[Decky]

That is obviously bollocks though. They produce 100% of all the worlds wealth and it is as true today as it ever was.

[Thompson_NCL]

"Useless" work? Without the Proletariat you would have nothing. Everything that you have is produced by a worker. If they vanished tomorrow the remaining people would be dead within a week.

Ah, but that won't be true for very long. Within a 100 years, automation and robotics will have annihilated the dependency upon the working class for labour.

Time to become a machine breaker? There's already brick laying machines being developed which can lay 1000 bricks an hour.

[Decky]

Who manufactures and maintains those machines Hong Wu? The shareholders? Who mines the raw material to make the machines and the raw materials they use? Is the capitalist in his suit down on the coal face?

[Thompson_NCL]

Who manufactures and maintains those machines Hong Wu? The shareholders? Who mines the raw material to make the machines and the raw materials they use? Is the capitalist in his suit down on the coal face?

Machines will dig up and process the raw materials then transport the materials to automated factories. The machines themselves will be designed and maintained by well paid engineers from the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois class. The unclean masses will not be needed.

[Decky]

Fuck off, they can't even make a compo silo that doesn't jam up every few days and need stripping down and fixing. Totally automated factories.

[Thompson_NCL]

Fuck off, they can't even make a compo silo that doesn't jam up every few days and need stripping down and fixing. Totally automated factories.

And yet automation already exists in many aspects of our lives and runs without error and as I said, there's a brick laying machine already. Of course they'll break down, that's what keeps engineers in a job after all. But they'll on the whole be far more reliable and efficient than humans.

[Decky]

There are many bricklaying machines that work perfectly well when the are demonstrated in perfect conditions. Meanwhile in the real world down muddy hole and in other cramped spaces they won't be a lot of use, ditto during interruptions to power. I imagine moving them from one job to another would be rather more difficult than sending a text to a brickie and having him turn up on the new site the next day. Enjoy your fantasies about gassing the plebeians and replacing us with machines anyway. You are a true Tory. You hate the majority of the British people and I expect you call yourself a patriot.

[Scheherazade]

This post is a great example of being wholly ignorant of the situation faced by the masses of people throughout the world who have no choice but to work long hours and often in poor conditions to eke out a living. People like that aren't idiots who waste their life working 70 hours a week: the great majority of people have no other choice because all they can do is sell their labor for a wage which is, often enough, hardly enough, if that.

________________________________________________



Voting for either Trump or Hillary would have produced violence of some kind and deaths along the way. Even things like sanctions are done with the full knowledge that children will starve to death as a result, for instance. Whether you voted Hillary or Trump, poverty and homelessness and food insecurity will never be solved in the US. Whether you vote Democrat or Republican, there will never be racial or gender equality in the US. Capitalism's fundamental building blocks of exploitation and systemic inequality on the basis of class always results in the lower classes fighting among themselves and being pitted against each other, losing themselves in identity politics and becoming powerless and voiceless as a result.

This post is a great example of being wholly ignorant of the situation faced by the masses of people throughout the world who have no choice but to work long hours and often in poor conditions to eke out a living. People like that aren't idiots who waste their life working 70 hours a week: the great majority of people have no other choice because all they can do is sell their labor for a wage which is, often enough, hardly enough, if that.

________________________________________________



Voting for either Trump or Hillary would have produced violence of some kind and deaths along the way. Even things like sanctions are done with the full knowledge that children will starve to death as a result, for instance. Whether you voted Hillary or Trump, poverty and homelessness and food insecurity will never be solved in the US. Whether you vote Democrat or Republican, there will never be racial or gender equality in the US. Capitalism's fundamental building blocks of exploitation and systemic inequality on the basis of class always results in the lower classes fighting among themselves and being pitted against each other, losing themselves in identity politics and becoming powerless and voiceless as a result.

I'm not talking about people who have to do to lack of choice or to support family, I'm talking about overworked middle class Americans who force themselves to work just to afford things they don't need and go into debt.

[Albert]

Robot technology is progressing Decks. Soon robots will be the new proletariat, working class will become obsolete.

[Scheherazade]

Robot technology is progressing Decks. Soon robots will be the new proletariat, working class will become obsolete.

That's why any career which could be replaced easily by a robot is a risky career option in this day and age.

I doubt this will happen though, I think the American economy will implode long before this becomes a reality - what do you estimate the actual cost would be?

Even these primitive robots cost $75,000 a pop.

https://www.robots.com/faq/show/how-muc ... obots-cost, so replacing, say 100,000 workers with these robots would cost about... 7.5 Trillion, almost half of the entire US GDP.

And more robots or androids which could potentially take the role of an entire worker, cause a paultry... $7 billion per
unit.

http://www.alux.com/most-expensive-robot-in-the-world/

So building 100 million or so of them to replace factory workers would cost about... well let's just say well over the entire world's GDP multiples.

So where are you going to manage to scrounge up that money short of invading other planets and harvesting resources from alien civilizations? It would be (literally) cheaper to build your own Death Star:

Students at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania worked out how much it would cost to build the Death Star and came up with a figure of $8,100,000,000,000,000 ($8.1 quadrillion!?), which is 13,000 times the world's GDP.

[quetzalcoatl]

Personally I am not a laborer / worker so I would have never been very enthused about it..

Do you use your hands/mind to produce output for an employer? Then you are a worker. Do you sell your labor independently? You are still a worker.

Are you able to employ others to produce your output, and subsist exclusively on that output for your income? Then you are not a worker. This does not mean necessarily that you do not fulfill a valuable role - just that you are not a worker.

[Political Interest]

A lot of the middle classes hold the indigenous working class in complete contempt. I have noticed it on many occasions. For example, they will laud the capabilities of foreign workers in comparison to native ones and use this as a pretext for mass immigration. How many times I have seen someone in a suit on a television debate say "a lot of British people will not do those sorts of jobs". The reality is that they will do them but the bosses and capitalists do not create them or they deliberately seek out foreign labour because they know workers from outside England will not complain about their conditions and will work for slave wages.

The United Kingdom's unemloyment problems could be solved very quickly but it is more convenient to point fingers and call the working class lazy and pampered.

[recurnal]

As an aspiring cognitive scientist, I might be able to weigh in on the question of whether robots will soon overtake the proletariat. I'll start by saying I doubt it. When people mention the "exponential progress of artificial intelligence" or what have you, they are unwittingly talking about only one sort of AI: narrow AI, which concerns the accomplishment of expert tasks like diagnosing a disease given a list of specific symptoms. Narrow AI's domain is the closed system with clear rules. Life, of course, is far from a closed system with clear rules—and industry is no different.

General AI, narrow AI's counterpart, concerns the smooth assimilation of unprecedented data and the accurate judgment of details as either relevant or extraneous. In other words, if I'm a basketball player and someone in the stands pulls out an assault rifle, my priority should not remain calculating the trajectory of my shot; I should instead try to avoid the trajectory of his. Millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned humans to accomplish these common sense tasks with singular ease, but robots are notoriously terrible at them. No basketball-player robot, as yet, knows how to play dead in a mass shooting—in the past fifty years, in fact, general AI has progressed little to none. Expecting scientists to achieve a sudden breakthrough amounts to wishful thinking.

Industry can't expect to do without both general AI and the proletariat, all the while avoiding disaster. At the very least, the proletariat will remain a needed part of industry if only to push the big button when the burgers come out green on the assembly line. While one might argue this is a laughable role, it is no less critical. What's more, Mark and Engels even predicted it, if my reading of the communist manifesto is correct. Labor will invariably become more "repulsive," according to Marx and Engels, but this won't prevent a revolution of the working class so much as stir one.