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

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

#161

Post by edblarney »

andai wrote: post #156
edblarney wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs " I'm afraid your statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'the economy' is. 'The economy' is people providing services and building products for one another. So that guy who waited on you at the restaurant, the girl who did your payroll, the guy who delivered your mail, the person monitoring you…

Most of them can be automated.

True, but not for a very long time.

The day someone that can make a robot to clean my bathroom and then make me a ham sandwich, I'll get worried.

In the meantime, other industries like sports, entertainment, tourism, etc. expand.

One are that will be the last to be automated is 'taking care of the elderly' - it's human-intense and that market is only expanding.

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

#163

Post by AnthonyMouse »

roryisok wrote: post #119
fictioncircle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? It is largely a desire for a control mechanism where the sheep are inherently dependent on the mecha…

I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions. leverage If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerf…

> but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need".

More likely the opposite. Making $12K/year sucks. You can make $12K/year + 17K/year by flipping burgers, but that still sucks. Much better to go to college and then make $12K/year + 70K/year.

And a UBI allows more people to do that because it reduces the risk of quitting a bad job to go to school.

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

#164

Post by gech »

cnnsucks wrote: post #158
TheSmiddy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that giving someone just enough money to live will kill their motivation is insane. If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? Most UBI schemes are initially targeting around 1k per month which is nowhere near enough satisfy the vast majority of people.

"why do people still work 40+ hour weeks" Mostly it's about upbringing. People are taught to have expectations for themselves and they strive to fulfill them. 15h would be bare subsistence for most, and that's not good enough. The minute they can live their expectations without work they usually check out; e.g. 45 year old "retired" government workers bankrupting their muni/county/state with union negotiated pensions…

Both something that doesn't exist, and also something you've mischaracterized. Pensions are delayed payments for work already done.

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

#165

Post by gech »

rrggrr wrote: post #23

>McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. False. McAfee will find a corresponding increase in middle class jobs in India and China and elsewhere for the same time period. The narrative that says automation has destroyed the middle class is demonstrably overstated to the point of being close to false. Employers arbitraged labor rates across borders…

You're stating that a positive cancels a negative?

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

rrggrr wrote: post #23

>McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. False. McAfee will find a corresponding increase in middle class jobs in India and China and elsewhere for the same time period. The narrative that says automation has destroyed the middle class is demonstrably overstated to the point of being close to false. Employers arbitraged labor rates across borders…

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lowpro wrote: post #135
wilkommen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.

Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. Value is the point where they meet. Salaries of social works and EMTs are where the supply of those positions meet the need for those positions in any certain area. Art has a defined supply and demand, where the supply is high and demand is low (probably due to the fact you can buy copies of famous masterpieces for very cheap).

> Everything, including art, follows supply and demand.

It isn't about supply and demand, it's about transaction costs.

Suppose you could create a work of art that fifty million people would each value at 25c, so total value of two million dollars. Far more than enough to pay your wages for a year. But if you actually try to charge them, the credit card company wants 30c + 3% per person (consuming more than the entire value) and other payment mechanisms suffer similarly infeasible costs in money or inconvenience or otherwise.

But if we would pay the artist unconditionally and then they create art and give it away, we would get two million dollars worth of art for $12,000 and with no transaction costs.

Meanwhile this allows some of the artists to become famous and then charge prices for their art that exceed the transaction costs, and now they're paying taxes and funding the UBI for the next generation of artists/inventors/experimentalists/etc.

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

#168

Post by AnthonyMouse »

notahacker wrote: post #136
ar0 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Inher…

Inherited wealth is if anything a generous comparison, since those eligible to inherit wealth are often encouraged by their parents to jump through sizeable work-ethic related hoops to ensure their inheritance, and inheritance is usually with good reason more heavily taxed than most money transfers. UBI is all about assuming that it's entirely unreasonable to set thresholds of need or effort to state handouts when we…

The anti-nationalist argument makes no sense given that we don't provide most existing forms of social assistance to non-citizens either, and anyway there is no inherent reason that a UBI couldn't be provided to non-citizen legal residents if people so desired it.

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

#169

Post by shams93 »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #80
philipkglass wrote: post #43

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A u…

The idea that giving someone just enough money to live will kill their motivation is insane. If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? Most UBI schemes are initially targeting around 1k per month which is nowhere near enough satisfy the vast majority of people.

It needs to be indexed to GDP, it should not be welfare it should be each citizen's cut of the machine driven GDP. That won't stop people from forming new kinds of human markets and selling their art, or doing things like benefitting from a scientific breakthrough, people who own the machines may benefit the most, but if you tie it to GDP and its a cut of the economy rather than a welfare check far fewer people will sit around and get loaded. They will be motivated to do the thing that everyone told them "don't quit your day job" for, the dreams of childhood coming into manifestation for the masses for thee first time in human history.

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

#170

Post by maverick_iceman »

goda90 wrote: post #33
problems wrote: post #7

People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular. I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.

Those things freed up people to do more things that require mental instead of physical labor. Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to? Spiritual and emotional labor? I struggle to envision how we can continue to keep people prospering in a money based economy on just those kinds of work.

Mental labor has been automated for a long time. Slide rules, electronic computers all these automated vast amounts of mental labor.
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