For all those that think automation is just a threat for the little people

[Moonbeam]

Also, geometric rate does not mean what you think it does. Look up Geometric progression. Rate does not denote progress or regress. Your statement means nothing without that context.

In the first place, you live in a world where the rate of change has happened at a pace to which humans have had the ability to adapt, but change is happening at a geometric rate. Given time and continued progress in the rate of technological advance, only an artificial intelligence will be able to manage it.

 

[Moonbeam]

realibrad: You cannot cobble together words and expect meaning from them. What does the following mean?

M: I don't comprehend everything I read. I don't however automatically assume that's the other person's fault. I am glad that you asked what I meant though, but I have a growing suspicion that instead of understanding for the sake of understanding you are looking for something to argue with. I am not very interested in that, but I'll explain this time as best I can.

You want to know what "Isn't prison defined by ones definition of freedom which is defined by ones definition of self worth?" means:

Jaskalas: Folks associate their job and "hard earned wages" with their sense of independence and freedom.

M: I was asking them if this implies that if freedom and independence is defined by having a job and wages than slavery or prison can defined as the lack of self worth derived from unemployment and poverty.

J: If government were to hand them things, there'd be strings attached. It wouldn't be "freedom" anymore.

M: He is saying that welfare destroys this freedom. Working for money is the same as working for self respect. Taking yields nothing by way of self respect.

J: There is a tremendous amount of fear associated with the welfare state, and with unemployment in general. Restrictions and substandard quality being chief among them.

M: He is talking about the conservative position that the welfare state destroys society and they are afraid that will happen, especially with mass unemployment.

I then ask, "What if the cost of freedom is met by the exchange of definitions."

I am asking what if I as a poor unemployed person buy my freedom by giving up the idea that my value is in having a job and what I earn from it, and instead discover that I have some other qualities of worth or that ones worth isn't dependent of the usual categories.

 

[Moonbeam]

Hell, we have Zaap here creating near infinite stupidity in just one thread. Imagine the potential stupidity of a world full of Zaaps. It's mind boggling.

In my opinion you guys get along so well together because you are both looking in the mirror and don't much like what you see which for me is sad and ironic because you're both two of my favorites. Emotional honesty is so very refreshing even if not as refined as it could be.

 

[werepossum]

Hell, we have Zaap here creating near infinite stupidity in just one thread. Imagine the potential stupidity of a world full of Zaaps. It's mind boggling.

Dude, there is NO way I'm climbing between you two!

In the first place, you live in a world where the rate of change has happened at a pace to which humans have had the ability to adapt, but change is happening at a geometric rate. Given time and continued progress in the rate of technological advance, only an artificial intelligence will be able to manage it.

Well - it would have to be an artificial intelligence with a conservative brain defect. Otherwise the logic conflict between "I have saved the world" and "you're preventing me from accomplishing anything" would lock that sucker down tight in the IF/THEN loop from Hell.

 

[Zaap]

Hell, we have Zaap here creating near infinite stupidity in just one thread. Imagine the potential stupidity of a world full of Zaaps. It's mind boggling.

Geeze, dude! You needed the WHOLE tube???!

 

[Moonbeam]

Unfortunately creating stupidity is an even better route to power than is creating scarcity. Being the only person or party who can deliver scarce desirable resources is a position of power - but with stupidity one doesn't even have to make something scarce. Simply convincing enough stupid people that it's threatened is enough to gain and hold power.

You mean like being programmed you are being mind controlled? Imagine a world in which people thought there was a real devil running around causing evil instead of it being just their own self hate.

 

[Moonbeam]

I think the point of this is that if we continue to replace human labor and slowly acquired human skills by machines that can do and learn and out produce humans giving folk who employ machines over humans the competitive edge, and this capital concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, we will have to come up with some paradigm shift to ensure that access to a quality of life is provided for all. If people are going to have almost unlimited free time we will have to learn to fill it with some meaningful purpose.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

Again the irony is blazing- the fact that people can actually survive in the world with tons of leisure time to do nothing but the above, when in the past these same people would have freakin perished or been put to death as excessive useless mouths no one would bother to feed, is actually a byproduct of the luxuries afforded by the very automation said dimbulbs quake in their boots over!

Survival? I think we can do better. This isn't the dark ages. It's the plethora of "leisure" time that is part of the problem. There is a difference between unemployed and lazy. We have a glut of folks who are not currently employable for a variety of reasons. Your broad generalizations and callous nature are not part of any workable solution.

Those more intelligent people should just stop inventing things so the poor poor little snowflakes that only know how to toke up and shout about cops and robots can keep feeling special and have some sort of a role in society that pays them at the outer fringes of someone else's inventions/productions/manufacturing processes, etc..

Invent a robot cop who delivers the toke then. I'm sure it will reduce the unemployment by one while simultaneously putting a hundred people out of work. Good math is good. Have some more of what your smoking?

P.S. edit thanks for the lively debate!

 

[glenn1]

Survival? I think we can do better. This isn't the dark ages. It's the plethora of "leisure" time that is part of the problem. There is a difference between unemployed and lazy. We have a glut of folks who are not currently employable for a variety of reasons. Your broad generalizations and callous nature are not part of any workable solution.

Well we've tried the progressive solution of ever increasing social welfare for decades and the level of dysfunction and crime in the "not currently employable" sector is higher than ever. Hopefully they'll realize that giving someone taxpayer dollars doesn't give the recipient a sense of purpose, substitute for morality, or create any true social capital. If that means that the lower social classes have to devolve into Morlocks then so be it, but giving them unemployment checks is patently not the answer.

 

[fskimospy]

Well we've tried the progressive solution of ever increasing social welfare for decades and the level of dysfunction and crime in the "not currently employable" sector is higher than ever. Hopefully they'll realize that giving someone taxpayer dollars doesn't give the recipient a sense of purpose, substitute for morality, or create any true social capital. If that means that the lower social classes have to devolve into Morlocks then so be it, but giving them unemployment checks is patently not the answer.

That's odd, crime stats show that crime overall and in that 'not currently employable' sector is actually much lower than it was in the past. Considering your logic, that means progressive policies have been working like a charm!

Now I'm sure you will immediately abandon that logic and find some other reason to say it has failed.

 

[fskimospy]

I think the point of this is that if we continue to replace human labor and slowly acquired human skills by machines that can do and learn and out produce humans giving folk who employ machines over humans the competitive edge, and this capital concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, we will have to come up with some paradigm shift to ensure that access to a quality of life is provided for all. If people are going to have almost unlimited free time we will have to learn to fill it with some meaningful purpose.

This is very true. While improvements in automation are very desirable, they do represent an increasing accrual of power towards capital over labor. I'm not sure what this shift will look like, but I agree that one will likely need to happen in the future.

 

[realibrad]

This is very true. While improvements in automation are very desirable, they do represent an increasing accrual of power towards capital over labor. I'm not sure what this shift will look like, but I agree that one will likely need to happen in the future.

Is that surprising though? Anyone can have a baby for the most part, but to create something is far more difficult and for many impossible.

I really do expect that society will start to have most if not all of its basic needs met by those who give away goods/services for free. They wont do it for the love of humanity either, but as a marketing tool. Goods/services will become so cheap, that everyone will have access to them. Once those basic needs are met, people will be free to focus on other things. It will be a very Star Trek like world, where work is not required to survive.

There will likely come a point, where material resources are no longer scarce. Once that happens, the only commodity that will be limited is people.

 

[Matt1970]

Automation is what makes civilizations advance. We can go back to the stone ages and wash clothes down in the creek or ride horses to the store. It hasn't worked out to well for countries like North Korea, but I am sure we will do it better than them.

 

[Matt1970]

That's odd, crime stats show that crime overall and in that 'not currently employable' sector is actually much lower than it was in the past. Considering your logic, that means progressive policies have been working like a charm!

Now I'm sure you will immediately abandon that logic and find some other reason to say it has failed.

You don't think a lot of that has to do with the fact a good portion of our population is behind bars?

 

[BoberFett]

When the leaders of the Jamestown settlement declared that people had to work to eat, they had a job for everybody.

You're as dumb as any conservative. Hundreds of years ago jobs were not created to keep people busy, you nimrod.

 

[bshole]

If people are going to have almost unlimited free time we will have to learn to fill it with some meaningful purpose.

Isn't that what porn is for?

 

[fskimospy]

You don't think a lot of that has to do with the fact a good portion of our population is behind bars?

I'm sure that could account for part of it, but the overall drop has been huge over the last 40 years or so. Far more than could be attributable to that.

Regardless, I wasn't actually making the argument that social spending was the cause, I was just showing that glenn hadn't checked his facts and considering the conclusion he had made if he applied the same logic to the correct facts he would come to an ideologically inconvenient conclusion.

 

[1prophet]

Is that surprising though? Anyone can have a baby for the most part, but to create something is far more difficult and for many impossible.

I really do expect that society will start to have most if not all of its basic needs met by those who give away goods/services for free. They wont do it for the love of humanity either, but as a marketing tool. Goods/services will become so cheap, that everyone will have access to them. Once those basic needs are met, people will be free to focus on other things. It will be a very Star Trek like world, where work is not required to survive.

There will likely come a point, where material resources are no longer scarce. Once that happens, the only commodity that will be limited is people.

This almost happened but the powers that be put a stop to it, since free is not good for profits.

It's called planned obsolescence, it isn't stopping any time soon and the ramifications to the environment are severe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfbbF3oxf-E

Did you know that the lifetime of light bulbs once used to last for more than 2500 hours and was reduced on purpose to just 1000 hours?

Did you know that nylon stockings once used to be that stable that you could even use them as tow rope for cars and its quality was reduced just to make sure that you will soon need a new one?

Did you know that you might have a tiny little chip inside your printer that was just placed there so that your device will break after a predefined number of printed pages thereby assuring that you buy a new one?

Did you know that Apple originally did not intend to offer any battery exchange service for their iPods/iPhones/iPads just to enable you to continuously contribute to the growth of this corporation?

This strategy was maybe first thought through already in the 19th century and later on for example motivated by Bernhard London in 1932 in his paper Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence.

The intentional design and manufacturing of products with a limited lifespan to assure repeated purchases is denoted as planned/programmed obsolescence and we are all or at least most of us upright and thoroughly participating in this doubtful endeavor.

Or did you not recently think about buying a new mobile phone / computer / car / clothes / because your old one unexpectedly died or just because of this very cool new feature that you oh so badly need?

 

[Matt1970]

This almost happened but the powers that be put a stop to it, since free is not good for profits.

It's called planned obsolescence, it isn't stopping any time soon and the ramifications to the environment are severe.

Did you know that you might have a tiny little chip inside your printer that was just placed there so that your device will break after a predefined number of printed pages thereby assuring that you buy a new one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfbbF3oxf-E

 

[NikolaeVarius]

This almost happened but the powers that be put a stop to it, since free is not good for profits.

It's called planned obsolescence, it isn't stopping any time soon and the ramifications to the environment are severe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfbbF3oxf-E

This is an insanely dumb post.

Planned obsolescence is a thing, most of the examples in this article are not.

 

[Moonbeam]

I'm sure that could account for part of it, but the overall drop has been huge over the last 40 years or so. Far more than could be attributable to that.

Regardless, I wasn't actually making the argument that social spending was the cause, I was just showing that glenn hadn't checked his facts and considering the conclusion he had made if he applied the same logic to the correct facts he would come to an ideologically inconvenient conclusion.

I thought it clear that was your argument. I also thought your conclusion, that if he abandoned his argument he would find a new one to support his original conclusion to be likely, but I think it more likely he will deny the truth of your data. I feel that his point of view shows all kinds of signs of being religious in nature, that some part of his ego is attached to it. There is also data that shows that direct giving of money to the poor has great outcomes.

Where he is on the right track, in my opinion, is in his concern about generating self worth. There, I don't think he gets very far because he does not understand the issue of self hate. Nobody, it seems, wants to look at that.

 

[Jhhnn]

You're as dumb as any conservative. Hundreds of years ago jobs were not created to keep people busy, you nimrod.

I didn't say that. I said that jobs were created for everybody because they lived in a non-automated world of scarcity. Leadership involved putting everybody to work to overcome that scarcity for the good of all. The leaders of Jamestown saw it as their duty & the people saw it as their duty to participate. It was an issue of practicality & morality, as well.

Modern economic leadership involves no such thing, obviously. Modern technology insures that a lot less human work needs to be done while remote ownership & control provide no moral compunction or sense of duty to the community at all.

Leadership & ideology matter. They change the world. Or you can just blame the victims.

 

[Moonbeam]

Isn't that what porn is for?

As much as there is a part of me that can enjoy porn, I don't indulge it. And I
also don't find it funny. It makes me sick. I think sex is best between two loving people filled with tenderness, not two actors going at it mechanically. I see it as a perversion of something far and away more valuable. I see it as an objectivation of sex that leads into meaninglessness, and a crude exploitation of the people involved. I see not sexy women, but some poor mother's lost child. I do not think that truly happy people would involve themselves in it because it is self demeaning. Sorry, but you pushed one of my buttons.

 

[Moonbeam]

I didn't say that. I said that jobs were created for everybody because they lived in a non-automated world of scarcity. Leadership involved putting everybody to work to overcome that scarcity for the good of all. The leaders of Jamestown saw it as their duty & the people saw it as their duty to participate. It was an issue of practicality & morality, as well.

Modern economic leadership involves no such thing, obviously. Modern technology insures that a lot less human work needs to be done while remote ownership & control provide no moral compunction or sense of duty to the community at all.

Leadership & ideology matter. They change the world. Or you can just blame the victims.

He does't like you because you are a liberal. He has a box labeled liberal by his definition of the term and naturally whatever you say will sound like ithe box is speaking. The dislike will make him want to Zaap you.

 

[Bubbleawsome]

Real Steeling ur jeeerbs!


The robots!! The robots!!!!!!!

:awe: