Ray From Cleveland
Diamond Member
- Aug 16, 2015
- 97,215
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You're out of touch with reality. You being in your early 60s, will most likely see completely autonomous trucks by the time you're 70, 75 at the most. The early to mid-2030s, about 10 to 12 years from now. Eventually, there will be autonomous truck convoys transporting goods on our highways, monitored by artificial intelligence, with a few people in a remote location looking at some big computer flat screens on the wall, telling them where all of the truck convoys are and how they're doing. Even if that is 20 or 30+ years away, that's still an undiscernible "bleep" in history. What're twenty, thirty, or even forty years? Nothing.
Eventually, no matter how much you try to postpone the inevitable adoption of a non-profit system of production, it will come, knocking on our door. Inevitably, we will be forced due to advanced technology, to adopt a democratic form of socialism and communism. It won't be Soviet-style communism or what you had in Poland under the USSR. But nonetheless, it will be an American, democratic form of communism. That's inevitable.
Independent posted that he wants the government to intervene and make complete automation illegal. That's an example of capitalism, undermining human progress by using the government to criminalize an activity that forces the market to take a certain course. The "free market" itself naturally leads to extreme efficiency in production, eliminating the need for human wage labor. Capitalism cancels itself out, it eliminates itself, creating the technology that makes production "hands-free", and low-cost. A robot can work, 24/7, without getting sick, or complaining about wages, or bad conditions in the workplace. Robots don't unionize and cause trouble for capitalists. What might begin as a spiteful "fuck you" to the working class by capitalists, ends with the demise of capitalism, due to the lack of wage labor.
No wage labor = no paying consumer = no capitalism.
Understood but these advancements have been going on for 30 years or more, and look at us today, a huge labor shortage. When some jobs close down, others open up or expand. Growing up nobody used a lawn care service in our neighborhood. As people decided they didn't want to take care of their lawns and yard, landscaping became very popular. Now most people use them. Want a big mac meal but too lazy to get it yourself? No problem, call Uber eats. They'll pickup your order and deliver it to your door. Same holds true of your grocery store. Give them a call or go online, choose what you wish to buy, and they too will deliver it to your door. Same with your drug stores as well.
I've been a landlord for 30 years, and the last ten years have never been better for us. Supply and demand sent rental prices through the roof. How did this happen? People decided they don't want to deal with home ownership anymore. If the hot water stops working, you have a water leak under your kitchen sink, a light stops working, people don't want to call around for a reasonably priced repairman. They want to make one call, and that's to the landlord to get their problems solved.
Yes, we've lost millions of jobs thanks to automation and will continue to lose millions more. But we will also create more jobs as people are wanting more convenience in their lives and willing to pay for it.