131–140 of 511 posts
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A UBI in the salary range of an Amazon warehouse worker would be on the order of 1/3rd GDP.
30K / year * 100 million people = 3 trillion. 1/6th GDP. Lots of money.
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Of course, and with good reasons. Before you wrote your comment, did you stop to think why people work inside Amazon's warehouses if the working conditions are so oppressive? It's because the alternatives are still worse. And now they'll lose those jobs and have to face those alternatives. Of course those of us who perceive this as an injustice will complain. The complaint is not directed at Amazon only, it's at the…
Can I just clarify: you're saying that Amazon, despite offering jobs which are (apparently) less bad than other alternatives, are participating in systemic oppression of the working class? In your view, what should Amazon do to not systemically oppress the working class?
Convert itself into a co-op:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Definition_...
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A UBI in the salary range of an Amazon warehouse worker would be on the order of 1/3rd GDP.
30K / year * 100 million people = 3 trillion. 1/6th GDP. Lots of money.
Clever use of UBI also allows redoing many labour laws & protections because having UBI to fall back on will substantially improve the bargaining power of workers so they won't need the same protections.
* Sorry don't have a reference, seen this discussed a few places as common knowledge.
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Automation isn't the problem. These jobs being lost are terrible and no one should do them. The problem, as always, is capitalism. Amazon wouldn't be where it is today without its massive workforce, including its army of factory workers. None of the people losing their jobs will benefit from this increase in productivity, though. Those gains will go only to the people at the top. Meanwhile, there will be more competi…
> The problem, as always, is capitalism So other economic systems aren't interested in efficiency gains and exponential growth?
Surprised to find so many modern Luddites in comments. History lessons says that new professions will appear.
Very few people are actually suggesting that automation is bad, per se; the concern many people have is that the rate of change needs to be managed such that significant numbers of people aren't left behind. People can only retrain so fast, and some people will never be able to effectively retrain. Automation that suddenly puts them out of work needs to account for what they're supposed to do, and hopefully it's something better than "sit at home and drink themselves to death / overdose on opiates / engage in crime".
I'd rather intentionally put the brakes on automation, even though it's a hit to efficiency (and depresses the value of labor -- automation makes human labor more valuable over time), if the alternative you get with unlimited automation is a massive disenfranchisement of working people and consequent destabilization of society.
Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. All the efficiency gains of that automation are going to pale in comparison to the damage and loss that will happen during one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat.
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UBI. Then we can be gleeful about more automation.
A UBI in the salary range of an Amazon warehouse worker would be on the order of 1/3rd GDP.
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Can I just clarify: you're saying that Amazon, despite offering jobs which are (apparently) less bad than other alternatives, are participating in systemic oppression of the working class? In your view, what should Amazon do to not systemically oppress the working class?
> In your view, what should Amazon do to not systemically oppress the working class? Convert itself into a co-op: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Definition_...
Presumably they'll do pretty well since there won't be any big bad corporate overlords to steal the value of their labor.
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UBI. Then we can be gleeful about more automation.
People need to feel useful to others. Right now, in the US, we fulfill that need through work. Work is an integral part of our culture. If you make a whole swath of the population feel redundant, especially practical, no-nonsense people who are used to having work define who they are, they are not going to adjust well. They are quite different than college-educated hippies who would rather get more education and go s…
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Sure, it's good news, just not for the people you're thinking of. Think about people who work in Amazon warehouses despite those conditions. Why do they do that? Because the alternatives are worse. This just removes these jobs and leaves them to face those alternatives.
I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs. Not quite so many people would be saying, "This is great! I for one look forward to technological advancement." I do think the future should involve more automation, I just think we should be -- I dunno, a little less gleeful about it and think about the people it's impacting.
Technology changes so much that half of all programming jobs that exist today will be gone in 10 years. Some new ones will be created though.
The scary thing to me though, is if industry truely embraces open source/block chain. We could get into a state where most software is open... and fixing it is a bounty system, then 20% of programmers would make 80% of the money as they build AI to indentify opportunities, and solutions.