Socialism hasn’t ever worked so far, and has killed over a hundred million people in the attempts.
What’s the basis for your comment?
Why do you believe that a system which doesn’t work — and destroys the countries it’s implemented in — will suddenly work, but none of the models which have worked successfully will continue to work?
That is funny looking at history where it actually never worked, you can have starving people in North Korea vs China which is a not socilism anymore from market perspective... I come from a post-socialist country, and when growing up in the 90s we and 90% of the society was so poor after 50 years of socialism that my parents could not afford a pair of Nike or Adidas. What me and most mates were wearing was Nice and Adidos... as a pair of oroginal Nike was like 1/3 of my mum or dad salary. So I’ll never say yes to any socialist ideas! As these ruined several countries: Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland and at least a dozen of other countries from the other side of the Iron courtain.
the welfare-state is social democracy.
liberte, egalite, fraternite are essential socialist values.
in the US medicare/medicaid are socialist programs.
Socialism and capitalism have their warts. Thinking there's a perfect system is naive. Being uncritical of either system is a mistake. As soon as your system turns into a religion (faith) it's pretty much screwed.
Naming things is important and all, but I'd prefer to evaluate policies on their individual merits instead of simply classifying them as X is part of Y and total Y is bad therefore X is also bad.
Are worker co-ops bad just because they are socialist? Is it bad to regulate a company dumping chemicals in your drinking water because it saves them a few bucks?
On the flipside, is it bad to have reasonable pay discrepancies (not 300x, but maybe 8x) which markets naturally produce?
I think as a general rule we should strive to avoid concentrations of power in the hands of the few. Which has been a side effect of both capitalism and communism.
I'd think about all this from slightly different perspective.
Humanity evolution is clearly follows the trajectory with well known "strong points" (in math sense) Slaveholding, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, …
Point (in math sense) has no dimensions so you cannot say "we are exactly at Capitalism now" but rather somewhere on that trajectory between strong points. Closer to Capitalism, closer to Socialism are the right terms I think.
It is obvious that, let's say, Europe now is somewhere in between of Capitalism and Socialism. And in 1900 it was around pure Capitalism point, in some countries between Feudalism and Capitalism.
And "Robots economy" will move us closer to Communism where 95% of population will not participate in goods/services production activities. So that will be that famous "... to each according to his needs" [1]
I think that the parent poster was most likely referring to democratic socialism as practiced in much of the EU and Nordic countries as opposed to totalitarian communism or Stalinism as practiced in the countries that you listed.
Those EU and Nordic countries are not democratic socialist though. The Prime Minister of Denmark repudiated Bernie's comments saying so. They even say they are capitalist with strong safety nets, which is not socialism.
The Nordic countries are not socialist. They have not seized the means of production and handed it to a poorly-incentivized bureaucracy that claims to speak for the public.
If you have private ownership of production you are still capitalist. All the Nordic countries do this. They are not so much socialists as welfare states. If we must have a welfare state, I would much prefer the "citizens as shareholders of the country" model with a basic income, rather than the overweening paternalism of current welfare states.
I come from a post-socialist country, and when growing up in the 90s we and 90% of the society was so poor after 50 years of socialism that my parents could not afford a pair of Nike or Adidas.
socialism is already present in most countries, including the US. and people are still unhappy.
i personally think there will no difference. automation has been happening for at least two centuries, and so far it’s been a major success on all fronts.
i think this fear of automation just shows how conservative people really are.
If by "socialism" you mean government owning all the robots, deciding what to build, and how much everyone should get, then the majority of people will not get good life. (we'd be lucky if people don't forget how to build robots in generation or two!).
If you mean that when majority of work is free, people simply by existing will produce enough value for other people to deserve UBI large enough to live(1), then yes, but it is not a system that is called socialism today.
(1) the value for other people will be produced simply by increasing the likelihood of new science and art being created, so like investors are happy to waste lots of money to get one really successful startup, people as a whole would be happy to waste lots of money on UBI to many people, to get some really talented scientists.
This idea works very well, as long as it is applied to a tiny group of people who know each other well (one family). With larger groups it doesn't work at all because of game theory. The people who work hard to build better "means of production" or use them more effectively, as a reward get all of their work seized by people who do not want or know how to use these "means of production". As a result the production goes down and the quality of life of the people goes down too. If you allow people to leave your country the best workers leave it, dragging the quality of live of the remaining people too, if you want to not allow that you have to build a police state, and the quality of life becomes even worse. This is a simple theory, which have been tested multiple times, and sadly in my country too, and i hope the next time this idea gets tested it is tested on people who wilfully join the test and have the ability to leave it.
> Social ownership: can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.
The problem with all of this, is that if someone works better than others, and creates his own "means of production" there must exist someone else who will seize it and distribute it to the collective, otherwise the means will again concentrate at the hands of lucky or more hardworking people.
In some cases whole population of a country may behave as a single group. Let's say USSR at 1941 was clearly one single group focused on "do everything for the victory".
As of the humanity... Global warming and other global threats will group us all.
That's a very good example of a case where people were not acting as a single group at all. Most of the soldiers were simply leaving everything and retreating, because at first they were not sure if Hitler was really worse than Stalin (http://www.solonin.org/en), groups of people were joining with German army sometimes hoping to get rid of soviets and sometimes because wanting to kill neighbours (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera), food was being captured from all the areas that potentially could end up under German control, which ended up causing the famine in Leningrad. So even if from afar it looks like a single group, it was much more complex and turbulent close up.
Can you explain why you think that is necessary and not eg Social Democracy? Industrialization and automation has gone most of the way already (from working 7x16 to working 5x8 because of it), and socialism hasn’t even worked briefly while social democracy has done a lot better. What is it about this final small push of automation that requires public ownership?
But nowadays we should have taken another step (4x7?). Millenials are the first generation living worst than their parents, inequality increases and wealth and work are not well balanced.
Why? Because capitalism has won and socialism is not watched as an alternative.
We are slowly getting there. We went from no paid holidays to one two three weeks and so on. Many countries have less than 40 work weeks in some sectors already. It won’t be quick to hit 35h workweeks but it wasn’t exactly quick to get to 40 either.
(Note: this reasoning of past progress doesn’t apply to the US)
We've had excess transfer of wealth to the rich before, around the 1920s. It was dealt with in capitalist countries by raising taxes and increasing spend on things like health and education. The countries that did that fared better than those going for full socialism.
The notion of "means of production" is not applicable to modern economy since now a simple computer can be "means of production" in the right hands, that's why modern states redistribute some percentage of produced goods, instead of trying to seize means of production. This redistribution still does lots of harm, but if we decide to not redistribute at all, we end up with a large number of people who are so unhappy that may agree to destroy everything as they don't have anything to lose (though usually it turns out they underestimate the amount of things they can lose), so to prevent this we may end up with ubi, as my unpopular comment above was suggesting.
If by "socialism" you mean government owning all the robots, deciding what to build, and how much everyone should get, then the majority of people will not get good life.
It is not comparable at all, first of all walmart handles only one specific field, unlike the state having monopoly on everything. Second, there are competitors to walmart so when walmart starts to do crappy job a competitor that does better job will drive it out of business. Third if you build your own robot walmart won't be able to take it, and socialist state will have to take it to remain socialist.
All of this forces walmart to listen to the people who consume its services, in socialist economy no one has incentive to care.
I see so much arguing over terms and definition, while the basic premises and dynamics of the system should be familiar to everyone.
It's a fact that we're witnessing the concentration of capital into the hands of fewer and fewer. You can see that by looking at what the top 1%, 0.1% own compared to the bottom 80%, 50% etc.
It's also a fact that the bottom 60+% rely on work to get their needs met, to sustain their lives.
So it only follows that should the rate of automation explode, devaluing the work that currently sustains a huge portion of the population, we've got a huge problem on our hands, making the system unsustainable.
But we're also seeing governments, especially in northern Europe, employing taxation policies that are in a way trying to prevent this growing inequality. And in fact, the level of inequality of a nation has been correlated with a lot of undesirable problems. UBI is a natural extension of that.
I have no conclusion on this topic but I think it's a species wide existential question.
There was a time when you barely had enough time or energy to ensure survival. Doing less was an obvious optimization. But now I think we're pushing the system on the opposite limits. Doing nothing is also detrimental.
Losing physical work won't be detrimental, it's something no one likes and no one is particularly good at, losing creative work would be but it doesn't look like we are particularly close to creating ai, and when we create it we'll find some way to stay at the center of it by either creating devices that augment our brains, changing our brains to be as good as the ai, or simply uploading into computer and becoming part of ai.
In any case there is so much work in science, that we should be happy for every human that is freed from physical work.
Physical work is creative. Wielding the body takes intelligence and is improved incrementally by trial and error. People can and do take pleasure in it. Robots are merely an extension and enhancement of the bodies of their operators. (So the perennial fear of robots 'taking over' amounts to saying that bodies will somehow take over.)
It's not about being free from physical work, it's about choosing what problems to work on -- before other problems choose you! In most cases people who work a job are having their problems chosen for them. So they are still, in this sense, slaves.
And this is itself a problem. We haven't found the solution yet. But we may...
Using your body and mind is maybe half of life. The problem is the context in which you do so. A balance between selfish~ pleasure, altruistic pleasure (social role) is necessary. When so I'm sure most people are highly happy.
It's succeeding brilliantly. The purpose of automation is not, and has never been, to free people from work to pursue lives of leisure and intellectual stimulation. Its purpose is to concentrate the wealth created from labor into the hands of the ownership class without having to lose any of that wealth through hiring and compensating a human workforce.
When the number of jobs available to the labor pool is reduced by automation, the market value of human labor goes down, but the amount of work humans are required to do to survive remains the same, or often it increases to take advantage of the efficiencies create by automation. Obviously, people will tend to wind up either unemployed, because there are fewer jobs, or working harder for less money, because their time is worth less.
This isn't a failure of the system, this is the system working as intended.
That was kind of true, until the existence of the communist USSR, and the great depression and it's results(among them WW2), made the ruling class in Europe/US pay more attention to workers.
Do we need to pass through that kind of trouble in order to pay attention ?
Da Vinci's predictions of a helicopter weren't looking too good 170 years ago either. The history of flight in general is a great story of old dreams becoming reality.
And the dream has a simple origin, we knew birds could fly, so why couldn't humans?
The Industrial Revolution posed a similar question, if machines can do some kinds of work, why can't they do every kind of work?
A cynic would ask, what happens to the workers when there's no work? But I suspect the scarier question is, what happens when there's not enough work for everyone to be employed?
And modern transportation creates another question of what happens when the remaining work is happening elsewhere?
1. Advances in technology allow people to offer news services and new technologies that previously had not existed (automation fallacy/luddite fallacy) Eg: invention of the cotton gin paved the way to modern retail clothing industry.
2. After a new technology is invented, people who do the work the old way continue until it's no longer feasible.
3. When it becomes infeasible, they have to find other lines of work, rely on family and friends, or some combination thereof. We'll call this displacement.
4. Here are 2 ways to measure displacement: speed* (time to render old work infeasible) and size (number of displaced people).
5. Speculation: the time after something like the cotton gin is invented, displaced workers increase. But over all it's speed* is slower.
6. Speculation: increasing centralization has increased the scale at which automating solutions displace people. Other advances in technology possibly increase the number of innovations. Advances in logistics and information increases their speed*.
7. Speculation: The automation fallacy may apply, but there are still an increasing number of displaced workers. So that the nature of this scale is nonlinear. It increases drastically with centralization, speed, and generalizability.
>> Advances in technology allow people to offer news services and new technologies that previously had not existed
That's the real interesting question. What will they be ?
Some i can see:
- more machines -> more machine maintenance and setup. But it'll be under the guidance of machines(AR, AI), So it won't require expertise, it would only require a medium or low amount of "good hands" skills. So the pay won't be good.
- i would have said more marketing/selling, but given the amount of marketing and tiny niches that exist today, i'm not sure that's the case. And in any case AI will be better than us at that.
If there would be more money( a big if, maybe we're heading for a different equilibrium):
- more money -> more goods being bought -> more jobs on the manufacturing/retail/supply-chain which mostly will be machine maintenance etc.
- more money -> more human based services being bought(basically selling good interpersonal skills, and care).
I am not certain what evidence you could point to to suggest that any of the things you suggest is done with more money ever actually happens. We have very concrete real evidence that all of that 'more money' goes into financial services companies, and all gains go back into the financial services industry. Companies hire workers when they need more money, not when they have an excess. Workers generate profit for companies, they're not a sink. Once those companies can purchase robots rather than workers, if it's profitable they will do that of course (and I would rather be starving to death in the street than doing a job that a cheap machine could be doing better, I've seen some people suggest we reserve some low skill jobs for humans and I think that sounds like the worst and cruelest torture imaginable). The gains they make from those robots will not be used to hire new workers, it would obviously be better spent purchasing new robots and if that would serve to reduce demand for their products from oversaturating the market, they will send the money to the financial services industry.
Every choice has positives and negatives, however. Robots are good at some things, and bad at others. This could lead to an interesting clash. Robots, modular manufacturing, etc is very good at producing large numbers of identical copies of a product. There is no guarantee that society will continue to value this over production of a wide variety instead. If every production run is in numbers of dozens rather than millions, the advantages of automation start to falter. It's also important not to underestimate the power of human brain flaws. One of the flaws of the human brain is 'essentialism'. It's a complicated concept, but boils down to people might see robot-produced goods as not as 'rich' as human-produced goods, even when they are identical. Essentialism is the belief that an objects history is somehow attached to it. And if society decides that an object which has a human hand in it is far more valuable than a 'soulless' robot-produced good... whoops. That could seriously limit what products robots are actually able to bring value to. Human sense of value is what rules the economy, not objective value.
There were many tradeoffs made back when production centralized into factories and big companies. All of those tradeoffs are up for renegotiation, and those who simply assume the choices made 100+ years ago are going to stand will be, I think, sorely disappointed.
The problem is that we all need a place to live, want it to be nice and there is a limited supply of real estate. In the UK anyway, a large amount of our free income is devoted to bidding as much as we can afford for nice houses. Since everyone is bidding For the same pool of housing, we end up working as long as we can to out compete each other. We’re doing it to ourselves.
We have done it to ourselves. Women enter the workplace, up go house prices. Financial deregulation, up go house prices. Low interest rates, up go house prices. Restrictive planning regulations, up go house prices. QE, up go house prices. Help to buy, up go house prices.
I mean that those two sentences, repeated over and over in the news weekly, don’t make the masses stop and think is a sign that the media machine is doing its job.
True but I would say the bigger problem is strict anti-building regulations in these areas where demand is high. Why aren't we building 20+ story tall buildings and massive underground structures?
Many people move to the most expensive cities in pursuit of jobs. This seems like a problem with load balancing?
We need better incentives to encourage large organizations to expand in smaller cities with room to grow, while discouraging job growth in larger cities, and then people will move to less expensive places for the jobs.
this has to do with globalized movement and brain drain towards major metropolises from everywhere around the world rather than with robotization of anything.
I'm not sure that's true, I watched a presentation by Jeffrey Sachs a while back that showed working hours have been decreasing for a long time across the developed world.
I suspect what has happened is that change hasn't been spread out evenly. We spend more time in education so start work later. We retire earlier either through choice or otherwise. Hourly workers tend to work less than they would like and salaried workers work more.
What perspective are you viewing it from? The perspective of the worker is not the one that thus far funds or initiates any robot-driven initiatives, so I'm not sure why the effect on them would be used to judge success. For those who did fund and initiate the move toward robotics, it has been extremely successful, driving large amounts of money away directly into the hands of executives and shareholders (who are primarily financial services companies). As far as whether the moves will be undone or whether they will cease to be increased going forward, it's that perspective that it is necessary to take.
One factor that so many analysts across the spectrum fail to account for is something that I think is going to lead to a great surprise for a lot of people. All of this technology, all of the data platforms, robots, etc.... it's CHEAP. Everyone focuses so closely on how these technologies will affect the factory floor, the centralized gigaproduction facility, they completely miss the fact that the distributed back yard shed operation can outcompete them. It doesn't have the overhead and the limitations of those centralized factories. Advancements in distribution, shipping, and logistics are available to everyone for a pittance. Services like Uber at their heart provide nothing but some server space for some software. That 'server space' can have its necessity disappear into the ether with distributed computing platforms simply aggregating the compute of its users. Not something currently regularly done, but there is no technical impediment to such a thing. And software like that has a tendency to just pop out of nowhere some weekend and change the landscape immediately. The software part could be handled like any FOSS project. Uber is a center in a system that doesn't need a center. (I'm not saying centers don't have advantages, I am saying that their presence is not an iron clad 100% absolute necessity for the system to work.)
At the same time companies have been abandoning every bit of value they ever offered to workers since the 1980s, welching on pensions they tricked people into working for them with, adopting wage stagnation so that workers have to jump ship every few years to remain solvent, etc... technology has been making it such that those displaced workers could pretty easily outcompete the companies that ejected them. The companies are still restrained by Baby Boomer execs who refuse to leave and refuse to abandon the management practices drilled into them in relation to manufacturing and retail business. They're blind to the outrageous overhead and inefficiencies of their offices and practices because, as far as they see it, 'this is how it has always been done.'
It is impossible to predict when any of these things will come home to roost. It is also nearly impossible to explain just how large of a change we are in for. It is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution which created central factories in the first place. That led to urban centers exploding in population. It changed how we built houses. It changed the moral norms of society. It changed the food we ate. It changed how we married. It changed family structure. It is not much of an exaggeration to say it changed everything. And now it's fundamental tenets (that production must be centralized, that distribution networks must be built, that large numbers of relatively low education physical laborers capable of extended periods of mindless repetitive actions are necessary, etc) no longer hold. It will probably take a long time. And it will unfortunately probably come with a great deal of conflict and bloodshed. That's just based on how history has gone in the past with changes of this scale.
In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken.
Nothing else is an issue at all. Everything else is essentially trivially cheap (excepting cases of disability).
A year's worth of food costs about as much as 1 month's rent on a small flat in London. (Many people increase their food expenditure, but the basics are doable for that).
Even in the northern towns 100K for a house is fairly standard. That's a ridiculous amount of money - a home does not take 5 man-years to produce any more.
The only thing anyone works for is rent, indirect rent (e.g. paying 5 quid a pint because of the pub's rent and the pub workers' rent and so on), their mortgage, whatever.
> In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken.
Yes, and this seems true in basically all the similar-ish countries too. (It's 100% broken in the the vast majority of the US and Canada. It looks like it's mostly broken in Australia and New Zealand too)
Wouldn’t it be true for any capitalistic economy. Owners will extract as much rent as the market will bear, and employees will pay as little as the market accepts. It seems only natural that those two forces would converge on having rent correlate strongly with wages
The situation in SE England in which 95%+ of those under, say, age 30 or so, will never own a home (and are currently in little rooms sharing with others if they're not partnered off) is not something that is a result of some sort of economic formula.
Individuals still have to decide that it's better than their alternatives (e.g. lower cost towns, rural living, staying with parents, emigrating, ...).
Hyperbole. Developed economies don’t have a “996” policy like China does, and even China will dial that back once the average standard of living rises sufficiently. The US had ridiculously harsh labor conditions in the first “gilded age” (long work hours, difficult and dangerous labor tasks, company towns that paid in scrips and charged high rates for company accommodations, etc).
“The robot economy” allowed each WhatsApp developer the power to supply 18million users each with their service[1]. It’s not that we are working more to accomplish the same amount of work. Total productivity of the economy compounds as innovation and specialization increase.
Also, from what I can tell, those who are highly productive seem to have phenotypes that drive them to constantly work at a high level (curiosity, grit, drive, etc). Those who don’t have these things are likely to be unable to find decent jobs, keeping them forever working for stagnant hourly wages while resentlful that they can’t find a rung to a ladder that leads higher.
I am pessimistic but still a little hopeful that we will develop good policy for moving into the future. Getting some form of fare distribution of the technology/ productivity boon will be difficult. I like the article’s mention of Soshana Zuboff’s “Surveillance Capitalism” which I recommend but if you are short of reading time you can get her message in digest form on YouTube.
Even though the documentary “Living in the Future’s Past” is about the environment, it hits great points on how our society is in need of a reset, that we need to all decide what we can do to help society and have a net positive effect on the world. Jeff Bridges and his friends did a fantastic job producing this documentary, I strongly recommend it.
Yet another stupid article as many not talking about progress and future but only about money, money, money. Those kind of people were laughing about cars being slower than horses.
Automatisation should be priority of everybody unless people want keep being slaves and keep shitty jobs that they don't like, keep living poor and hungry.
Job is demand - if demand for something will be satisfied that doesn't mean everyone will take it and don't want anything else.
The best basic example I know is bread.
Someone want white bread, someone dark bread other ones want sweet bread.
I have a small experiment for You reading this shitty comment, try to find exact number of how many types of bread people are buying and making around the world right now. Can you do that because I can't (Why ? One word - entropy).
We are people for god sake not animals so maybe it's time to start behave like one, don't you think ?
Note that the author is an Italian scientist/researcher that has been working as Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona. [0]
77 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadWhat’s the basis for your comment?
Why do you believe that a system which doesn’t work — and destroys the countries it’s implemented in — will suddenly work, but none of the models which have worked successfully will continue to work?
socialism is already everywhere. communism on the other hand failed on all fronts.
The economic system in communist countries was generally called socialism, while 'communism' is used for the political movement and its ideology.
Naming things is important and all, but I'd prefer to evaluate policies on their individual merits instead of simply classifying them as X is part of Y and total Y is bad therefore X is also bad.
Are worker co-ops bad just because they are socialist? Is it bad to regulate a company dumping chemicals in your drinking water because it saves them a few bucks?
On the flipside, is it bad to have reasonable pay discrepancies (not 300x, but maybe 8x) which markets naturally produce?
I think as a general rule we should strive to avoid concentrations of power in the hands of the few. Which has been a side effect of both capitalism and communism.
Humanity evolution is clearly follows the trajectory with well known "strong points" (in math sense) Slaveholding, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, …
Point (in math sense) has no dimensions so you cannot say "we are exactly at Capitalism now" but rather somewhere on that trajectory between strong points. Closer to Capitalism, closer to Socialism are the right terms I think.
It is obvious that, let's say, Europe now is somewhere in between of Capitalism and Socialism. And in 1900 it was around pure Capitalism point, in some countries between Feudalism and Capitalism.
And "Robots economy" will move us closer to Communism where 95% of population will not participate in goods/services production activities. So that will be that famous "... to each according to his needs" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
If you have private ownership of production you are still capitalist. All the Nordic countries do this. They are not so much socialists as welfare states. If we must have a welfare state, I would much prefer the "citizens as shareholders of the country" model with a basic income, rather than the overweening paternalism of current welfare states.
Did they have a house though?
i personally think there will no difference. automation has been happening for at least two centuries, and so far it’s been a major success on all fronts.
i think this fear of automation just shows how conservative people really are.
If you mean that when majority of work is free, people simply by existing will produce enough value for other people to deserve UBI large enough to live(1), then yes, but it is not a system that is called socialism today.
(1) the value for other people will be produced simply by increasing the likelihood of new science and art being created, so like investors are happy to waste lots of money to get one really successful startup, people as a whole would be happy to waste lots of money on UBI to many people, to get some really talented scientists.
This is only true in some kind of socialism, counterexample: mutalism.
"social ownership of the means of production"
Social ownership: can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.
Ref: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
The problem with all of this, is that if someone works better than others, and creates his own "means of production" there must exist someone else who will seize it and distribute it to the collective, otherwise the means will again concentrate at the hands of lucky or more hardworking people.
In some cases whole population of a country may behave as a single group. Let's say USSR at 1941 was clearly one single group focused on "do everything for the victory".
As of the humanity... Global warming and other global threats will group us all.
That's a very good example of a case where people were not acting as a single group at all. Most of the soldiers were simply leaving everything and retreating, because at first they were not sure if Hitler was really worse than Stalin (http://www.solonin.org/en), groups of people were joining with German army sometimes hoping to get rid of soviets and sometimes because wanting to kill neighbours (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera), food was being captured from all the areas that potentially could end up under German control, which ended up causing the famine in Leningrad. So even if from afar it looks like a single group, it was much more complex and turbulent close up.
But nowadays we should have taken another step (4x7?). Millenials are the first generation living worst than their parents, inequality increases and wealth and work are not well balanced.
Why? Because capitalism has won and socialism is not watched as an alternative.
(Note: this reasoning of past progress doesn’t apply to the US)
Is that so far from Walmart?
It's a fact that we're witnessing the concentration of capital into the hands of fewer and fewer. You can see that by looking at what the top 1%, 0.1% own compared to the bottom 80%, 50% etc.
It's also a fact that the bottom 60+% rely on work to get their needs met, to sustain their lives.
So it only follows that should the rate of automation explode, devaluing the work that currently sustains a huge portion of the population, we've got a huge problem on our hands, making the system unsustainable.
But we're also seeing governments, especially in northern Europe, employing taxation policies that are in a way trying to prevent this growing inequality. And in fact, the level of inequality of a nation has been correlated with a lot of undesirable problems. UBI is a natural extension of that.
There was a time when you barely had enough time or energy to ensure survival. Doing less was an obvious optimization. But now I think we're pushing the system on the opposite limits. Doing nothing is also detrimental.
In any case there is so much work in science, that we should be happy for every human that is freed from physical work.
It's not about being free from physical work, it's about choosing what problems to work on -- before other problems choose you! In most cases people who work a job are having their problems chosen for them. So they are still, in this sense, slaves.
And this is itself a problem. We haven't found the solution yet. But we may...
When the number of jobs available to the labor pool is reduced by automation, the market value of human labor goes down, but the amount of work humans are required to do to survive remains the same, or often it increases to take advantage of the efficiencies create by automation. Obviously, people will tend to wind up either unemployed, because there are fewer jobs, or working harder for less money, because their time is worth less.
This isn't a failure of the system, this is the system working as intended.
Do we need to pass through that kind of trouble in order to pay attention ?
And the dream has a simple origin, we knew birds could fly, so why couldn't humans?
The Industrial Revolution posed a similar question, if machines can do some kinds of work, why can't they do every kind of work?
A cynic would ask, what happens to the workers when there's no work? But I suspect the scarier question is, what happens when there's not enough work for everyone to be employed?
And modern transportation creates another question of what happens when the remaining work is happening elsewhere?
2. After a new technology is invented, people who do the work the old way continue until it's no longer feasible.
3. When it becomes infeasible, they have to find other lines of work, rely on family and friends, or some combination thereof. We'll call this displacement.
4. Here are 2 ways to measure displacement: speed* (time to render old work infeasible) and size (number of displaced people).
5. Speculation: the time after something like the cotton gin is invented, displaced workers increase. But over all it's speed* is slower.
6. Speculation: increasing centralization has increased the scale at which automating solutions displace people. Other advances in technology possibly increase the number of innovations. Advances in logistics and information increases their speed*.
7. Speculation: The automation fallacy may apply, but there are still an increasing number of displaced workers. So that the nature of this scale is nonlinear. It increases drastically with centralization, speed, and generalizability.
That's the real interesting question. What will they be ?
Some i can see:
- more machines -> more machine maintenance and setup. But it'll be under the guidance of machines(AR, AI), So it won't require expertise, it would only require a medium or low amount of "good hands" skills. So the pay won't be good.
- i would have said more marketing/selling, but given the amount of marketing and tiny niches that exist today, i'm not sure that's the case. And in any case AI will be better than us at that.
If there would be more money( a big if, maybe we're heading for a different equilibrium):
- more money -> more goods being bought -> more jobs on the manufacturing/retail/supply-chain which mostly will be machine maintenance etc.
- more money -> more human based services being bought(basically selling good interpersonal skills, and care).
- more money -> more/better healthcare
- more money -> more travel, hospitality ?
Anybody got other ideas?
Every choice has positives and negatives, however. Robots are good at some things, and bad at others. This could lead to an interesting clash. Robots, modular manufacturing, etc is very good at producing large numbers of identical copies of a product. There is no guarantee that society will continue to value this over production of a wide variety instead. If every production run is in numbers of dozens rather than millions, the advantages of automation start to falter. It's also important not to underestimate the power of human brain flaws. One of the flaws of the human brain is 'essentialism'. It's a complicated concept, but boils down to people might see robot-produced goods as not as 'rich' as human-produced goods, even when they are identical. Essentialism is the belief that an objects history is somehow attached to it. And if society decides that an object which has a human hand in it is far more valuable than a 'soulless' robot-produced good... whoops. That could seriously limit what products robots are actually able to bring value to. Human sense of value is what rules the economy, not objective value.
There were many tradeoffs made back when production centralized into factories and big companies. All of those tradeoffs are up for renegotiation, and those who simply assume the choices made 100+ years ago are going to stand will be, I think, sorely disappointed.
It seems we are addicted to it.
Inequality is up!
I mean that those two sentences, repeated over and over in the news weekly, don’t make the masses stop and think is a sign that the media machine is doing its job.
We need better incentives to encourage large organizations to expand in smaller cities with room to grow, while discouraging job growth in larger cities, and then people will move to less expensive places for the jobs.
I suspect what has happened is that change hasn't been spread out evenly. We spend more time in education so start work later. We retire earlier either through choice or otherwise. Hourly workers tend to work less than they would like and salaried workers work more.
One factor that so many analysts across the spectrum fail to account for is something that I think is going to lead to a great surprise for a lot of people. All of this technology, all of the data platforms, robots, etc.... it's CHEAP. Everyone focuses so closely on how these technologies will affect the factory floor, the centralized gigaproduction facility, they completely miss the fact that the distributed back yard shed operation can outcompete them. It doesn't have the overhead and the limitations of those centralized factories. Advancements in distribution, shipping, and logistics are available to everyone for a pittance. Services like Uber at their heart provide nothing but some server space for some software. That 'server space' can have its necessity disappear into the ether with distributed computing platforms simply aggregating the compute of its users. Not something currently regularly done, but there is no technical impediment to such a thing. And software like that has a tendency to just pop out of nowhere some weekend and change the landscape immediately. The software part could be handled like any FOSS project. Uber is a center in a system that doesn't need a center. (I'm not saying centers don't have advantages, I am saying that their presence is not an iron clad 100% absolute necessity for the system to work.)
At the same time companies have been abandoning every bit of value they ever offered to workers since the 1980s, welching on pensions they tricked people into working for them with, adopting wage stagnation so that workers have to jump ship every few years to remain solvent, etc... technology has been making it such that those displaced workers could pretty easily outcompete the companies that ejected them. The companies are still restrained by Baby Boomer execs who refuse to leave and refuse to abandon the management practices drilled into them in relation to manufacturing and retail business. They're blind to the outrageous overhead and inefficiencies of their offices and practices because, as far as they see it, 'this is how it has always been done.'
It is impossible to predict when any of these things will come home to roost. It is also nearly impossible to explain just how large of a change we are in for. It is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution which created central factories in the first place. That led to urban centers exploding in population. It changed how we built houses. It changed the moral norms of society. It changed the food we ate. It changed how we married. It changed family structure. It is not much of an exaggeration to say it changed everything. And now it's fundamental tenets (that production must be centralized, that distribution networks must be built, that large numbers of relatively low education physical laborers capable of extended periods of mindless repetitive actions are necessary, etc) no longer hold. It will probably take a long time. And it will unfortunately probably come with a great deal of conflict and bloodshed. That's just based on how history has gone in the past with changes of this scale.
Nothing else is an issue at all. Everything else is essentially trivially cheap (excepting cases of disability).
A year's worth of food costs about as much as 1 month's rent on a small flat in London. (Many people increase their food expenditure, but the basics are doable for that).
Even in the northern towns 100K for a house is fairly standard. That's a ridiculous amount of money - a home does not take 5 man-years to produce any more.
The only thing anyone works for is rent, indirect rent (e.g. paying 5 quid a pint because of the pub's rent and the pub workers' rent and so on), their mortgage, whatever.
Yes, and this seems true in basically all the similar-ish countries too. (It's 100% broken in the the vast majority of the US and Canada. It looks like it's mostly broken in Australia and New Zealand too)
The situation in SE England in which 95%+ of those under, say, age 30 or so, will never own a home (and are currently in little rooms sharing with others if they're not partnered off) is not something that is a result of some sort of economic formula.
Individuals still have to decide that it's better than their alternatives (e.g. lower cost towns, rural living, staying with parents, emigrating, ...).
Beyond that there's also political action.
Are they?
“The robot economy” allowed each WhatsApp developer the power to supply 18million users each with their service[1]. It’s not that we are working more to accomplish the same amount of work. Total productivity of the economy compounds as innovation and specialization increase.
Also, from what I can tell, those who are highly productive seem to have phenotypes that drive them to constantly work at a high level (curiosity, grit, drive, etc). Those who don’t have these things are likely to be unable to find decent jobs, keeping them forever working for stagnant hourly wages while resentlful that they can’t find a rung to a ladder that leads higher.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...
Even though the documentary “Living in the Future’s Past” is about the environment, it hits great points on how our society is in need of a reset, that we need to all decide what we can do to help society and have a net positive effect on the world. Jeff Bridges and his friends did a fantastic job producing this documentary, I strongly recommend it.
Automatisation should be priority of everybody unless people want keep being slaves and keep shitty jobs that they don't like, keep living poor and hungry.
Job is demand - if demand for something will be satisfied that doesn't mean everyone will take it and don't want anything else.
The best basic example I know is bread. Someone want white bread, someone dark bread other ones want sweet bread.
I have a small experiment for You reading this shitty comment, try to find exact number of how many types of bread people are buying and making around the world right now. Can you do that because I can't (Why ? One word - entropy).
We are people for god sake not animals so maybe it's time to start behave like one, don't you think ?
(and why is this a pdf? it's not even published
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Bria