And we see no limit to the number of robots being purchased. We see the opposite: robots standing around, often idle, because there aren't enough human customers to take up the produced goods and services.
Idle robots are everywhere, already. Most robots are idle, most of the time. The capital gets trapped in the robots and the humans just sit around and get fat or hang out at the gym all day.
Well, think about it. How many people have:
an electric dishwasher
an automatic lawn-mower
an automatic vacuum cleaner
a self-driving car
home automation
garage door openers
Thermomix
etc. etc. etc.
How many people eat prepared foods, frozen pizza, etc. Did they buy it at the self-checkout? And did machines build the food, in a big factory that only have a few industrial mechanics standing around?
Robots harvested, washed, cut, packaged, and sorted the veggies on the pizza. The dough came out of the dough machine. It was all put together and packaged by another robot, which sent the box on the rollbahn to the trucks, where a different robot loads them on the trucks. And the trucks largely drive themselves, now. At the other end... it's everything, everywhere.
Productivity gains, substituting labour with capital, largely borrowed and uncertain in its prospects.
Irrelevant to the fact that they can continue this, indefinitely, because the machine will continue to rise in productivity and efficiency, and human productivity and demographics will decline in the interim period, so that they can't simply go back to having humans do it.
The machines are increasingly competing against other machines, rather than against humans. The most-efficient machines will monopolize a market, the others will give up, and then the winning machines can earn a profit.
People think Bitcoin fixes this, but it doesn't. Bitcoin just keeps humans treading water a little bit longer.
What cannot continue forever, won't.
We are gaining efficiency (sometimes), at the cost of increased minimum scale of production, and complexity. Both of which increase fragility, in Taleb's sense of the word.
At scale, my country can no longer fuel itself, nor fertilise crops, nor make semiconductors.
One day we will offend China enough to trigger sanctions, and that day will come. I worry about that day, not robot utopia...
China can't afford sanctions. They are an export economy and their own population is dying out. They have to export Even More Even Harder, or they collapse.
That's the minimum scale of production I was talking about.
Human leaders are social primates, just more coked-up and psychopathic than most.
When growth slows and their underling's social climbs stall, they will play chicken with the War Train to bluff a larger share of the loot.
I think this is well underway already...
I agree that it can't go on forever, we are just disagreeing about whether humans or machines are the last ones standing. Humans can't seem to find a reason for their own existence, anymore, so they're capitulating.
Anomie and ennui are here, but they're far from evenly distributed.
Other than that, 100% agree.
machines don't have a reason without humans so there's also that
biggest fallacy of the singularity narrative is that robots can be customers, i can trace that error of logic through dozens of things... like smart contracts, one of the ideas behind that had to do with robots buying stuff from robots
absolutely none of that has ever happened or will happen. the robot is just here to make the human more productive. the end.
I have low-end versions of some of those. They require quite a bit of my attention and skills, otherwise they soon become unservicable.
I am baffled by how many GenZ men and women do not know how to clean a vacuum cleaner's filter, and how many won't even if shown. (Not just GenZ, my GenY wife too on this specific task).
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a cruel mistress. Fully-Automated Luxury Communism is not on the cards, for better or worse.
Billionaires can have Fully-Automated Potemkin Villages if they wish, but only with human staff playing at being the "Resident Evil maid" out of the master's sight.
Future vacuum cleaners won't have a filter to clean. Modern fire alarms don't have batteries. You won't need to know how to change a light bulb because there will be no lightbulbs.
Everything is going to end up completely over-mechanized and over-robotized, but once people have gotten used to that, they never go back. The person who never learned to chop veggies and cook soup, won't retire at 65 and learn to chop veggies and cook soup. His brain will have completely atrophied, by then. He will be living off of factory-made pudding.
That's why people like me look smarter and smarter and have a higher and higher productivity advantage: we learned to do everything manually, so we get how things work, and we don't have to waste money on unnecessary machines, and we are better about using the machines available and maximizing their capacity. We didn't change; everyone else did.
Those people already exist - they spend far more money than they need to on frequently replacing their fragile machines, they suffer from obesity and malnutrition, and they're boring to be around.
Hard disagree on automation replacing filters and light bulbs, those are exactly the jobs too marginal to be worth automating. So far we're mostly just making replacement more expensive in resources but cheaper and simpler in labour training.
💖 on your last paragraph. When my machines break, I love taking them apart and making them dumber, more reliable and more repairable. They look like Dr Frankenstein's Adam, of course :D
We already have filter-free vacuum cleaners and LEDs are not light bulbs. I'm just saying that everything will eventually be like that.
There are two kinds of filter-frees IMHO - the kind that require paper bags, and the kind that blow dust back out everywhere. A cyclone can only do so much. The human avoids doing one job only because the machine avoids doing another.
LEDs are modules, not simple bulbs, and they suffer failures too, admittedly not at the same frequency. They still need replacing and we not automating that...
I mean, think about the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the vacuum cleaner. Did they bring significant human productivity gains?
Nope. We just bought more dishes, more clothes, and bigger houses. And then we went to work to buy more highly-automated versions of them, and to purchase even more dishes, clothes, and house. The same type of work is being done, in the amount necessary for one household (and there are fewer people and more things and floor space in the household). Is the shifted labor more productive? Probably not, as it took women out of the home and collapsed the birth rate, and human production is the most-useful production.
I think they did bring productivity gains.
Many countries in Asia, even the middleclasses don't own washing machines because domestic staff are so cheap. Such a waste of human potential.
I would argue that we did become more productive and affluent, but social status is relative and that's what people thought they were buying and were thus disappointed.
That is getting worse, not better, and I don't have a solution. Culture is upstream of both politics and economics...
We simply have more and niftier versions of each thing, per person. This is greater affluence, but largely through redundancy. There used to be a house phone, a house TV, a house dishwasher, etc. and everyone shared it. Those things brought productivity gains. But then they incentivized people to purchase one of each and then to move to separate houses, and the gains reversed.
Why does my family have savings, unlike most Germans? None of us ever divorced and the kids stay at home until they are married, and we share cars and kitchens and bathrooms, and there is only one TV and one grill and one big freezer. We just buy fewer things because we share things, and save the difference, because employers pay us the wages that people who need to Buy All The Things require to subsist, but we don't require those things.
Your family has a dissident culture, and dissident attitudes to social status.
Don't change! 💖
Also, the mechanization took away specialization. There used to be one woman washing the dishes for 6 people, or so. She eventually got highly efficient at it. Now, there are 7 people, all in a different home, washing their own dishes.
And all of them need a dishwasher and a sink and dishes. So, you need 7 dishwashers and 7 sinks and 7 sets of dishes and 7 humans. Where you used to need 1 of each. So, the economic growth came from selling all of that excess stuff. But now, those things exist and the number of humans are declining. The factories keep pumping out the dishwashers, and they just sit around in the warehouse and eventually get written-off and crushed... and turned into more dishwashers. LOL
All true re specialisation.
But the global population is still rising, its just that purchasing power is less and less evenly distributed, because governments are redistributing more and more and distorting markets to breaking point.
Automation is neither the problem nor the solution...
Yes, but it's rising in an age where mechanization is on steroids. You can watch the Chinese producers struggle with their highly-efficient factories, to produce smaller numbers of products. It isn't possible. They have to flood the market with produce and destroy their own price point, or just throw half of the production into the furnace.
Same with German cars. Producing all of these cars for fewer and fewer drivers because the world population is still rising, but fewer of them are young or have families. Even building smaller cars won't solve the problem of the lack of drivers. So, it's less about the size of the population and more about the age-distribution through the populace. That's why the growth will suddenly reverse, when the oldest generation dies off en mass.
Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.
It didn’t work.
“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.
“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,”
Ted Gioia > https://open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia/p/we-really-are-entering-a-new-age
Yes, but only for a time (next two decades, is my guess). With the boomers continuing to die out, automation settling in, and the purchasing power of fiat currencies declining 2-3% on an annual basis, future generations won't be able to afford to raise a kid or support a family; hell, more and more people aren't even able to make rent or mortgage payments.
Also, it isn't just about liquidity redistribution. Newly printed money (or digital monetary issuance) misallocated into unproductive goods and services and nations' black budgets have severely crippled our ability to determine accurate foreign exchange rates. In short, it's all bullshit. They feed us only half the info, in hopes that we'll turn a blind eye to everything going on behind the curtain.
