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Robots/AI future, we need a full blown welfare state but not state socialism
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2013 May 10, 1:22am 395,597 views 61 comments
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New Renter
2013 May 19, 10:54am
My brother in law had a mid 90's Mercedes. Also a horrible POS.
Are you really that dense to compare Mercerdes and BMW with Trabant?
Perhaps a link to another time magazine article will help you about that.
Google is your friend.
Just tell this to a German, and he/she will laugh at you. Better yet, tell that to a former east German.
Did you even read my post? My point was even BMW and Mercedes - icons of supposed GERMAN super wonder engineering sometimes make crappy cars. I could include a few Porsches, VWs and Audis as well if you like.
But OK, lets do a comparison of apples to apples. Lets look at Trabant to some of its western contemporaries:
East Germany - Trabant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant_601
West Germany - Auto Union (Audi):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Union_1000
Sweden - Saab:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_96
(The latter is an example of a car made by a nearly country whose industry was NOT devastated by war.)
Three companies, two western one communist, two countries rebuilding after a devastating war one untouched yet they all made similar vehicles.
In 2008, Time magazine rated the Trabant as one of the 50 worst cars ever made.[4] In the West, much has been written about the Trabant, mostly negative. Emphasis was placed on the shortcomings of the Trabant, rather than its good points, such as that it could be easily fixed with duct tape. However, many of the former owners of the Trabant still emphasize advantages such as high capacity—the Trabant being able to carry over 1000 kg of cargo.
In 1997, the Trabant was celebrated for passing the "Elchtest" ("moose test"), a 60 km/h (37 mph) swerve manoeuvre slalom, without toppling over like the Mercedes-Benz W168 (1997 A-class) infamously did. A newspaper from Thuringia had a headline saying "Come and get us, moose! Trabi passes A-Class killer test".[19]
It had its good points too.
Rin
2013 May 19, 3:01pm
To gsr, Dan, and others, part of the reason why I'm posting here is that I'm experiencing a sort of survivor's guilt. Yeah, I'm aware that STEM careers (most applied sciences/engineering areas. not just software & related services) have been decimated by corporate America and that the middle class is being continually eroded.
Yet, unlike everyone else, I've survived because a few friends and I have figured out how to get some ppl to make money, simply by sloshing money around between boundary conditions. And as a result of that bogus work, my mortgage is paid off and in a couple of years, I may never have to worry about money, ever again, as I live simply and don't have a profligate lifestyle. Does it make me feel good that in a few short decades that much of the American middle class will be living on skid row, while a few persons like myself [ who made it during the final Gilded Age ] will have Auto-matron sentries posted outside our houses to prevent break ins? No, that doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy.
zzyzzx
2013 May 19, 11:07pm
And given the 5-6K of present-time flying drones, with some ~10% having some expert systems guidance, I'd say that we're not too far away from a Skynet future in that dept either.
I will have to rewatch that movie. I think I have the first one on DVD. I really do not recall it from the first Terminator movie.
But it's on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_%28Terminator%29
Skynet is a fictional, self-aware artificial intelligence system which features centrally in the Terminator franchise and serves as the franchise's main antagonist. Scarcely depicted visually in any of the Terminator media, Skynet's operations are almost exclusively performed by war-machines, cyborgs (usually a Terminator), and other computer systems, with its ultimate goal the extinction of the human race.
Rin
2013 May 23, 3:53am
Another 'bot posting.
Let's stick to one robot thread, the one which discusses the outcomes, and not let the posts scatter around.
freak80
2013 Sep 15, 11:24am
I didn't create the world around me but now that I've arrived, I'm gravely concerned about the decades ahead.
But the Baby Boomers say it's all our fault for not working hard enough. You know, the usual far-right drivel.
Tenpoundbass
2016 Aug 6, 7:44am
The Space age the Jet age the (blah blah blah) age.
This wont end any different. At first in the 50's and 60's both of those concepts were over thought.
Folks imagined jet engines on ever car, a personal jet engine back pack. Then the space age, we were all supposed to be living on Jupiter Terraces by now. A Space Station condominium in Space.
What we got in reality was far more practical. But nothing nobody prognosticated would really happen correctly, even though equally fantastic.
.
DOGEWontAmountToShit
2023 Sep 5, 6:44pm
More on this subject ...
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/robots-artificial-intelligence-jobs-automation
So far, this hasn't aged well.
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Yes, it's true, in the future, robotic/expert systems will perform much of the work, which is paying our bills today.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
Thus, it's imperative that we plan for the collapse of functional society, as a *function* of Moore's Law. This planning, however, should not result in what the conservatives fear... the Nanny State of Sweden or some other nation with exorbitant "cradle-to-grave" taxes.
Instead, the govt will need to exert a type of CPU/bandwidth cost averaging type of surcharge/tax, on computing services. This will need to be paid by all users, corporate and individual. Then, as time goes by, we need to determine which group of workers will be structurally displaced and put 'em on social assistance. This money will then be put back into the economy, so that the money velocity of sorts is retained.
As Moore's Law keeps accelerating up its parabola, more and more people will be out of work and on welfare. In the end, it'll only be the owners and the top AI/expert system designers, who'll be employed. All other work will be done by machines. When that occurs, we'll have a stable welfare society with the elite dole bungers, producing literature, music, and the arts.