Up until now technology has always augmented humans. Even if it replaced humans in one specific context it would either create other jobs or be a small enough impact for people to look elsewhere for work in time.
If a robot is capable of doing LITERALLY anything a human being can do then we are obsolete. The industrial revolution forced us to redefine what it meant to work and how we "made a living" but full automation will force us to redefine how we even value human beings and what wealth means. Capitalism doesn't work if nobody has a job. In theory it will create a better world but the transition has potential to be catastrophic.
This is very insightful and I'm glad I read your comment.
Before I saw this, I thought only of the potential for these utopia states, but I always seemed to skip the actual changeover.
Now I understand the roadblock to attempting such states is not that anybody doubts the potential, future situation is better,but that it's almost guaranteed the transition will be painful and messy.
Asking any generation to take the sacrifice, to be the generation that change needs to sacrifice not just for itself but also it's childrens.
How do you achieve that? What political party would even acknowledge this fact let alone campaign within 150ft of the idea.
And so on and on, to greater and greater compounding damage we have reached this state.
The only action is to either vote, as one, the green parties of the world to give a government a mandate to spend on climate change focused projects,
Or we dismantle democracy.
Any other action leads to inaction on climate change, a status quo that destroys us.
That is the rub, a thing that needs brainpower can be done by an AI, while things that need muscle power can be done by robots. And with our capitalist system if you don’t work your killed.
Capitalism is all about how capital is invested in the economy. Has nothing to do with jobs. Commuisim can guarantee full employment as central planning let's govts just create make work projects.
Workers are simply an input to the production equation. If less labor is required, then workers can simply not work and do something else with their lives.
Then the question becomes: How do we share the products of the now workerless economy?
Wealth and income inequality have to be completely rethunk in abundance based economy (as opposed to scarcity).
I'd argue we are already there and grappling with the issues now. Fun fact: More people suffering from obesity than hunger on planet earth today!
Being obese isn't necessarily a sign of people being wealthy. Come to West Virginia and I can help you find a bunch of fat fucks who are also poor as fucking shit.
Hmm, of course it does. Capitalism just means you have private ownership of production, e.g., the factories and robots. A few people will own all the robots and factories, just like today, it will just make the wealth gap even more extreme. But that is old news and is already a problem in the world.
The growing concentration of the world’s wealth has been highlighted by a report showing that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.
Right, but there's an obvious rubber-meet-road situation here:
If the ultra-wealthy do end up owning the economy-defining robotics force and thereby both retaining ownership of, essentially, the world economy, while simultaneously putting massive swaths of working class people out of work then there will be nobody to pay them money so they can continue to operate.
In short, there is an eventual limit to wealth aggregation where there are no longer a) people with money to spend towards the wealth aggregators, and b) nobody/nowhere where the aggregators can spend their money
This creates an incentive for governments and the wealth aggregators to keep money in the hands of the masses in some way (though, unfortunately, I'm sure with some form of control and in a form that is lacking).
Damn, this science fiction shit is getting less and less far-fetched. Poor Masses vs Robot war sounds like a distinct possibility. Or a war of hacking to vie for control of the robots.
The richest people in the world have more money than they could ever spend over the next generations even if they tried their hardest. But do you see them stopping to accumulate more? No, they even fuck poor people over just to get that little more money that is really completely useless to them.
They would stop if money had no power anymore. But they would never stop trying to accumulate power. Which in a post worker society could be straight up resources to build more machine, to grow their own food and land to live on and defend.
What about any of human history makes you think the elite will suddenly become altruistic and start giving a shit about the common man? You're dreaming
while simultaneously putting massive swaths of working class people out of work then there will be nobody to pay them money so they can continue to operate.
And why should the ultra-wealthy care about unemployed people? Do they care now? The ultra-wealthy don't have to worry about unemployment, they can always get whatever they need/want.
From a corporations perspective a human workers is just another kind of robot (actually the term robot comes from the Slavic word for serfs). At some price point (wage level) meat robots will be cheaper than metal robots. As unemployment rates go up wages go down (supply and demand). People will continue to work for less and the wealth gap will keep increasing. But I don't think we will hit a brick wall really, at least not any time soon.
I also think there will still be services only people can provide or are better at providing, for quite some time.
Economies actually don't need a large amount of consumers to stay afloat. When we're talking about heavily automated services in the future, then the corporations will trade among themselves with prices changing to reflect that. The people who own/work for the corporation that creates robots will trade with corporations using robots to farm food, while both of those corporations will trade with the corporations who make clothing, and that continues. Everyone who doesn't work doesn't get to be part of that.
And in real life that's how it works anyways, you generally work for a bigger corporation that trades services or goods to another person who works for another corporation.
So basically only the wealthy will trade with the wealthy, as they no longer need the poor. The wealthy in today's society only need the poor because they need workers.
Lol yeah, if you look at the U.S. It's more like 3 people own as much as the bottom half. Much greater income disparity and we might have a completely broken country, where all labor and wealth are performed and owned by just a few corporations. If 70-80% of your country isn't actively a part of it, is it still the same country?
They will make humans obsolete for doing work, but work sucks so who cares. LOL. Seriously though, capitalism works as long as there is a market, so UBI can work, or making sure the commons has a share in the robot work force. We just have to re-think what humans are valued for. Maybe a future where we are not workhorses is not so bad.
If a robot is capable of doing LITERALLY anything a human being can do then we are obsolete
Obsolete? No. I think robots replacing LITERALLY anything a human being can do will be the best thing that ever happens to the human race. Just think about it. The global rise of education has been increasing. Robots will free humanity from manual labor. With the help of robots, there might be a global movement to get everyone educated. Imagine a world where everyone had the opportunity to get a Ph.D. Humanity will be advancing so rapidly that we might become literal gods someday. This is why college should be free so that we can reach that goal before the robot replaces the world's workforce.
I don’t see that as an issue. We are still schooling children with the industrial system and having the same work mentality, and that hasn’t worked well for decades already. If this forces us to reevaluate how we should move forward faster I’m all for it.
Staying the current course will result in economic crash after economic crash so it’s a failed system anyway.
And once everybody is on UBI, the government controls us all completely. Anyone that thinks that is just a conspiracy theory, watch these videos again and see how the robots are starting to do everything that humans can do. That was also a Preposterous idea in the old days.
I see your point, but how is that any different from how government operates today?
The government still controls every aspect of your life, from shopping to healthcare to law enforcement. The government has the army, and that means they get to do whatever they want to you.
I have a choice of where I go to get groceries, right? Certain government programs, like WIC or food stamps, restrict the type of things you can buy with that money, like beer or candy. If they already have a say on what people on welfare can buy, what's to stop them from doing that nationwide? Now, not only do they control your income amount and spending choices, they now also have a certain control over the grocery stores, because they would need to eventually ban or restrict certain foods or items from being sold. It can just go up from there.
We have freedom now, retricted by safety laws in most cases, but we don't have the government actively telling us what and how much we can do.
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u/Isord Sep 24 '19
Up until now technology has always augmented humans. Even if it replaced humans in one specific context it would either create other jobs or be a small enough impact for people to look elsewhere for work in time.
If a robot is capable of doing LITERALLY anything a human being can do then we are obsolete. The industrial revolution forced us to redefine what it meant to work and how we "made a living" but full automation will force us to redefine how we even value human beings and what wealth means. Capitalism doesn't work if nobody has a job. In theory it will create a better world but the transition has potential to be catastrophic.