Ye Olde Videoe Clippe Threade

[Undertoad]

When people are peddling fear, just don't buy.

If you want to read the whole thing in one minute, instead of watching a 15 minute video, it's here:

http://www.cgpgrey.com/

(Oh but don't skip over the crowdfunding part, that's the whole point!)

Gist of it all, in case you want to reduce your reading load as much as your video load:

Information workers are going to be automated out just like factory workers.

Reason this is bullshit: Econ 101 tells us that, when the cotton gin was invented, there was a tremendous cry from workers who would be automated out of work. As the video points out, this type of automation has reduced our workload and generated tremendous amounts of wealth. The cotton workers got better and nicer jobs. But now, they claim, there's something different going on because now knowledge workers will be automated.

And then they point out that this has already been happening

And then they fail to point out why this has been bad for us so far

After 150 years of automating the shit out of everything we could possibly automate... including tons of information workers I assure you... we have single-digit unemployment and big screen TVs and work in air-conditioned offices instead of doing back-breaking labor on farms...

So what if the doctors are automated? Won't that mean that healthcare will be much much much cheaper than it is today? I thought from the last decade that healthcare is bleeding the economy dry. What would happen if that gordian knot was disentangled? You say that would be bad now?

Nobody has a real answer to this, because it's unknown and unpredictable. But that's where the opportunity to scare you comes in. Isn't it frightening that we can't actually predict the future? What if it sucks and we're all poor? Well that has never been the case, things have only gotten way way way way way better, and these folks have failed to point out why this would be different, this time. But if you are worried about it just save your money and don't give to their crowdfunding effort.

[glatt]

It's an interesting idea.

If everything becomes automated, then we don't have to work, and the machines will take care of all our needs. Wealth like humanity has never seen it before.

But our economies have always been set up on expecting payment for goods. And we work to get the money to pay for the stuff. If machines do the work, we won't be getting that payment. The only source of money will be owning stock in the companies that own the machines. Or I suppose real estate. You could be a landlord.

I think humanity would have to come up with a different idea of what an economy is.