Topic: Technological unemployment is (almost) here - page 6. (Read 88274 times)

Yep, involuntary joblessness is caused by work prohibition, and severely distorted labour markets. Not technology.

I'm not forcing anyone, people who preach against automation are.

You say : that the poor will starve because they have no job because nobody need them. (assuming no unconditional income)
I ask : Why does the poor doesn't own a robot which will work for him ?

If you say : Because he is poor and have no money for it.
I would ask : So why would'nt he work for himself or work for other poors who have no money for a robot ?

If employing another poor is cheaper than owning a robot, then it basically means that a poor is more effective than a robot, if not, why would the robot cost more ?

If you say : a robot cost less than hiring a poor,
I would ask : So why does the poor not buy a robot, since his wage is higher than a robot ?

It is unbelievable that so many people think that the middle/upper class must/should/are giving jobs to the poor.
No, the poors can provide services to each others as well and form their own economy. They are just prevented to do so when you have law like minimal wage, insurmontable bureaucraties bullshit to waste time on, or banks, legally mandatory for the business, refusing to even open a fucking bank account for them. (It happened to me as well, and I'm not poor)

If robot can grant you any desires, then yes, you don't need money at all, no need for any "unconditional income". You won't even need to socialize, since this need would also be taken care of robot.
If you need at least 2 thing that only other humans can give, then you start to enter into an exchange that will ultimately be done with money. Unconditional Income will be a tax on those who offer those services (by depreciating there stock of money) forcing them to work and give even more for the same thing.

Wouldn't that be a race to the bottom? There is only so much less they can get paid and have good living conditions.


Don't think poor people are useless. But you can do less with less access to resources. And a local community can't usually produce everything everyone there needs to live well.


What is the point of forcing everyone to work? Especially if you can already automate it?

One major difference from the Industrial Revolution in England is that England had large (often captive) external markets.  Unless the Pleiadeans want to buy your structured finance products and get manicures, in a flat global world, that just isn't true any more.  Robots immigrate freely.

The major reason to keep the masses liquid is to uphold demand.  But consumption levels today already press resource limits: Supporting consumption requires increasing resource efficiency; without a huge efficiency boost, the masses will  be liquidated. Thus technological unemployment is strictly required in order to avoid mass poverty.  How liquidity will flow to the unemployed remains to be seen.  Classic patterns are less and less applicable as services are saturated and automated. 

If you absolutely want to speculate what automation can do to society (assuming it is any good, which is not evident), look to what the industrial revolution did to Europe.

Before the industrial revolution, England could support 5 millon people, all starved, sick and know-nothings. With the agricultural technology, manpower was freed to work on the new spinning and weaving tech. After the revolution, England could support 50 million well fed, sound and conscious people.

You have to understand that a job is not a resource, but a drain of resources. The more that can be done without human brainpower (not even mules can have work for the energy these times), the better.

Why does anybody think a robot only work for the wealthy and not the poor ?

If you are saying "price", then you admit that it would be cheaper for a poor to be served by another poor than to buy a robot, and a new labor economy by poors for the poors would flourish.
If you are saying "robot will work for the poor" then what are you complaining about ?

I think this fallacy take root on the belief that a "poor" is essentially useless and can't benefit anyone, so other should take care of them rather than themselves.
A fallacy which also kill all sense of local community.

You can't be further from the truth, they are not useless, welfare state and minimum wages just prevent them to work for themselves.

You are only true that the poor will suffer automation if they are not permitted to employ each other. But this is not the fault of automation, but of legislations.

Saw this article recently:

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2015/05/13/surprising-jobs-that-robots-are-doing/

Was extremely interested by the multipurpose uses robots have come along to be doing. Soon they will be taking up job positions and saving companies money by doing jobs more efficiently than a human ever could.

Not just that. Constantly retraining everyone to perform increasingly more complicated jobs isn't going to work. Assuming different jobs will always show up. Which may not be the case. Another possibility is human labor ending up being cheaper than automation. Doubt living conditions will be great for anyone but the wealthiest then.

Yeah i've seen this before. It's funny when critics say "but we are not horses". Lol, they are missing the entire point, which is the trend is clear, and more jobs will be automated than new ones are created, which leads to perpetual unemployment stacking up.

For anyone interested in the subject, here's short (15 mins) video with good overview of impact of automation on human labour. It's from 2014 but don't think anyone posted this link before:

Humans Need Not Apply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Your nickname is on point for what we are dealing with. When the automation systems replace more jobs that can be created, that is the tippin point for shit hitting the fan.

Somewhat evocative of the invasion of the Sea Peoples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples during the Late Bronze Age collapse.  Possibly caused by "famine".

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Sure, the total number of high-tech skilled jobs could increase, but if 1 robot replaces 100 human workers, theres no way all of those 100 people will get jobs in robot development (even if they got required skills). If that was the case, the automation would be more expensive than human labour and would make no financial sense.

And you do have a point, even automation can be automated (!?).

It kind of reminds me all those 'experts' x years ago saying there will always be jobs for web designers and web-developers, because every business will need a website. All true, but they didn't anticipate that the process could be fully-automated, now we have shitload of online tools where you can create your own site from templates (on-line shops etc) without having any programming skills.

As a bonus, just found this article:

http://www.businessinsider.com/robots-that-are-stealing-our-jobs-2014-2?IR=T#

Of course, it is often suggested that the creation of robots will create more high-tech jobs for skilled professionals. That is probably true in the shorter-term until inevitably robots begin to manufacture robots, then shit hits the fan at a whole new level.

There already are hamburger vending machines. And I'm not talking about the ones that microwave pre-made burger and dispense it, but about ones that would cut the veggies and cook the meat after you ordered, so you'd get pretty fresh one.

I've seen an article some time ago but cannot find the link.

Well, if you think about it, the countries which already have benefits for unemployed (without time limits), benefits for the disabled, child benefits, state pensions are not that far from unconditional income. Pretty much every adult, whether employed or not gets his money one way or another.


Doubt that. Your robots would likely end up sitting on the couch with you and watching day-time tv. If I have a factory, why would I employ your robot if I could just buy/lease my own? Your robot will always have higher cost as you'd need to include not only its maintenance/depreciation but also costs of your living.

Much before robots become that useful, most people will already have bought one or two of them (it is worth surviving a massive economic transformation), and they will probably make robots works for livelihood. In the worst of hypothesis, people will associate to others who have robots.

It seems that, economically, there is a challenge: huge increase in robot-capital prices that would inevitably come in a robot-dominated economy. Technological advancements can't stop this. All the massive economic management we do for many, many stuff now, would have an analogue in the future. That is a non-trivial economic problem. As the current wealth of the world is inflated by imaginary assets (=fiat), there is not enough capital for the massive transformation (that is why the 1% can't just tell fuck off to the 99%, kill 95%, and become the kings of robots), so spontaneous processes would favor human beings undertaking robot-economy projects.

No need for government.

Most likely "death penalty" will be for you, conservative fanatics, conducted by unemployed crowd! Good news are that these people won't waste $100K+ of taxpayer funds on lethal injection but choose cheaper method instead!  

solution: cut taxes and gov spending
for people to lazy to work thinking they can just steal it or do other criminal things, there's a death penalty for that 

Basic income does not mean "very high tax" (well it depends on the political view of the people you talk with ).
On the english page of wikipedia about the basic income, there is not much information about financing it. The french page is more interesting about that.

- Cancellation of the "RSA" in France (free money program if you search for a job, around 400 euros I think). Anybody without a job can apply (with other conditions of course).
- Other social welfare program such as "housing help", or giving money for each baby born.
- Monetary creation, meaning not giving money to banks but directly to people (See QE for people).
- Then we come to taxes (eeeww are saying libertarians ^^) with property taxes and capital revenues and if possible, low "active" income taxes.
- Money spent on checking if people search for a job etc. Coming down to ZERO.
- Revenues from "nature" (like in Alaska with Oil).

I'm pretty confident that it will be at the center of the political debate in the forthcoming years.