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I cannot help it but see this as a socialist opinion piece. Clearly, without the introduction of a major tax on robots as capital equipment, robot-based manufa
by dmichulke 10y ago
I cannot help it but see this as a socialist opinion piece.
Clearly, without the
introduction of a major tax on robots as capital
equipment, robot-based manufacturing cannot
boost the fiscal revenues needed to finance
both social transfers, to support workers made
redundant by robots, and minimum wages, to
stem a decline in the living standards of low-
skilled and medium-skilled workers.
If robots do the work AND there is a functioning market, this will have two effects:
- substitution of low-skilled labor
- cheaper prices across the board
People most often forget the second item and ask for transfers as if people were automatically entitled because socialism. But they will get their share via the second item.
Also, work is infinite because human needs are infinite. Maybe servants in households become more popular again, who knows? If work weren't infinite we would all be unemployed already, according to the theories of 19th century economists. Yet here we are, working, and repeating the same mistake.
Another argument is that in the worst case we can just destroy all robots (and factories and wheels while we're at it), let's find out if we're better off after that or worse.
Finally, the current economic mainstream calls out "deflation" as the biggest threat to the economy, yet it is deflation that will increase real wages automagically. Of course, highly indebted entities (such as your government) will want you to believe otherwise so they claim that everything grinds to a halt if we just have negative inflation for a few months. Also, Central Banks would lose their justification if deflation is discovered to be not as bad as claimed.
- lg 10y agodeflation is tricky... if oil gets 10x cheaper because there's lots of new sources, it's great. if oil gets 10x cheaper because after the nuclear holocaust people are living in caves and don't have the refineries or machinery to make it useful, not so great.
- dmichulke 10y agoExactly. Deflation is not bad per se (though it can be)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Retric 10y agoI make decent but not insane money and feel zero need to budget because there is just not all that much stuff I want to buy. Unlimited wants is really an unproven assumption not reality. PS: Planned obsolecence for example is a direct result of limited wants.
- dmichulke 10y agoWhile I do believe you don't want more stuff, I have a hard time believing you wouldn't want more time, be it via a chauffeur, cleaning service, butler, cook, someone to run your errands or wait in line at the doctor. There is also improvements you might want to have like - a faster computer - a bigger apartment Now I know these options are not on the table today because you can get along without them but I doubt that if the price was low enough that you'd skip them. But if indeed none of this convinces you, let me know your profession - my bet would be you are a well-earning Zen monk :)
- majewsky 10y agoWhy would I need to invest into having more time when work is supposedly going away, this leaving me with more time automatically?
- dmichulke 10y agoI did not say "need to", I said "want to". Please comment below and say "I promise I will never want more time or more money, neither today nor in the future" if this is untrue. EDIT: I used human needs before but I'm not sure this is entirely synonymous to human wants
- Retric 10y agoI live 2.5 miles from my job, I don't see a chauffeur adding much. I already don't cook so a chef is not really that useful. I don't use most of the space in my apartment as it is, so more would be rather pointless. A faster computer, ehh possibly. I am kind of annoyed they have are not getting dramatically better all the time. But, automation is not producing new things, it's producing old things more quickly. Apple does not make a faster iPad than the one I am using so at best I would have spent less not gotten a faster machine. Which is the real issue. There is plenty of stuff I want but the problem is it does not exist.
- AJ007 10y agoBeing in the computing world we take deflation for granted. Things get cheaper and better, year after year and in a non-linear fashion. No one argues that things would be way better in 2016 if everyone had to pay $26,000 for 1980s era 8086s. In the short term putting a floor on incomes is going to hurt a lot of people. Increasing minimum wage can be viewed as a way to make it illegal to hire humans over robots. I don't know current prices, but a Knightscope robot was supposed to work out at or below minimum wage. Low interest rates are a double blow because you can finance a six figure robot at a very attractive rate. In the West I see policies being driven by inflation targets along with an attempt to build a high-income well educated workforce (this is the really, really nice way of saying things.) I see only the briefest hints of this outlook changing. There are going to be transition periods. Everything I have read doesn't do a good job at this. Policies in stage one could be very destructive at stage two, and vice versa. The demographics of the human population also must be strongly considered. A lot of countries have inverted pyramids. The current standard of living will not be sustainable without either a lot of immigration or mass scale automation. The long term goals should, #1 be humans surviving as a species and #2 having an extremely high standard of sustainable living. Neither is remotely guaranteed.
- makomk 10y agoExcept that robot-based manufacturing only reduces the labour component of manufacturing costs - there's still the cost of the raw materials, of factory space, of buying the robots, etc. Some of those, such as the cost of the robots, actually go up in this scenario compared to less-automated manufacture. So the net result is that an increasingly large share of the price of products goes to mineral rights owners, land owners, intellectual property owners, etc and an increasingly small share goes to labour. Which means wages will plummet faster than prices.