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Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

theguardian.com

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Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#21

Post by IndianAstronaut »

falcolas wrote: post #4
coldcode wrote: post #3

Someone has to program those robots.

Probably not the secretary, accountant or dispatcher whom they replace. And for every programmer created to develop for these devices, there will be 10, 100, even 1,000 desk jobs which will vanish. The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers; the rest will be left to fend for themselves - to find another meaningless job with a tiny wage, so they can live. This, as something of a tangent, is why I suppo…

>The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers;

People like William Shockley had the idea of paying people not to breed further. If our society really does hit a point where we simply don't have enough jo s, maybe his crazy idea is worth considering. Though hopefully without his original racist tinge.

Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#22

Post by Htsthbjig »

miralabs wrote: post #2

if everything gets replaced by bots, how will the economy run given that much of it is because of employees getting paid and in turn spending that money?

Ownership of the robots that do things.

Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave.

No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates.

Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners.

We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.

Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#23

Post by adventured »

maxerickson wrote: post #19
mschuster91 wrote: post #12

Currently, if a company disposes of all of its workers and replaces them by robots (minus a bit of left human staff for administration), the profits end up entirely in the pockets of the owners instead of getting redistributed to the working population. Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits…

Unless it is literally sitting in a vault (it isn't), Apple's cash is being used for stuff. Here's an article about that: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1246081-apple-does-not-have-... I don't really get the idea of a robot tax, why make special rules for one particular type of productivity? Should accountants that use better software also pay higher taxes than less efficient accountants that use simple calculators…

Even if you parked $200 billion in cash in a vault, its removal from circulation for any meaningful amount of time would generate a purchasing power increase for every other dollar holder.

The idea of a robot tax is not a rational one. It's based off of an emotional response to the fear of workers losing jobs and income. It will become a very loud, common argument over the next decade. It rests upon the incorrect notion that productivity gains through automation must inherently result in fewer jobs - when in fact, history has proven the exact opposite to be true (the industrial revolution being the overwhelming proof, but there were prior examples including the agriculture revolution). The most productive economies are always among the wealthiest for the median of people, and come in at the lower quarter of unemployment rankings.

Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#25

Post by jacquesm »

mschuster91 wrote: post #12

Currently, if a company disposes of all of its workers and replaces them by robots (minus a bit of left human staff for administration), the profits end up entirely in the pockets of the owners instead of getting redistributed to the working population. Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits…

By that reasoning we should have been paying a 'robot tax' for a long time (and an outsourcing tax as well).

Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#26

Post by branchless »

mschuster91 wrote: post #12

Currently, if a company disposes of all of its workers and replaces them by robots (minus a bit of left human staff for administration), the profits end up entirely in the pockets of the owners instead of getting redistributed to the working population. Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits…

land value tax.

Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#27

Post by vezzy-fnord »

danso wrote: post #18
salmonellaeater wrote: post #9

> But they note that the boundaries of what counts as routine and non-routine are moving all the time. It was once thought that driving was a skill so complex it couldn’t be automated only to see it turned on its head by Google and others. What happens when programming becomes routine? I expect there will be a very scary moment when we all realize that someone with the right resources has discovered the right learnin…

A lot of programming has become routine. Think of all the programming involved to build even a 1/10th of the functionality of what can be created, literally, in a single command. Yet anyone who is acquainted to programming and web dev would say that running the Rails generator does not obviate the use of programming. And for those who are relatively experienced, this automation is a huge benefit , allowing the progra…

Furthermore, the idea of the "one single algorithm" followed by extinction that the parent poster proposes is overly simplistic.

Assuming the sheer level of interconnectedness and computational ubiquity where every conceivable piece of matter used by humans out there has a bus or exports a remote API for most of these far-fetched AGI apocalypse scenarios to work, it's probably wiser to worry about crippling cyberwar way before AGI is even a consideration.

Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#28

Post by spacefight »

batou wrote: post #10
falcolas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not the secretary, accountant or dispatcher whom they replace. And for every programmer created to develop for these devices, there will be 10, 100, even 1,000 desk jobs which will vanish. The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers; the rest will be left to fend for themselves - to find another meaningless job with a tiny wage, so they can live. This, as something of a tangent, is why I suppo…

This is mainly why I write software...

And you will be replaced by software writing software.

Re: Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

#30

Post by bsbechtel »

jjoonathan wrote: post #17
miralabs wrote: post #2

if everything gets replaced by bots, how will the economy run given that much of it is because of employees getting paid and in turn spending that money?

Most interesting possibility: there will be an inflection point in the way we do production & distribution. The capital costs and inefficiencies of distributed production fall every day (internet to distribute knowledge, ever-advancing low-N fabrication technology) while the disadvantages of centralized production increase (capital is becoming more important, labor less important, meaning the average split of the pro…

There are lots of unknowns left in this world, and lots of exploring left to do. Space, curing disease, and finding additional sources of clean water and energy are all areas that require lots of work and human ingenuity. The challenge is getting people educated to do work in these fields and allocating capital properly. The unskilled labor market was known as the illiterate labor market 100 years ago, and we overcame that challenge, lifting those people up and educating them on how to read. The same can be done again, we just need to figure out how to do so.
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