Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics Robot in Your Future? Or, Robots are the Future?

Right - taxation would be one possible method for wealth redistribution.

I am reminded of the technology promises of the mid-20th century; labor saving devices (simple and sophisticated robots) were going to give us all lives of leisure. The only part they forgot to factor in was that it is a wealth concentrating algorithm (I always think of Al Gore dancing when I see that word) causing reduction in real income for the displaced labor peeples.

Until the dominant Capitalists become evil Socialists, we will never see any voluntary wealth redistribution. We will see a long cycle of unimaginable boom and bust, though (we seem to be riding the coaster over the hump right now...).

[b]47% Of All Jobs Will Be Automated By 2034, And 'No Government Is Prepared' Says Economist [/b] What concerns a lot of people for the near future is that governments tend to start wars to distract their people from economic problems.

Taxation is one source of government revenue. I believe that we should return to the tax rates of the 50's and 60's. CEOs and Wall Street making what they're making and owning the government is obscene.

I remember when I was a kid that the future held <30 hour work weeks, everyone had a job, house, boat, possibly an airplane, and the only problem was how to spend the extra leisure time. In some ways, we were trending that way, until something stepped in and redirected the future. CEOs are making multiples of what their employees make and what CEOs made when this country worked. I'd like to see us go back to what worked.

I'd like to see equal opportunity for the average American to improve his lot, which we once had. It's gone. The only socialism that I see is for the 1% and I don't believe that we'll ever see their wealth redistributed. I'd like to see America return to the land of opportunity.

war is not my major concern

without adequate stimulus people become zombies or worse

I don't think wealth redistribution is necessarily the answer. What about a system in which workers "displace themselves" by training a robot to do their job. They would own the robot, so they would be entitled to the bulk of its income (paid by the factory owner, corporation, or co-op). They could finance the original purchase, pay for upgrades and reprogramming, or maybe become skilled enough in robot maintenance to be able to do that themselves. An especially skilled robot trainer could find advancement by adding more robots to his or her cohort and just clone the programming. Heirs could learn robot management from their parent, inherit their parents robots (and those robot's "employment" contracts), etc.

Robots are owned objects just like our other tools, but nothing says only the 1% should own them. This will be quite a bit more obvious when everybody has self-driving cars. Why not let your self-driving car be directed by something like a cab company while you are not using it?

of course the problem with your scenario is there is nothing which would force a company to have a contract with a robot owner. why would they when they could just as easily or more so buy their own and depreciate them and then double dip by not paying wages but simply pocketing the difference as profit.

capitalism is not sentient and does not care an iota how it makes money from labor, either by owning robots (which they already do) or sending jobs overseas.

Somebody remind me - what are all these robots for? I know cRick is planning to have his automated Tahoe drive him to my HGTV Dream Home in Tahoe while he naps in the back, but where is he gonna get the dough to indulge in such unnecessities when his job has been taken by a LunchBot 4000 (hairnet optional) with the ability to dance like Al Gore?

(Say, is there some deeper meaning to the term "auto-mated" when it comes to car robots? Is that how they will reproduce? Fekkin' cars...)

[b]US Army considers replacing thousands of troops with robots[/b] Imagine what management could do with the fast food service industry, i.e. burger flippers, etc.