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Blue Star posted:I frankly wouldn't worry about this sort of thing. I used to be worried about automation but now I think it will happen much more slowly than anyone thinks. It's not going to be a sudden explosion of robots and software doing all the jobs. Instead it's going to be really slow, stretched out over decades and generations. Technology just doesn't move that fast. We're nowhere close to the technology needed to eliminate all jobs, or even a lot of jobs. Most people's jobs are safe for the next 50+ years. We'll have plenty of time to adapt. This whole discussion is sci-fi nonsense.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:47
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Effectronica posted:Marx's understanding was that the transition to communism from socialism required the automation of drudgery and repetitive tasks so that people could be free from a large part of alienation. So technological unemployment, or rather the kinds of technologies that would cause it under a capitalist system, was an essential part of Marx's consideration of capitalism, socialism, and production. Marx also predicted falling profits and resulting crisis leading to revolution. It's a reasonably specific take on capitalist failure. Capitalism delivering us peacefully to post-scarcity socialism wouldn't be Marx.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:50
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asdf32 posted:Marx also predicted falling profits and resulting crisis leading to revolution. It's a reasonably specific take on capitalist failure. Capitalism delivering us peacefully to post-scarcity socialism wouldn't be Marx. Thanks for this irrelevancy.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:52
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Nessus posted:I think the worry is not that the robots will take literally everyone's jobs, but that they'll take perhaps forty percent of the jobs relatively quickly, leaving vast swaths of the population without the ability to get money to purchase goods and services. At some point this makes the economy go down, which makes more people lose their jobs, etc. That's not going to happen, though. Not anytime soon. It may happen eventually but not for many decades.
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Nov 27, 2015 06:24
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It's worth noting that Marx's analysis relied on technology as labour enhancing rather than replacing, and it's the growing proportion of dead labour in the form of capital that leads to a decreasing rate of profit. It's a pretty good model, and the same one used by the likes of Smith and modern economists today, but there is no special reason machine can't essentially replace all labour, and conversely, there are some jobs that not everyone can do. So if anything the crisis comes sooner than that.
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Nov 27, 2015 08:13
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Effectronica posted:On the other hand, incremental changes could cause massive disasters. If, for example, someone comes up with software that allows 8 engineers to do the job of 10 by automating the process of producing drawings a little, that's still 20% of engineers that are out of a job, and need a job that pays similarly to engineering. Once you move into the position of rationalizing high-paying jobs, you end up with a social crisis, as you can't turn an engineer into a bank teller or cashier without significant suffering and a further encroachment of overproduction. This can occur even though the total number of jobs lost is small compared to the economy overall. I'm not entirely sure if you're being serious here. Because there totally is software that helps automate engineering as well as other technologies like CNC machines and 3D printers, yet engineering is still in high demand and is very well paid.
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Nov 27, 2015 16:08
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One thing to keep in mind is that under capitalism and without any lower limit to workers' wages, there's always the possibility of hiring more and more desperate humans to do stuff instead of investing in new machines (kind of like the roman-empire-didn't-use-steam-because-they-had-slaves thing). With something like a decent minimum wage and welfare, or a universal basic income, then full automation really can become a more profitable prospect to capitalists than just deepening the exploitation of the underclass. This only works however if these policies apply to everyone in the labour market. Because of the borders of the nation-state system and of barriers to the free movement of people combined with lack of barriers to the free movement of capital, capitalists are free to undermine attempts at this kind of progress by geographically limiting who is allowed to benefit from it, and taking away their capital to regions with more "investment-friendly" climates.
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Nov 27, 2015 16:49
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Consider that we live in a society where businesses decided that renting this billboard in response to a labour movement for a higher minimum wage was a good investment :
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Nov 27, 2015 16:52
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Bob le Moche posted:One thing to keep in mind is that under capitalism and without any lower limit to workers' wages, there's always the possibility of hiring more and more desperate humans to do stuff instead of investing in new machines (kind of like the roman-empire-didn't-use-steam-because-they-had-slaves thing). Yeah, in an alternate world where the US never lost any manufacturing jobs to other countries, automation of processes is much more attractive (and that is what happens a lot here today). Instead, thanks to the magic of globalized shipping being incredibly cheap at scale, we have the current system. Though what's interesting is that there have been manufacturing jobs brought back to the US, and they're not replaced by machines. These are typically high value or high margin items, like the Mac Pro. There's a factory somewhere in the US where workers are hired to hand assemble the computers.
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Nov 27, 2015 16:54
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In case anyone was wondering it turns out self-driving tech is way further ahead than most people anticipated as Tesla just released self-driving software to their car fleet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZe5DXeYzw Granted all it's capable of at this point is maintaining speed and not crashing on it's current course but most people, myself included, thought that was another five years away at least. We're way way further ahead and this is just what we know of. Who knows what the actual pros such as Mercedes have going on behind closed doors. This is the trickle of water before a dam breaks.
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Nov 27, 2015 17:00
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Bob le Moche posted:One thing to keep in mind is that under capitalism and without any lower limit to workers' wages, there's always the possibility of hiring more and more desperate humans to do stuff instead of investing in new machines (kind of like the roman-empire-didn't-use-steam-because-they-had-slaves thing). Yet isn't it true, though, that as wages rise across much of the developing world, and the prices of shipping and fuel rising, that many formerly outsourced manufacturing jobs are starting to return to advanced developed countries where advanced automation has driven down the cost of production? Marketwatch: "Record number of manufacturing jobs returning to America" Forbes: "Why It's Time to Bring Manufacturing Back Home to the U.S." Forbes posted:The first has to do with cost. It used to be cheaper to manufacture outside the U.S.; now the costs are now converging. In the manufacturing sector, the U.S. is still among the most productive economies in the world in terms of dollar output per worker. By the way, your post: Bob le Moche posted:The role that automation plays in capitalism's development and its crises is central to Marx's analysis. It's kind of the main thing actually. The increasing inequality is in fact a consequence of the increase in technological productivity, which has been integral to capitalist society since the beginning. That's very interesting! I'm not too well-read in socialist literature, so I didn't know that it was about technological unemployment to that strong of a degree. Thanks for enlightening me! What literature would you recommend by socialist authors that goes into details about this issue specifically? Should I just delve straight into Kapital? I'd thought that the focus was primarily on inequality and social injustice, and the class antagonism that that creates. If the socialist movement had not been so thoroughly crushed by capitalism and capitalist rhetoric, would we be in a better position today to deal with the impacts of technology? Even if for example we had fully socialized healthcare and a 4-hour workday, would we be that much closer to collective ownership of capital, or would it just still be capitalism where profits accrue to the capitalists even more quickly thanks to (broadly-accepted) mass automation?
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Nov 27, 2015 18:01
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mobby_6kl posted:I'm not entirely sure if you're being serious here. Because there totally is software that helps automate engineering as well as other technologies like CNC machines and 3D printers, yet engineering is still in high demand and is very well paid. This is because in many engineering fields it is illegal to do certain things without a real certified engineer signing off on them, and if those things end badly then that engineer is typically liable for the results. Engineering is generally tightly regulated and subject to significant liability, its not something any idiot with a piece of software is legally allowed to do. It's government regulation protecting engineering jobs by requiring trained and licensed engineers to do engineering jobs. Software can't take the place of a licensed engineer, and the software companies aren't interested in doing so for fear of also inheriting that liability.
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Nov 27, 2015 19:41
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Main Paineframe posted:This is because in many engineering fields it is illegal to do certain things without a real certified engineer signing off on them, and if those things end badly then that engineer is typically liable for the results. Engineering is generally tightly regulated and subject to significant liability, its not something any idiot with a piece of software is legally allowed to do. It's government regulation protecting engineering jobs by requiring trained and licensed engineers to do engineering jobs. Software can't take the place of a licensed engineer, and the software companies aren't interested in doing so for fear of also inheriting that liability. Licensure is generally only required for public works, although certain fields do require it as well (for example, after the BP Oil spill certain designs related to oil drilling now require a Professional Engineer to sign off). The main limiting factor is that engineers are trained to do what people do best and machines do the worst - design creative works. They fit a practical purpose, but the designs are also usually novel in a way that you can't just plug into an algorithm and get a good result. You are right though that inheriting liability will be a major impedance to automation in general. That's why automated cars will still probably require you to be alert at all times - if the car fucks up and no one's there, it's the car's (and the automakers') fault. If the car fucks up and a driver is there but doesn't solve the situation, it's the driver's fault.
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Nov 27, 2015 19:48
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Main Paineframe posted:This is because in many engineering fields it is illegal to do certain things without a real certified engineer signing off on them, and if those things end badly then that engineer is typically liable for the results. Engineering is generally tightly regulated and subject to significant liability, its not something any idiot with a piece of software is legally allowed to do. It's government regulation protecting engineering jobs by requiring trained and licensed engineers to do engineering jobs. Software can't take the place of a licensed engineer, and the software companies aren't interested in doing so for fear of also inheriting that liability. I'm glad that you're discussing an example rather than the actual ideas involved.
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Nov 27, 2015 19:54
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computer parts posted:Licensure is generally only required for public works, although certain fields do require it as well (for example, after the BP Oil spill certain designs related to oil drilling now require a Professional Engineer to sign off). The main limiting factor is that engineers are trained to do what people do best and machines do the worst - design creative works. They fit a practical purpose, but the designs are also usually novel in a way that you can't just plug into an algorithm and get a good result. Audi has announced they're developing a fully autonomous system for driving in traffic jams. And that they will have 100% responsibilty if it causes accidents. Edit: As in something you will be able to buy soon. Lucy Heartfilia fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 20:03
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Audi has announced they're developing a fully autonomous system for driving in traffic jams. And that they will have 100% responsibilty if it causes accidents. HEADLINE: Can low income earners be trusted to drive? How welfare queens are a liability on the road
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Nov 28, 2015 00:54
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Audi has announced they're developing a fully autonomous system for driving in traffic jams. And that they will have 100% responsibilty if it causes accidents. You can already buy a Mercedes that can drive itself in low-speed highway traffic, and Mercedes has said they'll have a fully autonomous car within the next decade. It sucks that another thread is getting overrun by self-driving car talk, but a lot of people with a narrow focus on Google's progress in this particular arena are going to end up being blindsided by how quickly automated systems are rolling out in production cars. It's kind of shocking how many people I know who don't realize that semi-autonomous parking systems are already a pretty commonplace feature in many new cars.
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Nov 28, 2015 01:31
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Paradoxish posted:You can already buy a Mercedes that can drive itself in low-speed highway traffic, and Mercedes has said they'll have a fully autonomous car within the next decade. It sucks that another thread is getting overrun by self-driving car talk, but a lot of people with a narrow focus on Google's progress in this particular arena are going to end up being blindsided by how quickly automated systems are rolling out in production cars. It's kind of shocking how many people I know who don't realize that semi-autonomous parking systems are already a pretty commonplace feature in many new cars. I'm not sure how much it's commonplace so much as unknown because most people here are probably not buying new $25-30k+ cars. I recently realized the closest thought I've ever had to a get rich quick scheme was to invest early in automated or AI systems and then use their labor to enrich myself, and then I realized this was basically an AI version of bitcoin.
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Nov 28, 2015 01:36
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Paradoxish posted:You can already buy a Mercedes that can drive itself in low-speed highway traffic, and Mercedes has said they'll have a fully autonomous car within the next decade. It sucks that another thread is getting overrun by self-driving car talk, but a lot of people with a narrow focus on Google's progress in this particular arena are going to end up being blindsided by how quickly automated systems are rolling out in production cars. It's kind of shocking how many people I know who don't realize that semi-autonomous parking systems are already a pretty commonplace feature in many new cars. Automated systems are rolling out quickly. I have automated cruise control in my Subaru and it's great. But there is a huge difference between this and the full meaning and implication of "self driving car". They're decades away. RuanGacho posted:I'm not sure how much it's commonplace so much as unknown because most people here are probably not buying new $25-30k+ cars. The average new car is 33k in the US.
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Nov 28, 2015 02:55
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asdf32 posted:Re:driverless cars This is completely out of touch with reality. Maybe some kind of wishful thinking from people that are afraid of what's coming.
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Nov 28, 2015 03:14
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I foresee unmanned vehicles basically making long haul truck driving an obsolete career.
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Nov 28, 2015 03:50
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rudatron posted:They will never make a shitposting robot....NEVER. All it's got to do is capture data and then generate and post an appropriately crappy response. I mean they have robots that write simple articles about market movements already. It'll be glorious, post on the internet and immediately a shitpost could generated by a program as a response. At some day in the future when the masses have forgotten the gentle art of how to truly poo poo post, we experts can come back in and consult on how to do it manually. Just glorious, I can see that future: "Why back in may day the drunks used to poo poo post. They had simple methods and procedure that were robust enough to do it trashed. If they could do it drunk you can do without the automation. " Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Nov 28, 2015 |
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Nov 28, 2015 05:15
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crabcakes66 posted:This is completely out of touch with reality. Maybe some kind of wishful thinking from people that are afraid of what's coming. And you think a driverless Uber is going to pick you up when? One thing people miss is that current tech like self-parking is a luxury like air conditioning or at best a safety feature like airbags. It's an improvement but not transformative. The serious change only happens when we're wiling to unleash millions of driverless vehicles onto the roads - reliably and in all weather and driving conditions. The technological, regulatory, legal and social changes needed for that are not coming around the corner.
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Nov 28, 2015 05:19
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Nessus posted:I suspect somehow that the rich folks - who do not even hold ALL the power now, just a huge amount - will stop sometime before the logical conclusion when there is one living human being who owns everything. It's much harder to slaughter other rich people, who can afford to employ private military contractors to protect themselves.
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Nov 28, 2015 05:51
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Audi has announced they're developing a fully autonomous system for driving in traffic jams. And that they will have 100% responsibilty if it causes accidents. I'd like to see a source for the liability claim.
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Nov 28, 2015 06:03
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computer parts posted:I'd like to see a source for the liability claim. In current driving assistance systems the driver has to keep the hands on the steering wheels or show in some other way that they are observing the process actively. This is not the case for Audi's Staupilot. The driver can do other stuff to some degree. But if the driver falls asleep the car will stop for example. The Staupilot has a black box to help determine if an accident was caused by an intervention of the driver or a defect of the Staupilot. Edit: In Germany accidents that happen while a driving assistance system is used are the driver's fault. The Staupilot doesn't fulfil the requirements for an assistance system anymore. Lucy Heartfilia fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Nov 28, 2015 |
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Nov 28, 2015 08:27
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Blue Star posted:I frankly wouldn't worry about this sort of thing. I used to be worried about automation but now I think it will happen much more slowly than anyone thinks. It's not going to be a sudden explosion of robots and software doing all the jobs. Instead it's going to be really slow, stretched out over decades and generations. Technology just doesn't move that fast. We're nowhere close to the technology needed to eliminate all jobs, or even a lot of jobs. Most people's jobs are safe for the next 50+ years. We'll have plenty of time to adapt. This whole discussion is sci-fi nonsense. It is not most jobs and it is not 50 years. It's up to half the jobs and in about 20 years. Systemic unemployment is going to happen much sooner than you think. crabcakes66 posted:This is completely out of touch with reality. Maybe some kind of wishful thinking from people that are afraid of what's coming. We're getting bogged down by the specific point of automated cars because it's a major hallmark of human advancement and there are lives on the line should the tech fail. It should be a debate all its own. As a point against automation, it's a weak argument and doesn't address all the other fields likely to be automated.
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Nov 28, 2015 14:58
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LeoMarr posted:The transition to automatonic labor will be brutal on employment. However the end result is very good. Very good for whom?
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Nov 28, 2015 15:02
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:In current driving assistance systems the driver has to keep the hands on the steering wheels or show in some other way that they are observing the process actively. Yeah, an actual citation. from the company. Especially since you seem to be deriving from German law instead of US law.
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Nov 28, 2015 15:09
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MeLKoR posted:Very good for whom? After the Revolution, everyone, comrade. 
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Nov 28, 2015 17:26
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computer parts posted:Licensure is generally only required for public works, although certain fields do require it as well (for example, after the BP Oil spill certain designs related to oil drilling now require a Professional Engineer to sign off). The main limiting factor is that engineers are trained to do what people do best and machines do the worst - design creative works. They fit a practical purpose, but the designs are also usually novel in a way that you can't just plug into an algorithm and get a good result. Are they, really? I thought engineering was more about turning other people's creative works into reality. Obviously there's some latitude for creativity, but if you asked me to list creative fields, neither "engineer" nor "programmer" would be anywhere near the top of my list. Paradoxish posted:You can already buy a Mercedes that can drive itself in low-speed highway traffic, and Mercedes has said they'll have a fully autonomous car within the next decade. It sucks that another thread is getting overrun by self-driving car talk, but a lot of people with a narrow focus on Google's progress in this particular arena are going to end up being blindsided by how quickly automated systems are rolling out in production cars. It's kind of shocking how many people I know who don't realize that semi-autonomous parking systems are already a pretty commonplace feature in many new cars. Autonomous systems that automate certain specific tasks under certain specific well-defined conditions are easy - so easy that they hardly even qualify as steps toward autonomous driving. Driving in a traffic jam on a highway? That's a trivial task. Drive down a twisty, turny backroad in bumfuck nowhere with tons of blind driveways, road paint so worn-out even a human can barely see it, and it's currently snowing? It's so different from simple tasks like automatic cruise control, traffic jam driving, and automatic parking that the same skills aren't even remotely applicable. We might have cars that drive themselves some of the time, but genuinely "driverless" cars are not coming anytime in the foreseeable future.
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Nov 28, 2015 18:02
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Main Paineframe posted:Are they, really? I thought engineering was more about turning other people's creative works into reality. Obviously there's some latitude for creativity, but if you asked me to list creative fields, neither "engineer" nor "programmer" would be anywhere near the top of my list. That's going to depend what you mean by creative work, but typically what happens is that other people have some sort of idea or vision and the engineer has to use their creativity to create a realized design to apply in reality. Like, consider a simple example - someone wants a dam built in a general area. "Let's put a dam here" isn't exactly creative. A Civil Engineer that's contracted would have to find an ideal (or at least sufficient) place to put it based on the conditions of the soil/regulations/etc, and then create a reasonably unique design based on those constraints. You can also look at whenever a company might need a unique part for a particular situation: a mechanical engineer would have to consider the basic tolerances given, but then think of the things that they weren't given, but still apply to the particular case (eg, part has to be between 3-4 inches and support 500 kN of force, but it is used in high heat environments so it will expand more and deform more). For programmers, you're right that there's a more wide variation in levels of creativity. For creating new programs there's the same sort of uniqueness I described above. For basic maintenance, on the other hand, there's a lot of operations that can be fairly routine, although the level of automation potential can vary.
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Nov 28, 2015 18:28
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Basically everything logistics related is staring down automation right now. You all are focused on drivers. Route selection for an international shipments, warehouse/inventory management, terminal operations, stowage planning on vessels, hell the operation of vessels at sea, loading of containers, etc all of that (and much more) may end up automated. The white collar management stuff too. The generation of pretty complicated documents like dangerous goods lists are already automated by some companies. And the companies that have automated systems usually produce a manifest that is more correct and in accordance with 49 CFR / IMDG code too. The filing of customs forms, haz declarations, etc all that can be (is) automated. It's just not uniformly so yet. At the very least it will become centralized, a much smaller number of people do things from single locations. Salt Lake City gets alot of this work, so do Boise and Norfolk.
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Nov 29, 2015 00:25
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high six posted:It's much harder to slaughter other rich people, who can afford to employ private military contractors to protect themselves. How do these hypothetical super-riches prevent this? If the answer is something like "breed Super Mutants to be your loyal jannisary slaves" I think most rich people, who may be assholes but appear to enjoy existing in something resembling the current world, would have to pause and go, "What's the point of all of this, exactly?"
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Nov 29, 2015 11:11
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TwoQuestions posted:No such system can possibly exist. Your value as a human being begins and ends at what you produce for other people, and for the longest time legions of laborers were needed to provide for people that matter. In a fairly short period of time we can *all* expect to be "dead weight". I'm kind of amazed I haven't seen anyone post Bertrand Russell's essay "In Defense of Idleness". His view is that the best way to encourage the development of the arts is to subsidize as much Idleness as we can. Examples like JK Rowling would seem to prove his point.
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Nov 29, 2015 11:27
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Main Paineframe posted:This is because in many engineering fields it is illegal to do certain things without a real certified engineer signing off on them, and if those things end badly then that engineer is typically liable for the results. Engineering is generally tightly regulated and subject to significant liability, its not something any idiot with a piece of software is legally allowed to do. It's government regulation protecting engineering jobs by requiring trained and licensed engineers to do engineering jobs. Software can't take the place of a licensed engineer, and the software companies aren't interested in doing so for fear of also inheriting that liability. This is an aside, but given what has happened in other licensed fields, I'd expect that issue to be hit from two sides: domestic oversupply and outsourcing. For example, law is tightly licensed and difficult to automate, but because of that 1) waay more people are going into law, causing a glut of employees, and 2) a lot of legal work is getting outsourced to India and other lower-wage countries, wherever possible. And, of course, where automation is possible, that's happening too. There is a cascade effect here: the more jobs get lost to automation and outsourcing, the fiercer the competition for the remaining jobs. And with high supply of labor, its value drops . . .
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Nov 29, 2015 11:38
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Blue Star posted:I frankly wouldn't worry about this sort of thing. I used to be worried about automation but now I think it will happen much more slowly than anyone thinks. It's not going to be a sudden explosion of robots and software doing all the jobs. Instead it's going to be really slow, stretched out over decades and generations. Technology just doesn't move that fast. We're nowhere close to the technology needed to eliminate all jobs, or even a lot of jobs. Most people's jobs are safe for the next 50+ years. We'll have plenty of time to adapt. This whole discussion is sci-fi nonsense. This is, frankly, harder to address. We are already living through the intergenerational increase in productivity without correlating increase in wages, and, as stated before, it's hollowing out the middle class. Anecdotally, in my area of the U.S., the mining industry is able to extract and refine ore using a tenth of what they used to. Back in 1951 we had a landmark labor strike, subject to a phenomenal film, Salt of the Earth:  At the current scale of global manufacture our mines, now, open and close based on the global price of copper, creating uprooted families who have to chase employment from Freeport-McMoRan. The hurdles for labor to organize are higher now, with split-shifting, migrant labor, and less community engagement with the Catholic church. If it weren't for the traditions held by families there would be no spirit left. And this is intentional. Beyond what directly benefits the mining companies, we understand that Capitalism causes engagement with ideologies without its participants' cognizance. That should be a deeply disturbing facet of markets. And that's assuming a best-case scenario of ignorance. Throw in technological streamlining, and we see a system emerge the produces greater numbers of the economically disenfranchised, and that is already our current "underclass" or however you want to label the under-and-unemployed, since the 1970s. U.S. government has been neutered to provide the education required to properly equip this class with the skills and mindset to engage at, at least, a subsistence level, with their local economies, creating a feedback loop of consumption where those who are better off will just buy new, instead of servicing the old, thereby concentrating more money... and it perpetuates. We end up with unemployed, uneducated, unsupported people throughout the country, a ripe target for manipulation and, if history is precedent, fascism. To me, at a certain point, a resurgence in civic engagement, Democracy, and a pull-back from the notion that Capitalism is going to organize everything better than we can has to occur. Or we'll backslide.
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Nov 29, 2015 13:26
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This is an aside, but given what has happened in other licensed fields, I'd expect that issue to be hit from two sides: domestic oversupply and outsourcing. For example, law is tightly licensed and difficult to automate, but because of that 1) waay more people are going into law, causing a glut of employees, and 2) a lot of legal work is getting outsourced to India and other lower-wage countries, wherever possible. And, of course, where automation is possible, that's happening too. There is a cascade effect here: the more jobs get lost to automation and outsourcing, the fiercer the competition for the remaining jobs. And with high supply of labor, its value drops . . . Anything that requires a PE isn't going to be outsourced (because a *lot* of it is government work which requires citizenship) and there is a very high bar towards getting a PE which lots of people don't bother with if they don't need it. You're correct that in theory non-PE engineering is vulnerable to that, but the US has an advantage in being head & shoulders above any country cheaper than us in quality. Sure, you see stories of programmers getting outsourced to India, but that's because their skills (at the surface) are relatively mundane. Companies are also discovering that the on paper money saved usually isn't worth the cost, which is why we've seen a lot of "in-sourcing" as of late.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:02
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computer parts posted:Anything that requires a PE isn't going to be outsourced (because a *lot* of it is government work which requires citizenship) and there is a very high bar towards getting a PE which lots of people don't bother with if they don't need it. My company is learning this lesson hard right now
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Nov 29, 2015 15:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:In a fairly short period of time we can *all* expect to be "dead weight". Ah! Yes, I've been meaning to read this essay, actually. This is as good a chance as any. In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell I quite liked this bit: quote: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? However, I don't think that Russell makes any point that any of us would disagree with. I have yet to see anyone in this thread praise a 8-12 hour workday, 40 hour workweek for the moral virtue that it instills. Most of us, I feel, would enjoy greater leisure time to spend arguing on the internet, or other hobbies.  Blue Star posted:I frankly wouldn't worry about this sort of thing. I used to be worried about automation but now I think it will happen much more slowly than anyone thinks. It's not going to be a sudden explosion of robots and software doing all the jobs. Instead it's going to be really slow, stretched out over decades and generations. Technology just doesn't move that fast. We're nowhere close to the technology needed to eliminate all jobs, or even a lot of jobs. Most people's jobs are safe for the next 50+ years. We'll have plenty of time to adapt. This whole discussion is sci-fi nonsense. Are you sure about that? Most of the statistics -- look up "Employment vs productivity" -- seem to indicate a divergence here. But how could productivity increase if employment is decreasing? It could only be because we're working smarter, that the average worker today is leveraging modern technology and automation in not only making up for the missing employee, but super-compensating and producing more than ever before.  Rotman, David. 12 June 2013. "How technology is destroying jobs" 
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Nov 29, 2015 16:23
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