[ExI] Farmville for real

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:15 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
> Kelly Anderson wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> spike wrote:
>>> Whoa!!  Most of your food comes from these illegal operations.

> Are you kidding?  You are speculating about what would happen to a very
> complex system if you were to change one of the variables.

I'm sure it is very complicated.

> But your speculation was actually just a Free Market Voodoo Fantasy.
>
>
> You cite "strawberries" as the crop that would suffer if all the
> undocumented and semi-slave workers were ejected.  You would not have a
> shortage of strawberries, you would have a shortage of every foodstuff
> imaginable, all the way up to the meat that is packed in meat-packing
> plants.

Strawberries was not meant literally...

> That is a serious error, because your later suggestion that IBM would stop
> working on Watson and instead build strawberry picking robots looks deeply
> implausible when you understand that what IBM would *actually* have to do is
> build general-purpose farm laborers to do an unbelievable variety of jobs.
>  In other words, they would have to build a full-scale AGI.  Strawberry
> picking is utterly trivial compared with the full range of skills required

Sure enough. But if the most labor intensive items are automated
first, then the people left to do the work would do more meaningful
work, no?

> Second, the response to the sudden loss of slave labor would not be that IBM
> would gear up and deliver robot farm laborers to replace them. Rather, the
> farm managers would be forced to raise wages until they could attract
> ordinary humans into that workforce.

In the short term, this is exactly right. Some price increases are
good. They lead to market solutions that help us go in the right
direction. The current immigration policy is no more or less market
manipulation than farm subsidies.

> This would cause a massive spike in food prices and trigger an inflationary
> spiral in the entire economy.

Yup. Is that always a bad thing?

> This would in turn force the government to react, because the only way to
> win an election would be to promise an end to the quadrupled food prices.
>
> Their reaction would be:  to invite migrant workers back in.  They would
> have no choice whatsoever.

Hopefully under a more rational guest worker program. I am, BTW, in
favor of a guest worker program. Especially, if children of guest
workers are not automatic anchor babies. Of course, that's not likely
to happen without a constitutional amendment.

> BUT.... assuming they stood their ground, then what?  Would IBM then allow
> itself to smacked upside its head by Adam Smith's Invisible hand?  Would
> they deliver AGI farm workers?
>
> Garbage.  They simply could not do it.  That is Voodoo Fantasy Free Market
> BS.  The technology does not exist, and could not be made cheap enough and
> versatile enough to substitute for more than a small fraction of the jobs.
>
> At least, not in the short term.  Long term (decade or more, maybe). But
> only if IBM were sure that the government would NEVER EVER cave in to the
> pressure to let the migrants back in.

You do bring up a VERY good point here, that governments are less
predictable than many other aspects of the future.

> So the moral of the story is not about the Invisible Hand doing wonderful
> things if it is only given the chance, but about the fact that a complex
> system will do things that are not even dreamt of in your system.

Screwing with things always has unintended consequences.

-Kelly