←back to thread

209 points Luc | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.2s | source
Show context
thisisnotauser ◴[] No.43938444[source]
Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
replies(18): >>43938471 #>>43938696 #>>43938810 #>>43938820 #>>43938893 #>>43938961 #>>43939051 #>>43939130 #>>43939348 #>>43939764 #>>43939868 #>>43939876 #>>43939959 #>>43939989 #>>43940363 #>>43940683 #>>43941496 #>>43944006 #
1. cryptonector ◴[] No.43941496[source]
As long as the pace of automation does not exceed some max rate that people can't figure out what to do with the excess labor, we should be ok.

Though I suppose it's always possible that we'll reach something of a "singularity" where we enter the realm of The Phools, by Stanislaw Lem. I can't find a copy of it online, so you might just have to buy the book in which that short story appears.

Briefly and to spoil it: In the story there is a planet with human-like people called Phools and a very stratified, hyper-capitalistic society with three classes, workers, priests, and owners, and someone invents computer that fully automates all factories which then causes 100% unemployment among the workers who then start starving to death. In the story the owners and priests ask the inventor to ask the computer to come up with a solution. You can imagine what the computer came up with... At the end the traveler screams at them something like "Phools! All you had to do was redistribute your income!".

Today -and on this planet- there are certainly a few people today who speak of "useless eaters" and who would like the outcome from that short story. And I can imagine that happening almost naturally. Already fertility rates are crashing worldwide, and we're on a path towards a crashing human population worldwide, and if that happens naturally then I think it means that humans respond to price and other signals and adjust their family planning accordingly, and that would not be a bad thing. Pray though that it's not like in The Phools where the population crashed in a much more dramatic and speedy way, and not at all naturally.