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The Future of Not Working

nytimes.com

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Re: The Future of Not Working

#181

Post by LoSboccacc »

greyman wrote: post #157
Razengan wrote: post #135

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. D…

> not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation I don't know if this statement is true, but a lot more jobs could be created in the area of teaching, caring for elderly and ill people, etc.

Still it's reasonable to expect the transition to a post scarcity society within the next two generations, at least not globally in the first phase but the growth boom will cause a new wave of hyperexpansionism to secure the growing lands and resource depots.

Jobs as care worker won't be enough and not everyone is good/motivated in them and I don't think you don't realize how bad it is for the cared to have a spiteful worker

There's a huge issue looming as the current mainstream libertarian model is ill suited for a post scarcity society plus there's gonna be a huge problem with migrations ready to compound with internal strifes.

Nothing impossible to solve with preparation but seems we gonna reach that point fastly and badly.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#182

Post by pokemongoaway »

Razengan wrote: post #135

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. D…

What reverses sterilization? Money? The possession of a certain ideology? Do you trust government in creating ideal criteria for which germ lines should live on - when the human genome project was such a failure?

Re: The Future of Not Working

#183

Post by cannonpr »

adrianN wrote: post #168
cannonpr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder about the "not everyone can contribute" perhaps they can't contribute in building cars, but with a cultural shift and education, well there are a lot of avenues of research and mathematics that only require thought and basic tools like chalk. I tend to view an unemployed human as an awful waste of computational resources. This ofcourse assumes we haven't figured out strong AÍ or we don't want to, cause th…

are you honestly suggesting that a large part of the population can be trained to become research mathematicians?

Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it ? That asides, research mathematics is only a small subset of mental tasks available to humans. There are a lot of areas that could benefit from "computation" Laws, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology. We seem to have forgotten how much of our society is based on how our thought is applied to knowledge. Thought rather than Praxis has been relatively neglected in our age.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#184

Post by thehardsphere »

state_less wrote: post #179
thehardsphere wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Meaningless drone work" needs to get done just as much as "science, exploration and invention." Just because it's work that seems tedious and boring to you doesn't mean it's not valuable to either the person paying for it or the person doing it.

Does it though? Look at the health insurance industry, Aetna pulls in $15B and has $3B in overhead. Couldn't automation cut out (nearly) all the people involved in that overhead. They spent $20 million pulling levers to get a better deal for themselves in Washington alone. This is worse than drone work, it's drone work that kills people.

Well, if we're going to drill down a layer and talk about specific companies and the specific work that is done for them, rather than paint entire classes of people as worthless, then sure, we can find all sorts of "meaningless" work.

Health insurance is actually a very good example if you want to find meaningless drone work, because of the rent seeking you describe and because of other perverse things that come about due to government intervention in that market. That's work that nobody would do if there wasn't a government regulating that industry. You could make an argument that all of that work is meaningless and human beings should be freed from doing it.

Of course, you could also argue that work is no less necessary simply because the government exists and intervenes in healthcare, because the government exists and is going to intervene in healthcare whether we like it or not. Thus, having drones at the office to lobby governments is valuable to Aetna. And I'm sure someone from Aetna would claim that they have to spend that $20 million or else they'd be unable to provide health insurance at all. Which is also a ludicrous claim, but a lot of companies seem to be getting out of health insurance lately...

Re: The Future of Not Working

#185

Post by adrianN »

cannonpr wrote: post #183
adrianN wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you honestly suggesting that a large part of the population can be trained to become research mathematicians?

Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it ? That asides, research mathematics is only a small subset of mental tasks available to humans. There are a lot of areas that could benefit from "computation" Laws, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology. We seem to have forgotten how much of our society is based on how our thought is applied to knowledge. Thought rather…

intelligence and mathematial ability can't be taught very well

Re: The Future of Not Working

#186

Post by powertower »

cannonpr wrote: post #183
adrianN wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you honestly suggesting that a large part of the population can be trained to become research mathematicians?

Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it ? That asides, research mathematics is only a small subset of mental tasks available to humans. There are a lot of areas that could benefit from "computation" Laws, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology. We seem to have forgotten how much of our society is based on how our thought is applied to knowledge. Thought rather…

> Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it?

Yes. The aptitude of higher abstract thinking varies greatly among different people and groups.

If you are really curious, check out the IQ test about pulling info from a sports column.

After that, your question becomes similar to asking why every short person can't be taught/trained to do well on a professional basketball team.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#187

Post by eternalban »

bennettfeely wrote: post #156
Razengan wrote: post #135

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. D…

> Mandate reversible sterilization at birth. This sounds like an absolutely atrocious idea ripe for corruption. It would be only a matter of time before those programs target the poor, those who whose political views, religious views, or ethnic origins are unwanted or inconvenient.

If you are willing to go that far, why not "mandate" no robots?

Re: The Future of Not Working

#188

Post by anovikov »

This looks so shiny only because the experiment is low-scale. In a country with an acute shortage of access to capital, small money explainably gives huge returns. If it was done to every, or even every poor, household in Kenya, it won't have resulted in anything but inflation and probably riots/genocide/burning of Give Directly workers for witchcraft. If everyone could buy that fishnet, fish in Lake Victoria will run out in a month, and almost everyone who did that will have simply lost that money. Further advancement will need a ton of capital AND education, and tradition of legal system to sustain complex companies that depend on intangible assets... Simply put, require a first world country to be done in. Handing out $22 a month to every Kenyan would do absolutely nothing for him - at least many times less than handing out $22 to 0.01% of Kenyans.

It's not like i don't believe in UBI. There are few other visible solutions to the automation problem (other may be economic incentivizing - like through tax breaks - and cultural promotion of resurrection of personal servants as a mass occupation) - but it can't work as good as this example simply because it doesn't scale so well.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#189

Post by NumberCruncher »

marmot777 wrote: post #121
NumberCruncher wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem is that programs like this does not change anything except making us first world citizens feeling comfortable about not having the power to stop exploitation of a whole continent. It is like a drug for the society making us feel good when we should feel bad and ashamed. And calling it "basic income" is just propaganda.

I don't think that's the point. This program's testing the basic income and I think the idea is there will be a number of tests under different conditions. If this concept proves viable, then that could serve as a model to scale it up. The problem this is trying to solve isn't that of just the developing world, the developed world is sliding toward a catastrophic failure of the system that depends on there being a jo…

>> This program's testing the basic income and I think the idea is there will be a number of tests under different conditions.

IMHO there have been enough test for basic income where the basic income was decoupled from the free job market. It is called socialism / communism. All of these tests failed badly and ruined whole generations. No sane person have lived behind the iron curtain would consider it as a sustainable economic solution.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#190

Post by kayoone »

sametmax wrote: post #178
Razengan wrote: post #135

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. D…

You don't need mandatory sterilizatiion. Men are scared enough of unwanted pregnancy. Just offer free VASALGEL procedure on and off for anybody and the problem will solve itself. Now we just need the procedure to become legal in the us, but i'm very eager to use it myself and have high hopes for it.

Birth rate in western countries is hardly the problem.
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