Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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pioneer98
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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sighyoung
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

Post by sighyoung »

Robots are welcome to my pile of exams this semester.

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pioneer98
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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pioneer98
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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A fairly decent (and fairly long) article on this topic. The short version is: there are no easy answers and we probably will need some kind of mixture of many different ideas.

Rise of the Robot Barons

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pioneer98
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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This opinion piece is starting to tread into the area of politics but it is an interesting take. Basically, he argues that the stock market keeps rising despite all the insane happenings (Trump, hurricanes, wildfires, a nuclear game of chicken, etc) because people are terrified that they are going to be displaced by automation. Since you can't beat automation, the only answer is to make sure you own some of the automation yourself. He gives an anecdote where a guy who owned some grocery stores in New Jersey saw Amazon encroaching on his business. Rather than reinvesting his profits in his own stores, he bought Amazon stock and made a fortune. If he's right, and this fear of being displaced is driving the stock market ever higher, the folks who have money are accelerating this trend by investing their money in automation....And for the people without money, well, "Just own the robots" sounds a lot like socialism to me.

Just own the damn robots.

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thrill
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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There is a future in which we nationalize Amazon as a civil distribution service for basic human necessities. Bezos better get his Mars base built before the torches and pitchforks come out tho.

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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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Speaking as an Amazon prime member with their rewards credit card I welcome our new overlords.

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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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Not to veer too out into left field, but the Walmart trend into the Amazon trend is pretty case in point faux-socialist to me. IE let's hand over the administration of foodstuffs and necessary home goods (obviously Amazon does sell computers and video games too, but bear with me) to one entity. The government can't be trusted but Bezos -- everyone is up for it. When the sad reality is, the only way to keep the American purchasing dollar worth anything is to put these vast markets in a space where they're too big to fail or compete with. Venturing into Walmart for the low prices always felt very ironic to me, to be honest, in its proclamation of American ingenuity; the place is a warehouse where capitalism at its finest has engineered prices too low to ignore, but where we are basically going straight to China for the [expletive] that we can't afford to buy at the local furniture store because of the whacked pay scale at the low end.

Just to say I can see the Amazon dream becoming a reality really quick. The ability to pump that stuff out at low low prices is too compelling for the corporations looking to gain a toehold or keep their gas pedal on the floor.

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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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Why the explosive growth of e-commerce could mean more jobs
Jobs have been lost at storefront retailers, which have suffered under the e-commerce onslaught. But worries about a “retail apocalypse” wiping out many of the nation’s 16 million retail jobs have missed a more important trend: E-commerce actually leads to more jobs by paying people to do things we used to do ourselves.

When people shop online, tasks that consumers once did — driving to a store, searching through aisles for a product, bringing it to a cashier and paying for it — are now done by warehouse employees and truck drivers. People spend less time shopping than in the past, research shows.

That means the bankruptcies and store closings in the retail sector aren’t the complete picture. Michael Mandel, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, calculates that the number of e-commerce and warehousing jobs has leapt by 400,000 in the past decade, easily offsetting the loss of 140,000 brick-and-mortar retail jobs.

Amazon accounts for much of the additional employment. Yet it’s also at the vanguard of automation. Since 2014, Amazon has deployed 100,000 robots in 25 warehouses worldwide. At the same time, it’s nearly tripled its hourly workforce, from roughly 45,000 to nearly 125,000.
Automation is also more likely in the coming years to make up for labor shortages rather than replace workers, Wulfraat says. Any warehouse workers displaced by automation will easily find jobs elsewhere.
Normally labor shortages could lead to higher wages. If it just leads to more automation, it's going to be hard for workers to ever get a raise.

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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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Amazon is scary. Now they are getting into pharmaceutical distribution. At some point when they own everything they are going to start raising prices and people are really going to get hosed.

Not to mention all of those supposed jobs they are creating are never coming to small towns like mine that desperately need something.

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