whatevs. as long as i can play angry birds 4 free
What is going to happen when the majority of the factories are robots and the people who took shitty jobs for low pay now have no options?
Good question!
Don’t worry about that. Just continue to buy stuff and we’ll be fine…
Option A. 40% worldwide unemployment leads to food riots, rampant homelessness, and social unrest that never ends. Corporations make out like bandits right up to the point that they realize there are no consumers left to buy their goods.
Option B. A Universal Basic Income ramps up as automation makes goods cheaper and labor less important, until we end up with a Star Trek economy where material goods have essentially zero cost, labor is optional, and money is a relic.
Or some muddy, ugly option in-between that limps along for decades like we always have.
That is highly likely considering how decisions are made in the USA, or not made.
See also - Adidas, doing the same thing.
They can throw their wooden shoes at the robots.
I, for one, salute our new…oh wait.
I’m not sure about the cost / benefit analysis here. Do they take the nets down, add more, or just move them somewhere else?
Or C. wages are continuously suppressed so that they’re still lower than the machine cost.
I would much prefer to see the world envisaged by Star Trek or more likely the culture novels rather than the one in elysium but going on the history of the last 30+ years and the capture of the media/government by corporate interests I can’t see it happening without some major problems erupting. I suppose it all lands on whether hope and optimism wins and we move towards a more citizen lead society the kind that Sanders is talking about or we see the rise of fascists like Trump.
I honestly don’t see how that’s even possible. The argument is common that we can’t pay McDonalds employees $15/hr because the bosses will just automate them away. But if it’s cheaper to automate a factory than to pay Chineese workers peanuts, then there’s simply no bottom to land on. Eventually there will be no wage low enough to justify human labor.
Oddly, even in the future, the economists and CEOs who brought us that future will still be people. At least until RoboSilicon Valley upstart releases RoboCEO®.
So China has had a problem with raising expectations of standard of living (no bad thing) which is whats pushed up their wage bills. Some stuff has moved to even poorer countries and some countries like the Philippines actually have maximum wages for certain sectors so they don’t end up pricing themselves out of the globalized market.
This of cause is what makes a mockery of politicians who say they will bring back jobs and manufacturing to countries like the US or the UK. The factories may come back but there is no way that the staff are actually going to be willing to work at a low enough pay to be cheaper than machines.
I have to say that I fully want the utopian solution, I just can’t see it happening with the current political/media and education system we currently have in a lot of the western world.
No need to speculate. It’s happening.
And, unfortunately, labor is the thing we use to justify humans.
The story listed under this one should be:
That is a seriously depressing article, true but depressing.
