Canned Pumpkin Isn't

[yogi]

It's all amazing, indeed. At the moment a lot of the games are dumb, even the virtual reality ones. They require a cue from a living person in order to respond. In the future VR will be meshed with AI and the machine will just ignore you and do whatever it thinks is best. You could ask it to assemble a Mercedes-Benz for you. It would order all the parts and construct your dream machine unattended. You would get a text message from the head robot telling you to come pick it up when it's built. They already sold your house to pay for it. LOL

[Kellemora]

Some day robots will take over the world and become our dominant masters, classify humans as a virus and begin eliminating us, hi hi.

[yogi]

There are enough prognosticators saying that is exactly what we are headed toward. It's a possibility, I suppose, but there is something about mechanical life forms that make me think it's not sustainable. Not sure what it is. And, if you look at all the viruses in our real world, those bots won't stand a chance in the long run.

[Kellemora]

OR Somebody hacks into a robot and turns it into a killing machine, hi hi.

[yogi]

There already are combat robots out in the field. It's not a pipe dream anymore. That's not the type of robot I'm afraid of. It's the true autonomous android that can determine it's own destiny and how to create it that I worry about. Smart bots will not allow themselves to be hacked.

[Kellemora]

And they will be able to design and build better than themselves machines too!
I think we are doomed Yogi, hi hi.

[yogi]

You express a concern that a lot of scientists have also expressed. They are warning not to let the genie out of the bottle. We can do that in this country, but places like China, Russia, and North Korea don't have to follow suit. China is the major technology leader in the AI field and Japan seems to have the androids down pat; human like and sensual skin et al. You would think that a race of aliens or robots would dispense with us mentally weak humans but that's something only us low life's would think of doing. A higher intelligence might not be so viscous. They will have simulated emotions, after all, and there just might be room for all of us on this planet. They will force us to do all the grunt work and maybe get rid of the weakest among us, but that's about it.

[Kellemora]

Where my wife's son lives, his neighbor has several robots. We had a few Roomba vacuum cleaners. But this guy has several that do different things, vacuum, scrub floors, dry and polish floors, etc.
However, he also had a couple of really expensive ones that mow his lawn, and one even does some weed whack type trimming around pre-programmed areas at ground level.
He even bought one that cleans his garage floor where he parks his car. It doesn't work at all like the indoor vacuum cleaners. It is more like a brush the pushes things up to the garage door, going from back to front of the garage numerous times. Then right as it gets done it runs along the garage door pushing it all into a pile in the corner.
You would not believe the number of leaves, pieces of gravel, grass clippings, and other things that end up on the garage floor from your car.
Must be nice to be rich and have money to waste like that, although in his case, it is beneficial to him.

[yogi]

There are those robots which delivering Amazon packages, not to mention the self driving vehicles and delivery drones. I have also recently seen a burger flipping robot. Those whacky kids working at McDonalds for $15/hr are on their way out. If memory serves me correctly, I believe they also tried robots at airport checkins. We went through an automated one once, but that was more like an ATM machine than a human. As far as the home bots go, a lot more development has to go into them. They are the ones they want to look and talk like humans. Once they reach the economy of scale, you should be able to buy one at WalMart.

[Kellemora]

I see video's of some really neat delivery drones doing things that almost seem impossible.
I know right now they are just dropping packages in front yards away from the house.
But the ones I'm talking about actually open a bin up at the eave of your house and put the package inside then close the bin, which is locked. The homeowner would push a button and the box would lower itself down to their height to take the package out. This way the drones are never down near where people are.

However, I also saw one being tested by the postal service that actually opens the mailbox, puts the mail inside, then closes the lid back again. One mail truck could stop at the end of the street and send out 8 to 12 drones who could deliver the mail, pick up mail, and be back to the truck faster than he could have driven the route down and back himself.
The first video I saw only delivered the mail, but the second on I saw at a later date showed it picking up mail before putting the delivered mail inside the box.
The only problem here was this is down at street level, so the drone has to jump skyward and wait as a car comes by, then go back to finishing its task. This was using existing mailboxes. A new design for a mailbox with a back or top delivery area would be an improvement.

I forget now which pizza company had the video of a drone that delivered a pizza. It was much more complex.
It would come to your patio and land, turn itself off, then emit a loud beep sound. You go out, open a small door on the top and hold your money up one bill at a time, or show it your credit card if it wasn't prepaid. If all was right, you could open the front door and slide out the pizza box. The drone would just sit there until you were back inside. If it sensed any movement, like from a cat or dog, it still would not start and take back off again until the area was clear.
However, I think it said right now they are only planning on using it for prepaid deliveries, as the ability to accept payment was just designing its starting phase. So the payment slot shown is only to leave a tip, hi hi.

Oh, almost forgot, we saw one on TV a couple of nights ago. You had to buy two emblems with a certain design on it. The first emblem had to placed near your front door, like next to your address numbers, and be visible from the street. The second was a flat panel, like a sign, and it had to lay on the delivery point. This could be on your door stoop, on the patio, or on a picnic bench in your yard. It had to be clear of obstructions for four feet around it and at least eight feet above it, so it could be on a picnic table under a tree. Where you put the flat panel had to be visible from the design emblem on the side of the house. With the exception of using a design that shows back door delivery, which then requires the purchase of three of their emblems. If anything came within four feet of the drone, it either wouldn't stop or leave until the area was clear again, and would not deliver to areas where it could be boxed in. It was an ad for investors if I recall.

[yogi]

I can't imagine how the coming robotic age will affect me directly. I may not be around long enough to find out, but it's all coming down rather quickly. A lot of people will be out of work due to the bots. Eventually most people working today will have a electro-mechanical replacement. I see a time when there won't be enough jobs for humans and we will have to adjust our thinking about how we spend our lives. More than that we will have to come up with a mechanism to pay people who don't have a chance to work for a living. I thought I might have problems finding things to do after I retired. That is a challenge at times, but there is no shortage of ways to occupy my time. I don't know how that would work when most of the people have nothing to do but watch their robots do their work for them. It could be a wonderful life.

[Kellemora]

People will still have to run and maintain the robots.
Look at the automotive industry as an example:
As they replaced workers with the mechanical machines, instead of the workers lifting and installing the parts themselves, they instead moved an arm over the part and the machine did the rest of the heavy work and redundant work. They still had to get the parts turned the right way and lined up in such a way the robots could pick them up the right way.
The welding machines need the anodes replaced quite often, and those that use rods or wire have to continually be loaded and adjusted.

I do realize that true robotics can very well replace the workers, but I think it will be a long time coming, no matter how fast we advance in technology.

Not that we were that fancy in our greenhouses, but over the years we added many minor-automated things to help the workers, but they did not take over their jobs, just made it easier for them to do is all. And in some cases a little faster, but not by much.
Jumping ahead to my plant system down in the city where I used skate conveyors throughout the building. People still had to set the bench on the conveyor, plant the liners, place them in a pot and set them on the bed. The only thing that was saved was carrying the plants one by one down 100 foot long aisles. When they loaded a bed, it rolled down the aisle by itself.

In our family owned greenhouses, we hired around 250 people ever since sometime before 1956. No matter how much modernization we added, we still had 250 people on the payroll in 1984 when we shut down operations. The only difference over that period of time was our production was a little higher, but not by all that much for it to be significant.

The thing is, if robots replace human workers, how will humans get the money to buy their products?
I think that is what most folks are thinking about as they see automation taking over jobs.
But if you look close, you'll see the jobs being taken over are mostly those jobs the people don't want to do in the first place. But before long, robots will be taking over the easy jobs also, some day!

[yogi]

The robotics in an automobile manufacturing plant are pretty sophisticated. The shops that still build cars in this country are heavily into robotics and scarce on human workers. It's a cost thing. Those places that can't build cars cheaply in the USA are building them in other countries. Most, if not all, the automobile making robots are pretty dumb. That is the reason why humans must interact with them. They have no intelligence and can only follow orders given to them by humans.

The next generation of robots will be able to think and decide the best way to perform a task., You will be able to go to the showroom and talk to a robot that looks and acts like a human being. That bot will place the order and do whatever it takes to get your custom features built into the car you order. At the assembly plant there may be a couple humans for decoration, but it will all be run by artificial intelligence. Custom parts will be printed out and sent to the assembly area where more worker bees will see that it all gets put together per your specs. The payment for such service will be in place by the time your car is delivered to your home by a self driving truck. All you need do is sign the receipt and your bank account will be emptied on the spot. It's almost at that point already and I don't think it will take decades to implement it on a large scale.

There will be social issues we haven't yet thought about, such as how do all those former auto workers pay their bills if they are replaced by robots? Good question that will demand a rethinking of exactly what socialism is. If you think politics is fun today, just wait until the bots get into it. LOL

[Kellemora]

When I was much younger, I worked on an assembly line at Wattling Ladder Company.
Because we knew the family, I was in their plant off and on over the years I was growing up.
I saw jobs done with manual tools replaced with pneumatic tools, and later by automated tools.

Working on the assembly line was a boring job, you basically did the same thing, over and over again, day in and day out.
Although the company did move you to other jobs on the line to break up the redundancy and boredom which was nice.
When I worked there, the screw machine was a manual device you had to crank down like a vise, then turn a couple other large handles to move the die plates which pressed against the rod the exact distance to form the screw threads on the end of the rods that held the ladder together.
This manual machine was replaced with a pneumatic air operated machine. Rather than turn a handle you pulled a lever, then when the plates closed you pulled another lever. It was a whole lot easier to use, but still took a worker the same amount of time to use the machine, well maybe a second or two faster.
The next time I stopped in for a visit, they had replaced that machine with a totally automated machine. It still took a worker to feed the rod in, and press a button and the machine would bring the plates down, and do the roll and raise back up again all by itself. This worked fairly fast too, so one worker could turn out twice as many rods. They also did not have to worry about getting them just right, because the machine made sure it was in properly before clamping it down.
Many years later, I was in a different plant with a machine that did something similar, only it was all computerized.
No longer did they have to use pre-cut wires to the right length. The wire was on a large spool.
This fancy machine would draw the wire, cut it to the right length (for each step), roll it to ensure the wire was flat and not arched, and apply the screw threads at each end at the same time, then feed them out in bundled packages one bundle for each ladder to be made. The operator only had to press the start button and the machine would run on it's own until the number of rods needed was finished or the wire spool ran out.
The bundled finished wires were set into cups in another machine that added them to the ladders all automatically too.
So I suppose with total automation, perhaps two out of five workers were out of a job. However, one of them probably was sent to school to learn how to program the machine for the next size ladder to be made.

Let me tell you a quick little story about a local company right near my home.
They made mattresses, mostly for the hotel/motel trade, and a couple of name brands.
They expanded their building by about 1/3 larger than it was.
Then put an ad in the paper to hire 2 IT guys, 14 front office, and 65 factory workers of various specialized skills, but would train.
They had over 250 people apply for the TWO IT positions, about 50 or so for the front office, and only 5 to work in the new factory. They ran another huge ad for factory workers, starting at 14 bucks an hour, 7 hour work day, paid for a 40 hour week, company matched health plan, etc.
Only 4 more people applied for the job.
The sad truth here is, nobody wants to do factory work, even with pay double the minimum wage.
They had to have several orders made overseas while they modified their factory to automation.
They even had machines to take the spools of wire, and rolls of materials and installed them on other machines.
Once they were up and running, they were able to produce four times what they could otherwise, but it was not enough to make up for the cost of the machines. They did get more orders, but were still faced with a worker problem.
The owner finally sent all of the work overseas and sold all of the equipment and shut down the local factory. All they have now is a large distribution warehouse, and are still having problems finding workers. Sad.
This is one place where AI Robots are truly needed.

You do know our largest and oldest bakery here, Kern's Bakery, closed down for lack of workers to fill the jobs.
Everyone wants to work in an office these days!

There is one solution to Robots as employees. Individuals could own and operate the robots, and companies would hire robots based on how well their owners trained them to do a particular job. Companies would not have the time to hire hundreds of robots and train them themselves, and from what I've heard about AI, you can't just plug in a program. Identical robots running the same programs may not function alike since they are really AI and make decisions based on what they learn. So that is one possibility to keep folks earning an income. Trouble is, they have to be able to afford the robot to take their place first, hi hi.

I read somewhere a couple of years ago, that if for every product sold, there was a 2% population distribution tax added to the cost of the product. It could replace the salaries of those who used to work as automation replaces them. The problem would be keeping the governments from pocketing most of it instead of distributing it as planned.
The article I read used the data from like six or seven token large cities, and compared the prices of goods sold in that city with salaries of those displaced by automation. This is how they determined 2% would be more than sufficient.
It was not run like welfare at all. If you had a job, and could not find another job, because your job was replaced by a machine, you would still earn an equivalent salary as you were trained to do another job. You couldn't just drop out of the workforce, you had to be trained in something for jobs that are available. At least up until you reach retirement age. Sounded like an interesting plan when I read it. It was also much more lengthy than I just described also.

[yogi]

There is the old saw about the illegal in this country taking jobs away from Americans. I suppose that is true, but it's more like the jobs were given to them rather than them stealing them. Your stories about people who don't want to do grunt work add credibility to the stereotype.

Our dearly departed co-administrator, Rusty, would tell me about how things were done in the UK. All eligible workers had to work. If they could not find work the government would do it for them. That often involved retraining for existing jobs. Should the worker refuse the training or the job offers after being retrained, he would lose his dole payments. That dole was an interesting concept I didn't fully understand. It's something like a guaranteed income, which is being talked about in some of the political rhetoric these days. Like your 2% figure, a tax of that size was all it took to keep the dole system viable. The end result was full employment, or so she said. They have homeless people in the UK but I guess they are not considered unemployed and looking for work. They play that same kind of trick here with the employment figures.

I don't have a feel for how it would play out, but my initial thought was that most of the bots would be corporate owned. That would continue until the bots got smart enough to demand independence. The initial costs would be prohibitive at today's stage of development. Only large corporations and governments could afford to own an entire workforce of bots. At some point there will not be enough jobs for all the people being displaced and idle. That's quite a different problem than having more job openings than there are people.

[Kellemora]

To get unemployment, you have to be actively seeking a job.
When I had my business downtown, we usually had two or three people a day stop in and fill out a form, but they didn't want a job, they just wanted to apply is all, and have us sign that applied, but we had no position open.

UK has a fairly good system. We have or had several friends who live there and my how they loved to talk about how good their system was to us, hi hi.
Based on the dollar amount of goods sold in the US at retail, 2% would be an amazingly high amount of money.

[yogi]

I was unemployed after they retired me from Motorola. That lasted six months; then I was no longer considered unemployed. They required me to sent proof that I was actively seeking work during that six months. The social worker said all I had to do was list the companies I applied to on the monthly claim form. However, if they decided to audit me, I would have to show proof that I actually applied to those places. Simple. I sent resumes and kept copies. That's how I figured out sending 300 resumes got me two or three actual interviews. One was from an insurance company that wanted me to sell insurance.

I think there is enough money and government programs in existence right now to pay for healthcare, provide affordable housing, AND establish a minimum annual income. Yes, there is corruption but I don't think that's the reason we all are not living on Easy Street.

[Kellemora]

Going back once again to when I did my thesis on Social Security.
Ignoring all the facts about the system itself, and only talking about the excess money.
The reason SS could not go belly up was because after they reached their solvency point four years earlier than expected, they would never have to pay out more than they took in. And add ten more years to that, and they could not pay out more than they took in, plus the interest on the money, if they doubled what they paid out.
After about 1980 give or take, no person would ever get back as much as they paid in, based on entirety.
Taking all of the baby boomers combined, it would take over 96% of them to reach retirement, with no more folks putting money into the system, to burn up the excess amount over the expected payouts amount. Trouble is, 96% will not make it to retirement age.
Although most of us would not put the money away ourselves at the amount taken out for FICA, IF WE DID, and could earn 3 to 5% per year and add that back into our account, each of us could draw over 95k per year, not the meager 12 to 25k SS pays back out to retirees.
Plus you have to also consider, at the time SS was established, normally only the man of the house worked, and the woman was a stay at home mom who would draw from her husbands SS at retirement. But all too soon, both husband and wife were in the work place contributing to SS, this nearly doubled the amount of money going in.
If you look at the high number of folks who paid into the system and died before reaching retirement age, and the many who retired but only lived a few short years after they retired, that has created one heck of a lot of excess, although that excess was planned to take care of the baby boomers when the workforce dwindled back down again. But don't forget to take into account inflation, and the much higher salaries paid today than only a decade or two ago.

For those of us who are making less than 1200 bucks a month from SS, making the minimum payment at 1200 would help several people out financially, who are instead drawing welfare or getting food stamps. In other words, the money is still going out, but not everyone can get on welfare or food stamps but try to live on a much lower than normal SS income.

As an aside: Even though my late wife did get disability checks, she never even came close to getting back 1/3 of what she had paid into the system before she died. Had I not remarried, and drew on her SS instead of mine, I would be getting more than double of what I currently get. So, where did all that money go? The poly-TICK-ians have stolen it along with the money from millions of others.

Now to my point. If there was a 2% federal sales tax placed on all goods sold at retail, meaning to end consumers. The income generated from that would be more per year than SS ever took in during an entire decade. It would be more than enough to ensure that every person in America over the age of 18 could get a subsidy payment over and above their salary for working to make each person have an income of something like 50 to 55k per year. This basically means, it wouldn't matter if you made 10 dollars an hour or 20 dollars an hour everyone would make the equivalent of at least 24 dollars per hour. If you earned over 24 dollars per hour you would not be eligible for a subsidy payment.
Naturally they would spend more since they had more to spend and 2% of that would go back into fueling the system with even more than it took to create the system in the first place.
The only problem would be keeping poly-TICK-ians from shoving the excess into their own pockets.

[yogi]

I used to think we in America had the best political system on earth. Even when my mind was under that delusion there were people telling me how much better it is elsewhere; Europe in particular. Minimum income guarnateed. Free healthcare. Full employment. It's all over there. Well, so I was told. Of course it's not that perfect on a grand scale but there are countries where all that happens. There is an old conservative doctrine teaching that socialism and government handouts are not a good thing. It's that line of thought that kept us from pursuing that European model. Something changed between then and now. Our system is not what it used to be and corruption in government is rampant. There are theories about why that happened, I no longer think we have the best political system on earth precisely because that was allowed to happen. Entire political parties have been compromised and have changed the way we are governed. It's no longer what it was intended to be in this country. It could just be a phase we are going through. I don't expect to be around to see it revert back to the ideals established by our country's founders. The system is too broken to be fixed quickly.

[Kellemora]

If you owned a business. Would you tell your employees they could set their own pay scale, agree on raises for themselves, and establish benefits for themselves? Of course you wouldn't, you would go broke almost overnight, especially after the employees found out they could vote themselves a raise any time they wanted, as long as most of them agreed on it.

By adding Rider Bills onto other Bills, the Poly-TICK-ians managed to get this passed for themselves.
They take a great bill that everyone wants, then sticks it to the people with a small rider bill attached with it.

Most of the poly-TICK-ians in Washington do what they want irregardless of what the people want.
They no longer care about us, they only care about lining their own pockets and nothing more.

We definitely need term limits on poly-TICK-ians, but since they do all the voting for themselves, they would never vote to end their lifelong highly profitable careers.

The whole lot of them belong in prison!