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In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

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Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#131

Post by pygy_ »

marcosdumay wrote: post #128
pygy_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

It's a great question. Without any good answer, just needs some better context. You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression"). Also, unemployed people are not comple…

The human bits are being gradually replaced. First strength, then dexterity, now smarts.

We are still, to some extent driving the demand side of the equation with our various needs (see Maslow's hierarchy), but it looks like finance has become mostly independent, for example.

The "rising tide that lifts all boats" is nice for people rich enough to buy a boat, and with the growing rift between economy and the medium income since 2008, it looks like many will be left to drown while the water rises.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#132

Post by nanistheonlyist »

aaron695 wrote: post #30
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders . Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-…

> slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. What's the negative as a slaveholder again?

The negative is the legacy of obsolete farm equipment clogging up the social welfare system.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#133

Post by blackbagboys »

danmaz74 wrote: post #96
pygy_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

> What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? And what's the incentive for a robot to do anything else? Supposing that future AIs will be based not on deterministic programming, but on some kind of reinforcement learning, it will still be humans who will design the rewards (incentives) - or it will be AIs with rewards designed by humans who will design the rewards of other AIs, and so on.

The problem is not that the robots will refuse to feed the idle meat bags, but that their owners will.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#134

Post by marcosdumay »

averagewall wrote: post #31
mschuster91 wrote: post #5

The consequences for societies that define the status/value of their members based on their employment/job will be disastrous. In, let's say, 20 years robots most likely will have overtaken agriculture, manufacturing and driving - by far the biggest job providers. And I see no movement at all by our politicians to prepare societies for this shift, except a couple countries playing small scale UBI... and the USA actua…

Have there been any societies that use something else for status where life wasn't horrible? I can think of schools and prisons where status comes from made-up reasons that exist only as a way to provide status and have net negative value to the society. I hope there's something besides jobs that can give people purpose while also not being harmful, otherwise we'll create our own harmful status games.

Any society that tries using something not based on utility provided for status fails for obvious reasons. (What may change with robots, by the way.)

But I don't see how your argument has any relation to the GP.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#135

Post by adamnemecek »

hedonistbot wrote: post #111
kevinr wrote: post #8

As is only appropriate, given the word's etymology. > ro·bot (n.) 1923, from English translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave," from Old Slavic orbu-,…

> from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,"... I am not sure if this is correct. In Bulgarian we have almost the same word работник (rabotnik) and it just means "worker". No forced, slave connotations. Also checked with google translate and it doesn't find Czech translation for "robotnik" but it suggests to switch to Polish and translates it to "worker" as in Bulga…

The correct translation is serf/serfdom or corveé.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#136

Post by jsymolon »

aurelianito wrote: post #89
tegeek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a really good short novel Manna [1] that explore two models of Post robotic world. 1. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Well, the 'good' model is quite depressing in my opinion. SPOILER ALERT!!!!! In the end, the protagonist chooses to be just waisting lots of resources just doing something of no value when he could choose to join the people that make all the advances and, with this choice, generating the conditions for more people to not live caged.

> protagonist chooses to be just wasting lots of resources just doing something of no value

In your opinion. Obviously they find it a good value for their resources.

Study history for interesting human actions. Some strive to improve the human condition, most go through life with no wake, and some, are evil and proceed to actively inhibit the human condition.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#137

Post by cobookman »

This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#138

Post by jcranmer »

aaron695 wrote: post #30
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders . Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-…

> slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. What's the negative as a slaveholder again?

As a slaveholder, you're forced to provide all the needs of your slaves. This prevents you from being able to externalize costs to others (e.g., the cost of schooling), and from being able to capitalize on "economies" of scale. There is also a large hidden cost in that maintaining a plantation slave society required virtually the entire free male class to participate in martial civil defense against slave uprisings.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#139

Post by terryf »

syshum wrote: post #36
kevinr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.

Most Self Service Kiosks in stores are not designed for User Experience or Efficiency in mind, that is way the fail They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something. This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout. Now…

Yes, 100% yes - I now only shop at the supermarket that gives you scanners. The system is genius, works like this:

  - swipe loyalty card, get a hand-held scanner
  - walk around the shop, scan items as you put them in your bag
  - when walking out, stick the scanner back into the holder
  - swipe your loyalty card, pay with card, leave
It's unbelievably convenient, mostly because you only have to put items in your bag once, when you're picking them up from the shelf, not twice when you have the usual self-serve kiosks.

Obviously it's trivial to steal items and they randomly sometimes check the bag contents on checkout, but this is extremely rare.

Basically, they're assuming their customers are not aholes. And it works beautifully.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#140

Post by shuntress »

pygy_ wrote: post #27
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders . Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-…

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

We move on to harder problems.

I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist.

There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.

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