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Question: how will the unemployed find the money to purchase said good dispensed by machines? Machines need markets to sustain their existence or else their ow

by kiba 15y ago

Question: how will the unemployed find the money to purchase said good dispensed by machines? Machines need markets to sustain their existence or else their owners abandon them or turn them into scrap parts.

doyoulikeworms 15y ago
This has happened a lot in history, but I'm no historian. The way I understand it, the automation (or technological improvement) of an industry lowers prices, and therefore helps another industry. Consumers to pay less for products, so extra funds directly (purchases) or indirectly (savings, investment) flow into new industries. In the short term, workers displaced by automation are unemployed, but in the long term, they have growing employment opportunities elsewhere (or even in the same industry, later). What's more, I feel like once automation takes hold in an industry, efficiency gains must accelerate relative to human laborers-- helping everyone. Sure, greater education and methodological improvements help humans to produce more for cheaper, but Moore's Law is a hell of an ally. IANAE(conomist), but I couldn't explain why the world didn't disintegrate after the Industrial Revolution(s) any other way.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
It's likely that a small number of high skilled humans (read: AI programmers, artists, and a few others) will have a functioning market among themselves. The remainder of humanity will subsist on some flavor of socialism. Most likely they will have a higher standard of living than the middle class today, but inequality will be dramatically higher.
- intended 15y ago
  At some point though, the ones subsidizing the others will say no.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    As long as the ones being subsidized don't create too much trouble (e.g. complain about inequality, demand too large a share, etc), why would the upper classes object? Libertarian as I am, I wouldn't object to a welfare state which supports people at college student levels. It would be so cheap that I just wouldn't care.
jerf 15y ago
How do they do it now? Because, after all, the robot job holocaust isn't in the future; it's in the past. As someone else pointed out, in the past, even the relatively recent past, the vast bulk of humanity was directly involved in growing food. Now those jobs are gone. So what happened? Other jobs, including types of jobs never imagined before. Capital producers, such as programmers, those still involved in mining, etc. aren't going to want to just sit there and hoard their programs, iron, food, etc., and they will find some way to spend it on other goods and services that the robots can't do, or that humans simply won't accept robots doing. The future has a lot more artists in it, I think. The unemployed will make money when you decide that there is something in your life that you want, be it art, services, or even just robot wrangling itself, and you want that good or service enough that somebody is willing to provide it for you for a price you'll take. Not you in the abstract, you. If you get desperate enough you may well be willing to pay them to learn how to do this thing you want, or at least subsidize their way through it. Things may change a lot, but the fundamental forces of economics don't break down until this set dwindles to zero (presumably because you can just instantiate an AI to do what you want), at which point all bets are off anyhow, and the poor will probably still be mind-blowingly rich by our standards at that point. Now, that's not to say everything's hunky dory. There is some legitimate concern about the rate of job elimination exceeding the rate at which people can retrain into other skills. I'm pointing this out though to make the observation that we have over a hundred years of historical answer to your question, a continuous cycle of destruction of industry after industry, yet barring a fundamentally finance-and-stupid-policy crisis that we happen to be in now, we're still looking at single-digit unemployment with people working ~40 hours a week, numbers that are very stable across decades (at least in comparison to the horrible pictures people paint of this scenario). It's interesting to discuss what's different about this innovation surge, but "Who will buy the Model Ts?" ceased to be an interesting question decades ago. (And personally, while the topic may be in the air, it hasn't happened yet. I don't think this unemployment spike has anything to do with robotics. The business cycle suffices to explain it. I don't expect the next wave of roboticization to really start impacting the job market for a good 5 or 10 years minimum. There's still a lot of pieces to put together.)
- ebiester 15y ago
  That tends to be my intuition as well. In the long term, things look really good. In the short term, it's looking like a lot of pain. The complication is the resource crunch, particularly in rare metals and water.

by kiba 15y ago

doyoulikeworms 15y ago

This has happened a lot in history, but I'm no historian. The way I understand it, the automation (or technological improvement) of an industry lowers prices, and therefore helps another industry. Consumers to pay less for products, so extra funds directly (purchases) or indirectly (savings, investment) flow into new industries. In the short term, workers displaced by automation are unemployed, but in the long term, they have growing employment opportunities elsewhere (or even in the same industry, later). What's more, I feel like once automation takes hold in an industry, efficiency gains must accelerate relative to human laborers-- helping everyone. Sure, greater education and methodological improvements help humans to produce more for cheaper, but Moore's Law is a hell of an ally. IANAE(conomist), but I couldn't explain why the world didn't disintegrate after the Industrial Revolution(s) any other way.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

It's likely that a small number of high skilled humans (read: AI programmers, artists, and a few others) will have a functioning market among themselves. The remainder of humanity will subsist on some flavor of socialism. Most likely they will have a higher standard of living than the middle class today, but inequality will be dramatically higher.

intended 15y ago
At some point though, the ones subsidizing the others will say no.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  As long as the ones being subsidized don't create too much trouble (e.g. complain about inequality, demand too large a share, etc), why would the upper classes object? Libertarian as I am, I wouldn't object to a welfare state which supports people at college student levels. It would be so cheap that I just wouldn't care.

jerf 15y ago

How do they do it now? Because, after all, the robot job holocaust isn't in the future; it's in the past. As someone else pointed out, in the past, even the relatively recent past, the vast bulk of humanity was directly involved in growing food. Now those jobs are gone. So what happened? Other jobs, including types of jobs never imagined before. Capital producers, such as programmers, those still involved in mining, etc. aren't going to want to just sit there and hoard their programs, iron, food, etc., and they will find some way to spend it on other goods and services that the robots can't do, or that humans simply won't accept robots doing. The future has a lot more artists in it, I think. The unemployed will make money when you decide that there is something in your life that you want, be it art, services, or even just robot wrangling itself, and you want that good or service enough that somebody is willing to provide it for you for a price you'll take. Not you in the abstract, you. If you get desperate enough you may well be willing to pay them to learn how to do this thing you want, or at least subsidize their way through it. Things may change a lot, but the fundamental forces of economics don't break down until this set dwindles to zero (presumably because you can just instantiate an AI to do what you want), at which point all bets are off anyhow, and the poor will probably still be mind-blowingly rich by our standards at that point. Now, that's not to say everything's hunky dory. There is some legitimate concern about the rate of job elimination exceeding the rate at which people can retrain into other skills. I'm pointing this out though to make the observation that we have over a hundred years of historical answer to your question, a continuous cycle of destruction of industry after industry, yet barring a fundamentally finance-and-stupid-policy crisis that we happen to be in now, we're still looking at single-digit unemployment with people working ~40 hours a week, numbers that are very stable across decades (at least in comparison to the horrible pictures people paint of this scenario). It's interesting to discuss what's different about this innovation surge, but "Who will buy the Model Ts?" ceased to be an interesting question decades ago. (And personally, while the topic may be in the air, it hasn't happened yet. I don't think this unemployment spike has anything to do with robotics. The business cycle suffices to explain it. I don't expect the next wave of roboticization to really start impacting the job market for a good 5 or 10 years minimum. There's still a lot of pieces to put together.)

ebiester 15y ago
That tends to be my intuition as well. In the long term, things look really good. In the short term, it's looking like a lot of pain. The complication is the resource crunch, particularly in rare metals and water.