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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I wrote a pretty goddamn lengthy and thought-out post up there. If all you've got in response is stale platitudes maybe I'm not the one being unproductive here. Genuinely impressed you've managed to post worse than the guy doing brain damage performance art. Are you just going to keep insulting me until I agree? Fine: yes you're absolutely right, in a socialist worker's paradise automation wouldn't cause any problems. Problem solved, close thread.
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Feb 28, 2017 06:27
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Family Values posted:Are you just going to keep insulting me until I agree? Fine: yes you're absolutely right, in a socialist worker's paradise automation wouldn't cause any problems. Problem solved, close thread. Yeah see you didn't even loving read my post. Go not read some other thread and poo poo it up with your didn't read lol insights. Maybe you can quote a Successories poster and really blow some minds.
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Feb 28, 2017 06:47
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BrandorKP posted:
I chose poorly when as a young man, I said, I want to design hardware, because it's the "realest" job around. gently caress it, I'm getting an MBA and making slide decks
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Feb 28, 2017 15:03
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Paradoxish posted:The threat is and always has been the loss of a meaningful number of jobs that are accessible to most of the population. If people need highly specialized skill sets just for a chance to enter a competitive labor market then we are hosed. Automation is gnawing at the middle and lower ends of the labor market, and it'll only take the unemployment floor going up by a few percent to trigger to a massive crisis. But the thing is. There is no set catalog of jobs written in the stars. Every time we have figured out how to not do all the jobs we have anymore we just think of new things that would be nice to have. We are no where near fulfilling all human want and need. Not even close. We aren't going to run out of things we could pay people to do.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:09
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:But the thing is. There is no set catalog of jobs written in the stars. Every time we have figured out how to not do all the jobs we have anymore we just think of new things that would be nice to have. Did you get this from the ride at Disney World with all the dinosaurs and Ellen Degeneres?
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Feb 28, 2017 16:14
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Brainiac Five posted:Did you get this from the ride at Disney World with all the dinosaurs and Ellen Degeneres? Disney world is a pretty good example of people that would have been farmers 200 years ago in that area but now have a job dressing up as giant dog people because we just keep making up jobs every time there is a free employment pool to absorb it.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Disney world is a pretty good example of people that would have been farmers 200 years ago in that area but now have a job dressing up as giant dog people because we just keep making up jobs every time there is a free employment pool to absorb it. Acting, restaurants, shops- all things invented in the last 200 years.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:24
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Brainiac Five posted:Acting, restaurants, shops- all things invented in the last 200 years.  Percentage of food budget spent on eating at home vs eating out https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/cheap-eats-how-america-spends-money-on-food/273811/ Cicero fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 16:29
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Cicero posted:Nah he's right. Not that those things are all entirely new, we just have a lot more of them. 100 years ago 'eating out' was much less common than now. No, he's saying those are new things. Furthermore, there are some obvious limits on how many restaurants can exist.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:30
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Brainiac Five posted:Acting, restaurants, shops- all things invented in the last 200 years. Yeah, kinda. In the way they exist now.  Most humans used to be farmers. Now only a few people are farmers. But instead of having the people that freed up just do nothing or die or something they did all sorts of new things. Like having people wear dog costumes at disney world.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:31
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, kinda. In the way they exist now. An economy where everyone is an actor would be a neat Borges short story because of the raw absurdity of it.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:33
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Brainiac Five posted:No, he's saying those are new things. Furthermore, there are some obvious limits on how many restaurants can exist. Brainiac Five posted:An economy where everyone is an actor would be a neat Borges short story because of the raw absurdity of it.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:34
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Cicero posted:Maybe he phrased it poorly, but I'm pretty sure he's including 'way more jobs of something that used to be less common' when he says 'we just keep making up jobs'. I want you to imagine what lunch looks like in a society where everyone works at a restaurant.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, kinda. In the way they exist now. Degrading entertainment for the dwindling number of employed people does sound like a pretty realistic career of the future
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Feb 28, 2017 16:37
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Brainiac Five posted:I want you to imagine what lunch looks like in a society where everyone works at a restaurant. Like can you please stop being intentionally obtuse, it's pretty dumb.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:38
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anonumos posted:Has anyone written about my gut feeling that amounts to "not all automation"? I don't think automation is inherently zero sum. Many automated systems give rise to new industries, creating more jobs than destroyed. Naturally most such positive knock-on effects are less invisible or more obfuscated than the negatives, but... The point of automation is inherently to reduce the number of workers needed to do a thing, or at least reduce the amount paid to those workers. That is often counterbalanced by increasing demand and spawning new industries related to it, but that's not always the case - it depends a whole lot on the conditions and general nature of the economy, especially since the new jobs are rarely comparable to the old ones. And even when it is the case, there's a limit to how many job losses the economy can reasonably absorb and replace. During previous major waves of automation, the number of jobs generally rose, because the economy generally had a lot of room to grow and was desperate for more workers, so rather than using labor-saving technologies to eliminate jobs, companies used them to accomplish more with the same number of workers. However, that's not a guaranteed outcome of automation, and the economy now is much different than it was then. For example, ATMs didn't cause consumer bank employment to drop, because even though it reduced the labor requirements at any specific bank branch, banks were busy with a massive expansion in the number of physical bank branch locations at the same time - there was plenty of unserved demand that banks wanted to fill. As a result, there wasn't a big loss in bank teller work, because banks were already building more branches that they needed tellers at, and ATMs simply reduced the number of new people they needed to hire to fuel that expansion. That doesn't mean that bank automation always leads to that, though. Consumer bank employment has plummeted over the last few years, because banks are shuttering their physical branches in favor of online banking and mobile banking, and market conditions aren't particularly favorable for consumer banking right now anyway. Bank of America, for example, has 25% fewer physical branch locations now than it did in 2008, and that's come with a similar reduction in headcount as well. Automation doesn't always lead to job losses, but that's something that depends on the nature of the automation and the state of the economy. The economy was able to absorb previous waves of automation fairly well, but as automation improves and the economy is forced to absorb more and more displaced workers, it will eventually run out of capacity - particularly considering the prolonged economic slowness we've been suffering for many years now, which might even be a symptom of the labor market changes caused by heavy computerization. "Well, people will just find something new to do" won't work when that "something new" can already be done by machines as soon as it's invented.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:38
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Cicero posted:So is your gimmick that every time someone says "we have more of X than we used to, that's one of the places that new jobs came from" you just reply "WELL NOT EVERYONE CAN BE AN X Y'KNOW GOSH THAT'D BE SILLY!!" You don't seem to understand that there are limits to existing jobs because they are efficient. Ten waitstaff serving 200 people, etc. Inventing bullshit sinecures that are purposely inefficient is pointlessly degrading compared to basic incomes or direct distribution of goods and services.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:41
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Brainiac Five posted:An economy where everyone is an actor would be a neat Borges short story because of the raw absurdity of it. That would make a good short story. But I mean that when farming was automated enough most people didn't need to anymore one new thing didn't come and replace it. A diversity of things replaced it. When resources free up (time, money, labor) there has not ever been a time where no one could think of what to do with it. I don't think that is even possible.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:47
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:But I mean that when farming was automated enough most people didn't need to anymore one new thing didn't come and replace it. A diversity of things replaced it. When resources free up (time, money, labor) there has not ever been a time where no one could think of what to do with it. I don't think that is even possible. This isn't the point, though, and you seem to be missing that constantly. Give me someone who's unemployed and willing to work for $8/hour and I'll find something for them to do. There's going to be plenty of work for humans to do for a long rear end time, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be economically viable to pay people a living wage to do it. You keep acting like "automation" is a bunch of discrete events, but the process of automation that we're talking about here has been going continuously for around two hundred years. More importantly, the kind of growth that led to widespread (for white people, anyway) and increasing prosperity in the first world has only existed for about half a century. There's no universal rule that says that we're always going to find things for people to do andi pay them enough to live comfortably. In fact, this wasn't even close to being true for most of human history and it still isn't true for much of the world's population.
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Feb 28, 2017 17:50
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Paradoxish posted:This isn't the point, though, and you seem to be missing that constantly. Give me someone who's unemployed and willing to work for $8/hour and I'll find something for them to do. There's going to be plenty of work for humans to do for a long rear end time, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be economically viable to pay people a living wage to do it. So prosperity has not existed in the past, barely exists for anyone in the present and will go away in the future? Unless we lock technology at an eternal 1980 or something?
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Feb 28, 2017 18:16
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:So prosperity has not existed in the past, barely exists for anyone in the present and will go away in the future? Unless we lock technology at an eternal 1980 or something? What?
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Feb 28, 2017 18:17
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:So prosperity has not existed in the past, barely exists for anyone in the present and will go away in the future? Unless we lock technology at an eternal 1980 or something? At some point you're going to need to accept that your first take on a concept is always way off. Write it on your hand or something. All you do is strawman.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:22
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Brainiac Five posted:What? He's saying that for most humans now and most humans in history there has not been enough to "pay them enough to live comfortably". But that also that could go away in the future because of automation. That seems to imply the only solution is some sort of bad sci-fi where every technology that doesn't fit into the one true band of 1967-2017 needs to be banished or something, then we could have this forever.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:23
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To put it another way: in the future society absolutely could be absolutely trash, but it's not going to be trash because we invented too many things and people would have been nice to each other and fair and just if we just had not put that one too many mhz in an iphone. Bad people can make a bad society right this second if they want. And they have, lots of places. Technology or not.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:31
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:To put it another way: in the future society absolutely could be absolutely trash, but it's not going to be trash because we invented too many things and people would have been nice to each other and fair and just if we just had not put that one too many mhz in an iphone. What the gently caress is this nonsense?
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Feb 28, 2017 18:32
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:To put it another way: in the future society absolutely could be absolutely trash, but it's not going to be trash because we invented too many things and people would have been nice to each other and fair and just if we just had not put that one too many mhz in an iphone. You are one of them. Your reflex to go "So YOU'RE telling ME... (stupidest possible interpretation of what the person said and/or outright fictional quotes the person didn't come close to saying)" makes people actively stupider. Your gimmick erodes human civilization.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:33
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Brainiac Five posted:What the gently caress is this nonsense? Fear men, not telephones. If they want to gently caress up your life they can do it without telephones.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:34
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:You are one of them. Your reflex to go "So YOU'RE telling ME... (stupidest possible interpretation of what the person said and/or outright fictional quotes the person didn't come close to saying)" makes people actively stupider. Your gimmick erodes human civilization. Why did you put your scolding to not use fake quotes in a fake quote?
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Feb 28, 2017 18:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Fear men, not telephones. If they want to gently caress up your life they can do it without telephones. It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Why did you put your scolding to not use fake quotes in fake quotes? You are the dumbest motherfucker alive and I hope you die of it.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:36
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Paradoxish posted:There's no universal rule that says that we're always going to find things for people to do andi pay them enough to live comfortably. In fact, this wasn't even close to being true for most of human history and it still isn't true for much of the world's population. This is a true statement even without automation. Laying this problem at the feet of automation is conflating two somewhat unrelated (or loosely related) phenomenon. As you say, it pre-existed automation technologies by a pretty large span.
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Feb 28, 2017 19:18
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Brainiac Five posted:You don't seem to understand that there are limits to existing jobs because they are efficient. Ten waitstaff serving 200 people, etc. Inventing bullshit sinecures that are purposely inefficient is pointlessly degrading compared to basic incomes or direct distribution of goods and services. In the long run robots/AI will probably eliminate almost all the actually important jobs in society, but that's still a long way off.
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Feb 28, 2017 20:11
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That would make a good short story. This is because the same technological and economic changes that largely obliterated agricultural work also led to things like mass production and global shipping. You're mixing up cause and effect. It's not that a bunch of people became unemployed and so the economy found something else for them to do, it's that technologies were invented that made turning an input into an output vastly more efficient, which decimated industries that had already pretty much maxed out how much input they had to process (like agriculture, since there's only so much arable land) and led to an intense hunger for workers in industries and supply chains that had plenty of unexploited input to expand into using. This wasn't an inevitable result of automation, though, that's just how things happened to settle with that particular automation and that particular economy. In the modern era, though, there's a lot less in the way of unexploited resources or unfulfilled demand, particularly at the low-skill end of things. There's a lot less economic slack to absorb the consequences of automation than there's been previously.
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Feb 28, 2017 20:27
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Cicero posted:In the long run robots/AI will probably eliminate almost all the actually important jobs in society, but that's still a long way off. Just wanted to quote what I thought perfectly summed up one of the viewpoints in this thread re "actually important jobs"
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Feb 28, 2017 20:58
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As i've said before I'm highly skeptical of automation because technology is still not good enough to replace humans at most tasks. Robots cant even fold a towel or make a bed. But even if we're not talking about literal robots, software and "AI" also isnt good enough to do what most people do. Humans are pretty flexible and smart and versatile. We can think on our feet and make splitsecond decisions. We can improvise. We can learn to do many different things. Having said all of that, if automation isnt pure hype and is actually something we need to worry about, the best solution is to give workers the means of production. Universal basic income may work or it may not. But i'd feel better if we didnt have to rely on the 1% to give paychecks to everybody so we can buy Ramen noodles.
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Feb 28, 2017 21:03
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Main Paineframe posted:There's a lot less economic slack to absorb the consequences of automation than there's been previously. I guess if you mean "in the trump economy" then yeah. Mass unemployment absolutely can be a real thing. We haven't found a level of technology yet that makes economic problems not happen. otherwise labor seems like a resource as much as anything. If we get a lot of excess super suddenly that isn't great. For any resource. But if we have a huge pool of "minimum wage workers" I don't really imagine a world where someone doesn't think of a way to utilize them, any more than I am worried that the world will someday dig up some iron and have everyone say "nah, we're good, put it back, we already used all the iron we wanted" even if some giant motherlode find of iron could gently caress up the prices short term.
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Feb 28, 2017 21:17
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:To put it another way: in the future society absolutely could be absolutely trash, but it's not going to be trash because we invented too many things and people would have been nice to each other and fair and just if we just had not put that one too many mhz in an iphone. You're an idiot. The argument is we're in the process of a making a bad society worse because we assume that there will always be enough jobs that we deem important enough for people to do, and by putting our head in the sand we disregard the consequences of automation: - low skill/no credential jobs displace to higher skilled/credentialed jobs , making the pipeline to actual functioning labour much further - less entry level positions could disenfranchise and essentially strand poor people with no way to bridge the education gap because they've got no loving money - if that disenfranchisement happens at a large enough scale, there'll be a whole lot of anger brewing up, so who knows what could happen then. This is real and valid, and has absolutely zero to do with 'too many mhz destroying society'. Stop beating up straw and calling yourself a world class boxer.
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Feb 28, 2017 21:19
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Maluco Marinero posted:You're an idiot. The argument is we're in the process of a making a bad society worse because we assume that there will always be enough jobs that we deem important enough for people to do, and by putting our head in the sand we disregard the consequences of automation: But jobs aren't a finite resource we can run out of. Workers are.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:15
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Workers are people, not a resource
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Feb 28, 2017 22:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I guess if you mean "in the trump economy" then yeah. Mass unemployment absolutely can be a real thing. We haven't found a level of technology yet that makes economic problems not happen. otherwise labor seems like a resource as much as anything. If we get a lot of excess super suddenly that isn't great. For any resource. But if we have a huge pool of "minimum wage workers" I don't really imagine a world where someone doesn't think of a way to utilize them, any more than I am worried that the world will someday dig up some iron and have everyone say "nah, we're good, put it back, we already used all the iron we wanted" even if some giant motherlode find of iron could gently caress up the prices short term. The Trump economy? How about the internet economy? The last two decades have been just a series of ever-greater bubbles while the fundamentals of the economy rot on the vine. We don't dig up more iron than we need. We could absolutely scale up our iron mining operations and dig up more iron per day, but we don't bother because there's no point in digging up more supply than there is demand. The same's true for other resources, like oil. We absolutely do say "nah, we're good, we've already dug up all the iron we need for today, slow down production and fire a bunch of the workers to slow our iron-digging rate to match demand". One difference between labor and other resources is that there's no resource-extraction industry to control how much is labor is available and ensure that the economy is not on the hook for supporting any more labor than it needs. Unutilized labor can't be put back in the ground (without mass murder or starvation) nor can the growth of the labor market be easily restricted. As for your claim that "someone will think of a way to utilize them", that ignores a basic problem involved - as automation marches on, there'll be fewer and fewer ways to utilize the larger and larger number of people losing their jobs, because more and more of the ways to utilize them will also be automatable.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:49
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