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Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; MY FAVORITE GAME OF ALL TIME IS SUPERMAN 64

The Washington Post has a story on the latest generation of robotic innovations. Taken in conjunction with the development of 3D Printing technology it is starting to appear that we are in the early stages of a revolutionary new production paradigm. In retrospect we may see the next few years as an important inflection point in the history of our mode of production.

This day has been anticipated for some time, as I will note below. Most commemorators in the past, however, would be shocked to discover the social conditions that appear to be accompanying the present rise of automation.

Here's the piece in the Washington Post.

The Washington Post posted:

New robots in the workplace: Job creators or job terminators?

BOSTON — At MIT, a management robot is learning to run a factory and give orders to artificial co-workers, and a BakeBot robot is reading recipes, whipping together butter, sugar and flour and putting the cookie mix in the oven. At the University of California at Berkeley, a robot can do laundry and then neatly fold T-shirts and towels.

A wave of new robots, affordable and capable of accomplishing advanced human tasks, is being aimed at jobs that are high in the workforce hierarchy.

The consequences of this leap in technology loom large for the American worker — and perhaps their managers, too. Back in the 1980s, when automated spray-painting and welding machines took hold in factories, some on the assembly line quickly discovered they had become obsolete.

Today’s robots can do far more than their primitive, single-task ancestors. And there is a broad debate among economists, labor experts and companies over whether the trend will add good-paying jobs to the economy by helping firms run more efficiently or simply leave human workers out in the cold.

(Weigh in: Should American workers worry about the growing presence of robots in the workforce?)

“We’ve reached a tipping point in robotics,” said Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The possibility is to run a factory, she added, “all while you are sleeping.”

U.S. firms have already begun deploying some of these newer robots. General Electric has developed spiderlike robots to climb and maintain tall wind turbines. Kiva Systems, a company bought by Amazon.com, has orange ottoman-shaped robots that sweep across warehouse floors, pull products off shelves and deliver them for packaging. Some hospitals have begun employing robots that can move room to room to dispense medicines to patients or deliver the advice of a doctor who is not on site.

Many companies see such automation as the key to cutting costs and staying competitive. Sales of industrial robots rose 38 percent between 2010 and 2012 and are poised to bring in record revenue this year, according to industry analyst Dan Kara.

“There will certainly be winners and losers,” said Ryan Calo, a professor of law at the University of Washington who focuses on robotics and public policy. “We’re talking about robots now because they are so versatile and affordable, and that will have profound effects on manufacturing, the entire supply chain and jobs.”

(READ: One innovation trend for 2013: Manufacturing jobs continue to return to the U.S.)

Already on the market is Baxter, a robot developed by a former director of MIT’s lab. It launched in September and is being used by plastics and metal manufacturing firms. With red plastic arms and a cartoon face, it can do the job of two or more workers, simultaneously unpacking pipe fittings from a conveyer belt while it weighs and places mirrors into boxes. When a human blocks its path, Baxter stops, its eyes widen, and then it courteously gets out of the way.

The price tag: $22,000.

The adoption of this technology is taking place even as many Americans, particularly those who are seeking blue-collar work, are struggling to find jobs that pay a middle-class wage. Many of them have seen little improvement in their lives even four years after the Great Recession ended.

Andy McAfee, a fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, notes that companies are getting more productive without hiring more workers. Since the end of 2001, the nation’s gross domestic product has risen about 20 percent. Meanwhile, the number of hours worked has gone up by only 2.8 percent and the total number of U.S. jobs has increased just 1.9 percent.

“Those latter two numbers are pretty close to zero. Is it so hard to believe that a realistic future combination of fast automation and relatively slow GDP growth could cause them to turn negative?” asked a recent blog post by McAfee, who co-wrote “Race Against the Machine,” a book about how Internet technology is altering labor markets.

But the International Federation of Robotics said in a study last month that paid employment has increased in countries that are the biggest users of industrial robots. For all the jobs lost in manufacturing, others have to be created in distribution and services, the report says.

Marlin Steel, a company in Baltimore, said it has increased its staff from 18 to 34 people in the past seven years because it began using robots to produce wire baskets that it sells to carmakers and pharmaceutical firms. The new positions are administrators and sales and marketing staffers, as well as engineers at its Baltimore factory.

“It’s a virtuous cycle. We are shipping great-quality products fast due to robots, and that in turn means more jobs,” said Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel.

But the math on job losses and gains due to new technology is a fuzzy science and highly subjective, other companies say.

Lear, a major auto-parts maker near Detroit with nearly $15 billion in annual revenue, says it uses robots developed by the Danish firm Universal Robotics to help screw together seats and put together electronic dashboards. The tasks require precision in a fast-moving environment.

Humans could do the job best, but Lear officials say they have to use robots for the company to survive.

“We use them to stay competitive and to keep core employment for everyone,” said Mel Stephens, a spokesman for Lear. “Does this lead to more jobs or job losses? I think you would be able to find numbers that support either thesis.”

Baxter’s creator, Rethink Robotics, says there will always be a need for humans in manufacturing.

The company designed Baxter to work alongside people. Its cartoon face changes expressions to warn people what it is doing. When it is interrupted, a confused look comes across its face. It appears sad when it is shut down.

By using cameras no more sophisticated than those in smartphones and with technology used in video game consoles such as the Xbox Kinect, it can sense when people are nearby or in its way. And it can be reprogrammed easily by guiding its arms to new tasks and pushing a few buttons.

Rethink counts Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as an investor, but both firms declined to comment on whether the online retailing giant will begin to use the robot.

These days, Rethink chief executive Scott Eckert spends his time defending his industry against critics who decry robots as job-killers. He said the firm is targeting 300,000 small businesses that can afford his product.

Without his robots, Eckert said, many of these companies might simply look overseas for manufacturing. But now it has become cheaper to buy a factory robot, he said.

“We want to bring U.S. manufacturing back and at least slow or stop the trend of people leaving the field,” he said.“Those latter two numbers are pretty close to zero. Is it so hard to believe that a realistic future combination of fast automation and relatively slow GDP growth could cause them to turn negative?” asked a recent blog post by McAfee, who co-wrote “Race Against the Machine,” a book about how Internet technology is altering labor markets.

But the International Federation of Robotics said in a study last month that paid employment has increased in countries that are the biggest users of industrial robots. For all the jobs lost in manufacturing, others have to be created in distribution and services, the report says.

Marlin Steel, a company in Baltimore, said it has increased its staff from 18 to 34 people in the past seven years because it began using robots to produce wire baskets that it sells to carmakers and pharmaceutical firms. The new positions are administrators and sales and marketing staffers, as well as engineers at its Baltimore factory.

“It’s a virtuous cycle. We are shipping great-quality products fast due to robots, and that in turn means more jobs,” said Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel.

But the math on job losses and gains due to new technology is a fuzzy science and highly subjective, other companies say.

Lear, a major auto-parts maker near Detroit with nearly $15 billion in annual revenue, says it uses robots developed by the Danish firm Universal Robotics to help screw together seats and put together electronic dashboards. The tasks require precision in a fast-moving environment.

Humans could do the job best, but Lear officials say they have to use robots for the company to survive.

“We use them to stay competitive and to keep core employment for everyone,” said Mel Stephens, a spokesman for Lear. “Does this lead to more jobs or job losses? I think you would be able to find numbers that support either thesis.”

Baxter’s creator, Rethink Robotics, says there will always be a need for humans in manufacturing.

The company designed Baxter to work alongside people. Its cartoon face changes expressions to warn people what it is doing. When it is interrupted, a confused look comes across its face. It appears sad when it is shut down.

By using cameras no more sophisticated than those in smartphones and with technology used in video game consoles such as the Xbox Kinect, it can sense when people are nearby or in its way. And it can be reprogrammed easily by guiding its arms to new tasks and pushing a few buttons.

Rethink counts Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as an investor, but both firms declined to comment on whether the online retailing giant will begin to use the robot.

These days, Rethink chief executive Scott Eckert spends his time defending his industry against critics who decry robots as job-killers. He said the firm is targeting 300,000 small businesses that can afford his product.

Without his robots, Eckert said, many of these companies might simply look overseas for manufacturing. But now it has become cheaper to buy a factory robot, he said.

“We want to bring U.S. manufacturing back and at least slow or stop the trend of people leaving the field,” he said.

In a fascinating essay writen in 1930, John Maynard Keynes tried to forecast the [url=http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf"Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren".[/url] Writing in the depths of the Depression Keynes manages to sound, to those of us reading him eighty three years later, at turns eerily prescient and damnably naive.

I'll only post excerpts from the tract, but its brief and well worth reading in full.

J. M. Smith, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren posted:

If capital increases, say, 2 per cent per annum, the capital equipment of the
world will have increased by a half in twenty years, and seven and a half times
in a hundred years. Think of this in terms of material things--houses, transport,
and the like.

At the same time technical improvements in manufacture and transport have
been proceeding at a greater rate in the last ten years than ever before in
history. In the United States factory output per head was 40 per cent greater in
1925 than in 1919. In Europe we are held back by temporary obstacles, but
even so it is safe to say that technical efficiency is increasing by more than 1
per cent per annum compound. There is evidence that the revolutionary
technical changes, which have so far chiefly affected industry, may soon be
attacking agriculture. We may be on the eve of improvements in the efficiency
of food production as great as those which have already taken place in mining,
manufacture, and transport. In quite a few years-in our own lifetimes I
mean-we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and
manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been
accustomed.

For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing
difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively which are
not in the vanguard of progress. We are being afflicted with a new disease of
which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will
hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment.
This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the
use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long
run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the
standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be
between four and eight times as high as it is to-day. There would be nothing
surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be
foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still.

quote:

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his
permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares,
how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won
for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

quote:

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years
we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair;
for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our
gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of
economic necessity into daylight.

I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change
which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings
in the aggregate. But, of course, it will all happen gradually, not as a
catastrophe. Indeed, it has already begun. The course of affairs will simply be
that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from
whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed. The
critical difference will be realised when this condition has become so general
that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed. For it will remain
reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be
reasonable for oneself.

The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be
governed by four things-our power to control population, our determination to
avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the
direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the
rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our
consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.

In a sense this essay demarcates one of the crucial turning points in the history of liberalism. Liberals had once been outsiders challenging the establishment, but by the end of the Second World War they had developed a new role for themselves as moderate anti-communists. A crucial component of this new moderation within liberalism was the assumption that perpetual economic growth would replace the need for revolution. Or as Keynes put it:

quote:

I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so
much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time-the pessimism
of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us
but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the
balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no
experiments.

This middle ground was a key component of the postwar liberal ethos. It is, in a sense, the real dividing line down to this day between a left liberal and a radical.

That is why I found this recent series of posts by prominent liberal and Keynesian Paul Krugman on the economic implications of robots.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (krugman.blogs.nytimes.com), Rise of the Robots, Dec. 9 2012 posted:

Robots mean that labor costs don’t matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that’s another issue). On the other hand, it’s not good news for workers!

This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing about globalization and inequality, capital bias didn’t look like a big issue; the major changes in income distribution had been among workers (when you include hedge fund managers and CEOs among the workers), rather than between labor and capital. So the academic literature focused almost exclusively on “skill bias”, supposedly explaining the rising college premium.

But the college premium hasn’t risen for a while. What has happened, on the other hand, is a notable shift in income away from labor:

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society”, or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.

I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.

But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications.

He followed up with a more technical blog post working through some simple conceptual models.

Personally I don't share Krugman's methodological approach to economics, which is heavily dependent on abstract models with really questionable assumptions (such as the assumption below that workers get their marginal product). But that is beside the point in this case:

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (krugman.blogs.nytimes.com), Capital-biased Technological Progress: An Example (Wonkish), Dec. 26 2012 posted:

Ever since I posted about robots and the distribution of income, I’ve had queries from readers about what capital-biased technological change – the kind of change that could make society richer but workers poorer –really means. And it occurred to me that it might be useful to offer a simple conceptual example – the kind of thing easily turned into a numerical example as well – to clarify the possibility. So here goes.

Imagine that there are only two ways to produce output. One is a labor-intensive method – say, armies of scribes equipped only with quill pens. The other is a capital-intensive method – say, a handful of technicians maintaining vast server farms. (I’m thinking in terms of office work, which is the dominant occupation in the modern economy).

We can represent these two techniques in terms of unit inputs – the amount of each factor of production required to produce one unit of output. In the figure below I’ve assumed that initially the capital-intensive technique requires 0.2 units of labor and 0.8 units of capital per unit of output, while the labor-intensive technique requires 0.8 units of labor and 0.2 units of capital.

The economy as a whole can make use of both techniques – in fact, it will have to unless it has either a very large amount of capital per worker or a very small amount. No problem: we can just use a mix of the two techniques to achieve any input combination along the blue line in the figure. For economists reading this, yes, that’s the unit isoquant in this example; obviously if we had a bunch more techniques it would start to look like the convex curve of textbooks, but I want to stay simple here.

What will the distribution of income be in this case? Assuming perfect competition (yes, I know, but let’s deal with that case for now), the real wage rate w and the cost of capital r – both measured in terms of output – have to be such that the cost of producing one unit is 1 whichever technique you use. In this example, that means w=r=1. Graphically, by the way, w/r is equal to minus the slope of the blue line.

Oh, and if you’re worried, yes, workers and machines are both paid their marginal product.

But now suppose that technology improves – specifically, that production using the capital-intensive technique gets more efficient, although the labor-intensive technique doesn’t. Scribes with quill pens are the same as they ever were; server farms can do more than ever before. In the figure, I’ve assumed that the unit inputs for the capital-intensive technique are cut in half. The red line shows the economy’s new choices.

So what happens? It’s obvious from the figure that wages fall relative to the cost of capital; it’s less obvious, maybe, but nonetheless true that real wages must fall in absolute terms as well. In this specific example, technological progress reduces the real wage by a third, to 0.667, while the cost of capital rises to 2.33.

OK, it’s obvious how stylized and oversimplified all this is. But it does, I think, give you some sense of what it would mean to have capital-biased technological progress, and how this could actually hurt workers.

Our grandparents generation thought that once we achieved the level of automation that is now technically feasible we'd all be working five hour weeks and everyone would be middle class. Instead the coming of automation is widely feared as the final death knell for the already imperilled middle class. Something truly perverse and strange is happening here.

Instead of celebrating the rise of automation, workers are (rationally) afraid of it. That's because the technological solutions to our economic problems are being deployed in an era of intense class antagonism and struggle. We simply cannot escape the reality that a society where one percent of the population control almost half the wealth will inevitably create conditions of economic servitude for the masses. This was Keynes error. When he outlined the four conditions he believed would control the economic prospects of our generation, he left out the most important factor of all: who has control over the factors of production. Vest those controls into the hands of a small group and some kind of oligarchy will inevitably arise.

The question now is what the implications of automation will actually be. I have little doubt that there are many unanticipated social, political and economic benefits and consequences to these momentous changes, and the purpose of this thread is to both identify and discuss them.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 01:45

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# ? May 19, 2013 17:38

Safe and Secure!: Jun 14, 2008; "Those who are more likely to do evil are conveniently cursed with an evil appearance. It even helps the rest of us good people avoid them, so that we can stay safe."

Won't we see people 3D-print their own worker-bots eventually? If we get to the point where we can automate everything necessary to live at a reasonable standard, what's stopping "open source" hardware stuff like GVCS from taking off?

Though it does seem like it's going to suck for the middle class for the next 50-100 years till it all takes off, even assuming necessary resources are widely available by then.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 02:17

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009

I thought the thread was going to be about this essay:

quote:

"In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell (1932)

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people's mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise.

One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.

But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface card in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.

From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917 [1], and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened, and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.

I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there is much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the West, there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of the governing classes, and especially of those who conduct educational propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor, is almost exactly that which the governing classes of the world have always preached to what were called the 'honest poor'. Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism.

The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of 'honest toil', have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made, but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching.

For the present, possibly, this is all to the good. A large country, full of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?

In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.

In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over production, the problem will have to be differently solved. the rational solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.

The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

[1] Since then, members of the Communist Party have succeeded to this privilege of the warriors and priests.

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 02:26

# ? Mar 10, 2013 02:24

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

Safe and Secure! posted:

Won't we see people 3D-print their own worker-bots eventually? If we get to the point where we can automate everything necessary to live at a reasonable standard, what's stopping "open source" hardware stuff like GVCS from taking off?

Though it does seem like it's going to suck for the middle class for the next 50-100 years till it all takes off, even assuming necessary resources are widely available by then.

Why do you assume that people will be able to profit from their worker bots, let alone that the majoriy of humanity will even have access to the means to produce them?

Who will hire the worker bot I made at considerable personal cost in raw materials when a capitalist could easily through economy of scale build his own army?

am I to start a company at severe disadvantage to the market-savvy capitalist? Am I to hope my robot can work my yard hard enough to feed me with more than a pittance left over to trade for goods?

Essentially, where do I get the means to support a high standard of living? Now I work for money to trade for goods. When my labor is no longer needed how will I afford the raw materials for my 3d printer/replicator?

Technology alone cannot set us free.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 02:46

Prolonged Priapism: Dec 21, 2007; Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!

Umm I think the idea is that we actually already produce enough material wealth (or at least have the capacity) to satisfy everybody's reasonable desires anyway, but ideas like "I must work 40+ hours a week to survive, leisure time is a reward and an indulgence" are why that fact never catches on. Basically read the post above yours.

Edit: is there a general name for this phenomenon? All sorts of people have been pointing this out for at least a hundred years (that capitalism and modern industry are now productive enough that we can all stop working so hard and stop leaving unemployed people out in the cold) but it never catches on. It's like some long form tragety of the commons; everybody is so sure that they'll win out if they just work hard, and then they'll relax, but nobody ever gets to relax and if we just all agreed to chill we could. It's us. We are the All-Defector.

I mean I get that this is generally opposed at the top level of society because it would mean less profit and fewer new markets, (and by the myth of the virtue of labor) but is that it?

Prolonged Priapism fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 02:58

# ? Mar 10, 2013 02:52

shots shots shots: Sep 6, 2011; Basically A Stupid Idiot

Real hurthling! posted:

Why do you assume that people will be able to profit from their worker bots, let alone that the majoriy of humanity will even have access to the means to produce them?

Why won't we see what happened with computers: The cost of even industrial grade computer resources heads to zero, and it acts as a multiplier for knowledge workers. The unfortunate implication is that if your work is zero knowledge, you are basically left in the dust by society.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 02:55

Prolonged Priapism: Dec 21, 2007; Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!

shots shots shots posted:

Why won't we see what happened with computers: The cost of even industrial grade computer resources heads to zero, and it acts as a multiplier for knowledge workers. The unfortunate implication is that if your work is zero knowledge, you are basically left in the dust by society.

It seems pretty obvious that this is exactly what's going to actually happen (to some extent), is there a way to combat this without just smashing all the machines?

# ? Mar 10, 2013 02:59

mynamewas: Jul 23, 2007; Point

Prolonged Priapism posted:

It seems pretty obvious that this is exactly what's going to actually happen (to some extent), is there a way to combat this without just smashing all the machines?

Politically enforce starker class divisions and social barriers, relegate democracy to nothing more than a tranquil institution that only guarantees petty individual freedoms but allows no greater participation by the wider public to determine or have a say in fundamental issues, and increase the power of the state to maintain the status quo.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 03:14

Lyesh: Apr 9, 2003

Safe and Secure! posted:

Won't we see people 3D-print their own worker-bots eventually?

No, because 3d printers only provide maybe half of what's needed for a worker bot. You also need to assemble the bots and that's not a process that automates reasonably at the level of a single household. Not to mention that there are serious material property and resolution issues with 3d printers at the consumer level and there's little reason to think those issues are ever going to be resolved to the point where they make a big impact on consumer goods, let alone anything larger-scale.

Laser sintering (the version of 3d printing that's usually used for anything that's not a toy) has been around since the mid-80s and hasn't really gotten much more use than other technologies like CNC, and neither one comes close to replacing purpose-built machinery for high-volume production.

quote:

If we get to the point where we can automate everything necessary to live at a reasonable standard, what's stopping "open source" hardware stuff like GVCS from taking off?

All of the above. I mean, you can probably make most of a machine shop from plans on the internet. That doesn't mean that it's reasonable to do it or that it's going to have a big impact on society.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 03:15

Prolonged Priapism: Dec 21, 2007; Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!

I don't know if your skepticism is as reasonable as you think. Remember, fifteen - twenty years ago, email was new and popular. A few years before that, an internet connection was a thing only nerds cared about. Now it's a social and economic necessity. A few years earlier home computers were a rarity, even though by that point they'd (computers) been around for decades.

Ten years ago this thing was state of the art. Cell phones with cameras were the new thing. Now they all record full HD video. If you had told somebody from 2003 that full HD video could be completely captured and stored on a mobile phone you'd have been laughed out of the room. Smartphones have gone from "lol yeah I love reading the newspaper on a tiny screen too, nice superfluous gadget bro" to "everybody has one and uses it for hours a day" in what, 6 years? We're still in the very early stages of this. Tablets didn't exist in any meaningful consumer sense less than three years ago. Now they're a huge segment of the market.

There are technical challenges, and I don't want to handwave them away, but the fact that nobody aside from sci fi writers could have guessed what 2013 would look like from 1998 should tell you a lot about how little authority we have when making even medium-range predictions. More than fifteen years out it's anybody's game.

The point is that this stuff could very well be in the mix in a significant way in about a decade. And there are going to be things that shake things up even more than that that aren't on anybody's radar yet. This is a worthwhile discussion.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 04:25

Shbobdb: Dec 16, 2010

As someone who sells automation and has plenty of leisure time: I welcome our new robot overlords.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 04:37

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 9, 2007; Remind me to work out until I also am buff and have to keep a pillow in front of my okay I'll be honest this is like the 50th custom title I've done tonight and I'm just phoning it in now.

I just hope that we have the luxury of any leisure time in the future considering how rear end backwards the whole philosophy of "you must have a job to survive or else" is.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 04:39

enraged_camel: Jul 4, 2007; GOD BLESS TEXAS

Lyesh posted:

Laser sintering (the version of 3d printing that's usually used for anything that's not a toy)

Toy? Huh? You're aware that gun parts are being manufactured with 3D printing, right?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ver-600-rounds/

# ? Mar 10, 2013 04:53

Cream_Filling: Sep 11, 2005; More generally, I worry that the whole 'animal rights' viewpoint is sort of decadent or even dangerous since it can serve to reduce the value of human life when it tries to elevate the value of animal lives.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

I don't know if your skepticism is as reasonable as you think. Remember, fifteen - twenty years ago, email was new and popular. A few years before that, an internet connection was a thing only nerds cared about. Now it's a social and economic necessity. A few years earlier home computers were a rarity, even though by that point they'd (computers) been around for decades.

Ten years ago this thing was state of the art. Cell phones with cameras were the new thing. Now they all record full HD video. If you had told somebody from 2003 that full HD video could be completely captured and stored on a mobile phone you'd have been laughed out of the room. Smartphones have gone from "lol yeah I love reading the newspaper on a tiny screen too, nice superfluous gadget bro" to "everybody has one and uses it for hours a day" in what, 6 years? We're still in the very early stages of this. Tablets didn't exist in any meaningful consumer sense less than three years ago. Now they're a huge segment of the market.

There are technical challenges, and I don't want to handwave them away, but the fact that nobody aside from sci fi writers could have guessed what 2013 would look like from 1998 should tell you a lot about how little authority we have when making even medium-range predictions. More than fifteen years out it's anybody's game.

The point is that this stuff could very well be in the mix in a significant way in about a decade. And there are going to be things that shake things up even more than that that aren't on anybody's radar yet. This is a worthwhile discussion.

Except the internet really hasn't been as revolutionary as you think it has. The overall structure of our society is effectively identical to that of the 80s. Even stuff like the media, supposedly the most directly relevant part of the internet, is essentially controlled by the same handful of companies for the vast majority of users - political opinions that aren't mainstream are if anything even more fringe and excluded than they were 30 years ago. Smartphones still don't really mean poo poo on a macro scale, and tablets even less so - both are too early to tell if they will really have any significant impact. Is spending hours on your smartphone really that different from spending hours watching TV and listening to cassette tapes? Is a tablet that meaningfully different from a smartphone or from a laptop? I question that. Most of your examples seem to be incremental advances that are cosmetically different, which is enough to tickle the hopeful futurist. Let's not rewrite history so soon - people predicted the internet quite effectively even 30+ years ago.

Ha-Joon Chang had an article about this where he claimed that "the washing machine was more revolutionary than the internet," and I agree with him.

Ultimately, 3d printing is really far less crucial compared to things like energy infrastructure. It's another labor-saving device that might also save on management stuff like stock and shipping, but it still can't really touch the service industry, it can't actually do all the work, and it's all worthless without the energy and material feedstocks for it to work. Not to mention the fact that home printing never exactly killed the book industry. The point at which you can produce enough usable products that buying a generalized machine instead of doing it in a specialized factory taking advantage of economies of scale is not likely to be anytime soon. And home printers are still mostly unreliable pieces of poo poo that never work right despite being incredibly simple technologies. IThink of the amount of money and maintenance a 3d printer that's capable of making more than crude wads of fused ABS will take even after economies of scale make them more available.

Ultimately, if you really are looking at radical changes, the key social institution to think about is the concepts of ownership and personal property. The debate on intellectual property is already heading down that road - ownership and control is not a set of natural laws.

Cream_Filling fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 05:12

# ? Mar 10, 2013 05:03

MaterialConceptual: Jan 18, 2011; "It is rather that precisely in that which is newest the face of the world never alters, that this newest remains, in every aspect, the same. - This constitutes the eternity of hell."

-Walter Benjamin, "The Arcades Project"

Here is a link to a blog post based on a paper I presented on this topic at a conference here in Japan:

http://theotherspiral.wordpress.com...st-imagination/

Not going to block quote, but basically it deals with the theories of "Abundance" being put forward by libertarians at The Singularity Institute and the consequences of automation.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 05:04

Lyesh: Apr 9, 2003

Prolonged Priapism posted:

The point is that this stuff could very well be in the mix in a significant way in about a decade. And there are going to be things that shake things up even more than that that aren't on anybody's radar yet. This is a worthwhile discussion.

People have been saying that since AT LEAST 2000. I have been reading about how cool this tech is going to be for years, and the best use I've seen for it so far is ripping into Games Workshop's profit margins. There are also artists doing neat things with 3d-printed items in combination with casting techniques. And that's probably where 3d printing has its best shot. In combination with other techniques of making things. It's a supplement, not a way to replace giant factories.

Being able to make small parts for repairing things would be great, but the plastics involved at the consumer level are too fragile to be usable for most of those kinds of parts. Not to mention that the parts themselves can typically be obtained at very, very low cost relative to that of a 3d printer.

My prediction is that 3d printing is not going to make a difference to the average person in western society within the next twenty years. There's just no indication that most people give a gently caress, and most of the underlying technologies are not improving at the kind of level that you'd need them to for it to come remotely close to affecting mass-produced types of goods.

Lyesh fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 05:16

# ? Mar 10, 2013 05:12

Cream_Filling: Sep 11, 2005; More generally, I worry that the whole 'animal rights' viewpoint is sort of decadent or even dangerous since it can serve to reduce the value of human life when it tries to elevate the value of animal lives.

And CNC stuff has been around for much longer than that. I still don't see the demand or the supply for home CNC equipment that can machine me a new key or repair part out of universal billet blocks when I can go down to Home Depot and get them for like a dollar each.

Just look through all the stuff you own and think of what it would take to have a non-lovely version of it made at home. Not to mention the fact that parts will have to be tested for defects, etc., before you use them in anything you care about. Basically the only area where this would be relevant in anything close to its current form is toys, art objects, and plastic garbage you buy at the dollar store. Everything else is likely far too dependent on materials, too complex, and/or just too important to risk making it at home. Not to mentiont the fact that a store-bought version will likely be much higher quality and not require complicated home assembly. There's a reason not everyone buys 100% of their home furnishings from Ikea.

Let's say this hypothetical maker device costs about as much as a car. Just what do you think the break-even point is going to be? It's not like it prints out the stuff even middle-class people actually spend the majority of their money on right now - rent, food, services, etc. Maybe you'd go down to the neighborhood copy shop when you need cheap plastic crap made for you. But then isn't that basically the same arrangement we have now? You go to the store and buy stuff or else go online and get stuff delivered to you. Yes, it might reduce stocking risks/costs and labor inputs, but it's more incremental than it is revolutionary. It probably won't even stem the flight of capital from developed countries into developing countries, though it might make the transitional stage of light industry and manufacturing more difficult for those countries.

Cream_Filling fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 05:44

# ? Mar 10, 2013 05:14

Lyesh: Apr 9, 2003

enraged_camel posted:

Toy? Huh? You're aware that gun parts are being manufactured with 3D printing, right?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ver-600-rounds/

Yes, and those gun parts break ~~before you put an entire clip through them~~ (whoops, I'm dumb and they improved it). Also, the part in question is essentially the frame of the gun. Anyone who's spent some time learning metal work can make one out of sheetmetal no problem.

Meanwhile, poor afghani villagers with access to a machine shop can churn out AK47s like there's no tomorrow with plans available on the internet. Which is another thing that's far more likely to affect society than 3d printers.

Lyesh fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 05:22

# ? Mar 10, 2013 05:15

Cream_Filling: Sep 11, 2005; More generally, I worry that the whole 'animal rights' viewpoint is sort of decadent or even dangerous since it can serve to reduce the value of human life when it tries to elevate the value of animal lives.

enraged_camel posted:

Toy? Huh? You're aware that gun parts are being manufactured with 3D printing, right?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ver-600-rounds/

That's like one of the least complicated parts on the gun, though. The only reason it's relevant is because the ATF defines that part as the part that's legally "a gun," and considers all the other (more complicated) parts to be just random, legally insignificant gun parts. You still need an entire upper assembly and trigger group - i.e. all the actually complicated working bits of the gun. No way you are printing out stuff like gun barrels or even trigger assemblies anytime soon, and even in the far future that stuff is probably going to be super complicated and specialized (and thus expensive and inaccessible). And if you screw it up, there's a chance that the small contained explosion powering the gun ends up powering stuff into your face.

Cream_Filling fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 05:27

# ? Mar 10, 2013 05:22

Prolonged Priapism: Dec 21, 2007; Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!

Broadly I agree that there's a lot of hype around all this, and most of it is probably unfounded. And yeah, the structure of society isn't that much different from what it was in the 80s (and it's mostly worse where it is).

HOWEVER. The internet is still in its infancy. Many of the best (or at least highest paid) business minds in the world laughed the internet off in the late 90s, and then felt all vindicated after the dotcom crash. And now Amazon is poised to eat loving WalMart. The big box stores are finished. Not in ten years, maybe not in twenty, but it's coming. And all those (lovely) retail jobs are gone too. Not because *robots* or *Google Glass,* but because of an Amazon warehouse within 6 hours of your house. That still hasn't sunk in.

Is it that much of a stretch to imagine this extending to basically the entire retail industry? Sure, groceries over the internet via van bombed in the 90s. But in 2025? When your fridge knows what you eat and can reorder it automatically? Cars don't drive themselves yet, but they will. The whole process is going to be automated.

Most of the service industry will probably die too. When was the last time you actually walked in to your physical bank? I do everything online now and occasionally hit up an ATM. My closest branch is actually hours away. I haven't bothered switching banks because it's not an inconvenience. Maybe you need a CPA for your tax stuff now, because TurboTax blows. But hell, I filed all my taxes myself in 2 hours, all online, at the state, local, and federal level. In 20 years how much of that work is going to need young finance grads?

Fast food jobs aren't much less regimented or more complicated than the industrial operations involved in making a car. The workers (and I know, I was one) are basically already flesh robots. And this is just the stuff that seems reasonable given today.

Personal inkjet printers didn't kill the printing or book industry, but Amazon Kindle (and the internet + smartphones and tablets) sure as poo poo did. Borders going under and B&N scrambling aren't a coincidence.

I know a lot of people scoff at tech entrepreneurs, but you can really start a business with no money now. Things can change very quickly. And the media part has gotten off to a somewhat slow start, sure. But tell me, how much cable news do you watch? What about your peers? Yeah, our parents are still watching Fox News and going to nbc.com, but nobody I know does anything but browse twitter, reddit, facebook, or forums for the majority of their media. Nobody cares about the channel - Hulu, Netflix, whatever. Nobody's loyal to that kind of thing.

Kids now grow up reading what other kids write. Ten year olds write code and edit ~*SiCk CoD MoNtAgEs*~ and other ten year olds watch them. From anywhere. Content creation can be done anywhere, content consumption can be done anywhere. The barriers are all gone, and the media giants will stay afloat on ad revenue (commercials nobody watches, banner ads and popups that are never clicked) for a while, but that's going to collapse too. Nobody watches ads. Kids google up adblockers, or switch tabs, or fast forward the TiVo. Advertising (and traditional mass media that depends on it) is going to change drastically. Will the political conversation switch? I don't know, but people spend a lot more time looking at political memes and five minute youtube videos about the deficit than they do watching the news or reading Yahoo! politics. The companies aren't the ones pushing it any more. Their ideology comes through, but that's because these are people with their parents' opinions. When they start to break away from that, they'll have peers, on the internet, with every sort of argument/explanation possible, in every media. I mean I only became a leftist after lurking D&D for years (and at one point made a helldump list of "worst D&D posters" for my right-wing rants about climate change and Obama's inauguration (I voted McCain

)).

I'm not romantic about platforms - I want to make it clear that I'm not preaching the Twitter revolution or anything. 3D printing might never take off. Amazon might implode tomorrow. But WalMart is going down whether or not Amazon goes away. Your (possibly electric (goodbye Exxon?!)) car will drive itself whether or not it says Google on the side. This poo poo is coming, and a lot of jobs are going to disappear.

The exact mechanisms might not be clear, but the trends sure are. Manufacturing, gone. Retail, going. Service, probably next. Now the questions becomes (as per the OP): Is this a change that's different from the ones we've seen in the past? Will the system pick up the slack by simply producing more consumer crap and keep us on the treadmill? Are people hosed? (even with their xxiPhone?)

# ? Mar 10, 2013 07:04

Kaal: May 22, 2002; In addition, a massively uptight cunt.

As far as 3D printing goes, there's already a lot of complaints from hobbyists that corporate patents are putting a stranglehold around the efficacy of open-source printing. Wired been running a number of articles about it recently. Techniques for creating complex molds and high-quality finishes are already being locked up to prevent competition. While 3D printing is definitely going to have an impact on our future society, I think that companies will ensure that the average person is limited as to what they can create and share with them (much as CDs and software are today)

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02...tents/?pid=2233

# ? Mar 10, 2013 07:28

QuarkJets: Sep 8, 2008; We're on a mission from God

Lyesh posted:

People have been saying that since AT LEAST 2000. I have been reading about how cool this tech is going to be for years, and the best use I've seen for it so far is ripping into Games Workshop's profit margins. There are also artists doing neat things with 3d-printed items in combination with casting techniques. And that's probably where 3d printing has its best shot. In combination with other techniques of making things. It's a supplement, not a way to replace giant factories.

Being able to make small parts for repairing things would be great, but the plastics involved at the consumer level are too fragile to be usable for most of those kinds of parts. Not to mention that the parts themselves can typically be obtained at very, very low cost relative to that of a 3d printer.

My prediction is that 3d printing is not going to make a difference to the average person in western society within the next twenty years. There's just no indication that most people give a gently caress, and most of the underlying technologies are not improving at the kind of level that you'd need them to for it to come remotely close to affecting mass-produced types of goods.

You've compared the cost of a 3D printer to the cost of a single part, but that's not a good comparison. Instead, we should compare the cost of buying the part to the cost of printing the part.

For instance, there are businesses that own 3D printers that they charge people to come in and use, or they'll simply charge for on-requested printings.

So yeah, I agree completely that this is a supplement to manufacturing. Sometimes this can be used to produce replacement parts, sometimes not. It's also good for hobbyist and 3rd party designs

# ? Mar 10, 2013 08:47

rudatron: May 31, 2011

The argument for automation works both ways though...kind of. In a traditional capitalist firm, the capitalist acts as a manager, and thus is able to justify their position of ownership as being 'good stewardship' in a moral sense. It's all bullshit, but it allows capitalists to divide workers against each other. Automation changes that entirely, because now all that matters are the people that make and design robots - the people who own them cannot claim to have been a significant part of the final good production, because they were simply rich enough to buy the machines to stay rich.

Capital, by employing more robots, is outsourcing it's own moral/ethical justification for existing in the first place. This, combined with wider middle class disenfranchisement will play out...interestingly. The worse case scenario is a fascist/luddite combination, but it could go any way.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 08:54

shots shots shots: Sep 6, 2011; Basically A Stupid Idiot

rudatron posted:

The argument for automation works both ways though...kind of. In a traditional capitalist firm, the capitalist acts as a manager, and thus is able to justify their position of ownership as being 'good stewardship' in a moral sense. It's all bullshit, but it allows capitalists to divide workers against each other. Automation changes that entirely, because now all that matters are the people that make and design robots - the people who own them cannot claim to have been a significant part of the final good production, because they were simply rich enough to buy the machines to stay rich.

The trend though in the past 25-30 years though has been precisely to incorporate a lot of those highly technical people into top levels of management though.

While the ownership class is in decline, the new managerial class isn't going to have a big problem reaping the same huge paychecks those guys used to make.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 09:15

rudatron: May 31, 2011

Can you prove that though? That claim of a trend is an explicit provable/falsifiable statement, and if you came to that conclusion because of data, I'd definitely like to look at it. I've done some searching for qualification versus income, but it turns out my google-fu is weak.

My assumption was that making/designing robots would still firmly be a middle class position, and they would thus still be under the same dynamics as other middle class people, ie- decreasing wages due to wealth inequality/distribution of means of production. As I said before though, I can't come up with any data because I wouldn't even know where you'd find statistics for this.

rudatron fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 09:35

# ? Mar 10, 2013 09:33

shots shots shots: Sep 6, 2011; Basically A Stupid Idiot

rudatron posted:

Can you prove that though? That claim of a trend is an explicit provable/falsifiable statement, and if you came to that conclusion because of data, I'd definitely like to look at it. I've done some searching for qualification versus income, but it turns out my google-fu is weak.

I'm mainly basing it on the type of people that get into top MBA programs. Tons of people from tech, and engineers/CS are highly represented. Those people are typically the ones that end up in leadership roles.

Also, a ton of people complain about banking and consulting stealing scientists and mathematicians from socially useful academics.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 09:43

Cream_Filling: Sep 11, 2005; More generally, I worry that the whole 'animal rights' viewpoint is sort of decadent or even dangerous since it can serve to reduce the value of human life when it tries to elevate the value of animal lives.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Broadly I agree that there's a lot of hype around all this, and most of it is probably unfounded. And yeah, the structure of society isn't that much different from what it was in the 80s (and it's mostly worse where it is).

HOWEVER. The internet is still in its infancy. Many of the best (or at least highest paid) business minds in the world laughed the internet off in the late 90s, and then felt all vindicated after the dotcom crash. And now Amazon is poised to eat loving WalMart. The big box stores are finished. Not in ten years, maybe not in twenty, but it's coming. And all those (lovely) retail jobs are gone too. Not because *robots* or *Google Glass,* but because of an Amazon warehouse within 6 hours of your house. That still hasn't sunk in.

Is it that much of a stretch to imagine this extending to basically the entire retail industry? Sure, groceries over the internet via van bombed in the 90s. But in 2025? When your fridge knows what you eat and can reorder it automatically? Cars don't drive themselves yet, but they will. The whole process is going to be automated.

What? No. Walmart is still doing fine because it's still cheaper and people don't like waiting for things they need immediately or buying everything sight unseen. And, again, most of what people spend their money on is stuff like rent and food. Amazon saves money by massive centralization and reducing the amount of labor they need. They are literally just a modernized Sears catalog. When they start having many, many warehouses all carrying the same crap, that's basically wiping out their competitive advantage.

You still aren't going to get people to buy things like clothes, shoes, food, or many other consumer goods until they get a chance to actually see them and feel them in person. Right now, internet businesses are somewhat parasitic in that they get a lot of sales from people who first see something in an actual store but then buy online to save money. But if you're anticipating the total replacement of retail, then where will this happen? The same goes for many other types of goods.

Even self-driving cars, in their current form, require a non-trivial investment in infrastructure before they are really practical. I don't see that sort of thing happening very quickly at all. Technology might be fast, but government projects are slow and significant infrastructure changes basically don't happen half the time. Most of the country still gets by on lovely, slow, unreliable internet compared to the rest of the industrialized world, and things are not really showing signs of change anytime soon.

Also, in general, I find it's best to ignore "business minds" because they are pretty much universally morons. Most of the stuff you're talking about was anticipated way ahead of time.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Fast food jobs aren't much less regimented or more complicated than the industrial operations involved in making a car. The workers (and I know, I was one) are basically already flesh robots. And this is just the stuff that seems reasonable given today.

Except this already happens: it's called instant food that's made in a factory. And the boil-in-a-bag food at many major chain restaurants. Workers are still cheaper than machines in many cases. And fast food workers are not the majority of money in the service industry. Huge swathes of it like non-crap food service, health care, child care, etc., are basically not going to go away anytime soon.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Personal inkjet printers didn't kill the printing or book industry, but Amazon Kindle (and the internet + smartphones and tablets) sure as poo poo did. Borders going under and B&N scrambling aren't a coincidence.

Except this is a bad example because it's intellectual property, which is very much a special case compared to regular consumer goods. You're talking about the total replacement of books with electronic reading. Not the substitution of home-made equivalent goods. There is no ebook equivalent replacement for underwear or potatoes.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

I know a lot of people scoff at tech entrepreneurs, but you can really start a business with no money now. Things can change very quickly. And the media part has gotten off to a somewhat slow start, sure. But tell me, how much cable news do you watch? What about your peers? Yeah, our parents are still watching Fox News and going to nbc.com, but nobody I know does anything but browse twitter, reddit, facebook, or forums for the majority of their media. Nobody cares about the channel - Hulu, Netflix, whatever. Nobody's loyal to that kind of thing.

Ha, no, all those tech entrepreneurs had a huge amount of capital, both explicit and hidden. Most people don't have the money, training, connections, and free time to just start a new internet company from scratch. It's not like the average American can just quit their job and work at a loss for 5+ years. People scoff at them because they're a bunch of rich white kids that get massive amounts of hype and most of their ideas are failures.

All those things you've listed - twitter, reddit, hulu, etc., are all owned and controlled by the same handful of people that own and control the "old" media. Same with blogs - the vast majority of blogs people actually read are owned and controlled by large old media groups. The more nominally independent blogs usually get bought out or sell out to those same people when they start getting even a little bit popular (because money), and much of the time their content is just copied from other old media sources.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Kids now grow up reading what other kids write. Ten year olds write code and edit ~*SiCk CoD MoNtAgEs*~ and other ten year olds watch them. From anywhere. Content creation can be done anywhere, content consumption can be done anywhere. The barriers are all gone, and the media giants will stay afloat on ad revenue (commercials nobody watches, banner ads and popups that are never clicked) for a while, but that's going to collapse too. Nobody watches ads. Kids google up adblockers, or switch tabs, or fast forward the TiVo. Advertising (and traditional mass media that depends on it) is going to change drastically. Will the political conversation switch? I don't know, but people spend a lot more time looking at political memes and five minute youtube videos about the deficit than they do watching the news or reading Yahoo! politics. The companies aren't the ones pushing it any more. Their ideology comes through, but that's because these are people with their parents' opinions. When they start to break away from that, they'll have peers, on the internet, with every sort of argument/explanation possible, in every media. I mean I only became a leftist after lurking D&D for years (and at one point made a helldump list of "worst D&D posters" for my right-wing rants about climate change and Obama's inauguration (I voted McCain )).

Except children have already had the ability to create content for many years - it's called elementary school art class. There's a reason nobody gives a poo poo about the content created there - it's worthless. The same goes for the wider internet: the majority of content created is garbage that nobody is interested in except the creators themselves. Also, you're massively conflating the capabilities of the various ages of children. 10 year olds are not downloading adblockers or writing anything readable by others.

Even with the barriers to the market opened up, the stuff that is going to get watched is stuff that is technically competent and has had money spent on the content to make it better than the rest. Most people don't have the time to get super-invested and trust a particular forum. Most of those 5-minute political videos you're talking about were funded either openly or under the table by one of a while raft of political organizations. The rest were made by a handful of ideologues who have the money, time, and expertise to make something that isn't crude finger-paints, and then are politically polarized and motivated enough to actually use their own resources for a cause instead of for themselves. The only exception is areas where there is no such competition because the whole viewpoint is so incredibly fringe.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

I'm not romantic about platforms - I want to make it clear that I'm not preaching the Twitter revolution or anything. 3D printing might never take off. Amazon might implode tomorrow. But WalMart is going down whether or not Amazon goes away. Your (possibly electric (goodbye Exxon?!)) car will drive itself whether or not it says Google on the side. This poo poo is coming, and a lot of jobs are going to disappear.

The exact mechanisms might not be clear, but the trends sure are. Manufacturing, gone. Retail, going. Service, probably next. Now the questions becomes (as per the OP): Is this a change that's different from the ones we've seen in the past? Will the system pick up the slack by simply producing more consumer crap and keep us on the treadmill? Are people hosed? (even with their xxiPhone?)

Except, just as before, you're being massively oversimplistic. Manufacturing is still a huge presence in the US. Making things is not going to somehow get superseded by the internet. And most of the offshoring that's wrecked various levels of manufacturing wasn't some sort of inevitability - it was the result of a concerted effort by industry and the government. Retail is not going away anytime soon. And especially not services, considering how big a deal healthcare is right now. You're basically imagining robots and magic internets doing all human labor forever. That's too simple a prediction to really be of any use when discussing the issue.

There will definitely be further shifts and contractions of the labor market, but it will be heavily influenced by the actions of government and the classes with power. Most of what many levels of management do is just as worthless and replaceable by technology as your average worker, but you're not going to see this happen anytime soon. We're seeing more and more management bloat in basically every industry even as technology has significantly reduced the need for lower level white collar clerical workers like secretaries, typists, etc. See, for instance, the famous claim that the UC system now has one senior manager for every actual teaching faculty member. A lot of those freed up resources from slashing lower level workers gets put into more managers. Why? Is it so higher-level managers don't have to work as hard? As opposed to workers where more technology usually means longer hours and more demanding types of labor. Or is it some sort of internal organizational thing, where hiring more managers gives you more potential allies when fighting internal political struggles or else to fight against future cutbacks in managerial positions? Is it maybe purely to dilute personal responsibility?

Arguably, managers have more class consciousness than actual workers, and they usually make moves that will benefit each other. Even at the highest levels, you see this in the behavior of corporate boards towards officers - the majority of boards are made up of current or former executives, and their behavior is heavily slanted in that direction.

Cream_Filling fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 15:01

# ? Mar 10, 2013 14:47

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010; LIKES: GUMMI BEARS

DISLIKES: JEWS, BLACKS, GAYS, HISPANICS, GYPSIES, ABORIGINES

shots shots shots posted:

Why won't we see what happened with computers: The cost of even industrial grade computer resources heads to zero, and it acts as a multiplier for knowledge workers. The unfortunate implication is that if your work is zero knowledge, you are basically left in the dust by society.

Because computers are tools that still need to be operated by a human. An architecture firm which buys a computer still needs an architect to operate that computer - the thing that's been replaced in this scenario is pencil-and-paper, not the worker. Workerbots, on the other hand, are by their very nature intended to operate mostly independently. On the other hand, a burger-flipping machine doesn't need a burger-flipper standing behind it and operating it, because it's not intended to help the burger-flipper, it's intended to replace him. In something like construction, you might still need one guy standing around to put the bots in the right place and keep an eye on them (though I'm sure that this can be eliminated eventually with automation-minded site planning), but you've still replaced an entire construction crew with one person and a squad of robots.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

HOWEVER. The internet is still in its infancy. Many of the best (or at least highest paid) business minds in the world laughed the internet off in the late 90s, and then felt all vindicated after the dotcom crash. And now Amazon is poised to eat loving WalMart. The big box stores are finished. Not in ten years, maybe not in twenty, but it's coming. And all those (lovely) retail jobs are gone too. Not because *robots* or *Google Glass,* but because of an Amazon warehouse within 6 hours of your house. That still hasn't sunk in.

Is it that much of a stretch to imagine this extending to basically the entire retail industry? Sure, groceries over the internet via van bombed in the 90s. But in 2025? When your fridge knows what you eat and can reorder it automatically? Cars don't drive themselves yet, but they will. The whole process is going to be automated.

Most of the service industry will probably die too. When was the last time you actually walked in to your physical bank? I do everything online now and occasionally hit up an ATM. My closest branch is actually hours away. I haven't bothered switching banks because it's not an inconvenience. Maybe you need a CPA for your tax stuff now, because TurboTax blows. But hell, I filed all my taxes myself in 2 hours, all online, at the state, local, and federal level. In 20 years how much of that work is going to need young finance grads?

The thing that bothers me about all these predictions is that fifteen years ago, everyone was convinced this poo poo would be real in ten years. Why didn't groceries over the internet work? Why don't we have fridges that can order food for you right now? It isn't because the technology wasn't there, it's because it's either expensive, involves more user involvement than the user prefers, or has logistical issues. For example, I ordered groceries over the internet last week. And then had to sit around at home all day because I had to be there when the driver arrived sometime during the six-hour delivery window with my hefty order which just barely crossed the minimum order threshold, or else I wouldn't have gotten my groceries and I would have gotten charged an extra fee on top of the hefty delivery charge and the gas surcharge. And even if I wasn't required to be home, I'd still want to be home for the delivery because there's no way I'm trusting milk that's been sitting on my doorstep for four-plus hours (even if it hasn't been stolen by someone walking by). That isn't necessarily unsolvable, but any solution to this requires either up-front investment on the part of the consumer, higher fees, or some sort of infrastructure on the consumer end.

All the technology in the world isn't going to change the fact that both the cost and the logistics make these impractical solutions for a lot of people, which is why Amazon is never going to be able to match the convenience and price of Wal-Mart, and why big box stores aren't going out of business anytime soon. Even Borders ultimately fell due to incompetent management and poor financial decisions, not because the books industry is dead; B&N is doing fine, and even if it wasn't, that's just the bookstore industry, not the books industry.

rudatron posted:

The argument for automation works both ways though...kind of. In a traditional capitalist firm, the capitalist acts as a manager, and thus is able to justify their position of ownership as being 'good stewardship' in a moral sense. It's all bullshit, but it allows capitalists to divide workers against each other. Automation changes that entirely, because now all that matters are the people that make and design robots - the people who own them cannot claim to have been a significant part of the final good production, because they were simply rich enough to buy the machines to stay rich.

Capital, by employing more robots, is outsourcing it's own moral/ethical justification for existing in the first place. This, combined with wider middle class disenfranchisement will play out...interestingly. The worse case scenario is a fascist/luddite combination, but it could go any way.

This isn't really any different from now, though. In a robot design firm, the capitalist can still act as a manager directing their design team even if they have no actual skill in that kind of design, just the same as in any other design or technology company. Besides, what's justifying their position of ownership isn't the fact that they're managing, it's the fact that they paid for (or convinced a bunch of investors to pay for) all the equipment as well as all the workers' salaries. There'd be nothing preventing the workers from coming together and forming an employee-owned firm not reliant on or owned by capitalists, but there's nothing preventing design or technical experts from doing that now either.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 18:09

Paul MaudDib: May 2, 2006

rudatron posted:

The argument for automation works both ways though...kind of. In a traditional capitalist firm, the capitalist acts as a manager, and thus is able to justify their position of ownership as being 'good stewardship' in a moral sense. It's all bullshit, but it allows capitalists to divide workers against each other. Automation changes that entirely, because now all that matters are the people that make and design robots - the people who own them cannot claim to have been a significant part of the final good production, because they were simply rich enough to buy the machines to stay rich.

Rich people can't claim to have a significant part of the production now, either, if you want to look at it like that. They will still make the same arguments that someone has to give the business a direction and bear the capital risk.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 19:31

silence_kit: Jul 14, 2011

My post is not that related to the main thrust of this thread and instead is just focused on the 3-D printing claims made in the OP.

Lyesh posted:

People have been saying that since AT LEAST 2000. I have been reading about how cool this tech is going to be for years, and the best use I've seen for it so far is ripping into Games Workshop's profit margins. There are also artists doing neat things with 3d-printed items in combination with casting techniques. And that's probably where 3d printing has its best shot. In combination with other techniques of making things. It's a supplement, not a way to replace giant factories.

Being able to make small parts for repairing things would be great, but the plastics involved at the consumer level are too fragile to be usable for most of those kinds of parts. Not to mention that the parts themselves can typically be obtained at very, very low cost relative to that of a 3d printer.

My prediction is that 3d printing is not going to make a difference to the average person in western society within the next twenty years. There's just no indication that most people give a gently caress, and most of the underlying technologies are not improving at the kind of level that you'd need them to for it to come remotely close to affecting mass-produced types of goods.

Are you a mechanical or materials engineer? I feel like the only people who get excited over 3-D printing are people who do not understand anything about materials and manufacturing. I suspect that what you said is correct: consumer 3-D printers will only ever be good for making cheap plastic crap.

I am no expert in structural materials, but I do know a little bit about electronics. You've got to go to extremes (sometimes you need high vacuums, usually you need high temperatures, almost always you need very pure materials) to be able to get electronic materials that are worth a drat. I suspect that the same is true for structural materials--you need to be able to go to extremes to be able to get quality materials, and this will never be safe or cheap for some guy at home who wants to make something.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 20:51

Nathilus: Apr 4, 2002

silence_kit posted:

I suspect that what you said is correct: consumer 3-D printers will only ever be good for making cheap plastic crap.

That's going a bit far. Sure that's mostly the case right now, but there's no reason to assume that it will always be so. We have a variety of materials that can be melted to the point they can be used in such a process then cooled back to a rigid shape. Not just plastics, but resins, some other carbon compounds, and metals. I'm not sure I'd put money on the guess that the technology will mature in 20 years, but at the end of the day the idea has some pretty awesome and unique utility. It mostly lies in communal projects though, not in the idea that every individual or family will own one of these.

As our manufacturing technologies continue to develop, one thing I expect to see is that more durable goods will eventually be custom made closer to the spots they are needed, possibly even on the spot in some cases. Whether 3-D printers will be a front in this process or end up looking archaic and outmoded because of more mature technologies is beyond my ability to guess though.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:15

Kaal: May 22, 2002; In addition, a massively uptight cunt.

Nathilus posted:

As our manufacturing technologies continue to develop, one thing I expect to see is that more durable goods will eventually be custom made closer to the spots they are needed, possibly even on the spot in some cases. Whether 3-D printers will be a front in this process or end up looking archaic and outmoded because of more mature technologies is beyond my ability to guess though.

Definitely, and we're already starting to see some movement in this direction with specialty goods; for example, some medical offices are using 3D printing to make custom prosthetics without sending out to a laboratory. While this news story features the fairly unique operation of replacing a skull (http://www.technewsdaily.com/17191-...ll-implant.html), I can definitely see the utility in a dentist office being able to manufacture a permanent crown or a denture right on the spot. I think that we'll continue to see this type of usage for the next 5-10 years as it becomes more and more mainstream. Just as inkjet printers were once the domain of industry, and then were adopted by commercial enterprises before becoming available to the common consumer, I think that 3D printers will experience a gradual increase in use.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:29

silence_kit: Jul 14, 2011

Nathilus posted:

As our manufacturing technologies continue to develop, one thing I expect to see is that more durable goods will eventually be custom made closer to the spots they are needed, possibly even on the spot in some cases. Whether 3-D printers will be a front in this process or end up looking archaic and outmoded because of more mature technologies is beyond my ability to guess though.

What you are doing here is blindly assuming that the technology will get better. This isn't always true. Technologies mature. What you may be asking for could be impossible. This is why I was interested if Lyesh knew a lot about structural materials, and could expound on his or her opinion.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:30

Kaal: May 22, 2002; In addition, a massively uptight cunt.

silence_kit posted:

What you are doing here is blindly assuming that the technology will get better. This isn't always true. Technologies mature. What you may be asking for could be impossible. This is why I was interested if Lyesh knew a lot about structural materials, and could expound on his or her opinion.

3D printing is a brand-new technology and they are constantly finding new ways of expanding its capabilities.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:32

Moridin920: Nov 15, 2007

silence_kit posted:

Are you a mechanical or materials engineer? I feel like the only people who get excited over 3-D printing are people who do not understand anything about materials and manufacturing. I suspect that what you said is correct: consumer 3-D printers will only ever be good for making cheap plastic crap.

I watched a video of a guy in a lab printing out a machine part that had moving parts and worked just fine that was within microns of the blueprint or whatever; it could be painted any color they want and it was really hard plastic. That was a few years ago. I feel like you don't really need to be a materials engineer to see the potential benefits of that and it's shortsighted to say 'this tech will never get better

' when there are real construction companies looking at 3D printing as a way to build stuff on Mars or the moon.

We must give the proletariat control of the labor robots, and own the means of production my comrades!

What will really be cool though is if 3D printing eventually became cheap enough for average people to own a decent unit. You think the music industry screams about piracy now, just wait until people can print out clothes/sunglasses.

\/\/\/ 1990 wasn't that long ago, and to go from "Hey this thing prints out a block" to "we print our prosthetics in-house, no need for a lab" is pretty good progress in that time.

Moridin920 fucked around with this message at Mar 10, 2013 around 21:39

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:34

silence_kit: Jul 14, 2011

Kaal posted:

3D printing is a brand-new technology and they are constantly finding new ways of expanding its capabilities.

How new is it? Reading the wikipedia article dates most of the techniques to like 1990. Those techniques probably were adapted from much older technologies and weren't brand new.

The picture that you get from reading technology news articles is usually warped. They say that everything is a brand new technology and always overstate its relevance to society.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:37

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

While reading the OP I was the whole time thinking of that Bertrand Russell essay - delightful that Mr Alloy had it posted in the second reply.

Immigrants "takin' our jobs" is a pretty similar situation, and I was just saying earlier today how crazy it is that society is so fixated on the "work is the only way to survive" model that people see "politicians are giving themselves huge bonuses" and the argument somehow turns into one about how there'd be more jobs available if it weren't for immigrants. Why on earth do we, as a society, demand jobs? What we should be demanding is cushy politician lifestyles. Fill half the country with immigrants, tax them, and we'll share out that tax money and all live a semi-luxurious lazy life! Build some state-owned housing for them too (or rather, pay them their own money to build it), charge them rent to live in it, and now we've got two thirds of every working immigrant's income to share out without doing a jot of work ourselves! (It's fun how this sounds like a loving awful thing to say and an endorsement of slavery but simultaneously it's the same thing we as a society are begging for for ourselves!)

Now substitute robots for immigrants and you've got a workforce that you can tax/seize all their earnings rather than just two thirds, and they can work 24 hour days, and they don't need somewhere to live.

The problem with this idea is that rich people own the robots, rather than them being entities that you can tax, but it would be a possible legislatable change; let the capital owners take a cut so they still have an incentive to have robots, let it be slightly more profitable than hiring minimum wage workers, but any profit beyond some threshold gets taxed into the "citizens dividend" pool and evenly distributed to everyone (including people who work - no reason they should get less free stuff from robots!)

But of course such a change could never happen because the people who write legislation write it for themselves and the capitalists, not to make life better for the rabble.

In an unrelated vein, what I personally would like to see in the progress of automation is what Real Hurthling said sarcastically - back yard food growing robots. An intensively 'farmed' quarter acre can apparently feed a family of four with enough left over to pay for its own expenses (fertilizers etc) and sell a few thousand dollars worth of food annually too. Farming that intensively as a human is a tedious boring chore, but it seems like a task well suited to a robot. While such a robot would be orders of magnitude less efficient than large-scale farmbots running tractors and stuff, the advantage is that it puts some actual production under the control of the middle class robot owner. The working class man who doesn't own a quarter-acre and can't afford a robot would still be hosed though. And we still really need some better climate-resistant long-lived batteries.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:43

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Nathilus posted:

That's going a bit far. Sure that's mostly the case right now, but there's no reason to assume that it will always be so. We have a variety of materials that can be melted to the point they can be used in such a process then cooled back to a rigid shape. Not just plastics, but resins, some other carbon compounds, and metals. I'm not sure I'd put money on the guess that the technology will mature in 20 years, but at the end of the day the idea has some pretty awesome and unique utility. It mostly lies in communal projects though, not in the idea that every individual or family will own one of these.

As our manufacturing technologies continue to develop, one thing I expect to see is that more durable goods will eventually be custom made closer to the spots they are needed, possibly even on the spot in some cases. Whether 3-D printers will be a front in this process or end up looking archaic and outmoded because of more mature technologies is beyond my ability to guess though.

He didn't say that 3D printers would ever only be useful for making cheap plastic crap, he said that consumer 3D printers will only ever be good for making cheap plastic crap. Finding more durable materials isn't the hard part, it's getting them down to a cost and convenience level that's worth adapting to consumer-level printers and targeting the consumer-level market. The capabilities of $50,000 lab-quality 3D printers aren't going to noticeably change the way society approaches manufacturing, what really matters is what the $300 3D printer that fits in your living room can do. You may be able to afford your own inkjet printer now, but there's a huge gulf in both price and capabilities between your home printer and something a professional print shop uses, and a similar gap will be present in 3D printing for many years to come.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 21:52

McDowell: Aug 1, 2008; Surely, Caligula was my greatest role

When is the last time you have heard 'Leisure' discussed in mainstream politics?

Automation producing a better standard of living and lower sum demand for labor has been a Marxist ideal for awhile. America has always demonized literal Marxism but LBJ's 'Great Society' appealed to that ideal. Since Reagan and the 'end of history' promises of leisure have more or less disappeared from US rhetoric, and the 'Great Society' is tainted with the racially charged memories of the 1967 Detroit Riots.

Running a political campaign now if you mention leisure your opponent will use an attack like 'We need jobs and he's talking about leisure? Gimme a Break!'

# ? Mar 10, 2013 22:01

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# ? May 19, 2013 17:38

Nathilus: Apr 4, 2002

silence_kit posted:

How new is it? Reading the wikipedia article dates most of the techniques to like 1990. Those techniques probably were adapted from much older technologies and weren't brand new.

The picture that you get from reading technology news articles is usually warped. They say that everything is a brand new technology and always overstate its relevance to society.

You're missing the point. Even if the idea came up 50 years ago, progress in a bunch of related fields only recently first allowed it to be possible. Materials science, for example, has been explosive in the last 20 years. I once went to a lecture at NASA where they showed off a carbon fiber prototype bike. You can now get that in stores for under 10 grand. As materials science, engineering, robotics, and a host of related fields advance, of course we'd expect the machines they produce to get more sophisticated. It may be an assumption, but if it is, it is one that underlies all of human progress.

# ? Mar 10, 2013 22:06

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