31–40 of 119 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There will be few people needed at the apex of the arts, once the best of the best can do the jobs of most everyone else combined. We still need an economic plan for everyone else.
Their amino acids will make an excellent source material for the 3D food printers.
I think this is a real indicator and validation of what the next economy will look like: humans at the apex of the arts, where imagination and craft will be highly valued in the everyday folk worker, and mundane or trivial tasks will be assigned to automatons. We will choose our own employment adventure.
There will be few people needed at the apex of the arts, once the best of the best can do the jobs of most everyone else combined. We still need an economic plan for everyone else.
This is so applicable to our industry. I heard Chuck Moore say once that most microcoded division routines are bad, because it's the first and only time that engineer writes one. He said his tenth division routine was far better than his first. It concerns me that in the rush to build abstraction upon abstraction, we're neglecting the tools and practices that make it possible to work on and improve the fundamental la…
I seem to recall a very old science fiction story about a future where nobody has to go to school. Instead, they play all day until they come of age, at which point a computer programs their mind with all of the expertise needed for whatever profession they'd be best at and would be most useful. The problem turned out to be that, while this is great, the programmed minds couldn't innovate further improvements, and so…
"Profession" by Asimov (1957)
This is a fundamental shift from how many other factories work. In general, the workers are not given enough information to replicate the product. They are shown how to attach a specific sprocket to a widget. The tasks are kept so simple (nothing to do with pleasantness) that no one can learn how the whole device is created or suggest improvements. This model lends to people being replaced by robots because human cap…
There are two kinds of jobs that robots will have a hard time replacing: these sorts of high-skill, creative, intution-and-experience heavy tasks; and low-skill but mechancially awkward tasks.
In both cases, the key to job survival will be that it's something of a niche. Anything remotely generic will be taken over by machines. So for example we'll still see certain kinds of literature generated by humans, but 100% of financial reporting, political reporting and sports reporting will be automated. More sophisticated commentary of the kind that Nate Silver does might last, but the Paul Krugmans and David Brooks of the world will be engineered out in the next decade or so by bots that troll the web for stories and generate canned ideologically-loaded commentary based on a smattering of data sources.
At the other end, jobs like fruit picking will be completely automated because it's a common task that can be implemented with a relatively generic machine, but cleaning houses will remain the domain of humans because houses are such awkward, complex spaces. Once we have a humanoid robot with very good AI that'll change, but I'm a little doubtful about seeing that in the next few decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not clear. Are you advocating for socialism?
Capitalism is a method for distributing scarce resources. Remove the scarcity and you remove the need for capitalism.
I seem to recall a very old science fiction story about a future where nobody has to go to school. Instead, they play all day until they come of age, at which point a computer programs their mind with all of the expertise needed for whatever profession they'd be best at and would be most useful. The problem turned out to be that, while this is great, the programmed minds couldn't innovate further improvements, and so…
[Edit: Looks like it was "Devil On My Back" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_on_My_Back Hope that is the one you are looking for]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not clear. Are you advocating for socialism?
Capitalism is a method for distributing scarce resources. Remove the scarcity and you remove the need for capitalism.
Nor are all alternatives to capitalism socialism. Socialism is also known to have very severe problems in application, particularly how to incentivize socialist managers to behave like capitalist ones in most circumstances, driving innovation and maximizing productivity. Socialist managers have somewhat different contstraints on them from capitalist managers, and nominally different long-term goals, but they are more similar than you might think.
The thing is: we know how to make capitalism work in a range of varieties, from the Scandanavian social democracies to the mess that's Texas. We have never seen a successful system of public ownership of the means of production (which is what socialism is, and nothing else). It has been tried in a variety of places and times, and it has always run up against fundamental problems of managerial incentives and political corruption at levels that make most capitalist political economies look pretty good (which is saying something!)
So looking for non-socialist means of distributing wealth in a society that is unequally post-scarce is a good idea. Today wealth is distributed almost exclusively through paid work, but that is a relatively recent invention. I'm not suggesting a return to feudalism or anything like it, but think we should be willing to consider variations in social order that are at least that large-scale, because the difference between what is coming and industrial capitalism is going to be at least as big as the difference between industrial capitalism and the semi-feudal societies that preceded it in many places.