[Cog]

I think Pstarr, if I understand him correctly, believes that peak oil will make automation irrelevant, as we will ALL go to a lower energy level where robots and automation are not a factor. Humans will have to do all the grunt work since we have no energy to power the machines.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'I') Starting very early in the 1970's government policy switched to 'Progress' farming mono crops hedgerow to boundary line with super specialized tools and equipment based on each type of crop. If you consider it Progress to create massive fields of monocrops that are totally dependent on fossil fuel inputs of fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides based on petroleum then sure, that is progress. However that completely ignores the vulnerability of monocrop culture growing patterns. If any crop disease comes along that favors one of those monocrops, like say Soybeans, then those millions of acres of soybeans growing border to border create a perfect incubator for that new blight to spread in an unstoppable fashion. Even worse, because we have now so specialized agriculture those farmers have to grow soybeans because they do not have the equipment to plant or harvest alternatives. A
So I repeat, what is your definition of progress? To specialize ourselves to the point of removing all flexibility and all capacity to rapidly adapt to existential change?

[vtsnowedin]

This is my first year with a truck with a backup camera. I have a couple of inches of fresh snow on the ground today and apparently the camera expects the road to be dark and sounds the alarm buzzer from the snow sitting on the trailer hitch. Of course it is a one lens camera and has no binocular vision so improvements could be forthcoming. Wasn't a self driving car that crashed blamed on the cars not seeing a white truck in the lane beside it? Seems I have the opposite problem.

[KaiserJeep]

Tanada, I am a Humanist and my definition of progress is very simple. Progress is what produces the most good for the most people. Digital electronics, computers, and A.I. software are progress because they enable us to do more for more people using fewer resources. That is the essence of Engineering.

Ibon, I have never claimed that "any form of self regulation will result in millions or billions dying". That is a spin on my actual position which is that when fossil fuel use is curtailed, either by resource constraints or by climate policy, literally billions of humans will starve. In fact I practice self regulation and resource conservation all the time, preach it to friends and family, and probably make myself tiresome when I do so - I'm trying to work on that.

This thread is wandering pretty far and - pardon me if I'm wrong - but none of you has displayed herein an actual knowledge of the video Obsolete. So I'll make a third and final appeal, this time to your intellectual vanities. The main content of the above video is 20-25 minutes of a Kinescope recording of an interview with Dystopian author Aldous Huxley which was made by the BBC and subsequently was apparently lost for six decades. It was made just after publication of his novel Island(1962), although the interview actually discusses more from his first novel Brave New World (1932), which has in common many themes from Island.

In the late 1950's and early 1960's, video tape recorders did not yet exist. Live TV was broadcast from a camera the size of a washing machine, stuffed with vacuum tubes, and a B&W 16mm film camera was then aimed at a B&W TV studio monitor and one frame of film was exposed for every video frame, in this case 25 frames-per-second for the BBC, and 30 frames-per-second for the NTSC analog video in the USA. You see Kinescope recordings of early TV performances frequently and will recognize the look.

The video Obsolete interweaves clips of Huxley discussing the themes of his novels, and then the producer Aaron Dykes narrates and relates the material to our present reality. I find that I lied before, the video is actually only 49 minutes, not the 55 I stated before.

You need to see this, whether familiar with Huxley's work or not. He was one of the great 20th century minds.

[Subjectivist]

I watched it before I made my earlier comment and find it kind of insulting you assumed otherwise.

[KaiserJeep]

Sorry, I thought you were going off topic like some others. You and Tanada both watched it, I believe.

Well, bottom line is that we have even more motive to be self-sufficient. Those who prefer to wait for the "government" to save them, those who insist on living in cities, will all die.

The idea of a UBI (Universal Basic Income) is very popular here in Kalifornia. There is even discussion as to what to do when you are a substance abuser, who can't be trusted not to drink or smoke your UBI, while starving or patronizing soup kitchens. No problem, you insert your EPB (Electronic Paid Benefit)(already exists and has replaced food stamps) card and put your thumb on the fingerprint scanner. The machine will dispense a daily ration of "people kibble", guaranteed to keep a human healthy and fed for a day. Or you might get lucky enough to actually have a source of income to combine with your UBI, for buying real food.

Meanwhile the corporate farms fight over the contracts for the grains, meat by-products, and vitamins/minerals in the kibble itself. The elites laugh as they watch us eat kibble, while enjoying their own diets, as they are the only ones with real food all the time.

If the surplus population gets too large for the kibble contract, the answer is a kind of reverse lottery. Individual pellets of kibble get a hard to detect substance that mimics a heart attack, randomly added in individual kibble pellets in the bulk storage. The poor man/woman/child must have eaten too many high cholesterol foods before beginning the UBI and the all-kibble diet. Alternatively, we could add some Soylent Green protein to kibble. Whole government careers could be made from "administering" to the populace on UBI. Call it the Total Welfare State.

Interesting topic. If in doubt of such a grim future, remember the alternative, which is to die.

[Tanada]

I was about to yell at you because i did watch the video and I thought that was clear from the references I made too it. The problem with the UBI is twofold. First, like the mice and rats having basic needs met is not enough to have a fulfilled life, and unfulfilled people tend to become restive and violent. There have been studies done decades ago of senile dementia, which comes in many flavors. Most people who returned 50 years ago rapidly succumbed to Senile Dementia and went off into an internal fantasy world pretty much daydreaming about life before retirement because that was when they felt useful. There was a study done IIRC in the 1970's in Framingham Massachusetts. they took 50 old folks in the nursing home who exhibited 'senile dementia' as it was understood at that time and asked them to do trivial tasks 'as a favor to the staff'. About half of the patients in the study responded very positively and resumed behaving like regular freshly retired elderly folks because they were being asked to do things that were within their capabilities and appreciation was shown for their doing so. IOW by giving them something that made them feel useful again the staff caused them to return to existence in the real world instead of spending all their time in deep reminiscence about their life earlier on, when they had felt useful.

You say you are a Humanist and want the best thing for the greatest number of people. Taking away that feeling of being useful is the greatest evil you could do to that three quarters of the population you picture being automated out of a job. You take away the feeling of being useful and you take away the reason to behave in the social structure we call civilization. Rats and mice do not reason on more than the bare instinct level, but even they lost their social structure when provided all their basic needs without effort.

All of mammal evolution is about being the most successful competitor to prove your genetic worth to potential mates. If you do not have to put forth any effort to achieve your basic needs then how do you show off for potential mates to demonstrate you are a superior or even adequate specimen worthy of their attention? Well for most males the only path left open is to dominate other males and that leads inevitably to violence as the other males are just as motivated genetically to be the Social Victors.

The second problem with UBI is pretty simple. Say you are an employer who has 10 workers in your business who you pay as little as you can get away with in the 'classic capitalist' fashion. Say you are paying $15/h to your manager and right down the levels to minimum wage for the lowest five employees. Now suppose UBI gets passed and suddenly every person including yourself gets your monthly direct deposit from Uncle Sugar. Hey wait you think, all my employees are having their basic needs met by the UBI payment, so any money they get from you is just spending money on top of their needs. You decide to reduce the wages of all your employees to the federal or state minimum wage whichever prevails in your area. Some of your higher paid employees quit in anger or disgust but you easily replace them because only 25 percent of the population can even dream of getting a job, and any job with some self respect is better than no job and feeling useless.

On paper your UBI from the government theory sounds compassionate, but ultimately it just goes to further depress the wages of those 25 percent who can even get a job in your automated Utopian dream. A real Humanist would at least acknowledge that UBI only makes matters worse, just like automation for the sake of automation. When you are destroying human self respect your automation utopia comes at far too high a price and is no Utopia at all, it is an evil Dystopia where excess humans are nothing but faceless objects with no purpose. dehumanization is the first step in extermination, asks the Romanii and Jews and Slavs who survived the German control of their areas of Europe. Ask the Ukrainians that Stalin ordered starved to death because they resisted collectivization of the farmland of the rich Ukrainian plains. Ask the soldiers of Mao Tse Dong's Long March who went into battle with one rifle for every four soldiers charging Japanese machine guns in human wave attacks, or the tens of thousands of teen age Iranian boys who were marched in front of the trained Army forces during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's to set off the mines in the defense perimeters so that the trained soldier behind them could make it close enough to the Iraqi's to kill them without suffering massive casualties during the advances.

All of those humans had their humanity stripped from them so that the leadership of their areas could do anything to them from wanton slaughter to literally making them cannon fodder to wear down an actual enemy. Your vision of an automated world strips 75 percent of humanity down to that level, just like the Germans and Russians and Chinese and Iranians did before you. The end point of that path is clear, if they are not even human then it doesn't mater what you do to them, so you do whatever you want.

That is the ultimate evil IMO.

[KaiserJeep]

I completely agree. I am in fact no advocate of UBI and no true Humanist could be. That does not however preclude this nightmare from happening, when only a quarter of the people have jobs and incomes beyond the minimum.

The basic problem remains. We are oversupplied with human labor and people. We are undersupplied with energy, clean water, temperature conditioned living spaces, healthy and stimulating food, and virtually everything that makes life rewarding and worthwhile.

Perhaps the answer need not be so complex. Perhaps we include the requisite hormones in the kibble, that preclude reproduction. You want to have children, you must earn enough to purchase healthy natural food long enough to reverse the involuntary birth control.

That and a wall on the Southern border of the USA plus a few details equals a population management scheme. After all, carbon dioxide emissions are just a symptom of overpopulation. There would be multiple schemes to make this country healthy, clean, beautiful, and comfortable if we could simply manage our numbers to a sustainable population level.

Yet the whole idea of involuntary control by the government over a person's reproduction simply creeps me out. Not that that matters, we are not the "elites" talked about in the video. Yet they exist and they are making plans that we are simply not aware of.

PS: The people kibble, the involuntary birth control, the pervasive/intrusive government, and the concept of total welfare are the stuff of recent Dystopian SF. The problem is that people are taking these concepts and making serious proposals out of them. We have a Constitution, but they don't have much use for it, because they believe that our many freedoms caused the problems we have. Heinlein among others wrote about these concepts and how the coin always has two sides. The economic doldrums following Peak Oil are bound to produce a lot of screwy proposals for solutions. The facts that we have these problems and how serious they are remain.

[careinke]

I watched the show, and though I happen to agree with a lot of it, it is clearly a warning against Agenda 21, and the evil George Soros who openly spends his millions to control society. The Koch brothers have nothing on him.

I think most of the commentators on this thread are underestimating the impact of automation. Yes we will replace cashiers, waitresses, insurance agents, drivers, etc... But also, we will or already have replaced Medical Diagnostics, Anesthesiologists, Lawyers, tax preparers, accountants, engineers, pilots, monoculture agriculture, and bankers among others.

Let's face it, employees are generally a pain in the ass. Robots/AI attentions do not wander, they don't call in sick, they don't steal, you don't have to pay them or the governments for the privileged of having a no longer needed germ filled prole doing the job.... Basically most of us become obsolete with little chance of survival without the public dole. The problem is how do we pay for it.

My plan is to work towards an economic global collapse as our last chance to save humanity and the environment. Without using force of course.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '&')quot;improvements could be forthcoming" Like rear-view mirrors? I know I know, there might be a little kid or dead animal below the bumper where you can't see it.

I remember from drivers ed a billion years ago (who takes drivers ed anymore. really) you were supposed to check behind your car, and under all the wheels before you drive away. Not kidding We thought it was kind of like overcompensating or something a worry-wart would do. Now we have robots to worry for us.

[KaiserJeep]

Folks, I did not claim that this was a happy video full of happy thoughts. It is nightmarish.

I am presently making plans to go visit the twin grandkids. They are 17 months old and walking, and collectively have about a 6-word vocabulary, consisting of "Momma", "Da-Da", and their favorite foods "Nanna", "Cookie", etc.

They are just as obsolete as their Grandpa, and it is incredibly disturbing to me that somewhere someone is plotting (over the long term at least) to eliminate them from the face of the Earth. Or that these bright children are considered a liability needing to be efficiently disposed of.

But I do not doubt that there are cold minds out there who are planning this with ruthless efficiency and a total disregard for normal human emotion. You are also obsolete if you are not among the 0.01% with all the wealth, because THEY don't need YOU for anything, with human labor rapidly and convincingly going obsolete.

I have said before, we are a society evolving beyond the egalitarian democracy we all know, into a society where there are Haves, and Have-nots, and those that are the Toadies of the Haves. That this society represents a resurgence of a kind of feudalism, because machines are better Toadies than are people is a new thought for me. But it does make a sick kind of sense.

Don't come to me with silly talk of an armed revolution, or a new-found use for the guillotine. After two generations of grinding poverty, very few will have small arms, transportation, a sailboat, a comfortable conditioned place to live, and even an education to understand what is happening in the world. The family property will have gone to the tax man after the grim decision to eat rather than pay taxes. All will have been subsumed in the desperate search for food and the other real necessities. The two occupations that remain after this comes about are "Toady" and "Vermin".

Plans are being made to deal with the Vermin. The world will again have death camps in the Nazi pattern. Being Jewish won't be an issue, only being poor and useless to the elites of society, not even good enough to be a Toady.

It's not like your thoughts on this topic matter to them. It's not like your Grandkids, or their kids, will be anything like yourself after 2-3 generations where nobody has any income above the government dole. They will be far more manageable and less of a thorn in the side of the elites than would be you, representing as you do people with actual memories of a lifestyle called Middle Class.

[evilgenius]

The answer is simple, create a class of stock that derives its income from the pool of monies available for the bonuses, or even payment, of management. That ought to be about as much as the 99% own of corporations now anyway. Then let the owners of that stock vote as to how much they want to keep versus pay management in bonus, or regular, pay. It would have to be hashed out, but the middle class could pretty much make a living in the new economy off of their share of corporate ownership in that way. Later, when automation also takes over all management positions the share would still be there, it just wouldn't have the inverse relationship with management to keep it in check. What you need is a good enough disincentive for your run of the mill capitalist to own that kind of stock, and very good reasons for what we call middle class people today to do so. Something like a low return, but a steady return might be enough.

[Newfie]

I'm retired, which means I'm obsolete I guess.

Glad to see this thread going so well. I had tried to have a similar discussion some years ago around Bertrand Russels essay "In Praise of Idolness."

This is a quick reply because I'm off to have snacks and drinks with about 100 similar obsolete folks, all sailors, in the week long Thankshiving sailors celebration here in St Marys, GA. Somehow we have found a way to have meaningful fun lives in our useless dotage.

But fear not! This obsolescence problem is only temporary. Eventually there will be a massive die off and tech collapse and all will return to manual labor for our gruel.

[C8]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', '
')
All of mammal evolution is about being the most successful competitor to prove your genetic worth to potential mates. If you do not have to put forth any effort to achieve your basic needs then how do you show off for potential mates to demonstrate you are a superior or even adequate specimen worthy of their attention? Well for most males the only path left open is to dominate other males and that leads inevitably to violence as the other males are just as motivated genetically to be the Social Victors.

.

[KaiserJeep]

C8, I'm afraid not. Those jobs are gone for good, just as the donkeys and men who were water carriers in Rome were never employed again after they built the aqueducts.

Nor do I believe that civilization is collapsing. The elites will still have their High Technology lifestyle, and will still be texting those 140 character snippets to one another on cell phones. Whatever production capacity remains will be adequate for the elite 0.01% who still own '
"stuff". The rest of us will spend 90% of our time thinking about our next meal, and our ambitions will be to have more food.

The aspiration of the rest of us in the Vermin class will be to rise to Toady status. Perhaps to be trusted to wear the livery of one of the Elites and to sit calmly behind the controls of the automated car, the nominal driver. Payment to be dispensed and consumed daily, in the form of actual food that was grown in the ground, so that we might feel superior to those that eat kibble.

One of the points made in the video Obsolete is that today as our jobs flee over our countries borders, those who lead are borrowing money, spending it, and adding it to the GNP, as if it were real products or real services. Meanwhile we have the lowest job participation rate in 62 years.

In fact, most of the things said in Obsolete are not prophesies, they are observations of the current state of affairs, and we are in fact, already inhabiting a sad state of Middle Class obsolescence.

I still say, for those of you who have not yet watched this video, you should.

Edit: As I perused the entire thread again, it struck me that many forum members apparently believe that we exist within an economic system which was designed and is being steered and administered by TPTB. In fact, I do not believe that this is so or has ever been so. George Soros and the Koch Brothers are no more in charge than are you or me. Economics is not a science, it is a collection of labels and descriptive theories that attempt to explain a "system" that is not in fact a system. The efforts of all of you to describe solutions and devise answers are all ultimately in vain, chaos theory alone rules economics - and the way things are is the sum of the collective actions of 7.4 billion people, each and every one of which has unique wants and desires.