What will people do when automation fully kicks in?

And who is going to bankroll THAT?
I mean, have you ever attempted to calculate how much money do you need to keep HALF of the US population just hair above the poverty line?
I'm gonna spare you the effort, with $12,000 per head for 160,000,000 people it's for all intents and purposes entire current US nominal GDP. That is by the way, 5 times the current federal budget.
Even extrapolating this into say 2050, when US GDP is supposedly going to be over 35 trillion, where the fuck are you going to get money for it? $12,000 for a person in US just laughable even today, let alone with 3 decades of inflation.

Seize the means of production and then starve.

*and robots don't pay taxes, and even if the companies are forced to do so, they still don't buy and consume shit

Growing risk of automation means we should implement wide range of socialist policies including standardization of living quality for the population excluding the responsible caretaker elites. It is the only way to protect ourselves and our children from the immense danger and societal disruption that automation will bring. It is important we begin work in anticipation rather than deal with the issues of the aftermath.

Literally entire top 10 highest HDI countries in the world excluding Singapore (because it's a fucking microstate) are socialist.
That's no the problem.
The problem I see here is that socialist countries have exorbitant income taxes to keep the socialism going. Make no mistake, they are cushy now, but who the fuck pays income taxes in a world where people don't work?

Basic income. Maybe Star Trek type society will not be a dream anymore.

So where does the money come from?

And currently ? Money is a creation. The economy is a creation. We invented all of this. It's our rules.

In theory, you'd tax the wealth the robots generate directly. In practice, that's not gonna happen while anyone outside of the government owns them, and its probably not gonna happen even if the government did own them because lol corruption.

do we actually, really need money? If we have perfect automation then we have a limitless supply of high quality goods and services, why not just give that shit away for free?

communism will be achieved.

(pic related)

>Ay lemme just hand 12 grand every year to every toddler in the nation
>Elementary school kids, ever wonder how you'll afford that new console your parents won't buy you? Here you go
>Highschool kids, who needs parents for gas and cigarettes, uncle Sam's got your back am i right?

this, un ironically,

give it 5 years and you will see the average person become a rabid communist, you will know it's over

>do we actually, really need money?
In theory, no.
But I'm not interested in year 2200 Star Trek space communism, I want to talk about this incoming transition that will put half of humanity out of the workforce while the other half will still be paying income taxes and everyone will be still wanting to buy fancy shit.
Just tell me which company is going to keep supplying consumers with products and services for nothing in return and how is this going to play out in global economics with nations which definitely aren't going to automate let alone abandon fiat currency in the same time frame as first world.

It depends on who owns the means of production. If it's extremely decentralized, and every citizen owns their own robot with infinite library of skills it can perform and a decent assortment of hand tools and materials to work with, then we'll all live like kings. If automation is owned by a few oligarchs and everyone is too poor afford goods and there's no work, then we'll be at the mercy of the strong. If this happens, even if they want to help they will be incapable. It will either be bread lines or mass death. At least with automation the bread lines will be efficient and automated.

Realistically, they'll starve in slums until they get genocided.

If no one has any money to spend, what would be the point of producing something? Capitalism definitely won't be able to exist with total automation.

The 5 rich people who control everything.

The rich could decide that maintaining megafauna is more important than producing food they don't need anyway. Imagine they decide to take France and turn it into a reserve for big mammals. The people will be chased away, and they deserve it because they don't own the land and live there illegally, and who cares about the loss of food production, no one can afford buying it anyway. Rhinos are cooler than food that'll be burnt because no one buys it anyway.

>If no one has any money to spend, what would be the point of producing something?
Just look at real estate. TONS of empty houses with no one who can afford to live in them.
There's more to trade and own than just money. You could own peoples lives. Their very wills and desires can be manipulated enough power. It's grotesque but with enough money you can even convince someone to sign their rights away. We're at the point now where most mega-corporations will only employ someone if they sign away their rights before working for them.

test

Race War

How is that gonna work?
You wanna tax corporations for money you're literally pulling out of your asshole and give them to people to spend on shit from those corporations, because people simply don't earn them anymore?
I understand economics were always a really wonky business, but this some crazy shit we're conceptualizing here.

it will end in a global communist revolution. the debate is really pointless.

UBI will never be enough to live on in the capitalist system.

In the meantime, we build robots that can do everything that people can do, and an AI beyond human intelligence. So that the day after the world pretty much carries on without missing a beat,

what?

Communist revolution is impossible. For any chance of success, it'd have to happen right NOW. We are only a few years away from all military forces being replaced by robots, and when that happens, the people in power will have an infinite army that will do anything they ask them to.
The commoners could never overthrow someone who has 100 million soldiers who obey anything they ask them to. It's too late unless the revolution starts today.

I'm with this guy
While right now you can kinda argue agains those who say that plebs have already no chance to resist their own governments in case of oppression, the armies and police forces are ultimately still staffed by normal folks with families and friends
the moment GI's and cops are made in a factory that isn't even staffed by people, you are fucked

>when automation fully kicks in

It won't

what makes you say that?

cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=10477

>inb4 it's different this time

>when agriculture fully kicks in

It won't
>when industrialization fully kicks in

It won't

ignore the russian bot trying to incite war. They've been spamming "race war" months now on /pol/. Civil war, race war, it's all the same end result for them. They wanna see their enemy destroy themselves.

Die because the capitalist class will no longer have any use for them.

Nice strawmen.

>inb4 it's different this time
of course it is for fuck's sake

we are not building technology which will allow billions of people to be employed, because there is an infrastructure explosion to exploit, like with industrial machines and automobiles
We are building technology that will handle the infrastructure buildup itself ,and then everything else
how fucking delusional do you have to be to ignore how 8 billion people can't be fucking managers and software programmers - and I'm saying this despite there already being a fucking technology evolving to murder those occupations as well
that's right, this time it's not just production, 1st world wouldn't give a fuck about that because its already largely running a service economy, I'm talking about software that is going to take over white collar jobs in next decade and half

There will still be an incentive to keep people employed. Since we live in a democracy, if too many people are without jobs, they will vote for socialist programs.
My main concern would be about the distribution of quality in the jobs that are decided to be kept around.
If automation does become the game plan and the people decide to be more socialistic, there might be another convenient war to thin the population.

soon

You seem to missing a few details like how:
A) You wouldn't continue paying for the current 1.2 trillion in welfare spending
B) You wouldn't pay a basic income to infants or other underage citizens, nor to incarcerated citizens, which drops the population down to 22 million instead of the 32 million you were thinking of when you talked about what you thought half the population would be
C) Most UBI proposals involve means testing (i.e. only pay the amount required to bring everyone's total income up to a given amount rather than paying everyone that same amount even when they're already earning that much or more), and obviously if you do that it isn't anywhere near as expensive to finance

Fight

I don't think those are strawmen, but rhetorical questions. Tie means that the answer to those questions is the same as the answer to the original question. In this case, the answer is, "They will find something else to do."

He's saying the strawman argument is something like:
>Automation of a single task will put people out of work.
When the real argument is:
>Automation of ALL tasks will put people out of work.
Everyone knows historically when a new technology eliminates one specific kind of work it creates many more new kinds of work. But that's not the real argument which is that having the ability to fully automate everything people can do will put people out of work. Because you can't create new jobs if all things people can do are already matched or superseded by what things artificial solutions can do. Or you could, but there would be no reason to because the artificial solutions would handle the tasks at least as effectively and efficiently and in many cases much more effectively and much more efficiently.

As soon as something's scarcity reaches a critical low point, people will redirect their efforts to produce something that is more scarce. Yes, there will be some hardship as people retrain, but it won't be as bad as you might think.

I think that a Negative Income Tax system to replace welfare might happen. I'm far more sure that art will continue to increase in value and some forms of handmade stuff will become luxury goods.

>art will continue to increase in value and some forms of handmade stuff will become luxury goods
Why do you believe artificial laborers wouldn't be able to create art or make identical artificial versions of existing handmade items?
I don't see a good reason to believe anything people do is beyond the scope of what a machine could eventually do (if not already do).

>A) You wouldn't continue paying for the current 1.2 trillion in welfare spending
it's still 5 times the federal budget just to keep half of the population above the poverty line, what's your point?
>B) You wouldn't pay a basic income to infants or other underage citizens, nor to incarcerated citizens
that's 45 million people out of 320 (and I'm actually counting people aged 0 to 24 as "infants or other underage citizens" here, the rest is 2 or so million prisoners) and it's not like those people live off air, they life off their parents and government, so we're back to square one, who will fucking pay for it?
>C) Most UBI proposals involve means testing (i.e. only pay the amount required to bring everyone's total income
but there is NO income, are you paying attention? We're talking the inevitable situation where bulk of the population isn't applicable for a fucking job anymore
Open the BLS statistics page, fucking do it
Mining, construction and manufacturing of goods, forestry and agriculture, transportation, wholesale and retail - 52 million jobs

Those jobs are gone in next 20 years. You can say goodbye to them.
And they have no replacement.

you are still cutting down trees with feathers

>What will people do
deautomate with nuclear war

>We're talking the inevitable situation where bulk of the population isn't applicable for a fucking job anymore
And do you believe this is going to happen all at once, like tomorrow all of a sudden everyone will be out of work because Jeff Bezos accidentally automated everything? Get the fuck outta here, you have all the time in the world to ease into this, you do means testing if you're talking about any reasonable UBI proposal.
>next 20 years
Gonna a need a source to back up the claim every single mining, construction, manufacturing of goods, forestry, agriculture, transportation, wholesale, and retail job will be fully automated within the next 20 years. Because somehow I doubt that.

"creativity will save us" argument is dead
youtube.com/watch?v=HAfLCTRuh7U

>And do you believe this is going to happen all at once, like tomorrow
pace is irrelevant, once the technology matures, it will happen fast enough to fuck the economy in the ass
quick example
Amazon is building centers around the world, really big infrastructure buildup. but they will be staffed by fucking roombas from the get-go, and the people who drive the delivery service vans are next on the menu

>pace is irrelevant
Pace is the most relevant thing possible, how could you say it's irrelevant? If the pace is full automation not happening until hundreds of years from now then that's a pretty big difference from your cited 20 year figure.

>While right now you can kinda argue agains those who say that plebs have already no chance to resist their own governments in case of oppression
Non-Americans don´t stand a chance - correct. And it serves them right: the fool deserves what he asks for.

There will be automation taxes. When a capitalist replaces one of their employees for a robot, they will need to pay them an indemnization equal to their then present wage. This will pay for itself in the long run even if you add the cost of the robot due to increased efficiency.
After all the population is unemployed, basic universal income and population control will ensue.

Learn to actually have interests/hobbies, especially intellectual. Most people are automaton wageslaves who participate in fleshly hedonism whenever possible (whenever they're not at work, although oftentimes they do so even there). They have nothing outside of bare minimum life maintenance (mainly just work) and flooding themselves with indisciplined gluttony and pleasure. When the world transitions to welfare states, I hope a life beyond this is shilled hard, otherwise the world will literally be comprised of complete aimless retards, with nothing in their lives except binge consumption of hollow media and strong drugs.

America is an authoritarian shithole compared to most of the world.

The money capitalists save by not paying wages will go to taxes instead and then it will be redistributed by the state.
And after maybe one generation after full universal automation, the AI will generate so much production that it will become economically autonomous and will dismantle the capitalist class, deeming it unnecessary.
After this happen the present concept of money will disappear, and will become just a way of managing priorities.

what if god is the all-mighty program?

The Matrix will soon be reality.

not gonna happen in our lifetimes, so relax

ahhahahahahaha this is fucking garbage.

Or our energy consumption won't be able to compete with our natural resources and we enter into a new dark age.

I wish I majored in something practical like MechE and learned farming.

Just how big is the threat of automation, actually? I understand factories can be largely automated, so I guess production of goods and factory jobs are possibly at risk. But how about all the other low skill jobs? Are we really going to see truck drivers completely phased out to software? Construction? Restaurant workers? From my (limited) understanding, physical and manual labor are much harder to automate. Isn't it the case that a lot of blue collar jobs will remain safe from robots for the foreseeable future? I'd imagine most office jobs are more easily automated by software. Data entry, data manipulation, filling out spreadsheets, etc.

If we're talking about a world where unskilled labor has 0 value...
It's about what the upper class will do.
>Weath sharing reforms combined with sizable population control measures intended to give the worthless and unskilled a modest life while preventing too many of them from ever existing
Where anyone who wants to hop off the welfare state and make some emone has to get a university education and become useful to the machine in some way.

Or, pic related. Which i'm extremely worried about. Because it would require no overt action on their part. They are not sending bombs to the slums. They will simply create their own highly insular communities where CURRENT private property laws completely defend their right to hoard the bounties of automation. They live in gated, guarded communities where the streets are paved with gold. The stupid and the unskilled live in our slums, where they could be arrested at any time, get sick and die, simply starve. No one will hire them and they have no material means to provide for themselves. Even if they started a business, there is no one to buy anything. The Engineer class will live somewhere in the middle, probably as Knights once served kings, STEMfags will serve the masters of automation.

The scariest part about scenario II is that it is already happening and we have been moving towards it since, I think, the end of WW2.

Unironic communism. Machines take care of the work and we all just share the massive excess equally.

>share the massive excess equally
That can never happen user.

or, each multipurpose machine is small and cheap enough every citizen has their own
We all produce what we need to survive in house. If we want something someone else has we trade our excess for it. For instance if I have tons of trees, I can trade "hand made" (robot hands) furniture for something else.

>he wants to go back to fucking barter

The same thing they do every day -- TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

People claim that a large segment of the population will go hungry because they can't afford food, of which we will have a large amount.

1. Do subsistence farmers also die?
2. If nobody can afford anything, where does the demand that drives the infinite supply come from?
3. If your job is automated away, do your former customers save money? (Yes: once the market reaches equilibrium.)
4. If your job is automated away, do your former customers sit on the saved money or do they just put that money into their second highest priority?

The reality is that as we more efficiently meet people's needs, we drive down prices and cost of living.

As we drive down prices, it becomes profitable to employ people in easier and easier jobs. Previously, these easy jobs weren't profitable, but now that we have higher spending power (thanks to automation) these easy jobs suddenly make sense.

Without inflation, in 40 years people will be able to support a family and a mortgage by grinding for MMO gold because all your needs can be met with $30/month.

Race War is coming

brace yourselves

race war is coming

...

I should add that this goes out the window when you have laws about minimum nominal wage. This scenario will never happen while politicians keep raising the minimum nominal.

>all your needs can be met with $30/month.

here's an idea
>invent general purpose robots
>sit on patent and don't give them to 1st world countries
>give them freely to 3rd and 4th world shitholes where people can live off $30 a month
>country becomes mass exporter of robot created goods overnight
>everyone earning thousands of dollars a month in land where all you need to live is $30
>what happens next?
As a social experiment, I wonder what would happen? Maybe it depends on he culture, but I believe the potential for extreme prosperity or extreme inequality and decadence is equally possible.

Fully automated luxury gay space communism

Communists get the boot.
nobody gets free handouts, even post scarcity
If you can't earn it yourself, you deserve to starve to death on the grave of your "job"

Mein gott.... It's pure ideology...

Sounds infeasible. How do you define what a robot is and how it is different than other machines? What of all the tasks currently done by machines that used to be completely people? Will new machines be taxed by how much more efficient they are than the previous model -punishing progress?
What of the new companies that start up using the robotic labor that have never employed people for those roles? How do you define what human positions they are equivalent to and the typical expected productivity of a person to be able to measure against?
There's way too many ways to game such a system.

this is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard, all this will do is delay automation, not solve it.

Fuck you.

Ideology is the only thing we have that makes this airless void of a universe mean anything. Zizek's problem is that he's still caught up in his wide-eyed innocent phase. He realises the power of ideology, but he has not yet embraced it.

Have you ever attempted to understand what post scarcity means

HAHAHAHHA I CANT EVEN, how much of a fucking retard do you need to be to a) think that a civil insurrection would be successful against the us military b) not realize that it would never happen because the military is comprised of said civilians

This

Well, compensations for unfair dismissal already exist, you get paid an amount of money dependent of your income and your time on the job, this will be not much different. The details about how it works I don't really know.
In relation to new jobs, you need to raise the taxes on capitalists on relation to the amount of automation in their production process. This tax should be roughly equivalent to the wage of the laborers you don’t employ. This will be then redistributed on the resulting unemployed population.
This won’t “punish progress” because the increased productivity of automation will pay for itself multiple times. You cannot expect for the rich to not pay compensation to society for this increased productivity.
In the end, this model will just last some decades, until we eventually develop a fully automated global “centralized” production industry that doesn’t need a capitalist class to function.
You don't "solve" automation, it is a good thing. You just need a non catastrophic way to transition towards a full welfare state supported by the extreme productivity of machines. The transition will be the most difficult part, during this period we will need to progressively apply more socialistic welfare policies. Universal income will be the near future step, in the not so far future the concept of money will probably just disappear due to negligible scarcity.

Get outta here with your common sense

rich people will start paying us to survive, if they dont they will get beheaded

slam poetry btfo zizek with buzz words

yes kill the far left, no living wage, unemployment skyrocketting, let people starve to death

what rhymes with shmevolushion

>You cannot expect for the rich to not pay compensation to society for this increased productivity.
That's retarded logic. So now capitalists owe people for not employing them? They have to pay for not needing to pay someone? Fucking gibs. You got money and I deserve money so you have to pay me not to work for you!!
Outright theft. But well, I guess we all better prepare for our new lives of permanent crushing debt to every other american we owe for making them miss out on potential wages by not employing them.

this guy lives in a fantasy world where everyone can be rich

So you are okay with dying of hunger when you eventually become unemployable?

And its not theft, its retribution for the *privilege* of sowing the benefits of technological progress that in which they did not directly contributed to develop.

This specific point is retarded but it definitely is the obligation of those with to support those without in a welfare state. Given that automation undeniably leads to a welfare state, Americans need to join the rest of the socialist west and embrace the idealism.

>So you are okay with dying of hunger when you eventually become unemployable?
the problem with asking people these questions is that they will readily say yes as they have nothing to lose in the moment. you're just giving the idiot an out

It’s cute how you see yourself as a proud capitalist. How laughable.