How many 10x productivity revolutions do we need? At the end of it, will there be only one person left producing everything for humanity in 5 minutes each Tuesday afternoon?
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Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
When we eat the rich.
I suppose 30-50 years ago. The main problem is that we produce too much useless garbage we shouldn’t be producing. If we would be able to stop that, we would have plenty of everything for everyone.
Hey I love my double packaging, because I love sorting my garbage. /s
Our economy relies on growth. Whatever it takes. Exponential if possible. When is it done growing? When is a tumor done growing?
When is a tumor done growing?
When the host dies.
I think we’re already productive enough, just not distributive enough.
Never. There’s always more to do. Once you can produce food, shelter and entertainment with zero effort, people will start working on less urgent stuff that got ignored because we were busy working on the essentials.
Currently, we’re ignoring preventative medical and psychological care, because we’re busy fixing everything that is broken. Well, not even all of it. Just some parts get fixed. Maybe, in the future fixing stuff is so cheap and easy, that we can shift our focus to prevention.
Once we’re there, we can start focusing on the next big thing, like building a Dyson sphere or whatever.
This is completely incorrect. We’re ignoring preventative medical care and other urgent stuff to make rich people rich because we have a stupid economic system where rich people decide what is important
Well, there’s a bit of that in there as well. Maybe that example was too specific to serve its purpose.
The idea is that urgent tasks get prioritized, while everything else gets ignored. Currently, we are ignoring a variety of important tasks, because they aren’t important enough.
Once automation fixes all the urgent stuff, we’ll tackle all the less essential ones, and oh boy are there a lot of them. Some of them trivial, and some quite useful.
You’re wrong though. Things aren’t being prioritized in order of urgency. If they were, everyone in the planet would be focused on climate change. Instead, we have some places actively fighting it.
You’re talking about equality, which is a very different type of measure of urgency. Obviously, that is not being prioritized as all, because that’s how capitalism works. Quite the opposite actually. When it comes to matters related to equality, the rich people prioritize themselves over everyone else.
However, I was referring to a completely different type of urgency based prioritization that can be seen pretty much everywhere in society. We build machines that are just barely good enough for the job instead of being actually great for the job, good for the people who use them and good for the environment. That sort of long term thinking just doesn’t have a place in our current system, because making machines just barely good enough is hard enough as it is. If we could do all the basic things with zero effort, we would have left over resources that could be directed towards making everything actually better in a variety of ways. Currently, those left over resources don’t exist, because they’re tied up in making all the basic stuff happen in the society. That’s why we aren’t focusing on making things actually good.
Individual people and some companies are actually trying to make sustainable and humane decisions, but the society isn’t.
It doesn’t matter how much more efficient we get. We already have the bandwidth to do everything we need to do but if gets vacuumed up into whatever rich people want it to. That will continue no matter how efficient we get unless society completely changes.
Never. There’s always more to do. Once you can produce food, shelter and entertainment with zero effort
We’ve been able to do that for about 100 years now. All of humanity’s technological problems have been solved - on paper - for generations. There’s unfortunately never been a magical consolidation period where all the hungry were fed and all the exposed were sheltered. That’s not something that automatically happens.
The technology and production capacity to raise Somalia to the same literacy, living standard and life expectancy as Denmark exists. It would just require surplus growth and production capacity to go to Somalia and not Denmark for a few generations. Example nations are arbitrary, adjust as needed.
A lot of the medical and psychological problems are caused by the “fixing” of other things.
There is a hole in the heart of every rich person. They try to fill that hole with money, but the hole is never full.
When Elon Musk and every person like him says, “I have enough money”: that is when the people who actually produce value will have reached enough productivity. Not before.
This is what I find fascinating about capitalism. It builds on the premise of increasing profit by increasing efficiency and quantity. With that mindset we should strive to improve efficiency until no one needs to work and everything is automated and autonomous, no? That would be the peak of efficiency? But then how would people pay for the products being produced? They cant, it needs to be free, since no one has a salary because theyre not working. But then the CEOs wouldnt make money. So theres no incentive unless your goal is not monetary but to improve the ultimate wellbeing of humanity. Its inherently a flawed concept since the main incentive is monetary, yet we refuse to accept what must be the ultimate goal to be able to keep power above others.
And yes, i know this is very simplified. But still explain to me why we do mass layoffs in favor of AI slop if the incentive is not entirely monetary and for the sake efficiency and or cutting costs. Explain how and who will survive the further we go along? Capitalism at its core makes the rich the survivors. There wont be infinite recursions of 10x productivity revolutions because the workers will die off in the process.
As soon as a capitalist has enough money.
Heat death of the universe, got it.
Never. The line must keep moving upwards. If it doesn’t come from productivity it comes from enshittification, layoffs, offshoring, etc.
To clarify, this is the thinking that is towards the core of the issue.
Well for most humans it’s when we reach star trek, and for corporations it’s when we reach *insert corporate dystopia of choice*
Brawndo
It’s got electrolytes :3
We’re kind of at a point where the cost of making stuff isn’t very important. It is far outweighed by the cost of moving stuff - not only financially, but environmentally and temporally.
There probably isn’t a lot more refinement to be done in most manufacturing processes, other than very niche things like microchip fabrication. Production machinery can pump out T-shirts or drinking glasses or automobiles faster than people will buy them, so the factories run for shorter periods of time. The only profit margins to be had in manufacturing come from bulk production runs, which is why you can’t order 10 injection molded parts or 50 custom silicon packages - you have to buy like 5000 units just to pay the cost of spinning up the production line.
But logistics… we’re basically killing the planet to solve logistics problems. A massive amount of greenhouse gas production is due to transportation. We need better ways to move things around.
If the environmental damage was accurately priced in, it would be much more attractive to produce locally with local materials and with local knowledge.
It would be less “efficient” in the sense of what a production facility could do in terms of output/input at the gates of the facility, but it would be much more efficient in terms of the overall economy.
Until we can make everything through the tireless efforts of a single Australian man
Let’s be a little more granular here. Increased production efficiency is good. If we could legitimately just have everyone take turns working five minutes a week and provide for all of humanity that would be great. The problem is how the benefits of increased productivity are distributed. If worker’s pay started at a reasonable livable wage and increased along with their productivity the world would be in a much different situation now. If we had a UBI scheme that allowed everyone to have a minimum acceptable standard of living automation would be much more desirable.
Increasing productivity of workers is met with demand for more production-intensive products. It’s like how every time hardware improves, software becomes more complex to take advantage of that increased capability. It’s like Jevon’s Paradox, but applied to productivity of workers.
One prominent example: our farmers are more productive than ever. So we move up the value chain, and have farmers growing more luxury crops that aren’t actually necessary for sustenance. We overproduce grains and legumes, and then feed them to animals to raise meat. We were so productive with different types of produce that we decided to go on hard mode and create just-in-time supply chains for multiple cultivars so that supermarkets sell dozens of types of fresh apples, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, etc., and end up eating much more fresh produce of diverse varieties compared to our parents and grandparents, who may have relied more heavily on frozen or canned produce, with limited variety.
Once I would probably have said when everybody has enough.
But I have found out that is naive, because looking at billionaires, it’s obvious that people just increase their consumption to the extreme if they can. Apparently we will never have “enough”.With near limitless resources, we will probably want to own our own planets.
The condition of being a billionaire is pathological, and should be dealt with in an appropriate way to pathology.
Most of those people started out as perfectly normal people. It’s the unchecked power that makes people go gaga.
No most did not start out like normal people, By far the most billionaires grew up very privileged. Not just privileged as in not being poor, or not being a minority. But really really privileged.
These people generally grew up in an environment of entitlement, that is way beyond normal people. They think they are entitled to be privileged, and they think they deserve their privileges because they work so haaarrddd and are so brilliant with money because everything is paid for by their parents, and they were never short of money.Bill Gates, his mother was on the board of IBM.
Elon Musk. His father owned an emerald mine in South Africa.
Donald Trump inherited a fortune, and was given a million dollars just to start on and learn the ropes.Common in almost all billionaire stories is that they never had to work for anybody, and they never had to worry about economical consequences of their actions.
There are some exceptions to this though, so it doesn’t explain everything.
Is it the Mormons that get to own their own planet when they die? Or is that the JW’s?
Mormons
Actually, ironically, that would be BETTER than what we have now. Billionaires increasing their consumption would at least mean they’re SPENDING their money on something which is paying SOMEONE.
Instead they hoard and do nothing with it.
