Liberal Explains How Automation Will Fuck Themselves Over Unwittingly

I don't fathom how people can be this stupid. They see the development of machines that make human labour obsolete and they see it as a bad thing? They literally don't even consider the abolition of work and money as an option when it's the obvious and only solution. Android bunny girls will bring us our collectivized tendies in the glorious FALC future!

Uh, well it varies by industry. I have a cousin who's working in the field of automation and she says it looks like most jobs will be gone in a generation or two.

Yes, because NEETs are paragons of human progress, and not depressing reminders of what happens to humans without a purpose or role in society

Hmm, I'm not so sure. The statistics are there. We may not be taking the brunt of automation yet, but I don't think we should wait until that happens to act, similarly to climate change.

Labor isn't the only way to give a man purpose, especially not low skill labor.

Golly gee willikers! I truly wonder who could be responsible for this on-line communique…

Automation is not overhyped. The way automation progresses nowadays is different from how it did fifty years ago and it makes no sense to say that everything is going fine by claiming previous "automation scare" happened and were unfounded. They might have been back then, they aren't today.

in a 'generation or two' and not 'tomorrow', and that's if you ignore the fundamentally social nature of work for a purely economistic perspective. The TED talk futurologist crowd is like an even smugger capitalist version of Stalin's planners, they envision a future of endless techno progress and consumption, but it's a future that seems to have no humans in it. 'accelerationists' tell us we should trust the technocratic bourgeoisie, that any attempt to actually shake off capital and the political economy is counterproductive. 'accelerationists' play into the worship of technics that characterises the reigning order. The massive growth of Uber and AirBnB has nothing to do with 'new tech' and all with regulation avoidance. While Sillicon Valley is not facing a boom, but a mounting bubble and a crises of stagnation. even big players admit it. The information economy is a phantom economy, that's why google's been trying to branch out into increasingly speculative 'hi tech' ventures.

Kids in the late soviet period where told they'd have a postscacity society by 2000 and probably won't even have to die.

So we will eventually automate nearly everything, and then the entire working class will be out of work, after which they will be offered UBI which they will need to feed back into the automated system (still owned entirely by capitalists) who will simply hoard as much money as they can (as usual), no longer even having to pay wages anymore, producing only just barely enough to keep the proles satisfied and continuing to feed their income back into the system for the capitalists to collect etc…

I can't see this as sustainable in the slightest, it is impossible to tax the bourgs, they essentially own the authorities responsible for taxing them. Where will the UBI money come from? Will it just be printed? UBI just seems totally infeasible within the current market capitalist status quo, and with the approaching automation shitstorm I can only imagine the bourgs becoming more powerful as the workers are totally removed from the economic equation, made obsolete and powerless.

Even if UBI were sustainable and wage slavery were abolished, living in a world totally beyond your control, in the hands of a few select capitalist inheritors of the armies of fully-automated machines, does not sound like a utopia to me. The means of production must belong to the workers or power over the entire planet will become totally centralized in the hands of a tiny few.

And what would give man purpose in FALC?

Also I have no idea what the argument in that pic is attempting to make, pre-industrial Appalachia wasn't some Arcadian paradise where the bare minimum of agricultural work ensured a decent enough lifestyle.

I don't know how you make the jump from "My Appalachian ancestors after a hard day's work logging/mining coal/homemaking would gather around the family piano and sing folksongs as a way of recreation" to "Obviously fully automated luxury communism will therefore enable even the lowest prole to spend his time creating art, instead of repeatedly OD'ing on fentanyl because his life has no purpose"

It's also interesting, to say the least, the way in which Srnicek and Williams, draw a lot on Nick Land while glossing over the more disturbing theological implications of Land's though. 'accelerationists' believe capital, not the proletariat, is the true revolutionary subject of history. What does this mean for humanity? We might end up like those chickens in VR factory farms, bodies that only exist to be exploited by technocapital. Total alienation. the triumph of Death.

socialism is for nigger-loving jews

Well, simply put, their desires. In a society where people's needs are met we would be free to pursue whatever it was we felt like doing, be it cooking, research, art, and so on. Having a job doesn't protect you from the problem of the meaning of life. Certainly capitalism hasn't aided this problem, given our current mental health crisis. What's stopping you from ODing on fentanyl because your life has no purpose right now? You've simply defined your purpose as a social function within society, and if you fulfilled that then you're satisfied. What prevents people living in FALC from doing the same?

Also the argument in the picture is trying to explain that in pre-capitalism people in their free time didn't just sit around doing nothing, rather they created the lauded culture of the past, the culture which right wingers want to "return" to, on some level. The point is that we have an intrinsic desire to make and do things that are meaningful to ourselves and others. (I think this could be why we tell ourselves that our work gives us purpose, because we suppose that it is meaningful to society.) NEET culture is a symptom that can primarily be explained by the alienation of capitalism– people hate their jobs, so they may seek a simpler life, or perhaps they cannot afford to go out, so they don't, or turn to anti-depressants because they view themselves as a failure for not living up to the "ideal lifestyle" marketed by corporations.

Our desire to make or do something meaningful won't go away under FALC, and because they will be unimpeded by poverty, social inequality, or scarcity people would have the time and means to explore and grow according to their desires.

Hot meme, Holla Forums

Right now, someone's purpose is to work to prolong their life and happiness by purchasing things that do just that. We don't find any inherent meaning in the literal work we do, we find it by what we purchase with the money we earn by working. If your dream is to build a house, you find pleasure in building it after acquiring the money for the materials, not necessarily in working *for* said materials or money.

But having a job provides structure and socialisation, which prevents (though obviously not in all instances) falling through the cracks into atomisation and anomie

Because people in the past didn't have the kind of addictive, overstimulating entertainment options that modern kids enjoy, like vidya and Netflix.

That's the expectation, but I think the reality would be full-blown hedonism, because creating is much more time-consuming and difficult than chasing the dragon, or going on an ecstasy-fueled sex binge or whatever

LIBERAL DETECTED.

What's wrong with hedonism?

...

that's in the best of cases, and probably not for a long time anyways. Who knows what might happen as soon as the useless eaters on UBI become an obstacle to further accumulation? I've heard 'reasonable' tech liberals talk about how it would be a good idea to just shove the poor in VR tanks and hook them up to soylent drips until they die out. The concept of Alienation and the dream of a world redeemed that's free of alienation have always been at the core of leftist thought. Why exchange that dream for vague promises that assure us that we will get the bare minimum of scraps at some point in the future and then die?

You can't be a true hedonism within capitalism. You are forever condemned to chase desires that are not your own.

There is no point to life anyway. Sentient life exists for the sole purpose of burning as much energy as possible before the universe ends.

I agree with you

Fucking hell, it's like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel

Are we assuming that there is no structure in FALC? I always imagined that there would be, perhaps not one defined by a job, just by what we actually did, which certainly is similar, but distinct from the confines of a capitalist wage labor job.

But who will makes the games and movies? The idea is that in FALC, only necessary labor is automated, like say waste management or crop production. (In the event it's believed that this contradicts my statement that people we be free to become cooks, you could still operate a restaurant if you want to, it would just wouldn't be necessary. This may be odd, but remember that a FALC society is no longer driven by need– it's in the premise.)
So those sorts of things won't be covered by automated processes.

Personally I think this is a result of consumer culture, which would certainly be a challenge to overcome, but I don't think it's impossible to overcome. A communist revolution isn't just about economical change, but cultural change as well.

So your'e rejecting intentionality and the human faculty to assign meaning to things? Anyone who believes in anything or has any convictions is merely 'spooked' in your view, am i right? Yet you anthropomorphize the sterile models of science, you transfer the human capacity to assign meaning to your reified model of the cosmos.

I don't have any negative feelings over other people's convictions or movements as long as I can continue to exist in peace.

I have a lingering suspicion Srnicek and Williams are tech industry shills pretending to be leftists, much like the pseudosituationists at adbusters magazine. Capitalist Realism lies at the core of their vision. Don't think about seizing the means of production or abolishing bourgeoisie property relations! It's just not realistic enough!

metamute.org/editorial/articles/demeaning-future-1

Why though?

Where will the UBI money come from?
Proles who can't work need money from somewhere to buy things.

I don't believe the implementation of full UBI to be likely, at least not in the near future. UBI /Automation might be being used as a psy op, the carrot and the stick. And the psyop is working. Just look at all the self proclaimed leftists who are like: 'nevermind, maybe those benevolent tech porkies will save us one of these days, they certainly will, we won't even need a revolution after all'. UBI is much like Obamacare, a market solution approved by think tank economists and coated with a thin veneer of 'progressivism'. It's probably going to be as shitty as Obamacare if it ever gets implemented.

Capitalists can't make a profit without selling something. There will be no alternative if the machine is to be kept going, assuming that a significant portion of the proletariat isn't capable of selling its labor.

Middle guy is literally describing communism but I bet he thinks it's some form of ultimate capitalist liberty

He's describing some societal effects of communism but believes capitalism will magically make them so. "The Invisible Hand™ shall guide us"

Well obviously he is too dumb to imagine a world without money but what he's actually saying is that everyone will have an equal share of the totally automated production

What? Space exploration is one of the areas that robots have dominated since the 1950s and for good reason. Having to bring food and other life sustaining items is a logistical nightmare. Not mention the fact that humans have an unfortunate propensity to perform poorly under stress unless they are highly trained. Robots will explore the stars for humans. It won't be something most of us will be able to do.

Capital could exterminate the proletariat. What's no longer needed as a labour resource can be a biological resource, something to be used in all sorts of profit maximisation experiments. Technology has created many devices ('Social Media') through which the human mind can be harvested by capital without conscious wage labor. The Prison industrial complex feeds off people whose captivity is more profitable than their labor. This class is only bound to expand.

Congratulations, we've reached Communism.

communism without humans.