Droids Will Replace Work?

Maybe this isn't the best article, but this is definitely a conversation worth having.

I'm sure this would not come as a surprise to any of us here. Most of the technical people here do things that make these sorts of things possible. I agree with the Author that we have not seen anything yet.

There are lots of things behind closed doors that are only going to make this worse. I'm not sure though that this will just cause lower prices. It could potentially completely reshape our economy. I believe that a large swath of people could find their jobs disappear over the next 10-15 years, and this could have crushing implications to our economy. If people do not have money to spend at the bottom of the economy, a large portion of our GDP would disappear virtually overnight on nation timescales.

Here is a quick back of the envelope:

Given that 44% percent of the GDP went to wages and salaries and that nearly 1/4 of workers make less than $10 dollars an hour. There are roughly 36,685,750 people in low wage jobs. They make 5% of the share of GDP, or 12% of the wage pool. Many of these jobs will be eliminated. There are lots of higher wage jobs that might be automated away as well that I'm not even going to make an attempt to calculate the impact.

While this might mean record corporate profits in the short term, eventually 25% of the workforce could be without jobs. People in these low wage jobs tend to always spend their whole paycheck, so there is a lot of economic activity that is going to be eliminated, and we will have to spend record amounts on assistance when it happens.

We are really headed into another phase of our society like the industrial revolution, however this time the revolution is on performance enhancing drugs.

It will be interesting how it plays out.

While it is a bit dystopian, if you haven't read Manna by Marshall Brain I would suggest you google it. While it is fiction, it is definitely gives you some things to think about.

"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." - Arthur C Clarke

If everyone is unemployed who pays their bills? Well the idea is that necessities become so cheap that people could pay for everything with what unemployed get in food stamps...

These unemployed will need low cost robo-housing (housing made by robots), low cost robo-healthcare (fully automated health-care clinics), and low cost robo-food (sheets of meat grown in robot factories). Hopefully those things will accompany the driver-less cars and retail-bots that replace all workers in stores and on the road.

People think "who will pay to maintain, or manufacture these robots?" Memristor-powered conscious robots will laugh at these types of questions... because that's primitive humanoid thinking. The robots of the future will explain they can "print" themselves, and because of new advances in materials science, and non-silicon low-cost electronics, hundreds of robots could be made for every person that exists on earth, per day... if needed.

Don't want to eat meat grown in a laboratory??? Don't want to trust your health to fully-automated robots??? Don't want to live in a robo-built trailer??? Then get a job programming robots!

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