There is always work that needs to be done. The real problem is that people don't want to adapt to changing workforce needs. Machines should be doing our trivial tasks. There is no reason anybody should be pushing for them not to. Human labor should be dedicated to things that machines are considerably worse than humans at doing.

Automation only causes unemployment for people who have allowed themselves to become stagnant in their professional development.

I think we are in agreement there in general.

I'm also not sure I would agree with your position that businesses are becoming any more powerful. It depends greatly by what metric you rank "power". Is it sway over people? Their ability to get what they want? Their ability to get other people to want what they want? Their ability to get what they want despite other people not wanting what they want? I wouldn't really say by any of those metrics that businesses today are any more powerful than they were 20-30 years ago.[/quote]

Good question. By that I mean that rich buisnesses seem to have ever increasing influence over government policies and laws.

It could be argued that they are considerably less powerful than they have been in the past; there are far fewer monopolies, and almost no monopsonies anymore.[/quote]

I would argue that this supports my conclusion of full employment eventually being achieved via lots and lots of small workforce buisnesses.

As far as business/organization vs individual power, I'd say voting and education reform will be more effective than any reform that deals with businesses or organizations directly.[/quote]

About voting, my counter argument to that depends on whether you accept my definition of buisnesses' increasing power as given above.

And about buisness/organisation vs individual power, my OP concludes with saying that they will essentially go hand in hand due to full employment being achieved with lots and lots of small workforce buisnesses.

The most important factor in your analysis (in my opinion, at least) is that automation will never be able to replace creative human work. Lots of unskilled and skilled labor can be automated, but something like research science and engineering much less so. So while a lot of jobs (particularly those that don't require extensive education) will disappear, that will only free up more money and human brainpower for the creative work. Education levels will have to rise to take advantage of this, but there's no reason that aggregate demand for labor needs to drop. There's no finite amount of work; there's always more to be done.

Yup, absolutely. This is what I meant by "Creation of work ... that people want to pay for". Its also why I said the word utopia in the conclusion. We will be able to work on a lot of cool stuff, but capitalism will demand that its stuff people want to pay for, i.e. stuff that is desirable, and most of it will be stuff other than essentials, because we already have those covered.

Plus, automation can reduce the cost of production to the point that products become essentially free. They probably won't, and business will charge money anyhow, but if the cost of producing food falls low enough that it can be easily covered for all people, then a significant driver of wages disappears because cost of living decreases. Again, it's not all that likely that this would be realized, and increased consumption/inflation is a much more likely result. But if the cost of living falls due to reduced cost of production, then the need for employment falls as well.[/quote]

Yup, again we agree, that would be a possibility but unlikely given long standing current trends.

Yup, absolutely. This is what I meant by "Creation of work ... that people want to pay for". Its also why I said the word utopia in the conclusion. We will be able to work on a lot of cool stuff, but capitalism will demand that its stuff people want to pay for, i.e. stuff that is desirable, and most of it will be stuff other than essentials, because we already have those covered.

I guess my point was more that the definition of a lean company (one with the minimum possible number of workers) changes. With a larger number of consumers (less wage slaves, more opportunity for advancement and a greater value on an idea + possible implementation) and vastly more creative power at hand, employment rolls can swell. I don't see the situation driving unemployment because the incentive to develop skills relevant to this marketplace would be stronger than it is today, and the reward for investment in new ideas will be better, or at least more likely.

I guess my point was more that the definition of a lean company (one with the minimum possible number of workers) changes. With a larger number of consumers (less wage slaves, more opportunity for advancement and a greater value on an idea + possible implementation) and vastly more creative power at hand, employment rolls can swell. I don't see the situation driving unemployment because the incentive to develop skills relevant to this marketplace would be stronger than it is today, and the reward for investment in new ideas will be better, or at least more likely.

Oh I see. You are saying that because the demand will turn from work that can be automated to work that can't be, then the employment roll in established buisnesses will swell, and that this may well allow for full employment of the population. OK, however redundancy is not only a problem in automation but also inherent to buisness. I guess what I'm prediciting is that as long as established buisnesses are not implementing close to full employement of the population then the solution to the unemployment will be the birth of enough new useful buisnesses to ensure full employment.

[quote name='forsandifs' timestamp='1303812164' post='4802991']and so again we end up with [[high unemployment]]. The surplus of workers set up their own buisnesses thus creating work

Unemployed people don't have capital. To create businesses you need capital.
[/quote]

Not necessarily, i'd expect future jobs to be far more service oriented and you can start up a service oriented business without any capital at all. (All you need to do is hit the streets and offer your services), if production costs of material goods are low the cost of human services will be low aswell and thus a larger range of rather trivial services can be affordable and worth both paying for and performing.

Oh I see. You are saying that because the demand will turn from work that can be automated to work that can't be, then the employment roll in established buisnesses will swell, and that this may well allow for full employment of the population. OK, however redundancy is not only a problem in automation but also inherent to buisness. I guess what I'm prediciting is that as long as established buisnesses are not implementing close to full employement of the population then the solution to the unemployment will be the birth of enough new useful buisnesses to ensure full employment.

It will always be true that if there is less than full employment in a population offered by existing firms, starting new businesses will produce new employment opportunities to make up the gap.

But the thing about the new work that's created is that redundancy is far less of an issue. If you're a biological research firm, you can always use more researchers. You can expand the scope of any project, or improve the speed and quality, or start entirely new projects. There will certainly be a limit on how much capital you can pour into your research, and a diminishing return at some point on each researcher added to any particular project, but you don't have redundancy in the same way you might on an assembly line. There's no bottleneck on production because what's being produced is ideas moreso than products, even though those ideas may well ultimately produce products. Plus, administrative jobs are created in tandem with growth in other intra-firm areas.

There will probably always be some level of unemployment, and new businesses can alleviate that (especially as established businesses fail sometimes). But I don't think that the freeing of human capital will produce the massive unemployment you described in earlier posts, except perhaps in the short term. Especially because, as I mentioned earlier, a decreased cost of living makes it less important for an individual to be fully employed or even employed all the time.

If humans ever invent a replicator like in star trek, work would be obsolete, money would become worthless, etc. ;o

And actually, that technology is not completely impossible and it will most likely be invented in the future.

Good question. By that I mean that rich buisnesses seem to have ever increasing influence over government policies and laws.

I'm really not sure I agree with that. It seems so because you hear about it more often, but businesses are getting increasingly less powerful than they used to be, it just so happens that you hear about the problems today more frequently than you hear about problems 60 years ago. If you look at coal, car, or telecommunication companies years ago; they were vastly more powerful than they are today and could be reasonably argued to be more powerful than any company today.

About voting, my counter argument to that depends on whether you accept my definition of buisnesses' increasing power as given above.[/quote]
I'd say your definition could be fine, but I just don't think it's happening. In fact I find the transparency of the internet is making the power of businesses dwindle even further. How many people would have heard of the AT&T/Tmobile merger 20 years ago? I hear about it every day and I'm not even in the US anymore

edit: or how many people would know what really caused the build up and crash during the financial crisis? There's a lot more information available that demands accountability, where before it was much easier for companies to sweet things under the carpet.

I don't think automation is the problem. Hell, i have a tool that automates the process of turning C++ code into machine-readable code, but no one's saying that's a bad thing. But a lot of people call a company for whatever service and they're met by a robot that tells them to press 1 for sales or 2 for technical support; it's not the automation that's the problem, it's the lower quality of service. That type of automation is ubiquitous in the business world.

My mom works at a certain company (i probably shouldn't say who, but it's a fortune 500) and they are outsourcing to India. Actually, India was supposed to take her job, but there were security issues about letting foreigners handle sensitive material and they couldn't get rid of her. Those security issues were supposed to be rid of by automated online forms, but those forms have problems and the Indians don't have privileges to fix them (can't, legally) so there's now a team here in the states and one in India trying to do the same job.

Automation does not always mean efficiently in practice as much as it does in theory.

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So while a lot of jobs (particularly those that don't require extensive education) will disappear, that will only free up more money and human brainpower for the creative work. Education levels will have to rise to take advantage of this, but there's no reason that aggregate demand for labor needs to drop. There's no finite amount of work; there's always more to be done.

Society needs jobs for the uneducated, though. There are many who either do not have the resources to become educated, or who are mentally handicapped. And it's not like we have the best education program in the world with schools closing down and extra curricular activities being cut. (But that was discussed well enough[color="#FF00FF"] in another thread.) Point is, any plan that relies on us having a good education system is flawed,[/font]

But even among those who have the opportunity and privilege to be educated, schools are becoming factories for manufacturing only marketable skills into the workforce. Schools don't empower students to succeed in the world, the enslave them to work for the world. When the advertise that you'll learn "valuable skills", they don't mean skills that will enrich your life, they mean it looks good on a resume.

If you're right about education levels needing to rise, i think we're absolutely boned.

Plus, automation can reduce the cost of production to the point that products become essentially free. They probably won't, and business will charge money anyhow, but if the cost of producing food falls low enough that it can be easily covered for all people, then a significant driver of wages disappears because cost of living decreases. Again, it's not all that likely that this would be realized, and increased consumption/inflation is a much more likely result. But if the cost of living falls due to reduced cost of production, then the need for employment falls as well.[/quote]

Google "usa produce food feed world". I thought i'd link an article but i couldn't pick just one. We produce well over enough food to feed the entire Earth. Since there's more supply than demand--i'm not economist here, but--why isn't it that food is so cheap that living costs go down? I think one of the problems is that most of the food we eat is heavily processed, so we're not only paying for the ingredients. Even if i could by beef for 50 cents a pound, i don't think gas would be any cheaper. I pay 50 bucks a week for food to survive, but my rent is much higher.

However, I don't think that government will ultimately succumb to corporate power.
[/quote]

Recently federal workers have come under fire and their unions lost bargaining rights. The corporate executives are able to evade taxation despite being the very people you'd think should be contributing the most. There's always NAFTA, which restricts unions and workers rights. It seems to me the government has been succumbing for many many years. Of coarse, there's always the pendulum argument. I hope i live to see it swing the other way.

EDIT: I realize i haven't substantiated any of my claims. Well, i checked some with google, but if anyone wants a real source, i can provide one. I just don't feel comfortable linking something that just happened to be at the top of a google search result.

Of coarse, there's always the pendulum argument. I hope i live to see it swing the other way.

Better hope that it swings early, because the counterreactions have a historical tendency to be extreme.