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

[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.

[Mjolnir]

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...

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.

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.

[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.

[Mjolnir]

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.

[Onaiom]

This thread:

[Absalom]

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.

icekatze wasn't arguing against you, he was supporting your point about the cost of clothing.

[icekatze]

hi hi

I was merely suggesting that "cheap," may not be the best indicator of the goodness of any given process. Nothing more, nothing less.

((Edit: Since there seems to be some confusion, I'll attempt to clarify my overall stance, not directly referencing any single post in particular. I am conditionally supportive of automation. It has the potential to help many people, and the potential to help only a privileged few. Change is inevitable, improvement is optional.))

[Nathan_]

Capital has to compete with labor, and that includes the high initial startup cost. given the prevalence of cheap labor across planet earth, robots are probably not just on the cusp of being adopted. It makes sense to automate when a basic laborer is getting 20-30$ an hour, not so much at 1$ per hour.

[Krulle]

So, we need to make transport much more expensive, so that goods are produced where they are consumed, unless the costs of the product makes the cost of transport a viable option.
Today, the cost of transport is close to negligible, the time delay transport includes is more a limiting factor than the cost.

Again, the world does not have enough globalisation yet. It is currently unthinkable to find a common way to make the cost of transport higher by all stakeholders supporting and implementing a common plan.

(And no, the loss of jobs in transport sector is of no concern to me, as jobs would right away be created locally to produce locally what would otherwise have been imported.)

[Nathan_]

So, we need to make transport much more expensive, so that goods are produced where they are consumed, unless the costs of the product makes the cost of transport a viable option.
Today, the cost of transport is close to negligible, the time delay transport includes is more a limiting factor than the cost.

Again, the world does not have enough globalisation yet. It is currently unthinkable to find a common way to make the cost of transport higher by all stakeholders supporting and implementing a common plan.

(And no, the loss of jobs in transport sector is of no concern to me, as jobs would right away be created locally to produce locally what would otherwise have been imported.)

That is basically a tariff, or alternatively non-tariff barriers to trade will also do the trick. As to the transports, stuff still gets shipped around even with limitations on international trade. They'll probably make out ok regardless.

[fredgiblet]

Capital has to compete with labor, and that includes the high initial startup cost. given the prevalence of cheap labor across planet earth, robots are probably not just on the cusp of being adopted. It makes sense to automate when a basic laborer is getting 20-30$ an hour, not so much at 1$ per hour.

The thing a lot of people fail to remember is that that $1 an hour is a good wage in those places. What happened in China with manual labor and in India with call centers is that the money we pumped into their countries through outsourcing raised the standard of living for the people until they started to price themselves out of competition. There's a lot of companies migrating away from those two because the people are expecting more money than they used to.

[Absalom]

Capital has to compete with labor, and that includes the high initial startup cost. given the prevalence of cheap labor across planet earth, robots are probably not just on the cusp of being adopted. It makes sense to automate when a basic laborer is getting 20-30$ an hour, not so much at 1$ per hour.

The thing a lot of people fail to remember is that that $1 an hour is a good wage in those places. What happened in China with manual labor and in India with call centers is that the money we pumped into their countries through outsourcing raised the standard of living for the people until they started to price themselves out of competition. There's a lot of companies migrating away from those two because the people are expecting more money than they used to.

Shame on you, you should know better than to bring economic realism into our paranoid ramblings of implausible apocalypses :p .

[icekatze]

hi hi

We're talking about apocalypses? I've been talking about ongoing trends.

Hundreds of thousands of people die each year because of poverty. Politicians and business leaders show anywhere from apathy to open hostility for the poor as it stands. Since people are becoming more productive yet are not seeing any economic improvement from the productivity they're responsible for, I don't see why they would see economic improvement from increased productivity that they aren't responsible for.

[Nathan_]

Capital has to compete with labor, and that includes the high initial startup cost. given the prevalence of cheap labor across planet earth, robots are probably not just on the cusp of being adopted. It makes sense to automate when a basic laborer is getting 20-30$ an hour, not so much at 1$ per hour.

The thing a lot of people fail to remember is that that $1 an hour is a good wage in those places. What happened in China with manual labor and in India with call centers is that the money we pumped into their countries through outsourcing raised the standard of living for the people until they started to price themselves out of competition. There's a lot of companies migrating away from those two because the people are expecting more money than they used to.

I'm not saying its a bad deal for them, that's their call, it is however, a wage level that will retard capital investment.