What happens when the robots (peacefully) take over?

Great Debates
81

This part of your scenario goes far beyond what I comprehend to be the concept posited in this hypothetical. This is at the level of star trek replicators, not simply increasing the efficiency of our manufacturing to fully automated, robot-controlled levels with no human involvement.

We aren’t going to have people fabricating stuff at home simply by making fabrication of stuff more efficient. Acquisition of raw materials, transportation, refining them into more usable raw materials, transporting them again, converting them into even more usable forms, probably yet another level of transportation (or several more levels of both transportation and production), and finally fabrication of the finished product will still exist.

Making things will still require factories for the foreseeable future, regardless of how much automation we get. As far as I know, energy to matter in the form of star trek replicators is considered scientifically improbable, and similarly some kind of ‘omni-gel’ type substance that can be instantly fabricated into whatever is also improbable (although far more likely with a limited set of possible things to produce). Therefore, no, people won’t be creating their own stuff at home - things will still be mass-produced in factories, they’ll still need to be transported around and people will still have to go to stores or have them physically delivered to their homes.

Now, the first part of your post that I didn’t quote makes some sense. I can see that potentially happening, maybe. If the manufacturing process is cheap enough, and there’s enough competition to drive prices down to near-cost, rather than allowing the manufacturers to simply make ever-higher profits as costs go down, then maybe that vision would happen instead of mine. It’s still pretty similar in the end, with the hyper-elite pushing everyone else out of their elite enclaves, except now they’re providing a basic living for them in order to keep them from revolting. That might very well be the more likely scenario - I’m not sure.

82

Another sign that we are headed in this direction, from tonight’s PBS Newshour:

Romney and the GOP are jumping up and down pointing at the lower workforce participation rate. If we had the same percentage of adults in the workforce (either working or looking for jobs) as when Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be over 11 percent instead of dropping to 8.1 percent. Shields and Brooks see this as a “terrible quandary”, but maybe it’s just part of the process of moving toward a future like the one **Lemur **describes. And maybe in the process of moving there, we’ll have fewer and fewer and fewer jobs, but without going back into double digit unemployment.

83

Well, yes, star trek replicator like devices constitute a very futuristic technology whose very existence is problematical. It would be nice to have a magic bullet that could end human need like that, but waiting for it could prove time-consuming and futile. Whereas the trend towards all goods being produced in factories that need less and less human input is happening RIGHT NOW. Look at the post above this.

It’s not the fact that factories need less and less human labor to produce goods that’s the problem. It’s that in a capitalist economy, those factories are owned by a very small percentage of the population. As the trend continues, you will find that political rhetoric among conservatives will increasingly describe the people made unemployed and unemployable by this trend as lazy, useless good-for-nothings, and the people who own things will believe it because it will create an image of them as godlike beings of great worth … job creators or something like that.

It’s a formula for human misery on a massive scale.

84

But Captor, that’s only if the Koch brothers and the Tea Partiers win the debate. I see it as highly plausible that what they would decry as an “entitlement society” will look appealing enough to a majority of voters that this wins the day, and thus the transition to a smaller and smaller workforce is peaceful, and the misery is prevented by what the right will sneer at as “welfare”, but which as Lemur points out will be cheaper and cheaper to provide over time.

85

I wonder how much of it is the value we put on quality of life as we become wealthier though. Even if you can afford a kid in developed countries the goal of life is happiness, not survival. So a lot of people choose not to have kids not because they can’t afford them but because they don’t think the world is a safe place. Robots and a post scarcity society won’t really change this. However radical advances in neuroscience probably would.

86

I think Wall Street basically owns our government right now. Our debates are meaningless, and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

87

Then why are they so intent on getting Republicans to overturn Dodd-Frank?

88

Because they are at heart greedy, stupid pigs and they do not want ANY regulation. Dodd-Frank happened at a time when Wall Street temporarily lost control of the government due to, well, imminent financial collapse in the US. The walls were literally falling down, there was a fear that the economy might flatline. Now that things are more stable, of COURSE they want a return to the unfettered license to gamble with bank depositors’ and taxpayers’ money.

Was this a trick question?

89

No: you said Wall Street already owned the government and that our debates are meaningless. You are the one not being consistent.

ETA to clarify: when you write “of COURSE they want a return to the unfettered license…” this necessarily implies that it is not, at present, unfettered. But that contradicts your saying that they “basically own our government right now” and that our “debates are meaningless”. If they were truly meaningless, they wouldn’t really be bothered by Dodd-Frank: it would be some sort of sham. But in fact it does seem to bother them quite a bit, and you admitted that as long as it is in place they are not “unfettered”.

90

Would be a nice solution, how long before people demanding their Human rights insisted that they should be able to have more kids, or they had the extra kids by accident, or some other excuse ?
Its a good idea and you’ve got to respect the Chinese for implementing it, but it is enforced.

Reduced birth rate doesn’t mean a declining population.

One million people having ten kids each means a next generation of ten million, who if they have ten kids each makes one hundred million.

But what if one BILLION people have only two kids each ?

That means the next generation is two BILLION, who if they’re all responsible people and only have two kids each themselves will make the next generation four BILLION people.

So if every part of the world magically achieved this standard of living whereby regardless of culture they all decide to have fewer kids then it doesn’t mean that the population will decline.

“Oh everything will turn out alright in the end”, ie. ignoring the problem and hoping that in time the problem will go away by itself doesn’t cut it.

Death by complacency, means that you still end up as dead as anyone else.

91

This question keeps popping up in the media more and more, it seems. This time it is PBS Newshour:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june12/man_vs_machine_05-24.html

One interesting tidbit from this piece is that there are now already so-called “lights out factories” where they don’t waste energy on lighting because they are so fully automated, and don’t need illumination. But overall, this story just skims the surface of the issues that in this thread were plumbed far more deeply (kudos to SDMB for that).

92

Now The Atlantic takes it on and adds a couple new ideas to the mix:

93

The thing about the birth rate is that having children is a difficult, painful and dangerous thing for women to do, so if there is abundance and no pressure to have children from others many will pass on it. That’s often left out of the conversation, how much it takes out of women to have children.

I’m thinking that since every place that girls/women can get an education, have other things to do, and free access to reproductive rights, they choose to have fewer children than would keep the population levels up.

That means that in a few generations the population numbers would dramatically drop given that situation, especially if they don’t need children to support them.

94

Rereading this thread, I see a lot of points I think need clearing up.

  1. I don’t think we are going to need AI to get to the point where robots make virtually everything. You don’t NEED a high level of intelligence to build things. Most factory jobs are boring and repetitive, that is, they don’t require much of the intelligence that your average human being possesses. They do not require what we would think of as intelligence at all. The eye-hand problem – making machines that can see and recognize objects and manipulate them – is something that can be solved incrementally … that’s what the “lights out” factories are all about, they’re an incremental solution to the problem of robots manipulating objects.

The replicators that are being spoken of are, I suspect, a long way down the road, 3D printers not withstanding, barring some leap in 3D printer technology. How long would it take to build a house out of a 3D printer? Another 3D printer? A wide screen TV set? A PC? A bed? I would personally LOVE it if all anyone ever had to buy to meet their material needs was a 3D printer and a starter bag of dirt (cause it could also print food). I am not holding my breath, and would have to have some convincing to make me think this was a near-term solution to human needs.

That said, I think it very probable that we will EVENTUALLY get there. The problem is the transition. We are already moving fast into the area of massive unemployment, and severe under-employment. The Republicans want to “fix” Social Security in 20 years … if only politicians of either party had any interest in what this problem will be like in 20 years. The trends are so obvious that, as mentioned above, even ECONOMISTS are noticing them.

There will be an extremely dangerous time coming up soon when the cultural/political beliefs that are based on everybody wanting a job being able to get one eventually will still be around, but there will be no jobs around to get. The cultural/political beliefs will change very rapidly among those affected, but MUCH more slowly among the wealthy and the few remaining middle class who are not affected.

I do not think the wealthy are going to attack the unemployed with killer robots. I think the wealthy are utterly indifferent to the fate of most non-wealthy persons (actually, most “non-themselves” persons as I believe that many of the wealthy are sociopaths). They will be content to let the unemployed die off on their own. Or survive, however miserably, on their own. They might even set up feeding stations! Are they not merciful?

Once human culture develops an ethos that actually values human beings in and of themselves, things will get better and we might even find our way to that utopia of a society where each human being contributes in some way with whatever it is that makes them unique as a person. I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about the shit we will have to go through to get there, and making it as non-catastrophic as possible.

Did I mention that global-warming associated climate change will prolly be going on during this period too?

Interesting times, my friends!

BTW, Slackerinc’s link to the Atlantic article contains a link to a huge number of articles relating to this topic, so I’m gonna link directly to that link right herein this link. All sorts of interesting reading for interesting times.

95

… Or perhaps the robots will do repairs themselves - after banning screwdrivers and wrenches so that humans cannot disassemble the tyrannical robot overloads.

We need another amendment :smiley:

96

Our biology won’t be the same due to genetic engineering and/or cybernetics. Future humans may end up being much more intelligent than we are now.

97

Hmmmm …robotic 3D printers here now … seems germane …

98

One misconception that people have is that automating a job has the net effect of decreasing available jobs by 1.

In fact, employment is basically unlimited. As long as anyone’s life is not perfect, there is a job for a human to do. Automating a process makes us more efficient at that process and frees human labour to do one of the jobs that machines can’t currently do.

The reason that there are any unemployed is due to a number of factors such as people not being trained in areas that the economy needs, market failures in matching people to roles, and a proportion of the population being unemployable due to general or mental health issues (and yes other factors, but I think those are the main 3).

If automation were a significant problem, why has unemployment continued to bounce around the 5% mark for the last century despite huge industrialization of engineering?

Finally, just to finish out the rant, the scenario of a few rich people making machines while the rest of us live destitute makes no sense at all, economically speaking. If no-one can afford what the machines make then much of the economy would tick on as it currently does.
The reality is that many people’s lives have already been made materially better by this kind of industrialization and will continue to be. (Though of course it may well be the case that income disparity may increase, particularly in low-tax countries).

99

Well said.

You’re describing frictional unemployment.

It makes no sense and it won’t happen, but it’s pleasing to certain segments to imagine a market economy as brutal exploitation instead of voluntary exchanges.

100

I guess so but that wiki seems to be implying short-term gaps in employment.

I was thinking about more long-term social factors, like the “unemployable”, cultural factors that this race/gender/age is rarely considered for this role, not enough people training in IT, say, or poor quality training, companies’ hiring policies (e.g. insisting on graduates for a job that doesn’t really need it) etc.