It's a question of what's the best return on investment for the tool
being used.

If it costs 15cr/hour in labor, plus taxes and bennies and such to
bring it up to 25cr/hour to have a human, then you're looking a
50kcr/year per human working on the line.
If you're running 3 shifts, that's a minimum of 150kcr/year for a "work slot"

So... can you buy a 'bot for that job for under 150kcr/year?
At TL10+, probably.

The exception is going to be jobs where there's some reason a 'bot
isn't usable.
In a lot of cases, that's going to be problem solving - jobs where
there are complications that are hard to code for. With Machine
Learning, that's going to go away over time.
I can think of situations where the local government doesn't want a
machine doing the job. One that comes to mind is dealing with the RUS
in the sewers. A bot that can traverse the sewers and execute 100 kilo
Rodents is an autonomous warbot. I can see the government having
issues with GM having a couple hundred of them patrolling the lower
levels of the factory complex, either because the Ratcatcher-3000
might get loose and decide that some humans on the street are valid
targets, or that the gov't is nervous about GM having a company of
mechanized infantry.

The other possibility is there isn't a union or minimum wage.
Those companies will work out the bare minimum it takes to hire a human,
Say 3cr/hour, no bennies, and the company provides room and board, so
the employee pays 20cr a day to the company store.
That works out to about 2000cr/year in worker cost, and 3 shifts makes
6kcr/year.

That's a much slimmer margin for a workerbot, but if you do the
standard Traveller amortization over 40 years, that's still 120kcr
budget for a bot.... so still hard to justify humans as employees.

But...
What if the bots are a new thing? That means there's still workers,
but they're either being phased out, or wage-dropped and they can see
the writing on the wall. There's a generation who have pensions as
part of their work contract, so they don't care, they're going to take
early retirement and be done with it. But the people who are PC's
ages, they know they're stuck in a job that's going to be phased out
in the next few years, and during that time they're going to get a pay
cut every year.

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 11:31 AM Peter L. Berghold <xxxxxx@berghold.net> wrote:
>
> I think I may have thought of a huge problem with how I describe some
> of the dystopian worlds in my universe.  Initially I had this idea of
> worlds that are wholly owned (either openly or subvertly) by
> corporations and the world and its inhabitants are exploited to work
> these huge factories and/or mining operations.
>
> On these high population industrialized worlds a very definite caste
> system is commonly employed with really poor people (think company
> store) living in densly populated housing on one end of the scale with
> the company executives on the other end of the economic scale.
>
> I began to question this a bit.
>
> 1) would this system work or would it collapse under its own weight.
>
> 2) would a system like this "wear out" a world using up resources until
> they were played out.
>
> 3) In a case where there are robots/androids used would manufaturing
> jobs even exist? If not what use would a high population be?
>
> Again I'm using you folks as a sounding board. I'm being a bit anal
> about my writing trying to minimize "handwavium" in the stories.  I
> want all the story elements to make sense.
>
> The high pop/industrialized worlds are a catalyst for characters in the
> story to leave.  In one part of human space there exists a star
> spanning government that is organized as a representative republic such
> that the worlds can do just about anything they want to do as long as
> it fits within the rules formed by the founding articles of federation.
>
> One of the paths for young people is to go into federal service (not
> just military, essentially any of the service related character types
> in Traveller) and they by charter are not supposed to be stopped by
> their planetary government from doing so.  (In fact I've started one
> story around that.)
>
> Knowing this group is populated with sharp minds what do you folks
> think?
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> Peter L. Berghold                                 <xxxxxx@berghold.net>
> Professonally: (retired) IT Professional (DevOps, Puppet, Perl...)
> Advocations: Dog Training, Beer Brewing, BBQ, Cooking
>
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