Hum, do we really need to see this as white and black. Work or no-work? Why not just introduce 30 hours/week or even 25 hours/week. And by that I mean employees keep the same weekly salary, companies use the gain in productivity by automation to give back some family time to employees. What we get in exchange, is one or 2 extra days of consumer spending. People tend to spend more during weekends anyways, so everybody is a winner. We keep the same salary, we have an extra day free in the week, companies get the 15% increase in consumption, and get slowly ready for full work automation.
As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
51–60 of 213 posts
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “When I play a game, I know if I have a few hours I will be rewarded,” he said. “With a job, it’s always been up in the air with the amount of work I put in and the reward.” This is stunning to me. I know that among the world, we in the US sometimes have a different work ethic. But video games coming up in this discussion of rewards per time invested is mind-boggling. > Happiness has gone up for this group, despite…
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ There are definitely dead-end jobs that don't make you want to get out of bed in the morning. Maybe something like the CCC would help with the feeling of meaningful labor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
I thought this was interesting from bullshit jobs:
"what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)"
Same idea echoed in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff https://www.amazon.com/Throwing-Rocks-Google-Bus-Prosperity/...
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#53So we can all play more video games: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/23/why-a... "Most of the blame for the struggle of male, less-educated workers has been attributed to lingering weakness in the economy, particularly in male-dominated industries such as manufacturing. Yet in the new research, economists from Princeton, the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago say that an additio…
How could one design economically productive outputs from a video game like playing experience? Thinking something like Ender's game meets Uber drivers...
Protein folding games. Path finding.
Image recognition and other dataset-labelling tasks that can be used to train better AI models.
Natural language translation. Duolingo doesn't look much like a typical video game, but it does have gamifying elements.
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
where one finds high unemployment, they are almost certain to find crime, drugs, gangs, single mothers This is because of poverty, not idle hands.
Nope. Look at the history of big housing projects in the days of generous welfare payments. Food, clothing, shelter, and some spending money were provided. Huge crime rate.
> "generous welfare payments"
Welfare programs in the past may be relatively generous compared to today, but I'd be interested to know when this golden era of welfare payments was, which era did you have in mind?
Also, it takes more than money alone to make people happy. It's possible to be financially comfortable but still live in a ugly, uninspiring place with very little that's enjoyable to do. I'd much rather be poor in an interesting/beautiful place like Venice than comfortably well off in a cultural wasteland.
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#55Every time I hear arguments about basic incomes, I think of universe 25.
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/03/the-amazing-rise-and-f...
Fundamentally, we're all animals and due to physics and material constraints, there's scarcity involved. By giving a basic income, we're pretty much ignoring the fact that eventually we will run out of water and food and manufactured goods.
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gregory Clark's work on tracking English class mobility in the 1700s-1900 (The Son Also Rises & A Farewell to Alms) indicates that this isn't the first time this has happened (ie, the obsolescence of a large portion of the labor force), and that it's possible to manage the transition with a fairly minimal amount of law enforcement resources.
This time it's different. Our most valuable asset as workers is our minds, if AI can make inroads into white-collar work as well as blue-collar and pink-collar work, what will be left for humans to do? We're not just talking about low-skilled workers losing their jobs, we're also looking at previously safe jobs like doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc... due to be facing very strong competition from the growth of AI (…
I don't think we're anywhere near doctors and lawyers losing their jobs to automation. It's mostly lower class jobs.
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
What else can they do? With the new wave of AI and automation there will be no jobs left for people with below average intelligence. You will need more and more researchers and programmers but not everyone can do those jobs.
Make art, educate themselves, read books - but the reward mechanisms of those activities are much less stimulating than those of video games.
I also think art can include things like being a chef, barista, baker, barber, and brewer, distiller, wine maker; not just the things we typically call art. Things that are in more demand than paintings.
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#58Every time I hear arguments about basic incomes, I think of universe 25. http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/03/the-amazing-rise-and-f... Fundamentally, we're all animals and due to physics and material constraints, there's scarcity involved. By giving a basic income, we're pretty much ignoring the fact that eventually we will run out of water and food and manufactured goods.
You can't relate the rodent utopia experiments as a defense of having to keep people in need of basic necessities to survive or they lose the will to live.
Besides the fact you are comparing rats to people, even the study itself considers all the localized factors that contributed to societal collapse:
* You are isolating them in a relatively small space with one another.
* You have uncontrolled population growth.
* You are using a species that naturally trends towards "clan wars" for territory.
* They are rats, and thus have nothing productive to do with their time in the absence of survival.
In the same reason you cannot just compare horses to humans and say that when physical and mental human labor is obsoleted there will be no new jobs for people because horses do not have the capability to invent their own work, rats are the same. Fundamental to our establishment of society is our ability to invent things for us to do beyond the survival every other animal dedicates their life to.
Also, it is incredibly nihilistic to think that human beings need to toil to survive or else life is without meaning or we will collapse society.
We already know that in first world countries people reproduce less. That isn't even a function of economic well being directly but a function of education, which relates precisely back to how humans aren't just animals acting on instinct. If your post-scarcity society is uneducated hairless monkies, yes, they would go the way of the rat colony dystopia. If you have a culture of education and intellectualism, and let people invent their own work, you have an actual utopia. It is the same mind that elevated mankind above all other animals that can stop us from destroying ourselves as we eliminate survival as a daily concern.
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#59What about we let the prices fell slowly towards zero as automation makes things cheaper and cheaper to produce? What's the point of distributing money if things are free?
That was Karl Marx's plan. Didn't pan out perfectly though. Most people just want more and more stuff. Cheaper prices will only result in people buyijg more.
As the cost of production falls and demand increases, I'm fairly confident the cost of materials will rise, if we continue to live in a capitalist society that'll be the mechanism that controls the level of demand. The other option that could work is more material wealth in the commons, for example sharing the use of cars rather than owning one outright.
Re: As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income
#60I seriously doubt it could be realistically implemented. More probable outcome is ballooning law enforcement costs due to significant fraction of population becoming unemployable and resorting to crime, and almost endless, Japan-style economic stagnation in all developed countries. Sorry for sounding pessimist. This time it gets serious and software is going to really eat the world. By the way in some countries (like…
This is a bit of a Luddite viewpoint. There will be some ups and downs as people adjust to the need for different skill sets however, automation won't simply wipe out any need for human labor. There are lots of things that will likely never be cost effective to automate or are impossible to automate.
Don't forget that the Luddites were substantively correct in their analysis. "Some ups and downs as people adjust" really meant multigenerational economic negative effects in their case, and may be similar for people passed over for automation now. The Luddite families and those like them took 3 to 4 generations to recover fro the blow, economically speaking.
Which isn't to say that it shouldn't be done, but that any assertion that people will "retrain" or "find new growth industries" with anything like their current quality of life is at best naive, and more often disingenuous. The most likely case is that the losers in such economic shifts will remain so. Any society that leaves them to sort it out on their own should at Leastbe transparent and realistic about what that means.
Discouragingly enough , truck driving itself is a rare example of fairly successful transition to a new industry, as it had a low barrier to entry for people needing to leave a rapidly shrinking workforce in agricultural areas - due to some automation and a larger scale mechanization. One generation of that and it is going to fall off a cliff too, possibly leaving the rural US in a dire employment situation.