by Sixstrings » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 20:50:49
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', 'S')o lets say, you have eliminated majority of jobs.
Who will buy produced goods?
How your customer could possibly pay?.
Bingo.
It's a catch-22.. end stage capitalism.. when capitalism becomes so efficient it destroys its own customer base and you enter into negative returns from more efficiency.
That's the problem the West has right now -- western Europeans and American workers can't compete globally. That's why we have structural unemployment now, because of a combination of offshoring, automation, and IT-related extreme efficiency.
The new age of robotics will extend this structural unemployment problem to the developing world.
Don't want to dig up the article again, but Foxcon wants to replace its Chinese workers with robots. The robot has already been designed almost ready to roll out -- has no legs, has a torso with arms hands and fingers, it's designed to be plopped right into a 3rd world factory worker's chair and use the same tools.
Maybe China will have a strong enough domestic consumer market by then. I don't know man, what happens though when robots can take the restaurant and starbucks and retail store jobs too. There just won't be any jobs for the masses of people. Television sets were once rare, for the rich, same with computers, same with cell phones. Now even third worlders have these in their home. Robots will be the same, rare and costly at first then everyone will have them.
I'm just trying to figure out what the masses of folks will do for work. We already have structural unemployment, how can we absorb a robot labor force when robots don't consume the products they produce? (same can be said for offshored workers, a Chinese making 24 cents per hour can't afford the Apple products he's building -- this amounts to parasitic and unbalanced consumer capitalism, when too many companies operate like Apple does then we enter into unsustainable negative returns.
Not that Apple gives a damn, they're now the richest corporation in history and they'll soon be worth one trillion dollars, meanwhile the only good they do for America is employing a couple thousand folks in California then they have like 30,000 retail workers making twelve bucks an hour and a million Chinese making cents on the hour -- their workers are so miserable they're committing suicide on the job, they've had to put up safety nets in case they jump from their dormitory cells)