Robots threaten 15m UK jobs, says Bank of England's chief economist | Business | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... -economist

Powered movement is key before you even get on to AI - you're talking fully-fledged cyborgs before it gets truly bad to my mind.

Are we heading towards the Star Trek utopia, where money is no longer desired because there are robots doing all the jobs and so no need for capitalism among the individual?

Mark

No. Star Trek is a 'post scarcity' economy, much like Banks' Culture, but it's nothing to do with robots. The idea is simple : In Star Trek, you can make anything at all provided you have a supply of energy (see food dispensers etc). And they have a system which generates effectively infinite energy (anti matter, dilithium crystals etc). Therefore no physical object has any value since anything can be duplicated instantly for free. Also, since the production time on even complex objects is effectively zero, there's much less need for people to put their labour to making things.

Having robots won't change the amount of resources we have. It won't make diamonds any less scarce, or mean we can make enough food for everyone instantly and for free. Until we can make any useful material, let alone complex objects, for free we can't approach the situation in Star Trek.

Basically, we simply don't have the knowledge yet to begin to make that economy. Just removing labour from the equation, which is what robots would do, doesn't get us there. It would require us to have a level of technology we can't even see how we'd get to.

So what would happen if all humanity was out of a job because robots had taken over all manual labour positions?

Mark

That's a very interesting question.
If you take the optimistic Star Trek view there will be a huge increase in the time people can spend on things like art, literature, scientific research and so on. Freed from the mundainity of jobs necessary to meet the basic needs of society humans are free to do stuff they find interesting and enjoyable.

Or we might go nuts and all kill each other out of shear boredom.

Hopefully the answer will lie more towards the Star Trek end of the spectrum.

Funnily enough, I was having a similar kind of discussion a couple of years ago with someone. Basically, we still have the Victorian/Industrial Revolution notion that you have to work 8 hours a day (or more), be ever present in the work place and expect leisure to be a lower priority. This is still very much the feeling of today, with Tory ministers trotting out lovely Victorian phrases like “the dignity of work”. So this is where we are, as a society. That’s still with us.

We don’t see much by way of robots in Star Trek. I’m very cautious about how the rest of the people in that world live because we really don”t see them. However, we do that that manual labour is very much that. Data was in danger of being misappropriated as a seed for a “race” of androids. Picard brought up the notion of slavery in the hearing, and Data was spared that fate. In Voyager, we have the ongoing problems with the Doctor and his “hologram rights” - and we even have a scene where a mine full of the EMH Mk 1s are working. Clearly, that society is not beyond the need for human-like labour.

I find it very hard to believe that there is not a class of people that are doing the work, not for the love of the job, but because they have to. I have an uneasy feeling that the Trek world is closer to Huxley’s Brave New World than people would like to admit. We are effectively seeing the Alphas and the Betas (O’Brien is pretty much Trek’s Bernard Marx) in the programmes. We don’t see robots because they are not there. If they were, then Data would not be such a novelty. The AI isn’t ready either - we see various states of EMH development, but they are not perfect. The Doctor “improves” only through prolonged running of his software, but he makes more catastrophic mistakes as a result.

The Trek universe may appear to be some panacea of peace, virtue and leisure, but only for those who have been selected for it.

I think there's a probably more truth in Agent Smith's monologue in the Matrix, where he said (roughly) the first matrix failed because the human mind rejected a perfect utopia, and that we needed to have misery and heartache in our lives to make everything seem real.

The vision of the federation, where money doesn't exist, always seemed a bit idealistic and nebulous; and never adequately explained - one of the biggest failings in the Star Trek universe IMO.

They were certainly having to deal with a currency of sorts in TNG and DS9, especially when the Ferengi became more than just a comic interlude. I think it’s such a basic part of our living, that we would find it hard to imagine a scenario where there is genuinely no money. How, then, do McCoy’s smugglers get their Romulan Ale across the line from the Romulan Star Empire? It won’t be for love or a nice book about Mark Twain.

Isn't it something implied in star trek that of the major space faring races, the federation is one of the more advanced technologically? It may be the feregni (for example) haven't figured out how post scarcity works yet. And anyway, if trading and business are THAT engrained in your culture, you're probably going to keep doing them for a very long time beyond the point where it's absolutely necessary, because losing it would cause such massive social upheaval. In the fergeni's case it always seemed to me trading is as much about 'getting the better half of the deal' as it is obtaining the item traded for.

Also IIRC replication technology only works up to a certain level of complexity. Something about the data storage requirements to keep the 'blueprint' of complex things being too high? For example, storing the pattern for a single person for a short period takes the entire data store of the enterprise in one episode? Otherwise why not just 'back up' the entire crew, so when one of them dies you can just replicate them back again.

So it may well be possible you can't replicate a particular complex drink or foodstuff, so those things remain valuable as they have to be obtained the 'old fashioned' way. But all of those things are optional luxuries, so the base economy still operates on the 'nothing has material value' model.

Scotty backed himself up ("Relics") and there was plenty of room for at least one more crewman on that ship. The feedback loop caused data degradation so the other crew member didn't survive. It didn't seem to be a memory limitation. As that ship was Star Trek Movie era, and it was a smaller vessel than Enterprise D, it should be possible to back up your crew in away missions. Or just back them up anyway.

It does appear, generally, that citizens of the Federation don't have a particular need for currency provided they are only transacting with other Federation citizens. That doesn't mean there isn't actual money kicking about as we see most obviously in DS9. Also note the tendency of the senior officers on the Enterprise to partake in Poker - do the chips have any actual value beyond the game?

Replicator technology does indeed have limitation. It can't create living matter and and at some level of complexity it falls over. I forget the episode but Quark definitely states at some point that gold is essentially worthless (IIRC he had come into possession of Morns fortune, denominated in Gold Pressed Latinum Bricks - the latinum wasn't actually in bricks so they weren't worth anything). The implication is that whatever Latinum is, it's too complex for a replicator to make where as gold can be replicated so is essentially worthless.

In TOS people definitely had jobs a miners (see the episode that has the Horta in it). Mining isn't usually considered a terribly safe or pleasant job. Also, the Klingons still use people to do mining for Dilithium (ST VI) although that appears to be within their penal system so it may be more to do with punishment than necessity. In TOS Kirk does mention paying someone using Federation credit or credits (I forget which) so, certainly in that period, the Federation still appeared to have some sort of money, if only to enable trade with non-Federation worlds.

I have seen some suggestion that the way the Federation works is essentially along the lines proposed by the Green Party at the last election - a minimum level of state benefit sufficiently high enough to live on (i.e. meet all basic needs - accommodation, clothing and food) so the job an individual does or chooses to do doesn't impact their general quality of life. This runs somewhat in tandem with a fundamental change in how the society 'keeps score' of success (i.e. it's not about the money any more but the development of the individual). So, while there is still money, everyone has enough of it to live in reasonable comfort and the accumulation of wealth isn't the be all and end all.

That already happened multiple times. Before the industrial and agricultural revolutions, well over 80% of this country (and at least that portion in all other countries) worked in agriculture. Doctors, teachers, lawyers were very rare. Travel agents much rarer still.

Then new techniques (water-meadows and what have you), new tools (seed drills etc), and power sources replaced most of that human labour. So we got lots of lawyers, teachers. If any of us here wields a hoe, it is in an allotment for leisure purposes. Unfortunately, all that civilisation was all in vain - we once more have hardly any travel agents. But if all the people whose jobs can be performed by a web site or a vending machine move on, we will have a much larger pool of labour to provide nice care homes when we are old, and childcare for our grandchildren.

Taking most manual labour out of food production helped make food immensely cheap. So much so that the ailments linked to poverty, which once were consumption and rickets, are now obesity and type 2 diabetes. Likewise, if cars were still built in the same way a Model T Ford was, nobody would be able to afford a fancy one with complicated bits like seatbelts and power steering - especially given that if hand built none of those would work. Only the gradual removal of human handiwork and power makes complex objects mass producible and affordable.

All of these effects have a knock on effect. Freeing up labour means more people are available to do more skilled jobs that machines still cannot. It also means that the cost of living falls, and people can pursue other options (drug addiction is one, a PhD is another). Whether you want to go all Star Trek or Blade Runner with this is really a function of which choice you think people will make given greater leisure and opportunity.