We demand more innovative product with shorter life cycles. Labour continues no matter what. "Robots will do everything" has been tosh spewed since I was a nipper. Guess what, I still make my own tea!
Well ain't that a hoot. We go and run the Indians off their lands and tell them they have to become civilized and live by our capitalist society because poor old stupid Indians are ruining society living life like savages, when we could have Capitalism. Now I see your telling us Capitalism is dead. What do we tell those poor old dumb Indians now, since we went and got them civilized? http://i.imgur.com/YDHdmOB.jpg
I think a lot of you are missing the point. Emerging technologies, robots, androids, 3D printing, and probably a dozen and a half other things that I haven't heard of (yet) are likely, within our lifetimes frankly, to render the need for humans to labor virtually nil. Fully automated food production, 3D printers at home that take in a pound and a half of sand, a gram of gold, an ounce of this, a couple of teaspoons of that, and print out an iPad 15 in under 5 minutes. Most infants today will never drive a car, and the automated drivers will make traffic jams, traffic accidents, and worrying whether you've had one or two too many out of our collective realm of experience. I could go on, but no need to belabor the point. How do we handle economic matters at that point? Do we NEED an economy at that point? I have no idea.
Google has a driver less car already for years. It can't reach the market because there is nobody to blame when it is in a wreck. You will see lots of this needing to be sorted well before human intervention is completely taken out. Machines have been making companies more efficient since day one, this is nothing new. There is a balance however. If too many machines take over jobs, you don't have enough people buying. We have resorted to a consumer economy years ago so we must have the money to buy the products. The jobs will be there, one way or another. But the good ones won't be.
Everyone in this thread has offered good logical opinions. Where they fail is their lack of imagination. The day will come when the robot can pass the Turing test. When you sit across the table from a robot and you can not tell whether you are talking to a machine or a man. That day will take some time. Before we have a Blade Runner world were robots are indistinguishable from men, robots will look like robots but have human intelligence much like Star Wars. My question is if you have self programming, self replicating, virtually aware robots that can do any job a human can do, why would a company hire a human? The problem is that the people in this thread think that robots are what you see on youtube. They think that robots are like Asimo the robot that has trouble climbing a flight of stairs. Let me give you the benefit of the doubt. Because your post has merit. It is possible that we will have a few people left who work. Then what do you do with 50 to 75% of people who are unemployed? The day of the self reliant American who goes out their into the free market, get a job and becomes self sufficient with no need of government programs is over. The Libertarian/Conservative Ayn Rand solution were a job puts food on the plate, clothes on your back and a roof over your head is over because no one is going to hire you. That is why I think that some form of income redistribution is going to be mandatory just to survive. http://www.businessinsider.com/50-percent-unemployment-robot-economy-2013-1
Under the logic of capitalism improvements in tchnology are used to increase work, not reduce it. Hate to burst your bubble but capitalism won't allow itself to fade away.
I think you're missing the point. Many think that children less than about 5 years old or so will literally never drive a car, because by the time they come of age, every car on the road will be controlled by a computer, which will put everyone who drives for a living out of work. Every toll taker in the country is going to be put out of work because of automated toll collection technology. Eventually, a sophisticated android is going to be developed that will not only be visually indistinguishable from a human being, it will happily labor 24x7x365 at a fully amortized cost of a fed bucks an hour, putting every waitress, construction worker, bartender, shoe shiner, and a whole lot of others out of work. As the ability to train said androids to do more and more complex tasks increased, that going to put every doctor, dentist, X-Ray tech, lawyer, and just about every other human field of employment out of work. Now, it's not a question of if. Merely how quickly. Perhaps in our lifetimes, perhaps not, but it is coming. And we have two choices. We can take advantage of the situation, and create a society that is affectively a paradise. Where our days are spent pursuing what we want to do, instead of laboring. Creating art, lounging by the ocean, playing with our children. Or, we can allow this society to be controlled by a very small number of oligarchs, while the rest of us are left destitute. Which do you prefer?
The first option, obviously. But by what mechanism do you think we would be able to go that path? Revolution? Reform? The level of technology isn't the real problem with switching to socialism, we could be living well and working only a few days a week with technology from two decades ago. The problem is switching economic systems.
200 years ago, employment was near 100%, not because things were fair, but because if you didn't work, you starved. It isn't capitalism that is eliminating the need to work, it is productivity driven by technology and cheap (relatively) power to run the machines. If one person produces 2 times what they consume, they can provide for another, non-working person. In time, productivity will be so high, no one will need to work. The problem is the transition from here to there. The welfare / unemployment state isn't working. The wage earners don't like paying a large chunk of their earnings to support those on SSI / welfare / unemployment, and those on the dole don't get to little to be considered a leisure class. A better way would be to cut working hours to assure minimal unemployment. Eliminate minimum wage, to re-establish OJT. Eliminate retirement age, so those that wanted to work as long as they are able, could do so. As employment increases, taxes fall. The need for government would fall. What happens to the size of government if we continue down the SSI / welfare / unemployment path? We would need more and more government "leadership" to force a slave state on the workers, to support the poor. How much of the "wage slaves" income goes to the employer? How much to government?
I honestly have no idea, which is why I decided to participate in this conversation. And I don't think socialism is the answer, when we reach the point it's unnecessary (and counter-productive) for 99% of people to live without "employment" we're into uncharted waters, though it will have to be some kind of cooperative form of living. If the machines do all the work, and the machine factory is owned by one person, well, that's not going to work out very well for anyone, including the machine factory owner, because if virtually everyone has no way to procure money, he's not going to sell a lot of machines.
Capitalism is close to having run its course even without a robot takeover. Money is going to be meaningless in, what, 25 years? And all the piles of gold in the world ain't going to buy a loaf of bread. People will be forced onto subsistance collectives to avoid starvation.
Always remember that we are ruled by the very rich and their dupes: the machines will work for the rich. Unless we stop them they will kill off everyone who doesn't contribute to their profits. You don't matter - none of us does. Only the thieveries of the thieves matter - until we string up the whole smelly gang.
Actually, when the scenario I'm describing becomes reality, it will completely rewrite the rules of society. Will there have to be some kind of rationing? Sure, for example there aren't enough raw materials, nor is there enough fuel for every person to have and use their own private 747. How that rationing will be done is anybody's guess at this point, for we can't conceive what is and is not going to be abundant to the point of virtually needing restrictions, vs. not. We're really to far removed from it being a reality to have an intelligent conversation about it just yet. But when a generation 15 3D printer is able to "manufacturer" a small, solar powered personal use airplane that uses no fuel and travels at Mach 0.88, without a human pilot needed, and can do so just by inputting the plans for the plane and whatever raw materials are necessary, it may turn out that we have enough raw materials for that? Who knows.
The future of any system will still be capitalist in nature. Collectivism is unnatural. Build all the robots you want. People ain't sharing.
Then explain to me how it's going to work. When every person who drives for a living is put out of work because all of our vehicles are driven by computers? When all toll takers are put out of work because of automated tolls. When human pilots are rendered unnecessary, human doctors are deemed too error prone compared to their robot counterparts, not to mention they have to do things like eat, drink, use the restroom, and do silly things like go home from time to time and have a life. When every manufacturing job in the country is done by an automated robot that, like the robot doctor, never takes a break, never has a bad day, never asks for a raise, and doesn't work for 20 years and expects to get paid for 50. When every strawberry picking job is automated, when Air Traffic Control is redundant to the triple-backup systems installed in every plane in the sky, and planned by a central computer that maximized efficiency worldwide. When every bartender, waiter, and waitress is replaced by an android that is physically indistinguishable from a human, and like the aforementioned examples, happily will work 24x7x365 without ever needing to pee, have a smoke, sleep, eat, or get a headache, all for a fully amortized cost of <$3 an hour. I could go on, but I have probably belabored the point as it is. Tell me, what do we do then?
Who knows? It will be a hurdle to overcome as we encounter it. And those of us that adapt will succeed and those that don't will be weeded out. Just as evolution has done countless times before. But we won't suddenly become a planet full of hand-holding, song-singing, campfire hippies. Sharing and caring. That is not in our nature and actually runs counter to the very principle of evolution. Competition is mandatory for our survival and growth. And one way or another, nature will see to it that it continues. It always does.
The scenario that has been mentioned by some futurist is that we will have a modified form of what we have today. Fully automated factories run by robots will do what we do today. There will be robot accountants, financial officers, robot truck drivers, robot managers, robot workers etc, etc . . . The capitalist will be human. They own the factories and everything in it including the robots. They make their profits. The government comes along and taxes the profits and gives it to the masses. The people have money to spend and the cycle starts all over again. In this world we will be on permanent vacation, hanging out on the beach, surfing the net. The robots do all the work, we enjoy the benefit. It will be a jobless economy.
Or, perhaps, we can just do away with money. What's the point if serfs give the money to the capitalist, the government takes it away from the capitalist, and gives it back to the serfs, only to have them give it back to the capitalist. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Or perhaps not, even in a society where human labor is not required, there will still be limitations on at least some resources, and some rational method of rationing those must be found, perhaps the lather, rinse, repeat process will create a natural rationing. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud. Now, THAT sounds good to me. Give me a hotel, a pool, 300 of my closest perverted friends, and more food than we can eat and booze than we can drink, and it will be paradise indeed.
The future holds free societies without hierarchical structures , vast networks of open source knowledge and ecological economies based on conservation and reuse of materials . Where did they taught you that? Collectivism and no concept of property were the social rules for 190.000 years , property concept came later with agriculture like 10.000 years ago and capitalism is even younger . Actually the main purpose of trade was to exchange women in order to enrich the gene pool .
It's called "being 5 years old." Think back. You might remember it. It goes something like this, "I want that! Gimme!" We don't share by nature. We're tribal. We only share within groups of people we care about. Which is why collectivism is always doomed to fail on a large scale. Because we have to fight one another to perpetuate evolution. No competition = no advancement. No advancement = stagnation. Stagnation = the beginning of extinction. Nature has this all planned out so that we keep growing. Don't fight it. Just let it happen. World peace is impossible. Wise people accept this. Idealogues waste their entire lives fighting for what can never be.
Yes there are people who are letting their chimp side take over and all they can think are wars and competition but those are evolutionary dead ends . As you may see throughout human history our evolution increases our ability to cooperate in big groups , it is inevitable that some day we will all become one group . Evolution wise we are without competition for 30.000 years ( Floresiensis was never a real competitor) did we stagnated ? Another aspect of our evolution is increased ability to control our emotions and reason , THIS is the main psychological advantage we have over our other ape cousins and it is a learnt behaviour . I guess i need to remind you that humans are born in very early stage with very little brains (in order to pass from the birth canal) so children are the worst possible example you can bring. Your "wise men" seem to ignore that evolution is not a ladder but a branching tree , sometimes accumulated mutations become dominant sometimes they don't but im any way you can not perpetuate evolution by killing weaker ones To continue your history class groups of people unable to cooperate in large scale were eliminated , think of the tribal nations of Celts , Gauls , Samogitians, Berbers and so on . Even advanced nations like us Greeks were taken over by inferior cultures like the Romans because they could cooperate in large scale while we had competing city states , i can jump to the Mayans or to Mongols but i think those examples are enough . .
So the billions of years of evolution has been tamed in 200 years or less? Not likely. We have calmed the beast by providing outlets, drugs, and societal convention. But, we have not eliminated it. Have we eliminated greed? Power seeking? Racism? Violence? That same drive that results in warlords, gang leaders, politicians, CEO's and monopolies. Create the right sets of checks and balances, and you end up with capitalism. Assigning someone to be the checks and balances, and you end up with big government statism.
Must be my English because you didn't understand anything i posted . Capitalism is not 200 years new, Phonecians had rich traders employing slaves 3000 years ago ...of course this does not make capitalism old. We have not yet become a violence free society but we are moving towards it , we have not yet become an inequality free society but we are moving towards it , our historical transitions lead us this way and it has very little to do with DNA and much more with the advancement of us as people and our societies as a whole. Seeking to maintain the old ways is like trying to keep Neanderthals around both impossible and pointless
Robots aren't going to change a thing, except that all current industries will have to compete with the new industry. That Baxter robots does everything you can do? Can it fix itself? Can it maintain the warehouse it is in? Can it have a conversation and make a sale? Can it spear fish? etc... a million and one industries. In any event m profession cannot be replaced by a robot, can yours? There will just be less low skilled jobs then before.
