The way I see it is that we have a problem of excessive greed. I even made a t-shirt that said, greedism, stealing from the poor to feed the rich.

I don't mind people making a profit but when banks and corps are pushing a 2% inflation a year, just to get more money, and they don't even give a raise, that is the root of the problem right there. Then they complain when minimum wage goes up, saying that it will kill jobs because they won't be able to pay their workers. That is total BS and they know it. Over a 3 year period they are making 6 to 10 percent or more than they were before and wages are stagnant, so that means that they are making even more profit.

It is a vicious cycle and it caused the last recession. They squeezed the workforce and since they didn't get the profit they wanted they laid people off. Then when sales dropped, because there were fewer people getting paid, they sheed even more of their workforce and on and on it went.

If you are going to have a consumer economy you have to have people who can actually buy services and products. That means you actually have to pay people to work for more than just hand to mouth money.

On the flip side, this could reap major benefits on the environmental side. That is, if people can still be usefully - but efficiently - engaged in the post-labor world.

As for metal printing, it's useful for some things but would be very inefficient for others. For example, to print a car's unibody would take a long time and a very large printer. To stamp and weld it? That's pretty quick. Granted, both processes are highly automated these days. For the machinery I work with, there would still be a large amount of regular machining and assembly work to build those machines, unless the designs themselves undergo a major revolution. And even then, the structural strength required does not lend itself to full adaptation of the near-future techniques.

That aside, it's more than just fabrication. Companies are working on automating such things as open-road trucking, where a single lead truck then guides a train of several other follow-on trucks, all drafting within a few feet for increased fuel efficiency. This is closer than we might think, as increasingly the bigger hurdles are legal and regulatory, not technical.

Back in 2004, I was working with a large factory system that took a lot of material handling out of the hands of forklift drivers and instead used driver-less lifts guided on a Local Positioning System in order to deliver raw materials to the production machinery. Now, this place employs a LOT of people, but the driver-less lifts allow for improved safety and also smaller aisles. In this case, automation made things better for the plant on the whole, including the workers.

There are certain industries that don't mold themselves as well to the most cutting-edge manufacturing tech, such as the industrial woodworking stuff that I deal with. Though, I suppose some of that is a matter of time. But like certain metal products, it would take quite a while to print a typical single kitchen cabinet unit (though possible, given the formulation of particle board) and would likely not be the best way to do things.

What I do see is that *some* of these processes require less and less brain power to accomplish. And that shows, given many of the operators I encounter. Slack-jawed is being generous in some cases, and this is a weakness in the advancement of technology. All of these advanced systems require basic maintenance, for instance, and I make my living by fixing stuff that is broken by the lack of 10 minutes of TLC each day. That said, the biggest complaint among my customers is finding and keeping good - or even mediocre - people.

Part of the problem is that we've moved away from quality craftsmanship to quantity production. Craft work - where actual skill determines the overall quality of a product - has been taken over, in part anyway, by the repeatable consistency of automation. This, is turn, may lead to lower wages since any swinging dick can push the buttons that drive the repeatable consistency. It's sort of self-fulfilling: automation allows lower wages, and lower wages means we need to make things cheaper. To make things cheaper, we need automation. Rinse, repeat. And there are certain products - the electronics our modern lives depend on, for instance - that wouldn't really be feasible with assembly by human hands. The more we demand those products made possible by high automation, the further we consumers are pushing the advances that are hurting labor.

But, but, there is still room for the experienced eye. There are certain things that we're simply better at than some sensor suite and a robot arm with a machining head.

Man has always looked for ways to make production easier, from everyday tasks to high-level craftsmanship. It might be simply a better way to hold the block of wood that the wood carver is working on, or better kilns to fire the clay pots, or an easier way to peel a potato. This is a pretty natural evolution of that goal, but taken to a vast scale. It was probably inevitable once the monkey first discovered it could poke a stick in the hole in the rotten log, to get at the food that was otherwise unobtainable.

What does all of this mean for labor? I'm not sure. I see both kinds of places in my travels: those where any warm body can do the job, and those where experience really does make a difference - even with automation in the picture - in the final product.

As consumers, we're at least partly to blame for whatever comes down the line.

To have an economy that is dedicated to the creation of debt, is to have an economy that is dedicated to the enslavement of the masses.

Wait, you work in the Beavis and Butt-Head industry??

Boobs and Buns. tinyE is a pimp.

Similar to manufacturing, not all "bureaucrat" jobs are equal. Some are more vulnerable to shifts in technology (or public policy & finance shifts) than others.

Once you get into these kinds of false premises, the rest of it just spirals downward into Marxist nonsense. :)

just two things to add:

1. no my job isn't fool proof, any fool can do my job as proof, I have several fools I work with.....
2. Wall-E is what it's coming down to we, Humans will polute the planet so bad we will need to leave it to survive, robots will do everything for us so we become sedentary, it's already happeneing

very accurate quote:


Matrix: Agent Smith: I like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I try to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively creates a natural equilibrium with it's surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.

In 20 years we will have even bigger headaches. Autonomous cars will displace millions who make a living by driving. There will be no more truck drivers, cab drivers etc. Actually if I think about it hard enough, I can't really think about many jobs that will be "safe" if the singularity happens.

There are two things that would fix the mess we're in: moderation, and contentment, which are prerequisite to achieving happiness. So I would say that it is ignorance that is the root of all evil, as it leaves us miserable and of foul temperament.

R&D + science. Yeah, definitely future-proof

Capitalism:

A shortsighted idealism that dictates that the only good skill a person can have is acquiring as much items of value a person can by any means necessary, creating a system of scathing inequality in the process and all other skills a person can have are worthless.

Well, since you love it you'll just have to take it and suck it up.

My job is to infiltrate factories and blow 3D printers and printed devices around the world. Therefore my job is futureproof and i see bright days ahead.
Hooray for Capitalism!!!

Unfortunately you've given a platform for all those revolutionary thinkers that understand "capitalism is the problem" to spout their half truths and misdirection. I particularly liked vsr's convenient ignorance of the fact Russia is also capitalist now (and significantly more leaky than the US). Personally I agree with you, if you look back through history at the growth in wealth of various countries, people have faired best under capitalism. In terms of bring people out of absolute poverty, the more closely aligned to capitalism a country has been, the better they have done (rising tide etc.). So yeah, in terms of how to run an economy - nobody has ever come up with anything better than capitalism. Your belief that we would all transition into robot maintainers was always a false hope I'm afraid. If the introducing of robots didn't reduce costs, they wouldn't do it. The way to reduce costs for nearly all businesses is to reduce headcount. Robots definitely will cost jobs, and from an economic perspective that's a good thing. One of the key drivers of an economy is productivity, i.e. output per person, so if one robot maintainer can replace 30 factory workers then economically it's a win. It does however mean 30 unemployed factory workers, and one in demand robot maintainer (I don't think the factory workers would train to maintain robots, too big a jump).

I think possibly one of the reasons you were thinking it would have no effect on employment, is because a lot of economists argue this. It's not that the factory workers won't lose their jobs, it's just that they'll get new ones. The Bank Of England tries to model expected employment, interestingly enough they don't factor trade into that model, nor do they factor in things like robots taking the jobs. It's been observed that employment rates are not bound to these factors, and generally if an area is prosperous, then there'll be work to do. It might be different work, the factory worker may start flipping burgers, or sweeping the floor in a trendy barber's shop, but they'll have a job.

The nice thing is that this is not a new thing. If you view robots purely as a productivity improvement, we've done this loads of times before. Probably most famous is the mechanisation of the UK textile industry, where the mills drew huge numbers to the cities, provided loads of jobs, gradually the mechanisation then made these jobs redundant (So the luddite movement emerged), and these workers moved onto other things. While all these people were moving to the cities, the tractor was changing the farming industry so that where a field required 50 workers, it suddenly required 1 (and one person to occassionally maintain the tractor). This drove cities to become even more focussed on provision of jobs, and factories sprung up building loads of new things, the assembly line came over from america, and more things started being made. Then there were some smart people that analysed workflow and efficiency patterns on the assembly line, and managed to improve productivity (thus reduce headcount) on those assembly lines. Unfortunately then there were a couple of wars with a depression in between. Then we got back on track introducing spreadsheets to replace the huge number of clerks, professional typists gradually saw that line of work fading away (I totally missed out the printing press, and publishing, but that was a similar story). Nowadays computer tech has meant that we no longer have half the types of jobs we had in the last century.

So, sorry to counter your wall of text with another wall of text, but the point is that productivity improvements have been driving our economy for centuries, their very objective is to destroy jobs, and it has worked out pretty well for us. Would you rather we hadn't introduced the tractor? It's also got nothing to do with capitalism, a communist country can still introduce robots, they'll just be state owned robots making the state owned companies more productive (they probably wouldn't though because most communist countries are terrible at managing an economy).

Also - SuperMeat! As a vegetarian that is purely one because I don't want to kill animals - I totally support that.

It's called post-scarcity economy, and quite frankly as far as I'm concerned it's the best thing that could happen to the world.

Post scarcity means that because everything is so cheap to make, from food to cars, that money is barely required (or not required). Sure, there will be few jobs we recognise today, but people will be able to survive on an income far lower then we do now. You might need £20k a year to live comfortably these days, in post scarcity you might get away with £1k because food costs pennies instead of pounds, or is given away for free.

There will be more art, more music, more books and games because all the people who are sitting in dead end jobs trying to make ends meet wishing they had the time to write their masterpiece would be able to.

It means an end to world hunger and poverty, and probably over crowding as it's proven that people have less children when they are in a safer more stable situation. It means we can build rockets and spaceships for a fraction of the cost and begin to colonise our solar system, ensuring one freak accident would no longer wipe out our whole species.

It is exactly Star Trek, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

I'm sure there will be downsides, problems and a period of adjustment when it does happen but over all I think it will be better for everyone in the end.