Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 19th Aug 2014 at 6:54 AM Last edited by AzemOcram : 2nd Oct 2014 at 3:52 AM.
Default Automation, Population Growth, and the Economy
Most of you should be fully aware of the fact that automation has made life easier for many people and has brought great abundance while decreasing the requirement for manual labor in agriculture, extraction and industry. Well, now we have computer programs that even do the white collar jobs for us as well. We also have made great strides in efficiency in many sectors of the economy.

As some of you are also aware of, the natural growth rate (birth rate minus death rate) in post-industrial countries is neutral or negative. If one looks at census data, read the news, or taken any courses/classes having to do with population ecology, one can see that the technologically advanced developed nations have far lower birth rates than the developing and least developed nations. Japan, for instance, has a negative birth rate and low immigration rate and is thus seeing the consequences of an aging population right now.

What do these two things have in common? Well, all economic systems that rely on currency (whether it is backed by specie or goods or just by the government), require two things in order to perpetuate, scarcity and growth. Automation has removed most of real scarcity while most scarcity we see in the world is maintained by artificial manipulation. Human population growth will eventually slow down or go negative as the human population nears the Earth's highest carrying capacity for humans.

In conclusion, there are two outcomes for the end of the 21st Century, money continues to exist but the unemployment rate in developed nations reaches over half of the population or money stops existing and the world transitions towards at least a somewhat sustainable mostly post-scarcity economy. I understand that resources on Earth are finite but if we as a civilization put enough effort into research and development of space travel, then mining and colonization of other planets and asteroids will allow humanity to continue in comfort for a very long time. However, if our economy still relies on money and jobs, which means workers need employment for their livelihoods, then the over 50% unemployment rate will be disastrous and poverty and violence will become rampant.

I do not want to bore you with dry academic articles so I will link to a 15 minute video by CPG Grey, who sums things up nicely.

http://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU

If you believe differently from this and see other outcomes, feel free to share them, I would appreciate the enlightenment and discussion. If you wish for me to elaborate, express my opinion, or provide more sources, feel free to reply. I have tried to present a well-written first post that follows all the rules and guidelines so I am pretty sure that I am not supposed to express my opinion in the first post.

Thank you for your time,

--Ocram

Always do your best.
Advertisement
Theorist
#2 Old 19th Aug 2014 at 11:09 AM
Quote: Originally posted by AzemOcram
Well, all economic systems that rely on currency (whether it is backed by specie or goods or just by the government), require two things in order to perpetuate, scarcity and growth. Automation has removed most of real scarcity while most scarcity we see in the world is maintained by artificial manipulation. Human population growth will eventually slow down or go negative as the human population nears the Earth's highest carrying capacity for humans.


That doesn't quite cover what money is, which is what money does. That's to say, currency requires neither scarcity nor growth, and economies don't "rely" on currency, currency is a reflection of an economy. This is all truly deep thought sort of economic theory, but that's the water you wade into when you make pronouncements regarding fundamental economics. What is money? Money is a phantom, regardless of what it's based on. It's a public trust. It's a socioeconomic unit. Even barter economies eventually evolve into some basic understandings of currency, even if it's "two cows equal three pigs." In that aspect all of what you're declaring "scarcity and artificial manipulation" is the same. The only reason we've moved to fiat currency as a general rule is because eventually most of us schooled in economics realized that it's all entirely arbitrary and based on confidence and social order. If I'm not being clear: Your fundamental premise seems to be out of order. You're imagining a world where there's some sort of "natural" manipulation of value. This is in error. All value, all economy, all currency, regardless of form or function, is at least half imagined, a delusion of merit attached to the perception of value. How much is a man's time worth? What's the fundamental value of a plot of land. These are meaningless questions until we arbitrarily attach meaning in the form of some sort of economy. Since such things are arbitrary though, the notion that you can reach a post-economic reality is...well, there isn't much inherent value in socialization, but try to keep groups of people from doing it? That's what you're arguing against.

Quote: Originally posted by AzemOcram
money continues to exist but the unemployment rate in developed nations reaches over half of the population


Without peasants, whatever in the world would all the people do? And what do farmers do while the crops are merely growing? Without the horse and buggy, what will happen to all the grooms? Point One: Automation removes jobs. Automation creates jobs.

What qualifies as work in people's minds is another arbitrary presumption, people don't "not do work" when they're not employed. Very few people merely sleep, eat, shit, and sleep again all day long, every day - and some of them that do are the most relative-wealthy sorts of people imaginable. So you've only got "jobs" for half the population working 40 hours a week? Is there some sort of rule of physics and mathematics that declares you can't employ all of them at the same pay for 20 hours a week? No, there isn't. Is there a hard and fast rule you can't simply account for people's needs with your imagined infinite supply of goods, and still have an economy because no amount of automation actually replaces human beings as human beings? One of the key elements of economics is that value is relative. Just because toilet paper is nearly valueless doesn't mean that it wouldn't have a great deal of value to your great-great-great grandparents. If everything we account for now as having value were to suddenly be declared worthless by mutual and maximum agreement, we could still attach arbitrary value to it or simply regard other things as being valuable (like our time, our creativity, just being there, whatever). Point Two: We invent new things of value all the time. Value is inherently imaginary. It's all tulips, all the way down.

Part of the current economic problem is that a very large amount of the relative, entirely arbitrary value of the world economy is simply sitting idle, re: Piketty. While in a political and practical sense that's an enormous problem, as a philosophical examination of wealth it's informative. The world still spins, people still work, the trains still run. All of their value could be arbitrarily removed tomorrow and arbitrarily discarded and it would merely be a political and social issue. The same amount of work, world spinning, and trains running would continue more or less - because such things are arbitrary and relative. What you're suggesting is nothing less than a similar problem: What if everyone were suddenly millionaires? Well, the prices would change. That's all. Point Three: Change happens. It's best not to shit your pants over it.

Even if that means some things are essentially valueless at some point, it's still just a price - and presuming that automation would somehow remove scarcity entirely is silly. The world is a finite space, with finite amounts of stuff making it all up. As you've noted, there's a finite amount of people milling about on it, and even with drastic amounts of tinkering we could not fill the spaces between all of us with an infinite amount of automation that would accomplish an infinite amount of work. Scarcity might change, but it can never be removed entirely. Not even if we stepped off of the planet and into the galaxy as hungry termites, consuming everything in our path. Even then scarcity would eventually come into effect. Point Four: No matter how much you have, you can't have it all. There is no such thing as "post" scarcity.

Quote: Originally posted by AzemOcram
or money stops existing and the world transitions towards at least a somewhat sustainable mostly post-scarcity economy.


This part is the entirely delusional bit. Money already doesn't exist and there's no such thing as sustainable anything, because change happens. We imagine money because it's useful to assign mathematics to something that happens even without money.

So what actually happens as automation displaces workers? I'm glad you asked! As you work in most of your jobs these days, unless you're a worker in a Malaysian sewing sweatshop or something such, you probably have noticed that a great deal of your "work" day sometimes involves sitting around doing nothing. Just like your boss, who has to do less work because he's got your butt to do shit for him, you might sit in front of a computer screen all day without having to set type, manage sheets of carbon paper to make copies of your work, etc. If you work in a restaurant you don't have to also manage livestock or stoke fires much these days, unless your business has arbitrarily assigned value to doing things that way. You might already be doing the work of ten people or more from 200 years ago and not even realize it. And yet, even though we've got many times more people in the world, we've still modestly got similar or better employment figures than in the past. What happened?

Well what happened is that we traded typesetters for copier technicians and that shifted some of the work with replacement employments, but what really happened was that as we had our basic needs held up better and better by technology we created an amazing amount of shit we don't need to want. Fundamentally, until our computers get smart enough to want for us, we're probably covered just there. The other thing is that we often no longer have to work to achieve our basic needs (or as much), and that's meant that we've shifted our demand from basic needs (which require work) to free time (which requires...the opposite of work). Basically we often work less for a roof over our heads than the opportunity to sit on our ass all day. We've even got special terms for the state, like retirement and "selling your startup to Google." The prices might change, but automation really doesn't change any of this. There might be political and social upheaval over it, but under no circumstances is it "post economic" or "post scarcity." The world doesn't stand still, but fundamentally we're just making this all up. Economics is the mathematics of society. Society changes, but we can still assign math to it because we're already just making up the numbers as we go along.

And since it's 5AM, I'll let that rest for now. I probably made a bunch of typos and maybe some analogy mistakes, but really, the premise of "stuff will happen" is great. It's the conclusions that arise from not understanding what economics is that are the problem. It's like complaining that physics doesn't explain the supernatural - if physics describes it, it's as natural as a nuclear reaction. You're using the right words, but you don't actually grasp what they mean and why.
Mad Poster
#3 Old 19th Aug 2014 at 3:12 PM
As for the population issue, there's probably lots to be said, but I'll try to be quick. Firstly, the main reason the world probably will become overpopulated is because we're getting more advanced as a species, and because certain groups in the population haven't quite realized that yet.

In earlier times the population rate grew very slow, because of harsh lives, poor hygiene, poor disease control (often from bad hygiene), working accidents, technology on its baby stage, high baby death rates, people died early even if they survived their first five years, and so forth. We've reined in most of those problems the past 500 years or so, and since the industrial revolution the population rate has grown not slowly and steady as before, but grown with some 5-6 billion people in just a few hundred years.

We have fewer wars and conflicts, vaccines, hospitals, better mother and child care, and people live longer, particularly in the industrialized countries. In the richer parts of the world, people don't get much more than 1-3 kids each, instead of the 8-10 kids people got in earlier times, or even as late as the current middle-aged parent generation, to make sure at least some would grow up and carry genes forth. The developing countries are still hanging back a bit. There's little birth control, and people still have lots of kids. That's one of the reasons why the population is still going up at a fast rate.

Also, after war times there will often be baby-booms. That's why there's a boom in the elder population right now. We're actually seeing the backlash of the baby-booming that happened around the world wars. The slowly decreasing amount of young people from fewer kids per family is outweighed my the increasing amount of middle-aged and old people of the after-war generations.

On the subject of money, or at least the concept of paying for wares with something of an equal or personal value (like trading a horse for a cow, or sheepskin for food, or a service for food, or similar) or a set value (money, precious metals, or similar), will probably last for as long as there are enough different groups of people on Earth to have something and someone to trade with.

I'd say your "two possible outcomes" can possibly be expanded to several other outcomes, but that might be my opinion.

Resources on Earth aren't "finite", if you reconsider what you can think of as resources. Oil is finite, from natural causes. Wood, food and other renewable resources are only finite if people shop it all down or don't grow new patches of it, or destroys natural resources.

If humans were willing to share, and we find new methods of conserving and using energy, and find other less resource wasting ways of doing things, we could probably sustain a population of at least the triple or quadruple of the population today. But humans are selfish bastards, at if you think of us as a whole, and we want it all even if "it all" is already suffering for our treatment of Earth.

My bet is that sooner or later we'll find some ingenious way of finishing ourselves off. Like making sure antibiotics won't work, or making nanotechnology that ends up killing us, or misusing resources so things eventually stops growing and we're left with mostly desert areas, or accidentally figuring out how to make too big black holes in labs. You name it. For being so smart a species, we tend to be pretty stupid most of the time. Perhaps there will be some kind of new viral infection that makes us mutate, just like what might have happened when we came down from the trees. Most of our genetic material actually consists of old viruses. Scary, but true.

And as for automation, you no longer need hundreds of people working on farms or in factories. But you need someone to do the damage control when machines stop working, and to oversee things, and to be creative. You need health care personnel, you need teachers, you need police, you need lawyers. You need every job where a machine can't do the thinking, where you need someone who can see nuances, who can show empathy, who can be a living, breathing human in a job where one is needed. Sure, machines are getting smarter, but they'll never be able to mimic the brain function of a human being. Artificial intelligence can only go so far. Most machines are actually very stupid. The computer you or I use can only read strings of 0 and 1, and everything has to be pre-programmed somehow (even those machines that can learn things "on their own" have to be programmed to be able to learn), while a human can take decisions based on things like experience, knowledge, social status, current state of mind, emotions, expected (or unexpected) prognosis, creativity, and so on. All in a heartbeat - or carefully thought through, depending on the situation. We can think for ourselves, and we're able (if not always willing) to see past the influence from peers. That's not something you can stuff into a machine and automatize. Even if it's popular in Japan, robots for healthcare business will probably for a long while yet be more of a curiosity than a norm, because no matter how fun it is to play around with robots, they'll never have a proper human touch. At least not in our lifetime. They might be able to serve tea without spending ten minutes walking across the floor, though...
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#4 Old 19th Aug 2014 at 4:21 PM Last edited by AzemOcram : 19th Aug 2014 at 4:34 PM.
Thank you very much for your responses. I value your perspectives on this matter.

I admit that I have not taken many classes on economics. In high school, I took a home economics class and in Running Start (community college), I took a business calculus class (before changing my major to chemistry). However, I read and watch the news as well as watch seminars and documentaries on economics (and other topics). I have also passed all 3 quarters of biology, which taught me about populaton ecology (among many other things). I have watched a seminar that said that capitalism and it's predecessor, mercantilism require scarcity and growth and those have been common throughout human history until recently.

It is now possible to provide food and adequate (though not luxurious) shelter to every human in the world but it is not desired politically. If you watched my video, computers and robots don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans. And they currently are in most fields except for creativity and face-to-face communication.

Most humans will soon become unemployable through no fault of their own. This means that machines and computers can outperform them. This means that employment will become a thing of the past but this does not have to mean that those without employment need to suffer. However, if we as a civilization do not make the proper preparations to ensure a smooth transition, then the result will be like the Great Depression but far worse.

If desired, I could provide the sources I learned about scarcity and growth.

I forgot to share my opinion in this thread. I have shared it elsewhere many times. I sincerely believe that the current civilization has already reached its apex somewhere between 1950 and 2000 but if you know about the equation y=-x², the rate of decline after the apex is very small for a while. However, technology and science has shown us that another, better civilization is possible to replace the current one, if the current one does not resist change too much.

Thank you for reading,

--Ocram

Always do your best.
Mad Poster
#5 Old 19th Aug 2014 at 4:59 PM
Robots can do things faster and more precise than humans, and they can do dangerous work like diving very deep or explore distant planets.
But that doesn't mean they're better than humans. They're good at what they do, and only at what they do. You can't set a car-making robot to explore Mars without rebuilding the entire thing and reprogramming it, and for that you need a human being to do the thinking. So better? I think not.

As for "food and shelter" everyone would already have it had we been able to share, so yes, if we would we could. There's also nuances in what "food and shelter" would mean. Shelter can be anything from a luxury estate to a cardboard box to keep the rain out. Having enough food can be anything from really having too little but just enough to sustain you for a period of time, to so much you have to throw it away because you can't possibly eat it all up.

I don't think most people will become unemployed anytime soon. There will always be jobs you can't set a robot to do, or jobs that it would be irresponsible to let a robot do. Or, you can, but it wouldn't lead to anything good. We deal with robots and mimicked AI every day, but mostly in the form of various apparatuses. Not in the form of social contact. Interaction between humans is needed. We are a highly social species, after all. Jobs that can be automated will be automated as far as it can reach, but as I said above, we're still going to need human minds to do the work. Not the lifting, the calculations, or the dealing with dangerous chemicals, but as being the brains and the creativity behind the machinery.
Theorist
#6 Old 19th Aug 2014 at 11:12 PM Last edited by Mistermook : 21st Aug 2014 at 5:22 AM. Reason: typo
Quote: Originally posted by AzemOcram
I admit that I have not taken many classes on economics. In high school, I took a home economics class and in Running Start (community college), I took a business calculus class (before changing my major to chemistry). However, I read and watch the news as well as watch seminars and documentaries on economics (and other topics). I have also passed all 3 quarters of biology, which taught me about populaton ecology (among many other things). I have watched a seminar that said that capitalism and it's predecessor, mercantilism require scarcity and growth and those have been common throughout human history until recently.


Okay, full stop on economics. This is where most people screw up their "I understand economics." Business? Home? That's all great for understanding how money acts in the limited cases we, as people, interact with money. Macroeconomics is the quantum physics bit of money - it's where it all starts acting like voodoo sometimes and then economists get blamed because sometimes everything turns purple. Let me repeat a fundamental tenet of macroeconomics: How much money there is doesn't matter, how much work there is doesn't matter. The only thing that matters in macroeconomics is that we assign arbitrary value to fundamental units for approaching relative values.

As far as world currencies are concerned, we could arbitrarily decide on units of Donkeys. Then say the entirety of the economic production of Liberia equaled 1 Donkey, then from there on it's only haggling that concerns the rest of the individual economies of sovereign states to determine how many Donkeys their economies are worth. It doesn't matter if you're getting paid in Dollars or Donkeys, and economics doesn't care if you're producing via automation or magic wands. Eventually you're running into arbitrary scarcities, resource scarcity, transport scarcities, and the like. And you're always going to have emergent demands, things like fiat monopolies, and tulip booms. And if there are less people then there is less labor, less labor means increased demand for labor even if you've got a decreasing demand for labor re: automation. So you've got less people, but they're more valuable. And if some things are less valuable then there's still beanie babies to suddenly demand, people are infinitely able to arbitrarily invent demand. That shouldn't be so in a rational economy, but humans are irrational sorts of animals.

That doesn't mean your imagined automation armageddon won't be a radically different world than we live in, but a Donkey is a Donkey. You might not have to buy your shoes or worry about feeding yourself, but you still have to pay to get the newest snarzzlebomk. There's still no "post-scarcity" on people's time and labor. There's no post-scarcity of antiques. There's no post-scarcity on human interaction. There's no post-scarcity on "I want ten billion tons of platinum to build my shining summer palace of ego," or, probably better put, there's no limit to human greed.

Quote: Originally posted by AzemOcram
It is now possible to provide food and adequate (though not luxurious) shelter to every human in the world but it is not desired politically. If you watched my video, computers and robots don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans. And they currently are in most fields except for creativity and face-to-face communication.


That's a change in the work force, similar to the industrial revolution pulling people out of the fields and into factories, but it has absolutely no impact at all on an economy in a general, fundamental sense. It dresses an economy in different clothes, it impacts people differently but the presumption in most places of cheap electric power, access to easy transportation anywhere in the world, and clean drinking water hasn't inherently removed scarcity in general.

Think of the whole world economy with a billion different demands and access to resources as a cat's cradle, an infinite, complicated string of dependencies stretched between several billion fingers. If the world suddenly has no need of milk it only follows that that a lot of the chains of those threads pull tightly towards other demands. Dairy cow resources might eventually vanish, cow ranches might shrink, truckers to ship cheese might move to other jobs, but eventually the whole thing still always stretches taut because there's always something that people want that they don't have enough of. And really, it's just as reasonable that, following a decrease of demand for something that there's created a demand for utilizing slack demand, innovation to repurpose things. Horse buggy manufacturers didn't all go out of business entirely when cars came onto the scene, they shifted their capacities to things like building boats and cars and (I think, might be misremembering this) even a radio cabinet maker or two?

What do people do when they don't have to work? We invent more work. We invent new reasons to work. After that it's all just arbitrarily assigning relative value (in the sense that such things are "assigned" by markets. There's no godlike price maker outside of incredibly managed economies, but even in those sorts of places there's still external economics, absolute scarcities, and people just being pricks like they usually are. The "communism" of the USSR leaned on some of this and ably demonstrated it: You can set a price for bread, but you can't invent bread out of thin air. Even when you can invent bread out of thin air, you've still got a price of bread implicit in the time and ease of consumption, branding, tastes, etc.

Quote: Originally posted by AzemOcram
Most humans will soon become unemployable through no fault of their own. This means that machines and computers can outperform them. This means that employment will become a thing of the past but this does not have to mean that those without employment need to suffer. However, if we as a civilization do not make the proper preparations to ensure a smooth transition, then the result will be like the Great Depression but far worse.


The Great Depression had nothing to do with the sort of economic transition you're talking about, and the great thing about economic transitions is that they're inherently labor intensive. Furthermore, as depressions and recessions are concerned, they're really going to happen regardless of anything else. All the capital currency management in the world can't keep all the little cups on all the spinning poles up in the air at all times given the complexity of a capitalist (or non-capital-based either) society.The system is, as I keep repeating until it sticks into everyone's heads, arbitrary. How much we value anything at all is less about its inherent value and entirely about its perceived value. Employment itself is a manufactured innovation, for most of tens of thousands of years the entirety of mankind was self-employed. I doubt we're going back to that, but it might look a lot more like that than it used to. But even imagining several billion self-employed people of the future you're still not getting rid of scarcity (because scarcity can reach a practical zero and still not be relevant to the discussion of it being absolutely zero, there's a finite universe surrounding us and absolute limits on transmissions of energy, information, and other good stuff. This is sort of like "almost the speed of light" is utterly more believable in science fiction than "faster than the speed of light." One is an engineering issue, the other is "how do I sidestep math.")

In conclusion, what you're describing, when considered as a short term problem that will resolve itself into a different economy is absolutely a concern. The problem is that you're using terminology with implications that are nonsensical implying a long term "problem" and a sort of meaningless unfounded dread based on that poor fundamental understanding. I'm playing extremely fast and loose myself here, because frankly when you really start talking about macroeconomics in any deep sense it's enough to make your nuts hurt from the existential pain. But the sky is not falling, shit will happen in the future, economics doesn't go away because robots are awesome, people always have value because we're self-important pricks, and everything will be okay even if a lot of people don't feel that way in the short term.

You want a danger to the human race worth having a bloody piss over, let's go to biology: In your imagined robot economy, one of the things entirely not covered up with suck because of scarcity is bioweaponry. There's only our inability to do the sorts of things a really good robot and computer might aid any of us in against the notion of some malicious jerkwad using...say a complicated, really smart beer maker robot... into churning out something really nasty and unleashing it on his bowling league.It's already trivial to build fairly effective ordinance - what happens when our terrorists can manufacture semi-weaponized common bacteria in their houses? That is something worth worrying over. The other...well unless your job is clearly one about to be automated away soon then it's a future sort of issue. And really, anyone younger than 25 these days just better get it into their head that job transitions and adapting to changing technology is a thing that they should strap themselves up for.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#7 Old 19th Aug 2014 at 11:45 PM
Thank you very much, Mistermook. I never looked at economics that way. I am 23 (tomorrow) so I understand that I must know how to do several things in order to keep up with the changing times. That is why I have taken Biology, Calculus, Physics, and both general and Organic Chemistry undergraduate college courses in addition to cooking and programming in my free time (I have taken classes but not for college credit in cooking and programming).

I guess my viewpoint of despair and doom on the future is a little bit out of touch with reality. I am glad that we are having this discussion and that I have learned so much.

Thank you,

--Ocram

Always do your best.
Theorist
#8 Old 20th Aug 2014 at 12:19 AM
Cheer up, in the short term, on a personal level? It could be really terrible..

:D
 
Back to top