The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Apply"

Discussion regarding the Outsider webcomic, science, technology and science fiction.

Moderator: Outsider Moderators

User avatar
icekatze
Posts: 1399
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 8:35 pm
Location: Middle of Nowhere
Contact:

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by icekatze »

hi hi
The odds of a car accident are extremely low as they stand now
As far as I can tell, looking at actual statistics, this statement is false.

In the USA alone, not a third world country, automobile accidents are one of the leading causes of death, at 32,719 in 2013, coming in right below suicide and above falls. And when you take non-fatal accidents into account, the statistics are even worse, as they are almost 71 times as likely.
Humans are never content if they are only given.
I think it is a mistake to assume that the only people who have income today are people that work for it. In 2012, an average US worker was more than 3 times as productive as they were 1978, producing $180,000 worth of goods. At the same time, wages for the average worker stayed the same or fell. Meanwhile the very richest, who are definitely not factory workers, tripled their income in the same period of time. There are people who make millions of dollars every year, and the only work they do is collecting interest and/or dividends.

User avatar
joestej
Posts: 179
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2015 1:47 pm
Location: My own little world...
Contact:

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by joestej »

dragoongfa wrote: That's the definition of Utopic. There is no way to have any number of people rendered content through benefits without any form of economic return for the one giving the benefits. People want an infinite amount of stuff, it's human nature. The more someone has at their disposal the more they will desire.

Give someone enough benefits for food, they will want more benefits for clothing, give them clothing and they will want housing, give them housing and they will want cars, give them cars and they will want entertainment, give them entertainment and they will want better food...

Humans are never content if they are only given. The only way for someone to be content with their wants is to put obstacles in their wants and the best system for that is to have them put to work for what they want.

Keeping humans employed is the only way a human system will ever work without collapsing either from overwhelming material demand or violence.
I see a lot of absolutes here, which is troubling. Even if we could somehow make a sweeping statement about Human nature that is absolutely true for every single person on the planet, changes in culture and technology may one day make that obsolete.

Yes, any society that can 100% subsidize a significant percentage of its citizens and still give them a decent quality of life would be described as Utopian. And yes, Humans are generally ambitious by nature.

Still, that doesn't automatically translate to rioting in the streets because the government won't spring for a fiber-optic internet connection. It comes back to Bread and Circuses: so long as their basic needs are met, the extra effort required by the lower class to change their situation (either via education or civil unrest) is usually not worth the benefit.

Similarly, while the upper-class might grumble about the 'freeloaders', they'll still have access to a much higher standard of living than the unemployed. The highest level of income tax here in the US is about 40%, and it applies to households who make around $450,000 per year. Even after you take out the tax, that's an annual income of a quarter million dollars. They're hardly going to revolt because they had to buy last year's sports car model instead of this year's.

Besides, 'putting people to work' is easier said than done. If a machine is cheaper and more reliable, how will you get companies to agree to use Humans instead?

This topic is touched on in THIS article, specifically #2 on the list. While anything from a humor site should be taken with a grain of salt, it's at least an interesting look at the subject with some good points.
"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness."

User avatar
Siber
Posts: 362
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 5:10 pm

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Siber »

Give someone enough benefits for food, they will want more benefits for clothing, give them clothing and they will want housing, give them housing and they will want cars, give them cars and they will want entertainment, give them entertainment and they will want better food...

Humans are never content if they are only given. The only way for someone to be content with their wants is to put obstacles in their wants and the best system for that is to have them put to work for what they want.
My understanding is that this is actually one of the arguments for a universal basic wage. Give people enough to live on, and don't make it vanish when they start improving their situation as many of the current unemployment benefits do but rather make it universal to absolutely everyone, and that basic wage becomes a foundation on which people can build. If there's no jobs available, then people are free to try to create their own opportunities rather than being dependent on finding a life-consuming job just to survive. But the basic wage allows survival, not luxury, so you still have that motivation to strive.

I understand there have been a few non-disastrous small scale trials of the idea, but I haven't looked into it in detail recently.

On another track, I just don't see banning automation as a viable option, even if it was desirable. I would expect any country that does it to be horribly out-competed by ones that don't, leading to either extreme protectionist trade policies, which doesn't seem to work out well generally, or to those jobs vanishing anyway. Maybe not for service and delivery, but definitely for manufacturing.
Atomic Space Race, a hard sci-fi orbital mechanics puzzle game.
Homeworld Fulcrum, a Homeworld Remastered Mod

User avatar
dragoongfa
Posts: 1920
Joined: Mon Jan 26, 2015 9:26 pm
Location: Athens, Greece

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by dragoongfa »

icekatze wrote:hi hi
The odds of a car accident are extremely low as they stand now
As far as I can tell, looking at actual statistics, this statement is false.

In the USA alone, not a third world country, automobile accidents are one of the leading causes of death, at 32,719 in 2013, coming in right below suicide and above falls. And when you take non-fatal accidents into account, the statistics are even worse, as they are almost 71 times as likely.
Absolute numbers tend to inflate things a lot.

Per capita the odds of being involved in a lethal car accident in the US is 11.6 per 100.000. People injured in non fatal accident still count for less than 1% of the population and the numbers have been steadily falling for years.

The US's per capita death and injuries are also far higher than most of the western world. Canada for example has 6 deaths per 100.000 inhabitants.
I think it is a mistake to assume that the only people who have income today are people that work for it. In 2012, an average US worker was more than 3 times as productive as they were 1978, producing $180,000 worth of goods. At the same time, wages for the average worker stayed the same or fell. Meanwhile the very richest, who are definitely not factory workers, tripled their income in the same period of time. There are people who make millions of dollars every year, and the only work they do is collecting interest and/or dividends.
Did you count for inflation?

100US $ from 1978 amount to 378.12US $ of 2015

If they are producing only three times more money then it is actually a net loss of raw monetary worth.

@Joestej

There are many disruptive ways a populace will demand more benefits than they are worth without resulting to open rioting and rebellion. Mass strikes of key economic areas was one of the reasons why ridiculous large pensions were given to certain worker unions in Greece.

The dock worker's union practically holds a stranglehold of every last Greek port and their long term strikes often mean food shortages to various island. Previous governments had to resort to forced conscription of dock workers to get things moving after a few days of strikes.

@ Siber

The problem are that the benefits always have to come from taxes and such a universal wage is literal poison for a state's budget.

User avatar
icekatze
Posts: 1399
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 8:35 pm
Location: Middle of Nowhere
Contact:

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by icekatze »

hi hi
Absolute numbers tend to inflate things a lot.
If you'd look at any of the references I cited, you would see that there are plenty of other things to compare it to.

Heart disease and cancer are far and away the biggest causes of death in the United States, accounting for about half of all deaths each year. Chronic lower respiratory disease is 3rd, at about 5%, and accidents is 4th, with about 5%. Automobile accidents are generally measured as a subset of overall accidents, but when measured individually, they make up about 1% of all deaths each year.

The USA has a death rate of about 731.9 per 100,000 each year. That is .7% of the population every year, in total deaths. To say that 1% of the total population being involved in accidents is a small number is highly misleading.
Did you count for inflation?
Yes. I did account for inflation. (I did take 3 years of economics, I understand the basics.)

User avatar
dragoongfa
Posts: 1920
Joined: Mon Jan 26, 2015 9:26 pm
Location: Athens, Greece

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by dragoongfa »

icekatze wrote:hi hi
Absolute numbers tend to inflate things a lot.
If you'd look at any of the references I cited, you would see that there are plenty of other things to compare it to.

Heart disease and cancer are far and away the biggest causes of death in the United States, accounting for about half of all deaths each year. Chronic lower respiratory disease is 3rd, at about 5%, and accidents is 4th, with about 5%. Automobile accidents are generally measured as a subset of overall accidents, but when measured individually, they make up about 1% of all deaths each year.

The USA has a death rate of about 731.9 per 100,000 each year. That is .7% of the population every year, in total deaths. To say that 1% of the total population being involved in accidents is a small number is highly misleading.
I did read your references which is where I drew that the numbers have been falling steadily for years. I was speaking solely for car accidents, should have made myself clearer.

The 1% of people injured in car accidents wasn't meant to mislead. It's a rounding up from my part based on the second source you provided. 2.1 million injuries per year amount to around 0.66% of the US population. Such injuries vary wildly in severity, most of which being lacerations if what a friend of mine who works in the ER is to be believed.
Yes. I did account for inflation. (I did take 3 years of economics, I understand the basics.)
So did I (accounting), which is why I asked. The numbers then are mind boggling, never thought that the US would let things go so tits up.
Last edited by Guest on Fri Nov 13, 2015 12:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Siber
Posts: 362
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 5:10 pm

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Siber »

Re affordability, the arguments I've seen for it generally claim that a basic wage allows for the cutting of most if not all existing benefits for low income households, which may or may not entirely pay for a livable basic income, but does account for a pretty big chunk of it at the least. Googling turned up a fair number of people doing math to it, but I don't really feel equipped to evaluate the quality of their math. This seems like a decent one. There are apparently a number of pilot programs being tried around the world too, which is exciting
Atomic Space Race, a hard sci-fi orbital mechanics puzzle game.
Homeworld Fulcrum, a Homeworld Remastered Mod

Absalom
Posts: 718
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2011 4:33 am

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Absalom »

peragrin wrote:We can't build a trinary computer yet.
Quick note: we can and have built trinary computers, it's just that they don't offer many advantages (they do offer some, but that just means they get used in specialty applications: flash memory, for example).

fredgiblet wrote:I don't think it's even difficult to come up with a system that allows people to be unemployed without serious consequences.
And yet, the benefits of doing otherwise. Imagine for a moment: gathering all of the able-bodied unemployed, and paying them to rebuild the mangrove swamps at the edge of the gulf of Mexico.

dragoongfa wrote:
icekatze wrote:Yes. I did account for inflation. (I did take 3 years of economics, I understand the basics.)
So did I (accounting), which is why I asked. The numbers then are mind boggling, never thought that the US would let things go so tits up.
You didn't know that the E-Suite hasn't been sharing the bounty? Apparently it's been going on since about the same time as the gold standard was abandoned. The only ways to counter it that I can think of involve non-free-trade (specifically restrictions on executive pay), or very decisive tax reasons to eliminate it combined with legal enforcement of share-holder benefit (the current board-based governance structure of many companies just doesn't cut the mustard).

Sadly I don't know the cause, but I fear that it's societal instead of legal. Though Reagan's "trickle-down" economics doesn't help as a philosophy: a rising boat doesn't drag much water with it, as the Middle Ages demonstrated decently well.

User avatar
dragoongfa
Posts: 1920
Joined: Mon Jan 26, 2015 9:26 pm
Location: Athens, Greece

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by dragoongfa »

Absalom wrote:You didn't know that the E-Suite hasn't been sharing the bounty? Apparently it's been going on since about the same time as the gold standard was abandoned. The only ways to counter it that I can think of involve non-free-trade (specifically restrictions on executive pay), or very decisive tax reasons to eliminate it combined with legal enforcement of share-holder benefit (the current board-based governance structure of many companies just doesn't cut the mustard).

Sadly I don't know the cause, but I fear that it's societal instead of legal. Though Reagan's "trickle-down" economics doesn't help as a philosophy: a rising boat doesn't drag much water with it, as the Middle Ages demonstrated decently well.
The suits getting more money doesn't surprise me at all, what shocks me is the stagnation of the working man's wages. I am still under the impression that US workers directly negotiate their pay, thus those able and qualified reaping higher wages during the negotiations.

Then again I am a fool for thinking this when a corporation can give the middle finger and move to china (so 1990 thinking of me :P) to offset the wage cost without any form of legal and financial offsets to safeguard employment. One of the many lethal faults of free for all capitalism.

Absalom
Posts: 718
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2011 4:33 am

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Absalom »

dragoongfa wrote:
Absalom wrote:You didn't know that the E-Suite hasn't been sharing the bounty? Apparently it's been going on since about the same time as the gold standard was abandoned. The only ways to counter it that I can think of involve non-free-trade (specifically restrictions on executive pay), or very decisive tax reasons to eliminate it combined with legal enforcement of share-holder benefit (the current board-based governance structure of many companies just doesn't cut the mustard).

Sadly I don't know the cause, but I fear that it's societal instead of legal. Though Reagan's "trickle-down" economics doesn't help as a philosophy: a rising boat doesn't drag much water with it, as the Middle Ages demonstrated decently well.
The suits getting more money doesn't surprise me at all, what shocks me is the stagnation of the working man's wages. I am still under the impression that US workers directly negotiate their pay, thus those able and qualified reaping higher wages during the negotiations.

Then again I am a fool for thinking this when a corporation can give the middle finger and move to china (so 1990 thinking of me :P) to offset the wage cost without any form of legal and financial offsets to safeguard employment. One of the many lethal faults of free for all capitalism.
So 1940 of you, really. Also, a lot of employees do little bargaining, if any.

At any rate, how are you supposed to negotiate a higher salary than your direct manager? The guy in the cubical with the Aeron chair probably gets more than you, but there's a decent chance he doesn't even get twice what you make (I used to make MORE than one of my managers at a grocery store, because I signed on BEFORE they stopped giving out standard raises: I was a lowly stocker): the fancy chair is PART of his raise. Unless they have "executive" in their job title, or they get paid in stocks/stock options, they likely follow the same pay ramp as you do, just with different starting points.

Incidentally, individual negotiations really don't help that much: your department likely has a budget it has to meet, so you really need enough employees behind the negotiation to get the entire department's budget raised. This sort of thing is why unions were formed (except that unions were often spawned in response to slavery-in-all-but-name, such as in response to the prices of the "company store").

And just for reference, if the minimum wage had been indexed to inflation in 1980, then the current minimum wage would be around $12 per hour. It recently got increased to $8.

fredgiblet
Moderator
Posts: 983
Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 4:02 pm

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by fredgiblet »

Absalom wrote:And yet, the benefits of doing otherwise. Imagine for a moment: gathering all of the able-bodied unemployed, and paying them to rebuild the mangrove swamps at the edge of the gulf of Mexico.
Imagine spending 10% of that to have robots do it while I play Fallout 4.
dragoongfa wrote:That's the definition of Utopic. There is no way to have any number of people rendered content through benefits without any form of economic return for the one giving the benefits. People want an infinite amount of stuff, it's human nature. The more someone has at their disposal the more they will desire.

Give someone enough benefits for food, they will want more benefits for clothing, give them clothing and they will want housing, give them housing and they will want cars, give them cars and they will want entertainment, give them entertainment and they will want better food...
There's a huge difference between "Want more" and "Riot for more". We'll always want more, but it's unlikely that we'll have a rebellion on our hands if we don't give people an unlimited amount of stuff. People WILL be content enough when they reach a certain level to be safe. Sure some people will whine and try to push through demands for more, but it won't take a lot to get people to the point where they aren't an actual threat.

As Siber said, one of the key points of the idea is that people will have the ability to do what they want. So if they WANT to be creative they can get some tools and make stuff. If they WANT to work then there will likely be places available for them to do so, but I suspect most people won't want to, and the next generation will be brought up with the new norm and the old norm will fade away.

Dragoon
Posts: 131
Joined: Wed Nov 07, 2012 8:28 pm
Location: US North Carolina: Eastern standard Time Zone
Contact:

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Dragoon »

an interesting discussion.

I would like to point out the doom of man to increasing automation has been predicted on several occasions. And yep, i understand that the articles are pretty clear that this revolution in technology is intrinsically different. writers, futurists, and games have projected the end result...masses of unemployed humans, devolving into a distopia. I however am rather confident that humans as the ultimate in adaptation will find a way to side step the doom of civilization once again.

I will however point out that with each trend there was economic and social upheaval. As humans adapted to the new environment they developed a means to counter the problem. Most of the work being done, or likely to be done by bots is vital to the economy. most of the work will not be easy to replace with new skill sets, and professions. It will undoubtedly require a new set of thought processes, educational strategies, and social structures.

My personal theory is that a two tier economy will evolve. The bulk of the mass production and services will be done by bots. However there will be a second tier, where the hands on human touch is preferred. that second tier will be smaller and more competitive. not everyone will be able to find a place in that second tier. the ones who cant find a niche will most likely end up rather unhappy with their lot and pushing for some sort of solution. which will likely create a subset of the second tier.... the economic equivalent of busy work.

even though I see the dangers of the bot revolution, I do see potential for humans to finally find a way to get free from the work for the sake of a paycheck. That will require a bit of thought and planning. Which requires that not only youtube, and internet news, junkies become aware of the issue. and discussion like this take place.

If past doom of society scenarios are a good indicator. I am fairly certain society after the bot revolution will look nothing like current society. But there will be a future which will allow the future humans to support themselves, and maintain a somewhat stable environment for themselves.

discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by discord »

absalom: on minimum wage, if you take that back further i wonder when it would start going the other way... my guess would be past the 1900 mark....well i was wrong, if for no other reason than there being no minimum wage law before 1912, albeit only for women and children, for a equal law we have to wait until 1933, and according to data it peaked in 68 at 10 current dollars...
http://money.cnn.com/interactive/econom ... ince-1938/
and it recently got increased to 7.25 on a federal level.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0930886.html <--- and there we have the 'real' numbers.... stupid fucking legislation system which allows local laws to override federal, the correct method is the other way around but with federal laws only as needed to solve serious problems(like minimum wage issues aka wage slavery).

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united- ... oductivity <--- overlay minimum wages with this little productivity graph and understand the issue.

User avatar
Mjolnir
Posts: 452
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:24 pm

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Mjolnir »

Absalom wrote:
peragrin wrote:We can't build a trinary computer yet.
Quick note: we can and have built trinary computers, it's just that they don't offer many advantages (they do offer some, but that just means they get used in specialty applications: flash memory, for example).
Several have been built, even, but they were largely experiments. Balanced ternary (each place value being -1, 0, or 1) allows a particularly elegant way of handling signed values, and ternary can encode larger numbers with a given number of signals, so it might someday provide a benefit in scaling up things like vector processing (SIMD units in consumer processors are handling 512-bit vectors...that's a lot of signals to get where they need to be, when they need to be there, and equivalent to around 324 ternary signals).

Number base has nothing whatsoever to do with AI, though, and the neurons of the brain are far too big and hot for quantum interactions to be relevant. Figuring out how the various network structures do their thing is still an active area of research, but the success of building computer models shows that only simple, local behaviors are required at the neuron level. The computational problem is simply that networks that can do useful things involve an enormous number of interactions between neurons and aren't well suited to simulation on typical general purpose Von Neumann-style machines, with a big memory store that does nothing on its own and a small number of processors that do sequential work on tiny fragments of it at a time.


On the threat of AI, the main one I see is from them doing exactly what people tell them to, especially in the short-sighted, increasingly disconnected-from-reality financial sector. An AI optimizing high-frequency trades for immediate profits will do just that, it won't have any comprehension of or reason to consider the implications its actions have on the economy as a whole, people's lives, etc. A bunch of AIs competing, cooperating, and manipulating each other as they do exactly what we built them to do could drive things wildly out of control before any human knows anything odd is going on.

What I'm not afraid of is AIs becoming self aware and taking over the world. They aren't going to turn into a human in a box, an AI will be more alien than anything that we might meet from another star system. We are the product of billions of years of selection for hard-wired survival instincts, motivations to gain and defend territory, acquire sustenance, protect against competing life forms, etc. An AI won't even have a reason to desire power or self preservation unless we give them one.


As for automation: if the Luddites had their way, we wouldn't have cheap, high-quality clothing. The idea that we should deliberately choose inefficient production methods that require the majority of human minds to participate in drudgery for half their waking lifetimes is either short sighted or simply insane.

fredgiblet
Moderator
Posts: 983
Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 4:02 pm

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by fredgiblet »

Mjolnir wrote:On the threat of AI, the main one I see is from them doing exactly what people tell them to, especially in the short-sighted, increasingly disconnected-from-reality financial sector. An AI optimizing high-frequency trades for immediate profits will do just that, it won't have any comprehension of or reason to consider the implications its actions have on the economy as a whole, people's lives, etc. A bunch of AIs competing, cooperating, and manipulating each other as they do exactly what we built them to do could drive things wildly out of control before any human knows anything odd is going on.
That's actually happened more than one in the stock markets already IIRC.
As for automation: if the Luddites had their way, we wouldn't have cheap, high-quality clothing. The idea that we should deliberately choose inefficient production methods that require the majority of human minds to participate in drudgery for half their waking lifetimes is either short sighted or simply insane.
To be fair we DO need to have a plan in place to handle it, and without such a plan the results will be...poor.

User avatar
icekatze
Posts: 1399
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 8:35 pm
Location: Middle of Nowhere
Contact:

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

If cheap, high-quality clothing means that a bunch of people have to live essentially as slaves in dangerous sweatshops, maybe it isn't such an marvelous thing.

User avatar
Mjolnir
Posts: 452
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:24 pm

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Mjolnir »

fredgiblet wrote:
Mjolnir wrote:On the threat of AI, the main one I see is from them doing exactly what people tell them to, especially in the short-sighted, increasingly disconnected-from-reality financial sector. An AI optimizing high-frequency trades for immediate profits will do just that, it won't have any comprehension of or reason to consider the implications its actions have on the economy as a whole, people's lives, etc. A bunch of AIs competing, cooperating, and manipulating each other as they do exactly what we built them to do could drive things wildly out of control before any human knows anything odd is going on.
That's actually happened more than one in the stock markets already IIRC.
Indeed, and with relatively simple and predictable systems. Wait for deep learning systems that can, say, figure out how to manipulate or cooperate with others to produce exploitable rises and falls in the markets, with causes that are much more difficult to track down...

fredgiblet wrote:
As for automation: if the Luddites had their way, we wouldn't have cheap, high-quality clothing. The idea that we should deliberately choose inefficient production methods that require the majority of human minds to participate in drudgery for half their waking lifetimes is either short sighted or simply insane.
To be fair we DO need to have a plan in place to handle it, and without such a plan the results will be...poor.
Agreed.

icekatze wrote:hi hi

If cheap, high-quality clothing means that a bunch of people have to live essentially as slaves in dangerous sweatshops
It doesn't. Practices such as that are a completely different problem. If you were to get rid of the automated loom, all you would do is produce sweatshops of weavers, and while driving the cost of the product far above anything they could afford. Further automating clothing production, on the other hand, could make the sweatshops unprofitable while reducing the cost of clothing even further.

User avatar
icekatze
Posts: 1399
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 8:35 pm
Location: Middle of Nowhere
Contact:

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

If you want to buy clothing that isn't made in sweatshops today, it is not going to be cheap. I did some searching and the cheapest t-shirt I could find from a company that pays its employees a living wage was $28. The cheapest t-shirt I could find in general was $1.75.

Edit: Although it is certainly arguable as to where the blame lies, the situation is not unlike the expansion of slavery that happened after the invention of the cotton gin. Whatever the root cause is, it is happening, and may require action to mitigate.

User avatar
Mjolnir
Posts: 452
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:24 pm

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Mjolnir »

icekatze wrote:hi hi

If you want to buy clothing that isn't made in sweatshops today, it is not going to be cheap. I did some searching and the cheapest t-shirt I could find from a company that pays its employees a living wage was $28. The cheapest t-shirt I could find in general was $1.75.

Edit: Although it is certainly arguable as to where the blame lies, the situation is not unlike the expansion of slavery that happened after the invention of the cotton gin. Whatever the root cause is, it is happening, and may require action to mitigate.
$28 is cheap as dirt compared to what it'd be if they had to pay people a living wage to weave the cloth on manual looms, and more automated production can bring the price down further without forcing people to work in sweatshops.

I'm really not seeing how you're getting from reduction of production costs through automation to sweatshops. Both result in reduced costs, but they are not even remotely morally and ethically equivalent. You are basically suggesting that avoiding automation in favor of manual labor will somehow reduce the abuses of manual labor...that is pure lunacy.

User avatar
Onaiom
Posts: 124
Joined: Sun Oct 13, 2013 4:06 am

Re: The coming "Age of Abundance", and "Humans Need Not Appl

Post by Onaiom »

This thread:
Image

Post Reply