What would people do when robots produce everything?

What will happen to humankind?

  • Things won't change much.

    Votes: 4 13.8%
  • Fabric of society will disintegrate and civilization will end.

    Votes: 7 24.1%
  • World will live in plenty, pleasure and peace forever.

    Votes: 4 13.8%
  • Nobody could possibly predict.

    Votes: 14 48.3%

  • Total voters
    29

LeBrok

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The time is coming, within 50-100 years when cheap and ubiquitous robots and automatic production machines will virtually produce everything. Robots will produce all the food we need, clothes, cars, homes, toys, etc; they will clean our homes, cook our food, repair roads, shovel snow and tend gardens, driverless cars will drive us around, driverless trucks, ships and planes will bring goods from around the globe. Our wearable devices will diagnose our health, dispense medication and hospital robots do operations. People won't need to work in manufacturing and service anymore. Perhaps there will be some jobs in politics, creative engineering and justice system for 1% smart and willing, but this is it.

This will be a colossal paradigm shift in our society. Will people get used to this new radically different environment? Will it be good for people and society? Can people fill a day with unimportant things? Will it be healthy for our psyche? Will humanity end in countless pleasuring ourselves with drugs and sex to fill the void?

After all, from don of humankind, we always did work, produced useful stuff for everyday life. As hunter gatherers we gathered firewood, mushrooms, roots and berries. We hunted animals all day long, then cut meat and organs, and fixed skins for clothing. In mean time we had to feed, teach and guard tens of our children in a tribe. We made our weapons to fight other tribes to protect fire and women.
As farmers we had even more long repetitive work around fields, herds and villages, raising even more kids and build fords and castles to fight countless enemies.
It got even busier for us during industrial revolution when we started producing thousands of new things.

Now, this busy production lifestyle, that we got used to in thousands of years, is going to end. End rather abruptly, I might add. People will become completely "useless". At least they would think and feel so.

However, perhaps, maybe, it won't be the end of the world yet? There is a big percentage of population, let's say 50%, who doesn't work already; the kids, people on welfare, retirees, and just the lazy. So, will it be such a drastic change if the rest of society joins in, doing "nothing"? Hell, I'm working many long hours myself, but I have so many hobbies and interest that I could fill more than a day with it. For a change, I would do only the stuff I enjoy all day long. Would it be so bad? Would it psychologically destroy me and kill me? Me and others alike.
Wouldn't it be like having a life of rich people born into the money? We all could enjoy the life they already have. The dream of many comes true.

Perhaps we can get used to it rather quickly, and life will go for thousands of years in constant joy and pleasure like nothing happened? After all, the pursuit of happiness is our natural law guaranteed by many modern constitutions.

Perhaps people will be stubborn and they will keep working along robots, for nothing more but keeping busy and feeling satisfaction from work done?

What will it be?

Will humankind survive?
 
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The balance between offer and demand will change dramatically.

The combination of IT and robotic will change all current jobs.

Most of the jobs will disappear and replaced by robotics (production, service).

There will be a lot of people whithout a job. No job, no money.

No money, no customers.

The Business World will loose a lot of consumers - it will cut his own arms and legs.

The problem is: IT and robos can only produce but not consume.
 
Yeah, that is true. If you dont produce anything useful, you can live only on system benefits. So, this pretty much sounds like Socialism utopia. If done properly.
Or capitalist nightmare, if not done properly. Because - who would enjoy and how much they would be eligible to enjoy of this paradise? Today it is about how useful you are in "adding value" (or screwing someone else's brain into buying not really necessary stuff), tomorrow? Who is closer to party? Or all get equal share of global currency?
 
The problem is: IT and robos can only produce but not consume.

That is not really true, at least not in the future. Robots also require spare parts, which in turn require raw materials, to be produced. So robots makers will be consuming to make and maintain robots. Even when robots become independent from humans, they will need to repair and maintain themselves and create new robots to replace broken ones or expand their numbers. There is actually a risk of going into overdrive and producing too many robots. Humans are prone to excesses, and the bigger the human population grows, the more robots we will need. If we decide to colonise many other planets, the need for robots will become so huge that it could put our planet at serious risk of overproduction and overexploitation.
 
That is not really true, at least not in the future. Robots also require spare parts, which in turn require raw materials, to be produced. So robots makers will be consuming to make and maintain robots. Even when robots become independent from humans, they will need to repair and maintain themselves and create new robots to replace broken ones or expand their numbers. There is actually a risk of going into overdrive and producing too many robots.

If robot production would consume so many resources then it probably won't happen because it would be economically inefficient - from a human perspective, unless it is economic from the robots perspective. The human perspective is the only one that should count for us humans.
Steven Hawking and friends recently warned about dangers of AI. Kurzweil and friends are optimists and are expecting soon the singularity to come. Both concerns self-procreation and self-improvement of robots. It is obvious that this is prone to exponential explosion, both quantitatively and qualitatively. If this happens, it would represent consumption, but detached from human economy. Robots would develop their own "economy" where human consumers have no space anymore. That would be malignant robot explosion. One might develop constraints to enforce benign procreation, but the more I think of it the more doubts I have, because the complexity of the constraints is too high. I don't know how it could be designed without highly dangerous experiments. Perhaps in a sufficiently realistic Virtual Reality. But how realistic would be sufficient? I don't know.
 
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Now, this busy production lifestyle, that we got used to in thousands of years, is going to end. End rather abruptly, I might add. People will become completely "useless". At least they would think and feel so.

A pessimistic but relevant article coining the term "unnecessariat".

LeBrok said:
However, perhaps, maybe, it won't be the end of the world yet? There is a big percentage of population, let's say 50%, who doesn't work already; the kids, people on welfare, retirees, and just the lazy. So, will it be such a drastic change if the rest of society joins in, doing "nothing"? Hell, I'm working many long hours myself, but I have so many hobbies and interest that I could fill more than a day with it. For a change, I would do only the stuff I enjoy all they long. Would it be so bad? Would it psychologically destroy me and kill me? Me and others alike.
Wouldn't it be like having a life of rich people born into the money? We all could enjoy the life they already have. The dream of many comes true.

Perhaps we can get used to it rather quickly, and life will go for thousands of years in constant joy and pleasure like nothing happened? After all, the pursuit of happiness is our natural law guaranteed by many modern constitutions.

Perhaps people will be stubborn and they will keep working along robots, for nothing more but keeping busy and feeling satisfaction from work done?

What will it be?

On the phenomenon of Bullshit jobs:

On the phenomenon of Bullshit jobs said:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. ...

For the moment and for a while there will be problems. It was not long ago when most humans believed that getting rid of physical and monotonous work would make us all happy. They thought sitting comfortably while eating excess carbohydrates in order to become big and fat would enable everyone to get through the winter and most problems are gone. Now that we achieved that, diabetes, obesity, back pain and mental illnesses increased instead. Today people are desperate to excercise and to do sports in order to get rid of those carbohydrates and to regain endorphine - they try to artificially restore the environment they just got rid of.
These bullshit jobs seem to be the same, but they are subtly economically driven. In socialism/communism there was no unemployment, because everyone got a task, even it was totally uneconomic and superfluous. In capitalism it used to be the opposite, but something is changing. Currently people are increasingly doing bullshit jobs.
 
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The balance between offer and demand will change dramatically.

The combination of IT and robotic will change all current jobs.

Most of the jobs will disappear and replaced by robotics (production, service).

There will be a lot of people whithout a job. No job, no money.

No money, no customers.

The Business World will loose a lot of consumers - it will cut his own arms and legs.

The problem is: IT and robos can only produce but not consume.

This is how I see it too. Actually the world economy is suffering already now from oversupply and deflation (evidenced by negative interest rates). People don't need yet another 30 styles of strawberry marmalade. Even consumption of cool new tech gimmicks is increasingly driven by hype and status. These things are merely nice-to-haves, but what people increasingly prefer is a secure, independent and healthy future and spare time. This is exactly what strangles the economy, because it can be purchased only by hoarding, which is a kind of consumption that behaves like "negative consumption" --> more deflation. Maybe a small number of sectors can still grow naturally, for instance medicine, pharma, biotech, surveillance and arms industry, but these are interestingly sectors of violence (medicine = "money or die") rather than consumer products.

Here is a possible way out:

1. "Unconditional Helicopter Money" (Unconditional Basic Income), where my emphasis is on unconditional. This is necessary, but not sufficient, because people will hoard it, which is fine. They should hoard it if they want. Conformism and communism is not required. Individual independence and benign inequality must be enabled. As for tackling the hoarding problem, see here:

2. Reducing supply instead of increasing consumption: To be achieved by official reduction of working time. In most developed countries there is an approx. 8 hour limit per day. It should be officially and slowly reduced. Those who exceed the monthly or yearly work time, should pay high extra tax. There should be no taxation of productivity per work time, only taxation of work time, in order to encourage efficiency/technological progress and to discourage labour dumping. Excess productivity should be compensated by reduced work time in the long run by political decisions. In addition to controlling only the money supply (as an attempt to control consumption), this is a necessary tool for controlling product supply, which was missing so far.

Increasing consumption by increasing consumers (=population) is not a good idea for obvious reasons.

No worries about inflation because this is what the economy currently is lacking. If inflation gets too high, the Basic Income increase can be halted as long as necessary. Also don't confuse inflation with currency devaluation.

I'm confident this could be a starting point for solving most of the immediate economic issues, but I don't know what to do about human nature, e.g. the desire to work, to be societal contributor, or yet unknown medical/psychological implications, decadence, .... Probably humans must learn to be entirely self-motivated and self-sufficient (ultimate individualism?). But this won't happen soon, it will take much time until we drop working time from 8 to 4 hours per day, and scientists believe that 4 hours/day are optimal for human psyche anyways, so no problem expected here soon.
 
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" Robots also require spare parts, which in turn require raw materials, to be produced. So robots makers will be consuming to make and maintain robots."

And from where will the robots take the money to buy their robots-consumption?


Oh, I see, in the future the robots will also get all money for their works. But robots

are too stupid, so the money will land to the few human owners of those robots-firms.

Basically, that is not a problem, but which money do they need? From the majority of humans, who will lose their work because of robots?



I think they will not have (enough) money for purchase anything, because the haven’t got any work. In the future the works are made by robots and we do not need human workers.

No work, no money for 99 % of humans.

Ok, there are some few rich people. But they do not need all the robots they produce.

Current civilization do not work if only 1 % of humans get the money for consuming.

Robots in combination with IT will accelerate destruction of current money civilization if we do not change this „getting money only by working“-system.
 
I am an optimist, I think energy will come for free soon and then robots will do all the boring jobs and humans will be creators and able to develop themselves where they want as we do our hobbies now. I also think that working for an employer will be soon die out and everyone will cooperate as freelancers by sharing our knowledge and skills. Food growing, with free energy and robots, will be mostly local thing, too, and people will grow into eating more green foods.
 
The balance between offer and demand will change dramatically.
How so? People will stop buying what we buy now? Will robots not produce what people require?

The combination of IT and robotic will change all current jobs.
Yes. Job market was changing every generation anyway.

Most of the jobs will disappear and replaced by robotics (production, service).
Actually they will not disappear, but will be done by robots instead.

There will be a lot of people whithout a job. No job, no money.
This is not true even now. Unemployed and handicapped people receive social assistance, money from government. Money without working.
Switzerland is thinking about introducing giving money to everybody.
The Swiss ballot initiative, which isn’t scheduled yet, doesn’t state how big the unconditional stipend would be, but supporters have mentioned 2,500 Swiss francs a month, which is a little under $2,800.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...2-800-a-month-to-everyone-no-strings-attached

In a grand scheme of things money is not needed. By your mobile phone, you can sand a list of what you need to the "supplier", and your things will be made and delivered. Made and delivered by robots of course.
I'm not saying it is the right way, but one of possible ways nevertheless.
 
Yeah, that is true. If you dont produce anything useful, you can live only on system benefits. So, this pretty much sounds like Socialism utopia.
It will be pretty much communism. Not by means of revolution or religious communs, but by way of robots. Communism didn't work because people needed to work, jobs were guaranteed by government and bureaucrats were running businesses, no incentives. At the end nobody cared. Nothing works if people don't care.
This time robots will work harder than people for no money and they will not complain. A perfect slaves people always wanted.

If done properly.
Or capitalist nightmare, if not done properly. Because - who would enjoy and how much they would be eligible to enjoy of this paradise?
Yes, this might be only problem in the future. People arguing, ho will get what for free, and if this is fair.



Today it is about how useful you are in "adding value" (or screwing someone else's brain into buying not really necessary stuff), tomorrow?
Who will care what you want and get? Obviously not robots.

I would like to notice that I'm not saying it will be better or worse than what we have today, but I see it coming soon, by a way of extrapolation of current trends into the future. I just hope it is for better. But who knows?
 
That is not really true, at least not in the future. Robots also require spare parts, which in turn require raw materials, to be produced. So robots makers will be consuming to make and maintain robots. Even when robots become independent from humans, they will need to repair and maintain themselves and create new robots to replace broken ones or expand their numbers. There is actually a risk of going into overdrive and producing too many robots. Humans are prone to excesses, and the bigger the human population grows, the more robots we will need. If we decide to colonise many other planets, the need for robots will become so huge that it could put our planet at serious risk of overproduction and overexploitation.

If robot production would consume so many resources then it probably won't happen because it would be economically inefficient - from a human perspective, unless it is economic from the robots perspective. The human perspective is the only one that should count for us humans.
Steven Hawking and friends recently warned about dangers of AI. Kurzweil and friends are optimists and are expecting soon the singularity to come. Both concerns self-procreation and self-improvement of robots. It is obvious that this is prone to exponential explosion, both quantitatively and qualitatively. If this happens, it would represent consumption, but detached from human economy. Robots would develop their own "economy" where human consumers have no space anymore. That would be malignant robot explosion. One might develop constraints to enforce benign procreation, but the more I think of it the more doubts I have, because the complexity of the constraints is too high. I don't know how it could be designed without highly dangerous experiments. Perhaps in a sufficiently realistic Virtual Reality. But how realistic would be sufficient? I don't know.


Keep in mind that robots will be able to recycle every little thing we will throw away. Robots will not only produce but also recycle and clean our old garbage. Robots have time and patience to do that. Everything will be recycled and reused. Actually thanks to robots will avoid running out of resources.

In 100 or 200 years will will send army of cheap robots to open old garbage pits, recycle our today's garbage and clean up the ground. World with robots will be much cleaner.


Robots are also perfect to travel the space to other planets and solar system bodies. They don't need life support, to carry food with them and oxigen. They can work on Mars or an asteroid as efficiently as on Earth. Natural resources of our solar system will be readily accessible.
 
A pessimistic but relevant article coining the term "unnecessariat".



On the phenomenon of Bullshit jobs:

Movie "Office Space" cators to this idea too.

For the moment and for a while there will be problems. It was not long ago when most humans believed that getting rid of physical and monotonous work would make us all happy.
Actually I know few people who love monotonous, repetitive, no thinking, no stress job. Well "love" is said too much lol, these people would prefer watching and sleeping in front of TV instead of working at any time. But if they have to work they go for the boring, mindless jobs.

They thought sitting comfortably while eating excess carbohydrates in order to become big and fat would enable everyone to get through the winter and most problems are gone. Now that we achieved that, diabetes, obesity, back pain and mental illnesses increased instead. Today people are desperate to excercise and to do sports in order to get rid of those carbohydrates and to regain endorphine - they try to artificially restore the environment they just got rid of.
I think half of education in future schools will be how to take care of oneself, how to organize your time, how to protect your body and mind against overeating, overusing of drugs, etc. People might go to school for first 30 years to "kill time", or acquire vast amount of new knowledge.
On other hand if there is something wrong with your body, the army of robots in close by hospital will fix you well. Or with new technologies we will pop a pill to burn fat and build muscle even without exercise. Like a hibernating bear.

Remember that there also will be a robot or two in every house. They will cook for you, healthy/low calorie food if you desire. Be your motivator and personal trainer. They can fix and renovate your house, without hiring a contractor. They can manufacture many things for you on a spot together with 3D printers. They will constantly monitor your health, and do medical procedures if needed. No family doctor required. As I said, a perfect slave.




These bullshit jobs seem to be the same, but they are subtly economically driven. In socialism/communism there was no unemployment, because everyone got a task, even it was totally uneconomic and superfluous. In capitalism it used to be the opposite, but something is changing. Currently people are increasingly doing bullshit jobs.
Cetrainly more bulshit jobs will be available in the future just to keep people busy and sane.
Nothing will stop you from growing your own food, building your own house, or your private pyramid, just don't expect making money on it. Surely, robots could do it more efficiently and much faster, but who cares. It will make you happy and give you purpose.
 
1. "Unconditional Helicopter Money" (Unconditional Basic Income), where my emphasis is on unconditional. This is necessary, but not sufficient, because people will hoard it, which is fine. They should hoard it if they want. Conformism and communism is not required. Individual independence and benign inequality must be enabled. As for tackling the hoarding problem, see here:
This is one way to insure people have money to buy goods done by robots and service.
Other way could be insuring that all citizens are the shareholders of all the companies and receive income as dividends.

2. Reducing supply instead of increasing consumption: To be achieved by official reduction of working time. In most developed countries there is an approx. 8 hour limit per day. It should be officially and slowly reduced. Those who exceed the monthly or yearly work time, should pay high extra tax. There should be no taxation of productivity per work time, only taxation of work time, in order to encourage efficiency/technological progress and to discourage labour dumping. Excess productivity should be compensated by reduced work time in the long run by political decisions. In addition to controlling only the money supply (as an attempt to control consumption), this is a necessary tool for controlling product supply, which was missing so far.
"Overconsumption" shouldn't be a problem in the future, as robot will recycle everything. No waste.


I'm confident this could be a starting point for solving most of the immediate economic issues, but I don't know what to do about human nature, e.g
.I agree, humane factor is the least predictable part of this equation.

Probably humans must learn to be entirely self-motivated and self-sufficient (ultimate individualism?).
I think we are already lacking good self motivation, self improvement teaching.
We can always go for designer babies to change human character fitting and in tune with new, post work, reality. It could be the easy way.


But this won't happen soon, it will take much time until we drop working time from 8 to 4 hours per day, and scientists believe that 4 hours/day are optimal for human psyche anyways, so no problem expected here soon.
Not needed. The "helicopter money" will give people option not to work for anyone who desire so. Leave jobs for people who wants to work, be busy, if nothing more than just for psychological health. In this case who cares how long should be the work week. Leave the choice to the interested in it people.
 
I am an optimist, I think energy will come for free soon and then robots will do all the boring jobs and humans will be creators and able to develop themselves where they want as we do our hobbies now.
I like your optimism. I would mind enjoying my hobbies all they long.


I also think that working for an employer will be soon die out and everyone will cooperate as freelancers by sharing our knowledge and skills
. This happens by means of social media platforms.



Food growing, with free energy and robots, will be mostly local thing, too, and people will grow into eating more green foods.
Now, this is matter of taste rather than supply.
 
How so? People will stop buying what we buy now?

A majority of humans will stop buying what we buy now, because they will lose their jobs. You think humans could do then another job or create a new job ? Not everybody can do it and if there will be new jobs they will be replaced by robots again. There will be no jobs for everybody who has lost his job, because robots destroy more jobs than they will create.


Will robots not produce what people require?

Yes, but there will be not so many people who can buy it.


Yes. Job market was changing every generation anyway.

Yes, but this time there will change to no job market. There will be a very small number of jobs. These jobs probably you will get if you are not married, you live in a poor country (small wages) and you are between 20 and 25 years old. For other humans there are no job market because there will be not enough jobs for all.


Actually they will not disappear, but will be done by robots instead.

Actually they will disappear for humans.

This is not true even now. Unemployed and handicapped people receive social assistance, money from government. Money without working.
Switzerland is thinking about introducing giving money to everybody.

Yes, unemployed Swiss people receive social assistance from goverment and also they have to pay it back (if they find any job). The goverment get this money from taxes. Who pay taxes? I think the working SWISS people (but many of them will lose their jobs to robots, too).


And how will Switzerland pay this money without working if in the future there will be less tax incomes? The rich people? No income. No taxes. No money without working.


In a grand scheme of things money is not needed. By your mobile phone, you can sand a list of what you need to the "supplier", and your things will be made and delivered. Made and delivered by robots of course. I'm not saying it is the right way, but one of possible ways nevertheless.

And you think we can get it all for free? If there is no money, there will be replaced with another value system and the problem will be the same.
How do you think humans get value without working?


Robots are only ok if they help us in our work, but not if they replace all possible works.
 
If robots will replace all our works then they should be our personal slaves.

Everybody will own two robots. The start capital for purchasing the robots we will get by our goverment.


One robot goes working outside for earning money, the other one do the housework. If a robot is damaged the other robot repear it automatically.

The humans use then the earned money for hobbies, paying taxes and other things.
 
Actually I know few people who love monotonous, repetitive, no thinking, no stress job. Well "love" is said too much lol, these people would prefer watching and sleeping in front of TV instead of working at any time. But if they have to work they go for the boring, mindless jobs.

Absolutely! But unfortunately these are exactly those jobs which disappear first, because they can be automatized and robotized most easily. More jobs become increasingly brainy, social and exhausting, on the other side, there are ever more status-bloated overpaid bullshit jobs.

I think half of education in future schools will be how to take care of oneself, how to organize your time, how to protect your body and mind against overeating, overusing of drugs, etc. People might go to school for first 30 years to "kill time", or acquire vast amount of new knowledge.
On other hand if there is something wrong with your body, the army of robots in close by hospital will fix you well. Or with new technologies we will pop a pill to burn fat and build muscle even without exercise. Like a hibernating bear.

But the leading AI and Robot tech companies currently prefer Transhumanism to solve these problems. I would ask them what is the point of being a human then, or what's the point of being at all. Google seriously plans to advance in AI that much that a human mind can be transferred and become immortal. This is no joke. Don't they understand that it is pointless if our artificial copies enjoy superpowers and immortality? Even a 100% exact copy of myself is still someone else.
 
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