Jones Beene wrote:
> The new paradigm for a factory job, and there can be tens of millions of > this type of job - will be to own, maintain, and supervise a handful of > industrial robots 24/7. We can give every worker a personal stake in this by > forcing business to give equity stakes to workers as the ONLY permitted > owner of robotics. > That is an intriguing idea, but I do not think it would work, for several practical reasons: Robots are not discrete objects, and they are not likely to become stand alone discrete items in the future. There may be some general purpose ones, but most will be built into equipment such as machine tools, or clothes washers. Such equipment is networked together and no one can say where one robot ends and the next begins. (The other day my brother-in-law installed a washer-dryer combination for an upscale customer that had to be networked together with a computer connection or neither would work. Arguably they more resemble robots than they resemble my mechanical analog washing machine, which is more or less a 1920s design.) You might set up a law arbitrarily defining one robot as, let us say "1 CPU, one or more storage devices, no more than 8 attachments . . ." Equipment manufacturers and factory owners would quickly find ways to get around the definition, and you would see large factories with only 2 or 3 legally defined robots, whereas by a common sense definition they would have hundreds. Robots will become cheap commodities, like laptop computers. It will be impossible to keep track of them. A factory owner will be able to buy a dozen general purpose ones, claim they for his home domestic use, and then bring them into the factory when no one is looking. Eventually, places of work where robots are used will be as common as places where telephones and computers are used today, which is to say: everywhere. So, to enforce this law you would have to have draconian and unprecedented government access to the records, management and decisions made at factories, bakeries, restaurants, farms, hospitals, offices, churches, discos, bars, houses of prostitution, and anywhere else robot labor will be used. I think there are only two ways to share the profits from computer labor: 1. Divvy up shares of corporations to everyone. I guess that is de facto communism. 2. Collect taxes from wealthy factory owners and give everyone else lots of welfare benefits, such as free food, free Internet, free education, free libraries, and rent vouchers. That is also socialism I guess. We are halfway there, what with public education and federal support for cheap food. The fundamental problem is that economics is based on the fact that most people have no capital or extensive property, so most people trade their labor for wages. Human labor is valuable, so we have a working economy. As I pointed out in "Cold Fusion and the Future" most jobs do not call for much intelligence. A robot with as much intelligence as a chicken could do most jobs we pay people to do. So when we have millions of cheap robots both general purpose and dedicated, human labor will be essentially worthless. We will have to find a way to give everyone what they need and want with a new kind of economy. Not communism, socialism or capitalism. All three are ways of allocating human labor, and they would be equally unworkable in a world where human labor is useless. As I see it, the only practical way forward is to gradually make just about everything free, or so cheap that most people will not need to work more than a few hours a week at some job or other. That is the direction we have been moving for the past 200 years. Look at the cost measured in labor to buy a loaf of bread or illumination for 8 hours, and you will see that the necessities of life are asymptotically approaching zero cost. Electricity really will be too cheap to meter someday. With robot food factories and cultured meat, someday it will not be worth keeping track of which groceries you buy. The store will charge a flat fee of 10 cents per kilogram, whether you buy 1 kg of filet mignon, carrots, bread flower, rutabaga or laundry detergent. (Actually, you yourself will not be buying these things in the sense of going to the store. You will tell your computer; the automated grocery store robots will assemble your order; the automated delivery truck will bring it; and your domestic robots will put the stuff away in the kitchen and by the washing machine.) - Jed
