Yup. Whether related to robots or not, Walmart is DECREASING wages and others may yet follow their ghastly example even as consumer prices and corporate profits soar 🤬
Yup, it'll probably take a few generations after work robots become commonplace for capitalism to finally shuffle off. Life will just suck a whole lot more in the intervening time as you fight for the few unskilled jobs and spend 25+ years in education to get the few skilled jobs available
I really don't understand your logic, guys. Why would that (supposedly evil) guy give you anything for free? Why are you his responsibility? Why don't you go and build your own robot? Or maybe you don't need a robot. Find a land, and start farming your own food.
I really don't understand this logic... who taught you that you're entitled to other people's achievements and successes?!
The rich guy didn't built the robot by himself. Most likely he only financed by paying the people who actually built it. He didn't built his business by himself but paid people to built it for him even if he had the idea.
He had an idea because he's smart and had the education to support his intelligence. He had that education because someone paid for it, either family or the state. Even if he paid for it he had the upbringing that taught him the value of education and had the luck to be born in a country where that education is valued and pays off.
Nothing he has was built by himself only. The only thing we do by ourselves is taking a shit.
I never said he would give you anything for free. I said quite the opposite. Idk how you interpreted "everyone will have nothing and fight over garbage to eat" as "we'll be given free stuff". It seems you're arguing a point I never made.
It starts with a basic idea like all people should have access to food, clean drinking water, shelter, healthcare, and a basic minimum quality of life. For most people, access to these things are currently granted by working and earning a wage.
Wealth and resources are finite. As a company generates profits and it gets hoarded by a minority of people, that means there are less and less resources every single day for the rest of the population.
As companies implement more automation, there are fewer jobs. With fewer jobs, that means there are fewer people who can afford the basic necessities of life. As companies introduce technology which can work faster than humans, it devalues a humans value to companies meaning less pay for employees, many of whom are living paycheck to paycheck as it is.
Furthermore, with these reductions in cost to produce a product through automation and robotics we do not see a related decrease in consumer prices.
In short, a person earns less while prices of goods continue to rise. The quality of life of the vast majority of the populace is continually going down.
Not everyone can be a CEO, executive, or high earner. It's just a physical impossibility. In addition, these same people weild disproportionate power in the legislature. They are able to manipulate the rules that increase the barrier of entry into a business as well as manipulate markets to prevent my goods from generating a significant profit, if they so desires.
So while I do not feel entitled to what they produce, finding land and starting a farm would not secure those basic necessities of life and the opportunities to do so decrease daily.
I used to think this way. But when tens of millions of people are struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, and buy medicine, it becomes that rich guy's problem. In general you really don't want huge chunks of your population to be desperate with nothing to lose. That's bad news.
The thing is we already live in that world. Labour saving automation is all around us but we work as hard as ever. My generation witnessed the arrival of the two parent income, women entered the workplace in order to afford better housing and foreign holidays. The result? More expensive housing and latchkey kids.
A robot works harder, does more, performs better and costs less than unskilled workers. A robot also does not harass coworkers or suddenly start working at another company. It would be incredibly stupid to keep hiring people who have no value to the company.
The only risk is that these unemployed proles would suddenly decide to seize the means- oh wait guns are banned
A robot is finicky, fails constantly, performs slower, and requires me to fucking babysit the piece of shit all night to deal with faults and errors. Theoretically the robot does the entire job of welding and bending and etching, but in practice they need me to make sure it doesn't shit itself.
I'm sure, at some point, they can replace me. We aren't there yet.
Not OP, but I'm an industrial field tech, my two cents:
"Robot" is a very wide term used for a bunch of different stuff, but mostly for industrial automation devices, which, unfortunately, at the moment are still very dumb. Industrial automation improves output, if your robot really is slower than a human, somebody messed up very badly.
What it doesn't improve, and instead reduces, is adaptability; humans can perceive and reason on a vastly superior scale to a machine, and they can adapt their actions to changing factors in a process much better than a machine can, and they don't need to be programmed for every single possibility.
It'll take a while before machines can replace humans in non-repetitive tasks, but in those task they excel, provided they are properly designed, built and maintained.
I bet it's just running scripts though. It won't have any actual intelligence.
When people talk about robots taking over human jobs they're talking really about AI powered robots. Ones capable of at least some actual thought processes rather than just blindly moving around based on what some unchanging computer code tells it to do. Ones that are capable of adapting to new situations and error handling on their own.
Companies don't really have those robots yet.
Comparing current industrial construction robots to AI robots of the future is like comparing a spinning wheel to a 3D printer.
Or, you know, we could use robots to slowly transform our society into a robotic utopia, where people get universal basic income and can do what the fuck they want, because robots do most of the work to keep our lives running.
But yeah, currently they are only attractive because they save costs. And that is attractive because we live in a capitalistic, profit driven society and not one where the well being of everyone is prioritized. (Although they can also help out in areas where human workforce is not available anyway, e.g., elderly care in several countires. Then again there are insufficient financial incentives to work in that area.) That's why it's highly probable that they will – for a long time – continue to be tools which will ease lower level work, so that humans can focus on higher level tasks. However, this level of capability is increasing over time, requiring even higher qualified humans to do very high level tasks until even those are replaced by thinking machines.
We currently have a pyramid of work. Most jobs require low to mid level education or qualification. The higher the qualification level is, the less jobs are available (but usually very well paid though). What we are going to see is that robots wil replace one by one the lower level parts of this pyramid. And that's bad, because unemployment rates will increase, because of that. A lot of people don't want to or can't improve on their education / qualification. And even if they would, I doubt that there will be a sufficient amount of jobs available. (That would be a good question for a research project though, since I don't really know how many new jobs could be created by requiring less lower level work. I am just pessimistic right now.)
ChatGPT caused a lot of concerns in text writing industries. Image generating AIs caused similar distress in the creative industry. Developments like this will continue at a high speed. At some point machines will be able to improve machines completely on themselves. Then we will have an explosion of machine intelligence.
Society is not prepared for this.
That's why I am advocating that politics have to speed up creating laws and rule frameworks in which robots are allowed to be developed and operated and which also take care of those who are in danger of unemployment and financial starvation.
Manpower will always cost less that a robot, no matter in what time, we are easily to replace and even use. Quality of work do no matter, quantity can be but still you need people to buy your shit, no manpower no economy.
- Related "rich elite man" after replacing all of his human workers for robots
In all seriousness tho -- robots require energy (and lots of it) in order to work efficiently. While "any ordinary human" has to pay for his own expenses. Which means, robots will be (best case scenario) a "gimmick" for a selected few and no way a popular thing, in a way that will make all humans irrelevant for ANY kind of job.
tl;dr: It's okay, robots won't take over the world.
Robots are already a veeeeeeery popular thing. Look at any car factory.
There won't be much difference between those and general purpose AI robots, except that the general purpose ones will be WAY more capable and profitable.
Humans will always have jobs, but that doesn't mean the trend of automation and advances replacing jobs won't continue, and maybe accelerate too.
In the early 2000's there was a documentary on Hyundai's fully automated factory. Required 3 full time workers, all of them maintenance. Every system had redundancies, to prevent the line from shutting down. Parts were delivered by truck (on special trailers that coupled to specific docks that automatically supplied the assembly line) or were made on site. It took 16 hours to fully assemble a car from start to finish and once the assembly line was full, a new car rolled off the line every 24 minutes.
It was something incredible to watch, as the factory was a closed ecosystem. Cameras filmed from behind observation windows used to monitor the activity. Even if an assembly robot was to break, the line would halt, the faulty machine was rolled out automatically through a maintenance line/door and the spare would role in, in a matter of seconds.