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Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by MBlume on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:06PM (#19004033)
...Good? Work is horrible? If a drop in the amount of work that needs to be done is actually a problem then that's a policy failure.
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by tjr225 on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:25PM (#19004112)
Fine, but as of right now I need work to pay for the education I got 4 years ago(50k), the doctor visits/ct scan I got this month(2k), and the food I need on my table every night.
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by empath75 on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:26PM (#19004118)
It’ll be a problem because ultimately the people who own all the capital won’t need anyone else to survive. They’ll build walls and robot guards and live in their utopias of plenty while everyone else starves.
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by redahs on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:49PM (#19004218)
The ownership of land by value is more unequally distributed than the ownership of capital. Capital depreciates and needs to be regularly replaced each generation. The wealthy have never needed robots to live a life of plenty; they can extract as much labor power as they need through rent.
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by throwaway218649 on Saturday January 26, 2019 @03:18PM (#19008208)
The "rich will just live on their land without workers" seems like a hypothetical scenario, but it actually happened a few times during the colonization of the Western United States and Australia (post-Native American/Australian genocide). Marx has an interesting note on this in chapter 33 of volume I of Capital:

> It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother-country… First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative - the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, "Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river." (E. G. Wakefield. "England And America," vol.ii, p. 33)

In the United States, the slave labor system kept the workers from subjecting their masters to this "violation" of property rights. There are many historical records of European colonists running away from indentured labor to join Native Americans (the reverse does not seem to have ever happened).

The wealthy need poor laborers a lot more than vice-versa. What is really happening with automation is that it is being used to build militarized police states around the world that keep the poor from squatting the land held by the rich, to force the poor to work for the benefit of the rich (for example, someone is going to have to keep working on oil extraction for a long time to come, even if all the farming will be done by robotic tractors). A police state forcing people into wage slavery is the necessary precondition for the "rich live in automated luxury" scenario to occur.

Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by AboutTheWhisles on Saturday January 26, 2019 @01:11PM (#19007503)
If you really believe this, does that mean you are studying robotics?
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by CyberDildonics on Friday January 25, 2019 @09:24PM (#19004363)
You do realize that food and wood literally grow out of the ground and water falls from the sky right?

If there is all this automation in your predicted future, how would people not be able to automate growing plants, filtering water and cutting down trees?

Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by ddingus on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:41PM (#19004190)
Maybe.

I'm not sure any of us are going to live to see that dystopian time, but o boy if I were one of the ones...

Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by mathattack on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:25PM (#19004114)
Indeed. The same newspaper that decry automation also complain about the future lack of workers available to take care of elderly.
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by deboboy on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:48PM (#19004213)
There's no immediate [5yr horizon] automation coming to solve this. Human home care workers will be needed [and more of them]; it's in a category of jobs that not even machines want.
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by jstanley on Saturday January 26, 2019 @02:12AM (#19005259)
But there will be plenty of people free to care for the elderly after the machines take their jobs.
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by Oletros on Saturday January 26, 2019 @04:19AM (#19005585)
It is good that we give the elderly care to people that has lost their work?
Re:Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite by zozbot123 on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:12PM (#19004059)
Exactly. And you see it with more than just automation. It's the "they took er jerbs!!! we need a wall to protect our way of life!" knee-jerk reaction.