Quoting your link:

Hey, finally something we can agree on. Here's another good one:

(His data was calculated before the mid-2000s, when illegal immigrants began streaming across the border at a rate of >4,000 per day -- so surely the wage-depression effect is larger now. Since then, the media has become more politically correct, and no longer publicizes these kind of studies.)

Has nothing to do with robots, though.

That's actually a pretty far cry from the situation Greece found themselves in... you see, interest rates are still low, and despite that fact, Greece can't service its debt.

Wow... "the size of the economy can never exceed X" is right up there with

Exponential economic growth is not sustainable if you limit yourself to the resources in a closed system. But if you bring in new resources from outside the closed system, the game totally changes. (You can disagree quantitatively with his estimate of "Gross World Product increasing by a factor of 10," but hopefully you agree qualitatively.) Incidentally, robots would definitely be needed to lay down thousands of square miles of PV cells in an environment deadly to humans.

I just googled reasons for the fall of the Roman empire, and while many historians have proffered many theories, none of them cited "because they employed new technologies" as a reason.

Indeed, Rome certainly would have fallen much earlier if not for their great technologies -- such as aqueducts that brought copious amounts of water to their cities, and allowed for half-decent sanitation. If you disagree, I assume you will be spending your afternoon ripping out your indoor plumbing?

"The final gear is fixed in a block of concrete. If it were free to turn, it would make a complete revolution in about two trillion years."

I'm guessing that because of the amount of "play" in the gears, there will be no stress building up inside that concrete any time soon... amiright?

You have it completely right, of course, and Gov. Schwarzenegger had it completely wrong when he subversively convinced millions of fellow Californians that deficit spending is "a gift from the future." (The citizens of the future will correctly view it as "larceny from the past.")

I don't hear anyone arguing with this. Which is interesting; basically everyone is admitting that private enterprises are able to extract more productivity than state-owned enterprises.

In other circumstances, some people forget this principle and argue vehemently for nationalization (as with single-payer healthcare -- as if eliminating the plurality of insurers who compete with each other on the basis of low premiums, would somehow cause premiums to fall).

Pretty well. The people who "serve the needs of the new computerized workplace" are called IT workers, and I know a ton of them. In 2015 we're still being told that this field has lots of opportunities: Hot Jobs in Demand 2015.

For the foreseeable future, robots will be tools for workers. Robots need a large supporting infrastructure of humans to:

* lubricate them, replace worn-out parts, and otherwise maintain them
* ensure a supply of feedstock or raw materials is brought to the robot
* transport finished products away from the end of the assembly line
* maintain the power grid and/or backup generating system to ensure reliable supply of electric power
* monitor the "health" of the robots (watch for warnings / diagnostic codes)
* design efficient workflows for the robots
* perform each robot's initial site-specific programming
* make improvements to each robot's initial site-specific programming
* re-program each robot when the line switches to production of a new model
* market, sell and install new or used robots; salvage and recycle obsolete robots
* design the next generation of robots
* Google even has a team of lawyers that lobbies legislatures to ensure robotic (driverless) cars will be legal, and won't be subject to undue amounts of liability that would snuff out the technology. (Theoretically, driverless cars will be involved in far fewer accidents that human-driven cars, and therefore should receive favorable legal treatment and be less costly to insure. Accidents involving human-driven cars are so common, there is rarely a thorough investigation. But the rare accident involving a robotic car will be investigated very thoroughly, and likely result in a software patch that makes the whole fleet even safer.)

As you can see, this long list of jobs supporting the the robotics industry involves a nice mix of unskilled, semi-skilled, and professional workers. And that's just what I came up with off the top of my head... surely I've missed many jobs. Hope this helps with your anxiety about "the operator will become unnecessary, we're DOOMED!"

To kill off the value of existing workers' labor would indeed be stupid and harmful. Fortunately, every time you equip a worker a more powerful tool, you increase the value of her labor (and make her job less shitty). After upgrading from a treadle-powered sewing machine to an electric sewing machine, she will assemble more garments (and her calf muscle won't be fatigued at the end of the day). If she starts out welding truck chassis by hand, and later supervises a team of robots that weld truck chassis, the value of her labor has increased exponentially, and her job has become safer.

You didn't have to shout, because everybody knows that nobody, not even you, wants to disallow people from driving themselves around. That was my point, and you missed it. Neither should anybody want to disallow workers from being equipped with more powerful tools. That is especially true when it comes to extremely powerful tools, such as robots. How do you expect workers to accomplish tasks such as laying down thousands of square miles of PV cells in an environment deadly to humans, if they're not equipped with robots?

How do you get around with such a huge chip on your shoulder? I don't work to enrich someone else; I work to enrich myself. The fact that my work also enriches the executives and the shareholders is a good thing, not something I should begrudge them. A lot of the shareholders are retirees like yourself, on a fixed income, who own shares indirectly, via their pension fund. If anything, I'm grateful to the shareholders for ponying up the capital that allows me to work in a nice facility with pleasant landscaping out front.

I can only conclude that you don't really want to increase the value of existing workers' labor and make their jobs less shitty; you just want to continue to be a clueless malcontent, mindlessly repeating the anti-capitalist clichés you've been indoctrinated with.

He put "automated" in quotes, because it's not really, but it's a great example of the false reasoning that's employed when efficient practices (like the use of robots) are discouraged in the name of creating jobs.

Disallowing people from driving themselves around would indeed create a lot of jobs in the taxi industry, and at the same time, would be awful for the economy in general.

Now for an even better example:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman travelled to an Asian country in the 1960s and visited a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

His advice was facetious and not at all accurate -- and of course, Friedman knew it -- because if every enterprise chose highly inefficient tools for the sake of creating jobs, the entire economy would collapse and no one would have a job.

You really don't get it.

The invention of the automobile simultaneously made life much cushier for humans (try getting around in a horse-drawn stagecoach for a while), and created millions of jobs that previously didn't exist (from repairing brakes, to paving roads, transporting fuels, and doing R&D of improved airbag designs).

Every new tool or technology has done the same thing: increased the average standard of living, and also resulted in a net increase in the number of jobs. You don't even have to be an optimist to believe this; you just have to observe what has resulted from every other technological advance. There's no reason to believe robots will be the first exception to the rule.

We are swimming in dozens of technologies that didn't exist 100 years ago, and there are also exponentially more people employed today that there were 100 years ago. That would be quite a contradiction, if the technologies that make our lives better also caused the number of jobs "to decline." They do not. (Although they do make one's time spent working much more pleasant. Driving a tractor with an air-conditioned cab really beats wrangling a team of oxen.)

So there is no contradiction, and that is very fortunate, because how would seven billion humans earn a living if not for all the technologies that created exponentially more jobs? Do you say "please stop with" every other technology that has lifted people out of poverty and caused the number of human jobs to increase? (No, you do not... in fact you use a piece of technology that's extremely advanced, by the standards of 25 years ago, every time you post to Slashdot.) So you and your ilk better not say "please stop with the robots." That would put a hard cap on the number of jobs, and ensure that average working conditions won't improve, and (if world population continues to increase) doom us to ever-increasing unemployment rates.

Every new tool or technology has ultimately enlarged the economy, and increased the number of jobs -- after causing temporary disruptions, like putting buggywhip makers out of work. For every buggywhip maker who lost his job, thousands of jobs have been created in the auto industry and other supporting industries (paving roads, transporting fuels, R&D of improved airbags, etc.).

There are more people employed today that at any earlier time in history, and most of the people who are employed today can thank some recent technology without which their job wouldn't exist.

The more disruptive the technology, the more jobs it ultimately creates. It's pure ludditism to think that robots would be the first exception to this rule.

Nantennas can't compete with photovoltaic cells because current diodes can't operate at terahertz frequencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

Hope this tiny diode can finally jumpstart the nantenna industry, and kick off an efficiency race with the PV industry. That would be fun times!

Thanks for the info. I checked with T-Mobile, and the $50/month plan gives you 1 GB per month of 4G data. If I understand correctly, after you reach that limit, your phone continues to work at some slower data rate (how slow, they don't say) and your tethered devices stop working altogether. (Is that consistent with your understanding?)

So for that reason alone, I think this is a no-go as a replacement for my home DSL service.

Now the tethering thing would have value for me, if it would allow me to shut off the expensive DSL service to my home. Is that realistic? Who's your provider, and what kind of speed/reliability do you get?