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While we are not currently at total automation, we are inching closer. An Oxford Study from 2013 indicates by 2033 upwards of 45% of our job force could be automated. This automation, causing a reduced need for work (thus wages) might cause (over time) capitalism to die. While there may be other possible reasons/ways capitalism may collapse, my main objective is to seek how capitalism could save itself from the reduction work/wages resulting from automation, assuming it's possible.

Capitalism (goods are owned by private individuals/businesses). People/workers buy those goods. Business automate functions to compete resulting in a better bottom line with less labor. Less labor, less money to buy goods... and so on. Eventually reaching a tipping point of little/no people being able to buy said goods.

If possible, how would capitalism prevent us from reaching that tipping point?

Sources:

I would cite more, but limited to two links.

RandomlyOnside
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    Isn't this the exact same thing that happened with the industrial revolution that arguably launched capitalism? (I'll give you a hint, that's rhetorical and the answer is yes.) The dominant method of producing physical goods at the time ("cottage industry") was mostly replaced by assembly lines and a great deal of automation. Why do you think this time is different? What makes you think this "tipping point" will happen this time, when it didn't last time? – HopelessN00b Apr 20 '17 at 06:01
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    Related: Should we expect more structural technological unemployment if growth becomes more limited by natural resources and less by labour? – gerrit Apr 20 '17 at 11:55
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    How would people stop being able to buy those goods if the increased productivity keeps making them cheaper? Who forces the people to participate in an economy that doesn't benefit them? And how could those capitalists stay in business if people couldn't buy what they produce? Who owns the factories and robots? If there is any scarcity at all, people will have a means of employment. If there isn't, that's not a question for capitalism. Capitalism is an economic theory, and economics concerns itself with the distribution of scarce resources and nothing more. – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 14:35
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    The service economy :-) There are all sorts of things which people are willing to pay to have done which aren't the simple assembly-line production of goods. – jamesqf Apr 20 '17 at 19:00
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    My late grandfather (who lived, and farmed, through the changeover from horse power to the IC engine) had a saying that answers the question well. "Every new labor-saving device that's meant to replace manual work needs six men and a boy [replace by "trainee" or "apprentice" if you are politically correct] to keep it working properly". – alephzero Apr 20 '17 at 20:03
  • @Luaan Besides tech products, whose price drops as they become obsolete, and entertainment products, whose price drops as the novelty wears off, when was the last time you saw an actual reduction of price? The current trend is for a company to reduce their manufacturing prices and keep the extra profits for themselves. The market will probably correct eventually - probably through inflation - but there's gonna be some sucky times first. – Tin Wizard Apr 20 '17 at 20:24
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    What's wrong with people simply working less? If goods are half as expensive to make I only need to work 20 hours a week to afford twice as many goods. (Then if my employer wants the same amount of person-hours as before, he can now employ twice as many people) – Reasonably Against Genocide Apr 20 '17 at 23:58
  • Just to make this clear - we are talking about GPAI. Such an entity is capable of putting objects and events into global perspective. When you say "automation", you actually mean "the end of all non-creative human labor". The consequences for the labor force will be fundamental. Everything, from education, to 40-hour work week will have to be reevaluated. Capitalism will have to change. – Vlad Apr 20 '17 at 19:26
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    @HopelessN00b No. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU – Ben Apr 21 '17 at 03:31
  • @Vlad: It's not simply a matter of artificial intelligence, regardless of whether the AI is general purpose or not. To do any sort of non-repetitative task - let's say gardening, for a concrete example - that AI has to be housed in a body that's capable of many diverse movements. Even if such a body could be built, it would have to compete with flexible & self-repairing human bodies. – jamesqf Apr 21 '17 at 04:05
  • @Walt You're seeing the results of continuous monetary inflation. In other words, countries are printing money and pretending it's worth the same. Almost everything is getting cheaper all the time (with or without a quality drop). The thing that prevents companies from increasing their margins is other companies. That's the whole point of free markets. In a real free market, you would see deflation over the last hundred years, not the unending inflation caused by politicians still using keynesian economics to steal our money :) – Luaan Apr 21 '17 at 07:44
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    @immibis We collectively stopped rewarding increased productivity with reduced working hours a couple of decades ago. Why, that is an interesting question with an answer involving politics and economics. – gerrit Apr 21 '17 at 10:23
  • "Isn't this the exact same thing that happened with the industrial revolution that arguably launched capitalism? " -- It logically can't be, since capitalism already exists. "What makes you think this "tipping point" will happen this time, when it didn't last time? " -- Because the circumstances are very different. The industrial revolution produced huge numbers of jobs that shifted the population from rural to urban. Obviously the current automation wave doesn't do that. – Jim Balter Apr 21 '17 at 11:13
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    "had a saying that answers the question well" -- grandfather's sayings don't actually answer questions well. – Jim Balter Apr 21 '17 at 11:16
  • @gerrit Someone was rewarded with reduced working hours, but it's not the folks whose productivity has increased. – Jim Balter Apr 21 '17 at 11:18
  • @JimBalter Indeed; society decided to organise solidarity among different kinds of workers and permit everybody a shorter working week, regardless of whether or not they worked in a sector where automation was reducing the need for manual labour. In the past couple of decades society (at least in NW Europe) has become far more neoliberal (social-democratic parties first abandoned their programme, and then their voters abandoned them) and now only a small minority calls for such solidarity to return. – gerrit Apr 21 '17 at 11:21
  • @gerrit I was thinking of Paris Hilton and Eric Trump. I'll have to think more about your more sophisticated argument. – Jim Balter Apr 21 '17 at 11:26
  • @Kik: I think first you have to ask whether it's reasonable for AI to think about everything better than humans. From what I've seen (and I work in an associated field) that's a pipe dream. Second, as I said above, even if you do develop such an AI, you have to provide it with some way to interact with the physical world, which for things more demanding than assembly lines, is neither easy nor cheap. – jamesqf Apr 21 '17 at 18:22
  • I believe the answer is simply shifting efforts into the tertiary sector. More and more people will try to convince others to buy stuff to get provisions. – Zdenek Apr 21 '17 at 18:58
  • You might find this short story interesting. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm – Chloe Apr 23 '17 at 19:32
  • @immibis people naturally want to earn more money than their current job allows for (up to a certain limit) and even if goods are free all of a sudden, you still have luxury goods like real estate, private jets, space tourism, etc, that would be based on how much money you have. – JonathanReez Apr 24 '17 at 12:38
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    @HopelessN00b It's simply wrong that the so-called industrial revolution launched capitalism. It is the other way round: it occurred first in England because it was the only country then which already had adopted capitalistic social property relations. Other countries were richer and more powerful at the time (Netherlands, France), but were not capitalistic societies yet. The English agrarian capitalism drove an increase in agricultural productivity that forced peasants that couldn't compete to sell their 'surplus' labor first to tenants and then for commodity production. – jjdb Apr 25 '17 at 10:48
  • @Luaan you don't really need a massive number of consumers if you own a factory. You may instead simply trade with other factory/land/mining owners and completely ignore the 99%. Although obviously you would also need a robotic police to keep the regular folks in check. – JonathanReez Jul 15 '17 at 10:46
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    There are a couple related questions on stackexchange because the question assumes that there will eventually be a point where employers no longer have a reason to hire more employees: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57989/is-there-any-job-that-cant-be-automated https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/2048/what-jobs-cannot-be-automatized-by-ai-in-the-future – Readin Jul 16 '17 at 05:10

22 Answers22

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In 1800, more than 90% of everyone were farmers. Modernly in the United States, which is a net exporter of food, less than 5% of everyone are employed on farms. That's a reduction of 85%, much higher than 45%. Far from causing the end of capitalism, it launched the industrial age.

In short, the capitalist answer is that there is always something else that people could be doing. Police departments could hire more police. Hospitals could hire more nurses. Automation leads to higher wages which leads to more consumption of other things: maid services; landscaping; construction; other things that don't have names because we haven't created them yet.

When I was young, we had a refrigerator, oven, washer, dryer, phone, television, and several radios. We added a microwave, a computer, and a VCR. Now, that VCR is already obsolete and replaced by Blu Ray players and DVRs (or the internet). And people each have their own phone, computer, and television (which may also be the phone or computer).

Capitalism can't tell what the future holds. But looking at the past, it can guess that the future holds something. Because our previous responses to automation has always been to find new and different things to do.

Brythan
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    Plus, somebody needs to think of the solutions to problems; the people that make computers faster, phones smaller but more powerful, someone needs to come up with HOW to actually do that. And there are plenty of things in this world we still need to figure out. – Andy Apr 20 '17 at 01:16
  • This is a good answer...as it very much is the capitalist's answer. (But it should be pointed out that agricultural automation has not been an overall good thing...) –  Apr 20 '17 at 01:43
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    Also, it should be pointed out that this whole idea is going to start changing very drastically. For the past 100 years, automation was mainly a replacement for hard labor. Going forward, we're finding that automation is increasingly a replacement for light labor and white collar work as well. –  Apr 20 '17 at 01:45
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    @blip: Going forward? Probably the first case of white-collar work being replaced would be direct dialing, the replacement of telephone operators by automated switches. That started in the 1940's. . – MSalters Apr 20 '17 at 10:37
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    Yes, we can keep producing more rather than working less. Until we reach limits. – gerrit Apr 20 '17 at 11:55
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    I find it interesting that you point to a question where you ask, Are there limits? And get two answers that say, Not as far as we know. That doesn't seem to support your thesis, that limits exist. And replacing high education work with automation could be helpful for inequality. Currently one of the problems is that automation tends to replace uneducated workers (often called blue collar workers). This makes things unequal, as demand for blue collar work drops while white collar work increases. If both are equally subject to automation, then inflation is less of an issue. – Brythan Apr 20 '17 at 12:12
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    I disagree. At some point (say in a 100 years) the automation reaches a point where it outperforms humans in every domain, even doctors, lawyers and artists. Humans will be simply obsolete by then, there won't be any job for them. The only role left for humans would be ownership of those robots & co. u̶n̶t̶i̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶f̶u̶l̶l̶ ̶s̶k̶y̶n̶e̶t̶ – Floern Apr 20 '17 at 12:18
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    @Floern Why would you expect that to happen? It's a prediction that has been made over, and over, and over again, and the result has always been the same - people found other things to do. Why do you believe "in 100 years" would actually be a point where humans are unemployable? If you make automatons that can do everything humans can do, you've just created a massive slave empire; not to mention that regardless of quality or cost, people seem to be turning back to "hand made" products for many reasons. Would you expect that to diminish as well? – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:11
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    Personal assistant were replaced with all the technologies in a smart phone... I think a big problem is that it's very hard (need a lot of imagination) to think of what we will have in the future. There's a lot of job now that people couldn't even imagine would exists. We can't imagine all the possibility that we will have in the future (just looking at the possibility of drones is huge). – the_lotus Apr 20 '17 at 14:15
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    We don't know what's going to happen. But my idea is that automation reaches a point where all those "new jobs" are immediately occupied by automation itself, because the robots are better suited to do those jobs from the very beginning. So humans will drop out of the production cycle, and I have no clue what would happen then. – Floern Apr 20 '17 at 14:26
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    If your numbers were right, that means the US had 4.8 million people doing agricultural work in 1800, and 15 million people doing it today. So that's still 3x more farmers today than then. Since the USA's birth rate is now well below replacement, perhaps this "problem" will eventually take care of itself. – T.E.D. Apr 20 '17 at 15:06
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    I wish I could give this answer more upvotes. It should be noted that people have been raising this same concern for hundreds of years (see: Luddites.) Yet, the predicted drop in employment has never actually occurred. The prediction has been wrong every time in the past and there's no reason to believe it won't continue to be wrong going forward. – reirab Apr 20 '17 at 17:47
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    @Brythan, sources for the 90% and 5% numbers? (Although they sound right to me) And I'd hesitate to call a 90% to 5% drop an 85% reduction. It's really an 85 point drop, but more importantly, you're talking about different bases. In 1800, the US population was 5,300,000. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html Now it's over 300,000,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_Census The farming population went from 4,770,000 to 15,000,000 (an increase of over 200%). Although the non-farming population increased many times more than that. Be careful with your percents. – user2023861 Apr 20 '17 at 21:10
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    Interestingly, farming might be the industry people move back into. Industrial farming has the highest productivity per unit of human labor, but organic farming has the highest productivity per unit of land. If industrial farming cannot meet the food requirements of a growing population, the market will support a return to old fashioned, labor intensive farming methods. – Kevin Krumwiede Apr 20 '17 at 21:47
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    The VCR may be obsolete, but the task it does isn't. And despite TV, VCRs, Blu-Ray players, and internet video, plenty of people still read books. Even if some of them happen to read eBooks rather than (or in addition to) paper ones. – jamesqf Apr 21 '17 at 04:09
  • @jamesqf Not just eBooks - don't forget audio books. It's still a book, but you don't even read it. Not my cup of tea, but certainly getting quite popular. – Luaan Apr 21 '17 at 07:47
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    @the_lotus Personal assistant were replaced with all the technologies in a smart phone - that's certainly not the case in any office I've worked in; personal assistants are still very much required due to the complexities of organizing an executive's professional and personal lives. There will always (the singularity notwithstanding) be the need for a professional PA to interpret the needs and wants of business people. – Spratty Apr 21 '17 at 10:01
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    @Spratty: Indeed, given sufficent money and need, some of us would likely hire a PA just to avoid having to deal with a smartphone. – jamesqf Apr 21 '17 at 18:05
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    How does automation lead to higher wages? Surely not for the workers being automated out of their job... – Federico Poloni Apr 23 '17 at 09:08
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    The human mind is more powerful than a Turing machine, the Turing machine encompasses every form of automation, therefore automation will never displace humans. – yters Apr 23 '17 at 09:30
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    @yters "The human mind is more powerful than a Turing machine" [citation needed] – Tin Wizard Apr 28 '17 at 19:20
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    @Walt, A human mind proved the halting problem. A Turing machine can't do this, since it'd have to run every possible Turing machine and check whether any ran forever. – yters Apr 28 '17 at 21:26
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    @yters Those are two different things. A human mind proved that the halting problem cannot be solved by a Turing machine. A human mind did not solve the halting problem, nor has their been any proof that a Turing machine could not prove that the halting problem is unsolvable. – Tin Wizard Apr 28 '17 at 21:36
  • @Walt, how else can a Turing machine prove the halting problem besides running every single Turing machine? It doesn't even seem to make sense to talk about Turing machines proving something. The very act of creating a proof appears to be unique to the human mind. – yters Apr 28 '17 at 21:57
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    @yters ahem – Tin Wizard Apr 28 '17 at 22:30
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    @Walt, that is recombining axioms to hit a target. Where does the target come from? Where do the axioms come from? A Turing machine has no idea what is true or false. At most it can make a valid deduction, it cannot tell us it is true. – yters Apr 29 '17 at 02:17
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    The paradigm shift from labor to automation will be radically different from a shift from farm labor to industrial labor. – PoloHoleSet May 16 '17 at 18:38
  • "Far from causing the end of capitalism, it launched the industrial age." It also launched a lot of entitled, self-reliant workers into soul-less, back-breaking shifts of twelve hours in factories. What economists tend to skip over the industrial revolution is how hated it was by the common man, and how it gave birth to socialist movements and, at the end, to the Communist Revolution. The industrial revolution started in the early 19th century and by 1960 the western world lived in the most prosperous of the worlds. The 150 years between both points were quite bloody, however. – Rekesoft Jul 17 '17 at 13:30
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    By now we're edging towards automating so much that the average human has no useful abilities or skills left to develop. When we're at a point where the majority of the population is unemployable because the skills that they could learn are useless against better cheaper robots, what then? – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 12:42
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    +1 The capitalist answer to "they took our jobs" is "Don't have a job that's easy-to-automate. Also, if you see that the automation of your job is getting close (like driving), and you were counting on performing it for your next 20-30 years.... well, you better start preparing for a career change. Just in case" – xDaizu Jan 16 '18 at 10:24
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    This post is not an answer to the question. The question should be interpreted as "If there are robots that can outperform humans in every job, how should wage be distributed?". The answer simply says "That's not going to happen". – fernacolo Jun 14 '18 at 07:40
  • Another favorite answer of mine in this vein is the calculator. You would think that a calculator would reduce engineering/mathematician jobs and wages from pre-calculator days, but it just shifted them elsewhere. – GOATNine Aug 16 '18 at 18:07
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    @Rekesoft If the new industrial jobs were so much worse than the old farm jobs, how did the industrialists ever convince the farmers to move into the cities? Having grown up working a small farm I can tell you it's because working a farm at that tech level is actually harder, less profitable, and more dangerous than even those early factory jobs. They were worse than what we have now, sure, but if you look at what people actually had to do for a living prior to the IR it becomes readily apparent why they were willing to switch. – Perkins Sep 27 '18 at 23:31
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    @Perkins Industrial revolution didn't bring farmers to factories - that only happened when tractors and other highly specialized machinery were invented (and became cheap enough). That's about a hundred years after, some decades after combustion engines were invented. The industrial revolution changed hand-made products with mass-produced products, so it was artisans who suffered the first wave of being outdated. As for "how they were convinced", that's easy, people stopped buying their products since factory-made ones were cheaper, until they went out of bussiness. – Rekesoft Sep 28 '18 at 07:31
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The answer from a capitalist's point of view is fairly straight forward. As demand for certain types of labor fall, demand for other types of labor will increase and workers will need to gain skills in other areas in order to maintain employment or for their own businesses to succeed.

A comment to your question alludes to this. There used to be a huge buggy whip manufacturing industry when horse buggies were the standard for transport. Today that industry has (mostly) died out. Capitalists would argue this is a Good Thing™, because there is nowhere near the level of demand for as many buggy whips so producing them in large supply today would be a giant waste of time and energy. This scenario is what proponents argue is one of the major selling points of capitalism: because of the decentralized nature driving market decisions, the market itself can react much more efficiently to changes in reality than any centralized government planning office could. A government could come up with a few solutions that may or may not work, but the market itself can try millions of solutions to a demand in parallel and what works will survive.

In terms of automation, I don't think any capitalists have all the answers (simply though because they happen to be a subset of people and I don't think any group of people have all the answers), but if they do they probably won't be sharing them publicly until after their IPO. In less abstract terms, all this means is that a different form of labor will evolve. What that is is really anyone's guess, but it's better to leave it to the market to decide rather than have a bureaucrat decide for you.

sds
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Sam I am says Reinstate Monica Apr 20 '17 at 20:00

  • if they do they probably won't be sharing them publicly until after their IPO -- I don't see how that follows... companies don't disclose all confidential information after they IPO; they simply report financial statements following SEC requirements

     –  Apr 20 '17 at 20:56
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    @AndreTerra I am using it more as a figure of speech here than a factual statement. If a capitalist has an idea on how to solve a problem, they probably won't share it until they can figure out how to make money off of it. –  Apr 21 '17 at 14:25
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    Perhaps buggywhips have (almost) become obsolete, but (per Google: http://www.horsecouncil.org/economics/ ) US horse-related activites were a $39 billion/year industry in 2005. Other estimates go as high as $300 billion. – jamesqf Apr 21 '17 at 18:11
  • @jamesqf That's partly the point, there are still plenty of people making money off of the collective horse industry, even though horses as a 'technology' have been rendered obsolete. It just isn't as prevalent in larger society as it used to, which I think is just fine with everyone. –  Apr 21 '17 at 18:39
  • @JeffLambert I'm perfectly fine having less horse manure everywhere. =) Give me carbon emissions any day! =D – jpmc26 Apr 21 '17 at 23:58
  • @Jeff Lambert: Believe me, as a horse owner myself, I KNOW about people making money off the horse industry :-) Nor would I say that horses are obsolete. Not mainstream transportation, of course, but for things like rounding up open-range cattle they beat the heck out of mechanical alternatives. – jamesqf Apr 22 '17 at 04:56
  • The idea that capitalism will naturally manage to do what's best for all seems like hopeful conflation. The imagery of the Middle Ages and the slums in the first decades of the IR don't suggest it always goes well. Take the process to the limit: one person suddenly solves all the world's production problems, such that no one need work at all anymore... he provides the world while he strips them of their remaining stuff, and then he has no more need of anyone, and they're left to die if we're envisioning strictly capitalism. – JeopardyTempest Jul 18 '17 at 07:54
  • So economic benefit !≡ people's benefit, and we're being fairly dishonest if we think some of the beneficial labor/environmental laws in place now (or for that matter things like public roads and schools) are "natural" consequences of capitalism adapting the system to fit it's needs. I'm not saying capitalism is all bad whatsoever, but thinking "it'll probably work that way because it has in the past" is dangerous and unscientific, akin to betting everything that Moore's Law would continue for the next 100 years. – JeopardyTempest Jul 18 '17 at 08:03
  • If he's providing the world, how is he stripping them of anything? Your logic is fundamentally flawed and it seems like you're trying to just find confirmation for your biases rather than trying to disprove yourself. Also, you can't discuss economics without first studying Economics, just like you don't trust a layman to offer you medical advice. –  Jul 19 '17 at 03:47
  • I don't think the demand for other kinds of labor will necessarily increase merely because one kind has decreased.What will happen is that the supply of that other labor will increase, bringing prices down. I envision a future where all production is handled by oligarch owned robots and everyone else just gives each other blowjobs all day while waiting for pity money from the government. There still will be elections, but they are conflicts between oligarchs. – Clint Eastwood May 24 '18 at 16:45
  • @ClintEastwood If that's what people choose to do that's OK. If society moves that far to where even selling of such services is morally acceptable enough to be legal, then all you've said is just a restating of my argument. I have a relative who has a neighbor that has supported herself for decades mostly as a dog sitter, perhaps another profession that could see another big increase in employment numbers due to increasing leisure time. –  May 24 '18 at 16:59
  • I think the biggest point in the argument that needs reiterating is that the future is nebulous and not easily predictable. No matter the competency of any single bureaucracy they'll never be able to think of the same amount of solutions as a free market. The market will definitely increase the search space also into worse decisions, but a government's worse decision would have a much longer lifetime since it is generally backed by law. –  May 24 '18 at 17:00
37

In 1930 John Maynard Keynes published the essay Economic possibilities for our grandchildren where he discussed technological unemployment ("unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour"). He proposed to solve the problem by working fewer hours:

[W]e shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

So say you have a factory with ten workers and you automate four jobs. There are two things you can do: fire four people, or keep everyone and reduce their working hours by 40%.

Keynes' 1930 prediction hasn't come to pass – yet, and it may never (interesting view on why it hasn't), but it's one reasonably famous proposal to solve the problem which could still be called "capitalist" (unlike e.g. basic income and some other proposals).

SJuan76
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    Does 40% work mean 40% the wage? That doesn't sound hopeful or even survivable in some cases. And if not why does the capitalist increase compensation or bother to automate? –  Apr 19 '17 at 16:16
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    @notstoreboughtdirt Automation also means it's cheaper to produce things, so products should become cheaper as well, compensating for the lower wages. Of course, the 40% example is rather extreme; in reality change would be more gradual. –  Apr 19 '17 at 16:23
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    I imagine the trickle down from improvements in wig making reducing the cost of living for wig makers is negligible. –  Apr 19 '17 at 16:39
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    @notstoreboughtdirt Compensation is mostly relative, so if everyone is both working and earning 40% less then companies producing consumer goods won't have anyone to sell to unless they lower the price of those goods. It wouldn't necessarily correlate to any drop in standard of living under that scenario, the question is whether the degree of imbalance between the top/middle/bottom becomes too great, because then any sort of social mobility would go out the window since someone in the middle wouldn't possibly be able to make it to the top. –  Apr 19 '17 at 20:45
  • I'd say that Keynes' prediction has absolutely come to pass! If you look at working hours e.g. in Germany, the amount of working hours per week is less than half of what it used to be 200 years ago. – dasdingonesin Apr 20 '17 at 13:08
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    But it hasn't changed all that much since 1930 @dasdingonesin. Certainly not to levels like 10-20 hours/week. –  Apr 20 '17 at 13:12
  • @dasdingonesin That's not technological unemployment, really. If you really wanted, you don't need to work all that much (provided the country you live in doesn't have mandatory work laws or fixed-rate taxes - many do to some extent, say only allowing employment at 40 or 20 hours a week etc.). It's just a trade-off between how much you value your free time, and how much you value the money you could have made if you worked instead. That's what originally drove work hours down. And how much time do people actually do their job out of those work hours? I know some who barely work at all ;) – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:27
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    @Carpetsmoker True, but I think the reduction from 48 to 35 hours is still quite considerable, especially taking into account the post-war spike. One of the major reasons the unions fought (and are still fighting) for shorter work weeks is to save jobs while more work is being automated, which is (as I understand it), exactly what Keynes meant: Spreading the bread thin on the butter. – dasdingonesin Apr 20 '17 at 13:48
  • Or you can shift the 4 replaced workers to help the other 6 and get a 66% increase in productivity. – Reasonably Against Genocide Apr 21 '17 at 00:01
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    That won't necessarily work @immibis, since there may not be demand for 66% more products. –  Apr 21 '17 at 00:25
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    But what if a worker wants to work more, so that he can earn more? Who would enforce these low hour work days? – JonathanReez Apr 24 '17 at 12:41
  • One of the things that Keynes and the like never seem to account for is that what jobs tech takes away, it replaces somewhere else. Lots of folks have brought up the buggy whip. All of those jobs gone because of the Automobile industry. Now, how many people does the Auto industry employ? The spreadsheet program was the death knell for the local bookkeeper (so it was predicted) now we have lots of Data Analysts. I work 40 hours a week at a job that didn't even exist 20 years ago. – Paul TIKI Jul 17 '17 at 20:21
  • @PaulTIKI That's all logical and good, but we're fast approaching levels of automation that make large swaths of the population unemployable. Not because they wouldn't learn new things, but because computers are getting so good at productive human work that even things like software engineering is starting to become more automated. What do you do when a lot of people in your society are just unable to compete with bots on any level? What is left for them to do? Even the service industry which would be the fallback when nothing else is usefully left to do is becoming rapidly automated. – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 12:48
  • @Magisch The automation is going to simply mean more abundance . the premise fails to account for what actually drives an economy in the first place. It gets lost in the weeds of the right now rather trying to look long term. Take a deep breath, take a step back, then take a good hard look at maslow's Heirarchy. – Paul TIKI Jul 18 '17 at 12:59
  • @PaulTIKI What makes you think that abundance will be available to the many? Wealth is self concentrating in capitalism, so the likely scenario is that the majority will be left to starve for the scraps while the elite can now more easily then ever control them using automated technology. There is no reason to believe human nature will suddenly shift into more benevolence and less greed. What economy does there have to be if very few people can have control over every single ressource necessary for human life? At that point, the rich are just self reliant and the poor get nothing. – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 13:02
  • @Magisch, you mean like in Feudalism? or the Reality in Cuban communism or soviet communism? They didn't call themselves "Rich" or "wealthy" but the top levels of the party certainly had access to a lot more resources. At any rate, look at history and you find that trying to absolutely control resources in a greedy manner is ultimately suicidal behavior. Louis XVI learned this the hard way. You are assuming that wealthy people are all like Martin Shkreli, and that just isn't true – Paul TIKI Jul 18 '17 at 13:31
  • @PaulTIKI You are assuming that you can extrapolate from a time where humans very much still needed each other to a time where they won't. If automation indeed is so far progressed as to automate most human endeavours, there will be nothing that could possibly stop the elite. They'll be self sustaining and almost undisplaceable. – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 13:36
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    @Magisch Economics is not a zero sum game. Also, the majority of the wealthy in the US are first generation rich. Most got there by simply living on less than they make. they tend to save money consistently over time. They don't get that way by stealing or screwing people over. There are probably some living nearby to you and you would have absolutely no idea. They also tend to be charitable givers out of proportion to most people. That is not a recipe for the kind of concentration you are talking about – Paul TIKI Jul 18 '17 at 13:39
  • @Magisch , I am extrapolating because that is one of the best ways to predict human behaviors. Also, my prediction skills are limited because I have run out of eye of newt for other methods of divination. Seriously, Catastrophising like this never helps. Humans will always need each other to survive and thrive. All the automation is going to do is bump people up one level on Maslow's heirarchy – Paul TIKI Jul 18 '17 at 13:57
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It doesn't have one. Full automation in a capitalist society will naturally evolve towards a dystopia without intervention from outside the economy.

When a machine is smart enough, and can do the job of a human at lower resource consumption than the human, there is simply no reason to employ a human. So far, machines have not been smart enough, and people have been able to adapt to new jobs at a faster rate than machines can.

Note that machines do not have to reach truly self aware or even particularly scary levels of intelligence to be able to as a group specialize in some new work opportunity faster than typical humans can (remembering that 'typical humans' are the kind of people who keep reality TV afloat). THAT will be the downfall. Each human needs to learn individually, but all robot replacements learn and benefit from each others' experience in parallel, and work at 100% from the first minute. Each human has variance in their performance, but a machine works like... well, a machine.

Steven Armstrong
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    Presumably we would still need humans to design the machines making at least some jobs. Unless you propose machines can design better machines than themselves and than humans can design, at which point we reach a singularity where we are defunct as a species, not just as individuals. – Vality Apr 20 '17 at 22:06
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    This is the best answer thus far. Capitalism has no answer. The rest of the answers are ideology. – Astor Florida Apr 21 '17 at 01:43
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    @axsvl77 That's the best argument I've ever seen in the whole universe. Let's just stop discussing anything, since everything you don't agree with is ideology anyway ;) – Luaan Apr 21 '17 at 07:56
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    You're wrong, and not in an interesting way either. Division of labour makes sense even if I can do every single thing better than anyone else in the world - trade will still make both sides better off. Increasing productivity means you need less resources to feed the humans, and in a different way than the robots. And either the robots will be owned by humans (investment like any other), or they'll be free (if they can do anything humans can, what right do you have to enslave them?). And thinking that robots will be able to benefit from each other's experience is hopelessly naive. – Luaan Apr 21 '17 at 08:02
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    "but all robot replacements learn and benefit from each others' experience in parallel, and work at 100% from the first minute. Each human has variance in their performance, but a machine works like... well, a machine."

    That's not remotely how machines work.

     – NPSF3000 Apr 21 '17 at 17:44
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    @Vality I think that is an inevitability, in which case we become the horses in the parable of the buggy whip, The US horse population peaked in 1915 and is now a bit more than 10% of its peak. We're sort of a meat-based bootloader for a more sophisticated type of intelligence. – Spehro Pefhany Apr 24 '17 at 11:07
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    @Luaan division of labour only makes sense when you cannot simply duplicate the more skilled labourer as many times as you want. This is why we no longer use horses for hauling goods or transport except in ultra niche cases or for the novelty. If cars and trucks were in limited supply we would still use them, but they aren't so we don't. – Steven Armstrong Apr 27 '17 at 20:46
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    @NPSF3000 That's exactly how modern learning machines works. Every Tesla with auto-pilot reports its "driving experience" back to the central servers, and makes all auto-pilot cars that much better. Every new Tesla is sold with the latest data, not needing to drive for a while to learn and improve. That's the robots' edge. – Steven Armstrong Apr 27 '17 at 20:46
  • @StevenArmstrong if that's how machine learning works 'work at 100% from the first minute' how come self driving technology STILL hasn't managed to become truly autonomous? – NPSF3000 Apr 28 '17 at 15:57
  • @StevenArmstrong Horses are much more expensive than trucks and cars (though even then, they keep their niche - e.g. forestry, low-level infrastructure, sport, art...); but that's not really the point here. Horses aren't workers, they are tools. They are force multipliers, not actors. Until robots get to the point of independent action, they are tools - afterwards, they are people. Slavery has mostly been forbidden for a while now :) – Luaan Apr 28 '17 at 16:09
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    @Luaan Workers are absolutely tools. Labour is just another exploitable resource. Horses and people are only distinguished in the eyes of corporations by the laws guarding them, and laws are forces outside the economy, like I qualified at the start.

    What do you think is going to happen when people are much more expensive than robots? We do not require independent action for this transition, as the lower 50th percentile of human workers aren't clever independent thinkers who are constantly solving novel problems. They're mostly just running off a script computers can't yet follow.

     – Steven Armstrong Apr 30 '17 at 03:58
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    @NPSF3000 I think you're possibly being a bit obtuse. Everyone new to a field starts off from scratch. To hire, you have to find a candidate, then test qualifications before hiring, then there's always training costs afterwards to catch them up with specifics to your company.

    Once at least one robot is qualified, install the right software and every subsequent robot is good to go from the start. No headhunting, interviews, or weeks+ of poor work while they get up to speed. Same performance as the last one on day 1. People also don't come with warranties, nor can you just sell them later.

     – Steven Armstrong Apr 30 '17 at 04:15
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    @StevenArmstrong " Once at least one robot is qualified, install the right software and every subsequent robot is good to go from the start. "

    Sure. As soon as a car is great at self-driving in SF it'll be fine in LA, or Dallas, or Shanghai or Berlin or London or outback Aus etc. And, once it works in one kind of vehicle (in sunny conditions) it'll work in all other kinds of vehicles in other conditions. It's obtuse to think that some hand-wavey simplification of technology is remotely an accurate depiction of how complex systems are developed or work.

     – NPSF3000 May 01 '17 at 04:09
  • @StevenArmstrong Have you ever watched, say, a worker on a construction site? They don't need to be "clever independent thinkers" to be hard to replace. Robots are very specialised, and will be for a long time, because flexibility is absurdly expensive; but I digress. You still haven't answered the main question - how exactly do people become more expensive than robots (ignoring unions, of course)? What advances in productivity and efficiency would make robots cheaper without a comparable discount for human workers? How many people can a single farmer feed today? – Luaan May 01 '17 at 17:22
  • @StevenArmstrong And even if that somehow happened, what prevents the "lower 50th percentile" from having their own economy, independent of the "robot world"? Are you going to force them by violence? When would the wealth and power sit in such a society? How do you become rich if you have noöne to sell to? – Luaan May 01 '17 at 17:23
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    @Luaan What prevents someone from someone with automation from entering their economy? Are you going to hold them out with threat of violence? That's unlikely considering the side with automation could just drop a celestial body on you. Wealth would be largely obsolete by that point, replaced by control of resources and raw power - whoever had the largest automated base would hold the most power. There would be no need for exchange of anything except information.

    And please remember I said that there were no solutions that could arise from inside the economy. Outside is another story.

     – Steven Armstrong May 02 '17 at 00:57
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    @Luaan What is wealth besides abundance of ressources? If 1% control the majority of the ressources, they don't have to sell to anyone to be wealthy. And they certainly have the means of supressing the 99% then... – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 12:51
  • @Magisch They have to trade with someone to keep being wealthy - since more wealth is continually being produced, they'd just become poor over time. That was one of the things that destroyed old-school aristocracy - they couldn't cope with losing their near monopsony on employment. One thing people tend to widely misunderstand is how much of a mobility in wealth there is. The people who were poor twenty years ago aren't necessarily poor now. And you're still assuming they're controlling all the resources they care about - as if owning all oil had any bearing on having pepper on the table. – Luaan Jul 18 '17 at 13:20
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    @Luaan That's a fallacy. Ressources that equal wealth have a hard cap, dependant on ecosystem. Capitalism isn't a constantly producing game, with sufficient efficiency and automation it becomes a hard zero sum game. – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 13:21
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    @Magisch "Resources that equal wealth?" Hardly. We're producing lots of wealth in things that aren't really material. Heck, I do that for a living :) Do you really think that a piece of software has no value just because it doesn't require "raw resources"? Do you really think your imaginary 1%er will just sit on his wealth doing nothing? He's still going to have needs he wants fulfilled. He's still going to try and make his wealth bigger and provide for his family. How exactly would your zero-sum scenario work? Where's the suffering customer who can no longer provide for himself? – Luaan Jul 18 '17 at 13:28
  • @Luaan Human survival is precluded on ressources. Everything else is extra and thus irrelevant to this discussion. – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 13:37
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    @Magisch Maybe in a communist utopia. Real humans have a lot more needs than "survival and reproduction" :) – Luaan Jul 18 '17 at 13:38
  • @Luaan It's how humanity evolved and has lived for the better part of 200.000 years. – Magisch Jul 18 '17 at 13:56
  • @Magisch We know very little about what humans 200 kya were doing, but it's a good bet they did a lot more than bare survival. Humans are adaptation executers, not utility optimisers - even though the only goal of our evolution is to make more humans, humans themselves actually care about things like fun, art etc. Survival is just the most basic need, it certainly isn't the only need. – Luaan Jul 18 '17 at 15:04
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I'm not sure if Tim Burton is a Capitalist or not, but he gave a really good illustration of what tends to happen over time in his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  • Charlie's father works capping toothpaste tubes
  • The factory buys a machine to cap the tubes. Charlie's father is fired
  • At the end of the movie, Charlie's father is the man who repairs the machine that replaced him

Capitalism's chief feature is that it self-levels. For instance, if you produce a good that is too expensive, nobody will buy it. Henry Ford realized that and began to produce cars at scale (which drove the cost down) and paid his workers enough so they could afford to buy the product they make. Today, perhaps half of every car is produced by automation and Ford still sells lots of cars.

Remember, the goal is consumption of goods and services, not creating jobs (which is purely a political goal). I found this comment to be insightful

Luddites have constantly engaged in the fallacy of looking at jobs as an end in itself, rather than facilitating consumption as the real end. Production is merely a means to the end of consumption and the real objective is to produce the most goods and services with the minimum effort. This fallacy becomes extremely apparent if you consider a simple case of a single person on an island. Obviously his objective is to build himself a nice house, grow himself enough food, build enough nice things for himself etc. with minimum effort. His goal is most certainly not to work 40 or 60 hours a week irrespective of what that labor produces. His goal is to produce the maximum set of things that he wants or needs with the minimum effort. He would be overjoyed if robots did 97.5% of his work needing him to work only 1 hour a week. Nothing fundamentally changes when multiple people are involved who do a relatively more complex form of barter using a money system to trade with one another and produce those set of items that they enjoy a comparative advantage in producing and trade with others to get access to other items that they have no comparative advantage in producing.

About 70% of the US was engaged in agriculture in the 18th century and luddites always feared automation in agriculture resulting in loss of jobs. Today about 2% of the US is engaged in agriculture since the average agriculture worker has his productivity greatly enhanced by technology, and the remaining human capital has been freed to engage in other productive endeavors.

Robots replacing human jobs will have the exact same effect as what technology has had so far when it destroyed human jobs, which is improve overall human productivity, leading to higher real incomes and greater prosperity.

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Machavity
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    Thank you very much for sharing that comment. It describes my opinion about this topic better than I ever could, and it was driving me insane not having a way to express it. –  Apr 20 '17 at 21:08
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    The Henry Ford thing is a myth. He didn't pay his workers high wages so they could buy his products (that's just as ridiculous as feeding dead humans to humans as food to produce electricity). He paid his workers high wages because nobody wanted to work there. People simply didn't want to stand next to a belt the whole day doing one thing over and over again. The worker turnover was horrible, so he had to keep increasing wages to increase his profit margins. You only make a trade if the value you are getting is higher than what you're giving away, and his workers simply didn't feel that way. – Luaan Apr 21 '17 at 07:54
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    The island analogy falls down because it ignores distribution of wealth. Say you had an island with 10 people, and it took 40 hours / week to build and maintain housing, and 40 hours per week to farm the available land. You could have one full time builder, who provided a home for a full time farmer in exchange for food. What have the other 8 people got to trade for the food and housing they require? – thelem Apr 21 '17 at 10:32
  • @thelem I think you're ignoring something important, though: scalability. There are many economic systems that can be made to work on a small scale (like 10 people), but not on a large scale (300M people). – Machavity Apr 21 '17 at 12:11
  • @Machavity I don't understand. My argument remains the same if there are 300M people on the island, with 10% working in housing, 10% in farming and 80% unemployed. – thelem Apr 21 '17 at 13:33
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    @thelem No, it falls apart at 300M. With 10 people the goal is mere survival. With 300M, the goals are far more diverse than just farming and housing (I can't think of any economy with only food and housing as their sole goals). You'll never reach 80% unemployment because there will always be demand for labor to reach the diverse goals of others. Even in poorer countries like, say, Mexico, the unemployment rate is under 10% consistantly – Machavity Apr 21 '17 at 13:43
  • @Machavity That's the argument made in other posts (e.g. by Brythan). I'm just trying to show why the one person island analogy doesn't work (because it ignores scalability). It suggested everyone could work one hour each per week, but if a community only needs to work 1 hour per person per week on average, what is to stop one person doing 40 hours of work, and leaving 39 with nothing to do. – thelem Apr 21 '17 at 13:55
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    @thelem "What have the other 8 people got to trade for the food and housing they require? " If they can't trade anything of value to the carpenter or the farmer for housing or food... they start trading among themselves. There's nothing preventing any of the 8 from realizing there is demand and starting to fill it. – NPSF3000 Apr 21 '17 at 17:43
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    @Machavity There will, eventually, be near 100% unemployment. Human beings are not efficient, they just seem like it so far because we have nothing of comparable intelligence to compete with. When we do have an intellectual competitor, we will either have to augment ourselves to the point of not caring about employment anyway, or we will be unemployable. Either way, no more people working. – Steven Armstrong Apr 27 '17 at 22:35
  • I think the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is better credited to Roald Dahl than to Tim Burton. – Evargalo Aug 17 '18 at 15:08
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    @Evargalo Partially. Burton invented the part where Charlie's dad gets a new job repairing the machine. – Machavity Aug 17 '18 at 16:20
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Capitalism doesn't have an answer, and doesn't need an answer. What people always forget when they worry about automation is that prices for things get less. At the turn of the century, people would pay 43% of their income on food, just to stay alive! That has gone down to about 5% now due to automation! (I can't find a source chart for before 1920's.)

us spending on food expenditures

What will happen when people can furnish their entire home by visiting the dollar store? (They can already do that.) They will have more money left over for other things: entertainment, sports, services, creativity, travel, etc. Maybe people will only work 1 day a week to survive? Maybe they will work 5 and live like royalty did in the nineteenth century?

Chloe
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    Correct. Under capitalism, there is no question of automation. Instead, automation is an answer to the question of not merely staying alive but one of thriving. – Aki Suihkonen Apr 24 '17 at 09:17
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    It seems to me your thesis is based around 1 industry, food. There are other necessities that are more expensive than in the past with little gains in income. Not sure i fully understand your answer. – RandomlyOnside Apr 24 '17 at 21:43
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    @jharris8567 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/08/3d-printed-houses_n_5773408.html Everything gets cheaper, in all industries. – Chloe Apr 25 '17 at 00:40
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    buying enough healthy, organic food for 5%-10% of your income? Not sure. – J. Doe Dec 04 '17 at 15:37
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    Do note that if you're living in the first world you're probably already enjoying a higher standard of living than most 19th century royalty while working only 40 hours a week. The king had more human servants, sure. But the food was worse, the healthcare was worse, the climate control was worse, the indoor plumbing was worse, the travel was worse, and most of those servants went to doing the stuff that Alexa will do for you today for free. – Perkins Sep 27 '18 at 23:45
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While labor is marginally valuable there is no problem. Fewer apple pickers needed means we've freed up people to be beekeepers. Fewer beekeepers needed means we've freed up people to be carpenters. And so on.

The imagined danger is when labor is not marginally valuable. When there is nothing productive a person with a free day could do that would cover the cost of living a day. A capitalist might laugh at this possibility and offer you a job at a not quite competitive wage, proving pretty clearly that day is not today.

And thinking a ahead on a whole system level is not expected of a capitalist, but if they did they might say something like: If a person alone can't earn his daily bread how was food found to feed him to adulthood? We will have reached the carrying capacity of the system and population growth ahead of resource growth is expected to be bad. Let him look for charity.

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    "And thinking a ahead on a whole system level is not expected of a capitalist" = interesting point! –  Apr 20 '17 at 01:41
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    " thinking ahead on a whole system level is not expected of a capitalist". That's in fact the core point of capitalism. Since the whole system includes all personal preferences of millions of people, you cannot think ahead. Capitalism is known to be sub-optimal with respect to the millions of preferences, but it is robust in regards to getting those preferences slightly wrong. – MSalters Apr 20 '17 at 10:51
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    @MSalters Depends on what you call "optimal". If you mean "satisfying all needs and preferences fully", sure. The only "optimal" solution would be to erase people's preferences (which, granted, has been attempted with indoctrination) :P But as for "we know of a better way of simultaneously fulfilling all those preferences as much as possible"... I'd like to hear of such an idea. Not to mention that capitalism keeps the responsibility on the individuals - they get to choose what they value more, to the best of their knowledge. – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:34
  • @Luaan: I think we can agree an optimal solution is at least Pareto efficient. I can make the stronger statement that capitalism isn't even Pareto efficient. That is not a constructive proof of alternate systems, though. That's the problem with an infinite set of alternatives. In a finite set of alternatives, I can find the best solution by comparing them, and the notion of constructive proofs is not that important. – MSalters Apr 20 '17 at 13:45
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    @MSalters isn't capitalism Pareto efficient if you make the common (unrealistic) simplifying assumptions, like perfect information and no barriers to trade? –  Apr 20 '17 at 18:22
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    @blip "interesting point!" more like unsubstantiated claim –  Apr 20 '17 at 20:57
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    @AndreTerra there seems more evidence of it than not. –  Apr 20 '17 at 22:25
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    @notstoreboughtdirt: A Pareto inefficiency in capitalism means that two parties can make a mutually beneficial trade, but don't. The reasons you mention can hinder such a trade, and therefore cause these inefficiencies. IIRC there are also numerical issues, such as non-existent derivatives of demand curves. (you can't have 3.1415 cars). – MSalters Apr 20 '17 at 22:26
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    @blip there are plenty of examples of "capitalists" (and let's pretend for a minute that is an actually useful word to describe whatever class of people the OP purports to describe) who think forward. in fact, those who do out-compete those who don't quite often. if you take any business strategy course you'll be served with numerous examples. one such example is IBM –  Jun 12 '17 at 03:56
  • @blip the burden of proof is on whoever made the claim, not me. my example is merely an attempt to falsify it. as for IBM, you're too focused on IBM today when I actually mean the history of IBM. it's a prominent example of incredible foresight in business strategy. –  Jun 12 '17 at 04:39
  • @AndreTerra Again, pointing out the exceptions to the rule doesn't negate the rule. There's plenty of evidence to reinforce the rule...the banking debacle, the bankrupting of the US Auto Industry. The first Internet Bubble. The second internet bubble. The third... –  Jun 12 '17 at 04:53
  • There is never nothing productive to do in a day. When all of the critical labor has been replaced with robots, food, clothing, and shelter will effectively be free and labor will be redirected to creative outlets- art, music, games, etc... IP law will need to be reformed in preparation for this. – Beefster Jan 22 '19 at 21:39
  • @Beefster Those things will not be marginally valuable; people will not be paid for doing them; without pay, people will not eat (even if food is relatively cheap, most people's labour will be even cheaper) – Reasonably Against Genocide Aug 04 '22 at 12:46
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More hair dressers!

As the primary production industries employ fewer and fewer people, service industries grow to take up the slack.

There will always be a market for having a real flesh-and-blood person use their time on you. It feels good, and will always be in demand.

In the old days rich people had servants to wait upon their every need. Including needs other people simply didn't have, like help getting dressed.

These days it is more common to go to a restaurant, hair dresser or some other place and pay the people there for their time and attention. (And, I guess, their actual work)

Look for example at the role of the "store greeter". I think most people would agree that this person does not do anything productive. They still have a job, they still earn wages and they still buy other goods.

Look forward to a future of more store greeters.

Stig Hemmer
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The answer is that even when machines can do anything, they are not necessarily the best ways to do it.

Many developing countries do manually many things that we automated away ages ago. And it makes perfect sense: in those countries, wages are so low that paying for a machine actually wouldn't get your investment back. Automation only kicks in when labor is scarce; if it isn't, and wages stay low, then humans will keep being the cheapest machine.

The problem arises when labor is locally scarce despite mounting unemployment; for instance because of unionization, minimum wages, or people not having the required skills, or monopolies being allowed to keep prices high on necessities. But that's a problem for politicians to solve.

Without political interference, price of food and building will go down so much (thanks precisely to automation), compared to what skilled technicians and machine owners make, that humans will always be cheaper at something.

Of course it depends if you like such a world.

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A simple examination of history should put this fallacy to rest.

Automation has been replacing manual labor for as long as manual labor to accomplish a specific task has been performed, at least several thousand years. And most of us still have jobs, despite the automation and a growing population. How did that happen, despite all the predictions of gloom and doom?

Probably the first bit of automation was the animal drawn plow. One person with an ox drawn plow could cultivate the same amount as many people with hand tools. Did that put the many people out of work? No, it did not - now that everyone wasn't engaged in food production, some could specialize in more advanced fields, like building better plows, breaking oxen to harness, building and operating wagons to transport all that extra food, or what have you.

Moving forward, consider the case of Ned Ludd, a weaver in late 1700's England, who smashed up some automated knitting machines. Granted, Ludd appears to have been a ne'er do well who was championed for the wrong reason, but the coming of the automated loom as opposed to hand spinning yarn did not put everyone out of work.

The automated loom dropped the price of clothing to the point where more people bought clothes more frequently, creating more jobs at the automated factory, plus more jobs to meet the increased demand for wool and cotton, plus more jobs to transport the raw goods and finished clothing into the new stores with new jobs to sell the clothing to meet the increased demand...

Eli Whitney automated two manual processes: extraction of cotton (the cotton gin) and a standardized firearm production line (previously, guns had been pretty much handmade). Both reduced the number of people necessary for the task, neither ended up putting people out of work. Drop the price of the item being produced, demand goes way up, production goes up, more jobs, and more jobs to supply those factories, and to transport the goods.

Arguably, the coming of the steam railroad put a lot of horse drawn wagon operators out of a job. But, the steam railroad so boosted commerce in general that there were plenty of jobs to go around.

And, one of the most ironic cases of automation and job loss: Henry Ford's auto production line. Ford automated much of the process of building an automobile, previously done by hand. Ford dropped the price of a car by an order of magnitude, by lowering labor costs. Did this eliminate jobs? In fact, it did the complete opposite. Ford's pay of $5/day for work on his automated assembly lines essentially created the middle class, and in the process, Ford created a lot of customers... for his cars. More cars sold meant more demand for metal (more mining/smelting jobs), more demand for gasoline (jobs drilling, refining, and selling gas), more need for repair (jobs repairing automobiles)... it just kept growing. The cheap automobile made a lot of new jobs possible that weren't efficient before, like traveling salesman, delivery person, etc...

Finally, let's look at a contemporary situation. E-commerce. It is putting some brick and mortar stores out of business. Oh, dear, that's automation killing jobs, right? In fact, the opposite has happened. E-commerce relies on delivery, with UPS and FedEx seeing explosive growth in delivery. More jobs. The websites must be maintained - being a good web developer today is a fairly lucrative occupation. E-commerce with its lower prices and greater selection has increased sales, which increases production, which increases jobs elsewhere.

For as long as civilization has existed, automation has been eliminating jobs. If you look at previous examples, not by today's standards, but within the context of their time, you should be able to see that for every job that automation eliminates, the results of the automation creates more than one job.

Automation is not only not detrimental to employment, it is mandatory for increased employment.

tj1000
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    Well said. the panic mongers always bemoan the loss of a sector and never come to grips with the fact that another sector will take it's place, and we can't accurately predict what that would be. – Paul TIKI Jul 17 '17 at 20:35
  • The latest AI developments hint that at some point 100% of human labor will be automated away with zero utility left from hiring humans. Then all the old theories go out the window. – JonathanReez Feb 17 '24 at 02:36
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Most of the answers here are optimistic, and assume there's a correct (or at least reasonable or workable) answer. Those are perfectly good answers, but... given many choices people don't always choose wisely. In which spirit, several stupid answers that seem to have been used before:

  1. Busywork and time waster jobs. Work behaving like a gas that expands to fill however much time is allotted for it. Water coolers and expense accounts.

  2. Lower pay. When people are too efficient at working, (not behaving like an ideal gas), pay them less, and maybe they'll do a worse job, and thus need more hours to pay their bills. Of course the money saved on wages would have to go somewhere, which becomes the rich man's burden.

  3. Move workplaces further from the home. More commuting means more work to pay for the commute, babysitters and day-care.

  4. Credentialism. In order to do the same job, upgrade the degrees, certifications and credentials required. More working to pay for more schooling. Make credentials harder to get, and easier to lose -- creating a bonding culture of fear, and plenty of openings for the next round.

  5. Propaganda. More demand for liars to reassure the public as things go sour. Perhaps all of the people can be fooled all of the time if only enough of those people work hard enough at it. Entertainment forever.

  6. Raise norms, and create more crime by outlawing and pathologizing more things. More police, prisons, and doctors are needed to fight these novel crimes and syndromes.

  7. Warfare. Nations X & Y can blame each other for their problems, and break each others windows and bones, and eventually create full employment for the surviving glaziers, bonesetters and undertakers.

  8. Conquest. Work can be spread quite thin for nations whose reach exceeds their grasp.

agc
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I don't profess to know the answer, but I have just begun reading Thomas Piketty's Capital (2014). I will report back when I get a bit further.

One thing I think we can safely assume, however, is that whatever society results, it will be far less egalitarian that that of the late-twentieth century. "Economic equality" was I believe an unusual circumstance in world history associated with an age of mass manual production.

Given the continuation of the trends of the last couple of decades Europe and America are almost certainly heading to become oligarchic societies presided over by the top 1% of "earners".

China may be the new egalitarian utopia until it too succumbs to the same trends.

WS2
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  • And the fact that the US and Europe have poor that would be counted in the 1% in many other nations? A rising tide lifts all boats, not just the yachts. – Paul TIKI Jul 17 '17 at 20:38
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    @PaulTIKI Well, there are plenty of people in the developed world who now depend on charitable food banks to live. I am not sure which are the countries where they would be considered part of the top 1%. – WS2 Jul 18 '17 at 07:01
  • 2.4 Billion people in the world do not have access to adequate toilet facilities, 663 million do not have access to clean water. You are talking about a third of the worlds population who are in relatively immediate danger from parasites that are eliminated almost altogether by something as simple as indoor plumbing. In the US, even the homeless have access to that. In the US, even families that may get a lot of charitable help have clean water, frequently a cell phone, access to libraries, the bulk have shelter, most have A/C and reliable heat. Sounds like the 1% to me. – Paul TIKI Jul 18 '17 at 13:14
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    Your point being....? The question asked about a capitalist answer to automation. Discussion has moved a long way since then. Whilst I do not profess to know the answer, I have a strong suspicion that the advanced economies are moving toward a far less egalitarian society than that of the late twentieth century. Indeed to a great extent they are already there. If there are no jobs for people to do, I don't see how they will have purchasing power. The only remedy would seem to be some sort of highly managed economy. But I've no idea what it will look like, or how it will be brought about. – WS2 Jul 18 '17 at 19:16
  • That did wander a bit from the OP. At any rate, there is a lot of getting wrapped around the axle over egalitarian society being disrupted. Most of it, when you get into it, is the politics of envy, especially when you get into the 1% vs the 99%. Too many get so wrapped up in the "Occupy Wall Street" thing that they lose perspective. To get back to the question, Capitalism will cope fine with the abundance. The agricultural industry is a good example – Paul TIKI Jul 18 '17 at 19:47
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    @Paul TIKI Problem is there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between overall wealth in society and it's egalitarian quality. Countries did not become rich until they began to become more equal. Consumers drive growth. But automation impoverishes consumers. – WS2 Jul 19 '17 at 22:52
  • Not at all. without automation many things we have would become impossible. You can't handcraft a computer. Huimans cannot reach the levels of precision required for a huge amount of modern life. The abundance that has come from automation now means we can live the life we live. Also, Consumers have access to quality devices because of automation. Otherwise most of modern society would only be available to the wealthy. History is covered in examples of this. Agriculture, Steel, Railroads. How far has the world advanced since the industrial revolution. Horse collars, seed drill, etc. – Paul TIKI Jul 21 '17 at 13:34
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    @PaulTIKI Equal societies are generally associated with mass production. It was mass production which carried wealth to the masses. And in modern western states business no longer lends itself to mass production. I am not making comparisons with Nigeria, heaven forbid. I am simply comparing modern society with that of 40 years ago. An important egalitarianism has been lost. – WS2 Jul 21 '17 at 16:57
  • The Egalitarianism is still there. First of all, don't be confused by dollars, but look at potential for upward mobility and quality of life. Any individual, through the twin mechanisms of hard work and living on less than you make, can become a Millionaire. Those 2 principles ignore class, location, race, education, and so on. Millionaire Next Door is an excellent read. Dave Ramsey's radio show frequently has "Millionaire" hours that prove that the average millionaire is not a crook, is probably first generation rich, is not a genius or star athelete. – Paul TIKI Jul 21 '17 at 20:48
  • Money, cash, whatever, is a semi irrelevant measure. The ability to move from one station in life to another is the relevant measure. So long as one can work and think, one has the means to move up.I have met millionaires who didn't finish high school, who painted houses, who conducted business with an almost fanatical eye on integrity and ethical behavior. The structure that led to that is still there. Mass production and automation help this mechanism, not take away from it – Paul TIKI Jul 21 '17 at 20:54
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    @PaulTIKI You've been reading too many self-improvement books. Try Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking fooled America and the World. – WS2 Jul 22 '17 at 06:00
  • I'll Pass, thanks. Cynical anticapitalism makes people do poorly i job interviews, leading to a self fulfilling prophecy about why you can't get ahead. I'll stay with positive thinking and books that have led me from pushing shopping carts at walmart to where I am now. Much more highly paid, healthier, and feeling better about myself and in a better position to help others – Paul TIKI Jul 24 '17 at 05:21
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    @Paul TIKI Ah, a mind closed to argument, on the basis that to do otherwise might affect one's employment prospects! Orwell and Huxley wrote about you(and millions like you). 1984 and Brave New World are about you! Big Brother holds you in his grasp! – WS2 Jul 25 '17 at 07:10
  • Ahhh, not so! Have read Orwell and Huxley, however I reject the negative nelly premises and have decided to stick with things that work. Fie on your Hobbes! Give me Locke instead. I blow raspberries at Nietzche and welcome Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson. The Existentialist types have never been more than annoying to me. In the world of the practical, you help others best from a position of strength. I do well, I can elevate myself and my family, then I can work on elevating those around me. It's doesn't fit as a highbrow philosophy because a) it works, b) it doesn't look for excuses – Paul TIKI Jul 25 '17 at 13:24
  • A simple way to think about it: Your actions have consequences, positive and negative. Own your mistakes and learn from them. Life ain't fair, it will throw curveballs and crap you can't control. With that in mind, Treat others as you would have them treat you, make the most of what you can. Whinging about it not being fair and a crappy situation is ultimately wasted energy. – Paul TIKI Jul 25 '17 at 13:40
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    @PaulTIKI What a potpourri of philosophers and neither Burke nor Payne among them! Where would you have been in 1789 - with Payne or with Burke? – WS2 Jul 25 '17 at 15:21
  • I'd likely buy each of them a beer. I admit, I am dredging up memories from a political science course taken some 25 years ago. Here is what I remember: Hobbes "life is nasty, brutish and short", Nietzsche :"God is dead, nothing matters, I'm a proto-goth" (with tongue firmly in cheek). Whereas Payne, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and even Madison, were generally positive in tone, espousing self reliance and personal responsibility with a very real emphasis on the possible problems with a government that is too powerful. – Paul TIKI Jul 25 '17 at 19:57
  • Incidentally, thanks for a civil discussion. this is fun – Paul TIKI Jul 25 '17 at 19:58
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    If you want a potted account on all of them, I think you can do far worse than Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (1946). – WS2 Jul 26 '17 at 14:22
  • That may have been the textbook for the political science class, or, one of them (I think we had 5). We covered a lot of philosophers that influenced the Founding Fathers. Outside of that, the most I remember from philosophy classes came from a class on Plato, where we spent the entire semester endeavoring to poke holes in Socrates' ideas. It was surprisingly easy, especially after a class in discreet and finite mathematics. Political science was interesting, but I found other classes far more interesting, like statistics, Database Management, and Process Management. – Paul TIKI Jul 26 '17 at 18:00
  • @PaulTIKI My interest is history. And philosophy, I maintain, can only be understood within a historical context. Social contract theory (Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke etc.) are really only relevant to the late-eighteen century. As soon as mass production of widgets started, nothing any longer made sense, except through a grasp of economics and capitalism. Whilst Marxist economic theory is patently absurd, his theory of history - in my view - has considerable relevance to the way we understand the modern world. – WS2 Jul 26 '17 at 20:46
  • You're talking about the Hegelian(sp?) dialectic, right? I think the fuzzy idiot had a glimmer there. The rest of his stuff is claptrap that has been twisted to generate a loss of life that, if it hasn't killed more people than Judeo/Christiian/Islamist wars, is certainly trying hard to catch up. As far as mass production is concerned, I think the effects come from much farther back than we give credit for. How old is the fishing net? i would also argue an animal pulled plow is the beginnning of mass production. Improvements that allow the production of surplus and specialization – Paul TIKI Jul 27 '17 at 13:40
  • "I will report back when I get a bit further." Out of curiosity, have you gotten a bit further? – Joel Harmon Jan 22 '19 at 01:39
  • @JoelHarmon I've read three of the four parts of Piketty's monumental work. (Each is a book in itself). Unquestionably a new inequality in western society exists, with the twenty-first century returning closer to the nineteenth century in that respect. But the new "aristocracy" are not so much people with inherited wealth, as people at the top end of the income range - the highest 1% of earners. This trend is startlingly apparent, but it is one which is more apparent in the English-speaking world than in other developed economies such as Germany, France, Japan. Worth a read. – WS2 Jan 22 '19 at 17:53
  • @WS2 So, does any of that merit an update to your answer? – Joel Harmon Jan 23 '19 at 02:36
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Machines are learning to think like humans and work like humans. That means that it doesn't matter what new jobs they come up with. If a human can do it, so can a machine. It can be even reversed, there may be jobs that can solely be done by a machine!

By the way. A.I.s are proven to be able to think creative, so they will be able to program themselfes. So how much more is a human worth in working power compared to a machine? Its Zero. Its even negative, since machines don't want vacation, don't want to be paid, just need to be sustained.

You simply do not need humans to work in industries anymore. So nobody is paid and either all food is free (good luck convincing those who own/command the machines to give out free stuff) or you have to become a farmer to survive.

You can say the gap between rich and poor will come to it's final form. Those with the machines will have ALL power and the rest will have NOTHING.

So I bet with time even the management will die out (either a war against the machines or somehting other, humanity always found a way to kill of a lot of folks) so what will count?

In a society that only consists of machines, there will be competition. The more efficient a machine is, the more worthy it is of being used as a blueprint for the next generation of its profession. So ultimately this society will evolve to a complete machine (or human-machine hybrid) society that strifes for efficiency (at least that would make sense since the base requirement for all that exists is sustaining that existence, either through reproduction or immortality)

anyone
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    Machines are far from being able to "think like humans". That's too bold a claim, to begin with. –  Apr 20 '17 at 21:13
  • A lot of the "machines thinking like humans" you have seen is just machines copying humans' thinking (surreptitiously extracted from your Internet browsing habits for example). They still don't exactly think for themselves. – Reasonably Against Genocide Apr 21 '17 at 00:04
  • I'am working in an R&D department for Automation and have seen things.

    Apart from that. We are talking about the future. Your claim is very naive, neuronal networks will experience a exponential growth in know how once they reach the point of developing themselfs (just like computers did with processing power). An no this point is not "far far away". Algorythms are becoming smarter each day and just because it scares you (I'm being bold here) doesn't mean it's not reality.

     – anyone Apr 21 '17 at 05:21
  • @immibis I'm a tech-guy not an talk-guy, look for Steven Armstrongs reply, he put my point it in better words. – anyone Apr 21 '17 at 05:28
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An answer by capitalism is a form of universal basic income to deal with automation and allow people to pursue creative pursuits and new ways to use resources instead of traditional industrial industries. While some call UBI a 'socialist' idea (and some socialist thinkers like Bertrand Arthur William Russell, British socialist activist William Morris, and socialist candidate for President of France Benoit Hamon have supported UBI. In fact, there is a form of UBI in socialism called a social dividend based on Marxist theory that says any surplus made by society should go back to the common worker), many capitalists support it as way to give people the money they need for basic survival even with the rise of automation. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, a major advocate of free-market economics and capitalism, supported UBI and economist Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman (a capitalist) came up with a form of UBI called a negative income tax where tax dollars are paid to people of lower socioeconomic classes to sustain themselves.

Basic Negative Income Tax Image

Even with automation, people could still participate in the economy with creative pursuits like writing or providing services for those who simply prefer a human interaction with their services, but automation with UBI (according to advocates) would be able to help even the playing field without completely abolishing the ability for someone to hold private property in a market economy.

Tyler Mc
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From a micro perspective, a capitalist will continue his labor / automation trade off based on marginal profitability. Because that's the only way for him to max his profits.

To out it another way, the substitution will yield the highest income for the labor, at the expensive of the maximum displaced labor.

This leads to a macro scenario whereby the goods and services produced by the capitalist may face a shortage of demand as consumers being increasingly priced out of the employment mkt.

But that's a case the individual capitalists cannot be expected to deal with. This calls for a socialist solution , for example tax on automation, ....

dannyf
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    so...there is no capitalist answer to the question? –  Apr 20 '17 at 01:42
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    If the services produced by the capitalists face a shortage of demand, the capitalist gets a lower marginal profitability. Therefore, capitalists which can satisfy their customers with better production volume and/or prices will be more profitable than those who do not, and displace them over time. You're ignoring the background effects - the cheaper it is to make something (thanks to automation etc.), the cheaper you can sell it with the same marginal profitability. The cheaper the people can satisfy their needs and wants, the lower wages do they require for the same standard of living. – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:44
  • Your are taking a micro economic perspective on this. Aka decisions by individual producers have no impact on the broader mkt. As it is an open loop system. If you are willing to consider the macro econ case where the automation impacts production and demand, your conclusion may change considerably. – dannyf Apr 20 '17 at 13:47
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    Again, this has been repeated in history over and over again. It's a prediction that hinges on assuming a change in one part of the economy, while expecting everything else to stay static. That simply isn't the case. How could it ever be possible that making enough food to feed a human requires more work than a human can provide as a result of increasing marginal productivity? That's a rather serious contradiction. – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:47
  • For example, take the extreme case where automation has fully replaced humans. Who will have the necessary income to consume the goods and services rd produced by automation, aside from the capitalist? – dannyf Apr 20 '17 at 13:49
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    Keynesianism is wrong. The theory is self-contradictory, it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't describe reality. If you want an economic theory that can actually make successful predictions, you need to look elsewhere. – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:49
  • How did it fully replace humans? Do robots own other robots? Are humans forbidden from having their own economy? How do the capitalists survive if noöne buys the goods they produce? You're basically doing a division by zero here, and assuming the results of that calculation make any sense. They don't. – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:50
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    @Luaan you are putting things way better than I can, good on ya! A lot of people here are also assuming that people will lock into the system and not move. If a person cannot afford the goods and services provided by automation, the law abiding will either find ways to do without, or a black market will develop. That's the historical pattern – Paul TIKI Jul 17 '17 at 21:05
  • Apparently socialism just means taxation to you... – Aryaman Oct 02 '17 at 19:00
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Prostitution and absolutism. As automation grows and control over resources remains in few hands, workers need to refocus on endeavors that are interesting to those in control of the resources. Capitalism only rewards success, so the idea of people in general turning to pursuit of arts and learning will not work out, in particular since reproductive media obliterate the need for most live performers (in antique times before literacy, it was a job description to learn all of Homer's available works by heart and travel reciting them, preserving them until people were actually writing them down).

Workers will be interesting for those things which cannot be readily automated. Sex will be one thing, and of course humiliation (either in connection with sex or as a value of its own) will be another that gives power over resources a special value not easily had otherwise.

It's not like empires based on similar principles have not been around previously. They went under in decadency numerous times in history, not able to keep up with less terminal forms of human societies.

But this time, capitalism is globalized, so it may stay the sole survivor.

user13577
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    I'm not so sure prostitution can't be automated. Heck, I think it's one of the first things that will –  Apr 20 '17 at 21:00
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    Yes, but this is too pessimistic. Prostitution can expand into great industry, with franchises, themes, costumes, role games, be fused with other kinds of entertainment, drive clothing, cosmetics, pharmacy, plastic surgery and genetics industries with itself and so on. – Anixx Apr 25 '17 at 10:24
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    "since reproductive media obliterate the need for most live performers": we've had cinema and TV for a while now, and yet there is still plenty of demand for live entertainment. – Steve Melnikoff Jul 17 '17 at 10:20
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Relying on welfare

Capitalism doesn't need to prevent us from that tipping point. Many economic systems in the world are only partly capitalistic with strong safety nets, taxation and redistribution of wealth including a provision of basic needs. See high welfare states like Danmark, Sweden, France, ...

Automation as driver of capitalism

Using machines you can produce more and more with less and less people. You only needed to invest capital into buying the equipment. That was actually a driver of capitalism and surely will continue being a driver. Somebody needs to buy all these robots who will do the work in the future.

Really cheap prices

Just look at the production costs of an Iphone in China and then at the selling price in the US? Many products can be produced en masse and really cheap, using automation probably even cheaper. So even though there might be less money to buy goods with the people because of lower employment, you might still be able to buy more products than before if prices fall enough.

More free time

We may not need to work 40-60 hours every week. 20 hours every second week might be enough to concentrate on family, hobbies, individual skills,...

Taxation

Taxes are an integral part of probably every government. By taxation of automation and redistribution of wealth you could probably quite easily achieve many different distributions of wealth. It mostly depends on what you want???

The real question:

How will total consumption and inequality develop in the future?

I don't know. I think everything is possible and it largely depends on what we want. Automation will only be one factor, maybe not even the deciding one. Among other factors are communication, education, politics, religion, wars, ...

There are natural limits though to how much one can consume and also on how much earth can provide (even with automation).

NoDataDumpNoContribution
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  • All those countries you mentioned are ardently capitalist... The means of production are privately owned. – Aryaman Oct 02 '17 at 18:59
  • @AryamanArora I agree but they are still high welfare states meaning that you have to pay a lot of taxes from your privately owned means of production to finance the welfare which is what I meant. – NoDataDumpNoContribution Oct 03 '17 at 14:35
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The question is a strange one. There is no "capitalist" answer. Capitalism is really just people being free to trade with each other absent outside interference, not a system designed to have answers to various questions. A better question is, "What happens in a pure capitalist system when machines become more efficient than humans at nearly everything?" A disaster is what happens. The few people who own the machines and the resources use those machines for their own benefit and everyone else starves.

But we don't have any pure capitalist systems where machines might take over. In this world any government of an technologically advanced society that provides the basic law enforcement required for a capitalist system also provides a social safety net. As machines replace more people, people whose skills are limited enough that they aren't more efficient than a machine in any job they might do, the safety net expands. That's the answer.

Readin
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First of, automation of jobs is a very real thing and its good to have talk that provisions our collective reaction to it. Since noone (suprisingly) mentioned this concept already. The faster we draw ourselves near automation the more essential the concept of Universal Basic Income becomes more apparent as a solution. UBI would be a promise of equal opportunity, not equal outcome, a new starting line set above the poverty line. With basic income, all income from paid work (after taxes) is earned as additional income so that everyone is always better off in terms of total income through any amount of employment — whether full time, part time or gig. Thus basic income does not introduce a disincentive to work. It removes the existing disincentive to work that conditional welfare creates. This of course also covers the people unable to work because their work has been automated, until and if they decide to re-educate themselves in another field of expertise, in case their minimum guaranteed income isn't good enough for them.

Perhaps best of all, the automation of low-demand jobs becomes further incentivized through the rising of wages. The work that people refuse to do for less than a machine would cost to do it becomes a job for machines. And thanks to those replaced workers having a basic income, they aren’t just left standing in the cold in the job market’s ongoing game of musical chairs. They are instead better enabled to find new work, paid or unpaid, full-time or part-time, that works best for them.

Check this article the above quote is from, for more on the subject as well as more citations

As well as this enlightening TED Talk

Leon
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Let's first put things in the proper perspective here. The machines and computers that are available today may look impressive, they certainly have made a lots of jobs redundant, but they are no match for a human being using its full intellect. When it comes to fully automatized systems, we're not even at insect level capabilities. A recent test with a drone trying to fly and navigate around obstacles had a performance that's a bit worse than what bees are capable off. Here we need to consider that the drone was controlled remotely by a large supercomputer, while a bee carries its own brain while flying.

So, we must first properly interpret the facts about the redundant jobs. This is clearly not due to technology approaching human level capabilities, it's simply a matter of there being large numbers of people who are employed to perform extremely trivial tasks. If 6 people are doing a job that for 85% is trivial work, but it also involves 15% higher cognitive abilities, then it may be possible to automate the tasks and keep only one person who will then be primarily engaged with doing the tasks involving the higher cognitive abilities.

The people who've lost their jobs will then have to find a new job, but they may need to be re-educated for that. They are, after all, humans with brains which are enormously more powerful than bee brains, which in turn are enormously more powerful than the machines that replaced them. So, the capitalist system isn't really under threat here.

Suppose that as technology advances, we do get into the situation where machines can start to rival human beings in all of their capabilities. In such a scenario you have to consider why intelligent systems that would likely start to resemble humans more and more, would be bothered to do our work. They'll have their own interests and will therefore need to be part of a capitalist system themselves.

So, in the end it will boil down to humans being replaced by a new machine version of humans. And if they become superior to us, then you won't get into the situation where all humans are out of work because all our work will be automated. Far from it, from the perspective of the machines we'll be the dumb machines who will be forced to do all the work in exchange for our primary needs.

Count Iblis
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    Yet, in the span of just a couple years, we've figuring out self-driving cars. I think the proper perspective is that up to now they haven't been a match for human intellect. Things are going to start changing very fast, though. –  Apr 20 '17 at 01:46
  • @blip Yes, I agree, but it's good to keep the perspective here that what we have now is machinery with substandard insect level intellect. While we may indeed reach human level machine intelligence in a century or even sooner, that kind of technology we'll then have even if it is still within our lifetime will likely be completely alien compared to what we have for the same reason why we are completely different from insects. – Count Iblis Apr 20 '17 at 02:37
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    Particularly, just like we cannot ignore that unlike insects we have a mind of our own, we cannot make the assumption that the human level AI systems can be used just like we use our washing machines today. It's far more likely that the AI systems will decide their own fate. – Count Iblis Apr 20 '17 at 02:40
  • True, but I think you're taking a big jump between "factory robots" and "skynet". Both are valid points, but there's going to be that in-between time...which is happening right now. For example, they're predicting the entire industry of driving (truck drivers, taxis, etc.) will be gone within a decade (we already have completely autonomous tractors and combines, for example). –  Apr 20 '17 at 02:43
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    @blip An automaton that can fully replace a human in any activity is a sapient being. You're talking about massive AI slavery here :) And if it can only replace humans in highly specialised scenarios, it means there's significant costs to development, deployment, maintenance etc. of these specialised robots. Unless you're assuming there's no more scarcity anymore, which would be a weird question to ask economy, which is a science entirely concerned with distribution of scarce resources. – Luaan Apr 20 '17 at 13:54
  • @blip automating driving is (relatively) easy, as there are clear rules to be followed and when every car is automated, the network aspect makes it almost trivial. you shouldn't extrapolate from this one advancement in automation that "things are about to change very fast". that conclusion does not follow logically. –  Apr 20 '17 at 21:11
  • @AndreTerra but every car isn't automated. And there are no clear rules. It's not a simple task. And it's merely only one example. One of example of many ways things are changing rather fast. –  Apr 20 '17 at 22:32
  • @blip there are clear rules of the road -- you know how other cars are going to behave to a great extent. my point about every car being automated is that it becomes progressively easier, not that all cars are automated now. other tasks are certainly more challenging to automate and entirely different problems. "changing rather fast" is a subjective statement. surely you'd agree that the industrial revolution changed, say, London "rather fast" as well, right? yet here we are. –  Apr 20 '17 at 22:33
  • @AndreTerra "other cars" is but hardly one issue with navigating roads safely. We're talking rain, snow, sleet, pavement, gravel, dirt, highways, drunk drivers, pedestrians, roadkill, big roadkill that can kill you, other bad drivers, etc. But that's all besides the point. The point is 5 years ago a self driving car was crazy talk. "Changing rather fast" is an objective statement based on the past timeline of automation. It's getting quicker. –  Apr 20 '17 at 22:38
  • Your example of London is a perfect example of what I'm saying. Yes, the industrial revolution in Europe was a very fast change...compared to previous changes is mass automation. The car changed things faster than the industrial revolution. The internet changes things faster than the car. AI will change things faster than... –  Apr 20 '17 at 22:40
  • @Luaan you can have non sentient AGI. There’s no law of the universe stating that all super intelligences must be conscious. It’s likely that consciousness is merely an evolutionary adaptation for biological creatures. – JonathanReez Feb 17 '24 at 02:39
  • @JonathanReez It's possible, but by no means granted. I wouldn't assume so. I don't see why you would need anything special for awareness of self - is there any more than a very limited reflection on the underlying thought processes? It certainly doesn't seem like a given. I doubt it's anything grafted onto the normal thought processes that we can avoid just by not implementing it. And even if it is, it doesn't mean we're not going to do it - for example, we can make robots that don't feel pain, but in the "wild", you definitely want some avoidance of damage etc., which is much the same. – Luaan Feb 19 '24 at 16:19
  • @Luaan pain and suffering are biological adaptations that have evolved due to evolutionary pressures. No such adaptations are necessary for AI and there's a 99.99% chance robots won't ever develop such a concept internally because it's not necessary for intelligence. Robot pain and suffering is only a thing because it's a nice idea for sci-fi, otherwise there's no reason for it to exist. The world does not function according to the rules of good fiction. – JonathanReez Feb 19 '24 at 18:38
  • @Luaan i.e. Data from Star Trek would've been an incredibly boring character if his AI was incapable of any suffering or emotions and didn't give a damn about whether it "lives" or not. But just because it would've been bad for the incomes of Star Trek producers doesn't mean that real world Datas would need to be like the sci-fi one. – JonathanReez Feb 19 '24 at 18:39
  • @JonathanReez That's a weirdly long response to something I didn't say :D – Luaan Feb 22 '24 at 10:33
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Interesting discussion. Here is an answer that hasn't been proposed: Exploration. When technology advances to the point we can automate all of Earth's industries, then that same technology will find a way to efficiently mine the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids for raw materials. It will also find a better source of energy than we currently use (solar, nuclear fusion, etc.) to accommodate the increased demand for energy to power all these robots.

With access to more raw materials and energy, we will finally have the means, and the reason, to explore Mars and the rest of the planets, and eventually terraforming them to suit us. Some will be happy to live a life of leisure back on Earth, some will want the opportunity to explore the solar system and beyond. That will require hard work and man's ingenuity, exploration can't just be pawned off on robots. We may explore the depths of the ocean as well, building cities underwater. We may even take a few thousand people and put them in sleeper ships and ship them off to other stars.

Finally.

CigarDoug
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  • We'll only really explore the solar system when it's cost effective to do so. Automated robots don't necessarily reduce the cost of space exploration. Just as there's plenty to be explored on Earth still -- you don't see unemployed people in their own submarines going to the depths of the ocean to explore the unknown. –  Apr 20 '17 at 21:12
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    "Automated robots don't necessarily reduce the cost of space exploration. " Wide spread automation reduces costs of energy, matter and computation. Space exploration, like many other endeavors boils down to energy, matter and computation. – NPSF3000 Apr 21 '17 at 17:53
  • @A.T. The "holy grail" is robots that make other robots. That allows you to send relatively small expeditions to faraway places (much cheaper than sending a mining fleet), which can in turn quickly expand into large factories sending materials straight home with little cost. We're very far from that point - and it will only really work well if those robots don't require special materials (something like silicon/carbon-printed everything would be ideal). Self-replicating solar arrays with e.g. microwave transmission would also be helpful. – Luaan Jul 18 '17 at 07:55
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Capitalism is not an ideological system, it is a series of relationships between people. Relational systems lack consciousness, and thus intent. We can't speak about the intentions of capitalism, rather we should look to past instances.

Does technology in capital generally automate existing practices? No. It causes breaks through the foundation of new methods of highly profitable exploitation. Frame weavers continued to work until they worked themselves into the grave—machine loom weavers were young women and children, with rape and brutality enforcing labour discipline which frame weaving male heads of household would murder over. Similarly Soviet MTS were used primarily on sovkhoz not kholkoz, and the workers in the declining industry were forced into new disruptive urban and resource industries. Coal miners do not retrain as computer operators: open cut mines mechanise with new "surface," labour. Google doesn't employ redundantly secretaries.

Now this could be either painful dislocation, or it could be permanent technical unemployment. Or it could be worker resistance to loss of geographic communities.

The wage rate could be lowered, making certain functions profitable: bicycle food delivery.

Existing technical relations could Ben reproduced in low wage regions: Bangladeshi garment work.

However, the general expansion of service labour without loss of pay can only come about IF the per capita wages increase in real terms. There are too few bosses to employ hairdressers: fellow hairdressers must buy haircuts.

The alternative Keynes posits of a 3 hour day, no loss in pay, would require a massive contraction in profits generally. Historically capitalists have had to be forced by unions or states forced by unions to lower the working week without loss of pay. Many western union movements are moribund or terminal.

Automation will result in massive disruptions, it could result in permanent emiseration, this emiseration could be exported, and productivity growth could change the goods bundle without changing real wages in positive %gdp/capita terms.

There is an out: if there is currently something not a commodity, but which could require labour in mass to produce, rate stars of profit and employment could be saved by the "enclosure" of this new field. This could be an existing thing not done for profit, childcare recently (reliant on female wage differentials white / pink collar); or, it could an entirely new desire.

Samuel Russell
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