Agifem wrote:The utopian life you describe differs from the society i describe, by the very meaningful difference of robots. Robots do all the tiring and mostly socially degrading work. Doctors exist, but the garbage-man is a robot.
I don't understand why this distinction is meaningful, or indeed why it would be helpful. It seems to me that if any jobs are retained by humans, those humans will inherently be more powerful than those without jobs. They will have status and power by virtue of their station, since their position in society is essential, giving them leverage that others without jobs do not have. Any job that cannot be duplicated by robots would be a danger to the system for this reason.
Scarcity. This is a vast topic in and of itself, which is the cause and primary objection many of you have to the existence of this society. Today, scarcity is a problem, a major one, and even though our capitalist economy handles it unevenly, it does handle it
But scarcity consists of two things : lack of energy, and lack of resources. Once you solve those two, even most advanced technology becomes available in near-unlimited amount.
That simply is not true. All resources have a point of diminishing returns, including energy. The very nature of physics dictates this at a fundamental level, in the form of entropy (closed systems are inherently losing their energetic nature and are degrading towards a static nature). In a more general sense, every form of resource, if useful or desirable, will reach a point where demand results in increased usage, which eventually places a limit on supply. Robots in no way mitigate this problem.
There is a reason i chose to go 50-100 years in the future. This is because robots will exist, but also because by then, I am confident mankind will have solved the energy problem, either by using nuclear fusion, or by improving the solar energy usage, both of which being fairly common sources of energy to make the scarcity of energy a problem of the past.
Even supposing we tackle fusion, and manage to make it have economic payoff, unlike with fission, energy remains a problem for a variety of reasons. Firstly, fusion plants aren't free, they don't last forever, are highly complex pieces of technology, and will certainly require highly skilled labor rare resources to build and to maintain. Fission plants, being comparatively low tech, require multi-billions of dollars to build, have an approximately 30 year lifespan, need constant maintenance, a highly skilled workforce, and don't actually result in net economic benefits. The cost to build them outweighs their energy output considerably (this may or may not change with the newest generation of nuclear power plants, that remains to be seen).
Fusion plants will, it seems, cost in the tens of billions, based on projections that arent even based on available working plants. The only plants we have are not yet able to actually produce energetic fusion. Given that fusion plants are substantially more complicated than fision plants, and apparently require all sorts of exotic elements kept in weird states (like liquid state noble gases and such), it's simply wishful thinking to imagine the energy problem can just be made to go away. Now, if we were able to do fusion using very simple technology, it might be made to be widely available, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There is no such thing as free energy. Fusion may well be the energy source of our future, but there is no guarantee as of the moment that it will be an efficient solution, and there is even less reason to believe that it will provide us with limitless energy, any more than nuclear fission has (which, at the time of its advent, was imagined to be our energy future: now we have shortages of nuclear fuel, plant closings, infastructure problems, and uprofitability).
Now, if we consider this abundance of energy a given, we realize that many other problems disappear. Oil isn't needed to fuel cars anymore, only to create plastics, which is probably the first shortage there will remain, and one i don't have a solution for. However, when it comes to metals (iron, copper, excluding mithril), they all exist in space in vast quantities. Space exploration then becomes an important way to solve resources scarcity, and as of today, energy is a very limiting factor in space exploration. I'm not saying space exploration can do everything, but i think it can help to a greater extent, and abundance of energy can help space exploration to a greater extent as well.
That would be great, if we never needed anything other than common elements. Also, mithril isn't a real metal. It's fictional (probably you meant it as a joke, however I wasn't sure, so I figured it was worth pointing out). However, a great deal of the high tech stuff we use these days requires rare or uncommon elements and/or minerals like cadmium, which isn't necessarily easy to find, and isn't very readily available. Lots of elements and minerals we use are actually pretty unique to earth, so expanding our search to space doesn't make it any easier.
Also, you have to consider both the energetic costs of space based mining, and perhaps more imporantly, the time costs. Traveling around in space isn't exactly quick, and going around harvesting stuff from asteroids and other plants requires energy, maintenance, and inevitable losses of investment. Even with robots doing it, undoubtedly many will fail, be destroyed, be decomissioned, need maintenance, or otherwise have associated costs. The scale of any harvesting operation that kept a steady supply would probably have to be vast as hell, and so many robots would require lots and lots of money. Give how much it costs to put a cheesy wheeled robot on mars, and given how many times it has failed, imagine the technological difficulty inherent in making complicated robots capable of getting to and asteroid, landing on said asteroid while both it and the asteroid moves, harvesting enough resources to make the journey worth while energetically, and returning with the payload. Adding in the fact that these robots would need to do this again and again and again, and undoubtedly aren't simple technologies, and you start to see how this could actually be a daunting task on even a small scale. Personally, were it my charge, I would probably try to simplify the process, maybe by trying to just divert asteroids to impact harvest sites on an area of a planet designated for harvesting, but then you have other costs, like the limit of the size of an asteroid you can do that with (gven that it would have to be pretty small to keep from causing serious problems), the loss of materials from burnup, and so on.
Anyway, the point is, its always nice to imagine you can just get stuff for free, but until you actually understand the costs of any given undertaking, its just wishful thinking. There is no such thing as free energy or free resources right now, and it's unlikely such a thing will ever exist, and imagining saviour technologies that will deliver us from the trappings of hisotry and economics is not really substantilly different from imagining some future utopia where humanity experiences a radical psychological shift and become selfless because some intangible social changes have taken place. Or where we reach some "singularity" point where the increasin pace of technology produces some arbitrary shift in the very nature of humanity. It's all just a hypothesis based on no evidence that we have at hand, and thus is, in essence, and article of faith, not fact. Now, if your set of conditions did manifest at some point in time, then there is a point at which it is reasonable to start talking about radical shifts in the way humanity and economy function. The problem is, we really have no objective reason to believe the changes you forsee have any likelihood of happening. Frankly, I think they have no chance of happening.
Robots and their creation. In this system, their is no reward for designing or improving robots, except pride, fame, and the social aspects (meeting co-workers, those kind of things). There is no reward for any kind of work, except those. But i am confident those should be enough to motivate enough people so that progress can still exist, even if at a lower rate than with capitalism. So what ? That's a price to pay for a fairer society, i think.
Well, what you mean is, there is not supposed to be any reward for these things. The problem is, since the system itself doesn't reward it, but people undoubtedly would want it anyway, there would be a market for improving robots. Which means you would have to explicitly outlaw the sale of robots. Which means there must be some entity regulating the manufacture and distribution of robots, and one which punishes those who do so outde the purview of said entity. In short, there must be a government agency that does this. If there isn't, people will sell better robots illegally, undermining the system. If there is such an agency, then there must be people running it, and in any system run by people of that complexity, you need a hierarchy of some sort, or at least a division of labor. Since some labor is more essential to the function of this endeavor than others, some people would inherently have more power over this system, and consequently over society as a whole, than others. Which means, right there, you have an entrenched power system, just like with capitalism, only now it will be government employees and, ultimately, politicians who have the power instead of entrepeneurs. Not unlike communism. Society wouldn't be any fairer. You would just be adjusting in which ways it would be unfair. Personally, I would rather a society reward initiative and productivity than a job whose value is arbitrarily decided by an enforced economic dictate (in this case robotics engineers and politicians).
As for building robots, it can be done by robots as well.
As for the robot paranoïa, something i completly understand. I am confident we can trust robots, in the present as well as in the future. We already do as of today anyway. Asimov's work is here of great help. His laws of robotics are commonly used in the design of today's robots, as they make a lot of sense.[/quote]
The laws of robotics aren't used in desigining todays robots, because no robots are sophisticated enough to comprehend anything like the laws of robotics. They can hardly even identify what a concrete entity like a human is, let alone what an abstract concept like harm means. Robots are in their infancy. As of the moment, robots only understand very concrete commands, and aren't substantially different from a computer program. Functional fuzzy logic has yet to be achieved in robotics, and as such, everything has to be pretty explicit. The idea of "harm" encapsulates such a wide variety of things because we humans can think in fuzzy adaptable categories. You could explicitly program a robot not to do X, Y or Z to a human in any given scenario, but it cant understand the concept "harm" and flexibly apply it to novel situations. Since it would be impossible to program for every specific contigency in which a robot might cause harm, we pretty much need fuzzy logic for something like the laws of robotics to function. We don't have that right now, and from what I understand, we seem to be a long ways off.
Controlling the robots. Another topic in and of itself. It can probably be done by an agency/ministery that submits to the governement. After all, government is responsable for providing everything to its people, it's only fair it is given the means of doing so. It does sound quite like a centralized economy though, but i think the democratic aspect of the government is enough to prevent some of the flaws of such an economy to exist. Not all for sure. But again, i think it's a price to pay that is worth it[.
Well, basically, any government that is 100% responsible for providing everything for its citizens is just about by definition Socialism. And, naturally, any system where the people are entirely dependent upon the government for everything will eventually become tyrranical in some way or another. In this scenario, people are depedent upon the government, democratic or not, and the government, being a central entity, if controlled by one faction, will become tyrranical. That is exactly what happened in the Soviet union. It didn't start out that way. It's just that some groups immediately estalished their control over the governments insitutions, and eventually the government as a whole, to the exclusion of other groups. Democracy would only prevent this if there were checks and balances. In most democracies, that is the private sphere. Ultimately governments in modern democracies require the marketplace to function. Without the backing of private industry, its hard to accomplish anything. If the government is the economy, well, basically, the government answers to no one and controls all the resources and all the power. Therefore, if one group seizes control of government, they control everything, and can consequently rule without any motive to answer to the people. Democracy alone doesn't prevent this, as is evidenced in the modern day case of Hugo Chavez, who got elected legally, implemented socialist reforms, started seizing private assets around the country, a now is more or les declaring himself dictator for life. He was able to do this because the populace allowed him to take away one of the great checks on dictatorial ambition, the free market.
While your intentions are noble, and I respect that greatly, the thing that many people dont realize in their dreams to see a more just world is that actually, one of the greatest tools for justice is the free market. It has to be regulated, and its excesses have to be curbed, and I think that this is one of the important roles of government, but historically, capitalism has been one of the great forces for the improvement of mankinds well being. People often get caught up in the individual instances of seeming inhumanity (people working for $1 an hour making shoes for 18 hours a day), often without either seeing the big picture, or understanding the specifics (for example the people in that shoe factory often have chosen to take the job because it is
better than the alternatives, and thus the work is a positive choice for them in their circumstances, and has imrpvoed their life, even if to us the prospect of working 18 hours for $18 seems exploitative).
There are myriad cases of abuse as a result of greed, but this isn't something inherent to capitalism, and greed cannot be eliminated short of genetically re-engineering humans. It will exist in any system, and will result in abuses no matter the context. The free market simply tempers that greed with opportunity and freedom of choice, the government with law.