5 ms·

I'm all for raising the minimum wage, temporarily it may help people for several years. The truth is the automation wave is coming quickly regardless of what pe

by mbfg 11y ago

I'm all for raising the minimum wage, temporarily it may help people for several years. The truth is the automation wave is coming quickly regardless of what people are paid. And it's not for just minimum wage jobs. Think about jobs like truck driver where there's probably several million people who count this as their profession in the US. In 10-20 years, that number will probably approach 0. There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone. There will be super wealthy 'robot owners' and peasant/slaves, and probably first in america. The only hope is that the government completely changes the entire society through 'more than' basic income. Of course we know that won't happen. It is high unlikely that even a subsistent basic income will be put in place. The government is run by the super-rich, and really only does what ever it takes to protect their interests. Hopefully my life span doesn't range long enough that i feel the devastating impact of these changes, but i fear the timespan where this occurs is so accelerating that it will be here in force way before we estimate it today. 30 years? I can see it being here in 30 years. Even if you have a job that is 'automation-proof' or 'automation-resistent' but not an elite, your income will be paltry compared to the super rich class, and thus you will be relegated to the masses. Yeah, I know, i sound hysterical. Hopefully i am. I doubt it.

crdoconnor 11y ago
>There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone. If anything is going to cause this dystopian future to happen it'll be trade deals like TTIP and TPP not magical androids. >Even if you have a job that is 'automation-proof' or 'automation-resistent' but not an elite, your income will be paltry compared to the super rich class Americans have fought (and won) against robber barons before and they will do again. This kind of shift in wealth is a cyclical thing that happens with or without jetsons-style robot maids.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  How do TPP and other trade deals which allow Chinese people to compete economically with Americans destroy jobs? I'm assuming, of course, that Chinese are people too.(I've never been there but I've met a few of them. They didn't seem that different from me.) Out of curiosity, did ending Jim Crow (allowing blacks to compete economically with whites) also destroy jobs? Can we create prosperity by making up arbitrary divisions and then imposing internal trade barriers?
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >How do TPP and other trade deals which allow Chinese people to compete economically with Americans destroy jobs? By moving factories which previously employed Americans to countries where they don't, leaving those Americans unemployed. All of that cheap stuff you buy at Walmart that was made by Americans pre-1990 isn't now all made by robots. >Out of curiosity, did ending Jim Crow (allowing blacks to compete economically with whites) also destroy jobs? No. No jobs were moved overseas via Jim Crow laws to take advantage of lax labor and environmental laws. Out of curiosity have you ever looked into the details of any of these trade deals? Because many of them implicitly support slavery. Does that matter to you?
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      By moving factories which previously employed Americans to countries where they don't, leaving those Americans unemployed. Assuming you are right that those Americans remain unemployed, you are completely ignoring the newly employed Chinese people. Do they count for nothing? Not even 3/5? Out of curiosity, since your calculus is explicitly putting zero value on Chinese people, why would you care about Chinese slaves?
      - crdoconnor 11y ago
        Are you saying that the employment prospects of Chinese people are the responsibility of the US government but implicitly supporting slavery isn't?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
spdy 11y ago
> There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone. There will be super wealthy 'robot owners' and peasant/slaves This will maybe be the case in the beginning but if you have to deal with an unemployment rate of 20-40% inside a country under heavy arms as America you have to find solutions quickly as modern society tend to fix problems when they occur we will have a bumpy ride into our new economy model that has to come. And with the automation that is coming like delivery / fully autonomous fabrics / A.I etc. we can provide the basic needs to everyone food / electricity / water / housing at no cost. We have to figure out reward and leisure.
- chii 11y ago
  >we can provide the basic needs to everyone food / electricity / water / housing at no cost. what evidence do you have of this? those resources are not free (unless you consider fusion a solved problem, and thus have near-free energy). More likely scenario is that the vast majority of people who are too uneducated, or is not from a wealthy background will suffer, whilst those with the means will live way above (literally, in huge skyscrapers/floating cities, as well as figuratively). There will still be slums, and the conditions of those places will be as you imagine.
  - erkkie 11y ago
    I am, also, very much imagining a situation like in the movie "Elysium" being both probable and probably inevitable; the more interesting question is will there be a revolution after?
  - adwn 11y ago
    > (unless you consider fusion a solved problem, and thus have near-free energy) I wonder where the idea that "fusion = extremely cheap" comes from. Even if/when we get commercially viable fusion, there's no reason why it should be significantly cheaper than energy from nuclear fission – you'll still need extremely complicated, high-precision, high-technology machines, generators, cooling towers, buildings, skilled workers, some amount of regulation, and disposal of nuclear waste. Oh, and if your fusion design is a tokamak, it might easily be more expensive than energy from fission reactors. If you want electrical energy that's some orders of magnitude cheaper, you'll need a break-through in fundamental physics.
aianus 11y ago
> Even if you have a job that is 'automation-proof' or 'automation-resistent' but not an elite, your income will be paltry compared to the super rich class, and thus you will be relegated to the masses. If my real income goes from $100,000 to $200,000 and the CEO's from $10 million to $100 million, am I worse off than before? Should I be averse to that future? I don't see why...
- zanny 11y ago
  > I don't see why... If you exist in an economy solely consisting of yourself and your employer, you went from receiving 1% if revenue to .2%. Your earnings are never absolute in terms of buying power or wealth - they are both relative, because the market behaves relatively to what people have or do not have. If your CEO gets 5 times richer than you, they now exert 5 times more economic influence on the economy and you in reciprocal exert 5 times less. R&D will cater less to you, industry will target you less, and most importantly your real spending power will go down. How? Because your economy just went from 10.1 million to 100.2 million. That is a 10 times inflation of the monetary base, which in aggregate would see a correspondingly (smaller) influence on the price of goods and services. Your buying power will drop. That extends to whole economies. If you are a part of a contiguous segment of the economy whose total wealth or revenue is declining, your influence, buying power, and real prosperity is also declining, regardless of absolute income. It is also worth mentioning that wealth is a much greater influence on prosperity than income. He who owns the means of production is he who reaps the spoils of growth first, and can decide what to do with them. That is trickle down in a nutshell, but it is at complete discretion of the capitalist running the show how the money they get is then spent, and nowadays it is definitely not going to be on you.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    > That is trickle down in a nutshell, but it is at complete discretion of the capitalist running the show how the money they get is then spent, and nowadays it is definitely not going to be on you. So wait, you're saying the capitalist can choose to pay people zero dollars for their salaries or charge 100 times more for their goods and workers/consumers will automatically accept those terms? Because that's not really how it works.
blazespin 11y ago
It will happen.. we still live in a democracy. Sanders didn't win, but he moved the democrats to the left.
- mbfg 11y ago
  I'd be happy to see Sanders pull an upset, but lets not fool ourselves, the democratic party didn't move an inch. They are the same corporatists that they ever were.
Zigurd 11y ago
We are already a good ways toward the outcome you describe, having gutted manufacturing employment. The reason we are so heavily policed and imprisoned is that those are good jobs for people with stronger necks than minds. Those people used to work in factories. Here's the twist: The self-organizing nature of free market capitalism has been fetishized without justification. Yeah it's more efficient than a Soviet Five Year Plan. But that's not saying much. What if command economies run my machine intelligence turn out to be the most productive and best able to deliver a good life for the most people?
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
>There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone Want to know the biggest job killer in history? The tractor. Farm employment in the developed world went from 70% to 2%. We have been through this before. We can generate new jobs.
- jqm 11y ago
  Indeed. I propose we create a professional meeting attender certification. We could even have meeting attending bootcamps which teach people how to do things like bring up points that only relate to one or two others, schedule further committee meetings, go off on tangents and otherwise extend meetings into a full time profession.... which it actually kind of is in some cases. I for one would be very grateful for this new class of service workers. I mean.. I don't change my own oil. I could but I don't. Jiffy Lube does it better and cheaper.
- turar 11y ago
  > We can generate new jobs. Yes, we can. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
- mbfg 11y ago
  We do create new jobs. But you do recognize it's a Ponzi scheme right? Each iteration include a smaller set of highly educated jobs, which will be out of reach for a larger percentage of the population.
avz 11y ago
Yes, we have already automated away some production facilities and will soon automate the rest, but human work is way more than just producing goods. Increasing amount of our work is focused on solving problems. Saying that we may now stop working is like saying there are no more problems to solve. That we're done here. That this is the world we want. Given the abundance of problems to solve, I think there will be abundance of jobs. Many of them may involve directing robots or ML algorithms for increased productivity at lower skill level. Others may involve seeking out specific problems to solve. Note that this task requires you: * to have initiative, * to be affected by a problem yourself or to empathize with someone else who is affected. Such jobs would stay around for a very long time. Maybe one day we will have a god-like super-AI that would not need to be run and configured by anyone and would seek out and solve problems completely of its own accord. But this isn't even on the horizon. EDIT: formatting

by mbfg 11y ago

crdoconnor 11y ago

>There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone. If anything is going to cause this dystopian future to happen it'll be trade deals like TTIP and TPP not magical androids. >Even if you have a job that is 'automation-proof' or 'automation-resistent' but not an elite, your income will be paltry compared to the super rich class Americans have fought (and won) against robber barons before and they will do again. This kind of shift in wealth is a cyclical thing that happens with or without jetsons-style robot maids.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
How do TPP and other trade deals which allow Chinese people to compete economically with Americans destroy jobs? I'm assuming, of course, that Chinese are people too.(I've never been there but I've met a few of them. They didn't seem that different from me.) Out of curiosity, did ending Jim Crow (allowing blacks to compete economically with whites) also destroy jobs? Can we create prosperity by making up arbitrary divisions and then imposing internal trade barriers?
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >How do TPP and other trade deals which allow Chinese people to compete economically with Americans destroy jobs? By moving factories which previously employed Americans to countries where they don't, leaving those Americans unemployed. All of that cheap stuff you buy at Walmart that was made by Americans pre-1990 isn't now all made by robots. >Out of curiosity, did ending Jim Crow (allowing blacks to compete economically with whites) also destroy jobs? No. No jobs were moved overseas via Jim Crow laws to take advantage of lax labor and environmental laws. Out of curiosity have you ever looked into the details of any of these trade deals? Because many of them implicitly support slavery. Does that matter to you?
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    By moving factories which previously employed Americans to countries where they don't, leaving those Americans unemployed. Assuming you are right that those Americans remain unemployed, you are completely ignoring the newly employed Chinese people. Do they count for nothing? Not even 3/5? Out of curiosity, since your calculus is explicitly putting zero value on Chinese people, why would you care about Chinese slaves?
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      Are you saying that the employment prospects of Chinese people are the responsibility of the US government but implicitly supporting slavery isn't?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

spdy 11y ago

> There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone. There will be super wealthy 'robot owners' and peasant/slaves This will maybe be the case in the beginning but if you have to deal with an unemployment rate of 20-40% inside a country under heavy arms as America you have to find solutions quickly as modern society tend to fix problems when they occur we will have a bumpy ride into our new economy model that has to come. And with the automation that is coming like delivery / fully autonomous fabrics / A.I etc. we can provide the basic needs to everyone food / electricity / water / housing at no cost. We have to figure out reward and leisure.

chii 11y ago
>we can provide the basic needs to everyone food / electricity / water / housing at no cost. what evidence do you have of this? those resources are not free (unless you consider fusion a solved problem, and thus have near-free energy). More likely scenario is that the vast majority of people who are too uneducated, or is not from a wealthy background will suffer, whilst those with the means will live way above (literally, in huge skyscrapers/floating cities, as well as figuratively). There will still be slums, and the conditions of those places will be as you imagine.
- erkkie 11y ago
  I am, also, very much imagining a situation like in the movie "Elysium" being both probable and probably inevitable; the more interesting question is will there be a revolution after?
- adwn 11y ago
  > (unless you consider fusion a solved problem, and thus have near-free energy) I wonder where the idea that "fusion = extremely cheap" comes from. Even if/when we get commercially viable fusion, there's no reason why it should be significantly cheaper than energy from nuclear fission – you'll still need extremely complicated, high-precision, high-technology machines, generators, cooling towers, buildings, skilled workers, some amount of regulation, and disposal of nuclear waste. Oh, and if your fusion design is a tokamak, it might easily be more expensive than energy from fission reactors. If you want electrical energy that's some orders of magnitude cheaper, you'll need a break-through in fundamental physics.

aianus 11y ago

> Even if you have a job that is 'automation-proof' or 'automation-resistent' but not an elite, your income will be paltry compared to the super rich class, and thus you will be relegated to the masses. If my real income goes from $100,000 to $200,000 and the CEO's from $10 million to $100 million, am I worse off than before? Should I be averse to that future? I don't see why...

zanny 11y ago
> I don't see why... If you exist in an economy solely consisting of yourself and your employer, you went from receiving 1% if revenue to .2%. Your earnings are never absolute in terms of buying power or wealth - they are both relative, because the market behaves relatively to what people have or do not have. If your CEO gets 5 times richer than you, they now exert 5 times more economic influence on the economy and you in reciprocal exert 5 times less. R&D will cater less to you, industry will target you less, and most importantly your real spending power will go down. How? Because your economy just went from 10.1 million to 100.2 million. That is a 10 times inflation of the monetary base, which in aggregate would see a correspondingly (smaller) influence on the price of goods and services. Your buying power will drop. That extends to whole economies. If you are a part of a contiguous segment of the economy whose total wealth or revenue is declining, your influence, buying power, and real prosperity is also declining, regardless of absolute income. It is also worth mentioning that wealth is a much greater influence on prosperity than income. He who owns the means of production is he who reaps the spoils of growth first, and can decide what to do with them. That is trickle down in a nutshell, but it is at complete discretion of the capitalist running the show how the money they get is then spent, and nowadays it is definitely not going to be on you.
- marknutter 11y ago
  > That is trickle down in a nutshell, but it is at complete discretion of the capitalist running the show how the money they get is then spent, and nowadays it is definitely not going to be on you. So wait, you're saying the capitalist can choose to pay people zero dollars for their salaries or charge 100 times more for their goods and workers/consumers will automatically accept those terms? Because that's not really how it works.

blazespin 11y ago

It will happen.. we still live in a democracy. Sanders didn't win, but he moved the democrats to the left.

mbfg 11y ago
I'd be happy to see Sanders pull an upset, but lets not fool ourselves, the democratic party didn't move an inch. They are the same corporatists that they ever were.

Zigurd 11y ago

We are already a good ways toward the outcome you describe, having gutted manufacturing employment. The reason we are so heavily policed and imprisoned is that those are good jobs for people with stronger necks than minds. Those people used to work in factories. Here's the twist: The self-organizing nature of free market capitalism has been fetishized without justification. Yeah it's more efficient than a Soviet Five Year Plan. But that's not saying much. What if command economies run my machine intelligence turn out to be the most productive and best able to deliver a good life for the most people?

IndianAstronaut 11y ago

>There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone Want to know the biggest job killer in history? The tractor. Farm employment in the developed world went from 70% to 2%. We have been through this before. We can generate new jobs.

jqm 11y ago
Indeed. I propose we create a professional meeting attender certification. We could even have meeting attending bootcamps which teach people how to do things like bring up points that only relate to one or two others, schedule further committee meetings, go off on tangents and otherwise extend meetings into a full time profession.... which it actually kind of is in some cases. I for one would be very grateful for this new class of service workers. I mean.. I don't change my own oil. I could but I don't. Jiffy Lube does it better and cheaper.
turar 11y ago
> We can generate new jobs. Yes, we can. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
mbfg 11y ago
We do create new jobs. But you do recognize it's a Ponzi scheme right? Each iteration include a smaller set of highly educated jobs, which will be out of reach for a larger percentage of the population.

avz 11y ago

Yes, we have already automated away some production facilities and will soon automate the rest, but human work is way more than just producing goods. Increasing amount of our work is focused on solving problems. Saying that we may now stop working is like saying there are no more problems to solve. That we're done here. That this is the world we want. Given the abundance of problems to solve, I think there will be abundance of jobs. Many of them may involve directing robots or ML algorithms for increased productivity at lower skill level. Others may involve seeking out specific problems to solve. Note that this task requires you: * to have initiative, * to be affected by a problem yourself or to empathize with someone else who is affected. Such jobs would stay around for a very long time. Maybe one day we will have a god-like super-AI that would not need to be run and configured by anyone and would seek out and solve problems completely of its own accord. But this isn't even on the horizon. EDIT: formatting