Automation Will Crash (Liberal/Bourgeoisie) Democracy
Automation and AI will proletarianize the professional classes that capitalist "democracy" relies upon for legitimacy during elections. I honestly can't wait.
Proletariat won't become obsolete. They will need people to build, maintain, service and upgrade the robots in thr beginning before the robots can do that themselves. A lot of people in CS are going into machine learning and we will see a big push for people to go into engineering and robotics soon.
Read Marx, comrade. Automation will change the organisation of labour and the social landscape.
Automation is a meme, on its own it may displace employees but the problems of unsustainable debt-fueled consumption and investment are far more important. Economic collapse brought about by that is far more pressing and will do far more damage than robots.
it's happening now. many jobs are simple labor and involve performing more or less physical activities that couldn't be done by some kind of computer or robot.
this is true.
automation isn't the real issue. the main problem is that due to the increasing ratio of constant to variable capital (i.e. money invested in machinery and facilities vs workers) the workers find themselves less and less valuable AND less able to negotiate for better wages since less workers are necessary for production. in addition, the built-in safety valve of small businesses forming that can utilize the slack in labor markets becomes more constrained to the increased cost of entry into any given industry.
also this.
If that were true, it would've happened two centuries ago when the Industrial Revolution multiplied overall productivity 10x in a generation, yet the newly surplus 90% of the labor force continued toiling.
Much of this was due to porky's hunger, some (more now) due to the genuine consumerist desire for greater standards of life, some even from the desire for faster progress.
Unless these limitless desires are consciously curbed to some degree in pursuit of leisure, employment will never decrease.
You can't invent your way to FALC
What you don’t understand that the more automation there is the more the rate of profit falls. This has always been true. When the rate of profit was the most stagnate, 1945-1970 and 1982-2008 were the periods of time with the least automation.
Certainly, capitalism is imploding (though this process is being slowed somewhat through laissez-faire offshoring/migration) but that in no way means what I said would inherently be solved by socialism (even if socialism would make such philosophical reforms likelier), nor that a failing capitalist system will necessarily be replaced by socialism rather than something even worse.
welcome to complete market control.
Automate to accelerate the malfunction of capitalism and heighten potential for a socialist turn
Should we all look to become automation technicians? en.wikipedia.org
Yes, automation will crash. Self-driving cars have already started.
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Self-driving cars are the biggest of memes. Do you really think the resources exist to replace the billion regular automobiles in existence? And that people will have the money to buy them? They also require extensive infrastructure to work well, and don't even prevent accidents unless everyone is driving them.
The only way autonomous vehicles are a 'threat' is if we lived in a Keynesian fantasy-land where the middle class still existed and resource constraints don't matter. If immiseration and the expanding reserve army of labor keep continuing, automation will become irrelevant as it will be cheaper to employ humans anyways. The only major significance of automation is that drones make human soldiers irrelevant, such that future wars by bourgeois states may be fought without having to recruit and keep loyal masses of trained soldiers.
That's not how how sages work.
Burger Porkies buy new cars every two years and that’s 50 million people alone, not even counting non-burger Porkies who probably also buy new cars very often.
Nearly everything you said is totally wrong. How do posters keep managing to do that? First - the only difference between a regular and self-driving car is a camera, laser and a computer. And yeah, we can make another billion of them pretty easily. They're not that resource intensive.
In any case, the change that autonomous cars will bring is independent of whether they get taken up by the consumer market. Frankly, autonomous cars probably won't get taken up by the consumer market at all without being forced to by legislation or extreme subsidy. Level 5 autonomy, even if it was close to perfect, is unattractive to consumers - people inordinately trade higher risk for the sense of personal control.
In any case, it doesn't matter whether autonomous cars break into the consumer market. They only have to break into logistics to tip the system way the fuck out of whack. Trucking businesses will be pretty much forced to ditch their entire workforce the minute Level 5 autonomy becomes viable for trucks. The advantages of autonomous trucks are too great. You simply couldn't push truckers' wages down far enough to make human employment viable.
So even if autonomous cars never take off in the consumer market, there's millions of truckers who are going straight out of work. Not to mention taxi drivers, delivery drivers, etc, etc. Even if you could push human wages down below the deprecation cost of the autonomous piloting systems (itself an absurd proposition, considering that there are few, if any, moving parts), a human-piloted vehicle simply isn't capable of the same hours as an auto.
Ignoring this tech or trying to reverse it won't make it go away. You are right about one thing: Wages are headed straight fucking down. The wages system as a whole is heading toward an irreparable crisis. We need to be politically prepared for that. Calling for weaksauce Keynsian policies or socdem bullshit clearly isn't going to work. We need to be arguing for a real alternative.
Though it might seem paradoxical, I think this alternative might involve encouraging and exacerbating this trend. We should be arguing for wages and hours to go to zero as quickly as possible. We should be encouraging ever-greater automation to wipe out ever-larger numbers of jobs, and we should be simultaneously fighting for shorter workweeks and better conditions, to make employing people ever more expensive and difficult. The capitalists, short-sighted as they are, don't want to have to employ labor - let's give it to them so much they fucking choke on it. As wage payouts become smaller and smaller, the ability of capitalists to convert their commodities back into money will become more and more difficult.
Capitalists do everything in their power to avoid paying wages, because a dollar not spent on labor is a dollar of immediate profit - but without wages there is no exchange, without exchange there is no realization of profit, and without profits capitalism becomes untenable.
So we should be encouraging the capitalists in their quest to drive us out of the production process. We should be making it as difficult as possible to profitably employ us, by demanding everything we can. We should be making automated labor the most attractive thing in the world to the capitalists. We should be giving them the rope with which they hang their whole rotten fucking system.
Same thing happened with the shift from paper to computers, technology alone has never, can never, will never reduce employment.
We need a conscious policy decision, like France's 35-hour workweek, nothing else will cause any change.
Oh really why don’t you got to a rural area and ask them if automated agricultural technology has had any effect on employment there?
Of course, infinite demand will show up for more things to be delivered! People will order these extra things with the huge savings they get on delivery payments! I mean they wont have jobs but they will save 20 dollars on amazon orders so it balances out. I have no confidence in the idea of this delivery boom being big enough to match the number of jobs lost. Automated delivery vehicles wouldn't create traffic controller roles for the same reason we have automated stop lights now, that's one of the few "thinking" tasks computers already just do better than human beings. There will likely be less vehicles on the roads, not more thanks to more efficient delivery through automated vehicles so even if demand for delivery were to increase, mechanics certainly won't be in greater demand, they will just also need some basic training in diagnosing issues with the new parts and replacing them. The same goes for inspectors, existing inspectors will just adapt to the new roles there isn't any job creation here.
Plus this goes way beyond long distance transport of goods, here in australia the mining industry is working on replacing workers with self driving trucks and already has estimates on how many jobs they can cut. They aren't worried about having to do a little short term infrastructure work or hiring one or two inspectors when they cut way more than that. Do you think all those people will magically flock to another industry? The truck makers aren't expanding, they are just swapping to automated trucks. Where are the jobs meant to come from?
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Thats just replacing retail workers with automated delivery. Those arent comparable technologies, creating something new and streamlining existing work are not the same. As telegraphs were replaced by more efficient means new shit that required labor was appearing, there is no such new area at the moment except arguably the "sell information about yourself" sector. Older automation never created jobs, its just there were jobs waiting. That is no longer the case and unemployment is rising permenantly whilst wages drop further below inflation.
It reduced the amount of people employed in agriculture if the advanced agricultural technology came without the industrial revolution there’d be mass unemployment.
The Internet isn’t an innovation of the telegraph. There two completely separate inventions.
It's replacing something expensive, slow, geographically limited, and inconvenient, with something that will allow and encourage higher rates of consumption.
Yes, that is what happened:
ourworldindata.org
Teletype, the primary form of telegraph from the 1950s onward when computers came into being, was the main interface both on-site and long-distance to control and network computers, remaining so clear until dial-up modems and dumb terminals were phased out in the 2000s. Even now, parts of TTS remain deeply embedded in the software and hardware of networking equipment and command line interfaces.