Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab
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x.company
Good! I hope you also agree share people who actually produce the goods are entitled to bigger share?
> I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.
I assume "people who create robots" will be tiny minority, so what you are describing is exactly what OP said: bunch of people who create nothing vote to seize the robots (from their creators) and redistribute it (to themselves). All through democratic means, of course!
You have to take it from the individual.
Given that the US is now on the list of backsliding democracies [3], and given the era in US politics where government money was used to cement political loyalty [4], any sort of serious UBI plan has to have a plausible story of how it won't end in anti-democratic corruption or worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_Account_Program_(S...
[2] E.g.: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freest-co...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/22/united-state...
That's relatively hard to corrupt, in that it's a federal program with clear numeric criteria drawn from a system that is robust because it's a big slice of government revenue.
Also, as far as popularity goes, at least in the US there's a strong allergic reaction to The Wrong People getting government money. So the mortgage tax credit is seen as fine and reasonable, but "strapping young bucks" getting food stamps is a deep outrage. So I think UBI won't become truly popular until politicians can find a way to get enough control over who gets it such that only the right people (wink, wink) get it.
Menial jobs give meaning to leisure for many and are another form of socialization.
Someone please correct me where I'm going wrong here, because with my investor hat on, I can't make the numbers pencil out in these pop press robot-replacing-labor scenarios. In continuous manufacturing, high-risk environments, and all that sort of existing problem spaces, sure, but general Moravec's Workforce type activities, the numbers are nowhere near adding up for me.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoZ7lWzl6tk
[2] https://www.nspirement.com/2020/09/27/china-just-opened-the-...
I'd like the pricing story to change, as I know a ton of households would pay for a general cleaning robot for their homes.
-- Stephen Hawking, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...
Automation funnels that money away from people in poverty to property owners.
There is no support today, nor is any on the horizon, for people poised to be displaced by automation (in the US).
Combine all of these, and you're going to end up with a class of people with an inability to meet their basic needs, and with no support from the government. This historically doesn't end well.
And let's just say we lived in a unified society somehow. The net suffering of all peoples could only be alleviated by progressing technology forward and proper social policy. Removing one doesn't help solve the problem.
The problem is going to hit us all in the face soon, no matter how much we shout "but social policies will fix it" from the rooftops.
Also, if you dig beyond the basic rates (for example, into the "not in the labor force, but want to be"), you will see that it's around 6M, whereas the 20 year low is closer to 4M.
I'm not advocating for removing automation. I'm warning that rolling out the automation of even more jobs is going to cause societal problems. Perhaps I'm hoping the right person will read this and start doing something about it, since I'm not that person.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
But that's not happening right now (see earlier comments about social legislation), and it won't in anything resembling "in time" to prevent more people from losing their jobs with no reasonable replacements (i.e. above-poverty line wages) in sight.
It's easy to think that our actions have no consequences, or more accurately that "someone else" will take care of the consequences of the actions we take. And the more we say it to ourselves, the more we believe it.
- Why is the amount of automation we have good, and more is bad? That's an "I've got mine" approach. You're essentially saying that you're happy with your gadgets (dishwasher et al) and with the current price level and variety of consumer goods and no further improvement is needed.
- Who decides where the line between enough and too much is? A rich Westerner? Or an African without lights, running water, or a washing machine, who works by manually recycling garbage?
- How did we deal with the massive changes automation has already made to society? We're vastly better off now, why shouldn't we continue?
People have been asserting that machines imply post scarcity since the communist manifesto in 1848. I am not convinced.
"most people can end up miserably poor" == "ever-increasing inequality"
Which begs the question - is the misery of poverty due to the lack of access to important goods or services, or because of the relative wealth standing?
Poor people don't care that they will never own a Ferrari (or even a car newer than 15 years old, ever). They care about the basics, food, water, shelter.
Once we don't have people in developed (and undeveloped) countries living without adequate food or being one bad week or accident away from homelessness we can come back to see if they are just simply jealous.
Philosophically, why is inequality an inherently bad thing? If the poorest among us universally had the standard of living of today’s millionaires, why should we be bothered by the existence of trillionaires or quadrillionaires?
For me, it comes to a differential in political power. The greater the magnitude of inequality, the easier it is for the quadrillionaires to put the plebeian millionaires back into abject poverty.
As you said, it's because money begets control of other people's lives. If the only thing you could do with money is live in luxury, then hardly anyone would care about it but wealth can be used to:
1. Ensure your plans never fail because you continually inject money into the equation. And by that ensure that other peoples plans always fail because they run out of money first. 2. Stymie actions and actors that you dislike. (and revenge on your enemies) 3. Materially, improve the lives of your children.
Please.
To think there are only positives in this change is a naive approach of the future. Sure, there will be some benefits but we are in for a world of hurt if we maintain our current social structures (at least in the US) and decimate the working population.
Have you ever done laundry by hand? My grandmother did. It took literally an entire day of scrubbing.
History has shown that maintaining the status quo until everyone's in a world of hurt is the standard approach.
Labor saving home appliances, changes in family size, and convenience foods are a pretty big deal for how people of any gender spend their time. Time spent cleaning has decreased, and been replaced with other activities. Parenting has changed a lot and become much more intensive. One did not cause the other, but our modern lives absolutely co-evolved with appliances.
https://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/hours-spent-homemaking-hav...
any large scale, long running space colonies will need huge effort of robots that don't mind the hostile environment, without much much more advanced robots space colonization is a dream and so the end of life as we know it is certain (just wait for a big enough asteroid or a near supernova).
Automation is great when it works well, we just forget about it when it does, so we generally only recognise the bad.
My dishwasher often leaves dirty spots and stripes, which would easily be noticed and removed by a dedicated person.
Also I recommend the Technology Connections videos on how dishwashers work. Most people are probably not using them correctly for optimal results.
TLDW: Stop using detergent packs, start using the pre-wash bin.
Now it cleans shockingly well.
Good thing we have mostly automated production of soap packs, so they’re cheap, plentiful, and almost as good as the handmade ones our caveman ancestors used
Everyone owns washing machines now - people just move on to do other things
to their credit, they charged an incredibly fair price, and even folded
On the left wing, people like Andrew Yang, are proponents of UBI. The right wing is scared of UBI because if we do UBI, those bullshit job holders might just stay home. That will be a disaster in so many ways.
Flipside, lets not do UBI and instead do automation. We put all these bullshit job holders out of a job. It's exactly the same disaster, possibly even worse.
Lets now propose the government makes only themselves the only legal owner of any commercial robot. So Ford has to rent the robots from the government. That rent money goes to paying the bullshit job holders. It's the same disaster.
It's not just economical or political disaster. It's even mental health. There's a very large number of people whose entire self-worth derives heavily from their job. Pay them to stay home and they'll be depressed at home.
I think Keynes is someone who figured out first. The 40 hour work week needs to die. The best solution any government can do is stop changing minimum wage but start decreasing the threshold for overtime. We need to pressure the 40 hour work week down. Which is happening to some degree. Many countries have pressured down to ~37 hours. This is where we must go to solve the problem.
Please. Stop. Don't do that. It's weird and unnatural, leave scrolling alone.
It's like someone put some kind of smooth scrolling plugin on the page.
The interesting question to me is how much household design will shift. Both the rise of the automobile and the decline of household servants have shifted architecture.
As someone who knows very little about this space, the concept of using a virtual world to rapidly train on various tasks seems fascinating. I had a similar reaction upon hearing how GTA V was used to help train a neural network for self-driving cars a few years back.
GP mentions in a sibling comment that they've been working with computers for decade, as if that's a long time. Some of us have been at this for many decades, long enough to see the zeitgeist shift and things really change. The current tech backlash mood started sometime in the early 2010s and really kicked into high gear in the mid 2010s. GP has never really known a world that wasn't overtly negative towards tech.
This one comes to mind:
https://singularityhub.com/2013/10/24/willow-garage-spinoff-...
Also:
https://robots.ieee.org/robots/baxter/
These people sell robots that are in stores now:
https://www.badger-technologies.com
We'll see if something with an arm has as much success, but so far not much as evidenced by the graveyard of companies that have been trying. One will crack the code soon, maybe this one.