[ExI] Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Giovanni
Santostasi
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2012 5:43 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

 

Spike,

you still don't address the question of what happens with the robots do all
the menial tasks.

Can you give me a piece of you mind on that?

 

Giovanni

 

 

Good question Giovanni.  I don't have the answers, but what I find
remarkable is that we discussed this at length in ExI-chat right here about
15 yrs ago, back when I did a lot more reading than I did posting.  We never
did figure out the answers to that in those days, and still haven't.  Little
has changed really, other than now machines already do a lot of the work
humans used to do.  We recognized back then that as time went on, the
problem would only get larger, as work went from being comprised of moving
objects about to moving bits.  Brainwork was taking over.  The amount of
physical work humans can do generally spans a single order of magnitude from
the weakest to the strongest.  But in the kinds of work we have left, humans
can span several orders of magnitude.  Example: coding.  Some people can
crank out really good computer code, but most people can't write two lines
that work together.

 

We had a guy back then (don't remember who it was) making a very similar
argument to yours.  Actually he was more coming on saying capitalism was a
complete failure and we need to institute communism before it is too late,
which is related to your contention I think, possibly more extreme.  He
might have been intentionally baiting us too, knowing we were a bunch of
libertarian types and we wanted to see if we had any real ideas on how the
future of production would look.  What I do remember from those days is a
general realization that communism wouldn't solve the problem, even with the
general notion that capitalism wouldn't solve it.  I get the vague feeling
Greece is mostly concluding the same thing.

 

All that being said, one way or another I am convinced that competition is
good.  Because of competition we have created a world in which those who
lose the competition still can have a mostly decent life, few luxuries but
seldom will starvation threaten.  Fairly recently starvation was a constant
threat.

 

spike

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