[Pops]

If you smash your TV and internet connections, it mostly goes away.

Spanish Pipedream

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@meier

[Herr Meier]

Pops, I took a break, chopped some firewood and mulled over all this. My brain is clearly not big enough to understand it all.
Where will it end?
Isn't the end the situation where one single owner on the planet owns one single or multiple robots that do everything that needs to be done even leaving the owner without a job, providing all the luxury the heart desires?
Clearly even with unlimited energy available there is some kind of breaking point.

[Pops]

My brain is clearly not big enough to understand it all.
Where will it end?

Me too, LOL

One thing I've decided after reading forums for a while is most think there will be an end, a resolution that we'll get to see it in our lifetime. We believe getting this person elected will fix everything, or doing that market action or implementing this other regulation or simple ingenuity will invent a solution bringing everything to a conclusion like an episode of CSI.

But probably not, it will go on and on even if we extinct ourselves.

I think people will attempt just about anything to profit and of course since everyone does it there will always be the struggle. At the root, I sorta believe cheap energy has allowed us the illusion of democracy and freedom simply because profiting was not a zero sum game when the energy slaves were increasing. But, on the other side of that divide, when the slaves are expiring, it will be a negative sum game and we'll get down to it - even if we have to do it with sticks and stones.

[ennui2]

I don't believe it's possible for bots and AI to design their own replacements. That's purely sci-fi.

The field of IT has gotten so broad that it encompasses various levels of skill. It's not an exclusive club of propeller-headed nerds with comp-sci degrees anymore. So there are opportunities. Straight IT jobs or anything that can be performed by manning a computer or a phone can be done via telecommuting. It can also be outsourced to grunts in the 3rd world, but luckily I haven't seen the destruction of jobs for domestic IT yet.

My feeling is that when commuting costs hit a certain pain-point that corporate cultural inertia preventing telecommuting will break and you'll see a huge boom in telecommuting. This is a lot more efficient than Manhattan projects for mass-transit. You just eliminate unnecessary travel and use Skype to substitute for face-to-face.

If everyone who could telecommute did, it would save a ton of wasted petroleum. So far I had only one job that let me telecommute for a bit, but otherwise I've had to drive. Luckily my new job allows me to take mass-transit, but the first leg is diesel-electric commuter-rail. Unless that can be electrified, it may be dead-man-walking post-peak and the path of least resistance for my profession will be telecommuting.

I think those who are in a type of job that doesn't primarily involve pecking at a computer or talking to clients on the phone, if it isn't medical or plumber or mechanic or something, are pretty much screwed. Adapt or die.

[Herr Meier]

But who will farm out the farm work?

Ain't it already? It's been a while that I've seen an American doing farm work.

[El_Producto]

Increasing automation is an interesting topic in itself, and when you add the strong potential of declining energy resources it definitely complicates things.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of increased automation right now. I saw an article in the paper the other day about how they're inventing a robot to make hamburgers for fast food restaurants. I was like, man, that sounds like a horrible idea. I worked at Arby's for like 2 and 1/2 years and a lot of people depended on those jobs. What real benefit is there to getting rid of them? So what if the burgers come out like 2 seconds faster or whatever, aren't people fat enough already? lol.

Logically I would think declining energy resources would decrease the amount of automation products, like robots and stuff, of which they are dependent on and a bi-product of. Human labor might become more profitable again.

[Herr Meier]

What real benefit is there to getting rid of them?.

One big incentive to get rid of workers is expensive and mandatory worker's comp insurance and now health care, too. Depending on the risk of the job it can add significantly to the total cost of the worker.

[El_Producto]

@Pstarr True, or who is gonna clean up the bathroom after someone smears "fuck you" in poop on the wall like we had to deal with one fine evening haha. But maybe they should invent a machine for that...

@Herr Meier Hm, yeah, I guess that does make sense. Laying off all the workers though would probably be a big societal problem. Talk about the few profiting at the expense of the many though, a few fast food executives getting bigger houses and everything while hundreds of thousands lose their income. Kind of makes me angry to think about, you know? I'm not sure what can really be done to stop it though.

[Keith_McClary]

My feeling is that when commuting costs hit a certain pain-point that corporate cultural inertia preventing telecommuting will break and you'll see a huge boom in telecommuting.

If everyone who could telecommute did, it would save a ton of wasted petroleum.

Long ago I naively thought that the computer revolution would mean the end of the paper industry. It seems we have not reached the pain-point - there still some trees standing.

[Herr Meier]

a few fast food executives getting bigger houses and everything while hundreds of thousands lose their income.

That's the big question I'm struggling to answer, too. Obviously with everybody laid off, nobody would have money to buy a hamburger, so the fast food executive probably won't be too happy either.

There seems to be a fine line somewhere of how much money needs to be in the hands of regular folks and how much can be siphoned off by 'executives' without causing a problem. But where is this line?

[radon1]

All sorts of valid observations here, but (as I keep repeating) automation results in higher overall employment, not lower. It is impossible to lay off everyone due to automation.

Drop the national boundaries and look globally. Those who are laid off locally have to be replaced with a greater number of workers elsewhere, in lower-cost locations, in order to implement automation. And the total level of consumption is normally growing.

As regards those laid off - it is cheaper to pay them unemployment benefits and generally keep them above the subsistence level, than retain them at their previous jobs. This is a key dynamic of capitalism and it will be like this as long as capitalism progresses in full power.

[Herr Meier]

automation results in higher overall employment.

That's the argumentation I was following, too. Until I took some time out chopping wood and thinking. I don't think it's that simple anymore.

I get into trouble with this as soon as I take the automation to it's extreme. Granted, this is sci-fi and probably impossible, but for the sake of argument it's still interesting.

If I'd were to build a robot that can do EVERYTHING. It can clean my windows, cook, fix my computer, assemble a new car, machine and 3D-plot new parts, perform dental work and surgery, build another equivalent robot and fix it, plant and harvest food etc etc.

Clearly if I owned such a robot I would have no need for workers. I would have no need to build a factory to sell stuff to make money, because I don't need money, because I have everything (as long as I have the energy and raw materials of course).

But even not going to that extreme you can see that robots getting more skilled and able to perform more diverse type of work. It will not be possible to have new work for displaced people simply because they are not able to perform more advanced work. As nice as it sounds, it is not realistic to think that everybody is able to perform robot maintenance and integration. There's a large body of people that are only capable of simple mundane factory work.

[radon1]

If I'd were to build a robot that can do EVERYTHING.

But that would be AI, an intelligent entity equivalent to a human being. Essentially, we may consider that entity as gainfully employed on terms equivalent to human. How is it different from a human then? Not sure that it's worth going that far at this stage. It would give rise to all sorts of considerations beyond economic or technical. An employee is essentially is a center of responsibility, and the responsibility is assured by greed, fear, conscience, altruism, you name it. How you are going to assure responsibility in the intelligent entity is anyone's guess, difficult to speculate.

There's a large body of people that are only capable of simple mundane factory work.

This is where everything is heading. Simpler, more mundane work, shorter production cycles, more specialization. Stand up, push the button, sit down, wait a minute, collect the item, put it in the pack. Repeat.

There has been an interesting article recently on the front page regarding the diminishing size of the human brain over the course of the last few dozen years. Should have a lot to do with the simpler tasks, narrowing knowledge horizons - i.e. progressively deeper division of labor over the recent human history.

[Pops]

(as I keep repeating) automation results in higher overall employment, not lower. It is impossible to lay off everyone due to automation.

Show us some evidence why this will continue past PO and you won't have to keep repeating yourself.

Along about '75 something definitely happened to decouple wages from productivity. Was it Disco?


(I couldn't find a chart that shows the increase in benefits on top of wages that comes from medical insurance in the US. If you include benefits, total compensation shows some rise.)


I'd like to blame it on Disco but alas I think several things explain it better. The first was the increase in oil prices brought about by OPEC. That put a real strain on industry to start economizing - the biggest post-embargo drop in oil use in the US was in industry.

Automation of course is the second factor - especially containerization early on. Container shipping singlehandedly made labor arbitrage possible by eliminating manual freight handling and cutting the cost of shipping dramatically. Containerization eliminated dock workers, digital networks then eliminated local managers by making real time oversight of anywhere possible from anywhere. You can see the impact in the rate of "productivity" increase around '95.

Automation based on CPUs has replaced legions of skilled and semi-skilled workers (like the pre-press trades I mentioned in the opening) with burger flippers and hair stylists.


h/t cultureshift.com

Kind of explains the wages stagnation in the first chart right?


If you step back and look at profit a little longer term you see the recent spike in the owners pot equal to the early 20th century when the industrial revolution was putting horses and ditch diggers out of business and increasing "productivity."




Which is why they call this the post-industrial revolution.

I don't believe it's possible for bots and AI to design their own replacements.

Just a decade ago I would never have thought it possible that a consumer product - a widely adopted product, would have the capability to tell you instantly what constellation you were pointing it without any user input, regardless of location anywhere in the world. And that capability would be simply a throwaway, mundane gimmick not used or even known to the majority of users of what is mainly a selfie-loading device.


The first industrial revolution used technology and fossil fuels to replace horses with tractors and created jobs in the cities that the industrial capitalists profited from. The workers got the upper hand for a few decades mid century after the communists skeered the hell out of the owners and in no small measure because fossil fuels created such an unprecedented surplus it was easy to share. It is absolutely no surprise then that with the increase in fossil fuel prices in the '70s that business began an all out effort to regain the upper hand. The equation had changed from endless growth to zero sum overnight with the threat of the end of cheap energy. It has been an all out effort since, including "corporate personhood", "privatization" and the rise of the supra-national corporation.

--

The first industrial revolution put muscle out of work, the post-industrial revolution will put brains out of work. The conundrum is they are both based on cheap, high EROEI (30/60/100:1) fossil energy.
So the question is, can you have a post-industrial revolution when the foundation of the industrial revolution itself is past it's peak?

[KrellEnergySource]

Laying off all the workers though would probably be a big societal problem. Talk about the few profiting at the expense of the many though, a few fast food executives getting bigger houses and everything while hundreds of thousands lose their income. Kind of makes me angry to think about, you know? I'm not sure what can really be done to stop it though.

You would think that in a democracy, plenty could be done to stop it. Labor laws could be passed that help retain the value of labor over the value of 'productivity'.

Back when I carried a pager as a computer technician, I already felt that such a technology was displacing shift work. Why have a night staff for a 24 hour operation when the salaried employee can be tasked with covering 'off-hour's'? Or the hourly employee can be "on-call" for some small part of their hourly salary, yet be required to be reachable and required to respond practically immediately by phone or in-person. My wife and I would frequently take two cars to social events in case I would have to leave. Today, the same goes for cell phones, more so.

My belief at that time was that if such labor practices were made illegal, then fully compensated shift work might come back into vogue, increasing overall employment opportunities.

We have building codes in place to help ensure homes are safe and energy efficient. Labor codes can help ensure work is valued and cultivated instead of pruned. Off-shoring can be legislated against, and we can choose to live within the resource constraints of our geographic home. But probably not under the current US political system, where the people we vote in represent only one of two ideologies, not the interests of their constituents.

Brian

[radon1]

Show us some evidence why this will continue past PO and you won't have to keep repeating yourself.

Never said that automation has to continue past-PO. Nor does it necessarily have to stop there.

Automation, within the scope of the current paradigm, will continue as long as it is profitable. This requires two things: population surplus outside the boundaries of the financial economy ("China's peasantry"), and resources which are sufficient, in marginal terms, to provide for accommodation of this surplus within these boundaries ("Siberian riches"). Whether PO dynamics have to be a critical limiting factor in terms of the resource supply for these purposes is an issue that requires a detailed analysis of its own.

Along about '75 something definitely happened to decouple wages from productivity. Was it Disco?

Think of Japan (Korea etc.). Cannot quickly find a graph of the Japanese industrial production/export over the same period unfortunately.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/japanese-ind ... ic-growth/

While Japan continued to close the gap in income per capita between itself and the United States after the early 1970s, most scholars believe that large Japanese manufacturing enterprises had by and large become internationally competitive by the early 1970s. In this sense it can be said that Japan had completed its nine decade long convergence to international competitiveness through industrialization by the early 1970s.

http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/c0117.htm

In the 1970s, the sharp increase of Japan's exports of industrial products to the U.S.A. and Europe began to cause international friction. In 1971, the U.S.A. announced it would end the convertibility of the dollar into gold. In December 1971, Japan revalued the yen from 360 yen against the U.S. dollar, which had been maintained for 22 years, to 308 yen. In February 1973, Japan adopted a floating exchange-rate system.