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posted by cmn32480 on Monday June 08 2015, @10:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-robots-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb dept.

Digital technology has been a fantastic creator of economic wealth, particularly in the twenty years since the Internet and World Wide Web were unveiled to the masses. And with non-trivial applications of artificial intelligence (such as Apple's Siri) finally reaching the mainstream consumer market, one is tempted to agree with pundits asserting that the Second Machine Age is just getting underway.

But Yale ethicist Wendell Wallach argues that growth in wealth has been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in income inequality; for example, stock ownership is now concentrated in the hands of a relative few (though greater than 1 percent). The increase in GDP has not led to an increase in wages, nor in median inflation-adjusted income. Furthermore, Wallach says technology is a leading cause of this shift, as it displaces workers in occupation after occupation more quickly than new career opportunities arise.

This piece led to the latest iteration of the 'will robots take all of our jobs' debate, this time on Business Insider, with Jim Edwards arguing that the jobs lost tended to be of the mindless and repetitive variety, while the increase in productive capacity has led to the creation of many new positions. This repeated earlier cycles of the industrial revolution and will be accelerated in the decades ahead. Edwards illustrated his point with a chart of UK unemployment with a trend line (note: drawn by Edwards) in a pronounced downward direction over the past 30 years. John Tamny made a similar point in Forbes last month.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:15PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:15PM (#194245) Journal

    Can't get my head on how so many people really takes serious the childish game called capitalism.

    Capitalism just works. Markets just work. That's why most of the world takes it seriously. For example, you complain that two thirds or so of the world only has 10% of the wealth. That sounds bad because 10% is a lot less than 67%, right? But it's more than enough to elevate them over time to a developed world standard of living. And that's what's been happening.

    just realize can't get a balanced currency with the single metrics that is called now money (and which you proposed be substituted with energy).

    So what? Nobody eats money. Nobody tries to travel via money. Nobody tries to make things or make them go with money. Money is just a means for simplifying trade. That's all it does. So for a simple task, you don't need a bunch of "metrics" that just add complexity and screw up your ability to do stuff. All those things you trade via money are what you actually want to balance. And glancing through your essay, I see that we already have more than one money metric with each national level currency being its own metric. You just want it on the local level rather than national level as part of some colossal fragmentation of humanity. I think that's a terrible idea, but hey, not my fantasy.

    Frankly, I still can't take seriously your utopia. Partly, it's the high level of suspension of disbelief, such as assuming without reason that capitalism will completely fall apart. And you spend way too much of the time complaining about nonproblems in capitalism and markets (for example, whining that markets "compel" people to seek profit or the above mentioned fact that some people have more than others).

    Ultimately, my view is that if the global economic system just shuddered to a halt, then people would make another capitalist system. There's just too much we do with that we can't do with competing systems. It's also the best solution to human greed yet devised and beats hoping that greed and similar negative traits magically go away.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 09 2015, @09:58PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 09 2015, @09:58PM (#194273) Journal

    Money is just a means for simplifying trade. That's all it does. So for a simple task, you don't need a bunch of "metrics" that just add complexity and screw up your ability to do stuff.

    Until the simplification blows in your face as inadequate for the societal purposes (trade is a mean, not an end).
    Like cases you trade irreversible damage (like: non-renewable resources or sustainability or biodiversity or human lives) in exchange for something ephemeral (like iGadgets [wikipedia.org])

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 12 2015, @01:50PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 12 2015, @01:50PM (#195392) Journal

      Until the simplification blows in your face as inadequate for the societal purposes

      "Until".

      Like cases you trade irreversible damage (like: non-renewable resources or sustainability or biodiversity or human lives) in exchange for something ephemeral (like iGadgets)

      I believe trade is more than adequate for that particular activity.