Scott Santens has been thinking a lot about fish lately. Specifically, he’s been reflecting on the aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life.” What Santens wants to know is this: “If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”
Unlike most of us here at Free Republic I think this guy ‘may’ have a point.
Automation both in straight computers that take over repeatable office level tasks from humans. I.E clerking as in one computer now does the job of hundreds of clerks in keeping up the accounting ‘books’, figuring out actuarial tables, etc.
As for myself I actually helped in such an effort. When I started to work at my last job there were over sixty union people working three shifts a day to collect weather data. Today there are four and ten times the data is collected and processed in seconds where it used to take hours.
So this guy is wondering how do we as a nation take care of all of the people whose work has been automated out of existence. (I’m going to avoid the jobs sent out of the country for the time being.)
Logically there are several methods to do this. In no particular order: ‘F’ them... no benefits ya slackers, go find a job, go be a ditch digger. Okay... Where we once used hundreds of ditch diggers to dig a ditch we can use one guy on a ‘Ditch Witch’ to do that job.
How about a railroad line? Ten guys with a track laying machine replaces the hundreds if not thousands that did that. More automation in other words, less people more machines and the efficiency goes up. We all know of hundreds of such examples.
Where we as a society once needed thousands if not millions of human workers to build/create our cities and infrastructure now need only a fraction of those numbers and the machines that replaced the back breaking labor of the rest.
So what happens when we have too many humans and not enough work to keep them busy? We have what we see today... a transition from the need for more workers to the need to keep the ‘idle’ occupied and fed.
It’s a tough thing here people... If we as a society aren’t careful we will see war breaking out as population depleter, or plagues... or something else. We use welfare and entertainment of various sorts to keep our unemployed population in check. But that’s at the expense of the employed population. So what we get are even more societal pressures.
As for me I don’t have any answers. I just see that it’s all going to come crashing down and at some point in the future society will equalize again. That process though is going to be excruciatingly painful.
On the one hand, the aspects of the benefits of automation and the amount of work it can save is true.
But perhaps the one flaw in automation as an extension into wholesale replacement of the idea of work, its value, the compensation needed, etc., is that automation does not fully sustain itself. If and until automation can produce, operate, maintain and upgrade itself without human help, then it cannot become a wholesale replacement.
Even when the level of automation approaches those capabilities, who is going to take the time to become educated, willing to work and exist outside the utopia of a guaranteed living existence offered by it (automation). I’d think the curve on this would reach a peak and then fall back down to disrepair.
That was in 1996. Computers have been with us for over 30 years, and yet there are tons of people who still do not know how to use one, how to work with them, how to use the applications that have been around for more than two decades. Most of them are otherwise smart people but just seem confused and confounded by technology.