Automation in the Workplace

[Innula Zenovka]

Seems to me that we've been somewhere near here before, rather more recently than the Industrial Revolution.

During my working lifetime in the UK, I've seen some pretty major disruptions and upheavals. We've lost, or almost lost, entire industries (e.g. coal and steel) and seen the automobile construction industry completely changed, with factories closing and later reopening assembling, using primarily automated techniques, parts made elsewhere. Global markets and free trade mean that many consumer goods that would once have been made in the UK are now made and assembled almost entirely abroad, so even if humans rather than machines manufacture and assemble them, the jobs have been lost to the UK labour market.

Business and commerce have been radically changed by both computers and the internet. I can remember the size of payroll departments of even quite small businesses back when I started work. Now it takes only a few people and a copy of Sage to handle the payroll for a considerable number of employees. Similarly, typing pools are now pretty much a thing of the past.

In the retail and service sector, we've seen retail banking massively changed, as cash is primarily dispensed by ATMs rather than tellers and most deposits and withdrawals are done electronically rather than over the counter, while back-office functions have been largely computerised or off-shored. We've also seen the rise of out-of-town shopping centres, to the detriment of smaller shops in town and city centres, and now we see the fall of shopping centres as more and more purchases are done online.

If your purchase is handled by one of Amazon's more recent warehouses in the UK, almost all the packing and handling will be automated -- I think I remember reading that humans are involved in the process for about one minute from the time Amazon receive the order to the time it goes out for delivery. The large supermarket chains work in a similar manner. Staff no longer need to check stocks or reorder; that all happens automatically, with the goods being picked and loaded by machines at the warehouse.

Nevertheless, there seem to be plenty of jobs to around. UK unemployment, using ILO definitions, is pretty much where it was back in 1975, at 4.1% (historically pretty low for the UK). Certainly the nature of the jobs has changed dramatically -- in many cases, people are doubtless in much lower-paid, less secure work than they would have been a generation or two ago -- but high rates of unemployment, at least in the UK, seem to depend far more on government economic policy and world economic conditions than they do on automation, global trade or computerisation.

Certainly UBI seems an attractive idea (I have no idea about its practicality) but I'm not convinced that it will be necessitated, at least in the short term, by automation. Personally, I'd rather concentrate on measures I think will be needed to assist people, like offering generous support to people who lose their jobs (whether because of automation, changing markets or adverse economic conditions), including assistance with retraining and relocation if necessary.

I think, too, that governments need to give urgent attention to the fact that, quite simply, changing economic and social conditions mean that some towns and cities are going to grow in size, and others are going to decline as major local industries close or shed workers. Certainly in the UK successive governments have made a bit of a hash of this, I suspect because it's not the sort of problem that's easily solvable by simple overarching solutions. It needs detailed work on the ground to put together workable plans and means of achieving them (or at least of creating conditions in which the plans stand a chance of being realised), and it also means facing the difficult fact that some -- many -- people can't, for whatever reason, either retrain or relocate, and something has to be done for them.

While UBI might well be a solution, or part of a solution, I don't think it's either a panacea or the whole story, and I'd hate for the debate about what should be done to mitigate some of the effects of a changing labour market (and things must assuredly be done, and particularly in the USA, where social welfare programmes make even the UK's somewhat miserly efforts look generous) to turn into an argument about UBI.

"Here's the problem. What do you intend to do to fix it?" seems a better question to ask politicians than "Will you introduce UBI?".

 

[Jorus Xi]

Most everyone in the US has either a computer or a smartphone (or both). That's most of what you need to make devices "smart", aside from a physical connector or wifi to the robot or whatever you want to control. New cars are coming *loaded* with smarts, and the components can be procured and repurposed to make other things smart.

I fully understand the timing problem, which is why for the last 5 years I've been working on the idea of "seed factories", the starter sets that people can use to bootstrap up the rest of what they will need. People would pool their resources, acquire a starter set, follow the instructions, and build the rest. The idea is to have the first seed factories prototyped and tested before mass unemployment hits.

God I want to write this big effort post about how you are attempting to shoehorn a really cool technology that's a really nice square peg into a sociological round hole but I'm not sure if I can stay up that long. So I'm just going to do the really short version then maybe come back tomorrow and reply to whatever gets posted back at me. Gonna go ahead and apologize if I come across as an asshole here, I'm a cranky computer janitor who wasted his sociology and history degree so I could preach at people on the internet.

Here we go.

Suffice it to say this really need maker based barter economy that this assumes is going to crop up will eventually grow to the point where a commonly agreed trade medium comes about. Lets call it money for giggles, I just like the word. Eventually my collective is going to be producing an excess of shoes, and carting around my collectives shoes and also our off-brand screwdrivers in order to get some 3D printed mangos is a pain in the ass. I'd much rather have a medium of trade that promises you a given value of shoes should you ever wish to trade it in than say... cart the shoes over to your mango stand. Again, I like the word money.

Now we've each found our production niche, I'm making shoes, your making mangos, the folks across the street are making uh, fuck it, artisinal robo crafted dragon dildos. Whatever. Now no matter how you slice it some short industries are simply going to make tools that everyone needs, and ultimately someone is going to make BETTER tools than the other guy makes. For instance I produce my shoes with snazzy pumps on the front that make you jump higher, just like in the 1990's. Because my shoes are cool and everyone wants them, and I'm a greedy cunt, I don't upload the specs to my cool pump shoes to "Makernet" or what the hell ever, or I hack my makernet connection so you can't see my specs, and everyone wants my shoes. Because pumps are rad, unlike those shitty "Catapult" shoes.

Suddenly everyone who buys my shoes jumps higher, I have more money and we've recreated capitalism because "Add 3d printers" isn't actually a sociological fix for a sociological problem.

This doesn't even get into the general factoid that most people who are the types that actually sit and look around and say "What does my community need. Shoes? Cleaner water? Dragon Dildos?" aren't likely to be the same type of people who are going to be facing the unemployment line when the last factory shuts down. The kind of person who has a level of ehhhh lets call it "External Vision" to take a good hard look at the world around him and say "Yeah if I made dildos this place would be better for it" tend to generally make at least a little something of themselves anyways. These are the motivated few who frankly when this shit all shakes out will likely still have jobs. Meanwhile joe screwdriver turner at the handcrafted dildo shop really just wants to do that quarter turn on the dildo, go home, microwave a pizza and maybe jack off to CSI Miami. We are absolutely facing for the first time in human history where basic unskilled human labor for the people who frankly aren't that clever, aren't interested in being that clever, and aren't equipped for being that clever, and generally distrust cleverness and in general simply become supernumerary to existing human society. I feel like I'm going to break out into a Pratchett quote and say something like "And so the people of the revolution were faced with the age old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, that was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people"

Like it's great that you've found a neat technology that solves oh 1/8th of the problem, but you forgot to solve for people in what is ultimately a people problem. I won't even get into the "3D printers + people = egalitarianism" thing. It's the classic Underpants + ??? = profit! problem. Please solve for ???.

And that's not even going into the tig ole who's going to provide these basic tools to the unwashed masses? You've already cut the government out and I'm pretty sure Amazon is gonna tell me to go fuck myself.

Like we've already gone through periods of community based tool creation haven't we? Are we literally going back to the 1800's with slightly fancier technology and calling it societal progress?

 

[Kara Spengler]

Whether UBI gets involved or not we are looking at a revolution. Right now if you need, oh, a desk, you need a certain amount of currency. How does the economy adapt when a generic desk is pretty much free (assuming we work out some solution to the energy problem, then it is just rearranging mass which the universe has plenty of)? Of course there are premium desks but not everyone needs one.

At the moment our economy is balanced on producing a mass of items. What happens when most of those items are pretty much free to everyone? Not everyone will want items that come at a premium. Even if I want a top of the line computer I could give a toss about lots of other things.

 

[danielravennest]

(1) Suffice it to say this really need maker based barter economy that this assumes

(2) Eventually my collective is going to be producing an excess of shoes, and carting around my collectives shoes and also our off-brand screwdrivers in order to get some 3D printed mangos is a pain in the ass.

(3) Because my shoes are cool and everyone wants them,

(4) "What does my community need. Shoes? Cleaner water? Dragon Dildos?"

(5) Meanwhile joe screwdriver turner at the handcrafted dildo shop really just wants to do that quarter turn on the dildo, go home, microwave a pizza and maybe jack off to CSI Miami.

(6) We are absolutely facing for the first time in human history where basic unskilled human labor for the people who frankly aren't that clever, aren't interested in being that clever, and aren't equipped for being that clever, and generally distrust cleverness and in general simply become supernumerary to existing human society.

(7) Who's going to provide these basic tools to the unwashed masses? You've already cut the government out and I'm pretty sure Amazon is gonna tell me to go fuck myself.

(8) Like we've already gone through periods of community based tool creation haven't we? Are we literally going back to the 1800's with slightly fancier technology and calling it societal progress?

(1) I never said the cooperative would be a barter economy. Money of some kind makes sense as an intermediate good to eliminate the "coincidence of wants" problem in barter. I also don't assume that *all* jobs have gone away. Some people will still have them, and therefore participate in the standard money economy.

(2) I *did* say that the seed factories were aimed at the basics (food, shelter, utilities) that people need to live. The sort of basics that a Universal *basic* income is supposed to cover. 3D-printed mangoes would be a luxury item. If you want luxury items, you work for them like people currently do.

(3) again, cool shoes are a luxury item, not the basics.

(4) I think most people would agree to what the basics are: Food, shelter, utilites, some kind of transportation. Basic medical care would be nice.

(5) "screwdriver turner" isn't a job category where automation has displaced many jobs. Robots do that. The community co-op factory will have a few people overseeing the robots. The rest of the people get the basics without having to work at it, or work very little. Your house might arrive as a kit from the factory, and the construction bots assemble it. You get to paint, decorate, and maybe plant flowers.

(6) And yet all those people seem to be able to use smartphones. So you reduce ordering stuff from the community factory to a smartphone app, and all is good.

(7) The thing about starter sets is they can expand themselves by making parts for more equipment, and once expanded can produce more starter sets. So in theory you only need *one*. In practice, you will need to distribute multiple copies around. Embryonic versions of such things *already exist*. They are called "makerspaces" or "hackerspaces". Workshops with a bunch of tools, including computer-controlled ones like 3-D printers. Today, such spaces are mostly used by hobbyists for their own little projects. But if the need arises, they could be converted to self-expansion and supplying basic needs, assuming someone provides instructions on how to do it. That's the part I'm working on - the "how to do it".

(8) In the 19th century, most people were still farmers. There's no need to go back to that level. An electric farm tractor and a field of solar panels to charge it can feed 100 people, and you only need one farmer to manage the farm. An electric tractor isn't going to be very different than any other electric vehicle, so a generic electric-vehicle maintenance shop will be able to handle the community's needs.

The level of automation and robotics sufficient to put people out of work can also be applied to meeting their basic needs without much work. A few people will need skills, and have to put time in to maintain things, but not everyone.

 

[danielravennest]

At the moment our economy is balanced on producing a mass of items. What happens when most of those items are pretty much free to everyone? Not everyone will want items that come at a premium. Even if I want a top of the line computer I could give a toss about lots of other things.

Looking at what is happening with knowledge and information may be instructive. If you wanted an encyclopedia in 1970, either you or your library had to spend hundreds of dollars on a paper copy. Now you can have a portable copy of Wikipedia for a couple of dollars worth of USB drive space. That's pretty much free.

As far as the energy problem, a solar furnace is mostly made from glass (the mirrors) and metal (the supporting framework). The furnace can melt scrap glass and metal to make more parts like itself, and alternately generate steam to drive a generator. Assuming you have some robots to tend the furnaces, you can build up a field of them for nearly nothing. Even with humans, you can do it cheaply. Energy isn't really the limiting factor.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

(2) I *did* say that the seed factories were aimed at the basics (food, shelter, utilities) that people need to live. The sort of basics that a Universal *basic* income is supposed to cover. 3D-printed mangoes would be a luxury item. If you want luxury items, you work for them like people currently do.

Are 3D-printed mangos a thing and, if they are, why are they any more luxury items than 3D-printed apples?

 

[Ashiri]

As far as the energy problem, a solar furnace is mostly made from glass (the mirrors) and metal (the supporting framework). The furnace can melt scrap glass and metal to make more parts like itself, and alternately generate steam to drive a generator. Assuming you have some robots to tend the furnaces, you can build up a field of them for nearly nothing. Even with humans, you can do it cheaply. Energy isn't really the limiting factor.

Way too simplified. The idea of melting scrap glass and metal and hoping the resulting products are fit for purpose scares me. Maybe limiting the scrap to clear bottle and plate glass, and the metal to aluminium alloys might be feasible.

 

[Jorus Xi]

Here we goooooo

(1) I never said the cooperative would be a barter economy. Money of some kind makes sense as an intermediate good to eliminate the "coincidence of wants" problem in barter. I also don't assume that *all* jobs have gone away. Some people will still have them, and therefore participate in the standard money economy.

I want you to bear in mind that I think UBI as a long term solution is basically untenable with society in the general state it's in now. But so is this because you will now have a jobbed elite and a for lack of a better word "Untermench" who will simply have 3d printed uh... well lets call it what it is, mostly badly constructed shit made out of the wrong materials for whatever is actually needed because no one is going to dump proper materials on the mench to run through their 3d printers.

(2) I *did* say that the seed factories were aimed at the basics (food, shelter, utilities) that people need to live. The sort of basics that a Universal *basic* income is supposed to cover. 3D-printed mangoes would be a luxury item. If you want luxury items, you work for them like people currently do.

And you failed 100% to understand the problems that these people are going to be facing. Food and Shelter are not things that are scarce in this country. We have more houses than we have people, and we export the vast majority of our food, and the vast majority of our land that IS in fact already setup for farming, is laying fallow at the moment. 3D printing some corn is kinda fucking stupid when you can literally just have a farmer.... uh farm more corn. By not exploiting these resources that literally already exist we would just be uh..... creating a new sprawl of poorly produced shantytowns with questionable materials at the edge of civilization? How is "Makerizing" a house significantly better than say, chopping down some trees and building a log cabin? Or moving into one of the 300 completely empty houses that already exist?

(3) again, cool shoes are a luxury item, not the basics.

I think you fail to understand basic human nature amongst impoverished groups. I didn't use "Cool Sneakers" as my example on accident. That is literally the kind of thing that will happen, because it's the kind of thing that literally happens in poor impoverished functionally non economically viable populations today. When you have nothing, relatively silly shit like that tends to go from "That's a luxury but I'll buy addidas instead" to a very important morale boost and status symbol. People are not rational actors. People are not rational actors. People are not rational actors. I already knew I was going to make the statement that PEOPLE ARE NOT RATIONAL ACTORS at some point during this discussion because the initial paper used one of the absolute dumbest fucking terms when it comes to economics that has ever been coined: Bootstraps.

(4) I think most people would agree to what the basics are: Food, shelter, utilites, some kind of transportation. Basic medical care would be nice.

Which kind of brings me to my next point, are these people going to be a swarm of locusts in trash hills utilizing substandard equipment with innefficient production techniques or do we assume that some really resource rich uncle is going to be dumping raw materials on them on the reg? Maybe we can make some fun game out of it like the hunger games only minus the trademark. The maker games? The Hangry games?

(5) "screwdriver turner" isn't a job category where automation has displaced many jobs. Robots do that. The community co-op factory will have a few people overseeing the robots. The rest of the people get the basics without having to work at it, or work very little. Your house might arrive as a kit from the factory, and the construction bots assemble it. You get to paint, decorate, and maybe plant flowers.

Robots are automation. And again. Who's paying for the construction bots? If you have the rad assumption that they'll build themselves, who provides the raw materials. Maker stuff isn't magic. Not to mention you missed the entire point of the "Guy who turns screwdriver" anecdote. The point wasn't the turning of the screwdriver, the point was to illustrate the kind of person you are dealing with when it comes to starting up really cool and neat hackerspaces. They are the kind of people who don't JOIN really neat hackerspaces, and would view the entire concept with at best confusion, at worst contempt.

(6) And yet all those people seem to be able to use smartphones. So you reduce ordering stuff from the community factory to a smartphone app, and all is good.

You vastly overstate the intelligence of your average device user. You'd frankly be amazed at how many people actually CAN'T use a smartphone for much more than watching videos. In the last 10 years I deployed a tablet and iphone base of roughly 800 devices to a roving tech base that had up until that point done everything entirely through paper processing and flip phones. During the initial deployment we made the mistake of thinking we could simply load our MDM software on and leave some basic instructions on how to connect to Microsoft Exchange. This caused a complete false start and we ultimately ended up shipping 700 of the devices back so we could configure them FOR them, then mail them back out. Thankfully in the last two years MDM has gotten good enough that it will do the job for us. There's a tendancy of us tech dweebs who post on the internet that the world at large has a basic level of "Savvy" with technology that they simply do not have. Have never had and don't really want to have. This follows up with the myth of "Young people really get technology" when really they only interact with it at the most basic of layers. However none of this is the point I want to make. The point I want to make is "Who's paying for the smart phone lol". Reminder that these people are jobless and apple and Verizon both are heartless fucks.

(7) The thing about starter sets is they can expand themselves by making parts for more equipment, and once expanded can produce more starter sets. So in theory you only need *one*. In practice, you will need to distribute multiple copies around. Embryonic versions of such things *already exist*. They are called "makerspaces" or "hackerspaces". Workshops with a bunch of tools, including computer-controlled ones like 3-D printers. Today, such spaces are mostly used by hobbyists for their own little projects. But if the need arises, they could be converted to self-expansion and supplying basic needs, assuming someone provides instructions on how to do it. That's the part I'm working on - the "how to do it".

Maker spaces and hacker spaces are mostly filled with self starting entrepreneurial types, who have the time and money to buy $800 worth of meltable plastic to make kitchy meltable plastic shit. For the most part they inject a lot of money into setup costs and semi to mildly expensive materials to make a product that's just slightly less good at what it does than one made in a proper factory with controlled and safe for the consumer AND producer manufacturing processes. I mean it could be that I'm a blithering idiot but I don't see how decentralizing to the point where we're making shoes in say 1000 plants with little to no quality control is better than say, making those shoes in 10 plants. At the very least we're destroying efficiency in the name of the word "Wow neat technology", at the very worst I literally fear for the state of roads as even basic distribution from any of these communes to the people and areas they service becomes a squids nest of overlapping routes. I already thought Amazon was making this bad enough.

 

[Jorus Xi]

(8) In the 19th century, most people were still farmers.

I don't think the century that was literally the birth of people flooding from rural areas into mass production centers should really be thought of "As the farmers century" but who knows, I actually read history books.

The level of automation and robotics sufficient to put people out of work can also be applied to meeting their basic needs without much work. A few people will need skills, and have to put time in to maintain things, but not everyone.

The few people who need skills will quickly learn that they don't need the people who have none AT all and we're back at square one. So I'm going to wrap this up with this long and overly wordy statement. I like the maker movement. I think 3D printing is something that will be greatly trans-formative to a LOT of things, but I'm also fairly certain that the efficiencies needed to make "Makerbot created houses" out of the kind of not free sturdy raw materials may be pionered by a few maker communities in a lab, but they'll be perfected by the kind of people who have no interest in seeing the soon to be non working poor getting some shit for free.

I think you vastly overstate the uh I dunno magnanimity of the people that literally own the raw materials that would be required to make mass produced makerbot houses provided you wanted them built out of materials that wouldn't blow over the next time a Washington Windstorm hit, or a Gulf Coast Hurricane hit, or you wanted them insulated and not not randomly catch fire, or basically not be the modern equivalent of a high tech favela. I don't think you've taken into account the environmental impact of building a shitload of shanties which we will tear down forests to make room for rather than say doing something social and maybe seizing all of the empty housing that already exists. I don't think you've taken into account the societal and environmental impact of splashing out a few hundred people into millions of communes each one producing the stuff that their community needs to thrive, a mass duplicating effort in the name of "Cool technology" that would largely force people out and away instead of doing the environmentally, socially responsible and by god just plain more efficient method of moving into the cities. I don't think you have thought through that eventually the "Doers" in this entrepreneurial maker society are going to start using their power and influence to push the non doers out by hook or by crook. I don't think you have yet to come to the realization that this is an issue about society and economics and that automation was always "Just the excuse" and that Globalization does almost as much, if not more damage in this regard as automation.

Honestly the kind of freedom from energy and resource woes that would allow this particular pipe dream to come to fruition would make the entire "Can we do UBI" question friviolous, because lol yeah of course it would.

 

[Jorus Xi]

Way too simplified. The idea of melting scrap glass and metal and hoping the resulting products are fit for purpose scares me. Maybe limiting the scrap to clear bottle and plate glass, and the metal to aluminium alloys might be feasible.

THAAAAANK YOU. I'm pretty sure a materials science guy literally just had a heart attack when that post was made. I watched a neat youtube video of a guy who figured out how to make cauldron steel out of relatively common materials such as self fired clay bricks and steel sands, and it was really cool, he made a weapons grade steel ingot but now all I can do is imagine him standing up at the end of the video and going "And now I shall make a new frame for my Ford F150"

 

[Jorus Xi]

And because I hate the edit button and feel like making a four post whombocombo, I'd like to re-iterate, I don't think that UBI is going to be the answer. The answer is going to be more along the lines of realizing that we can't let the top echelons of society to continue to horde wealth to the point where, frankly people doing largely unimportant jobs that people largely shy away from can't afford to eat. The entire automation debate's entire foundation is based off of "Capitalism" as a good and moral construct and that the duty of any entity is to create capital and shove it into the pockets of ... frankly the few. If the gross abuses of capitalism were fettered and businesses run as a co-op the gross push to replace relatively unskilled labor with cheap automation would be lessened. The mentality of production would shift towards pushing out a good product for a reasonable price as opposed to an end game sprint to the bottom common denominator in order to extract as much wealth from the company as humanly possible until you eject.

Basically pseudo communism only instead of the state being the owner, the workers themselves were the owners, giving each one a stake in success, and an interest in creating a community that creates a product. I didn't hate Daniel's idea because of the communal/co-op practices. I hate it because it assumed the power brokers who currently own everything including the resources would have no say or stake in his maker based system. I disliked it for it's inefficiencies, and for the fact that tech adoption just doesn't move as fast as it would need to to stop people from starving in the street. I dislike that the simple reality of THAT kind of co-op would push things further apart and out of the areas where the infrastructure already exists to do these things, functionally tearing apart more land, burning up more resources, while people starve just so we can avoid the heady cost of having a revolution that we'd eventually end up needing with his solution anyways because steel ain't free.

The long and the short of it is this is a societal/economics problem. The people suffering have no money and no power. No matter what macguffins are invented by eggheads unless that is addressed, you will just be delaying the damn cycle.

I hesitate to say this, because we aren't at "THAT" point yet, but I don't really see this being set to a workable solution until the people get so pissed off that they start hanging some of these fucking criminals that lord their wealth and the untouchable aura it gives them over us in the streets. Something tells me I'll either be too old or too dead to join in by that point, and it's entirely possible that as a close to upper middle class educated person, I may get hung along side those shitheads.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Thanks, Jorus, for stressing that large numbers of humans aren't rational actors, a fact that continues to confuse the smaller number of humans who are linear and logical. Many more humans are driven by emotions of greed, self-interest, and the desire for power.

As we're seeing play out in front of us every day now, people will consistently "vote against their best interests" - which is a whopping misnomer based on the assumption that "best interest" is defined in the same way by everyone. Economic self-interest -- even survival -- is not the North Star of human psychology. The desire for tribal identity, established traditions, an inflated sense of worth -- all of these motivators can easily overwhelm more benevolent and rational solutions to fixing problems.

 

[Jorus Xi]

Thanks, Jorus, for stressing that large numbers of humans aren't rational actors, a fact that continues to confuse the smaller number of humans who are linear and logical. Many more humans are driven by emotions of greed, self-interest, and the desire for power.

As we're seeing play out in front of us every day now, people will consistently "vote against their best interests" - which is a whopping misnomer based on the assumption that "best interest" is defined in the same way by everyone. Economic self-interest -- even survival -- is not the North Star of human psychology. The desire for tribal identity, established traditions, an inflated sense of worth -- all of these motivators can easily overwhelm more benevolent and rational solutions to fixing problems.

Humans in general aren't rational actors. It's part of why libertarianism is so fucking stupid, I generally don't take it to a macro scale when trying to talk someone down from that particular dumb platform though because you need to make it relate-able and micro. Simply stated "The Human Rational Actor" doesn't exist. There has never been a human that was a rational actor at all times, and I dare say most humans aren't rational actors MOST of the time. Once again we have to go to the micro scale to see this in action.

By definition a rational actor makes his decisions based off of a logical tree that will do him the most good in his life. Just saying that out loud most people are already thinking "MMMmmmm that's a bit much". But it's required to be a rational actor, because minor bad decisions can lead to major bad consequences. How many times have you eaten pizza this week? A snickers bar. Do you keep junk food in the house. What do you snack on? If you answered that you've done any of the first three and the answer to the last wasn't "Fruits and vegetables" welcome to the irrational actor pool. Population you and everyone else. All of that shit is BAD for you. Even at best in moderation it's not good for you. Have you ever smoked? Had more than one sexual partner? Played the lottery? Unprotected sex? Gambled in las Vegas? Fell down some stairs because you were in too much of a hurry? These are all decisions that your average person thinks isn't "That big a deal" but several of them can have future life shattering, and finance shattering consequences.

This doesn't even get into those "Shitty choices all around" scenarios. My Daughter has a treatable cancer that has a 40% survivability rate. I can treat her with a better than average chance she's going to die and be in debt for the rest of my life or I can let her die, and be viewed as pond scum by anyone who knows the story. What's my rational choice?

We won't even get into the fact that the Human Race's greatest moments of triumph is also a readers list of frankly irrational acts. Ride on a kite with a motorbike engine glued to it powering a glorified windmill? Are you daft? No one rational would ride in that deathtrap.

It's just so stupid that someone would build an entire political and economic philosophy out of something that's literally never existed.

I may give it a try myself, write a book for morons in 100 years to salivate over. I'll call it "Elveconomics"

Or maybe Orcinomics.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Looking at what is happening with knowledge and information may be instructive. If you wanted an encyclopedia in 1970, either you or your library had to spend hundreds of dollars on a paper copy. Now you can have a portable copy of Wikipedia for a couple of dollars worth of USB drive space. That's pretty much free.

As far as the energy problem, a solar furnace is mostly made from glass (the mirrors) and metal (the supporting framework). The furnace can melt scrap glass and metal to make more parts like itself, and alternately generate steam to drive a generator. Assuming you have some robots to tend the furnaces, you can build up a field of them for nearly nothing. Even with humans, you can do it cheaply. Energy isn't really the limiting factor.

Right. It is not really a limit. Assuming we do not work out a viable form of fusion soon at some point we will need much more energy. At that point a field will not do it, we will most probably opt for a dyson sphere or at least a ring structure.

edit: I guess technically there is a limit given the mass/energy of the universe is finite however compared to what we can unlock now you may as well call it unlimited.

 

[Brenda Archer]

Creating an economy where some people have money and others only have stuff can’t work. No matter how nice the stuff, money is the flexibility to make decisions and the ability to reduce social friction and meet unplanned needs. If the new makers are in business for money, that’s just a new iteration of manufacturing as we know it. They will be competing with the imports in WalMarts.

When people lose their flexibility of choice, they re-create the mentality of the jailhouse and criminal pathology follows. Austerity doesn’t work, but frugality does. It’s better to have a tiny income you control, than comfort under someone else’s idea of the good life, because then you have choices when someone abuses their power, which is inevitable.

Distributed production with a money economy is still capitalism and without a money economy it’s going to be tribalism and there will still be a market - there’s always a market even if it must be a black market.

I don’t know of a better system than social democracy. The US is going to come around to it eventually or stubbornly become a third world country, but it won’t be the first time in history that blind ideology and tribalism wrecked the cohesion of a society.

People need to feel they have a dignified status in a unified society. Self-directed people who go out on a frontier and roll their own society do that for themselves. The rest need to be more tightly integrated into the existing society. The US in particular doesn't know how to do that and it’s a bigger problem than redistribution. We already have plenty of redistribution. It’s just going to the favored people in the political process, so the effects on the economy cannot be questioned.

I do like the idea of putting tools in people’s hands, because it could release creativity and problem solving. Climate change, like any frontier, will create a lot of pressure to solve problems we can’t predict, so empowering people at a local level can only be good.

 

[danielravennest]

Are 3D-printed mangos a thing and, if they are, why are they any more luxury items than 3D-printed apples?

3D-printed fruit of any kind are a luxury, because ordinary fruit are much cheaper. So far as I know, nobody actually makes 3D-printed fruits. There *are* people making 3D printed chocolates and such, because you can print them in shapes that aren't possible for regular chocolates. They are specialty items, much more expensive than regular chocolate. I would assume if you tried to make a 3D-printed fruit, it would similarly be more expensive than the ordinary grown version, and thus a luxury item.

 

[danielravennest]

Way too simplified. The idea of melting scrap glass and metal and hoping the resulting products are fit for purpose scares me. Maybe limiting the scrap to clear bottle and plate glass, and the metal to aluminium alloys might be feasible.

The scrap metal market comes in many specialty grades. It is about 4-5 times cheaper than finished metals. If you do your own separating by type, you could save even more, but I assume you feed your furnace crucible with consistent bought scrap. Then you pour it into sand molds for whatever shapes you need. Metal casting is old, old tech.

 

[danielravennest]

(1) mostly badly constructed shit made out of the wrong materials for whatever is actually needed because no one is going to dump proper materials on the mench to run through their 3d printers.

As someone who does woodworking starting with the trees, you either have no idea what you are talking about, or pushing a straw-person argument. Nobody is going to 3D-print lumber. You build or buy a bandsaw mill, feed it logs, then stack and dry the boards. The wood you get that way is every bit as good as home-improvement store lumber (sometimes better). I know people who built their own house that way for $4/sf. Not a fancy house, but habitable. Logs are heavy. So an electric farm tractor with a "log arch" is very helpful getting them from the stump to the mill. You can make do with a pickup truck, an old junk axle, and a winch.

(2) Food and Shelter are not things that are scarce in this country. We have more houses than we have people, moving into one of the 300 completely empty houses that already exist?

I don't know what world you live in, but in the US, we have a 3.4% total housing vacancy rate Some units will always be vacant, like my house was for 6 months before I bought it. The previous tenants moved out, the owner decided to sell, and it took time to find a buyer (me), close the sale, and move in. The fact that prices for both rental and for sale properties have been increasing much faster than inflation indicates the current vacancy rate marks a *shortage* of housing.

(3) or do we assume that some really resource rich uncle is going to be dumping raw materials on them on the reg?

As someone who used to own 100 acres of timber land (I had to give it up during the Great Recession), I used to *be* that resource-rich person. I'd be happy if people could make good use of that resource, for a share of what they get out of it. And of course I'd set rules, like don't trash the woods or you lose access. Mass unemployment (the base assumption in this discussion) means mass unused resources. The owners of those resources will be looking for ways to put them to use.

(4) Robots are automation.

No, you can have automation without robots, such as phone customer service menus where you enter a number, rather than a human CSR. You can also have robots without automation, such as teleoperated robots, with a human controller. The two often are found together, but they are separate things.

(5) And again. Who's paying for the construction bots? If you have the rad assumption that they'll build themselves, who provides the raw materials. Maker stuff isn't magic. Not to mention you missed the entire point of the "Guy who turns screwdriver" anecdote. The point wasn't the turning of the screwdriver, the point was to illustrate the kind of person you are dealing with when it comes to starting up really cool and neat hackerspaces. They are the kind of people who don't JOIN really neat hackerspaces, and would view the entire concept with at best confusion, at worst contempt.

There will still be *some* people with money and resources - the winners in the capitalist system. They can *finance* the starter sets, like we do with cars and houses, in return for a share of their output. They are used to make the later machines. Raw materials are not scarce. The top 10 meters of 1 hectare of land (2.5 acres) contains 250,000 tons of raw materials. Two counties farther from Atlanta than I live you can find such land for $7500/ha, thus $0.03/ton. Essentially all the value-added comes from digging it up and turning it into something useful. Hackerspaces as they are now are the starting point, just like computer clubs were in the 1970's. They need to be commoditized and simplified for the masses.

(6) Maker spaces and hacker spaces are mostly filled with self starting entrepreneurial types, who have the time and money to buy $800 worth of meltable plastic to make kitchy meltable plastic shit.

That's not the experience I have at the one I frequent (Freeside Atlanta). There are a few people with high-paying jobs, but a lot of tinkerers and artists that don't have much money. They can't afford a home workshop with all the tools, so they come and use a community space that has them.

My replies follow the numbered quotes above.

 

[Ashiri]

The scrap metal market comes in many specialty grades. It is about 4-5 times cheaper than finished metals. If you do your own separating by type, you could save even more, but I assume you feed your furnace crucible with consistent bought scrap. Then you pour it into sand molds for whatever shapes you need. Metal casting is old, old tech.

Casting is all well and good (good enough for The Iron Bridge) but many applications require forming (forging, rolling) and/or machining. To melt cast iron or steel you obviously have to have a crucible which can withstand that heat. Aluminium alloys would be easier to deal with but you still need to know what particular alloy it is.

 

[danielravennest]

I'd like to re-iterate, I don't think that UBI is going to be the answer.

On that point we agree. It was a major point in my paper. I was proposing an alternate solution.

If the gross abuses of capitalism were fettered and businesses run as a co-op the gross push to replace relatively unskilled labor with cheap automation would be lessened.

I identify this as a root cause of the problem. The capitalists are a different group of people than the workers, and their goals are opposed. If the factories are owner-operated, i.e. the people who work there are also the owners, their interests are aligned.

I hesitate to say this, because we aren't at "THAT" point yet, but I don't really see this being set to a workable solution until the people get so pissed off that they start hanging some of these fucking criminals that lord their wealth and the untouchable aura it gives them over us in the streets. Something tells me I'll either be too old or too dead to join in by that point, and it's entirely possible that as a close to upper middle class educated person, I may get hung along side those shitheads.

I'd like to avoid the hanging people in the streets phase. I'm an engineer by profession, and my career has mostly been looking at long-range projects. Automation-induced mass unemployment isn't a problem *yet*, and it isn't assured that it will become a problem. But I feel it is worth my time to try and come up with a solution far enough in advance to make a difference. Don't hate me for trying.