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Comment by zeth___ | Hacker News Reader

>when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete economically, what's going to happen?

The same thing that happened the last time machines replaced most of the labor.

Billions will live in misery and want, a few will become so obscenely wealthy they rival most governments, a world war happens when the contradictions between the old powers and new powers can no longer be managed, revolutions happen just about everywhere when the people have nothing left to lose and the rich are hung from the lamp posts. Give it between 10 to 100 years.

This isn't a new problem that has a technological solution. It is a sociological problem where the people with the power to solve it are the ones who benefit most from the problem not being solved.

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This idea that the poor will rise up and overthrow the rich doesn't seem viable in the world today.

The technology we now have to quell an uprising far outstrips anything we had in the past.

Furthermore, the lifestyles of the "poor" today have luxuries that yesterday's rich could only dream about. This results in the poor of today being rather "soft in the belly" compared to the poor of the past.

Simply taking away electricity and internet from today's poor people may be enough to quell any uprising that started today.

Point per point you're saying what the rich of yesteryear said about their society.

The poor overthrowing the rich wasn't viable in 1913 either. Lenin himself said that it would be generations before a revolution could occur. And he was right. If not for WWI a socialist revolution would have been impossible.

The poor living better today than they ever had was something the Ancien Regime in France said before the French Revolution. They were right, until a bad string of harvests leading up to the revolution made the point moot.

And the poor being too much of a rabble to ever organize themselves is something that every ruling class has said since the dawn of recorded history. Yet bread and circuses did not help the Emperors, each of whom for 300 years died a violent death.

So the simple answer is: we're not special. What happened before will happen again, just bigger and worse because we have so much more capability than our ancestors. In 1400 sacking a town would mean a few thousand people raped, killed and sold into slavery, today it would mean millions vaporized and hundreds of millions exposed to radiation, toxic chemicals and biological agents.

I very much agree with this sentiment. Now has always been special, and history always repeats itself. I can't believe that current diversions and pain killers are so good, that if basic needs in the Maslow's sense of the word, food/clothing/shelter, didn't suddenly come in short supply, there wouldn't be legions who would turn up very organized.

A friend once told me that the main difference between old money and new money in the US was old money seemed to have an understanding that they had to give back to the unprivileged. I don't have much experience with either so I don't know how true it is, but it would make a lot of sense for families that have managed to hold onto wealth through peasant revolts would have a healthy respect for preventing the conditions for them.

I don't see how a population exposed to mass destruction (nuclear holocaust, biological agents, etc.) is going to have the same effect as a a couple of bad harvests, nor how a bunch of untrained civilians with semi automatic guns are going to compete against the modern military industrial complex.

The word has changed, but the cards that the common people hold remains about the same as before. Your "starving common people" may hold a full house and yesterday, that meant something, but nowadays, it doesn't compete with the straight flush of a modern military, psych-ops, and the entertainment distractions of today.

Do you really think it is likely that we would be in a similar situation where we have literally run out of food and people are starving?

I'd agree that people would revolt if they were starving to death, but bad harvests don't happen on a continent wide scale. It is effectively impossible for a 1st world country to have most of its population literally starving to death.

Yes. Hunger isn't a logistics problem, it's a political problem. People like the writer of that headline are making an argument very similar to 'poor people should starve to death, because that will motivate them to work and not be poor, and nothing else will get through their moral decay and general badness'

Of course we'll be in a similar situation (or we are: if we are, it would not be covered on any mainstream news, because it'd be effectively a political decision).

Flint, MI doesn't have water. Puerto Rico barely has electricity, and they didn't even do anything to warrant getting reduced to pre-technology. These things are political decisions: the USA more than has the capacity to immediately remedy the problem and will not.

So, a bad harvest can be defined as 'for political reasons, someone decided it's time for the poor to be starved' and the capacity of agriculture to adapt to a productivity shock has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Mass starvation is inevitable from the climate change we have already locked in the system alone, not counting unpredictable events like WWIII, a revolution in China, or any number of other low probability high impact events.

The only question is if the extreme high end of food prices during bad harvest years will be larger than the income of the bottom 50% of the population in first world countries in 2040 or 2080.

Unless I’m mistaken hasn’t the advent of industrialisation significantly reduced poverty everywhere it’s touched?

You are indeed wrong: https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/economi...

It wasn't until 50 years after the end of the first industrial revolution that living standards increased, and continued to increase. There was a huge number of laws and public functions that were created during this period to deal with the problem of industrialization, from the creation of the first public police force in London, to the banning of child labour (down from the the 18 hours children used to work in 1820).

It's sobering that a peasant alive in 1400 had a higher standard of living than all his descendants until 1900 in Britain.

It’s a good point, but it doesn’t invalidate the fact that we do now enjoy a standard of living unimaginable to a 1400s peasant, in no short order due to the industrialisation of a fair whack of the planet.

That we have a standard of living that high is a historical contingency. Industrialization can work with slavery just as well as it can with 1970s style welfare states.

It is politics and struggle that determines which version of industrialization we end up with, not industrialization itself.

One of my favorite alternative history ideas is the combustion engine and assembly becoming viable in 1790 instead of 1890.

Imagine a South that replaces all the slaves with tractors and automated cotton pickers, and a North which finds slavery works better in Fordist conditions than free labor.

"standard of living" is not defined only by having a smartphone and a microwave.

There are many critical aspects that were very often better for the average 1400s peasant than a 1900s industrial worker or even many people as today:

- sense of community: super tight-knit for many 1400s farmers

- ...of belonging to a place

- ...of purpose

- job safety!

- food safety

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