Robotics and AI have improved significantly and will continue to improve into the future. How much have humans improved over the last 30 years? People simply cannot compete, and this is a trend that cannot be reversed, or shouldn't be reversed.
Just as mass industrialization necessitated huge social change in response. The emergence of a middle class, the growth of cities, organized labor and work hours, etc.
As automation and AI continue to replace jobs and more and more people find it difficult to compete at any price. I predict you will see similar societal changes in response. I don't know what those will be, and they probably will not come easy. We could see a utopian future similar to Star Trek, or a dystopian one instead.
This begs the question: as human productivity is increasingly usurped by machines, what will happen to the human manufacturing population? Will we finally figure out a way to distribute wealth in a agreeable way (through, for example, basic minimum income) or will we go back to the a feudal model of living?
Interestingly, someone has to purchase the goods that these systems create. Thus, giving people the funds to do so, regardless of where they come from, seems like a necessity.
This was basically Marx starting point: The idea that capitalist competition will cause capitalism to eat itself - sooner or later there are no new markets to expand into for growth, and competition will force ever slimmer margins and ultimately the only place you can trim margins in in employment costs. Then what happens to your market?
His belief was that on one hand capitalism was/is absolutely necessary to create sufficient wealth to make redistribution viable (he made the point in The German Ideology that a redistribution before that point would do what we saw e.g. in the Soviet Union: simply spread poverty around, and restart the class struggle it tried to erase as people tried to et out of poverty), on the other hand it would in its end-stages lead to "overproduction" combined with mass unemployment as it would fail to reconcile the need to try to win more of the market with the need to cut employment costs.
The ways society could prevent this happening are many, including things like basic minimum income as you suggest. But Marx argument was that societal changes of this magnitude tends to instead result in increasing tensions until revolutions erupt for the reason that ruling classes rarely see the gravity of the situation until it is too late.
There are many ways he could be wrong about this, but I find it very interesting to observe the increase in frequency with which this issue of automation and its consequencs is now coming up again.
Marx didn't consider how capitalism, coupled with a lack of a satiating supply of survival staples (aka today "guaranteed basic income" aka welfare entitlements), necessitates raising the accepted standard of living and thus creating a renewing demand for labor (mundane included). Most of humanity past did not enjoy what we now consider poverty-level baseline necessities, much of which exist thanks to jobs of all kinds both creating and buying those products & services. He never dreamed of the poor needing & owning cell phones, indoor running hot drinking water, a/c, a car for every adult, TV, etc.
Actually, Marx foresaw exactly "a renewing demand for labor" (although foresaw is kind of the wrong word; directly observed would be more accurate.) See "Capital".
He also foresaw the shift from manual labor to intellectual property as the essential component in production.
What happens is QE is used in a top down fashion to infuse the market with capital. Basically the opposite of a living wage. Its happening now on a large scale ie. Japan and the US.
QE benefits everyone who borrows money for anything. We bought a house with a 3.1 rate, something that would have been unheard of in generations past. Same with rates for auto and every other type of loan.
The elites will share their wealth only insofar as it's cheaper to do that (bread and circuses) than it is to keep the proles at bay through force.
What Marx saw as an inexorable trend towards socialism may have in fact just been a temporary consequence of the industrial revolution, wherein labor was especially important and the power of an individual worker was large in historical terms. It's not impossible to imagine a sort of "Neo Feudalism" where a small minority of elites find it cheaper to maintain control via technological force-multipliers than to share their earnings such that everyone is actually happy or nearly so.
Not quite. He did note the increasing automation (and sadly either willfully or not fudges his numbers to make the worker more important) in his writing.
His message was less about how important labor was, but how labor got squeezed between the industrial capitalists owning the factories, and the rentier capitalists who owned the land, housing and issued loans.
Alternatively, as massive increases in productivity in manufacturing lead to plunging prices of goods, much smaller incomes will be able to support an increasing standard of living.
People still needs some income at all. Otherwise, they will either rely on welfare or resort to crime for survival. This is a explosive combination, specially in a society where the unemployable's fare is seen as just and self inflicted.
Exactly right. I feel housing/medical expenses remain independent of all the gain productivity. With PEs buying large housing stock in markets and hospitals keep getting increasingly larger and integrated I do not see what would force them to not extract maximum possible money irrespective of the cost to them.
Wasn't feudalism mainly a hierarchical means of controlling land and the people that worked the land? If you don't actually need peasants/serfs to do anything then you wouldn't need feudalism.
One of the drivers for feudalism was the prevalence of cavalry in warfare starting after about 700AD. Mounted knights are expensive to maintain, hence the solution of providing land grants in exchange for military service. It's a medieval version of the military-industrial complex.
The connection between mounted warfare and feudalism is controversial [1] but it's common enough that societies adopt social structures optimized for defense. There were almost certainly multiple reasons for the prevalence of feudal relations.
Not exactly. Feudalism was rent seeking from top to bottom. Local Barons obtained the right to get rent from peasants who lived on their land. In turn they paid to their local Earl who paid to the local Duke and so on up the ladder to the King. Without the peasants at the bottom their would have been no feudalism. Of note, the peasants alone were generally forbidden from bearing arms.
Why do you think we need to do that? The economy will sort itself out as it always has. The job market will just shift. Some jobs will stop being, others will be more in-demand, which will create entirely new ones.
So if i replace 100 workers with 1 robot, and it takes 1 programmer and 1 maintenance technician to maintain said robot - I've created 2 jobs by destroying 100.
This is what you are proposing as the solution to the problem of job shortages?
The economy will sort itself out and efficiently provide goods for those with the means to trade for them. For those without something to trade, the economy will provide nothing.
No we don't, I am not anti-progress but my personal opinion is that increased automation will lead to further inequality and potentially economic contraction. Thing is, we are not born equal, different people have different skills, we can't be expecting everyone to become an engineer or a scientist. Blue collar workers losing their jobs will not lead to interesting times...
> we can't be expecting everyone to become an engineer or a scientist
We don't have to. There are many complicated jobs that aren't white collar but still require a highly skilled individual and are not currently achievable by robotics (millwrights for example).
The OP is referring to removing monotonous, simplistic, repetitive jobs.
True to a point but you're trying to handwave around some very simple math. We are not seeing new industries emerge that require large pools of labor which means the jobs being wiped out by automation are not being replenished.
> We are not seeing new industries emerge that require large pools of labor which means the jobs being wiped out by automation are not being replenished.
Do you have a citation for that? I would be interested in seeing that. According to the Chinese government (which has been accused, in fairness, of fudging the numbers) their unemployment rate is highly stable.
Historically, as countries transition from developing to developed their workforce will shift from primarily non-skilled labour to primarily skilled labour [1]. China appears to be following this line naturally, if you trust their reported unemployment rates.
I do not have a citation. Are you aware of any combination of industries that have emerged in the last 30 years that have produced strong demand for unskilled or semi-skilled labor? Housing & construction hasn't blown up, manufacturing sector jobs have vanished. Mining is in sharp decline. Forestry has automated away most of it's workforce. Infrastructure is also in the toilet. So what am I missing?
I highly recommend Manna by Marshall Brain - http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm - He looks at how this may play out, with several variations on the theme throughout a single storyline.
Just as mass industrialization necessitated huge social change in response. The emergence of a middle class, the growth of cities, organized labor and work hours, etc.
As automation and AI continue to replace jobs and more and more people find it difficult to compete at any price. I predict you will see similar societal changes in response. I don't know what those will be, and they probably will not come easy. We could see a utopian future similar to Star Trek, or a dystopian one instead.
We live in interesting times. :)