Monday, September 3, 2012

All In a (Future) Day's Work


Today is Labor Day in the US, a holiday we evidently borrowed from Canada, and ultimately from Australia. In the linked post I talked about working in space. Here, as you might guess from the title, we'll consider the future of work, whatever planet it is performed on, including none.

The past is prologue: For most of the last ten thousand years, extending to the origins of Labor Day in the century before last, work was largely synonymous with agricultural labor. And, all too largely, work was associated with more or less naked forms of exploitation - sharecropping, rack-rent, serfdom, and so on down to outright chattel slavery.

Agrarian Age exploitation had effects beyond the purely economic: Think of medieval villeinage (a form of serfdom) and the etymology of 'villain.'

Exploitation was often less intensive in environments where agriculture was so marginal that not much could be squeezed out of the peasants. Thus mountainous uplands and other rugged environments were often associated with both poverty (even the lords were poor) and freedom. Montani Semper Liberi, goes the motto of West Virginia: Mountaineers are always free. Much of the Western conception of freedom is rooted in this tradition. Thomas Jefferson might be a plantation slaveowner, but his ideas were built around independent small farmers.

Cities, with their more complex market-based economies, fostered a different sort of freedom. In the medieval German usage, Stadtluft macht Frei: City air makes one free. Urban freedom had much less to do with economic equality, and much more to do with a dynamic balance of power between money and labor interests.

Markets in themselves are inherently oligarchic: one florin, one vote. But an alliance of quasi-monarchical state interest and a populist interest can push back against the oligarchs. Machiavelli was the first to notice that the 'conflict of the orders,' so long as it did not get out of hand, could be a positive basis for freedom.

His ideas - with his name filed off - contributed more than Jefferson's to the theory of the US Constitution: Compare its strong federal government with the weak central institutions of the Articles of Confederacy.

In the Agrarian Age, both mountain freedom and urban freedom were special cases. Exploitation was the norm, embodied in latifundia, manor, and plantation. In the industrial age - which is essentially urban - mountain freedom is even more marginalized, but urban freedom has become widespread. Indeed it has become rather normative, even if often honored in the breach.


Well, that turned out to be a rather lengthy prologue. Now, what of work in the future?

One possibility, which has sometimes come up in comment threads here, is that technology will lead us to a post-scarcity future. Economists will say there can be no such a thing, because human desires are limitless. But we still come from the primate house, with some basic physical needs and comforts. Once we have ample food, we don't want more of it - we want instead some combination of tastier, more convenient, and more appealing to our vanity.

The higher the productivity level, the more things come down to vanity. Whether or not it is technologically feasible, we can at least imagine a world where basic physical comforts are so readily provided as to be nearly free. But in this same world there is almost no demand for productive labor, and it is not quite clear how this nearly free stuff gets distributed - let alone any high level of pleasures.

This post-scarcity economy is often imagined as hobby-driven, with people 'working' for the sake of self-satisfaction, the way I write this blog.

But the economy could equally well be a crass, somewhat creepy mix of celebrity culture and Thorstein Veblen. A world where those in a position to do so hire everyone else, at nominal wages, as personal servants - not to do any work that even cheaper robots couldn't do just as well, but for the sheer ego gratification of showing off how many servants they have. This too is primate-house behavior.

Or the post-scarcity economy could be a mix of both.

But a post-scarcity economy is, alas, scarcely a given. Technological progress tends to come in leaps, followed by longer periods of maturity with only gradual, even glacial progress. So another possibility, at least for the midfuture, is a decelerando, a technological world that stabilizes at a level somewhat higher than today's, but only somewhat.

Such a world has some rather sobering implications. It will not be a world without work, because a robot capable of doing, say, restaurant kitchen work (and doing it more cheaply than Latino immigrants) is a doubtful proposition. But it may be a world without very much high-paying 'good' work, especially if the oligarchic tendency of markets is unchecked by political 'countervailing power.'

In such conditions, the upward concentration of wealth means that investors will have plenty of money. But given a low rate of innovation, due to largely mature technology, they will struggle to find profitable places to invest it.

Their desperate search for high rates of return will fuel asset bubbles, from Impressionist artwork to real estate. And the financial shocks from successive popping of these bubbles will leave the economy sputtering, performing below even its constrained technological potential.

If this world sounds rather familiar, it should - it is arguably the world that has been emerging, at least for the already-industrialized economies, in the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. We still have plenty of innovation in some industries - especially 'tech' in the sense of computer-related - but unlike mid-century tech progress it is not creating all that many jobs.

If the decelerando scenario is correct, this will become more and more the case.

All of which, in an urbanized, post-industrial future, could be fuel for a new 'conflict of the orders.' Which could take catastrophic forms. Or, channeled into political rather than violent conflict, might well take the positive, freedom-generating form outlined by Old Nick Machiavelli.

Discuss.





The image of Carolingian peasants comes from a blog about the history of cooking and food.

245 comments:

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Mangaka2170 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mangaka2170 said...

If off-world colonies happen, it's likely that, due to the expense of space travel, every inhabitant might be contractually obligated to either work in that colony's primary industry, or otherwise help in running it.

Depending on how self-sufficient the colony is, things like welfare, retirement, the 8-hour work day and other things we now take for granted might not even exist (or in some cases, such as welfare, might not even be necessary), being luxuries that only those living in a self-sustaining biosphere can afford due to the richness of their environment.

Samantha said...

Oh, that's an idea! Off world colonies could be created, not because people need things that can't be obtained on Earth, but because the ultra wealthy have bought up the available real-estate on Earth and are using off world colonies much like we use China now. Cheap, easily controllable labor colonies.

It wouldn't be that making things on Mars would be cheaper it would be that maintaining Martian poverty is easier and more convenient.

Brett said...

@Rick
Economists will say there can be no such a thing, because human desires are limitless.

This may not necessarily be the case, although it's still speculative at this point. I would recommend checking out Noah Smith at Noahpinion's post on "Desire Modification". Combine that with Mood Modification technology down the line, and you could have people stimulating themselves in such a way so that they find their lives much more enjoyable as is.

I do think there are some potentially scary implications in there (Smith himself mentions the Focused from Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky as one negative possibility), but also some potentially useful gains.

But the economy could equally well be a crass, somewhat creepy mix of celebrity culture and Thorstein Veblen. A world where those in a position to do so hire everyone else, at nominal wages, as personal servants - not to do any work that even cheaper robots couldn't do just as well, but for the sheer ego gratification of showing off how many servants they have. This too is primate-house behavior.

I think the "everybody serves the Cyber-Aristocrats" only works if the rich can keep and maintain their wealth and incomes in the face of social pressure, inheritance taxes, and the low returns you mention below. If they can't (and often they can't - even in the days of the landed aristocracy, most aristocrats moved down after 2-3 generations), then you'll gradually see a flattening of economic inequality over time.

I also tend to think that our world will be one of Games. Most of us will be living in a world constantly interwoven with augmented reality and artificially generated electronic content, with the result that a lot of us will spend our free time playing around in "secondary worlds".



Such a world has some rather sobering implications. It will not be a world without work, because a robot capable of doing, say, restaurant kitchen work (and doing it more cheaply than Latino immigrants) is a doubtful proposition. But it may be a world without very much high-paying 'good' work, especially if the oligarchic tendency of markets is unchecked by political 'countervailing power.'

Demography might be a challenge to that. If current trends continue, then the working-age population of the world is going to eventually crest and decline - and it's already declining in many countries. That will tend to drive up wages for young people, and accelerate the adoption of automation.

I also tend to be more afraid of a scenario where a small number of people use automation and technology to become rich off of higher productivity, while many others remain unemployed. That could happen if existing professionals and firms turn out to be very good about preventing changes in labor use and compensation in their sectors (like if doctors managed to keep a whole lot of medical activity legally only allowed to be done by expensive doctors).

Their desperate search for high rates of return will fuel asset bubbles, from Impressionist artwork to real estate. And the financial shocks from successive popping of these bubbles will leave the economy sputtering, performing below even its constrained technological potential.

Unless the government is continuously bailing them out when the asset bubbles burst, this will tend to eventually kill off firms more inclined to risk-taking. The surviving firms will settle into lower returns, because they have no choice.

@Mangaka

I think it's more likely that the first space colonies will be independently organized ventures among people who want to live in space Just Because, and who can collectively afford the materials, assembly robots, transportation up there, and costs of upkeep to keep them going. "Company Colonies" don't strike me as too likely - most of them, if manned at all, would probably have rotating staff.

H said...

Quite an interesting post. And you touch quite a lot of topics. This are some of my toughs on some of them.

I disagree with you on the idea that technological progress is slowing down.
I think we come to forget that technological progress has always been gradual. Books tell us that the Wrigth brothers invented the aeroplane in 1903 and wee tend to forget all the small steps which came before (from Leonardo Davinci to Clement Ader, through Otto Lilienthal) and all the small steps that where necessary after that in order to for it to become commonplace. Revolutionary technologies only become revolutionary after that gradual evolution has taken place.

We have more or lest the same going on today. Gradual but constant improvement in almost every field and some decades from now we may realize that this or that technology was revolutionary (and we will forget that we didn´t seem to appreciate that progress).

There may be a plateau where technological innovation no longer pays its cost, but I think we are still far away from it.

What will this mean for the future economy and workplace? Well I discard the idea that financial bubbles are forming because technological progress is slowing down. Periods of irrational optimism
have been commonplace through the course of human history, including during the 19 century, a period of rapid and radical technological change. In fact new technologies (railroads, cars, internet, biotech...) have often been the target of financial bubbles as investors had very high expectations that failed to materialized in the expected time.

What does a time of fast technological change mean for the workplace of the future? Well more or less what has been happening for the last 200 years. New technologies increase productivity and prosperity at unprecedented levels, but most of the workforce lacks the skills necessary to operate these new technologies. The result: an excess of workers with "old" skills which have to depress their wages in order to compete with the new technology and a lack of workers with "new" skills whose paycheck receives a premium because of competition between employers. After all they are the ones who benefit the most from the new gains in productivity.
As a result inequality increases. As these new technologies become commonplace and workers adapt their skills to the new situation, the gains in productivity allow for a general increase in income and inequality recedes and those high salaries become the norm. A period of relative stability and gradual improvement follows, until the next technologies are mature enough to force new changes.

What means this for our space setting? Well it means that since technology can already do a lot of things without human presence and since sending anybody to space is expensive, anybody who works there will be a highly skilled specialist whose training has been very expensive and his salary will probably be high.
Of course at first, only a few will have the necessary skills to perform this kind of jobs. After such jobs become commonplace, such salaries become again the new normal. Until another disruptive technology becomes mature enough.

Those are only the my humble toughs.

Brett said...

I wouldn't be surprised if wages in the Developed World stagnated for most people for a while longer, at least for jobs that don't have artificially high demand or low supply due to regulation and protectionism. As the world becomes more economically integrated, you'll eventually start to see wages move towards a set of global equilibrium wages, with some variation due to differing living expenses.

The silver lining is that worldwide economic integration plus new technology opens up the possibility of greatly decreasing the costs of living, which is effectively the same thing as raising wages if it happens faster than the rate of inflation can corrode wages and raise prices.

Spacepow said...

On space colonies: I think the default model for space colonies will be the traditional economy, in which everyone performs the roles expected of them (determined by social custom). If you want a shoe fixed, the shoe fixer will just do it for you.

In other words, society in a space colony will be similar to society on a space ship. I hope this merits a post. :/

Damien Sullivan said...

I've come to think of post-scarcity Santa Clause machines (SCM) as potentially quite deadly. You're no longer valuable to others as a skilled trading partner, or even as a serf, but as the raw elements in your body, shot and stuffed into the hopper of someone's SCM. You become wealthy by killing people and taking their dirt, as in the bad old days, but don't even need someone working the dirt.

Fortunately, I'm not sure SCMs will be possible, let alone economically dominant if they are, compared to the powers of specialization in a complex economy. I suppose the SF peaceful ideal would be dominance by an economy like today's, but SCMs powerful enough to get colonies going, until they could grow their own economies.

***

Technology: didn't we just have this argument? But yeah, I think the rate of Big Changes has slowed if not stopped; we're in the era of Little Incremental Improvements.

***

Capital: I'm not going to pretend I /know/ what the problem is. But one might be a shortage of government doing enough taxation and investment in public capital. The US has cut back on infrastructure and public education for 30 years, after all, while for some reason China, despite being a developing country, runs a trade surplus and buys foreign assets rather than investing in itself. So there's a lot of private and public capital that's been running around in lieu of more sensible public policy.

Less obvious what the problem in Europe is, apart from the premature eurozone; European public goods seem fairly if not perfectly well provided. But then I don't know if European capital has been a global problem, vs. a Spanish one.

Damien Sullivan said...

Some thoughts on what I've mentally called "trade and transhumanism".

Comparative advantage means that humans would still have an economic use even if superhuman automation is around, *if* you're committed to keeping humans alive. Once you are, well, robots might do everything better, but no matter how much they can do, a human can always do something extra for the economy as well. So even in the Culture, possibly humans should be managing their own affairs and distribution of goods more -- though what they clearly do do is entertain themselves and each other. Being the Culture, a Hub or ship Mind will entertain you as requested, but having to amuse everyone at once might strain even a Mind.

Of course, just as comparative advantage in trade economics assumes you can't invade and kill off another country, replacing it with your more productive colonists, so the above breaks down if letting humans starve becomes an option.

***

There's a neat idea in econ, "trade equals technology". Suppose I told you I had a nanoforge that could turn wool into cars. You'd be skeptical; that's not nanotech, that's transmutation!

Yet a ship is such a machine; I can take your wool away, and come back a bit later with cars. I *actually* went to Japan, but to an Australian, it might as well be a magical nanoforge.

You want to turn lead into gold? Easy! Sell lead, buy gold!

Obviously at a global level the gold supply is fixed, but up to the scale of even large countries like the US, trade is frigging magic for turning stuff into other stuff, in all sorts of impossible ways.

Which helps show why trade sanctions hurt: you're basically destroying a country's transmuters and SCMs.

Not really going anywhere with that, but it's a neat perspective.

Of course, trade is less useful when there's a massive tax involved -- such as interplanetary (or interstellar!) transportation costs.

Skírnir said...

We brushed that sort of topic a couple of days ago on sfconsim-l. I'll say pretty much the same thing here as I did there.

Scenario: thanks to technological advances, productivity is so high that a fraction of the workforce - say, 20% - can satisfy the entire demand. Most of the work is not done by people, but by machines.
So what do you do with the remaining 80% of the workforce?

Basically I see two modes:
A) a small fraction of the workforce gets most of the work and most of the money. The large majority is, in the extreme case, left to starve; but more likely sedated with alms, just enough to avoid the worst of riots.
Those who own the machines reap the profits, those who operate the machines get a small share, the rest gets virtually nothing.

B) no matter how the work is split up, the income is split more or less evenly. Various solutions are possible in detail. For instance, maybe everyone needs to work only 10 years at 20 hours per week to qualify for a lifelong pension (and average life expectancy may be much higher than now).
The profit generated by the machines does not flow into the pockets of a small owning caste, but distributed among everyone, not least those whose jobs the machines took away.

--

Of course these are more or less the extreme positions, and there can be a gradient between them. But which of those routes you take basically defines how dystopian or utopian your setting is.

Of course, money is not generated out of thin air, it is tied to demand. I may be able to cheaply build a million flying cars, but that doesn't put one red cent into my pockets unless there are people who are willing and able to buy those cars.

Tony said...

Looking a little bit behind before looking forward... I think the characterization of traditional economies as "exploitation" misses one of the most important points to be made about future work. Slavery, serfdom, castes -- hierarchy in general -- is an answer to what we would think of today as severe limitation in accessible and applicable energy. When you only have so much power (both physical and political) to go around, most people hardly have any. Those that have power tend to do things to keep it, because not having any power is by definition infinitely worse than having at least a little bit. (Can't divide any amount of personal resources by zero power to apply them.) Throwing disapproving epithets at what is simply a condition of a given environment, as if there was some form of contingency involved, is missing the point.

Now, what does that have to do with work in the future, where there will so much more power to go around? Simply this -- hierarchy will still exist, and will be unavoidable. The lowest class of person will be satisfied more completely. Just look at what we call "poor" in the US, compared to what poor really means in most of the rest of the world. The lowest class of person will seem to be in less of an economic and social straightjackets than a slave, serf, or untouchable. But the lowest class of person will still have very little, if any, real power, compared to those that control the direction of society.

Instead of being a slave to the agricultural calendar and the master's legal and physical power, the lowest class of person will be a slave to limited opportunity. Instead of: want to be free to leave? See if you can get past the guards, the runaway slave hunters, and the courts; the formula will be: want a satisfying life experience? See if you can get past the barriers to entry, when only 50% (or less) of the people can be usefully employed.

The total quantity of power will be orders of magnitude greater than the agricultural era, but the distribution of power will be essentially the same. The goal of power acquisition will still be to enable maximum enjoyment of personal agency, but the control of such power will still be one of the objectives of its acquisition and maintenance.

Brett said...

@Skirnir
Scenario: thanks to technological advances, productivity is so high that a fraction of the workforce - say, 20% - can satisfy the entire demand. Most of the work is not done by people, but by machines.
So what do you do with the remaining 80% of the workforce?


In a situation with that much "surplus" labor, you might never simply get to the point where you have 80% unemployment. Human labor could easily be so cheap that it displaces automation, or is used in complement with automation. That has happened before - the massive increase in use of migrant labor in US agriculture actually reversed a trend towards greater mechanization in the 1950s and 1960s.

It's important to remember that there's no real hard "Man vs Machine" dichotomy. 50 years down the line, it could be "robot versus augmented human with voluntary implants that prevent boredom and monitor for mistakes".

Demand is also not something that can be "satisfied". We've seen this historically with increases in productivity simply leading to people demanding more and/or higher quality goods and services. You might see a whole range of services once only available to the rich that become available to almost everyone (one I've thought of is tutoring on just about any subject).

Mukk said...

Lets assume post scarcity. Lets define it as enough food to feed everyone, enough shelter, and enough power for a decent standard of living.

There is the possibility of a nightmare distopia where jobs hardly exist and people starve amongst the plenty because they cant make the tiny amount of money to afford this.

There is the possibility of the masses living on the government dole and not really contributing anything to society.

There is the possibility of an economy dominated by service and arts held up by a small group of technical specialists who keep the machines running. Kind of like how a small percentage of the population farms anymore.

The last one seems most plausible to me.

Mangaka2170 said...



The problem I have with this one is the "not really contributing anything to society" bit. It carries with it the assumption that everyone on welfare are a drain on resources that don't do anything with their lives, even if they have a useful hobby that they've had difficulty finding employment for, such as art or game design. In the context it's often found in (especially since we're talking about welfare here), "contributing to society" would be better worded as "gainfully employed." It assumes that the only way one can contribute is either by doing someone else's work, or by being sufficiently cross-disciplinary, lucky and/or wealthy enough to make a living working on your own terms. There are plenty of ways people can contribute to society without being gainfully employed, but that's completely ignored in the semantics of "not really contributing anything to society."

/rant

I see Mukk's scenarios panning out in this order of plausibility: 3 (service- and arts-dominated economy supported by a comparatively small group of technical specialists), 1 (jobs hardly exist and most people can't even afford food "too cheap to meter"), 2 (vast majority of people live in a welfare state).

The most plausible one has historical precedent (if you go back far enough, the rise of agriculture meant that a society could afford to have people not engaged in gathering food or fending off predators, allowing for the development of technology), while the next most plausible one is currently happening on a global scale (starvation tends to be rampant in poverty-stricken and war-ravaged countries, and those governed by dictatorships, despite the US and Canada producing enough food annually to feed all 7 billion of us), while the least plausible one still requires a mechanism for production of this abundant food, shelter and energy (although if we assume that only 20% of the available workforce is actually required to run this economy, then there's a chance that it could still happen, but if we're going to be even remotely fair about this, then this assumption must hold true for the other scenarios as well).

Tony said...

Mangaka2170:

"The problem I have with this one is the 'not really contributing anything to society' bit. It carries with it the assumption that everyone on welfare are a drain on resources that don't do anything with their lives, even if they have a useful hobby that they've had difficulty finding employment for, such as art or game design..."

If it was useful, they'd presumably get paid for it, right?

The whole problem with the gift or social economy is that if it were a real economy, people would really be getting paid. Even if we imagine a post-scarcity or mostly post-scarcity society, the value of genuine art or artifice would still accrue to the people who do it best. Maybe they get paid in some kind of social credit or something of value. And the people who today are starving artists still wouldn't accumulate any, because their art sucks (by the standards of those who have power to reward art -- no judgment on anything you like or might have done yourself implied).

Brett said...

The starvation scenario seems unlikely to me. When people can't get food, they tend to either quickly turn to rioting, or they migrate to areas where there is food. The only exceptions tend to be hyper-police states like North Korea (scratch that, pretty much North Korea alone), meaning that most governments are going to do hand-outs if they have to, before it gets to that.

Mukk said...

'Contributes value to society' would include these things
Making pay preforming services.
Making pay by selling art they produced.
Making pay through selling the use of technical expertise.
Making pay through selling materials of worth they produced.
Raising children well, supported by family or government. (I want to emphasize well. Teaching them so they can succeed in life, trying to create good moral character.)
Doing research and being paid for patent use or subsidized by government, company, university...
And more that I haven't thought of off the top of my head.

If its a real contribution then most of the time it will pay well. I will admit that sometimes people who are doing good work aren't supported by society despite deserving it. The system isn't perfect. Some people are parasites that make huge ammounts of wealth and contribute nothing of worth. But society pays for things it values with money. Its the measurement stick we have.

If I paint the Mona Lisa I contributed to society. I can sell it for good money. If I make a crayon drawing not so much.

Actually this amuses me. Imagine an economy where some kind of board issues 'ration credits' based on their evaluation of how each individual contributed to society that quarter.

Z said...

I think the single most important realization is that future economics, including "post-scarcity," is going to depend far more on political conversations that people find wildly uncomfortable, rather than being the inherent products of the existence of certain kinds of technologies.

On the one hand, it's not clear why a self-replicating universal fabricator would usher in a age of uniform physical comfort when industrial economies are already self-replicating in aggregate, and are filled with goods that are priced essentially on the number of atoms they contain and the energy needed to rearrange them. Granted, the existence of those industries has been associated with huge increases in the number of people living in nominal material comfort, and better manufacturing technologies will help, but there are plenty of instances where pathological under-and-over-use of a good exist in proximity, and the sheer quantity of stuff is not the issue. If the ability to make enough stuff to fill every mouth (or put a car in every garage, or whatever,) is the mark of post-scarcity, then it should already be here, and yet it isn't.

On the flip side, even magical universal fabricators don't get to dodge scarcity in the strictest neoclassical sense- I can always desire something beyond the capacity of my box to make without depriving someone else of an identical capacity- whether the limiting reactant in question is carbon emissions before some sunken island decided to carpet bomb you, or you run out of element X, or your fusion radiator heat the planet to incandescence, or your expanding computronium swarm being unable to accelerate past c.

Luckily, though, neoclassical economics isn't our best description of reality. People's happiness is not an open-ended scale pegged to their economic productivity, and they don't devote each additional calories to breeding. There are certain goods we begrudge our neighbors, and some we don't. All in all, there's hopeful whispers of the existence of a plateau where nobody starves or dies of an illness their neighbor could avert with the application of money. Life on the plateau might be sort of like college, or a vigorous semi-retirement- you can work at bum jobs for a little extra, or dig into an idea for which you have real enthusiasm or aptitude, but there's always a roof overhead, and health insurance, and Wi-Fi, and a dining hall, and a gym, and lots of free time.

Unfortunately, all of the tools for finding said plateau end up asking tremendously fuzzy and contentious questions like what makes people happy and what constitutes a positive right. Lots of those questions can probably turn into real science- but it's science that makes political engagement about climate science look informed and pragmatic- largely because the last power that had an interest in such questions, the USSR, spent most of a century vacillating between being merely depressing at the task to actively murderous. There exists entire sectors of the electorate that are unable to simultaneously conceptualize that markets are wonderful engines for making things and getting them to people, and that markets are also prone to producing a slag of the occasionally lucky, who portray themselves as the supremely talented, who attempt to become the landed gentry, and don't care to leave the ladder in place behind them, or offer it to anyone excluded the first time around.

H said...

Well such a society has is already been and has already been tested. We call it government intervention.
Where a board of officials distributes wealth according to their idea of value.

On another case:
I think the point can be made that most developed countries already have a post scarcity economy. After all hunger and famine are things of the past, while housing, healthcare and education is available for almost everybody (I say almost because the details change from one country to another).

And what`s the result? Are we satisfied? No. We demand more, no matter if it is better education, exotic holidays, high speed internet access and bigger cars, and so on.
And yes, very rich people tend to have human servants, and expensively trained, highly paid ones, just to show of how rich they are. (Meanwhile a decrease in inequality has made servants prohibitively expensive for the middle classes)
So yes, I would argue that human desires are limitless.

And yes, jobs are increasingly hobby-driven. Just a few centuries ago, a child born in a family of farmers would be a farmer, born into a family of smiths, would be a smith.
Modern universal access to education results in that most people can have a choice in the kind of work they want to do in the future.

Of course all this has been the radical increase in productivity thanks to trade and technological development. The idea that it would result in massive unemployment reflects the fallacy that the amount of work to be done is limited. But as we are seeing it is not, it has never been.
As a result economist consider that increases in productivity actually increase employment mostly through three mechanism: 1)An increase in profits attracts investment, therefore increasing the demand for work.
2)The fall of prices and 3)the rise of salaries which basically are have the same effect increases consumption therefore increasing demand for work.

just my humble thought.

Damien Sullivan said...

"If it was useful, they'd presumably get paid for it, right?"

Not if they're producing a public good (anything informational), or a non-monetized one (mothers). Not everything has a price yet, and not everything *can* be individually priced.

"it's not clear why a self-replicating universal fabricator would usher in a age of uniform physical comfort when industrial economies are already self-replicating in aggregate"

Possibly because 'in aggregate' capital is a lot easier to to control access to and collect rent off of, vs. something self-replicating at a household scale. Also, the real economy still takes skilled labor, while the fabricators are envisioned to be automated.


Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Not if they're producing a public good (anything informational), or a non-monetized one (mothers). Not everything has a price yet, and not everything *can* be individually priced."

Anything informational is a public good? Are you familiar with the concept of a signal-to-noise ratio? Not all information is created equal. Compare the work of Rembrandt to the work of your average high school doodler. Compare Shakespeare to "One bright day, in the middle of the night..."

Motherhood is a consequence of living, not a public good. We do well to reward competent, caring mothers with social approval and special cultural positions. When we incentivize just any woman with direct economic rewards to be mothers...well, that doesn't work out all that well.

"Possibly because 'in aggregate' capital is a lot easier to to control access to and collect rent off of, vs. something self-replicating at a household scale. Also, the real economy still takes skilled labor, while the fabricators are envisioned to be automated."

The fabricator still needs power and raw materials. Those have to come from somewhere, and be accounted for. Universal fabs would change not much about capital aggregation and distribution, since raw materials and fuel for power would still have to be sought, extracted, refined, and distributed.

Skírnir said...

A little thought on the side,

@Rick,

did you already write a feature about the national structure on the world in a Rocketpunk PMF?

If yes, can you put a pointer to it? If not, how about doing so? ^^

In particular, the majority of spacefaring SF settings appear to feature a "United Earth", often organized into purely geographical sub-entities (e.g. "The North", "Oceania" etc). This may stem from the thought that only a united humanity would be able to overcome the obstacles towards conquering space, but is this really the case?
How likely is a balkanized Earth, based on present-day nations? Maybe some big nations split up, small ones join together?

Just saying... looking at us today I'd say fat chance that we're going to build a world-state... not anytime soon nor thereafter.

Anonymous said...

I'm going to take Skirnir's scenario and subject it to my own thoughts.

First, the cynical view:the 20% pay taxes, get to keep what isn't taxed, but cant vote, or are...discuraged...from voting. The 80% live on the 'Dole' and do get to vote...persumably for whoever can promise them the better deal.


Second, the more 'Hopeful' view: the 20% still produce and pay taxes, but have a powerful voice in how they are governed, and the 80% are incuraged to better themselves, or to migrate to new areas where they can do cheap labor and have a chance to improve their social/economic status. And by "new areas", I mean undersea, Antarctic, or off-world outposts, installations, or colonies.

Realisticly, I'd expect a mix of those two possibilties. You'd have more than 20% being in the workforce, and less than 80% being on the dole. People in the workforce would be worried about being replaced, with many constantly trying to upgrade their skills; many people displaced from their old jobs will struggle to apply their skills to new ones, perhaps in niche industries. I think that in that situation people would, with capital, take fewer risks, but more on an individual level.

As for space flight, space industry, industry in space, off-world bases, et all...scientific research bases would need a science staff, a maintenance staff, and an operations staff. I'm not sure if we will ever be able to program a robot to be creative, so I think that we will still have to have engineers and technicians to fix malfunctions and solve problems when it comes to the physical layout of said bases; that may mean that a relatively high percentage of people living and working at those off-world installations are middle-aged or older; something to think about.

Oh, and as far as trade with off-world colonies? they produce information resulting in boosting the level of research, and in exchange, they can buy coffee and chocolate; why those two? Well, they are space-intensive, so growing, proccessing, and packaging into useful 'doses' would put an unacceptable strain on most near-term outposts; companies that supply these two things to off-world bases get first dibs on whatever info and/or breakthroughts these outposts make. Kind of contrived, but no more so than many other schemes.

Ferrell

Anonymous said...

Oh, and on the subject of a "United Earth"; the 'Terran Empire' is more likely. Individual nations are most likely to be part of the human culture until at least the next Ice Age and beyond. Future historians will look back at this gobal network of nations and refer to it as the Age of the "Terran Disunity"...

Ferrell

Damien Sullivan said...

Tony: I didn't say motherhood was a public good, I said it was non-monetized, in response to your "if it was useful they'd presumably be paid for it".

"raw materials and fuel for power would still have to be sought, extracted, refined, and distributed."

Solar panels for power. And fabricators are often assumed to imply *dis*assemblers as well, sorting dirt for minerals, or high quality recycling. So no, no centralized fuel or massive mining and refining operations.

Skirnir: A PMF united Earth isn't implausible to me. We're already knitting together global governance (in non-standard form) in trade, war crime justice, peacekeeping/response to blatant invasions, and the environment. Environmental pressure will grow with global warming.

The EU gives a model for knitting together countries peacefully and gradually, one which is starting (at a very very nascent level) to be imitated in Africa and South America. It's currently choking on the flaws of the euro, but it's too soon to say how that'll be resolved.

Skírnir said...

@Ferrell: interesting scenarios, but I find it implausible even for a "cynical" setting that the taxpayers get no vote. It simply doesn't make sense, and it's unnecessary, because even with a vote those 20% can regularly get overruled by the remaining 80%.

However, compare this to present-day American society, where the privileges of the wealthy are defended even by many poor people, because they have been indoctrinated their whole life that "you can get rich, too". I actually find this much more cynical.

What also might not be too far off is the opposite scenario, kind of like the classical greek democracy: _only_ the taxpayer gets to vote, and gets votes proportional to their income. This was kind of the case in pre-WW1 Germany, with the added spice that while workers did get a vote, the employer could make his workers vote for his preferred party (read: conservative) because polls weren't secret and ballots were cast _in the workplace_.

> A PMF united Earth isn't implausible to me. We're already knitting together global governance (in non-standard form) in trade, war crime justice, peacekeeping/response to blatant invasions, and the environment. Environmental pressure will grow with global warming.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic there, but what I see is that international war crime prosecution doesn't work when some of the most powerful nations, e.g. USA and China, refuse to participate, and let their war criminals get away with a little slap on the fingers the scale of a parking ticket for dozenfold murder of innocents (and I'm not even talking about China here).

As for the EU, we'll see how that goes -- currently the public opinion is that the EU is overextended and may go belly-up fast.
(The funny thing about Greece is that it was _known_ back then that they faked their numbers to get into the Euro, they just blatantly lied, but although this had been revealed before the Euro-introduction, they were accepted, apparently because the commissars thought "Aw come on, Greece is such a small country, what's the worst that can happen?")

The _idea_ of unification and cooperation is very reasonably, but as Gary Brecher put it, man isn't a reasonable creature, it is tribal: "My gang yay, your gang boo!" We'll have to see if we can overcome that.

---

On a totally unrelated note, Captchas are annoying but I understand they are necessary in this medium. Have you thought about setting up a real forum?
Also, I am getting better at deciphering captchas. ;)

Skírnir said...

P.S. - sorry for double post, an afterthought or two occured to me.

@Ferrell again:
I don't know if maybe your phrasing was just a lapse, but I find it rather peculiar to define relegating 80% of the populace to cheap labour as "hopeful" scenario. In my view, that would be the cynical scenario. (While, as I said, your "cynical" scenario is just implausible.)

"Encouraging" people to better themselves doesn't do squat, you have to actively provide the opportunity for them to do so. Such as providing access to education regardless of economic background.

Either way, the scenario of the whole workforce competing for a small number of jobs is what isn't working now. Even ~10% unemployed put enough pressure on the job market to freeze income for decades in spite of increasing productivity. The profits are just accumulated by a very small caste at the top.

http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-2394&y=-2492&z=3
(Warning, it is really, really HUGE.)
The data I'm referring to is:

Production worker hourly wage:
1965: $19.61
2007: $19.71

typical CEO hourly wage:
1965: $490.31
2007: $5419.97

This is not the solution to our economic problems, it's the cause. We'll have to think of something different for the future.

Damien Sullivan said...

"kind of like the classical greek democracy: _only_ the taxpayer gets to vote, and gets votes proportional to their income"

That's not the classical Greek democracy, certainly not Athens, which extended the vote to all male citizens, and used sortition heavily to guarantee true equality.

It's more like the Roman Republic, which was explicitly plutocratic in the vote-weighting of the Centuries.

"international war crime prosecution doesn't work"

I didn't say we had a world government, I said we were knitting governance together.

The EU isn't the same as the euro. I don't see the EU going belly-up.

As for inequality, that's been soaring in the US. But that's largely the US, not a universal trend.

Skírnir said...

Ah, I realized my mixup. The Greeks had the _eligibility_ to be elected tied to tax. Only the wealthy had access to higher offices.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Tony: I didn't say motherhood was a public good, I said it was non-monetized, in response to your 'if it was useful they'd presumably be paid for it'."

The structure of the sentence made it seem like you were asserting motherhood as some kind of absolute good.

"Solar panels for power. And fabricators are often assumed to imply *dis*assemblers as well, sorting dirt for minerals, or high quality recycling. So no, no centralized fuel or massive mining and refining operations."

Really? The power to disassemble and assemble matter at the molecular level, from local solar power production? Oh, I think we need not look too hard for a reason to maintain centralized power production and distribution networks.

Also, taking my back yard as an example, how much caliche and granite dust do you think you need to shove into the hopper to get enough iron and carbon atoms (not to mention a few percentage points of molybdenum, chromium, and manganese) to make the steel for something as simple and unassuming as a bicycle? That right there would create value in land that no amount of decentralized nanofacturing would be able to overcome -- or at least a healthy trade in feedstocks, which would be dominated by capital aggregators, who could afford to create better efficiencies in feedstock extraction, refinement, and distribution.

And how much is one of these fabs supposed to cost? They might be capital equipment on cost alone. Nor does the average person -- or even community -- need the biggest fab, or even a medium sized one. Somebody has to hold the real big ones, and some mechanism has to exist for him to sell his output to those who don't have big ones, but who need big products.

Then there's the question of spare parts and design for ease of maintenance and repair. A useful fab might only make parts, while the remaining work of assembly and test still goes to humans.

See, even a magic wand isn't so magic, if you subject it to the physics and economics of the real world.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"As for inequality, that's been soaring in the US. But that's largely the US, not a universal trend."

Actually, it's an industrialized world trend, if you're comparing to the whole planet. The developed countries have been pulling away from the undeveloped and even developed world for centruies now, and they still are. "Inequality" in the US is really just a quibble about internal distribution of masses of wealth undreamt of just a century ago. But Europe, developed Asia, and Australia all have the same order of wealth in the aggregate, even if they choose to redistribute it internally. That's why #occupy crowd gains so little traction in the US -- as "unequal" as they claim everything to be, nobody with a job -- which is still most people -- is really dissatisfied enough to do anything about it, no matter how much they bitch and moan about howl ittle they're paid, what a b@stard the boss is, etc.

Tony said...

"undeveloped and even developed world" in the above should read: "undeveloped and even developing world"

Damien Sullivan said...

Actually, no. Much of the world is catching up with the West, though the bottom billion isn't much. (Though a lot of them still have cell phones.) It's easier to copy growth than to invent it after all, and more and more countries are getting better at that.

"The power to disassemble and assemble matter at the molecular level, from local solar power production?"

Sure. Though it'll be somewhat slow, if you don't have a lot of area to devote.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Actually, no. Much of the world is catching up with the West, though the bottom billion isn't much. (Though a lot of them still have cell phones.) It's easier to copy growth than to invent it after all, and more and more countries are getting better at that."

Damien, Damien, Damien...

In the US, in the year 2000, 284 million people enjoyed 25.4% of the world's wealth of the world's wealth. In that same year, in China, 1.25 billion people enjoyed 8.8% of the world's wealth. The average person in the US was almost 13 times more wealthy than the average person in China, a rapidly developing country.

There has been some convergence since then, but expecting things to converge all of the way is, IMO irrational. There just isn't that much energy to be had. And expecting significant convergence in places like Africa and much of South America? I'm not holding my breath. Once again, too much energy required and not enough energy to go around. And the rich will fight to keep what they've got.

"Sure. Though it'll be somewhat slow, if you don't have a lot of area to devote."

There are certain chemical, electrochemical, and thermochemical -- like refining metals -- operations that are endothermic. Nanodbots aren't going to change that, for the simple reason that the input heat has to be applied at the molecular or microcrystaline level. (It would in fact be interesting to see just what kind of nanobot could survive the thermal environment necessary to break dwon various iron and aluminum compounds, and what kind of fab chassis could contain and control the heat coming off of the process as the metals are driven to a temperature from which they could settle into a crystaline structure.

And where is the immediate concentration of power for that going to come from? Solar cells just sitting out in the yard? I doubt it seriously -- unless you mean to add a large battery farm or magnetically levitated flywheel storage device. These were supposed to be cheap, compact systems, right?

Anonymous said...

Here's an interesting point for discussion: I believe that we have already reached the post-scarcity point with regards to information: Modern computers and networks can duplicate gigabyte-sized collections of information for negligible cost. About the only scarcity involved in the economics of information these days is the artificial scarcity imposed by copyrights and patents, which are the last remnants of the state-sponsored monopolies of the bad-old-days of mercantilism.

Skírnir said...

>" Once again, too much energy required and not enough energy to go around. And the rich will fight to keep what they've got."

In the long run, we'll "just" have to produce more energy. Of course that's a tremendous task. Current world power consumption is around 15TW. 90% of that is fossil, which will have to be replaced rather soon, so we have to rebuild practically _all_ the power infrastructure.
Most developed countries draw an average of 5kW per person (except the US, which draws 11kW); warmer countries need less (e.g. Portugal 3kW). Let's say that for a comfortable standard of living, an average of 4kW per person is ample.
World population also keeps growing; I think we can expect _at least_ 10 billion before it levels off. Let's be optimistic and go with that figure: then to provide everyone in the world with western living standard, we need a total of 40TW.

It's a lot, but it can be done, with a mix of regenerative energies (solar-thermal, geo-thermal, wind...), and hopefully fusion some day, or Thorium-based fission if all else fails.

Damien Sullivan said...

Tony, Tony, Tony. As usual you sound so confident and condescending, yet you're full of shit.

Transparently so, too. You quote 2000 numbers? Hey, guess what, it's 2012. If convergence is happening -- what with China growing at 8 or 10% a year and the US 3% if it's lucky -- that'll change those numbers by a large factor, like 1.7 to 2.33

2011: US GDP/capita 48,387, China 8382 (PPP). Americans now only 5.77x as wealthier as Chinese, down from your 13, an improvement of 2.25x. In exchange rate terms China has 5414, for a factor of 8.9x.
(Number source: Wikipedia GDP/capita lists, first column.)

"expecting things to converge all of the way is, IMO irrational."

Shifting those goalposts again. You claimed global inequality was increasing and I called you on it; now you're claiming it won't be eradicated, an entirely different claim.

"There just isn't that much energy to be had"

There's plenty of solar or nuclear energy to be had. And if those don't work or get scaled for some reason, then the convergence will happen the other way, as our standard of living collapses to theirs as the fossil fuels run out.

"I'm not holding my breath"

Or paying attention to what's actually happening in those places, including Africa having some of the world's highest growth rates, and most of South America having converged to 1/3 of US income, which by historical/world standards nearly makes them rich countries.

Not worth responding to you on the other bits, where you introduce nanobots out of the blue, and refuse to show any imagination about different processes even with the leeway of those processes being slow and inefficient.

Anonymous said...

Just a quick thought, but historically the best method for a nation to restrain population growth is to industrialize (which normally means urbinization); so the obvious solution to world population growth is for everyone to industrialize to the level of the West...makes you wonder why some people are so vehimenately opposed to industrialization, but still scream about overpopulation. Again, just my thoughts.

Ferrell

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Tony, Tony, Tony. As usual you sound so confident and condescending, yet you're full of shit."

Keep a civil tongue in your head, young man.

"Transparently so, too. You quote 2000 numbers? Hey, guess what, it's 2012. If convergence is happening -- what with China growing at 8 or 10% a year and the US 3% if it's lucky -- that'll change those numbers by a large factor, like 1.7 to 2.33

2011: US GDP/capita 48,387, China 8382 (PPP). Americans now only 5.77x as wealthier as Chinese, down from your 13, an improvement of 2.25x. In exchange rate terms China has 5414, for a factor of 8.9x.
(Number source: Wikipedia GDP/capita lists, first column.)"


You don't have to agree with me, but I think those numbers are as soft as whipped cream. We're running up against fossil fuel limits, which will kill and eventually roll back that growth.

"Shifting those goalposts again. You claimed global inequality was increasing and I called you on it; now you're claiming it won't be eradicated, an entirely different claim."

Nope. Just looking further downstream to what is likely sustainable.

"There's plenty of solar or nuclear energy to be had. And if those don't work or get scaled for some reason, then the convergence will happen the other way, as our standard of living collapses to theirs as the fossil fuels run out."

1. They won't scale. Solar is based on resources and techniques that make ROI -- in energy terms -- marginal at best. Nuclear is, well...problematic.

2. Who says that the haves are required to let the have-nots take an equal share? I said the rich would fight for what they have. You think that won't happen?

"Or paying attention to what's actually happening in those places, including Africa having some of the world's highest growth rates, and most of South America having converged to 1/3 of US income, which by historical/world standards nearly makes them rich countries."

See above. You can't wish us out of resource depletion just to make your argument work.

"Not worth responding to you on the other bits, where you introduce nanobots out of the blue, and refuse to show any imagination about different processes even with the leeway of those processes being slow and inefficient."

The real world I live and work in every day isn't about imagination. And you're the one that said fabricators are "*dis*assemblers". What is that concept most commonly associated with? That's right, nanotechnology.

First you accuse me of shifting goalposts, then you accuse me of introducing something you introduced yourself? Please.

Tony said...

Ferrell:

"Just a quick thought, but historically the best method for a nation to restrain population growth is to industrialize...

The problem is the energy that industrialization requires. People think we'll just endlessly develop more. That's simply not rational, given the pretty obvious limits we're running up against.

Tony said...

Anon:

"Here's an interesting point for discussion: I believe that we have already reached the post-scarcity point with regards to information: Modern computers and networks can duplicate gigabyte-sized collections of information for negligible cost. About the only scarcity involved in the economics of information these days is the artificial scarcity imposed by copyrights and patents, which are the last remnants of the state-sponsored monopolies of the bad-old-days of mercantilism."

Ahhh...yes, the "information wants to be free" fallacy. Data wants to be free, and sometimes even is -- or at lest so cheap as to be virtually free. Information -- as in aggregated, organized, purposeful data -- represents human effort. It's creation deserves just as much compensation as any other effort that adds value. Legal protections for the value in that effort is just as valid as it always has been.

Ray said...

I grew up hearing that with increased automation, computerization, and productivity, we'd all have much more leisure time and wealth. That is, much more than the golden age 1969's single-earner household with a 9-5 job and a one hour lunch. Instead...

"Not only are Americans working longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept, but now they are also working longer than anyone else in the industrialized world." (abc news)

Now a minimum of two incomes are pretty much mandatory. People in higher class jobs are 'expected' to work more than 40 hours (read: easily replaced if they don't work free overtime), while those in lower class jobs need at least two jobs to pay rent.

In Hong Kong, they protest in the streets when their lunches get cut from 90 minutes to an hour, but in the USA, "Today only one third of workers take a lunch break away from their desk." and most people can't even remember the luxury of taking a whole hour for lunch.

As to those 80% vs 20% numbers that people are talking about... "agriculture: 1.2%, industry: 19.2%, services: 79.6%" 'Services' at 80%? Sure some of those are important, and some pay a living wage, but the vast majority are low-wage jobs like telemarketers or answerers, waitresses, and cashiers - all of which could be replaced today by answering machines, autodialers, self-checkouts, fast food style serve-yourself, vending machines, etc. And we know it. _Most of our economy is already unnecessary._

So how far are we from seeing some kind of freedom problem? The workers are overworked (they have no free time and don't even feel free to eat lunch!), while the unemployed are 'free', but not free to succeed. The workers can't work less, because they'll lose their jobs to cheaper replacements from the pool of unemployed. The unemployed can't easily get jobs because they aren't really needed.

We may live in 'interesting times'. Is the future day's work really likely to be shorter and more pleasant, as was thought in the past? Or will it follow the current trends of becoming longer and less pleasant, with more cut-throat competition? If we actually only need to employ about 30% of the population full time, what kind of resentment will that set up between the classes? Or will we find some way to spread it out so that everyone only needs to work 30% of a full-time job? How would that work with highly-skilled jobs? I could see still being effective if I were only working 3 hour days, but only because my job is also my hobby and what I do and study in my spare time. Not sure it would be the same with a lot of jobs.

Ray said...

After a few minutes thought, I have to followup. I was pretty bleak, but then I thought, what if all advertisers and marketers were removed? Marketers produce nothing of value. They increase /perceived/ value, but they aren't really necessary in any real sense. The same goes for paparazzi photographers, celebrity gossip reporters and a lot of other jobs.

Then it occurred to me that we might just be going through growing pains - a post-industrial phase-shift. Perhaps in the future, none of us will be doing anything productive, but employment, wages, leisure time, and freedom will all increase and the economy will work fine, totally on the basis of perceived value. Maybe we're just transitioning to a totally artificial economy. Some sort of giant socially accepted group hallucination where value is defined differently.

What would be the effects of that on freedom/exploitation? And how long could it last before someone shattered the illusion?

Tony said...

Re: Damien

You know, after some thought, I have to admit that you are right -- I was being ridiculous about the spread of wealth in monetary terms. And even more ridiculous in my defense of the original error.

But here's the kicker...what I really meant -- and don't accuse me of shifting the goalposts here, because it really did require some quiet relfection to realize it -- was that the technology and know-how that creates wealth in this modern age really is a possession of the developed world, and the underdeveloped and undeveloped world is really far behind in that respect. A chip fab in Malaysia, for example -- say one that made the memory in the $5-10 thumb drive that you probably have hanging from your keychain -- is not a technological possession of Malaysia. It's an industrial colonization, intended to exploit a comparative advantage in cheap labor. Nobody in the host country knows how to make a chip fab on their own. A relative very few even know the theory behind the operation of a memory chip -- and none of them know the proprietary design information that goes into the chips made in their own country. You could say similar things about an athletic shoe factory in Thailand, or even an industrial farm in Africa.

The industrialized world knows stuff, and increasingly knows more, every day. The developing world does stuff, and gets paid a wage, but never really learns all that much about what its doing. That's what globalization really means, mostly.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“[H]istorically the best method for a nation to restrain population growth is to industrialize … so the obvious solution to world population growth is for everyone to industrialize … makes you wonder why some people are so vehimenately opposed to industrialization, but still scream about overpopulation.”

Heartless libertarian communism to follow …

Yes, overpopulation is the problem with regard to the distribution of wealth. We’ve created a tremendous amount of wealth, but it must be shared by a still growing pool of people. Cutting demand would stretch current supplies much further.

However, we can’t seem to agree on population controls. The “conservatives” don’t want us to prevent, abort, or euthanize the unwanted, and the “liberals” don’t want us to let the unneeded starve.

Brett said...

@Tony
It's an industrial colonization, intended to exploit a comparative advantage in cheap labor. Nobody in the host country knows how to make a chip fab on their own. A relative very few even know the theory behind the operation of a memory chip -- and none of them know the proprietary design information that goes into the chips made in their own country. You could say similar things about an athletic shoe factory in Thailand, or even an industrial farm in Africa.

Just because they start off as factories where everything but the labor is imported from the West, doesn't mean that they have to stay that way. Technical expertise and the like learned on the job doesn't disappear, and technology leaks out (particularly when the host country coerces the foreign company to disclose it to their domestic partners, like in China).

Tony said...

Brett:

"Just because they start off as factories where everything but the labor is imported from the West, doesn't mean that they have to stay that way. Technical expertise and the like learned on the job doesn't disappear, and technology leaks out (particularly when the host country coerces the foreign company to disclose it to their domestic partners, like in China)."

By the time you learn how to build your own Model 2012 fab, the company that established one in your country is working on a Model 2032 fab. You simply can't catch up by copying technique. You have to develop a world class education and research infrastructure, or you'll always be behind. Too many places are just too far away from that objective.

Aaron said...

Tony;

Really? The power to disassemble and assemble matter at the molecular level, from local solar power production?

Biological life works exactly like that. So, yes.

Also, taking my back yard as an example, how much caliche and granite dust do you think you need to shove into the hopper to get enough iron and carbon atoms (not to mention a few percentage points of molybdenum, chromium, and manganese) to make the steel for something as simple and unassuming as a bicycle?

Elements freely available in the atmosphere are sufficient for making plastics, and woods. Even if we decide to simply stop doing materials science, most if not all of the problem can be solved with simple substitution.

That right there would create value in land that no amount of decentralized nanofacturing would be able to overcome -- or at least a healthy trade in feedstocks, which would be dominated by capital aggregators, who could afford to create better efficiencies in feedstock extraction, refinement, and distribution.

If everyone has fabs there is no longer any need for labor in the traditional sense, and therefore no need for the division of labor, and therefore no need for chits to mediate the division of labor, i.e., no need for money or capitalism.

Now say, in contravention of all common sense, that nobody thinks to substitute common materials for uncommon, or that some scarce material absolutely cannot be replaced or done without (for the first time in history). Will that get you your trade, dollars, and capitalism? Well, if the only thing you can do with money is buy raw materials, and you're the guy who has raw materials, what are you going to do with dollars once you get them?

No, I'm afraid the only way to get anything that looks like trade after there's nanofacturing on every desktop is by creating an artificial need for money. You won't need to elaborately trade your labor for little bits of thousands of other people's labor, but you might need it to pay debts incurred before the fabs came out, or to pay taxes, or things of that nature.

Any capitalistic trade that happens by then won't be so healthy. It will mean that people have to work, not in exchange for others' labor, but because there's a gun to their heads.

And how much is one of these fabs supposed to cost?

How long does it take before someone figures out how to fab more fabs?

Somebody has to hold the real big ones, and some mechanism has to exist for him to sell his output to those who don't have big ones, but who need big products.

If you need something big, including a big fab, you make it the Johnny Cash way, one piece at a time.

Then there's the question of spare parts and design for ease of maintenance and repair. A useful fab might only make parts, while the remaining work of assembly and test still goes to humans.

Already being computerized and mechanized.

See, even a magic wand isn't so magic, if you subject it to the physics and economics of the real world.

You just argued at length that a technological change more fundamental than the agricultural revolution won't change anything fundamental, and you conclude that you're the one being a hard-headed realist?

Z said...

I think the single most important realization is that the shape of the the future economy, and the future workday, is going to depend largely on political decisions that we seem well-conditioned to avoid (and thus resolve in one particular direction by default,) rather than being the inevitable outgrowth of given technologies- because recent history has already suggested that high tech societies can take divergent paths.

We've had a century or two of concerns about technological unemployment- capital replacing a unit of labor and the labor going unused (and the worker unpaid, and ergo destitute) proving largely unfounded. The pin-sharpener was better put to use as the pin-sharpener machine operator, etc. Wages rose, productivity roses, and unemployment fell..up until about the mid '70's, at which point median wages wedged and the productivity increases largely ended up in accounts of higher-income brackets. Divvying up those higher income brackets reveals that the higher you go, the less and less they are filled with the sort of folks people are rather comfortable with being well payed and instead accrue increasingly to managers and financial workers, and further study suggests that most financial workers have empirically demonstrable success rates rather similar to chance- which incidentally demands that their continued prosperity depends on outsourcing loss.

All of this seems to suggest that the single most important element in securing income in the modern world, irregardless of the technologies involved, is access to capital rather than access to skills, and that maybe, just maybe, technological unemployment might not be as easy to shrug off as neoclassical economists, with their fondness of sliding about on demand curves, would like to suggest. Data is a bitch.

Skilled workers are naturally more skilled than ever, but those skill sets attached to longer educations, more frequent career changes, networks enabling intermittent work for a variety of clients- in short, an increasing fraction of a person's lifetime where they aren't receiving regular infusions of cash, times which are, again, easier to handle if you have capital. We also know that across a lifetime, lots of total costs are lower if you always lived with access to money- being able to pay for preventative care is cheaper than emergency treatment, for example. (cont.)

Z said...

(cont.)In a related vein, we have data indicating that in every successive economic downturn in the last century, the amount of time between a return to pre-shock GDP and the return to pre-shock levels of employment has been growing, indicating that employers are finding it progressively easier to replace a worker with something that isn't a worker, and are less and less able to find things to do with the resulting surplus of labor. (We talk an awful lot about robots as some sort of looming phenomenon, but most jobs people have done in history don't require the full gamut of human talents. If your job was to read to a shop of cigar makers and they bought a CD player, it doesn't matter that it fails the Turing test.) Again, there is a hint that technological unemployment, with employment in this context meaning spending most days doing work for which you are paid in some connection to the amount of time you spent, might be a real thing. We also have the most recent job figures that indicate that most jobs restored from the recent shock have lower wages than those they replace- if technological unemployment isn't real, we might be looking at technological McJobing, where the hardest parts of a job to train a person to do (and thus secure for them greater pay) are the easiest to design a machine to perform- which has some obvious truth to it when we consider the progress of computers in performing math to, say, climbing a tree or humming a song.

And lastly, we have the fact that the Earth's atmosphere can absorb something like another 500 gigatons of carbon before it proceeds to rearrange the Earth's climatic zones in a fashion...wildly unfamiliar to a lot of hard-to-move infrastructure, populations, and the genomes of interesting and useful species, and assorted interests already have futures riding on 2500 gigatons of deposits in the ground- meaning that people with capital have monetized the drowning of people without it. It also means that any plan to alleviate global poverty that hinges on huge increases in total global physical productivity without first paying *some* attention to its distribution might tend towards the self-defeating.

(cont.)

Z said...

(cont.) Before we dig any further, I think it's important to pay some attention to the tech panaceas of self-replicating nanosynthesis and whatever technology supplies it with gobs of power- nanosolar, fusion, whatever. While it obviously opens up huge vistas of what you can make and what you can make stuff from, it's not clear exactly how it's an absolute game-changer as a manufacturing technology (as opposed to all the other crazy stuff nanomachinery might be able to to-medicine, etc.) Modern industry has spent two centuries taking one onject after another and making the primary determinants of its cost the type and number of atoms it contains. Building things atom by atom doesn't change the fact that some atoms are preferable to others, or that those atoms are unevenly distributed on the Earth, or the thermodynamics of rearranging them from their native to final form- a bond is a bond. Self-replication is nice- but economies as a whole self-replicate (that's that whole growth thing) and even industries that have self-replicating capital, like farming, still have costs. That's not say that such technologies are not wildly cool and enabling of wonderful things- it's just that the suggestion that no one will be poor when they have a box in their house that makes their T-shirts, instead of having them arrive by FedEx, might be missing the point. A fab wouldn't replace actors or strippers or doctors or nurses or soldiers or cops or plumbers or scientists or programmers or elevator repairmen or bridge welders or plumbers or teachers or congresspeople or fab-product designers or fabber intellectual property lawyers. If you want to build a power intensive product in the middle of the night, then you want power from somewhere else, and all of a sudden there's a power grid, and people to buy power from, and people to fix power lines, and you need to pay them for when they want to buy a car. Maybe they could take a car out piece by piece from their home fab (or fab a bigger fab,) but if they don't want to turn all those bolts or turn their house into a giant vacuum fabrication chamber, they'll probably get it from someone with a bigger one, who will want to be paid. Lots of the old arguments about extracting any and all materials from dirt or seawater or whatever don't hold thermodynamic water, regardless of the process involved. And of course, a universal fab is a long way off (if it appears- mechanosynthesis of any and all materials is a dicey notion) and there's all the tech generations between here and there where fabs can work with one material or not another, or are a big industrial technology. Not every technology shrinks to home scale- and the legal difficulties in such shrinkage when the device can comfortably make bazookas or nerve gas could get complicated and DRM-y. Having the number of people involved in making consumer goods asymptotically approach zero doesn't get rid of the rest of the economy- it just raises the question of if their freshly unemployed selves can find a source of income that allows them to afford the goods (or the good-making machines) that replaced them- and the same goes for any technology replacing any job on that list.

So. Right. Work. All the above facts suggest to me that the future of work comes in two flavors, separated by a political decision. The first is that, If This Goes On, the work arrangements of the 14th century become increasingly familiar. The single most important consideration in whether your working life is pleasant (pleasant meaning both well-paid and leisurely, like being the Duke of Florence, and intrinsically interesting, like being Galileo or da Vinci) is the mean free distance on the social network between you and someone who already has a pile of cash. Heredity is the surest such short linkage, and the next best bet is access to shared institutions, which are liable to be expensive. That's where the useful skills will be taught, but perhaps more importantly will simply be going through the door.
(cont.)

Z said...

(cont.) Outside that increasingly calcified sector of the workforce (and workforce here includes people who flip coins to pick stocks for their trust funds)you're interchangeable- with a swath of humanity and increasingly sophisticated tools. Replacing workers is easier than "creating" them through training or "maintaining" them through adequate compensation. People may not want you to starve to death, but the framing of any wealth transfer from wealthy to poor is liable to be framed as charity rather than due recompense, with attached notions of loyalty, and a drive on the other side to optimize the outlay/loyalty ratio rather than optimizing human achievement.

This obviously sucks. It almost certainly sucks for you, because it sucks for most people- and being smart doesn't help, because the whole point is that being smart/driven/etc. is a characteristic the system is increasingly ignoring- the tools that those with capital can buy are replicating more and more of the functions of smart people every day. It even sucks for rich people, because said rich people are missing out on all the wonderful things that might be made or done by one of the poor people, were they not poor- whether that be a book they needed free time to right, or an invention they needed education to perfect, or even a marital partner they never would have met.

So. The alternative. If the main determinant in the modern technological environment in whether or not your work is lame or awesome is how close you are to capital, then we need to get more people close to capital, and if people with capital are screwing people without capital (including unborn generations who could inherit a denuded planet) then they need to be in the same risk pools. The reaction vessel of the economy needs stirring to prevent the accumulation of uninteresting and unfortunate cruft at both the top and bottom.You can get people closer to capital or its products with good old fashioned 20th century liberal consensus goodies- public education, trust busting to ensure competitive space for new players, inheritance taxes to prune dynastic growth, and so on. That might be enough. But it might not, and it might be eventually be necessary to make a move that's been proposed independently by the favored economists of both left and right- enrolling the whole populace in a trust fund, capable of furnishing both income and capital, filled up with income derived from resources prone to rent seeking, like land, that are inherently common, like the atmosphere and fisheries stocks, and from shares of the productive infrastructure granted in exchange for certain legal advantages (namely incorporation.) (cont.)

Z said...

t's not state ownership. We don't want that. The whole Soviet system was such a horrific mess because it was both a monopoly and a monopsony in every class of good, complete with the distortions of both. No price signals, no efficiency. But to take an example of land, if land is a source of capital, and they aren't making any more land, than fresh generations are automatically deprived of income simply by dint of when they were born, unless that dirt is taxed and the proceeds paid out- a rather old notion known as Georgism. If carbon emissions screw everyone else in the economy, whose fields are going to burn up or whose coastal home is going to drown, they need to be taxed (or rather, they need to pay for consumption of a common resource, namely the buffering capacity of the atmosphere,) and if the energy in fossil carbon is released now and is thus unavailable to future generations, then that loss needs to be stored in trust for future generations- the Alaskan mineral trust fund and citizen's dividend is a fair prototype. The original legal rationale for corporations stipulated that certain classes of legal risk were being removed from the back of a group of people so they would and could perform some publicly useful function. That last part is obviously a little wiggly- unless you just pony up some non-controlling (to avoid the aforementioned monopoly) pile of stock and the associated dividend to a public trust fund, and then that little requirement is taken care of.

You use that pile of capital to pay a dividend to every citizen and furnish a basic income and to provide them with access to a a few big lifetime lumps of cash to pay for educations, start businesses, invest elsewhere, whatever. People get sniffy about 'the dole,' but it's not some dependency where 20% of the population is forced to pony up for 80%- it's getting paid a dividend for owning stuff that you have cause to own. We know that longer spans of unemployment insurance result in people finding higher paying jobs, and we know that people with unemployed incomes below certain levels grow sufficiently discouraged that they often stop seeking work, and we know that most startups spring from people that have the option of not earning a wage for a while. Getting rid of really poor people gives them the option to get richer, work less, or both. It can diminish certain classes of social costs, like economically motivated petty crime. Technological unemployment is not nearly as scary if the resulting profits from replacing workers with machines pay out as a dividend to those same workers.

Z said...

That's the road I see to a 'post-scarcity' future. Real honest to goodness post-scarcity is a meaningless concept- I can always request enough to something that it deprives my neighbor of a similar option. Even Culture citizens probably can't just order up a whole Orbital. However, there is empirical cause to believe that there's something of a plateau in the amount of satisfaction derived from material means, and getting everyone onto that plateau seems feasible. On the plateau, we know there are some goods that are status icons and diminish in perceived personal value when other people have them, and some that do not. One that doesn't is vacation. So it might be, if the economy needs fewer and fewer hands to run, and the dividend from the fund gets bigger and bigger, and the jobs that remain are offering plentiful free time, it might be that we arrive at some Federation/Culture-esque point where people do things they are good at, because they want to, and still have a roof over their head and a meal in their belly. There'd still be jobs, probably- humans are often hard to replace at everything, especially things that we enjoy receiving from other human beings- and there'd still probably be people who thought it was a good use of their time to focus on getting lots of stuff. And that's all okay. What would be absent is people suffering and depriving other people of their accomplishments because chance didn't put them in a family or an era that already had cash when the traditional paths to get said cash got crowded by machines and wealthy people preoccupied with maintaining their station.

Z said...

And somehow I dropped a bit. Well serves me right for writing a tome. Sometimes I just get excited. :-P

So, fit this in there:

"I think it's important to pay some attention to the tech panaceas of self-replicating nanosynthesis and whatever technology supplies it with gobs of power- While it obviously opens up huge vistas of what you can make , it's not clear exactly how it's an absolute game-changer as a manufacturing technology (as opposed to all the other crazy stuff nanomachinery might be able to to-medicine, etc.) Modern industry has spent two centuries taking one object after another and making the primary determinants of its cost the type and number of atoms it contains. Building things atom by atom doesn't change the fact that some atoms are preferable to others, or that those atoms are unevenly distributed on the Earth, or the thermodynamics of rearranging them from their native to final form. Self-replication is nice- but economies as a whole self-replicate and even industries that have self-replicating capital, like farming, have costs. Such technologies are wildly cool and enabling of wonderful things- it's just that the suggestion that no one will be poor when they have a box in their house that makes their T-shirts, instead of having them arrive by FedEx, might be missing the point. A fab wouldn't replace actors or doctors or nurses or cops or plumbers or programmers or repairmen or bridge welders or plumbers or teachers or congresspeople or product designers or intellectual property lawyers. If you want to build a power intensive product in the middle of the night, then you want power from somewhere else, and all of a sudden there's a power grid, and people to fix power lines, and you need to pay them for when they want to buy a car. Maybe they could take a car out piece by piece from their home fab (or fab a bigger fab,) but if they don't want to turn their house into a giant vacuum fabrication chamber, they'll probably get it from someone with a bigger fab, who will want to be paid. Lots of the old arguments about extracting any and all materials from seawater don't hold thermodynamic water, regardless of the process involved. And of course, a universal fab is a long way off and there's all the tech generations between here and there where fabs can work with one material or not another, or are a big industrial technology. Not every technology shrinks to home scale- and the legal difficulties in such shrinkage when the device can comfortably make bazookas or nerve gas could get complicated. Having the number of people involved in making consumer goods approach zero doesn't get rid of the rest of the economy- it just raises the question of if their freshly unemployed selves can find a source of income that allows them to afford the goods or the good-making machines that replaced them- and the same goes for any technology replacing any job on that list.

So. Work. The above facts suggest to me that the future of work comes in two flavors, separated by a political decision. The first is that, If This Goes On, the work arrangements of the 14th century become increasingly familiar. The single most important consideration in whether your working life is pleasant (pleasant meaning both well-paid and leisurely and intrinsically interesting) is the mean free distance between you and someone who already has a pile of cash. Heredity is the surest such short linkage, and the next best bet is access to shared institutions, which are liable to be expensive. That's where the useful skills will be taught, but perhaps more importantly will simply be going through the door."

FBH said...

I actually think it's way more likely to go the opposite way. It's not that they'll be a shortage of good jobs but rather of normal jobs.

For one thing I'm not sure I really believe in decelerando as you're presenting it. I don't necessarily think we're going to get an instant singularity but can you really say technological change over the last two decades has been less than in the two decades before that? The fact that I'm even able to discuss this with you (who is based I believe in America) from Britain shows that there has been considerable technological change. It's more that various technology tends to reach a point of maturity and then slow down. Aircraft did this for instance. Computers may well do this, but not for a while.

That doesn't mean we won't see other, new technology or even better computers. We'll just see them more slowly than before.

Furthermore, a lot of low end work is already being automated. Supermarkets are becoming more automated, with only inertia holding it back. This comes in the form of both automating stuff in the store (like making people scan their own stuff) and in the elimination of stores (go online and order your groceries then have them delivered). Both are better economically for the companies involve but will eventually eliminate a lot of labour.

I don't think there's much reason to believe that a similar process won't happen in fast food or even, over a longer time period, in call centres.

Finally there's the fact that in some ways we're already post scarcity. The production of stuff is now mostly based demand not on supply.

All this together means that overall capitalism is doomed. Because of automation normal workers will gradually be pushed out by machines. There will still be a place for skilled workers and creativity until and unless we get true AI. However if increasing numbers of workers are being pushed out of the market (Basically they have nothing to sell because their labour is not valuable) you're going to need another system to meet their economic needs.

Or I guess you could just create some really labour intensive process to suck up all their labour. Like maybe space colonization.

Tony said...

Aaron:

"Biological life works exactly like that. So, yes."

So no. Biological processes can't produce refined iron and aluminum crystals. There's an energy threshold that biology can't cross.

"Elements freely available in the atmosphere are sufficient for making plastics, and woods. Even if we decide to simply stop doing materials science, most if not all of the problem can be solved with simple substitution."

You can't sustitute wood or plastic for structural steel.

"If everyone has fabs there is no longer any need for labor in the traditional sense, and therefore no need for the division of labor, and therefore no need for chits to mediate the division of labor, i.e., no need for money or capitalism."

Somebody still has to use the products of the fabs to do stuff. And you still have to extract, refine, and distribute fuels anf fab feedstocks.

"Now say, in contravention of all common sense, that nobody thinks to substitute common materials for uncommon, or that some scarce material absolutely cannot be replaced or done without (for the first time in history). Will that get you your trade, dollars, and capitalism? Well, if the only thing you can do with money is buy raw materials, and you're the guy who has raw materials, what are you going to do with dollars once you get them?"

Buy the products of fabs. Comparative advantage still works, even if an entire factory can be compressed into a single machine.

"No, I'm afraid the only way to get anything that looks like trade after there's nanofacturing on every desktop is by creating an artificial need for money. You won't need to elaborately trade your labor for little bits of thousands of other people's labor, but you might need it to pay debts incurred before the fabs came out, or to pay taxes, or things of that nature."

"[N]anofacturing on every desktop" Doesn't build things like cars and planes and ships. Also, why would everyone own a fab if they don't need fab products every day? Once again, a fab is a different kind of factory, not a relegation of the comparative advantage in factories.

"Any capitalistic trade that happens by then won't be so healthy. It will mean that people have to work, not in exchange for others' labor, but because there's a gun to their heads."

Melodramatic nonsense.

"How long does it take before someone figures out how to fab more fabs?"

Still costs time, resources, and energy to make a fab. That limits their availability.

"If you need something big, including a big fab, you make it the Johnny Cash way, one piece at a time."

And then you have to make the tools to assemble the pieces -- a little crane to make a bigger crane, to make a bigger crane...

"Already being computerized and mechanized."

So you have to use your fab to make a whole assortment of robots to man a factory that the fab is supposed to replace? Now you're really making sense.

"You just argued at length that a technological change more fundamental than the agricultural revolution won't change anything fundamental, and you conclude that you're the one being a hard-headed realist?"

Yes -- because I see it as a change in technology, not a change in the physical rules of the universe.

Tony said...

Re: Z

Turn all of the unemployed into a collective rent-seeking landlord? I leave enumerating the (rather obvious) difficulties as an exercise for the student.

Re: FBH

Supermarkets won't go away simply because future delivery doesn't satisfy immediate needs. Also, people like to visually and physically inspect their food in person before buying.

WRT technological advances, no, there haven't been a lot of fundamental ones in the last twenty years -- just increased miniturization and penetration of digital technology. Filling up the application space is not the same thing as invention.

Z said...

Tony- Please do some enumerating, as this student is curious. Piguvian taxes aren't rent seeking, they're renumerative. Attempts to define royalties of natural resources as rent seeking have all stumbled when it is pointed out that they are finite and consumable. But most importantly, the whole issue with rents isn't that they exist- it's that they are never pass into the hands of people who pay them and thus are distorting. A systematic effort to collect rents and rebate them improves, not lowers, aggregate market efficiency. And dividends on stock aren't rents at all.

So, to get this straight, you don't approve of mineral royalties, spectrum sales, gas taxes, and the government ownership of stocks and bonds? There's quite a field of economists (and national pensions and sovereign wealth funds in nations far more solvent than the US) who would take issue with that.

Tony said...

Z:

"Tony- Please do some enumerating, as this student is curious. Piguvian taxes aren't rent seeking, they're renumerative. Attempts to define royalties of natural resources as rent seeking have all stumbled when it is pointed out that they are finite and consumable."

Such taxes are rent-seeking on their face -- they distort the economic and political environment in favor of a player, without creating wealth. That the atmosphere's capacity to receive polution, or the land's capacity to support agriculture are finite means that extraction of value from them must be rent. You're just changing the accounting rules in favor of your preferred class of rent-seekers.

To enumerate the possible complications:

1. Obviously, with government power implicit in the activity, the rent-seeking majority can demand excessive rent, with no legal recourse available to the rent-paying minority.

2. There's no way to determine a valid rent, because there's no market. You have a single, collective, unacocuntable rent-seeker, imposing its will on numerous rent-payers, without the payers able to withold the rent, even if it distorts the rent-payer's operation out of business.

3. It's not as if the rent-seekers are totally unaccountable. If they didn't demand energy, industrial products, and agricultural produce, the rent-payers wouldn't be involved in activities that notionally demand rent. We've had that argument here before -- it always devolves into one side pointing out that we all benefit from economic activities (even if indirectly), while the other side claims that producers are more to blame than consumers (as if modern transportation, energy consumption, and conveniences were forced down the consumers' throats, willy-nilly).

"But most importantly, the whole issue with rents isn't that they exist- it's that they are never pass into the hands of people who pay them and thus are distorting. A systematic effort to collect rents and rebate them improves, not lowers, aggregate market efficiency. And dividends on stock aren't rents at all."

I suppose you totally miss the Ouroboros-like irony in the idea that rents should be collected and then rebated, apparently in full.

"So, to get this straight, you don't approve of mineral royalties, spectrum sales, gas taxes, and the government ownership of stocks and bonds? There's quite a field of economists (and national pensions and sovereign wealth funds in nations far more solvent than the US) who would take issue with that."

To the degree that such things could be cast as excises on necessary and predictable economic activity, it's hardly anything new -- just a rake-off, as old as road and river passage tolls. And there's no underlying motivation to get back for the sake of the peepuls.

FBH said...

@Tony
Corner ships may continue to exist. Supermarkets may carry on due to inertia and the reasons you stated for a while longer. . .

. . . but that doesn't mean they'll require much labour. Automated supermarkets already exist. Delivery to your door already exists.

The writing is very much on the wall for low end labour that's not call centre stuff already, and it's only going to get worse from here.

Tony said...

FBH:

"Corner ships may continue to exist. Supermarkets may carry on due to inertia and the reasons you stated for a while longer. . .

. . . but that doesn't mean they'll require much labour. Automated supermarkets already exist. Delivery to your door already exists."


You could get your corner grocer to deliver back in the 40s. The supermarket triumphed over specialty shops because it was more efficient -- everything in one place. The Walmart "supercenter" is just a logical development of that -- more everything in one place. And these aren't going to go away, because people like to look and touch before buying anything that goes in, on, or close to their bodies.

Now, are supermarkets getting more automated? Yep. But it's a long way from eliminating most of the checkers, to deploying stocking and inventory by robotics.

"The writing is very much on the wall for low end labour that's not call centre stuff already, and it's only going to get worse from here."

You can't digitize swinging a hammer, repairing an air conditioner, or fixing a car. Most of the service economy is still people doing stuff that only people can do, and very securely so.

FBH said...

As a thought experiment, let's imagine an automated store with even basic future technology. For this we'll assume that technology is basically how it is now, but electronics are cheaper.

Let's further assume that people are willing to spend the time and money to go to the store for the privileges of inspecting their goods, and they want this enough they're willing to pay the store enough for the store to actually want to maintain another leg in it's distribution network (So supplier > distribution centre > stores > house rather than simply supplier > distribution centre > house)

How do we eliminate as much labour as possible?

Well, first off let's tag everything with a microchip and place detectors at the entrance and exit. Give each customer a card with a similar chip and have them set up a direct debit. The customer walks around the store, gets whatever they want and then walks out. As they exit the store what they took is automatically collated and the account is billed. Alternatively, those who wish to pay by cash feed it into a machine outside and receive a prepayed card/chip which they can use until it runs out of cash.

If you try to take too much the door doesn't open. That should minimize the need for security guards.

This is even less fuss than the current store system where you have to scan your own goods, either at an automated till or using a scanner device. It would I would say be an objectively better shopping experience for customers. It is also cheaper for the store because it requires no labour. It is cheaper for the customer because they spend less time in the shop and the shop can pass on the lack of labour costs to them.

Automate cleaning and shelf packing and you're basically down to a fairly minimal amount of guard labour and maybe a store manager to oversee everything.

This is not going to employ the population guys. Especially not as other automation susceptible jobs are replaced.

FBH said...

You could get your corner grocer to deliver back in the 40s. The supermarket triumphed over specialty shops because it was more efficient -- everything in one place. The Walmart "supercenter" is just a logical development of that -- more everything in one place. And these aren't going to go away, because people like to look and touch before buying anything that goes in, on, or close to their bodies.

They're not going away because people are not yet completely use to internet shopping and the systems to do it do not have total distribution through the population. When they do people will find that they don't like looking at products as much as they like the extra cash and time they have because they got a delivery.

Now, are supermarkets getting more automated? Yep. But it's a long way from eliminating most of the checkers, to deploying stocking and inventory by robotics.

They are at most a decade away the complete eliminate of most checkers. I know at least one store near where I used to live which has already completely eliminated them. Another two make them optional. Ordering your groceries online is already an option in most stores around here. As time goes on it'll increase.

You can't digitize swinging a hammer, repairing an air conditioner, or fixing a car. Most of the service economy is still people doing stuff that only people can do, and very securely so.

How are you defining service economy here? Those jobs you mention are not exactly what I would call service sector, nor are they, at least where I live, particularly low end labour because they're in fairly short supply.

Also those jobs can be automated. Maybe not this decade but in the 1990s we couldn't or didn't automate supermarkets. The idea of say, an automated body shop that connects to your car, detects which components show wear, replaces them and bills you for it without human supervision is not that out there. Indeed there are plans to deploy that kind of system already on some military vehicles.

Damien Sullivan said...

"You know, after some thought, I have to admit that you are right -- I was being ridiculous about the spread of wealth in monetary terms. And even more ridiculous in my defense of the original error."

Thanks.

"A chip fab in Malaysia, for example -- say one that made the memory in the $5-10 thumb drive that you probably have hanging from your keychain -- is not a technological possession of Malaysia... but never really learns all that much about what its doing"

How about a chip fab in Japan, or South Korea, or Taiwan? Those were all parts of the developing world, now they're counted part of the developed world, who've learned about what they're doing?

Aaron: can your fab give me a haircut? Babysit my child? Take out my appendix? Trade in services isn't an artificial need for money. And yes, trade in raw materials matters, and in energy supplies, and in land and location.

Tony said...

Re: FBH

Proximity reader technology is nowhere near good enough to do what you suggest. It's hard to even imagine a portal that would be able to read 10-100 tags reliably in a fast walk-through. Remember, each tag is just a transponder that is excited by the portal's RF transmitter and transmits back a tag ID number on some designated frequency. How do you descriminate numerous tags, all transmitting at once? How do you discriminate charging for one of the same SKU, or five?

On top of that, every supplier has to insert tags into their products. That's doable, but at what cost? Not only that, but these tags have to be integrated into the products in such a way that they can't be removed and simply dropped on the floor before exiting the building. That's a packaging design challenge that I don't think anybody's even begun to try to solve. And as hard as they make it to remove the prox tag, are they going to include anti-tamper sensors and power supplies for such in the package, to deter people who know where the prox tags are and who can figure out how to remove them without destroying the product? Are they going to install sensors to pick up tamper alarms throughout the store? How much is that going to cost?

(And don't even try to dismiss any of the above. I used to be a customer system analyst in electronic security system design. I know what such systems can and can't do.)

Making people have to set up an account to shop in a certain store? That's not going to fly. People go to different grocery stores in town to get different items. Currently they can use cash, credit, an ATM card, or check at will. Having to set up an account with each store? That's regressive.

The door is going to be locked for people trying to leave without paying? What are you going to do, run everybody through cattle chutes at checkout? Or just lock the doors on everybody until the miscreant can be apprehended? How do we apprehend the miscreant, since we laid off all of the security personnel? If we run everyone through cattle chutes, the criminal and civili liability for physically confining people is going to demand a level of system reliability that is problematic, to say the least.

Having said all of that, I have no doubt that checkers will go away, but not too many other store personnel.

Why, I simply don't believe in sotcking automation, or the automation of too many other tasks. Invoke it all you want, I'm not buying.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"How about a chip fab in Japan, or South Korea, or Taiwan? Those were all parts of the developing world, now they're counted part of the developed world, who've learned about what they're doing?"

They industrialized and developed a world-class education system in time. 21st Century latecomers? Not so mmuch.

Tony said...

Re: FBH

Oh yeah -- remodellers, appliance repairmen, and car mechanics are definitley service sector. They sell you repair or replacement parts/systems, then sell you the labor to install them. They don't make anything themselves.

FBH said...

Tony:
snipping the first bit for length

At very worst then you might have scan chips on individual bags. I do see the problem with multiple people going through the door at once. I guess we might have to resort to a "scan as you pick up" or "scan as you bag" system.

There's also the fact that as more and more people choose to order online your actual stores will require less and less through traffic.

snipping more for length

(And don't even try to dismiss any of the above. I used to be a customer system analyst in electronic security system design. I know what such systems can and can't do.)


It's not going to be significantly more difficult than barcoding every product. Sure, some people may be creative enough to remove them but you only need to keep the rate of shoplifting down to the same level that it is now in order for it to be workable. This is groceries, not consumer electronics. As I said, you could still employ a few security guards to do it.

Given the way electronics are going, we may well be able to put some level of electronics throughout every square foot of city, let alone square foot of store.


Making people have to set up an account to shop in a certain store? That's not going to fly. People go to different grocery stores in town to get different items. Currently they can use cash, credit, an ATM card, or check at will. Having to set up an account with each store? That's regressive.


So just scan your card or whatever as you enter the store and take a tag or a tagged bag. As you're right that it'd be difficult to scan everyone just from their tags as they go through the door this actually simplifies things. Just have the person log into a bag as they enter the store and then anything they put in the bag is theirs.

That's just a simplified version of the barcode scan devices that are already used by automated stores right now.


The door is going to be locked for people trying to leave without paying? What are you going to do, run everybody through cattle chutes at checkout? Or just lock the doors on everybody until the miscreant can be apprehended? How do we apprehend the miscreant, since we laid off all of the security personnel? If we run everyone through cattle chutes, the criminal and civili liability for physically confining people is going to demand a level of system reliability that is problematic, to say the least.


Pretty sure I mentioned having minimal guard labour here, so that's not going to be a problem. Many stores around here already use a system of magnetic coding which sounds an alarm and disables the doors if you walk through without having paid for an item.


Having said all of that, I have no doubt that checkers will go away, but not too many other store personnel.

Why, I simply don't believe in sotcking automation, or the automation of too many other tasks. Invoke it all you want, I'm not buying.


We can make robots that build something as complicated as a car. I'm pretty sure we can develop robots to pack shelves with minimal human guidance. The only issue is whether those robots cost more than a humans wages do. Right now they don't. In the future the cost will decline.

The exact same logic too eliminate checkers applies to the elimination of shelf packers. It'll happen. It just might be a bit further off.

Tony said...

FBH:

"There's also the fact that as more and more people choose to order online your actual stores will require less and less through traffic."

I'm still not groking why more people are going to order groceries online. Online purchasing works for stuff that you're willing to wait for and which have an inherrent expectation of quality -- media and electronics, mostly; some clothes and other dry goods. I'm not seeing it for food and a lot of other things that are immediate need and benefit from in-store inspection.

"[RFID inventory tagging]'s not going to be significantly more difficult than barcoding every product."

Oh, yes it is. Each RFID tag is a radio device. That puts a lower limit on size, cost, and applicability. Barcodes were just changes in label design. I suppose one could someday develop a printable RFID tag, but that would be easy enough to scratch off.

"Given the way electronics are going, we may well be able to put some level of electronics throughout every square foot of city, let alone square foot of store."

Sure you can -- creating a more crowded and complex RF environment. That could easily run into diminsishing returns very quickly.

"So just scan your card or whatever as you enter the store and take a tag or a tagged bag. As you're right that it'd be difficult to scan everyone just from their tags as they go through the door this actually simplifies things. Just have the person log into a bag as they enter the store and then anything they put in the bag is theirs."

Why is this better than simply training customers to self-scan at checkout? I'm not seeing the advantage.

"Many stores around here already use a system of magnetic coding which sounds an alarm and disables the doors if you walk through without having paid for an item."

Old technology. It hasn't appreciably improved in the last twenty years, since I first started working with it. It's just gotten a little more reliable and switched over from the old mag tags to RFID.

"We can make robots that build something as complicated as a car. I'm pretty sure we can develop robots to pack shelves with minimal human guidance."

Sorry, but that's not factual. We can make robots that can perform carefully scripted procedures in carefully coreographed process models. We aren't anywhere near a robt that can dig into a shelf, inspect dates on cans, rearange product, rearange whole shelves, etc. But we can get high school students working part time to do that very reliably. That's not going to change any time soon.

FBH said...

Tony

(not quoting this time because of Length)
-Online Shopping

I already order groceries online. So do a lot of people I know. The reason most people don't right now is because internet shopping is comparatively new and not everyone has a device to do it. That won't be the case when they're giving out I-phones in cereal boxes. Stores will also encourage people to do it because they don't want to run actual stores. It's costly in terms of labour and opens them up to theft. Those who like shopping will be pushed aside the way people who liked going to corner shops where.

-Scratching off Tags

Except that exactly the same applies to barcodes. People shoplift things from supermarkets.

-Self Scan customers:

You could train customers to scan at the checkout but it's likely better to give them a device to scan with, more convenient anyway. Having used both systems scanning yourself is a lot easier. The idea here was to make a store that was as user friendly as possible.

-Shelf Stacking

Just put extra levels of diagnostics onto cans. Even if you still have to have some highschool students as long as you can have enough less it'll work fine.

Mangaka2170 said...

I honestly don't see how we couldn't do automated shelf stocking using today's technology with any more difficulty than doing it conventionally. Sure, the startup cost would be huge, but since printing barcodes is cheaper than paying someone minimum wage to read and comprehend expiration dates, I would think that it would pay for itself in fairly short order.

Placement of goods on the physical shelf wouldn't be a problem, since each area of shelf space could easily be assigned a machine-readable designation based on a local coordinate system, and the same could be done in each area. All the stock bot has to do is make its rounds, and if it spots an object that's not supposed to be where it is, it can take it over to its designated position.

Since we already have barcodes and barcode readers, and since we're assuming that the stock bot is doing the shelving (as that's part of the job), I would think that a networked stock bot system would be faster and more efficient than a minimum-wage stock jockey as it can keep better track of inventory by comparing the original shipping order quantity to what's on the shelves to what has been shipped out/sold, all in real time. With an additional barcode on each product to list expiration date, all the stock bot has to do is find the expiry date code, scan it, and compare it to the store's date/time clock.

Of course, since such a system could be easily adapted to inventory and distribution of anything, a lot of service jobs, including postal, courier, restaurant delivery and library, would more or less disappear if such a system were to take off.

As for appliance repair, the reason why we have appliance repair services is because appliances are fairly expensive, in turn because we expect them to be reliable and to not have to replace them very often. If, for example, air conditioners were significantly cheaper, it would eventually get to the point where it would be cheaper to replace the unit entirely, rather than pay someone to fix it, or learn to fix it yourself (it's already gotten to that point with a lot of consumer electronics; right now, it's cheaper to replace a faulty cell phone with a new one rather than get it repaired (this also means that the most expensive part of most cell phone use is the call/data rate plan; they practically give phones away (provided that you sign onto a plan), which was unthinkable 20 years ago)).

Tony said...

FBH:

"I already order groceries online. So do a lot of people I know. The reason most people don't right now is because internet shopping is comparatively new and not everyone has a device to do it."

Manifestly not factual. There were internet grocery operations fifteen years ago here in the US. They were overbuilt and undersubscribed, which led to their failure. Attempts at reboot in the last five years, with much better technology, much smaller ambitions, and mcuh deeper penetration of the internet into society, haven't notable improved market share. Once again, a person can go to the store and get it now, or order and wait. A person can physically inspect the meat, produce, etc, or trust the onlince grocer's pickers. Some will adopt online grocery buying. I really can't see most people doing so.

"You could train customers to scan at the checkout but it's likely better to give them a device to scan with, more convenient anyway. Having used both systems scanning yourself is a lot easier. The idea here was to make a store that was as user friendly as possible."

Too easy to circumvent scanning everything, especially with large orders. Checkout scanning, even if done by the customer, usually involves verification, like putting the scanned product on a scale, to verify that everything is scanned.

"Just put extra levels of diagnostics onto cans. Even if you still have to have some highschool students as long as you can have enough less it'll work fine."

Extra levels of diagnostics at what cost? Not just on the cans, but in installing and operating monitoring systems? It's like personal helicopters and flying cars -- maybe technologically doable, but not practical in any real sense.

Tony said...

Re: Mangaka2170

When was the last time you shopped for groceries? I only ask because everything you assume about how a stockbot would work would be undermined by customer intervention in the first hour of store operation.

Also, how does a stockbot even read a barcode on a can or bottle five rows deep on a shelf?

Mangaka2170 said...

@Tony:
Not all that long ago, actually, but thanks for taking interest in my personal affairs.

Firstly, the whole customer intervention problem is just as present in an automated system as well as a manned system, and there are ways around them that you don't seem to have considered, such as setting it up as a vending machine-type of delivery method, or having the stock bots themselves routinely replace the goods on the shelves in blocks, leaving it up to a backroom stock bot or two to condense partially depleted goods blocks and storing the merchandise info for future use by the system to track which goods are stored where, down to the individual unit.

The barcode problem is purely an organizational system, not a mechanical one. All the system needs is to know which goods are where, putting the units closest to their expiry date up front in the block so that the customer would most likely select them first. Even if the customers do not, it would allow for easier access for the stock bots when they do their rounds. If this system were to be used (and it reeks of zeerust, let me tell you), it would be safe to assume that the people who make it their profession to design and test systems like these would have come up with solutions for these problems well before they were made available for commercial use, because that's what they're paid (and trained) to do.

Besides, weren't you the one who argued in favor of automation in the Space Warfare threads? I would think that a warehouse would be an ideal candidate for automation.

FBH said...

Tony
Manifestly not factual. There were internet grocery operations fifteen years ago here in the US. They were overbuilt and undersubscribed, which led to their failure. Attempts at reboot in the last five years, with much better technology, much smaller ambitions, and mcuh deeper penetration of the internet into society, haven't notable improved market share. Once again, a person can go to the store and get it now, or order and wait. A person can physically inspect the meat, produce, etc, or trust the onlince grocer's pickers. Some will adopt online grocery buying. I really can't see most people doing so.

Well for one thing, the internet's penetration of society is really still not all that deep. Most old people may have internet but many of them don't really grok it yet. It'll be very different for the generation that grew up with I-phones.

Second of course there's the fact that stores are not yet aggressively pushing it. As fuel costs increase and stores look for new ways to compete you'll see them do so. It's much cheaper for them to eliminate labour, so they'll do it. Stores that don't will simply be priced out of the market.


Too easy to circumvent scanning everything, especially with large orders. Checkout scanning, even if done by the customer, usually involves verification, like putting the scanned product on a scale, to verify that everything is scanned.


A pick up and scan from the shelf system already operates in some UK stores. There's not really a difference between giving the person a scanner and giving them an RF tag bag.


Extra levels of diagnostics at what cost? Not just on the cans, but in installing and operating monitoring systems? It's like personal helicopters and flying cars -- maybe technologically doable, but not practical in any real sense.


Given the way computer pricing is going? Almost zero.

Even if you assume Moores law runs out relatively soon computer chips are going to be just incredibly cheap.

Aaron said...

Tony;

So no.

"As usual you sound so confident and condescending, yet you're full of shit."

Biological processes can't produce refined iron and aluminum crystals. There's an energy threshold that biology can't cross.

Coal. You've already been told it's just a question of patience.

I feel, after reading your other comments, that you're probably silly enough that I should preempt an observation of how long geology actually takes to make coal. Humans doing a thing on purpose can be more efficient than happenstance doing it by chance. And no, I'm not actually saying we'll be making coal itself, I'm saying stored solar can be plenty strong enough.

You can't sustitute wood or plastic for structural steel.

We were talking bicycles. You can, in fact, make most of a bicycle out of wood or plastic as a hobbyist, and some folks do. Existing plastics are good enough to comprise the whole thing; they don't because nobody's making bikes under conditions of limited iron and easy extraction of atmospheric matter.

Are you trying to introduce buildings into the discussion? Nobody needs highrises, so we don't actually need structural steel. But if you like highrises anyway, maybe you could get a state to build them. States will always have concentrations of resources, markets or no.

Somebody still has to use the products of the fabs to do stuff.

Like eat? I'm not sure what you're even picturing here.

Well, if the only thing you can do with money is buy raw materials, and you're the guy who has raw materials, what are you going to do with dollars once you get them?"

Buy the products of fabs.


You've got a fab.

Comparative advantage still works, even if an entire factory can be compressed into a single machine.

Doing capitalism is an awful lot of work. Such comparative advantages as might exist cannot be great enough to make it worth all the fuss. Maybe I'm a great novelist, and there are people in some third world country who are "only good for" dumping raw materials in the hopper and hauling off the finished product. Dragging all that stuff around, not to mention keeping the workers so desperate or coerced they don't just carry the fabs off to their huts and figure out how to use them: just not worth the trouble. Unless having people doing menial for you is your only joy in life. There must be such people, enough folks act like it, but that's not economics anymore.

Aaron said...

part 2

"[N]anofacturing on every desktop" Doesn't build things like cars and planes and ships.

Of course it does.

Also, why would everyone own a fab if they don't need fab products every day?

Turn that around in your head for a while. Can you think of something you need every day that's made out of atoms to be found primarily in the atmosphere? Do you really have nothing in your house that isn't used daily?

"Any capitalistic trade that happens by then won't be so healthy. It will mean that people have to work, not in exchange for others' labor, but because there's a gun to their heads."

Melodramatic nonsense.


You know it's been done before, right? Look up the hut tax.

"How long does it take before someone figures out how to fab more fabs?"

Still costs time, resources, and energy to make a fab. That limits their availability.


Humans are not homo economicus. (If we ever do find homo economicus we should commit genocide against it, right down to the cute little economicus babies, because such creatures would be more dangerous than all the terrorists in the world put together.)

Time: an average human will gladly take that time for the sake of at least one other human. Lots of us are more generous than average, some much more. Resources: you're counting on humanity getting very unlucky, and needing an element which is hard to come by. But biological life already does nano and is made of common elements. Energy: we've already been over this.

And then you have to make the tools to assemble the pieces -- a little crane to make a bigger crane, to make a bigger crane...

Which is how it works now. Fabs just make it easier.

Yes -- because I see it as a change in technology, not a change in the physical rules of the universe.

Isn't it remarkable how many thousands of years it took us to stumble on the one and only socioeconomic order which is compatible with the laws of physics?

Rick said...

God dammit, Tony -

Damien, Damien, Damien...

... Is indeed arrogant and condescending, and does precisely zero to support your argument. All it has done is interrupt my catching-up with the thread, break my concentration, and generally put me in a bad mood.

You often make important points, but making them with less of a sneer would be ... helpful.

Ray said...

Tony said...
You can't digitize swinging a hammer, repairing an air conditioner, or fixing a car. Most of the service economy is still people doing stuff that only people can do, and very securely so.


Repairs of consumer goods? For a few major items like cars, that may still make sense. For anything else (and often even for cars), it's much cheaper to buy a new (and improved) disposable one.

Not so long ago radio repair was a viable career. Would you pay a trained, licensed, skilled, and experienced professional radio repairman $80 an hour to fix a $10 radio? Doesn't seem like such a secure career path.

I simply don't believe in sotcking automation

As a former stocker, I don't believe in it totally being automated either. At least, not for quite awhile. But made so much more efficient that you can lay off half the stockers? Sure, we have that tech now. Whether it's cheaper varies - for some employers, it probably is, for others not quite yet. Lay off 83% of the stockers? Just around the corner, not as cheap as the labor yet. But it's coming.

Labor is the major cost of a lot of businesses, and a lot of it is redundant or only in place because the companies are still using legacy systems. Some people will of course always be needed, but already we only actually need a fraction of the people that we employ, and mostly due to the fact that we're not utilizing current technology efficiently (or at all). If, as a businessman, you could easily double your profit margins, why not? Pretty much the only reason, other than friction of change in an organization, is wanting to preserve that 'human touch' for marketing purposes.

That's not entirely negligible. But even if only some of the businesses were to lay off 50-83% of their employees, that would still be a pretty major hit.

Thucydides said...

Much of this discussion is going into the weeds and trying to discuss consumer and marketing tactics using technologies that are hardly defined yet, much less developed.

Fabs, 3D printers and similar devices will move into the economy in a big way where they are more efficient or provide some sort of advantage that traditional manufacturing does not. Prototyping, creating unique "one off" items and hobby use come to mind. A factory might have fabs in assembly bays to create custom shims so parts can be assembled with the correct clearances, to use a trivial example.

Our real problem in conceptualizing this stuff is we are thinking of how the new technology can be used in the "old" way. Factories used to have massive drive shafts and pulleys across the ceiling so the single huge steam engine could power all the machines. When electric motors were invented, the first thought was to replace the steam engine with an electric one, keeping the drive shaft and pulleys. It took a long time to conceptualize and change over to the idea of each machine being individually powered by an electric engine. Our thinking is still at the "lets put the electric engine on the drive shaft" stage; we can see the advantages of eliminating the black gang and having a more reliable engine, but haven't yet gotten the experience and understanding to see where this can go.

FBH said...

Ray's totally right actually. The problem is not, at least not in a timescale of the new few years. The problem is that you're going to end up with so much less labour that it won't employ the population. Even if you have a labour surplace of say, 20%, that's a huge problem for a capitalist system.

Further for the subject of this blog, even assuming a pretty big decelerando, it'd likely become more than that as you hit plausible mid future.

Anyway there are some benefits to this though, especially for our purposes. Once you get past the willy Coyote moment for capitalism (IE once everyone realizes it doesn't work), assuming you get a non-dystopian system you've suddenly eliminated one of the biggest problems with space colonization. You no longer have the problem "Couldn't we instead use this to feed the hungry?" Because the hungry are already being fed. It's not necessarily going to be the Culture, but a sensible use of labourless economics should be enough to provide everyone a good standard of living independent of their effort.

Get everyone fired up enough about it and you can fund space exploration and you've got a huge production suplace from the people who aren't labouring that you can use to sustain it.

Rick said...

90% of that is fossil, which will have to be replaced rather soon, so we have to rebuild practically _all_ the power infrastructure

The good news being that, over a generation or two the infrastructure will wear out / become obsolescent, and be replaced in any case.

I don't know what the actual cycle time is, but - so long as you can take some time - transitioning to post-fossil energy sources could be a rather smooth process.

Rick said...

I should add to the above that yes, there is the little matter of how costly non-fossil energy production actually turns out to be.

But from what I have read, there's at least a credible case that solar will be cost competitive in the near future, well before the midfuture.

Rick said...

On fabs and grocery store operations, a fascinating discussion!

My views are mixed. I do think there are physics and engineering constraints to fabs that rule out a lot of the nano-hype. Fab-as-cornucopia, like its dystopian counterpart, gray goo, seems to ignore issues of heat production and dissipation, etc.

On a somewhat meta level, I'll note that much of the talk of fabs and self-sufficiency seems to be rooted in re-creating the Jeffersonian ideal at a higher tech-level. (And for all the talk of 'markets,' this strikes me as the real driver of most libertarianism.)

But much greater automation of grocery stores strikes me as not too hard to implement, even if it takes a few decades due to customer habits.

Perhaps fresh produce and meat will be hived off - those are the only parts of the store where I need to inspect more than the sell-by date.

OTOH, all it needs for meat and produce delivery to take off is for (enough) delivery services to develop a good reputation for delivering quality stuff. (And I would expect this sort of thing to begin at the high end, affluent consumers paying a premium to avoid going to the grocery store.)

Rick said...

the shape of the the future economy, and the future workday, is going to depend largely on political decisions ... rather than being the inevitable outgrowth of given technologies

This is a central point of my original post. The scope of political choices is constrained (including by the part of Z's remark that I elided), but I do not believe that it is nugatory.

Historically, 'mountain freedom' was largely sustained by the physical environment. 'Urban freedom' depended much more on active political effort. And was therefore more fragile.

But to some substantial degree, the future of work will be shaped not just by technological determinism, but by political choices that can make most people's lives much better or much worse.

Thucydides said...

The "self sufficiency" meme in modern Libertarian thought is mostly a conceptual way of negating "gatekeepers", crony capitalists, bureaucrats and other rent seekers. If you are reasonably self sufficient then you have created a source of capital which is less likely to be taxed away or seized by government whim or fiat. Since most people are not capable of being good at everything, there will still be a need for people to seek out goods and services they cannot produce on their own, hence there will still be a need for markets (even if they look more like eBay than WalMart).

Becoming self sufficient does not actually mean having high tech 3D printers etc.; you can go a long way with rain barrels and victory gardens, and using the Internet and telecommunications to reduce your need to physically commute. Even an urbanite can create a balcony garden, details are very dependent on your own personal circumstances.

"Work" in this sort of scenario is more directed at building personal capital (capital being resources, capital does not equal money, and Capitalism is based on the use of capital, not the accumulation of capital).

Tony said...

Mangaka2170:

"Firstly, the whole customer intervention problem is just as present in an automated system as well as a manned system, and there are ways around them that you don't seem to have considered, such as setting it up as a vending machine-type of delivery method,

Which costs how much to implement? How much space does the backplane of the vending machine and stock transfer space take up (because queue ordering is implicit)?

"or having the stock bots themselves routinely replace the goods on the shelves in blocks, leaving it up to a backroom stock bot or two to condense partially depleted goods blocks and storing the merchandise info for future use by the system to track which goods are stored where, down to the individual unit."

All that extra inventory coste money you're trying to save.

"The barcode problem is purely an organizational system, not a mechanical one. All the system needs is to know which goods are where, putting the units closest to their expiry date up front in the block so that the customer would most likely select them first. Even if the customers do not, it would allow for easier access for the stock bots when they do their rounds. If this system were to be used (and it reeks of zeerust, let me tell you), it would be safe to assume that the people who make it their profession to design and test systems like these would have come up with solutions for these problems well before they were made available for commercial use, because that's what they're paid (and trained) to do."

Huh? A burried or turned barcode is a burried or turned barcode no matter how you desing the system. That's the point I'm making -- these are fundamental problems, not design-around-able ones.

"Besides, weren't you the one who argued in favor of automation in the Space Warfare threads? I would think that a warehouse would be an ideal candidate for automation."

I manifestly did not argue in favor of automation. I eventually agreed that automation would work under certain circumstances.

Tony said...

FBH:

"Well for one thing, the internet's penetration of society is really still not all that deep. Most old people may have internet but many of them don't really grok it yet. It'll be very different for the generation that grew up with I-phones."

I don't use my smart phone for much more than a phone and a camera, and I program internet applications for a living. Most people just don't see the point in a lot of the things that internet enabled devices can do -- not because they're intellectually behind, but because they have no use for those things.

Also, WRT groking the internet, just what are people supposed to understand intuitively? That you can buy stuff online? Who doesn't know that? What else is there to know, as far as e-commerce is concerned?

This whole youth-understands-what-the-old-people-don't thing is a trope I've lived with all my life. From the flower children to the Internet generation, it's never been true, and it isn't ever going to be.

"Second of course there's the fact that stores are not yet aggressively pushing it. As fuel costs increase and stores look for new ways to compete you'll see them do so."

As fuel costs increase they're going to be looking for even more ways to run internal combustions engines (i.e. delivery trucks) on their own dime?

Too easy to circumvent scanning everything, especially with large orders. Checkout scanning, even if done by the customer, usually involves verification, like putting the scanned product on a scale, to verify that everything is scanned.

"Given the way computer pricing is going? Almost zero."

Except that on-shelf diagnostics don't have anything to do with the price of computing power. It's the cost of installing RFID tags on every product, installing sensor systems in the shelving, and the power requirements for running it all.

Tony said...

Aaron:

"Coal. You've already been told it's just a question of patience.

I feel, after reading your other comments, that you're probably silly enough that I should preempt an observation of how long geology actually takes to make coal. Humans doing a thing on purpose can be more efficient than happenstance doing it by chance. And no, I'm not actually saying we'll be making coal itself, I'm saying stored solar can be plenty strong enough."


I've been told? Yeah, I've been told a lot of things in my life. Most of them were less than reliable.

I really don't care how forced the process is, if you're waiting on biological process type mechanisms, you're going to be waiting a long time. If you're not waiting, you need to handle temperatures and pressures that aren't exactly desktop, or even back yard.

"We were talking bicycles."

No, we were talking cornucopia machines. Bicycles were just a common, everyday example of typical products. They also have to produce every form of product to be considered candidates for post-scarcity enablers.

"Are you trying to introduce buildings into the discussion? Nobody needs highrises, so we don't actually need structural steel. But if you like highrises anyway, maybe you could get a state to build them. States will always have concentrations of resources, markets or no."

There's structural steel in a lot of buildings. Even a lot of homes. Not everything is built out of sticks. And how about bridges and railroads? People don't need those either, right?

"Like eat? I'm not sure what you're even picturing here."

Bridges, railroads, resource extraction.

"You've got a fab."

Why would I have a fab? My business is extracting iron ore from the ground. Even people with fabs would rather buy my iron and sell me iron mining machinery, rather than dig a hole the size of a baseball stadium to get enough iron in trace elements to build a few buildings.

"Doing capitalism is an awful lot of work...but that's not economics anymore."

Yes, capitalism is so hard that the oldest human division of labor was between the farmer and the husbandman, and, against all odds, they actually managed to trade with each other, even though it was an "awful lot of work".

What you're arguing is apparently a vision of how you think people should live, not wether a certain type of supposedly transformational machine could be practical. I get that. Just don't expect me to agree.

Tony said...

Aaron:

"Of course [nanofacturing on every desktop builds things like cars and planes and ships]."

Ridiculous on its face. (And I'm sure intentionally so.)

"Turn that around in your head for a while. Can you think of something you need every day that's made out of atoms to be found primarily in the atmosphere? Do you really have nothing in your house that isn't used daily?"

If we're using solar energy anyway, why use nanofacturing to make artificial lettuce when I can just grow real lettuce, probably using no mor land area than the solar cells?

"You know it's been done before, right? Look up the hut tax."

I'm aware of hut tax, and share cropping, and a lot of other economic distortions. That doesn't mean that the people put to work in that kind of economy don't receive goods for their labors. They're just forced to take them at a disadvantage in trade. It's also true that such arrangements are not very stable (even compared to the normal economic instability of human trade).

"How long does it take before someone figures out how to fab more fabs?"

"Humans are not homo economicus. (If we ever do find homo economicus we should commit genocide against it, right down to the cute little economicus babies, because such creatures would be more dangerous than all the terrorists in the world put together.)"

I'm sure a lot of people believe that. It makes things like communism and libertarianism possible to believe in (though through different lines of reasoning). But of course human do make economic decisions every minute of every day. Life is a constant round of cost-benefit decision making.

"Time: an average human will gladly take that time for the sake of at least one other human. Lots of us are more generous than average, some much more. Resources: you're counting on humanity getting very unlucky, and needing an element which is hard to come by. But biological life already does nano and is made of common elements. Energy: we've already been over this."

Time: It takes time to do anything. If you're using a fab to make other fabs, you aren't using it to do something else. There's only so much time, and it has value.

Resources: No matter where you get them, resources are finite. Even if you take them out of the air or common dirt. If you're using resources to make fabs, you're not using them to make other things. There are only so many resources, and they have value.

Energy: We haven't already talked about this. You've simply assumed it away. It take energy to build or dismantle chemical compounds. ANd you only have so much from your field of solar cells, no matter what process you turn it towards. If you're using it to make fabs (and the solar cells to support those fabs), you're not using it to make something else. There's only so much energy, and it has value.

"[Building tools to make tools] is how it works now. Fabs just make it easier."

Of course that how it works now. But fabs don't make it easier. They just change how its done.

"Isn't it remarkable how many thousands of years it took us to stumble on the one and only socioeconomic order which is compatible with the laws of physics?"

People have been engaging in trade from positions of comparative advantage since before history. It was stumbled on a long, long time ago. Modern capitalism is the same thing with a bunch of ruffles and flourishes.

Tony said...

Ray:

"Repairs of consumer goods? For a few major items like cars, that may still make sense. For anything else (and often even for cars), it's much cheaper to buy a new (and improved) disposable one."

Disposable houses, buildings, heating/AC systems, airplanes, ships, plumbing, electrical systems, etc, etc, ad infinitum? Those all demand repair and maintenance activities that belong to the service economy.

"As a former stocker, I don't believe in it totally being automated either. At least, not for quite awhile. But made so much more efficient that you can lay off half the stockers? Sure, we have that tech now. Whether it's cheaper varies - for some employers, it probably is, for others not quite yet. Lay off 83% of the stockers? Just around the corner, not as cheap as the labor yet. But it's coming."

And I watch what the stockers do when I go into stores. I don't see hardly any of it being economically automated. The variety of sizes, shapes, textures, and flexibilities just defies automation with current or foreseen robotic abilities. People just don't seem to understand the careful programming and process planning that goes into modern manufacturing and warehouse robotics. And one simply can't control the store shelf environment to anywhere near the point that similar performances could be achieved.

Tony said...





September 7, 2012 7:02 PM

Rick said...
Thucydides:

"The 'self sufficiency' meme in modern Libertarian thought is mostly a conceptual way of negating 'gatekeepers', crony capitalists, bureaucrats and other rent seekers. If you are reasonably self sufficient then you have created a source of capital which is less likely to be taxed away or seized by government whim or fiat. Since most people are not capable of being good at everything, there will still be a need for people to seek out goods and services they cannot produce on their own, hence there will still be a need for markets (even if they look more like eBay than WalMart).

Becoming self sufficient does not actually mean having high tech 3D printers etc.; you can go a long way with rain barrels and victory gardens, and using the Internet and telecommunications to reduce your need to physically commute. Even an urbanite can create a balcony garden, details are very dependent on your own personal circumstances.

"Work" in this sort of scenario is more directed at building personal capital (capital being resources, capital does not equal money, and Capitalism is based on the use of capital, not the accumulation of capital)."


Libertarian self-sufficiency is based on a fantasy of independence. No man is an island. No man has ever been an island. No man "owns" property except that the community agrees he has a right to own it. No capital has any value (beyond sheer physical utility) outside of a system that allows people to agree on value without fighting over it.

Thucydides said...

No Libertarian (or libertarian) believes man is an island either. OTOH no man is a vassal or beast of burden for others, so if people are attempting to impose rents on your time and effort (especially if you have not agreed to allow your capital to be used for their purposes), then you have every right to take actions to thwart their rent seeking.

If you re read the post you will see that trade and voluntary cooperation is both explicitly and implicitly required as part of a libertarian social system (Since most people are not capable of being good at everything, there will still be a need for people to seek out goods and services they cannot produce on their own, hence there will still be a need for markets)

Suggesting that you have no "right" to property is one of the hallmarks of political philosophies that are the opposite of classical liberalism (including it libertarian offshoot), and certainly the right to ownership of property and the unfettered use of property is one of the basic ideas behind the founding of the American Republic. Personal liberty, ownership of property and Rule of Law define the classical liberal position, dating back to Edmund Burke in the mid 1700's.

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"No Libertarian (or libertarian) believes man is an island either..."

Libertarians believe people are islands in one very critical sense. They think proprietary rights are something real, without reference to surrounding social conditions. They believe that by claiming a right to goods or land you possess, there is some real, unassailable attachment between you and the property, regardless of other people's opinion.

The problem is that that has never been the case and can never be the case. Property rights only exist in the real world when the community agrees that they exist, and to the extent that the community agrees that they exist. That is because only the community's laws and customs make it possible for someone to say, "This is mine," and expect that statement to be respected without contest. You can claim all the property you desire to claim, but you can't keep it in the face of stronger persons or groups unless the community bands together to defend your claim.

See, T, you're all exercised about theories of rights. I'm interested in the practical reality of rights.

Tony said...

Also...

The idea that an individual has some absolute right to resist whatever he considers to be rent-seeking would lead to anarchy in half a heartbeat. People have to negotiate the best deal they can get within a complex system of rights and duties. That's always been the case, that will always be the case. SOmetimes one has to subordinate. SOmetimes one can dominate. Most of the time a person just muddles through, probably a little more constrained than he would like, but nowhere near as constrained (in a successful economy and political system) than the worst case.

That's simply because governments and large economic forces have to balance the maximal attainment of their objectives with the ability of the vast majority of the people to submit, and the very real constraint against killing the goose that lays the golden egg. What I see in your rhetoric, T, is a deep-seated prejudice in not understanding this very obvious fact of life. Everyone and every group lives in a power balance with everyone else and every other group. Excursions into absolutism, in either direction -- towards too much personal autonomy or too much group control -- are bound to fail, simply because they distort the balance of power into a shape that can't be long supported.

As Mr. Miagi said: "Arr of rife, barance."

Anonymous said...

Ok, I'm back from my computer crashing;
Tony:"The problem is the energy that industrialization requires. People think we'll just endlessly develop more. That's simply not rational, given the pretty obvious limits we're running up against."

Energy and limits...give me specific examples, (beyond simply 'it's hard, so it won't be done'): otherwise it's just your opinion; also, it makes me think that you have a nasty reason for dismissing the very idea of underdeveloped and developing nations bettering their situation (and that of the rest of the world), by industrialization.

As far as robots and automated supermarkets; people demand reliability from the machines that replace human labor; it also has to be both cheaper and at least as flexible as human labor. If it isn't as cheap, reliable, and flexible as Jonny-the-local-teen, then the store owner won't invest in it; if it isn't likeable, then the customer won't shop at the automated stores. Automation is wonderful, but if people don't like it, don't trust it, or won't see any savings from it, they won't want it. It has to be 'better' in the eyes of the customer and the investors, otherwise it won't gain a foothold in society. Factories filled with robots aren't in the public eye; supermarkets are. If the shoppers don't buy it, it won't happen any time soon. Believe me, I've seen a lot of people in markets and they have never struck me as wanting less service, rather than more, at any time.

Ferrell

Tony said...

Ferrell:

"Energy and limits...give me specific examples, (beyond simply 'it's hard, so it won't be done'): otherwise it's just your opinion;"

We have to hit peak oil at some point. Same for coal, gas, etc. The increasing rate of industrialization is just going to haul that event closer in.

Nuclear fission is problematic. If you give a country a useful nuclear fission power infrastructure -- not just one or two research reactors -- you make it a nuclear weapons power. Not a good thing to do in a lot of cases.

Also, after Fukushima, we have to seriously ask ourselves if we are really able to control nuclear power like we imagine ourselves to be. And I mean in rational, engineering terms, not in ideological terms.

Solar is okay, as far as it goes, but there are resource limitations in critical materials, and the pollution from the refining and manufacturing processes is pretty nasty.

Wind? Questionable ROI, over large areas.

Nuclear fusion? More than hard -- possibly not doable, at least profitably.

"also, it makes me think that you have a nasty reason for dismissing the very idea of underdeveloped and developing nations bettering their situation (and that of the rest of the world), by industrialization."

Am I a racist? No.

I just don't think that the realistic resource pool is not going to support eight or nine or ten billion people at high levels of economic success. And since the developed world already has the technology to live that high on the hog, and has the military skill and technology to stay on top, sooner rather than later the developed and developing world is going to find itself forcibly cut out. Not a pretty picture, but one that fits historical example and human nature.

jollyreaper said...


Comparative advantage means that humans would still have an economic use even if superhuman automation is around, *if* you're committed to keeping humans alive. Once you are, well, robots might do everything better, but no matter how much they can do, a human can always do something extra for the economy as well.


I'm trying to write a nice little short story that will be an exposition for my take on sailing through hyperspace. Naturally, I need a good mcguffin to hang it upon. It may not be completely unique but it's hard to be so in any field.

Old school humanity kept in place relatively strict standards of what it is to be human, even as the tech pushed the limits of what was possible far beyond. If we run the curves forward about cost of access to space and the economic power at the control of an individual, it becomes possible to imagine celestial Mayflowers shoving off STL into the deep dark. (Yes, there are loads of tech assumptions. This is squishy SF, not hard SF.)

Beyond the influence of the motherworld, these new cultures are free to develop and change, become strongly transhuman. Quirks of physics mean there's a limit to speed of thought regardless of substrate so there are no AI gods, no strong AI. There are certainly a lot of hacks for knowledge-boosting, the same way a sage with the ability to read and write can perform acts of magic by light of the illiterate sage.

So, when FTL is developed by way of hypersails, civilizations that were literally worlds apart became uncomfortable neighbors.

Those who reject transhumanism are part of the human identity movement, a kind of political and religious and societal catchall with hundreds of denominations that hardly ever agree with each other on the details.

The discreet trade serves those who might find it economically advantageous to live within a strict HI society but wish to sample pleasures from the wider posthuman world.

The conflict I've come up with in particular is a young girl from a very important family has had her virtue compromised. She slept with a boy from another important family. That not the scandal; the scandal is that he's deliberately infected her with a transhuman retrovirus. The virus itself does nothing, it's a sugar pill. The problem is that it marks her as having had work done, posthuman gene tampering. This shows up on any test. The only way to restore her virtue is to take her offworld to a transhuman wetshop.

What good is a test when you can fake it? Allow me to introduce you to my friend hypocrisy. Muslim women who have lived in the west and had recreational sex are paying big money to repair their hymens and fake virginity for the all-important traditional wedding. And we're all familiar with the tradition of Catholic schoolgirls who are technical virgins because they've put boy parts every place but one.

So the story is about trying to get her smuggled out past the system's security ships. And given that the opposing family knows that this is what her family will try to do and has friends in high places in the navy, the blockade is on alert.

There's no cat and mouse with PMF ships. There might be some noir detective action in getting her to a ship and smuggled out, evading security, but the space side of things would be about as boring as train schedules. But there is stealth in hyperspace (I should know, I made it up!) and so many more interesting things can happen.

jollyreaper said...

We can make robots that build something as complicated as a car. I'm pretty sure we can develop robots to pack shelves with minimal human guidance. The only issue is whether those robots cost more than a humans wages do. Right now they don't. In the future the cost will decline.

Look at Kiva robots. We're talking about automated warehouses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRg_1j-iWFU&feature=related

Now we're all familiar with big box stores that just put palletized loads of products right on the retail floor. It doesn't take much imagination to think of a truck rolling up to the loading dock, a robot unloading the pallets into the storage space in back, then moving a fresh pallet out to retail when the old one is exhausted.

Even the meatpacking side of things is getting more automated.

Ham deboning robot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrVFcqgHSLQ

This is precisely the sort of thing you could have convincingly said would never be done by a robot. Pigs are not standardized, too many variables to control, no way you could avoid doing the work by hand. Wrong, evidently.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Look at Kiva robots. We're talking about automated warehouses."

Yes, look at exactly what they do -- drive from here to there following tracks, picking up and moving shelving that humans have to load and unload. That's a very choreographed, simple task. And it relies on humans correctly logging items in and out of the shelving as the shelving is accessed. The motion elements of the system don't know what they're carrying. They just go to a designated spot in the warehouse, pick up a stack of shelves, take it to a picker or putter, then take the shelving to a designated end point. If items are incorrectly logged into and out of the shelving by human pickers or putters, the system works less and less efficiently.

As a programmer, it's neat application of sorting and optimization logic that all happens in a static management computer. The hardware is just I/O devices.

"Even the meatpacking side of things is getting more automated.

Ham deboning robot."


A step further along than welding robots, but still a system where the robots are static and inward-facing, not mobile and outward facing (as a stockbot would have to be).

jollyreaper said...


As a former stocker, I don't believe in it totally being automated either. At least, not for quite awhile. But made so much more efficient that you can lay off half the stockers? Sure, we have that tech now. Whether it's cheaper varies - for some employers, it probably is, for others not quite yet. Lay off 83% of the stockers? Just around the corner, not as cheap as the labor yet. But it's coming.


That's the kicker I think most people are missing in the automation argument, you don't have to invent a robot to do 100% of the job, whatever % pays for the cost of automation is fine and anything above that is gravy.

Think of professional kitchen automation. We used to have to haul the water ourselves! Someone had to cut the firewood. Gas, electricity, water, all provided via utility. You don't need anyone on your staff in charge of the job.

Dishwashers are still pretty crude affairs. They make life easier in the home. When in doubt, just try doing everything by hand for a while. It's a definite timesaver. In a restaurant, more so. Flatware and dishes can go through easily and with hotter water than you could stand as a human. Still needs loaded and unloaded, can't handle irregular objects or pots and pans needing extra attention. It's not a 100% robotic solution. But it lets one employee do the work of many.

Look at the mixer. That's a buttload of work if you've got to do that by hand. Making bread without a good mixer is hell, especially in commercial quantity.

We've seen some crazy good automation coming out with vision and manipulation. Can you imagine if we could build a proper veggie chopper bot? I never use a food processor at home aside from small grinder for nuts and such. But I'm also not dealing with the same volume of veggies as a restaurant. Peel, chop, as good as human hands? That's reducing low-skill scut work. Is this a completely robotic kitchen? No. Are humans still needed? Yes. As many as before? No. <== this is the kicker.

Over on the Stross blog a poster mentioned his own brush with technological unemployment. PHD in design theory, educated out the wazoo. The interface on the new machine he's in charge of is so good, the intern can be put on it and yield comparable results. Does the intern know what he knows? No. Does he need to in order to produce the same result? No.

jollyreaper said...

Yes, look at exactly what they do -- drive from here to there following tracks, picking up and moving shelving that humans have to load and unload. That's a very choreographed, simple task. And it relies on humans correctly logging items in and out of the shelving as the shelving is accessed.


Those robots are not on tracks. Right now they follow barcode stickers on the floor, not all that much different from humans reading signs to figure out where to go. Anywhere they need to go in the warehouse, they can go. They're not on rails.

As for shelves being stocked by humans at this point, yes. This is the % question, how much of a fully manual task can be automated? It doesn't have to be 100% to still see headcount reduction and cost savings.

The motion elements of the system don't know what they're carrying. They just go to a designated spot in the warehouse, pick up a stack of shelves, take it to a picker or putter, then take the shelving to a designated end point. If items are incorrectly logged into and out of the shelving by human pickers or putters, the system works less and less efficiently.


Is that any different from today how? Someone screws up an order, the wrong thing gets delivered. Doesn't matter if it's by hand or by bot. If I place a call to a human for a P42X and he types P32X, will the UPS delivery guy realize he's carrying the wrong box and fix it?

As for identifying products, I think it's going to be not very far in the future at all that RFID's will be built-in, same as barcodes are already on the packaging. Truck arrives at warehouse, doors open, robots go zooming onboard, each pallet is identified by RFID code and the warehouse computer tells the bot where to put it.

"Even the meatpacking side of things is getting more automated.

Ham deboning robot."

A step further along than welding robots, but still a system where the robots are static and inward-facing, not mobile and outward facing (as a stockbot would have to be).


That's not the argument I was making here. A meatpacking bot doesn't have to move. The point is that cutting meat is really, really complicated and the classic example of something that would be difficult to automate. Same with a self-driving car or voice recognition. These are really, really difficult tasks and yet we're now building machines that can do it.

Scifi usually starts with the case of "I have no idea how we could build it but if we had this technology, what are the consequences?" The future usually starts with the case of some geek saying "You know that awesome impossible technology from that story? I think I know how we can do that."

As another example of a partial solution worth the effort, the Roomba. Does it clean as well as a human with a vacuum? No. If you can afford to pay for a maid, she's a better investment than a Roomba. But what a Roomba will do is keep the general mess level low. It will make your thorough cleaning last longer, keep the animal hair from gathering in drifts. You'll still need to hit the corners and put the attachment down the seat cushions and use the other attachment on the drapes but your house will remain looking much nicer between thorough cleanings.

Is a Roomba Rosie the Robot? No. What would it take to make a Rosie? A lot more tech than I can imagine right now.

Your very first stocking robot might just be a Kiva device that picks a pallet from the back of the store and drives it up to where the stocker is at the shelves. It goes shuttling back and forth saving him multiple trips. If it takes two stockers to do a store at night and you can reduce that to one and a bot, that's automation.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Those robots are not on tracks...
They're not on rails."


You're being far too literal. The robots are effectively on tracks because of the simplistic and standardized motion design of the system. Everything travels in straight lines on a pre-established grid, and turns can only be 90 or 180 degrees, only at grid intersections.

"As for shelves being stocked by humans at this point, yes. This is the % question..."

Since nobody's disputing that, your point is what, exactly? As you yorself point out, we already automated a lot of things back when I was a kid.

"Is that any different from today how?"

It's not. But one of the big reasons for automation is increasing reliability over human efforts. That's valid as far as it goes, but most people seem to ignore the opportunities for mistake and misadventure at the human-machine interface. I was just making that explicit.

"As for identifying products, I think it's going to be not very far in the future at all that RFID's will be built-in..."

Aside from the cost-benefit issue with RFID, robots right now cannot efficiently load a truck, nor can they -- for essentially the same reasons -- very well unload an efficiently loaded truck. Computers can solve the packing problem almost as well as humans can, but the packing itself is not a simply or straightforwardly automated task.

That hasi mplications for shelf-stocking too, BTW.

"That's not the argument I was making here. A meatpacking bot doesn't have to move. The point is that cutting meat is really, really complicated...self-driving car or voice recognition...really, really difficult tasks..."

A reliable self-driving car (not one of Pentagon challenge cars that hardly go a few miles before losing their way) still requires a track embedded in the road or visible markers that the sensors on the car can read.

Voice recognition is brute force computing. It was solved decades ago in theory, but increases in processor power and speed have made it work better and better.

The ham boner is a lot like voice recognition -- it takes a known pattern and deals with runtime variations, within certain limits. It's a neat application of technology, but it doesn't surprise me, nor (to me) point in the direction that you seem to think it does.

"The future usually starts with the case of some geek saying 'You know that awesome impossible technology from that story? I think I know how we can do that.'"

Hardly. The future starts with serious engineers -- and sometimes not so serious, but seriously skilled engineers, like Woz -- taking emerging technology and exploring the application space. Flip phones were the exception that proves the rule. (And kids today, watching TOS, probably wonder to themselves why communicators were only phones.)

"As another example of a partial solution worth the effort, the Roomba."

Since nobody's deprecating useful automation that works, well...

"Your very first stocking robot might just be a Kiva device..."

Aren't we forgetting vendor stocking, which is used for high volume items with short shelf lives and seasonal variability, like beverages?

Still, once again, I could see robotic mules moving stuff to and from stocking location, no problem. Heck, back around 2000 they were trying that out in the materials management department of a hospital I worked in. I don't have any problem with that. I'm just not seeing the leap to fully automated stocking.

jollyreaper said...

Since nobody's disputing that, your point is what, exactly? As you yorself point out, we already automated a lot of things back when I was a kid.

My point is that we don't need a 100% solution before we implement a 40% solution. And what constitutes a useful price point changes along with the technology.

mistake and misadventure at the human-machine interface

We're already living with that now. We've survived.

A reliable self-driving car (not one of Pentagon challenge cars that hardly go a few miles before losing their way) still requires a track embedded in the road or visible markers that the sensors on the car can read.


Depends on what you call reliable. Here's the Google model. Bog-standard roads, no special equipment needed except for what's on the car.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/google-cars-300000-miles-without-accident/

Google’s self-driving car project is probably one of the most audacious experiments the company has embarked upon. Today, Google announced another milestone for this project: its fleet of about a dozen autonomous cars has now driven 300,000 miles without a single accident under computer control. While this is obviously very positive news for the project, Google warns that “there’s still a long road ahead.” The cars still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads, for example, and how to interpret temporary construction signs and other situations that could throw its systems for a loop.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works

Hardly. The future starts with serious engineers -- and sometimes not so serious, but seriously skilled engineers, like Woz -- taking emerging technology and exploring the application space.

You're going to tell me Woz isn't a geek? I'm sure they're out there but I've never met or seen interviewed someone who works in the hard sciences who wasn't first inspired by science fiction.

Sure, you might say nobody at NASA is going to score points by saying "Yeah, I landed a rover on Mars. What show inspired me? Sex and the City. I needed something vacuous to rest my mind after all that hard thinking. Screw that Star Trek crap." Scifi is usually out far beyond the possible and so has already defined the concepts before it becomes practical. When we actually build it, then we see how closely fiction can match reality.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"My point is that we don't need a 100% solution before we implement a 40% solution. And what constitutes a useful price point changes along with the technology."

Uh-huh...and? Nobody disputes any of that. The point I'm making is that automation is nowhere near being a complete solution to the stocking problem, and may never be.

"We're already living with that now. We've survived."

Really? Ya think?

My point is that its always going to be a problem as long as humans are in the loop. As I said, my intention was to make that factor explicit, because it is often forgotten or ignored, nothing else.

"Depends on what you call reliable. Here's the Google model. Bog-standard roads, no special equipment needed except for what's on the car."

Not that nobody knows how much of that milage is on a closed course, nor if they're even close to dealing with unexpected changes in road conditions or alignment.

"You're going to tell me Woz isn't a geek?"

His engineering isn't geeky, that's for sure. Certainly the original Apple II system design was informed by real engineering challenges and directed towards solving them.

Geeks dream, engineers do.

I'm sure they're out there but I've never met or seen interviewed someone who works in the hard sciences who wasn't first inspired by science fiction."

I pretty much fall into that category. Nothing I do or can do on computers is based on anything geeky. In fact, having grown up in a home with parents who worked with computers in their everyday lives, I never even thought of them as science fiction. They were just another type of work a person could do. Same with rocketry, for the most part, because one of my grandfathers worked on Redeye and Stinger guidance systems, while my dad did tech writing on Atlas ground support equipment manuals.

A lot of scientists and engineers that I know never even consumed that much science fiction growing up. They just came, like me, from science and technology housholds.

"Sure, you might say nobody at NASA is going to score points by saying 'Yeah, I landed a rover on Mars. What show inspired me? Sex and the City. I needed something vacuous to rest my mind after all that hard thinking. Screw that Star Trek crap.' Scifi is usually out far beyond the possible and so has already defined the concepts before it becomes practical. When we actually build it, then we see how closely fiction can match reality."

Actually, the guy in charge of Entry, Descent, and Landing for the Mars Science Laboratory was an 80s rocker who looked up at the stars one night driving home from a show, took an astronomy class, and eventually wound up in engineering.

Locki said...

An interesting anecdoate about automation and mechanisation that is quite relevant to this discussion about a post-scarcity economy.

Nothing exists in an island. Often what automation loses in human adaptability it more than compensates for with its reliability and speed.

I talked to a winemaker who makes premium wines. We don’t have cheap labour in Australia and picking by hand is fearsomely expensive. For their flagship wine they planted an entire vineyard appropriately spaced for hand picking. Hand picking theoretically is far superior for premium wines since each grape can be carefully handled with a mimimum of crushing and bruising and therefore a minimum of oxidation.

The expensive grapes harvested from the hand picked vineyard ended up being far inferior to those picked by machine and had to be used in a lessor wine. The reason for this is that the machines, whilst slightly rougher, could work quickly, in the dead of the night when it was very cold, so oxidation was kept to a minimum. Whilst the grapes were handled a bit rougher you ended up with a net win. You see this in medicine for screening tests too. Whilst the machines can be spooked by weird things they never get bored, or tired or distracted by things that compromise their objectivity (eg a reading a mammogram on a 35yo mother of 4 who has a family history of breast cancer.

To take advantage of automatic shelf stocking would merely take a redesign of the actual supermarket. I’m picturing a huge series of dispensors like a confectionary machine. Alternately you could just order it online. What you lose in being able to personally inspect the item you gain in:
1. People not crushing the produce before you buy (I'm looking at you grapes and peaches)
2. Cost
3. Convenience (true 24/7 shopping)

On a side note. Someone mentioned mars before. For the first manned mission to mars. I’m convinced we won’t see it in our lifetimes. But to get back off the surface of Mars would the astronauts need a multi-stage chemical rocket to get back off the surface? Or is Mars small enough to allow a single stage to orbit vehicle?

Anonymous said...

Tony said:"I just don't think that the realistic resource pool is not going to support eight or nine or ten billion people at high levels of economic success. And since the developed world already has the technology to live that high on the hog, and has the military skill and technology to stay on top, sooner rather than later the developed and developing world is going to find itself forcibly cut out. Not a pretty picture, but one that fits historical example and human nature."

first of all; you are appallingly cynical about humanity.
Second; you are either missing the point, or deliberately missinterpreting it; the whole point of industrialization is so THERE WON'T BE 8 or 9 or 10 billion people; my point was that industrialization reduces population through attrition due to a much decreased birth rate. And that's not theoretical, it's being observed now. Also, you seem to revel in contemplating the stagnation, or even the downfall of human civilization; you've got a lot of personnal problems.

Ferrell

jollyreaper said...

I think we're going to have to deal with Peak Everything and the future of labor before we ever get to PMF in space.

I can speculate about things that might happen, won't make any guarantees about what will, only say that the status quo seems unlikely to continue. The very economic model it's based on is played out.

Change for the better or change for the worse, that's the big question. I'd like to believe there's still hope, and not just the empty political slogans offered by our two corporate parties.

Tony said...

Ferrell:

"first of all; you are appallingly cynical about humanity."

Oh goodie, I can be appalling now. I've always wanted that. Thanks, dude.

Ugggh!

Sorry to not be one of the shiny, happy people, F, but I know my history. And I've already personally been involved in two resource wars, one of whcih I had the dubious privelege of helping to terrorize into submission poor Iraqi boys who couldn't help themselves, even if they wanted to. So please don't try to tell me I'm being unreasonably pessimistic.

"Second; you are either missing the point, or deliberately missinterpreting it; the whole point of industrialization is so THERE WON'T BE 8 or 9 or 10 billion people; my point was that industrialization reduces population through attrition due to a much decreased birth rate. And that's not theoretical, it's being observed now."

Except that while industrialization could start to reduce populations, the world population will keep growing until the demographic transition is made. The predicted peak is expected to be 8-10B people somewhere around 2150. So, in the next forty years, we can expect the world population to increase. At the same time, we're expecting to provide that whole population with a First World standard of living -- at least. Or the whole thing doesn't work anyway. Sorry if I can't look through rose-colored glasses at that.

"Also, you seem to revel in contemplating the stagnation, or even the downfall of human civilization; you've got a lot of personnal problems."

Believe me, I don't revel in it one bit. I just can't stomach not looking things in the face. If that's a personal problem, well, I'm sanguine to own that one.

Locki said...

And that's not theoretical, it's being observed now. Also, you seem to revel in contemplating the stagnation, or even the downfall of human civilization; you've got a lot of personnal problems.

Ferrell


===============

To be fair I quite enjoy reading Tony’s posts. They tend to be well reasoned, well researched and well written.

As long as an opponent can back it up I quite enjoy a vigorous debate with an opposing opinion.

Whilst sometimes tipping over into snarkiness Tony tends to be one of the posters who contributes a lot of interesting information and opposing viewpoints to the forum.

I may disagree with him but his pessimism is not unreasonable nor IMHO indicative of personal problems.

Thucydides said...

Since a lot of discussion has happened, this is split into two:

1. Tony;

Libertarians are aware of power balances and so on, the purpose of Libertarianism is to prevent the State from becoming overbearing while at the same time preserving the useful features of the State that protect individual rights (like laws, institutions and conventions that support the individual's right to ownership and use of property). Without a State to provide neutral protective services like the Police, Armed Forces and Courts of Law to arbitrate disputes, we'd be back in the Middle Ages where such justice as existed was usually of the vigilante variety and property was protected by having the biggest and baddest gang of warriors to do the protecting. This is obviously a paraphrase due to the limits of blogging, but you should see the essential difference.

For a modern example, people in Chicago are taking steps to deal with the school teacher's strike by banding together or utilizing on line resources. Between the charters and the community groups, one begins to get the sense that Chicago — surely representative, in this, of cities and towns across the nation — is having to rebuild a civic society in the gaps left by the official government structure. That is, the official government structure is not so much “the only thing we all belong to“ as akin to some outside organization that communities must be prepared to work around.

2. Ferrell:

There is an absolute limit to the energy budget of the Earth: 195 Petawatts, being the energy budget the Earth intercepts from the Sun. Now there is probably no way to convert more than a large fraction of that without messing up the biosphere and throwing weather, climate and the oceans out of balance, but there it is.

Thucydides said...

Sorry, forgot the link to the quote:

http://oceanstatecurrent.com/analysis/teacher-walkouts-in-chicago-conspicuous-details/

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"...like laws, institutions and conventions that support the individual's right to ownership and use of property..."

You say it and apparently don't even realize what you're saying. Laws, institutions, etc don't "support" individual rights -- as if those rights were preexisting and independent -- they create them. Yes, I know that next you're going to tell me about natural law and all that claptrap. The problem is that that is just a self-satisfying theory. In reality no individual right exists unless the community agrees that it exists, and commits to defending it.

Mangaka2170 said...

I know that this thread will probably implode from the ensuing paradox, but I agree with Tony.

Rights are not absolute; they do not objectively exist. If you want a good example of this, take a look at China and its stance on intellectual property. No, rights only exist because someone somewhere demanded them, and got enough other people to do the same, so that in the end they were able to take and hold them.

Granted, almost all rights acquired in the developed world today had some form of government help, even if it was only a sympathetic congresscritter, but ultimately, the reality is that one is not given rights, one takes them instead.

Tony said...

Mangaka2170:

"Granted, almost all rights acquired in the developed world today had some form of government help, even if it was only a sympathetic congresscritter, but ultimately, the reality is that one is not given rights, one takes them instead."

Errr...that's a bit stark, even if based on a fundamental truth. Nobody has rights that they don't assert, and which they are willing to fight for. But the whole point is to get the community to agree to some set of rights in principle, so they only have to be physically fought for on rare occasion.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“All this … means that … capitalism is doomed.”

Capitalism is a theory of economics, just as gravity is a theory of physics. You can no more have an end to capitalism than you can have an end to gravity.

jollyreaper said...

Capitalism ends when no one keeps the faith or the practices, just like any human belief. Gravity remains whether you believe in it or not. Newton's theory stands until a better one replaces it.

You might say economics will not go away but our model is always subject to change.

M. D. Van Norman said...

Sorry. Market forces are like gravitational forces. You can overcome them but only for a price.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Capitalism ends when no one keeps the faith or the practices, just like any human belief. Gravity remains whether you believe in it or not. Newton's theory stands until a better one replaces it.

You might say economics will not go away but our model is always subject to change."


Trade from positions of comparative advantage will never go away. That's all capitalism is, fundamentally. The real arguments that get people taking sides with all of the 20th Century "isms" are:

How much surplus does any individual get to keep?

How much any individual has to contribute (of the surplus he is allowed to keep) towards community goals?

And how much of a rake-off does the community's government get to take? (And, subsequently, what uses should it be put to?)

Now, various extreme-isms built around those questions vow that they can or will kill capitalism, because they are better or fairer or just more satisfying in a given worldview. But of course they won't, because they are extreme positions that can never be put into practice in the real world.

IOW, capitalism, in its most basic sense, has never, ever been implemented, for good or for ill -- it just is, even if sometimes it gets wildly distorted from time to time by extremist thinking and action.

jollyreaper said...

But there is also the theory to explain those forces. Theory doesn't always match reality, for example Reagonomics.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“I know that next you’re going to tell me about natural law and all that claptrap.… In reality no individual right exists unless the community agrees that it exists, and commits to defending it.”

As usual, there is something of a misunderstanding regarding rights, but that’s to be expected since there are more than one kind.

Civil rights are the kind described above. They require cooperation and/or community recognition to exercise. The best example is probably the right to vote.

Natural rights, on the other hand, exist without regard to recognition or cooperation. In other words, they can be exercised without permission. Examples include the rights of expression and privacy.

Natural rights can be infringed or suppressed through the application or threat of force, but they can’t be denied short of killing or seriously incapacitating the rights holders.

Anonymous said...

Thucydides said:"There is an absolute limit to the energy budget of the Earth: 195 Petawatts, being the energy budget the Earth intercepts from the Sun. Now there is probably no way to convert more than a large fraction of that without messing up the biosphere and throwing weather, climate and the oceans out of balance, but there it is"

And what the hell does that have to do with industrializing developing and underdeveloping countries as the best way to lower population growth?

Tony said:"Except that while industrialization could start to reduce populations, the world population will keep growing until the demographic transition is made. The predicted peak is expected to be 8-10B people somewhere around 2150. So, in the next forty years, we can expect the world population to increase. At the same time, we're expecting to provide that whole population with a First World standard of living -- at least. Or the whole thing doesn't work anyway. Sorry if I can't look through rose-colored glasses at that."

I never said that we were expected to provide the rest of the world with First World standards of living; you did. I'm tired of your pathtic need to always be right, even to the point of making up shit just so you can win an argument of little or no consequence; you have a pathilogical need to show others that your self-identified opponent is wrong, no matter how dishonest you have to be to do it.
Tony:
In the future, do not address me, do not expect me to reply to you, do not attempt to engage me for I shall ignore you. You will probably think that this means you've won something, but all it really means is that I'm done talking to an annoying, faceless voice, who seems to derive great pleasure from making people angry.

Ferrell

Tony said...

Ferrell:

"I never said that we were expected to provide the rest of the world with First World standards of living; you did. I'm tired of your pathtic need to always be right, even to the point of making up shit just so you can win an argument of little or no consequence; you have a pathilogical need to show others that your self-identified opponent is wrong, no matter how dishonest you have to be to do it.
Tony:
In the future, do not address me, do not expect me to reply to you, do not attempt to engage me for I shall ignore you. You will probably think that this means you've won something, but all it really means is that I'm done talking to an annoying, faceless voice, who seems to derive great pleasure from making people angry."


It would be sooo easy to snark such an outburst, but I'm going to just lay it on the line, matter-of-factly:

I'm not trying to piss people off, or win an argument, or anything like that. I just seem to be in disagreement with The Narrative a lot (whatever version happens to be at stake). I call it like I see it. I know that annoys a lot of people. That doesn't mean I'm insincere or talking to hear myself talk. It just means that I'm not interested in playing ball for the sake of playing ball. I'm interested in clarity about the subject.

In the particular case at hand, in order to achieve a demographic transition, there does in fact have to be high economic aspirations. The whole point is that as raising children becomes more expensive, the number of children per family goes down. That is because they start becoming an economic liability, rather than an economic advantage. See Colinvaux, Fates of Nations (which was first published in 1980, but reads like it could have been written yesterday). Also see the Wikipedia article on "Demographic transition".

See, I did my homework. No "making up shit", no dishonesty necessary.

And "First World" wasn't even an exageration. (And I never put that expression in your mouth -- let's be clear about that.) One still needs to industrialize to achieve the transition. And industrialization implies pretty high energy consumption. US energy use per capita has been statistically level for 40 years now. (See here.) So if a society only industrializes to a technological level of 1970, they still wind up using pretty much a First World energy usage rate, as we define it today.

In any case, we know that industrialized societies that first hit the sub-replacement fertility rate (without political distortions like the Chinese 1-child policy) were at 1990s levels of economic development. That sets a pretty high lower limit on what world energy consumption is going to have to be to extend the demographic transition across the board.

See, F, it's not about scoring rhetorical points. It's about being clear on the issues, regardless of the palatability of the conclusions.

Thom S said...

Delurking for a little bit to add my two cents:

From the engineering people I've spoken to, the general consensus is that any PMF fabs won't break the current industrial paradigm (although they may shift it more towards the 'village blacksmith' model of small-run manufacturing by local specialists), but a sudden spike in fuel prices might.

Further, my own little sphere of knowledge (biotech) gives me hope that PMF economics may have more to do with existing nano-factories (cells) rather than shiny sci-fi ones. With sufficient biotech, of course, all sorts of crazy stuff could be possible. As an off-the-top-of-my-head example: a designed ecosystem which provides all the basics for free indefinately (food, water, housing, some medicinal and manufactured goods) but only for a limited number of people and only by carefully sequestering the ecosystem from biological invasives and parasites.

That being said, I cannot stress enough that all systems are governed by their limits: limits in resources, energy, space etc. This, combined with the tendency for systems to grow to those limits means that whatever is most limited will have the most value. So even in some crazy post-scarcity system there will always be valuable goods of some form or another to exchange. The economic system may change but economics won't.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"As usual, there is something of a misunderstanding regarding rights, but that’s to be expected since there are more than one kind.

Civil rights are the kind described above. They require cooperation and/or community recognition to exercise. The best example is probably the right to vote.

Natural rights, on the other hand, exist without regard to recognition or cooperation. In other words, they can be exercised without permission. Examples include the rights of expression and privacy.

Natural rights can be infringed or suppressed through the application or threat of force, but they can’t be denied short of killing or seriously incapacitating the rights holders."


One can certainly deny any supposed right of expression or privacy short of killing or physically incapacitating a person. All one has to do deny expression is to instill fear of consequences. All one has to do to deny privacy is intsill the fear that everyone is watching everyone else. Or, like the Spartans, set up society in the image of an army.

As for the right to vote, of course that can be suppressed too, even if it nominally recognized in the applicable code of law. The list of technical means and historical examples is pretty long and well-established. Do I need to enumerate any of it?

What natural rights theories do is establish a Platonic ideal of rights, based on some conception of what people are inherrently able to do, if unfetterd. The fallacy is that the ability to do something does not logically imply the right to do it. In practical terms, the right only exists when the community legally recognizes the right and actually defends it.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“All one has to do deny expression is to instill fear of consequences.”

Yes, as I said, the threat of force can be used to suppress even natural rights. However, I can start exercising my rights again as soon as the apprehended threat has passed or diminished.

The right to privacy is especially tricky, since you don’t know what you don’t know.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Yes, as I said, the threat of force can be used to suppress even natural rights. However, I can start exercising my rights again as soon as the apprehended threat has passed or diminished."

But you're not exercising a right. You're exercising a capability, be it the ability to express yourself, seclude yourself from others, whatever. Whether or not you have the right to do any of those things is totally dependent upon a community of others.

In the first instance, the "right" only has meaning in the context of interacting with others. If you were by yourself, you could pretty much express yourself however you wanted, and nothing or nobody could stop it, except your own phycial limitations and environmental constraints. Also, if you were by yourself, you would have privacy, by definition. So you have to have a community for a person's rights to mean anything whatsoever.

Secondly, if you are in a community, the community gets to decide how individuals within the community get to use their own capabilities, and in what ways. It has to be a community decision, because it's the community's members that are affected, sometimes the entire community. What the community allows one to do, without submitting to the community (or its agents) first for permission -- that's where a person's rights begin and end, for any practical purpose. Any other idea of where rights originate, or what they are for, is nothing more than impotent philosophy.

M. D. Van Norman said...

Yes, I am arguing that the origin of natural rights is in one’s capability to exercise them. These capabilities can also become civil rights insofar as they are recognized and supported by the community. It’s simply an objective definition.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Yes, I am arguing that the origin of natural rights is in one’s capability to exercise them. These capabilities can also become civil rights insofar as they are recognized and supported by the community. It’s simply an objective definition."

Objective? Please show the chain of inference between being physically capable of doing something as an individual, and having an objective, unassailable claim on being allowed to do it in a community context.

(You first might want to brush up Hume's Guillotine, aka the "is-ought" problem.)

M. D. Van Norman said...

It has nothing to do with being allowed to do something. The right is natural precisely because it doesn’t require permission to be exercised and can only be directly curtailed by the initiation of force.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"It has nothing to do with being allowed to do something. The right is natural precisely because it doesn’t require permission to be exercised and can only be directly curtailed by the initiation of force."

Appologies in advance for being so blunt, but that's doubletalk. Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should. I could go out and shoot somebody right now, without any particular reason other than that I could. That would, in most societies, be considered an absolute wrong. I can, on the other hand go out and buy a soda, for no other reason than I could. In most societies, that would be considered an absolute right. The difference between "can" on one hand, and "should" (a right) or "shouldn't" (a wrong), on the other, is defined by what the community thinks of the act and its circumstances, not whether or not you can physically perform the action.

jollyreaper said...

These things can get all twisted around. I agree that force is the only way to preserve rights when the other guy won't take no for an answer. You can negotiate like civilized people with a civilized person. If he's coming at you with an axe, you better have a gun. Being dead and in the right means you're still dead.

The problem is that violence fetishists always push it to the point of might making right. Or to put it another way, weapons laying around have a habit of being used. Build a military to defend your land, a generation or two later some bright boy gets the idea of using it to take someone else's land. He'll have a really good rationale for it, a proper justification. It'll sound moral as hell. God will be on his side.

There's a big difference in mindset between being willing and able to defend yourself and spoiling for a fight.

M. D. Van Norman said...

Tony, now that is the is–ought problem. I’m merely setting an objective definition for natural rights. The moral imperative that defines their ethical limits hinges on the initiation of force.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins … and all that.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Tony, now that is the is–ought problem. I’m merely setting an objective definition for natural rights. The moral imperative that defines their ethical limits hinges on the initiation of force.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins … and all that."


Thing is, the whole theory of natural rights runs aground on the is-ought dilemma. Just because you can speak up for yourself, on whatever issue you desire, doesn't necessarily, categorically, objectively mean that you should. It takes values to make that determination. And values are contingent, not emergent. That throws any supposed natural right into the same bin with anything else that relies on contingent judgment.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"...violence fetishists..."

Cliches and caricatures again, j.

Damien Sullivan said...

"One still needs to industrialize to achieve the transition."

Arguably falsified by the data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate

By the first list, sub 2.1 countries include Iran, Chile, Brazil, Burma, Tunisia, Costa Rica, North Korea, Thailand, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Macedonia, Georgia, Moldova, Croatia. I don't think any of those are First WOrld, or all that industrialized, and many are starkly poor.

The second list adds such wealthy countries as Nicaragua, Suriname, and Paraguay.

The entire world has a total fertility rate of 2.5, which is above replacement, but not by a lot. World GDP/capita is $10,000, I think; world energy use is 2 kilowatts/capita. Neither evenly distributed, obviously.

Damien Sullivan said...

As for natural rights, they're nice rhetoric, but I don't think they're real. I'm a Hobbesian in part; one's natural 'right' is to do anything one can get away with, including killing each other. We give up such 'rights' in return for security, creating real rights to life and property.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“Just because you can … doesn’t necessarily, categorically, objectively mean that you should.”

Again, I’m merely defining natural rights objectively, not trying to determine how or when they should be exercised. That decision will always fall to the rights holder.

Referring back to the original topic, human societies waste a tremendous amount of work trying to suppress natural rights … because their success was contraindicated all along. That is the true is–ought “problem” regarding natural rights.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Arguably falsified by the data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate"

Is it possible that there is some other mechanism that leads to lowered birth rates? Obviously, by the data, there must be. What is it, do you think? Is it anywhere near as sustainable as industrialization appears to be, or is it just a passing phase? Hmmm?

I scratch my head over low birth rates in unlikely places, but I see no consistent -- or even apparent, mechanism. So what am I supposed to think, other than "that's interesting, but not difinitive"?

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Again, I’m merely defining natural rights objectively, not trying to determine how or when they should be exercised. That decision will always fall to the rights holder."

The point you're continuing to miss is that that you haven't made a convincing case that natural rights exist at all. You're presuming that they do, and proceeding from there. You need to back up a step and demonstrate their objective existence, first.

jollyreaper said...

T, you can call it what you want but it's true. There are violence fetishists out there. Every loudmouth in a bar who says he knows what he'd have done in a fight, every imperialist wanting to flex military muscle, every leader who started a war of choice. Aggressive acts, not defensive acts. Preemptive war. People who agree with it, apologize for it, rationalize it. Violence fetishists.

Hell, just look at YouTube videos with guns. In one camp you will find sober, responsible people who treat the tool with the respect it deserves. The other camp has the idiots who are careless, dangerous, and compensating for something. You want to call it a cliche? It's still true. Crooked politicians are a cliche but that doesn't make them Bigfoot. Philandering televangelists are a cliche but they aren't the loch ness monster.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“You need to back up a step and demonstrate their objective existence, first.”

I can criticize the government. Therefore, I have a natural right to criticize the government … even if doing so would get me disappeared.

Natural rights are an objective fact, as I have now repeatedly shown.

Anonymous said...

4M.D. Van Norman, I like your difinition of natural rights; as an American, it strikes a deep chord to hear the basis of my country discribed so elegantly.

jollyreaper; while I've never before heard the term "violence fetishists", but as soon as I read it, I realized that I've known people like that all my life; some of them are amusing (real gun fire would scare the crap out of them), some that make you worry about their sanity. Thanks for the great new phrase.

Now, as to the future of work; I'm thinking that (in the not-too-distant-future), people will train for, then work at a selected career for ten to thirty years before needing to scramble to find a new career (either through education or finding a job in a niche field), for the years between being let go from their first career until retirement. It may be that people get into the habit of starting 'retraining' well before their first career becomes obsolete or seriously down-sized; they will be, in a real sense, be betting that they will be able to catch the next wave of rising careers; most will, some won't, but most everyone will be (in effect), be taking out 'career' insurance by continously contenuing their employment-geared education.

Ferrell

Anonymous said...

That '4' was a typo, sorry.

Ferrell

Damien Sullivan said...

"I scratch my head over low birth rates in unlikely places, but I see no consistent -- or even apparent, mechanism. So what am I supposed to think, other than "that's interesting, but not difinitive"? "

Perhaps that your claim was wrong and should be retracted?

The alternative factor many demographers credit is the education and freedom of women, plus of course access to birth control, and low infant mortality; industrialization often causes these things, but great levels of it aren't required. And for all its black marks, even Iran isn't that bad on that front, and used to be better. Women have to cover their heads but can have good jobs and serve in Parliament, for example.

Basically, once women have a choice about squeezing out as many melon-sized objects between their legs as it takes to kill them, they say 'no'.

"I can criticize the government. Therefore, I have a natural right to criticize the government "

I can kill people. Therefore, I have a natural right to kill people.

This is not how I define rights...

Thom S said...

M. D. Van Norman,

"I can criticize the government. Therefore, I have a natural right to criticize the government … even if doing so would get me disappeared"

Using the same construction:

"I can hit a baby. Therefore, I have a natural right to hit babies... even if doing so would get me chucked in jail."

This is obviously not a good (rhetorical) place to start when putting together an 'objective' definition of natural rights.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"I can criticize the government. Therefore, I have a natural right to criticize the government … even if doing so would get me disappeared.

Natural rights are an objective fact, as I have now repeatedly shown."


Saying what you want to say is a human capability, nothing more. As others have pointed out, an inherrent capability can lead to a wrong as easily as it can lead to a right.

Please try again.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Perhaps that your claim was wrong and should be retracted?"

Don't think so. I'm far from the only person to explain demographic transition as a consequence of industrialization.

"The alternative factor many demographers credit is the education and freedom of women, plus of course access to birth control, and low infant mortality; industrialization often causes these things, but great levels of it aren't required. And for all its black marks, even Iran isn't that bad on that front, and used to be better. Women have to cover their heads but can have good jobs and serve in Parliament, for example.

Basically, once women have a choice about squeezing out as many melon-sized objects between their legs as it takes to kill them, they say 'no'."


Explain India, Israel, and South Africa. These are all places that should be exhibiting signs of a demographic transition -- especially Israel. But they aren't.

jollyreaper said...

re: "violence fetishists"

It's a phrase I coined on the spur but a googling shows I'm not the first to bang the two together. There's no original ideas out there, the most that can be said is that they're original to me before I found out they already existed.

There was a really good article I can't find on the web anymore, one about people mistaking symbols for the things they represent, actually making the symbol more holy than the idea. And a similar bad idea can go along with that, the idea of wanting the trappings and privileges of power without taking the responsibility. I'm sure the sword of Damocles story was probably old by the time it was first put to parchment, the earlier retellings lost in time.

As for your concept of continued career reinvention, this is what we're seeing today but it also makes things precarious. It takes a lot of time to get any good at something and this is just talking about stuff where there's no formal training. You can become an excellent carpenter reading books, watching videos, and putting it to practice. You can putter on weekends and take a lifetime to become good or spend twelve hour days and develop proficiency more quickly. It's difficult to rush a formal education and some schools will limit how many credit hours you are allowed to take. So you are talking about a significant earnings hit if reinventing your career involves significant formal retraining.

This isn't even factoring in the difficulty of learning and adapting as one ages.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"re: "violence fetishists"

It's a phrase I coined on the spur but a googling shows I'm not the first to bang the two together. There's no original ideas out there, the most that can be said is that they're original to me before I found out they already existed."


Did you google with quotes, to ensure getting only results for the precise term? I did. 1,690 results in the whole English speaking world. I'd actually expect more for the result of putting two common words together in a standard construction. Hmmm...

Anywho, it's obviously not a common concept, either academically or in everday discourse. It was just a suitably dismissive epithet to fit your rhetorical agenda.

"There was a really good article I can't find on the web anymore, one about people mistaking symbols for the things they represent..."

What does that have to do with violence fetishism, which we have already established is not a commonly used or talked about concept?

I'll agree that there are blowhards and idiots, and a lot of people who would shoot first and ask questions later. There are also .mil porn fanboys, who love to quote the technical characteristics of every weapon they've ever heard about, and love the sound of the various propaganda and marketing names dripping off of their tongues. But they're just a special case of the "idiots" category.

If you want to see someone who fetishizes violence, take a look at Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarrantino or, in literature, Stephen King. Except those artists are quite aware of the consequences of violence, and don't shirk from showing them in their work.

jollyreaper said...

T, you're getting into the "no true scotsman" fallacy.

Statement: The abortion clinic bomber was a Christian.

Rebuttal: No, he wasn't. No true Christian would bomb a clinic. He's an extremist.

I would tend to take the bomber at his word for why he did it. If he did it for religious reasons, it is a religious attack. This does not mean mainstream Christians are not condemning his actions, are not calling for his prosecution under the law. But to claim he isn't Christian is as silly as claiming he isn't male because "No true man would use a bomb to kill someone instead of doing it face-to-face."

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"T, you're getting into the 'no true scotsman' fallacy.

Statement: The abortion clinic bomber was a Christian.

Rebuttal: No, he wasn't. No true Christian would bomb a clinic. He's an extremist.

I would tend to take the bomber at his word for why he did it. If he did it for religious reasons, it is a religious attack. This does not mean mainstream Christians are not condemning his actions, are not calling for his prosecution under the law. But to claim he isn't Christian is as silly as claiming he isn't male because 'No true man would use a bomb to kill someone instead of doing it face-to-face.'"


Please tell me, who, out of all the people you've associated with the expression, has actually told you (or anybody else) that he's a "violence fetishist". Judging by the google results and your own admission, no one. It's simply an epithet that you made up to have a suitably nasty label to put on people who's motives you suspect and who's actions you disapprove of.

Okay, I was wrong in calling it a cliche, because obviously it isn't widely enough used to be one, by any stretch of the imagination. But it certainly is a caricature, and not a necessarily accurate one, even after you have explained your meaning in greater detail. It's just a rhetorical stick generated for the purpose of beating a class of people you wish to demonize.

jollyreaper said...

There's enough hits on the term that I wouldn't lay claim to inventing it myself.

As for demonizing, that's your opinion. Responsible gun owners don't like them very much, either. Here's a quote you won't read because you'll dismiss it as polemics or advocacy or simply because it doesn't fit with your opinion.

There’s stereotype we face as gun owners. Ask any anti, and they’ll tell you about the old white guy, cop wannabe, wearing his gun on his belt for all to see. He’s a hair trigger, locked and loaded and ready to go off at the first opportunity to defend life and limb. Nothing would bring more joy to his heart than plugging a bad guy with his Glock, basking in the accolades of a thankful citizenship. Hell, there might even be a ticker-tape parade in it for him . . .
Sadly, there are some gun owners out there with just this mindset. We’ve seen their YouTube videos; open carry screeds meant to inflame any LEO within earshot. We read editorials and reader comments in our local papers and shake our head at the occasional, “I got seven rounds right here for all the Muslims/hippies/reptilians ruining our country!” I haven’t really put a face to all the crazies hanging out at the fringe of the gun owners’ bell curve. Until now. Meet Richard Zentz, today’s irresponsible gun owner.
Zents was arrested last August for, “aggravated unlawful use of a weapon on his person.” Even though Halloween was a couple of months away, Zentz decided to visit his bank all dressed up in his DEA Agent costume, gun included. As you can see in the picture above, he’s wearing a DEA shirt, emblems on the pocket and sleeve. He even had a DEA badge.
His plan to play LEO dress-up was going pretty well until someone recognized him and, knowing he wasn’t DEA, called the police. In a town less than a hundred miles from Chicago, it didn’t take long for things to turn turtle for Zentz. He was arrested as he left the bank, obviously sad that he couldn’t play cops with the big boys (I mean, just look at that face; he’s devastated!).
Zentz must know a pretty good lawyer; somehow he ended up with only two years probation, a couple grand in fines and weekly dates with a piss cup (and gun-free, of course). Twenty miles east and he’d be lucky they didn’t perforate him on arrest.


http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/09/david-liberman/irresponsible-gun-owner-of-the-day-richard-zentz/

Claiming all X are Y is just as silly as claiming all X are never Y. Some people are responsible gun owners/parents/drivers/citizens and some people are not. The ones that aren't are the ones to watch out for.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"There's enough hits on the term that I wouldn't lay claim to inventing it myself."

You stated that you "coined [it] on the spur". Jusdging by the number of google results, the expression does seem to get coined independently sometimes, but hardly often. So, in the context of this discussion, it only really means anything to you, yourself, and nobody else.

"As for demonizing, that's your opinion. Responsible gun owners don't like them very much, either. Here's a quote you won't read because you'll dismiss it as polemics or advocacy or simply because it doesn't fit with your opinion."

I read it. And it is a polemic of a sort. But the persons described are not "violence fetishists", by any straight reading of the expression. They don't seem to actually engage in violence. They just talk a big game and use the possession and display of guns to help themselves feel important. I think that clearly puts them in the category of idiot (and possibly disturbed), without need of further embellishment.

"Claiming all X are Y is just as silly as claiming all X are never Y. Some people are responsible gun owners/parents/drivers/citizens and some people are not. The ones that aren't are the ones to watch out for. "

Hmmm...

Let's go back to your original use of the expression:

"The problem is that violence fetishists always push it to the point of might making right. Or to put it another way, weapons laying around have a habit of being used. Build a military to defend your land, a generation or two later some bright boy gets the idea of using it to take someone else's land. He'll have a really good rationale for it, a proper justification. It'll sound moral as hell. God will be on his side."

How did we get from politicians, tempted by the possession of military power to actually use that power, to private citizens, who don't actually use power, just display its accoutrements to assert their self-image? I'm not seeing the connection.

And niether type is necessarily interested in violence for violence's sake. (Which is what one might expect of a "fetishist", right?) On the one hand, the politician might not even care about violence per se, just be interested in the consequences of using force to achieve a goal of more power. On the other hand, we have a type of private individual who might like to seem dangerous, but who never would (for the vast majority of cases) actually perpetrate violence on anyone, except by accident or misadventure. Hard to see a fetishism for vilence in either case.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“As others have pointed out, an inherrent capability can lead to a wrong as easily as it can lead to a right.”

Tony, you’re not really going to confuse homophones, are you? We are referring to rights as prerogatives rather than as “good things” in this instance.

We’ve only touched on the ethical limits of natural rights, though I’ve suggested that they involve the initiation of force. Absent moral contraindications, you certainly have the right to kill someone or even to hit a baby. In fact, there are situations where such unpleasantness would not be morally precluded.

Again and again, I’m giving you an objective definition for natural rights (i.e., prerogatives). There are implications to that definition that many will obviously find uncomfortable, but that doesn’t make the fact less unassailable. Instead, you have to look at when you are morally justified in responding to the perceived abuse of a natural right.

Tony said...

M.D. Van Norman:

"Tony, you’re not really going to confuse homophones, are you? We are referring to rights as prerogatives rather than as 'good things' in this instance."

Ohhh...there's a very specific reason that I definitely am taking that approach. Stay tuned.

"We’ve only touched on the ethical limits of natural rights, though I’ve suggested that they involve the initiation of force. Absent moral contraindications, you certainly have the right to kill someone or even to hit a baby. In fact, there are situations where such unpleasantness would not be morally precluded.

Again and again, I’m giving you an objective definition for natural rights (i.e., prerogatives). There are implications to that definition that many will obviously find uncomfortable, but that doesn’t make the fact less unassailable. Instead, you have to look at when you are morally justified in responding to the perceived abuse of a natural right."


In all of the above, one can replace "right" with "ability" and not lose even a shred of meaning:

"We’ve only touched on the ethical limits of natural abilities, though I’ve suggested that they involve the initiation of force. Absent moral contraindications, you certainly have the ability to kill someone or even to hit a baby. In fact, there are situations where such unpleasantness would not be morally precluded.

Again and again, I’m giving you an objective definition for natural abilities (i.e., prerogatives). There are implications to that definition that many will obviously find uncomfortable, but that doesn’t make the fact less unassailable. Instead, you have to look at when you are morally justified in responding to the perceived abuse of a natural ability."


The only place the text breaks down is in the parenthetical association of "ability" with "prerogative". But that's a natural consequence of what you're doing wrong.

See, you're arbitrarily elevating a human ability to a moral value. You're saying that because something can be done, there's a moral imperative to let it be done, barring infringement of others' own moral prerogatives. That's a non sequitur -- just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that it is a moral good to do it, even if you don't hurt somebody else in the process.

You're also confusing which is which. In one place you have an ability as an ability -- something you can do. In another place you have it as a prerogative -- something you should be allowed to do. I could see where it can be both, but it is not necessarily so, and you haven't established the connection, except to baldly assert it.

That's why I equated "right" with "good". For something to be a right -- to be allowed with no prior permission or subsequent restraint -- it must only be undertaken as a species of moral good, and never as a species of moral wrong. And moral good and wrong are defined by the community, not by the individual, and certainly not by the simple expedient of finding out what one is capable of.

Tony said...

Additinal thought:

What I think is missing here, when talking of a right as a preprogative, is the understanding that prerogatives have a moral context. That's because a prerogative is something that should be allowed to a person or group. But "should" is a word from moral discourse. It has no meaning to the individual. It only has meaning WRT what the group, or at least affected individuals within a group, is be required to accept, for some non-arbitrary reason.

But, on the other hand, we have the assertion that a natural right is one that exists simply because an individual can perform an act. Okay, an individual can perform an act. But that has no moral. meaning, no "should" or "shouldn't", except in the context of a group. That is, except in the context of someone else being affected.

So how can it be that we can derive rights from simple analysis of individual abilities? Absent the group, there is no moral context. Absent the moral context, there is no prerogative. It simply doesn't follow.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“For something to be a right -- to be allowed with no prior permission or subsequent restraint -- it must only be undertaken as a species of moral good, and never as a species of moral wrong.”

Ah-ha! “Subsequent restraint” is not part of my definition. You read that in.

Subsequent restraint (i.e., punishment) is how society deters actual moral transgressions (theft, murder, etc.). Prior restraint is the problem I objected to with regard to the exercise of natural rights. That is an initiation of force and thus immoral in itself.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Ah-ha! 'Subsequent restraint' is not part of my definition. You read that in.

Subsequent restraint (i.e., punishment) is how society deters actual moral transgressions (theft, murder, etc.)."


Lack of subsequent restraint is a necessary condition, else there is no right. For example, regardless of what the law says about a certain type of speech -- let's say critcising the Big Cheese -- nobody places prior restraint on that act. It's the subsequent restraint written into the law that might cause someone to think twice. For something to be a right, it must be free of any restraint, prior or subsequent (except, of course, that it doesn't hurt others).

"Prior restraint is the problem I objected to with regard to the exercise of natural rights. That is an initiation of force and thus immoral in itself."

Once again, you're asserting natural rights as if they existed without (as yet) having satisfactorily demonstrated their existence.

Also, you keep using the expression "initiation of force". That's a libertarian term of art that is also not accepted (in its intended libertarian meaning) without logical demonstration as an objective fact.

M. D. Van Norman said...

You can believe what you want, but I’ve given you an objective definition. I’ve also suggested the social and economic problems that attend prior restraint of natural rights, though I’ve never said that rights are free of any restraint. None are.

You are, of course, free to quibble with my libertarian definition of moral limits. Morality is always relative.

Damien Sullivan said...

"Explain India, Israel, and South Africa. These are all places that should be exhibiting signs of a demographic transition -- especially Israel. But they aren't."

Once again you've made a false statement. I'd insert a snarky comment a la Mentor of Arisia if I felt in the groove. Looking at gapminder.org, as a handy site with data over time, we can see that all three countries have seen their fertility rates plummet. In 1950 Israel was 4.5, India 5.9, and South Africa 6.5. Now they're 2.9, 2.6, and 2.5. True, they're not at sub-replacement *yet* but India and South Africa are clearly heading there.

Israel -- which is far more industrialized than either of the other two, let us note, a full First World country -- has plateaued since 1995. I'd guess the Orthodox Jews are responsible for that, with the high-fertility religious subculture counteracting other trends. Or maybe immigrants, if Israel had further waves of Jewish immigrants. But it's exceptional.

(Another hypothesis would be the Arab Israelis. But while I don't have any data on their fertility specifically, it seems unlikely, given the trends in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and the West Bank/Gaza, all of which have had the usual plummeting birth rates. Jordan and Egypt are now tied with Israel, Lebanon is sub-replacement. West Bank is high at 4.4 but way down from 8.1 in 1965. Transitions everywhere, *except* in Israel. Neither industrialization nor women's legal freedoms will explain that.)

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Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"You can believe what you want, but I’ve given you an objective definition."

No, you've given a description of function, basedo n the assumption that natural rights exist. YOu have yet to demonstrate that they do exist.

M. D. Van Norman said...

A chair is a chair. It may also be a recliner, but it’s still a chair.

You may say it’s not a chair. Society at large may says the same, but if someone can sit in it, it’s still a chair.

Tony’s refusal to understand only exemplifies the problem I described.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Once again you've made a false statement."

I'll agree that I wasn't clear about what I meant, which was that the named states haven't completed the birth rate leg of the transition. You appear to claim that they should have, given a little bit of industrialization and political rights for women.

I'll also agree that these states have indeed decreased their fertility. But they have not descended to replacement or sub-replacement level fertility yet. I happen to think that what will get them there and keep them there is increased industrialization. You have asserted political rights for women and modern birth control as significant factors. We'll have to see -- both if those can alone get peoples below replacement level and if they can sustain that condition.

Also, let's not forget where this tangent got started. Ferrell said:

"Just a quick thought, but historically the best method for a nation to restrain population growth is to industrialize (which normally means urbinization); so the obvious solution to world population growth is for everyone to industrialize to the level of the West...makes you wonder why some people are so vehimenately opposed to industrialization, but still scream about overpopulation. Again, just my thoughts."

I didn't disagree with his premises, because I happen to think they're more or less correct. I just pointed out some pretty obvious consequences, given the assumption that fertility is directly related to industrialization level.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"A chair is a chair. It may also be a recliner, but it’s still a chair.

You may say it’s not a chair. Society at large may says the same, but if someone can sit in it, it’s still a chair.

Tony’s refusal to understand only exemplifies the problem I described."


Sorry, but that's not the form of your argument. Your argument is:

Some object X is a chair, because I say it is.

Let's try a different approach. How about you define a "right" in absolute terms, without reference to its nature, and we'll go from there.

Damien Sullivan said...

Well, per my earlier comment, several countries well below First World income levels are below replacement. I don't think any of them are at the $500/capita level, though I haven't checked; you could argue that $2500/capita is sufficiently industrialized, I guess. And given the trend lines, South Africa and Egypt would probably drop below replacement before they get particularly wealthy.

Urbanization may indeed help; for one thing, it takes away farms as the easy economic utility of children.

M. D. Van Norman said...

Tony, you are deliberately misunderstanding me.

A chair is a chair not because I say it is but because someone can sit in it.

A right is natural not because I say it is but because someone can exercise it without permission.

Perhaps you are merely offended by my broad use of the term and would prefer to describe only more high-minded ideals as rights. If that’s the case, you are free to err on the side of aesthetics, but you still can’t deny my natural right to wear polka-dotted underpants.

Rick said...

Considering some of the subthread topics, this has been nearly free of outbursts. All the same, I do ask everyone to show restraint toward others' opinions and even tone ....


On population, I would guess that both industrialization and women's rights (and contraceptive access) tend to slow down population growth. And since these often co-occur, disentangling them could be a bit of a challenge.


On 'natural rights,' I have to share the confusion over how they are distinguished from mere capabilities.

Do I have a natural right to ride the train for free (how cool!) because the only way to stop me is for the conductor to initiate violence by throwing me off?

I'm also hazy on how the right to wear polka-dotted underpants relates to the right to own, say, a railroad.


Having briefly stuck my oar in, carry on!

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Tony, you are deliberately misunderstanding me."

If only it were that simple...

"A chair is a chair not because I say it is but because someone can sit in it."

So a bathtub is a chair? Someone can sit in a bathtub.

"A right is natural not because I say it is but because someone can exercise it without permission."

Being able to do something without permission is the definition of any right.

"Perhaps you are merely offended by my broad use of the term and would prefer to describe only more high-minded ideals as rights. If that’s the case, you are free to err on the side of aesthetics, but you still can’t deny my natural right to wear polka-dotted underpants."

Now you're just being facetious.

M. D. Van Norman said...

I think I’ve made my point regarding rights, so I will simply tie it back to the original topic and reiterate that the suppression of natural rights is a poor use of resources and introduces more inefficiency into economic systems. Since such suppression is a common practice, it may play a significant role in economic problems.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"I think I’ve made my point regarding rights,"

You've made a point, but it ain't about rights.

"...the suppression of natural rights is a poor use of resources and introduces more inefficiency into economic systems. Since such suppression is a common practice, it may play a significant role in economic problems."

Using that kind of nebulous reasoning (what "natural" rights? using how many resources? vs. what alternate contingencies?) one could make a case that Martin Luther King committed single-handed genocide against the Little Green Men from Mars.

M. D. Van Norman said...

Disingenuity aside, an example would be the public treasure wasted on the “war on drugs.” The funding could be spent much more effectively than in the largely futile attempts to suppress the natural rights to privacy and personal property. However, the powers that be find drug use (even without harm) to be morally offensive, so we continue to spit into the wind.

Damien Sullivan said...

" I think I’ve made my point regarding rights, so I will simply tie it back to the original topic and reiterate that the suppression of natural rights is a poor use of resources and introduces more inefficiency into economic systems. Since such suppression is a common practice, it may play a significant role in economic problems."

Like the suppression of our natural right to murder each other? Or to pollute the air?

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Disingenuity aside, an example would be the public treasure wasted on the 'war on drugs.' The funding could be spent much more effectively than in the largely futile attempts to suppress the natural rights to privacy and personal property. However, the powers that be find drug use (even without harm) to be morally offensive, so we continue to spit into the wind."

The problem is that drug use involves more than a personal moral choice. I used to work in hospitals. I've seen the effects that drug use has on people other than the drug users. We might quibble about whther counter-drug efforts are targeting the right things, but you'll never convince me they're a waste of resources.

As for morals qua morals, every time I hear that drug use is a private moral choice, I know I've heard from a morally obtuse voice, precisely because drug use almost never affects just the user.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“Like the suppression of our natural right to murder each other? Or to pollute the air?”

Please reread my comments, though ethical limits on natural rights aren’t relevant to overall topic of human work and economies.

M. D. Van Norman said...

“… drug use almost never affects just the user.”

Everything affects everything else at some level. Using that fact to justify authoritarian controls is the road to totalitarianism, which I rejected for previously mentioned ethical limits.

Economic damage is just one practical effect of violating that ethical limit.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Everything affects everything else at some level. Using that fact to justify authoritarian controls is the road to totalitarianism, which I rejected for previously mentioned ethical limits."

Like I said, moral obtuseness. How much transgression of one set of ethical limits do we allow in one case, in order to avoid transgressing any ethical limits in another, arbitrarily preferred one?

M. D. Van Norman said...

Ha-ha! My last two remarks look self-contradictory. They’re not, because the respective ethical violations described occur at much different frequencies.

Crime is the baseline problem and certainly causes economic damage. However, suppressing natural rights that are not being abused creates more crime artificially and thus causes even greater economic damage than the problem the community was ostensibly trying to solve. Therefore, that ethical violation actually becomes the greater economic problem.

Tony said...

M. D. Van Norman:

"Crime is the baseline problem and certainly causes economic damage. However, suppressing natural rights that are not being abused creates more crime artificially and thus causes even greater economic damage than the problem the community was ostensibly trying to solve. Therefore, that ethical violation actually becomes the greater economic problem."

Crime is not the baseline problem, even though it is a major consequence of drug abuse. More significant, in my experience, are neglect and abuse of family, decreased contribution to the economy, health problems and treatments, other diversions of resources. Those all have economic costs. Of course they are not costs that Drug War opponents are likely to recognize, because they don't help their case one bit.

Damien Sullivan said...

Anyone who favors banning currently illegal drugs like pot and hallucinogens, but not the far more addictive and damaging drugs like alcohol and tobacco, is morally obtuse IMO.

Opiates and strong stimulants like cocaine and meth I'm more neutral on, though the DEA's paranoia is preventing patients from getting the full painkillers they need, and I've yet to see how throwing people in prison improves things. I'd be friendliest to banning stimulants, since meth is frigging scary, and there could be job pressure to take stimulants to increase short-term performance.

"I used to work in hospitals. I've seen the effects that drug use has on people other than the drug users."

You saw the effects that extreme drug abuse has on people other than the abusers. You didn't see the people who use drugs without causing problems. Selection bias.

M. D. Van Norman said...

It’s worth noting at this point—in case it’s not obvious—that historically the powers that be have often been willing to suffer the economic costs of suppressing various natural rights, whether through ignorance or by design.

Anonymous said...

Just to throw my 2-cents worth in; I've always been taught that "natural" rights were synonomous with "intrinsic" rights; i.e. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You live, so you have the right to continue living as long as you can; making your own decisions about how you live that life follows due to you being a sentiant being capable of actually making those decisions; the pursuit of happiness is just that, the ability to follow whatever path in life makes you happy. However, the flip side to that is that everyone else's intrinsic rights are just as importaint as yours; that means that your rights are absolute, to the point where they don't infringe upon anyone elses', and to the point where you decide they need limited. Most people prefer to live in the structure of civilization, rather than living naked in the wilderness, because they believe that the limits imposed by civilization are worth the benifits that civilization offer. Most 'rights' people talk about are subsets of these three; specifics that attempt to cover as many permutations as possible. I know that some might think that these are old-fashioned ideas, but really, people have fought and died for these ideals, so there's that to consider; also, they are ideals, to be constantly striven for, even if never fully achieved.

Ferrell

Locki said...

Damien Sullivan said...

Anyone who favors banning currently illegal drugs like pot and hallucinogens, but not the far more addictive and damaging drugs like alcohol and tobacco, is morally obtuse IMO.

Opiates and strong stimulants like cocaine and meth I'm more neutral on, though the DEA's paranoia is preventing patients from getting the full painkillers they need, and I've yet to see how throwing people in prison improves things. I'd be friendliest to banning stimulants, since meth is frigging scary, and there could be job pressure to take stimulants to increase short-term performance.

"I used to work in hospitals. I've seen the effects that drug use has on people other than the drug users."

You saw the effects that extreme drug abuse has on people other than the abusers. You didn't see the people who use drugs without causing problems. Selection bias.


Opiates are bad. Anyone who claims legalisation is the answer to addicative drugs like heroin has never done history.

See the Chinese opium wars. It devastated every level of chinese society, rich, poor, educated or illiterate peasant. Virtually every chinese emigrant has a story of a grandparent who lost it all and died early after becoming addicted.

The legalisation of marijuana in areas of Canada and Netherlands hasn't quite been the raging success some people were hoping for.

Legalisation sounds good in theory but it is IMHO the classic simple answer to a very complex problem.

There's no evidence legalising the other drugs will help the problem.

jollyreaper said...

I think what we are getting caught up on is that rights do not exist absent society's sanction and enforcement.

The definition of civilization I like is the response to "nobody ever said life is fair," the response being "what if we did something about that?"

A Roman noble could agree to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for fellow citizens. For slaves? Are you daft? Who would do all the work?

Natural rights existing as a real thing handed down by a loving God are a powerful argument. But they are no more real than the king's authority. Princess gets an imperial tone and commands someone to do something, why do they listen? Man with the pointy bit of metal pokes holes if he doesn't. Absent that, she's just a young girl too full of herself.

This does not mean that the rights we talk about are not important, just that they cannot do anything absent the society that created them. It's like a restraining order. We agree the wife has a right to not be murdered by her husband. The paper cannot hold him back. It will help her defense in a trial if he is found dead on her property in violation of said order.

There is an ongoing debate about which rights can be exercised. The point above about the only natural right is doing whatever we want to whoever we want unless they can stop us is correct. We give that up for assurance others don't do the same to us. But we don't allow group marriage even though we recently allowed mixed race marriages. We set the age of consent where it is because that's what we feel is right. We outlawed slavery because we do not feel it is right. We are in the process of legalizing gay marriage in places but not everyone agrees with it, the debate continues.

Final point -- due process is supposed to protect us all and see we are all treated fairly and equally. When those rules are not followed, trust in society and society itself will collapse. We return to a time before the social contract. I would not care for that.

Rick said...

Princess gets an imperial tone and commands someone to do something, why do they listen? Man with the pointy bit of metal pokes holes if he doesn't. Absent that, she's just a young girl too full of herself.

Can't give details just now, but this one could come back to bite you. ;-)


due process is supposed to protect us all and see we are all treated fairly and equally. When those rules are not followed, trust in society and society itself will collapse.

What's most fundamental, really, is some level of predictability - even if it is not very fair and not at all equal.

Put another way, you are generally better off paying protection money to an established capo di tutti capi (and giving deference to the family principessa!) than having to deal with contending gangs of roving bandits.

Westeros will likely be a whole lot better off if the Lannisters and Starks give way in due course to synologous Tudors. Even if they put some heads up on pikes above a suitable bridge.

Certainly I think that fairness and equality are better. But you can't even get a start on those until civil wars give way to a political process.

jollyreaper said...


Princess gets an imperial tone and commands someone to do something, why do they listen? Man with the pointy bit of metal pokes holes if he doesn't. Absent that, she's just a young girl too full of herself.

Can't give details just now, but this one could come back to bite you. ;-)


Tease. Guessing it's something you're working on?

What's most fundamental, really, is some level of predictability - even if it is not very fair and not at all equal.

Yup. Dependable suck is something you can deal with. Unpredictable you can't. is it going to be suck, not so bad or psycho-horror? A man can't live like that.

Curiously enough, that's the argument the GOP makes about liberals, "Businesses won't spend because they don't know what the tax situation is going to be. They need a predictable environment." And this is true in a sense but it's not a courtesy extended to others. Big business lesson: never, ever, ever do business with a trust fund prince. I can think of one particular friend who got screwed six ways from Sunday by someone like that. Signed contract, earnest money down, guy breaks contract. "You'll spend more money taking me to court than you'll ever get out of me." If you cannot trust business deals, society is going to fall apart.

Put another way, you are generally better off paying protection money to an established capo di tutti capi (and giving deference to the family principessa!) than having to deal with contending gangs of roving bandits.

In that case, it's something you can bank on. Especially because the mafia guy will be protecting his turf. If he can't keep other guys from squeezing his businesses, he's not worth paying protection to.

But, like I said, man with the pointy bit of metal or the shooting iron. You respect the princess because of the potential violence represented. If a rival mafioso proves her daddy ain't got no balls, no need to treat her like royalty.

Certainly I think that fairness and equality are better. But you can't even get a start on those until civil

I think a certain amount of horror is needed for that. Historians I've talked to who know about how terrifying systems have become more benign, they say it happens when the people who hold the reins of power realize they don't want to live in fear anymore. Stalin dies, his surviving lieutenants say "Do we really want to continue his madness?"

It's common to only think of this from the escalation standpoint. "You wanna get Capone? Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone!" Tit for tat, what happens when nobody has anything more to give? That's when peace happens, negotiated if there's anyone left to speak, by default otherwise.

Rick said...

Pretty much yes (including the tease).

Closely related is a basic political dynamic: Barons naturally want to be independent. Which gives the commons and the king a shared interest in keeping them in check. (An interest that sagacious princesses may recognize.)

This principle is, inter alia, the basis for my critique of libertarianism.

Thucydides said...

Wow, go away for a week and look what happens.

Closely related is a basic political dynamic: Barons naturally want to be independent. Which gives the commons and the king a shared interest in keeping them in check. (An interest that sagacious princesses may recognize.)

This principle is, inter alia, the basis for my critique of libertarianism.


Since libertarians are also interested in keeping barons in check I am a bit confused by how you see this as a critique of libertarianism.

Once again, the key concept is to have the minimally intrusive set of State institutions and powers needed to protect the citizens of the said State. The minimal requirments would be a military force to protect against foreign threats, a police force to protect against criminal activity and the Courts of Law to provide neutral arbitration of disputes. State operated military and police forces should prevent local commanders ("Barons") from pillaging the local community or setting themselves up as independent polities, police forces prevent vigilante "justice", and neutral Courts of Law provide an end point for disputes.

Note there are large areas which even libertarians are in disagreement, and some of us recognize there are areas where things can break down. OTOH, libertarians also recognize that intrusive use of state power often distorts things in favour of the "barons"; the current meme is "crony capitalism" but it has been called other things in the past.

Even many libertarians are unaware of the strongest argument behind our faith in voluntary cooperation; F.A.Hayek called it the "Local Knowledge Problem" and it is a powerful explanation of why markets work and central planning does not.

Damien Sullivan said...

Many libertarians are also unaware of, or wilfully disbelieve, the various reasons that markets can fail and central planning do better... to be fair, many non-libertarians don't have a clear grasp of that either; most people don't know economics.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Anyone who favors banning currently illegal drugs like pot and hallucinogens, but not the far more addictive and damaging drugs like alcohol and tobacco, is morally obtuse IMO."

Apples and oranges comparison, D. The problem with marijuana is not the relatively mild high, but the fact that it comes from a single dose. A single drink, or cigar, or cigarette will not render one dangerous behind the wheel. A single joint or hit will. We seek to control these items not because of some absolute health effect, but because -- like any other drug we control, say through presriptions -- a single dose represents a critical level of effect.

"You saw the effects that extreme drug abuse has on people other than the abusers. You didn't see the people who use drugs without causing problems. Selection bias."

People always want to take it in that direction, because they are so sure that their weekend joint isn't the problem. But it is, partially because even one joint is dangerous if the user doesn't just sleep it off, but also because these are habituating drugs that for most users are a daily thing. And that does lead to neglect in mothers, crime in search of money for that next high, etc. It's much more widespread and accute than you seem to think, D. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"Since libertarians are also interested in keeping barons in check I am a bit confused by how you see this as a critique of libertarianism."

Libertarians see themselves, for all intents and purposes, as autonomous barons. I know -- you'll trot out a million arguments why that ain't so -- can't be so. But it is, in fact, if not in theory.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Many libertarians are also unaware of, or wilfully disbelieve, the various reasons that markets can fail and central planning do better... to be fair, many non-libertarians don't have a clear grasp of that either; most people don't know economics."

Central planning doesn't do better. It just fails in a different way.

As for most people, they don't know economic theory. However, I'm pretty sure they understand economics a lot better than people steeped in theory. I'm certain my mother, a former bank executive who doen't know much economic theory and has even less time for it, knows more about how economics works than Keynes of Galbraith ever did.

Damien Sullivan said...

You're confusing business and economics.

"for most users are a daily thing"

...no, they're not.

"A single joint or hit will"

So? We have DUI laws. Taking that joint at home hurts no one.

"Central planning doesn't do better. It just fails in a different way."

No, it does do better, *in its appropriate domains*.

Back to ignoring you, I think.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"You're confusing business and economics."

Business is economics in practice. Economists that ignore business deserve the derision they receive for their ivory tower attitudes.

"...no, they're not."

For most users you may personally know. I get the distinct impression from your attitude about a lot of things that you lead a somewhat sheltered existence.

That's not a criticism, BTW -- just an observation.

"So? We have DUI laws. Taking that joint at home hurts no one."

Like I said, that's not as normal a pattern of use as you seem to think.

"No, it does do better, *in its appropriate domains*."

Okay, what are the "appropriate domains" for central planning?

jollyreaper said...

I believe in x!

That's symptomatic of your youth.

I've lived a very long time and seen a lot of things. My view is not unsupported.

Then you must have lived a very long time in a very sheltered environment.

You know, that sounds condescending.

Wisdom often does to the ignorant. No disrespect.

I'm going back to ignoring you now.

Victory is mine!

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"I believe in x!

That's symptomatic of your youth.

I've lived a very long time and seen a lot of things. My view is not unsupported.

Then you must have lived a very long time in a very sheltered environment.

You know, that sounds condescending.

Wisdom often does to the ignorant. No disrespect.

I'm going back to ignoring you now.

Victory is mine!"


It does seem like that at times. Except for the part about "victory". That's not the point and never has been, no matter what some may think.

The problem is simply a clash of belief versus experience. It never ends well.

jollyreaper said...

But only your life experience is valid. If anyone else has lived as long and seen as much and has come to a different conclusion, they must not have been paying attention. There is never any area of reasonable uncertainty or concession that the other side might have a point.

It's like the Chewbacca Defense, not just airtight but hermetically sealed and unassailable, operating off an internal logic that refutes any intrusion from without.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"But only your life experience is valid. If anyone else has lived as long and seen as much and has come to a different conclusion, they must not have been paying attention. There is never any area of reasonable uncertainty or concession that the other side might have a point.

It's like the Chewbacca Defense, not just airtight but hermetically sealed and unassailable, operating off an internal logic that refutes any intrusion from without."


Who's lived as long and seen as much? Rick, certainly. I respect his experience and I defer to it, even though I don't always agree.

Thucydides? Maybe. And you may notice that even when I disagree with him, I don't get all that frustrated, because I respect his obvious level of experience and consideration.

Anybody else, that you know for sure?

See, j, it's not that I place my experience on such a high pedestal, it's that I don't detect the voice of experience in a lot of contributors. I hear a lot of stuff I've heard many times before in my life, repeated in the same old ways as I've always heard it. It impresses me much less now than the first time. A lot of it is absolutely tiring -- and not a little bit depressing that people still believe it, after the Century of Isms proved so much of it so wrong.

I'm pretty sure you'll feel the same way someday. Just give it time.

Rick said...

Experience is very good for some things - even lots of things. But one thing it teaches (at any rate for me) is a reduced level of certainty.


Individual libertarians can have any number of reasons for self-identifying as such. The ones I have encountered seem most motivated by formal logical consistency. Which may be why it has such a big presence in geekdom.

But the likely effect of minarchy is to minimize restraint on economic elites, who can be expected to make the most of their oligarchic circumstances.

On 'local knowledge,' I'm a bit skeptical. Most major industries tend to be dominated by a handful of firms that operate all across the market zone. This trend has continued to expand across industries as they are rationalized.

If local knowledge were so critical, this should not happen, and markets would remain fragmented, with local firms taking advantage of their superior local knowledge. But this is not the case for most major industries.

Yes, globalized firms can and do grant local managers varying degrees of autonomy, often quite a bit. But this is ultimately a central decision - the local manager remains a bureaucratic functionary, not an independent player.

So Hayek seems to have been wrong about this, just as he was about his dystopian expectations of the postwar British welfare state. A road to serfdom? Not quite. It was suboptimal perhaps, but hardly dystopian.

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