Computers/Robots to cause economic collapse/starvation soon?

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

I just read Part 1 and Part 2 of this 3-part article (not sure if part 3 exists yet):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ap-impact-middle-class-jobs-cut-in-recession-feared-gone-for-good-lost-to-technology/2013/01/18/e37752c4-61b6-11e2-81ef-a2249c1e5b3d_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/big-data-and-cloud-computing-empower-smart-machines-to-do-human-work-take-human-jobs/2013/01/18/3c208272-61b9-11e2-81ef-a2249c1e5b3d_story.html

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:

Q: (TL) Who made the monuments on Mars?
A: Atlanteans.
Q: (T) So, the Atlanteans had inter-planetary ability?
A: Yes. With ease. Atlantean technology makes yours look like the Neanderthal era.
Q: (T) Who created the structures on the moon that Richard Hoagland has discovered?
A: Atlanteans.
Q: (T) What did they use these structures for?
A: Energy transfer points for crystalline power/symbolism as in monuments or statuary.
Q: (T) What statuary are you referring to?
A: Example is face.
Q: (T) What power did these crystals gather?
A: Sun.
Q: (T) Was it necessary for them to have power gathering stations on Mars and the Moon. Did this increase their power?
A: Not necessary but it is not necessary for you to have a million dollars either. Get the correlation? Atlanteans were power hungry the way your society is money hungry.
Q: (T) Was the accumulation of this power what brought about their downfall?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) Did they lose control of this power?
A: It overpowered them the same way your computers will overpower you.
Q: (V) Is it similar to them gaining a life and intelligence of their own?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) You mean these crystalline structures came to life, so to speak?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) And then what did they do?
A: Destroyed Atlantis.

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

 

[LQB]

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.

The gov doesn't need taxes - taxes are more for oppression and control (imo). The way it works these days is: the Treasury issues bonds at auction - primary dealers (TBTF banks) buy the bonds, then sell them to the Fed (for profit) - the Fed puts the bonds on their balance sheet and "prints" the money to buy the bonds. And everyone is happy. This works because the $ is the world reserve currency. As Cathrine Fitts like to point out, the $ reserve is enforced by the military "gun". The Fed will buy any and all bonds put before it, thus keeping interest rates low. So you can flood the world with $ and at the same time, force interest rates to zero - making it appear like there is no inflation. The term for this used by many is financial repression. It's a way for the US to screw the rest of the world (not to mention - us). This is the way I understand it so far.

Computers are already in control of the markets. The high frequency trading (HFT) algorithms have been causing all kinds of havoc in the markets and are used for control purposes. This kind of manipulation could bring down the entire house into chaos.

Computers are already in control of many weapon systems. If many of these computer control systems end up under a centralized network, then I could see wholesale destruction with just a little sentient-like mind developing on the computer's part.

I haven't read your references so if I'm off-base with these comments, I apologize SAO.

 

[aaronfransen]

I think there's another alternative too, though I'm not sure it's in our best interests either.

What if robotics was used chiefly in the production of food stocks and energy production?

The Zeitgeist folks touched upon this in their Utopian view of the future. Basically robots would take over all food and energy production, and we all could just [sarcasm] lay back and wax poetic about the majesty of life [/sarcasm].

Meh. I think that in our current state of development as a society, we can't handle that kind of responsibility/laziness. We'll turn into the blobs of people shown on "Wall-E". Which, come to think of it, was an excellent demonstration of where full automation will take us.

 

[Buddy]

One interpretation of this passage is something akin to the Terminator/Skynet scenario where intelligent/psychopathic machines decide to kill us all.

That's not an interpretation I get, though by looking around society, watching these sci-fi movies and reading fictional essays I see how easy it is to suspend disbelief long enough to give it some serious thought.

What I get from that C's session points to envy and greed as forces driving the accumulation of much more power (Atlanteans) and money (individuals in our society) than is needed. This can lead to nothing else but eventual collapse because the structure of our economy has been reoriented from its old base of gold as a standard to fix value of money into the zero-sum game that it is now. Currently, the value of money is fixed relative to the total amount in circulation. Example: for me to make a million dollars, I no longer have to offer you something for which you're willing to trade your gold so I can use my earned profits. All I have to do is borrow money with interest and you become responsible for part of it because it's spread out over the whole economy of which I'm assuming you're a part.

IOW, the pointers that I see refer to those personality and character flaws that create debt on every level of our being and between individuals and groups in society and between nations and cultures. It's debt--from the economic to the karmic and it all must be somehow paid, OSIT. I think the question is how. But these are just my thoughts.

Thanks for this topic, SAO. I enjoy exploring this subject.

 

[Rich]

Thanks for this topic, SAO. I enjoy exploring this subject.

Likewise thanks SAO.

New SOTT article has some relevant thoughts and links: http://www.sott.net/article/257788-Rise-of-the-droids-will-robots-eventually-steal-all-of-our-jobs

 

[whitecoast]

Yes, thanks for this topic SAO. :)

Another way computers may "replace" us could be that, instead of computers rebelling and either destroying or enslaving us, humans and psychopaths pollute our environment and bodies to the extent that we cannot reproduce any longer. If this happened, artificial life in the form of machines and computers, if sophisticated enough to run their own production and resource gathering, could be the only way human knowledge or civilization would survive.

 

[Buddy]

New SOTT article has some relevant thoughts and links: http://www.sott.net/article/257788-Rise-of-the-droids-will-robots-eventually-steal-all-of-our-jobs

Does anybody actually see a 'rise of droids' in the context of a debt-driven economy? That is, in light of what's been happening around the world during the thirty years since 1993 that Victor Vinge gave for his 'Technological Singularity'? I can't see how it would happen in the scenarios so far suggested.

 

[Rich]

Yes, thanks for this topic SAO. :)

Another way computers may "replace" us could be that, instead of computers rebelling and either destroying or enslaving us, humans and psychopaths pollute our environment and bodies to the extent that we cannot reproduce any longer. If this happened, artificial life in the form of machines and computers, if sophisticated enough to run their own production and resource gathering, could be the only way human knowledge or civilization would survive.

I think that scenario could be the destiny of the masses (us) :( I can foresee that the wealthy elite will ensure they are still able to continue their blood lines, even if it is through test tubes. I also think that initially the two tier rich/poor society will rapidly expand into a feudal system but there will still be human jobs for those serving those at the top of the chain. As an example makes me think of high-end tailors who survive on serving wealthy customers. Who knows??

Like the start of the Manna story, will read it at some point.

 

[Buddy]

Another way computers may "replace" us could be that, instead of computers rebelling and either destroying or enslaving us, humans and psychopaths pollute our environment and bodies to the extent that we cannot reproduce any longer. If this happened, artificial life in the form of machines and computers, if sophisticated enough to run their own production and resource gathering, could be the only way human knowledge or civilization would survive.

I'm curious about something. If "we cannot reproduce any longer", and by "we" I assume you mean humanity as a whole, how could machines and computers at any level of sophistication "be the only way human knowledge or civilization would survive"? Survive for how long? Is this a contradiction or am I missing something?

 

[Psalehesost]

Another way computers may "replace" us could be that, instead of computers rebelling and either destroying or enslaving us, humans and psychopaths pollute our environment and bodies to the extent that we cannot reproduce any longer. If this happened, artificial life in the form of machines and computers, if sophisticated enough to run their own production and resource gathering, could be the only way human knowledge or civilization would survive.

I'm curious about something. If "we cannot reproduce any longer", and by "we" I assume you mean humanity as a whole, how could machines and computers at any level of sophistication "be the only way human knowledge or civilization would survive"? Survive for how long? Is this a contradiction or am I missing something?

I guess the idea would be that they would embody human knowledge and civilization, and come to live a life of their own. If a sufficiently complex biological being can interface with consciousness, then perhaps the same holds for a sufficiently complex computer system. (The C's suggested that computers would begin to develop "faint soul imprint".)

 

[Buddy]

Thanks for your input, Psalehesost, though from the base of wide-ranging empirical data currently available in multiple subject areas, I don't see a pollution-based human sterilization and extinction scenario either.

During the time frame when pollution has been accumulating in the environment and in the body, there have been several lines of parallel development--any of which could potentially neutralize any probability of such a happening on a mass scale, OSIT. I'm referring to 1) all that natural activity on chromosomes 23 and 21 as brought to light by the Human Genome Project and pointing to the possible existence of feedback loops between the human physiological condition and Nature, 2) the growing field of gene therapy with its accomplishment of gene cloning to fix cells that have become sensitive to something that is killing or harming them, and 3) the discovery of stem cells living in our bone marrow; the use of which I think is already commonly known.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I disbelieve what the C's are saying, it's that I'm trying to ground myself in a "no assumption" mindset and learn more about the thinking behind the scenarios proposed by the various movies and stories. If this is all a very real possibility, I don't know that yet, but if it is, I don't believe for a minute that it will come from the expected direction.

I guess the idea would be that they would embody human knowledge and civilization, and come to live a life of their own. If a sufficiently complex biological being can interface with consciousness, then perhaps the same holds for a sufficiently complex computer system. (The C's suggested that computers would begin to develop "faint soul imprint".)

Why perhaps? That's the missing piece that's bugging me. The domain of computer technology is so much less ponerized than just about any other area, so I would think it possible to have much clearer vision while thinking in this area. One thing that hasn't been touched on yet: Do you think this topic, or its derivative concern of 'computers taking over humanity' might better relate to biology-based neural net development? These living, organic nets aren't 'computers' strictly speaking, but by the time that fact becomes relevant the term may be used informally. Kind of like how we say "xerox" when we mean "make a copy of..."

What do you think?

 

[whitecoast]

During the time frame when pollution has
been accumulating in the environment and
in the body, there have been several lines
of parallel development--any of which could
potentially neutralize any probability of
such a happening on a mass scale, OSIT.
I'm referring to 1) all that natural activity
on chromosomes 23 and 21 as brought to
light by the Human Genome Project and
pointing to the possible existence of
feedback loops between the human
physiological condition and Nature, 2) the
growing field of gene therapy with its
accomplishment of gene cloning to fix cells
that have become sensitive to something
that is killing or harming them, and 3) the
discovery of stem cells living in our bone
marrow; the use of which I think is already
commonly known.

I hope for our sake you're right! But I'm not sure how much I like the gene therapy idea. It just seems like it's part of the capitalism treadmill - where the system/technology creates a problem, and then develops a solution to the problem that creates another problem someone can make money off solving, etc. etc. It just seems to degenerate into greater disconnection from the natural state of the living system. Plus I don't think humans will be any good at manipulating DNA for pure benefits with no side effects until we're in 4D.

Why perhaps? That's the missing piece
that's bugging me. The domain of computer
technology is so much less ponerized than
just about any other area, so I would think
it possible to have much clearer vision
while thinking in this area. One thing that
hasn't been touched on yet: Do you think
this topic, or its derivative concern of
'computers taking over humanity' might
better relate to biology-based neural net
development? These living, organic nets
aren't 'computers' strictly speaking, but by
the time that fact becomes relevant the
term may be used informally. Kind of like
how we say "xerox" when we mean "make a
copy of..."

I think computers are more ponerized than you think. They're incredibly toxic to the environment, from all the mining, energy, and manufacturing they need. They are used to coordinate massive transfers of resources from "resource countries" to occupying interests, speeding up the degradation. They have also enabled the mass surveillance of whole populations in a way Hitler could not have dreamt. The biggest funders of robotics and AI research happens to include DARPA, and so on...

As for whether computers were a metaphor for brain development, I think the context that passage came up in was about how Atlantean technology ended up destroying them.

 

[Buddy]

I think computers are more ponerized than you think. They're incredibly toxic to the environment, from all the mining, energy, and manufacturing they need. They are used to coordinate massive transfers of resources from "resource countries" to occupying interests, speeding up the degradation. They have also enabled the mass surveillance of whole populations in a way Hitler could not have dreamt. The biggest funders of robotics and AI research happens to include DARPA, and so on...

Granted, but for clarity, when I said 'less ponerized', I meant less re-writing of the history of development; less hiding or distorting of the concepts that structure the hierarchy of knowledge related to computer technology--from the historical accounts of the mechanical abacus and punch cards, to todays dual channel high-speed RAM (and beyond) and how software programming can control and make use of all that. Few mysteries there, is what I meant, 'cause anyone can jump into the field and learn productive skills from the ground up and easily extrapolate from an empirical knowledge base.

As for whether computers were a metaphor for brain development, I think the context that passage came up in was about how Atlantean technology ended up destroying them.

Oh yeah. :) Thanks for the feedback.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

Granted, but for clarity, when I said 'less ponerized', I meant less re-writing of the history of development;

Actually I'm not sure that's true, though I can't back this up with empirical data. The "discovery" of the transistor may have been assisted by reverse engineering UFO's to some extent, or at least that hypothesis is still on the table with me. And we got the "crummy" version. I've been paying attention to the computer market for a few years - we have Intel and AMD as the primary x86 (regular desktop/laptops use those) chip designers/producers/distributors, and again without actual data, I've always just had a feeling that the market is being intentionally "milked" and progress is largely artificial. Moore's law (his observation) states that the number of transistors (and by extension, performance) on a chip doubles every 18-24 months. However, this seems a bit contrived to me.

There are a few things that suggest this. We know, for example, that a lot of credit for electro-mechanical discoveries was not given to Tesla, and a lot of his work was suppressed completely. We also know that they are killing abstract mathematicians left and right to suppress certain discoveries, and they've done this with physicists as well. Physics, which is intimately linked to computer technology, is being suppressed and "sensitive" things like Unified Field Theory are being covered up and hidden.

How about quantum computers - they have been "almost here" for how long now? It would be pretty ignorant to assume that the discovery and implementation of quantum computers has anything to do with our technological capability. Those things will make every encryption method on the planet immediately and totally obsolete - every single "secret", whether corporate or government, on any hard drive or transmitted in any way, will be easily decrypted by a quantum computer. Whoever gets their hands on a quantum computer first becomes extremely dangerous. I highly doubt that someone like Intel is allowed to just "invent" a quantum computer and mass produce it. If it exists, it is used by a very select group of psychopaths, and they won't let it into the mainstream until they have something much better.

So yes, while the history of computing seems linear and you can seemingly track the progress from the abacus to the Core i7, there are issues. Just like Laura's Secret History mentions - human history as a whole was "shaped" very neatly in a convenient box of going from primitive cavemen to modern day, and yet, it was anything BUT linear, this perceived "progress of civilization" is something designed for our consumption. Similarly, I think computer technology's steady "progress" is just as artificial, at least to a degree. Sure, there are discoveries, and sure there is improvement and real progress - but so much is suppressed and manipulated. Remember when the C's said that mathematics is taught in our environment in such a way that only a few will truly understand math and its implications? I suspect the same is true for computer technology - the real deep understanding of something like CPU design is probably not very common, to say the least. And very few have the resources/money to advance this technology. A single fab (chip factory) costs what like 5 billion now?

Why is it that the Ghz speed was going up so fast right until 2002, and then it stopped completely, and we've been stuck at 3Ghz or so for the past 11 years? And I know the "technical reason" - overheating, etc. And since then we've started going "multi-core", progress compared to the 80's and 90's actually ground to a halt. Transistor counts still go up, but actual performance is crawling along very slowly, and single-core performance has been basically the same since 2006, which is very important for a great number of tasks that cannot be run on multiple processors or cores, and require a singular fast core (which means higher Ghz, or process improvements, or both).

My hypothesis right now is that "they" know what's coming in the next few years, and technology is only allowed to advance to a certain point before mass destruction occurs. Extremely fast computers would accelerate other technologies and discoveries as well, by running simulations of physics, biology, nature, etc.

less hiding or distorting of the concepts that structure the hierarchy of knowledge related to computer technology--from the historical accounts of the mechanical abacus and punch cards, to todays dual channel high-speed RAM (and beyond) and how software programming can control and make use of all that. Few mysteries there, is what I meant, 'cause anyone can jump into the field and learn productive skills from the ground up and easily extrapolate from an empirical knowledge base.

Perhaps, or perhaps not. I think there is a monopoly - a few large companies responsible for all the chips (lately smart phone chips were added into the mix though). And those few large companies have been around since the "invention" of CPU's and had control of the progress from the beginning. Again, I'd have to research it for empirical data, but the whole thing does stink just observing it.

However, I could be wrong, and we could be on the verge of some really crazy computer technologies, like quantum computers, artificial neural nets, graphene-based CPU's, memristor-based memory and CPU's, spintronics, etc. Some of it may turn out to be more hype than practical, but it's all "in development" in the last few years and "promised" to start popping up by 2020, or right after that. However, by "coincidence" or not, the smelly stuff may hit the fan much sooner than that, which does seem rather convenient. So close but no cigar, almost as if the really advanced stuff was designed to come about just a few years after the planet experiences mass destruction. I guess we'll see :)

However, the whole robots taking people's jobs thing without replacing them with new jobs is currently happening and that's not going away. It seems like an elephant in the room that no one really talks about - I've not heard of economists or "the news" blaming automation and intelligent software for anything yet. Though, even if they did, psychopaths are once again the real problem, which of course won't be mentioned, because they're the ones choosing profits with no consideration for the well-being of those they are laying off.

As far as artificial intelligence having a "soul imprint" I think that doesn't mean anything on the ground. Perhaps psychopaths have a soul imprint as well, because they are, after all, intelligent (in some ways). But that intelligence and whatever soul imprint it attracts doesn't attract any conscience with it, so it doesn't do the rest of us any good. Clearly something else other than just pure intelligence is needed for conscience. Computers can become intelligent, but I would suspect that unless we understand what conscience is and exactly how it works and what's needed for it to exist, we may be getting some psychopaths with a hard drive.

 

[seek10]

Q: (T) Was it necessary for them to have power gathering stations on Mars and the Moon. Did this increase their power?
A: Not necessary but it is not necessary for you to have a million dollars either. Get the correlation? Atlanteans were power hungry the way your society is money hungry.
Q: (T) Was the accumulation of this power what brought about their downfall?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) Did they lose control of this power?
A: It overpowered them the same way your computers will overpower you.
Q: (V) Is it similar to them gaining a life and intelligence of their own?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) You mean these crystalline structures came to life, so to speak?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) And then what did they do?
A: Destroyed Atlantis.

One interpretation of this passage is something akin to the Terminator/Skynet scenario where intelligent/psychopathic machines decide to kill us all.

Our society is completely interlinked based to the computer technology, that needs electricity as its fuel and people that maintains them.

James wesley talks about different scenario's of collapse in his book "how to survive the end of the world as we know it ". one peeked my attention is called Kanban system or lean manufacturing system widely used by the entire world. No company keeps the inventory of raw materials ( for the factories) or food ( in case of stores ) in their storage ( nor more than a week or 2 ). i.e if the power goes out for a week or two,the entire society collapses. No power , No transportation , no goods/food movement every thing stops.

Same is true with some pandemic. When the schumer hits, even small disruptions to the system due to employee's in attendance to the job the entire system ( food, power, transportation, banking, health , manufacturing, distribution , general security etc.) collapses.

we already have a glimpse from hurricane sandy.

Tragedy is the entire system is configured like this. Even the banks that transact trillions of the dollars only plan for week or 2 weeks of disaster. After that "we are sorry". In these corporations, left hand doesn't know what right hand doing. Recovery is almost impossible.

One would ask why is the system is built in such a SUICIDAL way ?. People take insurance for different things, but there is no insurance for the 2 weeks of power outage in the form of practical steps to keep society running . Answer is as usual reckless parasitic psychopaths , that conditioned every body to be authoritative followers through out the hierarchy. so, it doesn't come from top, it is not considered.

This year we are flooded with news of robots taking over all menial jobs. there are news of robots creating more robots. I haven't seen robots writing their own software yet. If i see that news tomorrow, there is no need of surprise. If that type of situation happens ( like Transformers), our human prototype is extinct with in weeks. Robots doesn't need us as long as they had power.

Interestingly no body bothers about these robo invasion as they already invaded people's mind through "driod", "android ", "transformers" toys people are enjoying.

There is a saying in electronics - If the circuit board becomes complex, only feasible choice to make it work is replace it with another circuit board. our society's interdependence is like a circuit board.