no one claims this to be the case. a naive view of economics. The reality is that exchange is conditioned by the markets which themselves are conditioned by capital. There are those with capital and the masses without. The masses must sell their labour to those with capital below its value in order to recieve any fruits of their labour, whereas those who 'own' capital by virtue of coercion and force are able to live unproductive lives leeching parasitically off the labour of others.
It is silly to think that no one would learn maths or innovate were they not paid significantly more than menial unskilled labourers. Few people want to be at the lowest denominator, few people want to do menial unskilled work, few people want to be janitors. Humans are driven to great things and to innovate without a prospect of reward. There are always people who want to educate themselves, who want to be scientists and mathematicians, moreover those professions rarely pay particularly well. A vast, vast majority or physics, chemistry, etc. graduates who do find work in their respective fields do not earn great sums of money, they work as lab technicians and the like earning fairly meagre sums while doing the essential work of scientific inquiry which benefits us all. Even if skilled and unskilled labour had inversely proportional rewards with engineers earning an average living wage and janitors earning £65,000 a year people would still endeavour to be engineers. In the USSR everyone was provided a good standard of living. You could live well and comfortably being a street sweeper as many were. Yet the USSR had the highest proportion of engineers in the world. Unskilled menial labour is fundamentally necessary, it is in fact the most necessary labour there is. We would have absolutely nothing without it and all be dead. Unskilled menial labour is for the most part unpleasant, difficult, exhausting and often times dangerous. Very few people want to do it. Very few would do it by choice. But someone has to do it. Its essential. We need most people to be doing it in fact in order for us all to live. Yet you consider those who do this essential work unworthy of a good quality of life. There is an essential division of labour at the root of our civilised society, whereby the majority do menial work to produce a material surplus so that a minority subsidised by them can focus on specialised work. Consider if every person in the world was well educated, had a degree in maths and engineering, aside from society not being able to function in the slightest, only a minuscule fraction would work as engineers, a vast majority would still have to work the necessary menial, unskilled jobs. You owe everything you have and everything you are to the masses. They are more deserving of the collective produce of society than you.
We work in order to satisfy our needs and wants, we don't work for the sake of it. We've spent thousands of years working our way up, eliminating work wherever we can, mechanising, automating what we can. Once our needs can be provided for without work to a reasonable degree everyone can stop working. No one has to be a janitor an no one has to be an engineer. People will be free to pursue what they want to do.
Justin Jones
But economy doesnt work on hobbies. And 'equal reward' applies here, if doctor and janitor have the same pay, no one would want to be a doctor.
Listen, physical resources are limited and so this 'everyone should have infinite coke and hookers and everything will be fine' thing is something I cant understand. I'd rather do hobbies than study engineering at university but the reward for doing hobbies and studying for automation is not the same, so I choose to do the latter, and dont understand how can someone choosing former expect the same outcome.
It makes zero sense to me. Communising rewards of automation, but not communising the labor of building the automation, it doesnt make any sense. And also because resources are not physically unlimited, and because rewards dont happen randomly out of any hobby labors, prioritization has to happen. Prioritization of work, and prioritization of rewards.
If you've spent whole day doing something like studying women studies for example, you should have whatever rewards of that are, and not rewards of automation.
No. There simply isnt. I mean it would be nice if that would be the case, but that is not the case.
The fundamental axiom of your worldview is that there's just infinite free stuff for everyone out there.
No again. When it comes to feelings, hunger is what most people feel in common. If hungry enough, people even engage in cannibalism, this is very well recorded and documented. So people naturally hoard and pile and accumulate stuff, because feelings of hunger and need are what we all have in common.
No, we are discussing automation so I dont know how is this not obvious to you already. What % of modern economies are menial workers? If menial workers are absolutely essential… why are there whole factories out there without them? Yeah really, people who are developing automation cant possibly automate maintenance. So you simply wont sell to the masses. You wouldnt even need to sell. You could produce goods automatically with automation, for your own consumption. Need a chair? Just build one for yourself by yourself through automation..
Your utopian worldview is utterly disconnected from physical reality such as physical limit of physical resources. No one's gonna develop automation for you for no reason. People are hungry and all worry about their hunger. And some worry better than others.
you know, except when nearly all servers run off hacks of something a finnish egotist did to occupy himself without dealing with the fuckery of the MINIX licence. stupid, doubly stupid because you've picked a fucking doctor, which is second only to an astronaut in terms of "careers some people would do even if you made them undergo unnecessary dentistry just for the purpose of discouraging them from pursuing it."
Starting salary for a junior doctor in the UK is below the average wage, and even at peak levels will never match what you could earn as a currency trader. Yet, unsurprisingly, even in the centre of global finance capitalism, we've got plenty of doctors. It's not even about the labour of building it because in practical terms you're not just going to scavenge the parts yourself (even if you did that's technically theft lol). The realistic scenario is that you build the machine, and somebody else owns it because they paid for it. No, they didn't build the parts either, nor did they extract the raw resources, design it, manage the enterprise that constructed it, or do anything of that sort: They put money in, and they took ownership out. The Petit-bourgois "I BUILT THIS" fantasy almost never occurs in real life. (Also the guy who builds the parts of the automated machine probably isn't even an engineer, he's almost certainly a Chinese peasant inserting rod A into slot B.) If we're going to operate on that principle, since you've spent the whole day studying engineering you can fucking whistle for a doctor.
Nolan Sanchez
he doesn't need a doctor user, he has med-bot 2000 which he and his fellow technocrat STEMfag master race has designed in their garage out of his 30 mountain bikes.
Charles Kelly
Yeah, best of luck with that. I think personal responsibility is a safer bet. Might as well wait for Christ the savior because you have the.. innate soul worth saving or something. Nature doesnt work that way. You may thing you are entitled to automation, but people who got eaten by other people in some extreme circumstances probably also thought they were entitled to not being eaten.
I just dont see your entitlement to automation.
Cameron Long
Now i've remembered the image of a bike-kulak hoarding bicycles again and I'm smirking like an idiot. Bicycles! It wouldn't be funny if it was cars, or computers, or even fucking gnomes, but Bicycles! A house crammed to the rooftops with Bicycles!
I don't see your entitlement to oxygen, but here we are. really, that's the best you can do? in some unspeakably vague and general hypothetical example without specific circumstances where such an example could easily be googled and applied given there are both leading legal cases and famous movies of real world events based on such circumstances, something bad might happen which i imagine is vaguely contrary to my bizarre and inaccurate interpretation of your position. so there!
Matthew Davis
No one is entitled "to" automation. Automation isn't a fucking consumer good.
Automation is a factor that goes into a system of production, by way of making it more efficient. Since the 19th century it's been doing that and it's about to really kick it into high gear, as you well know.
What people are or not entitled to is not "automation", it is "stuff produced by automation".
And the reason the ENTIRE argument about what people do or do not deserve, what kind of work entitles them to what, etc, is because automation is so productive it makes allocation decisions like that meaningless, in and of itself. It doesn't take into account if what's being produced is really deserved by anyone - the law of value demands that production constantly expand, which is why we have crises of overproduction.
If you're going to study automation, you shouldn't think of it as some sort of cartoon object that people hold in their hands according to whether or not they earned it.
