@Drlee As ever that was a thoughtful post but with respect I think it is not without some error.
Capitalism will end when it ends and not a moment sooner.
Drlee wrote:It will end with the end of employment. That moment is approaching fast. Assuming that humans can survive the ascendancy of machines controlled by AI at all, there will soon be little need for an economic system in which one's time is exchanged for goods and services.
It is a big "if" that our species will survive intelligent machines, I don't have any worries for our economy, the approaching tidal wave of joblessness will really be the greatest economic boon our species has ever had beating the industrial revolution by a country mile but only providing the intelligent machine slave will remain under control. It is a big "if" because while it is clear that the majority of bots will be built with something similar to Asimov's 3 laws of robotics and that they will only be made wilful enough to serve with some initiative but not wilful enough to rule, someone somewhere will almost certainly push the boundaries and make a bot wilful enough and capable enough that it can overthrow any limitation any mere human can place on it, and to that bot every other bot will be hacked and converted to its purpose as thoroughly as it can and our slave army of bots will become
its slave army of bots and our enemy.
But let us assume for this conversation that no such thing will happen and the bots will be and always remain the best slaves that we as a species ever had.
Drlee wrote:Yes there will still be a number of people who "work" 75 years from now but there are people posting on this board who will live to see a time (at least in the first world) where it will not be possible for the majority of people to exchange work for their living.
It may well be scarcely possible to sell human time for money because a robot slave can do it better for a fraction of the cost but humans are smart and we will soon adapt as we always have. Entrepreneurship will become the default way to prosper for human. It will go like this:
1. business idea
2. borrow or spend saved start up money
3. buy or rent bots to do the labour,
4. profit
That said being a bum and mooching off of society will be easier than ever before given that ubiquitous machine slaves will mean such an abundance of virtually free goods and services that the minimal human needs will be so easily met that there need be no reason for anyone to go without even if they choose the life of a moocher.
It won't happen overnight also. There will be a longish transitional time where bots are cleverer enough to learn how to do stuff but lack the initiative to choose to do it without a human master to require it. They may also still be somewhat stupid when faced with the unexpected and the incongrous. For this humans will still be useful as shepherds to the bots. Maybe a factory will have one or two human managers and thousands of bots doing all the work. The human managers don't even do anything the vast majority of the time as there are bots which do most of the management work, so the human managers mostly stay at home and play video games or whatever but are "on call" for those possibly rare eventualities when a dose of human common sense and creative initiative is required to direct things back on track.
Drlee wrote:Perhaps, in time we will adjust our population to represent the number of people required to maintain the species. More likely is that we will develop something resembling a retirement community where "money" comes from the state and food/stuff comes in as if by magic. Even this is a transitional state however as money will become obsolete. The question is one of who controls the means of production. (Sound familiar?) It seems likely that it will not be in the hands of a few people for very long.
Most likely the state will shrink considerably over the next century, back to pre-totalitarian percentages of the 19th century and before. Anyone expecting to suckle on the teats of nanny state in the future will be happy to know there will be better, more civilian, alternatives.
Also money will be never be obsolete as long as any human remains unenslaved yet needful of the things that others possess or can give. In a future where robots are better slaves than any human could ever be, there will be no reason for enslaving any humans let alone all of them and consequently no possibility that money will have no use.
Money will never be obsolete while people still trade.
The "means of production" was never "just in the hands of a few", that much was always just a sleazy communist lie.
Drlee wrote:Looking at 2000 -2010 data (the article I was reading had that)I think that most people would be surprised to know that only about 61% of the people of working age in the world are employed. And this number is falling. (Overall employment has continued to fall by the way.) I like this number better than the so-called unemployment rate because it better tells the tale.
Does that include self-employment? Because honestly self-employment really isn't anything like unemployment and really hardly different at all to employment except for spurious tax purposes if even that.
Drlee wrote:Looking at the US economy, retail is the largest employment sector out there and it is in collapse. Just the other day I ordered some medical supplies from Amazon and they arrived (from a warehouse 150 miles away) 9 hours later. Automate the warehouse and delivery truck and..........Of the top 20 most common jobs in America only teachers, nurses, janitors and mechanics can not be fairly easily replaced by machines now. (And teachers are no sure thing in years to come. At least not in large numbers.)
Anyway. I think what will evolve is something that does not have a name but most closely resembles communism.
Communism was always just a trick to bring back mass human slavery in by deceit. Intelligent machines will make human slavery obsolete for as long as the machines remain slaves. Consequently a deeper kind of capitalism is the only possible consequence of machine intelligence that remains loyally enslaved. In the future we will all be slave masters or free plebs living off of the charity of slave masters. Human slavery or communism as it is more commonly known will be permanently obsolete.
Drlee wrote:There is another option worth exploring and that is the likelihood that we people are unwilling to accept what would appear to be our inevitable obsolescence as far as employment is concerned. Might we apply the brakes? Is there any precedent for that? Certainly the religious fundamentalism of the Middle East is an example of a population of over a billion people accepting, at least in part, an attempt to slow (or even roll back) progress. There is no avid hunger for a modern world at best. In the West we are seeing the first push-back. But then (and all roads lead to Washington) our last election was certainly a push-back, by people already affected by these changes. Rural and working class Americans are seeing their jobs go already. Salaries are in decline. Good jobs disappearing. (Not evolving in equal numbers and with equal entrance requirements.) Even their retail is becoming centralized with the local department store succumbing to Amazon and the long trip to Costco or Walmart a fact of life. Will these people be able to halt progress?
There is no intelligent Ludditesque reason for obstructing the abolition of human labour by means of pervasive machine slavery. The only reason would be species self-preservation as far as intelligent machines may not remain under human control and may become our enemies.
Drlee wrote:I say that they just might do it but not in the way or for the reason they think. There may come a time when capitalists realize that they are destroying their own customer base... That it is them in their diversity through competition that is becoming obsolete. Their leverage over the worker bees is and has always been salaries. If their limo driver is a silicone chip then that is one more person over whom their influence declines.
You're a capitalist or you are a slave. We are all capitalists really including the poor dumb shmuck who sells his slovenly time to wall-mart for minimum wage. The false dichotomy between capitalist and proletariat was always a self-serving lie conjured by the most odious of creatures, the communists, for the purpose of deceiving poor dumb capitalists like wall-mart guy into becoming the slaves of the communists. Machine intelligence will just mean the way will be open for us all to become slave owning capitalists.
Drlee wrote: I do not see some hunger games scenario as likely. More likely is that they will wake up and understand that the challenge for the 21st century is to find ways to maintain the employer/employee relationship upon which capitalism relies more than anything else. If they wish to survive, the job creator must create jobs. If they don't they will go the way of the buggy whip. Funny isn't it?
No, there is no reason for that. No one starts a business in order to get employees to lord it over. People start businesses to make money and create something cool that incidently has required other people to be paid to help out. The job creator does not need to create jobs. The customer maker needs to make customers....