[ExI] retrainability of plebeians

[Dagon Gmail]

>
> ### Marshall Brain has no idea. Structural unemployment of the
> able-bodied non-insane persons is a side-effect of government
> regulation, and it has nothing to do with technology.


I declare this statement ideology, almost as silly as stalinist rhetoric.
Worse it
is a dangerously naieve ideology - what you say is:

"we dont need to look at effects of technological fallout because we will
always
know that government regulation is a worse cause for structural
unemployment"
It can be one. Or the other. Or both. Or neither.

But - in the real world technology will have unprecedented effects. We had
mass
migrations of millions (in the US) based on cotton picking machines. And now
you
feel confident that technology will have no effects, "because governments
are
too blame?".


> The amount of
> useful work that can be performed by humans is always larger than
> their ability to perform.


And what if all available food costs money? And nobody is willing to hire
any of the
precious labour so you cant buy food? If this does not compute you are so
decadently
divorced from reality you may need therapy - in the form of having to visit
at least
several third world countries and having to live a week as a poor person in
each.
Nothing to worry about - at worst you will lose some body fat. Just be
cautious
to cook your water. If the water doesn't cost you money. Which you don't
have.


> As soon as one specific job is "destroyed"
> by technological change, another job opens. And the reasoning is quite
> simple - Jobs exist because they fulfill human desires but there are
> always more desires than there are resources (including humans) needed
> to make them come true. If an easier way of fulfilling a human desire
> is found, it will increase the amount of resources or decrease their
> use in fulfilling the desire. The extra resources are not destroyed -
> since there are always more desires available to soak up resources
> (including workers), the resources will be used to satisfy yet another
> unfulfilled desires, and not destroyed (i.e. sent to a concentration
> camp).


And harry potter can evoke this magical spell by speaking "creatus
amazingus"?
Rafal, if you are going to be a fanatic, be sure to be less conspicuous
about it.
Christians claiming "jesus saves all" have become lacking in credibility
too,
because the day to day reality is so at odds with their claims .


> This is why we don't have 98% unemployment even though close to 98% of
> jobs in farming have been destroyed by technological progress. I bet
> there were plantation owners worrying about the masses of dumb farm
> workers that would become unemployable with the advent of the steam
> threshing machine and such. The present robot scare is exactly as
> uninformed as the original Luddism, which was based on the same
> premise applied to English machine shops 300 years ago.


Big mistake. I am not a Luddite. *I want all these jobs destroyed*, and most
of all I want Rafal in the situation where he finds himself unemployable and
everyone around him shake his head and say "get a job", claiming the
free markets will solve it, as soon as we will have them implemented
after those silly politicians come to their senses.  When people like you
start
suffering any consequences in terms of acute misery, then we will finally
see
some change.

Sure, free markets can solve a LOT of problems. But they aren't the perfect
solution. Oh they do benefit some, and I see precisely those people defend
them, by fire and sword. But my claim is that massrobotization AND A.I.
and nano will be just too much, too fast to handle. Many people will go
unemployed and really pissed off really fast.
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