If the “robots” are really mere machines, then it should be easy to peacefully divide up the surplus more-or-less equitably, we’ll transition to socialism and everyone will be happy—it’ll be like Star Trek
Anyone want to bet on this one? in 2050, barring the singularity, Robots will do most work, including most work we currently consider to be intellectual work, and 90+% of the population will live largely useless (n the historical sense) lives, because robots can do EVERYTHING better than they can. Socialism will prevail, because caring for fellow humans is higher priority than abstract principles for almost everyone...and the almost everyone will besides have HIGH monkeybrain motivation to believe that this is right (it applies either to them or their close friends).
In the world of Iain Banks Culture, where material wants are gone...socialism is a brain-dead default state. Tyler Cowen has been on this theory-path for at least 5 years (I saw him post something maybe 5 years ago about the topic). I've been here quite a bit longer than that.
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I don't think I understand what you mean by socialism. Do you mean that the we'll be using a political as opposed to market process to allocate goods? If goods are effectively no longer scarce, why would we need any process to allocate them? If we're not using the political process to allocate goods, are we using it to allocate "fame" or "status" or some other such intangible? If so, why are market processes no longer the preferred mechanism to allocate these scarce resources? I am confused.
What will be the unintended consequences?
caring for fellow humans is higher priority than abstract principles for almost everyone
That is a big "almost".
"Everyone" used to raise food. John Deere came about and now machines grow all our food. Has this ushered in any kind of utopia?
it should be easy to peacefully divide up the surplus more-or-less equitably
??? What surplus?
I rather strongly disagree. I have friends who have been working in Artificial Intelligence for 30 years, and we're always 20 years away from computers thinking better than we do.
Funny how AI only ever produces idiot savants.
I believe that the problem is that we don't know how *WE* think, and so can't program computers to think better.
Until we understand the thought process as well as we understand the manufacturing process, it ain't happening.
There is a negative-feedback effect to automating work. For every laborious calculation we farm to a spreadsheet, there are several teams of IT gnomes we have to call and yell at when it crashes, when our computer needs more memory, when the database is down, etc. I can only assume the same holds aleph0-fold for any attempt at full-on AI we'd be able to come up with in the near future and try to lay 'most work' on. Which just means, come the robot revolution we wouldn't get rid of 'most work' at all, we'd just transform most of the labor force into a 24/7 army of (well-paid, perhaps) IT/QA/tech maintenance dweebs.
Also, Yglesias actually used the idiotic phrase 'global south', so in my book his post loses by forfeit.
I've also struggling to visualize what will actually entail for a couple of years now.
In my first post
http://contemplationist.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/the-end-of-economic-growth/
I tried to visualize the "end of economic growth." Surely 2050 is far from that end, but the approach to thinking about it is similar - if robot productivity is so high and broad as to eclipse the productivity of most humans, and thus robots become SUBSTITUTES instead of capital COMPLEMENTS, then yes, I guess most humans will be 'useless.'
But, really, how likely is this scenario? We don't know what future activities will be completely substitutable. There are large numbers of areas where human contact is desirable and preferably especially in the services industry.
Large scale manufacturing has largely ALREADY been automatized. Only supervisors for the processes exist.
Low level labor done by janitors, etc is clearly subtitutable, but the maintenance and upkeep costs of robots may be above minimum wage! So college students or other low productivity workers may still be employable in those - especially depends on labor market regulations.
Besides, I think "socialism" here simply means redistribution, not state ownership of means of production, and we already have large scale redistribution and the institutions for it.
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