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In response to automation replacing jobs I often say "Get a career that is high-skill that cant be automated"...
What people thing I mean:
* Mathematician
* Programmer
* Electrical Engineer
What I mean:
* Everything above
* Magician
* Actor
* YouTuber
* Etc.
@admitsWrongIfProven Thats the fault of the people and their spendings not automation.
Automation has been happening for thousands of years.. plumbing automated the process where people would haul out shit on carts, the wheel and wagons provided an automation for transporting goods... it is nothing new.
The thing is when each new automation increased the wealth for EVERYONE people also had new demands on their quality of living.
Imagine if everyone lived like the amish, a life style similar to what it was 1000 some years ago.. no electricity, no modern anything... It would cost you 100$ to live and you could literally work just an hour or two a day and sit by a river all day. You can have that leisure from automation right now... but you dont want that, instead you want all the wealth and do more work, so you get the electricity and the modern home, and decide to work and pay more for it too.
@freemo I do not understand. How do you expect to spend wisely if they don't get anything? After all, productivity gain wealth is not distributed but concentrated.
@admitsWrongIfProven See titus in kentucky as an example.. He has no job, and very little expenses.. its a prime example of how people could easily have a life of leisure off just 5 hours of work a **month** but they dont because they want their iphones and electricity.
@freemo I get it. You want to ignore the majority of gains going toward business owners, because you wish to have your own business and reap all there is to reap without any bad feelings. Not an evil thing, quite natural really.
Well, nothing against you personally, but i do not like the concept.
@admitsWrongIfProven No, I am addressing what you actually claimed rather than dealing in moving the goal post fallacy is all.
You said we dont have leisure from automation.. yet we do.. if you live a life like before automation (1000+ years back) your life would have a great deal of leisure relative to what it was like living that same lifestype pre-automation.
@freemo I don't get it. You say you don't sidestep, yet you do absolutely nothing to adress what i brought up. You just point to poor people and say they need to think about their spending, ignoring completely what i say.
I really wonder, is this a blockage in your thinking, an inability to consider such thoughts as "when someone gets rich, maybe that was not their doing alone, but also that of others that have not benefitted equally"?
I dont address you moving the goal post.. you said something, it was wrong, if you want to move the goalpost first you have to admit it was disproven and wrong and then you move the goal post and set a newtangent, then i will bite and address your new point.. but i wont waste time addressing your new tangent if you arent closing up the initial point faithfully
@freemo Well, i think we should end this discussion then. If you just accuse me of being wrong without actually getting the point, good evening to you and i will rather play a bit instead of discuss.
@admitsWrongIfProven enjoy.. If you want me to "get the point" try making the point the first time rather than being hyperbolic as you tend to do... since its much easier to disprove a hyperbolix stance and then when you go "no thats not the point" all that looks like is goal post moving
@freemo Well, i have to concede that i am sometimes a bit all over the place.
Let me try it a bit more structured:
As productivity gains happen, there are multiple consequences.
1- Production increases, given that the investment of material and labor is not protracted to the point where it declines (assumption: it does increase)
2- There is more product
3- Less work is used
Now, deriving from that, we get:
a- More availability of the product, decreasing prices (your main point)
b- More profits as a consequence of 2 even though a, because the cost went down due to 3
So far, i guess you would agree?
Now my point is that increased profits from b are concentrated on the owners of businesses, something that is not a law of physics, but due to the design of private instead of collective ownership. It may be what is established as normal, but i see no convincing argument that it had to be that way.
If we had a distribution of those arising profits that was more broad, we could argue for a direct increase in free time from 3 and b, yet what tracks is only the decreased prices from a, making this way less efficient in terms of "people and their spendings" (citing you) as b affects only a very small amount of people.
I hope this clears things up.
Oh, but the productivity gains DO translate into more leisure time for everyone.
It's just that people go on to trade that leisure for wanting more stuff.
It's easy to work for the standard of living of a century ago. It's just that now we want air conditioning and YouTube in addition to food.
If that's your point then why bring up leisure?
Anyway, that's a gross over-generalization with echos of the old Luddite attitudes that we so rightly criticize.
Not only will so many made redundant by productivity gains continue to earn money doing other things, but often those things will have been made possible by the productivity gains themselves.
And the gains in productivity will even unlock more opportunities for leisure, that you were so concerned about.
There will always be folks in difficult situations that society needs to address, but productivity gains also makes that easier as well.
Bring on the productivity gains. Let's not cling to the past out of fear of advancemet.
Honest question: Wait, you haven't heard Luddite having a negative connotation?
I thought that was the overwhelmingly common understanding of the term, backwards people clinging to the past out of irrational fear.
I wonder if you'd mind giving a sense of where you grew up because it's genuinely important to know what idioms are used where when trying to converse.
Again, if I had a winner takes all mentality, Why would I go out of my way to say one of the benefits of increased productivity is that it lets us better help those in need?
If you really want to frame it as winners vs losers, I'm explicitly talking about the loser taking, though I wouldn't frame it that way *because I don't have the mentality you're asking about :)*
So, growing up I always heard them referred to as I described above, backwards people clinging to the past over fears of the future.
You'd refer to someone as a Luddite because they refused to change to newer things, like a person refusing to get a smartphone even though they'd like it better because they were just used to an old flip phone.
That's the use of the idiom that I've so commonly heard.
@volkris @freemo But... are we talking about idioms or about human relations?
I would decline to talk about idioms, since i am not a linguist - i would be out of my depth, and it would be highly academic.
The base of this was, at least for me, about equity. It does seem to be missing from our current societys in many countries, and that was what i was trying to say.
So, with your often professed love for new things that advance us, do you think equity is there? All good, we just need to embrace the new?
We were using an idiom to talk about human relations :)
But one that was particularly relevant considering the historical developments that it referenced.
But no, not everything new is good. There are plenty of new things that fail. You had narrowed in on advancements that increased productivity and had implications for leisure, which I'd say focuses on the new things that work, not the ones that don't.
After all, a failed program--a bad new thing--is likely to harm productivity and intrude into leisure, unlike the ones you seemed to have in mind.
@volkris @freemo Hmm, if you insist, i will invoke wikipedia...
"They protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
So, it seems there is another dimension except "working"? It did work out for textile manufacurers, but not so much for the workers.
Leaving us where we started: i do claim that prodictivity gains are not equally distributed.
While i know freemo for a bit and am convinced that his snark is mainly aimed at getting more precise statements, you do not have this kind of standing. You sidestep, you invoke new things as helpful, you completely ignore my appeals at equity. You have a choice here: take this discussion seriously or do not.
Wow, you really threw some bombs with that criticism there. I don't know where that came from.
Anyway, it seems to me that you're changing your claims faster than I can address them. It's not that I'm sidestepping, rather I'm having trouble following your points.
At one point it was leisure, another it was equity, or equality, or winners and losers, or the workers being displaced, or workers in general... I think you're all over the place here, and it's hard to follow.
So, when you claim productivity gains are not equally distributed I say YES I COMPLETELY AGREE. Of course they aren't. Why would they be? Different people want different things and value different things differently.
Just as additional production and accessibility of iPhones will favor iPhone users and not Android users... but why would that metric matter?
But this is a brand new front, as far as I can remember in this thread.
Fortunately, we're in agreement there so I guess it's resolved.
As for the inequality problem, why would I go out of my way to state that society needs to address it if I want it to exist?
We ABSOLUTELY need to address peoples' needs, and that's exactly why we need to embrace increases in productivity, as that gives us more resources to do exactly that.
@freemo An old problem with organizing a society... naively, one would expect productivity gains to translate into more leisure time for everyone. Yet, that never materializes and people are pushed to either be productive or at least look like it.