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Comment by andrewmutz | Hacker News Reader

These statistics are scary. I believe that instead of worrying that "the robots will take all of our jobs" we should worry that the robots aren't taking our jobs quickly enough.

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Should robots appear tomorrow and replace 99.95% of the workforce do you really believe the robot owners will be altruistic enough to provide charity to the displaced workforce?

The attractive people who are out of work will end up in the sex industry. The rest will go to protection zones, ghettos, and will be sterilized to prevent reproduction, and possibly starved depending on how things go.

Society is not shock resistant and needs time to grow into things. Look at oligarchies and tell me socialism, capitalism, and communism are really any different beyond the rhetoric.

How many dev shops said they are agile when they were clearly waterfall?

No matter what you call it the ruling class will always call the tune and the poor and middle class will dance.

And who are the 0.1% going to sell the output of their robot labour to if everyone else is in ghettos?

Anyway, I’d hope in such a scenario some smart underdogs would illegally repurpose some robotics to create their own abundance. Might make a good TV show.

Let's take the states for example 99.95 are nonentities so that leaves 330,150,668 *.0005 = 165,075.

That doesn't count the sex workers, security, or workers programming and running the bots. That is still a lot of people for one country, and shopping will change a bit, and they will all pat themselves on the back for saving the planet now that the population is under control.

You will have resistance but in the end the deathbots will win.

That is frankly a deeply stupid sensationalist assumption of "structural unemployeement? straight to genocide!" The main origins I can find for it are outright projection from The Party's leadership who treated their people as tools and property who existed only for them. It showed in many ways from their military doctrines to lack of investment in even their intellectual workers like doctors. Lumpenproletariant were treated far worse than even homeless vagrants in the most callous of capitalists. Not even late Rome with its later high levels of unemployment and unrest was so cruelly stupid. They knew panem et circenses was the cheaper option in spite of the expense and the whinging of patricians about politicians appealing to the masses with quality of life issues. If the marginal cost of goods goes to nill guess what becomes cheaper than dedicated genocide bots which will lead to retaliation? Building more and using the excess to support them. Let alone what sorts of tasks become possible with a large excess, and the nature of veblem goods.

Romans attempted to feed its slaves to lamprey. They also refused automation because it would displace the slaves. They worked slaves to death on occasion. Rome had crucifixion and boiled people in oil for trivial reasons. Human cruelty knows no bounds and as a species we haven't changed much. If you look at modern examples:

https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017839/Madman-star...

> No matter what you call it the ruling class will always call the tune and the poor and middle class will dance.

Ever heard about the French revolution? Ruling class had to take dance lessons.

Maybe that's the problem. We stopped giving dance lessons to the ruling class a long time ago, but those lessons have always been the only reason why, as working class, we have the few good things we have.

And just like in the classic Animal Farm, the animals threw off their shackles and became the elites who crushed the downtrodden.

>Should robots appear tomorrow and replace 99.95% of the workforce

In what world is that going to happen?

Communism/socialism are sorta different. Look at cuba look at the values that people died for throughout the last century. Humans are imperfect but ideals are ideals, and show me the ideals that capitalism has gotten us but mass exploitation. We have to be more creative than the past and see better alternatives. Mass movements/protests are the only thing that have ever moved the needle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neozapatismo

Would robots always show up in productivity numbers or are there certain ways robots could be employed that don’t show up?

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