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Worthless: 3D printing is nothing but a nerd fad that won't leave hobbyist workshops.

6 (3%)

Unimportant: 3D printing will become common but won't be useful for much other than tiny full plastic objects.

8 (4%)

Minor Importance: 3D printing will function as a light industry that will coexist with existing manufacturing methodologies.

43 (21.4%)

Moderate Importance: 3D printing will challenge and slowly replace a large number of existing manufacturing businesses.

104 (51.7%)

Major Importance: 3D printing will completely flip the table on conventional manufacturing and quickly destroy existing business for anything you can make with them.

20 (10%)

Critical: 3D printing will disrupt conventional ideals of work and money so much that they collapse and are replaced in a paradigm shift.

20 (10%)

Total Members Voted: 199

[Pnx]

I've said it a dozen times before, and I'll say it again. We need to enhance our own biology! Not replace, enhance! We have the technology. We know how to make steroids for brain and muscle power. We just need to use it. But somewhere along the line, it all became taboo.

Well the stuff about how I'm pretty sure you're not going to be turning us into genetically engineered ubermensch any time soon aside, the issue isn't that machines are capable of doing these jobs better than any human can so much as they're capable of doing these jobs almost 24/7 without rest, without pay, with only the cost of their parts and power.

...

Sure, why not? I mean we can just phase the human species out of existence as we become obsolete.

A direct resource or post-scarcity economy does not equal the end of humanity any more than cybernetics equal the end of humanity. No offense Pnx, but I find your fears on this stuff to be totally arbitrary. We do things today that are radically different from how humans used to act, but it did not mean that we stopped being human.

I was being flippant dear, I wasn't seriously advocating we remove people as they become obsolete, the point was we're sort of all going to become obsolete sooner or later.

[SalmonGod]

Well, what do you do then? You can't just hand everyone a $25k/year minimum income stipend- that's financially unfeasible.

Why?  This is why the functioning of our economy is stupid and needs to be deeply rethought.  If the resources exist to be shared around, but the imaginary number game prevents us from doing so for no real reason, then we need to eliminate or replace the imaginary number game.

[DWC]

They say a modern textile mill hires exactly two employees. A man and a dog. The man is hired to feed the dog and the dog is trained to keep the man away from the machines. Automation can only go so far. Certain tasks are just more economical to hire people to do. Robot dogs would be too expensive.

While it sounds great to just have machines do all the labor and cut everybody a welfare check, less demand for labor doesn't mean less scarcity of resources. The earth is really have we have in terms of resources there will be limits for the foreseeable future and so everything is going to have a pricetag that will keep going up as resources are depleted. Post scarcity really means 'post labor' because automatization isn't doing much for material resource scarcity at all. If you assume technology will always keep getting more advanced and there will never been diminishing returns and resources will never become scarce then I suppose you have like, an unemployed underclass wallowing in decadence and some minority of white collar workers inventing new distractions for the robots to manufacture? Society would really need an overhaul sometime before this to be sure.

I'm not really sure how well balanced the economy will be in the future or how much automatization will eliminate jobs. Robots are still pretty dumb and expensive and how much have they really advanced in the last 20 years or so?

[Scoops Novel]

So NASA (and more short term, asteroid mining) will get a huge funding increase? It keeps getting better!

[SalmonGod]

Our population is unsustainable and that is a problem that needs to be addressed, but that's somewhat independent of this.  The way our economy is designed, it wouldn't even matter if resources were infinite.

Hell, one of the major problems that sustains consumerism is lack of time and freedom.  One of the biggest reasons petty distractions are so popular is because we're not able to do much more with our lives while holding down a job.  Give people the means to truly pursue self-actualization, and I bet anything you'd see a decrease in wasteful consumerism.

The real problem is the top-down nature of it all.  As labor needs ease up, demand on workers should also.  Employers should look at it and say, "Hey great I can cut everyone's hours in half, without changing anything else."  Instead they say, "Hey great I can fire half my workers, while continuing to squeeze inhumane demands from the remainder.  More profit for me!"

If nothing changes, the end game will be a handful of people who own all the machinery that makes their lives luxurious and everyone else can go fucking die somewhere they don't have to be looked at.

[Pnx]

They say a modern textile mill hires exactly two employees. A man and a dog. The man is hired to feed the dog and the dog is trained to keep the man away from the machines. Automation can only go so far. Certain tasks are just more economical to hire people to do. Robot dogs would be too expensive.

(...)

I'm not really sure how well balanced the economy will be in the future or how much automatization will eliminate jobs. Robots are still pretty dumb and expensive and how much have they really advanced in the last 20 years or so?

Eventually, in the distant future an AI will take the jobs of both the dog and the man...

As for how far robots have advanced, the answer is a lot, seriously. There used to be a lot of jobs machines couldn't do 20 years ago, now pretty anything short of something that requires conversing with a human being can be done by a machine. They can stack and manage boxes, they can drive cars, they can do pretty much everything manufacturing, they can be programmed to fulfill custom orders that would ordinarily require a skilled craftsman, and again, they can do it 24/7, and much cheaper too (a lot of these machines are pretty expensive, but they're constantly getting cheaper and more effective).

The one thing they don't beat humans at is versatility, I mean your box stacking robot can't mop the floors if there's a spill... But in the long run that doesn't typically matter.

[FearfulJesuit]

Well, what do you do then? You can't just hand everyone a $25k/year minimum income stipend- that's financially unfeasible.

Why?  This is why the functioning of our economy is stupid and needs to be deeply rethought.  If the resources exist to be shared around, but the imaginary number game prevents us from doing so for no real reason, then we need to eliminate or replace the imaginary number game.

Well, who distributes the resources? Capitalism can't- it doesn't take externalities into account. Central planning can't, either, it doesn't know how many of what to produce.

[Nirur Torir]

I'm not really sure how well balanced the economy will be in the future or how much automatization will eliminate jobs. Robots are still pretty dumb and expensive and how much have they really advanced in the last 20 years or so?

For one, 'Watson' beat Jeopardy champions and is now being used by certain nurses for utilization management; 90% of the nurses using it now follow its guidance. IBM thinks it could also be used for legal research.

[Pnx]

Well, who distributes the resources? Capitalism can't- it doesn't take externalities into account. Central planning can't, either, it doesn't know how many of what to produce.

Typically you're talking a little from column A, a little from column B. Might wind up being tough, but in the long run we're not going to have a lot of choice.

[DWC]

I'm not really sure how well balanced the economy will be in the future or how much automatization will eliminate jobs. Robots are still pretty dumb and expensive and how much have they really advanced in the last 20 years or so?

For one, 'Watson' beat Jeopardy champions and is now being used by certain nurses for utilization management; 90% of the nurses using it now follow its guidance. IBM thinks it could also be used for legal research.

Sure, but that's the kind of stuff you'd expect robots and computers to be good for. Data storage, analysis and research and memorizing facts and beating Russians at chess. I hear on NPR they are working on a psychologist/ therapist program with a nice virtual lady that asks you about your problems and can even diagnose and knows what questions to ask to figure it out. They'll probably have computers doing most of the legwork in computer programming and music writing even. Especially the latter.

I'm thinking of jobs that require a wide skill set, adaptability and a lot of moving around. Like regular construction work. I can't imagine automating the construction of large structures without using robots so advanced they can do anything a human can, then you'd have post-labor economy and robots writing your welfare checks for certain by then.

[SalmonGod]

Personally, I don't understand why it needs to be so complicated.  Technology such as 3d printing allows for people to be much more independent than ever before without needing to give up much.  Mass communications allows people to spontaneously collaborate to solve any problem.  These technologies should be allowing us to simplify our lives.  To live more dynamically.  We're just so used to everything being so controlled and organized around routine, and the people who benefit from that don't want it to change.

[Pnx]

I'm thinking of jobs that require a wide skill set, adaptability and a lot of moving around. Like regular construction work. I can't imagine automating the construction of large structures without using robots so advanced they can do anything a human can, then you'd have post-labor economy and robots writing your welfare checks for certain by then.

I can easily imagine that, heck we can even put together a program to design the structure given the parameters you want. At the end of the day building a structure is really not all that complex, it's a just a series of predictable jobs, which is what robots excel at.

Machines can easily be made to be adaptable by giving them the ability to swap out parts, they just can't easily be adapted to do things outside of what they were intended to do.

[Scoops Novel]

A bit melodramatic in all the wrong ways . They'll adapt, if this wasn't initially planned for, and the obvious question is how.

[Lagslayer]

Except there is no guarantee the robots will care about us at all. Hell, they might even become outright hostile once they have enough autonomy. Why tolerate these primitive meatbags when they keep getting in the way?

Call me a nutjob all you want, but they are programmed by beings that do the exact same thing.

[Pnx]

That is of course, a very common reaction, but you have to wonder, why would they want to?