A restaurant in Nagoya, Japan has replaced human chefs with robots. The robots are looked after by human operators, but the "arms" prepare Ramen dishes almost entirely by themselves:
While I'm enthralled by such technological innovation and what this says about how the future will look, this trend will likely cause some problems in America. As has been discussed on OneSTDV, two trends threaten American hegemony: dysgenic fertility and immigration of a low-IQ, menial labor class. The interaction between increasing automation and these two demographic shift could be disastrous for our society.
Low-IQ individuals inevitably end up in menial labor jobs like fast-food service, lawncare, and agriculture field work. Through dysgenic fertility and low-IQ immigration, the population of low-IQ individuals is steadily increasing. As robotic technology advances, menial labor jobs will slowly be taken over by automated systems. Thus, the supply of potential workers increases while the demand for these workers decreases. Initially, the current menial labor workers will oversee the first automated systems. But, eventually, these systems will run entirely free of operation. As a result, a large segment of the low-IQ class, a class pathologically predicated towards social turmoil, will have no steady job opportunities.
Resentment and bitterness amongst a permanently unemployed underclass may accompany the increasing use of robots in manufacturing and service.
12 comments:
Liberal idealism makes the natural occurrence of low IQ people a bigger problem than it needs to be. By giving low ability people handouts and subsidizing bad behavior, society incurs more costs unnecessarily. Low ability students in school are more practical than the teachers and administrators because they drop out of a program in which they cannot be successful. Meanwhile the educational experts refuse to offer programs appropriate to these students' needs. Students are a captive audience for educators who try to make them after their own image rather than simply preparing them with useful life skills and helping them reach appropriate goals.
"Liberal idealism makes the natural occurrence of low IQ people a bigger problem than it needs to be. By giving low ability people handouts and subsidizing bad behavior, society incurs more costs unnecessarily."
-silly girl
Liberalism is a religion, really. I've pointed out to many a liberal friend about the lack of intellect as the true reason the poor live in a dysfunctional environment. The solution, I would then explain, is to limit the number the children born to poor, dumb women. This would break the cycle of self-induced poverty.
Then the screaming starts. “How could you do that?! That’s not helping them at all!” Yes it is. True its illiberal and anti-libertarian but it’s the correct solution. Liberals are not interested in truly fixing a problem, just maintaining moral purity.
This an interesting post. One of the big arguments for immigration is that the newcomers will do menial jobs that the natives consider beneath them (Liberals insist on this even during a recession). However, robotics is a rapidly advancing field and I can see a lot of basic tasks today carried out by humans being automated in the next few decades.
People with a cognitive capacity below a certain threshold will be simply unemployable. Governments will encourage these people to 'upskill' themselves, but this will change nothing. They seem to ignore that getting a useless dumbed-down college degree does not actually enhance your IQ or productivity
I fully agree with Dan. A partial solution is to induce a decrease the reproduction rates of those whose IQs are too low to function in the jobs that have not been automated. Otherwise a substantial proportion of humans will be living unproductive and meaningless lives.
Unemployment hurts everyone, even upper class people with safe and steady sources of income. Our best response to this is to pass a law prohibiting the use of automated equipment in the fast food industry, and let the people who eat at fast food restaurants pay slightly higher prices. It's either that, or we raise taxes to pay for more unemployment and/or welfare benefits.
Japan has resisted massive immigration and therefore has an incentive to find ways to employ robots to take on these low-IQ jobs.
The US and Europe, on the other hand, have not resisted immigration invasions at all, but rather have encouraged them. Thus the US and Europe will be faced with a surfeit of low-IQ labor for many years to come. In that environment, there is simply no incentive to deploy robots; it is not economic when human labor remains so cheap. It may also be necessary from a sociological point of view to use human labor to keep these people occupied so that they do not become restless. Thus Japan has an incentive to move ahead technically whereas the US and Europe have an incentive to lag behind.
Forcing fast-food businesses (or any other businesses) to employ low-skill individuals is welfare by another name. The cost of wages, benefits and supervision will eventually drive customers away to cheaper, better options.
The only solution is to make people prove their ability to support a family before they are allowed to have children. Low-wage, unskilled jobs do not qualify.
"A partial solution is to induce a decrease the reproduction rates of those whose IQs are too low to function in the jobs that have not been automated"
Agreed. And a non-evil way to do so is to PAY low-IQ teenage girls NOT to get pregnant. Everyone agrees that teenage motherhood is bad for everyone. And if you reduce teen births among low IQ, you'll succeed in lowering lifetime total fertility among that cohort. Plus, the dullards who do have kids, at least since they're older, they are likely to have somewhat more resources to do a good job mothering.
So the plan would go something like this: Age 12 and older, she could come to a clinic, take a preg test and if neg, get a paycheck, then return in 3 months for another preg test and payment if neg. Continue until age 22. We could even offer free birth control, if desired.
We could, even, make a sliding scale -- the lower the IQ, the longer into adulthood we're willing to pay NOT to get pregnant.
Since it's all voluntary, there's no unethical coercion to slide down the slippery slope into totalitarianism.
@ Anonymous 4:01:
While I think your plan sounds great and avoids many moral problems (due to it being voluntary), I haven't had much success when suggesting this program to liberals.
Have you ever discussed this plan with an SWPL type? What was the reaction?
Easy - make permanent sterilisation a condition for welfare. Especially giving, say, $10,000 to a young woman for her to be permanently sterlised. The trick is to sterilise such welfare recipients before they have children so their incompentent seed isn't part of the next generation. However what about some sort of incentive for the highly productive to have more children?
"Have you ever discussed this plan with an SWPL type? What was the reaction?"
Usually eyerolls and some rambling sophistry about how it would be "unethical." Even after I explain the "voluntary" part -- which they NEVER seem to hear.
Actually, I've never gotten one even to the first step of admitting that IQ means anything, or if it does, that it's heritable -- at least when I was trying to persuade them. In my experience, the letters I and Q, when said consecutively, trigger some sort of implanted, strange hypnotic suggestion in these people to STOP thinking along such lines, and the conversation deteriorates.
But I've noticed a common phenomenon that a few days later, these same people, when they are bragging up their own KIDS, suddenly smarts is real, is important, and their spawn has it in spades. The cognitive dissonance makes my ears ring.
Shrug. We've a looooong way to go, yet, I fear.
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@ martha:
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