leaking pen wrote:
okay... if robots run everything and everything is abominably cheap, then no one will really have to pay much. there would be plenty of jobs if the avareage work week is five hours, you know?
Plenty of jobs doing what? Skilled or unskilled? Jobs that require skill, such as medicine or flying airplanes or programming cannot be practiced only five hours a week. The skills rapidly atrophy. That leaves unskilled jobs such as cashiers . . . which will all be gone in 5 or 10 years.
There will be essentially no manual labor left once we develop robots with as much intelligence as, say, chickens. As I described in chapter 10 of my book, I believe such robots will be capable of housework, cooking, driving, most production line work, and so on. As I said, rfid will soon put most cashiers and stock clerks out of work. Bird-brain class computers could easily stock shelves and the other labor in a grocery store or Wall Mart. In 50 years, the menial work, construction work, and hotel jobs now being done by Mexican laborers in the U.S. will be done by robots at a tiny fraction of the cost. There are presently more unemployed Chinese people than the entire US working population, and manufacturing jobs in China are disappearing rapidly as the nation automates.
That leaves only "intellectual" labor. How many reporters, authors or television producers do we need? How many stockbrokers and lawyers? Only a handful of gifted people are capable of doing jobs such as research science, medicine or architecture. We have all the politicians we need -- there are no empty slots in Congress.
Even high-tech industries need fewer workers. Back in the 1970s, thousands of computer engineers were designing many different kinds of CPUs and computer architecture at IBM, Data General, and dozens of other corporations. Nowadays just about the only people who design computer architectures are at Intel. Programming has no long-term future. Bird-brain class computers will not need programmers. Applications experts in various fields (manufacturing, agriculture, nursing and so on) will simply tell the robots what to do, and the robots will do the job.
It is not a problem that "no one will really have to pay much." The problem is that labor itself, which is the only thing most people have to offer, is rapidly becoming worthless. Many people even today cannot earn anything, even low wages, because they have no skills or abilities that can compete with machines.
In the 1950s, people who have no interest in academics would finish high school and go to work in a factory, bakery or as a mechanic, and they would make enough to live a good middle-class life supporting a family. Now the factories are devoid of people except for a few highly paid expert engineers. Hydroelectric dams in Georgia used to have hundreds of employees performing maintenance and monitoring the machinery. These places are now run with one or two people and dozens of computers.
In Japan they have coasted along for years with makework construction projects for people living in the countryside. They build road after road that no car travels on, and they destroy vast areas of the coastline with concrete and dams. The country has been running the biggest deficit in the world because people have nothing to do, and no meaningful skills in an automated world. Sooner or later they are going to have to face reality and restructure the economy to deal with the fact that labor has no value, and most people are superfluous by the standards of the past. Why pretend otherwise? Like it or not, even now we do not need most people to work anymore, and in the future only a handful of people will be needed to run the essential purposes of civilization. If that means people have no purpose, then they must make their our purposes.
Some people say that excess workers are caused by overpopulation. This makes no sense. If most of the population magically vanished, leaving only 100,000 people in the world, 50,000 of them would be without a job.
- Jed
