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>> No. 4936 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 6:13 pm
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>Elon Musk said he would probably launch a humanoid robot prototype next year dubbed the “Tesla Bot”, which is designed to do “boring, repetitious and dangerous” work.

>The billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla said the robot, which would be about 5ft 8in (1.7m) tall and weigh 125 pounds (56kg), would be able to handle tasks such as attaching bolts to cars with a spanner or picking up groceries at stores. Speaking at Tesla’s AI Day event, Musk said the robot could have “profound implications for the economy” by plugging gaps in the workforce created by labour shortages. He said it was important that the new machine was not “super expensive”.

>He described it as an extension of Tesla’s work on self-driving cars, and the robot would use the same computer chip and navigation system with eight cameras. But Musk gave no indication of having made concrete progress on actually building such a machine. At the point when a normal tech launch might feature a demonstration of a prototype model, the South African entrepreneur instead brought out an actor in a bodysuit, who proceeded to breakdance to a soundtrack of electronic dance music.

>Companies on the cutting edge of robotics, such as former Google subsidiary Boston Dynamics, have produced bipedal robots. But the clunky, heavy machines they have demonstrated bear little resemblance to the svelte designs Musk claimed Tesla could build. The announcement by Musk, who has a penchant for hyping new product launches, comes amid an investigation into the safety of Tesla’s full self-driving software.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/20/humanoid-tesla-bot-likely-to-launch-next-year-says-elon-musk

Lads.
Expand all images.
>> No. 4937 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 6:38 pm
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I'm not interested until they're catgirls.

As soon as they're catgirls I will renounce my stubborn life long socialist values and put every penny I own in Tesla stocks.
>> No. 4938 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 6:51 pm
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Of all the malignant billionaires in the world today I find Musk to be the most tedious. Like some kind of physical embodiment of the collective unconscious of all of the worst subreddits combined. Bezos and his dystopian wage cage have nothing on Musk's capacity to take a futuristic concept and render it trite with a knowing wink and some naff branding.
>> No. 4939 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 7:00 pm
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>>4938
I don't get the cult of personality around him.
>> No. 4940 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 7:01 pm
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>>4938
If you've ever watched interviews with Musk, it's obvious that he's quite autistic.

At least he's spending all his fortune on projects that he believes are good for humanity, he might be right or he might be wrong, but most other billionaires are just hoarding their wealth and when they die that wealth is just going to disappear into even more hedge funds and trust funds.
>> No. 4941 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 7:06 pm
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That's sod all, mate. I'm cracking cold fushion next year and here's some twat in a leotard to explain how, through the wonderous magic of dance no less...

>>4938
Indeed, and at least the only people who go weak at the knees for Bezos are other baldy business psychos (no offence otherlad). The braying hordes of Muskheads wouldn't even be that bad on their own, were it not for the fact that their confidence in the man leaks out into the wider culture and now he can rock up on stage, present an idle thought and get worldwide media coverage.

>He described it as an extension of Tesla’s work on self-driving cars, and the robot would use the same computer chip and navigation system with eight cameras.
Fucking Hell, these things are going to be deadlier than a T-1000.
>> No. 4942 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 7:11 pm
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In fairness to him, he's acknowledging that there must be a universal basic income as physical labour in the future will be a personal choice with developments like this. Maybe he is our fully-automated luxury communism saviour after all?

>>4940
The episode of SNL he hosted was just him saying "ha ha ha I have Aspergers" over and over.
>> No. 4943 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 7:22 pm
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>>4940
Bezos is also using his wealth on his space project to be fair, his idea being slightly more grounded around us moving industry off-Earth. A bit like Britain since the 1970s.

>>4941
>Technology used in self-driving cars has a racial bias that makes autonomous vehicles more likely to drive into black people, a new study claims.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/self-driving-car-crash-racial-bias-black-people-study-a8810031.html
>> No. 4944 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 7:45 pm
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>>4943
>Bezos is also using his wealth on his space project to be fair, his idea being slightly more grounded around us moving industry off-Earth. A bit like Britain since the 1970s.

He's also incredibly risk averse resulting in blue origin moving at a snails pace because they're trying to achieve perfection at every stage.
The exception is their proposal for a moon lander which was rushed to fit in with a timetable they couldn't control, ended up exorbitantly expensive and full of design flaws, and now Bezos is suing NASA for not being fair whilst bribing senators into proposing laws to tell NASA to give him what he wants. Meanwhile his top engineers are jumping ship to go and work for spacex instead.
>> No. 4945 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 9:17 pm
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TBF it's more realistic than you might expect. Sticking a robot in a factory used to cost seven figures and take a year, but now you can buy a cobot off the shelf for ten or twenty thousand and have it up and running within a day. For decades robots had to be fenced off in dedicated production cells, but modern robots have sensors to safely work alongside human operators. There's loads of manufacturing coming back to the western world, because automation technology has massively eroded the advantage China has in terms of wages.

Musk is a knobhead, but he's a knobhead with a real knack for driving industries forward through hype and sheer force of will. Nobody gave a shit about electric cars when Tesla started, nobody gave a shit about commercial space programs when SpaceX started, but now those industries are massively sexy. The "Tesla Bot" will probably be a disappointment if/when it actually emerges, but the upshot will be a shitload of venture capital tosspots chucking their money at industrial automation companies.


>> No. 4946 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 9:46 pm
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>>4945
We have a few of those dotted around at work.

It really begs the question of why we need an anthropomorphic robot at all. The tasks they describe don't necessarily need it, e.g. picking up the shopping could be done by a little bugger on wheels. Is it just for aesthetic reasons? Or do we think people will be less angry about robots taking their jobs if it's sold as Hollywood-looking futurism instead of drab conveyer belts with a few arms? Or is there genuinely no more versatile frame than the upright homonid? At least give the thing two sets of arms or go-go-gadget rollerblades or something.
>> No. 4947 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 10:04 pm
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>>4946
They're far better in space because you need a small robot that's able to go to where the work is needed. The ISS has a highly advanced robotic arm, but being attached to the station at one end is the big limiting factor in what they can do with it.

On earth for most manufacturing purposes a bipedal robot is pretty useless. But they would be very useful for a lot of maintenance jobs where it's not practical for a wheeled robot to access.
>> No. 4948 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 10:21 pm
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>>4946

Musk's argument - and it's not a bad argument - is that most of the built environment is designed around the human body. A robot that is roughly human-shaped is likely to be more versatile, not because there's anything special about the human body but because all the stuff around it is designed for humans. We design tools to fit the human hand, we design rooms to be easy for humans to move around in, we put buttons and switches within easy reach of the human arm and design them to suit human fingers.

In a controlled environment like a machine shop or a production line it's relatively easy to adapt the environment to suit robots, but it's a completely different kettle of fish if you want to use a robot in a kitchen or a hospital ward.
>> No. 4949 Anonymous
20th August 2021
Friday 10:39 pm
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>>4948
>buttons and switches
These are surely not going to be around - or at least that important - for much longer, given WiFi-controlled devices are becoming more and more commonplace.

If sexy robot helpers do become a reality in the near future, the adjustment period will probably play hell with people's mental health. Look at least year when everyone started baking bread and growing potatoes because they suddenly had all of this extra time. If we do get to the point where pretty much everything you historically needed to do is handled by a ping from your phone or an sci-fi chore-bot, it'll render almost every physical activity voluntary. I wonder what that would do to the population, given at the present moment we're obsessed with a black rectangle, and seem to have more or less lost the ability to engage. The end result of every communist fantasy is a renaissance where everyone spends all day doing whatever they want and is better off for it, but what if all everyone wants is to masturbate?
>> No. 4950 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 12:21 am
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>>4949
Futuristic humans show up in Wall-E, and I always thought they were very convincing since they're all brittle-boned useless fatties. There will always be people who reject the futuristic lifestyle, but we'll all wind up wanking as much as I do at the very least, which is once a day, sometimes twice, with the occasional day off.
>> No. 4951 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 2:45 am
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>>4949

You've already said it - people will bake bread and grow potatoes. Just because a robot can do both of those things better, that won't stop us doing them as a hobby.

Even in TNG some people cooked non replicator food for fun, even convinced themselves replicated food tasted different, not as good as the real thing, despite that being impossible.
>> No. 4952 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 11:53 am
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>>4949
I like to hope that we'll all start to make art, or adapt our profession to be more artisan/creative etc.
I'm a professional scientist - I'd definately want to continue my research in a post scarcity Musktopia, even if there's no financial incentive to do so.
My argument in favour of basic income has always been on a similar line - some of the great 'gentleman scientists' were tremendously wealthy and literally had no need to work, instead getting into science for fun (and to impress girls).

Or more likely, literally 6 billion people will all start podcasts.
>> No. 4953 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 11:56 am
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>>4949
Have you read the 'Culture' series by Ian M Banks?
Probably the best depiction of a society where labour (both capital and personal) has become unnecessary.
>> No. 4954 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 12:18 pm
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>>4949

>The end result of every communist fantasy is a renaissance where everyone spends all day doing whatever they want and is better off for it, but what if all everyone wants is to masturbate?

Yes.

I mean let's be honest here, there's only so much porn to wank to, and I say that even as someone who's being a long devotee of hentai and furry porn which I'm sure you know, variety beyond the ken of mortal men. I might well have all nighter wank odysseys once in a while, but most nights I'm happy just rubbing one out before bed.

It'd be like when you work in the Cadbury's factory. They let you eat all the chocolate you want because they know by the end of your first month working there, you'll never want to look at a Dairy Milk again in your life. People will do nothing but party for the first year or two I'm sure, but after that they'll start taking up creative, productive, traditional pursuits out of boredom.

It's really quite a philosophical sort of thing, but I'd consider myself both a socialist and a hedonist, and I reckon people will quickly come to realise the intrinsic value productivity has to our mental wellbeing. Without the self-discipline of work to contrast against, the aimless pleasure of sex, drugs and indulgence lose meaning.

They key to it is that it's productivity for your own sake; not productivity as anonymous worker drone #43265 at a job you don't care about for some areshole you hate.
>> No. 4955 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 12:34 pm
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>>4954

I think you're just scared of having to potentially create your own wank fodder, instead of continuing to pay starving artists who hate your fetish to ignore their principles in exchange for your weird smelly money.
>> No. 4956 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 12:43 pm
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>>4955

That applies to hentai, but furry artists are a different matter. You feel seedy commissioning them because you know they probably already jacked off to it while they were drawing your big black throbbing dog dick more than once before you even get a look at it.
>> No. 4957 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 1:03 pm
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The lumpenproletariat will be fighting each other for crumbs of soylent green, while the new aristocracy will be orbiting earth in their own personal robot harem, enjoying an endless succession of spectacular sunsets and even more spectacular fellatio.

I recommend learning to hack; it won't actually help you, but you might gain some satisfaction from reprogramming Elon's fuckbot to rip his cock off.
>> No. 4958 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 1:14 pm
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>>4956

Setting aside your labyrinthine deviance aside for a moment, and considering the scenario of a commissioned artist "using" work before presenting it - would it decrease or increase the perceived value of the work if they told you that they actually found it arousing?
>> No. 4959 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 1:16 pm
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>>4958
>Setting aside your labyrinthine deviance aside

Argh lexical repetition, why must I drink early on a weekend
>> No. 4960 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 2:23 pm
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We already have mindless machines doing our dirty jobs, we call them third worlders and immigrants. Labour will just shift more and more into different professions as it did during the industrial revolution or deindustrialisation etc.

Just imagine it, a planet of middle-class people. We'll all live in the London-Bristol megopolis while the North becomes a nature reserve.
>> No. 4961 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 3:03 pm
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>>4954
>Without the self-discipline of work to contrast against, the aimless pleasure of sex, drugs and indulgence lose meaning.
This reminds me of one reason why I don't particularly support guaranteed basic income. It's often advertised with the idea that if you don't want to work, you don't have to, but you can supplement your income by continuing to have a job if you like. I would certainly continue to have a job, and I imagine most people would. It wouldn't decrease the demand for jobs at all.

I don't know about the rest of you, but most of my aims in life are measured relative to other people. I want to be richer than other people; I'm fine with being poor as long as everyone else is poor too. I guess if you're talking post-scarcity, I could sit in my giant mansion same as everyone else, and life would be better than it is now, but my dream is to have a room I can just go in, as a job, and the more time I spend in there, the more money I get. Any novels I write with infinite free time are going to be shit.
>> No. 4962 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 3:26 pm
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>>4954

>I reckon people will quickly come to realise the intrinsic value productivity has to our mental wellbeing. Without the self-discipline of work to contrast against, the aimless pleasure of sex, drugs and indulgence lose meaning.

As someone who went into semi-retirement in their late thirties, I wholeheartedly disagree. I think that "people need work to find meaning in their lives" is just propaganda to stop people from going completely mental and murdering their boss. Not having to work and not having to worry about money is fucking brilliant; anyone who is in that situation and says otherwise is a liar or a lunatic.

Once you step out of the rat race, you don't really give a shit about status - fancy cars and designer suits are meaningless trinkets compared to the luxury of being able to get up at 11am, work only when you feel like it and never having to brown-nose anyone. Work stops being work when you don't need the paycheque and don't care about your career prospects, it's just organised play.

I really want humanity to reach a point where everyone can enjoy my level of luxury dossing, I'm just not that optimistic about the politics of it. I pay all my taxes without complaint and would willingly pay more because I know that I'm just a jammy bastard, but a lot of people in my position feel that their wealth is a justified reward for their hard work and innate brilliance rather than something akin to a lottery win. If automation continues to accelerate inequality, I fear that there will inevitably be a cataclysm akin to the Russian revolution or the fall of the Weimar republic.
>> No. 4963 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 3:45 pm
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>>4962

Going into early retirement has evidently damaged your reading comprehension then.

>Work stops being work when you don't need the paycheque and don't care about your career prospects, it's just organised play.

That was pretty much the whole gist of the post, you numpty. What do you do with your time in this semi-retirement? I bet you don't just spend it drinking Tennants Super on the sofa and watching Bargain Hunt. This is the central reason we're always saying to depressed lads in /emo/, get a hobby. Productivity fundamentally releases the brain juice that tells us we're not a useless sack of shit and makes us happy.

The key point is that it's only fulfilling if it's something you willingly choose of your own volition, not the coerced labour most people identify as "work" because it's either that or starve.
>> No. 4964 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 5:39 pm
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>>4963

My point is that there's no self-discipline involved. I'm incredibly lazy and disorganised, I spend the vast majority of my time doing absolutely fuck all, but I also have a knack for solving hard puzzles. I'm lucky enough that the kind of puzzles I'm good at solving have major commercial implications. People come to me with those puzzles and I very occasionally say "go on, that looks like fun", which is more than enough to sustain my shambolic and reprehensible lifestyle. There's no moral difference between me and the kind of scum that used to be publicly humiliated by Jeremy Kyle, I just happen to have certain intellectual gifts.
>> No. 4965 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 6:42 pm
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>>4964

How many people might have gifts like yours, but will never find out because they spend their entire lives bailing out water on their poverty boat?

Sure loads of people will just stay at home and watch their big tellies, but in the future we dream of, that isn't an issue and certainly isn't a drain on the state.
>> No. 4966 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 6:55 pm
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>>4965

>How many people might have gifts like yours, but will never find out because they spend their entire lives bailing out water on their poverty boat?

Loads, probably. The bigger question IMO is "how big can the gap between rich and poor grow before they start building guillotines?". Even if people just stay at home and watch big tellies, that's surely better than civil war.
>> No. 4967 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 7:30 pm
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>>4964

You're wrong and you're defeating your own point though, to be honest ladm8. Just because you're a lazy bastard with the good fortune to be an autistic genius doesn't mean that holds true for everyone. Even still- If you didn't have your gift for solving hard puzzles, you'd have something else that fills that gap in your psyche of "why do I exist". Very few people are truly content with the raison d'etre of "scratching my arse and watching The Chase", no matter what your middle class Waitrose shopping wanker assumptions about people with big tellies might be.

Personally the thing that gives me gratification is being able to see what I have created and know I made it with my own hands. All my hobbies ultimately revolve around making stuff, whether it be music, mods for obscure 90s shooters, little plastic soldiers, or indeed furry porn. If I didn't have my regular day job I'd spend all my time making stuff, simply because that's what I enjoy. I'd be a pillar of society whom everybody respected as a source of entertainment, art, and culture and porn.

The truth is most people actually do have something they can offer to society, whether they realise it or not. The reason we have such high rates of depression in modern society, despite our incredible levels of prosperity and quality of life compared to the past, is because we have become atomised and alienated from those things that previously anchored us and gave us purpose.
>> No. 4968 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 8:06 pm
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>>4967

I for one love scratching my arse and watching The Chase. I don't scratch my arse when Jenny is on though, that would be disrespectful. Also my hands are busy elsewhere.
>> No. 4969 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 8:12 pm
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Musk is like Peter Molyneux but worse.
>> No. 4970 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 8:39 pm
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>>4961
I think you're forgetting the ego dynamics of greed. I have a dream job and know from experience that it being interesting doesn't really keep me motivated when 80% of my time is still meetings and microsoft office. It's the social prestige that I run on and I suspect the same is true for most people.

I'm deeply sceptical of UBI and we (.gs) have been here before but I'll still admit that a teenager usually picks up the guitar to impress some girls.

>>4966
Why would the people rise up just because someone else owns a planet? It sounds daft when you're at the point of everyone living comfortably.

>>4967
>The reason we have such high rates of depression in modern society, despite our incredible levels of prosperity and quality of life compared to the past, is because we have become atomised and alienated from those things that previously anchored us and gave us purpose.

I'm loath to seriously enter into a utopian debate but, how exactly would you get people to resolve that sort of thing? I presume you're not going to go the coercion route so how do you get people to do community stuff.
>> No. 4971 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 9:00 pm
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My parents are rich enough that they could theoretically sustain me indefinitely, and indeed they have done a few times because I am a fairly shambolic adult. It was comfy, yes, but existentially it was hellish. I wouldn't buy myself a big TV, because asking mummy for your pocket money when you're 28 is, for me at least, fundamentally shameful. So I lived like a peasant. I don't know if it's just me, but I really want to have earnt whatever I have. Even if every millennial was in this situation, so I didn't need to feel as ashamed, that's pretty close to how things are in some places and I still don't like it. If they can get rich, why can't I? It would take a lot of effort for society to convince people to just sit quietly and accept free money without sacrificing their dignity. The recent furlough scheme has proven this; think of all the anti-lockdown people who didn't want to be paid to stay home.
>> No. 4972 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 9:40 pm
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>>4970

>I'm loath to seriously enter into a utopian debate but, how exactly would you get people to resolve that sort of thing? I presume you're not going to go the coercion route so how do you get people to do community stuff.

I'm not sure what the question is. The overarching theme of my argument is that absent the threat of destitution and starvation, you wouldn't need to coerce people to do anything. They really would do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Maybe it's a naive view, sure, but despite my utter cynicism in a lot of other ways I reckon that one's right. If people were naturally lazy, we wouldn't have the society we do today, we would all just have stayed in our trees eating the funny mushrooms and picking lice out of each other's fur.
>> No. 4973 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 9:54 pm
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>>4971

>It would take a lot of effort for society to convince people to just sit quietly and accept free money without sacrificing their dignity

Many Americans make essentially the same argument about universal healthcare- They don't want a handout, they want their independence, etc. Yet you don't hear many Brits saying the same about the NHS, even when they're wealthy enough not to need it.

If you don't like the sound of UBI, how about this: The citizen's wage. This isn't a hand-out from mummy government, it's be a fundamental right you are entitled to as a citizen, paid for by you and your ancestor's contributions to society at large.

Of course, there's still absolutely nothing stopping you working, and the idea is still that you want a decent workforce. But we're definitely going to need one that's better suited to a world of automation, and even from the most cold, lizard-brained capitalist point of view, some form of basic income makes sense in that respect. People will always still want more money on top of their free money.
>> No. 4974 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 10:17 pm
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>>4973
By all means top up my income however you want; I'm all for that. But I'm going to want a way to get more, and being an obedient capitalist lapdog is the traditional way to do that. Even clever cryptocurrency investments in my spare time wouldn't really do it for me, because I'm not very good at that and much better at just showing up to do a normal job. If Elon Musk's robots replace 20% of those jobs, say, some of the people who did those jobs will start eyeing up my job, and we can't both do what I do. Someone's going to wind up very unhappy.
>> No. 4975 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 10:37 pm
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I would absolutely quit working if I was being given enough money to live on comfortably. It would give me the freedom to do more volunteering and community-related stuff.
I think from the government's point of view, even unconsciously, there are a lot of people who'd be working to overthrow them one way or another, if they could. Forget bread and circuses, keeping people too busy earning a crust is a far more effective form of social control.
>> No. 4976 Anonymous
21st August 2021
Saturday 11:38 pm
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>>4974

>If Elon Musk's robots replace 20% of those jobs, say

My sweet summer child, you really think it'll be so few?

Consider that a full ten percent of the labour force in most countries is employed in the transportation industry alone. Mr Musk has already just about developed, as of right now in 2021, a working automation system that will make the lot of them obsolete.

That's ten percent of all jobs total, just gone, poof. Those trucks and busses and trains and trams can and will drive themselves, and that's literally the beginning. That's the tip of the iceberg, the very first baby step into the brave new world we're approaching.
>> No. 4977 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 12:11 am
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>>4976
So even more jobs will go, and even more people will be eyeing up even fewer jobs, and even more people will be hugely unhappy. Paying people to stay home and expecting them not to have existential crises is an even worse idea than I speculated! It's almost like I aimed low on purpose. You fell right into my ingenious galaxy-brained trap. Laughs evilly.
>> No. 4978 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 12:11 am
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>>4972
My point is that despite abundance and despite opportunity people sometime just don't. Certainly it's true when talking of our atomised society where people, despite being lonely etc., don't go to church like in ye olden days or whatever the fruity modern replacement is.

The reason I'm loath to enter into utopian debates is that they almost always end up being a hell once you factor in people who don't fit the mould. A good deal of the motivation behind society becoming atomised is that dealing with groups of people can be a pain in the fucking arse, you're not going to bring back nosy cornershop owners chatting with every customer despite a massive line. I don't even use manned checkouts if I can avoid it.

>>4973
To get Ted Kaczynski about this, we accept the NHS because we've been socialised into it. A UBI is, however you phrase it, a new dependence upon the state over your own hard-graft and not yours, it's golden handcuffs. Assuming the state doesn't fuck with your good boy credits with expiration dates and the reduction for bad behaviour, the relationship between citizen and state is fundamentally changed.

>People will always still want more money on top of their free money.

That's also terrifying. Planet of the dolescum with politicians increasingly just doing bread and circuses to win votes with new taxes and higher inflation to pay for it.

>>4976
10% is more than what is involved in just driving the bus, you're forgetting how long the tail of the snake is. And anyway, falling transportation costs feed into economic growth in new areas which creates new jobs just as we survive without many canal boats these days.

Anyway, jobs have historically not gone *poof* from new technology, there might be economic dislocation but this has always given way to new industry. We're not heading towards luxury communism.
>> No. 4979 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 12:48 am
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FIRE (Financial Indepence, Retire Early) is a thing, and there are a several blogs and guides for how that works. And the sum of it is that once money is no longer an issue you need a hobby. Or two, or three. No matter where you are on the spectrum we as humans desire company, food, shelter, and purpose. In that order.

It's not a hobby, it's purpose. You need a reason to be alive, and some find that in religion, but the better people find it in a craft. But (give or take some exceptions) none of us humans want to just vegetate and dwell on a couch. We're inherently creative.
>> No. 4980 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 1:11 am
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It surely says something about our conception of freedom that having to work 40 hours a week to live in a job that it isn't really necessary for a person to be doing is freedom, while it would be a dystopian tyranny to imagine a society where you just get UBI and (say) to stop you dossing about all day, you've got to spend say 5 hours a week in some kind of creative or educational pursuit.

Not that anyone ever really proposes the latter, but it's sort of implied by the idea that we should carry on the way we are because the alternative is people spending all day watching telly. "Okay, just force them not to while still reducing the total amount that they're forced to do shit they'd really rather not bother with" never really seems to enter into it. The state coercing you to work at Tesco via the DWP is freedom, the state coercing you to learn a subject of your choice via the DWP's successor is unimaginable tyranny.
>> No. 4981 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 8:16 am
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Having a job makes you time poor. You're forever prisoner to having your week constrained and you're in a constant battle for convenience to give yourself more time. If you're on the dole then you may not be rich in a monetary sense but you're no longer a prisoner to time.
>> No. 4982 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 8:48 am
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UBI would bring about a new cultural golden age because people would be freed from wasting their lives in pointless make-work jobs.

Jobseeker's Allowance was introduced in 1996 and made it more difficult to stay on the dole. British music has been utterly shit for the past 20 odd years. Coincidence?
>> No. 4983 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:25 am
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>>4978

I am actually a fan of Kaczynski's, beleive it or not, so I appreciate where you're coming from.

The fundamental failure of his outlook was that it doesn't account for necessity. It's nice when you can be a principled, philosophical purist about the concepts of freedom and autonomy, but the trouble is they always come off badly when you crash them into reality. With seven billion (and counting) people on this planet and a looming ecological disaster, anarcho-primitivism is an appealing fantasy, but ultimately fucking useless.

What we actually need, honestly, is leaders who have the balls to stand up and say "Look you snivelling cunts. You're going to have your freedoms curtailed, and it's tough titties. You can cry about it all you want, but the species isn't making it through without these changes, so you're going to have to suck it up." And yes, that's a terrible state of affairs, but this is the bed we made for ourselves. We're the ones who pissed in it and now we've got to sleep in it.

I mean, the way I see it the only other option is radical depopulation, really. We simply cannot have our cake and eat it going forward, we're going to have to make compromises.
>> No. 4984 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:41 am
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>>4983
>but the species isn't making it through

So what? Go radically depopulate yourself.
>> No. 4985 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:46 am
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>>4984

Do you want the species to survive or not?
>> No. 4986 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:46 am
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>>4976
I read a great book which made the point that it would be far easier to automate heart surgery than toilet cleaning. I wish I could remember the title.
Apparently this is a fundamental problem in AI - some of the lowest status jobs are going to be the most resiliant to robotisation.
>> No. 4987 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:58 am
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I have Asperger's, where's my billion fucking dollars?
>> No. 4988 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:59 am
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>>4985
It is not relevant to me. You may as well ask if I like the taste of moon dust.
>> No. 4989 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 10:01 am
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>>4988
What about if you could eat it with a Swizzelstick?
>> No. 4990 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 10:01 am
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>>4988

"I don't care about other people" he insists to other people.
>> No. 4991 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 10:09 am
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>>4990
These aren't even 'other people'. They do not exist.
>> No. 4992 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 10:30 am
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>>4991

If you're going to stick with this retreat into a vague sort of nihilism, keep it to yourself.
>> No. 4993 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 10:36 am
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>>4992
>Look you snivelling cunts. You're going to have your freedoms curtailed, and it's tough titties.

Keep that to yourself and leave me alone.
>> No. 4994 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 1:50 pm
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>>4969
This is an insightful and accurate comment.

Musk is a troll - he knows what he is doing; what he has on his side, compared to Bezos, is that he is actually an engineer. Bezos used to be a C++ programmer, and some of that shows in his work at Amazon, but he is not fundamentally an engineer in the same way as Musk.

This is a kite-flying exercise, like many of his projects - if enough people bite, he'll do it.
>> No. 4995 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 2:14 pm
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>>4994
>Musk is a troll
>> No. 4996 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 2:49 pm
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>>4978

>A UBI is, however you phrase it, a new dependence upon the state over your own hard-graft and not yours, it's golden handcuffs.

The issue is that an increasing number of people won't have the option of earning through hard graft. The rapidly increasing sophistication and falling cost of automation technology will inevitably create an underclass of people who just can't do anything better than a robot.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I think it's fairly clear that the status quo will not last. Is a completely artificial make-work job any more meaningful than a handout from the state? Can we disentangle politics from a UBI through some sort of sovereign wealth fund? Dunno m8, but things are going to get weird.
>> No. 4997 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 3:01 pm
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As has already been pointed out, plenty of people have already been made surplus to requirements by automation and technology. We don't have to postulate. We know what happens to them. They don't get UBI. They get made homeless.
>> No. 4998 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 3:20 pm
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>>4996
>The issue is that an increasing number of people won't have the option of earning through hard graft. The rapidly increasing sophistication and falling cost of automation technology will inevitably create an underclass of people who just can't do anything better than a robot.

That's not what has happened throughout history and I think we can be confident that it's not what is going to happen now. In a best case scenario we work less hours with less repetitive bullshit and injury. Again the productivity gains lead to growth which leads to new jobs just as the technology in itself opens up new fields of work.

If we're at the level of bullshit fantasy land tech then you can go out and found a colony on one of Jupiter's moons, teaming up with machines because we have different skills.

>Is a completely artificial make-work job any more meaningful than a handout from the state?

Probably. But then make-work jobs are entirely subjective in a world of agricultural surplus.
>> No. 4999 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 3:50 pm
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>>4997
Lolwat. People aren't homeless because technology has made their job obsolete. If you're homeless in this country then chances are it's because you're either a druggie living on the streets or you're in temporary accommodation because you want to live in parts of the country with a very high cost of living whilst having a minimum wage cleaning/shelf stacking job and can't afford the rent.
>> No. 5000 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 3:52 pm
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>>4999

That exact rhetoric will be used against you, too.
>> No. 5001 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 3:55 pm
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>>4998

>That's not what has happened throughout history and I think we can be confident that it's not what is going to happen now.

100% disagree. What's happening now is completely unlike the industrial revolution, because we're building machines that can think. A steam hammer can't replace a skilled craftsman, a horseless carriage can't replace a skilled driver, but computers can be skilled. A lot of people are going to find that none of their skills can match those of an intelligent machine that will also work 24/7 for no money.

Realistically, do we think that we're going to retrain a couple of million lorry, taxi and bus drivers to be computer programmers or robotics engineers when self-driving vehicles inevitably take their jobs?

People complain about working conditions in Amazon warehouses, but they're >this close< to fully automating their warehouses - they rely on humans to pick up objects that are too awkward for current-generation robot arms, but the vast majority of tasks are automated. What the hell happens to the thousands of people for whom working in an Amazon warehouse is the least-worst option available to them?

Even assuming we do eventually replace all of those jobs, it's likely to be an incredibly messy and traumatic process that could take decades or centuries. Many towns and cities in the North are still suffering the after-effects of losing their pits, shipyards and factories in the 70s and 80s. A lot of people who lost their jobs in that time never worked again - they just drifted from unemployment to incapacity to a pension.

I think it's incredibly blasé to assume that everything will be fine just because we've survived so far. Every previous technological revolution has been accompanied by huge social upheaval and massive amounts of bloodshed; I don't see why the next technological revolution will be different unless we learn from the past and plan for it.
>> No. 5002 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 4:13 pm
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Have you actually seen the fucking dance the man pretending to be a robot does? This has to be a prank, right? Like when Joaquin Pheonix became a rapper? That kind of long winded prank that doesn't quite land.
>> No. 5003 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 4:52 pm
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>>5001
>we're building machines that can think

We're not. Not with Elon's breakdance bot and not with any realistic plan to deploy machines into the workforce. The AIs we're building and looking to deploy in the workplace think distinctly different to people because the demand is in different tasks or, and this is where the real innovation is, complementing people.

In fact we actually have a window into this as Tesla did experiment with a fully automated factory but quickly discovered it was a nightmare.

>A steam hammer can't replace a skilled craftsman

Depends on the job. Many craftsman lost work and shifted into high-value goods, we saw massive job losses throughout the various waves of the industrial revolution. As you yourself go on to point out.

>Even assuming we do eventually replace all of those jobs, it's likely to be an incredibly messy and traumatic process that could take decades or centuries. Many towns and cities in the North are still suffering the after-effects of losing their pits, shipyards and factories in the 70s and 80s. A lot of people who lost their jobs in that time never worked again - they just drifted from unemployment to incapacity to a pension.

So you want to solve economic dislocation and the problem of people getting stock on the dole with...the dole and a prayer that other economies follow the same plan and people don't get mad when you massively raise taxes to pay for it. This is daft, we know how to avoid economic disruption with retraining, education and nudging people into the right careers etc. That's the kind of policy you should be advocating and what was behind those posters everyone was whinging about last year.
>> No. 5004 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 5:23 pm
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>>5002
A dude in a leotard dancing to Skrillex does not a robot make.
>> No. 5005 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 5:45 pm
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>>5003
>and [a prayer that] people don't get mad when you massively raise taxes
Tax robots. Even the epic meme robber barons of technology like Elon Odour and Jeff Spanish-for-kisses think we should do this, or at least claim to. You could even tax the company a whole minimum-wage salary for each robot, and give it to the person whose job was replaced.

Regarding making up awful busywork jobs, that's almost certainly what will happen. There were very few sales jobs 100 years ago, but there are loads now because there's nothing else for anyone to do. I tried to find a source to back up this claim, but most search results were just for recruitment sites offering me sales jobs, so that's QED as far as I'm concerned.
>> No. 5006 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 6:08 pm
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>>5005
>Tax robots.

No that would ultimately lead to passing the cost onto consumers and retard innovation. You don't tax someone for having a forklift on site because several workers could be doing backbreaking labour instead. This whole discussion seems to hinge on a lump of labour fallacy where there's some magical fixed-sum of jobs to do.

>Regarding making up awful busywork jobs, that's almost certainly what will happen. There were very few sales jobs 100 years ago, but there are loads now because there's nothing else for anyone to do. I tried to find a source to back up this claim, but most search results were just for recruitment sites offering me sales jobs, so that's QED as far as I'm concerned.

What's happened is the most developed economies moved into consumer industry, IT and very high-skill manufacturing jobs. Just as the surplus agricultural labour once fed into the cities to create specialists during the Bronze Age.
>> No. 5007 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 6:24 pm
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>>5001

>A lot of people are going to find that none of their skills can match those of an intelligent machine that will also work 24/7 for no money.

The important part that needs a lot more emphasis is that will work 24/7 for no money.

In the eyes of big business, that makes up for almost any reduction in the quality of work. It doesn't matter if the robot pizza boys run over a dozen people every week, Papa John is probably still coming out better off because he no longer has to pay real any delivery drivers.

Most of you are already familiar with the way your bosses would rather force more work onto already overloaded teams and "streamline" their processes or whatever shite, regardless of the consequences it has. You can see with your own eyes it's barely staying upright but from a management perspective, the costs are saved, the profits go up, therefore it's a 100% success. Automation will be much like that.
>> No. 5008 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:50 pm
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>>5003

>The AIs we're building and looking to deploy in the workplace think distinctly different to people because the demand is in different tasks

Nobody cares about "thinking differently" or "complementary skills", they just have a business objective that needs to be satisfied - lowering costs, increasing productivity or both. Modern AIs aren't programmed but trained - we give them example inputs and outputs and the algorithm figures out how to get from one to the other.

Automation won't replace all jobs any time soon, but it's aggressively eroding the middle of the labour market. Robots struggle with varied tasks in organic environments (cleaning, waiting tables etc), they struggle with very complex creative and intellectual tasks, but everything in the middle is ripe for automation.

>This is daft, we know how to avoid economic disruption with retraining, education and nudging people into the right careers etc.

Except we don't. One in five British adults lack the literacy and/or numeracy skills expected of an eleven-year-old, a figure that has remained stubbornly high for decades. It's a cruel delusion to imagine that everyone could be a robotics engineer or a cardiac surgeon if they just put their mind to it. Some people just aren't very bright. It's not their fault, it doesn't make them bad people, but they couldn't scrape together five GCSEs to save their life.

We saw the failure of this ambition during the Blair years. We radically increased the number of people who went to university, but the number of jobs that actually require degree-level training barely changed. We thought we were upskilling the economy, but we were really just creating make-work for junior lecturers and university administrators and lumping young people with the cost.

Wages haven't gone up since 2008 because per-worker productivity hasn't gone up. An increasing share of profits goes to capital rather than labour because an increasing share of productivity is generated by capital rather than labour. The threat of automation isn't hypothetical, it's happening as we speak, we're just pasting over the cracks and hoping for the best.

Sticking loads of people on the sort-of-dole isn't an ideal solution, I've said that I don't know what the answer is, but it is abundantly clear to everyone working in AI and automation technology that we need big political change in a real hurry, because things are going to get seriously ugly. Remember when scientists were warning us about climate change back in the 90s? That's where we are right now with automation. The people in the trenches are absolutely shitting themselves, but nobody seems to be listening.

Pinning all your hopes on retraining bus drivers as computer programmers is a really risky strategy when OpenAI are doing this:


>> No. 5009 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 9:51 pm
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>>5007

The machine-tending robot arm I showed in a previous post is a clear example of this. It's objectively worse than a human operator; it's slower at actually loading the machine, it doesn't know what to do if something gets clogged up with swarf, it can't do odd jobs around the workshop etc. None of that matters, because it does the work of three-and-a-bit full time employees and pays for itself in a matter of months.

Self-checkout machines in supermarkets are annoying for customers and increase theft, but the economics of replacing eight employees with one employee and eight machines is utterly compelling. Robots don't have to be better than you to take your job, they just need to be acceptable as a cheap-and-cheerful substitute.
>> No. 5010 Anonymous
22nd August 2021
Sunday 11:14 pm
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>>5006
I submit that back when forklifts were a new thing, trade unions still mattered so the workers who weren't made redundant (not a huge problem because full employment was government policy) got a large pay increase due to their increased productivity. That increased pay then ran through the tax system, so the overall result was no real change if you look at things as a distribution between capital owners and labour. (including the unemployed as "labour")
Now in the shiny new progressive 2020s, where Trade Unions aren't allowed more than 3 people lurking around outside and they can have their car doors confiscated if they look at you the wrong way, there's no need for passing on productivity gains. Just keep paying the guy who makes sure the robot doesn't trip over the extension cord whatever he was being paid before and fire the rest, then pass the gain onto shareholders, the most important people in the world. Don't weep for the unemployed, the DWP will have them programming the next angry birds or get them to take an innovative new job on an app where people pay them to pretend to be their friends or some other exciting innovation in boring dysopia.

A little anecdote I quite like: Economists used to think that it was "one of the most surprising, yet best-established facts in the whole range of economic statistics" that the share of the national income that went on wages was pretty constant. Varying up and down a bit as the economy itself does, but basically steady. Then a funny thing happened across the developed world starting in the 1980s: it began to fall. As an equal and opposite reaction, the share going to capital owners increased. How very odd. I'm not even really attributing 100% of that to unions, it's just that the union's biggest political disadvantage - that it was visible - also makes it the easiest one to point to. This post is overwritten enough as it is without pointing at other things too.
>> No. 5012 Anonymous
23rd August 2021
Monday 12:09 am
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>>5010

Also there's a huge microeconomic difference between a forklift and a robot arm. A forklift increases the productivity of a skilled worker, granting them more economic bargaining power; a robot arm replaces a worker entirely, greatly reducing the bargaining power of whichever unskilled worker it replaced.

This the crucial difference between mechanisation and automation that a lot of people overlook. In the 1970s, printing was heavily mechanised, which made skilled printers highly productive workers with a lot of bargaining power - the printing machinery needed constant skilled intervention and everything ground to a halt if the printers walked out, but they were capable of producing huge quantities of newspapers. In the 80s (starting with Wapping), printing became automated. The new automated machines didn't need printers with specialised skills to operate them, only electricians and mechanics to maintain them. Without effective bargaining power, the protests by the printing unions were futile.

Mechanisation can benefit both labour and capital, but automation benefits only capital because it replaces rather than augments the productivity of labour.

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