Someone was saying that even if using machines becomes cheaper than using humans, capitalist will still use humans because
"automation constitutes constant capital and human labour is variable capital
The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall disproves that fact"
What do those mean?
Machines cannot do maintenance on themselves.
I don’t see why that’s fundamentally impossible though. For example, people are already working on stuff like 3d printers that can produce copies of themselves by printing all the parts. So, you can have machines made out of modular components that can be printed. When a part fails, then a new one is printed and installed to replace it. This whole process can be entirely automated. And this would include the printers themselves.
Sure, but machines cannot do troubleshooting the way humans can. Yes you can have machines tell you what’s wrong, but they cannot reason why a problem exists and how to fix it. There are too many random elements to account for, things that are impossible to account for even. This is why you still have car mechanics, even considering all the fancy telemetry that exists. In the same way, a computer program cannot debug itself.
This is also true of a human worker though. That’s why the profession of “doctor” exists. The question is, why couldn’t a robot be made to perform maintenance on other robots?
I feel like you’re missing the point. Machines are quickly reaching the stage where they will able to troubleshoot, think and reason.
That’s what we’re discussing.
We don’t have general purpose AI yet, but I don’t think that’s a prerequisite for automating many jobs out of existence. Humans will still be needed to solve really complex problems for the foreseeable future, but the number of humans that need to work will be greatly reduced. A great example we can already see today are automated ports and factories in China where there’s a just handful people overseeing them.