81–90 of 258 posts
Japan is in a demographic decline. They need all the robots they can get.
China is a deeper decline than Japan too, which will make their geopolitics volatile
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okay, so the lack of robots/supply increases garbage collector wages, which broadly results in wealth distribution vs robots.
Why do you think that making people do what they don't want to do for more money is the most effective way to distribute wealth?
> … the most effective way to distribute wealth?
Nobody said this is a template for every problem, opportunity or other situation in economics.
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It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw) Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job. If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
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Why would the retirees want to be put back to work? Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once? Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task? Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed? There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
Money, money, money, and money. We need it to survive. Until people's basic needs are taken care of for them, they need to do what they can to live.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
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Japan has one of the lowest unemployments on the planet, 2.5%. Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't. As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.
But this guy googled it and apparently there are 18% of Japanese people not working, so obviously their entire society pivoting towards automation is wrong.
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Why not simply pay the homemakers? Why is it so important that everyone produce economic output at the widget factory? Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the val…
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Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.
I don't know about China, but I live in Japan and most konbini I have visited still have real human cashiers.
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It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw) Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job. If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
Only 2% of our efforts as a society go to getting food out of the ground.
The reason to have a job, to own property, to earn and spend money, to reproduce and fight in wars, it seems, is to maintain a valid stake in the whole game lest your masters designate you an undesireable.
For said master the more viable the alternatives to humans become, the more all those excess humans start to look like a liability.
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I agree with the teachers one. Having one lady in charge of educational instruction for that many kids will be looked back upon as barbarism.
So the solution is to have less ladies in charge? Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?
The robots? That's what we're discussing in this thread.