technology, androids, and the economy

Someone asked in another thread what happened to this community and why work seemed to have stopped. There are a few things I can think of as reasons for this. The first being that it is not a collaborative project and just the work of one person. Somewhere in these forums it is mentioned that absolutely none of the source code is documented, meaning once the maintainer is gone the code is likely useless to anyone else since they could probably write a new thing from scratch in the time it took to understand it. If there were more collaboration such as open sourcing, we would see a few new developers working on it, but not that many as specialists in advanced AI are rare. Le probably also wants to get paid with patents on the technology I assume, but companies would be unwilling to invest as by the time computers advanced well enough to run the AI appear the patent period would probably have run out.

Also, the smart kids that would normally be working on these projects are a dying breed that have started realizing their life is going to suck as they continue to need more and more education just to get by due to rapidly advancing technology. Here in the U.S. the problem of technology replacing jobs has been obscured by corporate greed and corrupt politicians. Everyone is ignoring the fact that machines and software are starting to replace jobs faster than they can be created. Normally when you invent the next big thing like the iPod, you also move into all aspects of production in shipping, but now your manufacturing, shipping, and whatever else is spun off into contract work by different companies that have automate and computerize making them able to produce ever more stuff with less labor. Sure people like to believe capitalism will balance itself out or fixing corporate greed will fix everything, but when you look at the problems from this viewpoint it all fits together too well. The technology allowed the corporations to use much less labor to produce more, which allowed them to take in more profits, which then allowed them to make bigger government bribes is one way of looking the corporate side of it. The labor side can be looked at by saying that people are not out of jobs because the economy is bad, it is because their position has been replaced by software or machines and they are no longer needed.

What happened to the answer of "just get more job training"? There's not much of a guarantee that the job will still be in existence by the time you finish training as new technology chips away more jobs. "But won't they go on to fulfill other human needs that weren't being met before?" Human needs are limited and common, there are few needs left to fulfill and they will fulfill them using the latest technology that would also limit how many jobs are created.

What are the people doing? Take a look at the Tea Party movement, as best as I can tell these people have probably lost jobs due to these technological changes and anti-intellectualism seems so popular because they blame the intellectuals for building the technology that took their jobs.Sure they have religion and other reasons, but history says it's always about the money.

The advancing of technology to the point and android can be bought and used to replace a human worker represents the end game. The economy may recover one or two more times, but there seems to be no way any economy conceived by man can cope with these changes. We're all in a race to the bottom as long as we continue to ignore this issue and place blame on the different facets of it, but not the actual problem.

/rant