Posted on 05/28/2015 7:46:09 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The elephants in the room lumber about, undisturbed by politicians or people of vision.
The hard issues of the economy are well known.
Politicians, bureaucracies, CEOs and trade union leaders have dealt the the issues of productivity, unemployment, competition from east and west, the collapse of industries through the decades of the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries. Yet these are harder now. Intelligent systems, robotic manufacturing, driverless vehicles, online services, all carve deep into established trades.
In the post-war decades, every time a new technology came along, the feared bonfire of jobs didn’t happen — or only briefly and not everywhere. It’s different this time. The jobs massacre that super-intelligent machines and systems presage, doesn’t — for now — seem to leave many large areas of human work.
My son settled, in his mid-teens, on the trade of an actor as his life’s work: and in his mid-twenties, became one. I was glad, yet felt obliged to issue the warning that this was a trade renowned for unemployment, and frustrated hopes.
But acting is not yet a candidate for automation. Maybe he was wiser than his co-evals who studied law, engineering and business studies. Maybe, if automation relieves us of much physical and mental toil, the old utopian dream of leisure and cultivation of the mind and body could be realized, and actors will be in short supply and highly rewarded.
Maybe: but what a massacre of jobs to get there! And as that comes closer, the political world has to simultaneously come to terms with a possibility rapidly becoming a fact. That is, the likely end to Western Europe’s long period of peace.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.reuters.com ...
But will there be Patlabor?
Oh No??...
Possibly, for those with the right mental attitudes and capabilities.
However, for several generations now, people have been relieved in practice of "physical and mental" toil in several communities.
British slums, American Indian reservations, US ghettoes.
Not much toiling going on in these areas.
Also not much "cultivation of the mind and body." More like their destruction.
Look I get the idea that there is much to gain, theoretically, from a world where the need for human labor has been largely or entirely removed. However, our actual history of groups for which that has been accomplished, even when provided with material stuff their ancestors never had, is not promising.
I am thinking more like Appleseed.
Ping.
I don't see automation effecting law, business and especially engineering any more, and probably less, than actors. Further, there are a LOT more unemployed "actors" than lawyers and engineers.
That “utopia” is a Marxist one.
Just like anything else, the market will self-regulate. If there is too much automation, it won’t matter how low the production costs get, because without consumers with money to buy the products, those businesses will not succeed.
I think where this should go is for humanity to branch out to other planets, we need colonies in other places that will present us with sufficient new challenges. Heck, we could start by figuring out better the ocean depths and what is beneath our feet!
Right, we can’t stay still too long because Marxist utopia will quickly become dystopia. We need to move out of the nest and on to greater challenges.
I want a robot that kills robots.
Just in case.
Not necessarily.
Marxism is about controlling the means of production and distribution of “stuff.” It assumes human effort will continue to be necessary to produce “stuff.”
Like the market, Marxism simply assumes an “economy of scarcity.” They are both about how to distribute scarce resources.
What we ‘re talking about here is an “economy of abundance.” Resources, or at least some or many of them, are NOT scarce. This has already happened with information. The interwebs have made acquisition of information that previously had a very high price essentially free.
Such a world, BTW, is the logical conclusion of a market economy. The market has for centuries been bending the productivity curve upwards. Productivity can be somewhat simplistically defined as the amount of human effort needed to produce a given amount of “stuff.” The logical end point of a curve always headed up is eventual arrival at a point where infinite stuff is generated with zero human effort. Or at least something approximating this.
It’s just not as simple as Marx vs. the market. We are facing something that quite literally has no precedent. Which makes it really hard for us to think about. I most certainly include myself in that group.
From our present perspective, I think most people assume the way such a world will be dealt with is by the government redistributing the resources sincce jobs for most will no longer exist. I assume there are libertarian or non-government alternatives. I just don’t know what they are.
In his writings, Marx envisioned a future in which people would be “free from labour” and focus their energies on being artists and philosophers. Communism, in his mind, was part of the process to achieve that utopia.
We are even examining our eventual mechanization of combat, with unmanned everything, using autonomous direction to eliminate human interference and disruption. There will be some of you who will be dismissive of this but we can't afford to be behind the rest of the world, particularly China, in this area of technological development.
The question really becomes, what will we do with people after this? Except for the exceptionally creative, there will be no work at all. We have that situation in a sense already in our urban areas. People with little education and few prospects receive subsidies to live a modest life and not hurt anybody. That obviously doesn't work.
Our "captains of industry" have adopted certain stopgaps to make sure that the money flows to themselves without any undue pressure to plan for the future by exporting many jobs overseas to China and other sweatshops or by rapidly importing "undocumented" and underpaid labor from Mexico and the rest of Central America.
All those actions do is delay the inevitable and make our country ripe for conflict.
The real question is, are there any leaders in our country, anywhere looking at where this is heading and what will have to do to make sure that there places in the workforce for our children?
Not entirely sure he meant this in the way we’re talking about here. He meant forced and imposed labor. I doubt he had the imagination to foresee a world where machines would do everything now done by people.
Or I could be wrong. If he envisioned a world in which no work would be required, I’d be interested in a cite.
In any case, if such a world was considered utopian by Marx, that does not mean of itself that it would be bad. Marxism, like Nazism, had many goals that just about anybody would consider desirable.
They had that world in the animated film WALL-E. All the people were fat and suffered atrophy and were consumed by mind numbing electronic pacifiers.
Marx also envisioned a point of near infinite material goods, but he believed that it would be the end result of collectivist, “managed” effort rather than through a dynamic system such as a free market. Socialism and Communism, in his mind, were milestones toward that end goal. The thing is, had no regard for individualism, nor did he consider that power is an extraordinary drug and that his philosophy would result in crushing deprivation and bloodshed. In short, he was twit.
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