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You are failing to see the scope of this. Imagine a world where your latte is served by a machine, your taxi drives itself, when you had surgery the guy operat

You are failing to see the scope of this. Imagine a world where your latte is served by a machine, your taxi drives itself, when you had surgery the guy operating the waldoes was working from his office in Mumbai, you do your own lawyering with the help of Watson running on your iPad, the malls are self service, and the cops are made by Boston Dynamics. Now imagine being sacked because your boss has a Watson too, trying to get a job - any job, and realizing that that the system doesn't need you - you are underqualified for the purely human jobs that remain, and your minimum living wage (covering rent, food, utilities and no slack) costs more than a burger flipping robot's amortized installation expense.

ef4 13y ago
No, I'm actually ambitious and optimistic about the scope of this. Massive automation absolutely does not imply massive involuntary unemployment. We've actually been through this before. We used to require 90% of the population to grow food. Now it's less than 1%. The rest didn't end up unemployed -- they ended up involved in entire industries and economies that didn't even exist before. Most of us have jobs that would sound completely fanciful to a farmer circa 1800. He couldn't have remotely guessed how most people would spend their time and earn a living in 2013. The same is true now for us -- I doubt anyone here could explain what most people in 2050 will be doing with their time. But the existence proof for there being useful work to do is the fact that not everyone has everything they could possibly want. So long as there are unmet needs and wants, there are necessarily opportunities for people to work together toward satisfying those needs. Either the poor can afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they will have a high standard of living, or the poor can't afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they constitute a large market in which the robots are not competitive, not relevant, and unable to put people out of work.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  No, they constitute a small, impoverished market in defiance of their numbers. CF: the present day ecosystem of food, etc provision to very poor people. It's heavily consolidated and the products are trashy because the amount of profit to be had is paper-thin.

ef4 13y ago

No, I'm actually ambitious and optimistic about the scope of this. Massive automation absolutely does not imply massive involuntary unemployment. We've actually been through this before. We used to require 90% of the population to grow food. Now it's less than 1%. The rest didn't end up unemployed -- they ended up involved in entire industries and economies that didn't even exist before. Most of us have jobs that would sound completely fanciful to a farmer circa 1800. He couldn't have remotely guessed how most people would spend their time and earn a living in 2013. The same is true now for us -- I doubt anyone here could explain what most people in 2050 will be doing with their time. But the existence proof for there being useful work to do is the fact that not everyone has everything they could possibly want. So long as there are unmet needs and wants, there are necessarily opportunities for people to work together toward satisfying those needs. Either the poor can afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they will have a high standard of living, or the poor can't afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they constitute a large market in which the robots are not competitive, not relevant, and unable to put people out of work.

JulianMorrison 13y ago
No, they constitute a small, impoverished market in defiance of their numbers. CF: the present day ecosystem of food, etc provision to very poor people. It's heavily consolidated and the products are trashy because the amount of profit to be had is paper-thin.