the Earth’s lithosphere; if we want automated manufactories to create unlimited amounts of other goods, some of those goods are going to require resources that are less abundant, such as rare earths.
Given a fully automated manufactory system that was given permission by the land owners of our planet to process the rock beneath our feet, this shortage of resources could be solved; hurrah! We can all have limitless quantitioes of electronic goods1 Except that this would cause environmental degradation.
No, that can be fixed as well; the automated manufactory machines would need to be programmed to restore the land to its previous state (or better still, improve it); something like mountaintop removal mining, but on a grand scale, and with carefully regulated end results.
To achieve a green and pleasant planet after all this activity would require a lot of energy input; some might say an unrealistically large energy input. On the other hand there is plenty of Space-based solar power (SBSP) that could be imported into Earth ; given enough (robotically produced) SBSP we could have a true post-scarcity society on this planet. This imported power would eventually cause problems with waste heat, in a couple of hundred years or less depending on growth.
Alternately rare earths and other resources that could only be obtained by environmentally damaging strip mining could be obtained from seawater and/or from asteroids. Hmm; once again we hit problems with growth- if all humans can obtain all of their material requirements from these automated systems, what would prevent the population from growing at an arbitrary rate? Perhaps everyone would be too busy enjoying themselves to have big families; but perhaps not.
Eventually you hit a situation where Earth resembles Corusacant or Trantor; waste heat would be the limiting factor here.
I’m hoping that in a post-scarcity society it would become fashonable to live as responsibly as possible; since almost all trappings of wealth would be meaningless, there would be no need for conspicuous consumption, and no need to have large families to support the adults in old age.
But in an environment where resources are abundant, growth often continues until some limiting factor kicks in. What would be the limiting factor in a post-scarcity society with fully automated manufactories? Waste heat considerations, or simply the choices made by the population to limit consumption?
You are aware, are you not, of the trend for populations to stabilize and even decline when societies reach a certain level of prosperity? See: Italy, Japan, others.
Yes; I hope that is a trend that will continue; but can we rely on it?
I don’t think so.
The population stabilizes because a child is a huge burden. Gotta take care of the kid, feed it, cloth it, pay for its school, take time off work when its sick, etc. Its not like when we were on a farm, and that kid was essentially a slave laborer, working without pay.
Kids are a net liability today rather than a bonus.
Now when we’re all on the dole because of the robot revolution, the kids are neither a benefit nor a liability, so I’d expect that the average number of births would go up.
This is the key point that I think people are misunderstanding. That we would require a “massive redistribution of wealth”. No, we won’t.
The future goods and services of the future, created by future robots of the future (again, using “robots” to mean a whole panoply of automated systems), aren’t going to be expensive, they’ll be cheap. Let’s assume a future where a small hyper-wealthy elite owns everything worth owning and performs all the human economic activity worth performing. And we need a welfare system to support all the useless drones who don’t own anything and can’t produce anything worthwhile. Except, is this welfare system “massive”? No, it isn’t. It’s cheap and efficient. Only a small fraction of the hyper-elite’s wealth is needed to provide everyone on earth with a comfortable lifestyle superior to a modern-day middle class lifestyle, with the added bonus that they don’t have to work every day.
Clothes, food, gadgets, furniture, high-rise apartment buildings, entertainment, medical care, all these things can be provided and they don’t cost very much. You save a lot of money now that people don’t have to commute every day to work, they don’t need to be expensively trained to work, they don’t need to do anything except not cause trouble. There may be some parts of this lifestyle that would seem constrained to our early 21st century tastes. Detached houses with yards might be rarer, private vehicles might be rarer.
But the reason this is sustainable is that the substitutes for today’s goods and services are so much cheaper. You don’t have expensive robot mailmen lugging envelopes from door to door, you replace that with email. You don’t have robot maids pushing vacuum cleaners around, you have vacuum cleaners that drive themselves. You don’t have Robocop running around capturing bad guys, you have millions of cameras everywhere. And on and on, the vast majority of economic activity won’t be replacing human work with robots that do similar work, it will be making whole types of work obsolete and replacing them with totally different goods and services that fill the same needs in radically different ways.
As for places to live, there’s plenty of empty land out there where we can build housing for people with no jobs, the reason everyone crams into expensive cities is because that’s where the jobs are. It’s a lot cheaper to live in South Dakota than Manhattan, but there aren’t any jobs in South Dakota. Welcome to the future, where there aren’t any jobs in Manhattan either. Of course, lots of people will still want to live in Manhattan, except the hyper-elite won’t let them. Oh well. There won’t be any need for the hyper-elite to keep the masses in their place, anybody who wants can join the hyper-elite, all they have to do is come up with some form of desirable economic activity that can’t be produced by automation. So you’re a non-elite kid who has no job and never will, and isn’t allowed to live in Manhattan. Same thing happens today.
And even though it will be much cheaper to provide a decent middleclass lifestyle for everyone on welfare, the hyperelite will also be much much much wealthier than the regular old millionaires and billionaires of today. We won’t need onerous taxes on the hyperwealthy to fund the modest lifestyles of the welfare drones, because supporting the welfare drones will only require a small fraction of the wealth of the rich.
But of course, this vision is actually nonsensical. Because it still imagines factories owned by the elites, which are taxed to produce goods and services which are then distributed to the poor. But in reality, what will happen is the poor will own machines to produce all these goods and services for themselves. We won’t need to tax a rich factory owner to buy shoes for some poor kid on welfare. If the poor kid on welfare wants new shoes, he’ll just have his home fabricator make him some shoes. Any gadget or tool this kid wants can come out of a box in the living room.
This isn’t socialism, where the state or the people communally own the means of production. This isn’t social democracy, where the means of production are privately owned but highly taxed and regulated to provide for the people. This isn’t even capitalism. This is more similar to a stage before capitalism, where people almost never produced goods to sell or trade, but instead for their own use. Whole categories of economic activity disappear from public space and stop being counted as economic activity at all. Just like vacuuming the floor of your own house isn’t counted as economic activity, or posting on the Straight Dope isn’t counted as economic activity, so automated production of a new pair of shoes won’t count as economic activity. It will be thought of more like brushing your teet or combing your hair. You need a pair of shoes, so you have some made and put them on, and when you’re done you throw them away.
So where do the hyperwealthy owners fit in? Nowhere. What do they own? The reason factory owners are wealthy today is that they produce goods that people want. “Factory owner” becomes just another job that is automated out of existence.
Of course in the future, some categories of goods and services won’t be automatable, and whoever controls the supply of those goods and services will be wealthy in a way that will make Bill Gates look like a peasant proud of the size of his compost heap. But I doubt those people will very much resemble the industrialists and entreprenuers and apparatchiks of the industrial age, just as those people don’t much resemble the landowners and warlords of the feudal age.
Easy enough to make having more than two kids a liabilty … do it and you are off the dole. Just make sure it applies to both mothers and fathers equally. I suspect however that it would not be a problem. I think given that the trends all indicate diminished birthrate within affluent societies, the problem will be maintaining population, after a while, and not a very long one give the prognostications for Japan.
