Stephen Hawking confirms: The problem is Capitalism, not robots
failedevolution.blogspot.com
failedevolution.blogspot.com
I just don't buy the argument that absolute livings standards have always been increasing due to capitalism but eventually when we get to a certain point it will all turn into disaster. That's similar to the argument that luddites have always made and they have always been wrong.
[0] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/wo...
If your definition of living standards is broader and includes overall welfare and social mobility, the point becomes debatable.
As for a Malthusian crash - denying the fact that ecosystems have a carrying capacity is irrational and counterfactual.
Logistic collapse has been observed time and again in natural populations. It's also been observed in human populations.
See e.g. among many possible examples:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925430/
So it's factually wrong to claim that disasters have never happened for environmental reasons - because they certainly have happened in the past.
Being unaware that something has happened isn't a justification for claiming that it can't be possible.
* living under repressive and/or dangerous regimes * lacking access to good nutrition & medical infrastructure * living in over-populated, under-maintained cities
Smaller percentage or world population is malnourished than ever before. http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-u...
Your last point is true in some sense, because more people live in cities than ever before. And you can say any city is under-maintained if you put your standards high enough. Due to this effect, there are mixed results in global sanitation trends. Access to clean water is improving, but I can't say for overall picture.
William F. Buckley liked to quote a friend that, "The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists." Socialism is the force meant to keep capitalists from becoming the totalitarian rulers of us all. The responsibility of voters in a democracy is to keep the forces of capitalism and socialism in check so that neither one dominates us and brings on disaster.
Understanding this fact that America and all other functioning democracies are a balance of socialism and capitalism has made me realize I am a Noam Chomsky-style anarchist. He observes that one cannot be an anarchist without also being a tempered socialist, because without some socialism to constrain the capitalists, they would quickly oppress us all in a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario [1].
Industrial revolution resulted malnutrition and deterioration of absolute living standards. It took almost hundred years from the start of the industrial revolution before real wages started to grow. You can see it from the historical records. The height of enlisted men in Britain decreased. Luddites were mostly right. They were not fighting against technology per se btw, they were fighting against losing their jobs.
The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes were made and capitalism was limited. It was very violent struggle. People were shot or beaten. Economic history teaches us that technological changes require political changes. What you attribute as triumph of capitalism ignores the fact that capitalism changed a lot. You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society.
Summary:
capitalism + technology + political change == benefits for everyone.
Workers had no choice. That is what allows employer exploitation: work for me or starve.
This is why the USA had slavery - there was abundant land. In the UK the UK was the plantation with land enclosure.
This is why now we feel exploited by "capitalism". Banks are flooding the world with fiat money as private debt primarily against land. Don't want to work for the man? You have no choice. Take out your banker debt for education and land and then pay them part of your salary as tribute.
This isn't capitalism.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...
When we have access to land we have a choice. Presently we must all toil away to maintain access to living space via a death pledge (mort-gage).
In a capitalist world money is the medium for the message. If we aren't financially free we aren't free.
I don't hold that debt is inherent to what we consider capitalism. I run the risk of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy with this, but debt is something we have because of path dependence, not because it's shown to be inevitable or optimal.
The fact that debt cannot be easily retired indicates that we haven't finished this as an institution. At the level of a debt holder, of course you can't do this. At the level of a general person living in society, the un-retire-ability of debt creates a common, sort-of pubic goods problem because it slows growth.
Classical and pre-Classical societies held debt jubilees. Could we? I don't know.
Capitalism would still be exactly the same. Debt precedes capitalism by... the entirety of human history.
The map is not the territory and accounting and finance are technologies that attend to productive enterprise, not the enterprises themselves.
What? Capitalism did not create poverty or famine - it inherited it, and then swiftly solved it. The industrial revolution, if anything, obliterated it from the Western world. Compared to the centuries of pre-capitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive.
1. http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...
I think this has been posted around here before: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-l...
Had they been able to choose between say farming and working 12 hour shifts in bad conditions they would have looked at the risk/reward. As it was the choice was work or starve. Wages are therefore set at subsistence levels rather than at the floor set by the alternative.
Land enclosure created unemployment. Employers were not bidding against one another to secure workers, they were in a dutch auction with labourers to "save them".
Similarly today due to very high land prices we cannot work selectively (unless you earn a lot). Were land prices to be suppressed I think we would see people choose to work less which would put pressure on employers who would have to hand over to workers a greater share of the value they produce.
http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/
Can't reply to you - one of the mods has disabled my ability to post (haven't posted in an hour and get "you're submitting too fast").
Or perhaps the thread has been closed down. Who knows.
The link you provide proves my point readily:
> Since population was increasing in Great Britain at the same time that landowners were enclosing common village lands, people from the countryside flocked to the towns and the new factories to get work.
At the time, Europe's population was increasing 300% per century, whereas in prior eras the population increase was around 3% per century.
Why was the population increasing so rapidly? Because capitalism was enabling the disenfranchised poor to survive for the first time. Obtaining household goods was becoming less of a struggle, people were living beyond the age of 40, and famine was no longer a daily reality for most.
The societal changes that occurred due to the industrial revolution were significant and immediate; of course there were issues dealing with this change. It was the most potent moment of change the modern world has ever seen - a culmination of the ideology of the Renaissance paired with the technology of the times.
Capitalism? Or just plain technological progress?
The article you're quoting, if anything, works towards my point not against it. Academia has run rampant with the false belief that capitalist events like the industrial revolution were on their whole exploitative. Entire sub-genres of academic study exist to explore on micro-levels events of injustice which often times are greatly exaggerated. Did you ever conceive of that being shallow?
Conversely, the move in the last few decades years back toward capitalism in the US has pretty much killed improvent in conditions for most of the working class, while radically accelerating gains for the narrow set of hypercapitalists at the top of the system.
My estimation of the 19th and 20th century reactions against the protection of property rights is that it led to a diminished capability of private industry to rationally and reliably deal with the issues posed by this great expansion of human procreation.
People like Henry Frick just didn't know any better because it was all new.
Capitalism works well at eliminating production as a bottleneck. The rest is up to us. There's generally another bottleneck. Much of the 20th Century was about logistics.
But it's sort of dangerous to say that "capitalism was limited" - the thing that limits capitalism is economic busts. It's dangerous for two reasons. One, it's extremely hard to do at all, much less well, and two, you have to ask yourself if it ever actually was done to start with.
Peter Whybrow has a very good presentation on one of the CSPANs using Adam Smith as a yardstick for what may be wrong with capitalism today.
Even the most pessimistic view suggests that real wages grew, especially after the conclusion of the Napoleanic Wars. [1]
> The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes.
The real benefits of industrialization were immediately realized via mass production of widely desired and previously unobtainable goods. This should be clear from migratory patterns: workers abandoned the countryside en masse (in spite of city living/working conditions) for a reason. Enclosure laws were not a major factor until 1845.
> You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society.
Of course you do. The rise of the managerial and professional classes is a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution.
[1] http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimi...
Not without political changes. Nobody is saying that industrial revolution did not bring middle class or reduce poverty. It's just that whole society must change and that includes new politics, new laws protecting their new rights, etc.
Some examples:
- 1819: Factory Act limited child working hours to 12 hours per day.
- 1832: any man owning a household worth £10 or more was allowed to vote,
- 1867: some working men were allowed to vote.
- 1874: Maximum weekly working hours per worker: 56.5 hours per week.
- 1918: all men over 21 and women over 30 were able to vote.
And that brings us back to the issue. Automation changes things and laws, rights and whole society must change.
Also, it's worth noting that "real wages" is not as important as compared to what those wages can buy. Sure, someone from 100 years ago could have "real wages" much higher than mine, but it doesn't mean much to me if I can't use the wages to purchase modern indoor plumbing, air conditioning, safe travel across the world and a very high likelihood that my wife won't die in child-birth.
Most human jobs for most of history have been unskilled work. Things anyone could be trained to do, not requiring high intelligence, and involving physical or repetitive work. The industrial revolution moved unskilled laborers from farms to factories, but there were still jobs.
But with near future tech, there will be very few things, if anything, unskilled humans can do that robots can't. We are just starting to see AI good enough that it can match humans in visual recognition tasks - which 10 years ago was unthinkable, and progress incredibly slow. This level of AI has been the main limitation to robots. We've had decent robots, but AI wasn't good enough to use them for anything interesting. Now it is.
Soon robots will take over almost all existing jobs. From truck drivers to shelf stockers to the mail man.
Of course there will be jobs that AI can't do (for now.) E.g. computer programmers or doctors. But realistically, what percent of the population can actually do those jobs? What percent of unemployed truck drivers are actually going to be able to retrain as computer programmers?
Decide what you want - fully stocked supermarket shelves thanks to capitalist efficiency. Or rationing, shortages and civil unrest thanks to government intervention in the markets and the dissolution of business.
We have socialism - the erosion of capitalism to provide a reward for those that won't or can't work.
What's your "new possibility"? Without a proposal, your point is moot.
I don't want to buy food from a state controlled organisation because they'd be crap at it. However, I'm not keen on healthcare being provisioned individually and privately or relying entirely on the market for policing or national security.
I concede, though, that nationalised health and defence has major benefits.
"Socialist" would say: "It looks like all-around outcome might be better if this thing is regulated or restricted - so let's do that".
Free market supported would say "let's not mess with people's freedom unless it is clear that not intervening in this particular instance is overwhelmingly harmful".
For what is worth, I think many people favoring state intervention have a hard time making distinction between "I don't like this thing" and "this thing should be forbidden or restricted".
A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
NB I agree about your point about the default - I would very much go with the assumption that the free market should be left to provide services unless there is a really good reason why the state might be good at it.
That doesn't make it automatically bad of course, socialized healthcare is probably a good example where socialism works.
http://www.bullshitexposed.com/scandinavian-socialism-debunk...
EDIT: Because I was downvoted:
> "1. Scandinavia isn’t really all that socialist"
Socialism does not have the same meaning in Europe and in the US and apparently, this was forgotten. They are liberal socialist countries, if you prefer.
> "2. Scandinavia isn’t actually as prosperous as liberals like to claim"
Raw GDP is unrelated how people actually live, I don't get this point.
> 3. Scandinavians have lower gross and disposable incomes
There is no mention of purchasing power, you can't buy the same things with the same salary in Dollars, it's comparing apples and oranges.
> 4. But money isn’t everything! What about the poor?
There is no mention anywhere in this part of the poverty rate of the different countries, just a graph of the poverty in the US (which does not argue for his point).
> 5. Norway is backed by big oil
Yes, and what about the other ones ?
> 6. Scandinavians aren’t as happy as Americans
Suicide rates are much much more than just economics themselves, and I don't understand why this is there.
Some of these, like Participatory Economics, have lots of literature/tutorials behind them.
Over the next decades we will lose millions of jobs and need an highly educated workforce for the fewer jobs remaining. But for some people the saying "you cant teach an old dog new tricks" will come true and this part of society needs a way to live in dignity. Talking for example about Truck/Taxi Driver / Assembly Workers / Mailmen you name it.
We as a society have a choice to make and i hope it wont be one you can see in several Dystopien movies.
We have seen communism and it did not work now we are on the full side of the other spectrum of capitalism and it does not work as well (Income inequality). Unconditional basic income could be one solution of many.
It's not a limiting doctrine that says you can only do this or that. It's a doctrine that says you are free to engage with others however you want so long as you respect their autonomy and freedom to make their own decisions.
If someone wants to start a voluntary socialist commune, they have the freedom to do so within a free market. Unfortunately for aspiring socialists, most people don't voluntarily want to adopt socialism (at least beyond a particular point) and socialists must then turn to force and coercion in order to enact their preferred style of society. Ignoring the emergent orders that arise from a free society of creative individuals is the truly limiting mode of thinking. (Note: I just used socialism as an example. You could substitute any style of governance that doesn't respect individual autonomy.)
The controversy is regarding which cases, if any, governmental coercion is justified. There is a wide degree of disagreement here, but even those who believe coercion is justified still admit that it's coercion.
Social Security is not even in theory aimed at providing a general social safety net, so its not surprising that there are better means if that is your goal.
Your binary perception of the world doesn't take into account why we have systems at all, be they capitalism or government. The point is to maximize quality for everyone, and you can't get there with a single tool.
Of course it is. It's a limiting doctrine that says "you may use the resources allocated to you within the property system, and no others".
This idea that property rights aren't a form of coercion is one of the most tiresome aspects of libertarian rhetoric.
Capitalism is a very effective economic system, and that efficiency often affords people more freedom than the alternatives, but it is still fundamentally a system of coercive constraints, as indeed any economic system must be.
I'll agree that there are many ways in which the status quo contains injustice as it relates to claims of ownership, but that's entirely different than calling the system of private property coercive. I also don't think there is one objective standard for what confers just and unjust title (i.e., I think this is an emergent social convention rather than some clearly definable concept), but that again is an entirely different topic.
If I try to use particular resources, the system will use violence to stop me. If you claim this isn't coercion, then I think it is your conception which is backwards.
>(E.g., The rapist claims they are being coerced because they can't do whatever they please with other peoples' bodies.)
Yes, the prevention of crimes is indeed a form of coercion.
This only sounds strange if you start with the assumption that coercion is inherently bad. If instead you recognise coercion as a necessary consequence of conflicting desires, you can start to discuss what coercion is justified.
Now I think property has shown to be a very effective economic system, and that using coercion to enforce it is therefore entirely justified. But it's still coercion.
When there is little to no coercion from government I doubt any free-market society will fail. And even if it fails, it cannot be as miserably as those socialist ones. Freeing markets almost-always brings better economy.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Anarcho-Capitalist Hoppe explains this in the book "A theory of Socialism and Capitalism" (Bear in mind that he puts russian style socialism, social-democracy, conservatism and social engineering in "Socialism" category with varying degrees.):
"....Nonetheless, socialism is very much alive and well, even in the West where social-democratic socialism and conservatism have remained powerful ideologies. How could this come about? One important factor is that its adherents abandoned the original idea of socialism's economic superiority and instead, resorted to a completely different argument: that socialism might not be economically superior but is morally preferable. This claim will be considered later . But that is certainly not the end of the story. Socialism has even regained strength in the field of economics. This became possible because socialism combined its forces with the ideology of empiricism, which traditionally has been strong in the Anglo-Saxon world and which, in particular through the influence of the so-called Vienna-circle of positivist philosophers, became the dominant philosophy-epistemology-methodology of the twentieth century, not only in the field of the natural sciences but also in the social sciences and economics...."
"....No matter what the charges brought against socialism are, then, as long as they are based on empirical evidence the empiricist-socialist could argue that there is no way of knowing in advance what the results of a certain policy scheme will be without actually enacting it and letting experience speak for itself. And whatever the observable results are, the original socialist idea—the “hard-core” of one’s “research programme” as the neo-Popperian philosopher Lakatos would have called it —can always be rescued easily by pointing out some previously neglected, more or less plausible variable, whose noncontrol is hypothesized to be responsible for the negative result, with the newly revised hypothesis again needing to be tried out indefinitely, ad infinitum. Experience only tells us that a particular socialist policy scheme did not reach the goal of producing more wealth; but it can never tell us if a slightly different one will produce any different results, or if it is possible to reach the goal of improving the production of wealth by any socialist policy at all."
In fact, it's the only way we could both imagine and successfully implement, but that's it.
On the other hand, we now know the limits of it, the corruption it brings, and that's a certitude.
So an intelligent and educated reaction is not to say "if you want result you need a self corrupting system" but rather "we like this abundance, and we can see our way to get it needs to be improved. How can we keep a balance between those ?"
The kind of state power brought by communism brought the worst corruption the world has ever seen.
I firmly reject the idea that nothing else can work or should even be tried.
That is, when you take a certain political position that not only determines what measures you want to apply, it also determines how you see every other political position. The center is not the same center for a conservative and for a left-winger.
The fallacy that there is a 'center' is just as bad as the fallacy of there only being a left and a right. Politics and economics are far more complicated than a continuum represented by a one dimensional line.
Capitalism isn't inherently the problem. We could have capitalism and tax capital owners at a high rate, and distribute the wealth much more evenly. It's possible everyone could become capital owners and it would be normal to live off interest instead of work. Like owning the robot that replaces your job.
This has happened before, kinds sorta. Everyone mentions farming has been automated almost completely. But the farmers mostly owned their own farms, and didn't all become unemployed, and instead benefited from it. However many farm laborers were forced to move to the city.
By nature, this system leads to capital accumulation. Since no capital is infinite, accumulation in one place means removing it from somewhere else.
So you need mechanisms to always redistribute the capital to avoid this problem and balance the system.
But capitalists will battle these machanisms to gain efficiency, and you will be in a rate race between the redistribution measures and accumulation workaround.
Since creating new redisitribution mechanisms is way slower than implementing the workarounds, eventually the system won't be evenly distributed.
Hence the rat races between taxes, and taxe evasion.
As of right now the pendulum is too far on the side of inequality, yet governments are unwilling or unable to correct. Probably a combination of both.
I agree with the first sentence but the second assumes the economy is zero-sum. This is only true to a certain extent within some domains, like ownership of physical land.
It's not a perfect example, I admit. Because not all farmers owned their land, and there were a lot of farm laborers that didn't own capital. But it's a much closer example to what I am talking about. As opposed to factory owners being automated, where none of the workers owns capital, and it's far more unequally distributed.
Start from a capitalist principle: if there's an excess of unextraordinary labor and a shortfall of jobs which will trade that for food/shelter/goods/etc, how would one take advantage of and simultaneously alleviate the supply/demand imbalance? By vertically integrating -- directly turning unextraordinary labor into food/shelter/goods/etc. This has been tried, they're called "communes," which is funny, because we started with a capitalist principle and wound up at a communist principle (people owning the means of production) while the popular dogma is that they're incompatible opposites.
In any case, communes have a bad rap for a good reason. They're hard. Economies of specialization and economies of scale are very real, and historically communes have had a tough time competing with the "job+apartment+supermarket" combination. I'm pretty sure that won't be the case forever: the "extremistan" economy is leaving more and more people behind while technology of every variety is advancing and (presumably) making extreme vertical integration more and more feasible. There has to be a crossing point.
The real question is "when?" It won't be obvious -- even once we have passed the tipping point, there will be a huge amount of friction. Putting together a decent commune that embraces modern modes of production will require significant risk and a huge chunk of capital (recouped with entry fees, presumably, since if it was able to more efficiently produce something already valued by the market why not just go into business doing that instead?).
But once the business model is proven, it ought to scale nicely. Communes compete with each other and with the traditional job+supermarket on social contract, each one providing a lower bound for the other. Which is important, because for all the blathering on about how traditional capital markets are based on consensual transactions, mutual benefit, and value creation, they seem to do a fantastic job of making life a living hell for a huge number of people by repeatedly un-fixing already fixed problems (like how to feed and shelter ourselves). And the world is certainly no stranger to communes gone awry. But maybe, just maybe, if they're in direct competition with one another we'll get to see them both on their best behavior.
If the people were actually vigilant, and didn't let this happen, as it already has happened in the US, then they wouldn't legalize bribery, and they would put those who give money to politician more than a small amount set in law, in prison. And it wouldn't matter whether the person giving the money is a small business owner or the CEO of Exxon. Both would go to prison for the same amount of time.
If the societies were that just and the representatives actually followed the people's will like that, then capitalism would be wonderful!
Actually, what happens, is that everything will be so cheap there wouldn't be any point of being a 'rich person', or hoard anything at all, because of abundancy. End of capitalism.
edit: There will be ads. Somewhere.
The inspiration for many of these entries: Stephen Hawking, perhaps one of the most famous scientists in the world today, who as the result of Motor Neurone Disease (also known as ALS and Lou Gehrig's Disease) is quadriplegic and uses a wheelchair, and who, since a 1985 tracheotomy, has used a computer voice synthesizer to speak. Somehow, though, he was able to have an extramarital affair, so apparently not everything is paralyzed.
Is there anything you are aware of that would prevent it, other than "it might not happen, for some reason"?
Nope, I don't mean that. Are these the only two things going on in the world? Is capitalism the sole driver for these two? Just trying to get a feel for why you would guess so horribly badly.
> Why would anyone want to prevent/change that?
What makes you think I have to defend myself against your straw man?
edit:
And you know what, the fact that I get shit for a snarky reply to something that doesn't warrant one, is extremely lame. Here's what Hawking said
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
In the context of that, no, I obviously mean more than just peaches and unicorns with "current trends", to suggest otherwise is, given the level of literacy on this site, flat out not arguing in good faith. At least I stand behind for dealing with it as such, I don't play nice with sophistry.
Trade (which is to say, markets) and globalisation are largely responsible for driving this. Capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) is currently the most successful model we have for facilitating these.
In the 1930s US almost all the jobs were in agriculture. Then robots took those jobs. Happened all at once, which hurt, but then what happened?
Picture the future as a few dozen capitalist overlords who own all the robots selling each other robotic goods and services (because no one else has the means, right?). Where's their value add? What's everyone else going to do? Sit on their hands and wait to starve to death?
Every year something like 10% of jobs (IIRC) disappear and are replaced by other, different jobs. That's a trend we can extropalate and economists do. The projected impact of 'robots taking our jobs' is (again, IIRC) single digits per annum.
Of course it's possible to argue that the rise of the machines or the on rushing singularity make it impossible to reason about this with any certainty, but then that applies to Dr Hawking as well, no matter how much smarter than the average bear he is.
The optimistic view is that automation will liberate humanity from all forms of drudge labour and eventually usher in a post scarcity society. This also arises simply from extrapolating current trends. Not that long ago the bulk of humanity was grubbing around in the dirt trying not to get killed by bears or die of disease. The proportion of the population for whom this an everyday reality gets thankfully smaller every decade. The long term trend of human history is that things consistently get better, usually because of technology. Why should that change?
Well, if there is anyone who knows about singularities, it's Dr Steve :-)
Right now, the "value" is basically just there to get other people to work for you. That and exchanging goods is all money does. When you have robots to build anything you want, cure all your ills, and don't need human servants, you don't need money. Robots get paid in energy, so to speak, and then there's only resources and control over them.
> The optimistic view is that automation will liberate humanity from all forms of drudge labour and eventually usher in a post scarcity society.
Right, and people who until now don't want to share, will suddenly change? That's not current trends, that is the opposite of current trends. The gap between rich and poor is growing, not closing.
Also, just because something is irrational, destructive and self-destructive, doesn't mean it can't happen or isn't already going on. Powerful people aren't necessarily the most intelligent or wise. I'd even say to reach some levels of power mental health defects are a necessity. Which, to me, is also part of common sense and things I'm surprised I even have to point out.
Here's a comment I bookmarked:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4428673&cid=453...
> The main part of the economics that don't make sense is trusting a secretive technocratic savior, wielding trillions of dollars of resources, to actually give a shit about helping out all the low-level peons who initially funded the system. It's an extremely elitist vision, that, by people's parents handing over investment money to a small cabal of technological geniuses, their kids will be handed a post-scarcity utopia on a platter --- instead of the wealthy technocrats simply joining forces with the rest of the oppressive oligarchy, laughing at the suckers who gambled away their children's futures on promises of technology serving the people rather than vice-versa.
No one is in a position to "confirm" this statement or prove it irrecusably wrong. More or less tenable arguments may be made, more or less well. I think Hawking does well here, behind the poorer commentary, but I'm unwilling to engage in or let lie propaganda for any end, particularly on a forum on which we are to default to respect for others' ability to engage in thoughtful dialogue. The source for this article is not easily to be dismissed, but the article's title is misleading - a straight fib - and a misleading headline that suggests one reading over another while pretending to fact is propagandistic.
Yeah, and that goes both ways. You can't wave away the apathy that exists by disagreeing on other grounds.
> This article is not easily to be dismissed, but its title is misleading - a straight fib - and a misleading headline to suggest one reading over another is propagandistic.
There is not much leeway in how to read Hawkings' actual comments, and as for title, that is the word "confirm":
> 1. to state or show that (something) is true or correct
> 2. to tell someone that something has definitely happened or is going to happen : to make (something) definite or official
> 3. to make (something) stronger or more certain : to cause (someone) to believe (something) more strongly
Notice the last meaning. So this is just a high-ranking comment with nothing to add, splitting hairs about the title. What Hawking said is not easy to dismiss, but that doesn't stop people from trying now does it.
edit: yep, it's already getting buried. Someone of the smarter people on the planet is talking about one of the more serious things in life, but let's talk about gadgets some more.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.
> Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.
> So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
When you start with ridiculous premises, you're going to reach ridiculous conclusions.
Not necessarily - and even so, the work left to be done by humans might only cover a small % of the population.
Except we don't live by their standards -- we live by our standards. And even if they had lived to see today, their standards would have immediately readjusted to want more. That's why it's ridiculous to assume we will ever have "everything we need".
AI + Space = everything we need
Machines have been labor saving entities since the invention of the wheel. Inevitably, one day they will perform all labor.
This is not true of many tribal or "uncivilized" cultures. Conspicuous consumption, luxury, and economic advantage/inequality as moral value systems are taboo for close knit tribal communities.
>Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can't be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.
-Lame Deer
Whilst I certainly want things that my iron-age ancestors wouldn't even have known they could want, my actual physical needs are not greatly different from theirs.
Part of the "challenge" a capitalist society faces is making sure there are jobs despite that only a tiny fraction of the population needs to work to provide everyone's basic biological needs, but that without work everyone else can't pay for those needs to be satisfied.
Unless we reach the singularity, there will always be the need for something.
And if you think of needs as something as abstract as "power over the universe" (which is still a limited resource, even after the singularity), you cannot ever reach the state where machines produce everything we need.
Hence, the premise can be unreachable, or - in parent's words - "ridiculous"
Inequality will always be with us because humans compete. If they don't compete directly economically they compete for social status.
Providing a base level of food, shelter, and medical assistance is achievable. I just don't think it will be enough when envy is factored in.
> machines produce everything we need
There's a difference between need and want. People want iPhones, but they don't need them, so they can decide themselves whether working more is worth it.
On the other hand, people need food. The only choice is work or die, which isn't really a choice. There is an infinitely large jump between extremely cheap food and free food (and energy/shelter). As food gets cheaper, wages decrease as well, so you still need to work about as long to survive. When/if food becomes free, people won't need to work any longer.
It is cynical and ignorant to assume the dollar is the monotheistic deity of motivation for everyone. There are and have been countless cultures across the world who don't require monetary payment to produce the requisite food for the community.
The things that people think they need. Be it plain consumerism or something cultural or social like honor, an iphone, a beautiful wife, a car for boys to impress girls or to go to work, a marriage before losing virginity.
In each of the above cases need in the survivalist sense and need in the subjective sense cannot be more different.
One will have a hard time arguing that those people don't need what we think they don't need.
Yeah, the physicist is out of his depth on capitalism. Just ask the forum full of computer nerds and wantrepreneurs!
I told my friend: "Hacker News: The place where people can call bullshit to someone as smart as Stephen Hawking..."
All I'm saying is that if you want to go toe to toe with a brilliant and respected man, come to the fight with some real arguments.
-Milton Friedman
-Milton Friedman
This is the root of the problem.
Another one I've a heard is a mankind whose the objective is the interstellar travel. Man would be an artefact of life to propagate itself across the universe.
About science and technology, Marx says they are consequences of sedentarization of the man. With agriculture, man had surplus of food and discovered trade, money and finally capitalism.
In Civilization the player begins as a nomad tribe and needs a good place to build its empire :-)
Some capitalist insight on the topic: https://mises.org/library/technology-and-government-shouldnt...
I think it's actually a transition from economy constrained by available labour to economy constrained by available natural resources. And I think the similar transition occurred in other times of history (like Roman empire?) and it wasn't pretty. It also shows that capitalism (or free market) isn't really that nice system when it works under global resource constraints, despite the claims to the contrary.