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“I can take you to factories [in China] now, where you’ll basically be alongside a big conveyor and the machines come out of the floor and begin to assemble parts,” he says.
“And you’re walking alongside this conveyor, and after about 800, 900 metres, a truck drives out. There are no people – everything is robotic.”
If this is true and continues to grow and replace human labor, I wonder what all the workers are going to do? Mass UBI?
Throughout history, some jobs disappear and new ones show up, maybe now it’s just happening faster. But that’s a natural thing, and societies have shown they can adapt. What doesn’t make sense, and definitely isn’t gonna happen, is keeping people getting paid for doing nothing over long periods of time.
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100%
Human wants are unlimited and comparative advantage means that there will always be demand for human labor (if only because they can underbid higher performing robots in some tasks).
One seemingly likely prospect for humans is just the demand for things that are made by humans.
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totally. Sometimes the shift happens faster or slower, depends on demand like you said, but it happens in the end.
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT OP 13 Oct
I'm sure they'll adapt. The already know they're on their own (as in the gov won't save them) so they'll like adapt to fill a void somewhere.
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111 sats \ 5 replies \ @OT OP 13 Oct
They've been trying to transition to a service economy for more than a decade now. I guess at this pace we'll find out pretty soon.
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88 sats \ 3 replies \ @OT OP 13 Oct
I think they do service differently to the west. They pay low and over hire to optimize convenience. In the west (well in Australia at least) the minimum wage is high so companies can't afford to hire too many employees.
I remember going to this fancy restaurant in Shanghai and they had a waiter stand over every table. I felt uncomfortable, but maybe the locals thought different.
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This looks like some fancy restaurant!
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT OP 13 Oct
It was. I just don't like the feeling of someone watching me eat.
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Exactly... it gets so old listening to people that clearly have never read much history or questioned what they are being told freak out about things that have literally happened over and over again...
We forget that the idea of "a job" is relatively new. Humanity survived without "jobs" for much longer than it has with "jobs".
Why is it that the answer to almost every problem people come up with is... Socialism?
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You're probably right, but the pace and the scale is unprecedented though. The good thing for the CCP is that people generally know that they get little benefits (health & welfare). This makes families more reliant on each other and may end up for a period of time having one working for the group.
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I disagree that if is unprecedented. The advances in technology have slowed massively in the 21st century. But more importantly what are you and I gonna do about it. Slow down technology advancement? That's the goverment's job.
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47 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT OP 13 Oct
Well... There hasn't ever been a billion people moving into retirement age around the same time.
what are you and I gonna do about it.
That's why we stack sats isn't it?
For me personally I've worked some pretty sh$tty jobs in my time. I'm happy to learn a new skill or even do a repetitive boring one as long as I can listen to an audio book or pod.
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I've worked some pretty sh$tty jobs in my time
Same here. Thankful for what I have and I am trying to stay humble and stack sats. Trying to be prepared if times get tough or even if they don't.
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Technical advancement is something good and important. We should embrace it. And all the fears for loosing job is actually what it sounds - just fear. If someone's labor can be easily replaced by computer code - even better, this person should upskill and make something more useful for himself and for the society. The only people who can probably fail this are the ones that do not want to make the effort to learn and adapt. But if you are not learning and adapting to the life and the environment around you, over time what you have in your pockets will decrease anyway.
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they probably have 1 of these factories and they use it to make the whole country look more advanced than it really is
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Might be exaggerated but I think it's real. I left China in 2021. When we returned last year for a holiday everyone had new electric cars.
Change can happen fast when there's no opposition.
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The refusal to face reality from Libertarians is fucking tragic and scary...because it plays right into Chinas hands.
You cannot accept that Chinas state led mixed economy is fucking over your crony capitalist west.
Did you even read the article? Seems like you didn't. Keep your head in the sand.
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this reply is peak reddit energy. you ok? idk man. sure china has some nice factories and the west needs to do better. ok. i'm going to have some coffee and stand in the sun. have a nice day.
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My point is since you may have missed it- NONE of the responses including the OPs even come close to acknowledging the FACTUAL CONTENT of the linked article.
You can apply reddit style trolling by denying this and attacking me the messenger but none of that will change the reality that you and most SNs Libertarians are in absurd and extreme denial of reality.
And no I am not ok with your collective denial of reality- it is actually both absurd and dangerous. That is why I am pointing it out...oh but Im sure you can come up with some 'clever' way to discount my viewpoint like calling me a CCP bot.
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Many analysts also note that China’s growing share of worldwide manufacturing gives it increasing leverage over global supply chains – and would make it a formidable opponent in a war.
But alongside Beijing’s stated desire to dominate industries of the future, Rian Whitton, an expert at Bismarck Analysis, says increased automation is also an attempt to mitigate the impact of the country’s ageing population.
“China has quite a notable demographic problem but its manufacturing is, generally, quite labour-intensive,” he says.
“So in a pre-emptive fashion, they want to automate it as much as possible, not because they expect they’ll be able to get higher margins – that is usually the idea in the West – but to compensate for this population decline and to get a competitive advantage.”
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Maybe...
That's lot of people to care for.
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It is a classic example of government responding to known trends and directing capital toward where it can achieve strategic economic advantage. At the same time the Chinese government has raised the age of retirement from 50 for women and 55 for men to 55 and 60 respectively. Governments responding to known trends with logic and capital direction can significantly advantage an economy. Market forces alone are not sufficient. Another example is the strategic advantage China now holds with rare earth supply chains.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT OP 13 Oct
Still a lot of mouths to feed along with people living longer than they used to.
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Yes but that is not a logical response to the point I have made. You demonstrate inability to engage in sequential reasoned debate where you recognise understand and respond to a respondents points. The Chinese governments deliberate fostering of robotics does logically respond to the population and demographic trends you refer to...while also increasing Chinas international competitiveness and war readiness.
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'“You get this sense of a change, where China’s competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad.”
It’s also a far cry from the cheap “Made in China” goods that many Westerners have associated with the “workshop of the world” in the past, underscoring how much cash has been poured into upgrading China’s industrial processes.
Far from being focused on low-quality products, China is now viewed as a leader in rapidly-growing, high-value technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, drones and advanced robotics.
The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.
After visiting a string of factories, Jim Farley was left astonished by the technical innovations being packed into Chinese cars – from self-driving software to facial recognition.
“Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned in July.
“We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”'
Most westerners are in denial about the advantage Chinas mixed economy has over the crony capitalism of the west.
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.