The lady who drove a Mercedes to pick up food vouchers.

[Mister Agenda]

Mister Agenda, if what you say is true, please explain to me why the UK is doing rather poorly lately with automation?

Because automation at the proposed level doesn't exist yet. In ten years there's a good chance that you'll be able to make a shirt for a nickel in five minutes on a 3D printer. THAT's the level of automation under discussion. Ten years past that, general purpose robots that can do almost any kind of labor...and ten years past that you'll be able to get one just like it for less than a new car. But 3D Printers alone can be considered the basis of a new industrial revolution.

Please explain why industry is packing up and going abroad where its cheaper?

Because it's still cheaper. It won't continue to be. You do understand we're talking about 'the future', not the 'right now' right? If we outsource to a foriegn company in thirty years, it will be their robots doing the work instead of ours, not their people instead of our people.

I don't understand anymore. We've gone from being a major superpower, a big f**king empire, to America's little puppet at best, and a laughing stock, a relic, at worst, as far as the EU, China and Russia are concerned.

No one gets to stay on top forever, looks like we're next. I don't consider the UK a laughing stock. Their current economic woes will pass. The one certainty is that things are going to be very different and it's not going to take very long.

You can't tell me automation hasn't played its role in our industrial decline. well, I mean you can, but unless you account for all of the changes and vast unemployment, social and economic woes, I'm not going to accept it.

I would say it's not an industrial decline if you can still make as much stuff as you did before. It's an employment decline, and absolutely automation has played a role in it. Rising unemployment is a serious threat. In the USA, it's estimated that half of current jobs will be obsolete in twenty years. The change is coming, what I'm saying is that we need to be smart about it and that the worst case scenario doesn't have to be inevitable.

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A human needs quite a bit more than rice, eggs, and vegetables. A human needs rice, eggs, and vegetables for their spouse and children too. As well as a house and car and clothes.....and entertainment, medical care, toilet facilities....etc. There is much more that goes into sustaining a human being than you initially think.

All a robot needs energy and maintenance.

All he says....all....lol.....and the desinger, and the r/d budget, and a maintenace bay, and a tech, and his family, and his house, and his car - And the people who work on his car and his......we could go on and on. Robots aren't islands any more than a man might be. I'd be willing to wager, as cool as it would be, that we won't require field laborers by the time we figure out how to make a robotic one. Field laborers are a very specific tool. Bit like designing a robot to work a halyard on a ship of the line - in 2014.

On a more sober note. I don't have to buy the field workers productivity upfront - in the way I would have to pay for the productivity of a robot upfront. That's why, for me, they would have to work better than a standard hammer- all other parameters being equal. I suppose that it;s an easier metric to meet in other occupations - where the gate is human speed, or productivity over time (a robot doesn't sleep) - but ag is actually gated by the biology of the crops. No amount of working faster will make the crops grow faster - and I can already plow an entire county under with time to spare with nothing more than a tractor. That 5 acre marker is subsistence farming with a stick out of a mud hut and no electricity (like the good 'ole days)..lol. Hell, if I were still in florida it would be hut optional.

Yeah, that's why agricultural machinery like harvesters and tractors never caught on.

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Which makes a prediction of some future government welfare state based upon such advanced automation a non-starter. Who is the government taxing, and what are they taxing (in order to foot the welfare bill) - when anyone could simply create what they required with their own privately controlled means of production?

People requiring less money to survive will make a basic free income more affordable.

Further, if they have such means - what would the welfare be needed for - even if they had the fund to accomplish it, which, as above...I don't see how they would.

A post-scarcity society can't be built in a day. The transition period could be decades long. Many, many people will need assistance to weather the part where machines take their jobs but not everybody has personal universal manufacturing capability yet.

If, just as an example, the government were to tax energy (wondering where the user would get the funds to pay the tax still......)commensurate with a rate that would allow for some basic income to citizens - why not cut out the automated middleman, and just have the people continue to perform those functions and receive that wage for that service?

You mean deliberately handicap ourselves competitively and let those jobs be outsourced instead of taken over by our own automation? I don't think that's in the cards, nor do I think it is wise.

That sort of automation is not the beginning of a welfare state - but the end of money (possibly even the end of commerce by any means), and thusly the end of any need for welfare. Everybodies all good, the robots have "got this"
(Somebody please say they've read some Ian Banks...lol?)

Eventually it should be the end of welfare states because basic necessities will literally be dirt-cheap. There's a long distance between there and here, though. It won't be the end of money because money is a symbol for resources. You may have heard that time is money? And home manufacturing won't give you free real estate. My imagination may fail to anticipate all the things we will still use some form of money for, but millions of people will be thinking of ways to increase their status, and acquire more of the resources that still aren't effectively free.