The Economic Order Of Post-Modernity?

[Eric the Green]

(10-23-2019, 10:01 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(10-23-2019, 01:07 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-22-2019, 03:25 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(10-22-2019, 10:50 AM)Marypoza Wrote: -- that's why l like Yang's idea of a basic monthly income.  to help supplement crappy low rent jobs. what's Yang's score anyhow?

Yang is advocating for policies at least a decade in the future, because the universal income meme has no play right now … except among people like us. If, as I suspect, job destruction outpaces job creation over a long enough period to prove, to the average member of the not-well-informed, that is something drastic or starvation, then it will get pushed to the front and fast.  Killing all the truck-driving jobs may be enough, but a huge infrastructure build-out may paper over that loss for a while.  We'll have to see how it plays.  We do need the infrastructure badly.

Can we reject technologies that do more harm than good? I'm not saying that we need go the route of the Old Order Amish in rejecting technologies because those do harm to old values... 

I suppose that if we cannot ban the AK-47 and the AR-15 we cannot ban self-driving vehicles. On the other hand we are going to need truck drivers just to ensure that loads are not diverted because someone hacks the instructions to pick stuff up or drop it off at the right place. Maybe the truck driver might become a sort of security guard, the sort of person smart enough (as I assume most truck drivers are) to figure that a load headed from Philadelphia to Chicago should not be going into Kentucky... 

Reduction of time spent on the job may be a certainty with the greater efficiency of assembly lines and computers. Meetings and office politics seem to be more common in office work, and I suspect that they are largely wastes of time. I'd rather telecommute (OK, maybe it would be wise for me as a way for concealing unpleasant characteristics of my personality) and not waste time on inefficient behaviors. (It would be great to live simply in an inexpensive place in which to live rather than New York City... or perhaps choose to live in northern Michigan in the summer and Arizona in the winter.

As machine knowledge becomes more and more capable, and the algorithms that apply it become more sophisticated, the need for humans at any level will disappear. Algorithms already identify errors and optimize themselves using other algorithms designed for the purpose.  As technology improves, humans will be needed less and less, so what do we do?  Most of us are task oriented, at least to some extent.  Doing nothing seems out of the question.

At some point, this machine-growth becomes sentience, and the machines are the next iteration in evolution.  We're far from that point today, but thinking about how that will be handled is something we, as humans, need to address.  Some think we'll meld with the machines, making transhumans the ultimate solution.  None of us will ever know.

I agree withe brower on this. I would say most humans are doing "tasks" now that they don't want to do, and aren't even meant to do. There is so much for humans to do than the tasks that machines can do. The arts, exploring the frontiers of knowledge, both outer scientific and scholarly knowledge, and inner, transformative spiritual knowledge, and all the fun of sex and romance, physical fitness, playing games and sports (the latter as team and spectator sport has already replaced war in advanced countries), social activism and transforming our politics and all of our relationships....