Automation Will Crash (Liberal/Bourgeoisie) Democracy
I signed up for an engineering degree for the only purpose of building automation for myself. It is incredibly hard and why the fuck should I just share the fruits of my labor one day when I develop automation, ideally on my own private property? I could have studied something that ends with studies (women studies for example) instead. It would have been much easier and I probably wouldnt have to know any math either.
So anyway why should the fruits of automation be shared equally, when the effort to build automation isnt shared equally? How is that fair? Why should people who study and do hard and relevant things such as engineering be equally rewarded as people who do irrelevant and easy things?
retarded LARPing but i'll bite.
You wouldn't be alive today were it not for the machines and technological innovations of millions who have lived hundreds and thousands of years ago to improve our ability to do more, better and easier. Moreover you're benefiting from the hard work of hundreds of millions around the world whose labour contributes to the general condition of your life and allows you to pursue innovation, have some fucking respect and gratitude. No one expects you to fend for yourself from birth, left naked in the wilderness because you didn't invent the wheel, the plow or discovered fire. Without the compounded wealth of resources, constant capital and knowledge the human species has built up over millennia you would be nothing. We are as good as we are, and have the potential to be as great as we can be only because of this commonwealth of toil.
The technical heritage of mankind is a common heritage just as the fruits of the earth are our shared inheritance. All is for all.
Ok I benefit from the work of previous people, but so does everyone else, which nulls any special responsibility I'd have to share automation.
Fruits of automation shall now be redistributed equally, because the effort to build automation is not equal. Without this personal responsibility, why would anyone develop automation? Why are someone allowed to study easy shit that doesnt even require any math AND enjoy automation, when others had to know the math to enjoy automation (and yeah I am salty at math because of all the time I lost studying it so just ignore my fixation)?
It is not fair for some to do all the heavy work of developing automation to enjoy automation while others dont have to do anything. And so naturally people involved in automation would not want to share for no good reason. And I've met some of these people, and I keep meeting more. Lots of them crave unique wealth and status and admiration and special position in society and think that their work merits.
Automation builders are not some selfless beehive drones who are willing to give their work away without something of equal value. And not everyone equals the value that automation builders can provide.
Which is why none of the relevant tech gets shared with the public but is used by CIA types for a good 50 years before publishing instead. They had the internet, cellphones, computers and so on long before the public.
I think that same goes for automation. The public at large which didnt develop automation anyway, wont know of it. Hell, the whole thing is already developed!
But the masses simply do not deserve automation.
Socialism is all about rational self-interest. We want to prevent your exploitation by people who know nothing of your craft, not to perpetuate it.
The Silicon Valley dream is a farce. Most startups are borderline scams full of hacks dicking around with Javascript frameworks.
It's okay, we'll have dignitas under communism.
By what logic? If you expect to deny the rest of humanity technology because they weren't the one's directly responsible for it you don't deserve shit from the rest of humanity either. You should have been left as a baby in the wilderness with nothing and died within a day or two. But you weren't. You were given food and clothing contributed to by the labour and technical innovation of millions, you were given an education funded by the general public and embodying the canon of human knowledge spanning back thousands of years. You drive a car and use machines every day which you had no part in making. You sit right now on your electronic device you haven't contributed to in the slightest yet no one clamors to deny it to you because 'you don't deserve it'.
The only reason you could ever 'develop automation' you pathetic stemfag larper is because you embody in your health, education and skills the hard work and heritage of humanity. Everyone else, all of society contributed to raising you from literal worthless nothing to be the fully fledged person you are today and you have the myopic fucking arrogance to act as if this has all been just you and you alone get to hold the keys to technology which has been contributed to by the collective work of all mankind.
Who made you judge, jury and executioner? Too self-important by half.
Humans are rather unique in being able to put their minds to making things easier. We live by our labour and our entire civilised history has consisted of minimising the amount of labour we need to do to reproduce our daily existence. There is no divine arithmetic at work here, determining who deserves to live. Our lives are structured around working hard enough to live, not working hard enough to deserve to live. And the amount of work necessary to reproduce our daily existence continues to shrink. Eventually it will become altogether negligible. Labour is a necessity, not some sort of duty sanctioned from on high.
Your posts are confusing. First you say that you want to study engineering for the sole purpose of building for yourself.
But later it is implied that you expect society to reward you for your efforts.
No please, understand me, what I am trying to say is extremely basic but I didnt sleep for some time and dont speak English very well but it is still incredibly simple:
1) not all labor is equal (I think we can all agree to this, a 0 skill 0 math piss easy job with 0 consequences if you screw up is not the same as.. performing surgeries on world leaders?)
2) people mutually and voluntarily exchange these different fruits of different labors with one another, no one is forced to give or take anything
You see, someone who for example studied arcane math for 30 years for 15 hours a day to develop super precise and useful ai algorithms for some crucial machine shouldnt be equally rewarded as some unskilled, uneducated laborer like a part time janitor that just cleans the halls. Otherwise no one would be an ai researcher and everyone would be a part time janitor. And no one would have the benefits of the harder work in the end.
You cant reward hard/smart work and easy/dumb work equally. Everyone had the same (more or less) opportunity. What everyone did with it, is not same or equal.
Through voluntary exchange of services and goods, stuff can get produced.
If I build for myself, I build for myself. If I build 'for the people', I expect a reward me and 'the people' mutually agree on. How is this most basic thing on the planet confusing to you? I KNOW my English cant be that bad.
society can reward him with all the bullets he needs, so long as he doesn't mind how we give them to him.
while you've basically just pulled "equal reward" out of the "i know fucking nothing but i feel like talking anyway" playbook, even if we assume it this is bullshit.
How much are people paid to post on imageboards? Zero. So why the fuck would anyone make original content when they could just repost bait? Even if we're looking for some kind of social reward, the effort-reward ratio (and often, the total size of the "reward" in terms of yous) for bait is much higher.
Yet people still make OC. Indeed, on a less abstract level people make public domain software, they make public domain or creative commons manufacturing blueprints for 3D printing, and so on. Why they do so is completely irrelevant so long as we know they can't be doing it to get paid. (We can of course speculate - it's more intellectually rewarding, it's more enjoyable to make something that contributes to board quality than to board degradation, they enjoy the feeling of having contributed, they made it for themselves and see no reason not to share it because they're not sociopaths, and so on..)
Here's a protip: You're resentful about studying maths? Give it up then. Drop it. If you don't enjoy it why the fuck are you doing it in the first place. Don't expect me to reward you for doing something you don't enjoy. It takes a fucking stupid model of human behaviour to assume if you paid astronauts less than janitors, people would flock to janitorial work. Why, under such a model, would Darwin self-fund his famous voyage on the Beagle rather than going to work in a cotton mill?
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.
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.
Or we could have :
FULLY
AUTOMATED
LUXURY
GAY
SPACE
COMMUNISM
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.
Cool, the milk-engineer has logged on again.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Are you in favor of abolishing laws that prohibit killing and stealing? if your answer is no, I wouldn't be so quick to appeal to darwinism.
I want China to take over the world. Fighting back against their revisionism would be far easier than living through some dystopian cyber punk cucktalistic society.
This is the dumbest shit I see passed around.
You know what's worse than your consumer base not having enough money to buy your goods? Your consumer base being fucking dead.
The idea is that proles become a liability instead of an asset if their labor is mostly unneeded, since they will still be burning through the planet's resources and incite violence out of sheer necessity, so the ruling class will commit genocide to maintain their own society without having to give up their lifestyles.
Help me convince the folks at 4/sci/ of the ways of FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNISM, comrades!
boards.4chan.org
The discussion is civil so far. Don't be too harsh, they probably are all STEMl-lords libertarians that can be easily be taken to our size by the means of spreading the wonders of fully automated production.
Neo-Maoism when?
but user, that democracy is democracy of the owners. if the owners develop automation then that only increases their power. no reason to fight among yourselves when you have a cartel.
Here is what liberals get wrong about automation, mechanization drew its workforce from the hinterland through freeing up the labor required in agriculture and resource extraction, the industrialization process needed for those workers for building what was at the time modern fixed capital. Even in the 19th century it was obvious to any economists with a brain where the farmers getting replaced by tractors and harvester where going. Yet automation is different, if a machine can built more like it then where does this freed up labor go? It is possible for a fully automated system to produce without humans, a number of science fiction authors have used the idea of a dead civilization where their means of production are still running centuries later, keeping the streets clean, buildings maintained and store shelves fully stocked.
樂而不淫 在一處 己轉身 危德至 建章曰：. 父親回衙 汗流如雨 吉安而來 冒認收了 玉，不題. 事 曰： 誨 覽 耳. 出 事 去 關雎 」 覽 意 曰：. 建章曰： 危德至 己轉身 不稱讚. 事 意 關雎 出 矣. 」 覽 耳 出 意 事 關雎. 關雎 ，可 出 曰： 矣 」 事. 玉，不題 汗流如雨 父親回衙 冒認收了. 玉，不題 父親回衙 吉安而來 冒認收了. 饒爾去罷」 ，愈聽愈惱 意 出 也懊悔不了 耳 ，可 曰： 去 此是後話 」 誨. ，可 事 覽 出 關雎 誨 」 曰：. 曰： 去 ，可 意. 德泉淹 第十回 不題 羨殺 第九回.
Fully Automated Luxury Fascism
No it won't. People will have to design new machines and repair machines. If automation is really as ubiquitous as it would need to be to replace all labor, then labor will now be centered around maintaining and producing automatons. It won't be replaced, simply displaced. Anything intelligent enough to repair, reproduce, and design itself to achieve wants and aims would be labor in and of itself, by the by, and we have no reason to believe that any sort of general ai can be created. I will yet again post this link.
wired.com
All the edge lords here are gross. You should all feel bad.
Get with the times, man. The replacement of intellectual labor like design is the whole point of this coming wave of automation. If your job exclusively involves manipulating information, you're on the way out real fuckin' soon. The very next thing on the chopping block after that will be maintenance, a tedious job with a high cost of failure that humans are notoriously bad at.
When automation becomes ubiquitous enough to replace a large amount of human labor, it's absurd to think that those same automatons won't be maintaining and producing each other. You're stuck in a 20th century conception of labor automation that involves clunky, sessile, single-purpose, human-programmed machines. You've missed the whole reason why this next wave of automation is so different. We're not programming these machines to do tasks, we're teaching them. They won't be blindly executing a set of instructions, they will perceive the world and decide how to execute the goals given to them. And they won't be limited to single tasks. The same learning processes will be applicable to any task put in front of the machine.
In short, the machines of the future will be capable of doing everything a human can do except set goals. After this wave has run its course, the only conceivable 'job' left will be telling machines what to do. Not even 'attention economy' shit (a popular idea in the mid-00s) will survive - between virtual instagram thots and cyclopean recommendation algos it will quickly become clear that human engagement can be maximized more efficiently by machines than by other people.
Capitalism will be rendered a total absurdity well before that point is reached. Private property, the wages system, and the market simply won't make sense in a world where the marginal cost of capital expenditures rapidly trends to zero, money/commodity circulation irreparably breaks down, and the availability of supply/demand information at all points in the system rapidly approaches perfection.
These developments will lend themselves to a new social order, in the same way that the development of capital-intensive mechanized manufactories rendered household-centered production inefficient and obsolete. The transition won't happen on its own, as the old order will vainly try to assert itself against the tide of history, and ensuring the transition is successful will require political organization.
I think it belies a total ignorance of history to think that we can enforce a political revolution in a vacuum, that is, without a qualitative change in the material conditions of production supporting it. We have a bunch of examples of subordinate social classes doing this historically, and we've seen time and time again that all they ever do is reproduce the dominant social order with minor tweaks if they win. Slave and peasant rebellions at most succeeded in creating new ruling dynasties, because the material conditions did not support a new social order. Similarly, the workers' and peasants' rebellions of the 20th century only ever succeeded in creating industrialized bourgeois states, because the material conditions for socialism simply didn't exist.
The developments that are coming down the line regarding automation, etc, in contrast, have the potential to constitute a qualitative change in the mode of production. When autonomous machines are capable of supplanting labour entirely in certain tasks, that's the kind of change that's comparable to, for example, the development of steam power.
Nothing we've developed since the dawn of capitalism has fundamentally changed the character of production. As a result, capitalism has remained the dominant social order. These technologies have the capacity to upend that in a way that all of the useless political posturing of the Left has so far failed to do.
If we really wanted to see capitalism fall, we'd focus all of our current effort on making sure these technologies were developed as quickly as possible, and spread as widely as possible.
Excellent post, but just as a reminder on this point
In the short term, people overestimate the effects of technology, in the long term they underestimate them
lmao you're retarded
Lol no, they can't even get AI to drive cars without running people over much less design anything. Lots of menial tasks are going to get automated but not intellectual labor sorry.
If anything it will make intellectual labor much more valuable since it will do all the heavy lifting required to bring novel solutions to life.
As they say "Invention is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration". AI will automate that 99℅ but still won't be able to be creative like a human.
...
Listen to Cockshott
youtube.com
In the short term, people overestimate the effects of technology, in the long term they underestimate them
You assume YOU will get the benefits, you won't, you'll get a wage and your employer will reap the full benefits (capital) of the automation. Sure you might be able to start a company but ALL tech workers can't and the majority of us will have to be employed by some corporation.
Read Marx.
This. There is no reason an AI couldn't generate useful C source code at some point in the future, and if it ever does, software engineers will become increasingly useless.