Posted by josefchen 20 hours ago
What do you mean by this?
Labouring for the sake of doing labour is stupid. If robots can do it cost effectively, they should.
It's all well and good to say that people shouldn't have to do menial labor. But unless you have something to fill the void, it's going to be a bad time for everyone involved.
Western culture ties the value of people to their work. The unemployed are "lazy" (itself a pejorative). The first question you ask someone you meet is "what do you do?" A lawyer is naturally more valuable than a postal clerk. (Despite an obvious example to the contrary. )
A lot of western jobs now are menial, or worse, useless. Lots of office jobs are, frankly, meaningless. Endlessly generating reports that no-one needs, or reads, isn't a path to massive self-worth.
In the US no job means no income. No health care. Your worth as a human approaches zero. In Europe, post war, there are far more social supports for the unemployed. That's a fundamental cultural difference. Asia is also culturally different in ways which are hard for US folk to comprehend.
For example there are 3 major political viewpoints; US capitalism, European socialism, and Chinese communism. Each appears to function well, and yet the US vilifies the others, while barely being able to tell them apart.
So, to return to your hypothesis of what "humans need", it may be less of that and more of "my culture needs". Which is perhaps going to come into play when predicting a post-labor economy in other cultures.
The people will always have something to do. What those somethings are is entirely up to the ruling class.
Ultimately, the whole point of an economy is to direct labour and resources in a way which allows people to have a good standard of living. If most labor can really be automated, then people can just spend more of their time enjoying their lives instead of working. The technology itself is not the problem. The only reason this becomes a crisis under capitalism is because the means of production are privately owned, and the people who own them require the rest of the population to sell their labor in order to live. Automation under private ownership frees people from a paycheck, while the owners keep the gains.
Western voting systems work more or less because the parties are in a mexican standoff when counting the ballots. This requires at least two parties and doesn't translate very well to electronic voting or vote-by-mail where a comparatively small minority (programmers or postal workers) can heavily skew the results in their favor.
Meanwhile, Western voting systems are much more of a game of hot potato than a Mexican standoff. Each party just blames the other party for all the problems, and you just a revolving door policy with no accountability. With a one party system, there's no scapegoat to blame. The very legitimacy of the party hangs on it delivering on the promises.
Multiple parties do hold guns at each other's heads in every voting station. Party 1 ensures that Party 2 doesn't steal any votes and vice versa. A party that does not have representatives in any given station will most likely lose some votes there.
You can shit on western democracy all you want, and you are probably correct in most cases however a single party system is not and cannot be democratic. In that case, the legitimacy of the party is guaranteed by the lack of alternatives that can fill the political power vacuum.
https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index
What makes this report interesting is that the organization publishing it was started by an ex-NATO chief and claims to unite democracies, meaning Western liberal style democracies. So it can’t be accused of having some sort of anti-Western bias. Their methodology is also straightforward, where they simply ask people if they feel their government works in their interest and whether they can hold it accountable. That’s the whole ballgame, because if people don’t believe the system is democratic then it inherently lacks legitimacy no matter what the constitution says. While people will surely attack this methodology, the sheer fact that a NATO-connected group published such a report gives its claims a certain credence given how dire these results are for the Western model of democracy. France now ranks alongside Kazakhstan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe in its own citizens’ eyes while the U.S. is split down the middle with about half of Americans saying they don’t think they live in a democracy anymore. China, on the other hand, sits up there with the Scandinavians and Switzerland, and Chinese people overwhelmingly say the system works for them. Notably, we can also see that perceptions of transparency, rule of law, and free speech are on the rise across the board in China.
And before you start trying to claim that people in China are simply afraid to speak their mind, the same report shows Russia at -21 points and Belarus at -9, so that whole excuse falls apart. Turns out that people living in states the West labels as being authoritarian do, in fact, complain when they’re unhappy. Various other western publications have reported the same thing for many years.
https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-...
https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democr...
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilif...
On the other hand, your claim that multiple parties hold guns at each other's heads is directly at odds with empirical research on the subject:
> What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Single party democratic model is a well defined principle known as Democratic Centralism and all the actual data shows that the way it is implemented in China produces far better tangible results than the western attempt at democracy. I'm sorry this hurts your feelings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
That just proves how nonsensical the numbers are. People have different standards, and peoples perceptions are not accurate.
Looking are the two countries I have lived in, people in one are “very positive” because journalists are no longer disappearing and they are confident the government will accept an election defeat. In the other, people are “neutral” because many feel the political class are out of touch, or that freedom of speech has been compromised by things like hate speech laws, or other issues at that level.
Perceptions are shaped by the media too. Other things being equal effective state control of media will make people more positive.
> No amount of media can paper over the fact that your life sucks.
1. A Chinese citizen experiences rising living costs.
2. Their social media feed is filled with videos of Americans struggling with medical bills, homelessness and housing costs.
3. They start feeling like they're better off by comparison.
4. Their satisfaction with their own country may increase without any improvement in their personal circumstances.
If media ownership was meaningless, governments and oligarchs wouldn't spend so much effort controlling it.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone...
Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri...
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growt...
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...
And your whole narrative falls apart when we look at how MAGA actively voted against Trump once the war hit them in the wallet. Also, look at the riots happening all across Europe where the media tells people things are going great.
China's rise has been nothing short of meteoric, and I applaud them for it. I'm certain that their average standard of living is very high by most metrics, quite comparable and maybe even better than western countries. IT IS STILL NOT A DEMOCRACY!
At any rate, I'm going to stop arguing because you seem way too invested in praising the dragon, and not just in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386836
You appear to have an infantile understanding of democracy equating it with simply having the ability to vote.
It's also hilarious that you think you understand Chinese system better than people who actually live in China and call their system a democracy. The sheer amount of chauvinism required to hold such beliefs is astounding.
At any rate, stick to subjects you have a clue about in the future as to avoid making a clown of yourself in public.
They have some political dilemma: people only accept the government because of economical growth, but they grew to a point where growth naturally slows down.
They have some financial and monetary stuff going on, but those are mostly non-problems. They have a bubble that is bursting too, that makes the other two problems larger.
All said, I wouldn't say they are in a knife edge.
And yes, China is aware of some slowing demand (although their exports are still impressive.) You can see this playing out in a couple ways.
Firstly they dominate production in key "future" technologies. Solar and EVs spring to mind as examples, but there are others.
Secondly they are investing in infrastructure (and goodwill) outside of China. Africa has a billion consumers-in-waiting.
While the US retreats from Africa (killing USAid, indulging racist theories about South Africa, etc), promoting isolationism (America First), activly alienating people via tarrifs, what is China doing?
China is quietly filling the void. They are building roads, ports, airports and other infrastructure. They are improving supply lines (Temu is expanding in Africa at a huge rate.) They are building cultural bridges, learning and teaching two very different cultures to work more easily together. In essence developing future customers, not antagonizing them.
It will be interesting to look back in 10, 20 or 30 years to see which strategy delivers better rewards.
That's a sure way to extend an unsustainable situation, while making it bigger. It doesn't usually lead to anything good on the long term, but I don't think they have been doing so much of it to break the world.
... and who knows? maybe this time it leads to democratization and growth all over the world, and they get somebody to export to. I don't think that's likely, but I can be wrong.
In the 60s your argument would have applied to most of Asia. South Korea was an agrarian society. All of eastern Europe (and much of western Europe) was poor.
The question is less "where are markets now" and more "where will they be in 2050"?
"Losing money" (whatever that means at the national level) is not terribly relevant when it comes to global strategy. The US "loses money" on the military, because the US has chosen the military as a way to strategic dominance.
China instead has chosen "production" as a global strategy. One empire is voluntarily contracting. Another is expanding. The US is fighting the last war, with planes and bombs, while China builds infrastructure and makes friends.
Who here remembers when Japan was gonna take over and the West needed to adapt
Russia is now probably in the state similar to circa 1980 China. In case The China Problem were to be Solved like how previous one was solved, perhaps militarily this time, that'll just launch the seeds of the same problem over the borders to there. OTOH we'll be watching Russian homage to Chinese recreations of Japanese interpretations of Disney animations by 2060s and that will be awesome.
Will the US become its own 1980 China or 1950 Japan, just to get onto the ladder back up to be 2020 China or 1990 Japan, finally building the California HSR owned by DOT? Is it playing a genius 4D Chess ... whatever ... move towards that? Maybe, I don't know. All I know is that it's not like people simply stopped being too alarmist with Japanese global takeover scare and it just went away naturally.
You're assuming the US starts using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in the US, rather than using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in China.
Especially when that American company is… Tesla!
Everyone knows that’s a combination that builds the best companies…the very reason why the whole world drives American cars.
Every time the article said, "I did such and such a thing," I thought, "No, Claude, you did not do that. You don't have a body. You're making this up."
West will outbuild china....
also author
> The next day, at BYD, I saw the other end of this: a car plant where everything I saw was automated.
Note there are no fully automated US car plants.
Unitree makes like 5 digit numbers chassis with high iteration, they use people because these are baby numbers where human iteration maximizes productivity, not lack of capability. They do it because they have this gear that west doesn't. Meanwhile PRC indigenizing all tooling to the highest end of precision. They're not going to use western robots for much longer. Indigenous replacement rate is basically J takeoff, even if we completely ignore that ABB/Kuka/fanuc all have massive assembling and R&D footprint in PRC.
Or take Tesla, one of the more competent US builders... ctrl+c, ctrl+v their model to PRC, a few rapid iteration cycles later, PRC plants > western plants (EU/US). Even SpaceX, forget payload/tempo/operational, PRC industry builds like 2-3x more first stages than US space program including SpaceX, i.e. when they figure out reusable they can put up 2-3x size reusable fleet... and that's basically them barely trying. The industrial lesson by now should be whatever West builds, PRC likely end up doing better, faster, cheaper, frequently pick all 3.
This argument generic copium by now - muh western imagination gap can somehow compete with PRC industrial gap... and robots that build robots is slightly more marketable and feasible than gray goo... until you realize one of PRC's core capability is just doing what west did better anyway.