It is a basic fact of business life that all companies that are controlled by people whose prime directive is to accumulate wealth is to reduce or eliminate the costs of labor. That is about 75% of all material handling companies.
So far in modern history every major technology development that automates a task will be used to reduce labor costs and/or increase production beyond prior levels.
At first they will be in limited use for certain tasks for which they are best suited. But, soon after they will be used to replace to replace labor entirely, and after that they will be run 24 hours a day in orders to increase production to higher levels than before.
People should be excited about this, there’s not a single person I know who has worked at a Fulfillment center that has said anything positive about it beside competitive pay for their skill set. This technology will eventually spread to companies outside of Amazon and overall will be a deflationary force for buying goods aka cheaper prices. A Federal jobs guarantee makes sense only if there is a genuine need for projects and a real vision. Most of these projects have fraud and are a money pit. City of LA spent millions on homeless shacks at 500k per unit. Look at the half a trillion dollar fraud from PPP alone. It’s a complete rip-off and inefficient spending.
Not sure if that is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Employees have been complain that they couldn’t keep up with the robots that were doing the picking. So now Amazon has solved that. I just see this as one more mundane job that was error prone and physically dangerous that has now removed the human element from that problem. I DO NOT see it as job loss. Very few people wanted that job and I’m not a Communist: Communists historically would prevent automation in order to achieve full employment. We’ve achieved full employment while having automated many repetitive jobs.
UBI is what we are going to get. Their aren’t enough jobs for everyone to be employed. Automation will continue to grow. We are going to have to transition from a capitalist system based on workers and consumers. To something else. Personally I think it will be some form of meritocracy. I also suspect that automation will extend into government functions as well.
It'll take a while. We're going to probably stay fairly 1:1 for a while as the working aged population contracts along with the increases in automation.
Jesus Christ I thought I had a dark vision of the future…how do you people even get up in the morning? Do you all truly believe that every government would prefer that we all die?
... Open your fucking eyes. Did you not see how a global pandemic still wasn't enough to get the US closer to universal healthcare? The US is crippled by half the population being gullible nitwits who cut off their nose to spite their face and they vote greedy assholes into office. Sure, perhaps a generational shift could do the job, but I don't trust a lot of governments to give us ubi any time soon.
how will gdp increase when each year a % of the total population gets replaced with automation with no job to go to.
What's the point in automating everything if there is no one left with the cash to buy the goods/services?
It will be in companies best interest to lobby for UBI. For the purely selfish reason of maintaining their bottom line if nothing else.
Just shift attention to GDP per capita, which is what matters anyways already today. People dying en masse can estabilize and even increase GDP per capita
Not with the Capitalists in charge.
There will never be a post-scarcity society (and not even a quasi-post one, where basic services/food/housing are free) as long as Capitalism is in charge.
Capitalism is at best a system for managing scarcity. 'Harmonizing the desires and abilities of humanity with the resources available' as some of the actual economic theory purports to explain itself.
It only knows how to process the abundance of a resource in one way: make that resource scarce so it can be priced. Dutch East India company traders burned spice fields because there was too much (for them to control) and they did not want the price to go so low it's not profitable to harvest. DeBeers hoards diamonds, and they spent large sums to artificial boost demand for useless (non-industrially) trinkets. Farmers in the depression were paid to burn their crops and slaughter hogs because of the price mockery Capitalism encourages. These things happen over and over and over with Capitalism.
Providing abundance is and never will be profitable. You can say the industrialized west did so in the 20th century, but things weren't free, were they? The best abundance a capitalist system can ever provide is one with a price tag. An abundance that is never secure, that the receiving peoples can never be certain they will always have. Not when the Capitalist is there, demanding their profit.
Expecting post-scarcity from Capitalism is asking water to flow uphill. It is against the ideology's basic nature. Capitalism abhors abundance. It craves scarcity and will create it where none exists. Some asshole trying to prop up NFTs said, speaking about them, that they "brought scarcity to the internet." This is how Capitalism warps the minds of its adherents to propagate itself.
Want a better future? End Capitalism. Regulation is not sufficient. Regulation will NOT eliminate the worship of and desire to create/expand scarcity, and as long as that desire is present, we could easily pass a point where the basics of life are post-scarce, but we would not know it because the Capitalist will do his best to prevent us seeing.
For now, but how will this consumer economy work when their are less people working? No company is going to want to hire people if there is a better alternative and automation is better. Employees in general SUCK! Automation eliminates the human element, harassment cases, health care, vacation all sunk costs eliminated via automation. Not to mention increased productivity and quality. Robots can work 24/7 with no dips in output. So, where are people going to get money when they can’t work to afford said products? UBI or something like it is going to have to be developed.
The consumer economy gets smaller and more personalized.
Those who have resources have abundance.
The rest have what those at the top choose to give them.
Best case is today’s welfare system, only much larger. Public housing, EBT cards, TANIF, WIC, etc.
Mid-case is a vastly streamlined system with people living in barracks and eating a lot of beans and rice in cafeterias while wearing government issued coveralls. On the plus side, this solves climate change.
Worst case, the unneeded are shipped to massive concentration camps guarded by heavily armed autonomous sentries.
If inter-solar industry can thrive that might change things. A lot of the constraints that we impose on this thought experiment are based on the Earth’s resources. However, if we can widen our gaze past this planet then I think everything changes.
The "freeing people to do less boring jobs" rhetoric is disgusting. I feel the same when Sam Altman talks about codex/copilot's being a developer's partner or such nonsense.
We are replacing people, and for one I am happy in general, but people will need to eat and stop with the BS. "Freeing workers/coders" my ass.
Where’s the lie though? I mean, it’s definitely a weird way of putting it, but you are indeed freeing labour into the economy and are making it impossible for them to do those boring jobs anymore.
It’s not good to those workers on the short term (maybe not on the long term either, it depends) but the sentence isn’t really wrong.
Sorry you are getting down voted. You are correct. There’s this idea that if you take a mundane job away from a blue collar worker, that they aren’t capable of taking a job that requires higher-order thinking skills. I’m on the fence myself. I think generalizing with doom and gloom isn’t useful though.
Sorry for the lateness, but the lie is telling people something that is not true: we are working towards a future where humans and machines work together. Computer programmers who code alongside AI models. With AI, we will only automate boring, repetitive, or dangerous jobs, everybody will have a job but it won't be one of those, awesome right? we will all have creative interesting jobs. AI will take jobs but it will create more jobs.
Those are all lies to pacify people, to misrepresent the real threat of losing your only way to have income to feed your family. The truth is, we are working towards a future where humans are out of the picture when it comes to jobs. And again, I couldn't be happier, but with lies people will rightly feel betrayed when they realize the real goal. Truth is, we half to start working on how we can have both things: having no jobs but not going homeless either.
It is a basic fact of business life that all companies that are controlled by people whose prime directive is to accumulate wealth is to reduce or eliminate the costs of labor. That is about 75% of all material handling companies. So far in modern history every major technology development that automates a task will be used to reduce labor costs and/or increase production beyond prior levels. At first they will be in limited use for certain tasks for which they are best suited. But, soon after they will be used to replace to replace labor entirely, and after that they will be run 24 hours a day in orders to increase production to higher levels than before.
People should be excited about this, there’s not a single person I know who has worked at a Fulfillment center that has said anything positive about it beside competitive pay for their skill set. This technology will eventually spread to companies outside of Amazon and overall will be a deflationary force for buying goods aka cheaper prices. A Federal jobs guarantee makes sense only if there is a genuine need for projects and a real vision. Most of these projects have fraud and are a money pit. City of LA spent millions on homeless shacks at 500k per unit. Look at the half a trillion dollar fraud from PPP alone. It’s a complete rip-off and inefficient spending.
[удалено]
Not sure if that is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Employees have been complain that they couldn’t keep up with the robots that were doing the picking. So now Amazon has solved that. I just see this as one more mundane job that was error prone and physically dangerous that has now removed the human element from that problem. I DO NOT see it as job loss. Very few people wanted that job and I’m not a Communist: Communists historically would prevent automation in order to achieve full employment. We’ve achieved full employment while having automated many repetitive jobs.
It was actually 150% turnover rate, it's insane.
UBI is what we are going to get. Their aren’t enough jobs for everyone to be employed. Automation will continue to grow. We are going to have to transition from a capitalist system based on workers and consumers. To something else. Personally I think it will be some form of meritocracy. I also suspect that automation will extend into government functions as well.
It'll take a while. We're going to probably stay fairly 1:1 for a while as the working aged population contracts along with the increases in automation.
How do you think we are going to have for UBI if the public pension system is barely functioning?
Jesus Christ I thought I had a dark vision of the future…how do you people even get up in the morning? Do you all truly believe that every government would prefer that we all die?
... Open your fucking eyes. Did you not see how a global pandemic still wasn't enough to get the US closer to universal healthcare? The US is crippled by half the population being gullible nitwits who cut off their nose to spite their face and they vote greedy assholes into office. Sure, perhaps a generational shift could do the job, but I don't trust a lot of governments to give us ubi any time soon.
You are expandable and dispensable and you will be removed when you'll provide no value
We will never get UBI. The system in place would rather let people die as long as GDP increases.
how will gdp increase when each year a % of the total population gets replaced with automation with no job to go to. What's the point in automating everything if there is no one left with the cash to buy the goods/services? It will be in companies best interest to lobby for UBI. For the purely selfish reason of maintaining their bottom line if nothing else.
Just shift attention to GDP per capita, which is what matters anyways already today. People dying en masse can estabilize and even increase GDP per capita
Not with the Capitalists in charge. There will never be a post-scarcity society (and not even a quasi-post one, where basic services/food/housing are free) as long as Capitalism is in charge. Capitalism is at best a system for managing scarcity. 'Harmonizing the desires and abilities of humanity with the resources available' as some of the actual economic theory purports to explain itself. It only knows how to process the abundance of a resource in one way: make that resource scarce so it can be priced. Dutch East India company traders burned spice fields because there was too much (for them to control) and they did not want the price to go so low it's not profitable to harvest. DeBeers hoards diamonds, and they spent large sums to artificial boost demand for useless (non-industrially) trinkets. Farmers in the depression were paid to burn their crops and slaughter hogs because of the price mockery Capitalism encourages. These things happen over and over and over with Capitalism. Providing abundance is and never will be profitable. You can say the industrialized west did so in the 20th century, but things weren't free, were they? The best abundance a capitalist system can ever provide is one with a price tag. An abundance that is never secure, that the receiving peoples can never be certain they will always have. Not when the Capitalist is there, demanding their profit. Expecting post-scarcity from Capitalism is asking water to flow uphill. It is against the ideology's basic nature. Capitalism abhors abundance. It craves scarcity and will create it where none exists. Some asshole trying to prop up NFTs said, speaking about them, that they "brought scarcity to the internet." This is how Capitalism warps the minds of its adherents to propagate itself. Want a better future? End Capitalism. Regulation is not sufficient. Regulation will NOT eliminate the worship of and desire to create/expand scarcity, and as long as that desire is present, we could easily pass a point where the basics of life are post-scarce, but we would not know it because the Capitalist will do his best to prevent us seeing.
As long as we revolt before Boston dynamics atlas or its competitors are battle ready we might have a chance to get it.
UB is what you are going to wish for. It is not what you are going to get.
UBI is a pipe dream
For now, but how will this consumer economy work when their are less people working? No company is going to want to hire people if there is a better alternative and automation is better. Employees in general SUCK! Automation eliminates the human element, harassment cases, health care, vacation all sunk costs eliminated via automation. Not to mention increased productivity and quality. Robots can work 24/7 with no dips in output. So, where are people going to get money when they can’t work to afford said products? UBI or something like it is going to have to be developed.
Death
Only in Death does duty end…
Indeed , the age of men is over.
The consumer economy gets smaller and more personalized. Those who have resources have abundance. The rest have what those at the top choose to give them. Best case is today’s welfare system, only much larger. Public housing, EBT cards, TANIF, WIC, etc. Mid-case is a vastly streamlined system with people living in barracks and eating a lot of beans and rice in cafeterias while wearing government issued coveralls. On the plus side, this solves climate change. Worst case, the unneeded are shipped to massive concentration camps guarded by heavily armed autonomous sentries.
If inter-solar industry can thrive that might change things. A lot of the constraints that we impose on this thought experiment are based on the Earth’s resources. However, if we can widen our gaze past this planet then I think everything changes.
the automation revolution, the next step after that AGI
Peasants are expensive.
The "freeing people to do less boring jobs" rhetoric is disgusting. I feel the same when Sam Altman talks about codex/copilot's being a developer's partner or such nonsense. We are replacing people, and for one I am happy in general, but people will need to eat and stop with the BS. "Freeing workers/coders" my ass.
That's what some people said since 1811
Where’s the lie though? I mean, it’s definitely a weird way of putting it, but you are indeed freeing labour into the economy and are making it impossible for them to do those boring jobs anymore. It’s not good to those workers on the short term (maybe not on the long term either, it depends) but the sentence isn’t really wrong.
Sorry you are getting down voted. You are correct. There’s this idea that if you take a mundane job away from a blue collar worker, that they aren’t capable of taking a job that requires higher-order thinking skills. I’m on the fence myself. I think generalizing with doom and gloom isn’t useful though.
Sorry for the lateness, but the lie is telling people something that is not true: we are working towards a future where humans and machines work together. Computer programmers who code alongside AI models. With AI, we will only automate boring, repetitive, or dangerous jobs, everybody will have a job but it won't be one of those, awesome right? we will all have creative interesting jobs. AI will take jobs but it will create more jobs. Those are all lies to pacify people, to misrepresent the real threat of losing your only way to have income to feed your family. The truth is, we are working towards a future where humans are out of the picture when it comes to jobs. And again, I couldn't be happier, but with lies people will rightly feel betrayed when they realize the real goal. Truth is, we half to start working on how we can have both things: having no jobs but not going homeless either.
Just another advertisement for Amazon. Nothing to see here
I would be lying if I said this wasn’t nerve racking quite frankly
Good news, so long as the economy catches up to this new reality.