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Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots
- mpweiher 11y agoYesterday's discussion of the Huffington Post reporting the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10361314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10361314
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoFully Automated Luxury Communism is an alluring idea. Could it work?
- yc1010 11y agoWasnt the world of Star Trek as depicted in tv series basically communist/socialist where technologies such as replicators, warp drives and very cheap energy making the "Federation way of life" possible, freeing people to explore space/art/science etc Basically it depicted world(s) of plenty, tho' yes it did have wars and trade etc, which is what made Deep Space 9 and the Ferengi so interesting :)
- teddyh 11y agoThe Economics of Star Trek (2000) http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html
- barking 11y agoIf you could explain to the people of an earlier time all our modern conveniences and how many hours we work and how little physical effort goes into almost every job, it would probably sound just like that to them.
- mccracken 11y agoIf you go just far enough back, the hours we work would sound ridiculous (but I do agree about the effort).
- Retra 11y agoYou have to be careful what you are calling work when you make a comparison like that. We might just be calling more things "work." How many people are artists, musicians, writers, comedians, or chefs?
- rangibaby 11y agoIt would probably sound more like a retelling of the "businessman and fisherman" joke.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoDepends which era. The workers of the 8-hour work week era would not be impressed.
- yourapostasy 11y agoIain Banks makes a compelling argument that the answer is a "yes, but with...curious complications", through his exploration of the issues brought up in his fictional universe of The Culture [1], in his series of novels [2] set in that universe. Note that he explores the margins of his universe; for the 99.999999% of the denizens of his universe, "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" totally works swell for their entire lifespans (hundreds of years). There are some key technical linchpins that make that universe possible, and commensurately unlikely for us in yours and my lifetimes. 1. Near-free, externality-free, near-Kardashev Type II-scale energy ("The Grid" in his universe). 2. Strong AI, replete with emotions and benevolent AI sapients (even though they eclipse human intelligence by far). 3. FTL, anti-gravity, matter manipulation (molecular level at inter-stellar distances) physics we simply can't even begin to prod at. 4. Nanotech. But that is one heck of a nice universe to strive for and toss the pebbles of our lives into moving towards however infinitesimal, nicht wahr? [1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm [2] http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=iain+banks+culture+series&sprefix=iain+banks+culture+series%2Caps%2C224 http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=search-ali...
- tumbas 11y agoWe should be scared of God and sin.
- tumbas 11y agoWhy did the communist collapse? because of their different economy or because they were God fighting bloodthirsty killers? God oposes the pridefull. They failed at materializm the very thing they preached could they be more ashamed.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhat is a god? Does a superpowerful phenomena that many anthropomorphise qualify? A being that can bless or curse people at a whim, whose ways are mysterious? An entity more powerful than kings and countries? If so, market economy is the one god we've created, and we most definitely should be scared of it.
- krapp 11y ago>Does a superpowerful phenomena that many anthropomorphise qualify? From a certain point of view, it certainly does - in many animist and "pagan" beliefs, a person, ideal or even inanimate object can become a "god" through the power of collective worship and anthropomorphism. Neil Gaiman did a good job expressing this in Western terms in American Gods.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
- _up 11y agoAnd how convenient that worldwide TPP, TTIP, CETA and ASEAN are on fast track to outlaw Robot Taxes. A lot of countries would otherwise probably try to save their then imploding pension and welfare systems with Robot Taxes.
- nyreed 11y agoDo you have a source for those robot taxes? Would like to read more, but google doesn't yield much.
- sktrdie 11y agoHow is Hawking all of a sudden an expert in Economy? Wasn't he a physicist?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoHe is a physicist which means he likely understand the concept of feedback loops. It only takes so much STEM education to start noticing some worrying trends. Also, Hawking probably reads other smart people, including economists. It's not as if he first noticed this problem. It's only that if you're famous, media actually report on what you have to say.
- AnthonyMouse 11y agoThe problem is that when you only understand half the issue, you start shouting "down with capitalism" instead of "down with corporate corruption of governments and international trade agreements negotiated in secret by unelected representatives", and there is no sensible alternative to capitalism as an economic model, but there are sensible alternatives to government corruption and unaccountability.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoYes, but another problem is that when you are too deeply involved with the minutiae of the system you lose track of the big picture - it's not corruption or trade agreements that's going to doom us, the real issue is with feedback loops embedded in the basic idea of profit maximization and growth economy. You may have zero corruption and perfectly honest people and market economy will still screw you over. Our system was pretty good for bootstrapping humanity into a technological era, and was pretty well aligned with our shared values for a time, but now it's becoming less and less well-aligned, in dangerous ways. In the end, with robots capable of doing anything, trying to keep people working for a living is prima facie ridiculous and evil. We need a way to avoid this future, and focusing just on new ways to solve government corruption isn't, I think, going to help us with this much. We need to stop riding the feedback loop. C.f. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ for some pretty good analysis of the problem
- PythonicAlpha 11y agoHe is simply right. The global trend is, that governments in all nations loose more and more of their former power and (partially) dump it to international corporations which hold the real power in their hands. There is an older documentary, that is still valid with the name "The Corporation" which shows, how corporations have used the US constitution and decades of lobbying and court cases to gain more and more power. So today, the corporations are difficult to held liable for things they do (in many cases they come away with small fees that don't even cover the harm they caused), but enjoy many of the rights which where meant for real citizen. This documentary comes to the conclusion, that many corporations behave like psychopaths, because when a corporation has to decide, (for example) to keep the environment clean or make more profits, the corporation rule is, to go for the money and forget about the rest. Anybody should watch this. Either on DVD, or I also spotted it on worlds favorite video site. With international treaties like TTP and others, the power of international corporations is hardened and it gets more and more difficult to reverse this global trend. With all their lawyers and lobbyists, the corporations are bound to win over the democracies -- what dictators did not manage to. This trend is undermining democracies and human rights, because corporations are not democratic and have only one rule to obey: The profit rule. So finally, we are all governed by money and nothing else.
- teddyh 11y ago(You mean “documentary”, not “documentation” – I was confused for while.) Also, link: http://thecorporation.com/ http://thecorporation.com/
- PythonicAlpha 11y agoThank you very much! Changed my text. As non-native speaker, the differences don't shine out so visible.
- hwstar 11y agoThis is why some corporations should be forcefully converted to benefit corporations which have more stakeholders than profit alone. Big Pharma, Insurance, and Utilities should be converted first.
- dovereconomics 11y agoNo. TPP, huge inequality, centralization, unemployment ARE NOT a consequence of free market capitalism. In such case, automation just doesn't outpace the labor market. Now, when tech companies are partying with an artificial economy controlled by the government, they have more than enough money to that.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago> TPP, huge inequality, centralization, unemployment ARE NOT a consequence of free market capitalism. Then what's the cause? Surely you have a guess?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- loup-vaillant 11y agoFrom the slant of your comment, I guess you're an Anarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems. If I'm right, you think the problem is the state, and the solution is getting rid of it. You are probably overlooking, ignoring, or downplaying the power of private corporations, or you think they would lose their power once we get rid of the state. My guess is different. I think that if we get rid of the state, we're more likely to get a corporate government than anarchy. Like what's described in the Continuum TV show. Whether that's a good thing… well at least, we would no longer kid ourselves about living in a democracy. --- Sorry if I put words in your mouth, but you forced my hand.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoAnarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems FWIW there are variations of anarcho-capitalism such as agorism, which is much less overtly propertarian (i.e. either advocating land value tax or not readily accepting the labor theory of property), and moreover which makes a distinction between entrepreneurs and mere capital owners.
- tnorgaard 11y agoTo be fair, it's not really capitalism he is arguing against, but rather Special Interest groups misusing their position in a capitalistic system. Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning liberal / "capitalist", spoke against monopolies and Special Interest groups for ~30 years [1]. I would have loved to see a Milton Friedman and Thomas Piketty debate although. :-) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2T2Ee8zm6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2T2Ee8zm6s
- nhaehnle 11y agoAre you so sure about that? Capitalism is at its core about the (private) accumulation of capital in the sense of means of production. This capital is used by human labour to produce things. Technological change is ultimately a process by which the ratio of capital input to human labour input increases.[0] In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed until it's basically unnecessary. Private ownership of this capital - which is what capitalism is all about - is then absolutely the problem, because it pits a small group of capital owners against a majority which depends on the products produced by that capital without having anything useful to trade left. [0] How you measure this ratio is an important but difficult topic, and in fact one must be careful not to let an implicit definition of measures frame the discussion.
- maratd 11y ago> In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed until it's basically unnecessary. Where is the evidence for this? Your entire arguments falls apart when this isn't the case. As manufacturing moved towards automation, labor moved toward rendering services. The number of jobs is highly correlated to the size of the population. We didn't see a reduction in available employment due to automation. We simply saw a shift in the type of work performed, with jobs moving toward things that were more difficult to automate.
- scotty79 11y ago
- joeyspn 11y agoWe should be worried about Keynesianism and Crony Capitalism. A free and fair market is not bad per se... Too bad we don't have that kind of market anymore.
- sethd 11y agoDid we ever actually have that kind of market? Perhaps what we should say is "too bad we haven't tried this kind of market yet".
- amalcon 11y agoToo bad that kind of market is, as far as we can tell, impossible.
- hwstar 11y agoWe should be worried about Supply Side (Chicago) economics and Crony Capitalism.
- monochromatic 11y ago"Scientist who is an expert on X opines on Y and Z."
- rumcajz 11y agoThe real problem is how demand curve behaves when the price is approaching zero (which is what you eventually get as productivity increases). Traditional economics assume that if the price of an egg is $1 you'll eat one a day. If the price drops to 1c, you'll eat 100 a day. But: Would you? In other words, at some point we are going to live in the world where consumption cannot catch up with the production. What then? Surely, economy would collapse: Goods won't be purchased and people producing them would be fired. Those fired would not have money to buy goods. The demand would decrease. More people will be fired. And so on until last human being dies of hunger. I would even argue that in developed world we've already reached the limit and the economy is kept afloat only by desperate measures such as whipping up the consumption using ads, lowering the productivity by employing large numbers of paper pushers and so on.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoAnd all of that doesn't even begin to address the resource limits of our planet. We can keep artificially sustaining the system by making more throwaway products for ad-driven consumption; we can keep people employed by inventing more bullshit jobs, introducing more managers of managers of managers into advertising industry, etc. - but at that rate, we'll soon hit the energy limit and the entire system will collapse back into middle ages. Or we'll all starve and die as the planet says "fuck it, I had enough" and shuts down the ecosystem for a while.
- rumcajz 11y agoThat's an interesting question as well. We may be saved by the fact that as literacy and wealth increases, natality rates go down. I've heard all kinds of estimates of when we'll reach the peak, ranging for 30 to 100 years. Whether the ecosystem will support us until population grows smaller and more sustainable is unknown.
- reagency 11y agoNope. Westerners with 2 babies consume 100x as much resources as rural Africans with 7 babies. And they can continue to consume more as the productivity increases. And we have room (in the population, not in resources) to double the number of high consuming people eveery 30 years for many generations.
- drawkbox 11y agoCapitalism and free markets are fine with some fair regulation on the outliers/abusers. Capitalism is ultimately a human system. Humans are much scarier than robots, the robots are only doing as other humans instructed (at least at the beginning). Capitalism, a human creation and system, has become a force that is ultimately good for advancement/innovation, but one that people can take too far in greed. Without some regulation, by design humans take it as far as they can go, it is part of our programming. But, when the future depends on the good will of mega rich humans to spread it around, that future is a very frightening prospect indeed.
- timtas 11y agoThis begs a question. Why are we listening to Stephen Hawking? Why do we think that destruction of jobs by technology is something new? Do we really think it's happening faster now than in times past? I call this presentism. The cotton gin, the loom, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, domestication of the horse, the wheel -- each of these in it's time put a sizable share of humanity out of a job. Compared to the steam engine, the self diving car is a mere incremental advance. Perhaps the time and place of the most rapid job destruction was the 19th century in the U.S and England. During this period, the standard of living of the average worker shot up somewhere between 10-fold and 100-fold. You will not find a measure by which average people's lives was not radically improved. In free markets, the blessings of technological innovation are enjoyed disproportionally by the immediate innovators, but they cannot hold their advantages for very long, not without protection from the state. Competition levels. History and reason amply show this. People see rising inequality and are told to reflexively blame capitalism. But is what we have today in the U.S. really "capitalism?" If capitalism is "fee markets bounded by private property rights," that's not what we have. The U.S. system is best called crony capitalism[1], or corporatism[2], and lemon socialism [3]. While some of the rising wealth of the rich today is earned, much of it is scam. Bailouts, regulatory capture[4], and the Fed's serial asset bubbles[5] -- these are just some of the zero-sum schemes which today shift massive wealth from the middle toward the top. Automation in free markets has always and will always make everyone richer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture [5] https://mises.org/library/how-central-banks-cause-income-inequality https://mises.org/library/how-central-banks-cause-income-ine...
- anarchotroll 11y agoDo you believe we would be better off if we destroyed/prohibited all the technological innovations you mentioned in your comment? Stop for a moment and think about that. Then, read the article below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- _yosefk 11y agoIndeed, technology leading to unemployment is happening right now while a Skynet-style AGI is IMO tremendously unlikely. However, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared" depends on someone maintaining the machines and the distribution of produce. (Because the opposite of Skynet - an AGI that maintains itself and keeps every human satisfied - is even less likely than Skynet.) And who is going to work for free while keeping everyone else's best interests in mind? The fact that, well, nobody would, not really, is somehow missed by people who blame "capitalism" or whatever instead of blaming human nature.
- verbin217 11y agoI think basic income would do a lot to resolve this tension. People can work towards their own interests with a flat tax on their income and capital gains. Those tax dollars are redirected to an electronic deposit given to everyone for the same amount every day. Lets say $35. You could vote to allocate the usage of those dollars. Like 30% has to go to housing. Then everyone is free to use additional income however they like. It's a sustained capitalistic representation of basic human interests. I suspect it'd do a lot for the economy too. Both by increasing demand (poor people actually buy things) and decreasing fear.
- _yosefk 11y agoIMO very few people who could become good engineers would choose to do so with basic income available that essentially lets them live a so-called "life of the mind." Just an opinion, of course.
- verbin217 11y agoIMO those very few people would benefit tremendously from a less diluted workplace. Such that they may actually seek it out were it not for the forces that drive them away. The modern startup is essentially this. It just takes a VC to make it a reality. We're a few technical iterations from essentially deprecating everyone else. We ought to start talking about this. A "life of the mind" in a world with seamless VR and other escapes could actually be wildly more productive than our current life in the world. We should just start trying to make people more comfortable. The engineering mindset seems inherently rare. I suspect distributions converge such that it simply CANNOT be pervasive in a population. What then? We're making everyone else redundant to a degree that we don't even need the entire engineering-capable subset. Honestly I think the money is and will-be potent enough to attract the capable. Ideally we would find creative ways for other people to work if they desired it. But these may become increasingly rare and undependable. People need a safety-net they can actually reason about. Modern welfare isn't it. They could relax and think MUCH more productively if it were simply: I can live in this tiny box and eat/sleep/internet indefinitely while I learn whatever I want. $35/day buys you that.
- meeper16 11y agoI'm more scared of Democrats and Republicans than Capitalists.
- pdkl95 11y agoDavid Simon described the problem very clearly: That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress. [...] Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism [...] but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection. It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. [...] Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-cap... (the original talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk )
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- timetoswitch 11y agoI thought hacker news would have more libertarians than this. I'm saddened.
- edc117 11y agoSo write something for us, be that libertarian! The strongest sign of a robust ideal is that it stands up well in discussion and dissent.
- anarchotroll 11y agoIf the so called "evil wealthy people" control all the machines that produce goods and services, what would they use those goods and services for, since the rest of the world is miserably poor? Apparently not even Stephen Hawking understands the broken window fallacy.