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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#431

Post by trolleski »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #421
malfist wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "they" in your story?

Probably referring to those with vast amounts of power and wealth at their disposal. There isn't some vast conspiracy. But generally it takes a certain kind of person to crave that type of wealth and power. So they tend to all pull in the same direction to keep and build upon said wealth/power. Thus can be viewed as collectively working towards the same nefarious state of things.

Yes, but sometimes they actually cooperate and coordinate, like we saw in the Epstein files.

And the unpredictability actually has a name and it is "flooding the zone".

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#432

Post by doctorwho42 »

andyferris wrote: post #387
dominicrose wrote: post #320

It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high. A leap of faith is req…

It always required a leap of faith - that’s the point of life, getting married and having kids. Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if tha…

Someone in my career in the 1950's... In a heart beat, even if I didn't know what was coming next.

High taxes lead to reinvestment.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#433

Post by cbondurant »

ironic, given the title, that I can't read this article on my main desktop, because cloudflare's bot detection has had me as a false positive for years now. I'm just forever stuck on the cloudflare captcha.

No space for this human here, I guess.

Edit after reading through this on a seperate device that hasn't been banned from most of cloudflare: I think this guy is vastly underestimating the amount of humans that are still in the production loop of almost every supply chain.

Consider the humble through-hole LED. A product that surely has reached near the absolute peak of production line optimization, being an almost purely fungible product who's form factor will never change. They are still manually put together by humans. A sheet of semiconductor diodes is separated with a manually operated machine for human access. the prongs are placed into a jig by hand, so that a semi-automated machine can place each diode onto the correct leg. Then the jig is placed, again by hand, into position for the injection molded plastic dome.

It's not just one long automated pipeline that has a couple of hoppers for raw materials at one end and finished LEDs at the other. real human beings are still involved at every step of the process. If we can't achieve end-to-end automation for something as dead simple as the humble through-hole LED, after almost 50 years of process improvement? Technology will never fully remove the human from the economy.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#434

Post by doctorwho42 »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #79

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization. This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everyw…

Who owns the machines and their output?

I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be great if we didn't have to work to survive and thrive. What they are saying is, based on current trends, we are more heading for one of those scifi dystopias than star trek.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#435

Post by nmcfarl »

oersted wrote: post #377
kakacik wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary. There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids. P…

Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis. I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of…

I really think this depends on the job. As soon as I read your initial comment, I thought about locums in medicine, people who float for as little as a weekend at a time, and as a little as once a quarter at any particular hospital. And the entire hospital industry has been built around them at least in the western United States. They’re clearly contributing something.

I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#436

Post by mothballed »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #430
bluGill wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.

Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning? I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.

Everything about being a male parent was far less precarious, and being a female parent was less precarious after childbirth. There was literally basically no liability if the children died, and not only that, the people around you would likely understand and sympathize with you. You could just make a best effort and if you failed, chalk it up to bad luck and try again. And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended. That's a lot more inviting to having children than the current status quo.

Society today still doesn't really do dick to help parents but not only that they've built unprecedented apparatus around jailing, ridiculing, condemning, and harassing parents for any perceived weaknesses in their strategy including failing to foresee their financial situation decades into the future.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#437

Post by trevithick »

mothballed wrote: post #406
lqet wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the populatio…

A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one piece of wood at a time with cash. I bought a piece of shit car with cash. I've never used debt, I just got all the things I have by buying shit cars and shit land and slowly slowly making things better until I have nice things. For much of the youth, this is i…

I'm glad you addressed that your house-building strategy isn't feasible almost anywhere. There was an interesting article posted to HN on this topic a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470400

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#438

Post by monerochan »

bluGill wrote: post #417
captainbland wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The masses work because they want to consume For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs. This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of li…

They choose to live on part time income. You can have roommates which greatly reduces your cost of housing. You can eat "steak and lobster", or "rice and beans". Not everyone buys streaming subscriptions, and not just the Amish are doing without. I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.

[dead]

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#439

Post by sosomoxie »

bediger4000 wrote: post #228
sosomoxie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.

LLM AI won't give them a cancer cure, guaranteed.

They believe it will, which is why they are acting the way they are.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#440

Post by throw0101c »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #430
bluGill wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.

Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning? I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.

> I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation.

Perhaps one was/is sometimes a stretch, but starvation and famine were a thing:

> Over two million people died in two famines in France between 1693 and 1710. Both famines were made worse by ongoing wars.[127]

> As late as the 1690s, Scotland experienced famine which reduced the population of parts of Scotland by at least 15%.[128]

> The Great Famine of 1695–1697 may have killed a third of the Finnish population.[129] and roughly 10% of Norway's population.[130]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#17th_century

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695–1697

But even a single year is not unreasonable:

> The Great Famine, which lasted from 1770 until 1771, killed about one tenth of Czech lands' population, or 250,000 inhabitants, and radicalised countrysides leading to peasant uprisings.[135]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#18th_century

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famines_in_Czech_lands

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