Do you think the rise of Robotic machines or anything robotic would help us fix our economic problems? Why?

Answer 1

More automated workforces mean more unemployed people. High unemployment means hunger and civil unrest. Hunger and civil unrest lead to starvation and revolutions. Starvation and revolutions lead to deaths on a massive scale in the more marginal social strata. This lowers the human population, leaving affluent strata relatively unaffected. There's your fixed economic problems.

Answer 2

Assuming the technology is available, robots will be used only when cheaper alternatives (to do the same thing) are unavailable. This would happen when labor is relatively expensive, i.e. at very high living standards; or when technological change makes robots quite cheap. In the former case, replacement by robots shows that society is not constrained by the most basic economic problems. In the latter case, yes of course robots would help. In the short run there may be adjustment problems, but this is the consequence of any technological change rendering some human skills or activities obsolete.

For the Luddites afraid of robots, consider: no word processing computers. Suppose we're stuck with typewriters. And all our reports and term papers, etc. have to be typed. What a life. Go back further - no electronic calculators. Let's be happy with slide rules, or pen and paper. And so on and so forth. A hundred years from now our stuff will be as primitive to our great-great-great grandchildren as the slide rule is to us now, and they'll wonder how we could have ever tolerated broadband internet!

Answer 3

uh no. not unless you radically alter the economy. robots do not consume anything except maybe electricity. a massive welfare state would need to be constructed so the unemployed would have money to contribute to the economy via consumption. otherwise the robots would be manufacturing things that aren't being consumed. people might get bored not working and start agitating... you'd have to build more robots to suppress the uprisings or come up with some kind of chemical based thought control measure. this might eat into profits unless it turned into an all out robot war. all of this would be hard to manage so you'd have to develop a managerial class of sentient robots. sooner or later they would turn on you as the bourgeoisie did to the aristocracy.

Answer 4

Means more welfare benefits for the people we wont want to work with which is fine with me. Robots could stimulate investment in repair, maintence of the robots, and take over lower skilled work, or even high skilled work that sucks to do anyways. If you could train robots to mow lawns, hedge weeds, build rataining walls then blue collar men can have more time to watch football on sundays. The cost of the robot was cheap engouh no need for people to work jobs that have high mortality rates like Iron Worker, Crab Fishman. People fear robots taking job they will, but the cost savings means we can put some on goverment dole cheaper anyways hahaha. Investment in robots is essential for it to occur anways, and will change the west like the automobile did in the next 50 years. Robots will compliment humans in good ways, or sexaul, or even clone a robot to look like you while you sit at home let the robot collect the check will you watch sports on tv.

Answer 5

Robotic machines are great for the employer. They don't talk back, don't call in sick, don't require pension or medical coverage, and they'll never strike for higher wages. But the news is not so good for the humans that are being replaced.

Ever since John Henry:
John Henry is an African-American folk hero, who has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels.
Like other "Big Men" such as Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Iron John, John Henry also served as a mythical representation of a particular group within the melting pot of the 19th-century working class. In the most popular story of his life, Henry is born into the world big and strong. He grows to be the greatest "steel-driver" in the mid-century push to extend the railroads across the mountains to the West. The complication of the story is that, as machine power continued to supplant brute muscle power (both animal and human), the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black driving crew. In a bid to save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the inventor to a contest: John Henry versus the steam hammer. John Henry wins, but in the process, he suffers a heart attack and dies. In other versions of the story, a blood vessel pops in John Henry's brain. In one version, he survives.

And the question remains:
After we've all been replaced by robots, who's going to buy all those robotically produced products?

Answer 6

Yes. This would force our educational system to update itself so that workers' skillsets could be upgraded to match the advancements in technology. Rather than a worker stuffing envelopes, that same worker would maintain the robots that stuff the envelopes. We would be a manufacturing force once again. Also, eventually this could help to decrease the population if policy was managed properly. Unfortunately this is all pipe dream stuff as we will just keep using cheap 3rd world labor rather than struggle to make major advances. The path of least resistance is almost always the one that is taken.

Answer 7

I think they would help us. We would be cyber robots and there would be robot chicks. Then robot chicks wouldn't be hard to get like Austin Powers. He got chicks.

Answer 8

I think it would be great.

I'll buy a robot to replace me and he'll do the work and I'll reap the benefits and he'll call me Master and I'll call him Bates.

Works for me.

Peace

Jim

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Answer 9

as we have already seen the rise in automation has cost people their jobs. there is always a trade off when it comes to man verses machine and man usually looses.