How many 10x productivity revolutions do we need? At the end of it, will there be only one person left producing everything for humanity in 5 minutes each Tuesday afternoon?
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Very interesting question!
The economy doubles roughly every 20 years (since centuries at least), and for me we are already there (living in the EU mind you).
We still need some more for renewables, but that’s about it IMO.
NOW, that is my perspective, maybe people growing up today thinks “just a bit more and I’ll be satisfied”, but I doubt it. You can’t eat 50 steaks a day.
The evident problem we have is that rich people siphon away lots of it, so we still have to get up at 8:30 and drive to work. A gradual transition (people still need to work) seems what would be the best way forward, IMO.
Yeah, I guess I was thinking about this as “If we were to set a productivity goal for humanity, where would that be?” It’s a bit tiring in everyday life (in my line of work but I guess everywhere?) that you can always produce more of everything and there is no point where your todo list is just empty for a while. If it is, just add more items.
Increasing productivity of workers is met with demand for more production-intensive products. It’s like how every time hardware improves, software becomes more complex to take advantage of that increased capability. It’s like Jevon’s Paradox, but applied to productivity of workers.
One prominent example: our farmers are more productive than ever. So we move up the value chain, and have farmers growing more luxury crops that aren’t actually necessary for sustenance. We overproduce grains and legumes, and then feed them to animals to raise meat. We were so productive with different types of produce that we decided to go on hard mode and create just-in-time supply chains for multiple cultivars so that supermarkets sell dozens of types of fresh apples, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, etc., and end up eating much more fresh produce of diverse varieties compared to our parents and grandparents, who may have relied more heavily on frozen or canned produce, with limited variety.
When we eat the rich.
Never. There’s always more to do. Once you can produce food, shelter and entertainment with zero effort, people will start working on less urgent stuff that got ignored because we were busy working on the essentials.
Currently, we’re ignoring preventative medical and psychological care, because we’re busy fixing everything that is broken. Well, not even all of it. Just some parts get fixed. Maybe, in the future fixing stuff is so cheap and easy, that we can shift our focus to prevention.
Once we’re there, we can start focusing on the next big thing, like building a Dyson sphere or whatever.
This is completely incorrect. We’re ignoring preventative medical care and other urgent stuff to make rich people rich because we have a stupid economic system where rich people decide what is important
Well, there’s a bit of that in there as well. Maybe that example was too specific to serve its purpose.
The idea is that urgent tasks get prioritized, while everything else gets ignored. Currently, we are ignoring a variety of important tasks, because they aren’t important enough.
Once automation fixes all the urgent stuff, we’ll tackle all the less essential ones, and oh boy are there a lot of them. Some of them trivial, and some quite useful.
You’re wrong though. Things aren’t being prioritized in order of urgency. If they were, everyone in the planet would be focused on climate change. Instead, we have some places actively fighting it.
You’re talking about equality, which is a very different type of measure of urgency. Obviously, that is not being prioritized as all, because that’s how capitalism works. Quite the opposite actually. When it comes to matters related to equality, the rich people prioritize themselves over everyone else.
However, I was referring to a completely different type of urgency based prioritization that can be seen pretty much everywhere in society. We build machines that are just barely good enough for the job instead of being actually great for the job, good for the people who use them and good for the environment. That sort of long term thinking just doesn’t have a place in our current system, because making machines just barely good enough is hard enough as it is. If we could do all the basic things with zero effort, we would have left over resources that could be directed towards making everything actually better in a variety of ways. Currently, those left over resources don’t exist, because they’re tied up in making all the basic stuff happen in the society. That’s why we aren’t focusing on making things actually good.
Individual people and some companies are actually trying to make sustainable and humane decisions, but the society isn’t.
It doesn’t matter how much more efficient we get. We already have the bandwidth to do everything we need to do but if gets vacuumed up into whatever rich people want it to. That will continue no matter how efficient we get unless society completely changes.
Never. There’s always more to do. Once you can produce food, shelter and entertainment with zero effort
We’ve been able to do that for about 100 years now. All of humanity’s technological problems have been solved - on paper - for generations. There’s unfortunately never been a magical consolidation period where all the hungry were fed and all the exposed were sheltered. That’s not something that automatically happens.
The technology and production capacity to raise Somalia to the same literacy, living standard and life expectancy as Denmark exists. It would just require surplus growth and production capacity to go to Somalia and not Denmark for a few generations. Example nations are arbitrary, adjust as needed.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
I think we’re already productive enough, just not distributive enough.
Once I would probably have said when everybody has enough.
But I have found out that is naive, because looking at billionaires, it’s obvious that people just increase their consumption to the extreme if they can. Apparently we will never have “enough”.With near limitless resources, we will probably want to own our own planets.
The condition of being a billionaire is pathological, and should be dealt with in an appropriate way to pathology.
Most of those people started out as perfectly normal people. It’s the unchecked power that makes people go gaga.
No most did not start out like normal people, By far the most billionaires grew up very privileged. Not just privileged as in not being poor, or not being a minority. But really really privileged.
These people generally grew up in an environment of entitlement, that is way beyond normal people. They think they are entitled to be privileged, and they think they deserve their privileges because they work so haaarrddd and are so brilliant with money because everything is paid for by their parents, and they were never short of money.Bill Gates, his mother was on the board of IBM.
Elon Musk. His father owned an emerald mine in South Africa.
Donald Trump inherited a fortune, and was given a million dollars just to start on and learn the ropes.Common in almost all billionaire stories is that they never had to work for anybody, and they never had to worry about economical consequences of their actions.
There are some exceptions to this though, so it doesn’t explain everything.
Who?
I was initially thinking of some of the shark tank guys who like to tell their rags to riches stories. Like Daymond John or Robert Herjavec. But a quick search tells me they are not actually billionaires.
Is it the Mormons that get to own their own planet when they die? Or is that the JW’s?
Mormons
Actually, ironically, that would be BETTER than what we have now. Billionaires increasing their consumption would at least mean they’re SPENDING their money on something which is paying SOMEONE.
Instead they hoard and do nothing with it.
Don’t feed the windego. It only grows hungrier.
Let’s be a little more granular here. Increased production efficiency is good. If we could legitimately just have everyone take turns working five minutes a week and provide for all of humanity that would be great. The problem is how the benefits of increased productivity are distributed. If worker’s pay started at a reasonable livable wage and increased along with their productivity the world would be in a much different situation now. If we had a UBI scheme that allowed everyone to have a minimum acceptable standard of living automation would be much more desirable.
Not a fan of UBI here as a practical solution, but it’s nice as a heuristic vision in discussions. It wouldn’t solve any problems on its own, prices would just adapt and you’re back at 0. That is, unless you put in the effort to fight the political fights for regulation of rent and food prices, working conditions etc. And if you do that well, you don’t need UBI. Anyway, UBI as a concept helps “summarize” where such fights would be needed IMHO, I just don’t believe it would magically make exploitative businesses not exploit everything they can.
There is a hole in the heart of every rich person. They try to fill that hole with money, but the hole is never full.
When Elon Musk and every person like him says, “I have enough money”: that is when the people who actually produce value will have reached enough productivity. Not before.
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Hey I love my double packaging, because I love sorting my garbage. /s
As long as most of our productivity goes towards the ultra rich, we’ll never have enough
On a population level the more prodctive we are the higher living standard we can afford. Usually the choice is getting another gadget instead of fewer working hours in the US at least. Some European countries are reducing work weeks.
This is actually a stupid question. Loaded questions like this are annoying.
