Agreed. Think about how great this world can be with millions -- nay, I say billions if we're lucky -- dreaming about when their next meal might be.

No, history suggests labour is very unlikely to be significantly less valuable in the future.

People should stop caring about what Marx said, because Marx wrote his books back in the 1850s and he described the problems of the 1850s. The world has changed a lot since then. Our goal is to solve the current problems, not the problems of the past. The future problems have to wait until we got time for them.

The biggest problem of our current society is debt. We are spending the money of other people, which works great until they want their money back.

https://commodity.com/debt-clock/

Note1: The good old proven method of going into massive debt, building a huge army and simply invading your ceditors doesn't really work anymore, because they have nuclear weapons. China = not good!

Note2: Germany and Japan are still get screwed even 70 years after losing the war. They are not getting paid for their goods, so they have to go into debt as well to refinance themselves. Japan is basically busted.

No it doesn't.

Maybe we could use some robots to increase the rate of posting on this forum.

well named, thoughts?

That depends on whether you characterize people dying in the streets as a problem, because a country might do fine financially even if that's the case.

The field of economics is built around predicting the future and understanding built in mechanisms in systems, and for that purpose Marx is as good as (or even better than) many current economists.

Sometimes Marx is mistakingly credited with wanting to change capitalism but in a sense that's untrue; Marx considered capitalism a necessary and natural step in the "societal ladder" which would ultimately lead to the revolution and communism. He didn't believe you could have communism without having a long period of capitalism where a country accumulated wealth first (which Lenin tried to work around by being more imperialistic). And this wealth would be increasingly going towards the top which sooner or later would lead to revolution.

Reforms have always been necessary at one point or another in every society, either because external things happen (war/disease epidemic) or alternatively because the system is not stable (what we see now).

The problem is it was easier to revolt against the aristocracy 150 years ago to force a change than it is today, and the question is how far it has to go before things will change. I suppose a change of presidency is the first step.

So, clearly the first question is whether there will be enough work maintaining the robots to go round. Probably not when the first maintenance bots hit the market.

The second thing is that the state of play doesn't change much from history. Either the masses seize a share of the wealth or inequality grows. If we're talking about a hypothetical in which we can produce more with greater efficiency and far less man hours then it seems to me that the only question is how does the common man ensure he gets a share? Without wanting to forget the gravity of the problem, this has many solutions before pitchforks and guillotines. UBI is one of the more plausible.

I'd also drop in David Graeber's On the Phenomenon of Bull**** Jobs.
https://strikemag.org/bull****-jobs/
He argues that, so far, the issue of automisation has resulted in the creation of entire new sectors of administrative roles, financial sectors, corporate law, and such that appear to do very little other than to ensure that people are in work and not complaining about it.

So many bull**** jobs - it's one oft the reasons that new companies have a decent chance of beating more established ones. But people are less content for them - not everyone can persuade themselves deep down that they are doing something useful when it's bull. And they vote. Democracy cannot survive this without a paradigm shift

Oh they are complaining about it - they really really are. Just not many are listening.

Blanchflower was on TV today talking about his book 'where did all the good jobs go'. Hallelujah! someone is finally starting to notice.

I’m almost certain you were gleefully cheering when McDonalds began replacing cashiers with automated kiosks.

Give the article a read, he's very aware of the moral crisis it causes in people.

I don’t care about income inequality at all and I doubt the poor do either. That’s more of an issue for outcome economic egalitarianists, which I’m not. What I care about and what I think the poor care most about is eliminating poverty and making sure everyone has a legitimate opportunity to climb the economic ladder. As long as that happens it doesn’t matter if we have a gazillion billionaires as far as I’m concerned.

I'm getting an error. Might look harder at some point but maybe you can correct.

It'll be the swear filter blocking out the s word on bull****

There’s a difference between jobs and employment—self-employment. I think jobs and our dependency on them is more a byproduct of the industrial age and an education system that trains people for jobs than an inherent feature of economic life. I see things evolving to where many more people will be self-employed as in agrarian economies; something like technology farmers.

No, I think the first question should be: Automation has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years and people have always worried about all the jobs being automated away - what make the next 5, 20 or 100 years any different that makes you believe the fear is FINALLY coming true?

F-wording automation! The only good it has done over the last few hundred years is let the common may work at a desk in an air condition roomed as opposed to back breaking work in a coal mine or out in a field and lowered the price of nearly every single product or service ever invented.

Of course I am happy when automation makes things cheaper.

How dare you to not be jealous of your neighbor. If your neighbor creates a product or service that makes other people's lives better that makes him evil! We must take the money he has and give it back to the people who voluntarily gave it to him because they decided they would rather have his product than the money they gave him.

So, the first bit was a joke about the Simpsons clip where he tells the kids that their future in the army will be building and maintaining robots to fight wars for them.

The second part is that I'm not opposed to automation.

I could argue with you that the valuable jobs have been going for a while now and it's accelerating but it's kinda pointless because there's a far more important point which addresses your precise question.

That is that we are now in the era of AI/Automation replicating human abilities - walking, talking, understanding speech, driving, picking stuff up, mapping terrain etc etc. That's very different from being very specialised machines for specific jobs as the tech can increasingly be easily adapted to do any job.

d'oh!

Maybe. It would be nice to reinvent the concept of leisure. It used to be just for the privileged aristocracy but maybe one day everyone can have it.

If we could somehow take our productivity technology back to the 1950s, we could probably get by working ~10 hours a week provided we wouldn’t mind staying put at 1950s living standards. That’s the issue—the more people get or can get, the more they are willing work to get more/better stuff. My prediction is that with AI in 20 years or so we’re going to have things available we can’t even imagine having today, and people won’t be able to live without whatever those things are and keep working as much as they can to get them.

How can you say all the valuable jobs are gone? I know people who have a higher purchasing power than 90% of the people in 1894.

For 100s of years people just like you have been saying "no, it is different now because the machines can now do Z where before they could only do X & Y." During that time frame the automation has gotten better and better so I ask again why has your argument been wrong for hundreds of years but now it is all of a sudden right?

Hey Viggorous. This is the artist formerly known as Quick_ben. Do you think a revolt is necessary, or even feasible at all, anymore?

Not feasible at all. TPTB will just threaten to turn off everyone's phones unless they all go home.

Was it this: