Robot-based economy

in the future he has already come back through a timeloop and changed history so that it no longer seems as if he was in battlestar galactica but he actually was originally only now time is twisted

Bucky was an engineer & inventor, btw. Not a politician. America has this whole "work for it" ethic which is charming and something I feel true in many ways, but it's so ingrained in the social fabric that most Americans would consider a notion such as this "communistic" which basically equates to "evil" in the mind of a still-great-many of them/us. And thus, as Ned so succinctly put it, it will never "fly".

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Er, it just occured to me that this argument might not sway ILX much. But the target is popular=worthy Capitalists.

Ned, you mean apart from the fact that it's socialism, and thus box office poison?

Don't get you, DV.

Everyone keeps arguing that but personally I think the more of us embrace our lazy slob selves and direct that towards a philosophy of no harm/no foul, then the happier we'll all be. ;-)

What do you mean by the western work ethic? I don't see any overlap between Irish and idealised American (they have one, we don't).

Where is Sébastien?

(robotic cheers)

bah xpost

The 20th century to thread!

(ie it seems to me this has already long-since begun; machines take on menial-labor roles, freeing humans for a mix of leisure spending [there's your capitalism, your Disneylands, your cable TV, your mini-golf, etc] and creativity/invention)

Wait, isn't one of Vonnegut's books based on the idea of a future like this?

Here's a good summary on the essay and some networking with other future studies thoughts, that I got from the http://amormundi.blogspot.com/ amor mundi blog:

"Marshall Brain writes today over in his Robotic Nation blog: “[C]onventional wisdom says that, as robots take over jobs, the increased productivity should be good for everyone. With robots taking the mundane jobs and increasing productivity, people should make lots more money.”

He proposes, however, that a recent article from USAToday, paints a different picture, when it points out:

"Since Bush took office, nearly 700,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared from the region [ie, "the crescent of states stretching across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River"]. Many are gone forever, outsourced to places such as China and Mexico where labor costs are lower. Even if the jobs are replaced, the salaries and benefits often aren't. 'The jobs that are replacing them are much lower wage,' says Jeff Collins, a business professor at the University of Arkansas."

“Manufacturing,” continues Brain, “is, right now, the most robotic area of the economy. As the service sector turns robotic, we should expect to see this same downward spiral there as well... [M]ost of the "normal" jobs head toward minimum wage instead of getting better as the robots arrive. Instead of the wealth created by robots spreading out to everyone, it concentrates in the wealthy, since the wealthy own the robots.”

This is an argument Brain has made in several places, among them, notably, an essay entitled Robotic Freedom.

Mundi Collaborator and Friend James Hughes neatly summarizes Brain’s recommendations for coping with these dilemmas in an excellent and sympathetic column of his own, “Getting Paid in Our Jobless Future."

“Brain," writes Hughes, "argues that every American adult should receive an annual income of US$25,000 from the federal government. This would save capitalism by keeping the demand-side strong, eliminate poverty, establish general economic security and give people the leisure to spend long years in school learning to do something that robots can't.” Hughes goes on to expound his own case for a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) as a way to disseminate rather than concentrate the enormous new wealth created by increasing automation in another column of his, "Embrace the End of Work."

Here is the very clear-eyed and compelling conclusion of Hughes’ argument in that piece:

“In the end, business would rather invest first in people in the developing world and then infotech and robots rather than expensive human workers in the developed world. Because of this, wages in the developed countries will fall in competition with the lowest wage human competitors around the world, and then in competition with the increasingly inexpensive robots and expert systems. Jobs will disappear, wages will fall and we will face three choices: Luddism, barbarism or basic income.

"The Luddites might win a temporary battle here and there, delaying one or the other labor-saving device or innovation. But in the end they will lose, and the technologies will come. Then the question will be what happens to the displaced, and to the economy.

"Without an expanded social wage (benefits and income from the government) in general, and a guaranteed basic income in particular, we face widespread immiseration, economic contraction and polarization between the wealthy, the shrinking working class and the structurally redundant.

"Or we can avoid this bleak future by re-embracing the techno-utopian vision and consciously striving to shrink working life by reducing the work week, mandating paid vacations, raising the minimum wage, improving workplace protections and providing health insurance and a basic income as a right of citizenship. All these policies will make human labor more expensive and investments in automation increasingly attractive. Employment will shrink, social wealth will grow and be shared more equally, and we can start rejoicing instead of despairing about the end of work. As Marshall Brain says, humanity can go on a permanent vacation."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/almost-human-the-surreal-cyborg-future-of-telemarketing/282537/

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2013/12/avatarscreen/cfd99083c.jpg

"This is Richard, how are you today?" asks the telemarketer. His voice is confident and happy. His accent is classic American. Perhaps he grew up in Nebraska.

Richard continues, "I'm just calling you with a very special offer. My company, the Home Security Company, is giving away a free wireless home security system and in-home installation."

The man on the couch tries to claim he's busy, but the telemarketer parries, "I know you're busy, but this'll just take a few minutes," then soldiers on.

They go back and forth for several minutes before the telemarketer successfully pushes him down the sales funnel to a specialist who will set up an in-home visit.
"Basically, the agent is just the driver but the system has its own life. The agents work as ears and hands of the system."

Such conversations happen millions of times a year, but they are not what they appear. Because while a human is picking up the phone, and a human is dialing the phone, this is not, strictly speaking, a conversation between two humans.

Instead, a call-center worker in Utah or the Philippines is pressing buttons on a computer, playing through a marketing pitch without actually speaking. Some people who market these services sometimes call this "voice conversion" technology. Another company says it's "agent-assisted automation technology."

Clever. But telemarketing has been striving to robotize their employees for decades, so this is just a tiny increment of change. A low-paid human is still pushing the buttons, because low paid humans are still cheap as hell.

as someone who had a scripted cold-calling job at on point in youth this sounds like a godsend for the worker

plus people with limited or accented english language skills can get a job they were effectively discriminated out of before

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/arnold

Twitch TV Plays Pokemon Telemarketing

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/technology/personaltech/how-to-make-americas-robots-great-again.html