Harlow already laid the groundwork. Just make us a fuzzy computer and we’ll accept it as our mother and starve to death.
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It also includes many unskilled trades with training programs that can be done in a weekend. You could potentially replace a lot of construction work with a few skilled individuals and robot laborers. Bad news for the workforce.
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So frustrating! Nobody does anything about it.
WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE MALE ROBOSEXUALS, TOO?!?!?
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Automation was more romantic in the 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_aMaNKqpDY
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Well sure! We’d be able to get those ladies out of the workforce and back in the home, while the US continued to dominate worldwide manufacturing allowing us to live lives of leisure. I mean, who wants something made in Japan, right fellows?!
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“The Order to Stop Construction”
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I wish you were, but how can we have a post-scarcity, leisure society when to be part of that you need to have money
Post-scarcity economies don’t require money, once energy and other resources become so plentiful as to qualify they essentially become worthless. Land allocation might still be problematic in such a scenario, though by the time we’re advanced enough to make such an economy possible we’ll probably be building orbital habs and lunar/martian colonies (there’s also still a lot of uninhabited land on Earth, Australia and Antarctica for example).
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Except that yes, there is a vast literature and lots of discussion on the problem of automation, going back to the 60s, at least. In fact, you could make the argument that these discussions going back to the days of early industrialization, with the luddite riots in England. In fact here are three books on this very topic:
When people talk about labor, they generally mean male industrial work. Unions have generally been built male (generally white) labor (with stories on black male later coming after the 60s).
There is only recently emerged a literature on men and masculinity (which, if you’re interested, I’ll dig up some titles on for you), but you have to remember that up until the 60s, history and other fields that studied society generally focused on men and their roles in society, especially in public life. Gender history has, until recently been code for the history of women.
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Well, isn’t the problem though that people who own and have profited off resources that we all need aren’t just going to let them go once commoditized? Land allocation is a problem (not and in the future) because it has been turned into a commodity. It’s not just the distribution of things like energy that’s a problem, which is precisely where the conflict coming in right now regarding renewables. There is one group who hope to make renewable technologies open source, under some sort of easily sharable IP, and easily accessible, but of course the oil, gas, and coal companies don’t want that at all and are fighting tooth and nail against it. We already saw this with the initially attempt to create an electric car, which was originally killed off:
http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/
Now that we have a second round, we have car companies attempting to tell us that we can’t have our cars that we spend tens of thousands of dollars on, we only “borrow” them. There is, I think an organize attempted to cut off any movements to make technologies that solve many of our scarcity issues sharable in the first place.
That’s true… the problem is making that land habitable for large populations in the first place in a way that’s attractive to some number of people. I’d suspect that reworking those lands (or building structures for huge numbers of people to live in for all the time) could be expensive, and getting governments to buy into such a project that would cost so much might be tough.
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you still don’t seem to be getting the basic concept here. there is no cost (in terms of making land habitable), and if everything looses it’s value there’s no incentive for wealthy people attempt to hoard everything, letting everyone else have as much as they want won’t affect them.
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Doesn’t that assume that how we define and understand value is stable over time? how do we actually go from land being a commodity that is sold in a market place to not being that any more. Right now, things that are sold are invested with value (which is created in any number of mechanisms).
Making land habitable takes time and labor, and who has the time to invest the labor? In the case of Australia (I assume you’re talking about the outback and desert in the middle of the country) who owns the land? Is it owned by the state? is it set aside for the Aboriginal people? Do you propose just showing up and working the land? With what equipment? What about water? Food for the project? This is what I mean by saying it will cost to make it habitable.
It was Adam Smith who proposed the notion that value is inherent in human labor that works on the land or materials found in nature. Oil in the ground has not market value until it’s extracted. it doesn’t have to be this way, but as long as it’s the defining ideology of our time and that’s backed by state and corporate power, it’s going to be hard to get out of… just flooding a market with some kind of good is not going to end it, because value is a social construct in the first place, a definition agreed upon by people in a community. Meaning, yes we can change it, the question is how, I believe.
Just for clarities sake, I’m not saying that we can’t find some other way to define value, just expressing what I believe to be the dominant view of value in our modern world.
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you seem to have stopped talking about a post-scarcity economy in this post, I’m confused.
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I guess my point is that to have a real post scarcity economy, you need to have everyone have equal access to the basics in life, right? Well, how do we get that with our current world, where nearly everything is sold in a market for a profit?
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What I think @anon61221983 may be saying, if I may be so bold, can be summed up as: “what good is a post scarcity economy, if we can’t get to there from here?”
If I may add my own two cents: Let’s say someone invents real cold fusion. Like, a cargo container sized device that takes air and turns it into electricity with a very good net gain, indefinitely. What’s going to keep that person from selling limitless energy, or even limitless energy machines, and everyone progressing on business as usual? Unless all the inventions necessary for post-scarcity happen simultaneously, aren’t patented, and are freely doable/gettable by everyone, then there’s not going to be a post-scarcity world. Because limitless free energy isn’t going to be handed out for free without lots of changes. If it happens slowly then there’s going to be a class of people who are post-scarcity and a class of people who are dead because nobody feels like sharing what they can make the technologically disadvantaged pay for.
And I see @anon61221983 beat me to the punch.
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Technological advances. A middle ages Mindysan33 might ask the same question about how to overthrow the feudal system.
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Sorry, but that’s not a very good argument. At every stage of human development prior to the modern age the ruling classes have had far more power, relatively speaking, than they have now. And they couldn’t stop technological advances from diminishing their power. Technology can’t be stopped, someone might try slowing it down for a bit, but it won’t last long.
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Tough luck this time, though. We got a lot of new toys since then. We got China cranking out modules that we’d have to painstakingly assemble from discrete parts before; the electric car I’m involved with got assembled entirely from such components. We got the Net. We got lots of pissed off (or inspired, or idealist, or otherwise motivated) people all around the world. The blueprints for a tech can be and are spread over the Net in the matter of minutes. Attempts to take them down are met with Streissand effect.
So the crucial thing is how to get the technologies accessible enough, independent on a handful of large factories, or at least dependent on their products in only a small handful of classes, generic enough that they cannot be restricted. (E.g. good luck getting microcontrollers off the market.) Batteries, membranes and electrocatalysts are likely in the set of potential breakthroughs; you can make supercap-grade graphene with a LightScribe CD-RW unit, many nanoparticles are common liquid-phase chemistry, and so on and on and on until next-next Christmas.
As of restricting use of devices, one thing is the corporate will, but the end users’ obedience is something entirely different. In other words, “enforce it, bitchez”. There are quite many people with enough knowledge and attitude for what I like to call “unilateral opt-out”. if I own it, I own it. If a lawyer says otherwise, my soldering iron not-so-respectfully disagrees.
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…of course, as well as enabling techno-utopia, this could just as easily enable humanity’s destruction by unfriendly AIs.
Dammit, you reactivated that damn basilisk again.
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It’s funny that nearly any non-capitalistic system tends to be casually dismissed as “utopian”. Since capitalist mythos are popularly based upon the fictitious possibility of everybody somehow getting something out of it without anybody being unfairly exploited, isn’t it just as valid to describe many capitalist notions as similarly utopian? After all, it’s a system which was designed to appear all-inclusive, necessary, and desirable.
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