labor and its discontents

[dsrtao]

I think we're in a period of massive upheaval which we are all desperately trying to avoid noticing.

One of the things which is changing is the allocation of income and wealth as a proxy for allocating goods and services. Activities which were once rare are now common; some which were valuable are not; some which were unthinkably esoteric are temporarily valuable.

There is a trainable pick-and-place robot station now available for $25K. Any factory job that involves a variety of repeated motions while sitting or standing can now be automated by a machine that costs about the same as a year of minimum wage labor, but can run 24/7 and never takes a break. Long term that's about an order of magnitude reduction in costs. An autonomous micro-forklift for warehouse use should be available in the next few years  at a cost of about $50K. Amazon and Walmart will swap them for people first, but it won't be long before a supermarket is run by two people and a bunch of droids: one front-of-house customer service rep and manager, one stocking and accounting supervisor. Both of them clean up spills as needed.

The lesson of the 21st century is that jobs are going away. But if you value a person by their job, most people are then valueless. Since that's an outcome we want to avoid, we need to start valuing people in some other way.

Comments

[seawasp]

Yeah, I've written on this before. There's two paths this can go. One is to continue to insist that only those who work have value, and ends with a vast reduction in population after a war between the haves (with military robots) and the mobs. I give even odds on who wins that war.

The other is to recognize that "work" is becoming an outdated concept, and let the machines do it all and let people reap the benefits.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

One of the real problems I see with outcome two is that we simply don't know what to do with all that free time. We're imposing harsher competition on children, to eliminate the scourge of unstructured time; we work longer hours to afford more expensive pleasures so we don't have to be bored for even a second. Without work and a commute to eat up 10 or more hours a day, things look pretty grim.

Not to mention the part where people with free time are more likely to notice and act on discrepancies in treatment and privileges. That's inconvenient for folks who have more.

Probably better than the morlock/eloi war, though.

[seawasp]

No, we know what to do with the free time... IF WE DIDN'T HAVE TO WORK SO HARD TO PAY FOR THE FREE TIME.

If I didn't have to work and could just do what I wanted, I'd be perfectly happy, and I suspect most people would too. They'd go on vacations, pick up hobbies, play games, maybe even read some of my books.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I grew up around the idle rich. It may have skewed my perspective.

[seawasp]

Possibly. I have had no contact with idle rich, but my vague impression is that they have their own... jobs? which are centered around things like showing HOW idle and HOW rich you are.

That might well happen in the scenario in question, but it wouldn't be the same as it is now. I depicted what I think of as the "positive outcome" version in the future of _Grand Central Arena_ -- the Arenaverse solar system is the end result of such a progression.

[pamelina.livejournal.com]

Hopefully, we manage to luck out by electing a progressive visionary, like we did in the other period of massive inequality and immanent class war--the great depression, when we elected FDR.

I know what to do with my free time, as I'm a (very minor) member of the Idle Rich. Curious people will learn new things, adventurous ones will go adventuring, and lazy ones will party, watch media, or get drunk... and more of all sorts would get politically active, hopefully.

Problem is that we think people need to be deserving to get a good life, and that means political nitroglycerine to expand the social system entitlements. Also, the wealth and power that exists is already owned by the point whatever 1 percent, and they are not going to be willing to give it to the unwashed undeserving masses through taxation.

It scares me.

Oh, and good systemic economic reform would come out of a fee and dividend system taxing greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels at the source. That it might save civilization from global warming is a pleasant side benefit.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Check out Symbotic or Kiva.

The entire WAREHOUSE will be a robot.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords every few days when the UPS truck comes by. :-)



(Not really: I don't tend to do business with Amazon if I can help it.)

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Jobs have always been "going away". My father worked in the British coal industry in the 1940s and 1950s when the labour force (and it was a laborious business, shovels and hand-picks and horse-drawn coal-waggons underground) was over 500,000 strong. By the 1980s automation and coal-cutting machinery had reduced that workforce to about 40,000 men who produced more coal tonnage than the previous generation did even as the seams thinned out and they had to go deeper and dig out a tonne of dirt and overburden for every tonne of coal they got to the surface.

There aren't actually many jobs left where someone standing at a bench or beside a conveyor belt does exactly the same thing for eight hours a day, at least in the West. Those jobs were automated out of existence by purpose-built machines decades ago. The pick-and-place robot has no judgement though, it can't figure out that screw A doesn't fit into hole B because of a manufacturing flaw or the screw is bent. That judgement has to be provided by its human programmer along with a large and expensive suite of sensors and computing power. The $25K robot is simply the flexible actuator that makes things happen. Making the right things happen is more difficult.

I've worked on production "lines", actually work cells and an important part of our job was to do many-eyes QA on the parts we were assembling, looking for defects and preventing them getting to the customer. A simple robot can't do that, not without a lot of extra sensors and hardware the employer gets as part of the $8 an hour they pay the worker along with their labour and expertise.

[seawasp]

Yes, but that's really a matter of development now. It'll be a while before such systems are as good as a good human, but to be economical they have to be "good enough" -- i.e., save enough on labor costs that their cost, plus any new costs that arise from the less-rigorous assembly of whatever, are still less than that of the people who were replaced. THAT threshold is coming much closer.

"It's [still] the economy, stupid!"

[pamelina.livejournal.com]

Well and concisely said. Seems to me the economic system is the most important area of knowledge that average people don't have, (aside from how systems themselves work, that is. And how the economic, environment, and government systems interact.)

I'm reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" by nobel winner Daniel Kahneman, which I highly recommend. He points out the economic irrationality we humans demonstrate, and suggestions for improving.

Heck, most of us don't have any idea what the difference between income and wealth is, much less what their own economic situation is, and what their future economic situation is likely to be. Finding out is fascinating.