There’s an interesting book called “The R-Master”
It posits a future with a universal income, and anti-gravity, and immune-boosting drugs, and a bunch of other cool stuff.
I wouldn’t call it dystopian, but the book shows that such a future would not necessarily be utopian either, especially if humans don’t evolve morally along the way.
Fair enough on that.
As for utopia, I understand that, but I’m not sure I agree. I think that utopian thinking can play a useful role in helping us to think about new ways of living, of breaking out of our ideological boxes that can blinker us. The late philosopher had some thoughts on this topic of using utopia break through our ideological constructs:
I agree that Utopia should be the ideal to strive for, unfortunately with the status quo, it doesn’t look like happening before a little metaphorical and literal bloodshed.
Yeah, maybe so. I do think we are in a bad place, but we’ve been here before. We already seem to be going through some metaphorical and literal bloodshed… If only people would learn from history…
You may well be correct.
My point being that “robots could give us all material abundance if the rich would not hoard” and “the current population is way beyond sustainable levels” are two thoughts that no one should be able to hold in their heads at the same time.
What I suspect that some readers of this article really mean by “the rich are keeping all of us from material abundance” is something like “the rich are keeping me, my family and friends, people I admire, and a select subset of everyone else from material abundance”.
We’ve had a few enlightenments and regressions throughout history, let’s hope the current, tentative one takes a firm root without too much spilled.
Yeah… I’m not too hopefully right now. The world seems to be run by people who got theirs, and could give a shit about the rest of us plebians… But, from your lips to… someone’s ears?
The world has always been run by people who got theirs, but us plebians have now opened the Pandora’s Box that is the Intertron, and allowed us to view the full scope of their shenanigans. The wool is not pulled so easy anymore, hence unrest.
Whatever the outcome, these are the times that future historians will be studying about, and storytellers will be spinning yarns around, and wishful time travellers will be yearning for. We’ve witnessed a lot politically, technologically and culturally in the last few decades up to and into the new millennium. We live in amazing times, and I’m glad that I get to exist in the midst of it all.
I have hope in the endgame, but I think it’ll get darker first.
I just hope you’re right, because I suspect that not everyone in our shrinking world views the past few decades as an era of triumph, but one of tragedy. How good things look really depends on where you exist in the pecking order generally speaking and that’s always been true. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t some good and hopefully things happening, but those things don’t necessarily negate the bad things, either, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, it makes sense, I just regret that I’ll not get to see it all evolve in long time.
How so? How, exactly, is what he is saying “sixth-formish”, whatever the hell that means?
Income inequality is on the rise.
http://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality
Automation is on the rise (as a bonus - it also helped cause a massive decline in manufacturing employment)
That last point bears further examination. Manufacturing jobs have plummeted in the United States, but manufacturing output has been steadily climbing since the 70’s. Of course, outsourcing is the single biggest reason for this marked change, but automation has definitely played it’s part.
It doesn’t take a genius to make the prediction he stated, if we assume that the two will continue to rise in the future, and we have no rational reason to assume otherwise.
Do you have some compelling evidence to present to us that will bolster the argument that increased automation, without some form of wealth redistribution, is NOT going create an increasingly higher disparity between the rich and the poor, including a steady loss of jobs? If not, maybe you should stick to the maths?
The counter-argument presented by those that are pro-automation is usually the same tired trickle-down theory that has led to such a massive disparity in wealth in the first place, and we all know that’s some grade-A, family sized, bullshit right there. We’re supposed to accept, in good faith, that automation is going to lead to lower prices for everyone, and that those savings are primarily going to be funneled into new business, increased standards of living, and growth opportunities, as opposed to the pockets of the rich - despite direct evidence to the contrary, in the form of said massive wealth redistribution. What’s that smell?
There is no doubt that automation brings about wealth for those it benefits, otherwise it wouldn’t be implemented. The only question is who’s going to reap those benefits, particularly in a future that will see more and more traditional jobs replaced by increasingly complex automation software.
The only real criticism you can levy against what Hawking said is that it is in no way new. Ffs, the Luddites were formed around 1811.
If God blesses my family with wealth for our faith and dedication, who is the state to come in and steal it when the faithful patriarch dies?
Read the entire discussion first, I’m not in the habit of repeating myself.
TLDR?
There you go.
You seem to be conflating “faith and dedication” with money and respect, which is not a universal view. I also never mentioned the state or taxation, though that is another interesting subject for discussion. My question is relating to attitudes regarding workers who lose their jobs due to automation (as opposed to being incapable of performing tasks), and those who have chosen to never perform work but are not ostracized due to the presence of unearned (by that particular individual, not any forebears) wealth.
I liked Laurie Penny’s piece on this in the New Statesman.
The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we’ve created a moral universe where people who do notwork to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern – the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else’s profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us.
Maybe the state is an instrument of your god, ensuring that younger generations don’t succumb to sloth, avarice, or greed.
Well, if the robots do all the work in the future, then the only jobs left to humans would be the most menial and most creative ones.
Things like artists, musicians, advertising executives, telephone sanitizers…
There’s a common misconception about the evolution of automation that frequently crops up whenever the topic of job destruction comes up. It’s an assumption that the effects of automation only impact the worker when, in fact, not only are jobs being obsolesced but capital too. Machines aren’t just getting more capable. They are getting smarter, smaller, more adaptive, more commodity-like in production capability, lower in minimum necessary production volumes, and most importantly cheaper. As a result, an increasing amount of industry is being initiated out of pocket that used to demand Big Capital amortized over decades and corporations are now not only outsourcing produce to other countries, they are abandoning ownership of production in favor of contracting it. Capital is an increasing competitive liability to companies. It greatly delays the exploitation of improving technology. In the year 2000 our civilization hit a key milestone. That was the year the volume of consumer goods produced in ‘job shops’ exceeded that produced in the traditional manufacturer-owned factory. And that trend never stopped. The factory as we’ve known is is already an anachronism.
The long-term picture for production is an evolution toward increasing commodification and networking of production capability paralleling the commodification and networking of computing resources, (we’ll soon start hearing terms like ‘the production cloud’), a continuing decline in the cost of that capability, a trend toward on-demand production, a demassification of industry as increasingly critical time-to-delivery and the cost of transportation encourage production localization (the industrial network encounters a ‘last mile dilemma’ akin to that of the early Internet and create Fab Wallahs as it once created Net Wallahs), a merging of production, transportation, and economic networking, and eventually an integration of production into the infrastructure of the built habitat as a public utility.
The next Apple will be a company with a tiny fraction of the employees whose jobs will be concerned chiefly with product development and the management of portfolios of product ‘spimes’ and their brand. All actual production will be on-demand, local, independently owned, and increasingly municipally or community owned. Already corporations are becoming desperately obsessed with brands, IP, the enclosure and appropriation of the creative/intellectual commons, competition in court rather than the market, and the stripping-away of consumer rights because they know the material value of goods and the exclusivity of the means of production is soon to collapse, leaving only intellectual abstractions and legal restrictions on which to base most market value.
This means that, while they may be living high on the upper decks, the rich are ultimately in the same boat as the workers as automation begins to drive down the cost of money toward nil. Meanwhile, the demassification of production will produce a parallel demassification of economic and political power. This is the core premise of Post-Industrial futurism. The evolution of production is eroding Industrial Age paradigms from the inside-out, leading ultimately to economic, political, and cultural disruption.
That’s an interesting theory. Won’t “raw” materials (say, plastic for 3-D printers) still need to be produced at a mass level?
Yes, but even there the minimum necessary cost-effective production
volumes are shrinking and the relative simplicity of commodity goods
leads to highly efficient markets where costs are transparent, human
labor quotient already marginal, and thus market-wide price capitulation
common. Another aspect of production localization is that global trade,
now commonly in finished goods for currency, potentially starts to shift
to an exchange of commodities in kind as values and demand become highly
predictable by quantitative analysis. Currency is redundant with
economic automation as knowing demand needs no intermediary metric. The
more the world trades predominantely and in automated fashion in
commodities the more the market starts to look like Fuller’s World Game.
