I'm going to go ahead and call you on that one. What you probably mean is that rich people will get a lot richer comparatively. There will be a wider gap on paper.

Those same machines have a tendency to make that paper gap more meaningless as time goes on. Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Even the poorest people in developed countries live lives unimaginable to the rich of the past.

The question is: Would you rather be a poor man in a rich society or a rich man in a poor one?

This isn't to say that we don't need a better token of societal value than "an hour of labor" to face our own strange future, but I don't subscribe to the "Elysium" point of view.

When food was scarce, it would be unreasonable to think that anyone but those that produced the food were entitled. However, now that we can produce as much food as we currently can, how can we justify that some people in the world can exist in such dire straits that they must still endure hunger.

Today, we have enough abundance in key areas of human necessity that should be able to ensure that no human goes hungry ever again, yet many still do.

Yes, but you have to take the shuttle to the airport, check in your bags, go through security, get groped by TSA, dick around the terminal while waiting for boarding, then wait for your "zone" to board, then fight others for scarce overhead bin space. Once you land, you need to wait for your turn to get off the plane and then wait for your bags.

Bill gates does not have to do any of those things. This and similar advantages (made possible by shitloads of money) allow him to increase the income gap even further.

Perhaps in 50 years time, everyone will travel how Bill Gates does now, and Bill Gates would travel even better. This would come about through better automation of air transport.

The argument is fairly simple: we can try to decrease the gap between Bill Gates and everyone else, or we can leave the gap where it is and focus on shifting the entire bar so far that the bottom rung of the future becomes higher than the top rung of today. This is the progressive idealist viewpoint of capitalism and stands in direct opposition to the socialist viewpoint. Historically, mixing the two together works best, and it's what we use: capitalism with high taxes. Unfortunately, localized competition for tax money is driving those taxes down and destroying the system while also using the taxes for short term and ultimately useless goals instead of long term infrastructure. In comparison, Norway is probably the country closest to 'correct' in how they are using the wealth generated from oil taxes - investing it in the positive return economy.

I've read a couple of studies that link happiness to how wealthy you are relative to your friends and your neighbours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_income_hypothesis

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/suicide-rate-rich-n...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7497...

So each individual would be happier if they were that rich person. Obviously the other neighbours less so.

If the choice is based on whether you want the whole world richer or poorer, then it's a bit more abstract. We're built to look for relative advantage and we'll do it whether it's measured by a better stick or a nicer logo/wife/jet/body/mind. We're already in that richer society (relative to most of our forefathers), but we abstract away the improved situation and compete in any environment we find ourselves in, and are (again, in general) happy to the extent that we succeed.

I love the saying "Youth is wasted on the young". For an old person, wealth would be the opportunity to go for a run again, meet a girl, or have the energy and opportunity to try some venture again. No matter what country you live in, most will experience these things - youth, friends, love, loss, possibly children, competition, failure and success. So unless you're actually in a war situation being hunted down by a rival tribe or army, life's not bad.

Automation has never unemployed people, only persons. Specific categories of jobs are removed by automation, but these are replaced by other categories of jobs. Demand is created for the products of these jobs, and the whole machine keeps turning.

The consumer driven economy is built on artificial demand. The vast majority of 'stuff' bought is unnecessary. Without advertising and a culture that emphasises keeping up with the joneses we would see unemployment on a large scale, but our economy has adapted to fill the unemployment niches.

The real challenge is not how to prevent unemployment through automation. It is to find an alternate solution to artificially inflated demand which doesn't waste so much labor and materials producing goods and services which are strictly speaking unnecessary.

Your argument essentially amounts to "this is how it's worked in the past (unemployed people have been able to find other categories of jobs), so it'll always work that way".

When labor is freed up, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ it to make money. When production costs are lowered, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ the freed up capital. This is why so many companies are hiring at the same time as they are firing. Taken at a national or global scale, the result is that labor and capital follow supply and demand curves and that adjustments to the system through automation are compensated elsewhere through economic incentives.

This isn't true, though people keep writing about it in various contexts: Babbage in the 19th C, and David Ricardo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo. The jobs people do change. No one in 1800 worked as a video-game designer or social media marketing specialist. Few people today work as farrier or milliners.

I have no idea what the book situation is like in China, but if you can, get a copy of Tyler Cowen's recent book Average Is Over.

5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.

The entire world has been getting richer for centuries, and in the last couple decades the world has seen unprecedented wealth creation due to the fall of Communism. See Cowen, noted above, or something like Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

At some point, the machines will win, and everyone that doesn't have the means to own machines and/or integrate them into their body is going to have a really hard time of things. Just how soon is debatable, but the way things are going I won't be surprised to see it in my lifetime.

But consider: machines are still dumb. At the end of the day, someone automates the process.

If all work that is necessary for the function of life can be automated, how wonderful! But, consider the dishwasher. It saves time, but is often misused by dirty dishes going in without pre rinse and disposal. So technically the work has been automated, but parts of the work still require manual operation. But now we pay people to pre wash instead of wash.

Consider: washing the dishes across a town employs 1000 people. Pre-washing the rishes employs 300 people. Loading the dishes employs 100 people. The factory creating the dishwasher is automated and employs 10 people. 50 people are involved in designing and marketing the dishwasher.

We have now gone from employing 1000 people to employing 150. Those 850 people are now unemployed and must seek or create new employment. Whether they succeed is irrelevant though, the dishwashing process now needs fewer employees and economic benefit has moved from the employees to the smaller number of people creating the dishwashers.

So your argument doesn't work for a simple reason: automation (by definition) reduces the number of people required to complete a task.

Aside from getting in to the meta discussions here. I think automation is also an enabler as much as it also detracts from different kinds of labor.

I think it just means a temporary disruption in the short term, but a redistribution of skills in the long term.

One good example of this is one we're seeing now. It was Auto and industrial before where people had the most employment (at least as far as what had the highest quality of life).

This will (and is already) moving to technology. As it matures, it will become easier to teach and I hate to say it, but commoditize the work.

After that, money made will be based on combinations of value add not necessarily what skills you know.

At this point, you have intelligence explosion, and current economics means squat. The machine will take over the world, killing us all in the process (we're made of atoms it can use for its purposes, whatever they are).

Or it can build a paradise, if it has been programmed to do exactly that. Good luck with that, since it's not exactly easy to describe "paradise" with programmatic precision.

Yup, except why do the developers not get the income? Presumably they are selling the machines?

>4

Yes. The key with this kind of logic is to relate it to the current situation, though; people with more workers can afford even more workers. Why doesn't it all blow up now?

There is more to success than simply scale of manufacturing capability; firms need to keep ahead of competitors, keep up with technology, manage the whole stack, etc, and then they can end up controlling the whole market (at the thing they do) and having nowhere else to go because the firms in other fields have an advantage that takes something special to beat.

Also, the neat thing about capitalism is that money to buy more work is rarely the bottleneck, because you can get a capitalist to invest in your scheme (if it looks any good).

>5

The second thing (poor get poorer) does not necessarily follow. Only the people who can't do anything that machines can't do better get poor. The working poor have more buying power because the machines create more wealth for less money.

In practice, despite a lot of automation, we don't have many people unable to do anything productive; people are very much more versatile than machines (for now).

More on that: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...

>In the future (my crazy thoughts):

Yes, eventually the set of people who cannot do something that machines can't do better includes everyone, and everyone becomes unemployed. (Which looks pretty good, IMO; who likes working?). There are more serious problems than unemployment at this point, though.

At this point, why do you expect the machines to still be under the control of the capitalists? If the machines can do capitalism, etc better than capitalists, any wealth that ends up in the hands of an autonomous machine will eventually increase to eclipse the human capitalists as well. (And of course, meanwhile the machines are increasing in effectiveness because they are better at machine design as well).

This is called the "intelligence explosion" or "technological singularity" scenario, depending who you ask, and looks like bad news, unless we do some serious stuff to make sure the machines work to specifically benefit humanity instead of just continuing to find better and better ways to do whatever other task they were doing. (Better ways that eventually include overpowering humans militarily and melting us down for raw material).

If you want more info: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/

The poor will get poorer b/c they will have neither capital (money/development machines) and because eventually the rate of cannibalization of industries will increase over time. Software's eating the world, and that process is accelerating.

Machines alone won't be worth much more than the sum of their parts because they are mass produced and largely interchangeable, so there's a ton of competition in the market. They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner.

When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again.

>When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again.

You are assuming the rule of law holds through all of this.

If an autonomous machine intelligence is capable of becoming militarily sovereign (in the sense that it becomes nontrivial to simply "arrest" or otherwise overpower), it matters little whether the rest of us think it has rights, or who nominally "owns" it.

If that machine is also able to outcompete human capitalists at wealth accumulation (assuming market holds) or human generals at military power (assuming nothing)...

And let's face it, it's not that hard for even lone smart humans to be militarily untouchable. Think cybercriminals: If today we decided that cybercriminals weren't people and were owned by the government, would the they care? No; they are sovereign through anonymity, and their legal status is not an impediment to their work. Likewise with autonomous machine intelligence.