Well I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Posted on 01/15/2013 9:35:42 AM PST by ksen
For most of modern history, two-thirds of the income of most rich nations has gone to pay salaries and wages for people who work, while one-third has gone to pay dividends, capital gains, interest, rent, etc. to the people who own capital. This two-thirds/one-third division was so stable that people began to believe it would last forever. But in the past ten years, something has changed. Labor's share of income has steadily declined, falling by several percentage points since 2000. It now sits at around 60% or lower. The fall of labor income, and the rise of capital income, has contributed to America's growing inequality.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Jerry Brown from 1995
http://biggovernment.com/mrichmond/2010/06/10/jerry-brown-flashback-we-need-more-welfare-and-fewer-jobs/
The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs. Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I’m talking about welfare for all. Without it, you’re going to have warfare for all. Without a universal health care like every other civilized country, without a minimum level of income, this country will explode. You can’t blame the guy at the bottom forever. At some point there’s a reaction and we’ll see that the real criminals are those calling the tune, making the rules, and walking to the bank. We have the money, we have the brain power. The United States now has the highest measured wealth of any nation ever in the history of the world. We could rebuild our cities, we could create the kind of buying power and community well-being that will provide for peace. The guaranteed income is one way.
Another way is to have always the availability of work in a nonprofit, in community service. A third is to start giving people training to develop skills where they can be self-supporting. You could come up with a cash supplement. Even conservatives have suggested a negative income tax to cut out the bureaucracy. If we were smart, we’d get rid of welfare and give people a family assistance like they do in Europe…
The problem isn’t even a problem. Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we’re all in it together. It’ll work when there’s a shared sense of destiny. It can be done! It’s all there! What isn’t there is the leadership to create the kind of social network, the safety net, the distribution that would truly create a just and equal society…
We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let’s-take-care-of-one-another. That’s the creative challenge. First, expose relentlessly the big lie that comes over the tube every night-that if you just go out and find that job, and work harder, it’ll all be fine. It won’t! There’s not enough work to go around and a lot of the pay is not fair. Unless you totally yank up that system and create a better one, unless the spirit changes, unless the heart opens, unless we confront power with the truth of our own unarmed but absolute fearless truth, we’re not going to overcome it. Evil is too embedded to be overcome by anything other than a spiritual challenge.
Well I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
That’s not a robot. That’s a zombie...I dated a couple of them.
Ned Ludd also advocated smashing the new automated weaving machines at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution as it would put weavers like him out of work... hence the term Luddite. Obama himself has berated ATMs and kiosks as taking away “good jobs”. Any growing technological economy produces structural unemployment as new technologies make others obsolete. Consider the telephone business say 60 years ago when telephone operators still manually connected 6your calls. These operators lost their jobs to dial phones. Phone service was expensive and many people did not have phones or relied on shared party lines in rural areas. With cellular technology the telephone industry has been transformed and employ more people than back in the days of telephone operators .
Jerry Brown makes sense! :)
What timeframe are you talking about? I want to be sure I have the same one in mind.
Don’t worry because if Bill Gates and Microsoft design those robots then they will be obsolete every six months and will die from viruses in between model changes.
Pat Buchanan was probably the last populist that was in the politics, he was utterly repudiated, but his outcry against Free trade and illegal immigration still resonates today. Throw in bailouts, bulging pensions, selective law enforcement, police state, world policing, etc. the anger will grow.
The greatest period of growth in agricultural productivity in the U.S. was from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Doing the exact same thing over and over is perfect for robots.
Can we replace congress with robots?
It's economic reality. People are getting paid less for producing more. We were sold a bill of goods saying that if the "job creators" just had more then it would trickle down to us in the form of more and higher paying jobs. Well, the "job producers" have more now than have ever had and corporate profits are through the roof but the rest of us are stuck with stagnating wages, longer hours and high unemployment.
People are becoming more and more aware of this so when the government starts stepping in the wealthy will have no one to blame but themselves.
1940s: 5.6%
1950s: 4.1%
1960s: 4.4%
1970s: 3.2%
That kind of growth for 40 years wasn't seen before and hasn't been seen since. It can be argued that several other factors besides farm mechanization were at play, but what can't be argued is that leaving half the people who lost their jobs to farm mechanization “in the wind” was detrimental.
You mean like all that mass murdering going on in the Scandinavian countries?
Yes, Bookchin was an anarchist, but he was strongly opposed to Marxism. He wanted people to have real freedom and real control of their lives. He probably wasn't as strong on "property rights" as I would like, but he wasn't violent, was not a crypto-big government guy, and really did respect freedom.
He looked at technology and came to the conclusion that soon we will have plenty of "stuff" and not much need for labor. His conclusion that this could open an era in which coercive control faded away, the political elites lost power, and people re-discovered the joys of local communities.
I think it could be that way. If folks are afraid of the term "anarchism" than they might consider "libertarianism" (I generally do not like the Libertarian Party) or some new term signifying small local communities.
It doesn't seem like a bad political goal to me, and if we don't go in that direction, then I see a real possibility that we will all end up wearing Mao suits and spend our days shoveling each other into ovens. If the Government stays big and powerful, and if most humans are "useless eaters", than it won't be a good thing.
Post-Sarcity Anarchism. It may sound ugly, but it's a lot closer to what this country had in 1800 than what we have now.
100 million people killed by socialism in the 20th century. But don’t you worry — Norway is off the hook. I don’t blame them. But I do not see socialism as a benign political philosophy either.
On the flip side, those who design/manufacture robots will be in high demand and well paid for decades to come...
“I think we’re heading for a Socialist Utopia. And how do you feel about that? The feral crowd in the inner city may be ahead of the curve on this one.”
We certaonly know how to do accomplish that: the government takes money out of the economy so it can’t be invested in new opportunities and pays people for not working. That works every time to preserve and enhance the feudal system by denying opportunity and growth from the common people. In democratic feudal systems it ensures control for the rulers (see the history of negroes and indians in American politics), and that’s what Atlantic readers want.
If we don’t hinder the government from ‘helping’ us with this problem they will surely try to use it to bankrupt us and make most everyone an inner-city peasant. Dependency and stagnation are great for the security of the rulers.
OTOH an economy that invests it’s excess income in whatever new opportunities come along instead of giving it to the government for welfare will grow and prosper in ways they can’t imagine. Just as the ‘wonders’ of today couldn’t have been imagined by the employees of the buggy-whip factories when Henry Ford came along.
So yeah, you can expect a feudal (eg: socialist) ‘utopia’ if the government can help us enough...
(Hmmm... cheap robots making robots- wouldn’t everyone have their own robot after a short while? Why even have factories then? Capital would have even less of an advantage over labor.)
1940s: 5.6%
1950s: 4.1%
1960s: 4.4%
1970s: 3.2%
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/chart-graph/us-government-spending-percent-gdp
Hmmm, what started going up sharply in the 1940s?
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