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I think it revolves around just one fundamental question that's become obvious since the start of the industrial revolution: why have workers if you can get wor

I think it revolves around just one fundamental question that's become obvious since the start of the industrial revolution: why have workers if you can get work done without them? You can answer this question rather quickly; very often, the benefits of being able to produce something en masse outweigh the initial drop in quality due to adopting an automation process that is not yet mature but evolves over time, and that's been proven many times in the past two centuries. It's just the speed and the scale that have been following logistic distribution. We're still before the midway point as a global society, but we can certainly see the big speedup as more and more work becomes automated. If people's work can be automated away as a whole and people somehow become poorer rather than richer, then the benefits of automation are sucked away from them. And here comes the flaws you mention - or the flaw, I think, singular. They happen exactly in this one point.

chrismorgan 4y ago
Sometimes it’s just an initial drop in quality, other times it’s permanent. My favourite example is book binding: hot-melt glue has completely supplanted cold glue in mass production, despite being drastically inferior, because it’s (just barely) good enough, and it’s so much faster/easier/cheaper for production. Many aspects of computer setting of works for printing also show a significant regression in potential quality (prose, musical engraving, &c.), though the right software and proper human tweaking can balance that out—but people seldom actually do as much tweaking as would be done automatically by the experts of old. And as for text presentation on screen… well, that’s just lousy compared to what an expert setter would do. But it does adapt to different media with no or minimal effort required, doing in one second what used to take days, and that’s a rather big deal.
toomanydoubts 4y ago
Something I sometimes think about, is how really can capitalists benefit from that? If you can automate your company away, and fire all employees, and if every company is doing that, then workers have no jobs or ways to make money. So the customers for most of the companies start disappearing. It's the ultimate accumulation of capital, to a point that the wheels of economy grind to a halt.
- dougabug 4y ago
  That’s exactly what happened to the Magratheans in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Unfortunately, the venture was so successful that Magrathea soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. The Magratheans went into hibernation, awaiting an economic recovery that could afford their services once more.“
- vidarh 4y ago
  This is exactly Marx' thesis. He took capitalists on their word with respect to believing that competition will drive margins towards zero over time, and that as a consequence cutting labour is inherently a pre-requisite for surviving competition, and that as a result that capitalism will eventually, once it runs out of new markets to expand into, start experiencing crises of simultaneous overproduction and under-employment. If he was right, it can be "patched" and made to work with a sufficient level of redistribution to avoid such crises, or left to fail catastrophically without.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Why should it matter what benefits the group of people who end up just sitting on a pile of money in the end?
avgcorrection 4y ago
That’s not the fundamental question. The fundamental question is: Why have owners?

chrismorgan 4y ago

Sometimes it’s just an initial drop in quality, other times it’s permanent. My favourite example is book binding: hot-melt glue has completely supplanted cold glue in mass production, despite being drastically inferior, because it’s (just barely) good enough, and it’s so much faster/easier/cheaper for production. Many aspects of computer setting of works for printing also show a significant regression in potential quality (prose, musical engraving, &c.), though the right software and proper human tweaking can balance that out—but people seldom actually do as much tweaking as would be done automatically by the experts of old. And as for text presentation on screen… well, that’s just lousy compared to what an expert setter would do. But it does adapt to different media with no or minimal effort required, doing in one second what used to take days, and that’s a rather big deal.

toomanydoubts 4y ago

Something I sometimes think about, is how really can capitalists benefit from that? If you can automate your company away, and fire all employees, and if every company is doing that, then workers have no jobs or ways to make money. So the customers for most of the companies start disappearing. It's the ultimate accumulation of capital, to a point that the wheels of economy grind to a halt.

dougabug 4y ago
That’s exactly what happened to the Magratheans in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Unfortunately, the venture was so successful that Magrathea soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. The Magratheans went into hibernation, awaiting an economic recovery that could afford their services once more.“
vidarh 4y ago
This is exactly Marx' thesis. He took capitalists on their word with respect to believing that competition will drive margins towards zero over time, and that as a consequence cutting labour is inherently a pre-requisite for surviving competition, and that as a result that capitalism will eventually, once it runs out of new markets to expand into, start experiencing crises of simultaneous overproduction and under-employment. If he was right, it can be "patched" and made to work with a sufficient level of redistribution to avoid such crises, or left to fail catastrophically without.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Why should it matter what benefits the group of people who end up just sitting on a pile of money in the end?

avgcorrection 4y ago

That’s not the fundamental question. The fundamental question is: Why have owners?