Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#2[deleted]
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#3And then, in the next 100 or 200 years, a geomagnetic storm destroys all electrical systems and no one will know how to perform basic jobs because we delegated them to robots.. I know, a dystopian vision, but still possible :)
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#4The question that always occurs to me is, if most people are to be jobless, then who can afford all the products and services provided by the robots?
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#5Once again sethf hits the nail on the head. The response is entirely up to us.
I'm not personally optimistic: this country has a deeply held Puritanical work ethic, and even if we get past that we have a real nasty habit of not liking to give any government benefits to "those people".
But if we can get past that...
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#6The question that always occurs to me is, if most people are to be jobless, then who can afford all the products and services provided by the robots?
The question is: who needs the jobless people?
http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...
Table 1
U.S. Equine Population During
Mechanization of Agriculture and Transportation
Year Number of Horses and Mules
1900 21,531,635
1905 22,077,000
1910 24,042,882
1915 26,493,000
1920 25,199,552
1925 22,081,520
1930 18,885,856
1935 16,676,000
1940 13,931,531
1945 11,629,000
1950 7,604,000
1955 4,309,000
1960 3,089,000Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#7Whenever I see the "positive" prognostications, I wonder if the author is intentionally spinning a tale for their own ultimate benefit, or if I'm just way too cynical. I don't see any way that the advance of automation can do anything but destroy any desirable concept of society. To me, the future inexorably looks like Detroit or Nairobi, not like Tokyo or Singapore.
Education is a red herring. Most people (and I'd include myself in this) are simply not mentally capable enough to be trained to outperform automation in any task automation can perform. More education will not rescue us.
The future I see is, like Asimov's "Solaria". In that world, what purpose does a laborer have? What strength could even rebels have? When the "top" of society controls machines that will produce, fix, and fight, then they are completely insulated and the majority of humanity is disposable.
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#8The question that always occurs to me is, if most people are to be jobless, then who can afford all the products and services provided by the robots?
Well, they could always start trading with each other - cutting us slow, dim-witted, lumps of meat of the system entirely - Charlie Stross gave a view of that with the Vile Offspring from Accelerando:
Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
Personally, I'm hoping that in the long term we end up with something like a technologically plausible version of something like the Culture (i.e. the Culture's combination of AI and biologicals existing in harmony), or at least the ending of Elysium.
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#9The question that always occurs to me is, if most people are to be jobless, then who can afford all the products and services provided by the robots?
[deleted]
Re: Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split
#10The question that always occurs to me is, if most people are to be jobless, then who can afford all the products and services provided by the robots?
I am not sure this is an helpful response but you have plenty of countries where a small oligarchy controls an enormous share of the GDP and most of the population is dirt poor. I can't remember the reference offhand but there was an African country where the personal budget of the head of state was something like 20 or 30% of the total state expenditure.
edit : I think it was Malawi under Banda.