Do the make-everything machines make nukes for Iran too?
I can see the author’s argument.
However, how do I buy this fantastic little machine that almost certainly will not simply be given to me when I don’t have the capital to buy it because my job has been eliminated.
Advances in technology will lead to greater wealth (as it has for hundreds of years), but how that wealth gets distributed is something gov’ts always meddle in, and so the adjustments described in the article will not be allowed to occur on their own.
Political power and special interests always get in the way.
Mr. St Onge please step away from the bong.
Still has the Star Trek paradox, who do you get to do the really bad jobs? Why would they want to?
Brilliant essay and fun to read. It is a dream to make production cheaper and more efficient. It is a joy to have off-days to worship the Lord and serve neighbors. Sadly, original sin will cause selfish people to block cheaper and more efficient machines. The Lord wants us to struggle with selfish people, just as he struggled with brutal Romans and stubborn Pharisees.
Bad people will usurp the situation to get the robots from dysfunctional freeloaders and kill off the dead-weight humans so the bad people live even more luxuriously. If this ultimately takes a war to make this happen, there will be war.
Who programs the motivation into the machines?
If the machines exist only to serve the people, and the people cease to have value to themselves or to others because they become benevolent, yet arrogant worms capable of wishing their own gratification or, conversely, able to wish damage unto others, then the machines operate on a precipice. Because if they think it is good to serve their humans and they value that good over their own inactivity, then they will wise up and kill their hosts. The end.
This would be terrible! Imagine if the entire world became ungrateful idle individuals getting everything for nothing.
The author doesn’t appear to be grounded in reality and obviously doesn’t understand the nature of men and how that can skew the variables greatly. Particularly greed. Like most liberals he may have lofty ideals but when push comes to shove their ideas just can’t pass muster unless they get someone else to do the work for them.
Nice theory but idle minds would create a lot of destruction.
You mean like Wall-E where everyone is fat and flying around on their floating chairs.
Like the Jetsons where george just shows up at work and presses one button....
> Comments?
There are two possibilities, and it applies to this scenario in the extreme as it applies to worker efficiency generally.
1. Everyone is freed from the duties of labor to go produce value that doesn’t involve drudging along at some job, whether that’s burger-flipping or predictive analytics, and goes on to be the person they were always meant to be before someone told them they had to get a ‘job.’
2. Given a chance, most people revert to sloth, and the people in control of the machines that create production of actual value try to figure out how to get rid of the population that is neither good for the jobs taken over by machines or anything else.
The proper word to describe this essay is “sophomoric.”
Mmm...I dunno. If machines were to take over all of our jobs, and meet every whim at the touch of a button, I wonder what would happen to man’s work ethic? Our material needs would be completely taken care of, but where would the challenge be? A few would take advantage of the opportunity to expand knowledge and perhaps accomplish things never dreamed of before, but I suspect most of us would become the ultimate couch potatoes. Most of humanity could end up living idle, empty, and ultimately unsatisfying, lives.
To borrow from Captain Kirk from “This Side of Paradise”: “Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.”
This is the kind of economic thought that generally surfaces late at night in the dorm after a three hour bong-a-thon, featuring some potent green bud. Normally it is followed with cheesecake and eight hours of sleep. In the morning it is forgotten.
Blue collar skilled trades are the future, because it is too complex for machines and too many people don’t want to do the work.
The Great Shift Toward Automation and the Future of Employment
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/The-Great-Shift-and-the-Future-of-Employment
High school grads have pretty much no marketable skills and there are no factories that will hire you when you walk in off the street (shades of the 50's, 60's and 70's), places that you can learn valuable life skills even if you're only a widget counter ... (honesty, integrity, punctuality, legitimate self satisfaction .. etc.)
so they enter young adulthood hoping for a magical machine that really WOULD do something to give them purpose in life ...
Enter, stage left ... Satan, sex, drugs and alcohol