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The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#231

Post by yummyfajitas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #225
yummyfajitas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The middle class in the USA is already paying for such a service! When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something .

> When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. Okay, there's a sense in which that's true, but... > All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something. The problem with that (aside from any other problems with the whole "basic job" idea) is that the only sense in which it the preceding claim is true is if you count…

Are you seriously claiming that the only non-working government dependents are the elderly and disabled?

I've linked to this expose by NPR on disability fraud before: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#232

Post by yummyfajitas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #222
yummyfajitas wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Soviet Union had only this system, nothing else. I'm proposing is using this kind of a system to provide government services (e.g. filling in potholes) in return for money we are already spending . In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector. I'm proposing no restrictions on the private sector - in fact, one explicit goal of this system is to make government dependence less pleasant (you need to go out into…

> In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector. AFAICT, this was strictly true (if at all) only between the first Five Year Plan and 1936; the private sector (that is, non-government directed business) was restricted in both what markets it could participate, and the forms of business (in most markets where private industry was allowed, the only business form allowed was the individual independent worker/owner, t…

Ok. The only thing I'm proposing doing is reducing the disincentives to joining the private sector. Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#233

Post by yummyfajitas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #223
yummyfajitas wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the private pothole filling entity gets the contract, and the government directs it's dependents to do something else. But it'll actually be pretty hard for the private sector to compete on any task requiring unskilled labor. The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work. Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instea…

> Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instead of giving people money NOT to work, we instead give them money to work. No, you are actually proposing giving them money, whether or not there is work, and then trying to scrounge up some (perhaps meaningless) work so that the money you give them cannot be used for personal development, small entrepreneurship, etc. > I'm not proposing communism or slave…

No, you are actually proposing giving them money,...

We already give them money. I'm simply accepting that this is unlikely to change.

Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts)

The labor is not forced you are free to turn it down. We have no way of knowing whether the labor is economically inefficient, due to existing market distortions caused by paying people not to work.

In any case, unless you are claiming that there is no valuable government work to be done at all (are you?), it's a little silly to suggest that my plan to redirect idle labor into providing those government services is inefficient. The labor is either wasted or it's consumed.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#234

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #231
dragonwriter wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. Okay, there's a sense in which that's true, but... > All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something. The problem with that (aside from any other problems with the whole "basic job" idea) is that the only sense in which it the preceding claim is true is if you count…

Are you seriously claiming that the only non-working government dependents are the elderly and disabled? I've linked to this expose by NPR on disability fraud before: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

> Are you seriously claiming that the only non-working government dependents are the elderly and disabled?

I'm saying that the overwhelming majority of government spending on the non-working is benefits to the aged and disabled.

SS and Medicare alone are the majority of such spending, and go exclusively to that group, and overwhelming to the aged specifically; the next big chunk is Medicaid (at least, the portion that goes to people that aren't working, some Medicaid beneficiaries are low-income but employed) which, while income qualified, has a very significant fraction of its expenses go to Medicaid/Medicare dual eligibles.

And, so, to the extent that your pointing to the share of government spending that goes to the non-working is intended as something other than a red herring, it only makes sense if you plan on dragging the aged and disabled into your forced labor army as a condition of their continued survival.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#235

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #232
dragonwriter wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector. AFAICT, this was strictly true (if at all) only between the first Five Year Plan and 1936; the private sector (that is, non-government directed business) was restricted in both what markets it could participate, and the forms of business (in most markets where private industry was allowed, the only business form allowed was the individual independent worker/owner, t…

Ok. The only thing I'm proposing doing is reducing the disincentives to joining the private sector. Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.

> The only thing I'm proposing doing is reducing the disincentives to joining the private sector.

No, that's not all you are proposing. You are proposing a particular mechanism that you claim is aimed at that goal (not merely proposing the goal itself), which has concrete features beyond just the goal you claim for it.

> Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.

Perhaps, but you haven't provided a reason to believe that, just offered a factually-incorrect distinction between your proposal and the labor policy of the Soviet Union.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#236

Post by Drakim »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #208
Drakim wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does humans have any value outside of what they can offer to corporations? Would there even be any point to keeping humans around?

It works the other way around: do corporations have any value outside what they can offer to humans? Is there any point to keeping corporations around?

I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag ;)

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#237

Post by wolfpwner »

wangchow wrote: post #54
cousin_it wrote: post #6

Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…

Hence the communist manifesto dropped 200 years too early. Countries that use communism are far too early at adopting the philosophy because it requires production to exceed consumption on a massive scale. The hybrid model in mixed capitalist/welfare doesn't work so well because we're introducing a labour force (robots) that doesn't fit our economic model. Edit: What we'll probably see is an introduced free basic inc…

Communism is the ultimate future of human beings ;-)

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#238

Post by Falkon1313 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #145
ohnomrbill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can cook. Will people pay me a living wage to cook? Will that wage cover lost income from being on government programs? Does cooking (given the relative difficulty of becoming wealthy doing so) provide an income ceiling higher than getting paid via welfare/Social Security? There is plenty of work to be done. It's just not paid work. How do you propose to coerce people to pay for this work?

I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc. Now the "…

This is 100% wrong. We have a large surplus of labor, and no demand for it. Wages have been stagnant for decades. If there was a demand for labor, wages would be increasing. They're not. It's common for a minimum wage job (or below) to have 200+ applicants.

You're suggesting that when 200 people apply for a single waitress job, all 200 should be hired? That's going to be a really crowded restaurant. The Fire Marshal might have a problem with that. How many people do you need to hand you your burger anyway?

Agricultural jobs are out. Less than 2% of the workforce now produces more than double the food the entire population needs, plus exports, cattle feed, pet food, biofuels, and agricultural products used in manufacturing, etc. Manufacturing is rapidly going the same direction. Soon less than 2% of the population will be able to manufacture way more stuff than we need. That leaves only the service sector. The service sector is a weird beast, ranging from the below-minimum-wage waiters/waitresses (for which there is no demand) up to professionals like psychiatrists (where we really do have a scarcity). But at the moment, at least, costs of higher education are skyrocketing. Sending those 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of school to become psychiatrists would enable some few to excel, but what about the rest? And what about the cost?

Having 200 people serve you your burger is not a solution. Forcing 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of higher education is not a solution. Forcing children, the elderly, and the disabled to work is not a solution. The main problem is a lack of demand for labor, and the only way to solve that is to artificially create a demand. But now you're just paying people to dig holes that don't need to be dug and then fill them back in. That's useless and degrading. Why are we even doing that? What is the law of nature proclaiming that anyone who doesn't spend most of their life making someone else richer should die of starvation?

We need to rethink the basics. We need to rethink what we expect of people and why. This is not a futuristic sci-fi singularity thing, this is something that is happening right here and now, and it's already affecting us.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#239

Post by Noseshine »

alanwatts wrote: post #136
Noseshine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the only reason for having vastly more people with coding abilities is to lower the price of coding. There is no need for so many coders. Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once , then replication is free - that's even worse than in industry, where everything needs to be developed just once too but at least production required people.

>Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free This is true in terms of physical reality, but not in terms of the patent system.

Which is human-made and not a property of the universe. That is not an argument for OPs comment, since it can be changed very easily. Nor does it have any influence even if it isn't (changed) - I don't see the relevance for this sub-discussion?

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#240

Post by [deleted] »

alanwatts wrote: post #136
Noseshine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the only reason for having vastly more people with coding abilities is to lower the price of coding. There is no need for so many coders. Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once , then replication is free - that's even worse than in industry, where everything needs to be developed just once too but at least production required people.

>Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free This is true in terms of physical reality, but not in terms of the patent system.

[deleted]
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