The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[All Darc]

Well, society in our actual world functions based in production and consume, and wealth and jobs are based in enterprises and labor.
If you cut the labor, replacing with advanced robots/androids, there will be no jobs, and without jobs people will have no income and there will not be consumers without income.

In our time simple robobs and machines took some of the labor, allowing the increasing of the production, incresing life style quality due larger production which created lower prices. But now we are not talking about reduce labor increasing productivity and increasing wealth, but we are talking about replace human labor nearly completely.

Originally Posted by freebeard

I think you can divided those time spans by 10.

That is the big question, though. What do you think?

[redpoint5]

The price of anything is mostly to do with the amount of human time and effort put into it. With robot automation replacing human effort, and possibly robots making robots, we trend towards zero marginal cost. Stuff will cost next to nothing. When things cost next to nothing, the limits for resource consumption are removed.

The problem will be that we'll be so "rich" that resources are rapidly depleted. That's already an issue with current levels of automation.

[freebeard]

I don't pretend to know. On the one hand, you have a Post-Scarcity society where everyone's needs are addressed. Why get out of bed in the morning?

OTOH, people taken as a whole are diverse and creative. Ad Astra!

Maybe Idiocracy, maybe Star Trek.

[RedDevil]

Energy and politics are interwoven, so if you care about either it is essential to understand how those relations lie. Who is pulling the strings, and what strings.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/07...reen-new-deal/

Well... I never expected it to be that bad and one sided.

[redpoint5]

I refuse to click on the trash site Cleantechnica.

Is there another source, or a summary of their "news"?

Originally Posted by freebeard

Maybe Idiocracy, maybe Star Trek.

Sounds like an interesting premise for a show.

[RedDevil]

They refer to https://www.opensecrets.org/ as a source without pinpointing to the actual data.

But one image says all. (oil and gas company donations, 2015-2016)

[sendler]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

The price of anything is mostly to do with the amount of human time and effort put into it. With robot automation replacing human effort, and possibly robots making robots, we trend towards zero marginal cost. Stuff will cost next to nothing. When things cost next to nothing, the limits for resource consumption are removed.

The problem will be that we'll be so "rich" that resources are rapidly depleted. That's already an issue with current levels of automation.

Pricing will trend toward the cost of energy, materials, hardware and design time. Which it already has for factory farming and clothing so food will not go much lower since these have been almost fully mechanized with super cheap fossil fuel energy for decades and/ or have shifted to locations where whatever humans are involved get paid next to nothing. AI will now begin to replace engineers and designers.
.
So this also implies earnings potential for laborers will approach zero. We will (already) need a whole new way of distributing wealth or the "owners" of the robots (big corporations) will have all of the money and the people will have none. Already happening.
.
The bottom 90% of people in OECD countries have less wealth now than they did in 2000. All gains in GDP plus a little go to the top 10%. And most goes to the top 1% which now owns 40% of the wealth.
.
Jump to t=229 to skip to the sledgehammer.
.
https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?t=229
.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKK...F&index=7&t=0s

.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

They refer to https://www.opensecrets.org/ as a source without pinpointing to the actual data.

But one image says all. (oil and gas company donations, 2015-2016)

That one image is a lie, so it proves the source (CleanTechnica) is a worthless pile of garbage that nobody with an ounce of independent thought should spend a second reading.

For instance, Koch Industries backs approximately 15% Democrats throughout time, and during the time in which that graph supposedly depicts, contributed to Democrats though it isn't represented. Koch even donated to Bernie Sanders during 2016!

Better to go to the source than to give credit to a site known to be factually incorrect in nearly everything they publish.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/rec...t=A&cycle=2000

It doesn't surprise me that people in the oil business back the politics that are favorable to that industry. It also doesn't surprise me that those in the industry consider themselves to be providing a resource of enormous worth to consumers, which is plainly evident considering almost everything we have now is due to oil as energy and as products, and considering the consumer has the choice of whether they will spend their money on oil products or not.

BTW- The American Federation of Teachers spends more on lobbying than Koch, and backs about 0.5% Republicans, which suggests they are even less independent minded. The frightening thing about this is that teachers interact and shape our children, so they tend to be exposed to groupthink echochambers of shallow thinking.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/top...083&cycle=2018

Originally Posted by sendler

Pricing will trend toward the cost of energy, materials, hardware and design time. Which it already has for factory farming and clothing so food will not go much lower since these have been almost fully mechanized with super cheap fossil fuel energy for decades and/ or have shifted to locations where whatever humans are involved get paid next to nothing. AI will now begin to replace engineers and designers.
.
So this also implies earnings potential for laborers will approach zero. We will (already) need a whole new way of distributing wealth or the "owners" of the robots (big corporations) will have all of the money and the people will have none. Already happening.
.
The bottom 90% of people in OECD countries have less wealth now than they did in 2000. All gains in GDP plus a little go to the top 10%. And most goes to the top 1% which now owns 40% of the wealth.

The cost of resources is tied to the labor to extract. If that's automated then the cost plummets. There are certain constraints such as land suitable for farming which will set prices at some bottom level, but even energy can eventually be automated with robots building solar/wind/nuclear.... and maintaining it all.

Statistics lie anyhow concerning wealth distribution. Ask the bottom 25% if they would rather be the bottom 25% now, or be the bottom 25% in 2000. They can go back to not owning cell phones, standard definition 27" TVs, and terrible sitcoms.

The real problem is that an increasingly complex world increasingly dispossess a larger percentage of the bottom portion of society. That's how we end up with increasingly popular yet tragically simplistic ideas that if the problem is wealth inequality, than socialism is the best solution. It's a concept that only sounds good if ones understanding of how things work extends out only 1 move into the future.

[sendler]

3 farm workers now feeds 97 people. Eliminating each and everyone of those 3 people is not going to make food much cheaper. As Phosphorous and fossil carbon for nitrogen and liquid fuel get more remote food prices will inevitably begin to go back up. Regardless of eliminating the remaining 3% of people still employed in the industry. You are vastly overstating the personnel expense involved in many heavy industries which have been already very highly mechanised.

[redpoint5]

Well I'm thinking far into the future; like 50 years, not so much short-term. I expect we'll have more clever solutions to problems in the future.

As I said, there's a floor to the price of food since farmland is somewhat limited. That said, the tractors and equipment in the process of food production will drastically reduce in price, and assuming energy is cheap due to automation building power generation, there will be additional price reductions. The savings doesn't come from eliminating a few farmers so much as the cost to do everything down the line will be reduced.

You've reiterated the point I had that resource depletion will be the inevitable problem caused by automation. That will oppose the trend towards zero marginal cost.