Hello, my good friends.

Remember like a year ago when I used to post those big threads that went on long tirades about sociopolitical topics and then asked relevant questions to the community? No? You don't because I only ever made two of those threads and half of you people barely even remember my existence?

Well, too bad, because I'm making another one. As you may have garnered from the title, this post is about capitalism and why it is doomed to fail in the (possibly near) future - at least in the semi-purist sense which it exists in today.

If you like watching videos made by bad content creators, you may have seen this one at some point in the past:



That video has a lot of inherent biases, ignores a lot of data, cherrypicks, and generally isn't something that you should tote as your only knowledge of the subject, but the basic point that it makes is definitely substantial; jobs are disappearing at alarming rates due to rapid automation. This automation even poses threats to jobs in more "advanced" fields of work such as diagnostics and surgery, programming and coding, physical and scientific engineering, and so on. While these pose threats in the long run, however, the far more pressing matter is how quickly mundane jobs which make up the bulk of service will start to disappear.

Taxi and uber services? Inventory, restocking, and manual labor jobs of that sort? Retail and food service industries? Delivery, both short-scale (delivering food) and long-scale (semi-truck drivers, postal service, FedEx/Amazon/etc)? All of those are not only going to become *laughably* easy to automate within the very near future, but are also going to be infinitely more cheap and efficient for companies to buy and put into motion. A self-driving car will be a much more expensive purchase up front than a delivery driver's salary, but in the long term, it will be the cheaper option and will be available for work nearly 24/7. Plenty of restaurants and fast-food chains are already phasing out "waiters" in favor of "servers" who simply bring food to your table that you've already ordered off of an electronic tablet - one that's not going to forget or mis-remember certain aspects of your order and one that doesn't require a week's training before they can be put on the job.

Of course, this is all buildup to the main point I'm trying to make - the fall of modern capitalism and how this is going to affect society.

Now, this applies to many western (and worldwide, really) nations, but I'm going to use American culture as the primary example both because it's where I've lived for the last 11 years and thus have a better understanding of, and because free-market capitalism has been something of a hotly debated topic in recent American history. The culture which surrounds "work" in America is...weird. As anyone who's ever lived in Europe (or knows anything substantial about Western and Northern European culture) will tell you, economical and political leanings in America slant fairly heavy to the right even when they appear to slant left from an American viewpoint. There's this hyper-conservative ideal that's really just commonplace and accepted in America that a person's worth is inherently tied to what is often said to be their "contribution to society" but really just ends up being "their monetary worth in their direct surroundings" in many cases. A poor man born into poverty who works two manual labor jobs to provide for his family is often considered to be a leech on society not worthy of assistance while a rich man who contributes little aside from being rich is often heralded as a job creator and wonderful benefactor, which seems a bit backwards.

But these are my socialistic viewpoints intruding too heavily on the argument - the point of this thread isn't for me to challenge the current work-centric and capitalistic mindset of most nations, it's to ask how society will change these viewpoints in the coming future.

Sooner or later, enough jobs will be automated and enough people will exist that, reasonably, enough jobs will not exist for people to inhabit them but enough resources will exist for those same people to live in at least a semi-comfortable lifestyle. We're already seeing this coming at odds with the capitalist mindset; something like four times as many empty houses exist in the United States as homeless people, and our current president is fighting tooth and nail in attempts to bring a nearly three-centuries old system of energy production back into the limelight all in the name of "keeping jobs".

Capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, and so on are all things that I would consider necessary in an environment that requires most of its populace to directly contribute to the well-being of a state. But once most of the populace doesn't need to contribute? These systems are no longer required and start to appear archaic. We're soon going to be looking at a situation in which most of the populace not only won't need to contribute to the workforce, but in which a significant portion simply statistically cannot contribute to the workforce. In cultures such as America or Japan where a person's worth is often judged primarily on the basis of them having a job and the poor are looked at as "deserving" of their status because they didn't "earn" the right to live comfortably, I personally think this could have a rather devastating impact as the cultures adjust.

But what are your thoughts on this phenomenon, friends?

you know what time it is cindy

It's an incredibly exciting prospect, but like Turkey said, I don't see it leading anywhere good, as far as destroying capitalism goes. It just reeks of pie in the sky to me.

Quote

; jobs are disappearing at alarming rates due to rapid automation.

They aren't, though.

If anything, automation has led to humanity's shift towards capitalism.

They...definitely are. Like, quantifiably.

Automation compliment's labour though, it doesn't nullify it.

We've been crying wolf over the prospect of automation since the 1800s. Poor farmers thought that industrialisation and agricultural advancements were going to kill their jobs, when it had the exact opposite effect. There's no concrete evidence that automation is the ticking time bomb that's going to wreck the economy and capitalism. It's just speculative guff.

But industrialization did kill plenty of jobs for poor farmers. The farmers themselves were fine, sure, but you don't see nearly as many field hands nowadays, now do you?

There's no concrete evidence, sure, but there rarely is any concrete evidence for societal and economical shifts.

Quote from: Anglosaxophone on April 22, 2017, 05:36:07 PM

Automation compliment's labour though, it doesn't nullify it.

We've been crying wolf over the prospect of automation since the 1800s. Poor farmers thought that industrialisation and agricultural advancements were going to kill their jobs, when it had the exact opposite effect. There's no concrete evidence that automation is the ticking time bomb that's going to wreck the economy and capitalism. It's just speculative guff.

But industrialization did kill plenty of jobs for poor farmers. The farmers themselves were fine, sure, but you don't see nearly as many field hands nowadays, now do you?

There's no concrete evidence, sure, but there rarely is any concrete evidence for societal and economical shifts.

No...It really didn't. Early mechanical harvesters and improved ploughing techniques resulted in better crop yield for farmers, and in turn, a higher demand for agricultural labour to operate them. Automation was practically Christmas for serfs and peasants on the cusp of industrialisation.

I'm not implying future automation has absolutely no negative consequences whatsoever, but the suggestion that it could lead to the downfall of capitalism itself has no basis in reality. The labour market has always been extremely elastic and adaptable to change.

I am suggesting that this will lead to a point where there won't be enough jobs for people to consistently work at the same individual rate that they are now, not that jobs will be phased out entirely any time in the near future.

I don't think that anyone could disagree with this. Looking at now compared to the early 1900s, people are working less hours and making much higher earnings. I don't see why this trend wouldn't continue. The idea that there would be such a radical shift that capitalism wouldn't be able to continue seems like a very big leap.

Quote from: Töqi on April 22, 2017, 01:20:49 PM

Quote

; jobs are disappearing at alarming rates due to rapid automation.

They aren't, though.

If anything, automation has led to humanity's shift towards capitalism.

They...definitely are. Like, quantifiably.

Quantify it, then. You posted no source citing the supposed decline in jobs.

The idea that automation will cause structural unemployment relies on a fundamental misunderstanding on how technology interacts with labour.

It isn't true.

I also like how you basically wriggle out of substantiating your post by providing a single, shitty source and then acknowledging it's shittyness as if that absolves you of its flaws.

But w/e.

The point of my original post was to spur discussion, not to state a claim and then fuck off. Apparently this site is incapable of differentiating between the two. If I wanted to just come in here and post evidence of automation leading to a decrease in job opportunities, I wouldn't have much difficulty finding any evidence for that phenomenon through studies conducted by more than reputable sources.

But w/e.