ASIMOV SAVE US (Automation & the Economy)

[Cantih]

http://www.cracked.com/podcast/what-...al-generation/

Apologies, there sadly is no transcript, you'll have to actually listen to the thing.

But essentially

Spoiler: show

Even a hundred years ago, it took a not insignificant percent of the human population to produce enough food to feed the entire human population. Now, efficiency has made it such that it takes a a surprisingly insignificant percent to provide enough food to feed an exploded human population.

This allowed a shift from farming to manufacturing, but efficiency struck again. Outsourcing is a red herring, the count is still dropping. Example:
http://www.ibtimes.com/nike-unloads-...erable-1587447

We've moved on to service, but again, efficiency will come. Already, layoffs have happened, hiring hasn't come back. And today's Sunday, but if it were Monday how many of you would be reading this http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-s...mic-job-exist/ at work, hmm? Yet the job is still getting done despite less manpower and more fuckabouts (how many coworkers to you think "how are they even still here?", hmm?). Fast food workers are striking in fits and starts for living wages, and corporations are already looking at trading cashiers for kiosks. http://www.cnet.com/news/mcdonalds-h...reen-cashiers/

The next thing were going to see, barring a surprise, is an adjacent industry collapse due to autonomous vehicles. Seriously, once people aren't the ones driving, you are going to see a whole swath of industries being made redundant.
Do you work for an insurance agency? Vehicle loans at the bank? Taxi driver/chauffeur? Traffic enforcement? DMV? Auto Repair? Vehicle trauma at a hospital? Ambulance chasing lawyer? Gas station (oh, you need to worry about Tesla too, at least you can depend on slurpees)? Parking lot owner or attendant/valet? I can keep going.
Prepare for your job to drastically shrink or disappear outright. Start getting ready today to retire or change careers.
And that's just one single bit of tech. Self driving cars.
Watson is more than likely to end call centers, and much more.

Entertainment looks to be a solution. Aha, that's creative, efficiency can't do much there, you think. But there is a time problem. Assume you had nothing else to do, and didn't even need to sleep. That's 24 hours a day to consume media. 100 HOURS of video are uploaded to Youtube each MINUTE. Most of it is crap nobody wants to see, but as long as one minute each minute is worthwhile, that's saturation just on Youtube alone, and Youtube isn't the only game in town. It doesn't matter what your flavor is, there is ultimately a saturation point, there is only so much entertainment work to be done, and it's not going to scale well with the population.
(This also assumes that the people making the entertainment get paid. We all know digital media is infinitely and perfectly reproducible. And you can dredge through BG for plenty of examples of the sentiment "I could pay, but I don't have to now, so I ain't gonna.")

This actually leads us to a tangent, that doesn't actually solve the issue, but is worth bringing up.

Spoiler: show

Now, perhaps you look around, and see plenty of things that need doing.
Classroom ratios are getting worse, and despite the insane load on teachers, to control budgets there is a concerted effort to reduce their income (which already isn't as high as you'd think).

I can regale you about Los Angeles' (lack of) public transit infrastructure and resulting traffic, and the fact that it won't even reach anything resembling decent coverage until I'm (and many others are) eligible for Medicare (if we even make it that long.)

I'm pretty sure New Orleans, almost a decade later, is still largely not unfucked from Katrina.

We can't even be bothered to bump NASA's funding to a penny on every tax dollar. In less than a billion years we need to be off this planet if the race is to survive, and it's only going to get harder the longer we put it off.

It goes on and on, there are so many things worth doing, that need doing, that takes people to do them now. But it costs money, and doesn't give a juicy enough quarterly RoI (if any at all), so nobody can be fucking bothered to pay what it's worth to do it. Hooray for the market.

But look at internships, look for calls for community service, look at volunteerism. Stuff people would like done. But pay for it, oh no, couldn't possibly pay for it. Could you do it for free? Free is good.

Free doesn't pay bills.

Ultimately, efficiency or some other problem means there will be fewer jobs than there are people. Humans are clever little fucks, efficiency will continue to increase until physics itself says no. (And even then, man I'd be careful, betting against human ingenuity is not the safe bet.)

And so we reach whole point of the podcast and the post is this.

As long as you demand a person pay their rent and bills and food and insurance and taxes and et cetra and et cetra and et cetra, but ignore the fact that there is no work left that anyone will deem worth paying for...
Well, you work it out. It's not very hard.
But I can't expound on it much without becoming particularly angry and pointed enough about it that I output something quickly not worth reading.

[BerenTebogo]

http://www.cracked.com/podcast/what-...al-generation/

Apologies, there sadly is no transcript, you'll have to actually listen to the thing.

But essentially

Spoiler: show

Even a hundred years ago, it took a not insignificant percent of the human population to produce enough food to feed the entire human population. Now, efficiency has made it such that it takes a a surprisingly insignificant percent to provide enough food to feed an exploded human population.

This allowed a shift from farming to manufacturing, but efficiency struck again. Outsourcing is a red herring, the count is still dropping. Example:
http://www.ibtimes.com/nike-unloads-...erable-1587447

We've moved on to service, but again, efficiency will come. Already, layoffs have happened, hiring hasn't come back. And today's Sunday, but if it were Monday how many of you would be reading this http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-s...mic-job-exist/ at work, hmm? Yet the job is still getting done despite less manpower and more fuckabouts (how many coworkers to you think "how are they even still here?", hmm?). Fast food workers are striking in fits and starts for living wages, and corporations are already looking at trading cashiers for kiosks. http://www.cnet.com/news/mcdonalds-h...reen-cashiers/

The next thing were going to see, barring a surprise, is an adjacent industry collapse due to autonomous vehicles. Seriously, once people aren't the ones driving, you are going to see a whole swath of industries being made redundant.
Do you work for an insurance agency? Vehicle loans at the bank? Taxi driver/chauffeur? Traffic enforcement? DMV? Auto Repair? Vehicle trauma at a hospital? Ambulance chasing lawyer? Gas station (oh, you need to worry about Tesla too, at least you can depend on slurpees)? Parking lot owner or attendant/valet? I can keep going.
Prepare for your job to drastically shrink or disappear outright. Start getting ready today to retire or change careers.
And that's just one single bit of tech. Self driving cars.
Watson is more than likely to end call centers, and much more.

Entertainment looks to be a solution. Aha, that's creative, efficiency can't do much there, you think. But there is a time problem. Assume you had nothing else to do, and didn't even need to sleep. That's 24 hours a day to consume media. 100 HOURS of video are uploaded to Youtube each MINUTE. Most of it is crap nobody wants to see, but as long as one minute each minute is worthwhile, that's saturation just on Youtube alone, and Youtube isn't the only game in town. It doesn't matter what your flavor is, there is ultimately a saturation point, there is only so much entertainment work to be done, and it's not going to scale well with the population.
(This also assumes that the people making the entertainment get paid. We all know digital media is infinitely and perfectly reproducible. And you can dredge through BG for plenty of examples of the sentiment "I could pay, but I don't have to now, so I ain't gonna.")

This actually leads us to a tangent, that doesn't actually solve the issue, but is worth bringing up.

Spoiler: show

Now, perhaps you look around, and see plenty of things that need doing.
Classroom ratios are getting worse, and despite the insane load on teachers, to control budgets there is a concerted effort to reduce their income (which already isn't as high as you'd think).

I can regale you about Los Angeles' (lack of) public transit infrastructure and resulting traffic, and the fact that it won't even reach anything resembling decent coverage until I'm (and many others are) eligible for Medicare (if we even make it that long.)

I'm pretty sure New Orleans, almost a decade later, is still largely not unfucked from Katrina.

We can't even be bothered to bump NASA's funding to a penny on every tax dollar. In less than a billion years we need to be off this planet if the race is to survive, and it's only going to get harder the longer we put it off.

It goes on and on, there are so many things worth doing, that need doing, that takes people to do them now. But it costs money, and doesn't give a juicy enough quarterly RoI (if any at all), so nobody can be fucking bothered to pay what it's worth to do it. Hooray for the market.

But look at internships, look for calls for community service, look at volunteerism. Stuff people would like done. But pay for it, oh no, couldn't possibly pay for it. Could you do it for free? Free is good.

Free doesn't pay bills.

Ultimately, efficiency or some other problem means there will be fewer jobs than there are people. Humans are clever little fucks, efficiency will continue to increase until physics itself says no. (And even then, man I'd be careful, betting against human ingenuity is not the safe bet.)

And so we reach whole point of the podcast and the post is this.

As long as you demand a person pay their rent and bills and food and insurance and taxes and et cetra and et cetra and et cetra, but ignore the fact that there is no work left that anyone will deem worth paying for...
Well, you work it out. It's not very hard.
But I can't expound on it much without becoming particularly angry and pointed enough about it that I output something quickly not worth reading.

It's a completely irrelevant quibble, since I'm interested in much of the stuff being presented here as well as increasing NASAs funding, but:

We can't even be bothered to bump NASA's funding to a penny on every tax dollar. In less than a billion years we need to be off this planet if the race is to survive, and it's only going to get harder the longer we put it off.

Everything piece of technology and innovation you have ever held, used, bought, been a part of, been a cog in the machine of, etc has been come about solely because of the efforts of the last (and I'm being generous here) 500 years. 500 years is 5*10^2, so we're on the 10^2 timescale for all of society and civilization as we know it.

A billion years is 10^9, that's a difference of 10^7, or more than the amount of years we've been working to get where we currently are CUBED.

The human race, one way or another, will not be here in a billion years for tons of reasons let alone evolution (go watch COSMOS). Hell, even 10,000 years from now would be overly generous and could be argued from a very solid position using science, math, history, and epidemiology that I don't know enough about to really throw around.

Also, human ingenuity will not overcome physics, you make your point a lot better when you stick to facts and realistic opinions.

[Meresgi]

Honestly so much of my job could be done away with, but people are stupid with computers and security so i'm good for quite some time haha. That said, I constantly seek to do away with all of my menial tasks as much as I can via scripting/programming solutions...but everyone I work with are so scared of anything that doesn't have a GUI -_-

[Cantih]

Spoilered because your right Sath, it's incidental to the main topic

Spoiler: show

It's a completely irrelevant quibble, since I'm interested in much of the stuff being presented here as well as increasing NASAs funding, but:

The human race, one way or another, will not be here in a billion years for tons of reasons let alone evolution (go watch COSMOS). Hell, even 10,000 years from now would be overly generous and could be argued from a very solid position using science, math, history, and epidemiology that I don't know enough about to really throw around.

Also, human ingenuity will not overcome physics, you make your point a lot better when you stick to facts and realistic opinions.

The bit about breaking physics is hyperbole. We'll likely do stuff eventually that looks like we're doing it, but aren't actually breaking anything. But the point is that a lot of human history is full of "It can't be done!" and then someone going "Nah bitch." and doing it anyway.
Believing humanity is incapable of doing something is not always a wise position to take.

And to that point, boy yes am I aware of how capable we are of fucking ourselves and everything up. And every day it becomes easier and easier. But I have to hope that we can manage not to do it, and do what little insignificant things I can to make sure of it.
As for the evolution part, hell, adapting to the gravity issues of interplanetary and interstellar life alone are going to take biological modifications that make the differences between neanderthalensis and sapiens fucking nothing. We just are not made for it.
But while human and human race may not be the right words, if neanderthals were here today, and what ever comes after us were here too for arguments sake, if they're sapient, I wouldn't have much of a qualm calling them peers.

And yeah, I have been watching COSMOS every week.
goddamn nascar

[Senji]

Global event/genocide/WW3/gov breeding regulation, even separated caste communities ala utopia 1%ers or walled off mega cities will happen before fully automated roadways.

Skilled/science/medical will have jobs all the way until the last ships take off into orbit because the earth got too fucked up to stay.

Can't be surprised when bottom tier minimum brain cells required jobs continue to get automated though with things that will need maintenance/software though.


Billion years though? Was that just swinging for the shock value fences?

[arus2001]

Populations growing and the employment opportunities relative to technology shrinking is something I feel like I've "noticed" on my own and probably experience with the whole shotgun approach of lobbing job apps around, but very rarely, if ever, getting a callback and ultimately blown off if I try to follow up on my own. On the industrial end, indeed, tech has risen to such levels where people aren't even needed. Just watching some of those "How is it made?" type shows can give us a window into all these intricately designed assembly lines that churn out products and packaging far beyond what we'd be capable of manually, let alone flawlessly (most of the time). On a simpler end, you could see stuff like Blockbusters or other video stores losing out to Redbox and/or Netflix and similar iterations, nevermind actual piracy.

We're basically a bubble waiting to burst, and what's scarier, you have people out there trying to cut back support programs or just outright stigmatize people on welfare, food stamps, etc. because of the whole "bootstraps!" mentality that may've worked 30+ years ago, but is now beginning to collapse due to the exponential tech growth. Correlations to wealth inequality could probably be made quite easily here, which is why I was hoping OWS could've pulled off more than it managed, but apparently we're not quite at that social breaking point. Call it communism, socialism, or whatever, but short of some cataclysmic plague or natural disaster, someday we're gonna have to disassociate progress, or at least comfortable survival, with greed. So, if the eventual question is, "Who would work if nobody has to?" the likely response would be, "Those who enjoy it." But even entertainment is speculative.

Guess we're a future of Wall-E fat fucks.

[Cantih]

Billion years though? Was that just swinging for the shock value fences?

Not in the least
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_sun#Earth.27s_fate

During its life in the main sequence, the Sun is becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years) and its surface temperature is slowly rising. The increase in solar temperatures is such that in about another billion years the Earth's water will evaporate and escape into space, rendering the planet inhospitable to all known terrestrial life.

[Senji]

Rofl I construed the need part to pertain to something else, but for it to have been about be burned up by the sun; then yeah, shock value.

[Cantih]

Sigh

Spoiler: show

Pretty much all rocket fuels utilize hydrogen to some degree. The industrial processes that produce hydrogen do so using either petroleum (we already know the future of this) or water, which by that point will be gone on the surface, and if we're still around (probably using underground construction), what we've got a hold of will be under strict lockdown. We likely will not be blowing it on launches.

At that point the only options are space elevators and ion drives. Each of which have their own headaches. Ion drives are not fast things, and they still need fuel (not hydrogen, but there are still resource issues), and are only useful once in orbit. And due to Earth's properties, a space elevator is a pain in the ass to build here. They are much easier to build on the Moon or Mars.

Well, there's also NPP. But all the modern designs are fusion, which again, hydrogen. And the old fission bomb version has resource issues, which due to the time scale we're dealing with, half-lives start to become a significant factor.
I do not know enough regarding antimatter to speak on it's feasibility.

Like I said, it only gets more and more difficult. It's not shock value "OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA BURN", it's real, practical issues.
Since I hold with ingenuity, we might be able to still do it if left that late, but I would really rather not leave it that long. The sooner we're off, the better a position we're in.

[BaneTheBrawler]

ideally by the time we get to the point where efficiency is so high no one has jobs we'll be post-scarcity.

[Niiro]

ideally by the time we get to the point where efficiency is so high no one has jobs we'll be post-scarcity.

We're already in a post-scarcity world in many ways.

That doesn't stop people from creating artificial scarcity for profit. If anything, that's the business of the future.

[BaneTheBrawler]

an incomplete post-scarcity is not post-scarcity. it's pretty much an all-or-nothing proposition, because of exactly that.

[Quicklet]

I think it's more likely we'll move further away from post-scarcity than closer to it over the next 50 years. Automation is great, but barring breakthroughs in energy technology (which will likely come, but we're still far away from where we need to be) and politicians being ballsy enough to embrace energy tech that will supplant a significant part of the global economy, anyone who isn't already a part of the global network of concentrated wealth will be at larger and larger disadvantages as time goes on.

[Sqwunk]

http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wils...ssion_reactors

Transcript if you can't watch his video

Spoiler: show

0:11 Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this. And this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what I've done well. I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons. And I decided that I was going to set out to try to solve this problem.

0:52 And this probably is not what you're expecting. You're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion, because that's what I've done most of my life. But this is actually a talk about, okay -- (Laughter) — but this is actually a talk about fission. It's about perfecting something old, and bringing something old into the 21st century.

1:15 Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works. In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it. This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine.

1:58 And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it? Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here? And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world. And this is what it is.

2:18 This is a small modular reactor. So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here. This is between 50 and 100 megawatts. But that's a ton of power. That's between, say at an average use, that's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that. Now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they're built in a factory. So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity. This region right here is the reactor.

2:54 And this is buried below ground, which is really important. For someone who's done a lot of counterterrorism work, I can't extol to you how great having something buried below the ground is for proliferation and security concerns.

3:09 And inside this reactor is a molten salt, so anybody who's a fan of thorium, they're going to be really excited about this, because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233.

3:26 But I'm not really concerned about the fuel. You can run these off -- they're really hungry, they really like down-blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that's been down-blended. It's made into a grade where it's not usable for a nuclear weapon, but they love this stuff. And we have a lot of it sitting around, because this is a big problem. You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and that was great, and we don't need them anymore, and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially? What are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons? Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff.

4:08 So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive. It's still thermally hot but it's not radioactive. And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas. So going back to what I was saying before about all power being produced -- well, other than photovoltaic -- being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine, that's actually not that efficient, and in fact, in a nuclear power plant like this, it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient. That's how much thermal energy the reactor's putting out to how much electricity it's producing. And the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature. They operate anywhere from, you know, maybe 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. And these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which means the higher the temperature you go to, thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies. And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle. This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency. And I'm really excited about this, because it's a very compact core. Molten salt reactors are very compact by nature, but what's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you're fissioning, not to mention the fact that these burn up. Their burn-up is much higher. So for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor, a lot more of it's being used.

5:52 And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets. Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it. So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons. They love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place. And they eat them up, which means that, combined with the fact that the cladding doesn't last very long, you can only run one of these reactors for roughly, say, 18 months without refueling it. So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system. No refueling means you can seal them up and they're not going to be a proliferation risk, and they're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores.

6:49 But let's go back to safety, because everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe, and I'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons. One, it doesn't operate at high pressure. So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core. These reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure, so there's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident. Also, they operate at high temperatures, and the fuel is molten, so they can't melt down, but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances, or you lost off-site power in the case of something like Fukushima, there's a dump tank. Because your fuel is liquid, and it's combined with your coolant, you could actually just drain the core into what's called a sub-critical setting, basically a tank underneath the reactor that has some neutrons absorbers. And this is really important, because the reaction stops. In this kind of reactor, you can't do that. The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island -- looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products. So the core of this reactor, since it's not under pressure and it doesn't have this chemical reactivity, means that there's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor. So even in the event of an accident, yeah, the reactor may be toast, which is, you know, sorry for the power company, but we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land. So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity. Carbon-free electricity.

9:14 And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation. It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap. You can put them anywhere in the world you want to.

9:29 And maybe something else. As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me. But I think I get to come back to this, because imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50 to 100 megawatts. That is the rocket designer's dream. That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream. Not only do you have 50 to 100 megawatts to power whatever you want to provide propulsion to get you there, but you have power once you get there. You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts -- wow, that's a lot of power. I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts. That's a ton of power. That could power a Martian community. That could power a rocket there. And so I hope that maybe I'll have an opportunity to kind of explore my rocketry passion at the same time that I explore my nuclear passion.

10:35 And people say, "Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents?" But we launch plutonium batteries all the time. Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor.

11:05 So I'm really excited. I think that I've designed this reactor here that can be an innovative source of energy, provide power for all kinds of neat scientific applications, and I'm really prepared to do this. I graduated high school in May, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) — I graduated high school in May, and I decided that I was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that I've developed, these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes, but I want to do this, and I've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people I've ever had the chance to work with, and I'm really prepared to make this a reality. And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world.

12:02 And I'll just say one more maybe philosophical thing to end with, which is weird for a scientist. But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky. The energy that I'm able to talk to you today, while it was converted to chemical energy in my food, originally came from a nuclear reaction, and so there's something poetic about, in my opinion, perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy.

12:37 So thank you guys.

12:39 (Applause)

I don't really have much else to say on the topic of us losing jobs due to technology and people needing something to do. But I can give you a quote from Buckminster Fuller.

Spoiler: show

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
"The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30

And The RSA Animates have a couple of interesting videos on the workforce. I couldn't watch them right now to review which ones are definitely relevant to the topic but I think these two short videos are related to what this thread is about.

[Roranora]

Global event/genocide/WW3/gov breeding regulation, even separated caste communities ala utopia 1%ers or walled off mega cities will happen before fully automated roadways.

Atlas Shrugged first?

Billion years though? Was that just swinging for the shock value fences?

lol @ shock value fences

I guess true sustainability doesn't differentiate much between the next 500 years or 10,000 years. It's kinda moot given how badly and quickly we're crashing this train, anyway. =/ If we could ride earth a little more harmoniously, only then would we have worry about the serious challenges earth and this galaxy will present over hundreds of millions and/or billions of years.

We didn't know then, at least not like we do today. I don't blame the industrial revolution, at least at its roots. It'd fall more on the greed and misguided interests that drive all of our process engineers to find the right answers to the wrong problems. Over and over. Now let's try to cure the cancers we've created. Brilliant.

Just re: Monsanto: hydrogenated oils, GMOs, and pesticide treadmills are all IE/consultant-type driven solutions to the wrong problem. We need not define problems and sets of constraints that require us to feed both Toronto and Mexico City simultaneously and optimally. In short, we should utilize a higher percentage of our population and our efforts on our food. Better food, and not necessarily more efficient food, although it'll get there. This global food supply idea isn't something a singular entity can or should control.

Yep, Wall-E incoming.

[BerenTebogo]

http://www.dyarstraights.com/msgundam/SIDEMAP2.JPG

Ore ga gundam, etc etc

[CorvusFortis]

Thorium Reactors are the next step for more than one reason, but we'll need that kind of (essentially) free energy in order to continue scientific endeavors / keeping the world lit.

There is enough Thorium on earth to power society until the sun dies and humans don't have that long anyway. If we want to survive a nuclear winter, a massive volcanic eruption which forces an ice age, a 10km meteor strike, all of which are only compounded upon by global warming, then we'll need a power source like this for our (literal) man caves.

[Cantih]

ideally by the time we get to the point where efficiency is so high no one has jobs we'll be post-scarcity.

We're already in a post-scarcity world in many ways.

That doesn't stop people from creating artificial scarcity for profit. If anything, that's the business of the future.

an incomplete post-scarcity is not post-scarcity. it's pretty much an all-or-nothing proposition, because of exactly that.

I don't quite hold to that, because there will never be "complete" post-scarcity.
There is only so much beachfront property (even in the face of things like Dubai's Palm projects). Fathom Events may increase reach, but there are still limits to occupancy at the real live venue. There will be only be one penthouse spot per building. Traditional manufacturing, 3D printing, hell anything short of Star Trek replicators for every single person, means the demand for a new product at it's introduction will exceed it's supply.
And there is only one original of every physical piece of art. Even if sufficiently advanced technology creates a perfect molecular replica, and some wag plays a perfect shell game leaving everybody "oh shit", the fact remains, one is the original one is a reproduction, even if you can't tell. And the display of the works can only handle so much capacity at one time, which means ultimately at scale, you can reach a point where someone who does want to be in the presence of the original, will be unable to, and bam you have scarcity.
There will always, be some form, of true scarcity.

So, like the military joke version of Xeno's paradox, the mathematician may never reach a broken down jeep, but the mechanic can get close enough to make it work.
We don't have a full technological version of true post-scarcity, but it's certainly within reasonable means of our capability to provide a non-shit (but not luxury) standard of living to every person on the planet. And to the topic at hand, that the labor needed to do so will not ultimately provide full employment (and provide less and less work as time goes on).
And that non-necessity scarcity will still exist means there will always be carrots to dangle to make up for any shortfalls between the number of "odd people that inherently want to be doing a thing that needs doing" and the number of "people actually needed to do a thing that need doing". Relying on stick measures (Work or Fuck Off And Die) when you don't need to is not a good thing. I should not even need to say that.

So, it comes up again. We are not, "technically post-scarcity" (the best kind of correct), but I think it's pretty safe to say we are now witnessing the start of the transition from full scarcity to post-scarcity, and not recognizing this is fucking up a lot of lives in the lurch. And it's not even things like violence, or lack, or natural disasters. People are in the shit because greed wins out and we don't give enough of a damn. There is no, GOOD reason for it to be happening.

[BaneTheBrawler]

the concept of post-scarcity does not include unique/luxury/collector goods, lol.

[Xantavia]

I've seen this happen my job over the past 2-3 years. Went from needing 2 projectionists a day to run the theatre, with an additional shift being needed once a week to help with the building and take-down of 35mm prints. Theatre switched over to digital, and suddenly there was not need for any projectionists. Sure, somebody once a week had to ingest digital content and build playlists, but the starting of the movies was computer controlled. Now, they have started sending us digital content, and I'm sure it won't be long until they start doing the movie playlists from one central location.

Same thing goes with the ticket sales. They are really encouraging people to use the automated ticket kiosks, or to buy online and use your phone to get in. If it wasn't for cash, I have a feeling box office cashiers would be the first to go. It seems more of the job now is about calling our help desk when something breaks, so they can send a tech out in a few days if we are lucky. 1 tech to cover 2 or 3 states, so you know how important that is corporate. Hell, we lost internet access a month or so ago due to a bad router and it had a major impact on business operations. Went down early in the morning and wasn't fixed until late afternoon the next day.

It is obvious to anybody that comes through the door we are totally understaffed, but the "solution" is to let people know about ticket machines and vending machines, so they can get to their movie without having to interact with any staff. And they better hope their movie starts on time without any problems, since we don't know if anything goes wrong until somebody tells us. Yet another benefit to having an unmanned projection booth.