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That’s why they have radiators.
I approve of this.
Have you considered that Charlie Kirk and Victor Glover may actually be the same person? Maybe Kirk reincarnated as Glover. No need for reincarnation to follow linear time.
The robots won’t have all the jobs. And the demand for human labor will increase.
There will always be some jobs humans can’t do. It’s not that there’s something magical about humans and the human mind. It’s just that there are certain jobs that are so complex and involve such human emotional intelligence and human interaction, that any machine that could do this instead of a person would have to be a person themselves. I might trust Commander Data to be my kid’s elementary school teacher. But that’s also because I would consider Commander Data to be a person. But there would also be little reason to mass produce Commanders Data to be elementary school teachers, as that would amount to little more than slavery. A mind is a mind, regardless of the substrate. Forcing a mind to work for you is a moral abomination, regardless of whether that mind is flesh or silicon.
As automation has increased over the generations, the demand for human labor has increased. The fields whose services have increased in price high above inflation are non-coincidentally those with the highest amount of unavoidable human labor. Think medicine, higher education, and home construction. Automation generates vast wealth. People who profit from highly automated industries then have more money to spend on things. There’s more money in the economy to support the labor-intensive industries. But automation can’t meaningfully decrease the cost of producing them. So the wealth generated in low-labor intensity industries goes towards bidding up the cost of the goods and services produced in high-labor intensive industries.
Or another way to look at it. Automation is deflationary. Whenever the production of a good or service becomes highly automated, the cost that good or service tends to go down. There’s a reason the idea of a walk-in-closet would have been considered absurd to your ancestors. When people spend less money on the automated goods, they have more money to spend on the labor-intensive goods.
Or, a third perspective. A reasonable assumption is that future automation will look like past automation. Yes, automation can be disruptive on an individual level. If you’re 55 and your entire career specialty is automated away, you’re going to be really hurting at a personal level. You just don’t have time to retrain for a new career field, and medically you may be unable to. But as a whole, people move into fields that have high need for workers. We have a higher labor force participation rate than we did 200 years ago, despite only a single-digit percentage of people needing to work in agriculture now. Wave after wave of automation has failed to result in the predicted mass employment and immiseration of the populace. And every time we’re told that “this time is different,” it turns out to be no different than the previous times. The people telling you that this round of automation will be completely different from all the others are the same people profiting from the current AI bubble.
Then we need to seriously rewrite corporate charter law. For example, maybe it shouldn’t even be legal for corporations to own other corporations. Limited liability as a concept has some value, in terms of encouraging investment. So there is value in LLCs existing. But we don’t need the free-for-all we have now. We could move corporate governance to a white list model, where there are only a set series of structures you’re allowed to use to organize a company.
Among these are the regulations would be restrictions on the forms of compensation you’re allowed to provide high-value employees. Maybe the only legal form of pay for executives should be salary.
And again, you can enforce this by relying on the little people that the executives don’t even recognize as human. Does a CEO formally have $10 million to their name, but they have exclusive use of a $100 million mansion provided by their company? Fine, let the janitor rat him out, and in turn the janitor will end up owning that mansion.
There are ways around this. For example, let’s say you set the wealth cap at 10 million. You write a law that says, “anyone that reports an illegal fortune larger than this will receive half of the money confiscated from this illegal fortune to divide tax-free among yourself, friends, and family.”
Billionaires don’t know how to manage their own money. They hire accountants. So you make it so any random accountant can rat out an illegal billionaire and get paid enough to not only max out their own lifetime allowable fortune, but those of all their friends and family.
Sure, the billionaire could avoid this by just dividing up his wealth among his own friends and family. But in that case, he’s still losing control. And that’s ultimately the point of this. Thousands of low-digit millionaires are infinitely superior to one billionaire.
Yeah, and I think that anyone knowledgeable enough to model nuclear winter accurately would refuse to participate in that kind of military planning. If you go to a climate researcher, put a gun to their head and said, “help us calculate just the amount of nuked cities needed to cancel out the temperature increases of climate change or we’ll shoot you,” I think most would just say, “fine. Do it.”
It makes sense when you’re trying to specifically talk about the labor involved in reproduction. Humans reproduce via sexual reproduction. It takes two to tango. That’s why the term reproductive labor applies to both men and women.
You could use more vague terms like “domestic labor,” but you lose a lot in generalizing this much. Often you want to talk about just the kind of labor that arises in the period after a child is born. But all couples, all individuals have domestic labor. Reproductive labor is something much more specific.
You can’t see the difference between being forced to work and have sex with a single man, who you are stuck with without the possibility of divorce, and the general need to work for one of any number of employers? Really?
Pre industrial households would do small manufacturing for money to supplement agricultural labor.
See the hilariously named putting-out system.
ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant
Intrusive thought of the day:
Simulations suggest that evenly a relatively modest India/Pakistan exchange (modest by the standards of a full nuclear exchange between Russia and the US, you’re still talking millions dead) would produce enough dust and soot into the air to seriously affect the climate of the planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Recent_modeling
But that also implies nuclear winter exists on a scale. Even one H-bomb will have some affect. In principle, it would be possible to determine the precise level of nuclear winter required to combat global warming. Then, if the target country doesn’t have nukes of their own to retaliate with, a nuclear power could drop just enough nukes to cause just enough nuclear winter to cancel out global warming. As long as they’re the only one releasing any nukes, they could precisely control the scale of the resulting nuclear winter effect. Literally designing an act of mass genocide as a means of combating climate change.
:/
You do understand that evil people can do multiple evil things for multiple independent evil reasons, don’t you? This “everything is a distraction from Epstein” is cringe.
Maybe they’re a family of clowns, and they consider “Bozo” to be a racial epithet against their people.
My husband and I don’t have a TV in our bedroom. We’ll go to bed at different times, and a TV going is just too much light and noise. If one of us wants to fall asleep to a TV show, there’s a very comfortable couch in the living room.
I think it might be different if we had kids. In that case, having a TV in the bedroom can be useful, in case you want to watch something kids aren’t old enough for yet. But it’s just the two of us, so we keep a TV out of the bedroom. The bedroom is for sleeping and other activities.
Sure. But the point is they viewed those updates as an obligation, not a bonus. I view those first updates as an obligation - merely delivering the core features promised. But anything beyond that is a bonus.
Why do you assume these all need to be new careers? Why do you assume that we can’t expand existing careers? It’s happened in the past, it can happen again. Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.
There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford. Really any industry that involves a lot of human labor. People want more education than they can afford. People want more healthcare than they can afford. People want more childcare, private tutoring, home cleaning, personal trainers, life coaches, financial advisors, and on and on. Think of the retinue of assistants and employees the wealthy employ. Now imagine the number of people who can afford those services drastically expanding. We don’t even need to necessarily invent new careers. There’s plenty of latent demand already. Those masses of displaced agricultural workers? Most of them found jobs in fields that already existed.
This is false. I’ll ignore the employment rate and focus on labor force participation rate, as unemployment doesn’t count people who are long-term unemployed and have given up working. Labor force participation is a better metric here.
Labor force participation has gone up and down, corresponding with changes in demographics. Despite generations of technological change and automation, we’ve always found ways to employ the excess labor. Human labor is always the ultimate bottleneck. There’s probably enough latent demand for human labor to employ many multiples of our current population.