#1
robots will take more and more menial labor jobs (starting with the destruction of any job that primarily involves driving) and less and less people will have necessary jobs, let alone jobs at all. the birthrate will collapse and low-skilled positions will cease to exist as the population of humanity withers away.

discuss.
#2
Nice copy paste from 1955.
#3
fewer and fewer, op. really I'd welcome your proof reader's job getting given to robots
#4
the primary failing of science fiction is that it does not incorporate robot labor logically. either robots do not exist, are extremely rare, or are sentient and antagonistic. or, if they do exist, their existence is not taken to its logical conclusion. C-3PO, for example, is a masterpiece of engineering. he is sentient, perfectly understands and can communicate thousands of written and spoken languages, can at least convincingly mimick human emotional inflections, understands and quickly reacts to his surroundings, and makes rational decisions. he can move under his own power, autonomously, quietly, even over uneven terrain and long distances. he is a bit slow and clumsy, but his model is not designed to be terribly fast or graceful; other droids are quicker and more dextrous. even with all these features, though, C-3PO units are a mass-produced commodity, not considered terribly rare, valuable or important; despite being clearly functional he is almost not purchased, even at "crap we found in the desert" prices. what reason is there for menial labor to exist in such a world? everything from construction to farming to customer service to transport to war machines could be fully automated.
#5
even outside of such science-fiction trappings, we can imagine far less competent robots replacing human laborers for many tasks. people talk about how robots will never replace people because People Have the Spark of Creativity which cannot be duplicated by a mere machine, and even if you believe that this is true, it can only be true for high-level geniuses and artists. you don't need the Divine Fire to plow a rice paddy for 60 years
#6

getfiscal posted:

Nice copy paste from 1955.



we are all george jetson

#7
hmm, yes, unemployed people with a ton of time on their hands will definitely stop reproducing
#8
Your not smart
#9

TG posted:

hmm, yes, unemployed people with a ton of time on their hands will definitely stop reproducing



they will be encouraged to and later forced to as they grow ever more superfluous

#10
also, economics will take hold as standards of living increase, as they have elsewhere. children are produced by poor people as slaves. they provide a lifetime of free labor and excess money and a safety net for their parents advancing age. as the liberal-democratic welfare state comes into place, unplanned pregnancies and the need to fart out a dozen slaves to avoid starving to death at 50 both dramatically decrease. children become net financial burdens for the individual and the native birthrate collapses to barely-replacement levels, at best. this is how it is has taken place in all industrialized countries regardless of history or culture
#11
Not according to a little thing called the labour theory of value
#12
I hope robots replace sex workers
#13
star wars is more so fantasy than scifi (or at least SF, as in speculative fiction). vonnegut wrote a book (i think his first novel) called Player Piano which was about a society where robots had completely replaced the proletariat and the previously-working class were jobless and living off of a weak welfare state that provided just enough for them to live on and not revolt. it was prob vonnegut's closest thing to "pure" SF he's written. i thought it was ok but then again i read it years ago and i had bad taste then, and i dont really remember it verymuch
#14
except they're gonna go extinct from global warming first. truckers are screwd tho, as are cabbies since self-driving cars are at least plausible.
#15
truck drivers are the most common job in 29 states and will be utterly decimated within a decade or two. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state
#16
a crucial difference in this new paradigm compared to the old: a woman who makes shirts in Indiana and a woman who makes shirts in Indonesia are both people, and people have certain limitations. They need to be shut off and are utterly non-productive for at least several hours a day; this is a basic limit of the unit, seemingly insurmountable, and in real-world applications many of these units function productively less than 2000 hours per year, which translates to an uptime of less than 23% of the potential maximum. Human labor requires the capitalist to part with some amount of money greater than the minimum for the person's basic maintenence; in some cases, a substantial fraction more. In many places, they can often even complain, leave, strike, or vote. They tend to get more expensive every year with only a marginal increase in efficiency. Humans are illiquid; taking at least a decade of production and training to be used for any useful end, continuing to require regular maintenence and fuel even when not in use, even when broken or obsolete. These are obviously suboptimal conditions for any capitalist to operate a labor force, and there is no way that human manual labor could conceivably compete in the long term.
#17
To the op the actual point of technology is there is no such thing as skilled labor & with time all jobs will be de skilled. I'm going to shoot you in the head. Hitler was right. There is no God save the idea of death. Good day.
#18
if the proletariat go extinct it will be in a peoples revolution. either the ruling classes destroy humanity or the class society will be dismantled
#19
Maybe none of that will happen and all of history from here on out will be a long wheezing fart.
#20

c_man posted:

if the proletariat go extinct it will be in a peoples revolution. either the ruling classes destroy humanity or the class society will be dismantled



ya.

#21
theyre actually all going to starve to death during the Great Water Wars of the mid 21st century
#22
this is why im training to become an organic wet nurse
#23

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

the primary failing of science fiction is that it does not incorporate robot labor logically. either robots do not exist, are extremely rare, or are sentient and antagonistic. or, if they do exist, their existence is not taken to its logical conclusion. C-3PO, for example, is a masterpiece of engineering. he is sentient, perfectly understands and can communicate thousands of written and spoken languages, can at least convincingly mimick human emotional inflections, understands and quickly reacts to his surroundings, and makes rational decisions. he can move under his own power, autonomously, quietly, even over uneven terrain and long distances. he is a bit slow and clumsy, but his model is not designed to be terribly fast or graceful; other droids are quicker and more dextrous. even with all these features, though, C-3PO units are a mass-produced commodity, not considered terribly rare, valuable or important; despite being clearly functional he is almost not purchased, even at "crap we found in the desert" prices. what reason is there for menial labor to exist in such a world? everything from construction to farming to customer service to transport to war machines could be fully automated.



yeah maybe u should stop watching shitty fantasy movies and actually read scifi like player piano, as Hitler said, if ur gonna talk about "the primary failing of science fiction"

#24

aerdil posted:

shitty fantasy movies



gasp

#25
real talk: is star wars actually all that great? nah. not really.
#26
it is a children's movies for literal childrens
#27
robots can do anything a human being can, except buy stuff. read capital ffs
#28
a world of ex-capitalists wallowing in luxury items their shared army of robots made is obvs the same as the end of class society and the means of production being held in common by all..
#29
#30
Sorry to hijack this thread, but can someone please explain the plot of The Last Samurai? I was like, samurais, ninjas, guns, I don't know wtf is going on here. Had a hard time telling who was who especially Tom Cruise because his costume kept changing.
#31
Shao Kahn sent Shang Tsung to establish the sacred tournament as a competition between his armies and Earthrealm. The prize for the winner of Mortal Kombat would be that the champion would not age for 50 years until the next tournament. Kahn would only be allowed to take Earthrealm if he won ten of these tournaments in a row. Raiden rallied the best fighters of Earth into the White Lotus Society, a group established to discern a champion every 50 years to defend Earth in the tournament. The Great Kung Lao was one such warrior defeating Shang Tsung and becoming Grand Champion. Lao only kept the title for one generation before eventually falling to Shang Tsung's then-new secret weapon, a Shokan prince named Goro. Goro proceeded to win the following eight tournaments, giving the Outworld warriors nine consecutive victories.
Imprisoned in death for centuries after his betrayal by Shao Kahn, the angered Dragon King secretly worked to revive his physical body. By transferring his essence into an apparition, he appeared to Shujinko, a very promising warrior who was set to be the chosen Earthrealm kombatant in an upcoming Mortal Kombat tournament. Claiming to be an emissary of the Elder Gods named Damashi , he tricked Shujinko into embarking on a quest to obtain the Kamidogu from the various realms and placing them in the Nexus, a special location created between the realms to ease the travel of the Champion of the Elder Gods.

Before the events of the next Mortal Kombat tournament, Quan Chi had recruited Sub-Zero the Elder to help him retrieve the ancient amulet. Sub Zero proceeded to venture through Earthrealm, defeating the gods of Wind, Earth, Water, and Fire and obtained the amulet. Sub-Zero then delivered the amulet to Quan Chi. Quan Chi later gave a fake amulet to Shinnok, whilst he kept the real one for himself. Raiden then confronted the Lin Kuei warrior and revealed to him his mistake by giving Quan Chi the amulet. Reluctantly, Sub-Zero then proceeded to return to the Netherrealm and retrieve the amulet from Shinnok. Sub-Zero was successful and preserved the peace of all reality for the time being.

Two years later, Earth rallied some of its best fighters in order to win the tenth tournament and preserve Earthrealm's freedom. Amongst the established warriors were Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, and Johnny Cage. With the help of Raiden, the Earthrealm warriors were victorious and Liu Kang became the new champion of Mortal Kombat. Scorpion, who was a rival clansman of the Lin Kuei, and the same man Sub-Zero killed years before, fought one another again. In the end however, Scorpion slew Sub-Zero in retribution for his own death by Sub-Zero the Elder's Hands.

Despite Shang Tsung being unable to deal with his failure in the last Mortal Kombat Tournament, Shao Kahn ordered the Tarkatan horde to attack the Wu Shi Academy. The Tarkatan horde raided and killed most of Liu Kang's fellow monks, including his Shaolin Masters. This enraged Liu Kang enough to follow them into Outworld. He was not alone. Kung Lao, Johnny Cage, and Major Jackson Briggs, who was in search of his missing subordinate, Sonya Blade, were also following right behind Liu Kang into the realm seeking revenge, and to compete in the next Mortal Kombat tournament at the same time. But unbeknownst to Raiden and the Earthrealm warriors, the tournament in Outworld was a ruse, a diversionary trap set by the Emperor in an attempt to break the rules set forth by the Elder Gods themselves, and in rescuing Sonya, Shao Kahn scheme was, and has been thwarted and the Earthrealm warriors prevailed. Shao Kahn, However responded by resurrecting Queen Sindel on Earth and stepping across the dimensional portal gates to claim her, thus successfully merging it with Outworld. The Earthrealm warriors rallied once more in a battle for the first time, and upon Shao Kahn's defeat, the threat of Earthrealm was over, and as he was severely wounded and escaped back into Outworld, the Emperor was defeated. But most importantly, when Edenia was freed from Outworld, and was returned to a whole realm for the first time since Kahn conquered Edenia so many years ago, Shao Kahn's final attempt to conquer Earthrealm has failed once again.

hth
#32

swirlsofhistory posted:

I hope robots replace sex workers


this will be good. sex robots will spermjack the willing males and transport said sperm deposit to a sperm bank. if a woman decides to have a child she can go and get genetically matched based on the sperm analysis. THis means that good genes will have guaranteed progeny. i see no possible way problems could arise from this-

#33
the fact that we havent abolished the family yet and dont raise children in communal spermwards is probably the biggest failure of the Left in the twenty-first century
#34
Infinite human suffering is probably a reasonable price to pay for a robot that would suck my smelly little dick.
#35

dipshit420 posted:

swirlsofhistory posted:
I hope robots replace sex workers

this will be good. sex robots will spermjack the willing males and transport said sperm deposit to a sperm bank. if a woman decides to have a child she can go and get genetically matched based on the sperm analysis. THis means that good genes will have guaranteed progeny. i see no possible way problems could arise from this-



http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadian-couple-sues-sperm-bank-allege-donor-was-schizophrenic-1.2314078

#36
The united states does a pretty good job of importing people to make up for population shortfalls resulting from economics and eternally escalating urbanization. I do have serious concerns that new industries and jobs are not being invented fast enough to keep pace with our new forms of automation.

I could see the value of untrained/unvalued labor eventually going down sufficiently that some strange things happen to our economy. Like, half of America will live like the upstairs/downstairs in Gosford Park while the other half lives off the land, roaming from free wireless spot to free wireless spot. An entire community of nomadic hipsters pools their day's beggings so that they can afford to recharge their ancestral airbook and read the latest issue of The Sun or transcribe the latest issue of Wild Mushroom Foraging.

I can see somewhere like Japan slowly turning into a sort of weird post-labor-scarcity place where fewer and fewer people own more and more capital until their population reaches a very low equilibrium. If they haven't invented womb-tanks by then.
#37
the proletariat is going to go extinct... after it overthrows capitalism and abolishes class society
#38
[account deactivated]
#39
whats going to happen to all these slaves now that the cotton gin has replaced their labor? I guess they'll just be freed and live a life of luxury while the working day goes down to 4 hours.
#40
[account deactivated]