I just read Part 1 and Part 2 of this 3-part article (not sure if part 3 exists yet):
While reading, it occurred to me how computers, robots, and machines in general may cause a total economic collapse and mass starvation (assuming the plague, comets, ice age, climate change, and psychopaths don't do the job first, although psychopathy is very much related to the automation/computerization issue too).
So let me start by quoting a curious passage from the C's:
One interpretation of this passage is something akin to the Terminator/Skynet scenario where intelligent/psychopathic machines decide to kill us all. However, an entirely different scenario suddenly occurred to me while reading the above articles and thinking about the C's quote, and it just seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense and appears to be much more immediate.
Basically, picture a simplified economic model as it now exists - people produce goods/services, for which they get paid, and then spend that money on other people's goods/services and "donate" some to government via taxes as well. Now let's introduce computers/robots into the mix.
Let's say a company replaces one of its workers with a robot because the robot is 10% more efficient at the same job, and for simplicity's sake, let's say the company also has to spend 10% less money on the robot than it paid the human worker. So that's a 20% gain for the company all around. Now that worker goes home without a job, and let's assume he can't just go get a different job - what happens next? Well he needs money to eat and live, where will it come from if he can't work because he was replaced by a machine? The government? Unemployment benefits? Let's explore those scenarios a bit. And let's say that person represents about half the country or more, all of whom just got replaced with robots.
The government gets its money from taxes, which come out of people's paychecks - but if people don't have jobs, they don't get paychecks, and don't pay taxes, so the government won't have the money to give to people once enough people are replaced with machines.
Fine, let's turn to the companies that fired them - they are making extra profits and spending smaller amount of resources on the new robots (20% gains total in our example) - the government can mandate that they use those "savings" and hand them out as unemployment benefits indefinitely to support the unemployed. But right now it's only 20% gains from the robots, so at most, strictly speaking, the companies can only give the people 20% of their previous salaries as indefinite unemployment benefits. Any more than that and the companies would be taking a loss, which would make the robots not worth it economically, and they might as well hire the people back.
Not to mention with enough people out of work, nobody is spending on the goods/services being produced by the robots either, so the companies will start failing left and right with their robots. Essentially what has occurred is relocation of resources - instead of paying people, the companies are spending resources to maintain robots, which in essence is like "paying" the robots, which is a form of outsourcing, except humans are no longer recipients of resources, machines are.
The only way I could see this actually working out economically is if each robot is equal to at least 2 people as far as economic benefit to the company goes. Then the company could, in principle, support the person they laid off indefinitely, giving them the same salary they were making - and also maintaining the machine, since the machine is working as hard as 2 humans and so while the company wouldn't reap any benefit, they wouldn't take a loss. Benefit would come when machine is better than 2 humans.
But robots will take time to "get there" technologically - at first they will be only marginally more beneficial to a company, but certainly something like 20% or even 40% more efficiency sounds extremely lucrative to any company, and I don't imagine any of them having the foresight to wait until the benefit is at least double or more so that all those out of work people could literally not have to work, and still live comfortably. As the C's said, they are "money hungry" and truly psychopathic in nature, they have no concern for social stability, they are short-sighted and like a parasite that infests and kills the body because its hunger couldn't be satiated, they will not stop consuming/infecting until everything is dead.
So perhaps computers will overpower us because money-hungry psychopathic corporations will use them instead of humans to do work, without considering the consequences, without considering how to viably restructure society to ensure human survival in an economy where jobs for humans no longer exist. Humans can only survive in a society that no longer depends on jobs as long as the robots that replace them are cheap/efficient enough to support the jobless humans as well as themselves. Otherwise the resources must either go to humans OR robots since robots aren't yet good enough to support both, and because the initial robots are marginally more efficient, but the margin is enough to make corporations salivate at the immediate profits, companies are already jumping on board to replace humans, without thinking this through.
Anyway this just makes a lot of sense to me, and as the article points out, the effects of this are already being felt, and they are accelerating in the coming months/years.
Here's an interesting recent SOTT article that brings the point home:
http://www.sott.net/article/257013-Goodbye-fast-food-jobs-First-robot-restaurant-opens-in-China
And here is a very interesting sci-fi short story about the very real prospects of replacing human labor with machines, and keeping the majority of humanity in an animal-like state because they are no longer needed, and how such a society might actually be structured in a terrifying not too distant future:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
While reading, it occurred to me how computers, robots, and machines in general may cause a total economic collapse and mass starvation (assuming the plague, comets, ice age, climate change, and psychopaths don't do the job first, although psychopathy is very much related to the automation/computerization issue too).
So let me start by quoting a curious passage from the C's:
C's said:
One interpretation of this passage is something akin to the Terminator/Skynet scenario where intelligent/psychopathic machines decide to kill us all. However, an entirely different scenario suddenly occurred to me while reading the above articles and thinking about the C's quote, and it just seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense and appears to be much more immediate.
Basically, picture a simplified economic model as it now exists - people produce goods/services, for which they get paid, and then spend that money on other people's goods/services and "donate" some to government via taxes as well. Now let's introduce computers/robots into the mix.
Let's say a company replaces one of its workers with a robot because the robot is 10% more efficient at the same job, and for simplicity's sake, let's say the company also has to spend 10% less money on the robot than it paid the human worker. So that's a 20% gain for the company all around. Now that worker goes home without a job, and let's assume he can't just go get a different job - what happens next? Well he needs money to eat and live, where will it come from if he can't work because he was replaced by a machine? The government? Unemployment benefits? Let's explore those scenarios a bit. And let's say that person represents about half the country or more, all of whom just got replaced with robots.
The government gets its money from taxes, which come out of people's paychecks - but if people don't have jobs, they don't get paychecks, and don't pay taxes, so the government won't have the money to give to people once enough people are replaced with machines.
Fine, let's turn to the companies that fired them - they are making extra profits and spending smaller amount of resources on the new robots (20% gains total in our example) - the government can mandate that they use those "savings" and hand them out as unemployment benefits indefinitely to support the unemployed. But right now it's only 20% gains from the robots, so at most, strictly speaking, the companies can only give the people 20% of their previous salaries as indefinite unemployment benefits. Any more than that and the companies would be taking a loss, which would make the robots not worth it economically, and they might as well hire the people back.
Not to mention with enough people out of work, nobody is spending on the goods/services being produced by the robots either, so the companies will start failing left and right with their robots. Essentially what has occurred is relocation of resources - instead of paying people, the companies are spending resources to maintain robots, which in essence is like "paying" the robots, which is a form of outsourcing, except humans are no longer recipients of resources, machines are.
The only way I could see this actually working out economically is if each robot is equal to at least 2 people as far as economic benefit to the company goes. Then the company could, in principle, support the person they laid off indefinitely, giving them the same salary they were making - and also maintaining the machine, since the machine is working as hard as 2 humans and so while the company wouldn't reap any benefit, they wouldn't take a loss. Benefit would come when machine is better than 2 humans.
But robots will take time to "get there" technologically - at first they will be only marginally more beneficial to a company, but certainly something like 20% or even 40% more efficiency sounds extremely lucrative to any company, and I don't imagine any of them having the foresight to wait until the benefit is at least double or more so that all those out of work people could literally not have to work, and still live comfortably. As the C's said, they are "money hungry" and truly psychopathic in nature, they have no concern for social stability, they are short-sighted and like a parasite that infests and kills the body because its hunger couldn't be satiated, they will not stop consuming/infecting until everything is dead.
So perhaps computers will overpower us because money-hungry psychopathic corporations will use them instead of humans to do work, without considering the consequences, without considering how to viably restructure society to ensure human survival in an economy where jobs for humans no longer exist. Humans can only survive in a society that no longer depends on jobs as long as the robots that replace them are cheap/efficient enough to support the jobless humans as well as themselves. Otherwise the resources must either go to humans OR robots since robots aren't yet good enough to support both, and because the initial robots are marginally more efficient, but the margin is enough to make corporations salivate at the immediate profits, companies are already jumping on board to replace humans, without thinking this through.
Anyway this just makes a lot of sense to me, and as the article points out, the effects of this are already being felt, and they are accelerating in the coming months/years.
Here's an interesting recent SOTT article that brings the point home:
http://www.sott.net/article/257013-Goodbye-fast-food-jobs-First-robot-restaurant-opens-in-China
And here is a very interesting sci-fi short story about the very real prospects of replacing human labor with machines, and keeping the majority of humanity in an animal-like state because they are no longer needed, and how such a society might actually be structured in a terrifying not too distant future:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
