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> At this point, there will be a genuine question: why do we need to work to benefit from the goods of these industries? For the same reason you can't look ove

> At this point, there will be a genuine question: why do we need to work to benefit from the goods of these industries? For the same reason you can't look over to your neighbor's driveway and say, since he doesn't use his truck all day while he's at work, why can't I drive it ? The people who built those automated industries expended capital, and likely, borrowed against future revenue to do so. What you are free to do is compete with them. You can drive them into their stupid lender's hands by forcing a collapsing of margins in the industry using your wits. But nationalizing the factories has, historically, generally led to nasty (the opposite of what your conscious advocates would call desirable) outcomes. And you are saying that a 100% automated factory should be effectively nationalized.

knodi123 9y ago
> The people who built those automated industries expended capital, and likely, borrowed against future revenue to do so. > What you are free to do is compete with them. You can drive them into their stupid lender's hands by forcing a collapsing of margins in the industry using your wits. So the solution for the hordes of people who were put out of work by automation, is to gamble it all on the bet that they can outcompete powerful, established businesses by operating with far less profit? Are you really saying "I'm sorry you lost your factory job, but the only moral solutions are a.) let your family starve to death, or b.) every unemployed factory worked just, sorta, becomes an entrepreneur, scrapping with all his former coworkers and bosses over who can survive on the slimmest margins." ? Nationalizing factories may lead to undesirable outcomes, but your alternative is a different kind of dystopia.
- aorloff 9y ago
  I'm not suggesting that literally, I'm saying that's what the overall system does. Someone will gamble their time on beating powerful established businesses, and they will figure out some efficiency to win by. Some of the factory workers will find other work, some in other industries, or other businesses in the same industry. But when you are suggesting policy, you think about the overall system, not just the poor factory workers. The overall system works, even if labor isn't part of production due to automation, because labor builds, maintains, and services the automation. Sometimes there's some debugging involved too. Yes some workers will lose their jobs because they don't have marketable skills any more. That's why we invest in education. Maybe not terribly wisely, but that's the idea.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    You're saying "someone will gamble", another one would say "he was at the right time at the right place to have it all together in order to be able to take that risk. By the way - the only reason he was at the right time and at the right place was because the country he was living in could allow him to have it all". Our planet as of today becomes an increasingly finite resource. Someone else's gamble is hedged by your responsibility.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    But eventually, you will run up against something never before experienced in human history--exhaustion of demand. The problem with automation is that the robots don't want anything, and all they need is power and maintenance (that is much easier to perform than medical care). They can supply goods and some services so much more efficiently than human labor that no human can effectively compete with them and still be able to eat. So the humans that formerly did their jobs have nothing to trade at market. They are forced to subsistence labor, if they are even allowed to do that. You can't afford the electric induction cooktop or the electricity produced by robots, so you have to burn scavenged wood in a hand-built rocket stove. The displaced laborer contributes no more demand to the robot-supplied marketplace. Each worker you make obsolete removes their demand. The robots produce less, consuming only their most basic needs, and send most of the output to their owners. The owner class, who does not consume 100% the maximum output of their robots, slowly buys up all valuable resources with the excess, as those who wish to avoid subsistence lifestyles sell off their assets in order to stave off scavenging for roots, mushrooms, and squirrels. Perhaps some of them can manage a parallel economy trading in inferior goods and services, but the threat always looms that anyone too productive will be able to buy in to the robot-owner class and stop supplying the under-economy. Most everyone becomes Spam. They only trade with each other until they can be steak again. So everything in the under-economy sucks. One laborer can maintain hundreds of robots, who can each support a specific want of millions of people, but only have thousands of owners. The owners don't want more than the robots can provide, so those humans that don't own can't manage to sell much of anything to the owners, except things that robots cannot provide [yet]: art, love, babies, etc. Every unemployed-becomes-entrepreneur is a last-gasp effort to leap the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, like a salmon shooting past the open jaws of a grizzly. If you don't buy in soon, you might not have anything left worth trading for your golden ticket.
Iv 9y ago
> But nationalizing the factories has, historically, generally led to nasty (the opposite of what your conscious advocates would call desirable) outcomes. And you are saying that a 100% automated factory should be effectively nationalized. Most of the companies that were nationalized in 1945 in France are now world class companies. Renault, EDF, France Telecom (now Orange), SNCF, AFP... And yes, I say that automated factories profits should be nationalized. What is the alternative? People owning means of production that are impossible to compete against as they are so established and tuned to have marginal costs of production of zero.
grive 9y ago
> For the same reason you can't look over to your neighbor's driveway and say, since he doesn't use his truck all day while he's at work, why can't I drive it ? Now. This sense of ownership will be far more diluted once the truck is entirely automated and only needs ressources to run, while the knowledge that it could be far more efficiently allocated to be used by you at this time is made clear by our connected environment. Then the same question will arise for your neighbor's truck: "why do we need to reserve ownership of these goods for the benefit of a limited portion of society?" Starting from the fruit of labor, whole industries, to the minutiaes such as these. A connected world means that such micro-optimization would become possible. So don't dismiss this on the basis that right now, this is not how we operate.
- chii 9y ago
  Your neighbour might not be using said truck right now, but it's availablity for use instantly is in itself valuable. Ownership gives you that. If it was shared, then you lose the instant availablity. Unless the automation creates free trucks for all to use, you scenario can't really come to pass.
  - grive 9y ago
    > Unless the automation creates free trucks for all to use This is indeed pretty much the basis for these questions to arise. Not free of course, but such marginal cost that ownership would not mean much. When instead of 50 cars / trucks, you only need 15 and their cost is shared among the local community, with the price of buying one / maintainance very low due to automation, it will make sense to have this kind of system. Doesn't mean ownership would disappear, simply that for most people it would be more convenient / cheaper to use this system, and as such most people would choose to do so.
    - chii 9y ago
      > such marginal cost that ownership would not mean much. wouldn't this situation make people own _more_ trucks, rather than less? Today, we already have the situation with yatchs - people tend not to own a yatch, but share with several families/people. And this is because yatchs are damn expensive to own. If yatchs are as cheap as a car, it'd be trivial to just buy one, even if you aren't using it very often.

knodi123 9y ago

> The people who built those automated industries expended capital, and likely, borrowed against future revenue to do so. > What you are free to do is compete with them. You can drive them into their stupid lender's hands by forcing a collapsing of margins in the industry using your wits. So the solution for the hordes of people who were put out of work by automation, is to gamble it all on the bet that they can outcompete powerful, established businesses by operating with far less profit? Are you really saying "I'm sorry you lost your factory job, but the only moral solutions are a.) let your family starve to death, or b.) every unemployed factory worked just, sorta, becomes an entrepreneur, scrapping with all his former coworkers and bosses over who can survive on the slimmest margins." ? Nationalizing factories may lead to undesirable outcomes, but your alternative is a different kind of dystopia.

aorloff 9y ago
I'm not suggesting that literally, I'm saying that's what the overall system does. Someone will gamble their time on beating powerful established businesses, and they will figure out some efficiency to win by. Some of the factory workers will find other work, some in other industries, or other businesses in the same industry. But when you are suggesting policy, you think about the overall system, not just the poor factory workers. The overall system works, even if labor isn't part of production due to automation, because labor builds, maintains, and services the automation. Sometimes there's some debugging involved too. Yes some workers will lose their jobs because they don't have marketable skills any more. That's why we invest in education. Maybe not terribly wisely, but that's the idea.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  You're saying "someone will gamble", another one would say "he was at the right time at the right place to have it all together in order to be able to take that risk. By the way - the only reason he was at the right time and at the right place was because the country he was living in could allow him to have it all". Our planet as of today becomes an increasingly finite resource. Someone else's gamble is hedged by your responsibility.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  But eventually, you will run up against something never before experienced in human history--exhaustion of demand. The problem with automation is that the robots don't want anything, and all they need is power and maintenance (that is much easier to perform than medical care). They can supply goods and some services so much more efficiently than human labor that no human can effectively compete with them and still be able to eat. So the humans that formerly did their jobs have nothing to trade at market. They are forced to subsistence labor, if they are even allowed to do that. You can't afford the electric induction cooktop or the electricity produced by robots, so you have to burn scavenged wood in a hand-built rocket stove. The displaced laborer contributes no more demand to the robot-supplied marketplace. Each worker you make obsolete removes their demand. The robots produce less, consuming only their most basic needs, and send most of the output to their owners. The owner class, who does not consume 100% the maximum output of their robots, slowly buys up all valuable resources with the excess, as those who wish to avoid subsistence lifestyles sell off their assets in order to stave off scavenging for roots, mushrooms, and squirrels. Perhaps some of them can manage a parallel economy trading in inferior goods and services, but the threat always looms that anyone too productive will be able to buy in to the robot-owner class and stop supplying the under-economy. Most everyone becomes Spam. They only trade with each other until they can be steak again. So everything in the under-economy sucks. One laborer can maintain hundreds of robots, who can each support a specific want of millions of people, but only have thousands of owners. The owners don't want more than the robots can provide, so those humans that don't own can't manage to sell much of anything to the owners, except things that robots cannot provide [yet]: art, love, babies, etc. Every unemployed-becomes-entrepreneur is a last-gasp effort to leap the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, like a salmon shooting past the open jaws of a grizzly. If you don't buy in soon, you might not have anything left worth trading for your golden ticket.

Iv 9y ago

> But nationalizing the factories has, historically, generally led to nasty (the opposite of what your conscious advocates would call desirable) outcomes. And you are saying that a 100% automated factory should be effectively nationalized. Most of the companies that were nationalized in 1945 in France are now world class companies. Renault, EDF, France Telecom (now Orange), SNCF, AFP... And yes, I say that automated factories profits should be nationalized. What is the alternative? People owning means of production that are impossible to compete against as they are so established and tuned to have marginal costs of production of zero.

grive 9y ago

> For the same reason you can't look over to your neighbor's driveway and say, since he doesn't use his truck all day while he's at work, why can't I drive it ? Now. This sense of ownership will be far more diluted once the truck is entirely automated and only needs ressources to run, while the knowledge that it could be far more efficiently allocated to be used by you at this time is made clear by our connected environment. Then the same question will arise for your neighbor's truck: "why do we need to reserve ownership of these goods for the benefit of a limited portion of society?" Starting from the fruit of labor, whole industries, to the minutiaes such as these. A connected world means that such micro-optimization would become possible. So don't dismiss this on the basis that right now, this is not how we operate.

chii 9y ago
Your neighbour might not be using said truck right now, but it's availablity for use instantly is in itself valuable. Ownership gives you that. If it was shared, then you lose the instant availablity. Unless the automation creates free trucks for all to use, you scenario can't really come to pass.
- grive 9y ago
  > Unless the automation creates free trucks for all to use This is indeed pretty much the basis for these questions to arise. Not free of course, but such marginal cost that ownership would not mean much. When instead of 50 cars / trucks, you only need 15 and their cost is shared among the local community, with the price of buying one / maintainance very low due to automation, it will make sense to have this kind of system. Doesn't mean ownership would disappear, simply that for most people it would be more convenient / cheaper to use this system, and as such most people would choose to do so.
  - chii 9y ago
    > such marginal cost that ownership would not mean much. wouldn't this situation make people own _more_ trucks, rather than less? Today, we already have the situation with yatchs - people tend not to own a yatch, but share with several families/people. And this is because yatchs are damn expensive to own. If yatchs are as cheap as a car, it'd be trivial to just buy one, even if you aren't using it very often.