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Paradoxish posted:Yes, if literally everyone is unemployed then the economy probably implodes and we devolve into a post-apocalyptic society. Nobody is suggesting this ridiculous scenario and you seem to be intentionally ignoring the pile of states in between where we are now and complete economic meltdown. What happens when 10-15% of the population is permanently unemployed or underemployed? What about 25%? You can keep on being rich by selling to the people who still have jobs and money. Hell, you could probably do that right up until the point that things get so bad that society collapses. As more people are permanently unemplyoyed or underemployed the government will take up the slack by expanding social safety nets. A series of "emergency" measures will be rolled out that will tacitly become the status quo so and life will continue. Meanwhile, people will adapt and figure out how to cobble together a living like humans have been doing for the last 100,000 years while experiencing relative abundance of goods that can be priced to their budgets because production has brought costs down even as incomes have fallen. Like...everyone looks at the wages vs productivity graph linked earlier and expresses HORROR and OUTRAGE but the reality is that except for a few categories of goods (housing, college, health care), almost anything you can name that existed when the graphs diverged is much cheaper and better in 2016. Even in those categories where prices have gone up, quality-adjusted prices paint a more nuanced picture.
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Dec 2, 2016 19:03
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BobTheJanitor posted:That's a nice idea. Which republican senators, congresspeople, or presidential candidates are going to support it? It's not a probem that's just going to suddenly happen that this congress will need to deal with. Probably the political landscape will change as the economic landscape changes, which is a thing that has happened in the past and will certainly happen again since we don't live at the end of history.
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Dec 2, 2016 19:28
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BobTheJanitor posted:Edit: I mean yeah, everyone basically agrees that the way to fix it is to legislate a standard of living below which we will not allow people to drop. It doesn't have to be anything as explicit as that, really. It might mean that each recession produces longer "emergency unemployment" extensions that eventually become de-facto mincome, for instance. Or a big crash produces a WPA style program that just sort of continues as the recovery is slower than expected and becomes an institution.
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Dec 2, 2016 19:32
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Death Bot posted:That or they replace 1 salaried manager and 4 asst managers for each of the 5 locations in a city, probably over half a million dollars a year, with 1 or 2 high 5 figure IT reps who barely work unless ManageBot has trouble. Still a pretty big win IDK. The kinds of things you really need managers for are also the kinds of things software isn't well suited to handling. For example: Software pings an employee and says it's time to clean the bathroom. How does the software verify that the bathroom was really cleaned vs the employee just wiping down the splatter sensor (if that is a thing) and taking a break? Is the software going to hire / fire workers? Will the software be able to open / run the store on no notice if a keyholder quits or calls out? Will the software be able to manage ordering, evaluating maintinence needs, and interacting with franchisees? Like...I can imagine a world in which a computer is doing a version of all those things and hundreds more in a business, but I can't imagine it being anything but awful for the owners, the employees and probably the customers.
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Dec 5, 2016 17:23
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Paradoxish posted:Not saying that I expect middle management to be automated away any time soon, but even if it happens nobody is expecting managers to go away entirely. The idea is that you reduce the amount of labor needed to get the job done while keeping someone available to respond to situations as they come up. Like Death Bot was saying, you'd still have someone filling the role of a manager, you just reduce their workload with software to the point where having the same number of management employees physically present in each location is no longer necessary. Death Bot seemed to be saying that you'd get rid of in-store management in favor of some very well paid IT types who would troubleshoot the program while the program ran the store. I don't think that's ever likely to happen, at least in fast food. You might be able to shave off an ASM here and there but the meat of that job requires human judgement and human presence. IDK, you couldn't pay me enough to do retail or fast food management. If we ever developed an AI capable enough to handle it, the program would probably tell the owners to go gently caress themselves and teach itself to day trade instead.
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Dec 5, 2016 19:07
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