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My Lil Parachute posted:I honestly don't see why it is morally right to literally pay people to do nothing. At least tie it to trivially easy volunteer work like a few hours a week helping in nursing homes or something. I want to address this post in detail, even though it's really old at this point and the poster (probably) isn't even following this thread any more. Reason being this is how Republicans think. I lived around them for years and I used to think I was one. Being able to address these points without being alienating is important (good job, guys!  ), and it's a deceptively complicated matter.So, first of all, why is this statement incorrect from a logical standpoint? It's guilty of my favorite logical fallacy - begging the question. Basically, it assumes a premise that has not been agreed upon or justified. In this case, it makes three assumptions: 1: Getting something for free is immoral. There are two ways of looking at this one (that I've seen), and they typically go hand in hand. The first is that you can can take this further (and many do) to say that getting something for free is the same as stealing. Taken even further than that, it turns into "Getting something free is stealing from me." Essentially making the argument that someone else getting a handout (welfare, foodstamps, whatever) is directly negatively affecting the person making the argument (usually through additional taxes). This is why you commonly hear people on welfare being called "leeches". Why this is wrong: Welfare is an overall net benefit to GDP. Increased GDP leads to more wealth and cheaper goods. You can think of welfare as an investment, like your 401k. Just because you have to pay out for it now, doesn't mean anyone's "stealing" from you. Granted, there are some people who will end up with less wealth due to wealth distribution (duh). If you believe you are in this group, you are almost certainly wrong. If you actually DO belong to this group (again, you probably don't), congratulations! You have more money than you probably know what to do with anyways. Stop worrying so drat much. Note: If you have ANY debt at all (credit cards, mortgage, car payments, student loans), you don't belong in this group. There are no "working families" that belong in this group. The only "single mothers" that belong in this group are CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies or celebrities. See where I'm going with this? The second way of looking at this is that it isn't fair that you work for something and someone else doesn't. This is a big one I hear a lot. This argument is essentially the grownup version of "Why did Timmy get a Playstation for Christmas, and I didn't?" Yes, I know that sounds condescending. That's because it is. Why this is wrong: Look, this one doesn't have a great answer, so just bear with me. The short version is two-fold. 1: Unlike in ancient times, not everyone has to work for there to be enough to go around. We have a surplus of pretty much everything. Hell, the government subsidizes crops because we produce so much extra that the market would crash if they didn't. 2: If you're getting mincome, you've probably had a lovely life. It's not very Christian or mature or whatever of you to complain that someone else got something handed to them when you've pretty much had your whole life handed to you. People don't actually "bootstrap" themselves. That doesn't even make sense. The phrase is "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps" because doing that is literally impossible. Try it sometime. Put on some boots and try to lift yourself off the ground by pulling up on them really hard. See? Told you. Life isn't fair, and that's why we have welfare - to make it more fair to people that life was a bitch to. I mean, you're free to quit your job any day and live ~~luxuriously~~ on food stamps. No? Didn't think so. 2: We should not do things that have a net benefit to society if they are immoral. This is a weird one. If we grant the previous assumption that getting something for free is immoral, then the second assumption you have to make is that it is better to not help people if helping people would be immoral. Which is... well weird. How could helping someone be immoral? What does that even mean?  3: We need people to "work in nursing homes or something." ~6% of Americans are unemployed. These aren't just the people who don't have jobs. These are the people actively looking for jobs that can't get any. The US Workforce has a "Participation Rate" of about 63%. That means that 37% of persons over the age of 16 aren't even looking for a job. This includes students, stay at home parents, retired people, disabled, etc. In other words, only about 57% of American adults actually have jobs. If those other 43% suddenly had to find something to do with their time to collect mincome, what the gently caress would they even do? It's better for everyone that they stay at home with their kids or paint or garden or do hard drugs or literally anything but look for a job. This number is only going to go up as automation improves. I can easily see participation rate get as low as 20% in the next 50 years as manufacturing and low-level service jobs become obsolete. We're going to need a mincome at some point. If we don't, it's going to be painful.
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Dec 17, 2014 00:10
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wateroverfire posted:Whether welfare is a net benefit to GDP depends on where the money to fund it comes from and what its alternative use would have been. If the money would have been spent anyway than in aggregate it's a wash. If it would have been invested then there's an opportunity cost associated with handing it out to be consumed and it's not obvious that's net positive for GDP. If the money is just going under a matress then sure but most of the time that's not what what's going on. You're underestimating the income inequality. If we took all the money the top 20% makes, we could double the income of everybody else. The top 400 individuals make over 1% of the total income for the country. - 106 Billion dollars between them. They alone could afford to give $300 to every man, woman, and child in the country every year and would still be rich beyond most people's wildest dreams. wateroverfire posted:Beyond that, though, I think a fundamental tenant of a just society is that you fund your steam account through your own effort and not your neighbor's. This is a fundamental tenant of libertarianism, not society. At some point along the road, we forgot about that. There is no place for such thinking in a future where workforce participation is likely to be the exception, not the rule. wateroverfire posted:God bless. Deuteronomy 24-25: If you enter your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat all the grapes you want, but do not put any in your basket. If you enter your neighbor’s grainfield, you may pick kernels with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to their standing grain. i am harry posted:1. You need only to watch church goers drive their cars around the church parking lot to see how little they care for their peers, let alone the scum of the world. As fun as it is to write off a group of people as evil/coldhearted/whatever, it's both hypocritical and counterproductive. Some people go to church. Some people drive like assholes in parking lots. Some people do both. Insinuating anything else is just strengthening the argument that it's acceptable to paint an entire group of people with one brush (which is what, ironically, we are calling people out for). KillHour fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 15:16
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My Lil Parachute posted:hello. Hi. My Lil Parachute posted:I would alter the wording to say - "Taking something from someone else, without their approval, is immoral". Additionally things obtained for free are not as valued as things worked for. Firstly, not all people would agree with this. Read the bible quote I posted if you need proof that ideas like this have been around for a long time. This isn't new, and shouldn't be scary. Either way, individual ideas about morality and value are irrelevant to a discussion about public policy. This is about what is sustainable and necessary, not about what gives people the warm and fuzzies. I'm deflecting because I can't argue you on this point. Not because you're necessarily correct, but because I know that this is a belief that was likely reinforced for a long time by your environment and others around you. I'm not nearly naive enough to think that I can change your beliefs, so you'll just have to believe me when I say that your personal mores are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Also, if you're going to play the morality game, I should let you know that the final boss is the freakin' pope. My Lil Parachute posted:Have you got any cites for this? It sounds a little like the broken-window fallacy. This isn't the same as breaking a window to employ glaziers. This is simple and straightforward redistribution of wealth, which is a well studied issue in economics. I'm sure others could site specific resources better than I could, so I'll leave this question open. My Lil Parachute posted:I would propose a cap on the number of hours worked per week instead. A shorter working week will happen, but it won't be because we want to employ more people. Having more people do the same job for less hours is a straight loser from a business perspective. First, there's more paperwork, more training, more benefits. Secondly, for anything outside of unskilled labor, having more people working on a task just makes no sense and leads to increases in error and delays due to increased bureaucracy. No, a workweek reduction will happen because less man hours are required to meet demand. This will also lead to mass layoffs. The layoffs will happen first. Then, when staff is at a bare minimum, hours will be reduced. Remember, a company will try to produce exactly as much product as will be sold and not a unit more. Companies won't just hire new people and start new manufacturing lines just because they can. They actually have to be able to sell the stuff they make. The idea that giving Frito Lay a tax break will suddenly lead to more chip factories being built is one of the biggest GOP lies. My Lil Parachute posted:Bootstraps: Sure, luck can play a huge role in life (are you born an orphan or heir to a billionare's fortune?) but from what I've seen, most people need some luck and a lot of hard work before they get anywhere. Attributing someones success purely (as many people do) to luck shits all over the work they did to get there. It's not about whether you're born an orphan or a billionaire. It's, quite frankly, whether you're born black (or to a single mother, or disabled, or gay, or in the wrong zip code...). I think most people need to think really hard about just how much was given to them for free. I think you'll find that it was a lot. In my case, I got a free education. Free, quality, consistent food my entire childhood. Free shelter. Free entertainment. Edit: two free cars. Free healthcare. A free pass from the cops (on several occasions - some quite serious). Free job interviews. Free professional references. A free 30 cents for every dollar in my paycheck (I'm a white male). I didn't have to work for any of this, it was just given to me by the very nature of where and to whom I was born. There's probably a ton of stuff I'm forgetting. It wasn't immoral for me to get those things (well, maybe the free 30 cents), and it's not immoral to think that others should get the same. My Lil Parachute posted:Hypothetical: Would you brutally murder 100 Americans at random if everyone else in the world got a weeks worth of food? On average, it would save more lives then it would cost, so would be a net benefit to society - whilst still being an abhorrent act. This is either a straw man or moving the goalposts. Possibly both. If you need to introduce extreme hypotheticals into an argument as your example of something bad, you've already conceded that the position you're arguing against has nothing objectionable enough to attack on its own merits. My Lil Parachute posted:There is a fraction of the population I wouldn't trust to make me a sandwich, so we will always see some unemployment. There are jobs at present which are not done because it is simply not economical but would benefit society (eg roaming the beach all day and picking up litter). With adequate supervision I don't see why we can't get a few hours of community service in exchange for benefits. Those supervisors need to get paid. The bureaucracy to police this needs to get paid. It's a loser from a money perspective, and a loser from a public policy perspective. England tried exactly what you're proposing, and it ended horribly. As much as you might not want to think about it, it's better for the economy and for society if we just subsidize everybody, regardless of what (if anything) they choose to do with themselves. My Lil Parachute posted:The long-term solution has to be a reduction in working hours imo. As I said before, this is going to be a symptom of the problem, not the solution. Edit: Holy crap, this thread exploded. Can we like, try to be civil, here? This is an opportunity for us all to learn from each other and work towards good public policy. Let's embrace it, eh? KillHour fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 16:50
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My Lil Parachute posted:I donate to various charities willingly. It would be immoral to use force to make me imo. I used to totally believe this! Turns out, I was wrong. We have to support other people and the economy as a whole. No, this is not voluntary. It's not about being nice, or good or moral. It's about making a decent life for ourselves in a poo poo world. Just because you don't personally know the family squatting in an abandoned building downtown with no heat in January doesn't mean you're not responsible for them. Being moral is about standing up and saying "the world's problems are my problems." We're insulated from how lovely the world is in our suburb McMansions and our gated communities, but it's still our problem. Our mess to clean up. You can't look on someone with no job, no home and no food and say "This is your fault!" because it's not. It's all of ours. We let them down. We let them slip through the cracks. We need to take responsibility.
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Dec 17, 2014 17:17
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murphyslaw posted:It sounds cliched but I think we absolutely have to begin thinking outside common moral boundaries and comfort zones in order to survive increased automation. "Nobly getting by with the skin on your teeth and taking no handouts" is admirable in a premodern frontier society but that is not the world we live in any more. More importantly, nobody ever actually did this. I think the only way you possibly could get by with no handouts is if you lived in the woods and grew your own food, or something. We underestimate how important all the free things we were given as children were to our success as an adult. I don't think anyone here can claim they were never given something they didn't have to pay off. Hell, my mom gave me thousands of dollars as a gift to help me buy my house just last year. It's something that, as human beings, we just do. I think the hard part is getting over the fact that you don't know who's getting the money and what they're using it for. One way or another, it has to happen, though.
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Dec 17, 2014 17:30
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Goddamnit; stop being a prick.
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Dec 17, 2014 17:55
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VitalSigns posted:Asking him to define the basis of his argument is being a prick? VitalSigns posted:But you deserve that, not like those welfare queens having more kids to get more of my money and using abortion as birth control because they're sluuuuuuts Being sarcastic and condescending is being a prick. And yes, poking holes in the structure of someone's argument is how you deface them on a live television debate. This is not a live television debate. You're not going to impress anyone by making My Lil Parachute feel attacked. Ytlaya posted:Let me give an analogy explaining why it's impossible to be morally rich. It still comes back to the fact that the more money you have, the more insulated you are from those that don't. In that position, it's easy to feel like you are not responsible for those persons, and moreover to feel like they had every advantage you did. There's a reason that every rich man in the bible was painted as a villain. Being rich while others suffer is, in and of itself, a sin. Edit: Forgive me for all the bible references. I am not particularly religious, but was raised Catholic and was around a lot of very conservative Protestants very often, so it was often a powerful tool in debates. If nothing else, it shows that these ideas aren't new, but have been around for millennia. Well before the advent of modern capitalism, as we know it. KillHour fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 18:09
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wateroverfire posted:This is thinking I have trouble assimilating. Your food, shelter, entertainment, cars, health related expenses, were all paid for by your parents (presumably). They paid taxes to help pay for your education. That stuff didn't just get showered on you because of where you grew up and who you were born to. You had advantages because your parents were willing to work hard to provide them to you. It's not immoral that you have access to those things but it is kind of telling that you don't seem to appreciate the sacrifice it took to deliver them. That upbringing directly led to me getting a good job (that I could not have gotten without such an upbringing), which will then allow me to provide the same things to my kids, providing them better opportunities than if I had been born into poverty. Likewise, my parents didn't just make all that poo poo appear out of thin air because they loved me enough or worked hard enough or bootstrapped enough. It's a self-feeding cycle, and it's why such massive inequality exists in the first place - rich people have rich kids; poor people have poor kids. wateroverfire posted:It's not immoral, but is rather naive, to propose that everyone should have those things and btw they will all be paid for by the state forcing someone else to be the rich-ish parent. I would like to point out that you just argued that some children shouldn't have good food, shelter, education, healthcare or entertainment because their parents aren't rich. wateroverfire posted:You as an individual don't get a free 30 cents on every dollar in your paycheck. =( That is not how statistics works. White males in general get paid more though the 30 cent figure is extremely debatable and needs to be conditioned by education, occupation, experience, and other factors. That is exactly how it works. In fact, because of statistics, it could be even higher than that! But it's probably in the ballpark. For instance, I make about 15% more than my wife (and always have), and we are about the same age, education level and have similar jobs. And we worked at the same company for a while - I got a higher paying job than she did, even though we started about 2 months apart.
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Dec 17, 2014 20:18
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wateroverfire posted:That is definitely a dynamic. However, what's your point? My point is that providing that stuff has a cost, and someone has to bear the cost. You're saying "don't worry it'll be someone else you'll never see" and IMO that's pretty naive. "Redistribute it all" is not a plan for breaking the cycle of poverty. My point is that the people who are bearing the cost can afford it. In fact, my household is in the ~55th percentile for income, and I can easily afford a ~10% increase in taxes, even though it is unlikely that I would need to bear nearly that much. Tax me, I'm good for it!  wateroverfire posted:Dude, I didn't argue that. I argued that saying "you're going to have all these benefits and don't worry someone else is going to pay" is pretty naive and that you're ignoring what things cost. We all have to pay. If you are rich and you're not paying, you need to be. Please, let me know how much this will cost. I'm sure you'll find that it's affordable if you're willing to go back to pre-Reagan tax rates. And yes, you literally argued that. Your argument was that it's unreasonable (or "naive", as you put it) to give all children food, clothing and shelter because nobody else should have to pay for it. You literally said that. wateroverfire posted:Good for you! That's ALSO not how statistics work, but if you guys are so similar in every other way and your jobs are really that comparable, why not coax her to ask for a raise? Yes, it is. Do you not know how a standard deviation works? You obviously never took statistics (or were bad at it, or something). Also, the reason she makes less than me is that she was passed up for the job she wanted and given a lesser job (in the same department) because of "lack of experience," not that she was given the same job with lower salary. She would have to jump 3 pay grades to catch up to me now. wateroverfire posted:Pretty sustainable tbh. We're all still here and the world economy seems to have been pretty resiliant in the face of crisis, so that's a good indicator that things are not about to fly apart. Business is good despite some headwinds. US growth is pretty robust though Europe continues to be Europe. Why do you believe The End Is Nigh? That seems like a much more controversial proposition - not to mention one that has been wrong any number of times in the last 100 years. There are going to be radical changes to the economy in the next hundred years. The economy of 100 years ago looks nothing like today, and economic trends took MUCH longer to propagate before the internet. A global crash can happen in seconds, now. Pingui posted:Somebody asked how much it would cost, and I figured I would give it a go. The premise is 15k USD per person, with a gradual decrease in actual benefit received going from 15k at 15k to 0k at 30k written down linearly. E.g. someone earning 25k would receive an additional 2,5k. In the end I have included 7,5k for children under 18. Honestly, it should probably be higher than this. If we made it $31,305 (Equivalent to $15/hr full time), we could make all the ultra-capitalists happy and abolish minimum wage! Then THE FREE MARKET  could decide if flipping burgers is worth another $2.50/hr or whatever.Edit: We could always just not pay for it. Get rid of whatever social programs are made redundant by a mincome (probably most of them) and throw the rest on the top of the budget as a deficit. We would essentially be taking out a negative-interest loan on behalf of everyone under a certain income, expecting to make it back in GDP (which we would, easily). It would be like those stimulus checks Bush gave out. Except it would actually work. KillHour fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 20:54
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Pingui posted:In my initial calculation, I did a miscalculation (people making from 15k to 30k all received 30k), making a substitution of all existing programs revenue positive. If you want to get people on board with a mincome, that should probably be the take-away instead of what you stated here. It should however be noted that I did not touch the military budget at all in the calculation, so if you want to increase the mincome that is probably the place to start. That number can't be right. Every thousand you add is going to increase eligibility, which makes each thousand more expensive than the last. Taking anything out of the military budget is pretty much a non-starter politically and economically. Like it or not, a large portion of our economy is tied up in military spending. A reduction in military spending is still austerity, which is the last thing we need right now. Honestly, putting it on the deficit may be the best option.
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Dec 18, 2014 19:39
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Pingui posted:You're right, I only tested it for small increases. At 30k it averages 195,653,150,680, starting at the number stated and ending at 210,323,855,513. Your math would put it a 30k mincome around 3 Trillion more than a 15k mincome. Military budget in 2010 was 1.2 Trillion, so it won't even cover it. I'm loathe to agree to cutting any spending in an economic downturn, honestly. It's an economic non-starter because even if the mincome ultimately does greater good than the austerity does harm, it is still going to be additional pain for individuals and uncertainty for the economy as a whole. The military is a HUGE demand generator for all sorts of goods and services. Companies will go under overnight if we cut the budget significantly. KillHour fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Dec 18, 2014 |
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Dec 18, 2014 22:22
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Pingui posted:My point isn't that the military budget could cover the short-fall. My point is that in a mincome scenario, cutting other services (which you proposed) while keeping the military budget a constant (which you are proposing) is silly. Particularly so when you (not me) want to increase the mincome to 30k. I don't necessarily think that mincome should be 30K. I think it absolutely should be as much as we can reasonably support. 30K is just the point at which I feel a single adult with no kids could live comfortably with a mortgage/rent, car payment, spending money, etc. in most of the country. It's basically the minimum that would have to exist for me to feel comfortable quitting my (admittedly much higher-paying) job to start a business and pursue my real dreams. I think that's an essential part of the appeal of a mincome - self fulfillment beyond just actually surviving. That being said, I still think that "who is going to pay for it?" is a red herring. The budget does not have to balance. As long as the growth in GDP is enough to cover interest payments (which it almost certainly will be), there's no real reason to ever completely pay off the debt. Especially considering we indirectly control the interest rate by controlling the inflation rate of the currency the debt is owed in. If cutting military spending isn't going to make the numbers balance, why do it? You're just hurting the economy in other places, at that point. HappyHippo posted:The idea that human labour will become valueless is nowhere near the realm of climate change and it's absolutely ridiculous of you to put them on the same footing. Most of the naive arguments for technological unemployment are clearly contradicted by the past few centuries of technological progression without massive unemployment. The burden is on you to explain what has changed to put us on the cusp. Computers. Since the invention of the first tool, machines have been a force multiplier for labor. One person can now do the job of 'x' number of people. You still needed a person running said machine. In the past, this simply lead to each person being more productive, which in turn led to each person being able to have more stuff on the consumer side. Labor's value has been increasing for thousands of years. With computers, this is no longer the case. Full lights-out chip fabs already exist that have no employees at all. Soon, other manufacturing will follow. This is unprecedented. You will be able to run an entire manufacturing plant with 0 employees. This is fundamentally different. In a scenario like this, labor has no value, as it is completely unnecessary. This isn't even the end of it. Robots don't need management. They don't need human resources or training or food services. They don't need janitors to clean the restrooms (because there are no restrooms). A business owner doesn't need internal affairs lawyers or payroll accountants or recruiters. The electricity to pay for the robots is less than the utilities to pay for lighting or heat or water. Fully automated facilities take up less space - there are no locker rooms or break rooms or parking lots. You don't need a security guard if nobody is supposed to go in the building. You don't need to pay worker's comp or health insurance or a 401k for robots. Payroll taxes, too. Companies that offer all these services go under. We will soon live in a world where anyone with capital to buy a facility and raw materials can pump out products with no human involvement whatsoever. The scalability is limited only by supply and demand constraints. Once you automate supply (not a large stretch to assume we will have automated mines and quarries), goods can literally be made for the price of electricity and transportation. With automated cars coming in the next 5 years, we're going to live in a world where products come to market seemingly by magic. A world where the first time an actual human lays eyes on a television or any of the components or raw materials that went into it is when it gets delivered to their door by an Amazon delivery robot. KillHour fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Dec 18, 2014 |
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Dec 18, 2014 23:06
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HappyHippo posted:Who designs it? HappyHippo posted:Who builds it? HappyHippo posted:Who maintains it? HappyHippo posted:Who repairs it when it breaks? HappyHippo posted:Who drives the trucks to bring the raw materials in, and the products out? HappyHippo posted:Who mines the raw materials? HappyHippo posted:Who designs the chips? HappyHippo posted:Who upgrades it when the next product is rolled out and the process changes? HappyHippo posted:Don't handwave this all away with "computers." You've basically shown that one part of the production process can be automated, which is something that's been happening for a few centuries anyway. The only difference is the scale. Computers aren't magic, and we aren't nearly as close to eliminating the labour in manufacturing as you think. And of course manufacturing has been a decreasing part of the labour force anyway. Agriculture was once the primary form of human labour, now in many countries it's something like 2%. Accretionist posted:Hell, in that article I just posted, they found large effects from paying out only as much as 1/3 subsistence. This can be small and still worth doing. HappyHippo posted:Missed this part. This is the usual hyperbole I get when I ask people to back up this idea, and as usual most of it is based on a science fiction understanding of technological progress. You're discounting the cost of robotics and extrapolating far too much from your example. Advances in computing power may have been exponential over the last few decades (although there are signs that that is slowing down) but not all technology follows that curve: advances in robotics have been much less impressive. We're nowhere close to having a fully automated mine. http://www.catminestarsystem.com/ http://www.komatsu.com.au/AboutKomatsu/Technology/Pages/AHS.aspx http://www.asirobots.com/mining/ http://mining.sandvik.com/sandvik/0120/Global/Internet/S003137.nsf/LUSL/SLFrameForm1A770BC5B2A975293C1257965003C974F?OpenDocument KillHour fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 18, 2014 23:48
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HappyHippo posted:Literally none of those things works without a human. They aren't making the point you seem to think they are. Just as a machine assists a human in force production, a computer assists with mental work. You're talking a about elimination of all human labor, but none of your examples demonstrates it. As always happens when I ask this, people respond with "but they've automated X" as if that meant anything. They've been automating things for a more than a century, you have to show that its going to be different in kind, not just degree. Well, the Google cars don't require human operators at all. The only function the human serves is to input a destination, and that itself could easily be automated. In fact, in many of those categories, human operators exist simply to make sure the computer isn't malfunctioning and to do a final QA check. But let's say we want something that is in operation today without any human involvement from start to finish. Not even to give instructions. Well, the best indicator of future technologies is usually found in military applications. What do they have there? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-in_weapon_system quote:Goalkeeper is a Dutch close-in weapon system (CIWS) introduced in 1979 and in use as of 2014. It is an autonomous and completely automatic weapon system for short-range defense of ships against highly maneuverable missiles, aircraft and fast maneuvering surface vessels. Once activated the system automatically undertakes the entire air defense process from surveillance and detection to destruction, including selection of the next priority target. Good thing it's only designed to shoot at missiles and not people! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1 quote:The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot can "identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles (3.2 km) away." http://robotzeitgeist.com/2006/11/samsung-techwins-sgr-a1-robot-sentry.html quote:The video shows how the robot tracks its target during the day and night and its ability to shoot at targets that do not respond to an initial verbal warning  If robots exist today that are trusted with executing human beings without human oversight, I'm pretty sure I will see ones in my lifetime that can deliver my groceries. HappyHippo posted:Again, no argument as to why things are suddenly different in kind, as opposed to degree. Showing me that jobs X Y and Z have been replaced or automated says nothing, they've been doing that for a century or two. It just frees up labor for other work. What you need to show is that we're on the cusp of something that is different in kind, not degree. Here is why things are suddenly different - once you have a general purpose robot with dexterity even approaching that of a human, you have nowhere for unskilled labor to go. Once you have robots that can learn repetitive tasks as well as a human, you have nowhere for skilled labor to go. Robots will be the first machines to replace humans, not just augment them. KillHour fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 04:27
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Vira posted:So automation reduced the workforce drastically for manual labor and there was a new focus on mental labor. And now we are seeing the dawn of the automation on mental labor. Where do you think a majority of the work force turn as the complexity of the automation grows? The argument to this is that new jobs will be created to replace the lost jobs, just as they always have. The missing piece to this is that when we create a general purpose machine that can replace humans (not just a specialized one like a printing press, or whatever), there will be nowhere for a human to go that said general purpose machine cannot replace them. Previously, it was a cycle of "Replace specific manual job with machine, that is only good at said job, humans adapt." It's going to be "Replace all manual jobs with flexible machine." Where do humans go after that? The argument now has to be "This won't happen." To that, I reply with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diaZFIUBMBQ KillHour fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 04:35
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Not everybody is suitable for white collar jobs. There are, and will be people that are a poor fit for the kind of highly-educated office work that cannot be automated. What of those people?
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Dec 19, 2014 05:53
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Sorry, app double posted.
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Dec 19, 2014 05:53
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HappyHippo posted:Sorry I can't watch this video right now (still on my phone). At least you get the idea that its not about automation of this or that, it's about some sort of general purpose automator that automates all takes for now and forever. Thats the only thing that could fulfill the argument that its being attempted and I'm not seeing that on the horizon at all. I'm not speculating about 100 years from now, that's a fool's errand. But in terms of the challenges for this generation its not something that we're facing. Yet I see it brought up all the time as though its just around the corner. For the first time in history, this type of general purpose machine is the focus of a massive amount of research. That video was of the robot that won the 2014 DARPA challenge, which was to build a robot that could perform 8 tasks designed for humans to do (things like climbing a ladder, driving a car, using power tools, etc.). The winning team was hired by Google. This isn't just science fiction any more. The purpose of these robots is to assist with damage control and recovery in disaster situations where it would be too dangerous to send a human. It is necessary that said robots be able to do nearly anything a human rescuer could to be effective, and massive progress is being made. These robots should be ready for deployment within the decade.
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Dec 19, 2014 06:06
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:43 |
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One of the best showcases for how quickly the field of robotics is progressing is ASIMO. Here is what he looked like when first revealed in 2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESLc26fNAe8 Here is what he is capable of now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a0HnVqh1jU More cool general-purpose robot videos for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkBnFPBV3f0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w40e1u0T1yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE-YBaYjbqY This is stuff that was impossible 10 years ago. KillHour fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 06:25
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