Topic: Technological unemployment is (almost) here - page 32. (Read 88255 times)

Of course they don't starve because welfare and crappy jobs like burger flipper still exist.

Under capitalism if you don't have a job you cannot live (not counting welfare and charities that only allow not to starve).

If you are not lucky enough to get capital and live from its rent, its only way to survive in the capitalist economy model!

I don't know. I haven't read the latest death toll from starvation numbers. Maybe you can tell me?

BTW, it's still pretty dumb that you keep thinking of capitalism as "having a job." It's not having a job and letting someone give you money, it's making jobs and making money. You are too far into the "get a good paying job to survive" brainwashing mentality.

Desperate people with AK-47 have much better chances than police with drones and satellites!

Your argument contradict himself. People will fight when they have nothing to lose - risking the life is much better than starvation for most people! Try not to eat just 3 days and you will understand what is it!

You should read OP before writing this rubbish - "white collars" will be (or yet being) affected as well as unskilled workers, so even if you learn hard it won't guarantee success. Do you know how many programmers (!) are unemployed in the EU and US now!? Even if entire population will learn valuable skills (programming, 3D modeling, robot maintenance etc) there won't be enough jobs for them all under capitalism!

P.S. I intended to discuss peaceful ways to solve technological unemployment issue and not the civil war, which is rather obvious if we won't solve this problem.

So, it'll be like the Taliban on camels, fighting US with their satellites and drones?
Besides, why would they want to fight? If, as you claim, technological unemployment will make us all poor, then they won't earn much for risking their life fighting. And if it won't, then those they want to fight will be the ones giving them jobs, money, and things to buy.

It's pretty sad, and rather disgusting, that some people's default reaction to seeing someone else's wealth is "I'm going to kill him and take it for myself" instead of "I'm going to learn from him and create it for myself." Thank god for karma, keeping these types of people poor and broken.

I don't think "tech elite" will be much happy with this fate - living in the small enclaves, spending large resources on the defense (80-90% "useless population" will fight very hard trying to capture these cities) and even don't having hi-tech products!

More likely it would mean that no one would make such devices, if they cost millions or billions, and there aren't enough people to buy them. So the only things that will be made will be the things that the makers actually know can be sold. Maybe that means that the TVs won't be as big, and gadhets won't be as fast, but I'm sure these wealthy types will manage somehow.

This small price premium at the sale beginning is nothing compared to the full R&D costs. Without the mass market a bourgeoisie and "tech elite" have to pay not thousands, but millions or billions USD so very soon these people will notice they are not the rich anymore!

They're elite. They can afford it. They'll be the only ones who can. As wealthy early adopters, they're the ones who pay thousands for new large screen TVs and expensive gadgets already, remember?

Most hi-tech products have huge R&D and initial costs (e.g. lithographic masks for CPUs), so only mass markets allow to set prices on the acceptable level. If we will reduce the production, bourgeoisie and tech elite will be new poor after buying these products!

Reduce production to the number of "bourgeoisie and tech elite" and increase prices to compensate, and you'll still make a profit.

It may be true for luxury goods, but what about mass-markets products that must be produced in the quantities many times exceeding number of bourgeoisie and "tech elite" to be bring profit for corporations?!

The actual empirical evidence doesn't support the wishful thinking that higher unemployment will hurt consumer spending and the economy in general. The bourgeois class doesn't have to fear people not being able to buy their stuff.

Neo-luddite riots started appearing, right I have predicted!
http://pando.com/2013/12/20/breaking-protesters-attack-google-bus-in-west-oakland-smashing-window/

1. I mean USSR had only single party, so it led to elite's degradation. If we will allow multiparty system with political competition this won't happen (banning only pro-capitalist parties the same way as nationalist/far-right parties banned in Germany now).
2. As I said later, state-wide ERP software can help to measure performance.
3. I think it is reasonable to require passing some qualification exam for the people who want to participate in the voting. People will have a lot of time thanks to automation, so why not to learn!

How do you have a planned economy with a democracy and elections? You believe people are capable of making decisions as to what it takes to run each and every business, or even if they only vote to pick one person to run one company, you think they can know the person's qualifications, how well they will fit into the company, and be able to evaluate their ongoing performance?
Even better, you think people will actually take the time to study these things before voting, instead of turning the entire planned economy into a popularity contest?

Besides market distribution and central planning there is one other distribution philosophy, participatory planning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_planning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
http://www.zcommunications.org/

This distribution philosophy implemented with a decentralized system of participatory democracy will go a long way toward resolving many of the fundamental weaknesses of our current social pattern.

At least something to consider along the way.

This can happen if elite don't have pressure from the population and expect to stay in the power forever. Late USSR is good example.
However, planned economy with democracy and elections won't let above problem to happen.

Sure, they took out all the aristocracy (my great-grandparents were among them), confiscated all land and houses (my great-grandmother's mansion became a kindergarten), and raided all the wealthy merchants and businesses. And then they didn't know much what to do with it, other than grow food. Yay for basic agricultural economy.
And no, the transformation started before Stalin. Lenin was possibly even more evil and ruthless than Stalin, but we just didn't get a chance to see how much more. Stalin was just carrying forward Lenin's ideas.

Yes, Soviet Russia was marketless. We had three guys in our neighborhood, who owned a bakery, manage to get a higher allowance of flour, which, instead of using to make basic pasta like the their bakery was required to, they used to make extremely good pierogis using their own cooking skills and recipes. There was still pasta, but we all loved their pierogies, and paid them extra for it. When the government found out they were trying to make a profit selling their own stuff, all three were disappeared into a labor camp, and we never heard of them again.
I know my history, because my family and I live it. And I don't go to free-market web sites, or know of any. I just read a lot about global business and economics in various countries.

No one said they can't organize, or be smart and scheming. It's just that...


... if they take the machines, including the "machines" of business structures and supply chains, they won't know how to run them, and those machines will be useless to them. And if they do know how to run them, they will simply become the new bourgeoisie, being all arrogant in thinking they "know how to run things" or that the machines and the business "won't run without them," or even having the audacity to ask for higher pay, just because they think their jobs are "more important" or "more difficult." And this cycle will continue, until there are no more bourgeoisie left, and no one knows how to run the machines and businesses equally.

I mean laizess faire capitalism which is so actively advocated by libertarians. They won't easily give up and likely to move to the enclaves or even floating cities when socialist pressure will grow.