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I don't understand this view. Every time I see people spending hours of their time watching harlem shake videos or any other silly nonsense on the web, I am hea

I don't understand this view. Every time I see people spending hours of their time watching harlem shake videos or any other silly nonsense on the web, I am heartened that there are infinite jobs in entertaining each other and providing "non essential" services. OK sure, robots will take over construction and heavy lifting, leaving only a "super class" of surgeons and whatnot still able to get any of the jobs we recognize today. But I think we are far away from robots taking away other very human jobs. I pay for a twitch.tv subscription so I can see StarCraft games in 720p+. I literally pay other people to play video games. This is not some strange oddity, this is the future. Remember: once upon a time it was a full time job for just about everyone in a society to get food, take care of children, and just generally do the bare minimum to survive. I'm sure they look at the world we live in today as "post-scarcity" the same way we imagine a world of tomorrow where robots do all of our duties. When agriculture introduced surplus into our society, it didn't cause a collapse. It instead allowed art and science to be born. Just as those early humans would have scoffed at Michelangelo getting a paycheck for putting colors on walls, so to does this possible future seem frivolous to us. But it is no more frivolous than all the current people employed in our current economy convincing each other to buy things we don't need. If or when machines do everything we consider essential now, I assure you we will find new things to do with our time, some will be better than others at these new things, and thus we will pay each other to do them.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
There is a difference between being paid to do a job and a job that increases the total wealth in the world. There are two ways to look at this - the pg style do something people want (such as play Starcraft well) and a more physicist viewpoint of decreasing amount of energy needed to achieve a given outcome. (Yeah that definition needs some work but it is intuitively measurable) Anyway, if robots do all the stuff that is physicist-style Like farming or manufacture and humans then sit around doing arts and crafts, that's great for humans - as long as there is some means of distributing the wealth (energy transformed into goods?) - and preferably a fair means of doing so We could just hand out food, or give everyone a "job" - but correcting the compensation when the job is not actually productive is hard. We are going to go into a world where economics will have to catch up. A job is essentially an overloaded concept - it does two things, distributes wealth and is an actual means of wealth creation. Split the two and we are in uncharted waters, but splitting the two we are.
- tolmasky 14y ago
  I don't understand why you think any rules change just because the jobs being done change. This revolution of automation has largely already taken place, and I would argue that the automation isn't even the important part. What difference does it make if all food is generated by robots vs today's reality of most food being generated by a tiny percentage of the humans with the huge help of technology? I certainly don't generate my own food, and I don't do anything very essential by the "physicist viewpoint", and yet I am still able to acquire food. Most people in this country don't farm and are still able to get food despite doing "non physicist" jobs. I didn't need a job handed to me or invented to keep me busy. My job is completely non-essential and would have made absolutely no sense 1000 years ago. It however exists because of technology and surplus. The guy playing StarCraft makes money. He then uses said money to buy food from guy who owns the crops, just like today. Its no different than how soccer players play for people for money. What is the complexity here? Why do you think we will need to figure out means of "distribution"?
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Good point....hmmmm..... So you are saying that the "wealth" of the changes in farming is produced by say 5% of the population, and they are the only ones who are really needed. The rest of us get to play a game where we guess the total wealth of the world (ie the food) and assign money to it. Then we split that money somehow (playing starcraft) and give some of it back to the farmers. I suppose I am now taking econ 101. I would however suggest that the automation revolution has not finished - the mechanisation revolution may be slowing but software is barely started.
- IgorPartola 14y ago
  Exactly. Here's the trouble: we are already more productive than necessary. 90% of humans can adequately supply 100% of the population with everything necessary. What if we lower that 90% to 10%? The problem is that capitalism, which aligns your job/business with your income, breaks down at that point. If there is no job for you to do, then under this system you'll starve. Will we let 90% of the population starve just to preserve capitalism? That's not exactly sustainable. The reality is that capitalism is not perfect, but it's the best we've come up with so far as a species. Once we hit the point where it stops working we'll have to re-imagine a whole lot of concepts.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
On a reread I do not think that the next wave or whatever will cause a collapse - if there are no jobs to be had then we shall not all be livin in the dirt - we will find ways to share the wealth some other way than wage packets. There are many ways of sharing the wealth - for example I benefit from road building schemes even if I do not recieve direct payments. Michalangelo as compared to a Neanderthal is an interesting idea - but reverse it - although michaleangelo presumably thought he had to work hard, if he had lived a life of same utility as a Neanderthal he could have done so on an hours work a week. It's just that he liked clothes and houses and wine. So I agree that in the robot future the effort needed to live like you or I will be small - but it won't pay for that holiday to Mars

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

There is a difference between being paid to do a job and a job that increases the total wealth in the world. There are two ways to look at this - the pg style do something people want (such as play Starcraft well) and a more physicist viewpoint of decreasing amount of energy needed to achieve a given outcome. (Yeah that definition needs some work but it is intuitively measurable) Anyway, if robots do all the stuff that is physicist-style Like farming or manufacture and humans then sit around doing arts and crafts, that's great for humans - as long as there is some means of distributing the wealth (energy transformed into goods?) - and preferably a fair means of doing so We could just hand out food, or give everyone a "job" - but correcting the compensation when the job is not actually productive is hard. We are going to go into a world where economics will have to catch up. A job is essentially an overloaded concept - it does two things, distributes wealth and is an actual means of wealth creation. Split the two and we are in uncharted waters, but splitting the two we are.

tolmasky 14y ago
I don't understand why you think any rules change just because the jobs being done change. This revolution of automation has largely already taken place, and I would argue that the automation isn't even the important part. What difference does it make if all food is generated by robots vs today's reality of most food being generated by a tiny percentage of the humans with the huge help of technology? I certainly don't generate my own food, and I don't do anything very essential by the "physicist viewpoint", and yet I am still able to acquire food. Most people in this country don't farm and are still able to get food despite doing "non physicist" jobs. I didn't need a job handed to me or invented to keep me busy. My job is completely non-essential and would have made absolutely no sense 1000 years ago. It however exists because of technology and surplus. The guy playing StarCraft makes money. He then uses said money to buy food from guy who owns the crops, just like today. Its no different than how soccer players play for people for money. What is the complexity here? Why do you think we will need to figure out means of "distribution"?
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Good point....hmmmm..... So you are saying that the "wealth" of the changes in farming is produced by say 5% of the population, and they are the only ones who are really needed. The rest of us get to play a game where we guess the total wealth of the world (ie the food) and assign money to it. Then we split that money somehow (playing starcraft) and give some of it back to the farmers. I suppose I am now taking econ 101. I would however suggest that the automation revolution has not finished - the mechanisation revolution may be slowing but software is barely started.
IgorPartola 14y ago
Exactly. Here's the trouble: we are already more productive than necessary. 90% of humans can adequately supply 100% of the population with everything necessary. What if we lower that 90% to 10%? The problem is that capitalism, which aligns your job/business with your income, breaks down at that point. If there is no job for you to do, then under this system you'll starve. Will we let 90% of the population starve just to preserve capitalism? That's not exactly sustainable. The reality is that capitalism is not perfect, but it's the best we've come up with so far as a species. Once we hit the point where it stops working we'll have to re-imagine a whole lot of concepts.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

On a reread I do not think that the next wave or whatever will cause a collapse - if there are no jobs to be had then we shall not all be livin in the dirt - we will find ways to share the wealth some other way than wage packets. There are many ways of sharing the wealth - for example I benefit from road building schemes even if I do not recieve direct payments. Michalangelo as compared to a Neanderthal is an interesting idea - but reverse it - although michaleangelo presumably thought he had to work hard, if he had lived a life of same utility as a Neanderthal he could have done so on an hours work a week. It's just that he liked clothes and houses and wine. So I agree that in the robot future the effort needed to live like you or I will be small - but it won't pay for that holiday to Mars