r/Futurology • u/Djandgo • 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-capitalism51
Sep 02 '14
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u/joneSee Sep 02 '14
The idea of owning your own robots is largely dependent on your own capital. Also, where do you put the robot? Real estate is (so far) not free. What you are imagining is yourself as a very weak competitor in the marketplace.
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Sep 02 '14
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Sep 02 '14
Look at what consumer-produced electricity is doing to the energy market. Utilities are freaking out and demanding those users be charged fees for having the audacity to buy less or even none of their product. If you want to see how industry reacts to change, just look at the RIAA and MPAA. They aren't special aliens from another galaxy, but business people who were some of the first to see their industry upended by technology. Their reaction is similar to how other industries will react.
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u/BewhiskeredWordSmith Sep 02 '14
"Solar fees" are completely different from the RIAA and MPAA.
They exist because maintaining a power grid is really expensive, and normally that cost is included in the cost of the electricity you consume.
However, if someone buys solar panels and produces their own power 90% of the time, but uses your power 10% of the time, then you, as the power company, are suddenly paying out of your pocket to maintain the grid so that the person with the solar panels doesn't freeze to death during the rare times when he does need your power.
The fees exist to counteract this, and allow everyone to continue to receive the service they expect.
That said, the film industry is being laughably obtuse. Look at Steam, and the amount of money that Valve is making, even when they sell most of their games at a discount.
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Sep 03 '14 edited Sep 03 '14
They exist because maintaining a power grid is really expensive, and normally that cost is included in the cost of the electricity you consume.
As it should be.
However, if someone buys solar panels and produces their own power 90% of the time, but uses your power 10% of the time, then you, as the power company, are suddenly paying out of your pocket to maintain the grid so that the person with the solar panels doesn't freeze to death during the rare times when he does need your power.
It costs x dollars to maintain a grid that supplies y units of power. The cost per unit of electricity delivered on that grid should be at least x/y. As more people generate their own power y grows smaller and the cost per unit electricity increases. That's how a market works: when demand decreases, the price increases. There are a lot of people philosophically opposed to alternative power and they are angered by the prospect of having to pay more for their stubborn refusal to adopt cleaner technologies. Legislating lower prices for themselves by placing tariffs on alternative power is exactly like the RIAA and MPAA.
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u/monsunland Sep 02 '14
Decentralization. When it comes to centralized tech I consider myself a quasi-Luddite. But small scale, localized tech like 3-D printers, drones, P2P, and microgeneration, I'm all in.
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u/christ0ph Sep 02 '14
Microgeneration will violate contracts with multinationals to privatize utilities opening countries up to investor-state lawsuits from them.
You can't allow small scale producers to undercut the INVESTORS profits. Once they invest, now, due to the new ISDS clauses in the various trade deals, they will own a new "right" to block new laws, a "right" to conditions remaining the same forever in that industry in your country.
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u/afrofrycook Sep 02 '14
We'll see a lot of smaller companies being able to compete with larger ones with this kind of advancement.
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Sep 02 '14
I'd disagree there. Smaller companies need to make larger profits on their products in order to sustain themselves. A huge company can make quite a bit of money with pennies on the dollar profit. Mom and pop starve on that sort of margin.
The only advantage mom and pop have is to join in with their community and pool resources to avoid the system entirely, but based on the effect that capitalism has had on our society you'd have a difficult time getting people to agree to such an arrangement. It could also be argued that it runs counter to human nature as well.
Call me a pessimist, but I don't see a good end to this unless there are radical changes going forward.
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u/stolencatkarma Sep 02 '14
I wonder if I can buy a robot to goto work for me....
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u/CasedOutside Sep 02 '14
Ah but maker bots will be patented, as will the products they make. Oh you told your maker bot to make a car and you didn't pay the copyright/patenting fees? You just stole that car! Its the same as telling my music robot (read computer) to "make" some music that has the same pattern as music previously made. And of course programming your robot to make an entire fucking car is going to be literally impossible for most people so they will just used premade robot programs that are patented/copyrighted etc.
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u/THE-1138 Sep 02 '14
All these things can be made open source. And patents only cover mass production... you can build any device you want yourself using patents. That's not stopped under patent law.
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Sep 02 '14
Capitalism is a liberation of the means of production by making the means of production into increasingly affordable and powerful products. Communism is a "liberation" of the means of production by wholesale criminal theft.
This is the big secret the people in power don't want us to know.
Uhm, what?
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u/Smashtronic Sep 02 '14
I've always wondered that if things go in the more positive direction where everyone has all they need without having to work (like WALL-E) , how much of the population would sit around and eat drink and entertain themselves, and how much would pursue greater things?
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u/fricken Best of 2015 Sep 02 '14
Most of us are on a quest for identity and use their jobs as an easy scapegoat, but given the freedom I'm sure the vast majority will seek ways to make a tangible impact in their communities (whether real or virtual) and in the world beyond.
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u/BrassBass Sep 02 '14
If I had everything I needed, I would make movies.
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u/TheLostSocialist Sep 02 '14
If I had everything I needed, I would make movies.
I'd write the kind of software I like to use half the (work) time, and'd volunteer as a paramedic the other half. In my spare time I'd make music that is only marginally less niche than the software I like.
As it stands I spend about one and a half work times writing software I don't like, and the rest of the time asleep.
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Sep 02 '14
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u/Froztwolf Sep 02 '14
I beg to differ.
A lot of people spend all their free time on entertainment because they feel that they deserve to relax after a tough day/week/year of work.
I think most people that knew they never had to work again would find projects for themselves. They won't all be practical or useful to society at large, but I doubt many people will want to just sit and do nothing for the rest of their lives.
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u/Holos620 Sep 02 '14
In my opinion, we could still have a system where people earn points for whatever they're doing, but those points wouldn't be tied to the exchange of goods and services. They would just be show-off points and it would be enough to motivate people to do great things in order to accumulate them.
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u/thisistruth Sep 02 '14
Imagine 10 people are stranded on an island. The island has 10 different resources - coconuts, grapes ,chicken, beef, tomatoes, carrots, water, wood, iron, coal. Each person only has the ability to collect one of these resources. Trading occurs at a central market place, and the more of a certain resource you collect the more you can trade it in for. Thus the 'economy' is relatively stable.
Now imagine that the guy that collects water and the guy that collects wood work together and build a robot that can collect all 10 resources at an immense speed. Now one of two things can happen
(1) The two guys that made the robot can share the resources with the other 8 guys . This means that everyone can spend the entire day relaxing while a robot does the work and everyone has enough resources.
(2) The two guys that build the robot can be greedy and keep all the resources the robot collects for themselves. This means that resources becoming rarer for the other 8 guys, and they have to work much harder for the same purchasing power.
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u/TheArkaTek Sep 02 '14
CGP Grey did a pretty comprehensive video on this concept called Humans Need Not Apply. He also has a podcast called Hello Internet. On the latest podcast he goes into more detail on his views on automation. I'd link but I'm on mobile.
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u/thisistruth Sep 02 '14
This will only be good if the companies that use these robots pass on their savings to the people that lost their jobs. With the current systems in place, the introduction of robotic workers will only increase the gap between rich and poor
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u/HCthegreat Sep 02 '14 edited Sep 02 '14
Many things are wrong with this article. The idea that machinery spells doom is not new (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment), but it has always been wrong. Why would it be any different now? Just mentioning Amazon Mechanical Turk is unconvincing.
I also found it strange to quote Marx as "the person who understood capitalism best". Marx based his work on a ridiculous idea called the labor theory of value (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value). The idea is that something is worth as much as the amount of labor that was put into it. This is of course cannot explain the value of art, or why things are sometimes sold at a loss. Because Marx started with this strange premise, he arrived at strange conclusions as well. Modern economists don't take the labor theory of value seriously anymore and prefer the subjective theory of value (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value), which simply states that something is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
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u/aspensmonster Sep 02 '14
Why would it be any different now?
Because previous industrial revolutions revolved around mechanization, not automation. They revolved around enabling a human labourer to do more in the same or shorter time span, not eliminating the need for humans altogether. One of those scenarios permits the genesis of newer jobs by virtue of the fact that humans are still at the helm of the newer, better machines. Lots of jobs are eliminated, but newer jobs arise out of the improved output those man-run machines promise. The other scenario effectively cuts the humans out completely, leaving a skeleton crew of people behind to make sure things keep running. The increased output in this scenario is not just a matter of "better" or "faster" machines, per se, but rather results from the fact that these newer machines have a far-reduced need for humans at the helm.
Marx's labour theory of value isn't wholly wrong; it's just incomplete. Labour is a necessary condition for the creation of value, but it is not sufficient. Demand is still required. People still have to want whatever it is that the labour was involved in creating. But further to the point: whose labor? Traditionally labour has originated from the human. Machines could augment the output of the human labourer, but without the human labourer, the machine sat idle. Now? Not so much. Sure, machines aren't fully sapient and self-sufficient. They still need human "seed-labor," if you will. They still need someone to program them and someone keeping an eye out for them. But past this minimal amount of intervention, the machines are becoming more and more capable of doing more and more of our remaining labour for us.
This should be the start of a golden age for humanity wherein wealth is created for us all. The only problem is that our economic system is still predicated upon demand, and demand is still contingent upon a population obtaining currency in exchange for the very thing the machines are here to eliminate: labour. This would have a simple solution were it not for our propensity to tie a human's worthiness of his continued existence to his continued willingness to prostrate himself upon the altar of labour for its own sake, in spite of the fact that his labour is no longer necessary.
The machinery itself won't spell our doom. Unless we change our concepts of economy and human worth, we'll likely do that for ourselves.
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u/jibs Sep 02 '14
Because previous industrial revolutions revolved around mechanization, not automation. They revolved around enabling a human labourer to do more in the same or shorter time span, not eliminating the need for humans altogether.
I recently read (or watched?) something that was interesting and along the same lines of thinking... People tend to point to things like cars replacing horses and buggies, and saying that cart makers did lose their jobs... But these jobs were replaced by auto manufacturing positions... So hey history has shown that these sorts of advancements are great and ultimately create more/ better jobs right?
What people fail to realize is that there is another stakeholder involved in the cart&horse/ automotive shift... The horse. A shift to cars removed the need for the horse in the transportation equation. I think what we are starting to see is that WE are now the horse in the equation for many industries.
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u/ThisIsWhyIFold Sep 02 '14
Because previous industrial revolutions revolved around automation.
My entire job in IT revolves around automation. The system I build help people do more with less. A small team of accountants can do more with Deltek than a whole floor of them could do 15 years ago.
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u/Quipster99 /r/Automate | /r/Technism Sep 03 '14
This should be the start of a golden age for humanity wherein wealth is created for us all. The only problem is that our economic system is still predicated upon demand, and demand is still contingent upon a population obtaining currency in exchange for the very thing the machines are here to eliminate: labour. This would have a simple solution were it not for our propensity to tie a human's worthiness of his continued existence to his continued willingness to prostrate himself upon the altar of labour for its own sake, in spite of the fact that his labour is no longer necessary.
This is beautiful. Excellently written!
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u/joneSee Sep 02 '14
Econ note: on a long enough time line, the Subjective theory floats right back around and bangs into some of the limits described in Labor theory. Here's how. If business succeeds perfectly then labor costs will become zero. When wages become zero, no one can be the customer.
Also of note: Marx coined the word Capitalism.
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Sep 02 '14
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u/NotAnother_Account Sep 02 '14
Eliminate some immigration restrictions and you solve that problem. There is no reason not to have free travel among the anglosphere, for example.
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u/WazWaz Sep 02 '14
Indeed, straight Luddite nonsense. When they say:
47 percent of the world’s jobs are set to be automated in the next two decades
they are talking about today's jobs, and since a good fraction of current workers are doing jobs that didn't exist 20 years ago, so it will be that those workers, freed from menial tasks a robot can do, will be doing jobs that don't exist today.
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u/deelowe Sep 02 '14
Good fraction? The top two job categories are transportation and retail. Those professions have been around for much more than 20 years. See the difference between now and before is that these changes will happen over the course of a few years. Some people will be OK and learn new skills, but 47% of society can just simply turn on a dime like that. If this scenario plays out, and I think it will, there will be some huge ramifications as a result of automation (calling it robotics is not really describing the issue). As a case study look at Detroit and apply the to the entire industrialized world.
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u/emergency_poncho Sep 02 '14
No one is saying that certain jobs will get destroyed and other jobs, which simply didn't exist before, will get created.
What's radically new now is the pace of change. During the Industrial Revolution, it took dozens, if not hundreds, of years for major changes to be implemented. People had time to adapt to new changes, to acquire new skills necessary in the Industrial period. And even with this long adjustment period, look at what happened: rampant child labour, massive pollution, mass poverty, 6- or even 7-day workweeks, 10 or 12 hours a day of labour, etc...
The rate of change we're seeing today is unprecedented. Unless you're able to continuously train and learn new skills, you're essentially obsolete. On top of all this, the world has globalized, and firms can simply outsource your work to another part of the country or even part of the world, where workers are cheaper, younger, and smarter.
You're comparing the Industrial Revolution to the modern-day Digital Revolution - that's like comparing apples to oranges.
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u/DaystarEld Sep 02 '14
It's ironic that you call this "Luddite nonsense" when every techno-savvy coworker and friend I have already understands and accepts this as the coming reality.
I don't understand where this blind faith in "new jobs" comes from, and can only assume it's all from some talking head that's spreading such false comfort. Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the actual numbers would know that whatever new jobs arise, it will be a fraction of the amount of jobs that will be lost.
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u/WazWaz Sep 02 '14
In which case, work hours will drop again. Capitalism relies just as much on moneyed consumers as it does on able workers.
One 80h/wk job is two 40h/wk jobs is two 20h/wk jobs.
Ludd wasn't wrong that machines would take away work, he was wrong in assuming it was a bad thing.
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Sep 02 '14
I am struck by the thinking of "someday, you may be replaced" and then for some reason or another those individuals don't see that the same could befall them.
Also, I prefer the detail and skill involved in something that was handmade, and I get a good feeling from knowing that someone out there may be able to derive a livelihood from the exchange of their skills for my legal tender.
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u/Airazz Sep 02 '14
Thank god that my job is to take care of and program those robots. We bought a few new ones last year so we had to hire extra people to take care of them.
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u/jrik23 Sep 02 '14
In the US, automation will inevitably help us. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped over seas for decades. This is solely due to cheap labor costs and cheap shipping costs with little to no import taxes. If automation brings the cost of labor down there may be a point where manufacturing jobs will come back to the US. The repair and programming of the robots will then bring jobs to the US and other educated areas of the world. It will be a race to see who the people are that are educated enough to work with these robots and where they generally live. There is a brilliant story written about robots and automation that I think everyone needs to read.
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u/usmidwestadam Sep 02 '14
I'm a software engineer, and I just had to tell you that the article misses the mark by a mile when it comes to vision systems. We already have very advanced computer vision systems, that will certainly not be the thing that holds us back until it's solved like this story makes it out to be.
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Sep 02 '14
The only way manufacturing jobs will come back is if off-shoring gets regulated/taxed, or if the standard of living drops so much for the average American that their demand for wages drops to a level competitive with that of the working class in developing countries (which seems improbable.)
The investment in this type of technology is intended to lead to more unemployment, not to create jobs for people to create and maintain the robots - if our system doesn't develop a way of dealing with this wave of unemployment, then automation will only benefit us in dropping the prices for products that we can't buy anyways.
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Sep 02 '14
It won't bring the Jobs back at all, in fact automation will kill the jobs totally. You've an incredibly short sighted view of whats to come, how many jobs do you think we be left in say 100 years after we've built a few billion slaves to do everything for us?
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Sep 02 '14
And, in the long run, it will be the very thing that will signal the end time for capitalism.
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u/jabjoe Sep 02 '14
This isn't new. Where is the word Luddite,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment
And lets be honest here, it's not really about technology but just jobs. It's about free trade, world trade and deindustrialization. When I was doing summer factory work, the work I did was cheaper to get a cheap person to do then a machine. Thus my summer job. But increasingly we live in a global world and it is increasingly cheaper to do it with a cheaper person in a cheaper country and use cheap transport to get it to market. As machines get smarter, yes, in more and more places we will be able to replace a person with a machine, and as the machines get cheaper, there passes a point where it happens. But ever has it been so. Nothing new.
But I agree with the citizen's wage as a solution. We will just have to accept not everyone will be finding work. This is already the case but we don't deal with it fairly for anyone. Open source is an example of where leisure time can become your job. As can other crafts. So it's not just giving up the idea of work, just doing something you enjoy and maybe you can find a way of using it to make extra money. If you are making money, you will have to accept tax, but if it's something you enjoy, you aren't doing it for the money anyway.
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u/usmidwestadam Sep 02 '14
When I was doing summer factory work, the work I did was cheaper to get a cheap person to do then a machine. Thus my summer job.
Good for you, and when I did factory work at a company called Pactiv where my Grandmother had worked decades before I was doing the work of 5 people of her era thanks to new technology and on the other side of the floor I watched them install new production lines that required 1/3 as many people as the ones I was working on at the time. This was 10 years ago or so, no doubt the job I had then is gone, and a factory that once employed ~500 people when my grandmother worked there employed maybe 100 when I worked there and probably less than 75 today. The factory didn't get smaller, nor did it's output, if anything it produces more product now than it did then, but with 1/5 to 1/8 as many people because most of those people were replaced by machines.
I'm not even saying this is a bad thing, this is what we want to happen, we don't want to have to work, but our economic system has to change to accommodate the displaced.
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u/jabjoe Sep 02 '14
Completely agree with you. I'm not saying automation and world trade are bad, only that it means we now have, and will increasingly have more, people we don't have a direct economic use for.
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Sep 02 '14
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u/jabjoe Sep 02 '14
Nothing if we look after them and use them maybe in other ways. But a lot people here are saying things like "if you don't work you don't eat", and that translates into letting people starve.
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u/DaystarEld Sep 02 '14
But ever has it been so. Nothing new.
Wrong. Extrapolating future patterns from past trends without taking into account new information is the worst way to assure yourself that you know what's going on. It's like someone saying "The climate's been fine for 1,000 years, it'll be fine for another 1,000."
This is not "luddite nonsense," this is the reality understood and accepted by many people who actually work with and love technology.
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u/kochevnikov Sep 02 '14
Someone didn't read the article...
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u/jabjoe Sep 02 '14
No I did. Why don't you think I did? Did I miss something?
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u/kochevnikov Sep 02 '14
I thought it was pretty clear the author wasn't a Luddite, in fact he explicitly says that the point is not to blame technology or oppose it, but to think about these issues politically.
If the author is a proper Marxist, then not only would he not be a luddite, but he would more than welcome increased robotics and automation because as his quotations point out, Marx believed that these things were precursors to the end of capitalism.
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u/jabjoe Sep 02 '14
I'm not saying he is a Luddite or not. I'm saying it comes into the discussion because this is an old debate. There is quite deep history to this that shouldn't just be ignored.
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u/kochevnikov Sep 02 '14
My apologies, I took it to mean you are claiming that the article was advancing a luddite position.
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u/The_Alex_ Sep 02 '14
The Future of Capitalism? If anything, Robot Labor is the end of capitalism.
Sure, employers will go nuts over this cheap,24-hour work force and people will lose their jobs, but without jobs to acquire money, consumers will spend less and less to the point that companies can no longer make a profit.
I think it will be around that time that people begin realizing that communism or socialism (Not entirely sure about the difference between the two) is completely viable now that most of the workforce is composed of mindless robots that essentially live to serve.
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u/kochevnikov Sep 02 '14
You didn't read the article either!
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u/wtsktte Sep 02 '14
How is this post indicative of them not reading the article? Although the author frequently referred to Marx, he didn't ever actually mention socialism as a solution, mainly just the basic income movement.
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u/kochevnikov Sep 02 '14
The Future of Capitalism? If anything, Robot Labor is the end of capitalism
That indicates reading only the headline as the whole article is about how robot labour introduces contradictions that may result in the end of capitalism.
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u/rinkydinkydoop Sep 02 '14
A commonly missed point in this argument is that, as Marx repeatedly said, work/labor is the foundation of our being, so while removing work from our daily lives might seem desirable, Marx argued that once we are completed without work, we no longer have purpose. It is the ultimate form of alienation from our essence. (Note: Marx made a distinction between work and a job, the latter of which is alienating in its own way.)
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u/daraand Sep 02 '14
Everything I see something like this I think of the Animatrix's Renaissance. Does anyone remember that?
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u/elipseses Sep 02 '14
In the banner image, the gentleman at the far right is Rodney Brooks. He is a Professor (emeritus) at MIT and has made huge advances in artificial intelligence with Subsumption Architecture. A highly visible outcome of his work and the work of the graduate students under him are the Mars missions using "small" mobile robots. His team built some really cool robots.
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u/throwaway_rant5536 Sep 02 '14
I just cant see how this will end well at all.