A week ago, news that the U.S. job market appeared to be rallying conferred confidence toward economic recovery. Yet hot on the heels of these buoyant announcements were studies analyzing the British and American labor markets. They conclude that anywhere from one third to one half of all jobs will be performed by machines within the next two decades. Low skilled work will be hardest hit with circa 70% of these positions deemed 'under threat'.
These results appear months after publications like Scientific American acknowledge the dearth of good data on automation. As you'd expect of such fledgling research, solutions to the impending employment blight are thin on the ground: Deloitte's researchers concluded workers need more digital know-how, managerial and creative skills in order to 'upskill and adapt'. What, no basic income?!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @02:30AM
Linux sysadmins, specifically those who know a lot about Debian, have nothing to fear. Systemd unexpectedly getting installed on these Debian servers when performing unrelated updates, and subsequently causing a "horrible experience" like this one [debian.org], will guarantee them work for many years to come.
They'll be just like all of us RDBMS experts. Several years ago, we were told that we'd all soon be out of a job thanks to NoSQL DBs. Well, times have never been better for us! Many of these NoSQL DB setups have proven to be absolute disasters. Now we're getting called in to sort out these innumerable messes, and we still have years of work lined up ahead of us, even as we convert these NoSQL DBs over to real DBs as quickly as we can.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @02:33AM
American dream about to become nightmare (a choice between "economic eugenics" versus "pay them to keep them away from rebellion")?
How about free tertiary education [soylentnews.org]?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by theronb on Monday November 17 2014, @04:22AM
Time to move to a gated community.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @04:42AM
FTFY
(large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday November 17 2014, @04:44AM
Time to move to a gated community.
Yup. Like in all the other third world countries.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Monday November 17 2014, @06:20PM
I was in the Dominican Republic once for a wedding at a place called Casa de Campo. It's a walled fortress for the wealthy. And I don't mean "rich," I mean wealthy. A half-dozen servants per guest/resident. There was a yacht broker on site with $100M boats. In the hotel room where I stayed (it's a sprawling place with hotels, condos, homes) they had the guide book for stuff you could do during your stay. Amongst the activities was pheasant hunting. They would fly you by helicopter to their remote hunting grounds, where "unlimited pheasants" would be driven before you to shoot. That's serious money right there. Unlimited pheasants. This was the only place on the island with a water treatment plant that made the tap water safe to drink, but no one could drink it. At the restaurants you had the choice of evian or perrier, and that's it. They will not bring you regular tap water.
And right on the other side of that wall, abject poverty.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @07:49PM
We just all think we will be the ones on the rich side of the wall.
(damm a lot of people are going to be so shocked)
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Monday November 17 2014, @08:30PM
The lucky ones will be guarding the gates or serving the drinks.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @04:49AM
Seriously speaking, you'll designate yourself as an easy target for the discontent. Unless you have $10M-$100M to have access to a well protected one (i.e. one that can afford to pay a mini-army), your protection won't be strong enough.
Alternative: buy a ranch in the middle of nowhere and start working from home - chances are the hungry mob won't have enough energy to travel that far away (sure, you'll need to make some special arrangements with your choice of ISP to continue posting on SN).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by theronb on Monday November 17 2014, @05:58PM
I'm recently retired, so working is not an issue and we own a small piece of land adjacent to my brother-in-law's farm that's looking better and better.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday November 18 2014, @07:09AM
It may be an issue. Tell you what: just don't give up to posting on SN, man, you may depress your better half [telegraph.co.uk]
(I assume you are a male. If not, good luck with your retired husband).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by srobert on Monday November 17 2014, @02:44AM
When I was young (1970's), I read futuristic stories (about the 80's, 90's and even the 21st century) in which it was implied that all the coming automation would result in a much shorter work week and higher living standards for everyone. What the hell happened? We should have been on a 32 hour work week 20 years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @03:20AM
Your Boss needs someone to boss around, puny worker. Get back to work!!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Monday November 17 2014, @03:33AM
The automation has resulted in exactly that. The work week for many people got shortened to zero.
The living standards have also increased, at least with regard to automated things. We have now plastic and electronic money and can buy and sell without leaving home. We can listen music and watch HD movies from home. We carry inexpensive computers in our pockets that exceed all the world's computing capacity of 1960's. We can make phone calls from nearly everywhere (except caves and ocean depths.) Those benefits are available even to those who do not work or work part time.
The ideas of 1960s/70s was that some George Jetson of the future will be going to work, doing hardly anything for a few hours, and returning. But that does not make any sense from the POV of the factory manager. Who can deal with 4 shifts per an 8-hour day? It is far more practical to have one shift, and employ a person for 8 hours.
Now one could see an opening here. Instead of coming to work for 2 hours, George could come every fourth day; someone else would be filling other days. However there is a weakness here as well, it is called "training." Additionally, it only can be used at most simplistic jobs, where people are interchangeable. But take a doctor... he cannot leave his patient for four days; other doctors do not know his condition, and the flow of information between shifts will overwhelm them. If you take an artist, an engineer, or anyone else who works with his mind, it quickly becomes clear that a single project cannot be worked on by visiting workers.
One could possibly find workarounds even here; but they are not sought because there is no need. A human is perfectly capable of working 8 hours, and there is no shortage of willing workers. Would you like to share your day at the office - and your salary - with someone else, who you do not know? It's not like you are paid millions and can easily give someone else his chance at it.
That also plugs into the discussion of salaries. How much should George Jetson earn for sitting in his office for 2 hours? And how much should he be able to buy for that money? It depends on how important his contribution is. If George uses his unique skills to support manufacturing, he is valuable. But if he is only pressing a green button whenever a good sprocket floats by, his job adds little value - and today it is replaced with machine vision systems.
But he does earn some money, right? What is the value of that money? If we presume that robots are plentiful, the money reflects the share of goods (produced by those robots) that a person is entitled to. Inventors of communism believed that money will not exist; but in reality there are things that will always be in short supply - energy, raw materials, space on land, rare animals. On top of that there are items that are *naturally* limited - such as services of other humans. Money will have to exist to regulate production and consumption of these - even if some will choose to release their software product, or other services, for free. Without money in some form - and without goods that can be bought with it - there would be not as much motivation within the society to perform useful work. Why should I go somewhere and work if the alternative is that I don't go anywhere, stay at home or otherwise enjoy life, and there is no penalty?
Communists say that the society of the future will do away with private ownership of factories. They say that the state (which won't exist either, btw) will own those robotic factories, and humans will be occasionally working there to do complex repairs or improvements. This sounds good and close to what you were expecting... but there are issues. Most importantly, humans - as defined by their genes - are not exactly built for a communist society. All attempts to build communes in controlled conditions have failed, and to this day I can't think of any stable commune except a monastery. The part in communists' speech that "humans will be occasionally working there" is not founded in any historical basis. In the USA many people live on social security. How many of them volunteer their labor for any purpose?
Additionally, there is no transition plan from a capitalist society to a communist one. This is an important omission. Currently factories have owners, and those owners enjoy benefits of wealth. What is it that the society has to offer to them, so that they give up on that property and walk away? In 1917 the offer was simple: either you give us your factory, or we take it and shoot you. Today this is less likely to work, as there are fewer workers and more power in hands of factory owners. So it has to be peaceful. But what can they be promised if they already have all that there is? I don't know. To make matters worse, governments are very bad owners and managers - the example of USSR is quite informative. To summarize, there is no clear way to go past capitalism - and capitalism is not going to recruit people from the street just so they can sit their 2 hours on a chair and press green buttons. I think the future of humans is far darker.
(Score: 1) by NotSanguine on Monday November 17 2014, @05:03AM
You make a bunch of interesting points and the conclusion you draw:
I think the future of humans is far darker.
Is, unfortunately, likely to be correct.
However, I think the comparison between communism and capitalism misses and important point. Both were conceived and employed when there were serious scarcity problems. We haven't resolved those issues quite yet, but we've made huge strides in eliminating scarcity in many areas. Energy is still a big issue, as is the equitable *distribution* of food. There are other areas, but those are the big ones, IMHO.
Given the human penchant for adapting ourselves and our environment to suit our needs, I (too optimistically, perhaps) think we'll resolve those issues too.
If we do, and scarcity is no longer an issue, what then? Will we find a better mechanism for resource allocation?
The economics of abundance are much different from the economics of scarcity. If scarcity goes the way of smallpox, it seems to me that the betterment of humanity and the human condition can take a more prominent role. That would be a wonderful thing to see.
Unfortunately, the darkness you see coming is more likely. I just hope I don't live to see it.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by emg on Monday November 17 2014, @05:30AM
There's no such thing as a 'post-scarcity' world, because my billion robot army and I can use up as many resources as are available.
The people who believe that 'post-scarcity' nonsense are completely lacking in imagination.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday November 17 2014, @01:21PM
Theres an interesting Stross story (or some singularity author) along the lines of in the USA for the average dude water scarcity is not an issue but nobody in civilized areas goes around opening fire hydrants, and like wise post singularity you'll likely never be hungry or homeless, but by analogy trying to do something really stupidly wasteful will likely involve police/legal enforcement. So nobody blinks if you build yourself a nice garden but if you try to implement 100000 acres of factory farming, you can expect the police and zoning commission to be totally WTF.
Use as much energy as you want, within reasonable bounds, but when the waste heat is causing your neighbors land to turn to lava, you can expect some pretty harsh behavior.
The Stross (or whoever) story I'm specifically thinking of was computational, someone gets into what amounts to a bar fight and uses up her ridiculously high monthly computational quota trying to F with her opponent.
(Score: 1) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 18 2014, @12:54AM
There's no such thing as a 'post-scarcity' world, because my billion robot army and I can use up as many resources as are available.
The people who believe that 'post-scarcity' nonsense are completely lacking in imagination.
I'd point out that my outlook leans more toward the darker side of things, as is evidenced by what I said:
Imagination is not limited to the likely outcomes. In fact, the less likely the outcome, the more imagination it takes to visualize, IMHO.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by tftp on Monday November 17 2014, @05:34AM
We already can explore the economics of abundance. The simplest method is to conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that a hundred of your friends are given a life-long grant on basic sustenance. (How basic is "basic" - you decide for yourself.) What will they do? In what direction will they drive the society? Please select people from all walks of life; do not forget that cleptomaniac and that boss who is obsessed with power. We cannot shoot the unwanted people at the gates of the bright future. Consider *everyone* - and then see what happens.
In my simulations most people quickly go on a tangent. They are well represented by the rich heirs, or other nouveaux riches that we have today. How many of them invest their free time into something socially worthwhile? I think that too many people comfortably fall into a groove of hobbies; some start drinking; other seek excitement in crime. Hardly anyone studies quantum physics and tries to build a warp drive. We have tens of thousands of trust fund babies - and where are their inventions, their hard work, their art? Or will it be an endless "Occupy Wall Street" rally, with drugs and sex and vague demands of something that they couldn't remember?
The brave new world will be generating "trust fund babies" by millions. What will that world look like? Perhaps we know already, if only we look back at aristocracy of last 1000 years. Humans haven't changed since then. So what it is that they did back then? The same old routine of humans: they fought and killed each other, seeking power. Power over others cannot be made by a robot - and for quite a few it is the sweetest fruit in the whole garden.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday November 17 2014, @06:05AM
This is very true, and a point that I was going to make. There will always (for reasonable values of "always") be power hungry people whose drive is to dominate others, and they cannot peacefully coexist in an equitable society. The other big hurdle I see is this: The jobs that are easiest to automate are often also the easiest jobs to train a human to do. That means that entry level jobs are the first to go. Eventually only the most skilled and experienced people will be employable, but they will be irreplaceable since no one can get an entry level job with which to gain skills and experience.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday November 17 2014, @06:32AM
From history:
Even fast food staff (McD et al.) are threatened by construction of a robot (a vending machine) that makes a sandwich. Hell, I'd prefer to buy a sandwich from a robot! It'd be cheaper, faster, cleaner, and it will work 24/7.
That in itself is not a big concern. HR computers will simply focus on official training (MCSE etc.) One possibility is that a child is tested for IQ and abilities and, if found capable, is trained by the corporation for a specific type of work. Once educated, he is tested again and then employed for a long time. He then becomes the new middle class, a baron in the new feudal world. He would be a factory manager, for example, or a roboticist, or a doctor, or a scientist. He would gain a chance to rise in the new world order, as new factories are built and old ones are obsoleted and demolished.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Monday November 17 2014, @12:32PM
There will always (for reasonable values of "always") be power hungry people whose drive is to dominate others, and they cannot peacefully coexist in an equitable society.
You say that like we can't do anything about it. There will always be people who want to harm others, but we have got quite good at identifying and either helping them or locking them up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday November 17 2014, @06:50PM
I want to live on your planet.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday November 17 2014, @10:13PM
It's hard to lock up the ones who make the rules.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:15AM
Well, we may be quite good in helping them harm others, but I'm not sure this is a good thing. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @10:11AM
A monastery is a dictatorship. [wikipedia.org]
...and there are more layers of dictatorship in top of that. [wikipedia.org]
In contrast, in a commune EVERYBODY gets an equal vote.
For Communism|Socialism to work, there must be Democracy at ALL levels. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [rdwolff.com]
I've addressed examples of successful communes in a previous thread. [soylentnews.org]
Before white people invaded the Western Hemisphere, there were LOTS of examples of communal living in what became the Americas.
The Shakers (founded before Marx was born and before there was a USA) were VERY successful commies.
If it wasn't for the no-sex thing in their religious nonsense, I'm sure they would be thriving today.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @08:21PM
gewg I know you mean well but you are wrong.
https://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/communism-in-real-life.jpg [wordpress.com]
Both pure capitalism and pure communism would totally work. In small groups both do work (and very well). In large groups both fail wildly.
But both fail to take into account this http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 [penny-arcade.com]
People are dicks to those they dont know personally (even sometimes if they know them). When money/wealth/power are involved people will figure out a way to game the system.
Let me put in a thought process game way.
Lets say you have a magic box that has a giant button on the top, a small screen on the side, and slit on the other side. You push the button and a 20 dollar bill shoots out. On the screen it shows that the money came from Bill Gates bank account. Hey you think thats not bad. He probably would not even notice it. Its not even a rounding error in the daily bounce of his stock portfolio. You push it again. A 100 dollar bill shoots out. A picture of Warren Buffet shows up. Hey you think this money takes money from rich people and gives it to me. You push it again and again. Different rich people show up on the side. Then one day you push the button 2 quarters fall out and a picture of a woman standing at a counter arguing with a man show up. That woman needed that 50 cents to buy the food for her kid and now she is 50 cents short. What do you care? All you see is a picture. You push the button again and continue to get money. You dont know her. But she is not rich you argue! Compared to most of the world she takes home more in SS/disability/section8 than them. In this nation our poorest of poor are richer than most of the rest of the world. We are the 1%. The *AVERAGE* take home pay per day in the world is about 2.50.
People see money like it is some sort of magic box that gives them what they want. They are disconnected from where that money comes from. Wealth comes from building things. It does not come for free (it takes time, energy, and other existing capital). What do I mean by that? If you give wealth away (communism) you run the possibility there will be those who do not contribute back, because why bother they get it for free anyway? If you barter wealth away (capitalist) you run the risk of people hiring thugs/laws/tradebarrier so you can only trade with them (monopoly).
What is the point of this rant? You are arguing about which better way for the rich to spread their wealth around with no plan for the rest of the world to build a better life. They all can't flip burgers or be a factory worker or be computer guys. There just is not enough jobs for them to do. We have more workforce than jobs. The only way to create more jobs is to create more demand. But demand is not created with out someone having wealth to spend. If you have nothing you may yearn to buy a 55 inch flat panel TV. But you have 0 demand for it as you are literally unable to do it. It may as well be 1 billion dollars each.
This problem is not going to get better. Eventually it will be automated. Who owns the robots? It will not be you or I. It will be some conglomerate that cracks out 1000 robots a day. From their automated factory.
My guess is we dont end up in a communistic state. But in a wealfare state. Where those who have decide to be magnanimous and share their spare change. With just enough shared to keep us from getting too restless.
But rise up and take over the robot factory you say. The robot factory that builds drones and drills me from 2 miles away all automatically and I become a statistic on some spreadsheet the CEO reviews at the end of the quarter of criminals killed in trying to break in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @02:12AM
communism-in-real-life.jpg
Pointing to Totalitarianism and calling it Communism doesn't help your argument.
It just makes you look desperate.
Both pure capitalism and pure communism would totally work
If Capitalism worked, it wouldn't fail again and again about every 80 years with a giant economic depression.
In his book "Capital in the 21st Century", Thomas Piketty went back 250 years and examined Capitalism.
What he found again and again is that it leads to concentrations of wealth and subsequent system failure.
...but you are right that a system that has enough Democracy at its core can work well.
To see how that works with Capitalism, see "Piketty" (above) or "every 80 years" (above).
Click my previous link to Prof. Wolff as well.
a magic box
Your little fable is useless nonsense.
We have more workforce than jobs
...and there was another time when that condition existed.
To deal with that in the '30s, FDR put 15 million Americans on the public payroll and rebuilt/built the nation's infrastructure.
In 1944, he got a 94 percent marginal income tax rate on what today would be billionaires.
(He wanted 100 percent.)
That rate went down to 91 percent under Ike and to 70 percent under JFK.
There was a time when those who gained the most from the system were required to support that system and the system was stable with most folks living comfortable, financially secure lives.
...then came Reaganism.
When the marginal tax rate on the uber-rich goes below 50 percent, things rapidly fall apart.
When money gained from speculation is treated differently than money gained from labor, it's a recipe for disaster.
The only way to create more jobs is to create more demand
...and if everyone stands around navel-gazing at the chicken-and-egg situation, nothing changes.
For the solution, see "FDR" (above).
A society that can't find productive work for every individual is a failure.
This problem is not going to get better
Certainly not with the current system and the current crop of politicians.
What's needed is another FDR and another financial advisor with the insight of John Maynard Keynes.
I suggest Economics professor Richard Wolff.
a wealfare state
You need to look closely at the current state of affairs.
There's plenty of welfare (you need a spellchecker, dude).
The thing is that it's going mostly to abusive megacorporations.
Wanna bitch about welfare? Start there.
Meanwhile, every buck you put into the pocket of someone who is struggling to make ends meet will quickly spend that money into his local economy, stimulating the Multiplier Effect.
See "FDR" (above).
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 17 2014, @01:25PM
Speaking of the commies, they used to have a saying about "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". I expect something like that to be implemented by our current leadership to appease the public. We'll all have jobs, but they'll suck or be meaningless. We'll all have medical care but it'll be baboons with band aids. We'll all have free tertiary education, but it'll be basket weaving taught by the village idiot. We'll all have free food, but it'll be walmart junk food so no one will live past 40.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:55PM
You make the mistake of assuming work will not occur outside of employment.
I'm employed as a software developer. I spend 8 hours a day sitting in a cubicle, working on whatever software some marketing droid thinks the world needs. It's not very interesting. It's not very difficult. There have been days where I literally did nothing other than reading/posting to Soylent.
Then I go home, and what do I do? I write code that *I* want to work on. And if I come up with something cool, I release it to the public for free.
I've written more code for free than I've written for pay. Most people want to work, and they'll continue to work even if they aren't being forced to. In fact, some people might work *more* if they're not being forced to, since they'd be more likely to find their work interesting.
That sounds pretty cool to me. I'll take a crack at fixing those machines! I mean I probably don't wanna spend the rest of my life doing it, but industrial machines are pretty interesting, I might be willing to spend a couple years trying my hand at that if I didn't have to worry about money and shit.
Yes there is. The reason you don't recognize it is because it goes from the bottom up, rather than the top down. You don't convince factory owners to turn over the factories, you make their factories obsolete. You build your own employee-owned factories. Since you're not paying inflated CEO wages, you can pay the workers more and produce the product cheaper. They've now got no employees and no customers. This is hard, because it takes a lot of money to start a factory. That's why it isn't incredibly common yet. But we're getting there, more and more cooperatives are popping up every day.
Another option is just to start working with your neighbors more and don't buy from the factories. The "sharing economy" as some journalists call it is part of this transition. And technologies like 3D printers. The old Rep-rap idea of the first thing you print being parts for someone else to build their own printer. If efficiency continues to rise, we may one day reach a point where the amount of labor people *want* to do is greater than the amount of labor people need to have done.
And one last point -- what happens to scarcity if someone invents the Star Trek replicator? Theoretically it should be possible...would require a MASSIVE amount of energy though, so there's no guarantee it'll be *practical*, but there's also no guarantee it won't.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:28PM
I think you take your creative occupation and expand its properties to all other jobs. I am yet to see a man who cleans sewage pipes for pleasure. Robots won't be able to do this until they get AI.
And what happens after you realize that the job consists of crawling under racks, taking showers of hydraulic fluid, and risking your health by repairing potentially dangerous machines? Even if you manage to stay interested for two years, who will replace you? There are too few people like you. Repair of such machinery is not exactly trivial, I used to work on mainframes. A mindless replacement of cards will not help you if one of power supplies exhibits, for example, subharmonic oscillations, or trivially enters and exits an overload condition. The training alone will take a couple of years.
I am not sure who is "you" here. I can't find a billion dollars under the couch's cushions to build an employee-owned factory. No group of employees, unless they are multimillionaires, can chip in and have enough money to build a factory. There is only one way to do this - and that is by taking money from someone, who becomes the actual owner of most of the factory. That could be a bank, that could be a VC, that could be an angel (up to a few million, though.) But they own your business.
I think you are reliving the dreams of early socialists in 1880's ("сны Веры Павловны"). Please read here [wikipedia.org] (in English.)
CEO wages are high, but there are two issues with them. First, they are not that significant on the balance sheet of your factory. Second, where will you find the CEO who does what CEOs do? You know what CEO's duties are, right? Where will you find a CEO who works for $100K/yr and can take your company public? Or, perhaps, that is not the goal? Then anyone will do who ever ran a gas station or a pizza joint. With the same financial results, of course.
A cooperative is a very difficult way to organize manufacturing. It had been tried many times in human history, and it always failed as soon the size of that cooperative gets larger than a single family. And even the family-sized cooperative is not a guarantee of success. In Israel many kibbutzes [wikipedia.org] are now just owners of the land. Collective farms in USSR are gone. Collective farms in North Korea still exist, but I wouldn't want to say that they are a good example of anything. I do not know of other cooperatives that are successful and significant. Pretty much all businesses are governed as absolute monarchy, with strict hierarchy and obedience to orders from above. There is a reason for that - the same reason why in the army soldiers don't vote on plans of the battle.
Unfortunately, my neighbors don't have a 14 nm silicon fab in their basement. Sure, you can run subsistence economy [wikipedia.org], but low prices on virtually all industrial items are caused by centralized, highly effective manufacturing. You do not propose, I hope, to repeat the Chinese Great Leap Forward [about.com] and start smelting iron in every backyard?
Most of my discussions on the subject assume that this has already happened. It is not relevant how exactly the goods are made, as long as they are made by robots. The shape and the principle of operation of that robot is irrelevant. The only tiny difference is in amount of human labor that it takes to repair.
But please go ahead and ponder this. Six billion people suddenly have nothing to do. They have everything they want by just ordering it up from a replicator in their house, or from large public replicators if the item is too big. What processes will start within this society? Please be detailed, and do not neglect to calculate effects caused by all categories of humans. Consider that you can get any material good, even without limit - but you cannot replicate human emotions and human labor; you cannot replicate more land on a coast or more views of the mountains. You cannot even replicate rivers. What will that mean? What kind of world will you create?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:19PM
My mom always said she likes working on plumbing...I'm sure you could find some people. I don't think I'd personally want to work on a farm either, but I have some friends who are currently doing farm work on a volunteer basis. Look up WWOOF.
The health issues aren't much of a concern to me or many others. Hell it's not that different from the risks millions of Americans take by working on their cars. My own hobbies are quite a bit more sedate usually, but I have gotten hot lead in my eyes on more than one occasion which doesn't bother me too much. As for the skills required...yeah, that might be a problem, but that just means the machines will need to be more efficient or more durable before this change can occur. But I also have to wonder if things will be so specialized in fifty or a hundred years. Today you can buy a Raspberry Pi for $20 and hire any C coder off the street to program it. Hell on mine I interface with the hardware through *PHP*! Pretty soon there won't be much cost advantage to a traditional micro or embedded system vs a whole ARM stack. And you'll save a ton of dev hours by going ARM. Maybe in the near future industrial machines will just be generic UNIX boxes? Maybe they'll be entirely built of standardized parts? You don't repair the power supply on a desktop PC, do you? You chuck it and buy a new one. Unless you're someone like Dave Jones who repairs that kind of stuff for fun. So maybe we need a team with an electrical, mechanical, and industrial engineer to fix this stuff. Three PhDs. If the machine is efficient enough, that's fine.
Mondragon did it. Evergreen cooperatives did it. Plenty of others have done it. Usually they don't pop up overnight though, for the exact reasons you stated. Evergreen started with a worker-owned laundry service. Then they took those profits and rolled them into founding new businesses in farming and electricity generation and each of those contributes back to invest in expanding the network. This isn't fiction; it's been done, and it works.
There are already MANY worker-owned companies that exist and operate without CEOs. Usually they have some form of democratic governance. Occasionally they appoint CEOs for short terms on a rotating basis. There are plenty of ways to do it.
Mondragon is a federation of worker-owned cooperatives employing 74,061 people with an annual revenue of 12.574 billion euros. Guess they just have a REALLLLLYYYY big family, huh?
Yet. There's already a lot of research into 3D printers that can print circuit boards. I'm not saying we have the technology right now, but we're getting there.
Repair? Just stuff the broken one in the matter hopper of your neighbor's replicator and print out a new one! ;)
Yeah. That's the exciting part. Land will still be limited, although I suspect that will be less of an issue. Combine Google Glass, augmented reality apps, and the Oculus Rift and we can damn near live in a virtual world. Thing is, if we get something like replicator tech, *everything that exists* can be developed in an open source model. Or pirated. Of course good augmented reality tech would be pretty close to the same effects.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:15PM
I don't know how Mondragon is governed, so I can't say anything about that. But you are mentioning something else:
I think you are still looking at it from the POV of a technocrat, not a sociologist. US prisons are full of people; and if you discount those that shouldn't be there, still you have a lot of strong, violent people. Do you think they will be growing roses after replicators and abundant energy can satisfy every material need? In virtually all cases a US robber doesn't rob because he is hungry. My point is that the society is driven by many motives, and material needs are just one of them. Take medieval aristocracy, for example - they were all set for life. Did they all write poems and paint portraits? No; just a few did, like Michel de Montaigne. The rest used their time, energy and wealth on something else - on something that they felt so strong about that many died for. The world of Diaspar [wikipedia.org] needs a new man, and there is no way around it.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:11PM
Because if you look at the statistics, after eliminating stupid crap like drug or immigration charges, you get around 0.1% of our population are incarcerated for violent offenses. Most people just don't commit crimes. Which means those who do must do so for a reason. I would like to think that we may be able to discover and combat these reasons at some point. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see no reason to assume with any certainty that we could never virtually eliminate crime.
Or hell, maybe we'll defeat it technologically. It's pretty hard to steal my TV if my TV is just a virtual object projected through some sort of augmented reality tech ;) Identity theft could be a bigger issue though; people trying to steal each others' reputations and such...
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday November 20 2014, @07:31PM
Because if you look at the statistics, after eliminating stupid crap like drug or immigration charges, you get around 0.1% of our population are incarcerated for violent offenses.
I am not sure where did you find the 0.1% figure. Wikipedia reports this:
They are talking about small decline of violent crimes in last few years, but that is not comparable to the figures of more than 50% of inmates of state prisons being violent offenders. (Those crimes mostly are handled by states.) With recent removal of minor drug crimes in states that legalized the plant thing, one could expect that the percentage of other criminals will increase again.
(Score: 3, Informative) by melikamp on Monday November 17 2014, @03:34AM
I think these two graphs point towards a likely culprit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Productivity_and_Real_Median_Family_Income_Growth_1947-2009.png [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Income_-_Changes_by_Income_Group_1979-2011.png [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @10:29AM
Worker productivity has continually gone up but wages flattened around 1968.
It's that simple.
When workers have a boss, they get screwed and they have to fight for every crumb.
When workers are their own bosses, things get better.
How America's Largest Worker Owned Co-Op Lifts People Out of Poverty [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [commondreams.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday November 17 2014, @04:33AM
Those stories were overly simplistic. And too optimistic. Think of the Jetsons. That cartoon parodied the populist thinking of what the future might look like. And populist thinking is crude and unsubtle. Flying cars? Flying cars done up in the style of the technology known at the time, using heavy metal, fixed wings and rotors, held aloft by the sheer force of some awesomely compact, potent, and thoroughly unspecified power source? The flying cars in the Jetsons didn't have rotors, but they did make a high pitched putt-putt noise, as if powered by a small internal combustion engine. That flying car didn't happen, and never was going to, not that way. It was total big dumb engineering. Dilithium crystals is the place where good science fiction gives way to total fantasy. We'll get flying cars eventually, but they will be marvels of shape in flexible, lightweight materials, with enough AI brainpower to fly without crashing.
As for robotics, I think that too will come, but not as omnipresently as depicted in SF stories. For instance, will we have robot maids to iron our shirts? No, because for one thing, we ditched those high maintenance fabrics for material that doesn't need daily ironing. We've also had a relaxation of attitude about proper business attire. What about robots to vacuum the carpets? It certainly won't be in the style of the Jetson's robot maid. And it's hard to guess. Carpeting will probably become lower maintenance, or maybe we'll go back to hard floors, or perhaps rubbery floors like those used in gyms will become the custom.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 17 2014, @06:29AM
For instance, will we have robot maids to iron our shirts? No, because for one thing, we ditched those high maintenance fabrics for material that doesn't need daily ironing. We've also had a relaxation of attitude about proper business attire.
It's not high maintenance, if the robot (or human) maid does the work. Nothing says "I'm rich and powerful" quite like ludicrously gaudy clothes that you couldn't put on by yourself even if your life depended on it. Fancy clothing IMHO was a product of having cheap labor around to help dress the rich people up and maintain the clothing. When they had to dress themselves, things gradually got simpler (especially as the related skills, like tying a necktie or ironing a nice suit, atrophied). But with robots available, there may be a shift back to fancy. It'll depend to a limited degree, I think, on how practical the clothing needs to be (nobody wears a tie or ballroom dress when they're hiking in the boondocks).
Recent discussion about the iPad and its peculiar manufacturing quirks (the aluminum body and the failed corundum screen surface) got me thinking a little about clothing and possible technology driven fads. A big driver of the iPad style seems to be development of unique manufacturing techniques that gave the machine a distinctive and oh so shiny look.
I can see that happening with clothes as well. A couple examples that would show off near future clothing technology would be seamless clothing and the ability to change colors on the fly. More advanced stuff might be clothing that completely changes on the fly (eg, a dress one minute and a business suit the next) and floating shit (eg, your Snow White themed dress comes with lifelike, flying, robotic bluebirds). Similarly, clothing that shows off the mad sk1llz of your robot butler/maid (such as ridiculous pleating, an incomprehensible but elegant tangle of ribbons, or a complex laying of fabrics) could very well become popular simply because it's something to socially brag about.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 17 2014, @01:08PM
seamless clothing
What about fastener-less clothing? The only way to put on / take off my shirt (pants?) would be with the help of my ever present tailor-bot or a pair of scissors in an emergency?
One problem with blue skying it is look at history. We can technically "do" embedded electronic clothing (at least flashlight bulbs and batteries 100 years ago) but it never catches on despite enormous efforts. I don't think the wearable arduino types have much of a chance beyond maybe earrings.
Another example is simpler, "velcro fly" was a cool 80s ZZ Top song and OK video, but its not really stormed the market.
Even zippable sleeves on shirts and pants haven't taken over the market.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday November 17 2014, @02:18PM
Anyone who uses velcro frequently knows that the hook side, rubbing against sensitive skin in the extraction/storage procedure of using said fly, can lead to irritation. A zipper has a smaller surface area for the same amount of holding power, but is much easier on skin (except when it happens to get caught between the two sides of the zipper - again, a low probability occurrence because of the small surface area). A zipper is faster to work, needing no alignment (at least in its trouser-based incarnations - coats, that's another issue). Plus, a zipper has a much smoother zzz sound than velcro's rip, which has too much energy in the high-frequency range. I think the "velcro fly" was a problem looking for a solution.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 17 2014, @03:31PM
a problem looking for a solution
That's a funny summary of fashion in general and especially fashion with a thin layer of high tech smeared onto it.
I haven't owned shoes with velcro since the 80s or so, that seems to have gone out of style. Little kid shoes today, or at least in the 00s, also had velcro. I believe I own some extreme cold weather gloves that can strap shut with velcro. So velcro is not completely dead in the market.
You could work around abrasion on the hook side by perhaps putting fuzz side on the pants and hook side on some manner of decorated removable codpiece. I realize that sounds ridiculous, but ridiculous never stopped anything else in fashion...
I think it amusing the 30 years later the only ZZ Top songs I immediately remember are their advertisement songs. They had a song and music video about visiting Las Vegas, and the previously mentioned velcro fly pants-innovation. I KNOW they had some other rocking hair band ballads, but all I remember is their wanna be TV commercials. Oh wait, I just remembered, "Sharp Dressed Man" all you need is a "old navy" or "mens warehouse" logo at the end and tada, instant TV commercial.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NoMaster on Monday November 17 2014, @04:54AM
The futurist writers forgot to factor in the long-term effects of decades of "Reds-under-the-beds!" fearmongering, and your society ended up rejecting anything that sniffs even vaguely of "socialism" (let alone "communism")?
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @05:07AM
It started to happen to some, then it got stuck there. You know... the proverbial 1% some, who have had enough interest to lock it there.
Well, I'm on a 35h/week + 20 workdays paid holiday/year ( + 10 days/year public holidays + 20 days/year paid sick leave allowance which accumulates year-after-year).
I'm not living in the "no-vacation country" [forbes.com] though (whispering, eyes to the sky: thank You, God).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @12:00PM
I live in New Zealand, and I don't think it will be too long before we become free of the scourge of paid vacations. We've just lost our right to coffee and meal breaks (the employers now may shift them whenever it suits, and provide "fair compensation," which they decide upon).
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Monday November 17 2014, @05:46AM
I would say that those stories (that go much further back; at least to the social movements of the 1920's if not before that) reflect a colossal techie misunderstanding of how the political economy works in a liberal capitalist society. A refusal to witness that ownership of the "means of production" tells the tale (i.e., nature and capacity of the 1%-ers). Plus Friedman's Chicago school doubled-down on the ideology in the 70's and since then the rich are pretty much free to openly assert the right to take whatever they want from anyone, so the truth of the situation has trickled down more so than in the past.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @06:34AM
Well, when I was Crosby [wikipedia.org]... ummm... if I could only remember my name... it was '71, for sure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by davester666 on Monday November 17 2014, @07:29AM
That assumed something called "sharing the wealth". Unfortunately, the people with most of the money decided they would rather have more of it instead of sharing it with their stupid workers.
So their made their workers do more with fewer co-workers instead of keeping the existing work force and just having everyone work less.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @10:48AM
Mondragon is a worker-owned cooperative in Spain (around since 1956).
With the real estate market in the toilet, folks aren't buying homes and aren't buying stuff to put in those homes.
Mondragon's home appliances division had to shrink to adjust to the collapsing market.
Were those worker-owners canned? Nope.
People in their other divisions worked a bit less to make work available for their coworkers to do.
Everybody at Mondragon is still working and has made minor adjustments to their budgets.
Worker-owned cooperatives are awesome.
Bosses suck.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday November 17 2014, @07:48AM
That is simple and the reason why capitalism like every other ism MUST die, because it ended up ONLY going to those at the top, those with the capital to afford to own the means of production. The ultimate goal of capitalism is consolidation to the extreme and that is exactly what we have in the US oligarchy, with the top 86 families controlling nearly 90c out of every dollar made while everyone else is left to starve or live in abject soul crushing poverty.
I'll get hate for saying it but a lot of it can be blamed on the wave of deregulation and tax cutting under Reagan. Whereas before the rich would avoid the high tax rates by investing back into the country they can now simply hoard and use tax dodges like double dutch to avoid what little taxes they have. But at the end of the day we have to face the fact that technology has made most human labor obsolete and that many born today will not be able to trade their labor for capital as its just not required. so either we hand people a living wage or we end up going with a full blown rebellion when the people get tired of starving while the rich live like Gods. as much as I'd hope it'd be the former I get the feeling too many of the Ayn Randiates are secretly praying for the latter, a good ethnic cleansing only based on income instead of skin or religion.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @12:03PM
You won't get hate from me.
In New Zealand, we've had deregulation of our citizen-built power industries. Someone did an in-depth analysis of the water and power costs for the capital (Wellington). Water costs, in around 24 years, have gone up a little. Deregulated power costs, though, have gone up more than 290% for the simple reason of supplying record profits to the power companies. Every year.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 17 2014, @06:53PM
You should have read Mack Reynolds. He got it mostly right, though he was slightly further into to future than the present day. The Proles are paid to keep quiet, and also threatened, and sometimes abused, when they get "uppity". "Trank" was legalized...he had it made into a part of the welfare, but that hasn't happened yet, and it's only legal in a few places currently. Armies went mercenary and automated, but the big powers had rules about what weapons could be used in any particular war. The arena hasn't been reinstituted, and wars haven't been turned into "war games" between the mercenary armies that the various sides hire fight in front of TV cameras...yet.
When you have enough prophets, some of them will be about right.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday November 18 2014, @01:10AM
What happened is that the idea that all of society would somehow universally benefit from advances in automation is a farce, at least in a capitalist society. The only people who will benefit from human workers being replaced are the people who own the machines that replace them. This has always been, and will always be true. The owners of the machines will be the same people at the top who already own the companies that right now employ human beings.
The only way for society in general to benefit from mass automation is for society itself to decide that each and every human being that is born is entitled (yes, I said _entitled_) to food, shelter, and a basic quality of life. A socialistic society that decides that all of society will collectively "own" these automation resources will be the only kind of society that has any chance of achieving even a part of that utopian fantasy of regular people having more leisure time due to automation. A society that sticks to pure capitalistic tendencies will simply wind up pushing most citizens down the income ladder until there are a few super-wealthy "owners" at the very top, who will own all the factories and machines and robots, and the rest of society are simply unemployable poverty-stricken "losers". At some point of course the economy that makes the wealthy so wealthy will unfortunately completely collapse since there will be no one left to buy the products and services that have been completely automated. People without gainful employment can't afford to buy things. Without a middle class, the economies such as ours will simply grind to a halt. The "engine" of the economy is millions of people being paid livable wages who then go out and buy things, not the people at the top making massive profits to store in a bank vault.
No, I think only highly socialistic societies will survive the advent of mass automation. Meanwhile the capitalists will do everything in their power to continue to convince us that those filthy socialist countries are an abomination, until people collectively wise up and throw them out of power. I'm estimating between 50 and 150 years, since we'll definitely have the technology to have semi-sentient, highly adaptable, "teachable" computers combined with good-enough, reliable-enough humanoid robots by that time. After that, the likelihood that there will be any purely capitalistic society left, that isn't a total hell on earth to live in, is quite low.
If you think you can't be replaced by a robot with the intelligence of a 5-year-old child, who never gets sick, never complains and never needs rest, and has the attention span of a zen master, think again. I figure at least 9 out of 10 "jobs" people do now can be easily transferred to a teachable humanoid robot. It's going to start happening a lot sooner than a lot of people are expecting. I'll be shocked if I don't see a robot flipping burgers or waiting tables just as efficiently as a human can within about 35 years. And I fully expect the Republicans to be on the front lines of defending the right of the business owners to replace each and every human worker with a machine. The business owners will definitely benefit. Until it all collapses.
Capitalism: The least-worst economic system we've ever come up with.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @03:06AM
Woo-hoo! There'll be plenty of jobs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @07:44AM
Not going to happen. Looking at how it would be possible to automate a lot of jobs today, but they are not, because the software and actually the whole infrastructure is what it is, plus the costs, those jobs remain to be done by people.
Still when the 1st gen jobs (easily automated jobs) are done, that's not going to be 30% of jobs. The 2nd and 3rd gen jobs are going to take a lot more effort to automate, and knowing how things go, it'll take a lot more than a decade (after spending the other decade on 1st gen jobs, which i think will take more). Sure some jobs are pretty far automated, like in the auto industry the assembly of the body is very automated, still, try and automate doing the interior or wiring. Not such an easy task, doable, but not easy.
Another thing: when all those jobs are going to be automated, someone has to build and design the automation. There's going to have to be a lot more people involved in doing the automation.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 17 2014, @03:11AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday November 17 2014, @06:19AM
Your local McDonald's doesn't have electric outlets?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 17 2014, @06:33AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday November 17 2014, @10:16PM
I'm sure there were outlets in the back, and there's no reason the bots need to be bipedal. Most don't even need to be mobile.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 17 2014, @10:29PM
I'm sure there were outlets in the back...
You'd need a really long extension cable at that location.
...and there's no reason the bots need to be bipedal. Most don't even need to be mobile.
That depends on how many specialized robots you want to build for the tasks you want to automate. The more you purchase and maintain, the less economically viable it is up against low-wage workers. Take a moment to try to picture what all happens during the closing procedure at any given McDonalds and you'll start to see what I mean.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday November 18 2014, @02:15AM
And yet McDonald's is already replacing cashiers:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837810/automation-arrives-at-restaurants-but-dont-blame-rising-minimum-wages.html [computerworld.com]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday November 18 2014, @02:16AM
Out of curiosity: Do you know what all happens at any given McDonalds every single night?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday November 18 2014, @04:55AM
Look at it this way. I'm a CNC programmer, the guy that tells the machines what to do and how to do it. Eventually even my job will be automated.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday November 18 2014, @09:15PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @12:39PM
My floor-mopping robot is neither humanoid-esque nor a biped.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 17 2014, @05:05PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @03:18AM
The Law of Futurology [smbc-comics.com]
y - t = 0
y = approximate number of years left in the life of a futurist
t = years futurist thinks it will be until immortality is discovered
(Score: 1) by dlb on Monday November 17 2014, @03:31AM
I'm not sure giving money for nothing is ever a good idea. Look at the idle rich who inherited their wealth. I don't see many of them being of much use for anything good.
And skimming the article linked to above doesn't do much to change my opinion. Especially when they start listing "prestigious" supporters and end with the guy I highlighted in bold:
Milton Friedman, who specifically favored a negative income tax as a replacement for much of the welfare state. Many left-of-center economists, like James Tobin and John Kenneth Galbraith, were also on board. More recently, Emmanuel Saez and Jonathan Gruber....
Yikes.
(Score: 2) by carguy on Monday November 17 2014, @04:12AM
Bucky Fuller proposed something like R&D grants for anyone that wanted one -- while most will miss their goals, or turn into glorified goofing off, a few might actually turn into something useful for society?
While searching for a reference to the above, I found this recent blog post,
http://goatheadgumbo.blogspot.com/2014/08/dividends-for-all-sounds-like-something.html [blogspot.com]
References a new book on this topic.
(Score: 2) by emg on Monday November 17 2014, @05:28AM
Indeed. 'Basic Income' or 'Citizen's Income' is the last gasp of the Commies before technology makes them utterly irrelevant.
In two decades, many jobs will be automated. Many other jobs will have been created. And we'll be able to make many things in our garage with a 3D printer, so there'll be less need of 'jobs'.
The whole concept of everyone having a 'job' is an industrial era invention; most of our ancestors were hunters and farmers, who worked for themselves and traded for things they couldn't make. The industrial era was an anomaly, and we're returning to the natural state of the human race. The left hate that, because their industrial-era ideology will disappear alongside industry.
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Monday November 17 2014, @05:39AM
"most of our ancestors were hunters and farmers, who worked for themselves and traded for things they couldn't make"
This was possible because of the "basic income" in that you could just find food, for free, pretty much lying around on the ground wherever you were. Now that 80%+ of our population lives in urban environments, and property rights lock everyone out of wandering onto random property and taking the food resources there, what is there to replace it?
Or I guess the food, material and energy for the 3D printers will just seep out of the concrete floor of the garage for us all?
(Score: 2) by emg on Monday November 17 2014, @06:07AM
"Or I guess the food, material and energy for the 3D printers will just seep out of the concrete floor of the garage for us all?"
Uh, no. Space is full of raw materials and energy, certainly enough to last us until we start spreading out across the rest of the galaxy. Once we're off this planet, the industrial era is over.
Whereas, in your fantasy world, the remaining people who actually do have to do something useful are apparently going to be happy to work provide that food, material and energy to people who do nothing useful, and just breed more useless kids who'll demand more. Anyone with any grasp of human nature can see how laughable that idea is.
Oh, or is 'population control' going to be another part of your little utopia?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @12:22PM
Remind me, what will the 50% of people incapable of getting degrees do?
Will they become enginee... no, umm, docto... no, nurs... no. Let's see.
Could they become mathemati... no. Umm. Space pilots? No, getting into space seems to requires a doctorate or many, many years in training and basically being at the top of your field. Not everybody can be at the top of their field at the same time.
So, maybe they'd be farmers, or burger flippers? No, most of that will be automated. Well, maybe they'll drive vehi... no, that'll be automated. Teachers? Yeah, seven billion teachers.... no, wait, that seems unlikely.
I've got it! Photographers! We'll have 7 billion people working as film, radio, and television production staff. (Those jobs all pay minimum wage, by the way. I do it every day, and not a month goes by where my boss doesn't accidentally steal money from me. I'm owed a lot more than $2000 by now, for the last 20 months.)
Hmm. Really starting to run out of jobs here. So, let's see. Physicists, psychologists, computer programmers, network engineers.
Nope. Far too many people just can't get their heads around those topics - not because they're lazy, but because of brain injury, birth defect, or just being born with a slightly different brain structure. Poor quality teaching has a serious impact, too Regardless of that, how many of each would you need? How would the masses pay for them? As more people are shut out of jobs, retraining for new roles, wages will plummet - just imagine 20 million professional drivers suddenly training up in your field. Some of them have got to be better than you, or at least cheaper.
Come to think of it, self-configuring networks aren't too far away, either.
Priests! That's the ticket - seven billion people could find religion. Wait, which one? Also, if everyone's a priest, who would they preach to and where would the money to support them come from? Cops? No, that'd cost too much, too.
So if driving, fast food work, engineering, medicine, mathematics, physics, psych, teaching, and anything else you can think of are already basically sufficiently staffed, just where do you propose these 30-50% of new jobs comes from?
Consider, when all those drivers in America lose their jobs, and all their supporting forklift drivers too, and the extra fuel station attendants, and all the convenience store night staff, when all of these people lose their jobs, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think there'll be a sudden increase in the jobs that those people need, or a sudden decrease in the positions that their wages supported?
It seems to me that this "last gasp of the commies" is really the "last gasp of the oligarchs". Right now, my boss is stealing from my pay packet because his minimum wage staff are costing him too much.
Tell me, why do you think it's my role in society to pay him for the privilege of working for him? Why do you think I should foot the bill for his poor budgeting and management skills?
I can't for the life of me think of a reason, but it's a natural side effect of what you support.
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Monday November 17 2014, @02:06PM
"Once we're off this planet, the industrial era is over. Whereas, in your fantasy world..."
LOL. Thank you for the funniest sequence of words this year. Sustainably living off-planet will simply never happen, that's the fantasy that the geeks keep wasting time on.
I do in fact think that long-term there's a crossroads to be taken between slave-state dystopia and population-control socialism, and that the latter probably won't be chosen. Fortunately, this neatly resolves the Fermi Paradox, so at least there's an intellectual silver lining.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 17 2014, @07:04PM
Sustainable living off the planet will happen, if we don't collapse. But its not in the near term future, and it will require scavenging over wide areas for material.
His idea that space is generous you rightly call fantasy, but your idea that is will never be possible is just pessimism. It's not a near term deal, and it will never handle even a significant fraction of the population, but that's different from "can't happen". And once populations are out there, they will grow and speciate. (Geographic separation over long periods of time is the proven way to create new species.)
OTOH, people will always be inferior to (some) machines at handling the environment of space. By the time we can handle the environment there will be no logical reason to go. But people will anyway.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @06:29AM
There is no such economic rule that states.
'Better technology makes more better jobs for horses'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 17 2014, @01:15PM
The hunter gatherer analogy is pretty close to how my grandparents lived after retirement. They had cash to handle the residual cash economy they were still involved with (prop tax, food, energy) but the rest of their life they just kinda wandered around the land and gathered what they wanted plus or minus the residual monetary economy they were still involved with. My grandfather liked to fish, so if he caught a fish they ate fish, if not, well, the freezer has TV dinners in it.
I suspect a ramp up time will be interesting. What if instead of paying off banks, which doesn't work once you're pushing on a string instead of pulling on it, "we" decided to lower the retirement age by a couple years per year to keep unemployment and underemployment under control? If everyone over the age of 50 at my workplace was retired and medicare'd, I'd have some interesting promotion opportunities, of course with continued economic decline I'd probably get retired myself within a decade...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @09:31AM
The rich who created their wealth are not much better either. You don't get rich by making great inventions, you get rich by either leeching the markets (Buffet) or putting yourself in a position to fulfil a massive demand (Gates).
Meanwhile, Tesla spent his late years on what is essentially welfare.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday November 17 2014, @03:42AM
Could they please automate CEO's with a kinder, gentler, less money hungry CEO? Bloody sociopaths...
And the shareholders they feed... just a reminder: if you cut hours and jobs, PEOPLE HAVE LESS/NO MONEY TO SPEND ON YOUR PRODUCTS!!! IF YOU KEEP THEM EMPLOYED, THEY CAN BUY PRODUCTS!!!
Todays rant brought to you by Smackem-Jackems: Mmmmm-mmm-good!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @05:16AM
High horse you climbed there. Should I understand you took a poverty vow for your retirement years or are you putting some of your money under the mattress? Otherwise, you are a shareholder by using that pension fund you contribute to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @05:45AM
Must be nice to have a job where you can worry about a pension fund.
Singed
Q-Public Beer
Retire?
You think you'll get to do that. Oh how cute.
Singed
CEO
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @06:21AM
Really? With the same typo twice, you hope for a job?
Signed,
the singed AC [thefreedictionary.com]
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Monday November 17 2014, @06:45AM
"just a reminder: if you cut hours and jobs, PEOPLE HAVE LESS/NO MONEY TO SPEND ON YOUR PRODUCTS!!! IF YOU KEEP THEM EMPLOYED, THEY CAN BUY PRODUCTS!!!"
This is actually a really terrible argument (Henry Ford PR notwithstanding). For any given company firing some employees, the proportional money saved to the company is much higher than the proportional money taken out of the hands of the customer base. I suppose you could call this failing to meet the Kantian imperative (what if everyone did it?), but corporations are not run by philosopher-kings.
The broad upshot is that we simply cannot depend on the rationality of companies (invisible hand) to promote a well-functioning society. That can only be done by engaging in a non-broken political process.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday November 17 2014, @09:19PM
Why do you think that money would be important at that point? Money is only a mechanism for exchanging goods and labor.
Why does a factory owner want to be a billionaire today? Because he wants to build a great castle, and he wants to buy diamonds for his mistress, and he wants to have a $100M yacht, and he wants a personal doctor, or ten, to keep him and his family healthy. Today all that requires money.
But consider the future. Your factories are automated, but since you don't hire anyone nobody can buy your products. Except OTHER PRODUCERS. You make something that they need (navigation computers) and they make something that you need (yachts.)
There will be a small class of people that are needed to factory owners. Those would be human servants, technicians, engineers, doctors, artists. They will be paid for their work, and they also can buy yachts because they are also producers. What about others? Well, they are not needed in that society. They become dipples [goodreads.com]. We have them already, haven't we? Those who don't have usable skills, who have no ability or desire to work, those who exist on small social assistance and live in rundown, rat-infested slums? If you think of US' "inner cities", that's nothing compared to Brazilian favelas, or to most of Africa.
But, you may ask, why to build a factory just for a handful of customers? That might look like a valid question. However it all depends on the size of that factory. It doesn't have to be a city-like monster, depicted in Jules Verne's The Begum's Fortune. It could be a much smaller facility. Still filled with robots, yes, but not making too many GPS receivers, or not too many yachts per year. Why to make a yacht for someone who can't give you anything in return? Just out of love for humanity? That may work with one or two guys, but not on a statistically significant scale.
But, you may ask, if your robots are so good, why can't you press a button and order them to build ANOTHER factory, one that would be making yachts - or gizmos, or food, or whatever - for poor people? It won't cost you personally! But there are also issues. The most dangerous one is that billions of idle hands are a very dangerous force. You'd rather have them safely isolated from you, best if by a barrier between parallel worlds :-) What, in your opinion, a population of a city like NYC will do (or what social processes will begin there) if nobody has to work, and everyone is fed and clothed and housed in some reasonable amount? Do they start writing poems, singing songs, and painting paintings? Diaspar's computer had to seriously mess with human mind before materialization of a citizen; and note that a few "special" citizens that it was programmed to make from time to time resulted in trouble. You'd have to seriously pacify the population; otherwise that version of NYC will quickly devolve into masters and slaves, where masters control every aspect of life just because it pleases them.
The most logical (but not most humanistic) future may be a stratified meritocracy. It simply makes sense, as intelligent people are less likely to desire to dominate others - it is in our genes, but it is not practical anymore. People on the bottom of the IQ scale will be washed away into Dipples, if they are lucky - and into bioreactors if they are not so lucky. This will create evolutionary pressure, and perhaps after several hundred cycles new humanity will be formed.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Monday November 17 2014, @09:39AM
The only thing that 'll happen then is you'll eventually end up with medical consultants and engineers on minimum wage. Upskilling is just another way of pinning the blame on individuals.
Basic income is a conversation the western world should have had when the manufacturing jobs started to disappear. We're living in peculiar times - I still hear the puritan ethic parroted endlessly, even though the conditions for meeting that ethic have long disappeared.
In the US, and I suspect the rest of the western world as well, population growth has been consistently higher than job creation year on year. The growth of a piecemeal service sector with the likes of Uber (or in the UK, zero hour contracts) underline this - western economies can't even support full time service sector jobs anymore.
This leaves two possible outcomes:
First is you start paying people a stipend or guaranteed basic income. You accept that a fair proportion will sit around all day getting high, getting laid, and watching shit TV. They're absolutely harmless, and will support the consumer economy.
Others will do differently. They'll get an education (which they'll be able to afford) and enter the fulfilling jobs that remain. An enormous creative class will probably spring up, freed from having to spend their time scraping a living. There will likely be an incredible influx of goods and media for people to consume.
The second alternative is you let people fight with each other over a dwindling number of jobs, blaming them for their own inadequecy if they fail. You ghettoise them in substandard housing, humiliate them in a barbaric welfare system, and strip them of their dignity and humanity at every turn. You induce unprecedented survival anxiety, all in the name of "working hard". This is the path we've been persuing.
I know which world I'd rather live in.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by GDX on Monday November 17 2014, @12:17PM
This reminded how sometime ago discussing how the future is going to be I told a statement:
"The man always wait for a utopian future but that it awaits it is a distopian one. Unless we tame the human greed, pride, envy and malice there is nothing good in the human future."
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday November 18 2014, @01:33AM
I'm having a hard time determining that I do not live in your second option. Sure, I have fast internet, but if I stop working for a month for whatever reason, I'll be booted into the street as fast as the bank can take my house away.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @08:54AM
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday November 17 2014, @12:14PM
If you're going to predict something, predict it at least five years in the future. With the 24/7 news cycle churn, your prediction will be forgotten in five days.
At some point, though, we're going to have to confront the post-work society and how people will survive. When the blue collar jobs are overseas, the white collar jobs have been eliminated, knowledge work has been given to H-1B visa holders, and dead-end jobs have been automated, what are people going to do? We can't all sell extended warranties to each other, and not everyone can found a startup company. What will the permanently-jobless underclass do to feed themselves? I think we can pretty much give up on building wealth and making a better life. That's no longer possible for most people. The next generation or two are going to have to be concerned with making enough income to survive.
I always hear about more skills and education, but I don't understand how it works in practice. If some midcareer person in a white-collar job that no longer exists gets some training to be, say, a coder (since that's the popular example right now), the person will be an older entry-level worker looking for a first job while competing with all the out-of-work coders who have much more experience, so how does that help?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by keplr on Monday November 17 2014, @05:53PM
What will the permanently-jobless underclass do to feed themselves?
They won't. They're intended to starve to death, or be killed in "self defense" if they infringe on the property rights of their betters in an effort to obtain the material resources necessary for survival.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Monday November 17 2014, @02:11PM
Freely available here: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
The first half of it seems all-too likely.
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:10AM
This has been a known problem for a long time, and a solution has already been designed.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Monday November 17 2014, @03:44PM
How much physical area does a person need to survive? How much can modern automation attend to an individual's needs?
- What's the smallest roof / deck / window area which could be covered in greenery and produce sufficient food for a person to live on? (could such garden spaces be automated a la Aerogarden?)
- How many solar panels necessary to provide electricity for basic needs and modest entertainment?
- Can one store enough water on site to provide for drinking water and basic hygiene? What sort of filtration system would be necessary?
- What's the maximum density for composting toilets in a given area? How much solar energy would one need to divert using Bio char techniques instead?
- How large would a solar array need to be to charge an electric vehicle? Would storing energy by converting water into hydrogen and oxygen be safely feasible?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @03:22AM
How much physical area does a person need to survive?
Took a great course in solar energy in the architecture dept at MIT, mid-1970's. One of the projects proposed by the prof was based on building something about the size of a mobile home, but it unfolded on site to have a solar green house along one side and many of the other items you mention. Not self sufficient, but a reasonable step in that direction. For example, might not be possible to grow all the protein needed, but it should be possible to grow most of the fresh fruits and vegetables. The systems were mostly not automated and therefore depended on the resident(s)--maintaining the garden, closing dampers when the sun went down and other fairly simple daily/seasonal tasks.
Built in a factory (like mobile homes), in some volume, the cost could be pretty reasonable by western standards. Couldn't be sited in a city with hi-rises due to shading, but would work fine in typical density found in suburban/rural mobile home developments.
He got as far as shopping designs to modular house builders, but I don't think he ever managed funding for a prototype.