Robots stealing our jobs!

[Starchild]

In other news, some nice people have tried to plot the advances in nanotechnology, given the false starts experienced by all technology:

http://wise-nano.org/w/Slope_of_technology_curve

Best part? I'm only 46 in 2030, when self replicating nanofactories reach their prime

[pchang]

Haven't you seen Stargate SG-1. We only have until 2025 before replicators take over the earth, destroying everything else in their path.

[Starchild]

I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

[chequita guevara]

From my understanding, grey goo is an impossibility.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Boshko

Nah, won't happen people will always think up of more crap that they want. If robots become that advanced the demand for hand-crafted goods will probably sky-rocket.

Huh? Wait? There's going to be a craft fair everyday and people are just going to trade their crap? Do you have any idea how much crap that is?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Capital will never shift to an area that won't sell.

That's why it will fail.

[Kuciwalker]

Assuming we do hit practically infinite production, everyone will just not have to do anything.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Dissident
if robots do most of our jobs, and we don't create new ones, we have no choice but to go to socialism. In that case, I might actually support it. It'd be like star trek

I have always felt socialism was totally unworkable becuase of the horribly inefficient use it made of human labor. Nonetheless I agree. If we ever managed for the first time in history to start automating work faster than we can replace it then once it got to a point where human labor constituted less than half the total productivity then the time for socialism would have arrived. Kinda depressing since I think socialism blows in general, but probably better than a weird dystopia where nobody with capital has any incentive to hire any human employees.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Oerdin


Even if we assume machines 100% take over production, which is an impossibility, then we still have sales, distribution, accounting, design, and human to human services. That doesn't even count farming, science, engineering, energy production, human to human services, specialty art, handy crafts, or hundreds of other fields. We are in no danger of losing these employment opportunities and since manufacturing efficency is emproving so much we will be able to lower the cost of goods and through taxes provide more help to those few individuals who are displaced by the efficency gains.

When we learn to develop super fast super specialised AIs that can perform a certain intellectual labor task vastly more efficiently than a human can, a real big chunk of the rest of these jobs will cease to have any use for humans as well.

I agree that current automated capabilities would have to increase by a few orders of magnitutde to accomplish these things but the day in which we can build a machine that can information process as well as the human brain can't be more than a dozen or fewer decades away.

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Why bother getting concessions from workers if you can replace them by a robot for cheaper?

You've completely missed the point of my post. You know, I find it alarming that right-wingers who have had no real-life experience of hardship can actually justify this train of thought.

[Kuciwalker]

You missed my point: they aren't going to try and get concessions (not that that's a bad thing: you don't have some "right" not to be replaced by someone or something that costs less but does just as good work), they'll simply fire people, who will then be free to do other labor. If there IS no other labor because we've hit infinite production, then, well, we're set anyway.

[Provost Harrison]

But you know as well as I do that capitalism doesn't work like that...the robots cost money to maintain, and they will try and extract such concessions out of the worker as to make them cheaper, even though the more feasible alternative exists where people could be far more effectively used...

[axi]

In a world where all work is performed by the machines, those who own them will be living as kings and those who don't will be in the ghetto. They just won't have any work to do so they will have to subsist on charity, crime, prostitution. They will have their own para-economy. The elite will not mingle with them unless it happens by accident.

And one day, once all resources are plundered or if somehow the elite gets bored of planet earth, they will migrate en mase in another solar system and leave the others in the dark ages.

[Lul Thyme]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


We're talking about the complete elimination of labor, not merely labor saving devices. When humans are no longer involved in the role of production, then our only jobs will be to sell each other stuff, and that too can be handled by machines. So what do we do for money, just move things around?

As many people said, ppl will invent or increase the demand of needs that can't be yet done by robots, be it stand up comics, administrators whatever...
Think about it, the amount of jobs done by robots, and the amount of jobs saved since the beggining of time has kept increasing.
Just think about farmers.
One farmer and his tools and robots does what 100 used to do before.
What do the 99 others do?
New jobs that didnt exist, Un secretary general, fiscalist, managin a non profit organization, new age artist...
The same trend will go on.
Robots will take more and more jobs over, people will find more and more new jobs that produce things people didnt even think they needed before....

[axi]

P.S.: Of course everybody in the elite will be working. They will just be doing sham jobs, like the borgeois class has been doing for centuries (academics, religion, art, politics, administration, charity, etc). Machines already tend to make work reserved for humans more and more superfluous. in order to replace some of the lost jobs, we create bubble economies around such things as management, marketing, adveritsement, styling, showbiz, journalism, etc, jobs in the service sector that is.

Btw, has anyone read "The end of labor" by Jeremy Rifkin?