Our Robo-Port Overlords
I don’t know if you remember the scene from Season 2 of the Wire when Frank Sobotka is talking about a video he saw of next-generation port automation technology the horror it struck in him as he contemplated the future of stevedoring. Well, at HHLA’s Altenwerder terminal at the Port of Hamburg yesterday I saw an awful lot of impressive automation:
Among other things, automated cranes take containers off boats and load them onto automated trucks that move themselves into place and then drive off to their destination on their own. Volkswagon’s Transparent Factory in Dresden also has impressive little robot trucks that carry around the boxes full of parts and instruments that the workers need to use.
The part of my brain that’s familiar with economic history and models tells me that this automation is pushing the production frontier outwards and ultimately making a better world possible. But the common sense portion of my brain can’t help but fear the specter of mass inflation. And the part of my brain that watched Terminator: Salvation on the flight from DC to Frankfurt is still concerned about robot rebellion.
That aside, of course we have industrial robots in the United States as well. But I do think it’s somewhat telling that the most advanced sector of our robotics industry relates to the military. And it’s really quite advanced. But while military robots come with a sharply enhanced risk of rebellion and subsequent enslavement, it’s hard to see them as pushing the production frontier outwards. Military robots have led to fewer American deaths in Iraq than we would have seen in the absence of robots, but following a “don’t invade Iraq” would have saved many more lives at less cost.
70 Responses to “Our Robo-Port Overlords”
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September 24th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
No to worry–humans will always find gainful employment ruining decent movie franchises.
September 24th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Not sure I get the mass inflation part, unless the joke is that Germany is rubbing off on you. The fear is that unskilled labor will simply stop being a valuable resource, and the people selling it will have no productive way to earn a living. Hence Season 2.
September 24th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
The part of my brain that’s familiar with economic history and models tells me that this automation is pushing the production frontier outwards and ultimately making a better world possible.
The key word there is possible. Ultimately, technology is not the arbiter of progress; it is the social organization of technology that performs that role.
Automation can make economic processes very efficient, but unless there is a social commitment to ensure full employment, high wages, and low prices, there is no reason to assume that the benefits of technological efficiency will be broadly shared.
September 24th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Replacing human labor with robot substitutes is strictly better for a country like the United States that is close to the leading edge on technological development as it should improve labor productivity in the economy. Replacing human labor in the United States with cheaper labor elsewhere in the world is not necessarily good for the United States because there is no investment in improved labor productivity taking place. In that case the job might just be replaced with a crappier job in the service industry, for example. These two examples are simply not equivalent, despite what the economists would have you believe.
September 24th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
The reason you see automation in German ports is precisely that labor in Germany is expensive and scarce, while the energy needed to run the automated machines is cheap. This is also the reason why the industrial revolution occurred in England (cheap coal and costly labor), and why the US military has lots of robots. Military casualties are “expensive” for the US military, while robots are cheap.
Generally, when a factor of production is scarce or costly, technology minimizing the need for that factor of production will be developed.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
My father for years has argued that illegal immigration in many ways has preempted the level of automation that they have in Japan or Germany. Why make costly capital investments when labor can be had fairly cheap?
September 24th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Go to the Audi factory – rolls of steel arrive by train at one end and cars roll out the other – with just a handfull of employees in between.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
it’s just a big Roomba
September 24th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
This is the perfect opportunity to link to this excellent tilt-shift video of (I believe) the Port of Sydney.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
mpowell, that makes no sense. Replacing labor in the US with cheaper labor elsewhere does improve labor productivity, by definition. Sure, it might be replaced by a job in services but that’s true for labor displaced by robots too.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
military robots come with a sharply enhanced risk of rebellion and subsequent enslavement
Honestly, the whole idea that robots can take over anything is quite absurd. Robots run software, and software, by and large, sucks. Do you think a few thousand nerdy, overweight, undersocialized software developers could take over the country? And if not, why do you think their crap code could?
September 24th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
@11, I think that was meant to be tongue in cheek.
I don’t understand the thinking of people who would look at this and it would scare them. I guess a stevedore’s union wouldn’t be such big fans, though.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
David Caroll,
That’s an excellent point. It’s not robots who would take over the world – but software. The real question is not when will robots/software take over the world and what will they do with humans, but why would they take over the world? What would they want and what would be the point?
And why fear physical enslavement? Robots/software could simply dick with your account balance or your Netflix queue and bring humanity to its knees.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
and the robots don’t need health care, they show up pretty much 24/7/365, they don’t give attitude or complain and they do what they are told.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I think that by “inflation” Matt may have meant “unemployment.”
September 24th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
I think that by “inflation” Matt may have meant “unemployment.”
Thank you godoggo, I was seriously puzzling over how robots lead to mass inflation. That really is a brutal typo.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
10: What are you talking about? If you are employing 4 Vietnamese workers at 1/2 the cost, your costs may be dropping but labor productivity here isn’t getting any better. I’m not sure what you think determines labor productivity by definition, but this certainly isn’t it. If you do the work locally with robots, you still have to have a couple guys running the stuff and somewhere, somebody made those robots. Those guys labor productivity will be much higher. Generally, there are lots of intermediate steps where companies invest in tools and training to make their workers more and more productive.
When you move the work overseas you probably retain some management jobs here in the United States and the finance guys, of course, but that doesn’t really do much for the bulk of the workforce.
5: Your analysis is correct, but we could look at it another way. If you make labor expensive for companies, they will find ways to improve labor productivity. They will find ways to reduce headcount in the process, but I’d take fewer, higher paying, more productive jobs in a given sector than no jobs at all.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Well, if you get to a situation in which most of the people in the US are impoverished, and the robots are fat and glossy, that’s pretty much a working definition of the robots taking over our world.
And we’re halfway there, when the top 2% of the population own over 90% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% of the population own 2% of the wealth. That’s the kind of distribution you would have seen in England, in about the year 1200.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
As said, of course we have industrial robots. I’m not convinced military robots are that far ahead. I see them work in the biotech labs where I’m employed and I’m extremely impressed. I don’t get to see military robots, so who knows.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
15,16:But the common sense portion of my brain can’t help but fear the specter of mass inflation.
But I think the better substitution is actually mass deflation rather than “unemployment”. Steady or rapid increases in productivity should be deflationary.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
I fail to see how military robots can ever be truly cost-effective. This isn’t an anime movie. In real life, machines are extremely expensive and extremely vulnerable. Unlike the movie, if you rip out a chunk of wiring, the machine will probably stop working. In real life, software can’t come close to matching human reactions or tactics. There’s a reason why video games have to cheat like crazy to have a chance of competing with a human. software is inferior.
It’s hard to see how these things won’t be both far weaker and far more vulnerable than tanks, and less effective than your average infantryman. Drones are one thing, an actual land-robot would be pointless.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
you’ll see more advanced bomb disposal units, maybe some mobile gunnery placements. You will probably never see automated tanks, and actual robot soldiers are impractical at best. Will they save some lives? Probably. Will they be able to rise up and subvert us all? Don’t make me laugh. They won’t even ever actually replace soldiers.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
This U Tube video is the creepiest robot.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
soullite: And if you rip out a chunk of human, the human will stop working. There is nothing magical about human beings; they are just made out of meat, after all. It might take a very long time for technology to catch up, but humans are a fixed goal, whereas technology reliably gets better and cheaper every year.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
When robots engage in war games, they are many times more likely to pull the ‘nuclear trigger’ than are humans. This is to say that robots are dangerous executives, which would be a trivial point if the military did not aim to place them in just that role (this may no longer be official policy, but it was during the eighties). Manuel DeLanda’s sweeping study War in the Age of Intelligent Machines catalogs this development, placing it into a long history of military technology.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
The unemployment issue is what gets me about robots. Millions of American workers barely have the skills to survive in today’s labor market. As the robots (and globalization) continue munching on low-skilled jobs, where do they go? The only thing I can think of is wage subsidies, but that doesn’t seem like a long-term solution to a problem that continues to worsen over the long-term.
September 24th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Usert, to a remarkable degree, that’s not actually true. Humans can survive much more extensive injuries than you would probably think possible, and our bones heal without needing to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. Human beings also don’t cost tens of millions of dollars to train and equip.
Military robots replacing human soldiers are not workable at anything like our current level of technology.
September 24th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
mpowell: If you count the productivity of robots as labor productivity of the builders/designers of the robots, then you can count analogously productivity of outsourced workers as labor productivity of local managers of the outsourced product. In either case, fewer local workers can produce the same output as before, which is what I meant by labor productivity increasing by definition.
If you do the work locally with robots, you still have to have a couple guys running the stuff and somewhere, somebody made those robots. Those guys labor productivity will be much higher.
And if you can make robots so efficient that you can get rid of these guys entirely (i.e., with robots making other robots) your labor productivity will become even greater. Labor productivity is maximized when everything is produced by no one.
September 24th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Labor productivity is maximized when everything is produced by no one.
Honestly, that should be a long-term goal. With proper wealth redistribution and social safety net it should be nothing to fear. Of course, it means that an important goal of society should be eliminating poverty and reducing wealth inequality.
September 24th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
A limit problem.
Productivity equals output/worker. As productivity rises is the natural tendency to have more output or less workers. I still eat dinner. Should I have my neighbor up the street cook for the family with low cost robotic delivery or should I automate my kitchen.
Where the limit goes over the medium term depends on the relative gains from different types of automation. My politics would depend on the particular automation and the particular service it provides.
September 25th, 2009 at 1:22 am
As productivity rises is the natural tendency to have more output or less workers.
As prices fall demand increases. A UNIVAC I cost $1,250,000 in 1954 – equal to $100 million today – they sold 46 systems.
Gulfstream Aviation has about 9,000 employees building a few hundred planes a year. A G500 costs $36 million in no small part due to aircraft manufacturing being very labor intensive. If automation and energy poduction technology were to increase, to such a degree that the cost of a G500 fell from $36 million to $36,000, obviously there would be a massive surge in demand.
September 25th, 2009 at 2:27 am
Usert, to a remarkable degree, that’s not actually true. Humans can survive much more extensive injuries than you would probably think possible, and our bones heal without needing to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs.
And if we’re talking about soldiers in the Red Army at Stalingrad, that may well be relevant. Right now, however, I’d assume an American soldier with any kind of serious injury wouldn’t just be left to “heal” and carry on fighting as best he could. And I’d bet that the VA would indeed incur huge costs caring for him.
September 25th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Massive inflation, is what happens if a large organization tries to push the economy above full employment. Robots, could, theoretically lower the rate of full employment, but…I doubt it.
I’d have to assume the entire post is a joke, though.
Robots will not be even marginally intelligent in our lifetimes. Well, unless we find a way to turn unemployed stevedores into computer programmers. But in general, AI has seriously underperformed expectations for years.
September 25th, 2009 at 5:46 am
If you guys want to see the ultimate war robot, forget Terminator, go for CHAS from the Starship Troopers cartoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSYyksMT-jo
September 25th, 2009 at 8:50 am
This drive to have work done by robots is a perfect example of the basically antihuman, antinatural drive that animates the chattering classes in the late-capitalist West. The essence of Man is that he is ‘homo laborans’, and through work he expresses his essential nature. I mean both physical and mental work, for man is a creature with both body and mind, and to eliminate either of those types of labor is to do violence to his nature. To substitute machines for human labor in more and more fields of work is to distort what it is to be human, purely for the financial benefit of the oligarchic late-capitalist decadent elites of the West. It is fundamentally a gravely evil and disordered process.
A healthy society would be a society like Venezuela under Colonel Chávez today, which is encouraging more and more people to return to the countryside and to convert themselves into strong, self-sufficient, productive farmers. A healthy society would be one with many sweet potato farmers and very few professional bloggers, marketing specialists, public relations yahoos, financial whiz kids, and other professions that are parasitic on the hideous beast of monopoly capitalism. Just why is the stevedore’s job to be done away with? A German stevedore is immeasurably a better thing to do with one’s life than twittering away about pork chops and the NBA. The Yglesian late capitalist yahoo urge to eliminate the jobs of stevedores and substitute them with coffee shop servers or people who move money around on computer screens is, ultimately, one of the greatest threats to human nature and human virtue that we have, and it must be fought to the last breath.
September 25th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Hector,
May I ask how you came to be such a nut?
September 25th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Hector,
Did both you and Ted Kaczynsk have the same traumatic experience at Harvard the pushed you off the deep end?
September 25th, 2009 at 10:08 am
A healthy society would be a society like Venezuela under Colonel Chávez today, which is encouraging more and more people to return to the countryside and to convert themselves into strong, self-sufficient, productive farmers.
Which he does with oil wealth. Maybe that’s what the robots will enable for the West: generate enough surplus to heavily subsidize people prancing around farms. All the while convincing themselves they’re self-sufficient, of course, and wanting the gurmint off their backs.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:33 am
“A German stevedore is immeasurably a better thing to do with one’s life than twittering away about pork chops and the NBA.”
But that’s not because being a writer (analogizing twittering to writing, which is perhaps a bad analogy) is worse than being a stevedore. That’s because people are twittering about trivial nonsense. The German stevedore of today is probably equally interested in pork chops and soccer as the blog author is (somebody reads the blog after all, and it may well be the stevedore who’s reading it). It’s rather that BOTH the stevedore and the blogger live in a trivial society – it has little to do with their professions perse.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:37 am
The fear is that unskilled labor will simply stop being a valuable resource, and the people selling it will have no productive way to earn a living.
They can still smuggle cocaine, steal cars and digital cameras, and sling heroin. But this can lead to anti-social behaviors like feeding ducks whiskey.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Re: Maybe that’s what the robots will enable for the West: generate enough surplus to heavily subsidize people prancing around farms
Don’t be absurd, DJ. Those Venezuelans are not prancing around, they are growing things. Poultry production is up 33% since the start of the Chavez years. Corn production is up 50%. Rice production is up 90% since 2001. Coconut production is up 60% since 2001. Thanks to President Colonel Chavez and his investment in agriculture, today Venezuela has a lower unemployment rate than Mr. Obama has been able to achieve in this country. I understand that the popular late-capitalist hipster line is that back-to-the-land efforts are stupid, but unfortunately for you the facts say otherwise.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:43 am
soullite Says:
“Usert, to a remarkable degree, that’s not actually true. Humans can survive much more extensive injuries than you would probably think possible, and our bones heal without needing to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. Human beings also don’t cost tens of millions of dollars to train and equip.”
Put a bullet through somebody’s stomach, and figure out just how hard it is to fix them. Or set off a half-pound charge under their foot.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:46 am
acts say otherwise.
You accept what the Col. says as fact? My God, you’re such a fool.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Re: You accept what the Col. says as fact?
Yes, JMO. Unlike you, I trust what the Colonel says more than any number of decadent late-capitalists, exploitative oligarchs, sexual nihilists, Yglesian yahoos, and hipsters high on Foucault and bong hits.
September 25th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I trust what the Colonel says more than any number of decadent late-capitalists, exploitative oligarchs, sexual nihilists, Yglesian yahoos, and hipsters high on Foucault and bong hits.
So, what did they do to you – did they give you the ol’ Kaczynsk – is that what fucked you up?
September 25th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Honestly, that should be a long-term goal. With proper wealth redistribution and social safety net it should be nothing to fear.
Exactly. Tax robots and give the tax revenue to humans rendered unemployed by robots. Then they can become bloggers or start garage bands or other things that robots are no good at. (Or design, build, supervise, or repair robots, of course. Bulldozers put a lot of guys with shovels out of work, but some of them are still at work driving the bulldozers. Aside from Hector, I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the shovels.)
In the long run this leads to a robot slave class, but since unlike dark-skinned humans, robots really aren’t human and don’t experience resentment or plot rebellion, fears of a robot slave uprising are really just grounded on excessive anthropomorphizing.
September 25th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Be sure to wear a flower in your hair
September 25th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Chris gets it, tax the robots.
I think the deliver bot could easily afford a $1500 one time tax along with sales and gas taxes and vehicle registration. Make it a drivers license fee for robots, they pay $1500 fee to take their drivers license. If they fail, they pay it again for the next test.
September 25th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Re: Aside from Hector, I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the shovels.)
Chris,
The current government of Venezuela would beg to disagree with you. And, what is more to the point, nations which value human labor and human virtue will outlast those which celebrate comfort and ease and expect robots to do our work. In the long run, Russia and Bolivia will bury us. And a very good thing it shall be, too.
A healthy society would be one which treated robot stevedores the same way it treated porn, cocaine, and the works of the late and unlamented Michel Foucault: i.e. as contraband ripe for confiscation.
September 25th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
I mean, I honestly do not understand the thought process here. Do Yglesias and his hipster crew actually _like_ the idea of a society in which all manual labor is done by robots? Do they _like_ what the mechanization of industry and agriculture have done to our world? Do they not see that labor has intrinsic value? I mean, I understand one might make these arguments as part of a philosopher’s parlor game, but I cannot comprehend a person actually holding them with such gleeful abandon. It is as if the Yglesian hipsters have injected themselves with a moral and spiritual anaesthetic that deadens part of the human soul, and have rendered themselves totally insensitive to the proddings of the intuitive sense of natural law.
September 25th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
On the other hand, maybe all the Yglesian hipsters is to sit down for an afternoon with the collected works of Aquinas, Rousseau, Simone Weil, E.F. Schumacher, and a couple of the 19th century popes, and perhaps they would be cure.d
September 25th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
I mean, I honestly do not understand the thought process here. Do Yglesias and his hipster crew actually _like_ the idea of a society in which all manual labor is done by robots? Do they _like_ what the mechanization of industry and agriculture have done to our world? Do they not see that labor has intrinsic value? I mean, I understand one might make these arguments as part of a philosopher’s parlor game, but I cannot comprehend a person actually holding them with such gleeful abandon. It is as if the Yglesian hipsters have injected themselves with a moral and spiritual anaesthetic that deadens part of the human soul, and have rendered themselves totally insensitive to the proddings of the intuitive sense of natural law
Well, increased reliance on automation might help some countries, like Japan, deal with the short-term negative efects of depopulation.
Labor does have intrinsic value, I think, and I roundly reject the pitiful notion that our purpose as human beings should be to maximize comfort and convenience. But, I’d go further and say that in order to be meaningful, such a choice should be made by individuals without coercion from the state. Forced or coerced labor does not have intrinsic value, or at least it is a very different intrinsic value that is not edifying to the person performing it.
I come from a family where until me, we earned our bread by physically taxing manual work. I recognize the dignity and intrinsic value of such work and when I perform small volumes of manual labor, I feel as though I’m tapping into a small part of that. I don’t fish because I need the food to survive, but my grandparents did and when I do now I feel as though I’m tapping into a small part of that. So with all manual and agricultural labor – it’s a way of tapping into the things that make us human in the first place. Stray too far from that, and we become something else entirely.
But certain types of menial, rote, and mindless tasks that can be performed by robots are NOT edifying and have only utilitarian, not intrinsic, value. That type of work is arguably much more dehumanizing than staring at a computer screen all day. Allowing robots to perform such tasks can free up physical and mental capital for people to do work that is edifying.
September 25th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Re: So with all manual and agricultural labor – it’s a way of tapping into the things that make us human in the first place. Stray too far from that, and we become something else entirely.
Hugo,
EXACTLY! I agree with this 100%.
RE: But certain types of menial, rote, and mindless tasks that can be performed by robots are NOT edifying and have only utilitarian, not intrinsic, value. That type of work is arguably much more dehumanizing than staring at a computer screen all day. Allowing robots to perform such tasks can free up physical and mental capital for people to do work that is edifying.
I also agree with this. I have no problem with SOME degree of mechanization, and there are clearly _some_ tasks that should be done by machines. What I’m horrified by is the gleeful insouciance about robots doing _every_ bit of industrial or agricultural labor. Someone needs to decide what tasks robots should do vs. what should be left for people, and the decider shouldn’t be the free market.
September 25th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Someone needs to decide what tasks robots should do vs. what should be left for people, and the decider shouldn’t be the free market.
Who, pray tell, should that someone be?
September 25th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Apparently Thomas Aquinas should be the person telling us what jobs robots should be doing.
September 25th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Don’t be silly – on an abstruse technical matter like this you want the opinion of a young up-and-comer, like one of the 19th century popes. (Of course technically they’re dead too, but they’re not as dead as Aquinas.)
September 25th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Do they _like_ what the mechanization of industry and agriculture have done to our world?
You mean the Industrial and Green Revolutions, and the attendant drops in famine and infant mortality that have allowed for the quadrupling of the world population? Yes. Subsistence agriculture is surprisingly unpopular firsthand.
It is as if the Yglesian hipsters have injected themselves with a moral and spiritual anaesthetic that deadens part of the human soul, and have rendered themselves totally insensitive to the proddings of the intuitive sense of natural law.
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of the human mind,” huh? So Hector turns out to be a acolyte of the Butlerian Jihad – you coulda tipped me over with a feather. The natural law prods me in many directions, but “a robot butler is an abomination” is, I gotta say, not one of them.
September 25th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Any quotations from the Orange Catholic Bible wins the thread in my mind.
September 25th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
@Hector:
Who cares if Venezuela produces more corn under Chavez? Going back to the farms only matters if all we want is produce. Personally, I like my technology, I like engaging in mental work more than physical work, and I like reading blogs online.
Why would I want to give that up? So that I can toil in the dirt and sun? Hardly.
At least in my industry there are lots more things that need to be done than we have the labor to do. If we can free up labor to do these things, I say that it all the better. That said, a lot of the things we need labor to do, could not be done by farmhands or stevedores.
If we create a economy so efficient that we don’t need unskilled labor, I suppose it would be too much to ask you, Hector, that stevedores and farmhands decide, themselves, how they should occupy their time, rather than letting the government figure it out.
September 25th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
The essence of Man is that he is ‘homo laborans’, and through work he expresses his essential nature.
The problem with this is that a society built on Chavez-ism – but in a world where functional robots were known to have been invented, even if the Hectors of the world promptly banned them – would be still completely distorted by the knowledge that all that humanizing heavy manual labor was essentially an affectation. It would be less ‘homo laborans’ and more ‘homo makeworkans and more-or-less-discretely resentful aboutitans’. And you can’t uninvent the motorized grain tresher.
In the long run, Russia and Bolivia will bury us. And a very good thing it shall be, too.
Maybe. If so I wish them luck. But suppose I go to Bolivia and offer them free robots? What will they say? “Sorry, but it is through work that I express my essential nature?” I have a feeling that a lot of them might feel like expressing their essential natures through something voluntary for a while. And the Russians were pioneers in robotics already, google “Lunokhod”.
September 25th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
The thing I don’t understand about Hector is – why is he bothering us online? Does he not work? Are there no field to be tilled in his proto-agro-socialist utopia in Venezuela?
September 25th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Re: The problem with this is that a society built on Chavez-ism – but in a world where functional robots were known to have been invented, even if the Hectors of the world promptly banned them – would be still completely distorted by the knowledge that all that humanizing heavy manual labor was essentially an affectation
Nonsense. There are many inventions on which we look back, in retrospect, and judge that the world would have been a better place if they had never been invented. The classic example, I suppose, would be the atom bomb. You’re operating on the assumption that people dislike hard labor. They don’t. They dislike _alienated_ and _exploitative_ labor. That’s to say, they dislike working for a landlord or an employer and not seeing the fruits of their labor. If they owned their own farms, as members of peasant cooperatives such as those which President Colonel Chavez is setting up, they would be free and self-sufficient, and they would no longer see labor as an imposition. In a healthy Socialist society, as is taking root in Venezuela, work would be valued and esteemed as part of what makes us human, and people would take pride in their labor and be happy about working rather than trying to reduce working hours to a minimum.
JMO,
Actually you may only need to put up with me for a couple more years- I am strongly considering moving to South America or back to Africa after I finish my degree.
Re: You mean the Industrial and Green Revolutions, and the attendant drops in famine and infant mortality that have allowed for the quadrupling of the world population? Yes. Subsistence agriculture is surprisingly unpopular firsthand
Senix,
Don’t be a dunce. I’m not against all technological innovation. What I do insist is that all new technologies be studied by the authorities of church and state- in the light of what the natural law teaches us- and evaluated as to whether they would contribute to the betterment of Man in the economic, material, environmental, physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and moral realms.
I disagree with the pope who wrote ‘Rerum Novarum’, and find his prescriptions not radical enough, but he understood quite correctly that the industrial revolution contained much ill as well as much good and that it was necessary to sort the good from the bad, with the law of nature and of Christ as our guide.
I am not even against all labor-saving inventions. To a certain extent they are good and just things. What I am against is extending that trend to its ultimate conclusion, for the desire to create a world with no need for human labor- physical as well as mental- is against man and nature in its implications. There must be someone to say, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.” The free market cannot do that: that task is left to the two swords of church and state, whose duty it is to accept what may be accepted, and to deny what must be denied.
September 25th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
The whole post at #62 kind of seems a little “Old man shouts at cloud”-ish to me.
Progress is progress. The best thing to do is to make sure its benefits go to everyone.
September 25th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
But there is going to tens of millions of jobs. The Street Bots reduce the transportation costs of exchange. So, we do more things for each other in more varied ways or more varied time periods. The deliverbot, anyway.
Then sex android bot, the screaming tank with no driver, the drones that shoot deranged Arabs.
But deliverbot is nice, friendly and we all love him.
September 26th, 2009 at 2:00 am
The classic example, I suppose, would be the atom bomb.
So . . . you’d have preferred invading Japan to end World War II? And then, a million dead G.I.’s later, you’ve got to deal with the U.S.S.R’s designs on Western Europe.
On the other hand, maybe all the Yglesian hipsters is to sit down for an afternoon with the collected works of Aquinas, Rousseau, Simone Weil, E.F. Schumacher, and a couple of the 19th century popes, and perhaps they would be cure.d
Hector is Ignatius J. Reilly!
September 26th, 2009 at 9:56 am
15,16, 20. Thank you, I was just so confused. I thought that I had totally lost all of my common sense to econ and had no way to even process the common sense view. Mass inflation always struck me as something that wild-eyed goldbugs believe hides behind every corner – I was trying to decide if Matt was secretly one of those.
September 26th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I’m betting that Hector doesn’t dig ditches, pick lettuce, or unload ships for a living.
September 26th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Hector,
Why are you wasting your life getting a “degree”?
There are many inventions on which we look back, in retrospect, and judge that the world would have been a better place if they had never been invented. The classic example, I suppose, would be the atom bomb.
Some would argue that the advent of the atmoic bomb has prevented (and may continue to prevent) WWIII. It is certainly likely that had the bomb been invented the US and Soviet Union would have gone to war.
Do you really give no credence to that argument?
September 26th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
That should have been.
It is certainly likely that had the bomb not been invented the US and Soviet Union would have gone to war.
September 27th, 2009 at 7:08 am
Military robots have led to fewer American deaths in Iraq than we would have seen in the absence of robots, but following a “don’t invade Iraq” would have saved many more lives at less cost
Does this strike anyone else as remarkably incoherent? Consider the analogous argument:
“Polio vaccines have led to fewer deaths worldwide than we would have seen in the absence of polio vaccines, but following a ‘don’t allow anyone to fraternize with anyone else’ policy would have saved many more lives at less cost”.
Now, the first objection to this argument would be that polio vaccines do in fact cost less in the long run than enforcing some kind of permanent human-isolation program.
The same is true of military robots. Conflicts are bound to happen. Ideally, of course, they would never happen; but even then, assuming the need for a standing army, the point is still valid. I imagine it works out much cheaper in the long run to manufacture robots than to train more soldiers (robots aren’t paid wages, are instantly ‘usable’, have no costs associated with their ‘deaths’ other than manufacturing others, etc.)