These specific jobs are not economically feasible, but that opens up labor demand for new, sometimes hard to imagine jobs.
The more I read dig it, the more I don't believe in technological unemployment (i.e. a technology automates a person out of a job, and that person remains forever unemployed). Instead, recently, something seems wrong with the re-hiring process in the global economy.
Very lucid discussion (found on HN no less) here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...
We're in the middle of an education bubble right now, and while there will always be automation-driven job disruption, whether or not the workers will be able to retrain to meet the new job demand isn't guaranteed. There's an opportunity for relatively low-cost job training, but until the University-degree title system flops, it won't be revered to be the same level of quality.
Checking my memory just now I learned something interesting: the magic lantern was invented by Huygens in the 1600s, and he probably had a simple animation in mind -- he sketched a sequence of Death removing his own head.
I always get kind of agitated at the notion of post resource scarcity because if you took someone from 1000 years ago and dropped them into today they'd be amazed at how much everyone has. If everyone had 11th century desires but 21st century technology we'd be there. But we're definitely not. I sincerely doubt we ever will be.
As for the real world you can observe demand satiation right now among different ranks of the rich. Look at billionaires. They consume much more than the man who has only a few million in the bank, but sub-linearly more. From millionaires to billionaires you don't see a thousand-fold increase in consumption as measured by house size, food, beverages, clothing, medical care... Billionaires are three orders of magnitude separated from millionaires on the basis of control, not consumption; the richest will feel ill long before they consume all the champagne or caviar they could afford to buy.
Which is why the growing wealth inequalities are bad for the overall economy. The rich can't spend their money with enough scale or velocity.
In a sandbox game like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, once I have met all the objectives built into the game, I can invent new and ridiculous objectives, such as "build a fortress entirely out of obsidian 200 z-levels high".
Once you're rich, and can no longer spend all your income on everything you can think to consume yourself, you can buy a megaproject.
Run a political campaign for PotUS. Build a working town, like Disney's Celebration, Florida. Develop a self-driving electric car. Build a city that floats on the ocean. Start a Mars colony. Build a single Dyson heliostat. Breed elephants down to the size of Great Dane dogs. Develop sono-videophones so that dolphins in zoos can talk to each other. Cure one or more types of cancer. Breed a horse that wins the triple crown. Found a religion that out-grosses Scientology and Mormons, combined. Repave all the highways in your state, and do a structural integrity assessment of all the bridges and overpasses, too. There are countless ways to spend a colossal pile of money.
How does one get control of so many resources with a finite and exhaustible amount of imagination?
As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results".
If the ultra-rich do not spend enough, they might begin to undermine the foundations of the economy. Then, if enough people can trace the apparent cause of their suffering to the wealth inequalities, they will start killing and/or looting rich people, possibly without regard to their individual conduct.
So by all means, if you think you're strong enough, go ahead and hoard ever increasing amounts of wealth, without limit. There's a distinct likelihood that your estates will never be besieged by hordes of starving peasants, and that you or your heirs will never be kidnapped for ransom (or revenge) if you ever attempt to travel beyond your own holdings, and that you will never be shaken down by corrupt officials. The less people perceive the systems of civilization to be fair, the less apt they are to respect its rules of conduct. It only takes one pissed-off person to make your life Hell, and there are 7 billion candidates out there just waiting for you to give them a good reason.
We got from the beginning of the industrial age to now by burning coal and oil. But if we continue to do so now, it is likely to eventually make the surface of the entire planet uninhabitable, rather than just Beijing. Responsible people have therefore been shifting to more technically advanced sources--such as wind, solar, hydro, and fission--to meet their power needs. In the same way, people who have grown so rich that they could buy anything they might possibly want must alter their habits to avoid poisoning their own environment.
2) The unwashed masses will never rise up against their uhpressors;
3) Rich people don't have some magical collective which solves the collective action problem; they act in their own interests on an individual basis, just like everybody else;
4) In the current regime, wealth is not power;
5) "Less" money, "fewer" dollars; one is continuous, the other discrete;
6) Nuclear is way cool, but coal isn't going to kill the planet;
7) The rich didn't get rich by frivolously buying everything they could possibly want, they got rich by saving and investing the vast majority of dollars that ever passed through their possession.
2. History disagrees with you. Countries occasionally experience revolutions wherein the lower class murders a significant portion of the upper class (only to promote their own into the same social positions, whereupon they adopt similar behaviors). The unwashed masses may never exist long without a perfumed and shaved upper class, but they can certainly put a lot of bodies in the ground when they get the itch. For instance, look at the French Terror, or the Russian revolution, or the Khmer Rouge killing fields, or the Iranian revolution, or the Cuban revolution. Eating the rich tends to set back economic development by a decade or more, but that doesn't stop the lower classes from doing it.
3. Which is why there will be a lot of free riders on the coattails of those public figures that choose to pursue philanthropic projects. I'm sure that many of them lie about anonymously donating to charities.
4. Wealth and power are not equal, but they do have an exchange rate.
5. Thank you for the grammar reminder. Were you correcting someone upthread, or just mentioning it in case someone might get it wrong later?
6. Coal-burning won't kill the planet--it will just kill some of the humans on it, and maybe some unfortunate plants and animals that happen to live downwind or downstream from industrial zones. I still haven't forgotten the TVA Kingston ash slurry spill. I'm also inclined to believe that excessive burning of hydrocarbons for energy could trigger outgassing of polar methane clathrates, which would be an ecological disaster. It won't cause human extinction, but it will crater the global economy.
7. Is wealth a means to an end, or an end in itself? Of what use to the rest of humanity is the man who hoards without end, who fills warehouses to the brim and locks them away, never to be emptied? I don't care how the rich got rich. It doesn't matter to me whether they pulled themselves up out of the gutter by their own bootstraps, or whether they were lucky enough to be born rich. I only care about what you do with what you have.
I'm genuinely interested.
For example assume that a new billionaire is minted by a lottery with 100 million people buying a $10 dollar ticket. Long term it's neutral but in the short term it effectively removes $1B in near term consumption from the economy and spreads it out over 100+ years.
On the other side a million people will likely better invest and sound a thousand dollars than one person will invest one billion.
The effect is to concentrate economic activity in specific sectors where banks are willing to lend which means the economy is less flexible overall.
An economy with $1B of debt and $1B in savings spread over 10,000 people is going to be more diverse and resilient than 9,999 people who have $1B in debt and one person with $1B in savings invested in housing and car loans.
The best outcome would be if she invested in new equity in a company that created a positive ROI in excess of what the lottery ticket buyers would have produced. Anything else is a net negative.
This is fine so long as investments move. We have such a high degree of aggregation of capital now that it sort of doesn't. It's sort of ... pinned down in the light cast by the public markets.
Even mutual finds are just now coming of age, much less the things that were innovations on them.
If too much goes to salary than the investment stops making sense and the rich will hoard cash instead, but I don't think we're in that situation. Could that be why QE was pumping so much money into the economy with inflation staying low? I bet there are statistics about the amount of cash people and companies are hoarding now vs 50 years ago, but there's too many confounding variables for me to figure it out.
Minds can build robots to go mine asteroids light years away and come back through (duh) hyperspace. I meant the original comment quite literally.
Also, it is a really freaking good series if you like Sci-fi that tries to answer philosophy questions, which this series does a wonderful job of.
It's a lovely picture of the future, assuming we have a really friendly AI explosion.
(I'm sure you know all this; I'm just elaborating for those who haven't sampled the delights of Banks' novels.)
When you can move literally anywhere in the galaxy, amongst virtually any galaxy that hyperspace ships can take you to, there isn't a scarcity of space and machines can create literally anything in this world on demand, so demand is also never a problem.
I think somehow we are misunderstanding eachother, but it makes it much harder to explain this VAST ecosystem when it does appear you might not have even read the series we're all discussing.
Obviously the replacement fertility rate is going to be a lot lower in a society where people can live as long as they please and most choose centuries of life. But the Culture is also vastly wealthier than any real-life low-fertility nation. There's perfect birth control for both sexes and a general absence of destructive impulses among biological Culture citizens (due either to selection pressures or editing). I'd guess that the Minds don't need to nudge much if at all.
Having advanced that argument, I wonder if there is any consistent relationship between material prosperity and fertility. Would a weakly post-scarcity society[2] have higher or lower fertility rates than rich nations do today? There'd be none of the security-in-old-age pressures that drive high fertility in poor nations, but also none of the economic penalties to child rearing that discourage high fertility among the educated middle class in current developed economies.
[1] Ranked by nominal GDP per capita.
[2] A fully robotized productive economy, but we can't just gin up atoms and energy like in the fictional Culture. Also no FTL or teleportation. Real physics only. It's the Silver Plan of post-scarcity, as compared to the Culture's Unobtainium Plan.
The Culture is not limited to biological rates of reproduction. That nobody ever sets off a human forkbomb is a collective choice, somehow.
(Sketchy reply because I'm on a tablet.)
We always seem to want more "stuff" for some reason. Without some changes in the way we think and feel, we may never reach true post-scarcity.
For example, air is currently a post scarcity good.
You don't pay for the air you breath. But do spend your day trying to collect more and more air? No. Because you can have as much air as you want.
It is not a requirement per se for you to survive in those environments, but boy does it feel good to get some O2 if you don't have enough red blood cells in your veins to get the oxygen your body needs to feel comfortable.
The same is true, IIRC, in Beijing, where clean air can be hard to come by.
I suppose the only reason we don't usually experience air scarcity is because the ecosystem services of earth do a really good job providing it.
It's easy to imagine this not being the case. There is clean air scarcity in polluted cities, and of course in some space environments, air might be considered quite valuable and "hoarded".
Water scarcity and water use rights are totally a thing though.
The "air market" is effectively post scarcity for most people (baring the exceptions that you mentioned).
Other markets will become similar to the "air market" when we get really good at producing those things as well.
I actually really enjoyed Use of Weapons and think Player of Games (the ending at least) might be one of my all time top 5 favorite books I've read. Brilliant stuff, keep reading it!
The real cost isn't in the work itself imo, but in the contract those people had with society, which now needs to be renegotiated, and the workers are at a substantial disadvantage this time.
There is plenty of science and engineering jobs tat let you do both.
I think that to associate automation with what is ultimately a shrinkage of the GdP is a serious, although easy, misrepresantation. Those jobs are lost, but money is saved for a part of the population, which will spend it, and ultimately create a demand for new jobs. So it's not just "jobs lost".
Now this transition of course happens in the long term, and that's the problem, but it's different from interpreting automation as net loss.
edit: turns out there is a name for this, which is the "Lump of labour fallacy"; of course, as written, the transition does represent a problem.
The money mostly goes to the capital-owning class, i.e. the established rich, who spend relatively little of their incomes. They tend to buy high-quality items with a high purchase price and a low total cost of ownership (Terry Pratchett has an interesting passage on boots), and once you've got enough income you just can't spend it all -- so they spend a much smaller percentage of their incomes on job-producing things than the poor. (Here, "the poor" includes the middle class and noveaux-riches, who tend to squander money on mortgages -- and on gaudy short-lived consumer goods, like Teslas).
The rich tend to reinvest money instead of spending it, and typically live well within their means. It's not a bad way to live, as an individual (although you need some self-control and relatively modest tastes); but it has problems when most income goes to people who live this way. A lot of money ends up chasing few investment opportunities -- a situation that should sound familiar from the financial news.
In a free (and not colluded) market, end prices will go down. Profits will depend on the market, not differently from the effects of economies of scale in general.
> The rich tend to reinvest money instead of spending it
Investing money and spending it is practically the same, from the perspective of the economy.
It's also no longer an option to go work for the King's Master Blacksmith making armor for the Knights of the round table, but if that sort of thing tickles your fancy, you may be able to make do with setting up a small anvil and furnace in your garage.
For myself I fall in the optimists camp: technology does destroy some jobs, but it opens up many more.
Does it make anyone else sad to hear this? I see posts about robots/AI/etc automating away jobs and I try to be happy about that (who wouldn't want to never have to work again?) but I guess I'm saddened by some perceived loss of interesting opportunities.
If I wanted to get my hands dirty or get away from the world for a bit, before robots I could work on an oil rig for a bit. Now, that's not really an option.
Does anyone else have this sort of thought pattern? What replaces work you find enjoyable/exciting if it's not something you can do at home or by yourself in a post-AI, post-UBI world?