Comments on: Only Progressives could believe that robots will destroy the economy

By: Bookworm Room » More thoughts on robots and the future

Bookworm Room » More thoughts on robots and the future — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:56:55 +0000

[...] wrote last week about the fact that the lapdog media is finally catching up with Obama’s claim that the [...]

By: Texan99

Texan99 — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:00:52 +0000

When a robot replaces a worker on the factory line, what about the workers who designed and built the robot? What about the cheaper car that comes off the line, that enables another worker to find work that requires a car? It’s a mistake to look only at the effect on the production line, or to think of jobs as lifetime sinecures. Even the most menial worker has to change his task over his lifetime.
I think what worries us sometime is the knowledge that some workers are much more adaptable than others. We don’t like to think of the losers in that competition. But it’s just a new kind of competition: the job conditions change, and with them the sorting devices that separate the winners from the losers. Thank Heaven it changes, so that there are no permanent losers, only people shifting around being luckier or unluckier at different times of their lives.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 07:35:57 +0000

When slavery is the ultimate Utopian goal of the Left, it doesn’t particularly matter whether anyone thinks their goals are progressive or not. Whether one progresses towards evil or regresses towards cruelty and despair, the end destination is the same.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:40:45 +0000

CM…”The excess will accrue, of course, to the Streisands, Springsteen, Clintons, Gores, Pelosis, Obamas, professors, and crony capitalists who really, really, really care for the rest of us.”
This point needs to be emphasized again and again. Too many fairly intelligent people (like Larry Kudlow the other night) keep talking about how the Obamaites are advocates of “equal outcomes.”
They are really, of course, advocates of no such thing. The leading Obamites intend to monopolize power and influence among their own sort…and power and influence can of course always be converted to wealth or wealth-equivalent on demand.
The “equality” thing is simply a phrase to detract from the REAL class warfare…horizontal rather than vertical…that is going on.

By: Charles Martel

Charles Martel — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:22:14 +0000

Gratitude is more often felt in situations of scarcity than it is in abundance. The lord who can give a serf a loaf of bread will earn far more gratitude, even loyalty, than he will from a serf who toils to make his own bread. Such a serf is to be looked at warily as a possible political rival or—far worse—a man who neither needs nor honors the lord.

The lord’s solution is to cripple the self-sufficient serf’s ability to provide for himself by expropriating his means of production. This serves the allied purposes of taking away his potential political power as well as giving the lord booty he can use to bribe the serfs who no longer know how or desire to provide for themselves.

Best of all, by removing the threat posed by the self-sufficient man, the lord can institutionalize a low level of affluence. (You can see the Whore Media already leading the charge with articles on how we have to start getting used to a [permanent] era of lowered expectation.)

Strangling and crippling the means of abundance as a way of creating gratitude and dependence works better than Orwell’s solution in 1984 where the Party drained excess production by engaging in endless, inconclusive wars and constructing steel and resource-consuming floating fortresses and mega-skyscrapers expressing the Party’s power. In the kinder, gentler modern version, the Party will make sure we all have adequate heat, veterinary-level healthcare, condoms, abortion on demand, mass transit, decent (though tasteless and expensive) food, free “education” (we’re all Communications Majors now!), and other accoutrements of the Flukian utopia.

The excess will accrue, of course, to the Streisands, Springsteen, Clintons, Gores, Pelosis, Obamas, professors, and crony capitalists who really, really, really care for the rest of us.

But what the Caring Party will never do is permit the unleashing of the entrepreneurial risk taking and creative skills that lead to both massive abundance and political freedom. To do so would be to invite the Party’s end and the rise of independent, self-governing communities worldwide that would simply bypass the power and envy-driven, self-anointed saviors of mankind.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 17:05:00 +0000

An interesting book, and one I’ve been meaning to write a review of, is “Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?” by Amy Sue Bix. She discusses media and public perceptions of the effects of mechanization on the job market over the last century or so.
One example she mentions is the replacement of live music…for example, in movie theaters…by recorded music, and consequent unemployment of musicians.
No doubt, for a typical town musician with decent but not stellar talents, the “automation” of music meant that he or she would have to find another career. But for those with the talent and drive (and/or luck!) it gave them the opportunity to exercise their talents on a nationwide or worldwide stage and to be compensated accordingly.
On the subject of using or not using the *brains* of one’s employees, manufacturing executive Kevin Meyer has a good post.

By: Mike Devx

Mike Devx — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 15:10:50 +0000

I see jj’s point, too, and agree with both him and DannyL. Technological advancement directly and immediately eliminates jobs. It also opens up the opportunity for new jobs to appear or be created to satisfy new needs.

But the elimination of jobs is immediate and direct; the creation of new jobs takes time. The new jobs also require new skills, and that also takes time. Human nature: old dogs don’t easily learn new tricks. The people losing jobs to technology have a tougher time.

As usual, I don’t have all the answers for the problem; I’m just discussing the problem. If I thought I had all the answers, I’d be a Social Democrat liberal, embedded in the government, writing a thousand new regulations each day for the HHS, and a happy member of the Obama Administration!

I’d also add that technological advancement also transforms some jobs into robot-like jobs. Start with Henry Ford’s assembly line, which speeded up the production and assembly of parts and standardized those created “parts”. But it also turned the workers into virtual robots – making those jobs eventually, by their robotic nature, prime candidates for elimination by robot-machinery in our current day.

Every time technology is used to replace manual labor, it does so because it’s more cost-effective. And whenever it *is* more cost-effective, it’s going to happen, period. That genie is not going back into the bottle. You don’t ban the cotton gin. You don’t ban robotic assembly of auto parts. Our imaging technology now is such that a system of robots can now often unload and transport cartons and boxes from the backs of delivery trucks and route them to the proper location on warehouse shelves.

By: Caped Crusader

Caped Crusader — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:46:48 +0000

As a kid growing up in the 30′s and 40′s, I remember the oft told family story of how Great Uncle Walter, the owner of a thriving buggy whip business, after failing to diversify into something such as the S&M industry, was economically decimated by the introduction of the horseless carriage!

By: Danny Lemieux

Danny Lemieux — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:29:15 +0000

I agree with JJ on this.
I, too, have seen the industry within which I work automate heavily, resulting in far fewer jobs in manufacturing. This has had two consequences: one is the disappearance of relatively unskilled labor jobs and two is the increased requirement of STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and math) to qualify for increasingly highly skilled and well-paid jobs.
This is one reason why so many people and political demagogues erroneously claim that we have been shipping manufacturing “jobs” overseas at a time when U.S. industrial manufacturing production has increased.
I also suspect that a big part of the problem that we have today is this has left a vacuum in the jobs market and the creation of so-many B.S. jobs (“environmental engineer”, “diversity management”, “colon flushing” etc.) and the unfettered expansion of a non-productive, rent-seeking constituency for the Democrat party.

By: Earl

Earl — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 02:29:00 +0000

Not to be pedantic, but we are going to look foolish if we keep saying “Social Security was created when life expectancy was 62.”

It’s true….but it’s not the crucial figure. Because the “life expectancy” includes babies and children dying, and that has exactly nothing to do with the viability of Social Security.

Someone needs to find out how many years the average person reaching 65 lived when Social Security was created, and compare THAT to how many years such a person lives today.

Along with the number of people working for each person on S.S., that figure would be a realistic picture of the manure pit we’re in……..