/biz/ - Business & Finance

[Anonymous No.640514]

Thoughts on the tech revolution changing life as we know it? Uber, Tesla, Google Glass, VR, Soylent, Bitcoin etc.... leading us to a 'basic income' society where everything is automated? It is possible that all our desires to get rich will be completely irrelevant in a couple decades.

[Anonymous No.640517]

>>640514
what a coincidence. I just made a thread that has muh thoughts in it

[Anonymous No.640521]

>>640514
>basic income

fuck off, commie

[Anonymous No.640546]

>>640521
In an abundance economy, money is for poors.

Get over it, you luddite

[Anonymous No.640558]

>>640546
The abundance economy a la Star Trek is science fiction and will be stay there until an extremely cheap source of energy can be found - think fusion reactors, or anti matter reactors. But that itself will bring massive robotization of most labor, which creates a class of people with way too much time on their hands that are finally capable of thinking, which the elites never liked throughout history.

[Anonymous No.640602]

>>640514
No not at all. In a couple decades driverless cars will have made a huge disruption. with soylent its surprising it took thia long and within a couple decades it will be common but not prefferd , i maybe use it for 2 meals a day.

No op , beside the backlash from the powers that be we simply arent "a couple decades" out from tech that would allow post scarcity.

Universal basic income is solid. Ive crunched numbers and debated this endlessly and its just sensible , it would take a major economic catastrophe to be realized though and if your in the US dont hold your breath, we still dont even jave universal healthcare.

We live in interesting times to be sure but you overestimate our capabilities. For instance , to store the excess energy created by rooftop solar to disperse later in a manner thats feasible requires these batteries that need vanadium. That shits scarce. Mining asteroids is scifi until at least 2030 or later so that leaves us with oil.

[Anonymous No.640604]

>>640558

Elites have no power when money is worthless.

[Anonymous No.640619]

>>640602
Universal income is inevitable, there is no way there will be enough jobs to support our population.

[Anonymous No.640623]

>>640514

There is literally a thread directly above this one on the topic fuckhead.

[Anonymous No.640626]

The neat thing is that we are on the cusp of some very cool things. Just one little thing like 3D printing may totally change the world. To say nothing of all the other stuff.

[Anonymous No.640628]

>>640619
> there is no way there will be enough jobs to support our population.
You know what will happen. The communist utopia isn't gonna happen, because people in general are worse than dogshit to each other. Its gonna be a dog eat dog world.

[Anonymous No.640629]

>>640628
Things like nepotism are going to be very hard to eliminate. The world is getting better though, no matter people say.

[Anonymous No.640632]

>>640628

I doubt it. Billionaires are going the way of Gates because of social pressure from each other to look like saints in society and out-philanthropize each other. It just means all our goods will be made by very few, very enormous business conglomerates. Small business probably won't even be a thing in the future when technology is replaced so quickly that scaling it is impossible for small producers.

[Anonymous No.640633]

>>640632
That brings to the question what hand crafted even means. If a robot can hand make a chair, like a human, then why carpenter at all.

[Anonymous No.640652]

>>640632
>>640633

I disagree.

With so much spare time and little posibilites to prosper in "traditional ways" , 2 things will happen.

1 People will devote themselves to arts, philosophy, or dyonisiac life

2 with all the robotized stuff out there and a basic income, hand made goods will become a thing. Sure you can pay for a robot-made chair, but a hand-made one will be "unique" and "human made", thus it will have a symbolic value. And you know, people has something called "ego". IF you can show your neighbour that your chair is more "unique, beautiful and human-made" than his, you will buy it just to show "that you're more stylish, artistic and unique".

Marketing and crafts will become hobby-jobs and some kind of economy based on egos will arise.

It's something like idiots paying 5$ for a starbucks coffee just because it's starbucks and they can look more cool just because of it.

I think that the economy would change a lot, but it will not just dissapear.

Also, this will open the door to companies based on "hand made items". Some people will acquire the best quality materials and hire people to manufacture "unique items made like in the old days".

Also, antiquities will become even more valuable.

Finally, culture will become a more fluid industry. With all the people having time to devote to hobbies, the output of art in society will skyrocket, creating much more subcultures at a faster pace than ever.

There will be "jobs" related to this, people specialized in catching the latest and coolest trends and showing them to others in exchange for something. Perhaps some people will specialize in analyzing what a person likes and finding new kinds of music/painting/art that that person would enjoy based on its personality, that, given an overpopulated planet with such a fluid cultural movement would never been able to find on its own.

There are possibilites out there, but many people just lack imagination to figure them out.

[Anonymous No.640654]

>>640652
Oh, forgot also that most information to become good at a trade will be online, but people will still hire teachers to teach them new techniques, styles, or to market better the items they make.

[Anonymous No.640659]

>>640514

Huh? None of those things are "changing life as we know it". Tesla makes cars, Uber is just a taxi service, Bitcoin is a shittier version of FedWire, Soylent is a shittier version of food, etc. They're either slight improvements on the current system or slight steps backward that are slickly packaged and marketed to fuckwits like you as "disruptive innovation". There's nothing today comparable to the invention of the Internet, or the computer, or nuclear power, or the steam engine, or anything that actually revolutionized "life as we know it".

[Anonymous No.640668]

>>640659
>implying small steps aren't important when they add up

The creation of a post scarcity economy needs huge efforts in millions of different fields. Each resource available is unique in its way to make it abundant. For example, the technology needed to create a reliable and cheap form of energy will be radically different to the technology needed to make cheap healthcare universal.

Each little step counts.

In other words: how do you eat an elephant? A bite at a time.

[Anonymous No.640691]

>>640659
Bitcoin

[Anonymous No.640837]

>>640654

>What is virtual reality

[Anonymous No.640866]

>>640668

Most of these changes aren't leading us towards a "post scarcity" economy. Indeed, the materials to build Tesla's are far more scarce than those in internal combustion engine cars.

Post scarcity is a pipe dream for utopians.

[Anonymous No.640878]

>>640837
More like copied straight from Diamond Age.

[Anonymous No.640886]

>>640514
>a 'basic income' society where everything is automated

[Anonymous No.640901]

>>640886
>communism never works

[Anonymous No.640915]

>>640514

Gr8 b8 m8

[Anonymous No.640939]

>>640514
Are you implying people unironically think Soylent has a future?
It might be something used in Guantanamo Bay or during a total war. But even the poorest fuck wouldn't let himself down to drink this shit to save $400 a month.

[Anonymous No.640956]

>>640939
It's true man, soylent has the texture of jizz and the taste of shitty protein shakes

No thanks m8

[Anonymous No.640981]

>>640866
I didn't say tesla cars were directly leading to pos scarcity society. I didn't even mention them. Indeed, I'm a defensor of traditional internal combustion cars.

But you've got to understand, that science advances exponentially, and that the universe is huge and inundated in energy, so sooner or later we'll be able to tap onto that huge richness to feed billions of humans so we can become a galactic plague without even thinking about money.

Scarcity is the byproduct of primitive organisms with an inefficient metabolism having to live from the residual output created by the biosphere of a limited planet. Science will one day allow us to bypass that limitation and tap into the vast richness of resources present in the universe.

[Anonymous No.640988]

>>640939
>But even the poorest fuck wouldn't let himself down to drink this shit to save $400 a month.

If those 400$ a month are the difference between a better standard of living and a lower standard of living, many people will think about it. You just eat shit but then can spend your bucks into fun things.

Also, for some people soylent can be the only thing to eat. I know many african countries eat some kind of cookie the NGOs buy because it's cheap and nutritious.

You americans have to learn a bit more about the rest of the planet, 400$ is a lot of money in most of the planet, and not everybody can afford to buy colored cereals for breakfast.

[Anonymous No.640993]

>>640514
>uber, tesla, amazon, google, vr, soylent, bitcoin.

from that list....

self driving taxi cabs that you don't have to own and are cheap as shit, goods that are transported and delivered by self driving trucks, crops that are harvest by self driving combines, food that is delivered by autonomous cars/drones...

entire industries will be transformed - millions will have to find new work doing something else.

>couple decades

yeah.. probably about right.

>"basic income society"

frankly, i don't see how we don't keep the poor from eating the people and companies with the intellectual property to make these things which will take all their jobs, without those companies - or the govt - making welfare "basic"ly universal for everyone...

the end game of everything being automated is that the people that control the means of production of the automation, end up controlling all the capital, which breaks capitalism. Basically, in the end, Marx was right. His predictions were just foiled by several world wars which forced the current wealth disparities to disappear.