American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets.
"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
Yes. China's five year plans are translated into English and are quite readable.
Here's the 14th Five Year Plan, 2021-2025.[1]
Wikipedia has a summary.[2]
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
Right now, I try to consume content directly from the dragon's mouth with official news and reports, but it requires a bit of experience knowing how to read between the lines and having a strong bullshit parser.
Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.
If the goal was "be better than the US" then sure. But presumably their strategy is aimed at actually improving their country as it is for it's own people to live in. Much of which has nothing to do with the US.
How does Valve put out one of the worst releases of all time in Artifact and not get dragged through the coals ever for it? The only working strategy Valve has succeeded in running in the last 10 years is making passive income from Steam and that won't last forever.
Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
China has been methodically preparing for trade war and decoupling for the better part of the decade. US went in full throttle with zero preparation. This is not going to end well.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the political systems of China vs the US. China tends to think and plan longer term, where as the US seems much more transactional; what will win me the next election / midterm etc.
It's not even about China. Asia as a whole has seen massive economic growth in the last 40 years. Countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are self confident enough to no longer kow tow to America.
>The US once had a solid base to spin up heavy industry factories, but this withered away as cheaper overseas manufacturing cut US producers out and the American economy shifted toward leading edge technology and services.
The Americans in charge of the "economy" settled for "leading edge" technology and services.
We can eventually automate our economy by buying software and hardware from China. By electing Trump, we basically missed the chance to lead on anything, and instead decided to engage full time in trade and culture wars that aren't really going to yield anything. But as long as the work gets done, even if in China, we should be able to enjoy it.
Indeed, no one sane will invest in building factory systems on US soil under a Kakistocracy.
Robot platforms are already a difficult business model in the private sector. With the exception of robot vacuums the market just isn't viable in the US yet. Best of luck =3
Not gonna happen. On the 1% chance we have a fair election next time around and Dems get elected, they will be too busy cleaning up the Republican mess, and nobody will notice. Just like what happened under Biden.
China ironically can end US by simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
Yes, and I think this is the core motivation behind the Trump messaging - bring it back to the US if possible. In fact, he wants to bring back commercial and maritime ship building back[1]. Pretty cool! Hopefully this will employ lots of people.
No one is trying to make war, but naturally China is looking at changing the order of things, at least regionally. To make that happen it needs USA to move out, and create its own coalition of countries around the area.
Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.
UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want.
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
>The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.
If "meaning" was a good argument against UBI, then nobody would want pensions, because UBI is exactly the same as setting the state pension age to zero.
Purpose. I'm sure lots of people don't think of it as their purpose to work in factories and offices performing some routines they don't particularly enjoy but had to because they have to.
You have to think outside of this consenting slavery box. Individuals will find meaning in their lives. Volunteering is one. Learning a craft is another. Acquiring knowledge and improving oneself as a person is one too. Americans/westerners keep lecturing about "freedom" but they don't even recognize what real freedom is.
I too worry about a future where the rich no longer have any need for the poor. I think the scenario where the rich end up just giving the poor a bit of money each month is an extremely optimistic one. Much more realistic is a slow genocide, where the poor simply die en masse in the streets due to having no homes, food, and healthcare, while such homelessness becomes both increasingly more unavoidable and more illegal.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
i'm very far left ideologically and i think UBI in the current political economy is a bad idea because it's just gonna go to rent etc. all the capitalists will raise their prices.
The elites leaving common folk relatively alone would be a best case scenario. If people are free to build and supply for themselves with UBI then life wouldn’t be bad.
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes?
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives.
Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
Wealth =/= spending, and definitely doesn't equal consumption.
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
As it stands right now, the common people having phones is what justifies investment in the cellular infrastructure. Without that investment, wealthy people can have plenty of phones but no service.
Is it realistic to think that the poors will start their own economy servicing each other? I'm sure there would be chaos and violence for a period but eventually it seems like the path upward would be a whole new economic system for that 98%. This system could even make use of the automation offered by AI.
Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why communism doesn't work. The one-sentence summary of communism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" and clearly people's needs grow. I don't know how much longer CCP can still keep communism in its name; how will CCP leaders reconcile that the fact that only by abandoning communism did the country rise?
Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes
The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people.
This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc).
Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists.
That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines.
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen.
If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections.
Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.
Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people.
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up.
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
>Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
Robots that can build things already exist and can be purchased second hand, but I haven't see this level of hacking them to self replicate. The logistics of getting enough parts, and having the general purpose ability to diagnose a very wide range of issues with used components, and similar seem to prevent this from being some sort of self replicating singularity.
If such a robot did already have the power to do such self replication, why would it wait for a second hand hacker instead of the builder of the robots using them to produce copies at reduce cost?
I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce.
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.
The US has squandered its advanced manufacturing capabilities, warning bells have been sounding for decades, and yes, those chickens will eventually come home to roost. Not yet but soon.
When there's no social safety net and you live in a society which insists on "he who does not work, does not eat", anything which sidelines labor is not "perceived as" an existential threat, it is an existential threat. And recognizing it as such is not paranoia, but straightforward realism.
If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.
Once upon a time, a US president said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". His unconventional administration brought USA from deep economic depression into a golden age.
Meanwhile, the current ruling elite smears him as one of the worst presidents of all time, and has spent decades undoing that legacy and racing towards a repeat of 1929.
Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that.
American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".
I've observed this as well, I do wonder though if that doesn't strongly encourage competitivity(is this word right? autocorrect highlights it, huh) and make people work... well, more. More effective, more time, more angry. It's certainly one possible explanation for why they dominate in many areas. But it does sound like such an exhausting thing.
Well if it's worked so well thus far, why change it up? I suspect that if a country is not at least a little paranoid about the competition that it doesn't stay #1 for long.
The sub-title of the article is completely unhinged:
> China's Dominance Playbook, General Purpose Robotics Is The Holy Grail, Robotic Systems Breakdown, Supply Chain Hardships, The West Is Positioned Backward And Covering Their Eyes, China's Clear Path to Full Scale Automation, Call For Action
I closed the page quickly despite the subject matter is something I am interested in. Also the AI generated images that have no raison d'etre of being there.
>This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.
This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now).
Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there
Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs)
This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
Readit News
"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0237_5th_Ple...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_five-year_plan
[3] https://ccci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Policy%20Brief...
[4] https://www.cac.gov.cn/2021-07/23/c_1628629122784001.htm
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
They’ve also massively overinvested in sectors like real estate
But maybe if Drumpf screws up the US enough, they will be able to weather these problems
Or perhaps AI will get so good it won’t matter
Dead Comment
Mostly because it was prompted by decoupling from the last three administrations before going full-bore in this latest Trump admin.
The Americans in charge of the "economy" settled for "leading edge" technology and services.
Robot platforms are already a difficult business model in the private sector. With the exception of robot vacuums the market just isn't viable in the US yet. Best of luck =3
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China ironically can end US by simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
[1] https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-gr...
Dead Comment
What country are you referring to. US with Greenland, and Canada?
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
You have to think outside of this consenting slavery box. Individuals will find meaning in their lives. Volunteering is one. Learning a craft is another. Acquiring knowledge and improving oneself as a person is one too. Americans/westerners keep lecturing about "freedom" but they don't even recognize what real freedom is.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
The more customers I have, the less risk there is if I lose a customer. The less I have to bow to my customers whims.
If one of the 10 people ask me to hire their cousin, I might have to do that. If one of the 1,000 people ask me to do so, probably not.
Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
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A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
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There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans.
The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people.
This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc).
Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists.
1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen.
If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
Robots that can build things already exist and can be purchased second hand, but I haven't see this level of hacking them to self replicate. The logistics of getting enough parts, and having the general purpose ability to diagnose a very wide range of issues with used components, and similar seem to prevent this from being some sort of self replicating singularity.
If such a robot did already have the power to do such self replication, why would it wait for a second hand hacker instead of the builder of the robots using them to produce copies at reduce cost?
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.
Meanwhile, the current ruling elite smears him as one of the worst presidents of all time, and has spent decades undoing that legacy and racing towards a repeat of 1929.
American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".
It's amusing and sad to watch from a distance.
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> China's Dominance Playbook, General Purpose Robotics Is The Holy Grail, Robotic Systems Breakdown, Supply Chain Hardships, The West Is Positioned Backward And Covering Their Eyes, China's Clear Path to Full Scale Automation, Call For Action
I closed the page quickly despite the subject matter is something I am interested in. Also the AI generated images that have no raison d'etre of being there.
This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
What are you referring to?
I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now).
Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there
[1] https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598
[2] https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976
[3] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-j...
Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs)
This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
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