I'm solely in the consumer camp: I don't produce food, I buy and eat it (I don't buy and sell it either).
I think we've been trained to assume cheap food is a goal. I think the goal should have been clearer: cheap enough but not too cheap
The economics here are complicated. It benefits me to have cheap food, but if the cost is ag workers with systematic health problems, low income, farmers going bust, prison labor being used, its actually not really an overall benefit.
The price of strawberries needs to reflect the real costs here which include paying pickers a living wage.
Replacing pickers by robots only masks the problem, the problem of low paid workers remains: if they aren't picking, what are these people doing, and whats the wider cost?
Here in Australia we have this problem. We exploit backpacker labour (visiting kids on restricted visa) to do picking, we exploit migrant labour from island communities (we actually used to predate them for virtual slaves. Wierd history. Read up on "blackbirding") to do picking. And, we have a duopoloy in the supermarket supply chain which abuses market power to avoid paying farmers a living income stream, sometimes arguing over 10c or 20c price differences.
its really not helping to drive the cost of food down all the time. It has to be a realistic price, or you can't have safe, strategically suitable, sustainable, locally grown food.
The price of strawberries needs to reflect the real costs here which include paying pickers a living wage.
Replacing pickers by robots only masks the problem
What? If we had robot pickers then maybe we could get strawberries to be cheap enough that everyone could afford them, not just those who are wealthy enough to not worry about such jobs.
Historically, the developed world was spending much more. People can afford strawberries, they choose to spend less money on food and more on other items.
Displacing workers without considering the workers is an externality in action: everyone else picks up the cost. That's what I feel has happened every time work is automated: the specific company sheds labour cost and society at large has to remediate.
If we automate farm work equitably I'll be all in favour: the injury rates and low pay are horrendous. Equitably means we have to man up and address what happens to the farm workers.
I don't look at automation as the bad guy. In many cases, automating an industry changes the overall question, which can lead to further answers, that end up creating more employment.
For a start, who will create the tools? The manual labourers are the experts on what the tools need to be able to do? Secondly, if automation decreases the price of a product, it will often expand the market for it, and thus also related goods and services. But also, cheaper, automated products may make related products viable which previously weren't due to excessive cost.
IMHO, automation can increase economic activity sufficiently to absorb any labour excess, however it definitely needs the right planning and control. I think relying on the free market is too simplistic.
> if they aren't picking, what are these people doing, and whats the wider cost?
This idea needs to die so fast. It's an incredible psychosis that people fear the utopia that is automation. Imagine telling people 1000 years ago that everything around them will be done by robots, but that the people of the future would fight it. Psychologists are going to study this for generations.
It's also pretty offensive. The only reason you (or I) are not picking the fruit is because we were born somewhere else. No one deserves to do that. Especially if we know how to avoid it. What kind of sick fuck would subject someone to that just because they had fewer options. What else can they do? Perhaps help fulfill humans' literally infinite wants? What about nothing? I would much prefer nothing than forced unnecessary labor.
Please don't reply like this, it's not helpful and its abusive. Nobody is a sick fuck here. Robots displacing workers is not a black and white story as a follow-up says, much less gratuitously
It's obviously because of the way our economy is set up. One possible outcome of more automation could be higher standard of living while doing less work for everybody. Another possible outcome is a large part of the population being unemployed or underemployed, without health care and trouble to keep housing and even put food on the table, while a small portion of the population that owns the robots lives in luxury. Which of the two alternatives seems right now more realistic? We can't even agree on basic income guarantee which obviously is a necessary step to move towards the desirable of the two scenarios. It's understandable because that clearly would be "communism" and that's always bad and we cannot have that as god fearing, compassionate Americans.
I don't get it. You're saying the incompetent government's fiscal policy is unable to handle the growing inequality and therefore instead of fixing the government we should just ban robots? Seriously... Nowadays I think the biggest problem developed countries face is the opposition to progress because they are already happy with what they have and any improvement becomes an "us vs them" scenario where the new thing is demonized.
> instead of fixing the government we should just ban robots?
I don't think it's "instead", but "until".
> opposition to progress because they are already happy with what they have and any improvement becomes an "us vs them" scenario where the new thing is demonized.
Find me a single worker who will say no when you tell them "you now own this robot, and can live from its output instead of working".
Jobs are useless vestiges of the past. There is nothing honorable about jobs and no one cares about them. By their very definition they are things we don't want to do but have to for survival. This is all industrial work-centric brainwashing. If we can get survival without jobs that would be a great win for human kind.
> Another possible outcome is a large part of the population being unemployed or underemployed, without health care and trouble to keep housing and even put food on the table, while a small portion of the population that owns the robots lives in luxury
The whole point is that robots can make everything including more robots etc. We are talking of a world without scarcity. Why wouldn't everyone have health care? It would be virtually free. Everyone will have 10 or 20 robots. Who cares if someone has 40 or 100. Now that labor is solved people can focus on the fulfilling, interesting, human work of creating and inventing. The only job available will be to configure robots in interesting arrangements to make cooler stuff. But since we have so much stuff already, only a few people will do that as a hobby, for free, other people will make art or entertain or raise families or do nothing. Existence is inherently meaningless and filling time with worthless labor is only a distraction. That's the real issue to solve.
> It's understandable because that clearly would be "communism" and that's always bad
This is also brainwashing, communism is by no means "always bad", it just so happened that economies are too complex to centrally plan and that distributed computing through free individuals (aka capitalism) works better. But if, for example, computation got strong enough, it could potentially be more effecient to holistically and centrally plan an economy. Or in the case of automation, perhaps in a world of plenty, communism becomes the perfect system. I'm not advocating for communism, and I would never want it to encroach on freedoms, but these two cases are viable candidates for success.
You and GP likely agree on the same points, but are talking past one another concerning time scale. Their concern is if we automate the pickers of their jobs, what is their immediate recourse? Waiting years for society to establish a better safety net is not an option. One can retrain, but options are limited, and will be more so with greater automation.
The point is to be more mindful of the immediate effects of displaced labour due to automation. Is it a net social/economic gain to have prices slashed by say 10%, while at the same time seemingly externalizing both the social and economic costs of those who lost their jobs?
It makes sense to ask these questions to ensure such a paradigm shift goes smoothly for those affected by minimizing undue hardship.
I agree with this. The transition will be tricky and potentially long. It needs to be managed. And you're right that GP was hinting at that stuff too, but I saw a little bit of the misguided mainstream talking-points creeping in that I felt I needed to address.
I'm totally with you. You were calling the mainstream reaction a "incredible psychosis", which it is not. It's rational on in individual level given the current economic system and general attitudes especially in the US.
If it was up to me we'd get UBI ASAP and as automation makes work more and more obsolete get closer and closer to communism. I think this also is desirable because it will allow us to follow our natural instincts and contribute to the commons rather than try to put them on our individual balance sheets at the expense of everyone else. (See this great discussion: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-thinkers-podcast/...)
Even if we are in a robot Utopia, the benefits are not going to be passed down to illegal immigrants directly via a basic income. You still have to ask what will this group do instead because the option of "stay home" isn't always on the table.
The bigger long term issues to cheap food are water and loss of arable land from salinity caused by irrigation or saltwater incursion. Even without global warming, it doesn't look good.
In terms of sustainable locally grown food, most places are not going to be eating fresh produce year round.
I guess it depends how big a circle you draw around local.
For me, I prefer near, but I'll settle for in-state and ultimately in-country as "local"
Buying phillipine bananas and pineapples and thai rice, I want to understand why. We can grow all of these locally and very probably sustainably. If its food-as-aid purchase for regional trade, I can be there. But the assumption "because its cheaper" feels to me wrong. I suspect the reason the shops are selling imported bananas is not because of aid to emerging economies: its because they make more profit.
(to be clear, I'm in Australia. I believe that California (for instance) which was a food garden faces pretty intractable water issues. As do the various people who depend on the River Jordan. Australia has water issues too, but its more about equitable distribution than a complete lack of irrigation sources. We're not facing starvation due to lack of locally grown food in the 10-20 year horizon, climate change permitting. If you want to racionate to 'thats the bigger problem' I won't disagree)
California's water situation is not a "complete lack of irrigation sources", this is a big misperception.
There are big issues around distribution, water rights, allocation for farming vs urban areas, which crops to grow, and conflicts over distribution of water from (wetter) north to (drier) south and use of Colorado river water.
But it's not about to "face starvation due to lack of locally grown food", the situation is roughly comparable to Australia.
I think we've been trained to assume cheap food is a goal. I think the goal should have been clearer: cheap enough but not too cheap
The economics here are complicated. It benefits me to have cheap food, but if the cost is ag workers with systematic health problems, low income, farmers going bust, prison labor being used, its actually not really an overall benefit.
The price of strawberries needs to reflect the real costs here which include paying pickers a living wage.
Replacing pickers by robots only masks the problem, the problem of low paid workers remains: if they aren't picking, what are these people doing, and whats the wider cost?
Here in Australia we have this problem. We exploit backpacker labour (visiting kids on restricted visa) to do picking, we exploit migrant labour from island communities (we actually used to predate them for virtual slaves. Wierd history. Read up on "blackbirding") to do picking. And, we have a duopoloy in the supermarket supply chain which abuses market power to avoid paying farmers a living income stream, sometimes arguing over 10c or 20c price differences.
its really not helping to drive the cost of food down all the time. It has to be a realistic price, or you can't have safe, strategically suitable, sustainable, locally grown food.
I don't want soylent.