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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Here is my complete argument restated as one post: That high future is approximately three to four decades away. This seems to be the one thing that you can't grasp: we are nearly there, you and I are going to personally experience the future where nobody has a job or money and no alternative system is in place because nobody is doing anything useful about it TODAY. It isn't far off, it isn't a future generations' problem. How different do you see the world being in thirty years socially and politically?
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Dec 9, 2017 00:14
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Slavvy posted:That high future is approximately three to four decades away. Yeah probably, this computer age we are in now will almost certainly end up being one of the most major changes in human civilization since agriculture. I fully expect to die an old man in a world that is almost entirely alien to the 1980s I was born into. I think there will be winners and losers, I do agree that some people will be hit hard by the world being different. But I also don't think we need to just take generic millennial anxieties and then project them to infinity and say the future is just "whatever economic issues are on people's minds in 2017 but magnified forever!" any more than 1960s robots as black people or 1980s robots as cold war ever came to pass.
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Dec 9, 2017 00:52
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Please, for the good of everyone involved, don't reply to Owlofcreamcheese. I don't understand how this happens every couple of pages and all of you have such a short memory. He argues in bad faith all the time and he always moves the goalpost when someone summarily proves him wrong. It's not worth talking to him.
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Dec 9, 2017 01:17
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Chakan posted:Please, for the good of everyone involved, don't reply to Owlofcreamcheese. I don't understand how this happens every couple of pages and all of you have such a short memory. He argues in bad faith all the time and he always moves the goalpost when someone summarily proves him wrong. It's not worth talking to him. Should this thread just be people taking turns writing fanfiction of how grimdark and edgy they can make their vision of how the concentration camps are going to be once all the job creators go galt and take all the jobs we need to live?
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Dec 9, 2017 01:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I am assuming you just are posting this flow chart totally unrelated to your very recent claim that: No you idiot. What is the relationship between a tech company, oh let's say IBM and other businesses? That diagram is. A more modern tech company, oh let's say Amazon would be everything in the diagram. Now what does this relationship generate, what are these "tech kits" the tech companies make for traditional business? Automation. What's the loving point of automation? To serve the needs of business. Tech companies make tech for capital. What's this automation stuff for? TO MAKE BUSINESSES MONEY It's essential to tech and automation that they increase the concentration and accumulation of capital!
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Dec 9, 2017 03:35
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Yup. The incentive for increased automation is profit. As long as that remains unchanged, and there's nothing about the world as it is to indicate otherwise, automation will eventually lead to most of humanity subsisting or starving to death. The further we move toward the future whilst doing nothing, the less likely alternative outcomes become because the leverage working classes have (their labour) is diminishing daily. Soon we'll reach the point where automation is mature enough to make writing off human labour entirely more profitable than pretending to care about workers. Is this short-sighted? Yes. Is it inhumanly cruel and horrific? Yes. Are the people relentlessly seeking a bigger number at all costs ultimately irrational and stupid? Yes. Welcome to earf. In a way oocc is entirely correct in that a hundred years from now, barring nuclear cataclysm or gigantic social upheaval, the descendants of the 1% will have fantastic lives where robots do everything and nobody has to work and money isn't a thing.
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Dec 9, 2017 03:58
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:automation is a normal part of all human development and there has been dozens of times that dominant jobs became obsolete and instead of being replaced in some direct 1:1 way they simply opened society up to work on newer bigger and more abstract concerns. Unless those new and abstract concerns start shifting radically none of this matters for 95%+ of the people of the world because it's gonna be a ruinous wasteland.
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Dec 9, 2017 03:59
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BrandorKP posted:No you idiot. Is this ordained by god? Is this hundred or so year old relationship eternal and forever and can not be changed or altered ever?
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Dec 9, 2017 04:53
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Is this ordained by god? Is this hundred or so year old relationship eternal and forever and can not be changed or altered ever? It's a description of what is. It is a not at all controversial description of what is. That diagram is from a mangement MS program taught by a retired IBM exec. Can you see the Kingdom of Tech on that shining hill? Tech won't save us and you know better.
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Dec 9, 2017 05:21
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BrandorKP posted:It's a description of what is. It is a not at all controversial description of what is. That diagram is from a mangement MS program taught by a retired IBM exec. I'm not even clear how a future where 99% of the population is unemployed even makes a company money. What does the business even do that makes the rich people rich? What stops the 99% from giving eachother jobs to make their own stuff if no one is selling to them anything and all work is now zero skill labor that is so easy literally anyone can do it.
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Dec 9, 2017 05:34
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HAHA! we replaced all the mcdonalds workers with robots and kiosks and all the other retail workers! now lets just wait till the money rolls in as no one can afford our restaurants and only one rich guy wants to eat at mcdonalds every day. We will make literally dozens of dollars a day with this plot!
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Dec 9, 2017 05:44
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my favorite way to look at this (and lots of stuff in this vein) is to view most peoples concerns (or as oocc put it 'generalized and projected millennial anxieties') as a rhetorical trope for talking about whats going on *right now and even for some time now* we already live in a world where the 0.1% live as one form of humanity and the rest of us can at best aspire to a "middle class lifestyle' (its own whopping sack of ideological poo poo sandwiches) by doing utterly useless make-work jobs we already live in a world where they've openly bought the political system we already live in a world where the automated computer-driven pursuit of compounding interest forever is wiping out the majority of species people ask "what if" about this stuff because for the same kindof reason you ask someone about some problem "for a friend". the bad parts are already here.
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Dec 9, 2017 05:52
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Ormi posted:OTOH it appears to me most labor economists whose job it is to track job displacement and identify its causes don't think the case for permanent technological employment is very strong. Instead this viewpoint seems to mostly be limited to a bizarre internet echo chamber alliance of doomers and technofetishists with even media looking on with only agnostic curiosity rather than the abject terror expressed in this thread. This is interesting but I admit I don't have the stamina to read and digest the whole paper. Can someone with a stronger economy background comment?
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Dec 9, 2017 09:23
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Slavvy posted:In a way oocc is entirely correct in that a hundred years from now, barring nuclear cataclysm or gigantic social upheaval, the descendants of the 1% will have fantastic lives where robots do everything and nobody has to work and money isn't a thing. When I’m feeling particularly cynical, I imagine that the StarTrek utopia is actually the aftermath of letting all the poor die out and they covered it up with all that stuff about World War III and the Eugenics Wars, with Khan being some dude they brainwashed. Gotta admit it makes more sense than either a Mexican or the world’s whitest Englishman having the name “Khan Singh”
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Dec 9, 2017 11:02
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:HAHA! we replaced all the mcdonalds workers with robots and kiosks and all the other retail workers! now lets just wait till the money rolls in as no one can afford our restaurants and only one rich guy wants to eat at mcdonalds every day. We will make literally dozens of dollars a day with this plot! I dunno if you noticed but the 1% class doesn't think that far ahead. Just look at right now: deregulation has ushered in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, massively impoverishing the entire Millenial generation and then started writing all sorts of moronic think pieces blaming said Millenials'lack of spending on everything from laziness to avocado toast instead of the fact that they brought this on themselves.
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Dec 9, 2017 11:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm not even clear how a future where 99% of the population is unemployed even makes a company money. What does the business even do that makes the rich people rich? What stops the 99% from giving eachother jobs to make their own stuff if no one is selling to them anything and all work is now zero skill labor that is so easy literally anyone can do it. Lmao, your question has been answered multiple times in this thread. You are stuck in some kind of loop. Break
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Dec 9, 2017 13:07
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Slavvy posted:Yup. The incentive for increased automation is profit. As long as that remains unchanged, and there's nothing about the world as it is to indicate otherwise, automation will eventually lead to most of humanity subsisting or starving to death. The further we move toward the future whilst doing nothing, the less likely alternative outcomes become because the leverage working classes have (their labour) is diminishing daily. Soon we'll reach the point where automation is mature enough to make writing off human labour entirely more profitable than pretending to care about workers. This is all fairly likely. But, perhaps optimistically, I'm confident in the 99% at some point rising up in revolution against the 1% if this happens. Within Western/developed countries at least. The working/middle classes will reach a stage of economic desperation long before there are roaming armies of civil obedience robots in place, so will still have the capability for violent revolution. The taste of social democracy (particularly in Europe) has given most people certain expectations about lifestyle minimums, which they won't take too well to losing. Anyone in the developing world is pretty hosed though.
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Dec 9, 2017 13:58
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Lmao, your question has been answered multiple times in this thread. Answered with absurd conspiracy theories.
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Dec 9, 2017 14:15
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The entire country of Nigeria is a conspiracy theory. How else could there be rich people there, while the overwhelming majority of people live in dehumanizing poverty? How rich when not sell to ever person on earth product? How is babby formed?
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Dec 9, 2017 14:43
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The answer is simple: the non-rich will struggle to survive as they attempt to sell any bit of their labor or remaining physical assets they have, and with that fight for survival, there is still "skin in the game" for corporations. Also as far as the old "people living longer" argument, for a stable society you need more than higher life expectancy but some type of actual hope for population their lives will have meaning. The Soviet Union (for example) had tremendous calamities happen, involving the deaths of millions, but it could keep on ticking as long as the population had hope. In the end, perception matters. And it bears repeating: what is happening isn't just due to automation, climate change, austerity measures, or a yawning geopolitical vacuum...it is everything at once. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 16:03
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Doctor Malaver posted:This is interesting but I admit I don't have the stamina to read and digest the whole paper. Can someone with a stronger economy background comment? It points out that the report doesn't say that at all and that with in the report it shows that Automation is currently less of a factor in employment & wage trends than trade is. And that the report shows automation is trending down at the moment because at this point we're hitting diminishing returns on automation. TL;DR the media is still poo poo at reporting on science and their headline is usually dramatically overstating the argument in the paper.
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Dec 9, 2017 16:14
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Lmao, your question has been answered multiple times in this thread. You are stuck in some kind of loop. Break Oh no! He's been automated!
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Dec 9, 2017 16:55
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I think another side to this automation thing is that it heavily weighs in favor of large businesses that can invest in robots, smaller businesses that could grow and produce more jobs are held back because they can't compete against the price savings of huge companies.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:03
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economists are the ones telling us to dig up all the carbon and set fire to it in order to afford a new phone every 2 years instead of 3, generally speaking, gently caress their take
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Dec 9, 2017 17:06
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also with so much machine automation instead of having a bunch of forklift operators you have a robot programmer who has to make sure machines aren't running into each other or dropping product so in some ways the jobs just shift from a bunch of low paying to one high paying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHbI_B2sPA0
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Dec 9, 2017 17:07
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:The entire country of Nigeria is a conspiracy theory. How else could there be rich people there, while the overwhelming majority of people live in dehumanizing poverty? How rich when not sell to ever person on earth product? How is babby formed? And Switzerland is fake too, how can a place exist where people have a good lifestyle when rich people exist and could just hire an army to steal all their stuff?
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Dec 9, 2017 17:14
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StabbinHobo posted:economists are the ones telling us to dig up all the carbon and set fire to it in order to afford a new phone every 2 years instead of 3, generally speaking, gently caress their take I'm just going to assume this was an attempt at Cunningham's law and not the dumbest take in the last 10 years of D&D.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:16
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I think realistically we're going to start seeing the united states shrink into "cores" where the majority of high intellect production and creation are done with the lower classes living off the scraps of the few rich producers surrounded by a giant welfare state but really what else is new
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Dec 9, 2017 17:32
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basically megacities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZFkvOq0b48
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Dec 9, 2017 17:32
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Lmao, your question has been answered multiple times in this thread. You are stuck in some kind of loop. Break Nobody answered that question because nobody loving knows what the future will look like. That’s kind of the absurdity of this thread, you can’t just extrapolate forward from a 30 year trend devoid of any context and expected it to continue indefinitely. Nor can you extrapolate from a 100 year trend. I can’t believe how conceited you’d have to be to actually believe you know what the world will look like in 30 years.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:41
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[quote="“StabbinHobo”" post="“479167207”"] my favorite way to look at this (and lots of stuff in this vein) is to view most peoples concerns (or as oocc put it ‘generalized and projected millennial anxieties’) as a rhetorical trope for talking about whats going on *right now and even for some time now* people ask “what if” about this stuff because for the same kindof reason you ask someone about some problem “for a friend”. the bad parts are already here. [/quote] Yeah I think I’ve realized that that’s what’s happening itt too. Which is why people react so badly when 00CC tells them that actually they have no idea what the future will hold. They view this as an implicit claim that there are no problems with the present, although that is never present in the text of his posts. Kind of hard to bring the pathos and logos into alignment with this kind of argument.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:48
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Squalid posted:Yeah I think I’ve realized that that’s what’s happening itt too. Which is why people react so badly when 00CC tells them that actually they have no idea what the future will hold. They view this as an implicit claim that there are no problems with the present, although that is never present in the text of his posts. Kind of hard to bring the pathos and logos into alignment with this kind of argument. My favorite thing is sometimes there will be a thread about like, moore's law or something and everyone will run in to tell that moore's law is done and computers are stupid and nothing has been invented since 1998 and it's all down hill from here, invention is done, but then in threads about automation computers are amazing and can do anything and anything they can't do will be invented any second now and everything is terrible. A lot of people seem to have a shifting view of the future where whatever is true is only true in context of constructing a future where whatever problem society is facing at that exact second is extended out to infinity to be a world ending apocalypse.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:58
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Squalid posted:Nobody answered that question because nobody loving knows what the future will look like. That’s kind of the absurdity of this thread, you can’t just extrapolate forward from a 30 year trend devoid of any context and expected it to continue indefinitely. Nor can you extrapolate from a 100 year trend. I can’t believe how conceited you’d have to be to actually believe you know what the world will look like in 30 years. Nah, the question of how an economy can involve only a small subset of people from a much larger set of people has been answered. It's such a simple concept that even a child should be able to understand it and there are countless examples from real life that have been brought up to illustrate it better. Two globally rich Swedes make an economic transactions. How is a Congolese subsistence farmer involved in that economy? Not at all! Are the two Swedes still rich despite the noninvolvement of the Congolese? Yes. Huge if true, if you ask me, htbh
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Dec 9, 2017 18:08
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Xae posted:It is taking issue with one specific report that the media pointed to as saying that human labor will be completely displaced. They also say that it's not an issue just with that article but that generally speaking there is no evidence that automation leads to joblessness. That's a bold claim. Squalid posted:Nobody answered that question because nobody loving knows what the future will look like. That’s kind of the absurdity of this thread, you can’t just extrapolate forward from a 30 year trend devoid of any context and expected it to continue indefinitely. Nor can you extrapolate from a 100 year trend. I can’t believe how conceited you’d have to be to actually believe you know what the world will look like in 30 years. Yes, you can extrapolate and you should. Not because it will predict future perfectly but because it will show a possible/probable outcome if the circumstances don't change. They probably will change, but how much? We use extrapolation and other imperfect tools because it's better than the alternative which is throwing hands in the air and saying "Who knows!?"
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Dec 9, 2017 18:14
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Doctor Malaver posted:They also say that it's not an issue just with that article but that generally speaking there is no evidence that automation leads to joblessness. That's a bold claim. It isn't though. We automated agriculture from 60% of the population to 5% in a century (1850 -> 1950) and were still at near full employment.
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Dec 9, 2017 19:09
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Doctor Malaver posted:Yes, you can extrapolate and you should. Not because it will predict future perfectly but because it will show a possible/probable outcome if the circumstances don't change. They probably will change, but how much? We use extrapolation and other imperfect tools because it's better than the alternative which is throwing hands in the air and saying "Who knows!?" Yeah this is correct. We just have to recognize the difference between saying "present trends are worrying, what can be done today to address growing problems?" and apocalyptic proclamations that jobs won't even exist in 30 years. In fact I don't even think there's much disagreement really, barring the few cranks who want to preemptively ban self-driving semis. Nobody thinks there are no social problems today nor that there won't be problems in the future. But people seem to get insanely mad if you don't mime the exact right tone they think one should use to address the problem. Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Nah, the question of how an economy can involve only a small subset of people from a much larger set of people has been answered. It's such a simple concept that even a child should be able to understand it and there are countless examples from real life that have been brought up to illustrate it better. Going back through yours and OOCCs dialogue I'm not sure what point you are trying to prove to him. He has not stated that in the future, inequality will not increase. Rather he has argued that if inequality increases in the future, it will be because of mistakes made by society rather than as an inevitable byproduct of technological progress. This should be obvious to anyone of a leftist leaning, as it is sort of the entire premise of Marxist thought that social inequality can be eliminated by restructuring our relationship to the means of production.
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Dec 9, 2017 19:46
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Two globally rich Swedes make an economic transactions. How is a Congolese subsistence farmer involved in that economy? Not at all! Are the two Swedes still rich despite the noninvolvement of the Congolese? Yes. Huge if true, if you ask me, htbh I'm pretty sure the reason there is no economy reaching those farmers in the congo is because of past imperialism and current massive bloody civil war. Not because mcdonald's said "lol, lets just not sell to congo, lol, idk". If the country could stabilize for a second every company on earth would be there, exactly like all the other countries. Companies don't leave out the congo because they like to not have 75 million other customers, they leave them out because the political structure makes it so if they build a walmart it gets seized/looted/burned/whatever.
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Dec 9, 2017 20:26
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Squalid posted:Going back through yours and OOCCs dialogue I'm not sure what point you are trying to prove to him. He has not stated that in the future, inequality will not increase. Rather he has argued that if inequality increases in the future, it will be because of mistakes made by society rather than as an inevitable byproduct of technological progress. This should be obvious to anyone of a leftist leaning, as it is sort of the entire premise of Marxist thought that social inequality can be eliminated by restructuring our relationship to the means of production. There is no point in arguing with these people man, they've decided that automation is bad and their proof is that they feel fearful of the future. Also any discussion about changing society to resolve these social problems is met with even more ridicule. They pretend like reducing the work week or implementing systems like basic income are impossible to achieve even though we're moving that direction in many first world countries.
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Dec 9, 2017 21:41
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I don't think automation is inherantly bad , it's just nesissary to understand the things it causes and what end it serves. The existence of balancing loops that mitigate it's effects is not something I'd dispute either. Tech is one element in a system. We should be pushing to balance the negative effects of automation with socialism.
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Dec 9, 2017 22:02
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BrandorKP posted:We should be pushing to balance the negative effects of automation with socialism. It should be pretty obvious that automation also provides answers to formerly unanswerable questions about a post capitalist society. Like the constant question of "who cleans the toilets" magically solves itself when the answer is "no one does, the roomba does that". And anyone that has read any scifi knows why you can't do the maximum extreme and have president joe give us a savior machine to run the country itself but the bigger the big data gets the more it's possible to move the needle towards a planned economy and not have it go totally off the rails because it's too hard to know any objective answers on such a complicated system.
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Dec 9, 2017 22:49
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