Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Is Capitalism Flawed?
by
deisik
on 01/08/2017, 14:00:04 UTC

This is what people typically say

They innocently assume that all this automation appears out of thin air like banks are creating money. But industrial production is not banking. All these robots have to be first designed and then manufactured somewhere, and I promise you that somewhere deep down the line there will always be quite a lot of human labor involved. To get an idea, look at the history of automotive industry. It seems like it destroyed quite a few jobs in some sectors but it created many more jobs in other sectors as well as created entirely new ones. It's the same with automation and robotics, they just move human labor to other fields, and since they are more complex technologies, this necessarily means that more human labor is required in other fields. In other words, you can't escape the complexity loop

But average people cant take complex jobs

A few hundred years ago people were completely illiterate

They couldn't even read (let alone write), and so what? Complex jobs can be simplified to the point when your average Joe can do them (this is what division of labor basically means). Indeed, the jobs that can be automated will be automated, but the great divide remains unshaken, i.e. some jobs can't be done by robots, as simple as that. Apart from that, what AI are you talking about? This field has been stagnating for over fifty years already. All the recent "advances" have been entirely due to quantitative improvements only (more memory, more processing power, more specialized chips, etc). There is no true artificial intelligence as of yet and may never be (in the sense we think of it), it still essentially comes down to an incredibly complex set of conditions (if-else)