simply handing out money might have broader negative unforseen consequences with regard to incentives (witness the prescription oxycontin and heroin epidemic in the rust belt), but of course, doing nothing might be worse.
For all intents and purposes, we're already here. Farmers are only about 1% of the population, yet they feed us all. Add in house construction and clothing, and there's a very small number of people that provide the rest of us with food, shelter, and housing. That's all we need.
The average westerner has thousands of times more resources than required to exist.
So this scary future where robots rule the Earth and people don't have to work for basic needs? We're living it.
We just found other stuff we like. Stuff like iPods, notebook computers, vacations, stamp collections. Then we make money and trade it around for that stuff.
We'll keep automating, fewer and fewer people will be required to provide for our basic needs, and we'll keep coming up with new stuff we like. I don't see any reason that this pattern is going to change.
In the past, automation freed people previously working below their abilities: many manual laborers who would today be professors of literature, or interior decorators, or whatever.
If you now automate the lower rungs of profession, like PR executives, it may no longer work like that.
I’m not sure if that idea is right, and I doubt anybody can be. But it is also impossible to deny outright. This time, it could actually be different.
Having said that, for those of us in developed countries, it's worthy of note just how far away we've come from struggling to provide our basic needs. If you took a poor person today and described their life to somebody from 500 years ago, it would sound like they were kings. To the guy 500 years ago, our modern-day life would be a place where nobody would have to work. Yet we still work.
I guess humans are like that.
They destroyed them with a combination of austerity (e.g. not fixing potholes) and outsourcing (e.g. the million odd Chinese not-robots who actually make your iPhone).
All of this happened before in the 1930s - the austerity, the unemployment, the blame placed on automation by a subservient media and even the rise of budget-conscious automated restaurants (e.g. horn & hardart) that are profitable when the population is tightening its collective belt.
Whether we get out of it the same way we did last time - with an end to austerity with a job guarantee that builds necessary infrastructure and fiscal stimulus is purely a matter of wresting power back from the 0.1%.
Then, maybe in 100 years, the cycle will again repeat itself.
Apparently the market only really likes them when people are short of cash.
But, they could be making a comeback.
I don't think that particular condition has been fulfilled :P
In other words, people will need to adapt. The ones who take the risk to jump onboard before the ruling is (100%) a reality will have an advantage/lead.
There are low skilled technological jobs for the ones that can't study etc.
The world moves this way. If you don't adapt you're out.
while that's true, this statement hids an assumption that a priviledged person implicitly has that they might not even realize.
The really poor do not have an opportunity to adapt, because their existing, extenuating circumstances means they are fighting for mere survival in the short term, and cannot expend any energy/resources to adapt for the longer term.
Think education - anyone who's earning minimum wage will be hardpressed to adapt by re-educating. Without the help of a third-party (whether gov't or charity), they cannot but continue to just survive on their minimum wage, and then one day, get pushed out of even that job.
That has nothing to do with technology.
In today's world and 100 years ago, there are lots of poor and miserable people. Wars, corruption, explotation. Africa, Asia, South America etc.
If you have a crappy life today because you live in Somalia, 50 years on you will still be fucked and not because of technology.
That is a higher level problem. A sociologial/political one. It is a very complex problem that has always been there.
I would even argue that technology and globalization gives this helpless people more opportinities.
This days, for a stupid example, you can have a youtube channel/whatever and given the free resources online you can produce content and have a chance at making some money that wasn't posible 15 years ago. The entry barrier is much lower.
E: The same goes for studing. 20/30 years ago, the best case scenario was studing a degree in a US university with a good status and all. If you couldn't, your best chance was getting a degree in whatever university was near you. If you still couldn't do that, you where out of luck.
Now? It's still better to go to MIT if you're lucky. But if you can't you have a chance of learning on your own with the internet. And people are doing that. It won't be the same, but is much better than nothing.
Of course, there are still people that can't do that because they don't even have electric network (see the recent news about the teacher in Africa using a blackboard to teach MSoffice for example). Again, that is a much deeper problem.
Their point I think was that without a helping hand, for example a way to not have to work two jobs but perhaps just the one, then you have the time and cognitive capacity to explore personal growth.
Also they seemed to be speaking directly about America, so while poverty in Africa is an issue, saying "man look how bad Africa is" is just avoiding addressing the issue at hand.
In cases of extreme poverty, everything is complicated. The problem is there wether we change/evolve the productive model or not. The problem is there right now and it was there 50 years ago, 100 years ago and so on.
If you take away their low qualification "jobs" because of technology, new low qualification jobs will arise. They will be at the same position at least but chances are they will improve their life quality. That is what I think at least.
Do you think that avances in technology an automation will make the life of this people worse? Will progress make this people's life more miserable?
Will progress make the rich/poor people gap bigger?
What is the _root_ of this problem?
Are companys investing, making research and developing technology guilty or responsible of this?
Do we have to make them responsible of this (ie, make them pay) ?
Some may see this different, maybe we should instead pay and encourage/incentivize this companies for their work?
Absolutely. The root is capitalism puts much of the reward for workers labour in the hands of the already rich owners - with an excess of labour the value of a person in capitalist terms tends towards zero; pure capitalism has no notion of humanity or basic human worth, just of humans as resources.
The benefits of progress would need to be democratised, which is basically some form of communism - which countries like USA and UK have been ably brainwashed in to thinking is the devil and harmful to ordinary workers.
So we are worse than a century ago you say?
I won't claim to know the comunism/capitalist theorys or models at all but you are making this an absolute black or white argument.
It is not anymore. The developed countrys and the models we use are not black/white.
They mix-in in different proportions liberal and social politics and models making difficult and controversial choices. We have lots of mechanisms to "democratize" the progress.
You know one progress that has been democratized? Air travel. Technology was involved in this process.
Is not that easy.
And no. In no way communism is the solution to anything.
Edit: BTW, precisely, the problem at hand in this thread is the democratization of the technology. Now, every other company will be able to get a cheap robot which will take the jobs of people.
We've also had incredible technological growth in part through global conflict. And there has been a massive use of non-renewable resources and huge unsustainable environmental impact because of that (externalities don't matter in capitalism). Add in this unmediated growth allowed for by not accounting for the externalities, and you get where we are now.
Iff (sic) the companies buying the robots are distributing all the benefit; eg they're cooperatives, public interest companies, charities (with flat pay structures); then you're democratising.
Replacing a worker with a robot not only puts another worker out to be cared for by the social care, but also denies society the company's share of the tax payments associated with that worker - a double whammy. Then on top of that the robot doesn't get a share of profits, that share goes to the (in almost all cases already wealthy) owners and so increases the wealth gap.
I'm interested in why you reject, seemingly out of hand, all aspects of communism. Why are Maker Spaces, say, so contrary to your notions of good social order. Are cooperatives evil in your eyes?
On the subject of air travel - where I am in the UK the only reason there is an airport is because the government stepped in, paid a stupidly high price that went to private individuals, and took over running of the airport. Without the capitalistic need to pay private profits with every transaction the gov could have paid costs (probably negative in this case, but anyway) and used the additional monies to further benefit the demos as a whole.
In Europe we've had both social and liberal goverments.
None of them one-sided radicals. The same in the US.
If you ask me, I like a very thin and light weight state, with some regulations, and tweaks/adjustments over time to adapt to the current reality. But not one big dady that controls everything. The less the state is involved, the better.
Anyway, this is a never ending debate. IMO it doesn't lead to anything new. In the end, probably a compromise between the two models is best. Yes, I belive in solidarity too.
I don't reject all aspects of communism. All I say is that "communism as a drop in solution" is a (very) bad idea. For starters, just look at recent history. Yes, I know excuses can be made and arguments about external agents interfering in USSR/China/Cuba/NK et all.
With the specific example of taxing robots, I just think is a very unfair and bad idea. Yes, something needs to be done. But a company that replaces workers withs robots is going to reduce costs hence making more profit. Hence paying more taxes. It's taken into account already. Also, a fundamental problem arises. What is a robot? A computer is a robot. Every chip in the computer is a robot. This would be a very unfair model and a very inexact one leading to all kind of problems.
I don't know. I just find the idea of blaming and taxing the companys using technology to be more productive very unfair and I would say even childish.
Do you have even an inkling of a solution then. Just let all the poor starve and die? That's what your hands off no government interference suggests.
Undertreatment of pain is now even worse thanks to prohibition tactics.
There is no perfect lock, nor is there a drug with abuse potential unabused by someone, be they rich and famous (Rush Limbaugh really struggled in that Rust belt mansion while his maid was treated like his personal drug mule) or dirt poor living on 400 bucks a month.
Some people are functioning addicts.
Probably people you interact with and trust.
Not every poor person is going to use a hundred dollars on drugs the minute they have it.
If you want poor people off drugs, decriminalization and the death of the War on Drugs comes first.
Unless you like seeing innoncent folks drop like fucking flies everytime some genius cuts their heroin with fentanyl instead of something inert.
The problem in developed countries is quite different, there's plenty of capital (in comparison) and many of the people with the ability to make effective use of it are already doing so. The unemployed remnant is in a very different pickle. For example in the US there are far more unfilled jobs than there are unemployed people, it's that they are largely in different places and require skills and experience the unemployed don't have. That's a completely different problem to the one in Kenya, say.
That can't mean "unfilled jobs at market wage", because jobs at market wage get filled (that's what market wage means). So you're talking about unfilled jobs at below market wage. Of course there'd be tons of those posted. Not sure that comparing it to the number of unemployed people means anything.
All that happens then is that a suitable applicant quits their lesser paid job and takes mine, but at a market level that just shuffles the problem around. There's still an unfilled vacancy. It doesn't matter how much money you offer, the invisible hand of the market can't magically conjure up qualified experienced applicants out of thin air.
This is the problem with this kind of blinkered market forces fundamentalism. The market isn't instantaneous, there isn't an endless supply of every product or service depending only on price, to fill every need. The real world is lumpy, and slow, inelastic and constrained.
if we just broaden the handouts from taxes on the large corporate winners, couldn't that make this problem worse? unless there's something else driving it.
Eventually there'll be no truly useful purpose for most people EXCEPT as a functioning market for selecting goods and services, for the benefit of the much smaller percentage that can innovate and run small businesses. Heaping scorn on the majority of people seems like a weird strategy.
By far the most effective technique for improving conditions for the small entrepreneur is to dump money into the customer base, even if that customer base won't be making entirely 'good' decisions. Hell, if you don't like them all doing heroin at home in their rooms, build nightclubs. If they are not so broke that they can't come out, they'll start attending your nightclub because there are other things in life besides nodding off on soma.
People with no money tend to think they need to use any money they get ASAP on fast rewards, only when they have enough money to save do they start thinking about saving any at all. Of course this will hardly work to get those already addicted to change their ways overnight, but some long term financial stability can change the worldview of new generations so they plan for their own future instead of living like they were to die tomorrow.
The problem is we already do this in the US, and we've seen the concurrent rise of a new drug epidemic arise alongside it among the same demographic who are receiving disability.
Your post that I was replying to was also very specifically NOT about the working poor, but about jobless people on disability having a "lack of purpose".
The same thing that happened the last time machines replaced most of the labor.
Billions will live in misery and want, a few will become so obscenely wealthy they rival most governments, a world war happens when the contradictions between the old powers and new powers can no longer be managed, revolutions happen just about everywhere when the people have nothing left to lose and the rich are hung from the lamp posts. Give it between 10 to 100 years.
This isn't a new problem that has a technological solution. It is a sociological problem where the people with the power to solve it are the ones who benefit most from the problem not being solved.
The technology we now have to quell an uprising far outstrips anything we had in the past.
Furthermore, the lifestyles of the "poor" today have luxuries that yesterday's rich could only dream about. This results in the poor of today being rather "soft in the belly" compared to the poor of the past.
Simply taking away electricity and internet from today's poor people may be enough to quell any uprising that started today.
The poor overthrowing the rich wasn't viable in 1913 either. Lenin himself said that it would be generations before a revolution could occur. And he was right. If not for WWI a socialist revolution would have been impossible.
The poor living better today than they ever had was something the Ancien Regime in France said before the French Revolution. They were right, until a bad string of harvests leading up to the revolution made the point moot.
And the poor being too much of a rabble to ever organize themselves is something that every ruling class has said since the dawn of recorded history. Yet bread and circuses did not help the Emperors, each of whom for 300 years died a violent death.
So the simple answer is: we're not special. What happened before will happen again, just bigger and worse because we have so much more capability than our ancestors. In 1400 sacking a town would mean a few thousand people raped, killed and sold into slavery, today it would mean millions vaporized and hundreds of millions exposed to radiation, toxic chemicals and biological agents.
A friend once told me that the main difference between old money and new money in the US was old money seemed to have an understanding that they had to give back to the unprivileged. I don't have much experience with either so I don't know how true it is, but it would make a lot of sense for families that have managed to hold onto wealth through peasant revolts would have a healthy respect for preventing the conditions for them.
The word has changed, but the cards that the common people hold remains about the same as before. Your "starving common people" may hold a full house and yesterday, that meant something, but nowadays, it doesn't compete with the straight flush of a modern military, psych-ops, and the entertainment distractions of today.
I'd agree that people would revolt if they were starving to death, but bad harvests don't happen on a continent wide scale. It is effectively impossible for a 1st world country to have most of its population literally starving to death.
Of course we'll be in a similar situation (or we are: if we are, it would not be covered on any mainstream news, because it'd be effectively a political decision).
Flint, MI doesn't have water. Puerto Rico barely has electricity, and they didn't even do anything to warrant getting reduced to pre-technology. These things are political decisions: the USA more than has the capacity to immediately remedy the problem and will not.
So, a bad harvest can be defined as 'for political reasons, someone decided it's time for the poor to be starved' and the capacity of agriculture to adapt to a productivity shock has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
The only question is if the extreme high end of food prices during bad harvest years will be larger than the income of the bottom 50% of the population in first world countries in 2040 or 2080.
It wasn't until 50 years after the end of the first industrial revolution that living standards increased, and continued to increase. There was a huge number of laws and public functions that were created during this period to deal with the problem of industrialization, from the creation of the first public police force in London, to the banning of child labour (down from the the 18 hours children used to work in 1820).
It's sobering that a peasant alive in 1400 had a higher standard of living than all his descendants until 1900 in Britain.
It is politics and struggle that determines which version of industrialization we end up with, not industrialization itself.
One of my favorite alternative history ideas is the combustion engine and assembly becoming viable in 1790 instead of 1890.
Imagine a South that replaces all the slaves with tractors and automated cotton pickers, and a North which finds slavery works better in Fordist conditions than free labor.
There are many critical aspects that were very often better for the average 1400s peasant than a 1900s industrial worker or even many people as today:
- sense of community: super tight-knit for many 1400s farmers
- ...of belonging to a place
- ...of purpose
- job safety!
- food safety
This is not a new "problem". Work has been automated away for a very long time, and what happens is that someone people lose their job and move in to a DIFFERENT job, but society is massively better off.