4 ms·

I am from China, and I can share a bit of what I have learnt about Marxism in my secondary school: 1. As technology advances, machines will do more and more th

by cwhy 13y ago

I am from China, and I can share a bit of what I have learnt about Marxism in my secondary school: 1. As technology advances, machines will do more and more things that what human originally do. 2. As a result, less people will have jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment 3. At the same time, people (organization) who owns (not develops) machines will take this income. 4. People (organization) who owns more machines can more easily to buy another one. 5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer. -. Capitalism has bugs. In the future (my crazy thoughts): (If machines keep getting smarter) > More and more jobs are handled by humans, thus things like labor strike will have less and less impact on machine owners - since machines can still work for them. (If machines are smarter than human) > People who cannot develop machines will have no competition with machine owners, since they have machines which are smarter (If machines can developer machines) > Even people who can develop machines (maybe the last group of people) will be unemployed. People who own machines will have endless expansion. And people's life will be depending on how many machines they have and how advanced the machines are. About new jobs the machine enables: Other than machine generator/operators, most of them are entertainment which are generated needs. This portion of job looks unlikely will be replaced by machines. But who knows. I know my logic may be flawed and all objections with reasons are extremely welcome. I only proposed a problem with no solution, as I cannot imagine one (and definitely not pure centralized socialism), and I like machines.

agibsonccc 13y ago
It's not too far away. Many businesses are built on the idea of automating manual work now (mine included; one man shop!) . Aside from getting in to the meta discussions here. I think automation is also an enabler as much as it also detracts from different kinds of labor. I think it just means a temporary disruption in the short term, but a redistribution of skills in the long term. One good example of this is one we're seeing now. It was Auto and industrial before where people had the most employment (at least as far as what had the highest quality of life). This will (and is already) moving to technology. As it matures, it will become easier to teach and I hate to say it, but commoditize the work. After that, money made will be based on combinations of value add not necessarily what skills you know.
Joeri 13y ago
> As a result, less people will have jobs Automation has never unemployed people, only persons. Specific categories of jobs are removed by automation, but these are replaced by other categories of jobs. Demand is created for the products of these jobs, and the whole machine keeps turning. The consumer driven economy is built on artificial demand. The vast majority of 'stuff' bought is unnecessary. Without advertising and a culture that emphasises keeping up with the joneses we would see unemployment on a large scale, but our economy has adapted to fill the unemployment niches. The real challenge is not how to prevent unemployment through automation. It is to find an alternate solution to artificially inflated demand which doesn't waste so much labor and materials producing goods and services which are strictly speaking unnecessary.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- _lex 13y ago
  It's false to think that automation must create jobs, although it's a tautology that it does destroy/reduce parts of them. Your argument essentially amounts to "this is how it's worked in the past (unemployed people have been able to find other categories of jobs), so it'll always work that way".
  - Joeri 13y ago
    It's not automation that creates jobs, it's the incentives embedded in our socio-economic culture that create the replacement jobs for those that automation destroys. When labor is freed up, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ it to make money. When production costs are lowered, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ the freed up capital. This is why so many companies are hiring at the same time as they are firing. Taken at a national or global scale, the result is that labor and capital follow supply and demand curves and that adjustments to the system through automation are compensated elsewhere through economic incentives.
jseliger 13y ago
2. As a result, less people will have jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment This isn't true, though people keep writing about it in various contexts: Babbage in the 19th C, and David Ricardo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo. The jobs people do change. No one in 1800 worked as a video-game designer or social media marketing specialist. Few people today work as farrier or milliners. I have no idea what the book situation is like in China, but if you can, get a copy of Tyler Cowen's recent book Average Is Over. 5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer. The entire world has been getting richer for centuries, and in the last couple decades the world has seen unprecedented wealth creation due to the fall of Communism. See Cowen, noted above, or something like Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
- svachalek 13y ago
  Things never change, until they do. Think about the extreme case, where a $10,000 machine can do any job that humans currently do, better than they do, 24 hours a day. Would the entire world find new jobs, everyone doing things that no one up until 2013 had ever done before, things that machines are still not capable of, things that are valuable to the economy? I doubt it. At some point, the machines will win, and everyone that doesn't have the means to own machines and/or integrate them into their body is going to have a really hard time of things. Just how soon is debatable, but the way things are going I won't be surprised to see it in my lifetime.
  - tomrod 13y ago
    When you assume the outcome, of course it's inevitable. But consider: machines are still dumb. At the end of the day, someone automates the process. If all work that is necessary for the function of life can be automated, how wonderful! But, consider the dishwasher. It saves time, but is often misused by dirty dishes going in without pre rinse and disposal. So technically the work has been automated, but parts of the work still require manual operation. But now we pay people to pre wash instead of wash.
nyan_sandwich 13y ago
>1,2,3 Yup, except why do the developers not get the income? Presumably they are selling the machines? >4 Yes. The key with this kind of logic is to relate it to the current situation, though; people with more workers can afford even more workers. Why doesn't it all blow up now? There is more to success than simply scale of manufacturing capability; firms need to keep ahead of competitors, keep up with technology, manage the whole stack, etc, and then they can end up controlling the whole market (at the thing they do) and having nowhere else to go because the firms in other fields have an advantage that takes something special to beat. Also, the neat thing about capitalism is that money to buy more work is rarely the bottleneck, because you can get a capitalist to invest in your scheme (if it looks any good). >5 The second thing (poor get poorer) does not necessarily follow. Only the people who can't do anything that machines can't do better get poor. The working poor have more buying power because the machines create more wealth for less money. In practice, despite a lot of automation, we don't have many people unable to do anything productive; people are very much more versatile than machines (for now). More on that: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a... >In the future (my crazy thoughts): Yes, eventually the set of people who cannot do something that machines can't do better includes everyone, and everyone becomes unemployed. (Which looks pretty good, IMO; who likes working?). There are more serious problems than unemployment at this point, though. At this point, why do you expect the machines to still be under the control of the capitalists? If the machines can do capitalism, etc better than capitalists, any wealth that ends up in the hands of an autonomous machine will eventually increase to eclipse the human capitalists as well. (And of course, meanwhile the machines are increasing in effectiveness because they are better at machine design as well). This is called the "intelligence explosion" or "technological singularity" scenario, depending who you ask, and looks like bad news, unless we do some serious stuff to make sure the machines work to specifically benefit humanity instead of just continuing to find better and better ways to do whatever other task they were doing. (Better ways that eventually include overpowering humans militarily and melting us down for raw material). If you want more info: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ http://intelligenceexplosion.com/
- _lex 13y ago
  Developers will benefit from some of the income, but won't get it all. This is because their initial benefit will draw more people into software development, which, if not coincided by an increase in demand for software engineers, will lower wages since it'll increase competition for jobs. The poor will get poorer b/c they will have neither capital (money/development machines) and because eventually the rate of cannibalization of industries will increase over time. Software's eating the world, and that process is accelerating. Machines alone won't be worth much more than the sum of their parts because they are mass produced and largely interchangeable, so there's a ton of competition in the market. They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner. When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again.
noonespecial 13y ago
>5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer. I'm going to go ahead and call you on that one. What you probably mean is that rich people will get a lot richer comparatively. There will be a wider gap on paper. Those same machines have a tendency to make that paper gap more meaningless as time goes on. Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Even the poorest people in developed countries live lives unimaginable to the rich of the past. The question is: Would you rather be a poor man in a rich society or a rich man in a poor one? This isn't to say that we don't need a better token of societal value than "an hour of labor" to face our own strange future, but I don't subscribe to the "Elysium" point of view.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Yes, but you have to take the shuttle to the airport, check in your bags, go through security, get groped by TSA, dick around the terminal while waiting for boarding, then wait for your "zone" to board, then fight others for scarce overhead bin space. Once you land, you need to wait for your turn to get off the plane and then wait for your bags. Bill gates does not have to do any of those things. This and similar advantages (made possible by shitloads of money) allow him to increase the income gap even further.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    The point seemed to fly right over your head. Of course he realizes that the flying experience for Bill Gates is superior to that of your average coach class traveler. But the point is that they are both economically capable, in 2013, to fly in a jet that can take them across the country in a few hours. This is quite remarkable if you think about it.
    - yardie 13y ago
      Okay, expand that out a little. Bill Gates can fly into any country he wants and stay as long as he wants. Your typical coach flyer does not have that resource (visa constraints, return ticket constraints). He may have quite a few things in common with the upper-middle class but barely anything in common with the lower and poor class.
loup-vaillant 13y ago
> (If machines are smarter than human) At this point, you have intelligence explosion, and current economics means squat. The machine will take over the world, killing us all in the process (we're made of atoms it can use for its purposes, whatever they are). Or it can build a paradise, if it has been programmed to do exactly that. Good luck with that, since it's not exactly easy to describe "paradise" with programmatic precision.

by cwhy 13y ago

agibsonccc 13y ago

It's not too far away. Many businesses are built on the idea of automating manual work now (mine included; one man shop!) . Aside from getting in to the meta discussions here. I think automation is also an enabler as much as it also detracts from different kinds of labor. I think it just means a temporary disruption in the short term, but a redistribution of skills in the long term. One good example of this is one we're seeing now. It was Auto and industrial before where people had the most employment (at least as far as what had the highest quality of life). This will (and is already) moving to technology. As it matures, it will become easier to teach and I hate to say it, but commoditize the work. After that, money made will be based on combinations of value add not necessarily what skills you know.

Joeri 13y ago

> As a result, less people will have jobs Automation has never unemployed people, only persons. Specific categories of jobs are removed by automation, but these are replaced by other categories of jobs. Demand is created for the products of these jobs, and the whole machine keeps turning. The consumer driven economy is built on artificial demand. The vast majority of 'stuff' bought is unnecessary. Without advertising and a culture that emphasises keeping up with the joneses we would see unemployment on a large scale, but our economy has adapted to fill the unemployment niches. The real challenge is not how to prevent unemployment through automation. It is to find an alternate solution to artificially inflated demand which doesn't waste so much labor and materials producing goods and services which are strictly speaking unnecessary.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
_lex 13y ago
It's false to think that automation must create jobs, although it's a tautology that it does destroy/reduce parts of them. Your argument essentially amounts to "this is how it's worked in the past (unemployed people have been able to find other categories of jobs), so it'll always work that way".
- Joeri 13y ago
  It's not automation that creates jobs, it's the incentives embedded in our socio-economic culture that create the replacement jobs for those that automation destroys. When labor is freed up, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ it to make money. When production costs are lowered, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ the freed up capital. This is why so many companies are hiring at the same time as they are firing. Taken at a national or global scale, the result is that labor and capital follow supply and demand curves and that adjustments to the system through automation are compensated elsewhere through economic incentives.

jseliger 13y ago

2. As a result, less people will have jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment This isn't true, though people keep writing about it in various contexts: Babbage in the 19th C, and David Ricardo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo. The jobs people do change. No one in 1800 worked as a video-game designer or social media marketing specialist. Few people today work as farrier or milliners. I have no idea what the book situation is like in China, but if you can, get a copy of Tyler Cowen's recent book Average Is Over. 5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer. The entire world has been getting richer for centuries, and in the last couple decades the world has seen unprecedented wealth creation due to the fall of Communism. See Cowen, noted above, or something like Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

svachalek 13y ago
Things never change, until they do. Think about the extreme case, where a $10,000 machine can do any job that humans currently do, better than they do, 24 hours a day. Would the entire world find new jobs, everyone doing things that no one up until 2013 had ever done before, things that machines are still not capable of, things that are valuable to the economy? I doubt it. At some point, the machines will win, and everyone that doesn't have the means to own machines and/or integrate them into their body is going to have a really hard time of things. Just how soon is debatable, but the way things are going I won't be surprised to see it in my lifetime.
- tomrod 13y ago
  When you assume the outcome, of course it's inevitable. But consider: machines are still dumb. At the end of the day, someone automates the process. If all work that is necessary for the function of life can be automated, how wonderful! But, consider the dishwasher. It saves time, but is often misused by dirty dishes going in without pre rinse and disposal. So technically the work has been automated, but parts of the work still require manual operation. But now we pay people to pre wash instead of wash.

nyan_sandwich 13y ago

>1,2,3 Yup, except why do the developers not get the income? Presumably they are selling the machines? >4 Yes. The key with this kind of logic is to relate it to the current situation, though; people with more workers can afford even more workers. Why doesn't it all blow up now? There is more to success than simply scale of manufacturing capability; firms need to keep ahead of competitors, keep up with technology, manage the whole stack, etc, and then they can end up controlling the whole market (at the thing they do) and having nowhere else to go because the firms in other fields have an advantage that takes something special to beat. Also, the neat thing about capitalism is that money to buy more work is rarely the bottleneck, because you can get a capitalist to invest in your scheme (if it looks any good). >5 The second thing (poor get poorer) does not necessarily follow. Only the people who can't do anything that machines can't do better get poor. The working poor have more buying power because the machines create more wealth for less money. In practice, despite a lot of automation, we don't have many people unable to do anything productive; people are very much more versatile than machines (for now). More on that: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a... >In the future (my crazy thoughts): Yes, eventually the set of people who cannot do something that machines can't do better includes everyone, and everyone becomes unemployed. (Which looks pretty good, IMO; who likes working?). There are more serious problems than unemployment at this point, though. At this point, why do you expect the machines to still be under the control of the capitalists? If the machines can do capitalism, etc better than capitalists, any wealth that ends up in the hands of an autonomous machine will eventually increase to eclipse the human capitalists as well. (And of course, meanwhile the machines are increasing in effectiveness because they are better at machine design as well). This is called the "intelligence explosion" or "technological singularity" scenario, depending who you ask, and looks like bad news, unless we do some serious stuff to make sure the machines work to specifically benefit humanity instead of just continuing to find better and better ways to do whatever other task they were doing. (Better ways that eventually include overpowering humans militarily and melting us down for raw material). If you want more info: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ http://intelligenceexplosion.com/

_lex 13y ago
Developers will benefit from some of the income, but won't get it all. This is because their initial benefit will draw more people into software development, which, if not coincided by an increase in demand for software engineers, will lower wages since it'll increase competition for jobs. The poor will get poorer b/c they will have neither capital (money/development machines) and because eventually the rate of cannibalization of industries will increase over time. Software's eating the world, and that process is accelerating. Machines alone won't be worth much more than the sum of their parts because they are mass produced and largely interchangeable, so there's a ton of competition in the market. They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner. When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again.

noonespecial 13y ago

>5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer. I'm going to go ahead and call you on that one. What you probably mean is that rich people will get a lot richer comparatively. There will be a wider gap on paper. Those same machines have a tendency to make that paper gap more meaningless as time goes on. Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Even the poorest people in developed countries live lives unimaginable to the rich of the past. The question is: Would you rather be a poor man in a rich society or a rich man in a poor one? This isn't to say that we don't need a better token of societal value than "an hour of labor" to face our own strange future, but I don't subscribe to the "Elysium" point of view.

enraged_camel 13y ago
>>Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Yes, but you have to take the shuttle to the airport, check in your bags, go through security, get groped by TSA, dick around the terminal while waiting for boarding, then wait for your "zone" to board, then fight others for scarce overhead bin space. Once you land, you need to wait for your turn to get off the plane and then wait for your bags. Bill gates does not have to do any of those things. This and similar advantages (made possible by shitloads of money) allow him to increase the income gap even further.
- gfodor 13y ago
  The point seemed to fly right over your head. Of course he realizes that the flying experience for Bill Gates is superior to that of your average coach class traveler. But the point is that they are both economically capable, in 2013, to fly in a jet that can take them across the country in a few hours. This is quite remarkable if you think about it.
  - yardie 13y ago
    Okay, expand that out a little. Bill Gates can fly into any country he wants and stay as long as he wants. Your typical coach flyer does not have that resource (visa constraints, return ticket constraints). He may have quite a few things in common with the upper-middle class but barely anything in common with the lower and poor class.

loup-vaillant 13y ago

> (If machines are smarter than human) At this point, you have intelligence explosion, and current economics means squat. The machine will take over the world, killing us all in the process (we're made of atoms it can use for its purposes, whatever they are). Or it can build a paradise, if it has been programmed to do exactly that. Good luck with that, since it's not exactly easy to describe "paradise" with programmatic precision.