Here is how China deals with minimum wage

Yeah? Is that so? Then you should be right at the front of the tidal wave of people making fat stacks of cash off of all these developments.

I'm not sure why you're so upset about your clairvoyance.

 

Let's shut down the auto industry since buggy whip manufacturers and farriers are right on the cusp of murderous rampages!

 

It does make sense from the tech stand point. We just aren't ready, or capable for a self contained, self-driving car...the tech isn't good enough bby a long shot. Sure, we have examples built by universities (I watched a competition for these vehicles a while back where these vehicles navigated various courses on their own), but they are far, far from being ready for prime time.

Gas taxes...the tax amount doesn't change when the price of a gallon changes. The state is still collecting X number of cents per gallon regardless if gas is $4 a gallon or $2.89 a gallon. This is another political stunt to extract more money from you.

Here in PA the governor raised gas taxes 9.5 cents per gallon last year to "help pay for better roads". I will say this, this year PennDOT has been doing some serious road repair/paving, so maybe it worked in this case and the money didn't get siphoned off into some other nebulous fund.

I'm saying that due to the current state of self-drive technology, we have two choices; we wait another 20 years before it is perfected (if even then) and actually usable, or we take a less technically, albeit still expensive, route that can/will provide the benefits sooner.

I'm not suggesting the state alone, or tax payers should shoulder the total cost of some kind of upgraded road infrastructure for self-drive vehicles. I'm sure a tech company with the right backing would be more than willing to put some skin in the game if it promises big profits. With the way taxes are working and the price of gas so high (even with recent drops), I'd be willing to absorb say, another penny per gallon tax to pay for said installation of the sensors. Is a penny per gallon enough? I don't know as I have no idea how complex or expensive roadside sensor systems/networks would be...but certainly people in the industry could put that together.

As for automation in general, I'm not arguing against your points, but the fact remains...as long as technology continues to grow, so will automation. Automation has been cutting into all levels of low to middle class work for some time as it is. When was the last time humans actually wielded spray guns in a paint booth at an automotive factory, or a welder to build the various uni-body structures? It's only going to continue, it's inevitable.

I will take a little issue with one of your statements, "One of the biggest and most immediate problems we have with inner city unrest already is the lack of jobs for youth to aspire to and obtain." I suggest the issues are far broader reaching than just any lack of jobs. It has as much to do with the mindset of these people as well, which in turn brings in political factors too.

 

The point is you will have ZERO way of telling the difference.

 

That's a VERY good question, and one we must come up with a GOOD answer to. Because our choices are having 0.01% of the population owning, and profiting from, the robotic work force, while the other 99% of us starve, or some new paradigm, where humanity is free to life a truly free existence. It's not a question of IF this is going to happen, only when, and how. Self driving cars, self flying planes, entire farms that can be controlled by a consumer level desktop, nanotech making surgery and doctors obsolete, all of these things are coming. Perhaps not in our lifetimes, but eventually. And one way or another we as a species are going to have to adapt.

 

Oh we will adapt but into what exactly?

People are just to greedy, jealous/problematic, and arrogant to accept a free existence. We have proven time and time again that we as a species are too stupid to accept a civilized existence.

Without money/prestige/deserving class, in many peoples eyes, there is no motivation, no direction, no advancement (like as in improvements in mankind itself). It could turn into the ultimate gated community scenario, where the chosen few are the ones allowed to exist leisurely, while that 99% (the unworthy peasants) are driven back into the dark ages, and most likely driven to one or excluded sections of the world to fight for their own existence.

 

I don't know, and that's the $64,000 question. There WILL come a day when 99.99% of human labor becomes unnecessary. We'll still need visionaries developing (or improving) technology. Working on things liking breaking the speed of light, increasing the human life span to 500 years or more, and coming up with ever more efficient, and cheaper, robotic laborers. But in the meantime those robotic laborers will have replaced virtually all of us in the workplace. Drive for a living? Bet 20 years from now your profession doesn't exist. Same for those who pilot (which is already more about programming than piloting) aircraft. In healthcare? Listen to patients lists of symptoms and try to diagnose what's wrong with them? In a few decades a single drop of blood will be able to do that with 99.999% accuracy, and inject nanobots into the patient that have specifically programmed to solve one (or all) of the patients problems in a single sitting with 99.99% effectiveness, rendering virtually every medical professional obsolete. Trade stocks? Got news for you, you're ALREADY being replaced by computers, it just hasn't completed yet. Dig ditches? Soon robotics that never show up to work late and hungover will be cheaper than you are. Build houses for a living? Before you know it, massive 3D printers will be able to churn out a house in 1/100th the time human's can, with 1/100th the defects, at 1/100th the price, that will last for centuries, even if subjected to things like blizzards or hurricanes.

Then what? Your guess is as good as mine.

We SHOULD find a way to design society where people can just chill, relax, and do what they want. Sure, many will just "do nothing". Sit around, lounging by the pool, drinking beverages delivered by robots indistinguishable from humans. But others will create amazing works of art. Still others will generate music. Some nerdier ones will continue advancing the sciences, until we've reached the absolute limit of what we can know and do. THAT is what we should hope for. Whether or not we get it, as opposed to a very small amount of stupidly "wealthy" people and masses of hopelessly "poor" I cannot say.

 

This may not sound very optimistic, or even negative, but I hope I am not there to see it. Sounds awfully boring. The music and art thingy doesn't sound as good as you might think either but why mess with your vision. When people become useless, valueless, and obsolete, it's pretty much check and mate. Not that some of that stuff couldn't and/or wouldn't be useful, it is the elimination of a need for people that worries me the most.

 

I don't know about the boring thing. What if you could live an entire lifetime on what amounted to a permanent vacation. Don't think that would bore me at all. Though I'm not sure if the robot waitresses would respond positively to me or my wife hitting on them...

 

Don't worry, WWIII will be coming soon, and WWIV will be fought with stones and clubs, with no robots in sight. Unless they are our evil overlords, lol.

 

That sounds promising. Probably more realistic too. After the past decade or two I have lost all faith in the leaders of the world and the idiots who defend them.

 

Now that would be the real 'reset' button.

 

It's a good thing for one business operation; it's a catastrophe when everyone does it. Consider your own job and those of your family members, friends, and neighbors. What will you and they do when they are replaced by robots? Don't think it won't happen to you and to the people you know.

 

Other than maybe a supervisor/machine operator I can see what you are suggesting.

 

It's inevitable for a constantly evolving species. We're also free to use our minds to develop whatever our imagination creates, and you and I are equally free to buy whatever we want/can afford. If someone makes a robot that can do job x better then a human and save me money, then it's up to me, and me only on whether I want to invest in it.

 

We've got a long time until that happens. There isn't a single artificial "anything" that doesn't look fake when you look it in the eyes. There are too many nuances in the human face that people know, so when anything is "off" it really looks off. We can't even do it 2D yet, without using people to motion capture it. When the computer takes over to interpolate real emotion, it sucks. Forget about an actual physical android thing.

 

This is turning out to be a better than average thread.
I can agree that WWIII is on the way. I think it will be the biggest and most destructive one yet. This kinda' fits in with the narrative tho.
A whole lotta' things that are being invented are being stashed away in very secure storage that will likely weather the coming storm, along with the various bunkers we hear about for the wealthy and privileged. Once the dust and fallout clear, those guys will come back out. They'll have enough of the stuff that this round of humans made to to bring the recovery period down to maybe 50 years or less. From there, they won't need nearly as many people around. The reset, as Hoosier observes. From there, it will be far easier to maintain human population at closer to 500M for the whole planet.
Ah, the NWO realized.

 

I acknowledge that we're not there "yet". But it's not a question of "if", but "when". It may or may not be during our lifetimes, but it is coming, eventually.

 

Those jobs didn't require any real skill, and thus it was easier for people displaced to find other employ.

But not everyone can be an engineer, a computer repairman, etc. Those jobs tend to require much higher skill levels then people either can, or want, to obtain.

 

So why don't we?

 

We don't because certain people have the false belief that we can centrally command an economy and they managed to influence the rules.

 

The Farriers union would like to have a word with you on the subject of skill.

And on the subject of your point, if you had one, not everyone can be a waiter either. I'm not sure why you think there should be some sort of baseline job that everyone can do, but I'm quite sure you don't realize how judgmental and degrading you're being.

 

First off, why anyone would eat that fast food crap in the first place is a mystery to me. Secondly, the robots will work fine until one of them ends up killing a customer, then all bets are off.

I wonder how easy they'd be to tip over? I can see kids knocking them over as a joke; wonder if they'd get charged with assaulting a robot?

 

Automation is a big part of why we live so comfortably. People have feared and fought automation for centuries - just look at Karl Marx - yet automation has resulted in a better standard of living for people. This is just one more example.

I personally ate at a McDonald's in Paris last year where I ordered and paid through a machine. It was very convenient and it allowed me to order in English. A human did give me my food, but there were far fewer people working than you would expect. I can easily see how this would allow the business to save money while actually making for an easier experience than arguing with a minimum wage cashier.

Automation is inevitable, and usually makes people's lives better.

 

Just as a side note: look up "gross receipts tax"

Many states have them on gas.