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On the other hand, they were paid. Hard work trumps having nothing to eat.
by miahi 14y ago
On the other hand, they were paid. Hard work trumps having nothing to eat.
- mburns 14y agoThat just means we need robots to harvest food, too.
- jbigelow76 14y agoJust because the food is available doesn't necessarily mean the producers will be willing to give it to those without means to pay for it.
- TheGateKeeper 14y agoMaybe not, but enough to keep their robots in repair and enough for themselves who own them to have a home/food of their own wouldn't go amiss.
- pgeorgi 14y agoNothing that couldn't be fixed with some carefully applied lethal force (cf. french revolution).
- jbigelow76 14y agoIt's all fun and games until somebody loses their head over it.
- rpm4321 14y agoBut think about it - if the cost of labor plummets, and material costs plummet because the labor required to gather and refine materials plummets, the cost of pretty much every need and most wants are ridiculously low to non-existant. It's quite similar to the discussions about the economic impact of a molecular assembler.
- kamaal 14y agoSomeday they will be forced to. Its just cost of production will fall down so rapidly and to such low amounts. Getting rich that way will be like trying to fill a terabyte scale hard drive by adding 10 byte text files. It will be a exercise in futility. Think of it more like free phone calls, unlimited internet band width and free apps.
- randomdata 14y agoIt won't be long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFy6ZAjbeew http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFy6ZAjbeew
- newbie12 14y agoYou have stumbled into an old fallacy, the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs. More robots increases productivity for society and creates the excess resources for new and better jobs in other sectors, normally the service sector. This is a huge win.
- potatolicious 14y agoYou have stumbled onto an old fallacy either - that the creation of new jobs as a result of technological development floats all boats equally. Replacing people with robots certainly increases productivity, and frees up resources for other pursuits - it is also unlikely that the people whose jobs have been removed will find employment in many of these new jobs. So sure, the entirety of the closed system (i.e. the Earth) has experienced a net productivity boost - but for the areas impacted (i.e. that part of China) this is very much a net negative. This is probably the greatest social issue we face today. We are very rapidly replacing the jobs of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people. We are creating jobs elsewhere as a result - but the intersection of these new jobs with the skills of the unemployed is very low, and the nature of these new jobs also means retraining is becoming harder, not easier.
- krapp 14y agoThe future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. William Gibson, maybe