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What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

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Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#451

Post by yannis »

freehunter wrote: post #314
Cybiote wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox . The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.

I think we're getting confused on the definition of how the robot accomplishes its task. To clean a toilet like a human would, yeah that's difficult. To clean a toilet like a robot would, it's not. A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. Really, really easy thing to do. If a Roomba can clean my entire house, not fall down the stairs,…

And a self-cleaning toilet with that brush and software would be more effective and cheaper...

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#452

Post by I-M-S »

mac01021 wrote: post #410
guitarbill wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After watching Big Hero 6, I'm convinced that even that work could be automated.

??? Sarcasm? What in Big Hero Six says anything about the tractability of automating elderly care in the real world?

I presume what the poster wanted to say is that BH6 made them believe even robots can look and feel humane (and possibly also that they can be made soft, translating in less injuries for the people they care of)

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#454

Post by gabesullice »

drubenstein wrote: post #313
reflexive wrote: post #303

Article has many holes in reasoning. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum As NN Taleb points out exhaustively: social science puts too much faith in their models. "Measurable" trends? How do we even know what to measure, or that it's a trend? "Plausible" projections?…

Agreed about the "many holes". Furthermore on the models But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. This seems to be conjuring a whole new economic model out of thin air. How can it be the case that all of the models are wrong and that this model is right? I'm not saying it's wrong or right, but the preceding ar…

It's also just plain ridiculous. This would mean that most jobs are created by... sole proprietorships? If you're employed it's almost certainly by an LLC, LLP, 501(c)3, etc. These are corporations. The simple act of training an employee is itself investment. If you suddenly make the profit of this new hire less valuable, we're expected to believe that this won't mean a reduction in new hires, even at the margin?

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#455

Post by isostatic »

stale2002 wrote: post #317
knieveltech wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popular because people are clumping in areas that have jobs...

Also because they like those areas? Many people dream of moving to New York. And they would dream that with out without the jobs.

I'm sure there are many who live in New York who want to move out but can't because of the work. Certainly that's the case in London.

Desires change through life. Sure when I was 20-something I'd be happy living in manhattan, but in my 30s I want somewhere in the country with a nice small school for the kids. When I'm in my 50s I suspect a house by the beach would be good, maybe even abroad. When it comes to my 70s and I've got grandkids I'll want to be near them.

How many people want to live in Ny to live the "friends" lifestyle, find out reality doesn't meet expectation, then want to leave but can't due to work?

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#456

Post by gabesullice »

gordaco wrote: post #371
RyanZAG wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've redefined what "the level at which a human can subsist on". Go 50, 100 or 200 years back and look at the kind of life most citizens lived. It was far below what even a person without a job today has - and a person without a job has an incredible amount of free leisure time compared to the 18 hour days that were common even 100 years ago. The simple fact is that welfare and minimum wages have removed many…

Not really. I think most of the jobs are being lost because of the improvements in productivity. We need less people to do the same job, because we have a lot of machines and automation. So, even if there is more work to do (because there are more people on the Earth now than 100 years ago), there is relatively less "work per person" to do. I know this is not exact (lump of labor fallacy) but I think it explains a lo…

What you're seeing is "creative destruction". If you focus on any one industry or sector for a short period of time, then yes, there's less work to go around. But if you widen your lens across time and industries, what you'll see is that these jobs will be reallocated to more productive uses of human effort. That is, automation has made these people's effort relatively less productive compared to a machine, so they need to find work in a different field.

I'm not saying that this process is all sugar and rainbows, losing your job to automation _is hard_. Some will never recover.

However, human society has always valued what is scarce. What will be scarce in the future is products and services made by human hands.

Already we see this happening. Visit a farmer's market - see all the hand-crafted soaps? If you could have a new desk from Ikea or made with hand hewn wood, engraved and embellished by a true craftsman, which would you prefer? It sounds trite today, but as our most basic necessities continue to be met at ever cheaper rates, we'll start trading our labor for better, higher quality things. Where quality is measured in human ingenuity and artistic beauty.

We can see this shift all around us. The rise in natural grocery chains, farmer's markets, Etsy. There are hundreds if not thousands of individuals who have quit their jobs to become full time YouTube creators.

I know that it all sounds banal, but it's because it is currently only the wealthiest in society who at this moment can afford to shop exclusivly at Whole Foods. However, in a truely vibrant economy, one that embraces change and makes reallocation of effort as smooth as possible, one with ample access to capital, one with low barriers to entry, will bring these luxuries of today to society as a whole tomorrow. And it will probably happen faster than human history has ever made it happen before. We're just impatient and spoiled by a world that's changing ever more quickly.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#457

Post by joantune »

thenomad wrote: post #442
joantune wrote: post #426

The answer: communal work. Academic research, science, your own projects! UBIs for nothing would only work for certain people. We should ask them to commit to, and then supervise them in projects. That'll be the future, not fuck work, but love the work that you're doing, because you chose it after all! The author referred to some interesting concepts of lack of work that we can draw conclusions from: the Aristocrat e…

That's a really interesting proposal, and one of the few I've heard that actually could improve on a UBI in some ways. The obvious leak point - who would determine what was "worthy" work? If someone said "my project right now is to watch all of The Wire", would that be OK? Would it differ if it was "all of CSI Miami"? What about if it was "All of MIT's lectures on machine learning"?

That's a tricky question, and an important one.

What I meant with projects is something tangible. What you are talking about is education? should that count? if those people are being educated or want to learn something, shouldn't they be able to still have an UBI while doing it?

My answer to that is:

20hours/week of communal work - they would do that work 20 hours/week and still have time to learn whatever they want..

Also, a centralized system could give more rewards to scientific advancements.

The system that we have now seems to be:

If other people want what you are creating, they'll pay for it, so that's how you define what it's worth to have.

However, the system that we have is flawed in many ways, because the closer to the selling point and to the money that you are, the more reward you make. Which makes sense, but undermines by underpaying some very important jobs/tasks that are the backbone of a lot of things, to name a few:

Scientific research Investigative journalism

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#458

Post by thenomad »

joantune wrote: post #457
thenomad wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really interesting proposal, and one of the few I've heard that actually could improve on a UBI in some ways. The obvious leak point - who would determine what was "worthy" work? If someone said "my project right now is to watch all of The Wire", would that be OK? Would it differ if it was "all of CSI Miami"? What about if it was "All of MIT's lectures on machine learning"?

That's a tricky question, and an important one. What I meant with projects is something tangible. What you are talking about is education? should that count? if those people are being educated or want to learn something, shouldn't they be able to still have an UBI while doing it? My answer to that is: 20hours/week of communal work - they would do that work 20 hours/week and still have time to learn whatever they want…

I was talking about self-improvement, which is similar.

OK, further question - what if they want to watch The Wire and write a series critique for public consumption as their communal work? That's definitely something tangible.

Does that answer change if they're:

1) A complete unknown with a blog 2) Have published work but aren't very well known 3) Are a famous media writer with thousands of fans asking for this critique? 4) A well-known academic in the field?

If the answer to all of the above is "no", is that also true of other academic work? What about journalism? What about artistic work?

Having worked in the arts for years, the issue with any sort of "we want to pay people to do Good Works" plan is that eventually you have to have someone define what Good Works are, and more importantly, aren't.

I do not envy the many people on grants councils around the world trying to say "well, this thing is Art, but this other very similar thing is not."

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#459

Post by dpweb »

djKianoosh wrote: post #270
dpweb wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a great example of this now. Uber drivers. There are a lot of people out there with a lot of free time who are willing to work for very little. Maybe the Govt should make an app that people can use their phone to sign up and do jobs like cleaning up parks etc.. and the Govt can pay them.

this would be lovely, but it's utopian. uber drivers drive someone to a place, and if they dont they dont get paid. the sorts of jobs you're talking about arent always all so clearly verified/verifiable. you'd need other government workers just to verify that the job was done properly... ufff I can see the waste now

Drones verify the leaves were raked etc..

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#460

Post by mdpopescu »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #46
alexmingoia wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so. Examples of people earning a living in this way would be farmers who own their own land and related machinery, plumbers who own their own tools, software developers who own their own computer Nonsense. Our abundance is increased by specialization not a lack of it. Specialization and…

That's definitely a problem in the limit. However, we are nowhere close to that limit: our economy now mostly consists of vertically-integrated monopolies and oligopolies. Just think about, say, Comcast, which is simultaneously the most hated firm in America and yet subject to neither government regulation nor market competition. Among simple and easy slogans for solving our problems, "break them all up" is actually…

It's impossible to have both "neither government regulation nor market competition". (This is clearly the case with Comcast.) The reason for the lack of competition is exactly the presence of government regulation.
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