75% automated . . .

How would Labor be worse off through recourse to unemployment compensation simply for being unemployed on an at-will basis, at the rock bottom cost of a form of minimum wage.

Potential labor could stay in school as long as they want in order to command a prevailing, market based wage.

 

I'm pretty sure I'm not this:

I do speak French and sometimes it messes up my English, but not in this case. "Bourgeois state" is a standard Marxist term.

 

Yes, I bought it for myself. But you're missing the point. At some point automation is going to make human labor obsolete. It's not a question of if, just when. When that happens we're going to have to figure out how to handle it.

 

What makes you think it hasn't already had a major impact? You either embrace technology, or you get replaced by technology.

That's not some boogie man of the future, but rather a reality of today, and people either figure out how to deal with that reality, or they end up learning the joys of urban camping. This has nothing to do with "we're going to have to figure out", but rather individuals.

How are you going to handle it?

 

Why wouldn't consumers exist? The only disconnect will be between the consumers whose labor is no longer needed and the artificial meat. This is where Republicanism fails. We are seeing it already.

 

Even if you were right, it wouldn't magically happen overnight. It would be a gradual shift.

 

There will be fewer and fewer jobs every day as a percent of population. It's already here.

 

You're not understanding the problem of your worldview. The robot makes meat, but why? Who owns the robots? The government? If a private citizen owned the meat robots, then what incentive does he have to keep them in operation? If money is the incentive, then what good is that if nobody uses money? And if people do use money, then money is still important in that society, which means people will need jobs. It's a paradox.

 

Actually, if you took my story as some sort of a "progressive utopia" idea, you should try reading before getting too involved in writing.

 

I think it is going to go much, much further than it is today. I'm a tech supporter, too, and I'm hard pressed to think of a single thing where it isn't making inroads.

 

That is an interesting concept. Enter the current state of affairs into a computer and let the computer come up with a right action, leaving human emotions out of the decision making process. Wonder if it would work? No reason to think it wouldn't. A computer would have access to all data not just the data circulated by one party or another. It could take into account a bajillion more things than a lawmaker or even president could. We could have a computer for president. No racism, no partisanship, no animosity, no ego--just the facts please.

 

Only to the low-life losers who are capable of working and scam a living off the rest of us, yes.

 

Ya, I hate to (*)(*)(*)(*) on your little scifi circle jerk, but there's no way that your little socialist robotic utopia will ever support the population we have today, or what population will be in a hundred years.

 

Point is, the 'gradual' shift has already begun. But a change in Republican political thinking has NOT begun. The jobs are going to 'gradually' get more menial and scarce and the Republican answer is still "get a job".

 

Hm. Last time I checked, we don't live in a science fiction novel. So it would seem that the Republicans are basing their advice in reality.

 

Let's be real - this is just high scifi fantasy. There will always be jobs because there will always be a mutually beneficial use to human labor, and humans prefer contact with other humans - many people still miss having a "milk man". The only thing that would ever get rid of that many jobs is a higher minimum wage.

But I figure that, if we were to take this never-gonna-happen-scifi-fantasy-world of yours, then the world will become far more socialist. Remember how political views became distorted when slavery was involved, and people lived off the labor of others? Something much the same would happen with such an automated world - you might see the "free-soil" fight renew, but many people (in this comparison case, the Southerners) would be ecstatic. The main difference is they would probably seek to in some significant way socialize the gains, if not the losses, so that everyone gets a cut and then poof - we'd have a Finland-style welfare system where everyone just gets a check, not services or goods.

 

That was meant to be a joke . . . however, our present government does supply a LOT of material for stand-up comics, also.

 

And the jobs that require actual labor, will be reduced in number, and so, more people competing for fewer and fewer jobs. It's 21s century neo feudalism, except the working people faired better than under 21st century neo feudalism. We are structurally being driven into a nation with a tiny upper class, a sliver of a middle class, and a huge underclass. But from the bird's eye view, it looks more like a two class system, given that the middle class is even now, exclusive.

Of course the structure that is creating this, inevitably, being structured to send the greatest amount of income to the top, is the problem. We will reach a point where we will have to make a final decision on whether we structure an economy to provide for the majority of people, or if we keep on with the current model that is a rush to the bottom, and structured to yield this. Instead of globalization, we will have to be localized, so that the economic activity of buying and selling, employs our own people, in making what is bought and sold. It's the only model that has proved to employ the max number of your own people. And the issue we have, currently, are living wage jobs.

 

Your rigid political views stifle and compromise your imagination. Even PRESENT reality is subject to the differences of individual perceptions.

 

Well, I do agree that something is going to have to happen in terms of how wealth is distributed.

Between now and then, it's going to be important for our kids and their kids to be well educated, so that they can find and create new jobs.

We had this happen when we moved from agriculture to manufacturing. Our solution then was education. We noticed that our manufacturing economy required more education. So, we made the explicit decision to move from 8th grade being free and mandatory to having high school be free and mandatory (yes, there are some exceptions, but that's not the issue, I think).

Today, we're finding that the high school we are providing is not enough.

If we fail to do anything about that, we're going to have very serious problems related to a small wealthy class supporting an ever increasing population of those who can not compete.

Not only will that be bad here, but it will be bad for all, as nations (such as Germany) are recognizing the importance of education.

Main point:
We are 5% of the world population. The EU is 50% larger than the USA. China 4X our population. Etc. We've managed to stay ahead so far, but we are NOT going to compete in terms of our wealth, our influence, our standard of living, without using every brain cell we have.

 

I think I would vote for a computer this election if one was running; and that isn't a joke.

 

Wealth distribution should be simple. Pay your workers enough so they can live and work properly.

We do not need to compete with other nations on anything other than sports that is. We do need better education but more importantly education towards the occupations that society requires. What occupation is lacking workers? Then motivate students to learn those occupations in school and have them ready and able to work after school.

 

Our economic competitiveness is why we have the standard of living, the political influence, the military that we have. Saying we don't need that is just plain preposterous.

Training people to be "workers" (regardless of the definition of that) tends to fail, because our job market is changing far faster than that allows for. Look at Flint and Detroit. They had plenty of workers, but those workers were simply not prepared to take part in our changing economy. Simply training the next generation to do some kind of work will create the same kind of problem of having workers ready to do one kind of work.

We need our next generations educated such that they can be ready for a rapidly changing job market - a job market that is going to require greater education in the first place PLUS where every job must be viewed as highly likely to die.

We can't be prepared for what's coming by implementing a "train people for an occupation" mentality.

 

Unemployment compensation simply for being unemployed in our at-will employment States should solve for increasing automation.