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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stephen-hawking-capitalism-robots_us_5616c20ce4b0dbb8000d9f15In a Reddit "ask Me Anything" Q&A, a reader asked Hawking whether robots would eventually replace most workers and what he thought the consequences would be. He responded "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."This does seem to be the direction things are going. The push for an increase in minimum wage results in threats/plans to automate more services. With or without an increase, I don't doubt that I will walk into a fast food restaurant in the near future and find the cashier replaced by a touch screen for ordering.
When I first started working in a lab in the 80s, literally half my day was spent transcribing numbers on to reports manually, phoning results to doctors, and other clerical tasks, all of which have been replaced by computers. The testing as well became faster, more efficient, and more automated, even in microbiology. But even though advances in technology vastly increased my output, it didn't increase my wages, or decrease my hours of work. I'm sure this was true in other fields as well.
Society seems unlikely to abandon the Puritan work ethic any time soon and will be loath to pay idle citizens for doing little or nothing indefinitely. Will a large segment of the population be forced to suck it up and accept their post industrial peasant status?
Or do you see some other means for individuals to access and utilize technology, either to be self sufficient or in some sort of underground/barter economic system?
Highly debatable, you need consumers for an ecconmoy to function. As wages stop and stagnate the only way people can consume as they were or increase consuming is through debt, but as we are seeing debt without a real ecconomy supporting and reducing it, it can only increase- but not forever. Debt has taken the place of wages over the last 20-30 years as manufacturing ect has been eliminated, from ecconomies like Britians. And rather than allowing an ajustment which should have happened in 2008, all the private debts of banks got put onto the public. Germany actually paid off the whole of Greece debt, what once Greece owned to banks and other private institutions, now Greece owes to the people of Germany. Bizzarly historically it was always the debtor that was bailed out, today it's the creditors. Meaning all the debts get continued yet the creditors have no risks with Creditors getting paid double. How can you free up money when all debts are still continuing? It really makes you wonder, it's actually like they did the worst thing they could do, looked for the worse solution possible; with the knock on effect that governments all now burdened with the cost of all of these bank failures, introduce austerity. Madness, and a madness that's not changed and is getting worse, the bond appocolipse is comming, housing bubbles gonna blow, all the fake paper gold is not gonna keep real the gold price suppresed that much longer.
[You are not being paid in terms of output. Althought its a werid situation, "this computer increases my output and makes my job easier, you should pay me more"
There have been several local currencies, all with the same efffect - to provide a portable token of work. One of the best known in the UK was the Stroud Pound. It seems that a babysitting circle had half-hour tokens that you could acquire and distribute among the members, and new members had to earn a few hours before they could spend any. One day a woman found she had taken the wrong purse to the butcher's shop, but the butcher was in need of a babysitter so he swapped meat for tokens. As the meat also had a cash value, this established an exchange rate and small shopkeepers, carpenters and suchlike, were happy to join in the scheme because it was apparently beyond the reach of the taxman....It came to a sticky end, but only after several years.An old friend was a family doctor in a semi-rural practice. He never charged farmers for his services, and rarely bought food.
Quote from: Jolly on 10/03/2016 01:30:37Highly debatable, you need consumers for an ecconmoy to function. As wages stop and stagnate the only way people can consume as they were or increase consuming is through debt, but as we are seeing debt without a real ecconomy supporting and reducing it, it can only increase- but not forever. Debt has taken the place of wages over the last 20-30 years as manufacturing ect has been eliminated, from ecconomies like Britians. And rather than allowing an ajustment which should have happened in 2008, all the private debts of banks got put onto the public. Germany actually paid off the whole of Greece debt, what once Greece owned to banks and other private institutions, now Greece owes to the people of Germany. Bizzarly historically it was always the debtor that was bailed out, today it's the creditors. Meaning all the debts get continued yet the creditors have no risks with Creditors getting paid double. How can you free up money when all debts are still continuing? It really makes you wonder, it's actually like they did the worst thing they could do, looked for the worse solution possible; with the knock on effect that governments all now burdened with the cost of all of these bank failures, introduce austerity. Madness, and a madness that's not changed and is getting worse, the bond appocolipse is comming, housing bubbles gonna blow, all the fake paper gold is not gonna keep real the gold price suppresed that much longer. Interesting points. I would agree that debt did take the place of wages in fueling the economy and the perfect storm of near financial collapse in 2008. It's an interesting case study. In the States, the debacle started with the housing bubble,
and government initiatives to make home ownership more realizable for lower income people.
These mortgages required a smaller down payment and some what looser restrictions, but that increase risk was supposed to be effectively monitored and managed by the financial institutions and the government - and they arguably could have been if it had stopped there. But events in foreign markets, and deregulation or lack of regulation and transparency of newly invented financial products like derivatives, credit default swaps, and Structured Investment Vehicles were major factors which pretty much blew that all to hell.
Bubble bursts, even in things as big the housing markets, are inevitable, and shouldn’t result in horrible chain reactions and a systemic collapse if institutions aren’t over leveraged. The repeal of Glass-Steagall in the US removed the separation between depository banks and investment bank firms. The Glass-Steagall act prevented banks from using their federally insured deposits to underwrite their riskier, non insured investments. People argue whether Glass-Steagall repeal specifically caused the crash, but it is what made banks “ too big to fail”, requiring bailouts, when chickens came home to roost from other bad investments.
Credit default swaps, if I understand it, are a type of ‘ insurance’ on investments for a fee
, which was meant to encourage investment -not entirely a bad idea, since the investor can’t lose his shirt, unless institutions can’t actually cover the losses. This is what sunk AIG. This allowed AIG to write $3 trillion in derivatives while reserving precisely zero dollars against future claims. Risky investments aren’t necessarily bad if everyone knows they are risky, but not if there is irresponsible or outright fraudulent rating of risky ( and bank fee generating) subprime loans, bundled and sold as a securities to investors, devoid of any accompanying information about their source. Add to this mix a shadow banking system, in which regulated banks hide their riskier assets by selling them to a kind of “virtual” bank, called an SIV. SIVs allowed regulated banks to circumvent capital requirement regulations. The financial sector has increasingly become bets on bets on bets on bets, rather than the stock market most people picture,
in which investors purchase shares in companies that make something – like Ipads or running shoes. And when something bad happens (like it turns out those mortgages were sold to people who were likely to default combined with a deflating housing market making the house worth less than what was owed,) it causes a long chain reaction and a sudden scramble for capital, that may not even exist to cover losses and debts. What also happens as well in this sudden fire sale, is it’s often unclear who owes what to whom or what things are worth. The 2008 crash, at least in America was about debt, deregulation, and speculation. "There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product." Micheal Eismen - hedgeman fund manager. "Derivatives are still weapons of massive destruction and likely to cause trouble" -Warren Buffet.