Over the past several years there has been a rapid development of humanoid and other types of robot. There is still a large way to go before these machines attain the capability of even the least able human being but development rates are accelerating and when robots do become capable of replacing humans in a large way, the economic system will have an odd problem. This change may occur within the next twenty years.
Up to the present time the relationship of the production worker to the owners of the means of production has been that wages gave the workers income to provide the market for the goods produced. But what will happen when automatic machines replace most of the workers – and this involves many upper echelon workers as well. Where will the people who used to get the wages get the money to form the marketplace to consume the goods produced?
Evidently the whole economic system is in need of some new basic ideas.
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yes but . . .look at history for an answer. This has been the case since the industrial revolution and usually there are new requirements for labor coming from the new reauirements of a growing creative society. The interesting part is that these require more preparation and education than the previous WORKERS and in this way improve the economic base of the entire society. Everyone has to grow in order to survive. it's backwards evolution in that industrial evolution requires personal growth for economic survival.
The creation of intelligent machines is a revolution that has no parallel in history. There is no capability that an intelligent human can possess which can overome the lighting quick intelligence of an intelligent machine with a huge data base compared to the sluggish reaction time and limited data resources of human brains. Conceivably biological engineering might modify humanity into some sort of cyborg to change the relationship of human to machine and humanity still seems to have an edge in data sorting but this is in a severely limited field of endeavor not available to the huge mass of humans requiring sustenance. The difficulty still remains.
I think I'll start sweating about it when the machines build machines to service the machines it built to build machines. And even that point in time there will be a need for human intervention. No matter how "intelligent" a machine may become it will not be able to dream. And regardless of what the adage says about necessity & mothers invention begins with dreaming.
The symptoms of the problem are already beginning to appear, but still yet only slightly.Productivity of the work force is rising regularly every year but the real wages of the work fors is either constant or declining. Most if not all of the profits for innovation have gone to the owners of the means of production. There is a plethora of highly educated engineers and technicians flipping hamburgers to survive. Robot hamburger flippers are well within the capabilities of current technology.
As a retired industrial designer who suckled on Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke and Padget aka Kutner et al and, before that, Verne and Welles, I am well versed in dreaming and know well the process that leads to innovation. We are, at best, meat robots with a few tricks still up our sleeves, but don't look behind you and start sweating. By definition, the average IQ is 100 and gauging humanity by its taste for violence and gullibility and just plain ignorance and unwillingness to see the arising dangers of current technology, I see little grounds for complacence.