$15/hr.? No, you WILL bow to the robots. Artificial lives matter.

Based on what? A family of six with one person making 15 an hour is not decent.

 

What kind of cold, uncaring SOB are you? The fair wage would be $2,000,000/hr.

 

Many were as sure as you are about their job. Then, before they knew it, their job was lost to automation and/or offshoring. In Germany we have a saying: Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall. That applies to your thinking perfectly.

P.S.: How are you going to compete with your employer when automation was the reason you were let go in the first place? Obviously, the employer calculated that the robot provides more value than you, cutting costs of production. So, your idea of outcompeting a machine doesn't make sense, because you could have done this in the first place and wouldn't have lost your job.

 

Baloney.

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I doubt prevention is possible but if you want to speed things up just raise wages and make it more cost effective to use automation.

 

Emglish being the official and only valid language of this forum, would you kindly translate for me? Thank you.

As to your second point, though it is highly unlikely I could be replaced by a machine in my lifetime, I do have a strategy based on my ability to leverage my expertise, background, and reputation in my industry to compete directly with my employer and offer a unique value proposition to my clients whom I will take with me when I go.

 

The machines are coming regardless of how much the minimum wage is.

When it comes to the point that robots threatens human survival, laws will be made to limit their use, or prohibit altogether.
Government isn't going to side with thousands of machine who won't revolt over millions of people who will.

 

I said that if people dont have money to buy there will be no demand and i saw earlier on you agreed with that in principle saying it was only half the equation. You brought up the cost side of the equation as well which i agree with wholeheartedly.

If you give someone a minimum wage of 2000.00 there will be no job as they would just move it out or automate it no matter what protectionist policies we have in place.

The trick is now to find the medium which will generate more demand that will pay for the wage increases and make give businesses more demand. Its not 2000 but its certainly not what we have now.

at this point the typical neocon would then say but let the free market find the price. No. Employment being what it is since there are more workers than jobs employers have all the bargaining power. They can even pick an illegal to do it if they dont want to meet the minimum wage.

 

Those jobs do require a lot of thinking. If you can't pay someone a decent wage, you don't deserve to be in business.

 

Minimum wage should be determined at the state level. Problem solved.

In fact, it could be taken a step further. A particular business should have its minimum wage determined by the state based on a number of factors, such as profit margins, cost of living in the region, size of business, projected growth, etc. In other words, a mom-and-pop shop in Smalltown, USA should have a lower set minimum wage than a McDonalds restaurant in NYC.

 

Robots lack fine motor skills and the ability to adapt to new situations for which they are not programmed.

 

Time is the only scarce resource. There is depressed demand at the bottom, and society should raise the minimum standard of living of all citizens. High wages and high productivity are needed to increase standard of living and strong economic growth will result.

 

There isn't really a good translation for it. The best is "high pride comes before the fall" but pride doesn't quite describe it because "Hochmut" expresses the negative meaning of pride, but not the positives.

Reading your next response, though, it reconfirms that you don't get it that your job could be on the chopping block sooner than you think.

It is easy to think of it is always "the others" and they had it coming because they didn't better themselves and didn't realize that their profession was changing to automation. Well, at one point you will be one of "the others". And I doubt that your clients will come with you for services that they can get cheaper through automation. Isn't the free market a beautiful thing?

 

My position on this topic is not the result of pride - it is simply a fact. Low-skilled jobs are easily automated. High-skilled jobs (such as mine) are difficult to automate. I won't say impossible as Moore's Law seems to be validated by exponential gains in computing power, but again, it won't happen in my lifetime.

As mine is an intellectual pursuit requiring abstract analytical thinking and mastery of several disciplines, I think I'm pretty safe. Designing a machine that can lift boxes is one thing... designing one that can think is quite another.

Again, the possibility exists because it is impossible to know the limits of technology, but it will not happen in my lifetime. As far as my clients, there is a difference between price and value. And as I stated, I can offer a value proposition that my employer can't.

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Correct. Fine motor skills are not needed to load boxes in a warehouse or to flip burgers.

 

Compensation should be a private matter between employer and employee. Problem solved.

 

I assume you've done both? If you think it requires a lot of intellectual acumen to stack boxes and squirt ketchup on a bun, that likely reflects poorly on your intelligence.

If you can't develop a valuable skill, you don't deserve to be paid a penny more than your low skill is worth on the open market.

 

Burgers don't need to be flipped. They can run through on a conveyor with heating elements above and below.

 

Your ignorance of economics is painful to look at. Please educate yourself and try again. Even simple google searched will help you not sound so ridiculous. We get it, you like to judge people who make less than you. That doesn't entitle you to make up nonsense to demonize them.

 

Even better. Greater efficiency. And robots can load them into the conveyor. But I must admit, I like my burger made on a seasoned griddle with grilled onions.

 

This isn't the 1950's. 15$ does not matter...robots are taking a big chunk of the jobs anyway. Robots may even make the tents you will sleep in once your homeless.

https://danielteolijr.files.wordpre...-city-hall-v25-2015-daniel-d-teoli-jr-mr1.jpg

 

If you have a factual refutation to my position, I am happy to hear it. Otherwise, please keep you petty emotional outbursts to yourself.

 

It's true that automation will continue to consume low/no-skill jobs and offshoring will likely take the rest. The solution? Obtain a valuable skill that can't be automated. Or get stuck living in a robot-made tent.

 

Robots can make you one of those. Never having to wash the griddle is like a paid holiday for robots.

 

Heh heh. Just have to reboot from time-to-time.

 

There are more causes to inflation than just higher wages. Increasing wages might increase prices slightly. Right now, taxpayers are subsidizing low productivity companies who pay low wages. Increasing wages will increase demand, increase productivity, and reduce inefficiencies in the economy. It will also increase the adoption of labor saving technologies. All of this is good for the economy.

 

Of course there are.

Increasing the baseline wage across the board will most certainly increase prices in direct proportion to increased COGS, somerthing economists call cost-push inflation. At the same time, demand-pull inflation results from too many dollars in circulation. You give those minimum wagers a bump and they put those dollars right into the economy - which is fine, except their dollars are worth less. So you have more dollars, but they buy less and you are right back where I said you'd be: at the bottom.

You're half right: Taxpayers are subsidizing low-productivity workers. We need to significantly reduce public benefits to incentivize low-wage workers to obtain valuable skills.

Which will increase prices and decrease the value of those wages. See demand-pull as above.

There is no correlation between artificial wage inflation and productivity.

The root cause of economic inefficiency is government regulation and bureaucracy.

Putting more low-skill workers out of work. Yet you still want to artificially increase their pay?

It is actually negligible. What is good for the economy is REAL growth, not the artificial inflation of wages which is essentially a zero-sum game.