Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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MrSaigon

Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

Post by MrSaigon »

Been reading about the debate about our future:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... r_all.html

Which links to this from pew:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/


Ten people have all the money. My job could be done by a robot. My job is ultimately controlled, or could be, by one of those ten people. I'm not a stakeholder that matters at all. It's a disturbing thought. The death of capitalism won't be peaceful. Hopefully this is just a bunch of misplaced fear, like those zero population guys of the 1960s.

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

Post by pioneer98 »

We probably aren't as effed as China and the developing world. All that stuff we out-sourced to them to speed their development in the last 15 years is going to become obsolete. Rather than making plastic toys, cell phones, jewelry, etc, by cheap labor overseas, we'll make all that stuff here with 3D printers and automation. And at least here, we can still have a pretty big service industry that caters to the people with the money. Not sure what China will have.

Sorry to make another thread political, but I think the argument can be made it is our politics that are causing a lot of these problems. Technology has been displacing workers for well over a century now. What's changed? Our politics. It became sacrilege to tax wealthy people around 1980. We should tax the people reaping the uneven benefits of this system, then hire people to rebuild our highways and bridges, to teach our kids, and so on, like we used to do.

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

Post by GeddyWrox »

TOTALLY agree with Pioneer.

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

Post by IMADreamer »

Exactly Pioneer.

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

Post by doe_boy »

EPS, SVM, ROI...WTF?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... my/385259/
Meanwhile, the shift toward stock-based compensation helped drive the rise of the 1 percent by inflating the ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation from twenty-to-one in 1965 to about 300-to-one today. Labor’s steadily falling share of GDP has inevitably depressed consumer demand, resulting in slower economic growth.

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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

I'll add an AMEN for pioneer.

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

Post by thrill »

Pretty clear you or someone in your family needs to lock you and your descendants into the 1% in the next 50 or so years or you're s.o.l. Seems to be a weird tipping point where wealth is just going to lock in for good barring revolution.

MrSaigon

Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

Post by MrSaigon »

Humans aren't very good at sharing. We see these problems in our own country, but it's far worse elsewhere.

It's easy to picture the necessity of our sharing system to change, even radically pretty soon. The problem is the people that need to make the most change have the least incentive and most power to do so.

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

MrSaigon wrote:Humans aren't very good at sharing. We see these problems in our own country, but it's far worse elsewhere.

It's easy to picture the necessity of our sharing system to change, even radically pretty soon. The problem is the people that need to make the most change have the least incentive and most power to do so.
SOME humans aren't. It is obvious from the complexity of our social organization that in the not too distant past (from an evolutionary standpoint) humans learned how to help each other improve their collective lot and progress.

Although I sympathize with it and fight it every day, I am getting really tired of the cynicism and numbed helplessness of so much of current American thought.

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