I own a very large computer and server farm. With this equipment (which was manufactured in fully automated factories using robots) I provide a vast array of services which make me very rich.
New software is needed, periodically. The powerful computers are able to write new software as needed. I buy replacement parts for my operations from fully mechanized factories. Workers do not make my equipment or software. I have no labor costs.
***One of the cornerstones of Marxian economics was Karl Marx’s ideas around the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value argues that the value of a commodity is determined by the average amount of time needed to produce the commodity. An example of the labor theory of value would be if a t-shirt takes half the time to make as a hat, the hat would be priced at two times the t-shirt.
Will automation render workers superfluous or irrelevant? — Bitter Crank
An example of the labor theory of value would be if a t-shirt takes half the time to make as a hat, the hat would be priced at two times the t-shirt.
Probably this t-shirt took half time to made it but imagine is made of good cotton and with hands of professional. This is forced to be more expensive than the hat. — javi2541997
Just because machines do the labor doesn't mean that labor isn't the source of wealth. — Pfhorrest
How much extra would you pay to have an actual bartender mix your drink rather than a very reliable drink-mixing machine? Is beer better if you can chat with a live bartender? I'd say, definitely -- live person, please. — Bitter Crank
Is beer better if you can chat with a live bartender? I'd say, definitely -- live person, please. — Bitter Crank
Ricardo and Marx, primitives that they were, referenced actual live human labor, not automated machines. It is true, though, that machines impart some of their cost and value to the goods produced. — Bitter Crank
...purpose is the prescriptive analogue of the descriptive ontological concept of causation: cause is about why something does happen, while purpose is about why something should happen.
[...]
Similarly, the prescriptive analogue of the descriptive ontological concept of substance is wealth: wealth is stuff of value. And just as in my ontology I hold real objects of substance to be constituted by the things they cause to happen (ala "to be is to do"), so too I hold that the value of wealth is constituted by the purpose that it serves: a thing is of value for the good that can be done with it.
This concept of wealth can be further decomposed into concepts of capital and labor, which in turn can be further decomposed to familiar ontological categories: capital is of value for the matter and space that it provides, while labor is of value for the energy and time that it provides. And just as matter is ultimately reducible to energy, so too capital is ultimately reducible to labor: capital is the distilled product of labor, worth at least the minimal time and energy it takes to obtain or create, and no more than the maximal time and energy it can save elsewhere.
Similarly, just as physical work happens when matter and energy flow through space and time, what we might call "ethical work" happens – good gets done – when wealth flows in an economy, each kind of wealth diffusing from where it is in higher concentration to where it is in lower concentration. — Pfhorrest
Sang ever so eloquently by the rock group, The Who:
"Meet the new boss!
Same as the old boss!"
To be completely frank, it was more screamed than sung. — god must be atheist
Will automation render workers superfluous or irrelevant? — Bitter Crank
But anyway, the lesson is that complex production needs complex work arrangements, which necessitates a hierarchy of work-related duties including planning and slotting people into doing their jobs. This was the crux that made people throw away communist rule: they worked just like their counterparts in the free west (free? ha!), and yet they lived in abject poverty compared to the same, and had to listen to the same bullshit at work.
Robotism will do away with all that. — god must be atheist
The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production....Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself....The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head....With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.
On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.
‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’
Supposedly, labor creates all wealth by turning raw material (iron ore) into finished products (cars, shovels, guns to blow you away with, etc.) — Bitter Crank
Will automation render workers superfluous or irrelevant? — Bitter Crank
↪darthbarracuda So there must be more people maintaining farm equipment today than there used to be people farming then, no? — Pfhorrest
↪Pfhorrest Indirectly, yes. — darthbarracuda
Will automation render workers superfluous or irrelevant? — Bitter Crank
The end result of this potential process would be solely automated production. But, this in turn would transform the Labor Theory of Value as well into something applicable in a post-Capitalist society when living labor i.e. the working class is rendered moot in the production process. — Maw
This contradiction leads to a material condition which can "blow this foundation sky-high", in other words the Labor Theory of Value becomes irrelevant, we've moved past it to something else! A Theory of Value based on automated machine power. — Maw
If we grant that there is a tendency toward automation (which there seems to be) and that this does reduce the amount of productive* labour required for the reproduction of the working class as much as it can, that still leaves open the possibility that there is a lower limit of that process of production - a non-zero asymptotic socially necessary labour time for the labourer's good basket, which suffices to sustain the dynamics modelled by the labour theory of value long term - keeping the engine of capitalism going. — fdrake
I think that's true of Marx, but do we have any reason to believe it's true of reality? — fdrake
when there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."
Automation/robots would be created by an immense amount of physical labor by humans. — Zazie Kanwar-Torge
However, self-driving vehicles seem like a sci-fi delusion to me. — Maw
Full automation only makes sense if labor is counted as an unnecessary expense. — Bitter Crank
Still, their are companies pursuing what is either a delusion or a premature technology. — Bitter Crank
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