Elevated unemployment will always be with us now.

Quote from d08:

Just retrain the assembly workers as robotics engineers.

In reality though, it's looking bleak for the west.
China has it pretty much right though, as opposed to the western countries who favor the breeding of low intelligence "consumers" to prop up the economies - this will definitely come back to bite when these same masses won't have enough funds to do the only thing they know - consume.
You're already seeing it in Spain, Greece. Zero entrepreneurialism as people are just cozy collecting the government check and going to the occasional job interview, in the meantime spending their days at cafeterias with friends.
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That is about it. Don't forget in the US if you have enough people in one area, it can have its own congressional district. It is better for the politicians to have a large masses of loyal wage monkeis who will vote for them. If you have to keep the plebs in thier pen with some transfer payments then so be it. It is just about the money and the votes.

Akuma
 
Quote from achilles28:

That's what they said when Ford invented the car, Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison electricity, and HP the personal computer. All of those revolutionary technologies made workers obsolete in one industry, but fueled growth in the emerging tech industry, along with unrelated sectors...

Again, not to be rude, your argument is based on a general ignorance of how wealth is created and how innovation in one industry, leads to cost savings, and industrial expansion in other sectors. Take for the example the invention of the Model-T. It was slated to destroy the horse and buggy industry, which involved breeders, keepers, blacksmiths, leather tanners etc. Countless jobs would be lost!! And they were. Except the manufacturing of vehicles absorbed much of those displaced workers, and the cost savings derived from use of motor vehicles and the revolutionary impacts it had on transport, drove down the costs of physical consumables in all sectors, and allowed for greater economies of scale in the production of other goods. This meant consumers could buy more per dollar in their pocket, which they did, on other industries, like clothing, travel, food, housing. And then those industries experienced a subsequent boom which net-net, employed far more people than the horse and buggy industry ever did! That's how it works, in a nutshell.

Now take your example about automation. Robotics will displace a big chunk of workers, increasingly so, in industry. True. On the flipside, an entirely new field in design, engineering, IT and fabrication will emerge. And full-scale industrial automation (along with competition) will drive down production costs to an extremely cheap level. The price level, like it did upon the emergence of electricity, the car, the steam engine, computer, will decline, markedly. The net result is consumer wages buy far more stuff than they did before, which is spent on more manufactured products, food, clothing, shelter, travel, education, healthcare etc, which drives expansion in those sectors, and net-net employment goes up. And producers/manufactures sell more stuff at a similar margin (due to the reduction in manufacturing costs) = higher profits!!! This is how wealth is created...

The next thing you'll say is - what about a Terminator scenario where AI robots can do virtually all tasks for human beings, and there's no jobs left for us? That's the point. Humans don't work for works sake. We don't work so we can have a job to do. We work so we can buy things in exchange for our labor. In the T2 scenario, the machines could produce everything humans need, so there wouldn't be any need for us to work, to begin with! That means paradise. Nobody has to work > nobody has to be compensated for work > most everything is free, or cost pennies.... The real problem with that scenario is not so much that humans dont have jobs. It's political. Government and Corporations won't want to share the wealth. If humans have everything we need, there's no real method to control the people, and most people, would get real interested in politics, since they've got nothing else to do, which represents competition for the power elite at the top, who enjoy ruling over us.
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You're still not seeing the qualitative difference in displacement of manufacturing techniques and products and the displacement of actual human brainpower.

Yes, the Terminator scenario is one way that could play out.

As far as "why work?", there are studies that show humans work beyond what they need to precisely because there is some psychological gains from working over and above the monetary gains. It's not simply an exchange of labor for goods/services.

I agree that part of the problem in a true post-scarcity world would be political. Look at something like IBM's Watson, which is probably the most advanced AI out there at the moment. IBM owns it. IBM will probably own the next generation of most advanced AI as well. At some point then, logically, one would assume that IBM would be the company to develop the AI advanced enough to perform the function of complete displacement of even "knowledge workers". Would that basically mean that IBM would dictate who partakes of the post-scarcity abundance and who doesn't? Certainly, if they don't believe they will, at least to a great degree, they should stop working on the successor to Watson now, since it will basically be a waste of capital. Yet, if they don't work on the successor to Watson, Google will, so the very nature of competition will eventually lead to a company with a strong claim to have complete ownership of the IP that leads to AI capable of displacing even the "high-level" jobs. What sort of political impasse would that lead to? What if the company that builds it also builds in a mechanism whereby the AI "commits suicide" if someone tries to take control of it via political methods?

In my own case, I have worked in corporate strategy for a long time. Basically, I have been paid to think on behalf of my employers. They hire me to do this because I have the right credentials, the right IQ, the right type of work ethic, etc. But, at the end of the day, my job is basically to analyze data and develop recommendations based on that data. The fact is that at this point, no computer could do what I do. But, the day is coming when one will be able to and then even my type of work, which is at the apex of the corporate pyramid, will be displaced. If the world cannot find employment for someone with my resume, then that is a very different world from what currently exists.

Anyway, back to my point, it's not that I don't understand how wealth is created, it's that you don't understand the nature of the potential disruption that could result from an intelligence hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times greater than any human intelligence which has ever existed.
 
Quote from logic_man:


Anyway, back to my point, it's not that I don't understand how wealth is created, it's that you don't understand the nature of the potential disruption that could result from an intelligence hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times greater than any human intelligence which has ever existed.
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No, you don't understand how wealth is created, otherwise you wouldn't have said automation creates "demand destruction". That's ass backwards, friend. Now you wanna talk about AI. Fine, I already addressed that. I suggest you scroll up and read my post again. Humans don't work for works sake. We work to exchange our labor for goods and services we need/want to sustain and enhance our lives. If humans invent AI, then theoretically, the machines could perform all necessary work for us. On a practical level, that means any human could walk into a grocery store, fill a cart to the brim, and pay 5 cents for it. Or walk into a car dealership, and pay 20 cents for a vehicle. Silly stuff, like that. Money would cease to have meaning because goods and services would no longer be scarce, but limitless. Of course, that utopia would never manifest, but since this debate is squarely in the realm of theory, who cares
 
Quote from achilles28:

Having fun shadow boxing your straw man?

I repeatedly addressed the case where AI performed all tasks, and eliminated the need for human labor. In this case, the cost of production or service delivery is not virtually zero. It's zero.

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Well, what I read you kept saying that humans would just migrate to other industries they would create, like they have in the past. You made the analogy to the people freed up from the horse and buggy industry by the auto industry.

I see the problem, though. You think that because the cost of production is zero, the cost to the consumer will be zero.

Yeah, right.

What's the marginal cost of production of another copy of MS Office? What's the retail price?

Price is based on value, not production cost. That being the case, if there are virtually no humans who can create value to exchange for goods and services, regardless of whether those goods and services can be produced for zero cost, they won't be distributed to those who cannot create value to exchange for them. If there is no labor to be done, most people won't be able to create value.

Even if my cost of production is zero, I can still view the existence of humans who cannot create value as a negative externality (they take up space and are generally unpleasant to be around), so I would choose not to provide them with the "free" goods and services I can produce at no cost.
 
Quote from achilles28:

That's what they said when Ford invented the car, Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison electricity, and HP the personal computer.
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I think you mean when Karl Benz invented the modern car, Meucci the telephone, Tesla electricity, but I do agree about HP being the author of the PC.
 
Will you children stop whining about "automated thinkers" and get back to the politics forum? This is a good thread in the ECONOMICS forum.
 
Quote from vincentvega:

Will you children stop whining about "automated thinkers" and get back to the politics forum? This is a good thread in the ECONOMICS forum.
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Since automation is the main driver of the decrease in the need for human labor, especially in manufacturing, I think it's most relevant to this topic of elevated unemployment.
 
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