Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
Mcdonalds -- They did lower prices. Year over year prices stayed at the same level. That is a 1-2% price cut. And its not Mcdonalds expanding that's the benefit of efficiency. Its McDonalds dividend increasing leading to more money available for investment into any industry. Our entire capitalist system is based on goods becoming cheaper to produce overtime. Its the underpinning of thousands of years of expansion.
Work Week -- I agree that organized labour led to shorter work weeks and better working conditions. However this was made possible by the amount of profit being made by companies. A profit that was allowed to be made by automation. As I said in my post automation leads to increased efficiency is a fact. How you divide the winfall is a political issue.
What you seem to be missing is what Money is. Money is a representation of Human and Mechanical labour. There is a finite amount of human and mechanical labour available. (it can be added through energy extraction or adding more people, or making those people work more) So if we have a finite amount of energy in the economy the way you maximize economic output is to maximize the efficient use of that energy.
The lower the cost of an apple or an apple iPhone the more of these wigits people can consume and the greater the carrying capacity of the world.
And I agree that automation gains aren't necessarily passed on to the consumer. But that is a political issue of how wealth is shared and not an issue with automation. You seem to be caught up in the potential negative consequence of automation as opposed to discussing how regulation and government intervention can allow automation to happen while ensuring wealth distribution is appropriate.
Essentially you want to limit technological advancement because the technology might be used in weapons. Fix the distribution of wealth and not force people to work at pointless tasks that are unnecessary
|
You lost me when you tried to argue that McDonald's has kept their prices the same year over year. That simply is not true. In fact they went up after getting those order taking machines.
Companies were making profits before automation, they just had slaves instead of machines. Employers didn't just willfully decide to share those profits with their employees, nor did they willfully allow people to work a reduced work week. In fact they complained and fought throughout the entire process.
Technology being used in weapons? Where are you coming up with this stuff?
There are serious implications to workers being replaced too quickly by automation. People will make the argument that the order taking machine will need to be built and serviced by someone. That's very true, however the clerk losing their job likely can't do those jobs. They also will not need 10 people to make 10 new machines. Do you see how this starts to have a very exponential impact? There are ways to minimize the impact and I believe this issue should be taken seriously, I'm not in any way suggesting to stop automation all together, but at the same time we need to make sure we are not digging ourselves into an economic black hole. Eliminating local jobs by automation so that someone in Japan can have a job making these machines is not going to help us in the long run.