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points by jasonjayr 1 day ago | 0 comments
Not OP, but if China takes up labor and manufacturing automation with robotics in a big way, there are a LOT of people there that will not have much to do anymore ....
[–] roenxi 1 day ago
This is similar to complaining that we don't all have the opportunity to spend 8 hours a day doing backbreaking farm labour after the agricultural revolution - it is only important to have people labouring if the labour is achieving something useful.

Labouring for the sake of doing labour is stupid. If robots can do it cost effectively, they should.

[–] samus 23 hours ago
Industrialization did not occur to make people's lives more comfortable; it was introduced to make investors more wealthy, and it is not a given that the wealth will be distributed to society at large. Also, after each disruptive innovation people's existing skills and experience might very well be worthless in the new environment. These two factors together mean that it might take a long time to adapt to the new situation and reach a similar level of wealth again, and that is the main concern at the core of Luddism.
[–] roenxi 21 hours ago
I mean sure. The paint isn't dry on China's economy, they built most of it in the last 20 years. They're probably not feeling overwhelmed at the thought of that sort of change - they won't have jobs they never used to have, but there will be all this stuff available assembled by machines.
[–] bigstrat2003 1 day ago
For one, people need to feel like they have something meaningful to contribute. Work is an important part of that. For two, people need to be able to make a living, and work is an important part of that.

It's all well and good to say that people shouldn't have to do menial labor. But unless you have something to fill the void, it's going to be a bad time for everyone involved.

[–] bruce511 1 day ago
How much of the "need" is intrinsic to humanity, and how much is it a product of the culture you live in?

Western culture ties the value of people to their work. The unemployed are "lazy" (itself a pejorative). The first question you ask someone you meet is "what do you do?" A lawyer is naturally more valuable than a postal clerk. (Despite an obvious example to the contrary. )

A lot of western jobs now are menial, or worse, useless. Lots of office jobs are, frankly, meaningless. Endlessly generating reports that no-one needs, or reads, isn't a path to massive self-worth.

In the US no job means no income. No health care. Your worth as a human approaches zero. In Europe, post war, there are far more social supports for the unemployed. That's a fundamental cultural difference. Asia is also culturally different in ways which are hard for US folk to comprehend.

For example there are 3 major political viewpoints; US capitalism, European socialism, and Chinese communism. Each appears to function well, and yet the US vilifies the others, while barely being able to tell them apart.

So, to return to your hypothesis of what "humans need", it may be less of that and more of "my culture needs". Which is perhaps going to come into play when predicting a post-labor economy in other cultures.

[–] guai888 1 day ago
Totally agree but it is difficult to retrain people even when it is possible. Technology can replace certain work faster than society can adjust. How to use socialist policy to help with transition is still a work in progress. What happen in France and rest of Europe will become a textbook case and we do not know how it end.
[–] ares623 1 day ago
Same can be said for every country right now. And now, there's fewer and fewer reliable greener pastures that unsatisfied people can go to, which used to let off some much needed steam.

The people will always have something to do. What those somethings are is entirely up to the ruling class.

[–] yogthos 1 day ago
China has an aging population like most countries. So, automation will likely help fill the gap rather than make work obsolete. However, if China does get to the point where a lot of work is automated, they have a socialist system where the government can do things like step in to reduce working hours or provide universal basic services which would be impossible in the west.

Ultimately, the whole point of an economy is to direct labour and resources in a way which allows people to have a good standard of living. If most labor can really be automated, then people can just spend more of their time enjoying their lives instead of working. The technology itself is not the problem. The only reason this becomes a crisis under capitalism is because the means of production are privately owned, and the people who own them require the rest of the population to sell their labor in order to live. Automation under private ownership frees people from a paycheck, while the owners keep the gains.

[–] junofan 1 day ago
Why would wealthy party members put up with that kind of redistribution? If most things are automated, why do they need those people?
[–] yogthos 1 day ago
People in the west often make the mistake of assuming that China is simply a mirror of their own system rather then spending the time to understand it on its own terms. CPC has around 99 million members, and it is predominantly made up of regular working class people. Also, it should be obvious that the party depends on social stability to remain in power. So, ensuring that people have their needs met is paramount for the system to continue to function. http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-07/25/content_29525199_3....
[–] za_creature 22 hours ago
You need a lot of oversight for that 99M number to matter at all in the decision making process.

Western voting systems work more or less because the parties are in a mexican standoff when counting the ballots. This requires at least two parties and doesn't translate very well to electronic voting or vote-by-mail where a comparatively small minority (programmers or postal workers) can heavily skew the results in their favor.

[–] yogthos 17 hours ago
There is a lot of oversight in the decision making process, and there is also voting happening within the party. Furthermore, voting can only be meaningful when it is an informed vote. Random people voting on issues they don't understand is no better than a coin toss. For example, I might know that I want better traffic conditions in my city, but I'm not a civil engineer so I don't know whether it would better be accomplished by adding more subways, LRT, busses, or all of the above, and in what ratios. What makes far more sense is to collect public opinion and then having experts make plans to address the grievances, which is how Chinese five year plans work.

Meanwhile, Western voting systems are much more of a game of hot potato than a Mexican standoff. Each party just blames the other party for all the problems, and you just a revolving door policy with no accountability. With a one party system, there's no scapegoat to blame. The very legitimacy of the party hangs on it delivering on the promises.

[–] za_creature 16 hours ago
Votes within the party are meaningless. It's all just internal power games with no real way to audit the result; the only consequence of fudging the votes is that the party might splinter.

Multiple parties do hold guns at each other's heads in every voting station. Party 1 ensures that Party 2 doesn't steal any votes and vice versa. A party that does not have representatives in any given station will most likely lose some votes there.

You can shit on western democracy all you want, and you are probably correct in most cases however a single party system is not and cannot be democratic. In that case, the legitimacy of the party is guaranteed by the lack of alternatives that can fill the political power vacuum.

[–] yogthos 15 hours ago
That's demonstrably false because we can see how China has developed in tangible terms and how Chinese public feels about their governance. In fact, more people in China see their country as being democratic than in America according to the latest Democracy Perception Index from the Alliance of Democracies Foundation.

https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index

What makes this report interesting is that the organization publishing it was started by an ex-NATO chief and claims to unite democracies, meaning Western liberal style democracies. So it can’t be accused of having some sort of anti-Western bias. Their methodology is also straightforward, where they simply ask people if they feel their government works in their interest and whether they can hold it accountable. That’s the whole ballgame, because if people don’t believe the system is democratic then it inherently lacks legitimacy no matter what the constitution says. While people will surely attack this methodology, the sheer fact that a NATO-connected group published such a report gives its claims a certain credence given how dire these results are for the Western model of democracy. France now ranks alongside Kazakhstan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe in its own citizens’ eyes while the U.S. is split down the middle with about half of Americans saying they don’t think they live in a democracy anymore. China, on the other hand, sits up there with the Scandinavians and Switzerland, and Chinese people overwhelmingly say the system works for them. Notably, we can also see that perceptions of transparency, rule of law, and free speech are on the rise across the board in China.

And before you start trying to claim that people in China are simply afraid to speak their mind, the same report shows Russia at -21 points and Belarus at -9, so that whole excuse falls apart. Turns out that people living in states the West labels as being authoritarian do, in fact, complain when they’re unhappy. Various other western publications have reported the same thing for many years.

https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-...

https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democr...

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilif...

On the other hand, your claim that multiple parties hold guns at each other's heads is directly at odds with empirical research on the subject:

> What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

Single party democratic model is a well defined principle known as Democratic Centralism and all the actual data shows that the way it is implemented in China produces far better tangible results than the western attempt at democracy. I'm sorry this hurts your feelings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism

[–] mitthrowaway2 1 day ago
Institutional memories of civil wars and uprisings?