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I should say that while the tools had the potential to be a massively convenient thing for labour, and this is certainly how they're pitched, no self-serving captain of capital will have those tools and not push them to the limits because capitalism demands constant growth, everything else be damned. So while a machine may multiply labour's working power by 10, it will not reduce the amount of work they have to do by a similar amount. What it will mean is not only will they have to work the same, for 10x the benefit of capital, because the work is now "easier" to do, the rest of the family will now be forced to do it to survive. Hence lovely mills where children would be mangled in machinery to keep the spice flowing.
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Mar 10, 2016 17:57
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:The hysteria about overpopulation is not only wrong, its also like 40 years out of fashion. As already mentioned, global birth rates are falling and are projected to keep falling. One of the main driving forces of declining birth rates is the very evil regressive environmentalists rail against, which is the development of the 3rd world. There is every reason to be concerned about overpopulation. It isn't just an issue of ecological carrying capacity, but economic. 40 years ago there was basically infinite room for employment if you needed a sophisticated system of record keeping - today you can create much more advanced information systems that require far fewer man-hours to update and maintain. What is your solution to mass unemployment besides raging at some hippie strawman?
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Mar 10, 2016 18:44
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Ddraig posted:I should say that while the tools had the potential to be a massively convenient thing for labour, and this is certainly how they're pitched, no self-serving captain of capital will have those tools and not push them to the limits because capitalism demands constant growth, everything else be damned. This is what scares me the most. If they can really improve efficiency by such factors, these tools will allow even more centralization of capital. This is the cutting edge of companies who already are close to the center of the centralization process. The thing I don't get, regarding automation and AI, is... these are technologies meant to increase work efficiency and reduce the need for workers. Are governments and societies really answering to the unemployment that technology creates, or are they letting the problem fix itself? Does the "new jobs will arise" mantra tell the trusth? This is a honest question to the more educated, because I'm just working off assumptions. I assume there's getting less and less room for skill translation from job to job, and the employment of AGIs creates a smaller need, comparativeily speaking to the unemployment it will create, for professions which need years of study. I'm figuring more skilled laborers left in the dust compared to what happened in the past. Edit: on a semi-related note: AlphaGo is 2-0 against the second best Go player in the world. The Go subreddit has interesting discussions about the fact. Char fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 20:33
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Char posted:This is what scares me the most. If they can really improve efficiency by such factors, these tools will allow even more centralization of capital. This is the cutting edge of companies who already are close to the center of the centralization process. If you gave me the budget I could keep American workers occupied on just infrastructure for the indefinite future. Not like busy work and empty neighborhoods like China, like honest to God poo poo that needs to be done to maintain and improve the US for dozens of years. Its going to sound jingoistic but large reasons why China's investment over the past few years are not blossoming into a new economic renaissance is because of their lack of freedom to exploit it. When you regulate ideas, it will ensure economic stagnation because no one can act in a way outside the initial blessing of the party. Russia by contrast has gangster capitalism which is the only kind Putin knows, and has the extensive rent seeking and extraction of value from the infrastructure which prevents it from well accomplishing its purpose. Capitalism tempered by socialist regulation gives you the best of both. Infrastructure must be reliable and to bring this full circle AI will be added to infrastructure like businesses, travel and logistics as they prove to add reliability otherwise introduced by human error.
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Mar 11, 2016 00:16
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RuanGacho posted:
The CCP really does not give a poo poo in 99% of scenarios, or at least they value money more. China today is fairly similar to historical accounts of the US about 100 years ago, right down to the rivers that catch on fire and the blatant disregard for the environment. I'm sure if the US and Europe got firebombed in 30 years (like how we benefited in WW2) China would have economic dominance too.
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Mar 11, 2016 00:27
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computer parts posted:The CCP really does not give a poo poo in 99% of scenarios, or at least they value money more. China today is fairly similar to historical accounts of the US about 100 years ago, right down to the rivers that catch on fire and the blatant disregard for the environment. I'm sure if the US and Europe got firebombed in 30 years (like how we benefited in WW2) China would have economic dominance too. True, it has all been about "wealth" generation.
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Mar 11, 2016 00:28
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Pew's been on the ball lately with topical research surveys. A new just-released survey indicates that 65% of American workers expect that within 50 years, "much" of the work done by humans will instead be done by robots or computers. However, 80% of American workers believe that their own jobs will be around basically unchanged fifty years from now, and only 11% are concerned about losing their current job due to being replaced by computers/robots.
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Mar 11, 2016 16:29
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Main Paineframe posted:Pew's been on the ball lately with topical research surveys. A new just-released survey indicates that 65% of American workers expect that within 50 years, "much" of the work done by humans will instead be done by robots or computers. However, 80% of American workers believe that their own jobs will be around basically unchanged fifty years from now, and only 11% are concerned about losing their current job due to being replaced by computers/robots.  I'm pretty sure if my job is the same a year from now something catastrophic has happened generally speaking. Apparently people really are.that unimaginative.
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Mar 11, 2016 20:45
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They're imagining it happen to other people and not themselves, because that's how humans work.
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Mar 11, 2016 22:11
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RuanGacho posted:
If I get a regular job (not some ~creative~ position where I ~chase my dreams~) I want it to stay the same forever and work until retirement.
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Mar 12, 2016 12:48
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:If I get a regular job (not some ~creative~ position where I ~chase my dreams~) I want it to stay the same forever and work until retirement. The only people who have that kind of economic security today are executives - and even then they usually go through a couple companies. The economic / poltical debate in a digital world shouldn't recapitulate the 20th century fight for employee privileges - instead it must lay out a standardized and simple system for contracting labor.
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Mar 12, 2016 15:16
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McDowell posted:The only people who have that kind of economic security today are executives - and even then they usually go through a couple companies. The economic / poltical debate in a digital world shouldn't recapitulate the 20th century fight for employee privileges - instead it must lay out a standardized and simple system for contracting labor. I know next to nobody actually gets that kind of job security, but I think getting that kind of job security should be seen as a worthwhile goal by today's work drones rather than pretending ~dynamic~ ~energetic~ ~flexible~ short term jobs are the platonic ideal of work. Or just implement mincome 
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Mar 12, 2016 19:14
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Mincome must be made politically digestible as a revolutionary disruption of the labor market and HR.
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Mar 12, 2016 19:55
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Woolie Wool posted:They're imagining it happen to other people and not themselves, because that's how humans work. Also it's really hard for people to conceptualize what it means for a job to be automated. As a stupid anecdotal example, I know someone who's been working as, essentially, a data entry person for about a decade. Her job was originally to spend all day literally copying paper records into a database. Now she hardly ever does that because that process is largely automated, and so were a lot of the other responsibilities she picked up in the interim. Now her job description basically amounts to "do whatever around the office," including things that would have definitely been handled by other employees a decade earlier. If she quit tomorrow, I guarantee she wouldn't be replaced and most of her responsibilities would just be distributed to other people. That's real automation, but when most people hear the term they think of literal robots coming in and taking their jobs.
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Mar 12, 2016 20:44
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RuanGacho posted:
The vast majority of jobs and especially the most necessary ones are repetitive and and very similar from year to year. Does farming or mining change drastically from year to year and what sort of catastrophe are we in for if that's the case?
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Mar 12, 2016 22:03
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You realize that basically nobody in the US is actually employed in agriculture, right? It's something like 2% of all employment. And yeah, farming and mining have changed an incredible amount with technology. Agriculture is also likely to see some pretty drastic changes with automation over the next few decades.
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Mar 12, 2016 22:07
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Paradoxish posted:You realize that basically nobody in the US is actually employed in agriculture, right? It's something like 2% of all employment. And yeah, farming and mining have changed an incredible amount with technology. Agriculture is also likely to see some pretty drastic changes with automation over the next few decades. Over a 100 year period yes. They change incrementally from year to year like most jobs. In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of what jobs change considerably from year to year that aren't specialized tech jobs.
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Mar 12, 2016 22:19
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McDowell posted:There is every reason to be concerned about overpopulation. It isn't just an issue of ecological carrying capacity, but economic. 40 years ago there was basically infinite room for employment if you needed a sophisticated system of record keeping - today you can create much more advanced information systems that require far fewer man-hours to update and maintain. What is your solution to mass unemployment besides raging at some hippie strawman?
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Mar 12, 2016 22:28
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TheNakedFantastic posted:That sounds like a problem with capitalism not overpopulation. It is a general problem when you leave everything to random chance and individual choices. I brought this up in the techbro thread but the story about the data entry person reminded me of it. I'm in suburbs between NYC and Philly and there is tons of dead commercial real estate. Lots of economic activities requiring paper pushers in cubicles are never coming back - it seems reasonable for local governments to have a database of square footage and make some effort to provide everyone a bare minimum 'shoebox' to live in.
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Mar 12, 2016 23:57
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McDowell posted:There is every reason to be concerned about overpopulation. It isn't just an issue of ecological carrying capacity, but economic. 40 years ago there was basically infinite room for employment if you needed a sophisticated system of record keeping - today you can create much more advanced information systems that require far fewer man-hours to update and maintain. What is your solution to mass unemployment besides raging at some hippie strawman? I'm not even entirely sure what you're trying to say here, as you seem to be conflating multiple issues together. For starters, governments, corporations, and even individuals now have huge stockpiles of data, access to tons of computational power, and an enormous shortage of people who can actually combine the two to deliver meaningful information. Your claim that 40 years ago there were way more jobs in this area is wrong, information systems management and related fields are in demand and are rapidly growing. You also seem to be making the claim that a large or growing population is a cause of unemployment, which is also wrong. If a population is growing, and the economy is also growing in absolute terms but failing to keep up with population growth, then your economy isn't actually growing. If a wizard snapped their fingers and magically halted population growth, you would find that the absolute number of jobs in that economy would now be shrinking. As to my solution to the economic problems we face, I don't have an easy answer because one doesn't exist. If we're talking about the US though, mass unemployment is not really the problem we're facing. The US unemployment rate is slightly elevated, and it doesn't really take into account people who are underemployed very well, but we're talking like a single percentage point higher than ideal. In fact the US unemployment rate is already lower than the unemployment rate in many other countries with reasonably healthy economies and good standards of living. The reason people are hurting is not unemployment, but because our social safety nets suck, wages for the people who do work have stagnated, public infrastructure is vastly underfunded, the lack of universal health care places an unbearable burden on both individuals and employers, and housing prices are shooting through the roof in many urban areas for reasons not directly related to "people actually live here". Tackle those problems, and more, and you've got my solution.
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Mar 13, 2016 06:33
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Um. As someone in the situation, I might say you're focusing on the wrong unemployment rate. The unemployment rate commonly quoted only counts people who've been looking for work in the past six (I think) months. There are a *lot* of people who've dropped out of the workforce, quit looking for work, etc. because they've gotten discouraged.
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Mar 13, 2016 14:23
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Spacewolf posted:Um. As someone in the situation, I might say you're focusing on the wrong unemployment rate. Even with the U6 we're back to 2008 levels.
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Mar 13, 2016 15:47
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Yeah, but look at the workforce participation rate.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:31
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Spacewolf posted:Yeah, but look at the workforce participation rate. Which has been declining since 2000?
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Mar 13, 2016 17:35
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