It's stupid, the Economy.
As autonomous, self-improving and self-replicating machines and machine workforce evolve and acquire more advanced performance capabilities, the traditional model of work is at risk.https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/02/17/the-end-of-work-the-consequences-of-an-economic-singularity/
Since work is the foundation of human society, it is important that we understand and evaluate the ramifications of this. For instance, what role will the emerging manufacturing/production shifts have in redistributing power, wealth, competition and opportunity around the globe? It seems that the potential impact of emerging explosive manufacturing/production forces will massively reduce or eliminate the hours of the working week and number of working hours -- fundamentally choking the nature of the economic system globally -- leading to many complex questions for the survival of the economic system itself. So, when more and more work is automated and a different way of producing and manufacturing emerges, there will likely be a subsequent collapse of earnings of wages. That brings us to an important question: How will nations deal with the likely collapse of the economic system in the coming years? Are they prepared?
The end of work has been predicted before, and it hasn't happened yet. But what might be starting to happen is the devaluation of work, which means the devaluation of the human being.
The value of a human being is the product of his labour; such has been the orthodoxy of economics, and it follows that an increase of productivity results in an increase in the value of labour, but the production singularity, whereby not only automation is automated but progress itself is mechanised, mean that already, manufacturing is taking second place to services. Unskilled labour is already valueless; the human body costs more in resources than it can produce.
Economic logic therefore dictates the scrapping of this uneconomic unit. Your country no longer needs you. Fuck off and die. To object is to make an extinction rebellion.
Comments (72)
Human labor has been replaced by machine-labor for quite some time now, at least since the industrial revolution. As old work perishes new work is born.
I don't recall this from studying economics in the university. I thought the one they put on the pedestal was the consumer that optimizes his or her well being.
Or you just read only Marx or what?
Besides which, an economy powered by automation is an ideal for socialists; where productive forces replace human labor enabling humanity to decrease the need to work allowing us to pursue whatever ends we choose. This is only made possible, however, if value created by automation is reinvested back into society by collective ownership, contra private hands. Others, like Andrew Yang, lacking political imagination because they've drank the nihilistic kool-aid of neoliberalism, instead argue not for collective ownership but UBI (general at the expense of a welfare state and social services), further formalizing economic power in fewer hands, producing greater wealth inequality, and placing people in greater economic precarity.
I cant disagree with you more here if you agree with this "orthodoxy". If value is based on labor, it implies that people are simply looked at as utility units. Why should the end of work constitute a crisis? Are people anything but utility to you?
Quoting Maw
Yeah, the hype is misplaced - only for suckers. (So "don't be a sucker!" :roll: )
How can that be when trade has never, in the main, been "free" (of business-state collusion; public corruption; regulatory capture, regressive tax incentives (e.g. loopholes); neglect of labor & environmental protections; 'wars of opportunity' (e.g. Indochina 1946-1975, Congo 1996-2003/8, Persian Gulf 1991-2011, Af-Pak 2001-present) fueled by military-industrial arms dealing; strategic mal/under-development policies that facilitate ('laissez-faire' unregulated / gangster) resource extraction from export-driven economies; etc)?
My candidate for 'the biggest threat to labor' is customary or state regulated denial of easy / universal access to (a) clean water; (b) safe, effective, family planning; & (c) quality education of females of all ages. Y'know, because - Ignorance breeds surplus. Sickness breeds surplus. Poverty breeds surplus. But 'surplus people' are only a symptom (pace Malthus), like 'automation' (pace Harari) which compounds it, and not the problem: malign neglect ... abetted by the scale & complexities of technocapital societies.
:clap: Displaced "workers of the world ..." (too late?! :yikes: )
[quote=Maw]Besides which, an economy powered by automation is an ideal for socialists; where productive forces replace human labor enabling humanity to decrease the need to work allowing us to pursue whatever ends we choose. This is only made possible, however, if value created by automation is reinvested back into society by collective ownership, contra private hands[/quote]
There's the rub! Wouldn't even be a need for socialism if capitalist private wealth reinvested back into the commonwealth (Smith). Not even communists have practiced "reinvest back in society by collective ownership" like they've preached. Idealists essentialize by blaming "the problem is Human Nature ..." to wit (sigh): Hom? homin? lupus est, and then promptly make their case, of course, by their own rapacious (e.g. Randroid neolib) examples.
Ah, the plutonomy (or Red bureaucracy) ...
But what if 'the problem', seemingly perennial & intractable, is genuinely materialist: (post-tribal, urbanized) societies tend to dehumanizing Scales & alienating Complexity that reproduce themselves (however inefficiently, or wastefully, and unjustly) via caste-like 'divisions of labor' and/or (conflicting) class stratifications - and therefore is inherently intractable because the means to exercise radical choices are outmatched by the sheer scale & complexity of the problem?
Is reversing these structural accretions a viable option today? Has it really been viable since the advent of the convergence of the telegraph, railroad, steamboat & electrification (coincidentally, since Marx's death)?
Perhap this is the existential gist of (Žižek's quip): "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an end to capitalism".
:scream:
Suppose we can only rage against the megamachine, and no longer "change it" (Marx)? Maybe the only way out of this burning building is either to jump (i.e. leap of faith - Žižek's "ideology') or somehow tough-out the wait till the structure collapses and maybe climb out of its smoking rubble in one piece with scars & a few singed scraps ...
[quote=Maw]Others, like Andrew Yang, lacking political imagination because they've drank the nihilistic kool-aid of neoliberalism, instead argue not for collective ownership but UBI (general at the expense of a welfare state and social services), further formalizing economic power in fewer hands, producing greater wealth inequality, and placing people in greater economic precarity.[/quote]
No doubt. But Yang, after all, is a candidate for the presidency of the U.S. and not for the premiership of (e.g.) a Nordic social democracy ...
I've seen this kind of criticism of UBI from the left before, and I don't understand it unless it's just accelerationism. An UBI is not as good as truly distributed ownership, but it's certainly better than the status quo, explicitly decreasing wealth inequality (it's a wealth redistribution program after all), improving the efficiency of the welfare state (cash welfare is still welfare, and no means testing reduces barriers to getting that welfare), and providing people with greater economic stability. All compared to the status quo. So where does this objection come from, other than just "it's not good enough, no compromise, all or nothing!"?
UBI's like treating a brain tumor with heroin. In other words, it's bullshit. The social & political pathologies caused and exacerbated by structurally concentrated wealth isn't even addressed by redistributive schemes like UBI that leave (the) structure(s) of concentrated ownership ... concentrated. "Truly distributed ownership", as you suggest, "is certainly better than the status quo" - and that's the place to start.
Really? Is it not decided by the invisible hand? If the robot is cheaper, the robot takes the job. And if the the capitalist has scruples he goes out of business.
Quoting 180 Proof
That is saying the same thing in different language. Economics has always been malign necessity. This is a critique of economics as a form of life.
Quoting ssu
No. The accumulator gets the pedestal, aka the capitalist. Mass production requires mass consumption, and that means that labour must consume in proportion. But this is changing too. 3D printers, allow economical bespoke production, and the consumption value of the masses has been lost along with their production value.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is a crisis of economics as the foundation of human social organisation. It's not a question of what people are to me, but a question of what they are to the system of organisation of social relations. If I like humans and can afford them, I might keep a few as pets, the point is they are valueless to the economy.
Amazon will deliver to my remote fastness the materials and robots to build my palace by flying robot, and regular supplies of robot grown food until my own farming robots are fully functional. My trophy wife will be tended at the birth of my trophy children by the medibot who will also grow the spare body-parts I need...
Manufacturing gives way to services - it has already happened to a great extent. And once the capitalist has unlimited manufactured servants, he won't need you anymore. Only land remains in limited supply.
This is not an unfortunate mistake, nor is it a shortage of bricks.
Medical science progresses in leaps and bounds, but UK life expectancy is falling.
Replacing the NHS with American companies is not going to improve matters.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/28/the-dirty-war-on-the-national-health-service-review-john-pilger-documentary
Q. How does one get rid of the the proletariat when they are no longer an asset, and extermination camps are a bit notorious?
A. Let climate change take the blame. Just close the borders and turn up the heat.
But who cares. The economy is an abstraction- not an entity that values or doesn't value. Anyways, if people are mainly valuable by the work they do, someone better find a better way to find meaning in existence because I don't think that was or should ever be how humans are considered "valuable". In fact, it can be argued that humans are used by economic mechanisms of society, not enhanced or given value from it. To believe that humans are bestowed value by their usefulness to the labor-force is to have drunken the Kool-Aid of institutional manipulation. People are needed to keep the whole thing going, and it is in the interests of many to see that happen by having more people do this. People are then nothing but useful tools to be manipulated to maintain this system.
So how "bad" is this non-work scenario? It seems like people inclined to, will focus more on education and understanding rather than doing work for an owner or a state. People's lives aren't dictated by management and no one has to be at a particular place and time to "make the donuts". The end of work, sounds like a much better option. However, being that many tend to be masochistic, they'll just find more work for themselves anyways.
If we are just trying to fill up time by finding more work for ourselves, perhaps we should consider antinatalism. I am being serious. Why are we putting more people into the world to find work for to do in the first place? I'm sure you will say something like "the creative capacity for people to produce something is inherently valuable". Perhaps that is propaganda to get people to do more work though. Maybe people just get bored and would find anything more valuable than languishing in their own ennui. Rather, people are motivated by boredom which is actually instructive that humans lack initial fulfillment in general. Creative work, learning, and engagement with the world is only "inherent' because we are deprived of capacity to be happy merely existing. So it comes from a place of lacking. However, even so, creative work, learning, and engagement does not need to be in the confines of how economic or political system finds it useful. That is just propaganda to think it is so. It is group-think reinforcing itself. In fact, if the current system is defined by how "useful" people are to the economy, that is a strong case for antinatalism as any act that puts another person into the economy would be using them as simply units of labor.
People care, because if they are valueless in economic terms, the next step is that they will be no factor in political deliberation, or maybe I should say even less a factor.
So it's not that they should care 'inherently' about the economy, that misses the point, it's because it will have negative consequence for them if they are valueless regardless of them caring about it or not.
Edit: To give an example, one way of weighing on political decision-making for the not-so-rich, is going on a strike. That works some of the time because going on a strike causes economic damage. It gives you a form of economic leverage. Economic value translates into political power, so if you are economically valueless where does that leave you then?
I see so this is about leverage of economic power. I actually thought that right as I sent my previous post, but still think the post stands on its own :).
First off, the needs of economic an political value would change if there was no need for work and robots did everything, no? Thus, the "leverage" would not even be a part of the equation being everyone has the goods and services they need.
Yes it would presumably change in favour of the owners of the robots, who now own everything without conditions.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It will allways be a part of the equation, the leverage will just be 0 then for the valueless. Everybody does not automatically have all the goods and services they need... that would only be the case if the owners of the means of production decide it so.
Economic power is a part of let's say "total aggregate power"... and ultimately (no matter how much rules you make) this will allways be the biggest factor in determining who get's to decide.
That is a great question. But it is not an economic question, because Economics is founded on enlightened self-interest. The idea is that nobody has to care because the invisible hand of economics, which is the social equivalent of natural selection, will manage things as if we cared.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Another great question, but again not an economic question. By and large, for most people and according to standard economic models, a non-work scenario is a non-eat scenario. Personally, I think that's quite bad. I understand that you rather welcome the apocalypse as the end of suffering, but again that is not an economic matter.
I am more addressing those who might wish to rebel against their imminent extinction. I wonder if I need to lay out why socialism is not a solution to all this?
So your solution to the possibility of not owning the robots is to give us the ability to work more? I'm just trying to understand your end game.
I meant to answer your assertion here:
Quoting unenlightened
So your solution to the possibility of not owning the robots is to give us the ability to work more? I'm just trying to understand your end game.
I have no solution.
It's a question of how it's implemented. A UBI replacing all other social safety nets would be at least as bad and enable, if not come directly along with, lots of encroachment on those social safety nets. In addition to all other social safety nets, it makes more sense, having some money for food which is not means (or capability, he writes as he remembers the times the UK job centre "fit for work" assessments have been raised as a human rights violation in the UN...) assessed would be nice.
Its introduction is definitely (only) a palliative measure.
I also think that a high enough UBI is not just palliative but also partially curative for the underlying problem that necessitates that in the first place. If people have more money, they are more able to get out of debt, get out of rent, own the things they need to live instead of borrowing them from those who are wealthier than them; and if they have stable income regardless of work, they are also more free to try things other than take a job working for someone wealthier than them, like to start their own small business, or to band together to start a coop, and so on. An UBI can be a stepping stone toward helping people own more of the capital they need to live and work themselves, and so reduce capitalism. (There are still, of course, the underlying systemic factors that give rise to capitalism in the first place, but an UBI at least partially counteracts them).
Of course it's worth thinking about, as I said the solution should be collective ownership. My issue is it's exigency, which I think is clearly overblown.
Quoting 180 Proof
You are of course correct, I meant the biggest threat to labor specifically in terms of occupational displacement, rather than existential.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Exactly, so as @180 Proof stated, let's make a truly collective ownership our goal, rather than cede to a limited technocratic political imagination via the restrictive TINA nihilism that Capital demands.
Quoting unenlightened
The Invisible Hand is a concept. It doesn't decide anything. It may be true that Capital tends towards greater production at cheaper cost, but this isn't, strictly speaking, a law by any means. Certainly a number of factors,social, technical, play into deciding whether or not to replace workers with some form of automation, often a huge undertaking made with great risk. Ultimately, automation shouldn't be considered fatalistic lest we forgo our agency and our ability to demand and determine what kind of society we want.
I just don't understand this making-perfect-the-enemy-of-good attitude. It's like, I'm not exactly excited about either a Democrat or a Republican winning an election, but I definitely have a preference about which is worse, and given the odds of anyone better winning, I'm not going to complain if the less-bad of the plausible options wins. Likewise, an UBI isn't a perfect solution, but it's a much much better proposal than anything that's been seriously considered in mainstream politics for a while, so while I wouldn't just rest happy with an UBI, it's definitely at least a step in the right direction, and I don't get why people further in that direction would oppose it compared to the status quo. It makes about as much sense as opposing any other kind of welfare program on the grounds that those just prolong the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Maybe, but they're accomplishing that by alleviating some of the harm of capitalism, and alleviating harm is what really matters, and a little alleviation is better than none.
Gravity is a concept and doesn't decide anything. But things fall down.
Economics is how we conduct social relations. We do it with money. Money is a representation of property. Ownership is a relation we have made sacred. I would like folks as philosophers to look at this without providing instant fixes in the first place. If you look first, you will I think see that fixes based on shared ownership or UBI simply do not answer.
Labour is value; labour is virtue. This is the origin of economics; that a farmer works to improve the land and plant a crop. He invests his labour in the land and has to protect it until the harvest. Hence property.
And hence barter, trade, money. The tool-maker likewise invests his labour to produce the means of production, and hence capital. So the end of labour is the end of the foundation of the economy. But you think you can keep the functions of property and money when the foundation has gone. The Emperor has no clothes; money and property has no meaning or function any more. The working class is already dead.
So with labor gone, social relations would change. Think Star Trek or some other sci-fi scenario or historical one. Hunting-gatherers don't have the same concept of labor, property, and land. It is possible to form human relations without these "foundational" concepts. Economics is not a hard science. The assumptions of economics are not hard facts. I liken economic thinking and theory to willful delusion. If we all believe in "the law of this or that" (place economic "law" here), and enough other people take it to be so, then it must be true. But it isn't. The laws of economics, the "foundational" theories are NOT like gravity, as much as economists want their profession to be taken as hard fact like physics.
Certainly, if robots truly took over every aspect of life, there would be foundational changes to the current model. This doesn't mean that this disruption of the normal life, wouldn't give way. The Middle Ages was much different than currently. One can say "capitalism" the way we know it was really 18th-19th century models that have changed since "progressivism" of early 20th century. In the 16th-17th century, you can argue it wasn't even capitalism but mercantilism. Medieval economies were based mainly on feudal relations of peasant to lords with a small but growing merchant class that combined with the central government to form mercantalism eventually. It was agrarian-based.
So true, labor has been the common thread in all these forms, but the forms have changed. Without labor, the economy would be based on other factors that are less about work and more about fairness, justice, human rights, and the like. It's the same thing we debate now but take away the need to work.
Yes. What I am saying is that as long as we maintain a society based on money and property, the logic of our own conceptions will lead to our annihilation.
Eventually, either we will all be dead, or another way of forming social relations will come into being.
And here the philosophy begins. What might be the nature of those relations, and how might they be conceived? Hierarchy without property for example? is it possible?
Quoting iolo
In the short term, as long as we maintain the economic conception of ourselves, that is the crucial question. But eventually, I propose, it must inevitably become a meaningless question, for the reasons noted above.
I think we can all agree that AI/robots/automotion will take jobs, but I think most of us also agree that new jobs will be created in other sectors. In the actual unlikely event that there is apparently "no more labor" for us humans to do we have a much bigger problem than this marxism vs. capitalism debate... we as humans are probably done. If we have robots governing, robots developing better robots, robots commanding militaries, robot judges, etc. all while humans are sidelined... you get where I'm going.
This would be much larger than just an economic issue.
In any case I'm not losing any sleep over it. Sure, we'll lose truck drivers and we've lost cash register but we've had such an enormous boom in tech job offerings with really some very exciting implications for other fields as well.
Already in mature democracies people are dying on the streets because they cannot afford housing, medicine, or decent food. The value of unskilled and semi-skilled labour is falling. Labour is hugely expensive and robots are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
As manufacturing jobs shrink, service jobs are expanding. However, every servant needs a master, every service needs to be paid for. So for the poor, the hairdresser gets replaced with a DIY trimmer. So the hairdresser becomes poor. Manufacturing is the source, and services are ancillary. A society that is all services and no manufacturing collapses. The economy game stops. See rustbelt in the US, or anywhere North of Manchester in the UK. I'm not the top line economist, but I think this is fairly basic stuff. One can see already that the end of manufacturing is the end of society on a small scale, so it should not take an extraordinary feat of imagination to see the implications as the process continues.
I'm deliberately staying clear of international affairs so as to keep things simple, and obviously some communities and some countries are at a very different stage. But the first principle of economics is 'produce or die.' People are starting to die.
The other side of the equation is really far more potentially devastating and out of human control: it is the relentless decline of energy and resources, and the human effect on the environment and other species. All this ongoing production will not be sustainable, whether human or machine-implemented, due to declining energy and resources, and destruction of soils, pollution and depletion of water. It's not merely a political problem at all; to think that it is is just another manifestation of anthropocentric thinking and the monumental hubris that goes with that.
Unenlightened, anything social/societal is a form of ideology. What do you WANT society to threaten (de facto or by force) people to do? Right now, the ideology is one of internationally traded goods/services procured by monetary systems backed by governments. When bearing a child into the world THAT is what the parent wants (whether they explicitly say it or not) for/from the child. Do you think this is what people should be participating in? Is it naturally "edifying" to be a part of the labor force? Again, it is ideology- what outcome people want to see.
So I pose to you, what is it that YOU ideally want to see? People throw around a vapid word called "flourishing". I hope you will be more descriptive than that. If you say, "I want people to make friends, create things, maintain a physically healthy lifestyle, and find a moderate amount of pleasure in various pursuits of entertainment", than I have to question this. The reason is that this is ALREADY the mode by which the current normative socio-economic sphere operates. So, are you just buying into the current mode but WITH full employment and WITHOUT environmental degradation? Is that it? Is that the end goal?
Mass starvation due to robots and having full employment to stave this outcome, implies you are looking for some stability of SOMETHING. But that something is just the current ideology sans certain fringe outcomes from overproduction. What is the good life then supposed to be? I say there never was one and never will be one. If it is about maintaining ideology without these fringe scenarios, we indeed have no reason to live in the first place.
I'm happy to respond to you, just be aware that we are do seem to be on very different sides of the political spectrum so I wouldn't expect anyone's mind to change. Maybe we can both gain some deeper insight into the topics however.
You seem to be very worried about the decline of manufacturing but this has been going on in the US since like the 1970s. Since the end of the 70s the economy has boomed so the decline of manufacturing in the US was hardly the death knell of the US economy. I am very aware that many cities and towns suffered. Other cities and towns also suffered when manufacturing jobs were on the up and up and people left agricultural centers. We receive many of our products now from China and Japan, and just to be certain we still do have our own domestic manufacturing... I'm not an economist but if manufacturing were to die in the US what exactly is wrong with just getting manufactured goods from Canada and elsewhere? I guess it might be a security risk but not much else.
This was true in the Soviet Union. If you didn't work, you didn't get fed. It's almost 2020 now and people can make a living streaming video games. They can make a living doing digital content (is this production? I guess, but not really in the traditional sense.) It's not the 1950s anymore where we all need to receive our wages from factories in order to put food in the table.
In the past decade or so we've seen a shift towards a "gig economy" where a lot of apps like etsy, uber and airbnb to name a few connect other people peer to peer where someone can request a service or a facility and someone else provides it. Right now I think there's a big demand for better apps/platforms that can connect users in better ways and take a smaller fee for the transaction. To insist that we ought to be making more cars or tools or manufactured just feels very outdated; that's not where any of this is heading.
Not at all analogous to a social-economic concept.
I'm not interested in the Soviet Union as it no longer exists. I am not making political points here and I am not claiming we ought to be producing cars or anything else. But can you eat live streamed video games? If you cannot, you will need to trade directly or indirectly with a food producer. You are providing a service he is a producer. Man cannot live on service alone. Someone has to produce the devices, the houses, and the medicines and the food, but robots don't watch live-streamed video.
The automatic assumption is to assume, the owner of the robot will charge more; but, he or she can only charge as much as it will cost him or her to supply the goods that he or she provides.
The invisible hand is the social pressure that guides individuals through the operation of their self interest. It is not a necessary causative law, because any individual as labourer or as capitalist is free to defy it and starve, but on average, and given the social and psychological status quo, it is inexorable. And this invisible hand at the present stage of development, mandates the annihilation of most of humanity, because they are no longer profitable. This is already happening.
Proposed solutions based on money and ownership (UBI and socialism/communism) inevitably fail because they continue the social (financial) arrangements that produce the invisible hand. Nothing less than a new conception, (or possibly an old conception) of social relations including the property relation, and the nature of social virtue will suffice to remedy the situation.
Hey, you never addressed my last post!
Quoting unenlightened
You are making a straw man of work-as-virtue. Labor is only virtuous under an economic model. That is it. This doesn't mean value actually is in labor. You are putting in tricky words that are ambiguous like "social virtue". Money works as an incentive. If there are no incentives, you don't need money. The only other forms would be coordinated distribution, piracy and might-makes-right, or some hierarchy whereby those who are closest with the robots get the goods. What else are you looking for?
Yes indeed. I am not personally advocating labour, I am describing the economic model. I advocate changing the model.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm looking for a model that doesn't entail most of us dying.
Yes, we will always need producers, but I just don't see what's wrong with robots taking over much of that production (more things that are tangible as opposed to digital) as long as us humans can keep busy and keep earning income in other ways. Robots already do much of the harvesting and milking and sure jobs have been lost and you bet it's going to continue but to only look at this isn't viewing the whole picture.
I really like your argument. But perhaps there is a more optimistic component. Given the increasing life expectancy, idleness, and general quality of life that has advanced along with technology, would it not be safe to say that this hidden hand mandates a liberation from toil and struggle more so than our annihilation?
I gave you the three outcomes:
Coordinated distribution - Best one..least death
Everyone-for-themselves- Worst one..most death
Hierarchy-of-Access- Not great, leads to extreme inequalities.
If money and labor is completely taken out of the equation, it is all about power at this point. So who has power to access the distribution. How do we provide the best access to distribution? It would have to be some democratic process, similar to a Constitutional Convention. It would require people trust each other and the institution setting it up. Of course, that could be tricky.
Well, we have the welfare system of the Nordic countries. They have been taxing the rich to give the poor the certainty in life to take risks and innovate and create private business for decades and they have not seen the widening of the gap between the owners of the machines and the working force that most of the western world has. And they have been economically very successful. Why would that not work for the foreseeable future of automation? Just tax the rich more to make the poor more educated and able to take risks according to the level of automation.
An AI that can automate human innovation in most applications would of course change everything.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What is the source of power in this brave new world? Is it maybe this: -
Quoting schopenhauer1
In essence, it is already trust, aka 'confidence' that allows the economy to function. I think that trust (in the sanctity of money and property) has to be withheld, in order for a new trust to begin, that would depend on a free and open system of distribution, whereby if someone has gotten a little greedy, we can all see it and know where the resources have gone.
Much of socialist or communist thought is all about reconceptualizing social relations, especially property relations. I suspect you're imagining "socialism/communism" to be Soviet Russia or the like, but that was explicitly (in its own terminology) state capitalist, ostensibly as a means to socialism and then communism, so if that's the target of your critique then it's spot on, but that's also the reason Soviet Russia is rejected an an exemplar of socialism or communism by most socialists and communists: it wasn't, and never claimed to be.
It is still founded on the work ethic. When we do not work, what distinguishes rich from poor in a way that is remotely justifiable? That there should be a small group that owns the world and lets us live is no longer thinkable.
Well I don't want to argue about the terminology, if you have some workable ideas, never mind the ism they are claimed by, let's discuss them. But at the moment I see the invisible hand operating on rich and poor alike, and little sign of an alternative.
Yeah. We can do that can't we? Brain plasticity, social facilitation and so on?
There are different degrees of what kinds of ownership claims are supposed to be invalid, according to different thinkers. Some say only that natural resources not created by humans (such as land) cannot legitimately be owned. Others say the means of production, like factories, cannot legitimately be owned. The usual term there is "usufruct", in contrast to "property": things belong to whoever is using them, so factories belong to whoever works there, land belongs to whoever's living on it, etc. (Though another common terminological distinction is between "private property" and "personal property", where "personal property" is basically ownership of things you use, and "private property" is ownership of things others use; I think that terminology is needlessly confusing, though).
My own proposal is to keep claims to property per se, but limit the power to contract in a way that, most importantly among other things, makes contracts of rent and interest ("usury", a fee for use) illegitimate and so unenforceable, which makes them unsuitable as widespread economic instruments. With usury no longer a viable option, those who have more than they need (that they would otherwise be lending out usuriously) will have no more profitable option but to sell it instead, and nobody will be buying except people who need more than they have, so those sales will have to occur on terms that the latter group can manage, or else not at all, leaving the former group taking a total loss, which they obviously would not prefer. In this manner ownership of property will tend toward a more equitable distribution, with things being generally owned by those who use them, as in usufruct.
Ok, I'm making an honest attempt to understand this from a socialist perspective: Why would someone give a loan if they're unable to change interest? Even if people were 100% honest and they would always repay and there was no risk to the loan, inflation grows by around 2% a year so a loan would pretty much always lose the creditor money. There are just no more loans in this economy. I can't tell if you're fine with an economy with no loans or not.
But to the extent that loans remain necessary for a society, they can be offered as a social service by society: instead of a for-profit private bank, a credit union, owned by its members, can choose to offer interest-free loans to its members, collectively from its members.
And inflation is not some inevitable natural phenomenon. We make inflation happen on purpose, to encourage investment and discourage hording. We don't have to make inflation happen, and my proposal also encourages investment and discourages hording.
Well, as I said in the foreseeable future. If everything gets automated and no one has to work justifying anything would be quite hard. Still, technically the Nordic system might work and more would be given to certain people simply because of historical ownership. In practice, I don't think it would work in that extreme situation. But to say that the owning class would simply kill others off would also be unthinkable... human nature dictates that our pleasure and status is greatly defined by those lower than us. Even the poor of many western countries have objectively better lives than many kings of the past, but they don't feel it. The rich need the poor to feel wealthy.
- The rich own all the automatons, including killbots, and nobody else stands a chance of doing anything about it, so everyone else either starves to death or dies fighting killbots in an effort to not starve to death.
- The rich own all the automatons, and aren't all completely heartless bastards, so they "charitably" give enough of their bots' excess produce to keep everyone else alive and "grateful" to them for "providing" all of that, so long as nobody steps out of line or does anything to show themselves to be "unworthy" of their lords' "grace".
- Before either of those happen, a (pseudo-)democratic state seizes control of the automated means of production, and then basically does the same thing as scenario two, except rather than some private owners everyone has to appease, it's the politicians and whoever they're beholden to through whatever vaguely democratic or representational political system is in place.
- Rather than a state forcefully seizing the automated means of production and controlling it all centrally like that, somehow ownership of it becomes widely distributed and decentralized, and we all individually and collectively enjoy the labor-free bounty that it produces without having to be beholden to anyone else to receive that.
If I had to wager on the probably outcome it would be somewhere between scenarios two and three. The first and last both seem extremely unlikely, although I could see the second gradually evolving to the third ("look everyone stop bothering me for things, just vote one person to be in charge of figuring out what you all want and I'll rubber-stamp it!"), and the third gradually evolving to the last (as people use whatever political voice they have to gradually reform society for the better, now that there's no good reason not to).
I think you are mistaken. Without work, there can be no rich and poor. You have perhaps indicated possible paths, but the end cannot be a continuation of any economic class system. the shortage game must end. There is no point in the rich and powerful maintaining the poor in poverty; neither fun nor profit. It's game over.
An end to government seems likely too.
And now we have arrived to such an extent that one can make a living selling the services of someone who makes a living encouraging the willing to work on a treadmill for nothing doing nothing.
It's game over, but no one has noticed.
It's always been game over. We just kept breeding and blindly keeping it all going.
It's a blessing to have a mind made numb by a life of hard labor. No gloomy predictions.
No, the need for government, particularly a centralized world government with actual authority, is stronger than ever. There are existential global threats that have to be dealt with:
Climate change, A.I., nanotechnology, nuclear weapon proliferation, gene editing, etc.
I don't have much hope for us. We'll have to walk between raindrops to navigate the minefield. Without a centralized authority, it's totally hopeless.
One of the reasons our rivers don't catch on fire anymore is because of government environmental regulations. Also, look up the Montreal Protocol. And also the Paris Climate Agreement, which was ineffective and non-binding, but was still better than nothing at all.
I never got a response from you. I asked what is wrong with robots largely taking over production/manufacturing and humans moving into more service-related jobs.
You mentioned tractors earlier and tractors take jobs from people. I can't tell if you're trying to eliminate technology or not.
I did try to explain. There is nothing 'wrong' with any arrangement you might suggest, except that it does not accord with economics. Adam serves Eve in some way to earn money, and Eve serves Adam. Meanwhile the robots do the farming and mining and building and so on. A nice picture. Except what do Adam and Eve do with the money they earn, apart from pass it back and forth between them? The robots have no use for it, they just produce stuff and pass it around. There's no economy.
Unless all the robots belong to Simon the serpent, and he collects the money from Adam and Eve in return for his robot produce, and Adam and Eve serve him, to earn money. But Simon the serpent might need a few dozen servants for delights that the robots cannot totally fulfil to his satisfaction, but not millions, or billions. Again, there's no economy.
And if there are 100 Simons or 10,000, they have nothing to speak of for each other, and likewise no use for the millions.
They could invest that money, loan it out, start a business with it, save it, gamble it, etc. there's a billion things they could do with that money and it would still be an economy.
Machines do need things by the way.
Sure, they could paper the walls with it. But it wouldn't be an economy, because no one cares what they do. You imagine everything will continue as a normal economy, but it won't, and you need to explain, in this brave new world what investment even means, what property means, what a loan means. Clearly you do not understand and cannot conceive that this whole money structure can fail, I cannot explain it any better, sorry.
So basically in the end there will be a world of everyone living happily in fully automated luxury space communism one way or another, the question is only who gets to survive to see it and how painful is the transition from here to there.
The point is that if the robots produce all the food and other basic necessities, and need nothing from the humans, and don’t just serve the humans all equally but only serve some minority of humans who barely need anything from other humans because they have robots to do everything, then what are all of the other humans going to trade to the robots (or their owners) to get that food and other necessities? One trillionaire’s entertainment budget isn’t going to keep a billion YouTubers gainfully employed.
If robot ownership is widely distributed there’s no problem, so this isn’t an argument against automation, but against concentrated ownership of the automatons. And yes, the existing concentration of ownership of existing automatons (and other less advanced means of production) is already causing a less severe version of the same problem. Total automation is just the most severe case that most highlights the problems of capitalism.
If the machines are doing "the essentials" and humans are doing services there's still room to innovate with services. You could invest in a business related to facilitating services.
This is a contentious point. Now, I'm not a mechanic or a physicist.... but every robot I've come across needs things. There could certainly be some kind of machine-to-machine economy where humans could find their own niche; I think the whole idea of a machine-to-machine economy was the idea for IOTA which is a cryptocurrency but maybe we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here. If humans are doing services I don't see why a robot couldn't pay for a cleaning.
They could trade with each other or provide upkeep or improvements to the machines. Maybe they could trade with the machines too.
I'm somewhat sympathetic with you here; if a billionaire or a government owns all of the robot super-soldiers we have a serious problem. Additionally, if AI gains some kind of self-consciousness we also have a potentially huge problem on our hands. I guess I'll agree with you here insofar as I'm against monopolies.
True.
But this does not answer either, really. The efficient way to space travel is with minimum population and genetic diversity in storage. Even when the economy is identical with entropy, robots are more efficient than humans.
Blending food is stupid; we evolved to eat fruit and veg - not to drink it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing