WSJ Columnist: Robots Aren't Destroying Enough Jobs

foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-capital-account.html

I don't get it, aren't robots supposed to do all the work under communism? Why are you crying, OP?

Well, robots should take all the jobs. When no one works anymore, money stops making sense. And when money stops making sense, the state stops making sense.

Wow, all these shit part time and gig economy jobs sure are great.

I hope they keep overproducing and crash this economy into the stone age.

Are we already living in communism you dumb nigger?
Robots taking jobs under capitalism is bad.

He's right that they aren't destroying enough jobs. He's wrong about everything else though.

His arguments are equivalent to attempting to prove the sun won't set by pointing out that it's still light outside. To anyone who understands the potential for AI, it is obvious that we're looking toward a future of 100% unemployment.

Robots taking all the jobs is going to be one of the key factors in the downfall of capitalism and the establishment communism. And this is inevitable.

Establishment *of communism

...

I'd like this to be the case, but I still think it is wishful thinking. I don't see any revolutionary potential on the horizon.

Although, I guess communism is sort of possible when porky kills us all while inadvertently establishing FALC for themselves.

Read "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" for more insight on this.

You don't see any revolutionary potential yet because jobs aren't being lost on a large scale yet. Give it a few more decades. The technology is still in its infancy.

Decades? IBM and Google are in a race to perfect machine learning, both want a monopoly in the brave new world they envision of a capitalist utopia without the proletariat (they understanding of capitalism is weak).

Porky fucking up the capitalist economy is good for us in the long run, but it will suck in the short term.

Current machine learning is still quite far from true AI. They're only just starting to make crude AIs capable of more general (but still very limited) problem solving.

Google already has deployed machine learning for self-driving cars, and IBM has deployed machine learning for computers that replace marketing managers (computers that can predict fads in the market and pick what marketing campaigns will be optimal).

That's nowhere close to true AI.

Good enough to replace workers.

What makes you guys think that the closer we get to technological unemployment, the closer we'll be to communism (or even other socdem policies like UBI)?

Seems to me like laid off workers simply won't be needed at all, so no concessions need to be made to them and they'll be sterilized and encouraged to commit suicide so they stop being a bother and a drain on resources.

There is the little problem of where value comes from.

We call that exterminism, and it's a real possibility. This is why we must start to build parallel systems and attempt seizing of the MOP now instead of later.

I don't think they'll care once they realize they don't need people to both produce their goods and buy them anymore.

Value in capitalism can only be realized through human labor.

The bourgies who come to own the automated MoP and all the guns under capitalism will realize they outgrew the need for it.

But this would devolve into feudalism as the value of commodities would not be able to be realized.

Do you have enough faith in the bourgeioisie to not be that short-sighted?

This. Noone gives a fucking shit about "muh bad working conditions muh wageslavery", get it through your heads already. People will just adjust and get used to it. Job loss en masse on the other hand is extreme enough to actually cause people to rise up, simply because at that point it will finally be patently obvious that "yeah those robots really ARE taking your jobs" and people will finally realize there's LITERALLY no alternative, it's either starve or revolution.

There isn't going to be a fucking "workers revolt", what will happen is essentially a NEET revolt, caused by the system collapsing naturally because of automation. Marx was a LARPer.

If they pay attention to their own classical bourgeois theory on how value works.

Destroying jobs is good. We want to get rid of jobs. Here is the problem, though: reaching the level of technological development needed to (mostly) eliminate the state, wage labor, etc. allows the state to so thoroughly entrench itself as to be untouchable. Even if no one NEEDS to work, we may still have a society of invincible landlords who demand that people do "something (prostitution, probably) to "earn their way".

Welp… guess they are selling us the rope!

Was job creation always at war with Eastasia?

Jesus christ this board sometimes.

From the perspective of the capitalist AI god kings it is not capitalism that will become obsolete, but humanity itself. Full automation and UBI under capitalism will not result in communism but in the gradual phasing out of the human to make way for meaningless technoprogress and endless accumulation. Capitalism is a lovecraftian omnicidal death cult based in the total negation of humanity. The sillicon valley higherups and some STEM redditors are not only aware of this but pretty ok with it as well.

the silicon valley higherups and some stem redditors are total retards. when people want to make their heads roll because they created a system which made 70% of humanity irrelevant and the remaining 30% completely responsible on their well being through taxes they'll probably have a "made me think" moment. The capitalists are not retarded and neither is the bourgeois state. They won't allow for some starry eyed memelord to ruin the stagnant neolib system that has been going on since the late 70's.

'just waiting for the end of capitalism' is basically suicide. You can expect 'voluntary' extermination programs to be promoted as the 'rational' and 'humane' option by the liberal media, probably within the next 20 years or so. your social media newsfeeds will be targeted with especially calibrated content promoting affordable 'right to die' options endorsed by your favourite celebrities.

those in power are going to try and maintain their power by any means necessary, it might not be through neoliberal capitalism, but rather through something else which hasn't fully taken form yet. Neoliberalism is even now, moving further and further away from liberalism and any semblance of democracy. In a way the technocratic surveillance information state that seems likely to follow may be even worse than neoliberalism. They aren't letting 'the people' get in the way of the pursuit of efficiency.

tbh most western leftists are about as enslaved to technophilic passivity as the worst gee whiz elon musk fanboys. Humanity seems to be losing faith in itself, in what is characteristically human-art, emotion, relationships, freedom, philosophy- no thanks! it's all about technics now. There's no will to create the future anymore, the revolutionary spirit of the medieval heretics that wanted to create the kingdom of god in this earth, what was best about the bolsheviks the sans culottes and the spanish anarchists, is pretty much all gone. We look up to technics and experts instead. That is, instrumental rationality raised to the umpteenth power. 1st world leftists and neoliberals are pretty much indistinguishable by this point. They both dream of an utopia of passive hedonism where the human becomes an accesory to the machine.

That's an amusingly human-centric take on things. "Meaningless technoprogress and endless accumulation" could equally well be used to describe the history of biological life on earth.

Absolutely nothing has any meaning, so what does it matter whether the atoms arranged into self-replicating structures typically have 6 electrons or 26?

By all means, abandon technology. Personally I'd be quite happy if you stopped using the internet.

It wouldn't be the end of humanity, it would be the end of the traditional proletariat at worst. Technically, a society in which the bourgeoisie is able to eliminate the proletariat and establish a society with planned production, no state, no private property, etc. is still a Communist one. You can't have capitalism without a proletariat.

that's exactly my point though.

that's what gets me about the antihumanist mindset. It's a reductive conception of Being that dismisses human experience for being 'unscientific', while anthropomorphising technology. Meaning and meaninglessness are inseparable, they form part of the same dialectic whole, you can't have meaninglessness without meaning and neither of them is previous to the other or to the consciousness that determines meaningfulness. The human faculty to assign meaning and value to things is valid on its own right and does not need to be validated by 'objective' 'science'. Marxism is a philosophy that, despite the scientific materialist pretensions of some of its proponents, places a great emphasis on human consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, that's all the Hegelian legacy was about really. The left is all about realising the full potentialities of human concioussness as an emergent phenomenon.


I'm not against technology itself, but against technology as an ideology. we do not 'owe' technology anything, it's just a series of tools created by humans, not an anthropomorphic God like entity that somehow deserves our respect.

Don't be stupid it won't be feudalism. It will be slave society but instead obots will be the slaves…RIP Humanity

Don't you faggots hate work? Why do leftists like work so much? If someone takes away work will you die? Nothing to bitch about anymore? When everyone has hours and hours of free time do you think they will become buttmad leftists?

Work should be meaningful or entertaining, if it's meaningful then it gives you a feeling of power and importance and makes you feel good and provides a benefit to society, all shit tier jobs should be eliminated work should be rewarded based on competence and larger benefit to society, there should ideally be a population reduction, and everyone who doesn't want to work should be placed on UBI with free access to the internet and all the books he wants

it's not an utopia that's being created here. capitalism will not gone anywhere. We'll end up in an empty inhuman world where humans are nothing but isolated consumer units trapped in capitalist machine prison. There will be no
'free time', but total enslavement to the commodity. Eventually humans will become an obstacle to accumulation and will have to be destroyed as well.

you are probably going to end up in the matrix and live out the rest of your life as a lab rat on intravenous soylent rations, you know that? Worst thing is it seems like such a waste, humanity can do so much more

Considering the current US government wants to remain in a capitalist system where necessities requre an exchange of money despite that money becoming increasinly unavailable, yes. I'm sure every user here would love a world where work isn't a requirement, but that involves a massive social shift in economics, politics, and culture. Right now large portions of the population who've been brainwashed into thinking everything they and the top-tier bourg have achieved all they have through "hard work" and society is collapsing because of the lack of "hard work", and blame it on everything but the system (lazy generation, immigrants, minimum wage, robots, etc.).

Saw an interesting segment on Secular Talk, where it was proposed that Obamacare wasn't a success in terms of money, but in terms of shifting cultural opinion of healthcare away from a bought muh privilege and into an inalienable right. We really need the same thing for work, some sort of legislation that even if many don't like it, they'll find reverting back to the way things were to be even less palatable.

Feels good man

The only possible way demand for human labor will ever decrease, no matter how efficient, is if consumers intentionally and voluntarily decide to halt demand below maximum productive capacity.


Today’s “AI” is merely another tool to increase the efficiency of human labor, because it is still completely inferior to the human mind. And like every single such efficiency multiplier from the dawn of the industrial revolution to the present day, it will only result in greater consumption, demanding greater productivity, demanding maximum human employment.

Read Jevons.