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DarkCrawler posted:Always thought the labor needs of developed countries will eventually be filled by robots when most countries are developed and there is no longer enough cheap labor. I mean look how far we've come in the past 50 years, can't be much longer until that actually becomes viable on a grander scale beyond assembly lines. Robots (really machines in general) are good for repeatable tasks with low variation, but a lot of those are already covered by machines. The benefit of people is that they're incredibly adaptable for the price you pay them (or even if you paid three times as much as what you do now). To use one example, you can't make a robotic janitor. You can retool your system so that trash collection is automated (like having a garbage chute or whatever) but it's always going to be less expensive to pay someone to pick up the trash.
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Dec 6, 2014 20:22
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Helsing posted:It's never a binary choice between capital and labour. If totally automating janitorial work is prohibitively expensive that doesn't mean that you couldn't replace a team of janitors with one or two people directing a fleet of janitorial robots or something like that. I know it's not a binary choice, my point is that the modes of labor you want to automate (the cheap menial jobs) are quite often very very hard to do. What's more likely is that easier jobs (many white collar ones) are automated, and with labor becoming more of a rare resource, wages compensate for those "menial" jobs. Indentured servitude is unlikely on a company by company basis because presumably they'll be paying your debt so it's likely more expensive to do that and feed/clothe/etc you than just giving you a paycheck. Plus that would likely make high turnover a difficult thing. (On a sidenote I really hate the "society will change in x decades therefore you can't argue with me" statement because why even have the thread open if you're admitting to just pissing in the wind?)
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Dec 7, 2014 15:37
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tsa posted:Even 10 years ago taxi drivers would have laughed at the idea of being replaced by driverless cars but it's probably going to happen within the next couple decades. I think you are greatly underestimating the number of low wage jobs that can be eliminated. Sure janitors sound hard but fast food chains? Warehouse operations (see amazon)? Self-check out lines have gone from basically 0 in 2005 to 400,000 in a decade, and that trend will only increase. (and current labor is more expensive too)
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Dec 7, 2014 21:00
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Helsing posted:What's your evidence for white collar being easier to automate? Obviously some tasks like calculating sums or typing are easier but can you quantify how "white collar" as a generic area of activity is easier to automate than any other large sector of the economy? Factories have become ridiculously automated compared to 100 years ago and even front line retail is a lot more automated now than in the recent past. White collar work is typically concerned with transfers of information. That type of work has been and is being quickly subsumed by computer systems, and the trend of having consumers access and modify their own documents rather than relying on a (human) middleman. If you want to lump in creative works (i.e., engineering, advertising and the like) into white collar then no, those won't be easily automated.
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Dec 7, 2014 22:37
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ToxicSlurpee posted:What? More people = more consumption. More consumption = more emissions. Therefore, more people = more emissions. Only if per capita consumption is constant. The technology currently exists (more or less) to replace the vast vast majority of emissions and it would be infinitely more palatable than trying to do population control for the populace.
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Dec 8, 2014 01:24
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