Well I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
I believe that this is one issue that should, in a rational world, transcend political divides.
Wooden shoes work well to jam up the machinery...
I used to work with once but It called me fat so we had a falling out ;)
This sounds a bit like 0bama complaining about ATMs and online air travel reservations for unemployment.
We don't dig ditches anymore. I eliminate administrative staff time with innovative software solutions, but people still work.
Change is the only constant. We have to deal with it.
You can’t protect workers from the forces of history and technology. Workers need to protect themselves. Get new skills, things nobody is projecting as being automated in the next 20 years, when in doubt learn how to run the robots.
Onward progress, I say. Free people up to do other things. We’ve had this argument throughout our history (horse and buggy, ice man, milk man, etc) and those that want to hold onto the old way are always wrong.
Don’t fall for it. Bring on the robots.
Not nervous at all.
What a very starnge formulation!
Do nations have "income"?
Does the nation pay your salary?
Does the nation pay you a dividend? Capital gains? Does the nation pay you any rent?
In a perfect Socialist world, where the means of product are communally owned, then I suppose "the nation" might have a vast income, and might parcel that money out to the laboring classes.
But we're not there ... yet.
I suppose we’ll all have jobs as government bureaucrats, regulating the robots. Or as Diversity Coordinators for the Splunge Foundation, or somesuch.
Well change makes everyone nervous espceially change that affects jobs. Understand. However robot labor is inevitable and won’t be stopped nor should it be stopped. Whatever can be automated in a quality manner will and should be automated. There will still be jobs for people but they will be different new types of jobs. People must adapt. I am looking forward to low cost home robots that can do chores around the house.
Times have changed. Basically, both couples usually work, we work more hours, and salaries are stagnant. Don't worry though, we are more productive now than ever before!
Throw in more millions into the labor force via amnesty and your gonna have a utopia!
I'm all for automation of every labor saving task possible, but yes, there are consequences. For starters, what to do with all of the people who are put out of work or otherwise made obsolete? While some may find a niche in the new order of things, most will end up on the wrong side of the Player Piano river. There are more non-skilled people than there are skilled, and the former won't simply die willingly. Some say that the FEMA camps have been built to house Tea Party types, but I suspect that the useful idiots and unemployable eaters will be the first to rounded up, despite having served as voting tools for the tyrant who orders the genocide.
The bigger factor is the economic one of supply and demand. People without incomes cannot consume unless the government provides for them, but the government has already run out of money and is running out of producers to tax. Automation reduces the numbers needed for production. At some point robotics will be self regenerative and there will be little need for human intervention and upkeep. At that point, who is the consumer? If robots can do everything and humans are no longer needed, then how do humans pay for the goods and services that robots provide?
What economic system has been created to replace the barter/monetary system?
I don't know the answer, but God I love an egg cream.
Jerry Brown from 1995
http://biggovernment.com/mrichmond/2010/06/10/jerry-brown-flashback-we-need-more-welfare-and-fewer-jobs/
The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs. Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I’m talking about welfare for all. Without it, you’re going to have warfare for all. Without a universal health care like every other civilized country, without a minimum level of income, this country will explode. You can’t blame the guy at the bottom forever. At some point there’s a reaction and we’ll see that the real criminals are those calling the tune, making the rules, and walking to the bank. We have the money, we have the brain power. The United States now has the highest measured wealth of any nation ever in the history of the world. We could rebuild our cities, we could create the kind of buying power and community well-being that will provide for peace. The guaranteed income is one way.
Another way is to have always the availability of work in a nonprofit, in community service. A third is to start giving people training to develop skills where they can be self-supporting. You could come up with a cash supplement. Even conservatives have suggested a negative income tax to cut out the bureaucracy. If we were smart, we’d get rid of welfare and give people a family assistance like they do in Europe…
The problem isn’t even a problem. Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we’re all in it together. It’ll work when there’s a shared sense of destiny. It can be done! It’s all there! What isn’t there is the leadership to create the kind of social network, the safety net, the distribution that would truly create a just and equal society…
We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let’s-take-care-of-one-another. That’s the creative challenge. First, expose relentlessly the big lie that comes over the tube every night-that if you just go out and find that job, and work harder, it’ll all be fine. It won’t! There’s not enough work to go around and a lot of the pay is not fair. Unless you totally yank up that system and create a better one, unless the spirit changes, unless the heart opens, unless we confront power with the truth of our own unarmed but absolute fearless truth, we’re not going to overcome it. Evil is too embedded to be overcome by anything other than a spiritual challenge.
Well I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Ned Ludd also advocated smashing the new automated weaving machines at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution as it would put weavers like him out of work... hence the term Luddite. Obama himself has berated ATMs and kiosks as taking away “good jobs”. Any growing technological economy produces structural unemployment as new technologies make others obsolete. Consider the telephone business say 60 years ago when telephone operators still manually connected 6your calls. These operators lost their jobs to dial phones. Phone service was expensive and many people did not have phones or relied on shared party lines in rural areas. With cellular technology the telephone industry has been transformed and employ more people than back in the days of telephone operators .
Don’t worry because if Bill Gates and Microsoft design those robots then they will be obsolete every six months and will die from viruses in between model changes.
Doing the exact same thing over and over is perfect for robots.
Can we replace congress with robots?
On the flip side, those who design/manufacture robots will be in high demand and well paid for decades to come...
Easy, train people to design and or repair robots.
The author has purposely muddied the waters with the assumption that labor’s share has declined as a result of some inequity.
When we consider the magnitude of wealth gained by a very select few vs the middle class it is evident the that a spevial class of great minds have earned beyond the ability to grasp the magnitude.
First are the creators...... Microsoft,Google, Apple, Amazon etc. Then there are the entertainers, Actors, football,basketball, golf, baseball players.
None of these fantastically wealthy classes are robots. None of these put others out of work. To they contrary, millions owe their jobs to these wealthy.
The author is totally full of crap.