Posted on 11/03/2017 9:48:34 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
There is a pretty good book called “Ready Player One ...” which is coming out as a movie soon, that is somewhat based on this premise. It is a pretty fun book, with lots of fun 1980-1990’s trivia.
Elon Musk on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be ‘It’s going to be necessary’
http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-
UBI is just a bedtime story Elon Musk tells himself to help the super-wealthy sleep
https://qz.com/1024938/ubi-is-just-a-bedtime-story-elon-musk-tells-himself-to-help-the-super-wealthy-sleep/
The very idea of no jobs is ludicrous. When labor prices get very low due to technological changes, people become servants. The idea that robots will replace servants is also ludicrous. People have servants because it’s a high-status thing to order people around. They’ll always be a market for it.
Interesting article but I see no reason why AI droids could not game and participate along with humans. So I am not sure I accept their premise.
I miss the days when Orwellian science fiction had the decency to be put off into a distant future. Having it as a zeitgeist is eye-rolling. But per Stanley Kubrick, by 2001 we were supposed to have regular service to the moon so maybe there’s no need to put dystopia off very far when you’re soaking in it.
We’d have been much further along in space had folks like Fritz Mondale and Bill Proxmire not helped hamper NASA. I believe it was Gordo Cooper who explicitly blamed Proxmire for stopping the next goal of putting a man on Mars by the 1970s/80s. In a lot of ways, we’re worse off and further away from these goals than we were in the ‘50s (and it’s all become exponentially more expensive).
agreed
Opium used to be fun....
Hey, if I could replace people with that robot from Rocky IV i would
Read it and enjoyed it.
I told people years ago that when the technology had advanced to the point that fantasy was a far better substitute for reality, people would retreat into fantasy worlds.
It would be far, far worse than any drug addiction.
As smart as some of these people are.. they could benefit from an Economics class. Robots are great...but when you reduce labor to 0 cost, it will drive the cost of the products / services down as well... which means you have to sell more to maintain sales / profit levels... but.. since everyone is being replaced by computers... there is no one to buy the hamburger or haircut or robot picked lettuce... so while it is neat to think about ... in reality, over the long term... robots are not going to replace everyone. With that said.. we don’t need to be importing a bunch of low skilled labor into this country..because if they are ever not able to eat... they could start burning things... then we lose all the robots...
>As smart as some of these people are.. they could benefit from an Economics class. Robots are great...but when you reduce labor to 0 cost, it will drive the cost of the products / services down as well... which means you have to sell more to maintain sales / profit levels... but.. since everyone is being replaced by computers... there is no one to buy the hamburger or haircut or robot picked lettuce... so while it is neat to think about ... in reality, over the long term... robots are not going to replace everyone. With that said.. we don’t need to be importing a bunch of low skilled labor into this country..because if they are ever not able to eat... they could start burning things... then we lose all the robots...
Funny, you basically just described the book “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson
But I suspect, before we reach that point, outsiders could crash in and start to destroy the system, declaring the entire system evil. In some part of this fantasy complex, people will have to wake up and defend themselves from invasion. If their defense is successful, they can live on, but no longer be happy folks inside the dream fantasy. They may have to face both harsh reality outside and happy machine-generated fantasy inside the complex.
That doesn’t stop automation. It just results in societal self destruction. That’s one of the appeals of a UBI - it creates consumers out of the jobless. If automation works it could begin ushering is into a post-scarcity society.
By the same token, people have horses because they are a high-status thing to have. These so-called "horseless carriages" will never really catch on!
/s
QUESTION: Just how big is the market for human servants? I mean, how many people today in America are working as actual domestics? And whom would you rather have cleaning your toilets, sorting your undies, or drawing your bath? A human servant (who might be secretly spitting into your food, inadvertently sneezing onto your bedsheets, unthinkingly picking his nose while he folds the napkins)? Or a gleaming android?
Actually, the robotic servants will often be so unobtrusive (e.g., self-cleaning toilets, "intelligent" washing machines, built-in water temperature regulators, etc.) that you won't even be aware of them. Things will seem to happen "by magic."
Regards,
I agree! Robots are going to replace only about 99% of everyone. So, I guess that means that this is a fake problem, and we shouldn't devote any more attention to it.
/s
Regards,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
First published in 1909!
Regards,
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