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> Maybe they volunteer? Maybe they turn to hobbies and music? Maybe they have a life? ... and maybe they want that funded by other people doing the work. Sound

> Maybe they volunteer? Maybe they turn to hobbies and music? Maybe they have a life? ... and maybe they want that funded by other people doing the work. Sounds like medieval nobility to me.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Be as cynical as you like. But people's lives are their own. Decades ago we dreamed of the day automation took the yoke of labor from our shoulders. Now that it's approaching, all anybody can think about is "Keep the lower class working! God forbid they have a life!"
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Be as cynical as you like. But people's lives are their own. Are they though? Who exactly would fund the self-actualization adventures of the lucky recipients, if not other people? I'm guessing here, but I assume the funding wouldn't be voluntary. In that case, those people's lives are not their own, those people's lives (and the results of them spending parts of their lives at work) are shared. > Now that it's approaching, all anybody can think about is "Keep the lower class working! God forbid they have a life!" I live among the lower class. A good part of them do not work and still have a life.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Again, 1950's thinking. Most things are automated now. There's only 13M factory workers left in America vs 20M+ in the 70's, and population has doubled since then. So maybe 20% what there used to be. All that due to automation. And what's left is being automated as fast as humanly possible. After that, we're gonna have a big slug of people out of work, lots of relatively cheap goods, and a few very rich who own most of the factories. How is this gonna play out? In the best scenario, we go on to a bright future of little work necessary for everyone. Or, we blame those folks for being 'out of work', let them suffer and die. The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. This is the notion we have to get thru everybody's head.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      >The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. Somebody has to create, build, and maintain those factories. Someone else has to manage the output of those factories and distribute it. Someone else needs to work to secure raw materials for the factory. Age you can't produce everything in factories. You don't have a factory that grows food for example. Programming, especially web development is a great analogy here. You have tools that do almost all the things you would want a website to do. Why do we need web developers at all then? Because it turns out that connecting everything and fine tuning it for your specific needs is quite difficult.
      - nitrogen 7y ago
        You don't have a factory that grows food for example. Yet. Modern farms come pretty close, and there are lots of ideas to close the gap.
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes points to you for noticing there's a supply chain. But that's automating too. The remaining 'developers' in industry are Engineers. They number a tiny fraction of the human labor that factories used to employ. The idea the we can 'retrain' line workers is nonsense. They can't all become Engineers, even if we needed 30M more Engineers which we don't. Grasp at straws, sure some business processes might remain unautomated for some time. But it's not going to matter to most Americans. It'll be small change.
        Mirioron 7y ago
        >The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't. We're building better factories for more sophisticated technology. Factories are tools and they've improved just the same as every other tool. Their complexity has increased immensely. Sure, nowadays it still takes less effort to build the factory, but all the things that the factory makes needs a lot more work. Scientists, engineers, software developers, lawyers, PR people etc. I think almost all businesses are going to remain unautomated. Sure, significant parts of the processes will be automated, but not everything. Complexity will keep increasing and we'll likely still need humans to coordinate, because we're not very good at automating the unknown.

> Maybe they volunteer? Maybe they turn to hobbies and music? Maybe they have a life? ... and maybe they want that funded by other people doing the work. Sounds like medieval nobility to me.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

Be as cynical as you like. But people's lives are their own. Decades ago we dreamed of the day automation took the yoke of labor from our shoulders. Now that it's approaching, all anybody can think about is "Keep the lower class working! God forbid they have a life!"

luckylion 7y ago
> Be as cynical as you like. But people's lives are their own. Are they though? Who exactly would fund the self-actualization adventures of the lucky recipients, if not other people? I'm guessing here, but I assume the funding wouldn't be voluntary. In that case, those people's lives are not their own, those people's lives (and the results of them spending parts of their lives at work) are shared. > Now that it's approaching, all anybody can think about is "Keep the lower class working! God forbid they have a life!" I live among the lower class. A good part of them do not work and still have a life.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Again, 1950's thinking. Most things are automated now. There's only 13M factory workers left in America vs 20M+ in the 70's, and population has doubled since then. So maybe 20% what there used to be. All that due to automation. And what's left is being automated as fast as humanly possible. After that, we're gonna have a big slug of people out of work, lots of relatively cheap goods, and a few very rich who own most of the factories. How is this gonna play out? In the best scenario, we go on to a bright future of little work necessary for everyone. Or, we blame those folks for being 'out of work', let them suffer and die. The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. This is the notion we have to get thru everybody's head.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    >The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. Somebody has to create, build, and maintain those factories. Someone else has to manage the output of those factories and distribute it. Someone else needs to work to secure raw materials for the factory. Age you can't produce everything in factories. You don't have a factory that grows food for example. Programming, especially web development is a great analogy here. You have tools that do almost all the things you would want a website to do. Why do we need web developers at all then? Because it turns out that connecting everything and fine tuning it for your specific needs is quite difficult.
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      You don't have a factory that grows food for example. Yet. Modern farms come pretty close, and there are lots of ideas to close the gap.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes points to you for noticing there's a supply chain. But that's automating too. The remaining 'developers' in industry are Engineers. They number a tiny fraction of the human labor that factories used to employ. The idea the we can 'retrain' line workers is nonsense. They can't all become Engineers, even if we needed 30M more Engineers which we don't. Grasp at straws, sure some business processes might remain unautomated for some time. But it's not going to matter to most Americans. It'll be small change.
      - Mirioron 7y ago
        >The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't. We're building better factories for more sophisticated technology. Factories are tools and they've improved just the same as every other tool. Their complexity has increased immensely. Sure, nowadays it still takes less effort to build the factory, but all the things that the factory makes needs a lot more work. Scientists, engineers, software developers, lawyers, PR people etc. I think almost all businesses are going to remain unautomated. Sure, significant parts of the processes will be automated, but not everything. Complexity will keep increasing and we'll likely still need humans to coordinate, because we're not very good at automating the unknown.