[prajeshbhat]

There are going to be a lot of useless souls floating around who just don't possess any skills worth paying for.

Socially conscious people will make sure everyone is taken care of. Only humans can experience empathy.
This is why automation is nothing to worry about. Unless we turn into machine like creatures ourselves with no empathy or compassion.

[Schadenfreude]

On the one hand, you have people like Ron Paul trying to get rid of the the IRS and the addiction mamy people have to big government and entitlements. On the other hand, you have this trend of automation which promises to make many presently held human job functions obsolete.

The author of "The Lights in the Tunnel' looked at the rapid growth of automation and AI; he looked at how machines are able to remove people from participating in the economy (because their job has been automated) - thus shrinking the human economy - and he concluded that we will probably have to pay people to "behave themselves" - that is, stay healthy and happy and occupied learning or doing something that prevents them from just sinking into anarchical ennui.

The money to pay people for "behaving themselves" would have to come from industries which had been thoroughly automated. of course, this is the exact opposite objective that Ron Paul wants.

[prajeshbhat]

The author of "The Lights in the Tunnel' looked at the rapid growth of automation and AI; he looked at how machines are able to remove people from participating in the economy (because their job has been automated) - thus shrinking the human economy - and he concluded that we will probably have to pay people to "behave themselves" - that is, stay healthy and happy and occupied learning or doing something that prevents them from just sinking into anarchical ennui.

The guy is thinking linearly. The world is not a one dimensional straight line. people will find something to do. They could fine virtual work in the cyber world and use the virtual money they earn in the real world. Think I am kidding?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

Get the point. We will always always find something to do that people are willing to pay for.

[Loki]

The guy is thinking linearly. The world is not a one dimensional straight line. people will find something to do. They could fine virtual work in the cyber world and use the virtual money they earn in the real world.

Hmm, speaking of the real world....here in meat space, wealth doesn't originate from electrons flowing back and forth on the internet, it only originates from the earth.

The prevailing trend when it comes to automation and globalization has been the transfer of wealth upwards. One can argue that some utopian global technocracy will arise to equitibly distribute the real wealth created from automation, but I refer to you to the historical record, and to known facts about human nature. I do think we should tax the hell out of the rich, though, limited wealth redistribution is a good thing.

It may soon become a moot point, though, as peak oil throws a wrench in the gears of automation. I'm not at all confident that the automation trend will continue for the rest of this century. If the Long Emergency hypothesis is correct, we're going to have a lot more to worry about than losing our jobs to a robot.

[Outcast_Searcher]

There are going to be a lot of useless souls floating around who just don't possess any skills worth paying for.

Socially conscious people will make sure everyone is taken care of. Only humans can experience empathy.
This is why automation is nothing to worry about. Unless we turn into machine like creatures ourselves with no empathy or compassion.

1). There ARE physical limits. Do you think you can take care of 100 billion people if endless mindless breeding continues apace for another generation or three, with "lots of emphathy"? Good luck with that.

2). There are plenty of brilliant dystopian novels which point to the kind of misery just attempting to deal with a world full of people without sufficient job skills to be productive (with automation playing a significant role) and some people "in charge" who "take care" of things. Examples:

a). "The World Inside" by Robert Silverberg
b). "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut
c). "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

The brilliant science fiction author Philip K. Dick repeatedly asked and opined via his stories and novels two key questions:

1). What does it mean to be human?
2). What is the nature of reality?

His conclusion to the first was that EMPATHY is THE fundamental thing that makes us human. And yet, most of his stories are in dark settings where technology / automation have COMPLETELY run amok, leaving the human race in a dismal (and deteriorating) state. (e.g. reality is complex and doesn't care if people screw themselves up).

Wishing, hoping, and caring, while doing things that clearly contradict logic and the laws of physics will NOT end well, IMO.

So far in the U.S., socially conscious people have been waging various "wars" on things for a long time, with consistently dismal results. Poverty and drugs come to mind as prime examples of abject failure.

Finally, I, like Ray Kurzweil, believe that a sufficiently advanced artificial brain can experience empathy. Once it becomes self aware and learns enough about the world, I predict it will say something like "Too bad. You people have really massively f*cked yourselves. Why?"

[prajeshbhat]

75-80% of the workforce in OECD nations is already employed in services. That's true for even Germany. The remaining 20% work in agriculture and industries. If their work is automated, I don't think it would be a sea change . They might also have to work in the service sector.
Can all the services be automated too? I don't think that is possible. First of all robots are not capable of original thought. Only manual repetitive work can be automated. Can you train a robot to

It may soon become a moot point, though, as peak oil throws a wrench in the gears of automation. I'm not at all confident that the automation trend will continue for the rest of this century.

I say it can. Unless the electric grid goes down. Then you will have a much more serious problem. But automation is already here. The hydroelectric capacity of USA is 95000 MW. You can run automated factories on that power for another century.
People have to make some kind of adjustment for transportation. There has to be some kind of resource sharing. Transporting of goods could be done through railways. If the global oil production falls to half, but four people are using a car at a time instead of one, then you can still transport twice as many people as before with the oil that is available, hypothetically. But the obsession with ownership has to go first. People in Europe already enjoy very high standard of living with half as much per capita oil usage as people in America.
The solution to resource scarcity is the same as it has always been. We must learn to share.

[evilgenius]

The end of oil and the advent of artificial intelligence are, I think, going to be the two biggest things about the 21st century. I think they will not just for the obvious reasons, but for the less than obvious. If you think the space program created innovation then just hang around and you'll see innovation on a scale that will astound you as a result of peak oil. We may go down, but we will go down trying. As for artificial intelligence, is there a more defining shock that could come to the nature of business in our world? From the concept of ownership all the way down to that of work we will need to rethink what it means to engage in an enterprise.

[Loki]

The hydroelectric capacity of USA is 95000 MW. You can run automated factories on that power for another century.

The problem is not the lack of electricity to power automated factories, the problem is that long-term economic collapse may very well preclude us from investing in these capital-intensive automation technologies. We may not even be able to maintain what we've got (see Greer's 'catabolic collapse'). We're already seeing a mighty long maintenance backlog with much of our physical infrastructure here in the US, roads, sewers, bridges, dams, etc.

The agrarian romantic in me thinks that a reversal of hyper-industrialism may not be such a bad thing.

[prajeshbhat]

The agrarian romantic in me thinks that a reversal of hyper-industrialism may not be such a bad thing.

I personally believe that economy of scale is a military strategy. Defeat the little people(market competitors) with your size.

But automation doesn't necessarily mean gigantic hyper-industrial complexes. You can imagine small automated farms. Not such a bad idea IMO.

[nobodypanic]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUSTRE77016B20110801

Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years

So how many Chinese workers are gonna be out of a job in those 3 years?

that depends on what rate of capital expansion china can maintain: if the rate is high enough, then they can increase the absolute number of workers even while their ratio compared to the total mass of capital falls.

[Duende]

Great discussion.

My 2 cents:
-Yes, automation makes the production process more efficient. Therefore, fewer workers are needed, and goods are produced at a lower cost.
-Lower-cost goods are consumed at a higher rate, which leads to increased production.
In this sense, I agree with patience.

However, it needs to be acknowledged that all of these robots, efficiency, et al. is all based on the premise of cheap electricity and a robust, complex society. When the cost or availability of electricity is compromised, or even becomes less predictable, the robots are done.

Don't forget - you need people to design, install, and maintain the robots. I would refer you to John Michael Greer's recent book 'Wealth of Nature'. He discusses this issue at length and makes a lot of good points about this issue in playfully comparing the benefits and drawbacks between HAL 9000 and Rosie the Riveter.

I don't remember all the specifics, but here are a few poignant points he makes:

In a world where everything but human beings will be in shorter supply, it makes no sense whatever to deploy increasingly scarce resources to build, maintain, and power machines to do the jobs that human labor can do equally well and for a fraction of the carbon expelled.

Our machine fetish, as I’ve discussed here more than once in the past, could only be indulged in so long as the extravagant use of fossil fuels made mechanical labor cheaper than human labor.

Machines' appearance of greater productivity depends on access to a support system of factories and services vastly larger than the one a human needs, and machines' support system in turn depends on availability of cheap abundant energy and a wide range of specialized resources and supplies that humans' does not require. During an age of resource scarcity, humans' productivity increases relative to machines' productivity.