Average Is Over

Or more accurately, the average has changed.

Here's hoping the endgame of programmers putting themselves out of work is the nerd rapture (friendly A.I., post-scarcity, etc.).

But from what I can tell in history, the future tends to turn out much weirder than the human imagination can conceive.

I didn't read anything about giving anyone a PhD?

I could be wrong, but he's talking less about "shifting" average to include a PhD, to shifting how average people are going to have to fend for themselves - which is to fight to be above average. As another commenter pointed out, this is impossible (if everyone's special, no one is), but it's also good to mention that you get to choose whether or not you want to be average. Sure, you can rely on being a cog in a machine, but if you do that, you just jumped into a super-competitive market dominated by machines and cheap overseas labor.

So, you can either relegate yourself to that fate or choose something different.

I believe his point was that there's a shift in the past could escape with being average because it was localized and there was less overall competition for jobs because of geographic limitations.

The math is that the market for average has been commoditized over 7 billion people + machines, rather than the 300 million people we used to. That brings the level of average much, much lower for certain types of works. So, the solution isn't to try and raise your qualifications level in a pool of average people, but rather jump in a different pool altogether, where your value as a worker is not so easily commoditized (knowledge workers, developing fields & emerging tech).

For anyone familiar with Seth Godin, this talk isn't very new at all - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_averag...

There is also a defect in this comparison in that the journalists weren't helping displace average joe's jobs, but programmers are.

I tend to agree with that solution, though I think there are more and less sustainable vs. conflict-inducing ways of structuring it. The simplest way is just to pay out cash collected from taxes, but that's always subject to conflict around "my tax money going to support lazy bums" type stuff, and easy to cut (or fiddle with in various ways to meet other budgetary goals).

More sustainable basic incomes tend to be structured as royalties imo, like Alaska's oil fund. One possibility would be to look at what might happen in a future where agriculture is mainly mechanized, so in effect food is being grown by robots. Initially what that'll mean is whoever got in place first will profit from them; whoever had the land and the capital to invest in the robots will then own the results of their production, even in a hypothetical future where they run 100% on autopilot henceforth. So it's a sort of strong-dependence-on-initial-conditions type situation, where who gets the results of the robots' labor depends basically on who was on top in the last pre-robot generation (granted, it may not be a purely black-and-white pre-robot/robot transition). I think in that case we'd have to eventually (somehow) transition towards a bunch of arable land + robots being held in trust for the population as a whole, splitting up the proceeds, or at least a portion of them, like the Alaska oil fund.

Lots of details and questions around exactly how the numbers work out, but at a high level I like a solution of not intruding much into the "normal" part of the economy, like humans doing things for other humans, but operating some basic minerals/land/agriculture in some sort of trust arrangement, with proceeds distributed to everyone, as their share of the proceeds of the earth+robots (as opposed to the proceeds of other humans' labor).