What does the mechanised future hold?

SoulTax

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So here is the breakdown.

Industrial revolution.

Population and jobs increase. More factories are opened, more people are employed and paid. Resulting in more reliance on money, and more children being born as families could afford them.

Robotics and automation.


So factories went from standard conveyor belts to large scale automated machines. These machines opened the door for more complex things to be made, at a faster rate, with more consistency. Where a labour force would require hundreds of people to work on a stretch of tarmac. A machine focused force could get by with only a handful.

Advancing robotics and the future.

So as Robotics advances more and more. We can start to imagine the number of people that will be left out of a job. Automated factory floors that used to hold hundreds of workers, now only requiring a small handful to maintain those machines. As things are integrated into this way of working more and more, less jobs will be available to the public, until eventually something has to give.

Imagine a world where food and power are all provided by automated systems. Overseen by a few people per millions catered for. What do those millions do with their time? I imagine a world where millions are not reliant on money, because food and power are automated and provided by the area/country that you live in. These people can ponder things, as it was done in the latter half of the last millennium. The upper class sat around thinking up ideas. Charles Darwin was not a commoner, he was a wealthy lord that didn't have to work. he had the freedom and finances to travel the world and think for decades about whatever took his fancy. Thankfully it was evolution.

Imagine if everyone was in that position. Imagine the hundreds of beautiful minds that were probably hiding in the lower class. Never knowing their potential because their minds were occupied with working 16 hour days to feed their families. And the lack of education because they needed to start working at the age of 10, just like their fathers did.

Imagine the breakthroughs if we freed up the billions on this planet to just sit around and think. Sure most of the people would just be riff raff. But of the 1% that tried, a small fraction would actually have the potential to do something great.

Now it is hard to imagine how we could get to that place. I mean who is going to fork out the bill to create this automated utopia. Once that bill is forked out, what do they get out of it. No matter which way I look at it, money is the largest hindrance to the Human race.

Not quite sure what the whole point of this is really. Just doodling I suppose. Lots of time on my hands. I guess wishing that everyone could doodle all day every day, without the need to come back to reality and make some money in order to live.
 

rrh

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Much of what you say was predicted for the 1950s/1960s: people would work for two or three days a week, they wouldn't know what to do with their free time etc.

Switch to today, when with laptops / smartphones / etc., you are almost never really disconnected from work ...
 

Budza

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Much of what you say was predicted for the 1950s/1960s: people would work for two or three days a week, they wouldn't know what to do with their free time etc.

Switch to today, when with laptops / smartphones / etc., you are almost never really disconnected from work ...

BUT- the average person now achieves SO much more with tech. The goal posts have shifted. If you had to do today what took your grandfather a week, it'd take you a day or two...

RE the poor- they're the ones out of the information economy: they still take a week to do what ever they do.

IMO this is contributing to the growing inequality we're seeing. People used to have secretaries, typists etc. All replaced by tech. Machines are replacing people and management of the machines requires increasingly specialised knowledge. Many middle class jobs have fallen away, leaving labour and specialist & highly paid managers.
 

MisterFortySomething

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This reminds me of a quote from Warren G. Bennis:
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
I don't know when he said this, but it was a number of years ago and did not come to pass. I don't have any objections to a 4 day work week, however.
 

SoulTax

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BUT- the average person now achieves SO much more with tech. The goal posts have shifted. If you had to do today what took your grandfather a week, it'd take you a day or two...

RE the poor- they're the ones out of the information economy: they still take a week to do what ever they do.

IMO this is contributing to the growing inequality we're seeing. People used to have secretaries, typists etc. All replaced by tech. Machines are replacing people and management of the machines requires increasingly specialised knowledge. Many middle class jobs have fallen away, leaving labour and specialist & highly paid managers.

Yes this is what I am getting at. Not the 3 day work week idea. But as more and more things become mechanised, less and less people will be needed to be specialists at maintaining and repairing those machines. But what happens to everyone else. I think that the only reason that it hasn't all become mechanised yet is because people realise that we need to keep at least some people employed. Also low labour costs make it more profitable to employ people than spend on expensive machines.

But one day, somewhere in the future. We could reach a place where people don't actually need to work. At least not the mundane work that is needed to put food on the table. If we had billions of educated people, able to spend their time thinking about something that is their passion, we could potentially solve all sorts of problems.
 

zophas

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Just make sure you keep one Battlestar in a museum somewhere, just in case.
 
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