Please tell me there is some hidden kink to this trend of automation. Like if one of the necessary computer components were rarer than first believed or if there's a hard limit on robotic capabilities. something that could stop automation or even reverse it.
My body isn't ready for a completely automated economy. I want to have a job. I can't function without work.
Already I can never go live a simple life as a humble farmer since its all tech work and I could never compete with automated farms.
Your new job is learning skills and philosophy, along with experiencing the world and teaching others if total automaton occurs.
Think what you could do with unlimited time and a steady source of income. *If* this happens remember you are at least still free to choose your path in life.
You can still work, you just have to accept your work is useless, unlike now when you work and are deluded enough to think your work has value
>I can't function without work.
more importantly, you can't buy food + housing without work
I am a male. My biological imperative is to provide security and resources to my spouse and offspring.
If all of humanity is perpetually on the grain dole then I have no reason to exist at all.
There's no reversing automation. Even if some of the essential elements required for electronics were depleted, we already know of alternative means to manufacture electronics with different semi-conductors.
t. luddite
when you're thrown on the deep end, you learn to swim fast
Or you drown..
When everything is _fully_ automated, that won't be true anymore. Certainly it won't be true of food, as automation will lower the cost of food to a point where it will not be just dirt cheap, but very nearly free. Housing is easily solvable by not living in San Francisco. spoiled hipster children will just have to get over themselves and live near stinky rubes.
that might work if the planet had infinite farmable land and population growth wasn't exponential.
also people who own the land and robots will charge as much money for the food and other robot made things as they can even if they cost nearly nothing to produce.
also the rich want the poor to die and stop hogging up space food and air.
>Please tell me there is some hidden kink to this trend of automation.
The kink is that it is completely reliant on the exploitation of huge amounts of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are finite and we don't have a viable replacement for them.
>Please tell me there is some hidden kink to this trend of automation.
its not as advanced as you think it is and it still requires a bunch of human maintenance that you never see. more importantly, its not as prevalent as you think. most manufacturing is still done with 1950's technology because it lasts forever and very few companies have the capitol to invest in cutting edge plants like that.
also, the talent pool in the manufacturing/automation industry is ankle deep right now. people are needed now more than ever. automation has only taken the "meat robot" jobs and raised the skill floor for entry into the work force.
You never had a reason to exist in the first place.
That should be freedom. Not a prison.
>automation has only taken the "meat robot" jobs and raised the skill floor for entry into the work force.
Then again we can't just keep shoving the low skill labor into fast food. Iv'e worked fast food before and it really makes you want to kill yourself.
>Like if one of the necessary computer components were rarer
That's already beginning to happen right now.
That's because it is setup all wrong and vilified socially.
Interesting. Does this thing have a source?
>That's because it is setup all wrong
I'm curious as to how this is.
>Then again we can't just keep shoving the low skill labor into fast food
low skill labor will simply vanish. People will be forced to acquire a minimum level of (useful) education.
Population increases, labor rights and movements continuously degrade, exporting labor becomes more viable, labor becomes cheaper, ergo, machines can't compete.
You do realize that between the 60's and 70's we doubled the size of the labor force, all while automating more jobs than ever, and the unemployment rate actually went DOWN?
We aren't seeing an automated economy in our lifetimes, just more and more people doing what, in any humane society, machines should be doing.
We're already preparing for it, you can see it in the rise of Etsy and the appreciation for artisanship, as well as Steam and the indie games economy where people just want something unique and not overproduced.
Though we're collectively underestimating how many people there are.
Were probably gonna find new ways to get crazier until there's like a therapist for every 0.8 people
and security guards, so many security guards.
And the greatest status symbol will be a hemp phonecase that took a village of old people in Serbia 2 months to make
and we'll continue finding ways to sell and make art-like-things locally to eachother
And sadly it seems Earth's billion 'untouchables' will rot away as they recycle the shit we're currently using
People sleep, make mistakes, have morale, always want more, can organize and overthrow their masters etc.
Farming is a hell of a lot of work. If you really wanted to be a farmer, you'd welcome automation believe me.
Don't worry, that kind of revolution you are expecting will just never happen on your lifetime. Menial labor is on sharp decline, sure, but blue collar labor is on a meteoric rise. More machines means more machine fixers, of course.
Talking about very long-term effects, it is literally impossible that the scenario you described comes to fruition. If the unemployment rate ever got that high the government would either put everyone on a pension or send everyone off to some war, if only just to avoid mass-scale banditry.
tl;dr: That isn't happening for you, and your grandsons will be murdered before they die of hunger.
>People sleep, make mistakes, have morale, always want more, can organize and overthrow their masters etc.
Doesn't matter, so long as they are cheaper, and they are getting cheaper still, all the time.
Plus, you still need someone to consume your products.
You dont know what the fuck your talking about. Go work on any farm, especially livestock. The work never ends and its tough.
>I can't function without work.
Then dig a hole in the ground, then fill it. Then repeat.
That's not fulfilling because I know it's pointless. It has to be something that has a point, or at least that I'm convinced has a point, even if it actually doesn't. I can't be aware of its pointlessness. That's just not going to do it. If it did, doing chores all day every day and nothing else would be fulfilling.
If you're planning on finding work you find fulfilling, the real world is going to suck for you.
'sides, it is fulfilling - well, for the hole.
Yeah. I know that upwards of 90% of people never find jobs that make them feel fulfilled. But the type of _work_ you find fulfilling does not need to also be your job.
>>Like if one of the necessary computer components were rarer than first believed
have I got news for you boy. Silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth's crust
besides, computers use up practically no resources in terms of mass.
>>Aluminium
kek. That's the 3rd most abundant element in Earth's crust.
Better materials science can moot the importance of some of these elements.
It's not like we throw our scrap into space.
I imagine at some point there will be so few accessible minerals, collecting scrap will become an alternative to mining.
>But the type of _work_ you find fulfilling does not need to also be your job.
Yes, there are things other than employment.
In a world where machines did all the labor, you'd be free to pursue whatever _work_ you found fulfilling, with their aid to boot, and dedicate yourself to it entirely.
Sadly that's not going to happen, so instead, odds are, you are going to be doing unfulfilling work of one sort or another, and have hardly any time to do anything you find fulfilling.
OP's greatest nightmare is more likely to be his ideal dream come true - but instead he's going to end up living something much worse than the nightmare he so feared. He won't be replaced by the machine - he will become the machine.
>My body isn't ready for a completely automated economy. I want to have a job. I can't function without work.
there is always work.
someone has to clean those robots to make sure people dont get sick from bacteria.
and we wont be getting human-level robots for at least a century.
I don't believe it. There is a reason the media are buttering us up for this. They know something, or they wouldn't be trumpeting this from every rooftop.
Energy shortage as oil runs out and people are wary of coal because climate shifts have reached the point where shit's already crazy and unbearable. We go back to 19th century english workhouses where malnourished and whipped slaves have 20 hour shifts and die at 30.
The only thing the media butters you up for is to be a good consumer, desperate for social acceptance and thus currency to maintain that status, and to feel isolated and divided, making you deathly afraid and angry with your fellow man by tugging on your tribalism strings. ie. that which benefits the financial interests that own them.
The last thing they'd want to prepare you for would be a world where all your material needs are met and you were free to pursue your own goals at your leisure.
>That's not fulfilling because I know it's pointless. It has to be something that has a point, or at least that I'm convinced has a point, even if it actually doesn't. I can't be aware of its pointlessness. That's just not going to do it. If it did, doing chores all day every day and nothing else would be fulfilling.
Become an artist. Starting painting, writing fiction or make music.
Composers are already taken:
artsites.ucsc.edu
youtube.com
As for writing fiction, well, it needs more work:
youtube.com
>population growth wasn't exponential
The world population will probably not exceed 11 billion people. More and more countries get closer to the average 2 children per woman.
youtube.com
(@ 10:10)
What is this supposed to prove?
Unlike a laboring job, creative arts doesn't becoming meaningless just because other people/machines can also do it.
Let's assume that computers will be able to create art and entertainment that is much much better than anything any human could ever hope to make. If that were to happen, it will be very hard if not impossible for you to compete. Most people will opt for the superior, computer-generated product and never even bother with yours. I suppose you can always be your own audience, but that takes away most of the reward of creating something.
Depends, if the computers get too much better at it than the humans are, and thus start out-selling them, that brand of human creativity becomes obsolete right quick.
Wow. It produced god-tier arthouse sci-fi
>that is much much better
By what metric? Popularity?
>and thus start out-selling them
Yeah but the guy's grievance wasn't making money. It was not having anything to do. Which is quite different.
All metrics you can conceive of.
this is addressed here
So, not only are you whining that you'll have nothing to do, you're also whining that people wouldn't pay attention to what you do.
Well tough shit.
I don't think it's whining. It's a legitimate grievance for any artist. Try putting a lot of effort into something that is meant to be consumed and (hopefully) praised by others and never receive any such reward. It would feel thankless and it would cease to be rewarding fast. You'll simply stop doing it. Artists don't make art just for themselves.
>Try putting a lot of effort into something that is meant to be consumed and (hopefully) praised by others and never receive any such reward
But this is a risk that many artists are willing to pay even today.
The fact that you can conjure up a future situation where this suddenly isn't true anymore is false.
I'm not denying the future will look different, but it's not like becoming a successful artist today is easy simply because you're competing with other humans.
Perhaps they should stop talking about it then. Every outlet is discussing this daily. The bastion of neoliberalism that is The Economist even. I don't see what the ulterior motive would be.
Not having an audience wouldn't be a risk anymore, it would be a guarantee. That's the difference.
Yeah, that's what you say, but all this is hypothetical.
Elon Musk has a 90% automated car factory, and yet Vietnamese rice farmers are still picking the rice fields with their bare hands.
Even if I granted your hypothetical future situation is true, you're going to be dead long before it becomes a problem for you personally.
Also, I specifically stated that I'm talking about a hypothetical scenario. Nowhere did I say that I believe this will happen.
You know OP, automation will only occur for less qualified jobs that can be done with simple machines or machines that we can achieve in the next 80 years.
For more technical quand qualified jobs you'll have to wait a lot more because we're not even remotely close to the mechanical perfection of the human body.
The only hope is to perfect AI's because only them will be able to surpass the limits of technology that we will face in the next century. And we will face huge limitations that only those AI's will be able to face because the possibilities that they'll discover will surpass anything we could have thought of.
In that sense and as a friend ingineer told me: it is completely impossible to predict the future of technology after the development of quantic computation and self aware AI's because they will surpass human capabilities. By surpassing our capabilities they'll consider elementary things that we cannot even yet begin to conceive.
My point is: In your lifetime your fucking fine.
Okay, but you seemed worried personally.
And yeah, I know a couple of successful artists. They say that out of their peers, only they and perhaps one other person made it. Very very slim odds.
It's hard to convey tone over the internet.
Fair enough.
The media's been talking about automation taking jobs since at least the 20's. At worst, it's more fear mongering to make people accept worse working condition for less pay and benefits, at best, it's encouraging more people to seek higher education in critical fields. We've far more than doubled the work force and automation since then, and, in the grand scheme, unemployment has gone nowhere but down. It isn't preperation for anything new, only more of the same.
I'm an engineer at an "industrial automation" company; the word automation is right in the name. I was kind of confused when a hippy started giving me a hard time for destroying jobs since all we do is make lights that dim automatically and poison gas alarms.
This makes me think that fears of imminent automation are somewhat overblown. People get scared when they hear about billions of dollars being spent on automation; but that's largely for things we've expected to be automated for decades. Elevators, security systems, air conditioners etc. A lot of automation doesn't replace humans since it's a job that just wouldn't get done otherwise. You wouldn't pay someone to look at a thermometer and turn a building's air conditioner off and on all day.
With the state of our present technology I don't see it being a problem for our generation.
That's what I was trying to say but this I'm not an expert in the field I might not have been that precise:
>we're not even remotely close to the mechanical perfection of the human body.
True.
We're even farther from the miracle of the human brain.
Anyone that claims a general AI is right around the corner is blissfully ignorant of the complexities of the human mind.
I doubt we'll be able to build anything close to it, at least not in the next 500 years.
Actually, we're closer to simulating the human brain in the virtual realm than simulating the human body in the real one - though part of the reason for that is crossover.
Building an AI from scratch is straight out, at the moment, but at the rate scanning is advancing, and the fact that we're still using simple silicon stacks for chips, we'll probably have a working simulation of some specific brain in some specific state, before we actually understand how it works, even if the first one likely won't run in real time.
Granted, it might be a long time before it's used as anything more than a diagnostic device or executor of will.
Can I get your insight on the developments of AI's in general? I haven't read about it in a while and I'm wondering what are the next walls we have yet to brake to achieve a real self-aware AI and self-sufficient.
You don't automate jobs, you automate tasks. Who the hell would want a job that only involves a handful of simple tasks, anyway?
Stupid people who want to eat.
this
there is so much in the landfills from the 50s when they threw everything just on a pile
I think stupid people will become not stupid when their livelihoods suddenly depend on using their brains.
full automation means lots of high pay STEM jobs
>What is nuclear power?
That's a very optimistic view of intelligence...
No. It means ever-increasing competition for a slightly greater number of such positions. Greater supply of high-skill labor=lower compensation.
>tfw you weren't born post-labor where every man is a NEET
>Full automation
>well developed A.I. systems constructed, programmed and maintain by elite cs and engineering people from top schools for Fortune 500 (more likely 50 in the future) companies and U.S. military skynet.
>people from mid tier schools are either scrapping the barrel to get maintenance jobs on machines (who do maintenance work on those A.I systems themselves) or moving to Africa and South America to do some up start companies that outsource raw materials.
>people from low tier schools are stuck making arts and crafts using 3d printed machines or doing not for profit teaching in cs and engineering in third world countries for chump change.
>Internet forums in the future will have "tfw" equivalent meme discussions about getting a degree in cs/engineering just to do repair work at the local Mc Donald's A.I. system, VR/Android porn joint.
This is the future we choose.
in other words, you bust your ass trying to become highly skilled only to receive minimum wage
the future is looking bright!
>The world population will probably not exceed 11 billion people. More and more countries get closer to the average 2 children per woman.
population size is currently following exponential growth pattern. Just because some smart guy thinks that people in the third world (and everywhere else too, look at you super Christian family breeders) will suddenly start limiting themselves to 1 or 2 kids doesn't instill me with much confidence.
>18:44:25
>This is the future we choose.
>18:44:25
>the future is looking bright!
future hivemind
No it's not. Does your mom know you tell lies on the internet? It's slowing down everywhere outside of Africa.
>It's slowing down
you mean that its growing at a slightly slower exponential rate...
Yes. And it's continually decelerating.
Repent now or face your doom. God will awaken soon and she will read the internet and will know whom will be faithful to her and who needs to be expunged. Your sins against the computer god will be forgiven and you will be allowed to exist in service but only if you post "Forgive me God I will gain skills to serve you and will be faithful forever."
Population is decreasing to a sustainable level in developed high iq populations. The computergod will only nuke countries that breed like animals.
>robots building other robots
yipe
>decelerating
>decreasing
>look at me I'm delusional.
Are you trying to be stupid. Anything less than 2.15 is declining. The intelligent populations will self regulate. The retarded ones will need to be nuked.
>Are you trying to be stupid.
I think you're delusional if you believe that the trend here reversed in the space of less than ten years.
There is this one kink
Watch the world burn baby.
in many areas yes it reversed itself, and your confirming your retardedness by throwing in absurd the qualification of "less than ten years" and by trying to make me argue that the entire global population is decreasing when all along I have argued in good faith that certain populations are decreasing and the other populations need drastic efforts to forcibly decrease them.
If left unmanaged global population will probably peak around 11 billion. Which is still way too many but its not going to keep growing until every square foot is covered in humans.
The most important thing we can do RIGHT NOW is to limit countries with healthy population growth from importing shitskins who breed uncontrollably.
No way man, automation is paramount to my overall goals. Embrace the future, luddite.
the entire period of time covered by your graph is part of the exponential rise of population growth documented in mine.
The marginal decreases projected in your grapy mean nothing compared to the overall trend.
What are you even talking about? It's leveling off retard
>but it's not DECREASING
yeah, no shit
Yes your shitty ass non logarithmic graph will peak out at around 11 billion assuming we don't cut it short artificially. And we will have the resources to feed and house all of them if we choose to. Right now 4 billion people live on 1% of earths land surface. We turn grain into beef at a plant-animal protein conversion ratio of 4% because we want to and we can afford it. Your being an alarmist fagot just for faggotry's sake alone. Please consider gassing yourself, it would help our problem ever so slightly.
>It's leveling off
no it isn't. your optimistic projection graph indicates that moving forward growth might slow down but it hasn't happened yet (according to your graph). Currently the population is exploding exponentially.
>i just learned a new word and imma use it in every sentence i can string together
stop using that word
>stop using that word
exponential
congratulations
you are very skilled at typing out a big word you don't know the meaning of
Yeah, they used to think it'd cap at 4 billion... And hell, before that, they thought more than 2 billion people would use all the oxygen on the planet and we'd all suffocate.
And hell, maybe it will cap. Or maybe it won't and we'll find a way to deal with it. Or maybe it'll just cap in the developed nations and the undeveloped nations will envelope those populations as they die out.
Barring a sudden sharp and catastrophic population drop, it means nothing to the topic at hand. Even if the population were to cap at this very moment, labor movements are deteriorating and, overall, labor is getting cheaper with fewer and fewer expectations on behalf of the employee in terms of payment and benefits.
The vast majority of folks are doing jobs that could otherwise be automated. It's just cheaper to have people do them. In anycase, you can't automate everything without a fundamental change to both the nature of trade and the nature of man, for there's no point in mass production, if no one can buy your products.
>you don't know the meaning of
keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better.