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

theguardian.com

31–40 of 64 posts

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

#31
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?

Well at this point "labour" is free. The only logical solution I see at this point is basically communism. The only work left will be politics/ethics. But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.

No the labor isn't free, it's extremely expensive: R&D, installation, maintenance, replacement, operation, electricity, shelter, transport, insurance.

There will never be a scenario under any circumstances in which labor is free. It rests on a principle that guarantees that: energy will never be free, nor will all the other requirements such as materials, buildings, et al.

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

#32

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…

>Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax";

Well, we have a lot of "robots" in the house. We can listen to music via Compact Disc robots or mp3 iPod robots instead of employing human musicians to play live music. For example, composer Haydn's job was the "on call" music director for the family estate.

We also run take our C++ or Java code and let our personal desktop robots of file systems submit them to compilers to parse and execute the source code. The acts of "cl helloworld.cpp" or "javac hellowold.java" puts many human punch card operators out of work.

The elevator robots with automatic safety doors and algorithmic braking systems replacing elevator attendants manually closing the gates and guiding the elevator to the right floor. Robot freon compressors replacing ice delivery men. Etc,

I don't think people realize the oppressive nature of all the robot taxes we'd pay unless we listed every "robot" we interact with that replaced human jobs.

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

#34

"Will robots cause unemployment or create new types of jobs and increased leisure time for humans?" Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment amon…

Yup, typical dramatic headline technique.

Anyway, consumer's hunger increases with productivity increases. In 20 years, when even more robots than we already have are deployed, we will all want more complex, highly integrated stuff, requiring the same amount of employment to produce.

Anyone who doesn't believe me, think back to the days before interchangeable parts. We could live that way today and have lots of free time, but we apparently don't choose to. We have higher standards, want more diverse food, more complex entertainment, cleaner everything, fancier, more decorated houses, vehicles with more features.

Additional robots - on top of the ones of which we already have lots of - won't take away jobs, they will deliver us finer consumer items and health standards.

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

#35

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…

Funneling more money to a corrupt and incompetent government is not a solution, it is a horror show.

Ignore the ludicrous laws that conspire to hurt all but the largest corporate-fascist entities.

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

#36

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…

This is false. The Apple money is invested in other companies.

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

#37
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?

At some point, we will have to accept that a society based on the assumption that everyone should find a full-time job just doesn't make sense anymore. In Europe this is starting to become obvious, as we have high structural unemployment (very high in some countries) in spite of the jobs we keep just for the sake of it. Jobs like gas station operators or supermarket cashiers are mostly unnecessary and just kept because people boycott machines while there is unemployment, telemarketing could probably be banned altogether with everyone being the happier for it if it weren't for the loss of thousands of jobs, etc. This applies even to some intellectually-demanding jobs (not all): speaking against my own interest as professor in a small university, I often wonder if all the teaching we do is necessary when any of my neighbors with a PC is a couple of clicks away from lectures by the top professors at MIT.

At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this.

I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.

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

#38

"Will robots cause unemployment or create new types of jobs and increased leisure time for humans?" Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment amon…

We exported the low standard of living to agriculture dependent economies in the third world and keep them there with free trade agreements.

EDIT: I'm not some ranting nut job

http://www.freetradedoesntwork.com/

IAN FLETCHER: Libertarians simply don't know their history. Take out a $10 bill and have a look at the portrait on it. Alexander Hamilton, founding father and intellectual architect of American capitalism, was a protectionist, and protectionism was American policy from Independence until after WWII.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/free-trade-does...

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

#39
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?

At some point, we will have to accept that a society based on the assumption that everyone should find a full-time job just doesn't make sense anymore. In Europe this is starting to become obvious, as we have high structural unemployment (very high in some countries) in spite of the jobs we keep just for the sake of it. Jobs like gas station operators or supermarket cashiers are mostly unnecessary and just kept becau…

Or ... we let a considerable portion of humans starve to death and reduce the population

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

#40
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…

We have a similar idea to those communes already, they are called "businesses".
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