Robots stealing our jobs!

[axi]

IIRC, in that book I mentioned, there is a very fine chapter describing how black americans were forced by technology to migrate from their cotton picking jobs in the southern USA to manufacturing jobs in the north and how that led to the worsening of their economic situation. Very revealing about the way this mechanism works.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by 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.

All it would take is ONE person and suddenly everyone would be provided for. Everyone would be living as kings - there'd be no POINT to denying people stuff.

[axi]

No you are overlooking that it's not a contemporary person that will be miraculously granted the ability for paying for everyone's living. People will converge to that state of affluence progressively which means that will be gradually alienated from the realities that people very different than themselves face. When Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France learned that the poor didn't have bread to eat, she asked naively why didn't they eat cake instead. That's not very difficult to think about: everyone of us is more or less alienated from the poor, even if we meet with them every day. F.e. what do you feel when you meet immigrant Pakistanis or Iraquis begging at the traffic lights?

Also think that nobody will ever stop feeling that he need his wealth for himself, to cover all his superficial "needs", instead of giving it away, even if this reaches silly proportions. If that didn't happen, the rich people of the world would have abolished poverty by their own charity, since they have more than enough money to do that. But they haven't, so for what reason should they do it in the future, if they are not coerced to by the menace of the public wrath (or the Revolution, whatever)?

[Kuciwalker]

If there's infinite production then yes, one person could pay for everyone's living!

And if there's infinite production, even "needing your wealth for yourself" wouldn't prevent people from giving to others, because there is no possible cost.

[axi]

Don't you know any calculus?

The properties of infiinite are irrelevant, what matters is the direction from which you approach it.

[Kuciwalker]

You're the one who doesn't understand calculus (or is making a really, really piss-poor analogy), since you can only approach infinity from the negative direction.

[axi]

In a one-dimensional space, yes.

But try to imagine a 3D line plot of charity/wealth/time.

Reaching infinity on the wealth axis does not mean that you reach infinity at the charity axis as well.

[Kuciwalker]

Yes, but there's no reason to expect the proportion of charity to wealth to decrease. Therefore, as wealth goes to infinity, unless there is ZERO charity, you will have a infinite charity.

[Ted Striker]

I read on the news that some UN group predicted that the was going to be a huge upsurge in using robots in the HOUSEHOLD by the year 2007.

This sounds like the crap we heard in all those sci fi books from the 1950s.

Where are the ****ing flying cars already?!?!? Moller?

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
I read on the news that some UN group predicted that the was going to be a huge upsurge in using robots in the HOUSEHOLD by the year 2007.

This sounds like the crap we heard in all those sci fi books from the 1950s.

Where are the ****ing flying cars already?!?!? Moller?

those household robots will just be simple crap like automatic vacuums or lawnmowers. I don't think they mean that there will be robot servants in every house or anything like that.

[Whoha]

all work will never be done by robots. Human controls and decision making will likely always be needed. Then it just comes down to the fact that demand for goods is limitless. Technology does not "take jobs".

[JohnT]

minor nitpick...

Originally posted by axi
IIRC, in that book I mentioned, there is a very fine chapter describing how black americans were forced by technology to migrate from their cotton picking jobs in the southern USA to manufacturing jobs in the north and how that led to the worsening of their economic situation. Very revealing about the way this mechanism works.

Except...

... that the black migration started during WW1, and truly picked up steam following, especially with the closing of the US borders to European immigration in the 1920's.

... that a black fieldhand, engaged in the picking of cotton, was paid $.60/100 pounds in 1940, increasing to $2.10/100 pounds in 1946 (the average picker was capable of picking 200 pounds per 14-hour day). However, in WW1, black factory workers in Chicago were already making $2.50/day, doing far less onerous (and more steady, as cotton picking is only done during a single 5-8 week period) work.

... and that all this was already happening, in place, when International Harvester introduced the first mechanical cotton picker - in 1949.

Not that the mechanical picker didn't have anything to do with it - even as fine an observer of the American scene as David Halberstam states that the mechanical cotton picker was the greatest impetus of black migration in the 1950's. But it didn't do anything but accelerate a trend that started 40 years earlier.

[:) Smiley]

Infinite production will mean that economic goods would become alike to air and sunlight- you take the stuff for granted and don't need an economic system to deal with it.

[Dauphin]

Air and sunlight aren't taken for granted where a lot of people live. .

[Kuciwalker]

Yes, but they don't sell them. Except in Japan