I’m sure the Pentagon is developing contingency plans to cull the excess populace, without admitting to it, of course. Operations ringed about with euphemisms, Demographic Enhancement eg.

Posted by: ruralito | Nov 19 2014 19:13 utc | 4

The main reason it is cheaper to use these robots, rather than people, is that banksters have increased the cost of living via asset price inflation in real estate and education to the point where it is more economical to buy hundreds of these million dollar robots than employ $60K/year, +75% for social tax consideration, salaried people.
And even then, you might note that much of this work is simply extending existing machine press type work – most of the first 10 minutes are just modified forms of machine presses to cut out carbon fiber fabrics on metal frames.
On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs off-camera: design, production, and maintenance of the machines for example. Not nearly so much as handwork assembly, but then again, even without robots – the handwork assembly is going down.

Posted by: c1ue | Nov 19 2014 19:30 utc | 6

These robots create more wealth for less (human) work. In other words, they increase productivity. That in itself is a good thing. The problem is not automation but redistribution.

Posted by: bobs | Nov 19 2014 19:44 utc | 8

Luddites arise!! We deserve to become extinct.

Posted by: Fernando | Nov 19 2014 20:15 utc | 10

Jeremy Rifkin wrote a good book on this topic twenty years ago, The End of Work. Originally, automation was a socially progressive concept. Everyone was supposed to be freed up from mechanical, repetitious labor and share in the productivity gains that machines brought to the industrial process.
Of course just the opposite has happened. Productivity gains have all gone to owners of capital and almost none to the labor. In the U.S. free-trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT allowed the machines to be moved out of country, enabling multinational corporations to pursue global labor arbitrage; back home, the workers were left to fend for themselves at the Home Depot and McDonalds.

Posted by: Mike Maloney | Nov 19 2014 21:01 utc | 12

This is a somewhat fallacious argument on a macro level though. The vast majority of the global production sector requires a massive amount of human labor still. This sort of “the robots will take over” started out in pundit circles imo to obscure the real story, which was the wholesale transfer of entire factories – nay entire industries to the third world after NAFTA. This has been a huge talking point and remains to be, because it continues to obscure corporate intentions and thus delay or make obsolete any sort of justice due the economic victims of globalization, in the US and in the 3rd world. The jobs disparity in the US has not been caused by ‘technology’. These factories still exist, and still thrive, but with their many thousands of less-spendy employees.
In fact the only real production base left in the US is in defense industry.

Posted by: L Bean | Nov 19 2014 21:10 utc | 14

I’ve probably posted these before, but they’re quite pertinent here:
1) The Midas Plague – Frederik Pohl (This links to a simulation of a paperback…quite a nice touch.)
2) For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs – Robert Heinlein

Posted by: Dr. Wellington Yueh | Nov 19 2014 21:13 utc | 16

paulmeli – yes I get the ‘endless growth’ thing but you’re blaming the victim. The simple fact is that many thousands of gainfully employed Americans are now waiters, ‘chefs’, temp construction workers and the like, or have simply given up on finding full time work at all and are basically neo-rag-pickers(selling on ebay, making literally $1 here and there, etc). Waiters up 40% or something in the past decade. The owners have turned this into a service economy with the profits reaped from globalization. And it wouldn’t have happened without US gov muscle period. We can’t even blame ‘the corporations’ at this point. Everybody knows…it’s fascism.

Posted by: L Bean | Nov 19 2014 21:40 utc | 18

There is not going to be a revolution until the masses are hungry. We’re going to have to see americans suffering to make ends meet so that they will revolt. It can either take many decades or it can be sooner, but the american people are needed to stop the decades of innocent people being murdered by the U.S. government in other countries, while we argue about healthcare costs…

Posted by: relament | Nov 19 2014 22:13 utc | 20

Actually, from what I’ve seen, the primary benefits of offshoring are tax related.
Companies can spend tons of money to make their existing employees more efficient, or they can just throw 2 or 3 offshore employees to do the same thing.
The offshore employees, however, offer all sorts of lovely tax minimization schemes.

Posted by: c1ue | Nov 19 2014 22:42 utc | 22

The following quotation – unless the political confusion and impotence of the people in this democratic age can be overcome – certainly suggests one possible answer to B:
“All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
–Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations”, Book III, Chapter 4.

Posted by: rackstraw | Nov 20 2014 0:01 utc | 24

Bobs #8 writes:

These robots create more wealth for less (human) work. In other words, they increase productivity. That in itself is a good thing. The problem is not automation but redistribution.

Bingo!
Labor (jobs) is an input, which one WANTS to minimize for any given level of output. The best of all worlds is to enjoy maximum consumption, without having to give up ANY time to achieve that.
Are folks really that afraid to live in paradise?

Posted by: erichwwk | Nov 20 2014 0:22 utc | 26

“Are folks really that afraid to live in paradise?”
If only we had a choice!
So long as though that “own” everything can use access to goods and services – that limited access enforced by a copious amount of police violence and mass surveillance – to coerce people into sucking up to them in order to survive (sometimes known as ‘work’), humanity will continue to drift down the road of injustice and inequality.
Presumably the number of so-called “useful” people will get smaller and smaller and/or have to turn to more and more bizarre and degrading tasks so as to stay near those who “own”, if only in order to survive. All the while the number of “unneeded” will grow and grow, forced to subsist on less and less until we have had enough and decide to simply take what we need.
Of course, those that own everything see this coming and are building to prevent that from ever happening. One has to wonder what their plans are for the rest of us as more and more – at least in the US – all means of living are tied to having a job and the social safety net (including Social Security) is on the chopping block. The push for mass surveillance, huge military and police power are probably the clearest indications available.
This pattern in history has occurred before, if you’ll allow me some liberties. We might look at the course of Venezuelan history: when the peasants were pushed off of the land by the latifundistas and forced to crowd onto the hilltops of Caracas in great barrios – they stayed there, completely ignored in their shantytowns for decade after decade. They were simply ignored. Society split perfectly – one whole that had near zero contact with the other: not in the schools, not on the streets, not in the workplaces. The government treated these “excess” people as if they didn’t exist. They were simply corralled in their shanties by poverty and police, ignored by the government (though well exploited by the capitalists and the neoliberals) until the explosion of the Caracazo in 1989.
Venezuela, of course, has had as over the last two decades a happy ending for these previously excluded people. But our future may not promise the same.

Posted by: guest77 | Nov 20 2014 1:16 utc | 28

One wonders then how people are supposed to get enough income to buy products like the i3. How can we handle the social disruption such technology leaps produce?

Henry Ford in 1926…

“‘The country is ready for the five-day week,’ says Mr. Ford. ‘It is bound to come through all industry. Without it the country will not be able to absorb its production & stay prosperous. The industry of this country could not long exist if factories generally went back to the ten-hour day, because people would not have the leisure, the desire, or the means to consume the goods produced…Just as the eight-hour day opened our way to prosperity in America, so the five-day week will open our way to still greater prosperity. Of course there is a humanitarian side to the shorter day & the shorter week, but dwelling on that side is likely to lead one astray, for leisure may be put before work instead of after it-where it belongs. Twenty years ago, introducing the eight-hour day generally would have made for poverty & not for wealth. Five years ago, introducing the five day week would have had the same result. The hours of labor are regulated by the organization of work and by nothing else. It is the rise of the great corporation with its ability to use power, to use accurately designed machinery, & generally to lessen the wastes in time, material & human energy that made it possible to bring in the eight hour day. Further progress along the same lines has made it possible to bring in the five day week…It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege. This is not to say that leisure may not be dangerous. Everything good may also be dangerous-if mishandled. When we put our $5 minimum wage for an eight-hour day into effect in 1913, we had to watch many of our men to see what use they made of their spare time & money. We found a few men taking on extra jobs–some worked the dayshift with us & the night shift in another factory. Some of the men squandered their extra pay. Others banked the surplus money & went on living just as they had lived before. But in a few years all adjusted themselves & our supervision was less needed. There is, of course, a profound difference between leisure & idleness. Nor must we confound leisure with shiftlessness. Our people are perfectly capable of using to good advantage the time that they have off, after work. That has already been demonstrated to us by our experiments during the last several years. We find that the men come back after a two-day holiday so fresh & keen that they are able to put their minds as well as their hands to work. We are not of those who claim to be able to tell people how to use their spare time. We think that, given the chance, people will become more expert in the effective use of their leisure time. & they are being given the chance. The influence of leisure on consumption makes the short day & the short week necessary. The people who consume the bulk of goods are the people who make them…With the decrease of the length of the working day in the United States an increase of production has come because better methods of disposing of men’s time have been accompanied by better methods of disposing of their energy. Thus one good has brought another…Of positive industrial value is leisure because it increases consumption. Where people work longest & with least leisure they buy the fewest goods. Businesses the exchange of goods. Goods are bought only as they meet needs. Needs are filled only as they are felt. They make themselves felt largely in leisure hours. The man who worked fifteen & sixteen hours a day desired only a corner to lie in &, now & then, a bit of food. He had no time to cultivate new needs, hence he had only the most primitive. When, in American industry, women were released from the necessity of factory work & became buyers for their families, business began to expand. The American housewife, as household purchasing agent, has both leisure & money, & the former has been just as important as the latter in the development of American business. The five day week simply carries this further. The people who work only five days a week will consume more goods than the people who work six days a week. People who have more leisure must have more clothes. The eat a greater variety of food. They require more transportation facilities. This increased consumption will require greater production an we now have. Instead of business being allowed up because people are ‘off work’, it will be speeded up because people consume more in their leisure than in their working time. This will lead to more work. & this to more work. & this to more wages. Thus the result of more leisure is the exact opposite of what most people might suppose. Management must keep pace with this new demand–& it will. It is the introduction of power and machinery by manufacturers that has med the shorter day & the shorter week possible. That is a fact which working men must not forget. The eight-hour day was not the ultimate, & neither is the five day week. It is enough, however, to manage what we are equipped to manage and to let the future take care of itself. It will anyway. That is its habit. But probably the next move will come in the direction of shortening the day rather than the week.”

Ford News, p.2. “Mr. Ford Explains the Five-Day Week” (10/15/1926)

Posted by: CTuttle | Nov 20 2014 1:48 utc | 30

… Also, it was an attempt to make the (obvious) point that in a closed system anything business does to it’s workers it is also doing to its customers. They are separate groups composed of the same people.
Posted by: paulmeli | Nov 19, 2014 5:05:52 PM | 19
Well put.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Nov 20 2014 2:36 utc | 32

The problem is with distributing income away from the owners of the factories. Whether there is automation or not, that is the problem. It is already very hard without automation, but it definitely makes that almost impossible challenge even tougher.

Posted by: fairleft | Nov 20 2014 3:00 utc | 34

an automated car factory appears in Spielbergs film: Minority Report

Posted by: brian | Nov 20 2014 7:18 utc | 36

What a perspicacious perambulation away from constant prognostication of the next pugnacious politician’s prevaricating populist platitudes!
But let’s go a little deeper than skipping stones over the mill pond of technology, like some scruff schoolkid playing hooky from physics class.
I started out as a farm equipment machinist, and was one of the lucky ones to see the very first NC automation, a roll of punch ribbon fed into a ‘robotic’ controller, on an otherwise ordinary milling machine.
The machine shop owner was giddy, his newly appointed NC ‘programmer’ stood by proudly, as they loaded an aluminum blank on the machine bed, and pressed the GO button. With a bright whirr, and moving at alarming speed, the very first robotic machine tore into that aluminum blank in geometric precision, as that tune about Ol’ John Henry sang in my head.
“When John Henry was a little baby. A sitting on his papa’s knee. He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel. Said, “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me, Lawd, Lawd, hammer’s gonna be the death of me.”
Then just as John Henry laid down his hammer and died, when the whining cutter head should have moved up, over, and down again, the NC tape had a ‘hanging chad’, so the cutter head tore sideways through an intricate maze of passages it had just carved, then buried itself into the mill’s tool bed, throwing white hot sparks and molten blobs of red lava, until it had firmly welded that precision mill into a $75,000 piece of junk.
It’s not automation that’s the enemy, it’s the complex programming.
I moved in the opposite direction for awhile, learning under a German diesel mechanic, but you can only advance there as master:apprentice, it’s a lifelong grind. So I flipped around and learned NC programming, just as basic 8086 computers and digital controllers became available to write complex CNC programming, …and start creating shapes that the world had never seen before, at least, the guys out on the shop floor.
Again, I was lucky to see the first attempt at a miniaturized hard- drive platen. My job was to program, then cut four perfect 3″ circles out of that vapor-deposited pure-silicon slice, with four perfectly concentric hub holes. “The holes must be PERFECT!” my Swedish boss wrung his hands. The CNC program was pristine, the setup precise and triangulated three times. I pushed GO, everything on the laser cutter seemed to go OK, then plink, plink, plink, plink, four shiny platens …but when they spun them up to 6500rpm, one of them disintegrated.
It’s not automation that’s the enemy, it’s the Scale of Technology.
Anyway, with primitive PCs readily available, I focused exclusively on combining procedural code with logic coding, locked myself away for a winter, and wrote one of the first commercial engineering programs. Got an invitation to show it to a prestigious software bundler, ran their pre-solved math problem … and my answer was wrong by exactly 2.0000.
I found the missing 1/2-factor in my code, and begged over the phone for a chance to recompile and retest. But nobody gets a second chance.
It’s not automation that’s the enemy, it’s the Rule of Technocracy.
What used to take many years solving on mechanical computers now takes mere seconds. What used to be impossible to produce by any form of tool making, is now possible to reproduce complex curvilinear mathematics in metallic form. And with the advent of nano-3D printing, right now, even as we speak, it will soon be possible to create them at fairly low cost.
But who today, from 2000 Coup Now 14 Years After, has pocket change?
e-Books and e-Tool-making will go all electronic, with only the sweat equity in writing as their production cost, and therein lies the risk. You would think that as production becomes as easy as learning to code- write, and as consumption becomes as easy as $1.99 on the Apple Store, that we would have achieved the Best of All World’s through automation, where any bright young guy or gal can write their own retirement.
It’s not automation that’s the enemy, it’s the Global Omniverse.
You can hire India(n) writers for $1.21 an hour, that’s what a Silicon Valley programming company was caught paying their India(n) outsource. Media monopolies around the world employ India(n) reporters and copy writers and story editors for merely pennies per word now, mere dollars per story. I know engineering firms that are entirely India(n) back office. Then everything populist, consumable and mass produced, can be done for nearly zero cost, but at far below a living minimal wage. And everything luxurious, complex, and uniquely produced, goes to an elite cadre of the Best and Brightest, which is becoming vanishingly small.
Just like the BMW i3. Who will buy it? We are all the way retrograde to the Age of Pharoahs now, where only those of The Chosen, or the Technocrat Priest Class, or the Fawning Looting Bureaucrats, will ever see the shiny glint of gold in their purse.
While natural and strategic resources are now harder and harder to find, still the prices of those refined resources have been crashing since July. Everything is grinding to a halt. The world is heading into a massive overproduction hyper-deflation. The Monopoly game is almost over. It’s almost End Time.
All that’s only partly due to ‘automation’, of what’s in reality faulty electronic reprogramming of Everything … The Hive … The Collective.
So a Robot Tax won’t save us. A Millionaire’s Tax won’t either. Wealth among the burgeoning masses is shrinking faster than a rain puddle on the Kalahari.
Remember what Jesus said, “The poor will always be among us, but I will not always be with you.” He knew when to bug out. Except now there is no place left to bug out too.
It’s not automation that’s the enemy, it’s our MultiVariant GooglePlex.
It’s our inability to grasp the fundamental concepts of Lobachevski.

Posted by: ChipNikh | Nov 20 2014 11:00 utc | 38

b, maybe this is the answer to your concern:
The Next QE? Switzerland Prepares A “Living Wage” Of $2,600 For Every Citizen

Posted by: sarz | Nov 20 2014 12:42 utc | 40

I think you and others overstate this. Maintenence, service, supply and distribution are vital. Perhaps we’ll be at more value added jobs and that will open opportunities to do your own thing. But, people are smarter than computers and are smarter than the programers. I say that as a landscaper. I use tools, but I doubt they could replace my plant choices and location, the vast array I’d use and the like. There’s not a single nor 4 books that I can use show all the plants I use just in Dallas. I have 5 books all focused on Texas and Dallas, yet they don’t have the information. Computer programs are crude and not as detailed nor honest as a pen and ink drawing.

Posted by: scottindallas | Nov 20 2014 13:54 utc | 42

Curious whether MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) has broken into anyone’s consciousness here. The insights it offers are quite startling to my mind. To put it in slightly sensational terms: it reveals that we are basically sitting at a fully laden banquet… and starving.
The basic tenets are:
– no sovereign nation (one printing its own currency) can ever become insolvent
– governments are not revenue constrained (there is no operational linkage between tax revenue and government budgets)
– there is no operational need for governments to offer bonds – at interest – instead of simply “spending” money into existence
The first point above reveals – and gives a vocabulary to describe how and why this is so – that all the political theatre about deficit ceilings is literal nonsense. Ditto, the absurd austerity theatre in the EU. It is actually all simply premised on a misunderstanding of how banks and particularly central banks work. It is in fact rank economic malpractice. (My starving at the banquet table image above came to mind watching Europe tear itself apart and revive all its latent fascist history FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.)
With regard to the question of automation, what MMT would suggest is that it is actually quite possible to have a capitalist economy where jobs have been eliminated in great number but the productivity gains have been socialised (rather than allowed to accrue to a tiny minority.) What we need to do is jettison our out-moded understanding of what money actually is. Once that’s achieved – no small feat – practical solutions become obvious.
A good introduction is Warren Mosler’s “7 Deadly Frauds of Economic Policy”.
http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf

Posted by: Oddlots | Nov 20 2014 15:36 utc | 44

Posted by: Oddlots | Nov 20, 2014 10:36:29 AM | 44
It would be wonderful if Mosler’s theories were true, and the third one definitely is. But you’re wrong that ‘the problem’ is a misunderstanding of money. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in MMT or conventional Keynesianism, both would work wonders if applied to the US and/or EU economies. MMT may be right, may be worth trying, and Keynesianism may also be worth trying, ‘green’ economics may be worth trying, but it ain’t happening cuz the political system is funded by the rich and the giant corporations and led by the bankers and the military machine. _The_ problem is how to overthrow them.

Posted by: fairleft | Nov 20 2014 16:38 utc | 46

I cant wait for the time to come when robots do all the work and i can kick back and go surfing all day, everyday. Im not kidding. When everybody who works does so by choice, not because they have to, i will be fully stoked. Most jobs nowadays are unrewarding, horrible fucking slavery type occupations. And most people who do those jobs are forced to. Leave it to the robots. I wanna live… At least when you read an article that a robot has written, the truth will be more discernable than the current maelstrom of sheit being printed by humans. And anyway, i would prefer to see real machines rather than humans slaving away over a conveyer belt anyday… I can say that because i have worked in factories. It isnt fun. You punch that clock and suddenly youve been transported to Fascist Land with a heirachical order, a uniform and a “work ethic”… I would rather be a caveman. in

Posted by: Dan | Nov 20 2014 18:25 utc | 48

MMT just says government can print unlimited amount of money and give everyone unlimited amount of money. But in the real world, money is just a representation of real goods and resources. Say there are only 10 apples, then no matter how much more money government print, there are still only 10 apples.

Posted by: ultron | Nov 20 2014 19:34 utc | 50

Of course, a lot of the fruits of the improved productivity IS being harvested by the government, to bring freedom(tm) to the benighted peoples of Ukraine and Syria and other such places, not more comfort to the people of the “first” world…who should get a real job in the world according to Baronald Obamagan.

Posted by: a different anon | Nov 20 2014 22:27 utc | 52

MMT would completely agree that “in the end there are only 10 apples.” The point it is making is something like… there are 10 apples but we can only see 6 because our economics blinds us to losses in productivity that are self-imposed. So the point is not at all that “government can print unlimited amount of money and give everyone unlimited amount of money.” Its points are far more nuanced.
FWIW I think its potentially important because – along with all the other afflictions such as the complete domination of politics by moneyed interests – we also are in thrall to notions of thrift and responsibility that both are actually complete nonsense at the macro level and offer enormous reinforcement to the continued domination of moneyed interests.

Posted by: Oddlots | Nov 20 2014 23:22 utc | 54

Socialism or barbarism!

Posted by: Chris Geary | Nov 21 2014 0:12 utc | 56

Posted by: Oddlots | Nov 20, 2014 6:22:14 PM | 54
Oddlots, I have great respect for nuanced MMT theory, but again, I think Keynes made exactly the same point, that we need not to be “in thrall to notions of thrift and responsibility that both are actually complete nonsense at the macro level and offer enormous reinforcement to the continued domination of moneyed interests.”
The economic theory ‘fight’ against neoclassical economics, the economics that led to the Great Depression, is so sad. The stupid economics that distributes up to the rich, empowers financiers, slows growth and creates giant crashes is now ‘mainstream economics’. Those who oppose that nightmare are weirdo outsiders called ‘heterodox economists’.
Among the heterodox economists there is much big picture disagreement, but we’re united on what to do now: massive government social and economic investment. The limit, whatever your economic understanding, is set by inflation, and since there is almost none, the amount of investment could and should be huge. We should also be united on taxing away and using the wasted trillions sitting in bank deposits of the elite, and in making sure the surge of infrastructure investment is extremely green.
Okay, back to reality.

Posted by: fairleft | Nov 21 2014 7:12 utc | 58

a different anon at 52. Yes.. e.g. colonialism in Africa, the post- .. type, I’d say particularly that of France as a Nation (as the Anglo-variety comes more in the shape of mega corporations such as BP, Glencore to quote familiar names), is a huge problem that should be taken into account as well. An ATM down the road from me rests on slave labor for some part, the Swiss bank teller can go and invent new widgets or skis what not.
These problems are all way beyond the scope of short comments on MoA.
For ex. quantative easing and cheap money (low interest rates etc.) appear to ameliorate some problems temporarily (bank bail-outs say, questionable, dodgy aim), State investment may boost employment for a while (e.g. for infrastructure projects) – along a Keynes line – but they leave the underlying horrific problems intact, take place (if they do, rare today) in a frame where no alternatives for other arrangements are discussed. How one views all this depends on one’s views of what money is, how it works, etc.

Posted by: Noirette | Nov 21 2014 16:06 utc | 60

to CG @ 56 —
Nearly forgot to add — right on, comrade. Luxemburg is more right than ever.

Posted by: rufus magister | Nov 21 2014 23:43 utc | 62

rufus, I take your point, I agree for the most part.
Max Keiser is good (subtracting gold bugs, silver bugs, and new versions of bitcoin) but as for Piketty…
I haven’t read his tome, and it has become popular (or quoted etc.), while his work on the numbers may be solid within a certain standard ‘economic’ frame’, his basic argument, as it has been ‘understood, accepted’ or ‘touted’ is that capitalism leads inevitably – or is the main driver – towards inequality …
… inequality , as an outcome of capitalism, and NOT slavery, murder, genocide, war, subjugation and destruction of entire counries, rapine, financial fraud of 100’s of kinds. One of Max’s beefs, or even the main one, is that capitalism and the free market (to make it brief) are no longer current, not respected, not working, etc.
The horror is due to decisions taken by humans, not the fault of some vaguely defined socio-economic arrangement, aka capitalism. (Which I am not attempting to defend 🙂

Posted by: Noirette | Nov 22 2014 15:20 utc | 64

to Noirette at 64 —
I’ll confess as well to not having read Piketty, but like many folks have seen enough discussion to know broadly what he’s talking about. I cited him more for the debate he started, less than for his diagnosis and solutions.
I think the solution needs to be far broader (socialism or barbarism). And as you note, he let’s the human decision makers off the hook. The pro-capitalists do the same — I had to off-shore production because of “the market.” That is, you and your backers begrudge your workers making a decent living in a safe environment with a modicum of respect and dignity, which might prevent you from squeezing another beemer or vacation home out of them.
There are of course systemic features that drive part of this. But elements, like taxation and labor policies, can be consciously determined to incentivize certain behaviours. Like off-shoring and financial manipulation vs. unionization and (real) competition.
Here’s a piece from the New York Review of Books on The Creepy New Wave of the Internet that speaks to my worries about our future Borgification.

While it is true that a do-it-yourself subculture is thriving, and sharing cars, tools, houses, and other property is becoming more common, it is also true that much of this activity is happening under duress as steady employment disappears….
So here comes the Internet’s Third Wave. In its wake jobs will disappear, work will morph, and a lot of money will be made by the companies, consultants, and investment banks that saw it coming. Privacy will disappear, too, and our intimate spaces will become advertising platforms—last December Google sent a letter to the SEC explaining how it might run ads on home appliances—and we may be too busy trying to get our toaster to communicate with our bathroom scale to notice. Technology, which allows us to augment and extend our native capabilities, tends to evolve haphazardly, and the future that is imagined for it—good or bad—is almost always historical, which is to say, naive.

And to oddlots @63 —
For whatever reason, I usually can’t sit through videos on the Web. Except for music videos. But I will read the article you link to, many thanks, sounds like a good refresher course.

Posted by: rufus magister | Nov 27 2014 15:40 utc | 66

further to my 66 —
I’ve been meaning post this for a few days. The issue is larger than the survival of individual autonomy, the problem is the potential for de-humanization, from a narrow sense of loss of identity through surveillance & manipulation, to the larger problem of extinction. Stephen Hawking Says Artificial Intelligence ‘Could Spell The End Of The Human Race’.
Is breaking Asimov’s Laws of Robotics a misdemeanor or a felony?

Posted by: rufus magister | Dec 7 2014 15:53 utc | 68