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In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

136 points by helmchenlord 10y ago

elastic_church 10y ago
forget about the former title of coffee shop barista, our cotton and tobacco trade is about to go into overdrive!
almavi 10y ago
My first thought was: "Oh, great! If slave labor is not efficient anymore there will be no more slave workers in the world". On a second thought (and based on our history), that probably will be true, but only because people that today are working just for a plate of rice will starve to death.
- Quarrelsome 10y ago
  the sad truth is that slave labour needs no startup cost beyond a fist.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kevinr 10y ago
    Fists ain't cheap. Slaves are capital, and, like all capital, acquiring and maintaining them has nonzero cost. In the antebellum American South, some tasks like ditch-digging were sufficiently hazardous that a plantation owner would rather not risk their investment in their slaves, and so would hire Irish ditch-diggers by the day, as the plantation owner would be out less money if they died while digging the ditch.
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      Happy St Patrick's Day!
    - richthegeek 10y ago
      Somewhat off topic, but I can't figure out how ditch-digging would be particularly hazardous? The only danger I can think of would be a wall collapsing, but that could surely be avoided..
      - JetSpiegel 10y ago
        I'm assuming heat related conditions.
- jaggederest 10y ago
  It's fairly clear (and distasteful) that economically, slave labor is inefficient because you have to feed/house them or you lose the 'investment'. In contrast, you can pay someone well below a living wage with virtually no penalty. This is why so many people at the low end of the labor pool have multiple jobs.
rejschaap 10y ago
"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position." Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. So the investment is a bit higher than that. But you will recoup it very quickly on McDonalds scale. And they will be able to provide better and faster service.
- ghshephard 10y ago
  Indeed, Singapore where the new kiosks are almost ubiquitous, it's not uncommon for a cashier to have nobody waiting for them, but people still use the kiosks. 100% of the time when there is at least one person in line, I'll use the Kiosk - as all the orders are funneled into the same process queue. I particularly like the Kiosk because you can hyper customize every element of your order without confusion. With that said - these Gen 1 Kiosks are kind of kludgy, not super responsive - and have a lot of room for improvement. Once they improve the performance, I don't ever see ordering from a human. (It's already been many months since I've used a cashier to check out with at a local market - everything through the Kiosk) (Note: Singapore has no minimum wage and lots of intergenerational living, so there is a lot of inexpensive labor available from Seniors that work at McDonalds - this type of technology will have a big impact on them)
- formula_ninguna 10y ago
  Hence they'll be to sell people junk food even faster with better service? And more people will become more fat and sick in the long-term? coca-cola + humber = parapapapa. I'm loving it. McDonalds.
- kevinr 10y ago
  > And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.
mschuster91 10y ago
The consequences for societies that define the status/value of their members based on their employment/job will be disastrous. In, let's say, 20 years robots most likely will have overtaken agriculture, manufacturing and driving - by far the biggest job providers. And I see no movement at all by our politicians to prepare societies for this shift, except a couple countries playing small scale UBI... and the USA actually try to go the opposite route.
- manmal 10y ago
  I agree. In agriculture, the revolution has already taken place though. Even supersize tractors navigate themselves. A farmer can get by with a lot of machines and only a few extra hands, most of the time.
  - slurry 10y ago
    Depends on the crop.
- ximeng 10y ago
  Inherited wealth will just become a more important determinant of societal status than it already is.
  - XorNot 10y ago
    Black market robotics will become a thing I suspect. High grade user friendly systems the most coveted - you set then up out of view and use them to drive your retail business. We're going to go full cyberpunk yet.
- omegaworks 10y ago
  Dear Leader is already busily preparing military and domestic border enforcement positions for underemployed citizens to fill to counter the coming influx of climate and economic refugees. It's a great time to invest in detention centers.
- averagewall 10y ago
kevinr 10y ago
As is only appropriate, given the word's etymology. > ro·bot (n.) 1923, from English translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave," from Old Slavic orbu-, from PIE orbh- "pass from one status to another" (see orphan). http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot All that's old is new again.
- hedonistbot 10y ago
  > from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,"... I am not sure if this is correct. In Bulgarian we have almost the same word работник (rabotnik) and it just means "worker". No forced, slave connotations. Also checked with google translate and it doesn't find Czech translation for "robotnik" but it suggests to switch to Polish and translates it to "worker" as in Bulgarian. And работа (rabota) means "work" in Bulgarian and google translate shows the same for the Polish translation. Someone from Czechia here?
  - rljy 10y ago
    It does mean that in Czech. Which is strange, because in Slovak it just means work. I've translated a paragraph from wikipedia for you: "Robota neboli poddanství je ve feudálním systému osobní služba sedláků a rolníků pro jejich pány. Robotník je pak výraz pro poddaného robotujícího pro svého pána, někdy též vyššího správního či soudního úředníka, drába apod." "Robota is a feudal system of personal employment to the owners of estates and country houses. A robotník is a person who works for his/her lord." https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota Edit: I listened to the play by Karel and Josef Čápek, and it is most inanely stupid, sexist, pseudo-religious drivel I've come across in a long while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R. Edit2: The verb robit means to make something and has nothing to do with slavery.
    - 10y ago
WalterBright 10y ago
Slave labor is economically inefficient, and slave based economies have fared very poorly compared with free labor economies.
- elsewhen 10y ago
  > slave based economies have fared very poorly that may be true for the economy in general, but what about the slave owners specifically? that is the central point in the context of this discussion, since it is the factory owners that are making the decision about replacing human workers with robots.
legulere 10y ago
> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”. What makes a lot of things like food so expensive is human work. If you had access to slaves you could probably also reduce those costs. We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year.
- ohitsdom 10y ago
  > We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year. Those same people living under $1/day now would have their costs greatly increased if they became factory slaves. Can't be malnourished, so food costs go up. Can't live just anywhere, so housing costs go up to live on-site at the factory. Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up.
  - undersuit 10y ago
    >Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up. Unless it's cheaper to train a new slave and euthanize the old slave.
squarefoot 10y ago
Which will hopefully brings us to an inevitable change in our economics. If technological advance is going to create millions if not billions of unemployed people, the answer won't be rioting down the street and burning all machines in sight, although for many people this will appear the only viable solution.
- drieddust 10y ago
  This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class. People rioting down the street can be crushed by autonomous machines remorsely and effortlessly. There is a need to start political lobbying instead of hoping for an automatic economic change. Those who will control the means of production will not relinquish control once they realize their power. Once they understand that those millions doesn't matter anymore.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    > This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class. Not dying, but the abundant talent shows where a whole generation seems to sacrifice all regular career ambition for a nonexistent fairy tale already comes close. On the other hand, maybe the kids somehow have a very prophetic hunch that taking a crapshot at becoming the nation's "next top model" or whatever will eventually turn out to be a less terrible bet than fighting for scraps in an environment of increasingly automation-driven capitalism that simply does not need them anymore. The Black Mirror episode (spoilers!) with the training bikes nailed that quite well. When I watched it I was disappointed with the implausibility of a high tech society powered by the meagre 2 kWh you might realistically extract from a human per day. But this could actually be a subtle point made by the authors: the bikes are not really powering their economy, they are just a semi-plausible bullshit job made up in-world to make handouts look like a hard-earned wage, probably intended to fool those spinning the bikes as much as the elite who enjoys having the plebs nicely boxed up out of sight in underground caverns.
- tajen 10y ago
  Assuming machines can do everything a human can, what's left to humans and measurable (which is the only things humans can be rewarded for, hence can earn points for) are: - Art. Can't be replaced by a machine because appreciation for a piece is extremely correlated with the relationship to the author. Ex: I'm fan of [some singer], everything he does looks great to me in some way, and if I knew it were a machine or if I knew the author didn't come from the bottom of the masses, I wouldn't appreciate it. It's ever weirder with close relationships: My father listens in loop to the 10 songs I've written and played on an old tape (and that's the only reason he still has a tape reader in his car), and those songs mean little to anyone else: They are only valuable to him because they're mine. Although machines could produce art, man-made art is specific to humans. - And leverage. Today it takes 200 people to create a Whatsapp, negociate a treaty or design a new iPhone. Tomorrow, maybe only 3 people will be enough to solve world hunger, one artist to create a massive discography with all marketing material, concerts, interviews of himself and snapchat testimonials. Love of course is another thing humans can give, but is not measurable. If we agree point-keeping is a way of incentivizing people to drive their life, then how we measure a successful life will be art and leverage.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-generation slaveholding families have a fundamentally different way of looking at themselves and their culture than people who do not own slaves. Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim, we're going to be hacking into the human social ecosystem in ways never anticipated before.
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  > Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. Luckily, we have conveniently solved the ethic dilemma by defining work under slave conditions as better than no work at all ("think of the children!") and moving the exploitation sites far away.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit: BTW, I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely scared by the events and the speed at which they are unfolding.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    History. The French Revolution speaks of what happens when the populace at large decides that the situation cannot continue. Of course what would history remember of them had they lost?
thr3290 10y ago
> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”. There is a wrong assumption that factory has to cover those expenses. In reality this cost is often offloaded to government or another party.
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  Uhh, when they're property of the company and not actually considered people? I'm pretty sure you have to be considered a person in order to qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing vouchers. I mean, idk because all of those things came about after slavery.
  - thr3290 10y ago
    Prison?
    - thehardsphere 10y ago
      Prison labor is mostly out of fashion, isn't it? Not that many chain gangs anymore. The ones I do hear about are usually doing dumb things for the government instead of "manufacturing and retail."
AKifer 10y ago
Sooner or later, the robots and AI will be able to provide 100% of humanity material needs. AND The very nature of each societies will be shuffled by that new reality. When every material need is fulfilled, a lot of questions arise: 1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ? 2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ? 3- What will be the safeguard to prevent a maleficient/egoist minds to lock the access to all that abundancy ? That's quite philosophical question as humanity never experienced that kind of pure evil mindset. Every dictatorship, slavery, oppression were always driven by the context of competition towards the control over a limited economic resources. 4- And fundamentally, what will be the next thing that will drive the humanity towards evolution ? Knowledge curiosity ? Space exploration and adventures ? Spiritual achievement ? Perfection (and what's perfection ?) ? Are these goals philosophically equal ? Do willingness/laziness to adopt such a noble goals affect your share in the pie ? Does even "share in the pie" matter when the pie have an infinite surface ? Only the future, and futuristic/philosophical writings will tell us where all that game will lead this world.
- tegeek 10y ago
  There is a really good short novel Manna [1] that explore two models of Post robotic world. 1. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
  - throwanem 10y ago
    "Really good"? I found it amateurish in its style, questionable in its priors, and far from compelling in its conclusions, being neither enjoyable to read nor worthwhile to have read. One man's opinion, of course, and worth only what you paid for it, but even among the already questionable field of futurism, the very kindest that can be said of this effort is that it fails to stand out.
  - aurelianito 10y ago
    Well, the 'good' model is quite depressing in my opinion. SPOILER ALERT!!!!! In the end, the protagonist chooses to be just waisting lots of resources just doing something of no value when he could choose to join the people that make all the advances and, with this choice, generating the conditions for more people to not live caged.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
k_sze 10y ago
So it's now harder to say with a straight face "we're using robots because it's more ethical than exploiting people". "No, it's just cheaper."
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  It can be both. The fact that we say "it's cheaper" doesn't preclude "it's more ethical" especially when everybody agrees already that the presented alternative isn't ethical. Burning coal to generate electricity is both cheaper and more ethical than burning live toddlers. You don't say "we use coal for electricity instead of toddlers because it's more ethical" because that's self-evident to anybody but a true psychopath.
jgalt212 10y ago
Robots, or no robots, it's very important from a national security perspective to have a sizeable domestic manufacturing base.
dsjoerg 10y ago
anyone know who/what is behind this site?
6d6b73 10y ago
Automation will turn capitalism will turn into somewhat benevolent corporate city-states. Imagine a city run by a corporation which tries to automate, and optimize everything that is not its core business. To make the employees and their families happy, the corporation will provide the best care (child, health, environment) possible. In time this will turn some of these city-states into efficient, clean, healthy, happy places to live, but only relatively small groups of people will be able to enjoy it. Some of these city-states will be very dystopian and people living in there will be miserable. Technological and societal progress in these "utopian" cities will be much faster than in "dystopian" which will possibly lead to wars. We will not solve automation driven unemployment by taxing robots, and UBI will generally not work on a country wide scale. Partial solution will be Corporate UBI, which basically will mean that if you work for Corp X, you and your family will have everything they desire provided for them. As for everyone else.. This is already happening on some smaller scale. All these corporate campuses are beginning of that. They will eventually grow to become self-sufficient cities. Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them?
- lprubin 10y ago
  > Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them? It depends on if there are other viable/satisfactory (or better) options that you can voluntarily switch to.
  - 6d6b73 10y ago
    But switching might not be that easy. When you have kids in schools, your wife helps at a local X , and your parents depend on health care provided by the corp, it could be virtually impossible for a person to switch.
    - lotu 10y ago
      Comparing the inconvince of having to switch schools, not being able to volunteer and depending on healtcare/insurance to slavery is a massive insult to people that where and are actual slaves. Actual slaves did not legally own themselves or their children. Their owners can did take children, parents, and spouse and sell them to different slaveholders so they would never see each other again. A slave could not say fuck this my master is rapping and beating me daily so I'm just going to leave. If you want to a simple question to determine if someone is slave or not ask what happens if punch your boss in the face. An employe will be fired and never work their ever again, a slave will have to continue to work their for the rest of their life.
singularity2001 10y ago
Just to throw in a thought/data point: Nvidia is currently selling their 'industrial' deep learning system DGX-1 for $129,000. It doesn't have the IQ of a mouse yet, yet it can beat humans in some tasks (as can mice?). [0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html
maxerickson 10y ago
Cost effectiveness is also why farmers use tractors and other large machinery.
cobookman 10y ago
This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  People have said that it's only a matter of time before all manual labor is replaced by machines since the industrial revolution started. Yet it keeps not having happened just yet. EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.
  - _bpgl 10y ago
    > People have said that it's only a matter of time...Yet it keeps not having happened just yet. That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry? Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.
    - crdoconnor 10y ago
      Why do you think that the future will similarly not have jobs that you can't conceive of now? As far as I can tell the only special thing about automation in today's world is that the jobs being created are more often being created abroad than they are in the US (e.g. the million or so people employed by Foxconn in China) and predictions of automation destroying jobs are very blatantly being used politically as a way to draw flak away from job destroying trade agreements and austerian measures.
      - Sammi 10y ago
heynowletsgo 10y ago
The concept that machines will become the problem and not people is absurd. Completely absurd. People make the machines and people prevent machines from increasing the quality of life for most people. The only change needed in the progression of technological advance is people allowing labor saving devices to actually save everybody from laboring, not just a few. The problem remains the use of slavery by people to increase wealth.This notion of "we must fear computers because they are going to rule us" is frankly moronic, just a distraction from the inability of capitalists to share the rewards of advancement.

136 points by helmchenlord 10y ago

forget about the former title of coffee shop barista, our cotton and tobacco trade is about to go into overdrive!

My first thought was: "Oh, great! If slave labor is not efficient anymore there will be no more slave workers in the world". On a second thought (and based on our history), that probably will be true, but only because people that today are working just for a plate of rice will starve to death.

Quarrelsome 10y ago
the sad truth is that slave labour needs no startup cost beyond a fist.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kevinr 10y ago
  Fists ain't cheap. Slaves are capital, and, like all capital, acquiring and maintaining them has nonzero cost. In the antebellum American South, some tasks like ditch-digging were sufficiently hazardous that a plantation owner would rather not risk their investment in their slaves, and so would hire Irish ditch-diggers by the day, as the plantation owner would be out less money if they died while digging the ditch.
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Happy St Patrick's Day!
  - richthegeek 10y ago
    Somewhat off topic, but I can't figure out how ditch-digging would be particularly hazardous? The only danger I can think of would be a wall collapsing, but that could surely be avoided..
    - JetSpiegel 10y ago
      I'm assuming heat related conditions.
jaggederest 10y ago
It's fairly clear (and distasteful) that economically, slave labor is inefficient because you have to feed/house them or you lose the 'investment'. In contrast, you can pay someone well below a living wage with virtually no penalty. This is why so many people at the low end of the labor pool have multiple jobs.

rejschaap 10y ago

"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position." Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. So the investment is a bit higher than that. But you will recoup it very quickly on McDonalds scale. And they will be able to provide better and faster service.

ghshephard 10y ago
Indeed, Singapore where the new kiosks are almost ubiquitous, it's not uncommon for a cashier to have nobody waiting for them, but people still use the kiosks. 100% of the time when there is at least one person in line, I'll use the Kiosk - as all the orders are funneled into the same process queue. I particularly like the Kiosk because you can hyper customize every element of your order without confusion. With that said - these Gen 1 Kiosks are kind of kludgy, not super responsive - and have a lot of room for improvement. Once they improve the performance, I don't ever see ordering from a human. (It's already been many months since I've used a cashier to check out with at a local market - everything through the Kiosk) (Note: Singapore has no minimum wage and lots of intergenerational living, so there is a lot of inexpensive labor available from Seniors that work at McDonalds - this type of technology will have a big impact on them)
formula_ninguna 10y ago
Hence they'll be to sell people junk food even faster with better service? And more people will become more fat and sick in the long-term? coca-cola + humber = parapapapa. I'm loving it. McDonalds.
kevinr 10y ago
> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.

mschuster91 10y ago

The consequences for societies that define the status/value of their members based on their employment/job will be disastrous. In, let's say, 20 years robots most likely will have overtaken agriculture, manufacturing and driving - by far the biggest job providers. And I see no movement at all by our politicians to prepare societies for this shift, except a couple countries playing small scale UBI... and the USA actually try to go the opposite route.

manmal 10y ago
I agree. In agriculture, the revolution has already taken place though. Even supersize tractors navigate themselves. A farmer can get by with a lot of machines and only a few extra hands, most of the time.
- slurry 10y ago
  Depends on the crop.
ximeng 10y ago
Inherited wealth will just become a more important determinant of societal status than it already is.
- XorNot 10y ago
  Black market robotics will become a thing I suspect. High grade user friendly systems the most coveted - you set then up out of view and use them to drive your retail business. We're going to go full cyberpunk yet.
omegaworks 10y ago
Dear Leader is already busily preparing military and domestic border enforcement positions for underemployed citizens to fill to counter the coming influx of climate and economic refugees. It's a great time to invest in detention centers.
averagewall 10y ago

kevinr 10y ago

As is only appropriate, given the word's etymology. > ro·bot (n.) 1923, from English translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave," from Old Slavic orbu-, from PIE orbh- "pass from one status to another" (see orphan). http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot All that's old is new again.

hedonistbot 10y ago
> from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,"... I am not sure if this is correct. In Bulgarian we have almost the same word работник (rabotnik) and it just means "worker". No forced, slave connotations. Also checked with google translate and it doesn't find Czech translation for "robotnik" but it suggests to switch to Polish and translates it to "worker" as in Bulgarian. And работа (rabota) means "work" in Bulgarian and google translate shows the same for the Polish translation. Someone from Czechia here?
- rljy 10y ago
  It does mean that in Czech. Which is strange, because in Slovak it just means work. I've translated a paragraph from wikipedia for you: "Robota neboli poddanství je ve feudálním systému osobní služba sedláků a rolníků pro jejich pány. Robotník je pak výraz pro poddaného robotujícího pro svého pána, někdy též vyššího správního či soudního úředníka, drába apod." "Robota is a feudal system of personal employment to the owners of estates and country houses. A robotník is a person who works for his/her lord." https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota Edit: I listened to the play by Karel and Josef Čápek, and it is most inanely stupid, sexist, pseudo-religious drivel I've come across in a long while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R. Edit2: The verb robit means to make something and has nothing to do with slavery.
  - 10y ago

WalterBright 10y ago

Slave labor is economically inefficient, and slave based economies have fared very poorly compared with free labor economies.

elsewhen 10y ago
> slave based economies have fared very poorly that may be true for the economy in general, but what about the slave owners specifically? that is the central point in the context of this discussion, since it is the factory owners that are making the decision about replacing human workers with robots.

legulere 10y ago

> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”. What makes a lot of things like food so expensive is human work. If you had access to slaves you could probably also reduce those costs. We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year.

ohitsdom 10y ago
> We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year. Those same people living under $1/day now would have their costs greatly increased if they became factory slaves. Can't be malnourished, so food costs go up. Can't live just anywhere, so housing costs go up to live on-site at the factory. Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up.
- undersuit 10y ago
  >Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up. Unless it's cheaper to train a new slave and euthanize the old slave.

squarefoot 10y ago

Which will hopefully brings us to an inevitable change in our economics. If technological advance is going to create millions if not billions of unemployed people, the answer won't be rioting down the street and burning all machines in sight, although for many people this will appear the only viable solution.

drieddust 10y ago
This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class. People rioting down the street can be crushed by autonomous machines remorsely and effortlessly. There is a need to start political lobbying instead of hoping for an automatic economic change. Those who will control the means of production will not relinquish control once they realize their power. Once they understand that those millions doesn't matter anymore.
- usrusr 10y ago
  > This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class. Not dying, but the abundant talent shows where a whole generation seems to sacrifice all regular career ambition for a nonexistent fairy tale already comes close. On the other hand, maybe the kids somehow have a very prophetic hunch that taking a crapshot at becoming the nation's "next top model" or whatever will eventually turn out to be a less terrible bet than fighting for scraps in an environment of increasingly automation-driven capitalism that simply does not need them anymore. The Black Mirror episode (spoilers!) with the training bikes nailed that quite well. When I watched it I was disappointed with the implausibility of a high tech society powered by the meagre 2 kWh you might realistically extract from a human per day. But this could actually be a subtle point made by the authors: the bikes are not really powering their economy, they are just a semi-plausible bullshit job made up in-world to make handouts look like a hard-earned wage, probably intended to fool those spinning the bikes as much as the elite who enjoys having the plebs nicely boxed up out of sight in underground caverns.
tajen 10y ago
Assuming machines can do everything a human can, what's left to humans and measurable (which is the only things humans can be rewarded for, hence can earn points for) are: - Art. Can't be replaced by a machine because appreciation for a piece is extremely correlated with the relationship to the author. Ex: I'm fan of [some singer], everything he does looks great to me in some way, and if I knew it were a machine or if I knew the author didn't come from the bottom of the masses, I wouldn't appreciate it. It's ever weirder with close relationships: My father listens in loop to the 10 songs I've written and played on an old tape (and that's the only reason he still has a tape reader in his car), and those songs mean little to anyone else: They are only valuable to him because they're mine. Although machines could produce art, man-made art is specific to humans. - And leverage. Today it takes 200 people to create a Whatsapp, negociate a treaty or design a new iPhone. Tomorrow, maybe only 3 people will be enough to solve world hunger, one artist to create a massive discography with all marketing material, concerts, interviews of himself and snapchat testimonials. Love of course is another thing humans can give, but is not measurable. If we agree point-keeping is a way of incentivizing people to drive their life, then how we measure a successful life will be art and leverage.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-generation slaveholding families have a fundamentally different way of looking at themselves and their culture than people who do not own slaves. Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim, we're going to be hacking into the human social ecosystem in ways never anticipated before.

_pmf_ 10y ago
> Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. Luckily, we have conveniently solved the ethic dilemma by defining work under slave conditions as better than no work at all ("think of the children!") and moving the exploitation sites far away.
pygy_ 10y ago
With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit: BTW, I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely scared by the events and the speed at which they are unfolding.
- mjevans 10y ago
  History. The French Revolution speaks of what happens when the populace at large decides that the situation cannot continue. Of course what would history remember of them had they lost?

thr3290 10y ago

> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”. There is a wrong assumption that factory has to cover those expenses. In reality this cost is often offloaded to government or another party.

thehardsphere 10y ago
Uhh, when they're property of the company and not actually considered people? I'm pretty sure you have to be considered a person in order to qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing vouchers. I mean, idk because all of those things came about after slavery.
- thr3290 10y ago
  Prison?
  - thehardsphere 10y ago
    Prison labor is mostly out of fashion, isn't it? Not that many chain gangs anymore. The ones I do hear about are usually doing dumb things for the government instead of "manufacturing and retail."

AKifer 10y ago

Sooner or later, the robots and AI will be able to provide 100% of humanity material needs. AND The very nature of each societies will be shuffled by that new reality. When every material need is fulfilled, a lot of questions arise: 1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ? 2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ? 3- What will be the safeguard to prevent a maleficient/egoist minds to lock the access to all that abundancy ? That's quite philosophical question as humanity never experienced that kind of pure evil mindset. Every dictatorship, slavery, oppression were always driven by the context of competition towards the control over a limited economic resources. 4- And fundamentally, what will be the next thing that will drive the humanity towards evolution ? Knowledge curiosity ? Space exploration and adventures ? Spiritual achievement ? Perfection (and what's perfection ?) ? Are these goals philosophically equal ? Do willingness/laziness to adopt such a noble goals affect your share in the pie ? Does even "share in the pie" matter when the pie have an infinite surface ? Only the future, and futuristic/philosophical writings will tell us where all that game will lead this world.

tegeek 10y ago
There is a really good short novel Manna [1] that explore two models of Post robotic world. 1. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- throwanem 10y ago
  "Really good"? I found it amateurish in its style, questionable in its priors, and far from compelling in its conclusions, being neither enjoyable to read nor worthwhile to have read. One man's opinion, of course, and worth only what you paid for it, but even among the already questionable field of futurism, the very kindest that can be said of this effort is that it fails to stand out.
- aurelianito 10y ago
  Well, the 'good' model is quite depressing in my opinion. SPOILER ALERT!!!!! In the end, the protagonist chooses to be just waisting lots of resources just doing something of no value when he could choose to join the people that make all the advances and, with this choice, generating the conditions for more people to not live caged.

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k_sze 10y ago

So it's now harder to say with a straight face "we're using robots because it's more ethical than exploiting people". "No, it's just cheaper."

thehardsphere 10y ago
It can be both. The fact that we say "it's cheaper" doesn't preclude "it's more ethical" especially when everybody agrees already that the presented alternative isn't ethical. Burning coal to generate electricity is both cheaper and more ethical than burning live toddlers. You don't say "we use coal for electricity instead of toddlers because it's more ethical" because that's self-evident to anybody but a true psychopath.

jgalt212 10y ago

Robots, or no robots, it's very important from a national security perspective to have a sizeable domestic manufacturing base.

dsjoerg 10y ago

anyone know who/what is behind this site?

6d6b73 10y ago

Automation will turn capitalism will turn into somewhat benevolent corporate city-states. Imagine a city run by a corporation which tries to automate, and optimize everything that is not its core business. To make the employees and their families happy, the corporation will provide the best care (child, health, environment) possible. In time this will turn some of these city-states into efficient, clean, healthy, happy places to live, but only relatively small groups of people will be able to enjoy it. Some of these city-states will be very dystopian and people living in there will be miserable. Technological and societal progress in these "utopian" cities will be much faster than in "dystopian" which will possibly lead to wars. We will not solve automation driven unemployment by taxing robots, and UBI will generally not work on a country wide scale. Partial solution will be Corporate UBI, which basically will mean that if you work for Corp X, you and your family will have everything they desire provided for them. As for everyone else.. This is already happening on some smaller scale. All these corporate campuses are beginning of that. They will eventually grow to become self-sufficient cities. Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them?

lprubin 10y ago
> Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them? It depends on if there are other viable/satisfactory (or better) options that you can voluntarily switch to.
- 6d6b73 10y ago
  But switching might not be that easy. When you have kids in schools, your wife helps at a local X , and your parents depend on health care provided by the corp, it could be virtually impossible for a person to switch.
  - lotu 10y ago
    Comparing the inconvince of having to switch schools, not being able to volunteer and depending on healtcare/insurance to slavery is a massive insult to people that where and are actual slaves. Actual slaves did not legally own themselves or their children. Their owners can did take children, parents, and spouse and sell them to different slaveholders so they would never see each other again. A slave could not say fuck this my master is rapping and beating me daily so I'm just going to leave. If you want to a simple question to determine if someone is slave or not ask what happens if punch your boss in the face. An employe will be fired and never work their ever again, a slave will have to continue to work their for the rest of their life.

singularity2001 10y ago

Just to throw in a thought/data point: Nvidia is currently selling their 'industrial' deep learning system DGX-1 for $129,000. It doesn't have the IQ of a mouse yet, yet it can beat humans in some tasks (as can mice?). [0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html

maxerickson 10y ago

Cost effectiveness is also why farmers use tractors and other large machinery.

cobookman 10y ago

This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.

BurningFrog 10y ago
People have said that it's only a matter of time before all manual labor is replaced by machines since the industrial revolution started. Yet it keeps not having happened just yet. EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.
- _bpgl 10y ago
  > People have said that it's only a matter of time...Yet it keeps not having happened just yet. That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry? Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    Why do you think that the future will similarly not have jobs that you can't conceive of now? As far as I can tell the only special thing about automation in today's world is that the jobs being created are more often being created abroad than they are in the US (e.g. the million or so people employed by Foxconn in China) and predictions of automation destroying jobs are very blatantly being used politically as a way to draw flak away from job destroying trade agreements and austerian measures.
    - Sammi 10y ago

heynowletsgo 10y ago

The concept that machines will become the problem and not people is absurd. Completely absurd. People make the machines and people prevent machines from increasing the quality of life for most people. The only change needed in the progression of technological advance is people allowing labor saving devices to actually save everybody from laboring, not just a few. The problem remains the use of slavery by people to increase wealth.This notion of "we must fear computers because they are going to rule us" is frankly moronic, just a distraction from the inability of capitalists to share the rewards of advancement.