I agree with the OP that automation is a future crisis scenario. Just look at the solutions being proffered by some of the top posters in this forum. Re-train workers to be mathematicians or a programmers? Get the public to engage in SAVING and INVESTING? LMAO....this will never happen. Here's why:

The majority of the individuals that consist of the 99% are worthless and lazy. They rack up mountains of debt, and live obnoxiously unhealthy lifestyles fueled by addiction. These include: engaging in worthless social media, taking drugs, smoking cigarettes, binge drinking on alcohol, eating their feelings with fast food, and never going to the gym. These imbeciles breed with other imbeciles, and have offspring that they can't afford. The offspring they produce soak up their parent's bad habits and the cycle perpetuates.

It's the consumer class that Wall St. and Fortune 500 preys upon, profiting off of human stupidity, over-consumption, and the general inability to have discipline (i.e. credit cards, predatory lending, advertising, Hollywood social programming)

The challenge for the elites is that the unhealthy masses are living to be 90 f*cking years old. The government is already in massive debt, what the hell are they supposed to do with sick, unproductive people? Who is going to pay for this?

It used to be that you could make stupid people do a monotonous, non-thinking task all day long and pay them minimum wage. With robots entering into the equation, the unthinking masses will have nothing to do other than start shooting each other over victimimology politarding and being "triggered". Our own billionaire president is a mentally ill, twiiter-addict. That's how far from greatness this country (and world) has fallen.

If we look at history, what did crazy people rising to power lead too. WAR baby! That's where we're headed.

The central banks think they can prevent risk and the very essential human phenomenon of war and political uncertainty by supplying endless money in the system. But how long can they get away with this?

How far in debt can the U.S government go into before its considered a crisis? The last figures I checked was 13.7 trillion, and I believe that was a year ago. With the state of U.S. politics, do you ever think we will have a budget surplus? It's never going to happen. Every year will be a deficit. How will we ever reach a long-run equilibrium espoused by the economists?

How many times can the FED print money every time there is a recession in the stock market?

We are seeing the state of Illinois collapse with their bond ratings going to "junk". Is the rest of the country that far behind?

Quotes from Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza from today's WSJ article "Illinois Budget Talks at Make-Or-Break".

These quotes are in reference to passing a state budget:

"Derailment is imminent.....There will be no money, not a penny available for hardship cases such as social services agencies, domestic violence shelters, mental health facilities, and senior and hospice care facilities."

"Once unthinkable effects like delayed pension payments and missed payroll for employees are now a possibility, Schools across the state, too, might not be able to open on time."

"This is not a false alarm".




But don't worry Illinois! Good news for the economy is coming, robots are here to take your jobs!

As an Illinois resident (I hate this ****ing state!) I would be all for replacing all of the crooked politicians with robots. The worst part is, is that all of these crooked *******s will never go to jail where they belong. The state is already losing residents like rats fleeing a sinking ship. It's already a high tax state and anything they do will make it worse. They can't tax or cut their way out of this. Illinois is what left wing politics looks like.

My parents (in their 90's) are the only reason I am still here. Once they are gone, so am I.

Actually, war is going to be part of the drive to automation when it becomes cheaper to risk robots over hospital bills. War is definitely continuing to go high tech in the future.

The answer as you said it's quite simple and you will have to do it sooner or later in my opinion because if not you are not going to be competitive, you will have to close and the other 80% of workers will lose their job too

I think the answer is easy. Do what is best for your customers.

It's already starting to happen. California elected the Terminator as governor for 8 years : )

Mark "twang", you sound like the Chicken Little of the AI movement.

Care to refute anything I've posted?

Nobody knows what the future holds, both sides of the argument have merit.

Some people think social media is awesome. Others think it's turned the world into brainless zombies. Both sides have merit.

To blindly have a pie-in-the-sky outlook on robots and AI is simplistically naïve.

You didn't present an argument. You presented a worldview.

A worldview that happens to be shared by Berkshire.....

Berkshire views tech as bad business. The increased technological innvovation increases competition to such a level that all of your income has to be reinvested for new research and development. If you don't spend all of your cash on developing new gadgets some other company will, and eat up all of the market share.

If you factor that, on top of the societal cost of creating a mob of unintelligent, lazy, addicted, and dependent masses of people (due to being unemployed cus they lost their jobs to robots), then it isn't that difficult to take a bearish view on AI.

Berskshire bought IBM, which are an AI bet, possibly more than anything on the market.
Microsoft alone disproves that.

AI and the complete replacement of human labor with robots is a certainty, bar a catastrophic event or something like a Butlerian Jihad (both very unlikely). Human extinction from that event is somewhere in the double digit percentages. It is what it is; no one is going to stop it. The benefits of AI and robotics to war alone will mean that it will be developed out of pure defensive necessity.

Though it's possible, even probable, heck, even certainty that there will be a robot oligarchy of sorts, this does not entail double-digit extinction possibilities in my estimation. There is no reason robots and human goals should conflict. In my opinion, robots in the future would find maximum use of earth would be to allow humans to govern it, and to tax it for revenue while governing outer space utilizing unimagined energy supplies. Extension will be from not governing earth. Honestly, what short term use would robots have for earth that outweigh the benefit of an entire species?

Also, in the short term people may simply choose to have less kids as the environment is more competative, and selective breeding for higher IQs.

And also cybernetics, to compete, people are going to accept cybernetic implants. This is progress, imo as it will unlock previously unimagined achievement.

But how will they get robot veterans hooked on painkillers and xanax? Big pharma will lobby hard against this.

It's amazing the number of randoms on the internet who always know what Berkshire is thinking.

Humans are worthless to AI once robotics are superior to human bodies and silicon minds are superior to organic ones. On top of that they're dangerous -we represent the only major existential threat to AI - and compete for resources.
You're seeing robots as one entity. If they're not, if they're individual minds, which is a near certainty, wars for control and territory and resources are probable, long before they start expanding into space.

And that's not even considering what will happen sub-autonomy. Robot armies could destroy entire populations quite easily. If China overtakes the US in technology, and they decide they want to control Asia or Africa for resources, and they send in an army of advanced robots, the US does what?

Then there are the genocidal possibilities. Miniature robots are unstoppable vehicles for regional pathogen or toxin delivery, for example, abilities which will only increase as times goes by (we can now print any DNA sequence we choose and run a cell on it, for example).

The future of robotics and AI involves enormous risk.

The worry over existential threat is a product of evolution. Is there any reason to think that AI would even care about an existential threat?

UN Sanctions would be a nice step to regulate against a country developing Terminators. The trend of populism in western societies (Brexit, Trump election) has the potential to produce politicians that campaign for this. This would be similar to how the religious right-wing fundamentalists supported Bush for his policy to cut funding toward stem-cell research in the early 2000's.

How do you enforce UN regulations? It's a good question. The U.S. continually fumbles around w/ N. Korea and their nuclear development. History has proven that diplomacy accomplishes very little. At some point, you need to duke it out on the battlefield....

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-b...hnology-2014-3

-I'm not speculating, it's straight from the horses mouth.

Dude is a value investor. He wants to see a company have a major advantage over its competitors and long durability of the advantage over time. Sure, if Facebook dropped to 10 bucks a share in a panic scenario, he'd scoop it right up. But he's not going to overpay for "hype" stocks, the way many have with crap like TSLA or SNAP.

"The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage"

He gives examples of the airplane industry, car industry, yada yada.

Sure, he missed the boat on Microsoft, but avoided all of the other busts from the dot com bubble.

If you were to truly emulate Buffet here and take his advice of not investing in a market because you do not understand it, you wouldn't speak about topics you do not understand for the same reasons.

GM Garry Kasparov on the topic.

Kasparov confirmed moron.
You think AI won't be evolution on steroids? That's precisely what it will be. Programs that don't care about self replication and survival and improvement and resources will be out-evolved by those that do. Evolution just means "entities that do X take over the space and resources from entities that do Y"). Speed up evolution a billion times and you'll get an idea of what we'll see with AI and robotics.

I don't understand your position here. The above is self evident. Even the most advanced program in the world can't overcome the need for complex ecology and experimentation.

Wow TS must be a genius!