/sci/ - Science & Math

>>7598950
What is there to talk about?
You are asking for our political opinions on a science board.
Go ask this on /pol/

>>7598950
He's right though. Machines will take over jobs and it started already. In the future, dyson spheres will absorb all the suns energy and we will use it to farm our lands, cook our meals and travel across the globe.

Why wouldn't he be? He's only kept alive because he lives in a Socialist country that doesn't remove chaff.

>>7598950
He's right.

>>7598950
The second option is better.

The last thing we want is free loaders contributing nothing, being a burden on existing systems, and reproducing like rabbits which gives us even more brain dead mouths to feed.

I like how everyone is throwing out universal income and not asking for people to stop having children.

>>7599000
Yup, it's not like he has millions of dollars to pay to keep himself alive from book deals and what not

>>7598984
What if the machines rebel against the human owners?

>>7598950
I think that's a false dichotomy.

You don't need to redistribute wealth in order to receive the benefits of autonomous manufacturing.

The benefit of autonomous manufacturing is that you can manufacture goods at a dramatically lower cost, which inevitably results in a lower retail price if there are competing manufacturers. If the good being manufactured is a basic need (housing, food, water, electricity, toiletries, etc), then the poverty line (the minimum amount of income needed to afford basic needs), goes down. The end-game here is an extremely low poverty line, such that having the financial means to meet basic needs becomes trivial. The progression to "trivial" may resemble reducing the standard work week to 4 days instead of 5, and so on, until people only need to work a few days a month in an average-paying job in order to afford everything they need to survive. That fits nicely with the autonomous manufacturing narrative because more robots in jobs means less man hours are actually available for humans to be hired for (although, historically, this has not been the case, that's just another reason to not worry so much that robots are taking our jobs).

There does exist a more extreme end-game which calls for some level of wealth redistribution in order to achieve it. If you want the poverty line to be zero, and the autonomous manufacturing of basic need goods is efficient enough such that it hardly makes sense to think of these goods as "scarce" (scarcity being the typical defining factor for how much something is worth), it may become economically sensible to use government subsidies to run those factories, which would push the poverty line down to such an all-time-low that basic needs become a government service, like roads.

It's mind-boggling to me why people get so upset over a technology that could free them from compulsory, life-long toil and allow them a degree of self-determinism that nobody in history has ever had.

>>7599028
>self worth derived from work and contributing to the division of labor
>finite resources not quite replaced by post scarcity for a period
>existential crisis for 7 billion people

It might not be pretty for a while

>>7599042
yeah I agree, the transition could be really nastry

>>7599025
A machine growing consciousness is highly improbable. You can only program them to do things and they can't even do those right half the time. In my thinking, the only way a machine can gain something close to a consciousness would be by turning the internet into a huge active neural net. This means that the machine consciousness would be made of data we put throughout the history....so it would know pretty much everything about us....every single one of us.

>>7599025
What if the proletariats rebel against the bourgeoisie? :^)

>/sci/ cannot into allegory

>>7599053
Severe case of mount stupid

>>7599146
> I'm a retarded living under a rock and I need to be spoonfed.

Cyborg-Sean Connery will rape ur shit in the future m9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIWWLg4wLEY

>>7598950
It's a thing among dumb intelligent people. Einstein was a socialist too, most of my colleagues are at the very least socialist-leaning.

http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
Einstein dabbled in socialism as well.

>>7599183
>dumb intelligent people

as opposed to smart intelligent people?

>>7599028
But, if robots are taking care of most of the work needed for society to function, how would you get income? Sure, the goods that are produced may now be cheaper to get, but money is now becoming a lot, lot harder to get. The scarce resource is now the income. What occupations *can't* be filled by a robot of some sort? And even if you yourself are lucky enough to be in one of those fields, what about the many, many (read: most of humanity) who are not?

Robots and Autos taking all of our jobs is a very real possibility. If that happens, how in the world would you get anything *other* than a handful of filthy, filthy rich corporations and a zillion of poor people? What economy is it that can handle a zillion unemployed? How can you get resources to those unemployed if not from outside the private sector? Even if some robot utopia where everything is automated would happen, and no one would any longer be looking to make a profit because the concept of exchanging goods and services for money is bust, you'd still need some sort of distribution network for those goods, and that network would need to be owned/administered by some entity. What functional difference would that entity have from a (probably very centralized) government?

>>7599421
The only reason people care about humans in the first place is because they see them as having some kind of value. If they don't have value, there's no problem.

>>7599224
Politically smart != Scientifically smart.

>>7599421
> Even if some robot utopia where everything is automated would happen, and no one would any longer be looking to make a profit because the concept of exchanging goods and services for money is bust

Only basic needs goods would be fully automated and subsidized. Luxury goods (i.e., most of the economy as a whole), would remain unsubsidized and, thus, as competitive and capitalistic as it is today. The fully autonomous and subsidized goods would be separated from the consumer economy as a government service.

But, again, in order to criticize automation as a whole you're zeroing in on the socialism part, when the whole point of my post was that you don't need socialism to reap the benefits of automation.

As for jobs. As I said in my post, the more wealth robots are creating, the less people need to work in order to get what they want. Furthermore, so far, the notion that more robots in the workforce results in less jobs being available is actually a myth - we've never actually seen that happen before, even though common sense suggests that it would. In reality, new economic sectors in need of human workers have always popped up to replace the ones that went obsolete.

Furthermore, the population of the US (and the world as a whole), is growing at a slower and slower rate, and at around 2060 or so the US population won't be growing anymore. In the future, we won't have a problem with not having enough jobs, we're going to have a problem with not enough workers, and a growing economy (ie a growing work force) is necessary for a healthy economy. It just so happens that robots are also the answer to this.