The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

The topics of "boredom, vice and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor" come up whenever there is unearned income (from the point of view of the recipient). In this area, UBI and welfare benefits are very different from pensions, royalties or rents which - from the point of view of the recipient - have all been earned (through prior work) and thus don't come with indignity / stigma attached.

Inherited wealth is in some ways comparable and this is why there exist many examples where heirs have ruined family fortunes by desparately trying to make their own mark. (And many heirs of family fortunes would probably score high on the "vice" rankings, too.)

Look (because these posts don't seem to sit well with the HN crowd): I'm not against a UBI. I'm just saying that it will not solve all the problems. Getting people money to live is only one piece of the equation. Making it socially acceptable (both regarding the inside perspective of the recipients themselves and their self-esteem as well as regarding the outside view of society) to live off of UBI instead of being in regular employment will IMHO be far more challenging and will take time (maybe generations).

From a historical perspective your reservation is totally fair. But I think the issue is a lot more complex than just looking at the impact automation has had in the past. Here are a few points worth mulling over:

1. Automation in the past has been good at increasing worker productivity, and making new avenues of work possible. This is true going forward too. But each new generation of technology isn't "something we've seen before", it's a new thing with new consequences. Technological development isn't cyclical, so estimating the impact a new technology will have on the impact previous technologies have had is a poor model. This isn't to say the consequences will be bad, just that they're hard to anticipate. For the most part, the historical perspective is probably right though.

2. Automation in the past has been very effective in improving worker productivity, but developments in AI and robotics are looking at ways to supplant workers (i.e. electric cars don't improve our ability to drive, it removes our need for drivers). While in the broad sense this trend is good, and people will over time shift into new industries, it is going to be disruptive. Timelines will have a big impact on the shock. New industries won't spring up over night.

3. The timeline for this level of automation is much shorter than previous automation trends. The shift in agriculture happened over generations. The shift caused by driverless cars will likely happen in less than a decade. Add to that the efficiency of market pressures we have today - once one business is able to shift entirely to an autonomous fleet and save money over their competitors, all their competitors will have to follow suite to remain competitive. Entire industries could be displaced, and those workers will need to move somewhere.

4. This is more hypothetical and longer term, but it gets at what I think is the general fear around automation. Imagine we develop the ability to automate any unskilled job (whether through broad automation improvements or development of an actual general-purpose automaton). The primary factor in whether a business would choose to employ that automaton over a human is cost. The automaton is a once-off fixed cost, whereas a human is an ongoing cost. Once the cost of the automation is lower than paying a salary, humans will no longer be employed in that role.

5. Following from this, if it's the unskilled jobs that get automated, where do those workers go? At this stage, even if automation is creating new lines of work, why wouldn't that work also be automated? Basically, once we automate unskilled work, we never need unskilled workers again. In order to find work they'll need to skill up, which takes time and money. And if it takes a year to train a worker to a level that they're a net benefit, why not invest that money instead into automating the skilled work too?

I don't see the contradiction? If you inherit a lot of wealth you're likely to remain wealthy. Simultaneously you may not be motivated to work much and contribute to society.

The idea that technology will cause widespread job-loss and economic upheaval is such an old fear, and it never works that way. Technological innovations lead to wealth creation 100% of the time, along with more opportunities for more people, even if some jobs are initially replaced with other jobs. "This time is different" is announced everytime, and it's always the same.

This book is very good for anybody wishing to understand basic economic theory and see many examples throughout history of this exact debate taking place over and over and over again: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ (see the chapter "The Curse of Machinery").

> “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,”

It may not give them dignity, but it protects them from poverty, which strips dignity. It also protects them from vice-based-on-need, just not vice-based-on-boredom.