
The Robot economy and the future of work - syck
https://www.academia.edu/31709922/The_Robot_economy_and_the_future_of_work
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erokar
The "robot economy" has certainly failed so far. People are working more than
ever and it's a travesty.

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simonh
The problem is that we all need a place to live, want it to be nice and there
is a limited supply of real estate. In the UK anyway, a large amount of our
free income is devoted to bidding as much as we can afford for nice houses.
Since everyone is bidding For the same pool of housing, we end up working as
long as we can to out compete each other. We’re doing it to ourselves.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
We have done it to ourselves. Women enter the workplace, up go house prices.
Financial deregulation, up go house prices. Low interest rates, up go house
prices. Restrictive planning regulations, up go house prices. QE, up go house
prices. Help to buy, up go house prices.

It seems we are addicted to it.

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jroro93jdj
Profits are up!

Inequality is up!

I mean that those two sentences, repeated over and over in the news weekly,
don’t make the masses stop and think is a sign that the media machine is doing
its job.

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whatshisface
About 50% of the equities market is owned by households and mutual funds.

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zackkatz
This article is from 2105. The title should be updated to reflect that.

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downrightmike
We should listen to the future

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simonebrunozzi
Note that the author is an Italian scientist/researcher that has been working
as Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona.
[0]

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Bria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Bria)

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mark_l_watson
I am pessimistic but still a little hopeful that we will develop good policy
for moving into the future. Getting some form of fare distribution of the
technology/ productivity boon will be difficult. I like the article’s mention
of Soshana Zuboff’s “Surveillance Capitalism” which I recommend but if you are
short of reading time you can get her message in digest form on YouTube.

Even though the documentary “Living in the Future’s Past” is about the
environment, it hits great points on how our society is in need of a reset,
that we need to all decide what we can do to help society and have a net
positive effect on the world. Jeff Bridges and his friends did a fantastic job
producing this documentary, I strongly recommend it.

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buboard
[2015]

(and why is this a pdf? it's not even published

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negamax
Academia.edu wants to see and download your contacts. Yeah sure!

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azaras
Socialism is the only answer to the future of work if we want that a majority
of people have a good life.

~~~
mac_was
That is funny looking at history where it actually never worked, you can have
starving people in North Korea vs China which is a not socilism anymore from
market perspective... I come from a post-socialist country, and when growing
up in the 90s we and 90% of the society was so poor after 50 years of
socialism that my parents could not afford a pair of Nike or Adidas. What me
and most mates were wearing was Nice and Adidos... as a pair of oroginal Nike
was like 1/3 of my mum or dad salary. So I’ll never say yes to any socialist
ideas! As these ruined several countries: Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela,
Russia, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland and at least a dozen of other countries
from the other side of the Iron courtain.

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harimau777
I think that the parent poster was most likely referring to democratic
socialism as practiced in much of the EU and Nordic countries as opposed to
totalitarian communism or Stalinism as practiced in the countries that you
listed.

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ZhuanXia
The Nordic countries are not socialist. They have not seized the means of
production and handed it to a poorly-incentivized bureaucracy that claims to
speak for the public.

If you have private ownership of production you are still capitalist. All the
Nordic countries do this. They are not so much socialists as welfare states.
If we must have a welfare state, I would much prefer the "citizens as
shareholders of the country" model with a basic income, rather than the
overweening paternalism of current welfare states.

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agumonkey
I have no conclusion on this topic but I think it's a species wide existential
question.

There was a time when you barely had enough time or energy to ensure survival.
Doing less was an obvious optimization. But now I think we're pushing the
system on the opposite limits. Doing nothing is also detrimental.

~~~
chr1
Losing physical work won't be detrimental, it's something no one likes and no
one is particularly good at, losing creative work would be but it doesn't look
like we are particularly close to creating ai, and when we create it we'll
find some way to stay at the center of it by either creating devices that
augment our brains, changing our brains to be as good as the ai, or simply
uploading into computer and becoming part of ai.

In any case there is so much work in science, that we should be happy for
every human that is freed from physical work.

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winchling
Physical work is creative. Wielding the body takes intelligence and is
improved incrementally by trial and error. People can and do take pleasure in
it. Robots are merely an extension and enhancement of the bodies of their
operators. (So the perennial fear of robots 'taking over' amounts to saying
that bodies will somehow take over.)

It's not about being free from physical work, it's about choosing what
problems to work on -- before other problems choose you! In most cases people
who work a job are having their problems chosen for them. So they are still,
in this sense, slaves.

And this is itself a problem. We haven't found the solution yet. But we may...

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agumonkey
Using your body and mind is maybe half of life. The problem is the context in
which you do so. A balance between selfish~ pleasure, altruistic pleasure
(social role) is necessary. When so I'm sure most people are highly happy.

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szczepano
Yet another stupid article as many not talking about progress and future but
only about money, money, money. Those kind of people were laughing about cars
being slower than horses.

Automatisation should be priority of everybody unless people want keep being
slaves and keep shitty jobs that they don't like, keep living poor and hungry.

Job is demand - if demand for something will be satisfied that doesn't mean
everyone will take it and don't want anything else.

The best basic example I know is bread. Someone want white bread, someone dark
bread other ones want sweet bread.

I have a small experiment for You reading this shitty comment, try to find
exact number of how many types of bread people are buying and making around
the world right now. Can you do that because I can't (Why ? One word -
entropy).

We are people for god sake not animals so maybe it's time to start behave like
one, don't you think ?

