17 replies to this topic

[MarcusAurelius]

Stunning Progress in Technology Brings The Death of Unskilled Labor

July 5 2012
http://singularityhu...nskilled-labor/







Automate or Perish

July 6 2012
http://www.technolog...mate-or-perish/




When Machines Do Your Job

July 11 2012
http://www.technolog...ob/?mod=related

Edited by MarcusAurelius, 12 July 2012 - 07:36 PM.

[Alric]

I think this is a really good thing and we eventually want to phase those jobs out all together. I think we want this trend and should push for it. However, we do need a better education system, especially since we will eventually get to the point where you start studying for a collage degree in a field that doesn't yet exist and by the time you graduate it is already obsolete. We are already half way there, where a lot of people are studying for jobs that don't yet exist.

Hopefully the entire thing eventually kills the idea of jobs, and everyone can live good lives without a 'job'. I think that is coming eventually though I am not sure how the transition might work.

[kjaggard]

I think the growing pains we are experiancing now are just the first paniced inklings of what will need to happen, though admittedly it seems very early in it's arrival.

There is fast approaching a time when we will be able to home manufacture most of the things we need. Need new shoes, you can print those out. need a shirt, print one of those. Headlight on the car broken? Print one up. Eventually it could become Lobster tail and garlic butter built from scratch.

There is no job in any obvious place along those lines. The only jobs to be had in that setting are hidden. Fabrication unit repair, raw materials supply, programer for objects.

But objects programers are likely to be not long in the viable work market, mainly because I can make a lock and key that's bump proof in my home with my hands and some simple materials, scan the parts and upload them. I don't need to buy commercial plans. For most things like new shoes anybody could put together something like sandals or converse sneakers. Why pay when you can make a custom pair? And people can trade their designs like they trade memes online.

That just leaves raw material supply and unit repair. Only if you are getting into the basics of simple fabricators now and further down the line the improve, the raw materials are things that exist around us already. Either recycling plastics or easily converted biomass to biodegradable printable materials, eventually they will be atoms the stuff around us. Cut your hair and turn it into a silk scarf, old shoes become new watch and purse ect.

So eventually only those that repair and upgrade the machines will have much in the way of work... But even then, If I can manufacture an open source manufacturing tool and reclaim the raw materials in the first one to build a second new one... who needs repair when you can just periodically print a new one?

So we will live in a world where all our needs can be made at the wave of a hand, food when we need it and exactly as we like it.

But wait where will the energy come from? Print up some solar cells. Or a wind turbine, print up some batteries to store charges.

The only way that a system where the job is the only way to earn merit, and claim your chunk of the pie relative to your value in the heirarchy, can continue is if we keep upholding the monetary system and buying into things like insurance and 'I had to pay for these things so you will too, because nobody gets a free ride.'

The future can go two ways, an illusion system where artificially created scarcity generates grades of worth in humanity upheld by competition and how much we identify our personal value with our economic price.

When we start asking ourselves what makes me valueble, and are able to honestly say things like "My neighbors little girl loves the silly stories I tell at the playground while we look for butterflies.", and are able to see the value in that rather then imagine it as a waste of productive time we could be making a pay check to see to our needs and to keep up with the joneses. That's the day the system of illusion breaks down and money and the work we do for it will fade out.

We are coming on a point where we will create a world that grows food for our hunger at our thought, and clothes us for protection against elements and drapes us in decorative finery if we wish. All that will be left to us to work on will be developing ourselves and our relations with one another.

Throw in VR and AI and a person could live hundreds of years in a closet with all their needs met and the ability to visit and lives several lives of ease and comfort and they would be able to do so without ever needing to exchange goods or services with another person. No money, no need to work for it.

Those that don't want to do more than passively consume and keep to themselves can. The rest of us can improve ourselves, our understanding of the universe or tech, create art, and connect with other wonder seekers.

Like I said, we are on the edge of it now. We live in a world where for the cost of what I can earn in one hour of labor I can feed myself for a day. For the cost of a week and a half of 8 hour days I can have all my other living needs taken care of (not counting medical). So in two weeks each month my efforts earn me all my needs for a month. Compare this to a time where we hunted for days to get meat, and slaved in feilds for three seasons to have foods enough to eat and if we were lucky trade excess for clothes and simple comforts.

We are seeing the tech that will make this possible emerging now, and the brilliant makers set their feet in the path so that they are the rights of all people, not owned by those that would claim it and own it and restrict it's access for contracted labor which is no longer nessecary but for the making of stratified classes of people, to assure that some can have more and feel move powerful. These thing bots and repraps are open source. People can join and gain access and watch update. The abilities to then print the printer then allow the expansion into the community.

But at the same time we see the faults forming in the old ways. Less and less employment, and no idea how to continue to be part of the system without work and the pay it offers. Eventually there will have to be a break away from centralized money and big biz. People will start to see it as not being able to meet the needs of a community.

Right now a skilled laborer cannot get a job to get her skills to other people who right now need those skills. it's the means of exchange that has broken that system. But if the skilled laborer went to the people who needed her work and did her work for them and they could in turn provide from their gardens and mend clothes, or even just exchanged credits or IOUs for the value of those skills it allows needs to be met. and it becomes important what is going on in the area and who can offer skills again, not just showing up at an office for the local branch of an world biz.

It allows the easing of the struggle and the growth of valuing each other and the community which will ease the way for the tech to advance to a point where our needs can be met and exceeded simply and free. Then work become something else, the closest thing I can think of is 'relevance'.

[Mr. Carmichael]

Very well written post...

[MarcusAurelius]

I share the same sentiments actually as kjaggard.

Here is an excerpt from a poster called Curt Welch from the above links. I thought it was quite relevant and an interesting point to be made.


Within about 30 years, there will be no “jobs” for the government to hand out. The machines will do everything for us. Do you suggest the government put buttons on stop lights, so that they can pay someone to stand at the intersection, and switch the lights manually, instead of letting the computer do it? Hire people to be elevator operators again? Turn off the automatic phone call switching technology and put phone operators back to work routing all phone calls? Ban the use of computers for accounting so people can be employed adding numbers once again?

That is what it will be like for all jobs in the very near future, and what it’s like for many people today who have already either lost their job to machines, or are forced to work minimum wage jobs because there are no other good jobs left that they are qualified for. For now, instead of just handing out money, the government certainly could create real jobs by funding projects. But the real projects, when bid for in the free market, would not solve the question of how the needy find work, when they don’t have the skills to build a bridge for the government.

If we make up nonsense jobs (sit here for 8 hours and keep this seat warm and we will give you $50 at the end of the day), we aren’t really helping anything. The seat didn’t need to be kept warm. It would be better to just give the guy the $50 and let him do something he enjoys with his time.

The problem we are facing is not a problem of wealth. The technology is making us, as a society, amazingly wealthy. The problem is in deciding who gets access to the wealth. It’s a problem of how we share the wealth we as a society have created. We used hard work by humans combined with a free market to allocated the resources to where they can do the most good, as the two prime tools for creating this wealth. And along with those tools for creating wealth, we have used a system of sharing, based on how much hard work each human contributed to the system. The were no absolutes on what a hour of hard work was “worth”. We just in effect, divided all the wealth produced, by all the people that put their hard work into the hat, and then distributed to rewards, based on how much you put in.

It’s that system of sharing which is failing us, now that machines are playing a significant role in the picture. The machines are putting hard work into the hat as well, but they don’t get the rewards, their owners get the rewards.

This creates a winner take all game dynamic. It’s not fair for anyone except the winners. It’s exactly like the game of monopoly. Once you fall too far behind in the game, and have failed to secure enough assets, there is no hope for you to ever catch up and “win”. Your future in the “game” is doomed once you fall too far behind. But in real life, that means, if you are born in the wrong situation, you are doomed before you even start to play the game.

Before the machines started changing the balance of everything, all humans were given a very valuable asset at birth. they were given their own human body, and mind. A healthy human body was always a highly valuable asset in the free market. So having a healthy human body was the seed money we gave to everyone to get them started in the game. This investment, would generate for them, a life time of income. And it was that income from that free investment, that everyone got to life off of, and got to try and leverage into a larger fortune though wise investments of their income from selling their body and mind (and working for a living)>

But with the growth of machines, the value of a human body at birth is no longer a good stake to get you started in the game. It’s worth more if you educate it, which is why we provided free public education – to give people a better start in life, without having to work as a child, to pay for that education. But more and more, a free public education isn’t enough to get you a good job. An expensive college education is not even working very well any more.

In 30 years, being born with the “free assets” of a human body to sell into the market will be completely worthless. The supply of humans with bodies to sell will flood the market, and there will be no jobs that pay enough to get a person a reasonable share of the huge wealth the machines will be creating by that point in time. If we want to put humans first in our society, then we must, give everyone, a free minimum guaranteed income stream, to replace the income they would have been able to get in days gone past, from having the asset of a human body. If we don’t do this, then a small elite will take control of all the valuable assets in the world, and let the everyone else starve and die, and they will of course go to war to protest this, and all hell will break lose.

[Mr. G]

It is clear that capitalism won't be a suitable economic system in a post scarcity world. Planned obsolesence, artificial scarcity and the stock market will no longer be needed.

We will eventually have to move to a resource based ecomic system. Money as it is now will cease to exist. Money doesn't build infrastructure and manufacture goods. Energy, resources and time do. Since there are a finite number of resources available along with issues such as climate change, there must still be a way to allocate resources in responsible and fair manner. How this will be managed and enforced globally is anbody's guess.

G

Edited by Mr. G, 13 July 2012 - 06:48 AM.

[kjaggard]

Energy, resources and time do. Since there are a finite number of resources available along with issues such as climate change, there must still be a way to allocate resources in responsible and fair manner. How this will be managed and enforced globally is anbody's guess.

Honestly I'm not sure you have to worry about inforcement once we hit a certain level. One of the statistics I saw a while ago said that the lowest level of water consumption allowable for a first world level of living was about 6 gallons (22.2 liters) a person per day. That's for drinking and cleaning and laundry, during the week broken into daily equal portions, so actual daily uses will range on either side of that but average out to that.
If you set it at double that per person, and then say no more allowed, people will ask who you think you are telling them how much they can use, and they will look for ways around it. But if instead you develop a water system that collects greywater and processes sewage into usable materials and distills out the water and add atmospheric condensors and heavy rain collectors, Desalination plants ect ect. The people could well consume the same 3 gallons over and over again for multiple purposes everyday, and believe they are consuming from an inexhaustable resource pool.

Water is everywhere, food is made up of mostly carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen with other trance elements. What else is made of those elements? pretty much everything. Every time you flush your toilet, throw away a napkin, cut your hair, toss out old ratty clothing, vacuum up dust bunnies, brush your teeth and spit, wash your sheets and clothes, ect ect; you get rid of and forget about large quantities of those elements. What would happen if you didn't take it to the curb, but just crambed that old lounge chair in to a cupboard like it was a garbage disposal and it just made it majicly go away. Then you went about your life making a new couch to replace the chair ect.

So each person could have 2 to 3 times as much matter as they need in their homes and diet in storage at one time and never even feel like they are reusing the same stuff over and over again with only gradual accumulative losses do to the not completely closed and perfect system (exhaled co2, gifts given, population increases, parties, pets, dropped or lost items, entropy...). It's as close to a closed system as we can get and it should do the job quite well.

Over the course of years you may have to replenish the supplies of raw matter, but when this sort of tech is available we'll be looking at colonies on other planets and mining asteroids for materials if we need them. we might even see people using asteroids to build small ships and making them earth homes/world ships headed out into space using bussard ramjets and filtering the stardust and planetary remnants into the recycling systems, building suppplies for cloned or bred or synthsied humans to colonize other worlds or start daughter ships.

The real problem isn't is there enough material for humans on this earth, it's the problem of accessability, and waste of resources. So getting to that point where we can start doing the reuse and recycle points on the reduce reuse and recycle triangle to their maximum potential, will be the hard part and take time, but the upswing is that the only direction is toward that way. It's all just a matter of time frame.

[Mr. G]

I agree with the spirit of your post although it is perhaps overly idealistic. There certainly are solutions. However, will they come in time? Even if we had the technology tomorrow, the transition period would probably take decades. Also, if nobody works and we are cared for by our machine servants, how long before we forget what we know? Who is going to take responsibility to deal with the growing existential risks that we will face?

I know, I'm beginning to sound like the plot of a long recycled science fiction story. How did it end?


We will be facing a lot of upheaval in the coming decades and we will need a government that will be equal to the task. Ideas?

G

[Alric]

We have the technology today, that we could probably provide for everyone in the world without anyone being forced to have a job. Humans want challenges, and goals though so I think even if jobs weren't required, most of us would do them anyway. I for one would love to try and develop robots, even if I wasn't getting paid, because its just cool and helps everyone. Most people don't want to do back breaking labor(though some might), however most people would still be interested in intellectual pursuits. So I don't think you can compare the end of jobs as we know it, with humans getting lazy.

Even people who are super lazy, and they want to stay at home playing video games all they, they will want to do something. I bet most people who play a lot of games have thought about making their own games before too. If there is no risk involved, and you are not going to starve if you fail to make a successful game you can pursue those goals.

[kjaggard]

Some interesting things to say on the topic with links to further things to say on the topic... all starting with Bucky Fuller who as a skilled and learned man had the (pun intended) balls to question the system we live in and propose something that made more sense to him.
http://livingtheimpo...work-revisited/

( http://livingtheimpo...lition-of-work/ ) the original post it refers to.

"At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand — and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure — we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn’t make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other."

Edited by kjaggard, 13 July 2012 - 09:48 PM.

[Keitaro2011]

I hope that my job as a railway conductor isn't threatened before I can at least by a house and save up a bit to buy the skills I need... :/

[MarcusAurelius]

Migrant Workers in China Face Competition from Robots


July 16 2012
http://www.technolog...om/?mod=related

Edited by MarcusAurelius, 17 July 2012 - 03:46 PM.

[eacao]

It is clear that capitalism won't be a suitable economic system in a post scarcity world. Planned obsolesence, artificial scarcity and the stock market will no longer be needed.

We will eventually have to move to a resource based ecomic system. Money as it is now will cease to exist. Money doesn't build infrastructure and manufacture goods. Energy, resources and time do. Since there are a finite number of resources available along with issues such as climate change, there must still be a way to allocate resources in responsible and fair manner. How this will be managed and enforced globally is anbody's guess.

G

Money is a way of allocating limited resources. Money is your ability to vote on a product. If a lot of people like something, they vote on it. It's the same with smoothies, if they're good, they get voted on and they stay. If they're bad, they are rejected. If the world is experiencing hardships from finite resources, that is when money becomes more necessary, not less. There is less iron, the price goes up and building a stadium becomes too expensive. That's how the monetary system works, it regulates how valuable something is and if something is scarce, it is valuable. We already live in a resource based economy, we've never lived in anything but a resource-based economy. A world where money is abolished and things just get built is a world with greater waste, not less. There will be no value put on anything, it just gets made. If you're looking for something like the Venus-project where people get what they need and there is a diminished sense of ownership and posession requires a change of society, not money. It's not money's fault that people are greedy. If you get rid of money, nothing changes. People want money because it means they get things. If people got everything on-demand without having to earn any money, then people would squander the resources at hand. They sacrifice nothing to get it and have no incentive to budget.

And capitalism being a bad thing. There seems to be a lot of hating on capitalism within this community. I think I understand why, but I don't think it's right. I do understand hating consumerism - I do as well. Consumerism is bad but capitalism is natural. All capitalism is, is Darwinian economics. Survival of the fittest and most adaptable. A business will sprout up somewhere to fill a niche in the market. If it fills the niche then it survives. If other companies try to fill the same niche, there is competition and advances are made. Apple and Microsoft. Boeing and Airbus. This ensures evolution. Progression. Capitalism is good.

Consumerism is bad. Consumerism is the rampant progression to have more and more to the point where things are being made obsolete for no reason. The classic example is the computer - CPU's advance but rather than upgrading older computers with new CPU's, you throw away your old computer to but a new one. That's what consumerism is - nothing to do with capitalism.

[Alric]

The problem with capitalism is that is competes with democracy. In democracy everyone gets an equal vote while in capitalism everyone gets votes determined by how much money they have. Hence why 'buying' votes is such a problem in democratic capitalist systems. It is very difficult to have a country that is both democratic in nature, as well as capitalist, and that is why the US has had several major issues in the past, and still are. It happens very often that politicians ignore the voters because the people that really help them get elected are the special interest groups.

I am actually a capitalist and out of the economies we currently have I think capitalism is the best we got. However there is obvious flaws with the system, and it will eventually need to be replaced in the future.

The thing we have the biggest problem with currently is energy. If we ever reach the point where energy is extremely abundant, then the other resources are not a big deal. You can buy something and use it once then throw it out and recycle it to get back all the resources. The only thing lost is the energy required to produce and recycle it. If we have the energy then it isn't an issue.

[MarcusAurelius]

I agree with Alric. The problem with capitalism is the ability for it to undermine democracy. In a truly democratic society there is no room for overwhelming disparities in wealth or poverty. For the minute you start to buy votes and influence the democratic process by means of enticement through favours or money its no longer a proper system that serves the majority anymore. We have lived in pseudo democracies since the notion was uttered by greek philosophers in the ancient Greek civilization. But never has there been a more pressing urgency to really have a true democracy devoid of self gain and vacuous political rhetoric. This can only become possible with a better system. And I am a firm believer that even if the powers that be do not wish to evenly distribute resources to the masses in future, there will be a natural endgame of sorts scenario where capitalism won't be able to exist anymore after more game changing technologies emerge.

We have an enormous population problem currently, and in my opinion its not because of solely because of overconsumption but because capitalism allows for the problems to persist as long as there are no profitable reasons to remedy them. This is one of my major personal gripes with capitalism.

I understand eacao's adamant position that capitalism is a resource based system, given simply for its use of supply and demand regulating prices and availability of raw materials and produce. But what capitalism fails to do each time is to eliminate social problems that arise from the very processes that it promotes, and that is the accumulation of resources by a few while depriving the many of the most basic of resources. The negligence that capitalism allows is normal under this model, but under another more progressive and moneyless or resource based model.... it would be considered outrageous to build another multi billion dollar coca cola factory in the middle of some disenfranchised african nation while its people next door go without something as simple as running water.

Now there is a common tendency to separate consumerism with capitalism but one can't exist without the other. And I think consumerism is the inevitability of capitalism since without consumerism the motivations for capitalism would be a moot point. Is there a way to curb consumerism if all these multi national companies and corporations keep having their annual growth charts as a measure of success? I think not. Which is why capitalism was necessary for the last few centuries since the industrial revolution because there was no other viable system. But in this day and age where automation is creeping up on every facet of industry, one has to question where it will all lead to.

The problem of the future won't be about resources, there will be plenty of those, labor saving automation and high technology will see to that. It will however be about the greed and unfair hording of resources by the few, even in the face of overwhelming abundance. Now I believe that capitalism will meet a very impossible hurdle in the near future, whereby technology will trump many of its fundamental reasons to exist. Given this scenario I am betting that in light of all the sweeping changes, that there will be a few very powerful industry giants that will not want mankind to progress into a labor free future whereby there is enough for everyone to live comfortably without the need to work all the time. But this will be contested by the status quo and its desperate attempt to survive a crashing market where labor becomes superfluous because of massive automation in all sectors of industry.

I disagree that capitalism is necessary or good by the most part, just because it seemingly addresses mans desire for progress and competition bringing out the best in society. I think in a society that embraces redundancy and the making of competing (almost exact duplicate) products at the cost of our environment is inane and a needless endeavor. We just have to start thinking that automation is not a death knell for the survival of the working class. It isn't if a society is willing to change in order to liberate its people from mundane and ultimately pointless repetitious work. However it is a damning scenario to people who live in a capitalist environment whereby corporations see ownership as a point to be contested and selfishly held onto. This is the real problem to social change, when one day the ideas of ownership and labor are challenged because they become a pointless and unsustainable notion to grapple with.

[kjaggard]

I have no issue with capitalism I just don't see the system surviving with coming changes because it's hardly needed. Like your example of "A business will sprout up somewhere to fill a niche in the market. If it fills the niche then it survives. If other companies try to fill the same niche, there is competition and advances are made."

There isn't really a way for that to apply in a world where I can print out most everything I need and design my own things. at that point the only thing we need is designs. go look at things like blogs and instructable and tell me that in a world where people can get anything they need from custom designs or trading designs with people online like people swap mp3s and such and anybody can print anything, what business will sprout up to fill nonexistant niches? your more likely to see the last of retail being thrift shops and antique stores. maybe food sale too for a while.

The real thing you need to have that sort of system is regular customers. What we get when we break through this hump and have high grade self replicatable home printers capable of printing food sources too is occassional novelty purchases of things made the old way, for history of the items and collectibility.

You might get some production of hard to do with current level printers, with products staying one generation ahead of the home printing marker, but thats unlikely to last more than a decade after it starts. Things like claytronics may hit big and within a year there will be back engineered versions and then shortly after will be the open source design specs for first run designs. then improvments will explode as people tinker with them and whole different designs with crazy new applications will come into being.

and we'll hit a point where home interiors and transports are like dry erase board where we can swish it all away and put up a new design hourly if we wanted. None of it bought none of it sold. There just isn't a market.

[Mr. G]

Consumerism is bad but capitalism is natural.

Can you have one capitalism without consumerism? It doesn't seem possible to me, but I could be wrong.

G

[kjaggard]

Consumerism is bad but capitalism is natural.

Can you have one capitalism without consumerism? It doesn't seem possible to me, but I could be wrong.

G

yes. strictly speaking capitalism is when you have a medium of exchange, and a cycle of supply and demand. so basically if you used money, trade objects, or barter you are participated in some form of capitalism.

consumerism is a term derived from the concept of aquiring things and generally passive lifestyles. Consumerists don't generally want to harve to apply effort for something. they won't research on their own they with depend on the opinions of public figures. It's much like the US political system where there are only two options and each option tells you which team they will play for, the voter says my team is such and such and votes for their team... then doesn't think about anything political until they look at their taxes this year... and half the time even then they blame it on the other team. They have consumed a script and linear thinking without research or analysis.

Being a consumer can mean simply that you use capital and purchase things, it makes no assumptions of philosophy or reasons. Being a consumerist is sort of making being a consumer your philosophy and reason. If you work at your job just for money to buy the things you want and do the things you want, it likely consumerism. If you work to do something worth doing and look to make a difference in the world, and upon earning income you handle the funds for nessecities but the value you get in your life is not dependant on money (going to the library to participate in a book club, visiting elder in nursing homes, voluteer, hiking in the wooded areas, picnics in public parks), you can still be capitalist in your belief that in order to get something you must give something of equal value in return and that value can change depending on circumstances.