Robots replace all need for manual labor. How does society continue...

>since they've put so many people out of work, nobody can afford their goods and services
>big companies start going out of business
>economic depression

Why wouldnt you just become post-scarcity by that point? If you really have robots good enough to replace creative jobs.

probably. i'm not so good with macroeconimics.

fix the robots

>but what if they make a robot to fix the robots
cost efficiency, developing, creating and maintaining a specialized robot capable of fixing ten million robot variants is more expensive than paying some chinese faggot to fix ten thousand of them every day

If you manage to get a minimum guaranteed income set up for the populous, people will largely either seek out what jobs remain for more capital, or become complacent and bored.

More likely you'll see massive unemployment, the poor blamed for not finding work that no longer exists and gradual societal unrest that eventual explodes into anarchistic collapse. Because socialism is bad in even the smallest forms, apparently.

I would think that you would need a shift in cultural ideals enough to the point that "work to live" isn't such a prevailing thing.

Replacing the need for manual labor doesn't replace the desire to perform it. Some people just prefer jobs where they are working hard.

So, basically what's happening to us now then.

>What do the non-rich/non-scientist people do all day?

browse Veeky Forums

OP's making a common economic fallacy, easily remedied; Henry Hazlitt's classic Economics in One Lesson, page 33, The Curse of Machinery:

mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson

Stop worrying and learn to love the AI.

>learn to love the AI.
I can't do that if they don't have a body.

We either
a) make a citizen's wage a thing so that the economic gears keep turning, setting the stage for post-scarcity
or
b) kill off all the unskilled plebes after the inevitable uprisings, leaving only high-skilled and creative jobs. Effectively post-scarcity regardless.

Hedonism

You could try.

I mean, I've never ejaculated on a robot before, but I'm up for it.

AI's provide for humanity and no one has to work, outside of creating art and games. Utopia happens.

They play. They play games. They read. They go to the woods and roll around in the mud. The drive cars fast. They swim, climb, play sports, have sex, drink rum for breakfast and coffee in the night to keep having constant fun.

Assuming the question is about what people do in the case that robots are capable of automatically doing everything that we do, include maintain themselves, and the problem is that the humans are... bored, or something.This always such a silly question.

They turn to crime to keep busy from the now monumental amounts of free-time and lack of money they find themselves with. Some might even destroy the robots just to work, or at least feel what it's like to work having never done so in their entire lives. Others go bonkers and start shooting up the place because people are so accustomed to working that somehow not working is strange and unnatural to them. Chaos, user. Pure chaos.

Hey buddy, I've fallen in love with plenty of fictional characters so you can learn to love an AI that can actually respond to you.

>crime
For what purpose? Also many will find work in creative endeavors or managing the robots.

The same thing NEETs do all day.
Play games. Read stories. Chat online. Research irrelevant subjects. Masturbate to abnormal things. Get drunk. Get high. Live according to their whims.

Dude, it's 2000AD Judge Dredd. The writers took a very Hobbesian look at society as a satire where the only thing keeping back mankind's wanton chaotic nature is a strict and unforgiving law system. Rampant crime waves are a major part of the setting and life in Mega-City 1 is filled with lots of poor people turning to crime for a bunch of reasons cause most of the work (damn near all of it) is done by robots which leaves 87% of the population without even a low-paying job to keep themselves busy with. Even the creative work is often done by robots. Just think of it as someone thought up OP's question already and assumed the outcome would be a bleak one.

>jobs done by robots
>let's do crime!
... why?
Surely you don't need crime to feed, clothe, or shelter yourself, since you'd be eating food a robot grew, wearing clothes a robot wove, and in a house a robot built.
Crime for fun? We already do that, it's a game called Grand Theft Auto. And in a future with super-games made by robots, surely GTA LXIII will be incredibly immersive and engaging.
At that point it's not some analysis of human nature, even in the worst possible light. It's just contrivance to have conflict for the sake of conflict.

Anybody can do a heist. The trouble comes when you need to escape.

A lot of the early Dredd stories were pretty much just social satire on British politics during the late 70's and most of the 80's. While also for some reason taking place in America...yeah. Some of it is a little dated and other parts of it still work out pretty well, like Un-American Graffiti and how the normal citizens deal with essentially not having a future or even an identity. In relation to the video games, there actually are some comics where you find out, among other things, that video games are illegal in MC-1 along with real sugar, real coffee, even a kind of candy, and a bunch of other mundane stuff. Again, it's pretty extreme in it's portrayal at times.

So basically The Matrix except the humans voluntarily entered it.

>video games are illegal
Oh, so it's nonsense.

I really could see us banning a lot of currently common substances as time goes on. It seems to be a centuries long tread towards ever more safety. All the things banned in Dredd have already been linked to addiction

Basically communism.

So illegal sugar and coffee are totally fine and believe-able, but take away the games and suddenly shits going down. I did say it's taken to an extreme to a point, that point being that authoritative regimes don't work to stop crime. Also it's comics, nonsense is to be expected. Illegal video games is hardly the silliest thing to happen in the setting.

Making sugar and coffee illegal would be a matter of health codes and food/drug trade (which would be completely maintained by robots and would be simple as not having robots produce cane sugar or coffee plants), so yes, it is significantly more believable than outlawing a type of fucking media.

Because people are greedy.
>why not feed the poor since we have enough resources to do so
Because capitalism.

The proposed scenario would inevitably lead to war. That's how humanity dealt with inequalities since times immemorial.

It's less believable when they're all banned for exactly the same reason, they stimulate the citizenry too much and they'll start riots and committing even more crimes because of it. The logic used to ban the games is intentionally meant to be just as dumb as actual arguments used to ban games that have been attempted IRL. That they lead to real violence in the players who play them, which is a falsehood.

>What do the non-rich/non-scientist people do all day?
Whatever Dr. Wily tells them to do.

We're not going to live in some utopia, nigger. People will still need to pay taxes and the government will still need tax money. Efficient production will not replace the need for labor.

In fact, we've already seen this to a limited extent in the Industrial Age: machines replace labor to a large extent (where once ten tailors were needed, one Jacquard loom could do their work) and many Luddites were afraid the machines would put them out of a job. How did Western economies evolve? More focus on services, which also went parallel with better education of the population at large. If robots become a thing (and according to the narrowest definition of robot, we've already had robots for a long time), I simply see this trend continuing.

Nothing is complicated if you cut it up in small pieces. Where machines reduce the need for labor in one sector, I imagine division of labor will increase the need for labor in another. For example, programming. Let's say you need one really good programmer to program a certain operating system for one of your fancy robots, but you could also hire ten shitty ones. If they're cheaper overall, you're going to hire the ten shitty ones. The good programmer will either have to accept easier work that pays less, or he will have to move on to a more specialized area of programming (programming robots with more complicated tasks than cleaning, for example).

This is nothing new, this is a trend that's been going on for centuries and will continue for centuries to come. The only real problem is the useless 'labor' force Europe loves importing from the third world combined with incredibly low native birth rates.

marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Blood sport for the amusement of rich people and scientists.

The ever-shrinking upper class control robot empires which they cam mobilize via voice command while jerking off in the bathtub. Population control is increasingly seen as noble and just, and the large human population of the current era is viewed with horror. THe remaining lower-class humans are selected for their ability to serve or amuse the ruling class, natural selection kicks in rapidly and is augmented by breeding experiments and genetic tampering.

I think you're describing trends that are already reversing. The science of oppression, for lack of better words, has advanced prodigiously in the last 50 years. I think we're living right in the middle of a liberal ere and things from here on are just going to get worse for the common person.

The industrial revolution DID put people out of work. It destroyed existing economies and made everyone movie to cities to live in disgusting conditions and do factory work. The service economy didn't evolve directly from the industrial revolution, it evolved to quell riots after the great depression. You can't have a service economy unless the common people have money, and the reasons why the common people in Western countries have money aren't economic, they are political. There were several decades where politicians on both sides of the isle swore to win the war on poverty; that era is now over.

What I'm saying technological advancement and gains in productivity do not necessarily help everyone. Prosperity isn't necessarily shared. That isn't something that has to happen, it can go both ways.

They die, what can be used of their biology recycled to make a better (but provisionary) Brera of machine-men. Eventually humanity goes extinct and is succeeded by machines and by the dead but dreaming trans human remains of the elite; machines with human memories that still believe they're humans.

>Why wouldnt you just become post-scarcity by that point?
Because post-scarcity is by definition impossible.

Breed

Unfortunately yea. If there is enough of all essential resources to comfortably sustain every person, people will still fight for control of that resource, and for the social/economic power that comes with control.

If there is enough of every essential resource to sustain everyone, and you have conscripted some cosmic entity to magically insure that all these resources are evenly distributed to everyone, then people will go to war over non-essential resources which they now see as essential.

Post-scarcity might be possible if you were working with a more reasonable species.

Who the fuck works in manual labour nowadays?

That's a serious question. I'm unemployed and huge, and I'd take a manual labour job in a heartbeat.

Eh, enough genetic engineering...

>manual labour nowadays?
About 80% I think. Mind you counting in service jobs which robots would replace.

For america its mostly occupied by mexicans or other cheap labor, your best attempt to get a job is to make youtself seem like the boss can pay you less than normal legaly.

we ALREADY have enough food to feed everyone on the planet in 2016, but people still go hungry

Have you ever heard of dishwashing? Or bussing? Or anything in food service? Or anything in retail? Or any entry-level job anywhere?

You're probably looking for something that's JUST manual labor, and hard manual labor, and where you don't have to deal with customers or people as much, so I would say look for a construct company. I used to see listings for that kind of thing all the time on job banks.

Where do you live?

American chain groceries pour bleach over the food they toss in the dumpsters, just to keep hungry people from fishing it out

Flood the scientist jobs, drasyically lowering their worth marginally.

That or mass riots that along with the enproaching oil crisis and how little we actually have prepared we are probably looking at a 30 to 50 year long mini apocalypse.

work meaningless 60 hours work weeks with titles that sound just technical enough to be real while the owners of the robots rake it in and tell their underling to be grateful they have jobs

>How does society continue? What do the non-rich/non-scientist people do all day?
Bread and circuses. Prepare your collective anuses for Rome II:: Robotic Boogaloo.

If robots could perform social functions (i.e. provide services), too, we would either go FULL COMMUNISM, or have some technofeudalist scheme where some people own the robots and direct policy and the rest are provided enough not to revolt. At that point exchange wouldn't make sense. Some robots would be dedicated to servicing normal people, and the rest would functon to produce directly for the whims of the overlords.

If robots couldn't provide services, or them providing them had a greater opportunity cost than humans providing them, then everyone would be relocated to the service sector (i.e. you'd either sell your ass, or sell the burgers that some machine flips).

Pretty much all the trades... Many people start out as a helper who just carries shit and moves it around.

Being huge is not important (I for one chew out any guy who tries to look like a hero and move heavy shit on his own when a cart is right fucking there).

Good attitude and common sense is what'll get someone to apprentice you in the skilled parts of the job.

The Culture Sci-FI books portray a good answer to this question. Ian M. Banks writes some interesting ideas regarding boredom; hedonism, simulation, interests. It is quite far-post singularity though, but the basic ideas are translateable.
Some people indulge in pure hedonism; others become researchers of the obscure, or great craftsmen, or try to complete arbitrary challenges they set themselves - ie, build an AI totally by hand, or design great pieces of art, or learn, or just travel and see stuff.

I highly recommend them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

There is only one sensible option. Upload all of our minds to the matrix, put the matrix in a super-advanced satelitte server, have it run on solar-power, and orbit the sun until it becomes a black hole then die after millions of years of doing nothing but playing vidya in a virtual world.

Risible from start to finish.

It's not even that, even if it's undoubtedly part of the problem.
People behave in a competitive manner because, by definition, resources are finite; not the other way around.
And resources ARE finite, no matter wich ones you're using.
And in the end thermodynamics teaches that you can't win and you can't break even. You're allways using more than what you're recycling or reusing, by definition; and your instincts know this.
Being "reasonable" is not a factor in this.

Won't do squat.

Honestly, you'd probably see a large scale reduction in population, and only so much breeding as is necessary for the sorts of jobs that robots can't/aren't being used for.

It's one of the central sociological phenomena noted in the Asimov Elijah Bailey books.

>tfw scientist
Damn its good to know I'll always have job opportunities.

As long as the Sun's shining and we're not going Kardashev+, our resources are pretty much infinite.

The rich deport them back to wherever they got their biggest percentiles from and gass those who have too much native American blood, of course.

It's a multi-faceted problem.
On one hand, just like the Industrial Revolutions, the Nano-revolution (or cyber-revolution) will cost a lot of people their living.
This will doubtlessy happen: an emergent completelly new economic system means off with the head of most modern industry as soon as it becomes feasible. Industry will still exist but will decentralize from the places where wealth now gathers. If everyone can have a 3D printer and use it to obtain most of the basics for life, there's no reason to go to the City except to buy luxuries.
Clothes, utensils and most parts you might need to repair your car will be right there at the end of the mouse and they'll become like porno on the net: fundamentally free except if you're looking for something in particular not in the public domain.
This will mean that you'll be able to print new shoes, but if you want some fine Italian Leather you'll still have to go buy it: no way a printer or a robot can make that. I don't mean on the quality side of the equation, given enought time you'll be able to print something just as good. I mean on the Marketing side.
You'll have a choice between being some rural asshole that lives on his printer and on wellfare OR being a fine gentleman with handmade shoes and custom dress.
In short: economy changes, the big brass change, priorityes change and people that adapt will still find jobs, of a different kind from those avaible now. Those that won't adapt will at least still have "free" food, clothes etc, and will live considerabily better than their equivalents now.
As usual. It should have gotten old in the fertile cresent but here we are again explaining the same shit.

No they still won't because you'll still want more and search for more because that's your instinct and there's squat shit you can do about that or the finiteness of resources.

>For what purpose?
They are bored, and there is nothing to do.

A better society would structure medium education to be a gigantic party club that people can attend for more fun.
Or have actual free time activities for people to join in on.

A horrible state won't even deal with nigger/white trash/gangturf ghettoes before the Post Scarcity.
And the Post Scarcity will make it even worse.

>The ever-shrinking upper class control robot empires which they cam mobilize via voice command while jerking off in the bathtub.
This is spot on.
But it has a counter point: A lot of people will work enough to get a low level replicator, then fuck off to create a farm in the middle of nowhere, using the replicator to remove the hardest workload of farm life.

>natural selection kicks in rapidly
You need to gene engineer for large child batches first.

I've worked for several chain grocery stores in America and I know that's bullshit.

>Have you ever heard of dishwashing?
Do you not have electricity in America? There's nowhere here that has enough dishes done by hand to hire someone for just that.

>Or bussing? Or anything in food service?
They only hire attractive girls for that.

>Or anything in retail?
Every uneducated motherfucker's clamoring to get into any retail job that's available. There's pretty much nothing harder to get into where I even fulfill the basic requirements.

>Or any entry-level job anywhere?
Except telemarketing, which is 90% of the job market in general.

But yeah, if that's the sort of thing you call manual labour, forget I asked.

Man, it must be nice to live in the 70s.

Which is why it's called Grand Theft Auto and not Let's Take a Pleasant Walk.

>good attitude and common sense
and minority status and a DD-214 and a stellar entrance exam score and an uncle in the union

warehousing, ya dip

Demand is also finite, that's why post-scarcity is theoretically possible. It's impossible in practice due to the way humans act with regard to ownership.

Simulation VR matrixes provide some level of distraction/pacification while reducing resource strain.

Mass depopulation (VR addicts do not reproduce effectively.)

Return to feudalism based on local power generation and manufacturing controlled by local network administrators.

>dishwashing
'Dishwashers' are the people who operate the 'industrial/restaurant' dishwashers (pic related.) American restaurants/bars easily run enough volume to require someone who's full time job is 'scraping', loading, running, unloading and stacking load after load of dishes for the entire evening. (I know it was my first job almost a decade ago.)

until AI gets so advanced it bests human intellect

They build walls between everyone, so peace is finally attained on Earth.

Suicide rates sky rocket, degeneracy reigns, nuclear family completely breaks down, crime becomes rampant, obesity and disease rates soar.

Say what you will, the majority of people need a job/child/activity to be made to do in order to give structure to their lives.

Not sure if you count it as a manual labor but retail is always hiring. Graveyard shift at 24/7 markets or petrol stations, shelve stuffing at supermarkets, various niche stores that see two customer a day but need to be staffed all business hours. etc. Usually minimum wage 12 hour shift. But hey, it's something. Problem might be if you're signing material responsibility for the wares and the area has lot of shoplifters.

Catgirls when?

The difference between the Robotic Revolution we're about to come into and the Industrial Revolution is that the machines you described still took people to operate them. Sufficiently complicated machines don't need people beyond the programming and maintenance stage. The maintenance stage only needs to be done every so often by a few specialists. The programming phase also only needs to be done a few times to calibrate certain machines then off they do without the need for more human input. This isn't a spinning jenny where some asshole has to spin the wheel all day.

One could argue that people only feel that way because our culture has told them it is the only way.

Construction, ranching, or Warehousing. Alternatively go over seas and kill people. Pretty much the normal paths of life for stronk people since forever.

You act really smart for someone who doesn't understand what post-scarcity means.

Except you will get worse pay, you can expect it to half after the first 5 to 8 years.

I make a whole year's comfy expenses fishing crabs for 4 months a year.
Jobs for strong people aren't in pleasant places.

Join the neo-luddites, fight the machines, demand capital to flow via their labor, and while technology continues labor-destroying tech, such as self-driving trucks are destroyed.

. Some want communism or anarchy but can't organize enough to make a bomb, so they're laughed at.

The global revolution, as the communists and socialists and anarchists wanted, turned out not to destroy capital, but just flow it along. Instead of, in their eyes, destroying the most evil device mankind created, most yearned for it, most, even with the rich and the elite defeated, put them back on their pedestals, just with the regulation and stipulations of a more 'fair' capitalist society. Even labor was turned back from automation. In the end, the status quo prevailed, not the rush of technology or a new state for mankind.

The disappointment of the Commies, Socialists, and Anarchists made for many fun comedy routines.

Those problems increased when modern culture stopped saying that however.

BUTLERIAN
JIHAD

Degenerate spotted.

>robot labor is cheaper than labor of third worders
>some countries increase welfare, some countries create bogus jobs, some countries leave people to fend for themselves
>non-profits attempt to give education to third worlders
>most people in roboticized countries live in a post-scarcity economy, guaranteed food, housing, clothing but breeding might cost money/be limited
>cheap-ass labor makes complex projects like irrigation of Sahara/Sahara solar plants feasible
Overall I guess we'll see gradual raise of living standards across the world coupled with depopulation. If you're in Africa you have no need to have 1000 children as they aren't an economic bonus with robots doing everything.

They become toys for the elite to play with.
Human life has no inherent value anymore, everything you can do can be done by a machine that requires a lot less resources to keep running, the only reason to keep you around is moral imperative and any morality that moves against the tide of efficiency won't last the ages.
So you better do your best to please your overlords to convince them of your value. I mean, you could decide the gap between rich and poor has gotten too big and it's time for revolution but unfortunately the army has been automized too.

Call centers. Everyone works in a call center, it's one of the things robots will never be good at and companies can advertise as having a real human touch to their customer service (even if metrics proves otherwise).

>since they've put so many people out of work, nobody can afford their goods and services
>big companies start going out of business
>economic depression
All the money that was going to the laborers is now going to the engineers and owners. They use it to hire prostitutes and strippers, the demand for high class prostitutes skyrockets and the labour force moves on to that market (resleeving into new, more appropiate, bodies since this is the future) solving unemployment