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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

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Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#291

Post by godelski »

theonemind wrote: post #28
Apreche wrote: post #3

The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limit…

  > Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
You can't rule over the dead.

Though it's unfortunate that those in power don't seem to understand that their lives are much better than kings and queens of the past. Even the average person in a first world country lives much better than royalty from even a few hundred years ago.

It's ironic, the pursuit of power usually limits its own growth. To maximize power you have to give it up, because it's multidimensional

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#292

Post by godelski »

bodge5000 wrote: post #73
theonemind wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limit…

If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money EDIT: An ob…

The companies are moving so fast and don't seem to care if things are rough around the edges. They're really betting big that AI is going to be unhackable.

Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#293

Post by schnitzelstoat »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #279
insane_dreamer wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reskill find new work except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed neither of these conditions are happening this time around so we have not "been there before"

> except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge I think it's worse than that. The frontier labs are purporting that there won't be any "new work" required in the future—starting with knowledge workers and then eventually snaking down into more manual labor jobs via robotics. The irony is that these same labs are still hiring engineers to build the machinery they're so convinced will make…

Perhaps - there is a massive gulf between the LLMs and the sort of models required by robotics though so I'm not convinced progress will be quick there.

I have a young son and I intend to teach him robotics as a hobby partly because it is where I believe the high-paying jobs will be in 20 years.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#294

Post by munksbeer »

bobsmooth wrote: post #258
marcocampos wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things some people on HN believe leaves me baffled.

HN used to be even more libertarian than it currently is.

I don't think HN is libertarian at all. In fact, I can barely tell the difference between reddit and HN now. Anti-capitalism is the dominant sentiment here now.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#295

Post by Yizahi »

Aurornis wrote: post #36

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than d…

My total tax load is well above 50% if I include employer share he pays for me. That's a on very conservative bottom quartile IT salary. Far far from the USA ones. And then there is VAT which I won't even tray to include. I'm so thrilled to start paying 100%+ tax for OBI (Other's Basic Income) :) .

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#296

Post by card_zero »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #278
FridgeSeal wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It’s totally fine guys, if we give billionaires even more money it will totally all work out and be fine! Everything is ok and our benevelont overlords will take earnest care of us, despite literally never having shown the merest inclination to do that ever before”.

You jest, but the wonderful thing is billionaires are mortal. The known anti-semite and Hitler admirer Henry Ford's chartiable foundation added DEI to its mandate in 2021. Andrew Carnegie, an infamous monopolist and strike crusher...his charitable foundations helps fund science education to this day, and his university has graduated countless engineers. The point is... billionaires will die... their capital can conti…

I wonder what opinions a 163-year-old Henry Ford would have about equality, today, especially if he had no threat of death hanging over him. Execution (by proxy, via death) seems a needlessly harsh way to get rid of people's entrenched ideas.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#297

Post by Yizahi »

skybrian wrote: post #271
einrealist wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly doubt it will even provide us with a roof over our heads. In an unconstrained market, the pressure to extract as much as possible from the UBI will be enormous. The amount of UBI will probably always lag years behind the actual amount required to create a liveable situation, and increasing its amount will be a constant political struggle. UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement. Fai…

UBI could be done a lot of different ways, but it's a natural fit with progressive taxes. A UBI funded by taxes makes taxes more progressive. It's somewhat like the standard tax deduction, except you still get it if you don't pay any tax. It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on. The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out aut…

Making a good progressive tax scale is a task which a freshmen can do in a hour. The problem is not a better tax scale, the problem is how to find actual shit to tax. Doing nothing, we have the modern state of economy, when there are poor people having small to no tax basis, then "middle(lol)" class exposing all their assets and funds fully to the tax office and paying maximum taxes on this planet among everyone because of that, and then passing middle class we have people becoming richer and richer but "somehow" paying fewer and fewer taxes, culminating in billionaires who legally have zero assets, zero saving and zero income. You tax tax such a person 5%, or 50% or over 9000%, the end math will always be zero. Good luck funding UBI from taxing billionaires :) . And salaried people actually paying max bracket taxes already can't fund the whole planet by themselves, math is not mathing here.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#298

Post by cucumber3732842 »

daedrdev wrote: post #184
Aurornis wrote: post #36

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than d…

Made harder by the fact that we make it illegal and hostile to build housing

"It's not illegal, you can still do it if you jump through the mile long list of rules we've come up with to theoretically advance noble goals but in reality they're all like 10% noble goals and 90% driving business to parties we've liked all the years with the end result being massively raising the cost floor and minimum viable development"

-people who've never tried to do anything involving real estate or land development

And then these idiots have the gall to complain "why isn't anyone doing infill development" and "why isn't anyone putting apartment buildings on small lots?" etc, etc. IDK, maybe because your dumb ass made it illegal to do those things in a way that makes them have a snowball's chance in hell of being in the black. And that's just residential. Commercial is even worse because you get fucked by all the rules that apply to structures and then you get fucked again by all the rules that apply to your use. And don't get me started on how much of this is inherited from the feds in the form of "to qualify for grants the state shall adopt..." type rules which the states then roll downhill onto the municipalities. This is why every "new X" site plan looks damn near the same regardless of what state it's in. They're all designed to comply with rules that were written to satisfy the same requirements.

See also:

"But the regulations I like are the good ones"

Those people are stupid too. That's like littering and saying "but it's only a little, my trash isn't responsible for how dirty the whole place is"

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#300

Post by tasuki »

I'm confused. Is the article arguing that UBI leads to more inequality rather than less? What would then lead to less inequality?

> modern citizens under this system are freed from work only to be permanently trapped as captive consumers.

Wat? Trapped in what? This makes zero sense to me.

> The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations.

What is the proposed alternative? The (rather bad) alternative I see is no UBI and let the masses starve...

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