No offense, but I think the confusion is partly on you. We're talking no mathematical facts here. Everything is an assumption. Even capitalism and globalisation, even though alot of people just take it at face value and treat it like a fact without really knowing what they talk about.
And even between the so called Experts (big 'E' for importance ) you will have a problem figuring out exactly what they mean with a certain term.

I was not talking about demand-driven economics, but consumerism as part of a political/social agenda to fight socialism and keep the workforce at bay.
More in a tradition of Erich Fromm than Karl Marx or J.M. Keynes.

In the Shadowrun timeline/universe the corporations figured out, that guided (brand loyality) consumerism is their way to go. Whether we want to believe in it or not, the background sets it up this way.
So there we are, with lots of wageslaves instead of drones. And it is not because they drones could not do the jobs, it is because the big money wants people to work (or rot in the barrens) for some reason. What reason that is, we simply don't know.

Shadowrun does (like most sci-fi) make a choice on how mankind's future will look. The hard part is the short distance - suspension of disbelief can be a problem in alternate realities. It is easier to just go along Babylon5, StarWars or StarTrek without applying our current situation to it as it is far into the future while Shadowrun is just a few decades away.

/snip: rant about hunter-gatherers, self sustaining arcologies and stuff that goes too far off topic, if interested -> PM me.

Rather than hit the quote button a million times, I'll just respond to a few specific things and then proceed.

Easier isn't always better. Now, less work for the same gain is always better, but that's not "easier". In more specific terms, I meant that people have chosen the option that presents the least effort possible, even though it's not the most efficient use of effort.

Drones, microfacs and nano-faxes could replace a significant chunk of he manufacturing economy. In the descriptions of nanofactories in augmentation and of desktop manufacturing in arsenal, it specifically states that the corporations have purposely built the restrictions into the machines to prevent them from being too useful. It's the nanomachine equivalent of DRM.

And comparative advantage, specialists and trade aren't problems. It's when a handful of elites take a cut of every bit of trade. Again, it's not about reality, it;s about what we have in shadowrun. What we have in shadowrun are vast conglomerates that have, collectively through the corporate court, their hand in every pie. The corp gets their cut or they fuck up your shit. This isn't the corporation as a pooling of resources in order to attain the means of production. This is the corporation as a defacto state. People can specialize, produce, and trade in comparatively advantageous ways without having to tithe. The people who receive the tithe don't want them to, and leverage whatever power they have to prevent that. I'd like to point out that "give me your money and I won't shoot you" is a mutually benificial arrangement.

People don't eat each other in disasters. People are much more likely to help each other. But that's a minor point tangential to the discussion. I agree that the average person in the shadowrun universe would, It's just one of the ways the setting differs from reality.

I'm not a marxist. But for the purposes of shadowrun, I DO assume that all the worst things anyone has ever said about capitalism are true. This is just where I start the fiction from. It doesn't matter if that's not how it works in real life. I can just as easily point out that in the real world, companies DO automate when it allows them save money, and the workers lose their jobs. In the real world it's a subject of debate if trickle down economics produces greater standards of living, if a free market functions when the average consumer is advertised to so heavily, and many other questions. I have opinions on those in real life, but that doesn't matter. In Shadowrun, the answer is always that the corporations are evil, scumsucking parasites, and in any given instance, they will choose the option that maintains their control the most. Thus, shitty jobs for everyone, even if automation technology makes it unnecessary.

But consumerism is an assumption that's true. Do you enjoy eating? Do you enjoy looking good? Do you like sitting in a comfy chair? Do you enjoy reading roleplaying books? If so, then consumerism is factually true. It's not a tool used to "fight" socialism, it's a fucking fact of life and free markets organise themselves to cater to the fact that people enjoy consuming goods and services.

Wageslaves mainly do work that drones and agents cannot do; how does one program a computer to automatically create an ad campaign, design a new product or make the right small-scale business decision in an environment where the choices cannot be enumerated? You can't; metahuman intuition, creativity and physical versatility are what businesses will rely upon and drones will free a lot of people from menial work that doesn't need all that much attention to do more interesting work. You'll have people monitoring the cleaning drones, directing them when their preprogrammed behaviours are insufficient to complete the task or calling the small contingent of metahuman cleaners that exist to cover what the drones can't when the drones do not have the tools for the problem at hand.

Drones are simply more efficient at a number of things that require no ingenuity. There can still be shitty jobs, but drones will cover a alot of things. If it involves moving something or watching something then a computer does it better and cheaper unless the motions required are beyond a particular level of complexity, at which point metahumans have to be used because they require less maintenance.



Platonic,
Expectations govern what we choose to do in many ways, and if the expected outcome of the alternatives is not high enough then the minimum effort option may be expected to be the most efficient. I also feel that we should all consider the subjective nature of cost - to some the cost of the alternatives is much higher because they don't like that kind of cost.

Micro-facs and nanofaxes are not exactly the most efficient means of production; their advantages are in the form of being easy to switch production rapidly to create whatever a capricious user desires. However, this comes at the cost of some of the optimisations that can be built in at the design level, meaning that specialised assembly lines are still going to be more efficient and, when you have capital investments on the level of the megas, this is far superior to a jack-of-all trades. As for DRM, I admit the corps are being dicks but honestly it's not a big thing, it's not like they're the only people who can provide you with these products, after all.

The megas outproduce most smaller corps anyway, but there's always a niche for the smaller fish to swim in. Places where the megas don't tread, or don't care to tread, but that are still fertile grounds for making a profit. I mean, there are going to be thousands of smaller corps and the megas can't stomp on them all at the same time. They'll probably not even notice anything more than a grade below them unless the corp is exceptional. All corps in Shadowrun are assumed to be playing hardball anyway and although the megas can just crush the smaller corps they'd have to devote significant attention and risk being upturned elsewhere to do it, like America can crush any nation or group by sheer scale but can't do this because they'd be vulnerable elsewhere.

You can't say that not a single person has ate another because of food deprivation in the wake of a disaster. They probably told no one, but it will have happened.

I'm willing to give corps in SR the benefit of the doubt. They're by no means a force of good, but they're still providing useful goods and services instead of being the fey folk in the forest who ride out and steal babies in the night.

well, what I'm arguing is that no, drones don't do those jobs. People do, because there are advantages to having people do them beyond what's most efficient economically. I think that having the populace employed is a net benifit to the corps. Because all those people do exist, and they have needs. In order to keep them complacent, those needs must be filled, and it fits the corporate philosophy better to create jobs even when it's not the most economic, than to provide a social welfare state.

I think I can succinctly put this in terms that would resonate better with you.

1: any given person will, left to their own devices, pursue the course of action that maximizes their gain. (people are rational actors). Granted, there's personal stupidity, but absent other factors that tend to weed itself out.
2: Corporations are also rational actors.
3: If people receive no benifit from the actions of the corporation, they won't cooperate.
4. If the actions of the corporation create a net loss for a person, they will resist.
5. To prevent this resistance, the corporations need to make their existence a net gain to the person. Therefore it pays to get people to link their well being to the well-being of the corporation.
6. One way to do this is to give those people jobs. The other is charity.
7. Charity represents a loss for the company. Maybe not a net loss, because the advantage of a cooperating populace is high, but a loss nonetheless.
8. Employees, on the other hand, are a gain for the company. given the choice between placating the population for free, and placating them in exchange for labor, the corps will choose the latter.
9. Therefore, even when from a strict economic protection automation would prove more benificial, from a social perspective human labor is more advantageous and will be preferred.



I can think of a single instance where people killed and ate other people in the wake of a disaster, and that's the Donner party. Other popular examples either involve eating people who died in the disaster being eaten by the survivors, or cultures where cannibalism was practiced before the disaster. There are far more historical examples where people chose, during famine, to quietly starve to death. I'm not saying it's never happened. I'm just saying that it's not what usually happens. Oddly enough, in most disasters like earthquakes, city wide fire, floods, hell, even riots, the murder rates for a city usually go DOWN for the duration.

I've been fucking saying that there are more productive jobs that only metahumans can do all this time. YES, CORPS WILL CONTINUE TO EMPLOY PEOPLE IN CRAPPY JOBS, BUT THEY WILL NOT BE MENIAL TASKS THAT DRONES CAN DO BETTER, WHY DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THIS? Gah, people who refuse to understand what I'm saying...

For every N jobs you fill with a drone, you generate M additional jobs for maintaining and monitoring them. There are still going to be S jobs in the work area that drones cannot fulfil and you still need a metahuman for. You also support P drone manufacturing jobs by purchasing drones and drone upkeep materials. Jobs shuffle around and some people whine because they no longer have the work they're used to, but life moves on and the economy expands to take advantage of the fall in labour prices, even if N > (M + S + P).

Nobody has to permanently lose their livelihood just because drones exist; that kind of thing is a luddite mutant protectionist lie.


Alright, I wasn't in the possession of this information. I swear it was a throw-away comment.

I continue to think that humans will still be used because the M in your equation is, at best, 1/12 N. This assumes that someone needs to have all the drones actively subscribed to their system for proper monitoring. Considering they can cycle through them instead of continual overwatch, it's probably much lower. The P in your equation is also a job that drones would do better. So P is a subset of N, and the jobs that generates are added to M. S is subject to some interpretation. True creative work needs a person, but grunt graphic design could be done by an expert system. Gathering telesma must be done by hand. But almost any other manual labor job can be done by a drone. The human worker's greatest strength is that they aren't optimized for a specific task like a drone is, but it's anybodies guess if that winds up mattering much. Exactly how effective drones would be outside of the narrow focus of running is left kinda up to the GM, but what we have to go on suggests that they are universally better than the average worker. Not every human can find employment as a expert, only the top people can do that. So I beleive that M is a small fraction of N, P is the M of a recursive version of this equation (for manuacturing capability), and S is a small percentage of the total economy. Not only is N>( M+S+P), it is probably so by an order of magnitude.

Labor prices have a hard bottom: past a certain point a person cannot live on their pay. There's also a soft bottom of what people consider a reasonable lifestyle. You can stretch that one but if you do it too far to fast, it will greatly upset people. So if N is too much larger than (M+S+P), a negative social situation would arise faster than the economy could correct. I agree that the economy would have to correct. I also think that this would not be in the short term interests of the megas. After all, IRL such corrections are usually called recessions or depressions. Now that I think about it, the last time production increases demanded major work force reallocations was the Great Depression.

And yeah, the eating people thing was tangential to the conversation, but It touches on something I find really important. Everyone seems to assume that, when thrust outside their confort zone or in the absence of an authority figure, people turn into animals. Obviously, some people do. But the general trend is that when the shit hits the fan, people cut out the BS and work together. People who already have enough trouble don't go looking for more.

The Custom of the Sea is that shipwrecked passengers and crew draw lots to determine who will be killed and eaten. Yes, Canibalism is necessary often enough for there to be a codified custom to determine who gets eaten.

However, in these cases it is not a matter of "turning into animals", for from it. Cannibalism is the socially responsible solution to the problem of finding food and drink on the high seas. The inability to drink sea water means that dehydration will catch up to a person faster than starvation will and human blood is one of the few palatable liquids to be found on a lifeboat.


Anyway, the way I see it corporations are out to maximize profit. That's important. Sometimes, the most efficient solution is not the most profitable solution. Sometimes, you earn more money by being slow and wasteful.

Platonic,
I'm going to answer your points in reverse order. It's more pleasing (to me) that I do so.

After reconfirming the context, the cannibalism comment was meant to highlight how much a disaster impacts the lives of the people subjected to it. It was meant to support the note that people are pretty much the same but the situations are different leading to differences, in concert with the note that disasters are a lot more common in the world of SR.

Automation has been in progress since at least 1812, drones are just one more step along the way. I would believe that the slowly increasing capacity of drones would also permit long enough for a more gradual reorganisation than the hypothesized sudden introduction into a vacuum.

The "hard" bottom on labour prices is only hard in the short run. Again, incursion of drones in varying fields is a quite long-run phenomenon. Labour prices will dip many times, but never significantly.

If you go merely by subscription, the 12:1 is indeed correct. However, corps have all this autonomous computing hardware lying around so it's actually 1:0. But that isn't what I said; drone monitoring is not the same as simply having the drones subscribed. An alert-based system is predicated on the drone recognising that they're not appropriate for the situation, which is not a guarantee because this kind of recognition is complex and every measure has its flaws. The metahumans are there to identify when the automated detection schema fails. This requires active monitoring which can be done, but it requires a lot more attention than merely having the drones subscribed. I'm going to pull a figure out of my ass and say 4:1 for the monitoring staff.

Let me redefine P to be the maintenance and production portion, the reason is as you've stated - both of these tasks can be automated as well. Therefore once we establish the S for those areas and the P value we can determine how many metahumans they involve (we've already established 4:1 for N:M). I'm going to say that the average value of S is about 20:1, most of the jobs you use drones for are not going to involve exceptional circumstances all that often. Currently we get 20:6. The P value before automation I'm going to randomly assign at 10:1 (ie 20:2) for convenience.

We are left with R = (6+2R)/20. Given that the maintenance and production automation needs maintenance and production and so on, so forth... Computing the numerator as a geometric sequence (a = 6, r = 6/10), the limit is 15/20. That means that our final ratio is about 4:3. This is all bullshit, because the numbers involved are totally arbitrary, but it's an example of how the thing ends up working. Yeah, okay, drones end up outnumbering metahumans in some areas, but that means you can expand in those areas or shift metahumans to where intuition and flexibility are more needed. Feel free to disagree with the numbers, btw.

Again, sure there'll be people who do not change and they'll end up being employed by the people who can't invest in drones or don't want to invest in drones. Food preparation is an area where you need flexibility and intuition, for example. Whilst you have computers and drones to handle a lot of the drudgery; customers put a premium of customised food and that means that there is always going to be openings for metahumans to work in the area.

Hell, perhaps the reason that organised crime is stronger in SR is because they took in all the people whose jobs got replaced by drones. Who knows?


Hyz,
Depending on what definition of efficient you're going on, the efficient choice may indeed be synonymous with the greatest profit choice. Again, depends on what definition you're using. Certainly economics efficiency is greatest profit for corps.

What we see in SR is a potential factor intensity reversal in a number of industries, where more than ever before capital, in the form of drones, can replace labour in traditionally labour intensive work. In some areas, for instance, harvesting in simple agricultural setups capital will replace labour, as it already does. In a number of really shitty jobs, labour will remain more productive, the value of goods produced being greater than the cost of wages / capital rent. Where there are a large number of things that can go wrong, decisions have to be made regularly and/or a large ammount of human interaction is involved, labour still wins out even when drones are cheaper in money terms.

Ratcatcher.

Quality Control for the "Rat on a Stick" stand.

Elven Taste Tester at an Ork restaurant.

Orkish Taste Tester at an Elven restaurant.

Complaints staffer at the Crime Mall.

Heath, we have reached the point where we mostly agree with each other except on which numbers we pull out of our asses. I think the ratio of drones to people is greater. I also think the number of jobs that can be done by drone is greater. I don't believe food prep at McHughes requires flexibility and intuition, also, I think that drones are more flexible than you think.

But that's all opinion. Were this the real world, this would be where evidence would need to be gathered through experimentation and studies.

When arguing on the internet, about a fictional setting, I think this is a close to a win as we'll get.

Hmm... I don't see that Shadowrun requires (nor currently suggests) drones outnumber people on factory floors, and I can think of a few reasons why (keeping in mind, I'm pushing to support the current fictional setting, so I may bend things to make them fit properly)...

1) The big one is this; people spend money, while drones don't. Poor people generally spend a good deal more of their money than rich people. Poor people also generally spend a lot more money on processed goods which are easy to mass-produce and give excellent returns to the parent corporation. Most importantly though, the health of an economy is not measured by how many dollar bills it possesses, but rather, how much it moves that money. There were no fewer dollar bills in 1930 than there were in 1920, nor again in 1940, in fact to the contrary. However, the depression was caused due to the money not moving within the system i.e. - we want people to spend.

So, if corporations want to sell their products (presumably in order to increase their power over people, NOT for the purpose of making profit. They own basically all the money and all the resources anyway) they need to make sure people have money to spend so as to become dependent on them.

If all of a sudden the corporations stopped hiring people, sufficient people would have no income that they would either rebel against the corporations, or would move somewhere else, perhaps the NAN looking to become self-sufficient, and that means the corporations lose both power and control. Not good.

So I could definitely see a general agreement among the Corporate Court that corporations should hire people rather than drones when given the choice - it helps everyone and really hurts no one (we've already established these megacorps have no drive to be lean, so increasing the profit margin is secondary).


2) At least in the world I work, people get credit for managing people, not computers. Sure, the techie gets paid more, but he still doesn't get paid as much as the guy in charge of the mail room. No manager is going to let himself become a sysadmin if he can help it. Just like I described on the corporate level, this is a loss of power and income (people who have more people to manage need more income to their particular group).


3) The matrix - anyone here encountered a drone yet they couldn't hack? Sure, you can drive employees to buck their employers, but it is tremendously difficult, and almost impossible without paying a TON of money and getting traced. Drones, not so much. I can imagine some corp dragging itself up by its bootstraps because it uses a fully automated process to say make cars. Ares gets wind of it and figures 'oh, that's nice', hires a decker for $80k/year who goes in and starts just breaking stuff. Welding robots cut up the assembly robots. The smelter machine overrides its safety controls and dumps hot steel in the middle of the floor. A few months of that and you'll go back to hiring people like everyone else (not quite true, you'll be out of business, but the guys next to you will be hiring people).

Being a slave. Not a wage slave, but just a slave. Maybe a dwarf slave for a troll sex parlor.

A test subject for the new HMVV strain that your corp has been working on.

Tax collector in the barrens (given the assignment when your government just wants you to die.)

Quite a few government jobs probably suck now, like cleaning up radioactive areas or spills when a corporation does not want to deal with it.

Personally I think many of the suck jobs are probably seem like O.k. jobs, but the corporation forgets to tell you that the job of harvesting soy by hand just happens to be half a mile away from an insect hive, or as the janitor the corp decides not to tell you that you are doing nothing but handling radioactive waste. I mean so long as no one cares about you, and you are SINless people can do whatever they want to you as long as no one finds out.... and even then you might just be slapped with a small fine (save blood magic and toxic shamans experimentations and only because there is a 1 mill bounty to capture you and bring your ass into the white hats.)

Also if you had to clean dragon crap up that would be a sweet job. If you were able to even take a small amount of it every day after work do you know how much you would probably make selling it off as a regent? I mean a dragons toenail clippings are worth like 100,000k. Dragon dung has to be worth something.

As for drones delivering pizza's I think it's possible and it would be something like this.....

*****

Trid feed: Speedy Pizza has now created a drone pizza cannon! Many people were trying to find a fast, cheap delivery solution to pizza delivery drivers and now Speedy P's has found a solution.

"We all know that many drivers won't deliver to certain area's, and that traffic today is now worse then ever." Said Robert Kuyavetta owner of Speedy Pizza. This cannon will now deliver hot and steamy pizzas to your doorstep or building in under two minutes. "I mean without the Pizza Delivery Cannon ™ or PDC our policy used to be 'Your pizza in 10 hours, or you get a free 2 liter bottle of soy soda.' Needless to say we just expected to give them that soda especially around the holiday season. Also if you are up on the third floor just make sure to leave your widow open as we have had a few problems in the past." Rob cautions. "Also I decided to create the cannon after I realized that your pizza ended up in the same condition from being fired out of a cannon as being delivered by hand to the costumer."

Speedy P's has had some problems with the Pizza Delivery Cannon, and it has caused one or two serious injuries and some substantial property damage, but Rob told people to look at the waiver on the matrix and to always remember you might not want to be standing at your window waiting for your pizza to arrive. Rob also sells Pizza Delivery Cannon catching devices on his matrix node as well. To "prevent pizza or property damage."

The plot of the classic Sega CD RPG Lunar: The Silver Star, actually begins with a quest into a treacherous cave to collect dragon poop followed by an ever more treacherous quest to find someone rich enough to afford to buy it from you.

Yeah, collecting dragon poop isn't just a shitty job, it is simultaneously one of the most dangerous and rewarding Shadowruns anyone can attempt.

That is really funny.

as for the poor people don't spend money argument, its actually a tradegy of the commons, hilariously.

There is a 'common resource' called poor people in 2070, that require care and feeding, and if they get it will spend more money. But you still have an incentive to fire them all and hire drones instead. You could feel that the solution (divvy the commons up) is why corps have a 'lock in' system for their employees.

Urban Brawl Critic.

Desert Wars Critic.

Urban Cycle Critic.

Hockey Critic in what's left of Canada.

Confessional Priest that deals with Italian Mafia in a Country that allows magic to rip conversations out of a person's head, and no provision for protection to the Church.

Census Taker for the few SINers in Z-Zones. ("I winged the Census Man!" "That's a good boy!")

Silly CanRay Canada doesn't exist anymore.

On the subject of Shitty Jobs in the 6th world, I would say any meta-human who is discretely hired by the Humanis Polly Club.

LIES!

The USA tried to become reborn, Canadians are more patient and stealthy about their rebellion and attempt at recovering to the previous glory that was CANADA!!!