The Daily Blog Open Mic – Monday 8th May 2017

1. The Robot Economy: Ready or Not, Here It Comes
   Sunday, May 07, 2017 By JP Sottile, Truthout | News Analysis
   Excerpt
   September 17th changed everything.
   On that day in 2013, Oxford University published an innocuously titled academic paper by two mostly unknown economists. But “The Future of Employment” wasn’t just another number-crunching exercise in opacity by a couple of dreary scientists. No, their bombshell report portended a coming robot apocalypse that could change the nature of human civilization, and perhaps even human beings themselves.

   http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40495-the-robot-economy-ready-or-not-here-it-comes

   • Totally we are witnessing the dawn of a new human experience. Just say hi to any youth 17 or yonger and you should recognise pretty fast what I mean. They can barly lift there heads out of there devices. And they are frugile and anti drink driving. And I suspect privacy settings aren’t a high priority for millennials because they want to be in touch with every one all the time.

     For people born before the year 2000, they have perspective because we remember a time before cell phones when we used phones to orginise and meet up. Now you can choose a mate online. I cant say if its good or bad or not but it has compressed time so we can scroll through a wider varity of potential mates. So the speed we recieve information is new.

     So, I mean some one like me can just casually send an 800kg radiator 4000ks, three times a day if I wanted. Or I could casually fly 4000ks per day. So air travel is up in New Zealand and air travel is a privilaged position. You can get dubed titles instead of subtitled copies in 24 hrs which is unheard of and you can copy anything on the net billions of times for cents which is also unheard of at any point in human history. So it is a new human experience.

     • True that Sam.

       Will the elites kill us all off and use Robots as their slaves?

       • Will elites kill us all? Hmmm. Im not hard in that camp. If elites had it all there way, ‘you know, all for me and none for you.’ Well i couldnt imagine what kind of society that would be like. Id imagine it would be some kind of backward in-bread space colony. Seriously could you imagine being some of the last people alive on the planet and one or a few of you had killed every one else. I mean id stab some one like that in the throat for just being a kient. The whole experiment would blow up in an instant no mater which way you looked at it. It would be like a free hit, every one would be cool with something like that, the masses have always have been cool with this kind of peotic justice in the past, Iraq/Saddam. The bigger the tyrant the harder the fall.

         I mean i couldn’t imagine many reasons for pulling a 17th/18th century style french revolution but if enough people recognised that reform is not possible then thats another way elites always lose out in the end.

         The arts is a good example because paintings cant paint themselves and neither can robots make complex networks like a public transport system with out killing people, we cant even get that right on occasion. Maybe some time way off in the future, more than 17,000 years atleast, when cooling and computing power allow for more sophisticated programs. Things like chappie are way off but terrible things still happen anyway.

         VPOTUS dick head cheney had his way and casually slaughtered a million Iraqi, 10,000 his own troops. Just casually sending a 20/40 ton MOAB over 10,000ks. Just casual as fck ya know. Its just depends what kind of democracy people want to live in, a democratic one or the one we have now.

   • The article ignores supply of raw materials needed to extend out material lifestyle to include an infrastructure of robots and a giant supporting network of manufacturing them and maintaining that whole kaboodle.

     Technology has such an overhead that expansion to run all things using robotics is a dream which can be manipulated to setup smoke screens of what lies ahead.

     The same old Non Renewable Natural Resources limit will exist no matter what dreams are laid out to frighten us into accepting less while the few harvest more.

     All energy harvesting requires use of non Renewable natural Resources to a lesser or larger extent. As shortages will happen when the easy /cheap harvesting of any particular NNR is past then the viability of relying on that NNRs becomes degraded. In other words we have less to play with. The effect of substitution is that it create a larger need to use a less effective material and also increases the rate at which that NNR is depleted….. and so on.
     Systems start to collapse locally at first then globally.

     The predicted availability of any NNR therefore is not a reliable guide to planning its use.

     We don’t plan anyway but just consume.

     In less than 10 years the effects of the above chain of NNR depletion will be much more prominent and affect our use of NNRs.

     Since the NNR store existing in 1800 has been steadily depleted and now we have about one third of that left. But we are using them up faster than ever.

     Already our rate of increasing industrialisation has slowed and soon growth will stop and decline will set in rapidly.

     Robots will not stop that but the use of robots will bring it on sooner.

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