Posted on 06/09/2015 11:57:22 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Ever heard of the Luddites, who took their name from Ned Ludd? They were English textile workers who protested, from 1811 to 1816, against the development and implementation of labor-saving technologies.......
.... Robots are causing a new Industrial Revolution.....
[SNIP]
....Liberals are even proposing the regulation of technological advancement.....
.........One aspect of the massive agrarian job loss in America was that the unemployed farm workers did not sit idle. Instead of lamenting their fate, waiting for government to do something and/or take care of them, they took advantage of the fact that new technology created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. They took it upon themselves to do what was necessary to take advantage of the new jobs. They were not "wards of the state," did not have to be "weaned from the government provided tit," did not "wait for government to do something." Sure, some failed, but the vast majority survived the transition, learned new skills, learned to use the new technology, and did quite well. America became, as a result, a world power.
Society must also learn from history. It's a "sink or swim" world. Swimmers will embrace robots and new technology, sinkers won't......
......Individuals themselves must take advantage of the enhancements. Most won't, today's history tells us, if wealth is redistributed to them. Why work if they don't have to?
Liberals are already lining up to redistribute wealth. Liberals say that by embracing robots, the already rich entrepreneurs and top level management will get richer while the middle class and poor will be left behind. They advocate policies that have swimmers "pay their fare share." They are, in liberals' view, "society's lottery winners."
Socialism (or wealth redistribution, or whatever else liberals come up with) was not, is not, and never will be the answer......
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
If you sum the predictions she made in that one and Atlas Shrugged she has a better batting average than Nostradamus. :) :(
I’m interested in the various points of view on this.
One thing we don’t need are more laws, regulations, taxes.....
We’re sinking under this government “help.”
Lets see.. Obama and minons OWN the FBI, CIA, IRS, the military, NSA, AND the rest of the security forces.. plus most STATES... UNIONS... you know ALL UNIONS.. most media, and the rest of the entire Executive Branch of the federal Gov’t.. Congress for practical purposes the Supremes.. and God knows else..
Could be “private” visitations to ALL in Congress AND their staffs.. with a passing comment... “You have a nice little family there.. be a shame if something happened to them.. “
Would explain Congress whistling pass the “Be happy to comply” yard.. What else would explain the complete complicity of “use to be” conservatives..
EXCEPT for a few to make “deny-ability”(of the Coup) possible.. who knows maybe them too..
“Swimmers will embrace robots and new technology, sinkers won’t”
So, anyone who does not “embrace” (there’s that word again)robots and new technology can’t afford to? If not, why not?
Ah THEFT... it’s merely a mugging..
Someone better get PISSED off quickly..
or their lunch money will be gone..
It’s really really hard to piss off a republican..
maybe most of them are cowards.
Problem with this theory: It assumes all young people are capable of being prepared for this world.
In such a world all (desirable) jobs will obviously require a person to be capable of doing things a computer still isn't capable of. They will mostly be jobs that require considerable intelligence, probably upper third, with the level constantly eroding from below as computer capabilities continue to improve.
So what do you do with the (initially) 2/3 who have no real economic demand for services they're capable of providing?
When some millions of people who presently drive vehicles for a living are put out of work by automation, how many of them are going to, or be capable of, be retrained to write apps for smartphones?
The author also ignores that the Luddites were 100% right. The machines and factories utterly destroyed longstanding ways of making a living and the communities that depended on that. The net result was an improvement in human wellbeing, but a really large number of people got severely chewed up in the process.
The author also ignores that the Luddites were 100% right. The machines and factories utterly destroyed longstanding ways of making a living and the communities that depended on that. The net result was an improvement in human wellbeing, but a really large number of people got severely chewed up in the process.The liberal solution is to halt, or at least slow, progress. And they call themselves "Progressives!"
When you posit that AI-controlled computers will be able to outdo practically everyone in doing practically every thing, it’s hard to see how neoLuddism is avoidable - or, ultimately, even wrong. And if Luddism will, in the foreseeable future, actually be correct then, “Houston, we have a problem.”“Progressives” are not progressive - but the Constitution is progresive:
Article 1 Section 8. The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.Liberty is a blessing because it allows us to decide to do different things from what have been done before. A belief in the possibility of progress is the planted axiom in a belief that liberty is a blessing. IMHO.
The wheel?
The light bulb?
The sewing machine?
The steam engine?
Vaccines?
?
Lobbyists and Lawyers need to be told “Don’t let the door hit you in the butt.”
...and we can thank our friends on the left for accelerating the end of jobs for their constituents, with their $15/hour minimum wage, for starters.
5 years from now there’s a good chance that people in much of the country will not even have contact with a worker when they order at McDonald’s. Even most sit-down restaurants will become like In-and-Out where you grab a table, wait for your number to be called, then walk to the counter, grab your food and bring it back. Also don’t be decided if there is a plate/cut/utensil deposit. RFID-equipped plates/cups/utensils will be included in your bill and only removed if you bring your dirty dishes to the dishwasher intake (much as we do voluntarily).
The left seems to have it in for manual labor jobs - I sure hope their supporters know the Brave New World ahead for them.
You have hit on an important issue. What will people in the lower half of the IQ range do in the future? Mechanization, automation and computerization have allowed capital to replace labor in job after job. Government regulations (FICA, Soc Sec, unemployment insurance, mandatory healthcare, minimum wage) have driven the cost of labor up while Moore’s law has driven the cost of automation down.
Education is not the answer. You can’t take a man with an IQ of 80 and train him to be a network engineer or data analyst. There was a time when there were many jobs for a man with a strong back and a willingness to work. Those days are gone. Can society survive a 50% unemployment rate?
It’s pretty much impossible to reach a human at a public utility by phone, even many companies, and if you do..... it’s painfully obvious that English isn’t their first language.
Invention and automation, primarily promoted by the free market system that has really only existed for a few centuries now, has to date been in the best interests of mankind as a whole, spectacularly so. Although it has run over and severely damaged the lives of a great many people in the process.
But, as the financial planners say, past performance does not guarantee future performance.
I worry that the free market is in the process of destroying itself.
Look at productivity. Has been going up for centuries. It essentially measures the amount of human effort it takes to produce a given amount of “stuff.”
As with any upward curve, extend it indefinitely and you eventually reach a point where (nearly) infinite stuff is produced with (almost) zero human effort.
My concern is not that humans will be in poverty. Such a world will have immense amounts of stuff.
But Indian reservations, inner-city ghettos and British slums do not indicate that a life without work is good for people, even when they objectively have a good deal more stuff than their working ancestors had.
I’ve been trying to get people to propose libertarian alternatives to government redistribution in a world where there is a lot of cheap “stuff” but very low demand for work most people are capable of doing.
Haven’t gotten much response. Liberals like the idea of government redistribution. Conservatives like to believe that the market will automatically come through.
Maybe they’re right. I certainly hope they are.
People WILL work (because that is, as you rightly state, a GOOD healthy thing) - we will find the way to it, IF government doesn’t stand in the way and/or give people reasons (which destroys, as the article says) not to seek it, innovate and discover.
I hate all the STUFF in the stores, useless STUFF. But it’s not my place to tell people which nic nac to buy. But people NEED to start thinking beyond that and start saving and planning ahead (the social safety net needs to be less accommodating).
Light bulbs, steam engines, vaccines, etc. = all good advances that helped people live longer, healthier, happy lives.
The world of work was built on a world of scarcity. That’s what the market, and every other form of economy has always been: a way of deciding who gets what when goods are scarce.
We’re fairly obviously, to my mind, headed for a world where increasing numbers and types of goods are abundant, not scarce. Free or almost free.
This has already happened, in practical terms, with information. Quite literally I could go to my local library and (for free) do research in a couple of hours that would have taken days or weeks in earlier times, even assuming I’d known where and how to find the data.
Society has always been structured, at a very basic level, around the idea of scarcity. So what does a society of abundance look like?
I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does. And very few people seem to be interested in thinking or talking about it.
In such a society there should be less need for government. But I suspect we’ll wind up with more, largely because people aren’t willing to think hard about alternatives.
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