A brickfilm movie idea about preventing a Caprican future
Paul D. Fernhout
http://digg.com/general_sciences/Just_Robots_n_Amazing_Videos_of_the_Modern_Factory?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+digg%2Fvideos%2Fcontainer%2Fscience%2Fpopular+%28Popular+Videos+in+Science%29
Links to:
http://singularityhub.com/2010/02/11/no-humans-just-robots-amazing-videos-of-the-modern-factory/
"""
Modern manufacturing isn�t based on human labor, it�s based on the robot.
Still, most people cannot grasp the breadth of automation in factories. We
still picture plants full of human workers toiling to make our cars and
furniture, just as we imagine our meat comes from animals in a barn. The
truth is much more awe-inspiring, perhaps even frightening. The factories of
today have some human workers, but huge portions of assembly lines are 100%
mechanized. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics expects automotive jobs to
decline 18% by 2018 despite expected increases in production. Robots
eliminate the need for more workers. Before you lament the loss of jobs,
take a moment and watch how robots earn their role every day in the
workplace. Incredible!
You probably know that most cars are made with less than 24 hours worth
of human labor. The rest is all done by automation. Machines building
machines. It sounds simple, but you have to watch it to really understand
what it means.
"""
That estimate of 24 hours -- I wonder if that includes making the parts that
go into the car, or just assembly?
Note how some of those video scenes, like robot putting stuff in boxes,
would not be needed if people made stuff locally (no boxing) or if devices
were printed. For local manufacturing, you might eventually have just one
RepRap robot, not an assembly line, since most factories are essentially
just big 3D printers with people and robots inside them. Still, one can
imagine community factories that have flexible assembly lines with robots
long before then. "Community Factory" might be a good idea for a company
that makes a range of products locally on demand? Basically, anything you
buy in IKEA, maybe you could get (assembled if desired) from this community
factory that just takes as inputs electricity plus some raw materials like
logs of wood, some plastic pellets, and some metal?
Another link there on a Caprica dystopia-tending society:
http://singularityhub.com/2010/02/11/technology-from-caprica-series-on-scyfy-is-already-here/
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Along the lines of preventing a Caprican future, here are some notes about
making an educational Lego brickfilm on this (that I'll probably never do
myself) that touches on these ideas. It's just a rough sketch.
Background: I saw part of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the other
day on NetFlix. Remember how he fires all his human workers because of
industrial spying and replaces people with Oompa Loompas (robots)? By the
way, I'm now realizing that whole Willy Wonka film is a puff piece by Disney
for patents and copyrights, as Willy Wonka won't share his recipes or
technologies with others, and that's supposedly a good thing, and the key
decision of the boy is whether to share information, and he is praised and
rewarded for not doing that and becoming part of a proprietary elite.
Granted, there are other moral complexities there, but seen from an open
manufacturing perspective, that is a big issue -- deciding to hoard information.
The main setting for this series of shorts is a chocolate factory.
Essentially, the factory makes some sort of wrapped chocolate item, with
chocolate, foil, and maybe paper. There are trees outside (for cocoa beans),
metal foil rolls, wrapping stations, display stations for selling finished
wrapped chocolates, and so on, all tended by Lego people. It could be done
in other modes, I was just thinking Lego because we have a lot of it. Resources:
http://www.brickfilms.com/
Establishing scene:
Workers making wrapped chocolate on some assembly line. "I hate my job
because it is so boring and repetitive" one says. They get money that can
exchange for one of the chocolates they make at the end of the day. Money
comes into company, piling up. Most money goes to poker playing by the owner
with other factory owners (Casino economy of derivatives etc. as in Money as
Debt II -- US$4.5 trillion daily FOREX gambling vs. US$0.16 daily GWP
consumption)? The factory is producing more and more, eventually beyond the
demand for chocolate. There are layoffs. More automation with Lego devices
and Lego robots. More layoffs. The assembly line stops as no one to buy any
of the chocolates after the factory is entirely automated?
Solutions, each depicted as a separate scene (a dream by a different
worker?) Maybe they would alternate as dreams, negative and then positive?
Negative:
* Prevention, with patents and copyrights
* War, destroys machinery, jobs rebuilding
* Worker sabotage, destroys robots (Luddism)
* Robot watcher watcher watcher makework (Dr. Seuss)
* Pyramid scheme of debt ("Capitalism hits the fan")
* Endless schooling to become a robot engineer, also pyramid scheme
* Starvation
* Terrafoam welfare, like Marshall Brain
* Imprisonment, and then jobs for guards
Positive:
* Working less (unions?) and paying more
* Basic income -- taxation of the hoard
* Alternative currency as Kanban tokens to pull things through the line
* Email and twitter for chocolates to create a sort of currency (SPAM
problem as counterfeit demand?)
* People's capitalism (Marshall Brain and Albus)
* Gift economy, pushing things along the lines to give to people
* Resource-based planning
* Local subsistence production
* Making work into play
Odd:
* Rich pay people to be clowns? Services?
* Smart robots go on strike and do other things. Leaving a chocolate deficit.
* Police robots to force humans to keep working.
Irony with kids being neglected because parents have to work, while
eventually robots tend the kids?
Irony with police robots: "Why can people make robots to force us to work,
but not make robots to do the work?"
Issue of who owns what -- the land, the ideas, the effort of the workers,
the effort of the machines
When Lego robots first come. "This will make your jobs easier and more
productive." Guy in suit says "they violate patents and copyrights. Take
them away." Repeats of: "I hate my job." Then: "I needed my job!"
Lego robots come in. "We solved the patents and copyright problem by giving
the rights holders half the chocolate." Robots do a good job, producing more
chocolate than people want. "You're all fired, the robots can produce enough
by themselves."
Anyway, just putting some ideas out there. Kind of like a movie version of
this page I helped organize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
Maybe someone who knows how to make videos might want to do that as an open
source thing? The Zeitgeist people? Some people who like to make brick
films? Political cartoonists and moviemakers? I kind of see it as just a
bunch of example scenes to help people imagine all the possibilities.
If someone wants to make such a movie, consider these notes under a Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (like Wikipedia now has):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License
I can help out a little with feedback if someone wants to do this. This
probably would take a lot of time to make as stop motion with all these scenes.
There are probably ways to turn this into a computer game, too.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
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The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.