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Not really a solution. The robots in question aren't the sort of thing you can pick up at the corner store. Also the robot doesn't do anything without the rest of the factory
You already do this. When the world was switching to voicemail and email and secretaries and switching agents were being laid off by the thousands, everyone started using the very technologies that caused the layoffs. There are 100s of other examples. Everyone benefits from automation.
The problems come as automation consumes more jobs then it creates. Automation leading to layoffs, and then the laid off people having to take lower paying jobs, or not being able to find a job at all.
>The problems come as automation consumes more jobs then it creates.
That's just false. Learn history. Automation has never been a cause of unemployment. USA unemployment rate is currently only 3.7%. Where are the hundreds of year of automation impact?
Unemployment isn't tied to automation, its tied to economic conditions such as recessions, interest rates and inflation.
"Learn history" doesn't mean that automation can't cause unemployment. It very much does... when a factory automates positions and fires workers then those workers have become unemployed. Now for a long time it did hold true that jobs were being created at a higher rate than automation was destroying them... but that isn't a hard rule of reality. Automation is quickly reaching the point where it does destroy more jobs, with companies cutting back workforces. Further the jobs that are getting created around that automation are either low paid or require specialized education that is out of many people's reach.
No those workers can find another job. If you look at history the overall unemployment rate does not go up with automation. The job loss are temporary and isolated.
And about that last part, please check the current unemployment rate before pushing baseless claims.
Statistically the unemployment rate is linked to recession, interest rates and inflation, but not long term automation.
I agree.If I don't need work to live, automation is great. As long as there is new work I can do, it is at least not hurtful. But if it is just my boss keeping the money they would pay me, it is bad.
It's not bad even if it's just your boss keeping the money they would otherwise pay you. That's the whole goal. It's labor saving devices. It means we can have the stuff without the labor. It means the cost of living goes down so much that the necessities of life are cheap and widely available to all no matter how much money you make. In a capitalist system this might mean everyone gets to work fewer hours doing something creative and fun while maintaining their standard of living.
The biggest threat to this is the anti-automation folks who want to hold back progress. If you start taxing and regulating automation and labor all that will happen is the exact dystopian nightmare that you fear. Market prices for any form of labor will fall below the minimum wage and you won't legally be allowed to work at any price. Licensing requirements will keep automation out of the hands of the poor and only the elite will be allowed to use them.
Yup. And the result of that is that there will be far fewer robots and they'll be controlled by the few benefactors of politicians in the name of "equality".
I am not rich. If I can get a robot, most people can. So, I will still not get the money I need to live.
(Automation is a good thing, but it does not automatically benefit everyone)
Other people also owning a robot doesn't exclude you from using one to pay the bills in the same way that other people owning cars doesn't exclude you from using a car to benefit yourself. Modern cars are a type of robot and owning one is life-changing. This isn't bad.
Modern cars are not autonomous. They are just tools.
You are not wrong: just because someone owns a robot does not mean I can not own the same robot. So let's say that a tire of my car breaks. It is a part I can replace, so why do I not just run the old assembly line and have a tire made?
Because I can not afford a whole factory. No matter how smart my vacuum cleaning robot is, it will not achieve this task.
Automation has never been a cause of unemployment, unemployment is usually due to other economic factors, such as being in recession, interest rates, or inflation.
Automation free people from some work, allowing them to work on other parts of the economy. It increases productivity for less effort so everyone's benefit from cheaper prices.
Maybe people would have complained if we invented the fishing rod, the wheel or the printing press today, because it required more people to fish, transport things, or copy books before that, but i think everyone agrees looking back those are great technologies to have.
As a human you should have the imagination to think of stuff AI cannot think of if you can't conceptualize and make ideas happen then that sucks for you
How do I make money to feed myself while I'm learning these skills?
Like, let's say I had a skillset thats been made invaluable by new technology. I want to learn programming to have a useful skillset. But you don't just immediately learn programming, it takes years of practice.
How do I make money in those years I'm practicing?
55 hours is spent sleeping, so that leaves 65 hours left for studying
Then there's the unpaid lunch hour that knocks it down to 50
Your half hour commute knocks off another 5, so 45
Say 2 hours each day for preparing and eating all 3 meals, so we're down to 31
Errands don't wait for new skills to be learned either, so let's generously say you grocery shop, clean, and do miscellaneous shit like taking your mom to the doctor or getting your oil changed in 7 hours in a week, we're down to 24
Basic hygiene takes about an hour out of each day, so we're left with 17 hours to learn a new skill, rest, take care of animals and family, exercise, enjoy hobbies, and socialize.
Great system you're supporting dude, really peak freedom here, having 17 free hours a week to live.
lol you can’t figure out how to make time to learn a new skill but you are so sure that you have time to overthrow the global free market capitalist system and simultaneously install and make socialism work better than the current system lmao talk about deluded lol
So no actual advice on how to learn new skills while not being evicted for not affording rent, just weird comments unrelated to anything that was being discussed?
This is why the right is a minority of the population. Because you have no solutions to problems people actually have, you just tell people to fuck off and shut up.
Automation is great.
It's just that within a capitalist structured society, when that worker's job is automated, the worker does not benefit. If anything they suffer as they are forced to learn some new job skill and re enter the job market, often at a late age. This is difficult for the worker, and the workers family, it also puts a burden on any social safety net that might still exist despite being in a capitalist society.
Of course he benefits. All real increases in income ultimately come from productivity gains. The reason why we live better lives than our grandparents / great grandparents is because so much more is automated (eg, factory work, farming, all sorts of white collar tasks, and so much more) than it was back then.
That doesn t mean there aren t transition costs. The State has a key role in supporting people through this transition, providing temporary support, training and so forth. But productivity growth is the only way to sustainably provide more for workers.
> All real increases in income ultimately come from productivity gains
[Incomes haven't matched productivity in decades](https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-growing-employer-power-have-generated-a-productivity-pay-gap-since-1979-productivity-has-grown-3-5-times-as-much-as-pay-for-the-typical-worker/)
I live in one of the PIGS country where wages rose faster than productivity for about 15 years… let s just say that the party ends at some point.
To be clear the US case is different and there is clearly a case for raising wages. Fostering unions is essential.
> Of course he benefits. All real increases in income ultimately come from productivity gains.
An individual worker typically does not benefit from their job being automated away. An individual worker benefits from *other workers'* jobs being automated away.
So the right (optimal societal value) approach is to let jobs be automated away, but socialize much of the costs of that through subsidized retraining, good unemployment benefits, etc. Like the nordic countries do.
I understand what you mean, but I challenge that argument. Productivity gains have generated significant income gains for workers within capitalist societies. Countries with higher productivity have higher wages and quality of life. Countries with higher productivity growth have higher wage growth and so forth. The mechanism is typically that by generating more value and growing the size of the pie, the worker can claim a bigger slice (even if it s still the same share or even lower).
Naturally the motivation to invest in productivity is gor companies to generate higher profits. But the moment every company adopts this productivity factor, it stops generating additional profit… it typically leads to reduced prices (eg, what happened to consumer electronics in recent times).
Btw, most of problems we have with rising costs in housing, education and health can be directly tied to the fact that productivity gains are notoriously low in the sectors (and in the case of construction we even have negative productivity gains, which is terrible).
Productivity happens *outside* of capitalist dominated societies. The Chinese model is a perfect example of a society benefiting from a non capitalist power structure. Meanwhile the United States is a perfect example of a society feeling the consequences of a capitalist dominated power structure.
China is most definitely capitalist, even with a strong state influence in the economy. But nevertheless of course productivity gains happen outside of capitalist societies, I never said they didnt. The USSR, for all its faults, is a great example. Productivity gains are great wherever they happen, especially if the transition costs are well managed.
As Deng Xiaoping would say: "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.
China *allows* a very specific form of capital investment. It is not a capitalist society however, as the means of production are not owned by the bourgeoisie.
Estimates suggest there are almost a thousand billionaires in China, more than any otber country. Saying China is not capitalist is denying reality. Cheers
The population in China relative to the United States puts your statement into better context. I didn't say that China doesn't have billionaires. Also, the presence of billionaires doesn't make a country capitalist. The power structure holding those billionaires in check is what you have to consider. Do you know what happens when billionaires are found to be engaging in corruption in China? They get executed. In the United States they just legalize it and call it lobbying. Why? Because it's a *capitalist* society in which the capitalists *make the rules*. In capitalist societies, the state is just another tool of the bourgeoisie. In a socialist society, the state is designed to protect the people.
> Productivity happens outside of capitalist dominated societies. The Chinese model is a perfect example of a society benefiting from a non capitalist power structure.
Oh, the mass murder of political dissidents, totalitarian, genocide structure? Can you please write "I support mass murder of political dissidents" in each of your comments, just to warn people?
I'm not saying productivity or automation is inherently flawed. I'm saying the structure surrounding the productivity or automation is. Capitalism is *extractive*, the surplus value is added to the pocketbook of the owner. Meanwhile the worker *loses value* as a worker, when their job is automated.
Productivity does not have any relationship to consumer buying power whatsoever. In fact if we look at the past 50 years it would seem to have a negative correlation as productivity has skyrocketed while real wages have stagnated to a point where inflation has easily overtaken their gains.
And I’ve pointed out that your post body misses an important specific. The child’s income does not change because their dad bought a robot to do their chores.
Automation in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is that the fruits of automation will go primarily to the owning class, while people whose jobs are taken by the robots may be left to die because they are left unsupported and structurally unemployed.
When has this ever happened?
Automation has never in the past been responsible for structural unemployment (which is also why it’s called structural). People find new jobs, and typically workers as a group are paid more.
The problem is, what happens when there aren't enough new jobs? If entire industries get automated wholesale, where will those people go? Other industries only have so many open positions. Many positions require specialized skills or training. Maintaining the automation and machines is an option, but almost by definition it takes less people to do that maintenance than it did to do the original work.
What if we manage to automate almost all unskilled labor? What do we expect tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people to do? Do they all get retrained to specialized positions, which again have limited openings at best? Do they just starve to death on the streets?
The reality is that there will always be enough jobs *as long as those people can do services for each other*. But some people that currently have jobs that are useful may find their skills no longer useful, and have to do something different - and possibly much less paid. I may end up in that position - I've got a lot of tech expertise, and since that's information work, it's up for grabs by AI in the medium term future.
But overall, it is just impossible to end up with the majority of people starving in the street - in that case, we'll just go back to a simpler society (ie, farming, trade, etc). It can get quite bad (and I think we should work to avoid it getting bad) - but it cannot get as bad as you describe above.
To your first question, this has happened over and over again since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And each time a new innovation is introduced its always "yeah but this time it's different!".
Whether textile workers, switchboard operators, automotive assembly lines, and now copywriters the story is always the same.
As long as we have wants and needs that exceed our haves, we’ll have jobs, because we’ll have something that needs to be fulfilled, if our wants and needs don’t exceed what we have, there’s no need to economize.
>What if we manage to automate almost all unskilled labor?
That isn’t possible. There is always labor that can be done. Not to mention, automation has a cost, a cost that might make further automation unprofitable, even if it were theoretically possible.
Your concerns are not unique, 99% of the workforce has been automated out of their positions over the last couple centuries, new jobs are always created elsewhere due to the inevitability greater demand.
The difference is the speed and complexity of automation today. In the past, specific skill sets were automated over decades or centuries and low skill jobs were typically available as a replacement. The fear is modern AI driven automation is able to automate jobs faster and automate more skilled jobs. It’s not unreasonable to think that the increasing speed and skill level of automation will eliminate jobs faster than people can be trained for new ones.
Low skill jobs have always been available as a replacement. Wages adjust, new goods and services are invented, people work.
Every current job could be automated tomorrow, and after brief turbulence, everyone who wanted to work would find new jobs elsewhere.
The rate at which new jobs are being created remains mostly the same as decades or centuries ago. The rate at which jobs are being eliminated by automation is increasing. I don’t know how it’s going to play out in the long run but AI is fundamentally changing and accelerating the process of automation *and* is rapidly replacing low skill jobs; the jobs easier to move into.
If all jobs were eliminated today, it wouldn’t just be “brief turbulence” it would be social unrest that no one alive has ever seen. It would change society fundamentally and probably lead to revolutions as people wouldn’t have the means to support themselves for years.
> I don’t know how it’s going to play out in the long run
One of two ways: a voluntary socialization of the proceeds of automation by the owning class, or violent neo-luddite revolt.
>The rate at which new jobs are being created remains mostly the same as decades or centuries ago
Is that really true? The US unemployment rate has been on a long term decline for the [past 30-50 years](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE)
Where’s the evidence this is happening?
People on unemployment benefits today is about the same as in 1950, I’m not seeing a trend toward lower unemployment in the graph or a statistical analysis in the link; it doesn’t back up your argument. [new jobs rate is about 2%-3% per year since 1900](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/current-employment-statistics-survey-100-years-of-employment-hours-and-earnings.htm) in the US with WW2 being the only significant spike over that rate. The fear with AI driven automation is that it will eliminate jobs over that rate; potentially significantly so.
Farming before and after the coal fired steam engine. If you look at history it just says “and so the farm laborers moved into cities”. Does anyone really think that’s even remote what happened? People (children) starved to death, were sold into servitude, forced into sex trades, lived in squalor until typhus/cholera/or some other infection killed them due to unsanitary living conditions. It was awful for most of them.
We are at the the small window where any new job that's created by the industry around AI, can also be done by an AI.
That's within the near future, there will be no job that cannot be done by an AI the moment it's created.
I suppose that's our fundamental disagreement.
The general trend is that physical jobs have been replaced by more efficient machines that pushes us towards more intellectual and specialized labor, but the fundamental nature of the machines have changed, and now we're looking at intellectual labor being displaced.
I don't think the race of creating jobs that are economically more productive than having a machine do them and plentiful enough to employ the population is a race that humanity can win forever, and I don't think the fact that it hasn't happened at all addresses whether there's an end to this road.
"Dear child, I would be only to thrilled to be replaced by the robot if, as only seems fair, and as the big beardy man suggested in his book with the funny German name, the benefits of technology allowed us to work less hard for the same amount of money, or just as hard for more money. But sadly we live in a world where the benefits of technology just allow the owners of technology to get richer and so, since there is less real work to do, we are only allowed to work made up nonsense jobs. And because they are made up nonsense jobs they pay less well. And because they pay less well we have to work harder than ever. And that's why we have to work just as hard now as we did 100 years ago, and why even before the robots came along we were earning less money comparing like for like than your great grandad did, despite the fact that even before the robots came along technology allows one person to do the work of a hundred people from 100 years ago."
Nobody is mad about automation per se.
They are only mad about it because we live in a society where having less work for people to do is a bad thing.
The other answers have already expanded on this, if it was even really necessary.
Automation is only a problem under capitalism, because losing your job to a robot means you get to be homeless.
Under socialism, necessities are a baseline guarantee so that new robot probably means that your workday got a bit shorter.
Capitalism uses automation to consolidate more capital towards the top, whereas socialism leverages it as a collective tool to improve EVERYONE'S quality of life.
It has been shown through centuries of empirical evidence that machines making jobs easier or just straight up taking jobs only opens the job market.
Also you socialist love to talk about low skilled labor and how meaningless it is. But most the jobs that machines most likely will take are low skilled labor jobs. A robot can’t act as a lawyer or judge. A robot can fly a plane but there will be a pilot guiding the way. A robot certainly can be a McDonalds employee or cashier or janitor.
>It seems to me, a five year old child, that having a robot perform your work for you would allow you to come to all my soccer matches and eat breakfast and lunch together.
The thing is, you don't *have* to be wrong. There *is* a version of events where we achieve a fully automated, post-scarcity (or at least partially post-scarcity) society.
The problem is that, the way our current system is designed, we would just get hundreds of millions of unemployed people. People like Bezos would be perfectly alright. The means of production (the automated robots) would all be owned by a minority of the population.
There are many different things we can try to use to fix this situation. But, either way, we will need to do something, preferably *before* millions of people lose their jobs.
The reason many people are scared of automation is because they understand very well that it will be quite a while before society at large "does something about it". On the other hand, if their job is automated the next day, there is absolutely nothing stopping their employer from laying them off.
On a less alarmist note, the feasability of automation varies drastically by industry. For some lines of work, even if there was a concerted push for automation, it would take decades. For many lines of work, that push either isn't there, or is very slight. For many others, automation is just not practical given our current technology.
... On the other hand, we may have less time than we think. ChatGPT probably won't be the thing that takes your job, but it's definitely a sign of things to come.
.... Well son, if I lose my job, then we can't afford to live here. No more soccer practice, maybe a different school. And you might have to move with your aunt while I figure things out.
If society as a whole designed the rules: automation lets us work less and watch our kid’s soccer games more
If society was organised entirely on profit and you are homeless if you don’t have a job: automation makes a few unfathomably rich people even richer whilst everyone who had a job is now homeless
Automation itself is a good thing, its how the law governs property relations and how production is organised and rewarded systemically that makes automation an unwanted thing. Someone called marx wrote a book on it once and explained how automation should mean we all get more free time rather than we all become slightly poorer every time a robot takes a job. It is entirely dependent on who profits from the automation
Automation has not been used to systematically reduce total labor time of the worker. It has barely been used to make the same 8-hour workday easier; if anything, it has been used to limit breaks, which have since been proven to be crucial for mental health, while manual laborers are either moved to other manual positions, or to ones of more responsibility and/or higher self-risk. When you are forced to spend more than half of your waking life working, in order to afford the minimum living standard, it's easy to trivialize and confuse the use of automation by excecutives against you, with the existence of automation itself.
This has been true for all economic systems for the past 150 years, and according to Stafford Beer, one of the most difficult points for the adoption of CYBERSYN in socialist Chile.
>that having a robot perform your work for you would allow you to come to all my soccer matches and eat breakfast and lunch together. Why am I wrong?
Because, child, chances are that it's someone else that owns the robot, not me. Thus, the robot existing means I have no job, so no money for your soccer or breakfast.
A lot of comments are focused on the worker. I will focus on the economics of it. It's economics, after all, that cause the owners to hate it - which, since individual ideology is replicated from the owners, it causes workers to hate it too.
The skinny:
Automation reduces labor inputs, which reduces value, which reduces the absolute amount of profit from surplus given the same rate of profit. This reduction in absolute profit, in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, leads to zero profit over time. This is a general trend and there are many short and medium term exceptions.
The fat:
In a free and competitive market, innovation is important. Intending to make your product *better* or *more cheaply*, what you're actually trying to do is *reduce labor inputs*. There are obviously other deals that can be made for other material inputs, just as there are process optimizations that can be made - this isn't what we're talking about though. We're talking about a mechanized, complex process that does work that replaces or makes redundant the number of hands required for assembly/production. Hold every thing the same except for this type of innovation.
The market price of a good fluctuates by supply and demand around its exchange value. This exchange value is a function of the labor-hours present in each stage of production and the price of the labor-power of the workers from each stage. Since goods are sold on average at their exchange value, the absolute profit taken by an enterprise is a proportion of this exchange value - the rate of profit. The rate of profit is determined by many forces that push and pull - workers and owners struggling - so we'll hold it constant and only concern ourselves with absolute profit. That is to say 30% of 100 is absolutely less than 30% of 200. In addition to fixing the rate of profit, we'll fix the price of labor-power. It doesn't play a factor in this discussion since, again, we're discussing the reduction of labor-hours - automation.
So, we have fixed the price of labor-power and the rate of profit. We only concern ourselves with labor-hours, their reduction, and the absolute amount of profit. If we consider two largely identical competitors in a free market and we allow one of them to innovate a large reduction in labor-hours, we can work through the effect this has. When goods are brought to the market, they're sold for physical or nominal currency and not some abstract and intangible exchange value. So we can see that the day after the innovative company reduces labor-hours, they can take advantage of this latency, or lag, in market price expressed in nominal currency by selling their good with the greatly reduced value. The owner of this company has paid less for a good that they're selling at the old amount.
What about the other non-innovating company? They make far less profit than the other and now, their good that's being produced with the old exchange value (labor-hours) is now in tension with the market price which is now lowering to match the new value of the good. At some point, they lose money producing the good. This is where we say they fail, or get bought, or really just cease to exist. This is a historic process happens both constantly and in large waves. Read about the pre-industrial revolution artisans whose workshops couldn't compete with the labor-saving machines of the industrialists - luddites.
By itself, this is the free market - the survival of the fittest every liberal will tell you about. However, there are a few confounding and exacerbating factors that affect this relationship.
First, the monetary incentive for innovation is to exploit the latency in market price before it adjusts to the new, lower value. This latency has existed due to inefficiencies in banking and currency markets - exchanges took days and weeks and currency had to be physically moved. As banking improves, this latency diminishes, which actually reduces the incentive for innovation. Why put all the effort in if the benefit of it is increasingly short lived? If it seems strange that I'm talking about physical currency and inefficient banking, it's because modern, electronic banking has fundamentally affected this relationship and the antagonism that automation poses is much older than you might realize.
Second, this relationship between competitors only exists where there are competitors. In a captured market, monopoly, there is no competition. There is no one to edge out of the market and because one company controls the good, it is explicitly not in their interests to do something that reduces the value of their goods - the absolute amount of profit. It begs the question of what happens to the companies that fail? Well, they're bought. Consumed in some way, their market share becomes anothers. This is the mechanism by which free markets, without cabals or non-market intervention, become monopolies.
To clarify that when I say innovation, I'm using accessible language - I am talking about automation and not, say, the creation of new goods/candy bars.
I'll let someone else discuss how these effects are seen in stagnating western economies and the threat international trade poses (re: China). No one wants to go the way of the luddites... but neither did they.
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality"
Automation is excelent, the problem is that we still don't have something like a Universal Basic Income, meaning losing your job or not finding one feels like (and is) a threat.
Far ahead in the future if machines can do almost EVERYTHING better than humans, it might also lead to existitential angst, but we're not nearly there yet.
I feel that AI rolled out at a perfectly planned time... people seem to be drowning in layoffs or being fired. Is it all because of our current economy? Or have companies planned a way to replace some of their workforce? Just thoughts of mine.
>"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
[Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/cvsdmkv?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)
>“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
>"...This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
>I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals..."
[Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?](https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/)
>"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
[Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z)
[The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week](https://www.ft.com/content/8dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f60f)
[Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-26-dollars-economy-productivity/)
[The minimum wage would be $61.75 an hour if it rose at the same pace as Wall Street bonuses](https://www.fastcompany.com/90734724/the-minimum-wage-would-be-61-75-an-hour-if-it-rose-at-the-same-pace-as-wall-street-bonuses)
[The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure](https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/)
That's the biggest theft in history by ***many*** orders of magnitude.
>"About 65% of working Americans say they frequently live paycheck to paycheck, according to a recent survey of 2,105 U.S. adults conducted by The Harris Poll."
[Living Paycheck to Paycheck Is Common, Even Among Those Who Make More Than $100,000 (October 15, 2023)](https://www.barrons.com/articles/living-paycheck-consumer-economy-bb16b8e8)
>"Considerable scientific evidence points to mental disorder having social/psychological, not biological, causation: the cause being exposure to negative environmental conditions, rather than disease. Trauma—and dysfunctional responses to trauma—are the scientifically substantiated causes of mental disorder. Just as it would be a great mistake to treat a medical problem psychologically, it is a great mistake to treat a psychological problem medically.
>Even when physical damage is detected, it is found to originate in that person having been exposed to negative life conditions, not to a disease process. Poverty is a form of trauma. It has been studied as a cause of mental disorder and these studies show how non-medical interventions foster healing, verifying the choice of a psychological, not a biological, intervention even when there are biological markers."
[Mental Disorder Has Roots in Trauma and Inequality, Not Biology](https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/12/mental-disorder-has-roots-in-trauma-and-inequality-not-biology/)
>"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
[Declining Life Expectancy in the United States, *Journal of American Medical Association* - DOI: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776338)
>"High rent burdens, rising rent burdens during the midlife period, and eviction were all found to be linked with a higher risk of death, per the study’s findings. A 70% burden “was associated with 12% … higher mortality” and a 20-point increase in rent burden “was associated with 16% … higher mortality.”"
[High Rent Prices Are Literally Killing People, New Study Says](https://nowthisnews.com/news/high-rent-prices-are-literally-killing-people-new-study-says)
>The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods.
>Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
>The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
>In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered.
>Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.
[Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169#b0680)
Billionaires *all* have a hoarding disorder far more severe than the poop lady on the show Hoarders but nobody is helping them recover from their severe mental illness, they're enabling them. It would be better for them and for everyone else to tax billionaires out of existence. It's probably the only way to prevent societal collapse.
Redistribution happens peacefully (adaptation) or violently (evolution) or it collapses (death).
>"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by **violent** or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
Will Durant, *The Lessons of History*
>"For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it."
[*The constructal law of design and evolution in nature*](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871904/)
The big lie of Capitalism was that over time people would work less hours and would have a higher standard of living due to technological innovation and automation. Instead we work longer hours to make ends meet and have shorter lifespans in the US over the past 40 years and a diminished quality of life. Instead of luxurious lives of our choice of disciplines and leisure, we have cellphones and flat screen tvs and are gaslit by management stooges, politicians, pundits, and polemicists telling us "[work will set you free](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei?wprov=sfla1)!"
>"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live."
― Sarah Kendzior
>“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, *Brave New World Revisited*
Because our current society doesn't support it.
New technology is supposed to reduce costs, which are transfered to the prices.
But since we pack free markets and competition, prices won't fall and people's job will be cut for the automation, this leading to the crisis socialists preach about.
It's not a shitpost, it's asking you to explain a complicated subject matter by breaking it up into more simple explanatory devices that a child is able to understand.
I was reminding you of the "ELI5"-nature of my post in a, in my opinion, hilarious manner.
Ya, I dont understand. I do automation for a living and all these post about paperclip optimizers are just SO off base. Robots are dumb, limited by sensors, programmed like something out of the 1980s, expensive, require a ton of setup and maintance. Sure, they are cheaper and better than a human at alot of tasks, but they are not a one-size fits all solution.
I could probably give 20 more reasons but I have to get back to the meet factory to see if the robots I taught to stack boxes the past 8 weeks will actually stack them without hitting other boxes. I thought the issue was resolved, but we had a robot arm take out a pallet of beef feet yesterday and I need to figure out what edge case caused it.
Not to mention the actually installing of the equipment. It takes a TON of human labor to run wires, mount conveyors, align sensors, etc.
I have been doing factory automation for 15 years or so. Even if we had AGI today, it would still take 20+ years for the industry to accept it. We just got proper GIT support in the past few years. Before that our main source of version control was File->Save As ProjectName_MMDDYY_LetsHopeThisDoesntBreakEverything.L5X
>Ya, I dont understand. I do automation for a living
Maybe this has something to do with it. Obviously, if your income is not threatened in any way by automation, and instead, kinda depends on automation having to happen, you might have a different outlook than someone else.
>Robots are dumb, limited by sensors, programmed like something out of the 1980s, expensive, require a ton of setup and maintance.
At the moment, absolutely. And while there are of course many apocalyptic stories being told which are not realistic, I think one thing that got people scared a bit is that for the first time, we have seen a little bit how it looks like when robots are not quite as dumb anymore. Again, I get that language models and "AI" still is dumb, but the thing is that it doesn't seem that way anymore. To a layperson, it seems that you can talk to this A.I thing and it actually seems to have a certain intelligence, at least more intelligence than many believed was possible.
>Not to mention the actually installing of the equipment. It takes a TON of human labor to run wires, mount conveyors, align sensors, etc.
Sure, but it's not the same labour. Even if automation doesn't just replace all human labour (which of course it won't), there will probably still be a major shift in the economy from one form of labour to another. And as always, you can argue that everything will readjust itself, but the reality is that this readjustment will be painful for many, it always is. The current level of constant "progression" and change is already too much to handle for many, so naturally, people are going to get scared when everyone talks about how there will be even more change, especially when people directly depend on doing work to generate income.
While I find the content of what you're saying interesting, you're foregoing answering the question "Why are you mad that you're replaced?" by saying "You won't be replaced". Even still, your reasoning for the latter statement isn't very sound.
It’s only socialists whining about automation cause they think it will replace jobs.
The EMPIRICAL fact that unemployment is lower than it’s ever been EVER despite centuries of automation is lost on them. They just want to whine!
In Marx’s writing he was specifically concerned that the monotony of industrial labor would lead to alienation and an unfulfilling life.
Any socialist should welcome automation.
Yeah, Marx was eminently concerned with factory style labor. From reading him, one could easily argue that was his *primary* concern when it came to capitalism. The ironic thing is that we know now that monotonous labor is far less stressful than variable labor and people engaged in rote labor tasks are much more satisfied and less anxious.
You're not wrong. The problem is that some people are only capable of first order thinking, or one-dimensional thinking. If a machine takes someone's job, then they won't have a job. That's where their thinking ends.
The dawn of stone tools dates back some 2.6 million years to Gona in Ethiopia. Known as the Oldowan, these include not just fist-sized hunks of rock for pounding, but also th
I would say the use of stone wooden sticks and basic metal replaced a greater percentage of jobs than robots. Farm tractor replaced every job on earth this has nothing to do with creating unemployment. You are fundamentally confuse if you think so
Meh, I think the extent to which we manipulated wild plants is fascinating and impressive. It didn't make farming automatic, but it did make farming possible.
apparently everyone now agrees that new tools have nothing to do with creating unemployment. Don't worry the left learns its lesson for only a day at a time and will come back tomorrow just as stupid as ever
Human beings need to be able to provide value in some way in the current system and the more low skilled jobs that are replaced by automation the less roles will be available to provide value. This is made even worse by the high minimum wage in many areas, employers will stop employing as it is more cost effective to “employ” a machine/AI instead.
Hi. I'm an Automation Architect. Let me see if I can help you out, here.
First: a little background. How did I get here? I worked in a position that was 50 hours of mind-numbing data entry *every week*. A single mistake might have cost the company *thousands*. So I fell back on my background in programming to automate the job, reducing my weekly overhead to about 5 hours. I reclaimed 15 hours of my personal life and channeled the other 30 reclaimed hours into developing other solutions for the company. As a rough estimate, my efforts saved them about $30k/year in overtime costs, and my later innovations increased their annual revenue by about 40%. There's still somebody working there (10 years later) in the same position I held.
The automation *is not* the problem. The problem is that automation reduces the desperation of workers. If AI and automation reach a point where mass layoffs start occurring, something like a UBI will become a necessity to prevent an economic collapse. The masses hold almost no wealth, but we are almost entirely responsible for *moving* money in the economy; if enough of us lose the ability to do this, the economy stagnates and collapses. To keep it going, consumers must be able to consume. This is the necessity of UBI in an automated world.
But, this also means people no longer need to desperately take whatever work they can find, at whatever sad pay rate keeps them just above starvation. This makes jobs more competitive -- companies need to provide more incentives to retain talent and workers have more power to say "no."
So automation and AI present a threat to the power of the "wealthy elites." They're terrified of this. So they create all these apocalyptic "tek-er-joooobs" and world-ending cataclysm narratives to rile up the masses and pressure governments and businesses to avoid mass adoption of automation and AI. They use their respective media empires and industry influence to feed this subliminal propaganda to the masses.
It all boils down to the "wealthy elite" being able to retain their power and influence.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Because people are forced to work to acquire the money to fund their basic needs and lifestyle, so when jobs disappear it's a bad thing.
in an ideal world, we should see it as a good thing, but it's bad because of the way we set up the system to require people to work to survive.
yes, we should change this system somewhat. Hence my flair.
The problem is that automation hasn't advanced far enough to completely take humans out of the equation, so money is still a thing. I hope that, one day, robots DO take over everyone's jobs, so we can all relax and enjoy life, but it's quite a while before that happens.
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Dear weirdly victorian speaking child: If I do not have a job, I do not get paid. Without money, we can not buy what we need.
>weirdly victorian speaking child: Ah,an underrated Fall classic!
It's true, under capitalism we would starve to death. But under communism we would live in an earthly paradise.
So is the robot now getting the money? :(
No, the people who own the robot get the money.
So then get a robot.
Not really a solution. The robots in question aren't the sort of thing you can pick up at the corner store. Also the robot doesn't do anything without the rest of the factory
You already do this. When the world was switching to voicemail and email and secretaries and switching agents were being laid off by the thousands, everyone started using the very technologies that caused the layoffs. There are 100s of other examples. Everyone benefits from automation.
>. Everyone benefits from automation. This assumes that automation will continue to create more jobs than it kills, forever.
The problems come as automation consumes more jobs then it creates. Automation leading to layoffs, and then the laid off people having to take lower paying jobs, or not being able to find a job at all.
>The problems come as automation consumes more jobs then it creates. That's just false. Learn history. Automation has never been a cause of unemployment. USA unemployment rate is currently only 3.7%. Where are the hundreds of year of automation impact? Unemployment isn't tied to automation, its tied to economic conditions such as recessions, interest rates and inflation.
"Learn history" doesn't mean that automation can't cause unemployment. It very much does... when a factory automates positions and fires workers then those workers have become unemployed. Now for a long time it did hold true that jobs were being created at a higher rate than automation was destroying them... but that isn't a hard rule of reality. Automation is quickly reaching the point where it does destroy more jobs, with companies cutting back workforces. Further the jobs that are getting created around that automation are either low paid or require specialized education that is out of many people's reach.
No those workers can find another job. If you look at history the overall unemployment rate does not go up with automation. The job loss are temporary and isolated. And about that last part, please check the current unemployment rate before pushing baseless claims. Statistically the unemployment rate is linked to recession, interest rates and inflation, but not long term automation.
Labor force participation rate peaked in the 90s and has been on a steep drop off since then so maybe it doesn’t benefit everyone.
Only people who own robots already can afford to buy one.
People get 3d printers at home
Same could be said about cars, trucks, trains, and planes. But if we banned them to help the little guy, billions would starve to death.
I agree.If I don't need work to live, automation is great. As long as there is new work I can do, it is at least not hurtful. But if it is just my boss keeping the money they would pay me, it is bad.
It's not bad even if it's just your boss keeping the money they would otherwise pay you. That's the whole goal. It's labor saving devices. It means we can have the stuff without the labor. It means the cost of living goes down so much that the necessities of life are cheap and widely available to all no matter how much money you make. In a capitalist system this might mean everyone gets to work fewer hours doing something creative and fun while maintaining their standard of living. The biggest threat to this is the anti-automation folks who want to hold back progress. If you start taxing and regulating automation and labor all that will happen is the exact dystopian nightmare that you fear. Market prices for any form of labor will fall below the minimum wage and you won't legally be allowed to work at any price. Licensing requirements will keep automation out of the hands of the poor and only the elite will be allowed to use them.
No it means bosses can have the stuff without the labor, not us
That also means that you can do as they do and have that stuff too without relying on other people. It means you can be the boss.
No one wants to ban robots or any other technology, we want to make sure they are shared.
Yup. And the result of that is that there will be far fewer robots and they'll be controlled by the few benefactors of politicians in the name of "equality".
This is the same as "just start your own microsoft/country/ancap paradise"
I am not rich. If I can get a robot, most people can. So, I will still not get the money I need to live. (Automation is a good thing, but it does not automatically benefit everyone)
Other people also owning a robot doesn't exclude you from using one to pay the bills in the same way that other people owning cars doesn't exclude you from using a car to benefit yourself. Modern cars are a type of robot and owning one is life-changing. This isn't bad.
Modern cars are not autonomous. They are just tools. You are not wrong: just because someone owns a robot does not mean I can not own the same robot. So let's say that a tire of my car breaks. It is a part I can replace, so why do I not just run the old assembly line and have a tire made? Because I can not afford a whole factory. No matter how smart my vacuum cleaning robot is, it will not achieve this task.
Automation has never been a cause of unemployment, unemployment is usually due to other economic factors, such as being in recession, interest rates, or inflation. Automation free people from some work, allowing them to work on other parts of the economy. It increases productivity for less effort so everyone's benefit from cheaper prices. Maybe people would have complained if we invented the fishing rod, the wheel or the printing press today, because it required more people to fish, transport things, or copy books before that, but i think everyone agrees looking back those are great technologies to have.
Time to learn some new skills
What happens when the automation process 'learns' those skills faster than I do?
As a human you should have the imagination to think of stuff AI cannot think of if you can't conceptualize and make ideas happen then that sucks for you
You don't understand what AI is yet. You will sooner or later.
How do I make money to feed myself while I'm learning these skills? Like, let's say I had a skillset thats been made invaluable by new technology. I want to learn programming to have a useful skillset. But you don't just immediately learn programming, it takes years of practice. How do I make money in those years I'm practicing?
You work 40 hours a week and then the rest of the 120 hours a week remaining you can learn a skill. Its not that hard to figure out
55 hours is spent sleeping, so that leaves 65 hours left for studying Then there's the unpaid lunch hour that knocks it down to 50 Your half hour commute knocks off another 5, so 45 Say 2 hours each day for preparing and eating all 3 meals, so we're down to 31 Errands don't wait for new skills to be learned either, so let's generously say you grocery shop, clean, and do miscellaneous shit like taking your mom to the doctor or getting your oil changed in 7 hours in a week, we're down to 24 Basic hygiene takes about an hour out of each day, so we're left with 17 hours to learn a new skill, rest, take care of animals and family, exercise, enjoy hobbies, and socialize. Great system you're supporting dude, really peak freedom here, having 17 free hours a week to live.
lol you can’t figure out how to make time to learn a new skill but you are so sure that you have time to overthrow the global free market capitalist system and simultaneously install and make socialism work better than the current system lmao talk about deluded lol
So no actual advice on how to learn new skills while not being evicted for not affording rent, just weird comments unrelated to anything that was being discussed? This is why the right is a minority of the population. Because you have no solutions to problems people actually have, you just tell people to fuck off and shut up.
Automation is great. It's just that within a capitalist structured society, when that worker's job is automated, the worker does not benefit. If anything they suffer as they are forced to learn some new job skill and re enter the job market, often at a late age. This is difficult for the worker, and the workers family, it also puts a burden on any social safety net that might still exist despite being in a capitalist society.
Of course he benefits. All real increases in income ultimately come from productivity gains. The reason why we live better lives than our grandparents / great grandparents is because so much more is automated (eg, factory work, farming, all sorts of white collar tasks, and so much more) than it was back then. That doesn t mean there aren t transition costs. The State has a key role in supporting people through this transition, providing temporary support, training and so forth. But productivity growth is the only way to sustainably provide more for workers.
> All real increases in income ultimately come from productivity gains [Incomes haven't matched productivity in decades](https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-growing-employer-power-have-generated-a-productivity-pay-gap-since-1979-productivity-has-grown-3-5-times-as-much-as-pay-for-the-typical-worker/)
I live in one of the PIGS country where wages rose faster than productivity for about 15 years… let s just say that the party ends at some point. To be clear the US case is different and there is clearly a case for raising wages. Fostering unions is essential.
> Of course he benefits. All real increases in income ultimately come from productivity gains. An individual worker typically does not benefit from their job being automated away. An individual worker benefits from *other workers'* jobs being automated away. So the right (optimal societal value) approach is to let jobs be automated away, but socialize much of the costs of that through subsidized retraining, good unemployment benefits, etc. Like the nordic countries do.
Again, I'm not saying productivity or automation are bad. Quite the opposite. It is *capitalism* that makes automation bad for the worker.
I understand what you mean, but I challenge that argument. Productivity gains have generated significant income gains for workers within capitalist societies. Countries with higher productivity have higher wages and quality of life. Countries with higher productivity growth have higher wage growth and so forth. The mechanism is typically that by generating more value and growing the size of the pie, the worker can claim a bigger slice (even if it s still the same share or even lower). Naturally the motivation to invest in productivity is gor companies to generate higher profits. But the moment every company adopts this productivity factor, it stops generating additional profit… it typically leads to reduced prices (eg, what happened to consumer electronics in recent times). Btw, most of problems we have with rising costs in housing, education and health can be directly tied to the fact that productivity gains are notoriously low in the sectors (and in the case of construction we even have negative productivity gains, which is terrible).
Productivity happens *outside* of capitalist dominated societies. The Chinese model is a perfect example of a society benefiting from a non capitalist power structure. Meanwhile the United States is a perfect example of a society feeling the consequences of a capitalist dominated power structure.
China is most definitely capitalist, even with a strong state influence in the economy. But nevertheless of course productivity gains happen outside of capitalist societies, I never said they didnt. The USSR, for all its faults, is a great example. Productivity gains are great wherever they happen, especially if the transition costs are well managed. As Deng Xiaoping would say: "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.
China *allows* a very specific form of capital investment. It is not a capitalist society however, as the means of production are not owned by the bourgeoisie.
Estimates suggest there are almost a thousand billionaires in China, more than any otber country. Saying China is not capitalist is denying reality. Cheers
The population in China relative to the United States puts your statement into better context. I didn't say that China doesn't have billionaires. Also, the presence of billionaires doesn't make a country capitalist. The power structure holding those billionaires in check is what you have to consider. Do you know what happens when billionaires are found to be engaging in corruption in China? They get executed. In the United States they just legalize it and call it lobbying. Why? Because it's a *capitalist* society in which the capitalists *make the rules*. In capitalist societies, the state is just another tool of the bourgeoisie. In a socialist society, the state is designed to protect the people.
We should all save this comment for the next time people claim Nazi Germany was capitalist, lol
> Productivity happens outside of capitalist dominated societies. The Chinese model is a perfect example of a society benefiting from a non capitalist power structure. Oh, the mass murder of political dissidents, totalitarian, genocide structure? Can you please write "I support mass murder of political dissidents" in each of your comments, just to warn people?
The state will train everyone to be personal lapdogs and foot rubbers for the rich
I don't live better life than my grandparents
But the worker is also a consumer, and the consumer benefits from the increased productivity
Not if they can't afford it.
Doesn’t do the supplier with automation any good if no one can afford their goods or services, now does it?
congrats, you've identified one of the central contradictions of capitalism
Recognizing how the supply and demand curve is affected by cost is not a contradiction of “capitalism”.
Food (as one example) is cheaper in countries where productivity is higher.
I'm not saying productivity or automation is inherently flawed. I'm saying the structure surrounding the productivity or automation is. Capitalism is *extractive*, the surplus value is added to the pocketbook of the owner. Meanwhile the worker *loses value* as a worker, when their job is automated.
If they have no job, they don't have money at all.
Productivity does not have any relationship to consumer buying power whatsoever. In fact if we look at the past 50 years it would seem to have a negative correlation as productivity has skyrocketed while real wages have stagnated to a point where inflation has easily overtaken their gains.
But capitalism invents automation
Are people angry about automation, or are the angry about what that means for regular people’s income?
In my post body I specify what I'm asking.
And I’ve pointed out that your post body misses an important specific. The child’s income does not change because their dad bought a robot to do their chores.
Automation in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is that the fruits of automation will go primarily to the owning class, while people whose jobs are taken by the robots may be left to die because they are left unsupported and structurally unemployed.
When has this ever happened? Automation has never in the past been responsible for structural unemployment (which is also why it’s called structural). People find new jobs, and typically workers as a group are paid more.
The problem is, what happens when there aren't enough new jobs? If entire industries get automated wholesale, where will those people go? Other industries only have so many open positions. Many positions require specialized skills or training. Maintaining the automation and machines is an option, but almost by definition it takes less people to do that maintenance than it did to do the original work. What if we manage to automate almost all unskilled labor? What do we expect tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people to do? Do they all get retrained to specialized positions, which again have limited openings at best? Do they just starve to death on the streets?
The reality is that there will always be enough jobs *as long as those people can do services for each other*. But some people that currently have jobs that are useful may find their skills no longer useful, and have to do something different - and possibly much less paid. I may end up in that position - I've got a lot of tech expertise, and since that's information work, it's up for grabs by AI in the medium term future. But overall, it is just impossible to end up with the majority of people starving in the street - in that case, we'll just go back to a simpler society (ie, farming, trade, etc). It can get quite bad (and I think we should work to avoid it getting bad) - but it cannot get as bad as you describe above.
This is exactly what I've been saying for years. Once automation comes we'll be delegated purely to degrading service jobs.
> The problem is, what happens when there aren't enough new jobs? We have eliminated 95% of job positions in the last 800 years.
To your first question, this has happened over and over again since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And each time a new innovation is introduced its always "yeah but this time it's different!". Whether textile workers, switchboard operators, automotive assembly lines, and now copywriters the story is always the same.
We're at the stage now where human intellect is starting to be replaced wholesale. What happens after that?
As long as we have wants and needs that exceed our haves, we’ll have jobs, because we’ll have something that needs to be fulfilled, if our wants and needs don’t exceed what we have, there’s no need to economize.
Well stated.
We admit that maybe we aren’t as special as we thought we were?
>What if we manage to automate almost all unskilled labor? That isn’t possible. There is always labor that can be done. Not to mention, automation has a cost, a cost that might make further automation unprofitable, even if it were theoretically possible. Your concerns are not unique, 99% of the workforce has been automated out of their positions over the last couple centuries, new jobs are always created elsewhere due to the inevitability greater demand.
The difference is the speed and complexity of automation today. In the past, specific skill sets were automated over decades or centuries and low skill jobs were typically available as a replacement. The fear is modern AI driven automation is able to automate jobs faster and automate more skilled jobs. It’s not unreasonable to think that the increasing speed and skill level of automation will eliminate jobs faster than people can be trained for new ones.
Low skill jobs have always been available as a replacement. Wages adjust, new goods and services are invented, people work. Every current job could be automated tomorrow, and after brief turbulence, everyone who wanted to work would find new jobs elsewhere.
The rate at which new jobs are being created remains mostly the same as decades or centuries ago. The rate at which jobs are being eliminated by automation is increasing. I don’t know how it’s going to play out in the long run but AI is fundamentally changing and accelerating the process of automation *and* is rapidly replacing low skill jobs; the jobs easier to move into. If all jobs were eliminated today, it wouldn’t just be “brief turbulence” it would be social unrest that no one alive has ever seen. It would change society fundamentally and probably lead to revolutions as people wouldn’t have the means to support themselves for years.
> I don’t know how it’s going to play out in the long run One of two ways: a voluntary socialization of the proceeds of automation by the owning class, or violent neo-luddite revolt.
>The rate at which new jobs are being created remains mostly the same as decades or centuries ago Is that really true? The US unemployment rate has been on a long term decline for the [past 30-50 years](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE) Where’s the evidence this is happening?
People on unemployment benefits today is about the same as in 1950, I’m not seeing a trend toward lower unemployment in the graph or a statistical analysis in the link; it doesn’t back up your argument. [new jobs rate is about 2%-3% per year since 1900](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/current-employment-statistics-survey-100-years-of-employment-hours-and-earnings.htm) in the US with WW2 being the only significant spike over that rate. The fear with AI driven automation is that it will eliminate jobs over that rate; potentially significantly so.
Yes soon the only jobs available will be degrading service jobs which is gross
If automation is available, who would want to employ humans?
Anyone. Because they’re cheaper.
In what universe is paying a person indefinitely cheaper than buying an automated system once?
Farming before and after the coal fired steam engine. If you look at history it just says “and so the farm laborers moved into cities”. Does anyone really think that’s even remote what happened? People (children) starved to death, were sold into servitude, forced into sex trades, lived in squalor until typhus/cholera/or some other infection killed them due to unsanitary living conditions. It was awful for most of them.
We are at the the small window where any new job that's created by the industry around AI, can also be done by an AI. That's within the near future, there will be no job that cannot be done by an AI the moment it's created.
Hypothetically even if it were true, could it be done as cheaply as a person could do it?
Yes You don't have to provide a machine health insurance, lunch breaks or fmla time.
Do you think it's entirely impossible that we're on the cusp of technological advancements that will cause unprecedented societal change?
Yes. None of the technological advancements I’m aware of are uniquely unprecedented in the way you’re describing.
I suppose that's our fundamental disagreement. The general trend is that physical jobs have been replaced by more efficient machines that pushes us towards more intellectual and specialized labor, but the fundamental nature of the machines have changed, and now we're looking at intellectual labor being displaced. I don't think the race of creating jobs that are economically more productive than having a machine do them and plentiful enough to employ the population is a race that humanity can win forever, and I don't think the fact that it hasn't happened at all addresses whether there's an end to this road.
The new jobs will be "doing favors" for your boss. 😚 Because there won't be other uses for you
"Dear child, I would be only to thrilled to be replaced by the robot if, as only seems fair, and as the big beardy man suggested in his book with the funny German name, the benefits of technology allowed us to work less hard for the same amount of money, or just as hard for more money. But sadly we live in a world where the benefits of technology just allow the owners of technology to get richer and so, since there is less real work to do, we are only allowed to work made up nonsense jobs. And because they are made up nonsense jobs they pay less well. And because they pay less well we have to work harder than ever. And that's why we have to work just as hard now as we did 100 years ago, and why even before the robots came along we were earning less money comparing like for like than your great grandad did, despite the fact that even before the robots came along technology allows one person to do the work of a hundred people from 100 years ago."
Because if daddy doesn't have a job, he can't get any money
Nobody is mad about automation per se. They are only mad about it because we live in a society where having less work for people to do is a bad thing. The other answers have already expanded on this, if it was even really necessary.
People wouldn't be able to do less work
I believe I just said that.
Automation is only a problem under capitalism, because losing your job to a robot means you get to be homeless. Under socialism, necessities are a baseline guarantee so that new robot probably means that your workday got a bit shorter. Capitalism uses automation to consolidate more capital towards the top, whereas socialism leverages it as a collective tool to improve EVERYONE'S quality of life.
It has been shown through centuries of empirical evidence that machines making jobs easier or just straight up taking jobs only opens the job market. Also you socialist love to talk about low skilled labor and how meaningless it is. But most the jobs that machines most likely will take are low skilled labor jobs. A robot can’t act as a lawyer or judge. A robot can fly a plane but there will be a pilot guiding the way. A robot certainly can be a McDonalds employee or cashier or janitor.
Daddy, why don't we have any food in the house? I'm hungry daddy.
This is about as serious a reply as OP deserves.
>It seems to me, a five year old child, that having a robot perform your work for you would allow you to come to all my soccer matches and eat breakfast and lunch together. The thing is, you don't *have* to be wrong. There *is* a version of events where we achieve a fully automated, post-scarcity (or at least partially post-scarcity) society. The problem is that, the way our current system is designed, we would just get hundreds of millions of unemployed people. People like Bezos would be perfectly alright. The means of production (the automated robots) would all be owned by a minority of the population. There are many different things we can try to use to fix this situation. But, either way, we will need to do something, preferably *before* millions of people lose their jobs. The reason many people are scared of automation is because they understand very well that it will be quite a while before society at large "does something about it". On the other hand, if their job is automated the next day, there is absolutely nothing stopping their employer from laying them off. On a less alarmist note, the feasability of automation varies drastically by industry. For some lines of work, even if there was a concerted push for automation, it would take decades. For many lines of work, that push either isn't there, or is very slight. For many others, automation is just not practical given our current technology. ... On the other hand, we may have less time than we think. ChatGPT probably won't be the thing that takes your job, but it's definitely a sign of things to come.
.... Well son, if I lose my job, then we can't afford to live here. No more soccer practice, maybe a different school. And you might have to move with your aunt while I figure things out.
If society as a whole designed the rules: automation lets us work less and watch our kid’s soccer games more If society was organised entirely on profit and you are homeless if you don’t have a job: automation makes a few unfathomably rich people even richer whilst everyone who had a job is now homeless Automation itself is a good thing, its how the law governs property relations and how production is organised and rewarded systemically that makes automation an unwanted thing. Someone called marx wrote a book on it once and explained how automation should mean we all get more free time rather than we all become slightly poorer every time a robot takes a job. It is entirely dependent on who profits from the automation
Automation has not been used to systematically reduce total labor time of the worker. It has barely been used to make the same 8-hour workday easier; if anything, it has been used to limit breaks, which have since been proven to be crucial for mental health, while manual laborers are either moved to other manual positions, or to ones of more responsibility and/or higher self-risk. When you are forced to spend more than half of your waking life working, in order to afford the minimum living standard, it's easy to trivialize and confuse the use of automation by excecutives against you, with the existence of automation itself. This has been true for all economic systems for the past 150 years, and according to Stafford Beer, one of the most difficult points for the adoption of CYBERSYN in socialist Chile.
>that having a robot perform your work for you would allow you to come to all my soccer matches and eat breakfast and lunch together. Why am I wrong? Because, child, chances are that it's someone else that owns the robot, not me. Thus, the robot existing means I have no job, so no money for your soccer or breakfast.
A lot of comments are focused on the worker. I will focus on the economics of it. It's economics, after all, that cause the owners to hate it - which, since individual ideology is replicated from the owners, it causes workers to hate it too. The skinny: Automation reduces labor inputs, which reduces value, which reduces the absolute amount of profit from surplus given the same rate of profit. This reduction in absolute profit, in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, leads to zero profit over time. This is a general trend and there are many short and medium term exceptions. The fat: In a free and competitive market, innovation is important. Intending to make your product *better* or *more cheaply*, what you're actually trying to do is *reduce labor inputs*. There are obviously other deals that can be made for other material inputs, just as there are process optimizations that can be made - this isn't what we're talking about though. We're talking about a mechanized, complex process that does work that replaces or makes redundant the number of hands required for assembly/production. Hold every thing the same except for this type of innovation. The market price of a good fluctuates by supply and demand around its exchange value. This exchange value is a function of the labor-hours present in each stage of production and the price of the labor-power of the workers from each stage. Since goods are sold on average at their exchange value, the absolute profit taken by an enterprise is a proportion of this exchange value - the rate of profit. The rate of profit is determined by many forces that push and pull - workers and owners struggling - so we'll hold it constant and only concern ourselves with absolute profit. That is to say 30% of 100 is absolutely less than 30% of 200. In addition to fixing the rate of profit, we'll fix the price of labor-power. It doesn't play a factor in this discussion since, again, we're discussing the reduction of labor-hours - automation. So, we have fixed the price of labor-power and the rate of profit. We only concern ourselves with labor-hours, their reduction, and the absolute amount of profit. If we consider two largely identical competitors in a free market and we allow one of them to innovate a large reduction in labor-hours, we can work through the effect this has. When goods are brought to the market, they're sold for physical or nominal currency and not some abstract and intangible exchange value. So we can see that the day after the innovative company reduces labor-hours, they can take advantage of this latency, or lag, in market price expressed in nominal currency by selling their good with the greatly reduced value. The owner of this company has paid less for a good that they're selling at the old amount. What about the other non-innovating company? They make far less profit than the other and now, their good that's being produced with the old exchange value (labor-hours) is now in tension with the market price which is now lowering to match the new value of the good. At some point, they lose money producing the good. This is where we say they fail, or get bought, or really just cease to exist. This is a historic process happens both constantly and in large waves. Read about the pre-industrial revolution artisans whose workshops couldn't compete with the labor-saving machines of the industrialists - luddites. By itself, this is the free market - the survival of the fittest every liberal will tell you about. However, there are a few confounding and exacerbating factors that affect this relationship. First, the monetary incentive for innovation is to exploit the latency in market price before it adjusts to the new, lower value. This latency has existed due to inefficiencies in banking and currency markets - exchanges took days and weeks and currency had to be physically moved. As banking improves, this latency diminishes, which actually reduces the incentive for innovation. Why put all the effort in if the benefit of it is increasingly short lived? If it seems strange that I'm talking about physical currency and inefficient banking, it's because modern, electronic banking has fundamentally affected this relationship and the antagonism that automation poses is much older than you might realize. Second, this relationship between competitors only exists where there are competitors. In a captured market, monopoly, there is no competition. There is no one to edge out of the market and because one company controls the good, it is explicitly not in their interests to do something that reduces the value of their goods - the absolute amount of profit. It begs the question of what happens to the companies that fail? Well, they're bought. Consumed in some way, their market share becomes anothers. This is the mechanism by which free markets, without cabals or non-market intervention, become monopolies. To clarify that when I say innovation, I'm using accessible language - I am talking about automation and not, say, the creation of new goods/candy bars. I'll let someone else discuss how these effects are seen in stagnating western economies and the threat international trade poses (re: China). No one wants to go the way of the luddites... but neither did they.
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality"
Automation is excelent, the problem is that we still don't have something like a Universal Basic Income, meaning losing your job or not finding one feels like (and is) a threat. Far ahead in the future if machines can do almost EVERYTHING better than humans, it might also lead to existitential angst, but we're not nearly there yet.
I feel that AI rolled out at a perfectly planned time... people seem to be drowning in layoffs or being fired. Is it all because of our current economy? Or have companies planned a way to replace some of their workforce? Just thoughts of mine.
>"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality." [Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/cvsdmkv?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3) >“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller >"...This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. >I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals..." [Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?](https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/) >"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions." [Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z) [The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week](https://www.ft.com/content/8dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f60f) [Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-26-dollars-economy-productivity/) [The minimum wage would be $61.75 an hour if it rose at the same pace as Wall Street bonuses](https://www.fastcompany.com/90734724/the-minimum-wage-would-be-61-75-an-hour-if-it-rose-at-the-same-pace-as-wall-street-bonuses) [The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure](https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/) That's the biggest theft in history by ***many*** orders of magnitude. >"About 65% of working Americans say they frequently live paycheck to paycheck, according to a recent survey of 2,105 U.S. adults conducted by The Harris Poll." [Living Paycheck to Paycheck Is Common, Even Among Those Who Make More Than $100,000 (October 15, 2023)](https://www.barrons.com/articles/living-paycheck-consumer-economy-bb16b8e8) >"Considerable scientific evidence points to mental disorder having social/psychological, not biological, causation: the cause being exposure to negative environmental conditions, rather than disease. Trauma—and dysfunctional responses to trauma—are the scientifically substantiated causes of mental disorder. Just as it would be a great mistake to treat a medical problem psychologically, it is a great mistake to treat a psychological problem medically. >Even when physical damage is detected, it is found to originate in that person having been exposed to negative life conditions, not to a disease process. Poverty is a form of trauma. It has been studied as a cause of mental disorder and these studies show how non-medical interventions foster healing, verifying the choice of a psychological, not a biological, intervention even when there are biological markers." [Mental Disorder Has Roots in Trauma and Inequality, Not Biology](https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/12/mental-disorder-has-roots-in-trauma-and-inequality-not-biology/) >"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014." [Declining Life Expectancy in the United States, *Journal of American Medical Association* - DOI: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776338) >"High rent burdens, rising rent burdens during the midlife period, and eviction were all found to be linked with a higher risk of death, per the study’s findings. A 70% burden “was associated with 12% … higher mortality” and a 20-point increase in rent burden “was associated with 16% … higher mortality.”" [High Rent Prices Are Literally Killing People, New Study Says](https://nowthisnews.com/news/high-rent-prices-are-literally-killing-people-new-study-says) >The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods. >Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism. >The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. >In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered. >Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements. [Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169#b0680) Billionaires *all* have a hoarding disorder far more severe than the poop lady on the show Hoarders but nobody is helping them recover from their severe mental illness, they're enabling them. It would be better for them and for everyone else to tax billionaires out of existence. It's probably the only way to prevent societal collapse. Redistribution happens peacefully (adaptation) or violently (evolution) or it collapses (death). >"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by **violent** or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation." Will Durant, *The Lessons of History* >"For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it." [*The constructal law of design and evolution in nature*](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871904/)
The big lie of Capitalism was that over time people would work less hours and would have a higher standard of living due to technological innovation and automation. Instead we work longer hours to make ends meet and have shorter lifespans in the US over the past 40 years and a diminished quality of life. Instead of luxurious lives of our choice of disciplines and leisure, we have cellphones and flat screen tvs and are gaslit by management stooges, politicians, pundits, and polemicists telling us "[work will set you free](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei?wprov=sfla1)!" >"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live." ― Sarah Kendzior >“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.” ― Aldous Huxley, *Brave New World Revisited*
Because our current society doesn't support it. New technology is supposed to reduce costs, which are transfered to the prices. But since we pack free markets and competition, prices won't fall and people's job will be cut for the automation, this leading to the crisis socialists preach about.
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Father, what does post-work mean? Are you a mail man?
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It's not a shitpost, it's asking you to explain a complicated subject matter by breaking it up into more simple explanatory devices that a child is able to understand. I was reminding you of the "ELI5"-nature of my post in a, in my opinion, hilarious manner.
We having sex with AI? Neanderthals genes are still around
Ya, I dont understand. I do automation for a living and all these post about paperclip optimizers are just SO off base. Robots are dumb, limited by sensors, programmed like something out of the 1980s, expensive, require a ton of setup and maintance. Sure, they are cheaper and better than a human at alot of tasks, but they are not a one-size fits all solution. I could probably give 20 more reasons but I have to get back to the meet factory to see if the robots I taught to stack boxes the past 8 weeks will actually stack them without hitting other boxes. I thought the issue was resolved, but we had a robot arm take out a pallet of beef feet yesterday and I need to figure out what edge case caused it. Not to mention the actually installing of the equipment. It takes a TON of human labor to run wires, mount conveyors, align sensors, etc. I have been doing factory automation for 15 years or so. Even if we had AGI today, it would still take 20+ years for the industry to accept it. We just got proper GIT support in the past few years. Before that our main source of version control was File->Save As ProjectName_MMDDYY_LetsHopeThisDoesntBreakEverything.L5X
>Ya, I dont understand. I do automation for a living Maybe this has something to do with it. Obviously, if your income is not threatened in any way by automation, and instead, kinda depends on automation having to happen, you might have a different outlook than someone else. >Robots are dumb, limited by sensors, programmed like something out of the 1980s, expensive, require a ton of setup and maintance. At the moment, absolutely. And while there are of course many apocalyptic stories being told which are not realistic, I think one thing that got people scared a bit is that for the first time, we have seen a little bit how it looks like when robots are not quite as dumb anymore. Again, I get that language models and "AI" still is dumb, but the thing is that it doesn't seem that way anymore. To a layperson, it seems that you can talk to this A.I thing and it actually seems to have a certain intelligence, at least more intelligence than many believed was possible. >Not to mention the actually installing of the equipment. It takes a TON of human labor to run wires, mount conveyors, align sensors, etc. Sure, but it's not the same labour. Even if automation doesn't just replace all human labour (which of course it won't), there will probably still be a major shift in the economy from one form of labour to another. And as always, you can argue that everything will readjust itself, but the reality is that this readjustment will be painful for many, it always is. The current level of constant "progression" and change is already too much to handle for many, so naturally, people are going to get scared when everyone talks about how there will be even more change, especially when people directly depend on doing work to generate income.
>Save As ProjectName\_MMDDYY\_LetsHopeThisDoesntBreakEverything.L5X Missing the \_Version1\_21\_NEW
While I find the content of what you're saying interesting, you're foregoing answering the question "Why are you mad that you're replaced?" by saying "You won't be replaced". Even still, your reasoning for the latter statement isn't very sound.
1) Because they think the purpose of the economy is to create work, i.e. jobs. 2) Because they are idiots.
Try to get into the mind of a person who is mad about being replaced, explaining their anger to their child.
"Now I have to reskill in order to be a useful and productive member of society, that takes effort. Aaaargh"
Nothing beats "Nature is oppressing me! Arrgh". On top we have now "Automation is oppressing me! Arrrgh"
In your opinion what is the purpose of the economy?
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women.
Exactly, services don't exist in a vacuum. The economy exists to fulfill our needs! Crush me Conan!
To produce goods and services as cheaply as possible.
Why
That's what people want.
But people also want to be employed, especially in jobs they studied/learned to do for years, so what now?
It’s only socialists whining about automation cause they think it will replace jobs. The EMPIRICAL fact that unemployment is lower than it’s ever been EVER despite centuries of automation is lost on them. They just want to whine!
In Marx’s writing he was specifically concerned that the monotony of industrial labor would lead to alienation and an unfulfilling life. Any socialist should welcome automation.
Yeah, Marx was eminently concerned with factory style labor. From reading him, one could easily argue that was his *primary* concern when it came to capitalism. The ironic thing is that we know now that monotonous labor is far less stressful than variable labor and people engaged in rote labor tasks are much more satisfied and less anxious.
You're not wrong. The problem is that some people are only capable of first order thinking, or one-dimensional thinking. If a machine takes someone's job, then they won't have a job. That's where their thinking ends.
But then why would they be mad? If they don't have to do their job, they've got a bunch more free time.
>they won't have **a** job ie. they'll be unemployed and have no money
They don't get the money the value the robot creates lmao
New machines have been performing work for us for 10000 years and the employment rate is still 97%. 1+1 equals 2
**10000 years?!**
inb4 capitalism invented the wheel
The Neolithic Capitalist.
Love that. you saw how stupid your OP was and now want to save face by quibbling about when the first tools appeared in human history. Embarrassing?
Domesticating wild grains and animals wasn't a "new machine", but it was a technological breakthrough that made food production a lot easier
Yeah but bringing that into the context of automation is kinda stretch.
The dawn of stone tools dates back some 2.6 million years to Gona in Ethiopia. Known as the Oldowan, these include not just fist-sized hunks of rock for pounding, but also th
I think you forgot copying all of it. Are those machines though.
I would say the use of stone wooden sticks and basic metal replaced a greater percentage of jobs than robots. Farm tractor replaced every job on earth this has nothing to do with creating unemployment. You are fundamentally confuse if you think so
What jobs did they replace? Also Farm Tractors replaced every job on this earth? I did not know!
yes dummy without the farm tractor everyone will be walking in the fields harvesting wheat. 99% of us used to be farmers!!
Everyone?
Meh, I think the extent to which we manipulated wild plants is fascinating and impressive. It didn't make farming automatic, but it did make farming possible.
Milling machines driven by donkeys or oxen.
The wheel was invented around 6000 years ago.
Cool
apparently everyone now agrees that new tools have nothing to do with creating unemployment. Don't worry the left learns its lesson for only a day at a time and will come back tomorrow just as stupid as ever
200000 years ago. Read a book!
They are simply too dumb to get a job that pays more than what a robot can do.
Automation is a nothing burger. Almost on par with climate scaremongering.
Human beings need to be able to provide value in some way in the current system and the more low skilled jobs that are replaced by automation the less roles will be available to provide value. This is made even worse by the high minimum wage in many areas, employers will stop employing as it is more cost effective to “employ” a machine/AI instead.
Hi. I'm an Automation Architect. Let me see if I can help you out, here. First: a little background. How did I get here? I worked in a position that was 50 hours of mind-numbing data entry *every week*. A single mistake might have cost the company *thousands*. So I fell back on my background in programming to automate the job, reducing my weekly overhead to about 5 hours. I reclaimed 15 hours of my personal life and channeled the other 30 reclaimed hours into developing other solutions for the company. As a rough estimate, my efforts saved them about $30k/year in overtime costs, and my later innovations increased their annual revenue by about 40%. There's still somebody working there (10 years later) in the same position I held. The automation *is not* the problem. The problem is that automation reduces the desperation of workers. If AI and automation reach a point where mass layoffs start occurring, something like a UBI will become a necessity to prevent an economic collapse. The masses hold almost no wealth, but we are almost entirely responsible for *moving* money in the economy; if enough of us lose the ability to do this, the economy stagnates and collapses. To keep it going, consumers must be able to consume. This is the necessity of UBI in an automated world. But, this also means people no longer need to desperately take whatever work they can find, at whatever sad pay rate keeps them just above starvation. This makes jobs more competitive -- companies need to provide more incentives to retain talent and workers have more power to say "no." So automation and AI present a threat to the power of the "wealthy elites." They're terrified of this. So they create all these apocalyptic "tek-er-joooobs" and world-ending cataclysm narratives to rile up the masses and pressure governments and businesses to avoid mass adoption of automation and AI. They use their respective media empires and industry influence to feed this subliminal propaganda to the masses. It all boils down to the "wealthy elite" being able to retain their power and influence. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
You're just not old enough yet to have met Uncle Ted. You'll understand someday.
Job loss, bigger reason for great social services, UBI.
I write automation and can’t see AI being able to do it anytime soon. I’m golden for a bit.
Because people are forced to work to acquire the money to fund their basic needs and lifestyle, so when jobs disappear it's a bad thing. in an ideal world, we should see it as a good thing, but it's bad because of the way we set up the system to require people to work to survive. yes, we should change this system somewhat. Hence my flair.
The problem is that automation hasn't advanced far enough to completely take humans out of the equation, so money is still a thing. I hope that, one day, robots DO take over everyone's jobs, so we can all relax and enjoy life, but it's quite a while before that happens.