Our Civilization does'nt need us all to work. Now what?

when we will grow up consciously in such a way that love for power will be nothing compared to power of love then this will all seem so meaningless. We should be happy that less work is required due to automation of process, so we could do more with our life and do stuff we really want to do. We should ALL share what we have got, there is enough resources for anyone everywhere!

But when money is a gauge for happinesses this is just a nice dream. Our society needs change, money was maybe the upside when it started but now it seems likely that soon this bubble will burst and it will be downside also. We have almost outgrown from it or we will when free energy will be available.

I mean if we think far into the future when every imaginable work will be done with robots or machines, what will we do than for money or work? We have to take that into account or we will face a lot of suffering maybe even more than it is already present today if we don't choose the right path now.

love, compassion, sharing, unity. This principles must develop in our conciousness, until then we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

originally posted by: jonnywhite
a reply to: ForteanOrg
In your dream worldit does, but not in the real one.

There was a mr King who had a dream once. Most of it came true

In the real one we

.. no, in the real world YOU ..

increase our expectations of what a good life is.

Not really. In my youth we pretty much had the same expectations of what a good life was: good home, good food, good company, good health and proper education. The same goes today.

Soon people will want much more out of life. They will want to travel to other planets even.

Some, but most will not. I guess most would much more like to have a cure for (fatal) illnesses, see hunger and misery removed from the surface of the earth and ensure that we treat this place - our place - with decency.

This means our society will have to produce ever greater amounts of energy and science. Unless you think free energy is real, we will always struggle to produce it and distribute it and use it for various means.

Yes, we will have a much better chance of developing if we have many more people working as scientists, imagineers and artists. That's exactly what I guess will happen if we loose the "need" to labour like slaves. Let machines do what they do best, let humans do likewise. We are not born to go to a boring place to do some boring job each day - let a machine do it, I say. And liberate the poor soul that had to do that boring job to get a life (unless he really LIKES doing that boring job, but it's up to him).

Humans will go all out.

Maybe in your dreamworld they will, but in the real world..

(I couldn't resist, sorry).

But yes, we will see more integration of people and systems, I'm sure. There are some that think that the smartphone is the first step and I tend to believe them if I see how welded to their screens some are

They will combine with the machines and the AI. The best of the best will go to the stars or other dimensions or wherever only the best go. Again, unless you believe free energy exists (or perpetual motion), society will STILL have to balance its budget and give unto others what they're accounted for.

Of course we need energy. But our sun provides limitless amounts of it, it's just a matter of harvesting it. Look at Germany for example, where a large chunk of their energy already is generated using solar panels and wind turbines. Also, we now have far more efficient devices, so we can do more with less. So, I don't see "energy" as a real problem, it's our attitude that's the real problem. We have been lured into a world in which 1 percent of the people decides over the rest and they don't have OUR best interest at heart. There lies the real problem.

This means nothing will ever be free, even a basic "free" income.

See, that's were we differ. The entire "free" or "not free" discussion is a little trick of greedy bastards that preach 'scarcity' to force you into wililngly give up your freedom to work for them - as their slaves. Take a step back and look: there is but one Sun close to us and ALL energy we have originates from it. We can't steer it, we CAN, however, decide we need to become more efficient to harvest that energy and stop allowing some freaks to thrive on our needs. That's all.

Even homeless people today get limited "free" food/clothes/shelter/etc. But would any sane person consider that an ideal circumstance, even if a homeless person has a living standard of a 17th century king? Not people who've changed their expectations! People don't normally hold old living standards in high regard.

Acually, today's homeless people aren't even NEAR the standard of living of a 17th century king. But it is true that our standard has risen a bit - at least materially. And yes, we should continue to develop - but we should spread our newly acquired wealth evenly over all people, not like it is done now.

Expectations increase. And nothing is truly free.

Both aren't necessarily so. Expectations increase - but only because we humans tend to break the upward spiral by allowing wars, economic disasters, unnecessary spreading of diseases, unsafe technology etc. setting us back decades or even centuries at times. So, we need to be preprogrammed to expect more - only to be set back by a few in an everlasting cycle of building up and tearing down. That system is mostly driven by propaganda by the ones that profit from all that. If we simply would stop that and allow the upward spiral to continue, we would soon have reached the anarchistic ubiquity I was talking about before - and we would say "enough is enough, we're happy here". We have limited lifespans and it can't take anything with us and even if we'd live a 1000 years - there is only so much you can and need to do. Enough is enough - it are the likes of you, with their unfounded model of economic growth, the necessity of everlasting expectations and other hoghwash that burden our race. Cease!

Also, actually EVERYTHING is truly free, but we humans aren't allowing ourselves to see it like that. This because the greedy bastards still are able to convince the sheep of stupid ideas like "scarcity", so they can rise above the masses. They are truly sick, but instead of curing them, we praise them and want to be like them. Bah.

Conservation of energy doesn't permit that. That's the reason utopia is unlikely. I won't say it's impossible. I won't say it's impossible for us to separate desire from the material. I can't preclude the possibility humans can be satisfied or cooperative no matter their lot in life; great or small.

We're getting there, we're getting there! Keep up your hope, I'd almost say: keep up your expectations - at least for now, as we aren't there yet!

EDIT: That's where all those productivity improvements went: to higher expectations. We invested the extra production.

Nope. We created a class of filthy rich bastards that think they will iive forever and create ever bigger and bigger piles of money that YOU earn by working your tail off, partially in misery. They think that's allright, as they are our "employers" and "bosses" and "kings" or "mullahs" or whatever. They fieel they have the right to decide for us instead of with us and screw you over twice a day. We should really stop bending over voluntarily..

And our expectations are tied to progress. We EXPECT greater energy production and finer technologies. That encourages it to keep on. If everybody's expectations were stuck in the 17th century, it would grind to a stop. Research would shrivel. And hence the danger presented by disasters would increase. We may not survive because we didn't research.

If people will eventually live longer - perhaps a few hundred years - they will be able to live long enough to develop new types of skills. But as it is now, the greed of a few and the stupidity of the masses is the far greater problem. I can't cure the first, but we can educate the masses.

Mmm. That sounds familiar .. now doesn't it..

originally posted by: Realtruth
Sure would be nice to just enjoy the day without having to worry about working 40 to 60 hours a week, then we could just enjoy family and friends.

And double the population of the planet every few years. The robots ain't gonna like that. They're going to want those resources to make their own babies.

originally posted by: onequestion
I recommend we start by eliminating homeless and mentally ill people first. Then anyone on welfare and food stamps after that. Next we can eliminate anyone making under 250k a year.

In the future, if you can't repair a robot, you're not going to be needed. And after the robots design better robot repair robots, those people will be out of a job.

And then we can just lounge around all day and eat bon bons!

Until the robots decide to just reduce us to gray goo and incorporate us into themselves.

Keep your head in the sand if you like but whoomp here it is.

samsung-south-korea-robots-cheap-labour

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: onequestion
I recommend we start by eliminating homeless and mentally ill people first. Then anyone on welfare and food stamps after that. Next we can eliminate anyone making under 250k a year.

In the future, if you can't repair a robot, you're not going to be needed. And after the robots design better robot repair robots, those people will be out of a job.

And then we can just lounge around all day and eat bon bons!

Until the robots decide to just reduce us to gray goo and incorporate us into themselves.

Vacation Civilization.

a reply to: Xeven

One of many reasons Capitalism is failing is because we can produce everything we need with very few of us. We don't need us all to work. We just don't seem to want to admit that as we progress technologically, that most of us will be jobless.

Computer programmer here. Computers can't do everything. We still have many jobs that people need to do, especially truck drivers. The autonomous truck or car is nearly there technologically, but it has a long way to go before it's accepted and made available politically. 99.7% of US companies have less than 500 employees. Almost none of these can afford a machine to stuff product into boxes. Limited welding can be done by machine but the machines still have to be loaded by people. People still have to do the more complicated welds.

Computers can't even reliably convert a PDF (via OCR) to an EPUB book with flowing text. (That happens to be my hobby.) Even with 99% accuracy at the word level, there is 1% inaccruacy. Now if you have 1 million words total in a text, you have 10,000 words that are wrong, but you don't know which ones are wrong, so you have to check all 1 million. Or at least get a spell checker involved. Which still won't find all the errors.

But the shift in jobs is towards low skills jobs with even lower pay where people can't pay their bills. They bought their expensive house when wages were high, now the economy doesn't support $60,000 a year for janitors. That's one change we're looking at.

I am a drywall taper and I don't think a robot would even want the job lol. All joking aside I think its going to be a very long time like maybe 75 to 100 years before robots can completely take over skilled jobs.

Jobs like; electricians, plumbers, roofers, stucco, drywall, framing, crane operator, heavy machinery, firefighter, engineer and things requiring on the spot problem solving and travelling will be securely human for the next half century. Get into a trade is my advice.

originally posted by: bulrush
Computers can't even reliably convert a PDF (via OCR) to an EPUB book with flowing text. (That happens to be my hobby.) Even with 99% accuracy at the word level, there is 1% inaccruacy. Now if you have 1 million words total in a text, you have 10,000 words that are wrong, but you don't know which ones are wrong, so you have to check all 1 million. Or at least get a spell checker involved. Which still won't find all the errors.

Changing this is simply a matter of time, as time goes on we're going to be more likely to use fonts that are easily machine readable, and we're going to be less likely to be scanning in hand written paper documents. Given enough time services like recaptcha can handle the problem of word verification but that's contingent on the idea that we can maintain a need for word captcha and that we can stop increasing the amount of words we need to verify.

But the shift in jobs is towards low skills jobs with even lower pay where people can't pay their bills. They bought their expensive house when wages were high, now the economy doesn't support $60,000 a year for janitors. That's one change we're looking at.

This is an inevitable part of specialization even in jobs that previously required precision knowledge. Look at auto manufacturers for example. Each person (or rather a group of machines overseen by a person) does one specific task, no one needs to know how to fully assemble a car. Most jobs fall into this category.

The bottom line with wages though is this: 40 years ago we doubled the work force by making it common place for women to work if they wanted to. That dropped wages to the point where women had to work, and we've transitioned from single to dual income households. In those last 40 years we've tripled productivity with half of that happening in just the last 10. More productivity means less labor is needed so that's exacerbating our glut of labor. Until we reduce the supply of labor wages aren't going to go back up, and we can't simply arbitrarily start kicking people out of the work force which means the solution needs to either involve letting people voluntarily drop out of the work force while still having their needs and some wants met or we need to reduce the labor each person can offer from the typical 40 hours per week to something much less like 20 or 25.

Also, I think your timetable on driverless cars is too long. Making a driverless car is relatively easy, it's making it behave in a safe fashion on a road full of unpredictable humans that's hard but we're almost there. I think that once we get it down there will be incentives for people to make the transition fairly quickly (probably including conversion kits for existing cars) precisely because the most dangerous combination on the road is having some driverless and some human driven cars.

why not the kimks.....LOL. jk. not really. seriously. i like turtles. measuring iqs is the answer.


a reply to: onequestion

you get a manito parriba
a reply to: ForteanOrg