The Zeitgeist Movement - The Venus Project Moves Forward

Miscellaneous General
21

ahmm.. Well, Pink’s TED talk is short (18 min) and funny as well, I hereby poke you to watch it, you won’t lose much.
The claims (coming from repeated experiments) are simple enough:

  • Get a bunch of people,
  • offer half of them rewards for the best performances,
  • give them a task that requires at least rudimentary cognitive skills,
  • watch the group incentivized with rewards take longer on the same task

Right. And what happens after a week when the novelty of laboratory experiment wears off, and the task requires actual hard repetitive, and tedious work?

Are the people “without pay” still performing as well? I think we all know the answer here.

22

Really, it’s a short and entertaining thought-provoking talk, watch it.

“hard”, “repetitive”, and “tedious”, all the attributes of a task a potentially creative human shouldn’t be doing, wouldn’t you say? Specially since “repetitive” is all the qualifier a task needs to fall into the “we can automate this task” category.

23

“Specially since “repetitive” is all the qualifier a task needs to fall into the “we can automate this task” category.”

So what’s stopping them from being automated already if it’s so easy?

24

I don’t know. I’m a Electrical Engineer working at a university :slight_smile: I just deal with the actual automating.

A small example: a completely automated restaurant wait staff

Could you tell me why this isn’t more widespread?

25

I’m gonna go with prohibitive costs and/or lack of demand

26

When one thing is chosen another must necessarily be given up. If you could have both with no penalty then you wouldn’t have to choose between them. Economists call what is not chosen the “cost.”

There are things which, while we have the technical know-how to automate them, they have not yet been automated because there are better things people have chosen to do at this time.

27

Have you ever noticed anything common among wait staff at restaurants?

28

:smiley: is that a trick question?

Here in Portugal they are commonly rude XD

29

Really, it’s a short and entertaining thought-provoking talk, watch it.

“hard”, “repetitive”, and “tedious”, all the attributes of a task a potentially creative human shouldn’t be doing, wouldn’t you say? Specially since “repetitive” is all the qualifier a task needs to fall into the “we can automate this task” category.

What about this: Reviewing technical documents? How would you automate this?

I think most people having professional work experience will understand that accomplishing complex tasks requires real work, time, dedication.

Anyhow, I watched the talk.

One problem is to believe that the micro experiments (oh, the team without the monetary reward completed in 3 minutes less than the other!) he referred to are equivalent to real world salary compensation.

Also the speaker argues as if salaries and bonuses paid to employees by business are only a mean to motivate employees - as opposed to being a mean to keep employees working for the company at all, and avoid them going to work for the competition.

Businesses have been using non-monetary compensation for centuries.

it’s also a gross clichee to believe that businesses work only (or at all) with the “carrot and the stick” model. The fact that the vast majority of employees have a base salary (and only a relatively small marginal performance based reward) shows that most employees are not working under that model, but instead the “money equation” is already out of the question for a typical employee’s day.

Anyhow, I didn’t find the talk very interesting, the examples he gave are already well known, and he speaks as if he discovered something original, while I feel he only stated the obvious.

30

I don’t know about you guys, but I study hard and work hard to get good money. If I don’t work as hard and if I don’t study as hard, I’ll get paid less. I want to get paid more, so this is what I do.

I think the experiment would draw the wrong conclusion if they were to say “Don’t pay people: it makes them work better!”

31

Great point about lesiure vs. work. Work is what we want to eliminate

Or, at the very least, we would like to diminish labor and increase happiness. After all, wasn’t that the point of Human Action? Any action we take is directed towards attaining a goal and putting ourselves in a more desirable state of affairs. Anyway, yes, they contradict themselves greatly with this anti-technology craze in the temporary.

Yes, it may eliminate jobs. So what? They’ll go somewhere else. The buggy whip industy went out of business, and we’re doing fine. The point being automobiles take care of transportation much more efficiently. Some people still have to build the cars and the whole world is better off for the invention.

32

XD how about a list of said existent technologies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irk3845iQQI :slight_smile:
SirThinkaLot, click here, just for you :slight_smile:

HOLD IT!!!

cracks whip Foolish fool foolishly spouting foolish foolishness…more whipping [/Franzkiska Von Karma]

I have but one question for you: Where do you expect to get the resources and capital goods to put all of these technologies in place? Furthermore, how do you expect to continue to construct these as human population and consumption continue to grow as prosperity goes up?

33

http://objection.mrdictionary.net/go.php?n=4355393 XD!!

34

You won’t and can’t have the capital know-how though, once you expropriate it from people.

There is no excuse, if robots are already technologically able to be made, and provide so many benefits, there should be already a profit incentive to make them, and they should have been in the making as is. Its just not true. A.I. is nowhere near what TVP wants it to be yet. Robotics isn’t either. Less talking, more engineering, k thx?

The closest thing to SELF-MAINTAINING/REPLICATING ROBOT CITIES massively produced so far is this crap:

500×375 101 KB

SO GOOD

35

lol at the straw man yuberries :slight_smile:

“self-maintaining/replication robots” are a vision of a future that will inevitably happen (unless we kill ourselves in some US-China nuclear war)

but they are not needed for the kind of world the venusians preach about.
All that is needed is the ability to produce more than physically needed (by the human body) and commonly wanted - the definition of abundance.
(that and the general awareness of already being in that condition)

36

But the american people already produce more than they need. And government steals these “extra” money and then use it for services and other good stuff. Where is the fundamental difference?

P.S. I am not against VP in any way. I wish you guys goodluck, especially if you remain peaceful in this kind of politics, sort to speak.

37

According to whos decree?

38

Being in a state of abundance, the fundamental difference is the realization that moving into a “free-access” world becomes theoretically possible. A paradigm shift.

IF people continued working in the same places for the same amount of time, but simply the supermarkets become open to all, by definition of abundance, there wouldn’t be a lack.

Now, “why would people continue working?”, this is where automation comes into place.

IF society made a concerted effort to automate each undesirable job (i.e., in agriculture, make the huge farming machines self driven; in manufacturing only construct automated factories instead of manual labor factories; in services, generalize the automated kiosks and wait staffs)
THEN most of what is left are the desirable jobs, those that people actually want to do, independent of pay (IF they have all their needs, and most wants made available) (i.e., Doctors, Engineers, Researchers)

And another kink: “but there will always be some shitty task that hasn’t yet been automated, what then?”

In the US a lot of people today do voluntary work http://www.professional-resume-example.com/volunteer-statistics.html (and a lot of those said they didn’t do more because of lack of time). Think about the amount of unemployed people today, plus the amount that would be released by the said automation of undesirable jobs.
Is it a stretch to assume that we can reach a point where the available voluntary man-hours is greater than the “left-over undesirable tasks” in man-hours?

If that is not a stretch, then we would have reached a society were all work would be voluntary, the desirable jobs would be done “for fun”, and the not-automated-yet or not-automatable undesired tasks would be performed by voluntary labor. With all needs preemptively provided for, and most wants available in your local supermarket or by online ordering.

The physical needs? Aren’t those actually measurable? No need for an opinion or decree right?

39

IF society made a concerted effort to automate each undesirable job (i.e., in agriculture, make the huge farming machinesself driven; in manufacturing only construct automated factories instead of manual labor factories; in services, generalize the automated kiosks and wait staffs)
THEN most what is left are the desirable jobs, those that people actually want to do, independent of pay (IF they have all their needs, and most wants made available) (i.e., Doctors, Engineers, Researchers)

What you are basically saying, is that “if we built an immense stock of capital goods, then we’ll be all rich”.

The problem is, building capital goods (“Automate each undesirable job”) require real saving (i.e. deferring consumption).

To “automate each undesirable job”, implying that the only thing we have left is leisure, would required immense accumulation of capital goods, immense expense of labor time.

People believing this is a simple task, or that we are somehow able to do it today, are deeply deluded regarding the actual cost of automating processes. Cost in resources and human labor.

“Eliminating money” will do nothing to eliminate that cost, it will only actually destroy the main coordinating mechanism in the society that allows us to accumulate capital goods - trade and the market economy.

40

IF society made a concerted effort to automate each undesirable job (i.e., in agriculture, make the huge farming machinesself driven; in manufacturing only construct automated factories instead of manual labor factories; in services, generalize the automated kiosks and wait staffs)
THEN most of what is left are the desirable jobs, those that people actually want to do, independent of pay (IF they have all their needs, and most wants made available) (i.e., Doctors, Engineers, Researchers)

Think of that example: In your house, you have to spend time cleaning the bathroom. Why don’t you start at home, “automate this undesirable job” and show us all how it’s done?

Let suppose just for argument sake that you know exactly how to automate that job - you have already the plan (the technology) for building the ultimate “self washable” bathroom given to you by a time-travel explorer.

All you need is follow the plan: gather natural resources, refine them, transform them, create tools, what will help you create other tools, that will help you create yet other tools (and so on), until you are able to create the first piece of the first micro robot of the “self washable” bathroom.

Then, you repeat the process countless and countless of times, after imaginable hours spent (not counting errors, mistakes, accidents, etc…) - while feeding yourself, providing shelter for yourself, and after how many years? 40 years? You finally have your self washable bathroom.

Oh, and that self washable bathroom can breakdown, which can take you years to repair.

All of that for what? Not having to wash the bathroom for a couple of hours per week? See how your scarce resource - labor - could instead have been used to satisfy much more urgent needs.

Point being is that automating things take longer than doing them without automation. It takes a long time before a automating a given task “pays off” in terms of time saved vs time required to automate it.

If you believe that by having many people dedicated to this task it would be realisable in a short amount of time, then you have to realise that for all those people, there is a corresponding magnitude of different “undesirable jobs” that they’d like to automate, basically having different needs to be satisfied.

Thinking that we can eliminate scarcity by eliminating money, or that without capitalism wealth for all, is simply the belief of an ignorant person listening to tired old socialist slogans.

P.S. if you think that being a doctor is a desirable job, you should go ask one if he’d do it for free. Or if engineers would work on the same things if they weren’t paid.