Bay 12 Games Forum

And specifically in response to that bolded bit up top: Base labor already has to a large extent become a robot's job - just compare the portion of society made up by farmers in, let's say, 1700, and that same portion now. Is capitalism dead?

Productivity seems to be killing it, yes. Wealth disparity continues to increase, which is basically a way of saying (among other things) that less people are providing desired scarce elements. Just because the death throes are fervent doesn't mean the heart still pumps

And the article that more or less kicked this discussion off was pointing out that a huge upswell of unemployment is likely barreling down on ("developed", anyway) world.

Much of the developed world has or is turning to a service economy, sure, but part of the question is what happens if (and, quite likely, when) automation takes those, too -- when the man-hour required per unit of output is far and below the desired amount (insofar as fitting it into the current ethos of "those who don't work, don't eat" goes). Turning to creative efforts are all well and good, but for all the incredibly diversity involved in such, there's still a limited amount of work that can be done in the field. You'd still have a lot of people with just... nothing to do. You don't have to remove scarcity to break a capitalistic system. You just have to make it so a majority or significant minority of the folks relying on it to survive can't participate, because the remainder is doing everything that portion could, and more.

Haha, sure a robot would be able to mimic human behavior re: something like DF. It's almost as easy to program seemingly absurd action as it is to program something that looks reasonable. Probably moreso, really...

Look up that... hell, lemme see... yeah, something like this. A computer told to brute force something can very easily result in actions that are as or more absurd than anything a human can do on their best day. Give 'em the proper heuristic and they can eventually end up doing it with style and aplomb.

... really, it boils down the fact that we are machines. Biological machines made mostly of squishy stuff, but anything that can be done with "natural" materials can be done with "artificial" ones. It's a matter of figuring out how, and naught else. And when figuring out how to do something also tends to entail figuring out how to do it better in the process, well... anything we can do, bots can do better. Potentially. Not there yet, but in time.

Perhaps, but that still leaves the chef working the stove without much to do

It would be kinda' interesting to see cooks regulated to a sort of performance art, once machines are categorically better at preparing food in regards to taste, presentation, and nutrition. And hell, probably cost, too. "Look at the quaint person in a chef outfit trying to cook as good as a cookbot! Isn't it neat?" "Yes honey, that's very interesting, but very wasteful and it still doesn't taste all that good. Give the street performer a quarter and let's go home."

I'm sure the "handcrafted" version of every job will still survive in some form or another, as skilled labor is a form of art. Certainly robots won't do our cuisine for us. Maybe just our lowest fastfood/microwave/factory cooking, but not our cuisine.

... why not? Anything a cook can do, a machine will be able to soon enough, if they're not already able to. It's fundamentally motion, timing, and naught else -- and that can be programmed. And once it can be programmed and the means of replicating it by way of automation made sufficiently inexpensive, the preparer of cuisine will become cost inefficient, if not outright obsolete. Though once they're cost inefficient, they might as well be obsolete, heh.

That needs to change. The only way that will happen is to change the message from "its ok little snowflake", to "No, that is f*cking dumb, and you shouldn't be doing it."

... man, I hear what you're saying, but the cursory student of history in me notes that they've been trying to push that message on kids, sometimes with literal and systematic physical abuse, for centuries... hell, probably millennium. And failing. Every time sex avoidance has become a major aspect of a social group, large or small, it's neither stuck nor been effective to any particularly meaningful degree. It's, just. It hasn't worked. Pretty much every sign points that it won't work. There's a relatively limited set of things we're more or less wired to do, and, well...

I'd say do what nenjin said, but don't waste the effort actually trying to influence the social attitude regarding the subject. It doesn't seem to really matter what the social attitude is. Permissive or impermissive, what's considered underage sex these days happens anyway, and it happens to a pretty great degree. Only thing that social attitude seems to change is the reaction to it, rather than much in the way of frequency. And from what I've seen "special snowflake" seems to do a lot better on that end of things

Note and highlight the risks, sure, but keep stigma as far a way from the subject as possible. Risky and full of serious consequences, but a lot of things are that we don't call fucking dumb.

Again, by that line of reasoning, increasing the sex ed will only make the matter worse.

Only if sex ed consists of saying "No" first and loudest.

I honestly don't remember what sort sex ed my school ended up doing. I mean, I know we spent like, a day, maybe two, on it. And by day or two, I mean two class periods on the outside, so less than two hours. Some point in high school. Once. North Florida, rural school (graduating class was something less than 200, iirc.), for the curious. Probably somewhere in the late nineties. I don't even remember what year I graduated *vague shrug*

I remember the classrooms had white stone walls. I remember absolutely nothing else. It... doesn't speak highly of that school's sex ed program, at least at the time. M'not even sure if they segregated it by gender or not. Remember there were a good three or four folks knocked up (that I was aware of. Probably more I wasn't. Didn't exactly keep a hand on the school pulse.) before I got out, and teenage pregnancies were pretty common in the area regardless (Madre taught/teaches the adult school, which picks up dropouts, so... yeah).

Most of what I hear regardless of that points to sex ed in the states being able to stand some improvement, in general. As noted, less shock images, more facts. More realization that abstinence isn't really going to happen and pushing the fallback positions is probably the best idea. Frankly, if for whatever reason the institutions involved can't avoid going in the other direction and offering a "buffet of ways to have sex"... so long as the bit before this sentence goes through, I honestly don't think I care. It's not like it's not readily available online, already, with a hilariously minimal amount of effort, whereas solid advice re: issues-beyond-pleasure-and-experimentation takes considerably more effort to find and sift through.

If you're looking to minimize damage, it might even be better to get that "buffet" with less of the sex industry trappings involved, for all that American society, at least, almost certainly isn't ready for going that direction. Still a hell of a lot of social pressure against anything involving a healthier attitude toward the subject in this country

  I can't escape tension at work or at home, and I don't even know how to describe what it's doing to me.  Like it's harder all the time to fall back into a normal state of being after some emotional or anxiety-inducing event.

Sounds like plain ol' long term stress, t'me, after it's been piling on for a while without a chance to degauss. Which... yeah, been there a few times, if probably not as intensely as you are at th'mo'. It sucks.

The word of O'Sirus Obama, goddess of trucks and prostitutes, I guess. That's what they're supposed to do to gain followers, right? Bribes?

Quote from: Frumple on January 16, 2014, 06:36:16 pm

More necromancers need giant robots and a tastefully designed suit. Battle dog is pretty great folks ;_;

Battle Pug is the only battle dog web comic for me.(also has necromancers but so far no giant robots)

 

On one hand, that is pretty awesome, so far.

On the other, I really wish you had warned me about the toad nipples.