The robotic future cometh

[Tortoise]

TED talk on this topic.

http://youtu.be/kYIfeZcXA9U

Ultimately the speaker's conclusions are similar to mine....that this robotic future will fundamentally require a change in our economic system and the cultural notion that people must justify and support their existence through labor. In other words, a robot future will require us to fundamentally shift our conceptions on the meaning and purpose of life.

The TED talk was interesting, but isn't a fundamental shift in our conceptions of the meaning and purpose of life something that should have been happening since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution? A lot of the social conflicts and cognitive dissonance we currently experience in modern Western cultures is, I think, precisely due to the fact that we haven't reached a harmonious agreement on the meaning of human life. The Robotic Revolution is certainly increasing the urgency of that question, but it's a preexisting question.

In the Western world, our current standard of living is so much higher than it was prior to the Industrial Revolution that most of us could easily live like people back then did by working a mere fraction of the time that they had to. The problem is that hardly anybody today wants to live like people lived back then.

In fact, most people don't even want to live like people lived one generation ago. Our preferred standard of living appears to be a very fluid, social thing. People don't just want to survive; they want to live as well or better than their neighbors.

Paradoxically, it's that very same competitive social drive that ultimately gave rise to the Industrial Revolution and now the Robotic Revolution--the revolutions that are now forcing us to confront the meaning of that competitive social drive that got us here in the first place.

[doodle]

[url=http://The%20problem%20is%20that%20hardly%20anybody%20today%20wants%20to%20live%20like%20people%20lived%20back%20then.]The problem is that hardly anybody today wants to live like people lived back then.[/url]

Sign me up! I actually am looking to dial things back to somewhere pre-civilisation.

Ive had an interesting couple of conversations with friends on this topic over that last few days. One thing that came out is how little work they actually do. Most of them who work on a computer spend a good 4 hours a day just surfing the web. They could finish their work in a couple of hours a day they say, but they are required to be at work for 8 hours.

If you ask me, I really think that about 50 percent of the jobs people do today could be easily designed away. They are essentially just busy work... The other 50 percent could probably be done in half the time if the 8 hour workday convention werent so ingrained into our culture.

[Tortoise]

[url=http://The%20problem%20is%20that%20hardly%20anybody%20today%20wants%20to%20live%20like%20people%20lived%20back%20then.]The problem is that hardly anybody today wants to live like people lived back then.[/url]

Sign me up! I actually am looking to dial things back to somewhere pre-civilisation.

Including the sewage "systems" they had back then? Ewww...

Most of [my friends] who work on a computer spend a good 4 hours a day just surfing the web. They could finish their work in a couple of hours a day they say, but they are required to be at work for 8 hours.

Sounds like some of the more prolific members of this forum

[Pointedstick]

Paul Krugman has a column on this today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opini ... .html?_r=0

There's a lot of good stuff in there, though of course he ends with a typically Krugmanesque plea for a bigger welfare state:

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.

I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.”? But what, exactly, would they propose instead?

I'm still not convinced. While admitting that I don't really have a better solution, I just don't see the merit in assuming the existence of large numbers of unproductive people and then just giving them money anyway. IMHO that's a recipe for a very unbalanced and stratified society.

[doodle]

What about his question, what would you propose instead?

Maybe the Unibomber Manifesto could provide some insights. After all, wasnt crazy Ted petrified of what technology was doing to man?

[Pointedstick]

Like I said, I'm really not sure. What works for an individual (learn more about software design and robotics) isn't feasible to expect of a whole society. But paying an ever-growing number of people to be idle seems like a terrible idea to me.

The Unabomber's manifesto isn't really much help. I'll admit I've never managed to get through the whole thing before it starts to seem really silly.

[moda0306]

Paul Krugman has a column on this today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opini ... .html?_r=0

There's a lot of good stuff in there, though of course he ends with a typically Krugmanesque plea for a bigger welfare state:

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.

I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.”? But what, exactly, would they propose instead?

I'm still not convinced. While admitting that I don't really have a better solution, I just don't see the merit in assuming the existence of large numbers of unproductive people and then just giving them money anyway. IMHO that's a recipe for a very unbalanced and stratified society.

I dont really look at it as "giving money away."  People take on income all the time without having had to go out and overtly earn it, and it doesn't tear society apart.  I look at all the natural resources that aren't really anyone's to own in any natural, sovereign sense, and I figure the counter-act to that is essentially a "citizens dividend" in the form of a floor of human dignity that no citizen is left to fall below, or some construction that mitigates human misery to some degrees, especially for children who haven't made a mistake, but just lost the ovarian lottery.

But that's just my opinion... and it's still being honed as I learn more.  And it's easy to get frustrated with all the sh!tballs in society and simply want them to rot on their own.  Mostly the existence of children is what drives my bleeding heart logic (oxymoron?) .