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No Recent Automation Revolution

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Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#261

Post by mc32 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #251
tharne wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end. The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation. It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when tal…

So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live? There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great? Maybe thats the key differentiator?

Has communism been able to exist outside dictatorships? Or has it been unlucky in that regard and always attracted authoritarianism.

I guess the question would be, if given a chance to choose would people living in those regimes keep the economic system and reform government or would they vote for a different kind of system altogether?

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#262

Post by ameister14 »

6510 wrote: post #160
crispyporkbites wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - and we have enough capacity / productivity now to feed, clothe and shelter the global population. The challenge is really how to distribute resources in a "fair" way whilst incentivizing growth in productivity to keep increasing quality of life for all.

The challenge is to get people to even consider it. In reality it is not hard to pay people to follow courses, pay people to tutor/helpdesk or pay people to be available when they are needed. Imagine a gig economy where 100 employees are on call the year round, ready to jump in when you need them for as long as you need them, complete with training to make this absurd level of scaling possible. We could do a kind of…

That sounds like a terrible job for the temp employees

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#263

Post by ryandrake »

bamboozled wrote: post #236
kaybe wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them. I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

> It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. If I had to guess, you have a job, so it's fun for you to sit here and make these comments from your high horse.

I don't think anyone inherently needs what we think of as jobs. What we actually need is a way to provide for our own and our families' livelihoods, and the currently in-fashion way to do this is with "jobs".

If everyone were magically able to live without jobs, some would still go off and do things productive out of an innate desire to be productive, but many wouldn't.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#264

Post by panzagl »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #107
ashtonkem wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern America we used to have that, but non-job social structures have been hollowed out since the 1970s. Now Americans get a distressingly large percentage of their social interactions via work, making them psychologically dependent on their job too.

Well as I unerstand it, the average American salaried worker spends 10-12 hours a day, at least 5 days a week, at the office. With maybe 10 days holiday a year. How does anyone have time to have an actual life outside work?

We goof off at work.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#265

Post by ClumsyPilot »

tharne wrote: post #233
som33 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one. It is you need a giant violent state to create a culture of sophisticated property rights. AKA capitalism requires a state and legal system, it doesn't exist without one. Things like copyright and Intellectual property are pure man made cultural political fictions, they do not exist in the natural animal kingdom. How is it poss…

Capitalism is the default system that evolves organically when free men and women create things of value and voluntarily exchange them with others. That's not to say it's perfect or 100% fair. That's why you always hear communists and socialists talk about the need for a "revolution". No one ever talks about a capitalist revolution because people don't need to be coerced into voluntarily exchanging goods and services…

This is like a whole giant blob of assumptions and cultural bias. The only thing thats natural is law of the jungle, and the wish of the strongest. Otherwise known as the monarchy.

No need for a capitalist revolution? Did the monarchy give up power willingly? The french revolution, the american revolution, etc.

The only 'freedom' that exists in the natural world is the law of the jungle. You want freedom but want to live in a society? The idea of police and public prosecution, of justice and judges are all recent inventions. Without them, what stops me from taking whatever is yours and assures your freedom. How do you even come into possesion of land, water or any resource in the natural world?

Apparently some people's idea of freedom means they can wonder around the city spreading deadly disease. I would very much like freedom from them coughing in my vicinity and infecting me.

Some people think they have freedom to shoot me in the face if they feel 'scared', while i value freedom from getting shot.

Some people believ they have freedom to pollute the air with sulphur oxide, while i believe they should have to pay the cost it takes to clean up their pollution.

Any freedom for you is an obligation on me, and vice versa.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#266

Post by tengbretson »

m12k wrote: post #254
bamboozled wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. If I had to guess, you have a job, so it's fun for you to sit here and make these comments from your high horse.

I don't see what high horse you are talking about. The point is that having to work in order to survive is not inherently a desirable situation for a human to be in. A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. Historically such a life has been possible for a select few in the aristocracy, and they seem to have…

> A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on.

What you are describing is already a reality for our house pets. I don't find becoming a house pet to some AI/automated machine to be desirable in any way shape or form.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#267

Post by toasterlovin »

m12k wrote: post #227
toasterlovin wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, my take away from the recent US riots is that funding a class of idle people is a really bad idea. Edit: Just to clarify, the class of idle people I’m talking about are all the people on (relatively) generous unemployment as a result of Coronavirus shutdowns.

FWIW my takeaway is that underfunding a whole class of people, especially when it comes to education and healthcare, so they have a much harder time succeeding in the job market and tend to die or go bankrupt if they get sick, is a really bad idea.

I think perhaps you thought I was making a comment about black Americans. I was not. I added some clarification to my comment.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#268

Post by EGreg »

barrkel wrote: post #226
EGreg wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things become more fulfilling when you see everyone else doing them, such as raising kids. There are so many things people could be doing which are not compensated by the market and corporations. “Leaning in and earning $1 instead of 70c” is a meme that corporations use to get more humans to trade quality time with parents and kids for them. [1] Why don’t we ask about “Leaning out and spending more time with our fami…

> You've been CONDITIONED I haven't been conditioned, thanks. Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. We can't live at our current standards with artisan search engines, hand-crafted phones and home-made cars. But the same scale which enables modern living alienates workers from their labour. In most companies, all but a select few at the top have very little agency. They…

Corporations aren’t the best way to organize things. They are good, but have been outcompeted by decentralized systems with small owner-contributors and no ownership of the platform.

LiveJournal vs Wordpress

AOL vs The Web

Britannica vs Wikipedia

I could go on and on. Science, Open Source, Creative Commons allows collaboration instead of a top-down approach, and has been wildly successful.

In the past, we needed centralized manufacturing, centralized telephone operators etc. No longerz

Google “Distributism”

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#269

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

nine_k wrote: post #61
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized. Yea, but does it...you know, work? Why didn't the internet already eliminate most customer service? The common inquiries can easily be found solutions to online. if I'm calling support it's almost always because the resources available don't solv…

It just has become a filter for people with serious enough problems. If you can spend 10-15 minutes navigating voice menus, waiting, and listening to canned messages, likely you need operator's help badly enough. Anyone with a petty problem would have hung up already. And the canned messages also eliminate some of the calls which seek some obvious information. You know, it used to be somehow hard, but not impossible,…

So basically offload the cost to the consumer. Add up the wasted 10-15 minutes and on the whole it likely costs society more.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#270

Post by ClumsyPilot »

mc32 wrote: post #234
som33 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one. It is you need a giant violent state to create a culture of sophisticated property rights. AKA capitalism requires a state and legal system, it doesn't exist without one. Things like copyright and Intellectual property are pure man made cultural political fictions, they do not exist in the natural animal kingdom. How is it poss…

As long as people have to do things with land and resources there has to be a way to enforce use. It’s not like collectivism or communism or anything else allows interlopers to seize things willy nilly. Peasants in Cuba or the Soviet Union couldn’t just squat on land and do as they pleased. The kulaks are a good testament to what happens in those circumstances.

Kulas are not quite the same thing.

Common land used to be a thing, you could graze your animals there, etc. https://www.gov.uk/common-land-village-greens

Today, air and seawater are common resources that are being taken willi nilly and polluted

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