4 ms·

An interesting point: our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. Eg, making torches. Then he sells his torches to a f

by RyanZAG 11y ago

An interesting point: our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. Eg, making torches. Then he sells his torches to a farmer in exchange for some food so that the farmer can work after dark to make more food. And he sells his torch to a miner so that the miner can go in deeper tunnels. And so on. Simplified extensively, but at the heart of it, this is what we do. So our whole economy is built around this concept of making one thing others want, and then getting them to give you things you need in exchange. What happens with automation where a single person can use automation to make everything he needs without having to barter his work for the work of others? The entire system - the entire economy - becomes unnecessary. Is it possible that's where we're rapidly heading and maybe there isn't even a problem - just a movement to end 'economy' that we've relied on for a few thousand years?

Retric 11y ago
'Stuff' is a smaller part of our economy than you might think. Software, Entertainment, Healthcare, Lawyers, Land, Prestige, etc. Even then raw materials don't show up by magic. So, automation might get rid of low end restaurants, factory's etc but it's going to take high end AI to really kill 'the economy' as we think of it.
- afarrell 11y ago
  I think raw materials are actually going to be easier to automate. Australian mines already have self-driving trucks and US farmers have been at the forefront of UAV use.
  - jkaunisv1 11y ago
    You'll have to convince China
  - Retric 11y ago
    Mines are a factory that use raw materials they don't make them. Consider some Ore in ground is raw martial gold is the end product. So, as long as people still value land gold is not going to be free.
jjoonathan 11y ago
Economics will never disappear because many goods are fundamentally scarce. Fortunately, the necessities of life really aren't, so the economy could conceivably be pried away from its current position as holder of both carrot and stick (I'm defining "stick" as "withholding the necessities of life" here) and reduced to simply offering carrots. This would be an extraordinary improvement and would put capitalism on course to actually live up to the "consensual transaction" and "monotonic improvement" rhetoric so frequently brandied about by the younger members of the capitalist camp. And the communist camp? Well, people owning the means of production is what their philosophy was about all along. If it becomes practical to achieve such a state of affairs without government enforcement then the controversial and historically failure-prone side of their beliefs becomes moot. Capitalism and communism become more or less compatible, which will be no surprise at all to the people who have familiarized themselves with both schools of thought but possibly a bit of a shock to anyone who took the highly polarized rhetoric surrounding the issue at face value. In any case, this type of thing has been thought about and discussed before at great length, but there's a strong taboo hanging over the discussion which makes it easy to inadvertently ignore. > a single person can use automation to make everything he needs This would require a large amount of infrastructure per person. An intermediate target would be the point at which communes become viable -- share the heavy infrastructure across some number of people larger than 1 but smaller than 8 billion (or 300M if you think the US government is already sufficiently protectionist). The macroscopic trends of "increasing automation capability" and "decreasing market value of many peoples' labor" make it inevitable that this will happen at some point, the big question is when. It's possible we're approaching or have passed the tipping point but don't know it yet because we haven't invested enough effort in developing infrastructure optimized for decentralization, which is the opposite of what current market structures require. Also, there are a few big social sticking points, namely specialists who are necessary at the margin but who are still treated well by the traditional system (doctors). If workable alternatives can't be developed then the whole endeavor will have to wait until the market turns on them as well. One way or another we'll get past the issue, but getting around the social problems could take decades longer than getting around the industrial problems. The big danger is that we don't get to the point of viable decentralization before the automation economy makes enough people redundant to create large-scale human misery and political unrest. Arguably this has already happened, but it can get a lot worse -- and I sure hope that we don't get a chance to find out just how much worse that is.
morgante 11y ago
None of the automation that we're seeing is making it possible for one person to make everything he needs. Automation is increasing the returns to capital and making it possible for corporations to produce things with fewer employees—none of that implies that you'll suddenly be able to make things yourself. If anything, increasing automation increases the returns to scale. You might conceivably build your own torch. But you're certainly not going to purchase a million dollar torch-making machine. Automation poses a threat to the traditional economic model, but on the supply side not the demand side—you'll still be buying as much as before, you just probably won't have a job.
- nickpinkston 11y ago
  However, at Plethora (my company) and others like ReThink robotics, etc. are lowering the barriers to automation so that small entities (people / firms) are able to develop products - which will put competitive pressure on current firms - driving price down and/or features up. Plethora does this by removing the setup costs of manufacturing so you can do short runs affordably and actually be "agile" in your production. ReThink does it by making it easy to automate existing SMB production lines - meaning small firms can automate what they have or rapidly reconfigure with lower setup costs.
  - wcummings 11y ago
    I've had the opportunity to play around w/ Rethink's product. If this is the state of the art, I'm not even a little bit afraid of automation.
    - nickpinkston 11y ago
      Haha - yea, there's a lot of work to do for sure. I'd argue also that just robotics isn't enough - cell design and machine interfacing is actually way more time than the robot programming itself.
- the_ancient 11y ago
  >>you'll still be buying as much as before, you just probably won't have a job. how will one continue to buy at the same level with no income?
emmab 11y ago
This is why people specialize in one thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
mr_luc 11y ago
I don't think you have to reach for "economics won't exist" to see the serious problem that schemes like Basic Income would hope to address. > our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. As technology advances, the amount of preparation any of us needs to specialize in something useful/valuable skyrockets. Rather amazingly, 1% of the population of the US are truck drivers or work directly for trucking companies. With families, we're talking about closer to 2 or 3% of the population of one of the most advanced nations on the planet. What's the skills and preparation gulf between a truck driver and the person who obsoleted him? Same goes for manufacturing (which is thriving in the United States, but with lights-out machining, where one person babies and maintains a pod of CNC machines) and many other fields. We need less and less wet robots, and retraining them is close to impossible already -- it may eventually be completely impossible due to specialization.

by RyanZAG 11y ago

Retric 11y ago

'Stuff' is a smaller part of our economy than you might think. Software, Entertainment, Healthcare, Lawyers, Land, Prestige, etc. Even then raw materials don't show up by magic. So, automation might get rid of low end restaurants, factory's etc but it's going to take high end AI to really kill 'the economy' as we think of it.

afarrell 11y ago
I think raw materials are actually going to be easier to automate. Australian mines already have self-driving trucks and US farmers have been at the forefront of UAV use.
- jkaunisv1 11y ago
  You'll have to convince China
- Retric 11y ago
  Mines are a factory that use raw materials they don't make them. Consider some Ore in ground is raw martial gold is the end product. So, as long as people still value land gold is not going to be free.

jjoonathan 11y ago

Economics will never disappear because many goods are fundamentally scarce. Fortunately, the necessities of life really aren't, so the economy could conceivably be pried away from its current position as holder of both carrot and stick (I'm defining "stick" as "withholding the necessities of life" here) and reduced to simply offering carrots. This would be an extraordinary improvement and would put capitalism on course to actually live up to the "consensual transaction" and "monotonic improvement" rhetoric so frequently brandied about by the younger members of the capitalist camp. And the communist camp? Well, people owning the means of production is what their philosophy was about all along. If it becomes practical to achieve such a state of affairs without government enforcement then the controversial and historically failure-prone side of their beliefs becomes moot. Capitalism and communism become more or less compatible, which will be no surprise at all to the people who have familiarized themselves with both schools of thought but possibly a bit of a shock to anyone who took the highly polarized rhetoric surrounding the issue at face value. In any case, this type of thing has been thought about and discussed before at great length, but there's a strong taboo hanging over the discussion which makes it easy to inadvertently ignore. > a single person can use automation to make everything he needs This would require a large amount of infrastructure per person. An intermediate target would be the point at which communes become viable -- share the heavy infrastructure across some number of people larger than 1 but smaller than 8 billion (or 300M if you think the US government is already sufficiently protectionist). The macroscopic trends of "increasing automation capability" and "decreasing market value of many peoples' labor" make it inevitable that this will happen at some point, the big question is when. It's possible we're approaching or have passed the tipping point but don't know it yet because we haven't invested enough effort in developing infrastructure optimized for decentralization, which is the opposite of what current market structures require. Also, there are a few big social sticking points, namely specialists who are necessary at the margin but who are still treated well by the traditional system (doctors). If workable alternatives can't be developed then the whole endeavor will have to wait until the market turns on them as well. One way or another we'll get past the issue, but getting around the social problems could take decades longer than getting around the industrial problems. The big danger is that we don't get to the point of viable decentralization before the automation economy makes enough people redundant to create large-scale human misery and political unrest. Arguably this has already happened, but it can get a lot worse -- and I sure hope that we don't get a chance to find out just how much worse that is.

morgante 11y ago

None of the automation that we're seeing is making it possible for one person to make everything he needs. Automation is increasing the returns to capital and making it possible for corporations to produce things with fewer employees—none of that implies that you'll suddenly be able to make things yourself. If anything, increasing automation increases the returns to scale. You might conceivably build your own torch. But you're certainly not going to purchase a million dollar torch-making machine. Automation poses a threat to the traditional economic model, but on the supply side not the demand side—you'll still be buying as much as before, you just probably won't have a job.

nickpinkston 11y ago
However, at Plethora (my company) and others like ReThink robotics, etc. are lowering the barriers to automation so that small entities (people / firms) are able to develop products - which will put competitive pressure on current firms - driving price down and/or features up. Plethora does this by removing the setup costs of manufacturing so you can do short runs affordably and actually be "agile" in your production. ReThink does it by making it easy to automate existing SMB production lines - meaning small firms can automate what they have or rapidly reconfigure with lower setup costs.
- wcummings 11y ago
  I've had the opportunity to play around w/ Rethink's product. If this is the state of the art, I'm not even a little bit afraid of automation.
  - nickpinkston 11y ago
    Haha - yea, there's a lot of work to do for sure. I'd argue also that just robotics isn't enough - cell design and machine interfacing is actually way more time than the robot programming itself.
the_ancient 11y ago
>>you'll still be buying as much as before, you just probably won't have a job. how will one continue to buy at the same level with no income?

emmab 11y ago

This is why people specialize in one thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

mr_luc 11y ago

I don't think you have to reach for "economics won't exist" to see the serious problem that schemes like Basic Income would hope to address. > our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. As technology advances, the amount of preparation any of us needs to specialize in something useful/valuable skyrockets. Rather amazingly, 1% of the population of the US are truck drivers or work directly for trucking companies. With families, we're talking about closer to 2 or 3% of the population of one of the most advanced nations on the planet. What's the skills and preparation gulf between a truck driver and the person who obsoleted him? Same goes for manufacturing (which is thriving in the United States, but with lights-out machining, where one person babies and maintains a pod of CNC machines) and many other fields. We need less and less wet robots, and retraining them is close to impossible already -- it may eventually be completely impossible due to specialization.