4 ms·

We geeks are working at increasing the rest of the world's productivity. And we're doing great! This means that less people are needed to produce the same wealt

by fab13n 14y ago

We geeks are working at increasing the rest of the world's productivity. And we're doing great! This means that less people are needed to produce the same wealth, and that more and more people have nothing left to contribute, because we improve productivity faster than teachers improve education. It's not a bad thing: I'd rather have everyone being useful, but I'd rather pay someone for doing nothing than for doing an unnecessary job; at least in the latter case, we've got a honest view of the situation, we haven't broken the compass. A society where half the people are economically worthless and they don't even know it is doubly broken. Jobs serve two purposes in our modern Western world: they produce wealth, and they're our way to redistribute that produced wealth. The latter is a convention, not a necessity. Exchanging wealth for work proportionally is an effective motivator for those able to produce actual wealth, but for the increasing masses who simply can't, it's a cruel joke, a game they're forced to play and doomed to lose humiliatingly. So sure, they shouldn't get the same revenue as a heart surgeon; but if there's a robot which can flip burgers better than them, and thus make them economically worthless, I'd rather give them their minimum salary and let the robot do the flipping. My life is interesting enough that I don't need others to suffer in pointless jobs in order to endure mine.

zanny 14y ago
I think you touch on one of the greatest problems of the 21st century - coming to terms with the reality that maximizing for wealth creation rather than redistribution means very few people are doing things anyone can predictably assume is beneficiary - such as research, arts, etc. Almost every job lost in the last 50 years due to globalization and automation have been jobs very few people would want to do with their lives, and people always dodge that over some preconceived notion everyone should be putting in 9 - 5 hours. Though, I think the more acceptable solution is to just drastically cut the hours of the uneducated grunt work that still isn't automated (while spending the time to automate it, because we are at the threshold of eliminating traditional labor and that is a good thing) and just divvy up the available work to the many, maybe even as little as an hour a day, or an 8 hour shift a week. The problem is changing the entrenched century old agriculture / housing / trade industries to accept a lack of scarcity and dramatic price drops across the board. You want the income from that tiny work week to be the disposable income after providing food, warmth, shelter, and transportation, since it seems silly to even think of anyone living today unable to enjoy their life, when we have so much plenty.
- kefka 14y ago
  I worked for about 4 months at a factory. My job was thus: .5 sec: Put bracket in tapping machine. .5 sec: Press Tap button. 4 sec: wait to Tap bracket. .25 sec: Air blows tapped part into crate --Goto Beginning until 120 parts are in crate Change Crate --Then Goto beginning. Do this for 8-12 hours. Yes. a 5.25 second loop. Other things in this job was if a part was in the crate that wasnt tapped properly (I found out Im also in charge of QC as well..)I would have to manually check the last day's work all by hand. I was hired temp labor, at 8$ an hour. The machine that would replace me would cost $.5 million. That was one of the worst mind numbing jobs I had ever done. I figured once I started to contemplate suicide, I should probably get out of there.
- fab13n 14y ago
  There's another issue: it seems likely that a minority of people will be in charge of most of the productive work. It's great to cut grunt work into a couple of hours a week if we can, but we probably want to keep talented robot designers occupied full-time. How to provide effective incentives for that, without creating social instabilities? I'm afraid that financial incentives only works to some extent... The solution is probably to replace useless jobs with useful but unprofitable ones, but to keep people busy with almost-mandatory, socially useful activities. Without growing a management system comparable with the soviet one, in terms of ineffectiveness and corruptibility.
wildgift 14y ago
Or pay them to do something useful, but not profitable in the market. For example, childcare. Or taking care of old people. These are totally useful jobs, but babies and retirees don't have money. The adults supporting them no longer have triple the income to afford to pay for the lives of their children and their parents.
- fab13n 14y ago
  Exactly, and that's what taxes are supposed to be for: finance useful activities which aren't handled adequately by the free market. But before moving some workforce to those jobs, we first need to acknowledge this workforce as available, i.e. unemployed rather than employed at something pointless. Part of what fueled the industrial revolution was the number of farming hands which went unemployed due to agricultural mechanization: they became industrial workers.

by fab13n 14y ago

zanny 14y ago

I think you touch on one of the greatest problems of the 21st century - coming to terms with the reality that maximizing for wealth creation rather than redistribution means very few people are doing things anyone can predictably assume is beneficiary - such as research, arts, etc. Almost every job lost in the last 50 years due to globalization and automation have been jobs very few people would want to do with their lives, and people always dodge that over some preconceived notion everyone should be putting in 9 - 5 hours. Though, I think the more acceptable solution is to just drastically cut the hours of the uneducated grunt work that still isn't automated (while spending the time to automate it, because we are at the threshold of eliminating traditional labor and that is a good thing) and just divvy up the available work to the many, maybe even as little as an hour a day, or an 8 hour shift a week. The problem is changing the entrenched century old agriculture / housing / trade industries to accept a lack of scarcity and dramatic price drops across the board. You want the income from that tiny work week to be the disposable income after providing food, warmth, shelter, and transportation, since it seems silly to even think of anyone living today unable to enjoy their life, when we have so much plenty.

kefka 14y ago
I worked for about 4 months at a factory. My job was thus: .5 sec: Put bracket in tapping machine. .5 sec: Press Tap button. 4 sec: wait to Tap bracket. .25 sec: Air blows tapped part into crate --Goto Beginning until 120 parts are in crate Change Crate --Then Goto beginning. Do this for 8-12 hours. Yes. a 5.25 second loop. Other things in this job was if a part was in the crate that wasnt tapped properly (I found out Im also in charge of QC as well..)I would have to manually check the last day's work all by hand. I was hired temp labor, at 8$ an hour. The machine that would replace me would cost $.5 million. That was one of the worst mind numbing jobs I had ever done. I figured once I started to contemplate suicide, I should probably get out of there.
fab13n 14y ago
There's another issue: it seems likely that a minority of people will be in charge of most of the productive work. It's great to cut grunt work into a couple of hours a week if we can, but we probably want to keep talented robot designers occupied full-time. How to provide effective incentives for that, without creating social instabilities? I'm afraid that financial incentives only works to some extent... The solution is probably to replace useless jobs with useful but unprofitable ones, but to keep people busy with almost-mandatory, socially useful activities. Without growing a management system comparable with the soviet one, in terms of ineffectiveness and corruptibility.

wildgift 14y ago

Or pay them to do something useful, but not profitable in the market. For example, childcare. Or taking care of old people. These are totally useful jobs, but babies and retirees don't have money. The adults supporting them no longer have triple the income to afford to pay for the lives of their children and their parents.

fab13n 14y ago
Exactly, and that's what taxes are supposed to be for: finance useful activities which aren't handled adequately by the free market. But before moving some workforce to those jobs, we first need to acknowledge this workforce as available, i.e. unemployed rather than employed at something pointless. Part of what fueled the industrial revolution was the number of farming hands which went unemployed due to agricultural mechanization: they became industrial workers.