Posted on 05/21/2015 10:57:10 AM PDT by youngphys01
From my experience people that think adversity is important are also self-sabotagers. They make their own lives harder, keep the adversity level high, and thus never have to achieve, and more importantly never wonder how their life would have turned out if they’d gotten their act together younger. Adversity is their excuse, it teaches nothing other than new and interesting ways to insist it’s not their fault.
Exactly. And if we didn’t have pressures from the third world labor markets, I think free labor markets in this country might reallocate the labor into other roles fast enough to keep us above 25%. But we are already at 49%, so 25% and even lower is very believable.
It’ll take over pizza deliveries, grocery deliveries, etc. You can build light weigh, very fuel efficient driverless vehicles for small deliveries. We’ll can have the world delivered cheaply to our doorstep. Which is good, because the world will be at our door asking for a handout.
I didn’t see that one.
My guess is that initially the truck will rely on fuel pump attendants. But programming the truck to stop within a certain range of the fuel pump. And then designing a fuel pump to automatically insert the pump and load, are far easier than designing a self driving truck.
So I wouldn’t expect it to be long before the need for a fuel pump attendant is eliminated.
In my experience, there are few things that do more damage to a person's character than to have been given everything the ever wanted.
There’s a very large gap between not facing adversity and being given everything you want. That gap is where most people live, or at least try really hard to live in between break-ups, funerals and layoffs.
Then maybe we're working off of different definitions of "adversity".
If there is no gap between adversity and everything you want for you then your definition of adversity has no useful purpose. Because pretty much only old money and celebrities get everything they want, which means everybody else faces adversity, even people who would clearly tell you that as long as the mother-in-law is in New Mexico where she belongs they don’t really face any adversity.
It is wonderful to be a leftist! History starts fresh every morning and the future remains stagnant to the current standards!
The buggy whip industry died when Henry Ford invented the assembly line, heck many farmers “lost” their jobs and had to move into industry!
Then later a whole lot of secretaries lost their jobs to the computer and somehow we just kept booming....
These folks see the future thru the lense of today, they wonder, “what will become of the fast food burger fryer when a robot is bought to do that job? That poor guy will starve to death without welfare!”
The conservative understands that humans continue to advance and better themselves, we have faith in human ingenuity and productivity! When considering the same fast food worker, we think, “how great for that person to not have his talents wasted flipping burgers, now he can go out and invent the next new product!”
Liberals support socialism because they are intellectually lazy and have no faith in their fellow man!
Capitalism allows people to invent and build Harleys and employ hundreds of thousands of people for the whole biker culture.
Socialism keeps dial phones in peoples houses for decades.
Capitalism allows Apple and Samsung and LG to invent a trillion dollar industry that employs hundreds of thousands.
Now, yes. But this started out as speculating about the ramifications of a world of mass automation, where consumer goods and services normally available only to the rich become inexpensive and commonplace, and very few people actually work.
But the rich will always have something newer, cooler and more exciting available to them that the rest of us can’t afford. Almost everything you currently own, rent, or touch was, probably not that long ago even, only available to the rich. But now you have them, but the rich still have access better versions. Once only the rich owned cars, now pretty much every that wants a car has a car, pretty darn nice cars too, but we don’t have Bugatti Veyrons. And yes 20 years from now most if not all the stuff that make today’s Veyrons awesome will be in Nissan Sentras, but Bugatti will have added newer more amazing feature by then that we could never hope to afford... until they too become cheap and common place.
That’s the cycle. New things start off in the high end market and move down, but there’s always another high end thing. Raising the standard of living brings up both the floor and ceiling. Poor people now have things rich people in the 80s couldn’t even dream of (remember 80s cellphones), but the stuff that poor people have now is still dog crap compared to what rich people have. And even in a mass automated, 3D printed, self driving world that gap will remain. Rich people will have better 3D printers printing better stuff than you and I. And poor people will still be having riots while claiming to be horribly mistreated while never bothering to think about just how actually well off they are.
When reality starts getting to me, when I start focusing too much on what isn’t in my grasp, I look up videos from those really crappy parts of the world where people live in the dump building shanty towns out of refuse. THAT’S adversity. The fact that my company is run by an idiot who just announcing there will be a 5% reduction in force over the next year just because that’s how he likes to run things and the last few layoffs were random enough that I have no way of figuring out which group I’m in is annoying, but I’ve got way too many ways to ride that out without even reducing my expenses much less living in the dump, so it’s not adversity.
There's the piece that throws a monkey wrench into whole idea of a mechanized world where very few people actually work. Mechanization will not change that cycle. For people to simply wait until the few people that are working get around to figuring out how to make that "new thing" available to them seems anathema to the aspects of human nature we ought to be trying to foster, rather than have fall into disuse and atrophy.
Who says simply wait. The cycle will remain basically identical to how it works now. There is a hand-crafted, high on innovation luxury set of the world that sells to the rich. Then there is a “almost luxury” set that’s starting to commoditize those innovations for the upper middle class. Then there is the mass produced section that sells that same stuff to the masses. The difference between now and the future is that third step now still involves a few people and in the future it will not.
Luxury goods will still be hand-crafted because that’s part of the cache, just as it is today, part of the uniqueness, part of the ego trip of the price tag. Rolls Royce and Bugatti and Ferrari and Lotus don’t use the assembly line that has produced every car you’ve ever owned because if they did they’d be one of the cars you’ve ever owned, they will continue to be luxury automakers and they will continue to take longer to make fewer cars with as many hands touching them as they can get long into the future because if you have a Ford assembly line you aren’t Rolls Royce. But that won’t be a source for a lot of jobs, because there isn’t enough demand for those products to employ a lot of people. There’s only so many people out there buying million dollar cars, and even if your corporate goal is to make sure 1000 people personally touch some part of every one of those cars that market limit will hard cap your employee count at an insignificant percentage of the populace.
I was under the impression that we were talking about eliminating the jobs of a lot more than "a few people". I think the objective of automation technology should not be the elimination of those jobs, but shortening the time it takes new technology and innovations to work their way down the stack.
Each of the factories is a few people, they add up to a lot when they start hitting every single mass produced industry. Add in self driving trucks so you don’t need people to deliver those goods, and 3D printers so you aren’t even physically delivering most of your goods and a lot of people are out of work.
The goal of automation is to produce more stuff faster for less money. It’s not trying to eliminate jobs, but it inevitably will. That’s a significant part of “less money”, employees are expensive, even if you don’t pay them much. Finding them, hiring them, training them and losing them so you have to do it all over again adds costs. And they have performance limits. Which is why increased automation reduces head count.
Well, every job you eliminate is going to effectively remove a person or family from the middle class. What does that do to the demand side of your cycle?
Don’t know. That’s where things get exciting. We’ve got to rethink our brand of reality. In a world where we don’t need people to work for everybody to still have a very high standard of living how do we still give people this high standard of living? I’ve only got a few kernels of ideas how to work it out, nothing fully fleshed. But we will be figuring it out over the next 2 decades because it IS happening. We’re already on the path, we’re already further down the path than even people who see it will admit.
Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, but I'd worry about the long term effects of a population with no meaningful work to do.
Could be a problem. Could be an opportunity. Could be that freed up from the need for crappy jobs which, let’s face it, are mostly actually meaningless, we unleash our nation’s hidden talents with all kinds of awesome inventions and explorations. Or maybe we just become a nation of lazy slezoids who perform all kinds of aberrant behavior just to kill the time. We’ll find out.
If they continue to consolidate power and attempt to control the economy through centralized bureaucracies in DC, I think it will be the former. At some point the union will disintegrate under the sheer weight of it, just like the old USSR did and you'll start to see more of the latter.
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