I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed,
but some elements are already present. The first twenty years of my
working life were spent automating the production of telephone exchange
equipment, which resulted in many 1000s of people who used to work on
the production lines being made redundant. Many of them still do not
have jobs, and the area is now one of the most deprived areas in the
UK. A small number of people (such as myself) were paid a lot more to
do the continuing design work, until we were made redundant when the
production and design was moved to China.
So yes we need a new economic system to distribute the wealth in a
workable way as people like me continue to make millions of people
redundant, or maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is
digging trenches, rather than sitting at home watching daytime TV.
Nigel
On 07/10/2012 22:16, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Not just food, either. Hundreds of years from now, if you decide to tear
down your house and build a brand new one, it will take less human effort
than it now takes to deliver a pizza. The raw materials will be dirt-cheap.
I mean literally as cheap as a dumptruck of dirt. For common elements such
as carbon or iron, replicator machines will produce all objects at about
the same cost per kilogram. (Assuming there is no industrial scale
transmutation.)
Overall I suppose a new house will cost a few hundred dollars and take a
week to deliver.
Regarding my projected cost of food, I said food will cost roughly as much
as tap water today. I mean that water is the main ingredient of all food.
Also, I mean it will take about as much machinery and human intervention as
tap water takes. Tap water costs ~$1 per 500 gallons, or 4,000 lbs, or
1800 kg. The average person eats 5 lbs per day, so it comes to $0.50 per
year. Okay, I may be off by a factor of 100, but it still will not be worth
the effort to charge people $50 per year.
Earlier I estimated that the total cost of supplying all necessities will
be roughly equivalent to supplying tap water today. We use a lot of tap
water in the U.S. The cost is $335 per year. I figure this will be roughly
the cost of providing all of the necessities of life, such as food, rent
for a reasonable amount of space, internet access, travel around the solar
system, and so on. People who want to live in sprawling mansions or who
want to commute every month to Mars may have to pay more, out of pocket.
If we ask people to work to earn this money, and we pay them today's
average salary, they will work for 3 days per year. That's absurd for
several reasons:
1. Why bother?
2. Who is going to remember how to do a useful task that you perform only a
few days a year? I guess if we are talking about cooking a Thanksgiving
turkey I can remember how to do it, but that is not something anyone would
pay me to do today. I am sure household robots in 500 years will do a
better job cooking turkeys than I ever could. Something you do 3 days a
year is a ritual, not a job.
3. What work are people going to do in competition with robots? Consider
that 3 days of robot labor will cost a few pennies at most.
I cannot imagine people doing intellectual tasks such as city planning in
competition with supercomputer cogitation. People will make decisions about
how we want our cities and transportation networks to look, and where to
build a new airport, but computers will handle all the technical details. I
doubt anyone will even understand the technology.
There will still be important jobs for some people in the future. We will
need decision makers, movers and shakers and politicians. Someone has to
decide where to build the new airport, even if the machines handle all
technical details. You can have any house you want in a week for a few
hundred dollars, but there will still be zoning regulations and neighbors
will still complain about houses. We will need parents, teachers and
artists. We cannot let our children be raised by machines.
I doubt there will be any doctors or gourmet cooks. I am certain there will
be no taxi drivers, factory workers or farmers. Probably they will be gone
in 50 years. The sooner the better. If you don't think so, you probably
have not driven a taxi or worked on a farm.
Having people do most kinds of work in the future would be like paying Post
Office employees to deliver paper transcriptions of e-mail messages in
today's world. That would be an absurd waste of time and resources. It
would be such an annoyance for everyone, it would not even constitute
"make-work." No one could even pretend there is a use for it. Having people
do such idiotic tasks would be an insult to everyone involved, most of all
the workers. It would be like paying people to dig holes with shovels and
fill them up all day long.
Putting aside economics, this world of the future will be an enormous
challenge for the reasons described by George Orwell in "The Road to Wigan
Pier." See:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200391.txt
Starting here:
"The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world
all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more
interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one sick
to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a
water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a
couple of minutes. . . ."
- Jed
