Past Tense (DS9)

[FaxModem1]

Link to the page

I once saw a fan edit of the episode that removed all the bits on the Defiant aside from when they arrive and after they get back. It works better as a story due to us not seeing any perspective outside of the 21st century. It helps you get better get sucked into the atmosphere of the world.

For the episode's message. I find that it's rather relevant, as automation is inevitable unless there is a disruption in technology or society, and due to the cost of maintenance the initial cost of the machine being much cheaper vs the cost of labor and benefits of having a human there doing it, the numbers of jobs will decrease over time.

There's a rather relevant video about this, called Humans need not apply.

For decades, we've had manufacturing jobs replace human labor in factories, as it's a simple task that can be done by a machine. We're already seeing the first steps of automation taking service jobs in addition to the manufacturing sector, desire of employers for fully automated restaurants, pizza delivery bots,Burger machines starting in California

All of this is fine, as long as you have a society that cares what happens to its lower class people. As Chuck said, one able to give them homes, and ensure that they aren't thought of as something to be thrown away and forgotten. One without concern for those who are unable to work, or do not make enough to survive, runs into problems.

It seems like one of those episodes that gets more plausible with every passing year

[Dindu]

It seems like one of those episodes that gets more plausible with every passing year

Not sure how you can think that and dismiss the plot as irrelevant?

The episode is a warning that the inevitability of mass unemployment due to the increasing capability of automation is a problem society will have to resolve. That we, as a society, really ought to be planning for a situation where being unemployed is the norm, and that treating the subsequent jobless masses as irrelevant nuisances is wrong.

Surely, that makes it tremendously relevant?

I mean, this issue IS going to happen. We're almost certainly not going to encounter an ancient neutronium hulled doosmday device, we're probably not going to run into xenophobic metamorphs with a fetish for clay face, the odds are against discovering a travelling asteroid filled with sexy women who don't understand love, it's somewhat doubtful we'll have to deal with a super-computer intent on eradicating all life unless it can find its' mummy, but mass unemployment, that's a real thing.

Or did I misunderstand?

[FaxModem1]

I think I mistyped it. The episode works better without the stuff from the 24th century, and only seeing the stuff in the 21st century. That's what I meant.

Any time we cut back to the Defiant, all the atmosphere gets sucked out.

[Dindu]

Aw, OK, fair play, dude. I agree with that.

[FaxModem1]

That said, I love seeing the contrast of people struggling for food and shelter while millionaires(or richer) are enjoying lavish parties, while at the same time seeing blue collar social workers going through the motions at best, and being callous at worst. Mostly due to trying to keep their own heads above water. That's already present in almost any era, but this version of 2024 has stretched things to the breaking point because nothing changed. As one exchange in the episode goes.

BASHIR: It's not your fault that things are the way they are.
LEE: Everybody tells themselves that, and nothing ever changes.

The real message of the two-parter is, or at least seems to be, that things will not get better for as long as people don't give a damn about each other, and help each other.

[ScreamingDoom]

For the episode's message. I find that it's rather relevant, as automation is inevitable unless there is a disruption in technology or society, and due to the cost of maintenance the initial cost of the machine being much cheaper vs the cost of labor and benefits of having a human there doing it, the numbers of jobs will decrease over time.

This is, quite frankly, complete bullshit.

Ever since the inception of the Industrial Revolution, luddites have pulled out this little chestnut and it's always proven to be false.

Automation always creates new work eventually and enriches society as a whole. True, there is always some economic dislocation at first, but eventually things work out. There are scores of reasons for this; increased automation allows both greater specialization as well as generalization in the human population -- specialization in terms of knowledge required, generalization in terms of work done -- which is higher paid, increased material wealth enriches society as a whole leading to many knock-on effects that buoy up the general economy, old, ossified industries and businesses die, letting newer, more efficient organizations take over the economic reigns in sectors, new jobs servicing and creating the automation facilities rise, etc etc.

Now, the nature of the employment changes, sometimes drastically.

Before the Industrial Revolution, there really wasn't a need for most people to know how to read or do basic math. Both of those became critical as more and more factories came on-line. The rise of industrial robotics led to those factory jobs lessening, but the engineering and technical staff to design and maintain them blossomed.

There's no reason to think that trend won't continue.

In fact, with the refinement of robotics and computer technology, I would expect the centralized factories of the past to start to die off, replaced with smaller, local manufacturing.

Consider this: instead of some massive car factory somewhere, imagine if every dealership had its own factory. Instead of a stable of cars on the lot, a customer came by, maybe test-drove some example models, then put in an order for a custom car -- in the color they want with the features they want -- based on it and a week later came back to pick it up. That would be impractical without advanced robotics, but easily feasible with them. If, say, 60% of the car was manufactured on demand (I imagine most of the high-volume, little things would still be made in mass factories; no sense building standardized nuts and bolts for every car), that "dealership" would be employing a lot of people -- technicians to service the robots, engineers to do the custom design work a customer needed, and skilled craftsmen (as opposed to factory drones) to perform a lot of fine adjustments not suitable for robotics work.

The economic advantages of mass production put into a small business.

This is already happening, though with houses instead of cars. There are companies which use computer software to take a design for a house (gone over with the customer and in-house architects), split it into blocks able to fit on a semi trailer, and then are built (and tested!) under controlled conditions by robots and craftsmen before being assembled on-site. The end result is a house that costs roughly the same as a stick-frame built structure, but at a fraction of the time and with far, far higher quality.

No, if there is a problem with the economic future, it doesn't have anything to do with automation. Education is far more likely; in the US, the current public education system is ridiculously outdated and incapable of meeting the demands of an advancing technological society (and has been for a very long time). Another related problem is the societal attitude of technical or trade schools being somehow inferior to college education (albeit one with some truth in it with regards to diploma mills spoiling the batch). But that's a different subject.

[Dindu]

Well, opinion and all, but I think you're looking at it through a fairly narrow lens. We ARE seeing the effects of automation taking its toll, it's just that the people most affected by it aren't people living in the first world. Even in the US it's there to see; Detroit's a warzone, but what's even more alarming is that to support the first world's economy, there are billions (and that's not hyperbole) in slavery.

Compound that with a growing population and waving off the potential problem with 'never gonna happen' is, well. Mildly alarming.

Eventually there will be a point at which what a human being needs, both essentials and reasoned whimsy, will reach a limit. How long after that before there simply are no more jobs?

Might not happen soon, probably won't, but...

Lemme put it this way. Imagine for a moment that humanity has solved a lot of issues and we've come up with an android. That android is stronger, quicker, more nimble. It never tires. It never sleeps. It can access computing technology so advanced it makes ours look like play-doh, so it's more intelligent, it's more creative. And it only costs a hundred thousand dollars. Sure, that's a lot, but anyone can get one, have it working different jobs sixteen hours a day, and the rest in your home with the cooking and the cleaning and the ocassional handjob, it will pay itself off in only a few years, all of which you'll spend playing ImmersiveGame-o-Rama, or hiking, or whatever it is you enjoy doing, certainly not stuck in an office pretending you're not a few buzzspeak comments from going postal.
Corporations buy these things literally by the boat-load. Every primary industry is sorted. Mining, farming, construction, waste management, space engineering, doctors, nurses, teachers, software designers, artists, soldiers, police-peeps, sooner or later these things can and do perform everything.

What is left for humans to do? What JOB is left? Who's paying people to do anything?

Is that impossible? I'd be interested to know.

But if it isn't impossible, then to get there from here will involve a long process from where there are jobs to where there are no jobs, and that inevitably, leads to exactly the situation - increasing unemployment.

No one here has suggested stopping progress, only that the consequences of the path we're on need to be considered.

It is only rational, only sane, to think about how to deal with such a problem BEFORE it gets out of control. And even if you're right and it never does become a problem, there's nothing lost by working out solutions just in case.

[Robovski]

It isn't so much that automation will throw people into unemployment forever, leaving many humans surplus for all time, but rather that it creates unemployment NOW, eg truck drivers no longer having work after the trucks drive themselves. Large sectors of the populace who, while not unskilled, can be put out of work because there is no longer any demand for the work they know how to do. A simple competent AI combined with good speech recognition would put me and many like me out of work right now. What then? I'm 42 years old, if I'm automated out of a job what do I do then? Make YouTube videos? Go back to school to learn something the AI can't do yet and hope I make it to retirement? If I were to go back to school how would I pay my rent let alone the tuition?

It really is not as simple as retraining people to do other things who used to do things we no longer need. Not everyone is even suited to jobs that aren't currently suitable for automation (eg building trades). If this is the path we are on (and it appears to be) then we need to provide for those who are no longer able to effectively contribute economically and allow for the nature of changing skillsets and make education available to all and not just those who can afford it.

[FaxModem1]

For the episode's message. I find that it's rather relevant, as automation is inevitable unless there is a disruption in technology or society, and due to the cost of maintenance the initial cost of the machine being much cheaper vs the cost of labor and benefits of having a human there doing it, the numbers of jobs will decrease over time.

This is, quite frankly, complete bullshit.

Ever since the inception of the Industrial Revolution, luddites have pulled out this little chestnut and it's always proven to be false.

Right, and a lot of old jobs from those days are still, in some capacity, around today. Namely, things like transportation and transportation related industries. How many freight jobs are going to be automated in the next decade? Smartcars are becoming a reality after all. And Uber is trying to have automated taxis. How many people today supplement their income delivering people and/or food by working for Uber? If enough of those people are out of work, and can't find work, what are they supposed to do? When does the new era of new jobs come in fast enough to offset all of the unemployment and subsequent homelessness?

What about things like warehouse inventory, or shipping? Lots of people do those jobs today, and machines are replacing them. What's going to happen to all the people who can't afford higher education, or for whatever reason, are incapable of it?

Should technological progress be stopped? No. It's how society treats those incapable of work that matters.

Or, as I said in the rest of the post....

All of this is fine, as long as you have a society that cares what happens to its lower class people. As Chuck said, one able to give them homes, and ensure that they aren't thought of as something to be thrown away and forgotten. One without concern for those who are unable to work, or do not make enough to survive, runs into problems.

I'm not worried about the robots coming to take our jobs. I'm worried about a society that doesn't care that people have no job to do, because all the jobs are cheaper when done by robots, and no way to support themselves, since our economy works on the concept that you must work to survive. An adjustment to a more Federation like philosophy and government is a solution to that, especially as there are going to be millions out of work as technology advances. If there's millions of truck drivers, or people flipping burgers, and now machines can do their jobs for a tenth of the cost, what is going to happen to them? Like in the episode, you have enough people who no one cares about and are barely surviving, and you have a populous that is going to want change, and that can either take the form of peaceful reform, or in violent revolution.

It really depends on how society, government, and the population in general react to more and more people being unemployed, and unable to find work, due to machinery being cheaper than human labor, whether physical work or office work.

[TrueMetis]

There's no reason to think that trend won't continue.

I would say there is plenty of reason to think it won't. Because the jobs created in the aftermath of increased automation have had little to do with the automation.

A small amount of jobs are created making and maintaining the robots that replace people. There are less of these jobs than the jobs they replace. This is the reason for automation, so they can pay one person to do the job of many and therefore pay much less. Fortunately at the time when more jobs where being automated we see an increase in the number of luxury goods people wanted, so a larger amount of jobs in these areas were created than other wise would have been as more factories were opened in new areas to manufacturer more goods. But even together these jobs would not have made up for the jobs lost to automation. It was in transporting and selling these goods, and the service sector that jobs were really created.

Now however there's a important difference in modern automation and automation of the past. It's those transportation, selling, and service jobs that are being automated. So where are the new jobs coming from? It's not going to be in building and maintaining self driving trucks, electronic cashiers, and electronic baristas. The point of automation is that you don't need as many people to do that as you did to do whatever the automation replaced. And there aren't enough luxury goods that will see a spike in demand large enough to make up for these jobs.

And hell as automatons improve they may replace the jobs that were created designing, building, and repairing their older brethren. When robots build robots why would they need us involved except in a minor supervisory role? More importantly why would we want to be involved? You worry about your job, I'm going spend my time reading. (or playing video game, probably the later)