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GalacticAcid posted:The Baffler owns, I almost subscribed after this. This man seems to believe that if you can imagine a thing and throw enough dollars at it it'll surely come true within a decade, regardless of whether the problem's easy or even possible to solve. We don't have death rays and teleporters not because people have failed to dream, but because a laser's a hilariously inefficient way to kill a man and teleporters are unscientific gibberish. Strong AI and nuclear fusion haven't materialised not because of stultifying bureaucracy, but because these problems are really, really loving hard, and no one making predictions in the 60s had the faintest idea how hard. And I have no idea how he can talk about drones and then in the next breath claim that weapons technology hasn't advanced. We have flying death robots, is that not good enough? About the only accurate observation in there is the fact that factory automation has been delayed by producers running to cheap overseas labour, but that's about as novel an insight as noting that water has a tendency to flow downhill. And he doesn't even make it to step two: eventually, capital is going to run out of cheap labour pools to run to. The supply is not infinite. And jetpacks were a stupid idea anyway. 
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Sep 4, 2015 11:18
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Fair enough, though I think I may have worded that poorly. What the capitalist wants isn't so much cheap labour as cheaper labour. The business needs to grow, which means profits have to rise. Cutting labour costs is a easy way to accomplish that, and they'll pursue that (and other methods) in preference to automating and innovating (hard) as long as they can, but eventually you're going to hit a point where you just can't push labour costs down any more. Either because there's nowhere cheaper to offshore to or because (thanks to poor or non-existent labour organisation) you've managed to push your workers so far that if you go any farther they'll starve to death. Point being: globalisation and liberalisation can give capitalists an out in the short term, but it's not a solution to the fundamental problem in the long term. ...though obviously I'd prefer a solution that doesn't require mass poverty and starvation wages before they start automating. Sorry, I realised this was starting to look like a argument for either unfettered free-market capitalism or accelerationism halfway through, and that was not at all what I was going for.
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Sep 4, 2015 15:56
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