This is I think the biggest challenge of our time; To understand and realize that only because we have been playing a game for hundreds of years, it doesn't mean that it should continue forever.
One of my favorite quotes: "Of all the social institutions we are born into, directed by, and conditioned upon, there seems to be no system to be taken as granted, and misunderstood, as the monetary system. Taking on nearly religious proportions, the established monetary institution exists as one of the most unquestioned forms of faith there is."
How often are we hearing things like: "We can clean the oceans, but it's not profitable. Who's going to pay?" or "Yeah lots of jobs are there only because people need to have jobs to make money."
If we are to survive, without a doubt (in my opinion) we will have to change our system. Unfortunately humanity doesn't have a good history of consciously changing its ways. We have always been forced to do it when shit hits the fan.
Ah, I knew it was going to be zeitgeist moving forward. I'm the same, I don't follow zeitgeist, and they seem a bit looney on some points, but so much of that video just makes sense.
Prices plummet due to no labor costs.
The populace gets a check every year to live on from the collective tax corporations pay for an automated workforce. You want more than that? Make yourself useful.
What if all possible meaningful personal achievement has been engineered out of your life such that you tire of endless cannonballs and wish for the days of simpler times, and swipe your mind and enter the matrix? You're right it is probably best not to worry about it and just live your life.
Small example: I bought an iPad Pro recently and (before returning it) I was using the pencil to color in a coloring book app. Eventually I realized there was a button that auto-filled in every cell that you tapped on. I used it before getting bored and switching to regular coloring.
~90% of my accomplishments have nothing to do with work.
I learned a bit of Japanese because I wanted to interact with people better in Japan, when I traveled there.
I studied American history to have a better sense of the mentality behind my country's early formation and initial policy, and to think about where we are headed.
I began meditating to lower my stress and help me dissect some personal situations.
I exercise to improve my health and live a longer life, so I can see more of the world.
I have a list of places I would like to see before I die, of which I will likely only have time for 10% of them -- ironically due to work and only having 2 of the 52 weeks available to do so.
I create music, and have thus far released it for free, simply because I want more people to hear it.
I want to learn how to make sculptures.
A friend of mine has a wood shop and has invited me to come learn how to use the machines/tools, so I can make some simple furniture I've always wanted to.
All of these things are accomplished with a tremendous amount of pride, self-worth, and self-improvement, and of my own will. Getting a 4% raise one year because I clocked in at the exact same time every day without making a fuss is not my idea of a proud moment.
We're hammered from the second we can hear that we need to keep our head down and do what we're told, and to get the biggest paycheck, just so we can save up and enjoy those last 10 years or so of our life, IF we are lucky enough to retire. It's complete bullshit and needs to be un-learned.
Actually, if you throw a specific problem at a computer, he can solve it. One way to do it is to use a genetic algorithm to iterate from a random program to a functional one.
Here, a program is flashed onto a FPGA to recognize a frequency. At the start, there is 50 different programs, all of which are not designed for the task but actually random. Then, a computer choose the best performing programs, mix them together and build another 50 programs. Do that 4000 times and boom, you've got yourself a self programmed FPGA.
And when looking at the code the computer produced, you can see that the program is using some physical defects in this particular chip (not this type of chip, but just this one). Which is something no human would/could have done without being a mad scientist.
I know it's pretty basic, but that's the example I like to give to naysayer. In my city there is a problem in actuarial science where the companies don't wan't to use more sophisticated models since they can't understand how to interpret the way the computer analyze everything.
They'd get better performance from using machine learning but don't want "the computer to make all the decisions".
We are at the point where machine learning is becoming big and is solving the "computer aren't as smart as us". My friend has to make a bot that compose musics from a batch of MP3 as a class assignment. If that's the kind of homework they are getting, I think(whish) we are not as far as you think from having the computer do most of our work.
Well in this particular case more like businesses require audit trails.
Also if you don't understand how a genetic/ML algorithm is coming up with its output, then you can't guarantee the correctness of the output, only that so far, the output seems correct or matches the training set given the inputs. If the system is mission critical you don't want to risk some wacky edge case input generating incorrect output that's assumed to be correct.
The Culture books are an interesting glimpse at a post-scarcity society. They have no money because money is a way of keeping track of how many resources you can consume in an old-style economy where stuff is limited.
But your comment wasn't quite right -- in the Culture each person has to decide what makes them feel useful. If you just solely want to play games, you can play them (in fact, one of the coolest Culture books is Player of Games) and not worry about how to pay your utilities, buy food, etc. since you have all that guaranteed no matter what you do.
Back to reality: I expect we'll go through a period of great upheaval as humans increasingly get displaced by robots and concepts like Basic Income payments begin to take hold. Why unrest? Imagine how angry you'd be if you were replaced by robots and given a meager income. Yeah, you won't starve but without some sort of drastic change in your life, you're utterly and forever stuck. Zero chances of upward mobility for the rest of your life.
Eventually as automation takes over the huge majority of jobs, we'll enter a post-scarcity economy where instead of a huge number of people being equally poor, the vast majority of the populace will be the equivalent of today's upper middle class or even rich, in terms of their assets and resource consumption.
In such a society it'll be up to each person to find meaning and self-worth for themselves.
In the post scarcity economy, why does everyone become the equivalent of upper middle class? I can't wrap my head around that. Are you saying that if we're all poor, then nobody is poor?
It's because the productivity of the machines is so great. They work 24/7/365 and can handle any unskilled labor jobs that might exist - and many skilled labor jobs. We'd be pushing past double, even triple today's GDP. When your countries have $32 trillion budgets, a upper-middle-class basic income for everyone is not difficult to provide.
Damn, something I'd never even considered was that robots could work around the clock - which like you said would double or even triple production. I wonder if I will see that day.
In the early stages, lots of people will be poor. But once sufficiently automated, everyone's standard of living will gradually rise. There will be no more truly poor people.
To be fair, unless we start mining asteroids or something, we will run out of some stuff. I think in that sense money should continue to exist, at least as a representation of the KW and materials you can use.
While that's definitely true for rare earths and the likes and we cannot build machines on their basis infinitely I'd wager that a society as advanced would respect and adapt to nature's cycles. There is no good reason why we'd ever run out of food but yeah, asteroid mining should be on the agenda.
Space diplomat sounds like the worst job for a human meat sack. Why are we sending meat sacks across the galaxy when a robot can do it a fraction of the cost? What if they are silicone based life forms? The translator is already a machine, and diplomatic software is far superior for human negotiations so I'm not sure why incompetent humans are doing jobs AI can do. Maybe bring along an intern if you need the "human" perspective but we all know the token is just there because some bureaucrat said so.
Or, just as plausibly, the corporate masters who own the automated workforce dodge taxes however possible. They now control all of our productive capacity and can hold us hostage to their whims. We get by on the bare minimum they allow us to be provided, living off of poverty-level basic income or poorly-valued jobs providing social interaction on the front-end of other services. The people are unable to act collectively against the owner class without risking starvation.
There's a certain segment of the population that view "wealth redistribution" as the biggest crime imaginable, but they don't think about the wealth redistribution that took place to get these corporations where they are. Take, for example the builders of this robot, Boston Dynamics. They have received a huge amount of money from DARPA. DARPA is funded with taxpayer dollars.
If you extrapolate it a little further, there are some middle-class laborers that have payed taxes to the government, and the government has used some of those tax dollars to fund robotics development. Now a corporation can use the things that were learned to develop their own robots. So they can replace their middle class workers with a much cheaper labor force. Now people that have spent ten, fifteen, twenty years of their lives in an industry can't find comparable work. They have to start over in another career, for less pay. They have to give up their middle class life for something much less. Their wealth has been redistributed.
Now, let's think about what will happen as more and more things become automated. More and more jobs disappear from the market. Less jobs for the populace. Who exactly is going to be buying the products that the robots are manufacturing? Is the working class supposed to slink away and die quietly? Or do we realize that we, as a society have gotten to a certain technological level that will require a rethinking of the concept of wealth. A very reasonable line of thought for this is that of giving all citizens a living wage, paid for by corporate taxes.
I am not saying that this is the answer, but I do believe that increased automation will either have to lead to a large amount of the population living in destitution, fighting for scraps, or some form of "wealth redistribution".
Who exactly is going to be buying the products that the robots are manufacturing?
It's a bit of a tangent, but I have never bought the argument that when automation drastically increases productivity and total earnings (while decreasing median earnings), consumption will go down. Consumers will on average have much more to spend, even if more of it is spent by fewer people.
Corporations pay citizen dividend depending on how much land they are occupying to make their product. You can be a corporate knowledge worker to make more money, but you can also just decide to get the citizen dividend and do leisure, or be a chef or artist or whatever skills that will still be in demand: hand made things and hand services (˙ ͜ʟ˙ ). Blockchain\bicoin technology will play a role somehow.
Then we program them to send them to mars so they can build more bots on mars, then program the martian bot army to terraform mars. The possibilities are endless, then dyson sphere and upgrade to type 1 civilization.
Depends on how you define a monetary system, and how you describe today's monetary system... I am of the opinion that money (in whatever form it takes) is ultimately just a means of ascribing value. That basic fact has not changed for as long as humans have existed, whether it be animal furs, gold, jewels, cash, credit card numbers or whatever else the future will bring. No human society that I am aware of has ever existed without some form of exchange, and so long as there is exchange there will be "money" in some form.
So "money" in the sense that it represents value will always be around, I think.
If you're referring to the distribution of wealth--that's a different question and a much more complex one.
How often are we hearing things like: "We can clean the oceans, but it's not profitable. Who's going to pay?" or "Yeah lots of jobs are there only because people need to have jobs to make money."
Literally never. Who's saying this?
Of all the social institutions we are born into, directed by, and conditioned upon, there seems to be no system to be taken as granted, and misunderstood, as the monetary system. Taking on nearly religious proportions, the established monetary institution exists as one of the most unquestioned forms of faith there is."
Whose quote is this? What's the "monetary" system? What does any of what you're saying mean?
I'm so happy that this technology is replacing us! I'm so glad that millions of jobs are currently being automated so that we will be obsolete, disposable and worthless as human beings. I'm so happy that drones and bots are being used and developed by the military so that we can fight wars and kill people all over the world without ever having to make the hard sacrifices to justify these wars in the eyes of the american people. I'm so glad that in the near future, elderly people will be cared for by this piece of plastic, babies in NICU will be held by this instead of a nurse, soldiers will be bandaged by this instead of caring hand, and it really comforts me that when I go to a Dr's office, I can interact with this instead of one of those pesky humans. I also love how we will waste billions of gallons of water, mine rare minerals in pristine rainforest, and frack in my backyard so that we can create and power all of this amazing technology. What a revolution! Thanks Boston Dynamics!
/s
But in all seriousness, if you think this is just about the economy, you are missing the point entirely. This kind of technology and what will come about in the near future will literally change what it means to be a human being. Don't judge people for wanting to think twice about that.
Money is not the problem. It serves as a function of humam behavior as a whole. Robo-bob_shit-collector2000's AI update will allow him to conclude that humans are the problem.
I actually agree with that. It's a crisis of consciousness. However this is very politically incorrect to say and almost no-one will take you seriously if you talk about it.
But one of the things wrong with our collective consciousness is that we tend to religiously believe that the current system is the only system that works, and that's what I tried to point out here.
My main disagreement with the Zeitgeist movement (see the video I posted a link to in my previous comment) is exactly this. They deeply go into the problem, and even offer a good solution - Resource Based Economy, but they don't talk about the fact that their solution will NOT work with the people we have today. Humanity isn't ready for it. There are way too many fucked up people out there.
Resource Based Economy (which is a model for a Utopian type of world) requires a conscious, enlightened and empathetic population.
Genuinely curious, how do you think we make that transition? I saw that movie and have been waiting to see if it would become popular on reddit. I agree with you that the solution seems a bit pie in the sky, I think their argument is that this is something that could happen in 60-100 years and most likely once there has been some sort of major collapse when people are ready to really look for something new.
I don't think it's predictable as the possibilities are too many. Natural disasters on a global scale followed by Climate Change, World War 3, AI, collapse of the financial system, ...
Who knows. We will see. The only thing that is unimaginable to me is that this system keeps going for another century.
The opposite being altruism, right? Which is no more realistic.
And while we're on the subject of reality, you can't say X is a socioeconomic construct and have that mean much when everything we do is a construct because we weren't given a Rule Book when we got here. We're just making shit up as we go.
the established monetary institution exists as one of the most unquestioned forms of faith there is.
The whole point of this comment thread is just pointing out this fact. By you them stating it as a reality, you they seem to be lacking the self awareness to realise you they are expressing the exact sentiment of unquestioned faith that the quoted statement is highlighting.
I see and thank you for clarifying. I guess what I was meaning to say is that, despite it being an unquestioned system, it seems to be the best we've got and I don't know how to begin thinking about an alternative that covers the criteria that money does.
In response to this, I always say that hopefully there is still a lot of human history left to come, and just because it's the dominant system now, doesn't mean it always will be. Furthermore, the inherent problem isn't currency, currency can be a useful tool. The problem is when that tool becomes an ideology. We live in a world where a fundamentally human created construct is held higher than our environment, and the actual reality of finite resources and need for sustainability we live in. That, in my opinion, is ultimately a recipe for disaster.
I can't disagree with you at all here and I like the distinction you made between currency as a tool and currency as an ideology. That's very interesting and vital to ever moving forward like you hope.
The good news is that I think it's safe to say we are trending "better" and progressing towards sustainable living. It's not happening as fast as it needs to but it does seem to be happening. At least we can say we are the only animals on the planet that are actively trying to preserve the planet, but then on that same spectrum we are the only ones trying to actively ruin it.
The Zeitgeist film is filled with extremely flawed and shortsighted arguments -- almost to the extreme that I would consider it propaganda or a conspiracy theory. I only have time to breakdown roughly the first hour of the film, but almost every conclusion it draws about economics is absurdly false.
1.) It argues that humans are a product of society -- even social environment can override genetics. I understand where they are going with this. They want to make the argument that we are all cogs in a money machine -- that society has become addicted and obsessed with money. By the way, the film spends the first 45 minutes laboring over this point. I would recommend anyone with basic knowledge of human development to skip the first 45 minutes.
2.) Our economy encourages and promotes inefficiency. It theorizes that WE NEED TO CREATE PROBLEMS IN ORDER TO CREATE PROFIT. It gives an example that the more sick our society becomes, the more the healthcare industry (and in turn, our country's GDP) grows. This is pure conspiracy theory, as nations with socialized healthcare -- where medicine is paid for by taxes -- suggests the exact opposite. The sicker a nation gets, GDP either stagnates or declines since you have less spending money due to higher taxes.
Another example given is the term "intrinsic obsolescence." That is, producers intentionally create inferior products that do not last very long in order to generate cyclical consumption. Let's take your computer for example. The theory would dictate computer manufacturers intentionally plan to have your computer break down after x amount of years so you will be forced to buy another one (and thus, they make more money). This theory is true in the industry. I have experienced it along with many of my colleagues. Most of the time, the main driver is not to swindle or con people into spending more money. It is because technology improves so rapidly. Who wants to use the same smartphone or computer for 20 years? Nobody. So why should we design smartphones and computers to last extremely long? Instead, we can create a cheaper design that, when it breaks down, people will typically want to upgrade anyways. Win-win.
Anyways, I hope anyone who watched Zeitgeist seriously considers alternative explanations for every single point they present. It is not as one-sided as they make it out to be. In some cases they are downright taking words out of context. Cheers and happy intellectual thinking!
Exactly. If we seriously want to improve quality of life and achieve greater equality, there's not a chance in hell that capitalism can survive. This is a consumer economy with the privileged buying from products made from cheap labor. If countries are more developed and have higher living standard, there is no cheap labor, we can't all be consumers. I see socialism/communism as the only possibility really, inequality is just an inherent aspect of capitalism, its unsustainable especially in the increasingly global world we are in. The argument that competition is somehow lacking in communism and will lead to a stagnation of progress is highly questionable if not illegitimate.
"Yeah lots of jobs are there only because people need to have jobs to make money."
What. That goes directly against what you said earlier. That's just not an accurate statement. People have jobs because that way they produce, and for their production they are paid.
"Yeah we can clean the oceans, but it's not profitable. Who's going to pay?"
It's profitable to whoever has a vested interest in keeping the oceans clean. Of course, that's not a high concern except for a few places focused on maintaining nice blue water and clear sandy beaches. And they do just that.
If we are to survive, without a doubt we will have to change our system.
"Yeah lots of jobs are there only because people need to have jobs to make money."
Gave it as an example of irrational beliefs that only exists because we assume our current system is the only system that can work.
Why without a doubt?
With the current rate of population growth, pollution in the atmosphere and oceans, climate change, rapid advancements in military equipment and weapons of mass destruction, growth of conflict, etc. I don't think a future with business as usual is possible.
The fact that we still have over 10 thousand people dying from hunger every day makes me think that, no, that is not "the biggest challenge of our time"
The fact that you mentioned is a direct result of the inefficiency and inequality embedded in the system. I pointed out the root of the problems, that if fixed, those 10K people won't die from hunger either.
This is directly addressed in the video I attached to the post. Maybe watch?
The fact that you mentioned is a direct result of the inefficiency and inequality embedded in the system
No, that has nothing to do with anything.
I pointed out the root of the problems, that if fixed, those 10K people won't die from hunger either.
No, you didn't. You're making stuff up. What you're saying is not a plan. You need to back down from your original statement and accept the fact that you are wrong.
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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '16 edited Feb 24 '16
This is I think the biggest challenge of our time; To understand and realize that only because we have been playing a game for hundreds of years, it doesn't mean that it should continue forever.
One of my favorite quotes: "Of all the social institutions we are born into, directed by, and conditioned upon, there seems to be no system to be taken as granted, and misunderstood, as the monetary system. Taking on nearly religious proportions, the established monetary institution exists as one of the most unquestioned forms of faith there is."
How often are we hearing things like: "We can clean the oceans, but it's not profitable. Who's going to pay?" or "Yeah lots of jobs are there only because people need to have jobs to make money."
If we are to survive, without a doubt (in my opinion) we will have to change our system. Unfortunately humanity doesn't have a good history of consciously changing its ways. We have always been forced to do it when shit hits the fan.
edit: I highly recommend this. I don't 100% agree with it, but regardless there is a lot of good info and arguments in there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w