21–30 of 92 posts
I've heard universal basic income may be a viable approach, but I think it's unclear how it scales up as of yet. Regardless, I haven't seen better suggestions yet.
Anytime I see on HN suggestions that government is the solution my pessimist for the future gets some boost.
The government should do precisely NOTHING. The jobs don't belong to workers, so the premise is entirely wrong to begin with.
This is correct. It's not the government's job to provide you a job, it's a personal responsibility to find one, if you want one. If you seek one, the government might provide some minor worker abuse and discrimination protections, but this in no way implies you have entitlement to a job or even income.
Summarized ideas introduced in the article:
* Allowing for inflation to tackle unemployment (from 1.)
* Less monopole granting intellectual property laws (from 1.)
* Work-sharing programs (from 1.)
* Publicly funded higher education and training (from 1.)
* Subsidized education and training (from 2.)
* Making job benefits like health insurance and retirement funds more “portable,” (from 2.)
* Expanding the earned-income tax credit (from 3.)
> This set of proposals is based on the idea that the emerging wave of digital disruption won’t result in a permanent loss of demand for workers, but rather shifts in what types of work the economy needs.
[1] http://rooseveltinstitute.org/dont-fear-robots/
[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/2017-in-review/automat...
The government’s job should be to keep an eye that gains are shared broadly enough, and ensure increased productivity doesn’t cause excess environmental harm. (If the government funds Robotics research, all citizens should share in the windfall)
Maybe we all get assigned a robot as our "work" and we get the robot's pay.
>If the Robots Come for Our Jobs, What Should the Government Do? Nothing
The government should do precisely NOTHING. The jobs don't belong to workers, so the premise is entirely wrong to begin with.
This is correct. It's not the government's job to provide you a job, it's a personal responsibility to find one, if you want one. If you seek one, the government might provide some minor worker abuse and discrimination protections, but this in no way implies you have entitlement to a job or even income.
The article talks about how globalization caused automation to replace millions of factory workers. Factory jobs, aren't the greatest, especially before the 1970s, and in many parts of the world, are still awful. Similarly, If we could replace every mining job with robots we'd remove a lot of human abuse in many parts of the world.
You’d also remove the way for lots of people to make a living. The unemployed only know that making a living in a lousy industry is better than not making any living at all.
Do guaranteed minimum income. Give everybody a computer and lots of free time. If 0.001% of those people become hobbyist software developers it will pay for the program in a year. And we will probably get AI in two.
The total US tax revenue in 2017 was $3.422 trillion. If you split that evenly among 300 million people, each would get $11,000, which is half of the poverty line of $22,000. Even if you thought that little money was acceptable, to afford it you'd have to cut: 1. all military programs 2. all existing social security programs 3. all government infrastructure projects 4. all education programs 5. ...
The simplest solution is an automation tax which is revenue neutral. Any time automation moves in to an industry, the tax's revenues can be used to help transition those workers into other work, or give them at least an automation relief stipend. If we don't tax automation, what's to stop increasingly cheaper automation from replacing increasingly expensive first world workers? Especially when businesses are expected…