At least we’ll have strong female leaders!
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So these are the children of farmers who are doing these crappy jobs so they don’t have to do the crappy job of farming. Check out the movie Last Train Home to get some perspective. China is trying to move from an agrarian nation to an urban nation in a very short time. They may have planned to have all their people working crappy jobs in urban centers, but I’m not sure that they’ve planned for all those folks who used to be farmers’ sons and daughters losing their jobs to robots.
China, with it’s centrally planned economy, has to deal with tens or hundreds of thousands of people having to be trained to do something new. So, instead of having lots of factory piece workers, they’re going to have lots of… what? Restaurateurs? Cabinetmakers? Plumbers? Construction workers? If your economy can make stuff without people, and the society doesn’t need more people in order to be productive and generate capital for industry, what do you do with all the surplus human beings who can’t find work no matter what their skills are?
As someone above pointed out, we’ve decided somewhere along the line that the value of someone is what they do, not who they are. How do they make money, and is there any way they can make more money? How hard do they labor? How many hours a week do they do their job? What’s their JOB? Why can’t they find a JOB? Because working and “adding value” (meaning monetary value) is what we as a society have come to expect from every able-bodied citizen, whether it’s needed or not.
One of my favorite quotes from a film: “What is finished… is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods… Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren’t. The whole world not just us. We’re just the most advanced country, so we’re getting there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things…”
Network, 1976, written by the great Paddy Chayefsky.
Only it looks like China’s beating us to the humanoid stage.
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Thanks, I will watch Last Train Home. I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea what it’s like for them.
Heartbreaking, I’m sure, but this is the nature of change. It effing sucks. It sucks for anyone who looses their source of income and is forced to change, adapt, or die. But they will. As Stein said “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” Just ask a American coal miner, or autoworker, or steel worker.
Point being humanity as a whole is much better off without dangerous, harmful, and highly repetitive jobs.
Yes this is because idyllically all people are created equal. So the value of who you are should be equal to that of anyone else. Value comes from creation. Producing energy, novelty, or services creates value and is rewarded proportionality to how badly it’s needed or wanted.
I just don’t choose to see the word as Paddy Chayefsky’s Network. Yes I agree, it’s true, the world is a great big indifferent machine constantly striving for efficiency regardless of the individual effects. Whilst the men running said machine, who are driven by the same self-interest that guides us all, often game the machine to amass power and wealth, but us steel-belted bodies still have a place in this world. With wit and ingenuity I believe anyone, anywhere can rise from the bottom and overcome most hardships.
I think the point is being missed here: what if there IS no work for a set amount of people to do? What if what they can contribute has no value to anyone, or they’re too old to be trained in something useful, or there simply aren’t enough jobs for all the available bodies? That is going to happen. You cannot retrain everyone to be a robot programmer/maintenance person. If someone has a skill, such as cabinetmaker or potter, do we continue to do to them what we’ve done to pretty much every other industry? Devalue their skills to the point they can no longer survive? I’ve read multiple job offerings that require five times the skillsets for designers, film/video workers, etc., at half the salary those jobs used to get. Productivity increases have resulted in a pretty regular downgrade in salary, i.e., labor value.
The only solution that I’m aware of is something that is being debated in Switzerland right now: the Minimum Guaranteed Income (aka, Mincome). If you do nothing for a living, and you are of an age (say eighteen) where you could be working, you will be given enough money to survive on and various options of low-income housing. This was tried for a couple years in a small town in Quebec province, and it was quite successful. And then it was abandoned, like so many good ideas.
We have enough revenue in the world, enough food in the world, enough productivity, to care for everyone currently alive, but there is still starvation, poor housing, etc., even in places such as America, where there is neither civil nor religious warfare. Soon there will be machines that not only build things, but replicate each other, self-repairing or self-replacing as needed. A.I. systems will gradually replace a lot of “knowledge workers”. Perhaps organic farming or ornate woodcarving will be the “next big thing” for everyone to do, I don’t know. But I’ve been alive fifty-five years, and all I’ve seen is human beings with power and money do everything they can to grow their power, grow their money, and if the people down below don’t like it, the best they can hope for is to vote someone into office who will make it possible for them to do slightly better. Unless where they live, like China, voting doesn’t matter.
Paddy Chayefsky’s own comment on this situation is famous, in the same film from the same character, in a speech previous to the one I quoted above: “I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot - I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’”
Utilitarianism is at odds with Capitalism. And that’s the choice we’re facing.
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I see robot cars coming and wonder what happens when New York suddenly has 60,000 people who not only don’t have jobs their entire job is irrelevant. They can’t all just turn into coders or all go work in the food industry. Add all the delivery truck drivers, bus drivers and MTA train drivers and we’re still only talking about a single industry of transportation.
It’s going to get bad, with whole industries laying off workers, and they can’t all go on unemployment, it’s not like there aren’t going to be hundreds of thousands of other people just in New York alone looking to solve the same problem.
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Yes, yes, I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more either.
Then they will stop working.
From our perspective it appears like the robots will take all the jobs, but what we can not see over the horizon line of the future is all the opportunities that will be created because of this thing we fear.
Past performance doesn’t predict future results, with that in mind, looking to the past and gauging from the current rate of escalation between the global powers there will eventually be another war on a global scale which will provide plenty of jobs for the plebs. Either that or when shit gets bad enough people will rise up to burn it all down, again more jobs to manage the rebuild.
Human uprising seems more likely
Think of all the scribe jobs lost when the printing press was created
all the printing jobs lost to the desktop printer
all the telegraphy jobs lost to the telephone
all the switchboard operator jobs lost to TSPS
and on and on…
Pretty much each time a new technology replaced an older one there was a fair amount of social dislocation. It would be nice if we could maybe actually learn from our past and reconfigure our future to NOT make the same mistakes.
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First we have to actually know that history. The popular knowledge of the industrial revolution seems to be that it eliminated a bunch of crappy jobs and created a highly-paid, educated workforce (completely ignoring the multiple generations of mass poverty, underemployment, social problems and the welfare systems that were put in place to deal with it all), which is rather like having an understanding of the Nazis in Germany by jumping from 1930 to 2015 and deciding that Nazis taking over the government is a good thing because they lead to a prosperous, democratic Germany…
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If you think Trump is going to do anything differently, economically, than any other Republican candidate you’re seriously not paying attention to him. (Although it’s possible he might do things differently in the sense of fucking things up royally.) Sure, he came out against TPP (but then subsequently revealed he had no idea what it actually was), but for several reasons unrelated to his position on trade - he was being a demagogue, he wanted to use it to attack those who supported it, and to bring out the idea that somehow he could negotiate things better. The problem is, that’s insane - that’s not how trade deals work. He’s made it clear, however, that he’s a “free trade” man. His various economic positions run the gamut from the simply nonsensical to the outright insane; it’s unclear if he’s the least bit serious about any of them, but you’d better hope not. His idea about “bringing jobs back” involves “calling the company up” (and doing what he never says), and tariffs. Tariffs would destroy US exports, if he could actually make them happen - contrary to his assertions, the US produces a lot of goods. In fact, the US has never produced this many goods in its history - 50% more than just 20 years ago. The lack of jobs isn’t because of outsourcing - it’s because automation already happened. He fails to mention that because he can’t even come up with a nonsense solution that would sound good to people. His other proposals - where he has something concrete, are all uniformly disastrous for US businesses and workers. That’s not getting into the “social issues” like immigration - where his proposal to deport those here illegally in two years would literally require the formation of a police state that performed random sweeps of businesses and public places to see the identity cards of all people to prove citizenship.
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Aaaaahhhh, yes. I am big fan of Mr. Dickens. Bravo!
“At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, … it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?”
“Plenty of prisons…”
“And the Union workhouses.” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“Both very busy, sir…”
“Those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
— A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
published 1843
i would strongly urge you to reconsider this position.
i don’t know of course, but this sounds a lot like it means you are of a class of people who are not effected by “social issues”. it’s imperative, however, that people who are of the majority realize that people who are of the minority have real, human needs which are not being addressed. needs which include both economics and simple justice.
women’s access to contraceptives ( and trusting that individual women know when and if they should need an abortion ), gay rights and gay marriage, the right of transgendered individuals to privacy in bathroom selection, the needs of people of color who face unique challenges due to the legacy of institutionalized racism…
addressing these issues helps everyone. ultimately – diversity strengthens society.
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Welp, I’m doing what I can to education at least some of the public on our history… 
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Yep.
The equation seems pretty simple to me. For now, capital wealth means the ability to invest in automation, delivering lower cost labor, which provides increased relative returns on capital to the investor. Doing that creates a higher level of tech, and we start asking the tech to do more, more cheaply. Eventually, robots control the entire production process from commodity exploitation to sophisticated manufacturing, and use solar energy to manage those processes. They’d figure it out, because we will demand more efficiency.
Quite simply, the robots will propose automated security. And if we don’t accept it, they will foist it on us.
“For your own good, madam / sir”.
You see, we are predisposed to naughty behaviour. The robots will identify this failing, and indispose us.
Ahhh - the future - so bright, so shiny!
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Classic sci-fi, like Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids…
Meanwhile 60.000 poor fellows became, well, a lot more poor…
Is it too soon to make a “Foxconn something something something robot suicide” joke?
Yes. I’d imagine that would go down like a lead balloon.
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When more money = more speech, it’s hard to believe that “hope and optimism” will lead to anything ground-level. Besides, when I hear that I think more slacktivism like Internet petitions.
