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RE: Voices from the Shallows. #4
That is simply not true. First of all, incentives come in different forms. An incentive can be to help others, create a functioning society, learn, have fun, explore, etc.
Btw, I'm not a socialist. I'm a communalist.
I believe in a post-scarcity society, with local, direct governance, not socialism. States are almost as bad as corporations.
With modern technology, the need for toil is disappearing, what we need in the future is to make work voluntary, and give universal access to all resources. The robots and computers will do the rest. That future is increasingly possible.
Voluntary work? Work for the love of doing something isn't a reality for many people. Who loves to clean sewer drains? Who builds the robots? Your head is way up there in the clouds.
I am not talking about next year. There aren't many sewer drains to clean, most jobs are in service and management nowadays, manufacturing and dirty labour is a small part.
Cleaning sewers can be done by robots soon.
And robots will robots, that's how it works already, just like robots are building cars. A self driving car is a robot anyway.
My head is not in the clouds, I follow technical developments closely, it's a hobby of mine.
I know what's coming, advances in robotics are very rapid now, big money is flowing in.
Just wait and see, you'll be surprised.
The work left for humans will be care work, like nurses, teachers, and creative and innovative work, like artists, inventors and programmers.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/26/jobs-future-automation-robots-skills-creative-health
Robots can't replace most workers. Robots can do repetitive tasks very well and very quickly but when it comes to problem solving they fail and will always fail at these problems that arrive in a world built for humans.
A human world is very inconsistent and not all humans want the same thing. That house building robot is going to have to be able to adapt to each little whim that us fussy humans have.
Simply do a Google search about the sewer drain cleaning thing - you'll find hundreds of companies in any large city. Do you need to be schooled on supply and demand?
The article is written quite well but I personally think it is still very optimistic.
Take for instance this: I shoot video. I was interested in buying a 6-axis robot arm that is easily programmable that could hold about 1.5kg and have a reach of about 1.5m fully extended. By all means quite a small robot. I wanted it so that I could program it to move my camera and do movements like you find in the Kendrick Lamar - Be Humble video. A robot like this base price would be about $12,000 with a teach pendant to program it and that is a very basic robot. The one that was used in the video was a lot bigger and a lot more expensive ($60k or more) and it still has a slight shake in the video camera movement which I would not have accepted.
For many tasks there is no human replacement. A human is easily teachable and no special knowledge other than the ability to communicate with each other is needed to be able to pass knowledge from one human to another. A human can also multi-task, a human can problem solve even without having access to a huge database of knowledge to draw from (humans are better at solving problems in a human world).
Don't sell yourself short just yet - you as a human being are still valuable. I'd let you clean my sewer drain any time.
You are right, robots are not too good at non-repetetive tasks, but that is changing rapidly. I am talking in a longer timeframe, 5 to 10 years ahead, and then there is reason to believe that a lot will change.
I will absolutely not clean any sewer drain, ever. Dirty work like that feels undignified, and I would rather be dirt poor.