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What the heck is this guy promoting? He's basically asking for technological communism.
Capitalism depends on all peoples having money in their pocket whether it's the billionaire or the poorest laborer. It's a chain, the billionaire owner invests money in a business by hiring workers. That product is sold to those workers and the billionaire gets their money back so they can pay the worker to make more product. That chain is becoming shorter everyday and it's not necessarily just robots, even when you look at something like the construction industry one man can do the same amount of work many of them could have 30 years ago. One man can do the jobs hundreds did 100 years ago.
As more jobs are taken over by robots and machines those people are going to be left with nothing to do, in the coming decades there will be plenty of jobs building, designing and maintaining robots but what happens when those jobs are done robots? What happens when robots can do every conceivable job there is? The chain is broken, the billionaire owner no longer can sell any product because no one has any money to buy it. This isn't right around the corner but it's coming.
People have been predicting machines taking over poeples jobs for a long time but in this age it's completely different becsue now they are becoming intelligent. When you consider Watson on Jeopardy that has tremendous implications, some non technical people may not understand how profound that performance was but it's mind blowing for those that understand the tech.
I'm mostly conservative but the guy is right, it's inevitable that out society will have some form of socialism becsue there will really be no other choice. I don't think people should be afraid of that future but it's going be one hell of a rocky road getting there. There is going be a transition that is not going to be very pleasant.
Capitalism depends on all peoples having money in their pocket whether it's the billionaire or the poorest laborer. It's a chain, the billionaire owner invests money in a business by hiring workers. That product is sold to those workers and the billionaire gets their money back so they can pay the worker to make more product. That chain is becoming shorter everyday and it's not necessarily just robots, even when you look at something like the construction industry one man can do the same amount of work many of them could have 30 years ago. One man can do the jobs hundreds did 100 years ago.
As more jobs are taken over by robots and machines those people are going to be left with nothing to do, in the coming decades there will be plenty of jobs building, designing and maintaining robots but what happens when those jobs are done robots? What happens when robots can do every conceivable job there is? The chain is broken, the billionaire owner no longer can sell any product because no one has any money to buy it. This isn't right around the corner but it's coming.
People have been predicting machines taking over poeples jobs for a long time but in this age it's completely different becsue now they are becoming intelligent. When you consider Watson on Jeopardy that has tremendous implications, some non technical people may not understand how profound that performance was but it's mind blowing for those that understand the tech.
I'm mostly conservative but the guy is right, it's inevitable that out society will have some form of socialism becsue there will really be no other choice. I don't think people should be afraid of that future but it's going be one hell of a rocky road getting there. There is going be a transition that is not going to be very pleasant.
That's my opinion.
...and you're right!
And raising minimum wage is going to solve these problems?
Rather than just giving yourself a concussion pointlessly smacking yourself in the head, why not actually outline the alternative that effectively employs practically every adult in the population, with living wage jobs that keep them all productive, contributing members of society. If you disagree with some suggestion, you are honor-bound to make your superior suggestion known rather than just inanely criticizing someone else of not guessing what you apparently know.
I personally see a few other alternatives, none of which sound like they'd be good.
One alternative requires stringent and vigorous regulation of productivity. Productivity has generally been considered a positive thing in our economy, but clearly it is now becoming more damaging than constructive. All the pointlessly smacking one's self in the head isn't going to evade the reality of the damage productivity and similar aspects have had on the bottom half (measured by economic status) of the labor pool. Another alternative involves regulation of population increase. If approaches, such as productivity, are to remain unconstrained and thereby have unconstrained impact on society, then society will have to reestablish balance with a complementary aspect. The negative impact of productivity is lack of jobs, and therefore causing society to structurally prevent a number of people from being contributing members, so that means that society needs to make arrangements to have fewer people needing to be contributing members.
These two measures, independently, have been used by other societies, the first having been tried in India and the second having been tried in China, each with unimpressive results.
India has started moving beyond their issues by deliberately seeking to capitalize on the fact that their population is willing to live at a much lower standard of living than the United States, and therefore they can act like productivity, by draining away American standard of living from thousands of Americans and using it to satisfy tens of thousands of Indians. It's a rather impressive act of efficiency and productivity improvement, actually, from a business standpoint, but it does exacerbate the situation for which this thread is talking about solutions.
Of course, the flip-side of this mechanism also is an alternative: Deliberately reduce the American standard-of-living, probably by half, for starters. Of course, that's what's actually happening, right now, which is why we have so many discussions about economic issues in this forum. However, it's not happening fairly now, and so that's unsustainable.
Fairness dictates that that be imposed fairly, so figure it means coming up with a way of halving everyone's standard-of-living, rich and poor, instead of the current situation, where rich folks are exploiting excessive political power to place the entire degradation of the standard-of-living onto the poor. Regardless, we have no patterns for across-the-board standard-of-living reduction, and I doubt anyone would support such a thing themselves, much less come up with a way to prevent the rich from engaging in whatever corruption necessary to withstand the impact of whatever is suggested to reduce standard-of-living across-the-board.
Going back to the population control approach, again China tried this and it was generally considered a negative thing by many. It should be noted that if we don't curtail population growth somehow, catastrophe is inevitable. The planet can comfortably support about three or four billion, and we're approaching double that now. One interesting metric would be to see how many Americans, who instantly disparaged the Chinese policy when it first hit the news, are now more thoughtful about the idea, and not just for China but for the whole world. It's still going to be a small minority though: Everyone wants everyone else to pay the price for over-population and as long as that inane self-serving idiocy continues, nothing will change there. And so while technically, just as a matter of mathematics, this approach has to come into play at some point or another, I doubt it will carry much water in the political arena, and will therefore only take place in the context of worldwide catastrophe.
So anyway, I'd be curious to see if your pointlessly smacking yourself in the head has more legs than that, i.e., whether you actually have some better ideas. Let's hear 'em.
Capitalism depends on all peoples having money in their pocket whether it's the billionaire or the poorest laborer. It's a chain, the billionaire owner invests money in a business by hiring workers. That product is sold to those workers and the billionaire gets their money back so they can pay the worker to make more product. That chain is becoming shorter everyday and it's not necessarily just robots, even when you look at something like the construction industry one man can do the same amount of work many of them could have 30 years ago. One man can do the jobs hundreds did 100 years ago.
As more jobs are taken over by robots and machines those people are going to be left with nothing to do, in the coming decades there will be plenty of jobs building, designing and maintaining robots but what happens when those jobs are done robots? What happens when robots can do every conceivable job there is? The chain is broken, the billionaire owner no longer can sell any product because no one has any money to buy it. This isn't right around the corner but it's coming.
People have been predicting machines taking over poeples jobs for a long time but in this age it's completely different becsue now they are becoming intelligent. When you consider Watson on Jeopardy that has tremendous implications, some non technical people may not understand how profound that performance was but it's mind blowing for those that understand the tech.
I'm mostly conservative but the guy is right, it's inevitable that out society will have some form of socialism becsue there will really be no other choice. I don't think people should be afraid of that future but it's going be one hell of a rocky road getting there. There is going be a transition that is not going to be very pleasant.
That's my opinion.
I agree with your assessment! If you go back to the 1960's there was a time in our Country that we went after large corporations that we perceived as monopolies. Today it is just good business sense to buy your competitor, strip his assets and close his doors. Big business knows no bounds. Then, combine that with all of the new robotics - who will control the wealth?
How do we create a system that can fairly distribute the new wealth?
I'm mostly conservative but the guy is right, it's inevitable that out society will have some form of socialism becsue there will really be no other choice. I don't think people should be afraid of that future but it's going be one hell of a rocky road getting there. There is going be a transition that is not going to be very pleasant.
That's my opinion.
Or better yet, just pass laws banning certain machines from becoming too powerful. The first country to inoculate themselves from big time technology driven unemployment with "Luddite Laws" will be the financial super-power of the world. We could start by taxing companies that use certain technologies more than others that don't, hence undercutting the incentive of having machines replace human jobs in the first place.
Oh, and the "robots that are super smart" thing is WAY overblown. Problem is that we are reaching the limits of computer technology now and any computer that smart would be extremely expensive in the future. We are near the limits of silicone chips and anything else would be very expensive and hence uneconomic.
Ok. Doing less work for more money is something we've been doing for a long time. Automation has already provided you and I with more free time then our parents and grand parents have.
So new robots will be produced that continue that trend. Less work during your 8 hours, but more pay. And when younger generations say how tough things are at work, we will laugh because they won't understand how it was before.
Thats not communism. Henry Ford payed his workers enough money to buy his product. Thats capitalism
Ok. Doing less work for more money is something we've been doing for a long time. Automation has already provided you and I with more free time then our parents and grand parents have.
So new robots will be produced that continue that trend. Less work during your 8 hours, but more pay. And when younger generations say how tough things are at work, we will laugh because they won't understand how it was before.
Thats not communism. Henry Ford payed his workers enough money to buy his product. Thats capitalism
Henry ford was smart. American CEO's have short time horizons today though.
Businesses are counting on 2 billion new customers between China and India. They only need each person to be able to afford 17% as much as an American to make out better focusing on those 2 billion instead of doing what is necessary (paying higher wages) to ensure that Americans can continue to afford to be their customer. That's why relying on businesses to do the right thing vis a vis maintaining the standard-of-living of Americans is foolish. If there is to be anything that would safeguard American standard-of-living it will be government intervention and regulatory imposition.
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