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This will NEVER happen. If it ever comes to a point where robots can replace simple manual labor, guess what? It means the cost of labor will be so cheap that someone will chose to hire humans instead of robots. Just like no matter how cheap you make a car to be, it will always cost more than walking.
Automation will not eliminate labor, it will merely drives the labor cost down. And the mere presence of robotic automation means that there will be a lot of jobs relating to servicing and building the robots, which means there will be a new field of highly paid skilled professionals to offset the number of jobs loss to the robots - it just means that in the future of your vision, the gap between the rich and poor will be wider as the number of skilled professional will be of great share of the population and putting the unskilled workers at a greater disadvantage.
I could see a scenario in which the people who are still lucky enough to have jobs end up killing off the people who are unemployed and destitute due to automation making their skills obsolete.
In such a case, without a strong state to offer a social safety net the unemployed class would have to resort to theft in order to survive since the capitalists would own the private property, making even a life based on subsistence farming or begging impossible. ...
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I would go a step further and say a global holocaust is being planned right under our noses.
It has little to do with capitalism per se. We don't really have capitalism any more (if we ever did). It's more like private cronyism vs. government socialism....and the two are being merged into one entity. Power and control continues to be centralized at the top.
As much as I hate the dumbed down presentation syle of this show, I believe the information presented is accurate:
This will NEVER happen. If it ever comes to a point where robots can replace simple manual labor, guess what? It means the cost of labor will be so cheap that someone will chose to hire humans instead of robots. Just like no matter how cheap you make a car to be, it will always cost more than walking.
What if the robots are so absurdly cheap, like smart phones are now that no human would even be willing (or able to survive) for such a small wage? And they have to resort to theft and pillaging of the capitalists' wealth to survive?
I could see a scenario in which the people who are still lucky enough to have jobs end up killing off the people who are unemployed and destitute due to automation making their skills obsolete.
In such a case, without a strong state to offer a social safety net the unemployed class would have to resort to theft in order to survive since the capitalists would own the private property, making even a life based on subsistence farming or begging impossible. ...
See More
My dude.. go find an illustrator and write a graphic novel. What I just read almost caused my head to explode.
What if the robots are so absurdly cheap, like smart phones are now that no human would even be willing (or able to survive) for such a small wage? And they have to resort to theft and pillaging of the capitalists' wealth to survive?
Ok, let's think this thru shall we? If you can buy the most advanced/sophisticated/expensive machine ever created for only $150, that means everything less advanced would cost proportionally less than a robot. That's just common sense right? It'd make absolutely no sense if human can make a robot for $150 but a car still cost $20,000, right? A robot has to cost more than a car because a robot is over 100X more complicated to built than a car and the material and labor cost is more than that of building a car. Plus, the existence of a robot will drive the price of everything else down because it theoretically replaces almost every gadget you can think of. Why buy a car for $25,000 when you can just send your $150 robot to buy grocery or buy 10 robots and have them carry/push you around town? Why buy a washer when your robot can just wash your clothes "manually"? Why buy a vacuum when your robot can sweep using old fashioned bloom? Right? Everything technological HAS to cost LESS than a robot to make itself cost effective or it won't sell.
So a phone would probably cost about $2, a big screen TV about $20, and a car would cost maybe $100 at most if a robot can be had for $150 in your world.
So in this world, where everything is so cheap, why wouldn't human work for a small wage? If the choice is either to starve and steal OR to work for a very small wage; wouldn't the choice be obvious? It'd cost you $150 to buy a robot and then $50 each month for the subscription (using your smart phone analogy, you have to pay a monthly subscription), or you can pay say $20 a month for a human. Wouldn't someone opt for the human instead of a robot? Remember, this is a world where $20 is equal to the price of a flat screen TV, so wouldn't most people in such situation choose to work instead of pillage?
There are things that can drive a wretch in your imaginery economy like food shortages or very high cost of housing. But those are very different problems from the one you're proposing.
It is already taking place, and the well-fed don't care.
It is estimated that 50,000 people in the world die every day, of causes that are associated with poverty. A city the size of Cleveland or St. Louis or Zurich every week . That is a million every three weeks, or five times the annual equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust. It could be largely terminated within the lifetime of most of its victims, if the well-off agreed to a redistribution of the world's wealth, and downsized the TV screen in their recreation room.
You don't care, do you?
The per-capita GDP of the whole world is $10,000. That's $40,000 for a family of four. If your family could live on that, so could every Haitian and Bangladeshi and Malawian, with no increase in global output. But a decent and equitable standard of living for everyone (health, education, nutrition) would at least double the output.
What's the problem? What philosophical doctrine is so firmly entrenched that this cannot happen? Why do we have a genuine ongoing holocaust instead, with dire predictions of one worse by a whole order of magnitude?
Let me pose a hypotheses. The doctrine is that no-one is allowed to rise above poverty until they prove their productivity. Let's test the converse. Go to Malawi, find a village family at random, and give them enough money for the next 20 years that they stabilize their health and nutrition and drinking water to a modest standard, and move them to a city where their kids can get a consistent education, and give them a home that affords them social dignity, and training and access to a trade that can be remunerative. Come back after a generation, and see if you have raised their productivity commensurate with that kind of an income.
I know a man in Mexico who is doing fine. He and his wife and two babies were living in a mountain village in Guerrero, where he did what he could for a few cents, and she washed clothes on rocks in a cold river. He went to the border, came into the USA as an illegal, picked up some English and street smarts, learned a productive trade, and saved his dollars. After three years, he went back, got his family, bought a nice but very small house in a new and safe neighborhood in Puerto Vallarta, got a regular wage-paying job, and put his kids in a good school and bought his wife a washing machine. Draw your own conclusions from this story.
Ok, let's think this thru shall we? If you can buy the most advanced/sophisticated/expensive machine ever created for only $150, that means everything less advanced would cost proportionally less than a robot. That's just common sense right? It'd make absolutely no sense if human can make a robot for $150 but a car still cost $20,000, right? A robot has to cost more than a car because a robot is over 100X more complicated to built than a car and the material and labor cost is more than that of building a car.
No, I don't think so. An iPhone is already more complicated than a car but it still costs far less than a car, because Moore's Law has made tech products dirt cheap. A car still costs more and I imagine once we have cheap robots a car will still cost more because you have to pay for the designers, raw materials, the factory, etc....
It does happen. Good ole Sadam killed thousands of Kurds with poison gas. I don't think it was because they were economically lower class, though.
Masses in underdeveloped or war torn countries starve every year. Africa, mostly.
Gonna be a lot of people around the globe starving to death if the control freaks don't stop messing with the food productron system. There are very few net food exporting countries, and those countries are pretty much efftively feeding the world. Make it too difficult for those countries to produce food and a bunch of people are going to go hungry.
Not unless that "technocapitalism" invents a machine that lets you counterfeit such genuine looking money with ease, that someone in the lower class steals it, organized crime pirates the tech, and now every lower income person has a machine like this. Then, not only will the rich be the ones printing out money.
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