Digiwizzard posted:

You aren't getting it, introducing labour saving devices that can do the work of multiple people is a process that's been ongoing since 1712. Like all economic processes, it suffers from the law of diminishing returns. All of the simplest and easiest to industrialise work is automated at the beginning, and then harder and more complex work which becomes more difficult and expensive to automate. Eventually, you reach the point we're at now, where it's cheaper to have overseas factories staffed by Chinese migrant workers then a domestic factory filled with expensive as gently caress robotic arms.

Like I'm sure some secretaries lost their jobs when rich assholes started using BlackBerries, but more secretaries had already lost their jobs when rich assholes started using Filofaxes. It's an ever diminishing chunk of people who are being made obsolete. The premise of automation is that this time it will be completely different, because now AIs will replace all the humans who operate the machines. It's not going to happen, because the resources required for that infrastructure don't exist.

Main Paineframe posted:

Eventually there just won't be enough jobs left for everyone in the US without deep and fundamental economic and social change..
I'm talking "Great Recession levels of unemployment, except permanent and structural". That's more than enough to cause issues.

Main Paineframe posted:

No, the premise of automation is that labor-saving devices will reduce the number of people necessary to do basically every job, at least domestically, therefore crashing the economy as we know it. Sure, not all secretaries lost their jobs to Blackberries, but what happens to the ones that did? What job are they going to move to? They can't move to the office mailroom, since email killed that. They can't move to bookkeeping, since Excel and other computer programs cut the need for labor in that field and other related fields. Clerical work? Needless to say, that's been heavily computerized. And so on. Of course, that's a double whammy - not only is there no room for them in those shrinking fields, but that means there are plenty of unemployed people coming from those fields that are competing with them for the few jobs that remain. Eventually there just won't be enough jobs left for everyone in the US without deep and fundamental economic and social change.. I'm not talking about "robots replace literally everyone, leading to post-human economy", I'm talking "Great Recession levels of unemployment, except permanent and structural". That's more than enough to cause issues.

Main Paineframe posted:

nah, if they were actually interested in automating the trucking industry, they'd be spending less time playing around with funny tiny cars and more time figuring out who's gonna assume legal liability when an automated truck w/ no driver runs over a toddler

for the foreseeable future, it's just a luxury gimmick for rich consumers

Main Paineframe posted:

Eventually there just won't be enough jobs left for everyone in the US without deep and fundamental economic and social change.. I'm not talking about "robots replace literally everyone, leading to post-human economy", I'm talking "Great Recession levels of unemployment, except permanent and structural". That's more than enough to cause issues.

Taintrunner posted:

strong and stable economy

SKULL.GIF posted:

wow Barack Obama really saved us from the economic disaster and totally didn't just kick the can 8 years down the road

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/903271348893614081

Rated PG-34 posted:

robots make the market more efficient. lmao

that's what someone in the high freq trading business told me anyway

I guess it is a more efficient way of upwardly redistributing capital

anime was right posted:

call to action posted:

I don't know about y'all but I got the gently caress out of stocks in my IRA and 401(k) two months or so ago and I'm ready to buy at the bottom

Digiwizzard posted:

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to explain this. What you're describing is not a new phenomenon and the amount of people being made obsolete by productivity increases is something that's exponentially decreasing instead of increasing. In the case of the secretary, she will have to leave the company and find work elsewhere. Or she'll just be unemployed. It honestly makes zero difference because the amount of people employed in positions that are obsoleted by a guy getting a smartphone are already so redundant and marginal that it makes up a vanishingly tiny portion of the economy. While she's unemployed though, she'll add to the labour surplus which will continue to depress the cost of labour, which again means that humans are now so cheap that there's no point in buying machines to replace them.

If you're discarding the idea of Automation involving AI, then it just becomes a fear of the economy suddenly being destroyed by becoming Double Super Duper Industrialised, which is completely incoherent. You gave an example earlier of a McDonalds being reduced to a single employee operating a bunch of machines. It makes no sense, McDonalds is already a good example of someone taking a business model (a resturaunt where a skilled chef prepares food) and then stripping it down into an industrialised process where all the inputs are controlled and food is produced in an assembly line fashion. All of the McDonalds franchisees could go through the headache of designing, manufacturing, transporting and maintaining an expensive as gently caress rube goldberg machine that can produce a fillet-o-fish.. Or they could hire another teenager for $4.25 and train them how to make one in 10 minutes. In an economy where you have millions of people desperate to make a fillet-o-fish, there is no incentive to ever replace them with more machines.

Digiwizzard posted:

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to explain this. What you're describing is not a new phenomenon and the amount of people being made obsolete by productivity increases is something that's exponentially decreasing instead of increasing. In the case of the secretary, she will have to leave the company and find work elsewhere. Or she'll just be unemployed. It honestly makes zero difference because the amount of people employed in positions that are obsoleted by a guy getting a smartphone are already so redundant and marginal that it makes up a vanishingly tiny portion of the economy. While she's unemployed though, she'll add to the labour surplus which will continue to depress the cost of labour, which again means that humans are now so cheap that there's no point in buying machines to replace them.

If you're discarding the idea of Automation involving AI, then it just becomes a fear of the economy suddenly being destroyed by becoming Double Super Duper Industrialised, which is completely incoherent. You gave an example earlier of a McDonalds being reduced to a single employee operating a bunch of machines. It makes no sense, McDonalds is already a good example of someone taking a business model (a resturaunt where a skilled chef prepares food) and then stripping it down into an industrialised process where all the inputs are controlled and food is produced in an assembly line fashion. All of the McDonalds franchisees could go through the headache of designing, manufacturing, transporting and maintaining an expensive as gently caress rube goldberg machine that can produce a fillet-o-fish.. Or they could hire another teenager for $4.25 and train them how to make one in 10 minutes. In an economy where you have millions of people desperate to make a fillet-o-fish, there is no incentive to ever replace them with more machines.

Thug Lessons posted:

That system already exists. It's called insurance.

Main Paineframe posted:

So who pays for the insurance? The company that made the car? The company that made the software the car is running? The car owner?

Lactose Is Wack posted:

Just as a continuation

The Panera Bread near where I live normally has 4-6 people working as cashiers behind the counter.

Last week they installed 2 automated kiosks that fill the role of the cashiers. Almost no one went on line to the human cashier, unless they were paying in cash which was maybe 1-2 people in the total time I was in the store.

Why would they do this if there is such a large number of people in the labor pool not working ,who are eligible to work, and whose cost of employment (according to you) is not well beyond minimum wage. I think in NY they pay something close to 10$ an hour.

Thug Lessons posted:

Common sense would say the vehicles' owners would pay their own insurance, just like it works today. Maybe the implications of automation would imply a different arrangement, but I doubt it. In any case it's not an insoluble or even particularly difficult issue and certainly not one that takes precedence of actually deploying the technology.

call to action posted:

I don't know about y'all but I got the gently caress out of stocks in my IRA and 401(k) two months or so ago and I'm ready to buy at the bottom

quote:

The synthetic CDO, a villain of the global financial crisis, is back….In the U.S., the CDO market sunk steadily in the years after the financial crisis but has been fairly flat since 2014. In Europe, the total size of market is now rising again—up 5.6% annually in the first quarter of the year and 14.4% in the last quarter of 2016, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

call to action posted:

Because an iPad is cheaper than hiring a human even at $10/hr and people would rather interact with one vs. a person?

call to action posted:

It kinda sucks, I mean I love it because I'm an antisocial retard but maybe it feels eerie to normies?

Main Paineframe posted:

Absolutely no one is going to put a vehicle on the road unless they're reasonably sure who is going to be held responsible if it hits someone (and thus who is required to pay for liability insurance). If an algorithm is driving a car (yes, I know this is simplistic to the point of being inaccurate, I don't care because this isn't the pedantry forum) and plows through a family crossing the street, who is legally responsible? The programmers who wrote the algorithm? The manufacturer that put that algorithm in the car? The person who was sitting in the car?

It's not something you can just handwave away, because no major manufacturer or commercial operator is going to put a fully autonomous vehicle on the roads until they understand where the legal liabilities lie. it's a major consideration for actual practical deployment

rudatron posted:

If the laws are inconvenient for the deployment of automated driving, car manufactures & logistic companies will sinply change the laws - the benefits of cutting back on labor costs is too seductive for capitalists, it that comes at the expense of society then that's societies' problem, not theirs. Or do you still labor under the delusion that politicians aren't bought and paid for?

Thug Lessons posted:

I have to say, "it is impossible incredibly difficult for lawyers to create insurance law for driverless cars" is certainly a novel criticism of the concept, one I have never heard before. However it is an idiotic criticism because of course they can loving do it, easily. You're confusinhg the difficult and ultimately insoluble philosophical question of "who is really responsible" with the practical and eminently solvable one of "who is legally responsible".

What going to happen practically is that companies operating driverless cars are going to just purchase insurance from existing car insurance companies, because right now the law is that vehicle owners have to purchase insurance on their vehicles. It's possible (but in my view very unlikely) that, when an accident inevitably happens, the courts will find that actually some other party is liable in full or in part, and award a judgment against them, at which point they will have to start purchasing insurance. But contrary to what you're saying this will have practically no effect on viability of the deployment of driverless vehicles.

Main Paineframe posted:

I didn't say it was incredibly difficult. I said that no one is bothering to do it, and that it's a pretty big indicator of how interested manufacturers actually are in mass-market autonomous vehicles.

quote:

Amman explained that this video is from a "regular development ride," not a special ride done just for the video. It's sped up, but it includes all 22 minutes of the ride that Ammann took, in the back seat of this vehicle as the video was filming.

"Twenty-two minutes, fully autonomous, zero driver takeovers, zero driver intervention," Ammann said. "The whole ride was entirely controlled from the Cruise mobile app."

Lactose Is Wack posted:

Just as a continuation

The Panera Bread near where I live normally has 4-6 people working as cashiers behind the counter.

Last week they installed 2 automated kiosks that fill the role of the cashiers. Almost no one went on line to the human cashier, unless they were paying in cash which was maybe 1-2 people in the total time I was in the store.

Why would they do this if there is such a large number of people in the labor pool not working ,who are eligible to work, and whose cost of employment (according to you) is not well beyond minimum wage. I think in NY they pay something close to 10$ an hour.

Main Paineframe posted:

The reason there are so few positions that could be obsoleted by a guy getting a smartphone is because the original iPhone is over 10 years old. Most of the positions that could be obsoleted by current smartphones have already been obsoleted. No, it's not a new phenomenon - and that's exactly the problem. Automation has been eliminating jobs for more than a hundred years - we're running out of fields for the structurally-unemployed to flee to. And while it may not matter to you whether those newly-unemployed find new (lower-wage) jobs or not, it certainly matters to them. You tell a nice tidy tale of human beings happily sitting around in the "unemployed" category until wages drop low enough to become employed again at positions that paid less than they made before...but the reality is more likely to involve some mixture of starvation, homelessness, riots, and other civil disorder. We don't need to automate away so many jobs that human employment literally doesn't exist anymore in order to destroy the economy as we know it, we just need to automate away enough jobs that a good chunk of the populace can't make a living wage anymore. And we're already getting dangerously close to that.