= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vladimir_M comments on "Manna" by Marshall Brain - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (38)
On a related note, here is the economist Nick Rowe's recent excellent post about what will happen if most human labor can be automated fully and cheaply at some point in the future:
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/01/robots-slaves-horses-and-malthus.html
It's by far the best and clearest analysis of the issue I've seen so far. In case anyone is interested, I left a few comments in the discussion there, which I'd say resulted in some additional insight.
My comment there:
A situation which is very unlikely in the first place - and extremely unlikely to last for very long if it somehow magically happened. Machines already vastly exceed human capabilities in many areas.
This essay stops before things get interesting. What will politicians do if they have a big mountain of unemployed human voters to feed?
In the given Roboslave world, the government would run enough roboslave farms to produce food to feed them. And possibly, enough to feed everyone.
Wasn't that the point of slaves and machines? That they work so we don't have to?
(and at what point in the last tens of thousands of years did feeding yourself stop being your problem and start being your representative politician's problem?)
The usual problem with the unemployed humans is where the money to support them comes from. The usual answer is taxation of the robot companies. For that to work very well, there had better not be too many tax havens - and there had better not be too much of a "race to the botttom" between governments to host (and tax) the companies. These requirements seem moderately taxing.
Feeding unemployed humans is the government's problem in my country - and in many other countries with a welfare state. The more unemployed humans there are, the more likely they are to vote for a welfare state.
Yes, but that's only a problem in that you have to tax rich people to get their money to distribute it. My first reply was therefore "the government will tax the rich to feed the poor, what else could they do?".
But after a bit of thought, I realised that if the government owns self replicating slave robots and land, then it can use the slaves to create food without needing to tax anyone. The robots can't be taxed because their earnings go to their owners, but in this case they aren't earning anything because they give the food away. Their efforts don't take any human input so nobody needs a salary, and they can do what people can do so they can run farms and distribute food.
So, without comment on the morality of slaving human-equivalent robots (whether the robots care isn't discussed in the link), feeding unemployed people is a non-problem - the self running Roboslave farms are free food fountains.
They are borderline cornucopia machines limited to whatever humans can make and the right resources being available - in this case sunlight, land and seeds.
Yes, a benevelont socialist government could decide to feed the humans.
One problem then would economic competition between the governments with the human resource drain and the ones without.
However, to get to that point in the first place, some major government changes would be needed - in many capitalist countries.