After 16 years i've left local gov
- Thread starter [TFU] Thegoon84
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Caporegime
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You'll struggle to get a bot plumber.
Afterall no robot can have that many brews a day and charge so much for so little.
But on the other hand the cost to produce robot that can go into people's houses, remove a cast iron bath and plumb in 6 radiators etc.
Tldr become a plumber.
Afterall no robot can have that many brews a day and charge so much for so little.
But on the other hand the cost to produce robot that can go into people's houses, remove a cast iron bath and plumb in 6 radiators etc.
Tldr become a plumber.
why not? We've been automating quite significantly for 200 years now...
back in reality it doesn't actually work like that - at one point in history most of the population was working in agriculture, the fact that we need relatively few people in order to sustain us with food these days means the rest of the population is free to do other things
Caporegime
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Just lately many people worked in retail. However the high street and retail is going bust faster than you can say toysrus.
These are largely unskilled workers but economic agents who were not on benefits and had enough disposable income to wield purchasing power.
By pulling the rugs from under their feet you have two problems. More unskilled unemployed. Less spending power which slows economic growth impacting others.
There's a significant difference between 19th century mechanisation and so-called "full automation". Thankfully the latter is as others have said a somewhat unlikely pipe-dream, at least in our lifetimes.
Except we don't, employment is at an all time high, people find other jobs...
Well the point is more that people have trotted out the same flawed argument about automation for a couple of centuries now when over that time employment has generally increased
In the past only certain types of jobs were targeted for mechanisation/automation.
The difference now is that increasingly ALL types of jobs are able to be automated. This really is set to be a very different kind of challenge than we've faced in our past.
We can't all be artists/creative types.
Except UBI will HAVE to happen whether we like it or not..
First world countries are approaching higher and higher levels of autonomy...
Not strictly speaking true.
The purpose of capitalism is to extract value from workers and funnel that, in the form of money, to the elite. The whole purpose of capitalism is to give the workers just enough so they feel compensated for their work, but no more. Then wealth can flow upwards to the elites.
Now in a world with automation, the elites can control both the resources necessary for production and also the means of production itself. They do not need the lower classes. Moreover, they will be unable to extract anything from the lower classes - indeed the lower classes will be a drain on the elite, extracting UBI from them.
This I believe will be the turning point. When the elites are no longer able to extract value from the workers, society will undergo drastic changes. This could well result in billions being allowed to starve as they have no inherent value to the elites.
I'm not sure if I'm explaining this very well, but let me try this on you... We are allowed to exist today because we contribute to the wealth of the elites. That is the only reason we are allowed to exist. In a world where we all get paid UBI to do as we please, we no longer contribute to them.
And since the elites control all land, mineral wealth, law, military, etc... when we stop being useful to them they will be in a position to jettison a large part of the world's population. Ie, to let them die off.
e2: Just in case anyone thinks this is ridiculous.
Imagine you own a house and you have a family. You work hard to provide for them and meet their needs.
One day, a govt official turns up with a stranger and his family. He informs you that this other family will be sharing your house (space), and you will be providing for their needs (money). None of them are able to do any work nor help you with yours.
What would your own personal reaction be to this? You are sacrificing your space and income, and you might question what the purpose of keeping this other family alive is?
You are the only person able to produce something, they produce nothing.
I can't see how this plays out any differently when the elites control all production and resources, and have no need to maintain a human workforce any more.
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I see the point you are making but i don't think you see the following..
Most low-end jobs can already be automated, by the time UBI MAY be an option we are talking about white collar, upper working/middle class jobs.. The people today earning above the national average.
You cannot make over 60-70% of the population unemployed and give them no form of income, wealth will inherently lose its value and the only thing worth having will be equity.
As so prevelantly pointed out during fight club by Tyler Durden..
Skip to 1:02
sure but I'm not just talking about the 19th century... employment figures *now* are at record high, the luddite nonsense is still being shown to be nonsense
We've barely scratched the surface of where automation could eventually take us, tho. Not just blue collar but white collar jobs being made obsolete. Highly skilled jobs being made obsolete.
Nearer to present day, however, we could be about to see some sectors - employing vast amounts of labour - lost to automation in the next few years. Driving jobs for one. Truth be told I'm a bit sceptical about the viability of antonymous vehicles, but this is just one sector that could potentially suffer catastrophic job losses in the near term.
Yet we've been automating for a couple of centuries. As far as predictions of the future go we've not really been too good with those - the current trend is some handwaving argument about how all our jobs will disappear because: Artificial Intelligence. And some scare stories about the dangers of AI etc..etc.. even though AI has been around since mid way through the last century.
Nothing that would beat the turing test, an AI that can learn, adapt and grow as a being with access to exceptional processing power has potentially mind blowing implications.
I don't see all jobs going, many jobs are creative or rather practical.. Automation will simplify more jobs before anything else, there are still far too many weird practices that haven't aged well in the world.. We have only just seen the demise of movie rental in favour of streaming for example.. As well as the death of the high street.
Care to list some meaningful examples of automation (not mechanisation only) from 200 years ago?
I'm not sure what relevance the Turing test has here - then you jump straight into the AI fantasy stuff.... those sorts of ideas appear frequently - see the NYT coverage were popular back when Rosenblatt revealed his perceptron in the late 1950s:
https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/...ns-by-doing-psychologist-shows-embryo-of.html
then we get a resurgence in the 80s - some more coverage from the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/15/science/more-human-than-ever-computer-is-learning-to-learn.html
This stuff gets hyped, sure there was renewed interest in neural nets yet again starting in 2012 and there has been some real breakthroughs using deep learning in computer vision, NLP etc... but yet again this easily gets hyped up to silly levels with all the fantasy stuff
We've seen change in the past too though but this automation/machines are bad for jobs argument is an old one and has been consistently shown to be false - in case you weren't already aware see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
I'm not really sure what you're after, especially with regards to your qualifier of "not mechanisation only"? What form do you suppose automation took 200 years ago exactly. Here is a wikipedia article on "automation" if you click on history you can see some examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Industrial_Revolution_in_Europe
but yeah, after reading a couple pages, aside from being 4 years old, it says multiple times that they don't know the cause of death, just that the people had died. so, nowhere about "people killing themselves because they were taken off benefit", nor any evidence at all that the removal of benefit was the cause of death.
nice try though.
Caporegime
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It is but how long will that last? These unskilled retail workers won't have much to fall back on as more and more go bust!
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