Postcapitalism and the Impending Death of Work

[DMC]

28 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

The Clownbacks get paid nada, but the Carusos still trade with each other. Is there a market? Yes there still is. Except the Clownbacks are no longer part of it.

Now maybe the Clownbacks can re-train to do something else, like be governor or something. But, maybe they can’t or they can’t easily retrain.

First, want to say I loved that entire post.  Although the "Clownbacks" just made me think of Sam Brownback, so you lose some points there.  

Anyway, yes exactly!  The quoted is precisely what I was asking earlier in terms of the elites and "basic incomers" potentially having entirely different means of currency.  And then wondering about how education/training would work in such a society - would the Carusos even allow the Clownback kids to learn how to be part of elite society?

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Altherion said:

Your example is missing the relative scale -- there's a reason the rich are referred to as "the 1%" and in fact that slogan is an overestimate if we're discussing the people who will end up in control of the AI. Suppose there were 100 Clownbacks for every Caruso. The Carusos will undoubtedly get all of the coconuts they can eat, but they can only eat so much and, on aggregate, the Clownbacks who use their wages to buy coconuts from both are a larger fraction of the market than either of the Carusos is for the other. So yes, there would still be a market, but if the Clownbacks can't find other work, the market will shrink substantially.

Supposing the Carusos simply don't give a crap about the Clownbacks. In fact, they resent giving anything to those no good low down Clownbacks. All the Carusos care about is maximizing their own welfare. Why do they care if the market shrinks?

And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that in your example the labor market basically disappears. And the market for consumption shrinks too. But it did as well for my example too. It seems we're just using different numbers here.

[Altherion]

27 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Supposing the Carusos simply don't give a crap about the Clownbacks. In fact, they resent giving anything to those no good low down Clownbacks. All the Carusos care about is maximizing their own welfare. Why do they care if the market shrinks?

And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that in your example the labor market basically disappears. And the market for consumption shrinks too. But it did as well for my example too. It seems we're just using different numbers here.

The Carusos aren't interested in a large market because of the Clownbacks; they're care about it because they become richer faster when the market for their product grows. To deliberately cause a situation which lowers your profit is antithetical to capitalism.

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

The Carusos will undoubtedly get all of the coconuts they can eat, but they can only eat so much and, on aggregate, the Clownbacks who use their wages to buy coconuts from both are a larger fraction of the market than either of the Carusos is for the other. So yes, there would still be a market, but if the Clownbacks can't find other work, the market will shrink substantially.

Also, at some point one of the Clownbacks will either read about or reinvent the ideas of Karl, Vladimir, Zedong et al and then there will be trouble.

Regarding the first graph, that's a big part of what I don't understand:  under "basic income" or any similar concept, how can the Clownbacks ever provide any type of market?  As to the commie slam at the end, the Clownbacks do not need Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, etc. to come to the self-evident conclusion that they're being fucked.

23 minutes ago, Altherion said:

The Carusos aren't interested in a large market because of the Clownbacks; they're care about it because they become richer faster when the market for their product grows. To deliberately cause a situation which lowers your profit is antithetical to capitalism.

Don't really see your point here.  Yeah, that's antithetical to capitalism.  Considering the thread's topic, that's the entire thought experiment right?

[Spring Bass]

EDIT: Never mind for now

[Spring Bass]

4 hours ago, S John said:

And this is one area where modern humans in developed nations are woefully ill equipped to cope in comparison to our ancestors.  We are highly dependent on technology and tend to have highly specialized niches that take a good deal of education and training and leave us ignorant of the practical day to day survival things as well as the finer points of how the technology around us actually works.  If shit hits the fan it’ll be the primitive cultures in places like Africa and the Amazon who can withstand the trials of simply existing in the natural world sans technology.

I disagree with this. Modern society has a ton of redundancy built into it, both in the ability to ship food over vast differences relatively quickly and in our ability to store it. If a particular major crop fails in any area, we can move in food to cover the gap from other places - and short of an asteroid impact or supervolcano eruption, it's hard to imagine all farming areas in the US getting hit by the same calamity at the same time.

Subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers have it much worse. If the crops fail for them, they starve or migrate - or both. Just like the pre-modern era.

5 hours ago, maarsen said:

Let's go back to first principles here. Having robots or AI take over all human jobs cannot be self sustaining. Food is grown for people to eat, cars are made for people to get to their jobs, growing food,selling food, making cars.... Once machines or robots start doing such, where does the money come from to keep the machines in electricity?

  That's a good point. Unless elites make up for the shortfall in consumption spending, then either low aggregate demand would gradually strangle investment spending in this stuff, or we'd be stuck in a cycle of faster and faster debt bubbles until that becomes infeasible. The only other way would be if the automation made everything a lot cheaper, which would be tantamount to a living standards increase for folks even if their wages dropped (as long as they don't drop as fast).

 

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/7/2017 at 10:38 PM, Altherion said:

The Carusos aren't interested in a large market because of the Clownbacks; they're care about it because they become richer faster when the market for their product grows. To deliberately cause a situation which lowers your profit is antithetical to capitalism.

Except if the Carusos don't have to pay a wage bill, I'm not sure how they'd have a lower profit. There is simply more red and blue coconuts for the Carusos to have for themselves.

[Luzifer's right hand]

I work in a field in which the ship has sailed years ago.

Single purpose chemical plants require significantly less operators than they used to(a tenth is not uncommon) and the people that remain only serve troubleshooting purposes in most cases. A lot of plants do not even have enough shift operators for startup anymore and additional personal is necessary after a shutdown. 

In many plants most if not all maintenance is done by contractors(often with employees of east european origin here in austria).

In many well running single purposes plants the handling of raw materials and the shipment of products requires much more people than the running of the plant itself.

The administrative side expanded a lot in the other hand and cutbacks in that area are a pretty recent thing. They are happening now though and it seems a lot of positions were not necessary anymore because most of what those jobs entailed is already done by computers(mostly in the area of bookkeeping, billing and payroll). Its mainly done be not hiring new people after the old people moved on.

Despite the fact that such plants require less people to run it is actually far more difficult get people for the job because the pay is not as good as it used to be and the workload has increased exponentially. About 30 years ago a shift worker got about twice the pay of someone working on the day shift and usually had a lower workload(night shift was just there to keep the plant running for example and maintenance was done during daytime).

Nowadays you only get about 30% more.

On the other hand the output of most plants increased by a lot.

 

[Werthead]

Quote

 

I disagree with this. Modern society has a ton of redundancy built into it, both in the ability to ship food over vast differences relatively quickly and in our ability to store it. If a particular major crop fails in any area, we can move in food to cover the gap from other places - and short of an asteroid impact or supervolcano eruption, it's hard to imagine all farming areas in the US getting hit by the same calamity at the same time.

 

Except that the world's topsoil has been depleted by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution and the rest will be gone by around 2080.

That will cause a pretty major calamity.

[Iskaral Pust]

Soil regeneration and protection is one of our most overlooked and urgent needs. 

[SeanF]

I think there will be no shortage of work.  The danger is that it is low-skilled, not very well-paid work.  Two occupations that have proliferated over the past 50 years in both the UK and USA are hospitality workers , and hair-dressers.  A more recent example is the way that mechanical car washes in the UK are being replaced by individuals who provide a better service.  One could imagine a huge increase in personal service jobs, as robots and AI made white collar work redundant, because people prefer the personal touch to machinery.  The problem is that these jobs are not well paid.

It's professional people who really have to worry about AI cutting a swathe through their jobs.

 

[HexMachina]

Slightly related, more to do with automation than anything else, but by coincidence I was reading this article this morning and found it intriguing: http://regulatingforglobalization.com/2017/12/07/negotiating-algorithm-technology-digital-ized-work-labour-protection-reloaded/

Basically saying that while yes automation threatens quantity of jobs, we also need to consider the impact on quality of jobs. Not talking low skill/high skill though, more in the vein of “does this leave workers vulnerable to exploitation?  Does it allow for arbitrariness and discrimination etc? I found it a Very interesting read 

[Altherion]

15 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Except if the Carusos don't have to pay a wage bill, I'm not sure how they'd have a lower profit. There is simply more red and blue coconuts for the Carusos to have for themselves.

But there are only so many coconuts that the Carusos can consume and the shelf life of coconuts is finite.

That said, your point is taken: if whoever controls the machines is willing to limit production to trade with only other people who control the machines, they can theoretically do that. However, I don't see why they would do that as it risks violence in exchange for practically nothing (unless you count the gratification of their malice towards the Clownbacks).

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/8/2017 at 8:37 PM, Altherion said:

But there are only so many coconuts that the Carusos can consume and the shelf life of coconuts is finite.

Okay, supposing I wasn't writing in a parable in order to collapse a much larger and more complex economy into a couple of consumer goods and couple of laborers and a couple of capitalist. Supposing I was telling a literal story. So say the AI machine can produce 30 coconuts per day. Caruso can only eat 20 coconuts per day. So yeah he gives 10 to Clownback everyday because why should care?  (I'm assuming Caruso doesn't have any altruistic motives. Or maybe they are just very very small)

But more realistically the Caruso in our story isn't going just to consume coconuts but a variety of commodities. And perhaps its not likely that he will become so satiated in his consumption that he is willing to give up some of consumption in order to accommodate Clownback.

And while it's true that the shelf life of coconuts is finite, the error here is assuming, that Caruso won't give up some consumption today in order to have more tomorrow.  Supposing Caruso faces a trade off between how many coconuts to have today versus how many to have tomorrow. After making that decision, he orders the AI machine to bring to him X amount of coconuts for current consumption while taking the rest and planting them to grow coconut trees.

On 12/8/2017 at 8:37 PM, Altherion said:

However, I don't see why they would do that as it risks violence in exchange for practically nothing (unless you count the gratification of their malice towards the Clownbacks).

Assuming that the Carusos act solely in their own self interest, the threat of a civil war might in fact make them work out a compromise with the Clownbacks.  I'm sure some elites have relented and agreed to some kind of welfare state, in the past, in order to prevent civil wars or revolution.

[S John]

9 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Assuming that the Carusos act solely in their own self interest, the threat of a civil war might in fact make them work out a compromise with the Clownbacks.  I'm sure some elites have relented and agreed to some kind of welfare state, in the past, in order to prevent civil wars or revolution.

As a liberal who can see the sense in strict gun control, this is actually a reason why I find myself not entirely opposed to the idea behind the second amendment.  In scenarios of a dystopian future, maybe a few million AR-15’s dispersed amongst the plebes isn’t a terrible insurance policy.

[Spring Bass]

17 hours ago, Werthead said:

Except that the world's topsoil has been depleted by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution and the rest will be gone by around 2080.

That will cause a pretty major calamity.

If we do literally nothing about it, it will continue depleting. The FAO says though that it can be reversed, and in any case this isn't an evenly spread out phenomena.

[felice]

4 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

But more realistically the Caruso in our story isn't going just to consume coconuts but a variety of commodities.

And crucially, different sets of customers, and far more Clownbacks than Carusos. Say the blue coconuts are produced in bulk and eaten by Clownbacks, while the red coconuts are gourmet items that take a lot more resources to produce and are only eaten by Carusos. If the Clownbacks all get laid off and can't afford to buy cheap blue coconuts any more, then the first Caruso won't make any money, and will no longer be able to afford to buy the expensive red coconuts. So the second Caruso won't make any money either. And neither of them want blue coconuts, so there's no basis for trade.

[straits]

4 hours ago, felice said:

And crucially, different sets of customers, and far more Clownbacks than Carusos. Say the blue coconuts are produced in bulk and eaten by Clownbacks, while the red coconuts are gourmet items that take a lot more resources to produce and are only eaten by Carusos. If the Clownbacks all get laid off and can't afford to buy cheap blue coconuts any more, then the first Caruso won't make any money, and will no longer be able to afford to buy the expensive red coconuts. So the second Caruso won't make any money either. And neither of them want blue coconuts, so there's no basis for trade.

While it's not necessarily true that neither of them want blue coconuts, this is generally correct. I think the next logical question is, how long will it take for governing entities to concede that "free market" capitalism has some built-in paradoxical relationships that will make less and less sense as automation gains momentum.

I think rather than Carusos letting go of their (questionably earned, certainly undeserved) capital in order to redesign the way modern society functions, they will be coerced to do so with pitchforks and guillotines. 

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/9/2017 at 5:03 AM, felice said:

And crucially, different sets of customers, and far more Clownbacks than Carusos. Say the blue coconuts are produced in bulk and eaten by Clownbacks, while the red coconuts are gourmet items that take a lot more resources to produce and are only eaten by Carusos. If the Clownbacks all get laid off and can't afford to buy cheap blue coconuts any more, then the first Caruso won't make any money, and will no longer be able to afford to buy the expensive red coconuts. So the second Caruso won't make any money either. And neither of them want blue coconuts, so there's no basis for trade.

Well yes, the first Caruso would be completely hosed, if his primary customers were laborers, and if he couldn’t switch to making red coconuts, which in this example stands for an aggregate good that the well off, ie the owners of AI technology or the few people still employed by them like.

And what may happen here is that owners of the AI technology may specialize in making goods that only the elites like to consume, since there is no point in making goods for unemployed laborers.

[Altherion]

32 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

And what may happen here is that owners of the AI technology may specialize in making goods that only the elites like to consume, since there is no point in making goods for unemployed laborers.

But at this point you've basically guaranteed a revolution -- the lack of products on shelves is one of the few reliable indicators of it.