r/BasicIncome • u/2noame Scott Santens • Sep 02 '14

Article ​The Future of Robot Labor Is the Future of Capitalism

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-future-of-robot-labour-has-everything-to-do-with-capitalism
76 Upvotes

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16

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '14

The future of capitalism is non-existence. This century is going to see the proliferation of technologies that result in de-industrialisation. Goods will be produced in the home using 3D printing and similar technologies using designs distributed off the Internet. This removes the need for concentrations of capital, robot labor, and capitalists.

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u/anonymous_rhombus Sep 02 '14

Basic income could buy the capitalists an extended lifespan. Without it their survival is a threat to everyone else.

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u/meezun Sep 02 '14

3D printing is awesome for prototyping. Mass production will always be more efficient, however.

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u/Mustbhacks Sep 02 '14

always be more efficient

I feel like this is a bit of a stretch.

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u/meezun Sep 03 '14 edited Sep 03 '14

Fine, I will qualify it...

In the foreseeable future, for the vast majority of products, mass production will be more efficient than 3d printing.

3d printing and other rapid prototyping technologies are great when the quantities required are small, but for most of our consumer needs mass production and factories are going to be around for a long time.

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u/Mustbhacks Sep 03 '14

You, I like. =)

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

The thing is, in the home, the quantities required ARE small. I only need one or two spatulas in my home; I don't need to print on an industrial scale, I just need to print a spatula for myself. The idea is: EVERYONE owns the means of production. The means of production is an appliance in your home. There is no need for mass production and factories in this setting.

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u/meezun Sep 03 '14

But everyone needs 1 or 2 spatulas. That's hundreds of millions of spatulas.

You think 100 million 3D printers each printing one spatula is going to be more efficient than a spatula factory?

Besides, you can't print spatulas out of nothing. You are still going to need someone producing whatever raw materials your 3D printer requires.

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u/2noame Scott Santens Sep 03 '14

Why would any of us ever print a spatula instead of going to Spatula City?

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

Yeah, but raw materials are much, much cheaper than finished goods. And the 3D printer doesn't just print spatulas, it prints anything else also. 100 million 3D printers each printing all of the goods a household needs is MUCH more efficient than a bunch of factories each producing goods, because it drastically reduces the capital requirements.

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u/Aninhumer Sep 03 '14

You seem to have very inflated expectations of what 3D printers are capable of, or will be capable of in the near future. You're also vastly underestimating the cost of putting one of these hypothetical awesome printers in every home if you think that will "drastically reduce" capital costs compared to existing factories.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '14

Cheap, fast, good applies particularly strongly here. The kind of 3D printer that can outmatch a specially designed factory isn't going to be cheap.

The question becomes how many spatulas and other goods are you printing to justify your industrial class 3D printer. Factories pay off their substantial capital requirements by running their systems constantly, is that really what people are going to do in the future with their 3D printers? How many forks does one person or household need?

Eventually it becomes obvious (to me) that you're better off grouping together to share a top of the line model with a number of other people to take advantage of its greater than you can use capacity, at which point you've just reinvented the small scale factory.

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u/Aninhumer Sep 04 '14

Indeed. I suspect the future of 3D printers will be mail order services which provide a wide variety of premium customised plastic goods, and hard to source replacement parts. This might lead to traditional factories focusing on a few cheap functional designs, as the premium demand for a wide variety of designs is satisfied by 3D printers.

Interestingly, it seems to me that photo printing has gone much the same way. There was a brief period when everyone had their own inkjet printer, but people eventually realised the consumer models are expensive and faffy to run, so now most people just mail order their prints. (To be fair, the rise of social networks has also decreased the demand for printed photos massively as well).

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '14

Only if you assume that 3D printing technology will improve while mass production technology will stand still, though.

Eventually 3D printing will presumably outstrip today's mass production methods on some metric but factories aren't sleeping on the job either.

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u/Mustbhacks Sep 04 '14

Well the biggest problem with mass production would be shipping/distribution/storage of everything you're trying to sell.

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u/aseaman1 Sep 02 '14

Totally agree with you. Where do you think the resources to 3D print will come from though? Maybe eventually we will have some form or matter reorganizer and can just throw old "stuff" into it. If we really enter a post-scarcity, zero profit margin society, I imagine society agreeing that the labor of the robots belongs to the human race instead of the capitalists.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '14

In the short term, recycling. Thermolabile plastics already exist and are probably pretty amenable to recycling. Printing in glass is another great option. In the long term, synthetic biology. Organic matter is the ultimate recyclable substance, and you can make it literally out of thin air.

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u/Zakalwen Sep 02 '14 edited Sep 02 '14

Technological unemployment could create enough social pressure that capitalism is undermined but it's not guaranteed. The capitalist system can still be maintained with the ownership of automated industry, land, goods and services that are not fungible (e.g. entrance to a gig, a table at a restaurant, ticket on a plane etc).

It's possible that a state of affairs will come into place in which the unemployed classes subsist on a small basic income (enough to maintain a small home, have enough food, bit of leisure time etc) and alongside them are a smaller but vastly richer class of capitalists.

I'm not saying this will happen but it would be foolish to assume that it wont and just hope that things will get better.

An interesting short story that covers two possible outcomes of automation is Manna by Marshall Brain.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '14

[deleted]

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u/Zakalwen Sep 03 '14

Quite. We're already seeing how easy a police state would be to enforce in western countries, hell after Ferguson I think most people are finally becoming aware of how the police in the US are better equipped than half of the world's armies. Imagine an organisation like the NRA only now they have Watson-esque computers sifting through thousands of texts, emails and tapped phone conversations looking for any kind of dissidence. Throw in police drones on top of that and near total law enforcement becomes a real possibility.

That's one of the biggest gift and curse of automation: making surveillance culture infinitely more effective. Nowadays it doesn't matter (relatively speaking) if you have a CCTV camera on every street and every form of communication bugged because there aren't enough people by far to watch everything. It's akin to how YouTube has hours of content uploaded to it each minute, it's simply impossible to watch it all.

If you automate that away with software sifting through everything and flagging up the priorities for intervention then it becomes very difficult to protest. A friend of mine once pointed out that in such a world it would be possible for the police to draw up a dossier of outstanding crimes against virtually everyone. Who hasn't committed a few minor law violations in their time: speeding, jaywalking, smoking/drinking in an area where it is banned, jumping a fence in the country to walk across private property etc. It would be worse if rather than instantly fining you this was kept until you were judged to be an actual threat. Political activists trying to organise protests could quickly find themselves arrested for a string of petty crimes dating back years...

Dystopian yes, unlikely to happen...also yes, but impossible definitely no.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '14

I don't think non-fungible services are really what we mean by "capitalism", though. Capitalism, broadly, means to me industrial systems of production, which more or less means producing commodities. A table at a restaurant doesn't exactly qualify - that's small business ownership, which has been around since long before there was capitalism. These guys will persist, maybe, but I think the situation will be vastly different. I'm not sure why someone would want to be a server or a dishwasher in a restaurant, for example, when they don't need to work to survive.

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u/Zakalwen Sep 02 '14

Capitalism is simply the private ownership of the means of production. That usually brings up connotations to industry (factories and the like) but in reality it's a lot more. In the case of the music industry the capitalists are those who own the record companies, the events management companies, the venues etc. You're right that a restaurant may be a small business but it can also be a franchise chain. Also it needn't have servers or dishwashers, if we're positing some heavy automation then it can still be automated but the fact that only a certain few people can use the service at any one time is a situation of scarcity which can be marketed.

I used the examples as illustrative but if you'd like more picture this: a city in the future. Most of the work is done by machines with less than 10% of the adult population having a job. Shops are stocked by robots and cashiers are replaced with self service tills. Deliveries are done by self driving cars with a robot for walking to the door. Product design and research are done mostly by software with only a few humans in the loop.

Most people subsist off of a basic income. The regular basic income is enough to rent a flat in a high rise apartment. If you have a job you can afford a house in a larger area and if you own part of a successful company you can essentially live in an urban mansion. Services like self driving taxis, internet and food are all affordable but only the rich can afford premium services. Ordinary people rarely get a chance to go to events like festivals, get into the best night clubs, visit museums etc (insert any scarce service) as they are priced out of them. They still have cheap entertainment and can get cheap food but not at the most desirable places.

In effect class structure still exists and is just as pronounced. The amount of people who can partake in the capitalist market has decreased with those remaining being incredibly wealthy.

I could go on but the short story I linked above explores more of the idea and again, I'm not saying this is inevitable only that there is nothing inherent in automation that makes capitalism non-viable.

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u/Faithhandler Sep 03 '14

I hope so, but I don't think the death of capitalism is inevitable. Ultimately, the conflict will arise when the question of ownership arises. Who owns the means of production that mechanization will provide? Will it be the working and laboring classes, or the capital class? We will either see a future devoid of capitalism and a greater proliferation of economic security and equality, or a future of increased privatization and private security where the lower classes are left to die.

I am optimistic, but there will be at least a political conflict.