http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 I've been thinking about this for as long as I remember but what happens when we approach the Star Trek economy where most things can be done by robots or automation. What happens to the people who can't create content or design things for a living. We are already dealing with it in the midwest where there are entire towns decimated because of the lack of manufacturing job. What happens when it effects billions of people? We are dealing with a similar issue in the military where we have 2 million people the government is spending on during historically peaceful era. China has 3.5 million and India has 4.7 people. What do we do with the people that predisposed to labor type vocations like Military, agriculture, and manufacturing. Not everyone can be bankers, engineers, and artists. Can they?
I've brought this up before in discussions of Neo-Liberalism. The days of lifetime employment with guaranteed pensions in manufacturing are gone and even without globalism technology has and will do away with low skilled assembly line work. To deal with this I do think we need a revolution but not the one that Bernie Sanders talks about. The revolution that he, and Trump also, is one that would try to bring back an age that is about as likely as an end of industrialization and going back to guild manufacturing. Rather than reject globalization and mechanization I think we should embrace it and find ways of improving the competitive advantages of our labor force. Mainly through education. The area where I will agree with Sanders is that the profit and compensation structure of how corporations are run needs to change. The concentration of wealth needs to be addressed and we need to build better systems of distributing the capital along with better social safety nets. This is another area where the US can't do it alone and we need actual global systems to address this. One long term thing that we as a species and a civilization need to do to address this is to move off the planet. As trade and technology drive down the value of individual labor eventually we'll come to a point where there are lots of humans who either cannot make a living based upon the existing economic model or even if they survive on a social safety net aren't really contributing to human progress. At the same time we continue to deplete and pollute planetary resources. At some point the human species has to either grown and expand beyond the Earth or stay planet bound and either drastically reduce population or stagnate and go extinct.
Star Trek economy? There are still 50k+ workers at that ONE factory. Driving around town I still see guys using shovels and hammers at construction sites. Need for labor hasn't gone anywhere; out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
Yep, pretty much basic income for everyone so people can just relax all day and still have a high quality of life. Will we all become fat and lazy like Wall-E? maybe.
My point is that the just reduced the dependence at one factory by 60K people. It's only going to get worse with the rate of automation and technology. At some point there will billions of people that won't have anything to do. How do you keep these people from burning the place down?
I sorta believe that some people are wired a certain way genetically. Warrior, scientists, laborers, etc. Kind of like insurgent but not to that degree. What do we do with these type when society really doesn't need them anymore. At least to the current population size. It is not like evolution is going to take care of it because these people can still reproduce.
Unemployment is low and the labor force participation rate is turning up. Technology causes various industries to die out. This has been going on for generations. Also, I think humans will become much more cybernetic during the late 21st century. No idea what this will do to society, but things are moving this way very fast.
market might balance it self in the sense the more people likely unable to find job, the more likely to accept a lesser paying job to the point , automated production would't make sense as a justified cost/investment breaking point
when people are making six figure sums for having a live channel where people can watch them play video games online. i'd say new industries will eventually replace these lost jobs. from factories to call centers, that's my prediction.
Yes, the GOP and Trump, now that he's won the nomination, keep babbling about how "horrible" our economy is, when in fact it's the envy of most of the developed world. Here in Austin, the unemployment rate is 2.9%. If someone wants a job, the jobs are here. The problem people are having, and this dovetails with the "problem" of automation in regards to the workforce, is that unless you have the training, and preferably a degree, you're stuck with employment that pays somewhere between minimum wage and around $20 an hour. Back in the '60's and '70's, $20+ an hour was a wage that could enable you to buy a decent house for you and your family in a decent neighborhood, a couple of cars, a TV in the living room, money to take the family on a nice vacation, and a little left over to save so you could help the kids get through college. Not so, today, of course. Not even close. If you made $20 or more an hour and didn't have a degree, and many (actually most) didn't back then, you likely earned that wage because you belonged to a union, in my opinion. You had to get training and unions handled that very well. Non-union shops generally paid less, although they might pay more for a union trained electrician/pipe fitter/etc., which is a little ironic. If you were in manufacturing, the CEO probably made 20 times what the average worker made. That's in terms of the "CEO-to-worker compensation ratio." Today? In 2013, the "CEO-to-worker compensation ratio" was 295.9, compared to 20 in 1965. I got that information from the Economic Policy Institute, link below. The title of the article is, appropriately, CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less. When glynch "yells" about the vast income disparency between the average American worker and the typical CEO that they work for, this is what he's talking about. America is a great country, producing and consuming more as a society than any country in history, in my opinion, but the wealth that prosperity produces is concentrated more and more into the hands of a few, while the average American treads water or slips behind the standard of living their parents had as they were growing up. http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/
Who is we? Service and labor will always be part of the equation, otherwise food delivery and short term lodging would have displaced restaurants and hotels long ago.
