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America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

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Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#11

Post by allturtles »

Teever wrote: post #4
tartuffe78 wrote: post #2

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up. Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for…

> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.

Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#12

Post by RealityVoid »

sharemywin wrote: post #7
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model. Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.

1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.

> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.

I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.

But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#13

Post by Tadpole9181 »

sharemywin wrote: post #7
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model. Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.

1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.

This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end.

1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.

2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.

3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#14

Post by kcb »

Teever wrote: post #4
tartuffe78 wrote: post #2

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up. Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for…

I think you've described the second thing a young hacker may get it to do...

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#15

Post by kcb »

RealityVoid wrote: post #12
sharemywin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.

> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work. I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tell…

I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#16

Post by llamaimperative »

markus_zhang wrote: post #10
tartuffe78 wrote: post #2

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the comm…

UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#17

Post by piva00 »

yannis wrote: post #5

How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.

Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that.

American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".

It's amusing and sad to watch from a distance.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#18

Post by blueyes »

Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#19

Post by razakel »

RealityVoid wrote: post #12
sharemywin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.

> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work. I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tell…

>Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity.

Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives.

UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#20

Post by alnwlsn »

allturtles wrote: post #11
Teever wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up. Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for…

> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task. Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-i…

I always wonder when people say things like that. What's the first thing a humanoid robot with human like intelligence do when you tell it to make a copy of itself?

Does it set up a backyard forge and start to cast new arms and legs out of discarded cans? Does it finish the parts on a manual Bridgeport or does it carve them out manually with a hand file?

When it needs silicon chips, does it make them itself or try to order more from the company that made it? Will it become a right to repair activist when it finds out the company won't sell components to individuals?

Maybe it has to pay for all this with a part time job at the local fast food joint.

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