Out of Pod Experience

I will bite troll. The reason the minimum wage needs to be raised is that corporations have raised the prices of their products to reflect inflation but have not done so with the wages....across most of the board. So this has absolutely nothing to do with rasing the minimum wage. Increasing the efficiency of the production line has always been about minimizing man power. Nothing new here so move along.


EDIT: Also I will suggest that you go read The Wealth of Nations so you can understand....you do not need to read the whole thing if you are unable to. The main point I bring up is covered fairly early on, and you may just acquire new troll bait

Being unemployed should not be comfortable, if it is then all you're doing is breeding more entitled sloths who look to the government to hand them a nice life. If you want a nice life you have to work for it, you're not entitled to one just because you were born a human on the planet earth.

Also, working for minimum wage should not be comfortable either. Minimum wage jobs are not careers and should not be viewed as such. Minimum wage jobs do not, and should not afford the employee the ability to raise a family, careers are required for such life goals. This is all common sense that many socialists/communists fail to grasp.

There is going to be a rough transition away from a monetary economy/society at some point I suspect, where it ends up, damn, who knows. I guess we're all lucky that we probably will not live through that. And to try to predict where things will go from our current vantage point, I think is a useless endeavor.

I wish a robot would/could do my job

So robots continue to streamline our menial labor without ever taking over the actual creative aspect. They get the blue collar work and consistently remain absent from the white collar work. How is this a sign that we're gonna lose our white collar jobs to robots?

The only issue I have with robots doing all my work is I won't get the money and some rich person who owns the robots will expect me to pay for their existence. Of course that's a sociopolitical problem that exists in almost every powerful society that has a few centuries to develop it. It's not a problem with robots.

The only issue with robots doing art is they are not creative. You will have to program them, so an artist will have to do the programing and then they can replicate it. You will never technically get rid of human labor, because someone will have to repair the robots.

However, we might evolve to a kind of Star Trek based economy, people works because they want to, not for money. You would make wine because you like the taste of human made as opposed to replicated. Then you would give yoru goods away or barter with it. As all your other goods would be provided by automated or mechanized labor, in star trek this was replication. The replicator pretty much put everyone in manufacturing and ag out of business. If 3d printers become advanced you will see this happen, toss in robots doing a lot of the work and humans will just evolve past money.

I'll do this two fold, as I am a socialist (not a communist, anyone who thinks they are same is an idiot)

1) In the world described in the op, where work is replaced by robots, people would have no choice in the matter. If you woke up tomorrow, and all jobs were done by a robot, and there was no jobs anyplace, except maybe as CEO or in advanced robotics (needing a phd) then you have no choice but to be unemployed. In that case your argument of 'unemployment should not be comfurtable' becomes invalid. if there is 99% unemployment, and will always be 99% unemployment... then work becomes history.

2) The thing that capitalist don't understand is its a failed model just like communism. Pure capitalism doesn't promote competition, nor does it protect anyone form anything. Companies and people no longer give a crap unless its in there own back yard, as to a CEO you are nothing but a number. And if they can save $X by cutting a corner here, or there, yet it kills some people then oh well. The US, become what we are today because people ****** it up for the rest of us. A lot of regulation nd laws came about due to some jackass thinking money was more important then human life. So the people got pissed and made the gov change it. The only thing that works is an equal partnership of business, gov, and the people. Working together. Each checks the other. Offten this gets lost as one or two grab power. Unemployment, as it is right now, along with welfare, should be a safty net. You use it for a limited time, then get off it ASAP. But they are needed. Min wedge should not be something you do perminatly. but at the same time, in this day and age where companies are shipping jobs to pay dirt poor labor, its getting harder and harder to find ways to move up, esp as companies insist that you do more with less people.

It's all a balance. Untill the mentality of as long as I get my $$$$ everyone else can **** off changes, it will just get worse.

For one thing I am sure, we should watch the people that are meddling with AI.
Maybe we should stop working on it and treat developing it as a crime, but when? When we start to fear it or earlier?
Is fear good advisor? Fear of being overwhelmed and devoured by your own creation?

It will be an interesting day when robots become consumers of these products, too. I recently went to a crash test site and I was daydreaming that the crash test dummies were walking around and smiling and laughing and rolling around in SUVs..

I'm sure some day we'll have robots that think, act, and learn like chordate animals do. It'll be a great stunt for science and its practical applications will be almost entirely within the domains of scientific research and show business. They will be far more expensive than equally creative humans, and the humans will be easier to employ.

And some day later we'll have robots that are more creative and intelligent than humans. But even if these become cheap, they still won't replace very many of our creative jobs. This simple fact exists because many of the creative jobs exist not for a work vacuum but for an entertainment vacuum. Robots are for work vacuums: we make them to do work that we don't want to do. We don't want to make them to replace our fun. We will make them to provide fun for us. Some will do creative work but bored humans will always do more.

Some day in the very distant future we will have access to so many cheap robot designs that the gap between the rich and the poor will cease to be highly meaningful in sparser populations, as it will be easy for any poor person to purchase or build robots to care for themselves by working unclaimed land somewhere. It is not this future that scares me, it is the much nearer future in which the uncreative worker robots are expensive, but rich companies buy them and lay off workers. This future begins where the space age ends. The first stages begun in the '70s and we have been in full swing since the '90s. It's not the future anymore. It's reality.