Arising_uk wrote:FlashDangerpants wrote:That seems like an overreaction. ...
Why? As the profits from the automation so far don't appear to have been more equitably distributed so why think that'll change. Add to that that this time around the replacement jobs may not appear so easily.
Basic economic history.
Marx made a similar complaint, and that was already out of date when he wrote it. People are reacting as if automation was only just invented, like steam engines and combine harvesters never happened. The history of these things always results in both higher wages and lower costs of most of the of the stuff you buy with those wages, and also with lost jobs which get replaced by new jobs providing goods and services not previously on the market.
Arising_uk wrote:Correct, but that isn't terribly difficult to do. ...
Seems to be.
It isn't though. Again, this is basic economics as well. You may observe that house prices are high, and that capitalists intent on profit like to make stuff they can sell for high prices. And then the tendency of markets to observe where high returns on investment occur and pile in. After that you get extra supply which brings down prices (unless the extra supply itself causes an extra demand which I don't think is the case here as a rule. Otherwise Sunderland would have higher house prices than it does.
So if the problem of house prices in a certain area is bad enough that it requires fixing... All the state has to do is allow the problem to fix itself by looking for areas in which the balance of incentives can be seen to be preventing what is written above from applying.
Arising_uk wrote:We don't use ever increasing amounts of everything, we use what is available and if that runs out we use something else. Our civilisation used use much more leather, oak, rubber and the oil in a sperm whale's head than we do now. Those items were all replaced for most industrial uses without resort to space mining. ...
My point I'd have thought? We use until exhausted why will that not apply to all resources.
That's a bit of a lazy interpretation. We didn't stop mining sperm whales for oil because we ran out, we stopped because electric light is better than whale oil lamps. I'm fairly sure we stopped using oak to build our battle ships because metal ones are rather better. And I'm relatively certain that nobody wants to go back to using leather buckets.
What gave you the idea that we ran out of leather?
Arising_uk wrote:In 2014 global iron ore production was 3220 million tonnes. If you think you are going to grab an important slice of that market with iron grabbed out of space you are committing to creating most gigantic industrial complex yet seen in order to produce a product that is worth a little bit more than your average dirt. ...
And yet one paper using a modest 2% exponential growth in steel has the available iron mines depleted in 60 odd years.
Those things are always written by people who don't understand the difference in mining between a recoverable resource and a load of dirt with stuff in it that has of yet no net present value. That's a long topic, and it involves accountancy practices. I'm hoping you won't force me to go down that rabbit hole because it's immensely boring. The gist of it though is that proven resources of any extractive industry should not be treated as an estimate of the amount of stuff that is available. This same mistake was made by the Peak Oil crowd a few years back - I hope we are at least agreed that was a mistake.
Arising_uk wrote:But like I say, I'm not thinking about the markets but what a massive glut of resources would do to society and technologies, a la what the Texas oil glut did.
Did the ~Texas Oil Glut come before the invention of the technologies that made use of it, or was it driven by a desire to provide fuel for existing technologies?
There have been many tech advances which have made use of some commonly available thing which wasn't being put to either any or in some case any very valuable use. The plough for instance, which turned low value land into arable gold. Labour saving technologies such as the aforementioned steam engine turned expensive unproductive labour into expense highly productive labour.
I think of plenty of other examples of that. But what I can't personally think of ever once happening is somebody sending out a hugely expensive expedition to recover a load of stuff that has little value so that they can subsequently get round to finding a use for it.
Arising_uk wrote:What I was addressing was a suggestion that we need to mine in space to maintain our current standards of living or extend those to people in countries where it is not yet attainable.
And I'm not sure that's been addressed yet as if we use the American model they apparently are 5% of the world using 24% of the worlds energy and resources, how can we extend this to everyone?
Why would we use the American model of waste? Is the lifestyle of people in Sweden not as modern or comfortable as America's?
And where did that "and resources" come from? If somebody is writing that America uses 25% of "resources" they should stop that.
Seriously, we don't make progress by becoming more wasteful, and we never actually have. Look at patents and inventions, or at least at the ones which make any real long term difference. When fuel is a problem or an expense, fuel saving inventions are more valuable, and so investment is driven towards developing them. When fuel is cheap but labour is costly, the same effect drives investment in r&d in that direction. There was a big academic study of this a few years back, looking at 19th C patents in the US and Britain. In America where there was a lot of wide open land and huge forests, the tendency was to develop labour saving patents. In Britain, which was more crowded and less forested, the focus was more on fuel saving ones. The focus in each case is to stop something expensive being wasted unproductively.
This is as you would expect, people put more effort into solving real problems than non-problems, and the problems of today are typically rather preferred to those of a distant future. This is further illustrated by the fact that spoons have been around for thousands of years, and forks for many centuries, but somehow the spork was only invented much more recently.
So space mining for platinum in the hope it becomes something we can use a lot more of if there is a lot more of it, is your idea for how to approach this whole thing of problems and solutions. It just isn't the efficient one. Some other, and rather more practical ones include...
Self driving cars (nearly all cars are wasted nearly all of the time because they are parked far more than they are driven).
Self driving cars (a wasteful percentage of urban land is devoted to parking space for cars)
Self driving cars (the car industry wastefully employs far too many people and holds excess manufacturing capacity for the value of its products to society)
Lab grown meat, or better vegetable based fake meat products - I don't care which as long as they are tasty (meat industry emissions and water usage are very high, these technologies promise to cut that hugely - presumably one will succeed and the other will fail, but which doesn't seem to matter much)
Any number of renewable energy options (again, there's too many in the pipeline for them all to work out, sobad luck wave energy generation, that one is a shit idea)
Multiple nuclear fission options (molten salt reactors, better fast breeders, those mini nuclear power stations that Bill Gates likes).
Nuclear fusion with deuterium or something - if it ever works, it sounds pretty cool.
Hyperloops - ok that ones stupid, and doesn't really solve any problems, but every age needs its Concorde right?
Better 3d printing / additive manufacturing (You know Adidas is opening its first shoe factory in Germany for decades soon? Well it will use machines to put the shoes together which used to be a dangerous and nasty job for Bangladeshi children. Again, those sort of thing cuts waste on a large scale - those kids should be going to school, and shoes can stop being shipped across oceans for no good reason)
Now it really doesn't matter that some of the above will never work out. If they fail it is probably because something not in that list fixes the same issues better.
