Why machines should do my job

[Archaea]

I had a go at writing an article for Sott in an effort to contribute, unfortunately I don't know whether it's up to standard. But I figured I might as well post it and see if anyone has any suggestions or comments on how it could be better. Here it is: :)

Why machines should do my job

Imagine this: there’s no need to go to work. Sounds pretty good, and in today’s world of increasing technological sophistication, could be a real possibility. If having machines do all the labour, which is currently done by people, was a reality then a lot of people would have much more free time. Free time, which they could use to do whatever they liked.

So, how would this work? Simple, 100% of the machine’s wages are taxed and go straight to the government, then the government gives the people that money. This is essentially a machine tax, where all the work done by machines for corporations is given a monetary value based on what the corporations would have had to pay people to do the same amount of work.

It’s even possible to argue that the corporations are better off, because the flesh is weak, but metal is tough. Robots don’t get tired, complain, or get injured and ask for compensation, in fact machines are like the perfect worker, completely programmable, and you don’t even need to keep the fact that you’re programming your workers a secret.

This way of doing things would create a deflationary pressure in the economy. So even if the greedy corporations decided they didn’t want to pay their machines wages, they would find that they need to if they want to make a profit and/or stay in business. It works like this:

1) Corporations have machines to do peoples jobs, so the government needs to find some money to give to the newly (and not newly) unemployed.
2) The government comes up with the solution to tax the work of the machines to pay for people’s unemployment benefits.
3) The consumers, which are the people who get their money from the government, now have less money to purchase the products produced by the corporations, so the corporations have to lower the prices of their products.
4) This means the corporations are making less profits, they then have to lower the machine worker’s wages.
5) So now the corporations are paying less machine taxes, which means the government needs to lower the amount of money they give to people, and the whole cycle starts again.

I call this way of doing things technological capitalist backed socialism. This is because a system where people get their money from the government is socialism or communism. But in this system people can still get jobs to earn money on top of what they get from the government, provided there’s an employer willing to employ a person instead of a machine. It’s just that people don’t need to go out and get jobs in order to live.

The big problem with this however, is the same problem with everything in today’s world: psychopaths and greedy people. It seems more realistic, unfortunately, that machines will be used to supervise human workers, while they work all day, every day, while the management don’t have to do the supervising themselves. Essentially they will have machines to do their jobs, but no one else will. And not only that, but machines will continue to supervise you while you’re in the street or even while you’re at home.

 

[Kisito]

I think, the abundance of technologies and machines means more business, more jobs, and more hierarchies and control, so more domination. The hierarchy is used to separate humanity. STS have an interest in prosper machines and technology. For now the technology does not make us free, but we enslaved. :(

 

[James Henry]

Hi Archaea,

Since you are open to comments. To me, this does not seem to fit SOTT in neither style nor context as it is written.

It reads more like a debate position than an article, has more speculation than facts, and even you do not appear to be convinced by the end.

But the even bigger issue for me was its premise. SOTT is a beacon of truth to help humanity overcome the mechanical nature of this STS environment, not encourage its reliance to "the Machine". There are so many pieces that could be picked apart that my critique would probably sound cruel to you and that is not my intent. So I encourage you to do the Work and look at it closely yourself and see how it reads as self-serving wishful thinking. More of a support piece for the STS view. OSIT

 

[Archaea]

I think, the abundance of technologies and machines means more business, more jobs, and more hierarchies and control, so more domination. The hierarchy is used to separate humanity. STS have an interest in prosper machines and technology. For now the technology does not make us free, but we enslaved. :(

I agree, but I think this has to do with the nature of STS, rather than the nature if technology.

Hi Archaea,

Since you are open to comments. To me, this does not seem to fit SOTT in neither style nor context as it is written.

It reads more like a debate position than an article, has more speculation than facts, and even you do not appear to be convinced by the end.

But the even bigger issue for me was its premise. SOTT is a beacon of truth to help humanity overcome the mechanical nature of this STS environment, not encourage its reliance to "the Machine". There are so many pieces that could be picked apart that my critique would probably sound cruel to you and that is not my intent. So I encourage you to do the Work and look at it closely yourself and see how it reads as self-serving wishful thinking. More of a support piece for the STS view. OSIT

Hey James,

I agree with this too, I'm don't know very much about economics or politics, and this was an argument for my POV on the subject. It's the way I can see things working if/when machines start to take over all the jobs, and why I think it's actually a good thing in theory.

There's a lot of anti-machine stuff on Sott IMO, but I don't believe the rapid development of technology is the bad thing. The problem is that the technology is really powerful compared to just a regular small group of people, and in the wrong hands it can be used against the group of people.

I'll have a reread to see if I can see the STS wishful thinking side to it, I really didn't want to write a support piece for the STS view. I've talked to a few people about these ideas and every single one of them thinks that what I want is for the poor people who have to work to be put into a state of desperation. What I think this implies is an innate understanding of the evil of the PTB, it's not the work people need, it's the money, but the idea of getting money and having a job is so interconnected that it's assumed that when I say machines should do people's jobs I'm actually saying people should have no money.

This was the intent behind my article, to disconnect the idea of having money and having a job, and propose a model of how things could work.