cameronjpu's point of view strikes me as capitalist Panglossianism. It's like saying that there is no need for governments to have military and police forces, because people can arm themselves or hire guards.
As to employees being lazy bums, why not use access to sites like Facebook as a reward for doing their work?
On employment, I'd be happy to be self-employed or part of a cooperative. I've never had much taste for Randroid hero-worship of business leaders. It's like worshipping politicians or military leaders.
We are still some way to go before employment Götterdämmerung, because artificial intelligence is not good enough. It's one of the great disappointments of my life; I remember being very interested in it in earlier years. But artificial intelligence is nevertheless advancing; I found some companies that advertise artificial-vision inspection services -- you put a video camera on the production line and it sends its images to a computer that runs some software to check on whether the items look right. There's also work in warehouse robots and even crop-picking robots. You need artificial vision to recognize a fruit that's ready to be picked, and you need to move the arm to the fruit, which is why that technology has not gotten much notice. These actions may be trivial for us, but not for a robot.
But as AI advances, I think that employment Götterdämmerung is a real possibility, because for the large majority of (human) workers, it will be VERY hard to compete with robotized factories with good AI.
As to employees being lazy bums, why not use access to sites like Facebook as a reward for doing their work?
On employment, I'd be happy to be self-employed or part of a cooperative. I've never had much taste for Randroid hero-worship of business leaders. It's like worshipping politicians or military leaders.
We are still some way to go before employment Götterdämmerung, because artificial intelligence is not good enough. It's one of the great disappointments of my life; I remember being very interested in it in earlier years. But artificial intelligence is nevertheless advancing; I found some companies that advertise artificial-vision inspection services -- you put a video camera on the production line and it sends its images to a computer that runs some software to check on whether the items look right. There's also work in warehouse robots and even crop-picking robots. You need artificial vision to recognize a fruit that's ready to be picked, and you need to move the arm to the fruit, which is why that technology has not gotten much notice. These actions may be trivial for us, but not for a robot.
But as AI advances, I think that employment Götterdämmerung is a real possibility, because for the large majority of (human) workers, it will be VERY hard to compete with robotized factories with good AI.
