+ 1 for qntmfred for the Outkast skit reference.


[Edited on March 27, 2012 at 4:01 PM. Reason : qtmn qmnt tmnt unity]

3/27/2012 4:00:41 PM

Simple solution for the "problem" of increase automation:

Be willing to pay more for less.

3/27/2012 4:03:45 PM

3/28/2012 5:45:42 PM

The second contradiction that is inherent in capitalism is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The forces of production in capitalism, which view workers as a cost that must be limited, constrict the ability of consumption. The workers who produce the commodities that are to be bought and sold on the market cannot afford to purchase the items that they produce. As the capitalist turns to machines for increased productivity and efficiency, the workers perform only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack.

The forces of production and the social relations of people are intertwined. As technology increases, the possibility for a change in the forces of production also results in a change in the social relations of people. It is through technology that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall contradiction emerges. As technology changes and is introduced into the work force, a struggle over the control of the production process and the appropriation of the final product appears. This leads to a smaller amount of labor having to produce the profits, while the capitalist finds more and more of his capital tied up in machinery.

The rate of profit in capitalism is unstable because the various requirements of profitable production, dictated by the need for economic survival under capitalist economic organization, are mutually incompatible. As competition increases on the market, the capitalist must find cheaper ways to produce commodities to be sold. The labor force is then viewed as a cost that can be reduced, thus increasing the reliance on machines for production. Machines require less workers, albeit workers who possess the necessary skills to operate the machines. The workers are subjected to further economic oppression by the owners because as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. The working conditions in the factory do not improve, as the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery.

As the competition increases and the rate of profit falls, the capitalist is forced to invest more and more capital into machinery. The end result is that the ultimate of goal of the capitalist, the accumulation of more capital, is diverted through the additional investment of capital into machinery. As this occurs, a crisis in production occurs, as this has the long-run consequence of lowering profitability and hence undermining production itself.

Within capitalism, three contradictions exist that will result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The first contradiction, overproduction, could be considered as the main contradiction within capitalism. The tendency of the productive forces of capitalism to create growth is stymied by the limits to growth that capitalism creates. The second contradiction, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, involves the capitalist using his capital in a manner that will slow his profits. The capitalist invests more of his money into machinery, thus lowering the number of jobs available and demanding that smaller amounts of labor produce the profits. The third contradiction, centralization, is where the revolution really picks up steam. As the capitalist is continually engaged in competition, certain segments of the population, such as the petty bourgeois, are consolidated and pushed down into the proletariat. The proletarian numbers increase, class consciousness emerges, and revolution is underway. A violent struggle results in capitalism being replaced with Socialism. Oppression and exploitation are removed from society.

3/28/2012 6:20:46 PM

Quote :

"We could eventually have robot police officers"

3/28/2012 7:39:58 PM

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/robots-ate-my-job/robots-and-hourglass-economy

Quote :

"Kai Ryssdal: Time now to rejoin our traveling correspondent David Brancaccio, somewhere in the greater American Southwest, as he continues his long lonely coast-to-coast drive in the complete absence of human interaction. Our series is called Robots Ate My Job: What technology's doing to the future of jobs in this country. Today, what happens when the robots do take over. Here's David."

3/28/2012 8:47:33 PM

I got in my car halfway through the interview and thought the reporter was talking to a middle schooler at first

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/06/18/155278207/you-know-you-want-one-personal-robots-not-ready-for-you-yet

Quote :

"Meet Jake. At 500 pounds, he stands 4 feet 4 four inches tall, with a spine that stretches another foot. He has white urethane skin, a flat head sporting an array of camera lenses, and a laser scanner in his throat. And he may be coming to a home near you. Jake is a PR2, which stands for "personal robot," and the brainchild of Willow Garage, a robotics company in Menlo Park, Calif. Founded in 2006, the company is considered one of the most exciting, influential players in the world of personal robotics."

6/19/2012 2:18:08 PM

i'd cut off an appendage of their choosing to be able to work for Willow Garage

[Edited on June 19, 2012 at 2:30 PM. Reason : i'll settle for merely using ROS and OpenCV for the time being though]

6/19/2012 2:29:06 PM

i heard about ROS yesterday on NPR...pretty cool stuff!

6/19/2012 3:06:53 PM

Penis. Then want you to cut off your p33n.

6/19/2012 3:07:14 PM

*shrug* it's had a pretty good run

6/19/2012 3:22:54 PM

He'd just build himself a robo-dick

6/19/2012 3:24:49 PM

there's a nano- joke in there somewhere

6/19/2012 3:26:39 PM

^it's in your pants, brah.

6/19/2012 3:30:24 PM

there it is

6/19/2012 3:40:58 PM

You found it?

6/19/2012 3:45:33 PM

2/24/2013 9:13:08 PM

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-markets-0

Quote :

"HAVING discussed some possible refuges for humans looking to keep working in a robot-dominated world, let's get to some real talk. It is certainly possible that technological progress will soon switch to augmenting the productivity and wages of less-skilled workers. But it's also possible, and maybe more probable, that it will not. And while there are many different kinds of "skill" out there, it seems reasonable to argue that workers in the top quartile or top half for educational attainment are also likely to be in the top half for other, non-cognitive skills that might be favoured in the future. So what might happen to workers in the bottom half of the skill spectrum? One possibility, which I'll reiterate, is that a new development will come along that raises demand for their work. Another possibility is that labour demand for workers at the low end of the skill spectrum will vanish entirely. That seems a little improbable, but it's not entirely out of the question. Demand in today's economy for a typical 19th-century labourer—illiterate and innumerate among other disadvantages—would be about nil. Low skill workers could find themselves in such a situation, though it may be more realistic to say that today's economy wouldn't be possible in a world where large segments of the working age population resembled a 19th-century labourer. We'd be instead in a different, much poorer world, but one in which many of those workers continued to have jobs. And so we arrive at a third possibility, in which economic growth is constrained by the fitness of the workforce, and there are severe distributional issues. In this world, less skilled workers face intense competition from hordes of other less skilled workers and from ever more capable and less costly robots. Wages of the unskilled stagnate or tumble as a result. It's possible, of course, that wage rates for even skilled workers might disappoint, while the return to capital rises ever higher. Whatever happens at the top, the bottom finds itself struggling to capture any of the benefits of productivity growth. That creates a very difficult situation, because it so happens that modern economies continue to use wages as the primary means by which purchasing power is distributed. Really fast productivity growth might lead to tumbling costs for many different kinds of consumer goods, information, and possibly even health care. But people will still need incomes. Households will still need food and a roof over their heads, and society might even decide that they deserve more than that: that relative penury for huge segments of the population is bad for social stability, or even unjust. If society wishes to avoid such an outcome, the only real option is redistribution and a lot of it. That, in turn, could be managed in a few ways. Society could make a go at raising the earnings potential of less skilled workers by investing heavily in education. That will strike many as the most attractive solution, but it is also one that will face limits. Not everyone can be educated to Google-engineer level. More skilled or richer elements of society could effectively tax themselves by protecting certain job categories in order to maintain employment opportunities for the less skilled. So, driverless cars may soon be an operating reality. But society could pass laws banning or limiting AVs in order to protect certain jobs: taxi driver, for instance, or trucker. Depending on the size and organisation of less-skilled groups, that's conceivably a benefit they could vote themselves. And then there are direct transfers. Society could simply say that every household deserves a minimum income or standard of living and transfer the necessary money or resources from haves to have-nots. Or, one might say, from makers to takers. While perhaps an unavoidable outcome to some extent, the implications are distressing. Rich individuals would certainly not be anxious to support a permanently jobless underclass, and it's not clear that much of society would relish a life of sitting around on the dole. This sort of world is not so far-fetched, however. The "takers" in the 2012 election debate were not really takers for the most part. Some of those put in such a category are not of working age while others are members of the working poor, earning little and paying plenty to the public purse, though not in federal income tax. If wages continue to lag at the bottom, however, ever more workers may slip out of the labour force as the market wage for such labour slips below the reservation level. That reservation level has a few sources. Long-term disability insurance is one. Workers may go on state support via the criminal justice system. Or they may linger in dependancy on other family members: spouses, parents, or children. The point is that "technological unemployment" may become an effective reality given lagging wages for less-skilled workers, sufficient to eliminate the incentive to find a job and given reasonable (though not particularly attractive) alternatives. It's not a certainty that things wll develop this way. But it's a realistic enough possibility that societies should begin thinking significantly about how to reform and improve their welfare states: to substantially upgrade education, to provide for the best possible work incentives, and to secure finances for the foreseeable future. Technological progress sufficient to cause these kinds of dislocations should also generate overall economic gains large enough to make everyone better off. But just because everyone could be made better off by progress doesn't mean that everyone will be made better off. There must be an institutional framework in place to ensure that the gains from growth are shared."

3/3/2013 10:01:28 PM

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/bed4b2b5a70a



[Edited on August 24, 2013 at 8:06 PM. Reason : .]

8/24/2013 8:06:30 PM

8/25/2014 10:00:39 PM

Looks like the idea of restructuring our world in an AI future has finally hit the mainstream.

^ that video could have come out of my own head

[Edited on August 25, 2014 at 11:12 PM. Reason : ]

8/25/2014 10:54:08 PM

guess I should have bumped this thread more often

10/29/2019 3:25:37 PM

Yup.

11/9/2019 10:21:53 AM

^ why?

11/9/2019 11:13:50 AM

after i left this job, i landed at a good job that pretty much paid me 15k more a year and i've been here almost 8 years.. Destiny

11/9/2019 1:21:42 PM

cool, congrats!

11/9/2019 5:31:10 PM

11/20/2019 12:16:57 PM

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/bosses-speed-up-automation-as-virus-keeps-workers-home

Quote :

" Almost half of company bosses in 45 countries are speeding up plans to automate their businesses as workers are forced to stay at home during the coronavirus outbreak. Some 41% of respondents in a survey by the auditing firm EY said they were investing in accelerating automation as businesses prepared for a post-crisis world. The news comes just days after figures showing that 3.3 million people have filed for unemployment in the US. That is by far the highest number ever recorded, and a jump from less than 300,000 the week before. In the UK, 477,000 people applied for universal credit in just nine days. “The human cost is the most tragic aspect of this crisis, not only in terms of the lives lost, but also the number of livelihoods at risk,” said Steve Krouskos at EY."

3/30/2020 5:06:50 PM

Shame no one can stop free market capitalism.

3/30/2020 5:42:28 PM

bUt I wAs ToLd MeSsIcAnS wErE tAkIn DeRe JeRbz?!?

3/31/2020 6:16:47 AM

universal basic income. let the robots and positronic brains do all the work.

3/31/2020 12:57:35 PM

^^they are, along with robots. The difference is that automation will create more jobs than it displaces, whereas migrant labor suppresses wages.

4/1/2020 2:26:25 PM

move over Taylor Swift

6/10/2020 1:25:41 PM

6/15/2020 2:17:13 PM

o no

6/15/2020 2:53:00 PM

Welp, time to move into management

6/15/2020 3:26:20 PM

https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1284095222939451393

7/21/2020 11:38:04 AM