andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2017-08-31 12:00 pm
andrewducker) wrote2017-08-31 12:00 pm
Entry tags:
- advertising,
- automation,
- beauty,
- brain,
- china,
- citizenship,
- clothing,
- companies,
- currency,
- data,
- economics,
- europe,
- facebook,
- fat,
- finland,
- games,
- google,
- half-life,
- health,
- lgbt,
- links,
- mentalhealth,
- money,
- movies,
- music,
- names,
- nhs,
- ohforfuckssake,
- privacy,
- racism,
- regulation,
- size,
- society,
- surgery,
- transgender,
- tv,
- uk,
- usa,
- wales,
- weight
Interesting Links for 31-08-2017
- Man born and raised in UK told he is not a British citizen
- (tags: UK OhForFucksSake citizenship )
- Finland will keep sterilizing trans people
- (tags: Finland lgbt transgender OhForFucksSake )
- UK plan to bypass European Commission in Brexit talks doomed to fail
- (tags: uk europe OhForFucksSake )
- Are Some Psychiatric Disorders a pH Problem?
- (tags: mentalhealth brain )
- Why don’t you make your own Half-Life 3 if you’re so smart?
- (tags: games half-life )
- New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers
- (tags: automation clothing )
- How the GDPR will disrupt Google and Facebook
- (tags: privacy data regulation Europe Google Facebook advertising )
- Currency rates hit new low at airport bureaux de change
- (tags: currency UK europe )
- Large Companies Considered Harmful
- (tags: companies size economics )
- Patient plays saxophone while surgeons remove brain tumor
- (tags: music brain surgery )
- Moving from saturated to unsaturated fat doesn't help you lose weight, does lower cholesterol
- (tags: fat health weight )
- Marvel star slates racist Hollywood over name change
- (tags: china usa racism tv movies names )
- Beauty pageant winner hands back crown after being told she was too fat by organisers
- (tags: society weight beauty OhForFucksSake )
- NHS Wales: badly run by Labour or underfunded by Westminster?
- (tags: wales nhs money )
no subject
I've often wondered if automation would start removing cheap-labour manufacturing jobs before developing nation in South East Asia and Africa had been able to use the labour-rate arbitrage to boost their economies in to middle-income status. I've always thought that dealing with the politics of practically generalised robotics and machine intelligence would be easier if were we were all approximately as rich as each other.
Textile manufacturing seemed to be the most obvious route for poor countries to export labour and generate a surplus to be invested in infrastructure and education and to grow their economies.
I'm a bit anxious about a situation where it is as cheap to have a robot make a t-shirt in the USA as it is for a Bangladeshi to stitch it when the only people with the wealth and the wherewithall to make stitching robots are the West. I think that reduces the opportunities for Bangladeshi and co to join in with the 21st century on equal terms.
Pulling up the ladder
Yup, this is where the endgame of automation takes us. I'm not sure what can be done here, other than to keep pushing to make things cheaper, and then engaging in charity to make sure that people in developing nations get access to them.
Or, frankly, a lot of people in developed nations.
(Have I mentioned my liking for a basic income?)
Re: Pulling up the ladder
I have mixed feelings about basic income. On one hand I think it's diffcult to implement until after we have widespread practical general robotics and machine intelligence and the massive deflation in the cost of goods and services that come with that. I think the amount of basic income that our fiscal systems can afford at the moment is probably insufficient for anyone to live an adequate life on. On the other hand, a basic income or something very much like it (such as most people retiring on a good pension at 40) is probably the best long-term outcome to steer towards.
On the third hand I'm mindful of the lump of labour fallacy and the likelihood that as goods and services decline in cost this extra income creates new job opportunities at higher wages. And this interacts with things like reservations wages, savings rates and returns on capital (and therefore may turn out to promote lots of people to give up paid work early and draw a pension - which looks a lot like a basic income.)
In any event I fear that an ilitterate Bangladeshi subsistance farmer who never even got the chance to work in a sweatshop is going to have a hard time arguing her case for inclusion in the grand cornucopia of robot wealth.
Or rather a fairly straightforward case, just a hard time getting anyone with access to robots to care.
Or maybe not, maybe some combination of Comic Relief and Bill Gates will lend her the money to buy some robots.
The Marxist in me says to watch our for widespread changes in politics and law and cultural norms as the mode of production starts to change