People have been saying things like this for centuries. Even the word for it, Luddite is 200 years old.

I don't disagree that it's possible machines could take over all of our jobs, but it hasn't happened yet and I remain unconvinced that drastic solutions are required any time soon.

I could be convinced that certain groups of formerly employed people are struggling to find work, like unskilled men or people in that 50-65yo age range.

Yeah I don't get it either. We currently jigger our economy in all sorts of ways to ensure that people can zip around on funkee ducks wearing a fatbit slightly more cheaply. But building actual useful things results in "make work" pearl clutching.

There is absolute understanding of how wealth or surplus is created.

Tell me, if robots replaced the workforce 100%, who would buy the products they created?

No one would "buy" them. But if you are asking who would have them, the answer is everyone.

exactly, but given there would still be a degree of finity, there would still probably be a some system of money to determine what the robots made.

This is what really cracks me up when the deplorables start whining about the 'far left' groupthink here in Los Dos Politardias. A few thoughts...

• Every labor saving advancement should save laboring. Laboring is working people on the clock. Productivity keeps going up. Hours should be going down... but instead they're going up too. There's a "leak" in the system. Until that leak is fixed, there can't be any solutions. Unless that leak is fixed, earth will soon become unlivable.
  
  
• We should already have the 4-hour work day, right here, right now. Working four hours isn't getting a 'handout', working more than four is being forced to give a 'handout' to our undeserving overlords.
  
  
• The four hour day was 'on the table' in the US from the 1870s to the 1940s. By the 1930s significant progress had been made toward the six hour day. This is within the cusp of living memory. Sure, the world has changed, but this part of live hasn't changed that much, and all the changes aren't negative. This quest most certainly can be taken up again today. I can't think of a better idea.
  
  
• Large numbers of unemployed folk aren't that kinda problem, they're an asset and an opportunity. What's needs to happen is the organizing of the unemployed. This is another thing that has been proven to work in the US, both in the late 1800s and in 1930s.

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?
Organizing the Unemployed

Maybe you missed it, but Donald Trump promised a lot of socialism, and people liked it.

Dammit Trolley I'm trying to be original here!

There is a debate in the economic community on this topic. Some good reads

https://growthecon.com/blog/Baumol/
http://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-fut...y-productivity

I can't appropriately summarize but my take is that productivity itself may not be actually measuring things, and/or it gets distorted when the country moves from manufacturing to service.

Texas Hold Em is not zero sum, the rentier class makes it a losing proposition for even people who are slight winners by extracting near-arbitrary amounts simply for providing the table and chips.

Don't tap the tank on this one. We need the GOP to go full Kansas so we discredit not just Trump but their entire agenda.

Does a robot even need to be more productive than a human to replace one?

I remember when people thought W would totally discredit the Republican agenda.

Thanks, I didn't realize there was a rake.

Robot needs to be more productive per dollar spent, yes.

No, not at all.

I've made licence plates at Folsom Prison. They don't have a robot line. They pay 35-95 cents/hour which is about 2/3 recaptured by taxes. With wages at that level, automation is never going to pencil out.

The freight railroads have removed the engineer from a lot of switching jobs, and have the conductor operate the locomotive by RC control from the ground. This kinda automation is significantly less productive in cars sorted/hour.

There's plenty of examples of gratuitous automation used for union busting, atomizing workers, or to deal out troublesome stakeholders.

Just like to point out that a lotta folks use a word trick regarding the word 'productive'. We speak of a 40 widget/hour machine being more 'productive' than a 20 widget machine. But the phrase "more productive per dollar spent" isn't like that. That's just a fancy way of saying "more profitable".

Yea no **** sherlock,

The point is why assume robots are more productive, they might just be cheaper.

Not saying that is the case just saying that just because there is more automation dont have to assume some massive up boom in productivity as the reason for their installation might be cost based.

Productivity is output divided by input. Unless you count robot labor as an input, the only input for robot production is capital cost plus the cost of supporting humans. The distinction between something being cost-based versus productivity-based is meaningless.

If you're asking whether robots need to be more skilled at a task than humans to replace humans at the task, then the answer is clearly no.

TIL my cousin Shamey did some hard time in Folsom.

The thing is.. HE DID. Not among the media, but Trump ran against W to a greater extent than ****ing Hillary did.


The Democrats were so ****ing eager to appear reasonable and bipartisan that they switched to trying to rehabilitate Bush's legacy, a baffling mistake, but a country racist enough to have 46% of it vote for Donald Trump elected a black guy named "Barack" in 2008 because of just how badly Bush failed.

For whatever reason, partially driven by our idiotic media but in large part because of Democrat cowardice, we generally forget to make any elections at all about agenda vs. agenda. People didn't vote for Trump because of his corporate welfare/tax cut policies because a big chunk of the electorate doesn't even know that's his ****ing plan. We all laughed at how stupid "Trumped up trickle down" was, but at least that was about something

I assume that capital costs for a robot are substantial and they will need replacing.

If after looking at how much a robot will cost over its life time and a worker will cost over its life time there is going to have be some relation to productivity you can use to cost benefit both.

But you are completely missing the point, everyone is assuming that because robot productivity must go up, but if a robot produces about the same as a human, but costs the less then robot can be installed and productivity stay the same.

Some system but its hard to know exactly what that would look like. To take a silly example from Black Mirror it could be a system of social "credits" based on being nice to people and getting good reviews or some other form of social capital.

Capitalism was a system devised to solve the problem of scarcity. Because of how unimaginably successful capitalism was at dealing with this problem, we are rapidly moving into a world of abundancy. Capitalism has brought about its own demise. I'm sure the "haves" wont go quietly without a fight but the battle is already lost.

Being cheaper is the same as being more productive since you can buy 2 or 10 robots.

Eh?

You can hire 2 or 10 workers.

I think you are thinking about this in sort of a small-potatoes way. You are imaging like a Tokyo assembly plant and some giant blue robot arm mindlessly making widgets or something. Thats what is ALREADY happening. The "danger" of automation is so much more widespread than that. But the core principle is the idea that competition and technology are driving down margins. Capitalism cannot succeed without margins. If the marginal cost of any particular good is essentially zero, then it cannot be profitable. You are asking the question "in a world where everything is free, how will anyone be able to afford anything?" We are talking about the situation where the cost of all of your material needs is trivial. One way of thinking about this historically is thinking about how many hours a week one needs to work in order to meet their basic caloric, housing, safety needs or whatever. That number has been plummeting since the industrial revolution, from days to what is now probably less than half a day. But progress is accelerating. We are talking about a situation not where we are measuring the "amount needed to meet needs" in less and less time, like "2 hours" or "45 minutes" but where it can be measured in "opening the door for a stranger" or "posting a funny cat video online."