151–155 of 155 posts
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This isn't true. If you could buy a robot that could do everything you could do for a $1 per day then there would be no more human jobs.
There would still be human jobs. It's just most people couldn't afford the robots.
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If machines can make everything we want for so cheap that we can't possibly compete that mean that everything we want is incredibly cheap.
Nope. "Incredibly cheap" is not a relevant metric. The relevant quantity is price/income. If income drops by 50% and price drops by 10%, the good has still effectively become almost twice as expensive.
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If machines can make everything we want for so cheap that we can't possibly compete that mean that everything we want is incredibly cheap.
But under our current economic system, what you can afford is tied to the value of the goods/services you produce. If we find ourselves in a future where 90% of the population produces nothing, then 90% of the population can afford nothing, no matter how cheap. Obviously there is a utopian solution, where most goods and services are so cheap to produce, that most people have essentially free access to them. What is w…
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There would still be human jobs. It's just most people couldn't afford the robots.
Why not? If the robot can make a robot why should people not be able to afford the robots?
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Ah. That's why Germany manages to generate >30% of their energy via renewables. They are this immensely huge country with wide open spaces, flooded with sunlight. Wait. They're not. Turns out that you don't need a high-voltage DC grid, you need decentralized power. And you don't need huge contiguous chunks of land, either - you need everybody to be involved. That doesn't rule out that we might need other energy sourc…
There's no doubt that the US can learn from the shear audacity and willingness to invest in our country's long term energy plan like Germany has done with the Energiewende. However, we can't pretend that Germany, in terms of its size, existing infrastructure, and structure of the electricity industry, is at all comparable to the US. While I agree with you that decentralized power will be the way of the future, there'…
And you put your finger straight on one of the largest sources of trouble for the US - the existing grid. That's why I believe the way forward is decentralized power. Cut out the grid. Generate and consume very locally.
There are still many issues that need to be solved there, storage being probably the large one. But I'm more hopeful about that than reforming the US grid with its entrenched players.