When the very first cars were built, only the rich could afford it, but now a large part of the population (in developed countries) has one or more.
What do you think will be such an evolution in the future?
Ocean-front property… 😜
Lol. I always tell people I have oceanfront property, in 2050.
Don’t worry, I’m sure Corpos and the RIch will find a way to get government to eminent domain your property away and give it to them under some bullshit excuse like “protecting their investment in seaside property”
I know you’re only joking but fuck me, given the way things have gone this century…
It was only like 30% joke. We live in Cyberpunk, my friend.
Only without the awesome chrome.
better to ask, what can the average family afford now, but it won’t be so accessible in the future?
water.
(where i am now, water costs money but is still doable)
The average person will always be able to afford water because if they can’t they will soon cease to be a person. Watch out for statistical effects like that because they might mask the true horror of the situation.
i am concerned that drinkable water could become scarce
Water for drinking isn’t the issue - that’s about 0.01% of all water usage. The issue is irrigation for food crops, which is >50% of water use in many places.
are you not concerned about the water for those crops?
I am a little, but compared to carbon emissions it’s not a big issue.
It’s a localised problem, so affected areas can solve it without needing the entire planet to agree. And we already have both political and technical solutions available to us. The only reason we haven’t implemented the fixes, is because big agriculture lobbies government successfully and it costs them no votes. But if the average voter has to stop showering because of water shortages, you can bet politicians will “solve” the water crisis in short order.
How is that better lol, it’s a completely different line of thought.
Lab-grown meat.
“In 2013, the world’s first cultivated meat burger was served at a news conference in London. It allegedly cost $330,000 to make. That figure has plummeted in the almost-decade since, but cell-grown proteins are yet to clock in anywhere close to the same price as conventional meats.” (Source: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/lab-grown-meat)
The goal is to get the price down to a level the average supermarket shopper can afford, and if the science is successful it has the potential to revolutionize the food chain.
Once this is available and affordable, I will never eat animal meat again.
Totally agree - from an ideological standpoint I totally agree with Vegans/Vegetarians on the fact that meat produces unnecessary suffering and (more directly important to us humans) huge amounts of greenhouse gases and wasted calories. But from a practical standpoint I’ve just never been able to convince myself to make such a huge change to my diet - but lab grown meat is literally having your cake and eating it too in that regard.
Hell I’d happilly pay 2x for a cut of meat that was lab grown instead of coming from an animal - and imagine how amazing you could make - for instance - a steak when you have 100% control over it’s fat/muscle distribution/ratio. Making a Wagyu steak, vs a typical cut would be as simple as tweaking some settings
I’m already fairly satisfied with the newer plant-based meat replacements. They just need to come down in price to below actual meat.
Not everyone can eat them though, for whatever reason it can cause extreme abdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea/vomiting, and more in some people.
I know, because I’m one of those people. Took 3 impossible burgers before I noticed the pattern and looked into it.
Felt like I was dying the first two times, felt like I was dying the third time too… but that was mollified slightly by recognizing the pattern and hating myself for doing it to myself.
I can already buy impossible beef at my supermarket, it’s not even that much more that regular beef. And most fast food places offer it as well.
I don’t see it happening outside a reduced group of rich countries. They will probably license the method for a very high and unaffordable price.
Would licensing matter outside of rich countries? I confess I know very little about patent law and things like that, but I’d imagine that if - say - Thailand wanted to use the same method as the U.S. Company, that the U.S. company wouldn’t actually be able to do anything about it, since they’re not under the same jurisdiction
International law exists.
I know that, I also know that it has a relatively narrow scope, participation is by treaty and varies wildly from country to country, and often isn’t enforced well. Hence my comment
Free time.
As more and larger industries become automated we will have all the free time we can handle. What we do as a society today will determine whether that free time is spent pursuing our personal interests, or fighting over the last scraps of a dying planet.
I wish this were true, but frankly I don’t buy it. In the last 50 years, thanks to automation and technology - productivity has nearly doubled, and yet people have to work more than ever to make ends meet or buy a home. Automation just means that the ultra rich can produce more with the same workforce. The global economy is built on the idea that GDP has to be constantly growing, and the more growth the better. Why let perfectly good workers sit idle when they could be making you more money?
Some industries get fully (or mostly) automated, sure and jobs dissapear from those industries, but new ones always pop up so that the folks at the top can continue profiting off the labor of those at the bottom. You think all the folks who used to have job titles like “Calculator” just retired at the age of 30 and enjoyed not having to work anymore? Nah, they were just forced to take new (often shittier, lower paying) jobs.
When an individual company looks to increase profit margins they can either increase the price of their product or reduce the cost it takes to produce it. For the vast majority of companies the primary cost for their product is labor. Employees require a living wage, health care, paid time off, and also create additional costs like payroll taxes and an entire HR department.
With automation you have a high initial cost, but it pays out exponentially over time. Sure you still have software costs, repairs, retrofits, and all that goes into maintaining your typically modern assembly line, but you don’t have to worry about your robots suing you for sexual harassment or wrongful termination. You don’t have to worry about busting unions or hazardous working conditions. You can fire your entire HR and payroll departments, too, which is even better for the bottom line.
Because it’s so financially appealing to so many industries to cut out human labor, I consider it an inevitability. The rich will continue to do what’s best for themselves and they don’t really care if the rest of us all die off from starvation or war.
Now, that’s not to say that it will all happen over night. Over the next half century it will likely be as you say where jobs just get more and more concentrated as they squeeze every dollar they can from each individual employee, but if you look far enough into the future we will all become unemployable. And when horses became unemployable, we didn’t set aside 100 acres for them to live their best lives in. We made glue.
right - but you’re looking at it from a single-company perspective.
Individual companies will absolutely cut their work force wherever they can when automation makes it possible. My point is that new industries spring up to fill the vacuum. Things like instacart, Uber, and Doordash didn’t exist in 2005, neither did a myriad of other industries. Where there is unemployment, there is profit to be made in exploiting their labor (which is often cheap, thanks to the fact that they just got automated out of their niche), and as a capatilist society there will always be someone willing to make that profit.
they don’t really care if the rest of us all die off from starvation or war.
Not from a moral perspective, no - but from a pragmatic perspective they absolutely do. If 90% of the workforce was suddenly laid off and left to starve, what do you actually think would happen? That we’d all just sit at home and quietly die? Ask the french royalty what happens when it’s population realizes that it’s main hope to not starve to death is to dismantle the existing system and start over.
The rich of today absolutely squeeze the shit out of the working class for every penny they can - but not to the point where most are actually immediately concerned with starvation. It’s one thing to not be able to afford a home, need roomates, and to have to budget carefully to make ends meet (as is the case today), it’s another entirely to have significant portions of the population be told that there is no job for them, and likely never will be again.
But all that is mostly besides the point anyways, because until literally every possible human job is completely automated, there will always be profit in exploiting labor. And there’s only profit to be had in any case if there are people with money to buy things. If 99% of jobs are automated - that just means that for any given population of workers, they’ll be able to produce 100x more goods for the same (or less) pay. A Capitalist society is never going to say “that’s ok - we have enough productivity”, they’ll just scale up and make even more money
An interesting note about those new industries you mentioned: they’re all contractors. When people talk about working for Uber or door dash they typically aren’t saying ‘this is what I want to do for the rest of my life’, it’s more of a holdover until something better comes along. As these individual companies begin the process of automation it may be that contract work is what most of end up doing. Once most of us are contractors it will become a supply and demand situation where we all seek to underbid one another in order to feed ourselves and our families. We would still be working, but it would be like fighting over scraps.
If 90% of the workforce was suddenly laid off and left to starve, what do you actually think would happen? That we’d all just sit at home and quietly die? Ask the french royalty what happens when it’s population realizes that it’s main hope to not starve to death is to dismantle the existing system and start over.
You’re right, of course, but I doubt that it would happen suddenly. The process of automating 90% of the work force would likely take decades and be a long, slow process with a lot of half measures a long the way to appease the masses, much like we experience today. I imagine full-time work will be redefined to fewer hours and eventually we will need something like UBI to supplement us and drive the economy. Tax burdens will likely shift to corporations in order to keep the government running as human labor will slowly phase out.
And there’s only profit to be had in any case if there are people with money to buy things.
I think that this is the crux of the argument. As automation becomes cheaper than human labor, human labor becomes intrinsically less valuable. This means that any paid work will simply pay less, which gives the lower classes even less purchasing power. Wealth concentration will continue to worsen and the middle class will evaporate. If capitalism continues, it is at this point industry and economy will revolve primarily around the needs of the rich. The people will still be a consideration, of course, but more of a liability than an exploitable resource. A world war ending in nuclear holocaust would likely solve that particular problem, but I’m hopeful that capitalism will be abandoned before it comes to that.
Both of you may be interested in an anthropologist’s theory on Bullshit Jobs
It seems like a synthesis of everything y’all have said, rather than a refutationvof either of you.
“Virtue through suffering” is an interesting take on modern labor. I agree with most of what is posited in the wiki article you posted, but the book was written pre-pandemic and I think that our perspective on our own labor has changed significantly over the past couple of years. Gen Z in particular doesn’t seem to value pointless labor the way the Boomers do and I know many millennials would rather ‘cram and slack’ than do the 9-5 grind.
With the rise of automation our perspective will likely continue to change. I’m hopeful that we will go through a sort of Renaissance era where humans no longer tie their self worth to their labor and we can begin to view industry in terms of providing need rather than creating profit.
We have been hearing that for 35 years… production has gone up exponentially whilst labor requirements dropped yet we work more and longer than ever.
Everyone I know has to work multiple jobs and have roommates to be able to afford housing. What is this free time you speak of?
Jobless poor have plenty of free time.
Not if the rush have their say.
If electric cars follow this path and aren’t replaced with something else like enviro-friendly fuels, electric cars.
I don’t have an electric car, I dislike how many artificially limit things like speed, it shouldn’t be a paid upgrade if the hardware is capable, the amount of tracking worries me too, like Tesla staff could see through your cabin cameras.
I’d rather have environment friendly fuels that work with older cars, even if that requires a new ECU+Fuel pump.
Outside of the US and Canada, electric bikes look to be the future instead of mainly electric cars. E-bikes are not just massively more environmentally friendly, they’re also radically reshaping city design to be more livable. I hope the future isn’t just a different kind of car. I hope, for the sake of the environment and society, it’s a world with fewer cars.
Removed by mod
Gonna run my 90s Toyota until it’s physically impossible
it’s worth noting (not that this makes it better) - that artificially removing features isn’t a new thing with electric cars.
It’s always been cheaper to build only the more expensive version of something, then artificially cripple it for the cheaper version. CPUs are a good example - most CPUs of a given series are basically the same hardware, it’s just that the cheaper versions will be down-clocked, or have some cores deliberately disabled.
Before the tech existed to have heated seats be a subscription service, cars that were sold without that option, would often have the heating hardware still installed in the seats, it just wouldn’t be hooked up. Hell, sometimes literally the only difference between the model with heated seats and without was whether they installed the button to turn them on
No. The divide between the rich and everyone else is growing. We will be able to afford less and less.
Nothing? Not a single thing?
I can barely afford this comment
While the divide is growing, things are getting more and more affordable and even the poorest in developed countries today live better lives than kings two centuries ago.
That is a very vague measure. Their health is better? They have more stuff? They have technology that didn’t exist back then? They live longer?
Or are they more fulfilled? Do they have more of their psychological needs met? They’re happier?
Yes. To everything.
10 years ago even the president of the united states couldn’t have gotten their hands on a device equivalent to todays smartphones. Today even the billionaires can’t buy a better device than what the middle class has.
Hopefully healthcare.
Full genome sequencing.
The price of sequencing continues to decrease as the technology evolves. I have already seen claims of under $1,000 for a full human genome. I haven’t looked carefully into those claims, but I think we are around there. In some years full genomes will be so cheap to sequence that it will be routine. I want to buy one of those small Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencers in the future. I’ll use it like a pokedex.
Gene editing/therapy could become cheap in the future.
Which is how we get gattaca
Not here in Singapore. Cars went from affordable to being a luxury good. I wonder if its the same elsewhere.
Singapore is definitely special in that regards (in a good way, imo). I can’t think of any other place going quite as hard on reducing cars.
Joe mama
Ah, I see you’re a man of culture as well
Any type of technology that brings equality.
A perspective from India. 20+ years ago before ATMs were implemented, the bank officials treated each customer differently. A worker with dirty clothes would be treated poorly than a person who wears a tuck-in shirt.
Situation now: ATMs don’t know who is rich and who is poor. All people are equal.
Probably those fancy electric and hybrid cars. In the meantime, I’ll be over here, clinging to my old gas-guzzling relic. Someday we’ll all be cruising in high-tech, earth saving, luxury SUVs.
A brand new Prius starts at like $25k, which is about as cheap as a new car gets, I don’t think hybrid cars necessarily fall into the category of “rich people things”
