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pilight wrote: ↑Mon Jun 03, 2019 8:44 pm
We'll all survive, but there will be a significant change in our economic and social systems.
If there's one thing that automation is amazing at, it's generating wealth. It's just very, very bad at distributing it. We'll have to fix that, and that will be hard, but I'm pretty sure we'll manage it.
Amen. I don't know if we'd have to go full Universal Basic Income, but some kind of safety net would need to be installed.
Or not and the corporations fully take over and we're stuck eating $50 Cup Noodle and $75 Soy Burgers while organized crime becomes the only stable entry-level industry. Until they figure out Robo-Cops, then we'd just... lay down and die, I guess?
pilight wrote: ↑Mon Jun 03, 2019 8:44 pm
We'll all survive, but there will be a significant change in our economic and social systems.
If there's one thing that automation is amazing at, it's generating wealth. It's just very, very bad at distributing it. We'll have to fix that, and that will be hard, but I'm pretty sure we'll manage it.
Amen. I don't know if we'd have to go full Universal Basic Income, but some kind of safety net would need to be installed.
Or not and the corporations fully take over and we're stuck eating $50 Cup Noodle and $75 Soy Burgers while organized crime becomes the only stable entry-level industry. Until they figure out Robo-Cops, then we'd just... lay down and die, I guess?
Who is organized crime going to steal from if only a few people have money?
Realistically, if almost all labor is automated, the system as we know it collapses. Jeff Bezos can't sell stuff through Amazon if nobody has money to buy the goods. If Jeff Bezos the Third, Emperor of the Upstate Regions (Dollars Be Upon Him) has a mansion built by robots, run by robots, with food grown and delivered by robots, and robots fix other robots, he's kind of cut himself off from the economy. Money is meaningless except to pay people to do stuff.
I've heard the idea of a tax on robots being floated around.
pilight wrote: ↑Mon Jun 03, 2019 8:44 pm
We'll all survive, but there will be a significant change in our economic and social systems.
If there's one thing that automation is amazing at, it's generating wealth. It's just very, very bad at distributing it. We'll have to fix that, and that will be hard, but I'm pretty sure we'll manage it.
Amen. I don't know if we'd have to go full Universal Basic Income, but some kind of safety net would need to be installed.
Or not and the corporations fully take over and we're stuck eating $50 Cup Noodle and $75 Soy Burgers while organized crime becomes the only stable entry-level industry. Until they figure out Robo-Cops, then we'd just... lay down and die, I guess?
Who is organized crime going to steal from if only a few people have money?
Realistically, if almost all labor is automated, the system as we know it collapses. Jeff Bezos can't sell stuff through Amazon if nobody has money to buy the goods. If Jeff Bezos the Third, Emperor of the Upstate Regions (Dollars Be Upon Him) has a mansion built by robots, run by robots, with food grown and delivered by robots, and robots fix other robots, he's kind of cut himself off from the economy. Money is meaningless except to pay people to do stuff.
I've heard the idea of a tax on robots being floated around.
Darth Wedgius wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2019 4:05 amI've heard the idea of a tax on robots being floated around.
Yes, I've heard this too, but I don't think it will get much traction because it's kind of a stupid idea at heart.
Yeah, yeah, I get the logic. We used to tax labor done by humans - we can't really tax that anymore because it's all automated - so we tax the robots to try to redistribute the wealth they generate to the newly obsolete human labor....but it's overly gimmicky. We don't really care about the labor, we care about the wealth. It's the wealth we want to redistribute, so let's just tax that instead and cut out this silly middle step.
Now taxing wealth is hard...mostly because wealthy people don't want to be taxed and they generally have the political clout to fight it. But ultimately we're not going to have any choice.
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2019 10:32 pm
Shouldn't this be in the Sci-Fi forum?
No, because this isn't really fiction, this is the next 20 to 30 years and trends in reality. If you'd like, I can post a bunch of articles showing how automation is changing how labor, income, and the job market are being affected.
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2019 10:32 pm
Shouldn't this be in the Sci-Fi forum?
No, because this isn't really fiction, this is the next 20 to 30 years and trends in reality. If you'd like, I can post a bunch of articles showing how automation is changing how labor, income, and the job market are being affected.
If you want, I haven't seen the most articles on the subject and I would peruse them to become more familiar what not. Though I am actually familiar with automation in concept and was just joking, so if your chosen recourse instead is to block me for being an idiot then I would understand.
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2019 10:32 pm
Shouldn't this be in the Sci-Fi forum?
No, because this isn't really fiction, this is the next 20 to 30 years and trends in reality. If you'd like, I can post a bunch of articles showing how automation is changing how labor, income, and the job market are being affected.
If you want, I haven't seen the most articles on the subject and I would peruse them to become more familiar what not. Though I am actually familiar with automation in concept and was just joking, so if your chosen recourse instead is to block me for being an idiot then I would understand.
Nah, when in doubt, better to educate. Besides, this will make a good primer.
Got a sense of how automation is creeping everywhere, huh? Well, let's get into specifics.
One of the key areas of employment is transportation. At docks, the movement of freight is automated. Delivery of food is being automated by Amazon. Transportation of materials on the highway in general is being tested out by Tesla.While self driving taxis are being tested out as well in some areas. This includes delivery of packages by companies like FedEx , and even the US Postal Service is testing things out.
As mentioned, industry is becoming more and more automated. For instance, Auto-manufacturing, and cell phone production. But we knew manufacturing was being automated anyway. That's why people started leaving that and becoming baristas, working at McDonald's, or Walmart to survive.
Now, it doesn't have to be all these jobs disappearing to be a problem, but it can cause greater strife if it means lower wages due to competition of the remaining jobs. That's why I created this thread, because a lot of fields are going to be affected by the ripples this makes.
Universally customer service functions are increasingly being automated and made self-service where it isn't being outsourced to the cheapest providers possible. The problem is that customer service is like the factory work of the early 20th century; available everywhere but generally low paid and about to be blown away by automation skipping the whole unionizing reasonable wages stage. In the 20 years I have until retirement I expect if I still have a job in 10 years it will be babysitting virtual agents and handling issues too complex for the automation. I likely won't have the few colleagues I still have and with less staff it's easier to automate a lot of the HR needs... The only people with secure work in my company (an international moving company) in, say a 10-20 year time frame, are the executives and the people on the ground needed to ensure trucks and storage are clean and operational. This is true in all business - if I was a kid today I would learn to code or learn to work with my hands doing fitting/repairing (such as plumbing or HVAC) if I was looking for a career outside of the protected specialist jobs (lawyer, doctor, ect).
