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America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

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Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#81

Post by ben_w »

markus_zhang wrote: post #32
dttze wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.

If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.

> If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.

Only in a democracy.

China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway.

America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...

(I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#82

Post by elcritch »

markus_zhang wrote: post #10
tartuffe78 wrote: post #2

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the comm…

The elites leaving common folk relatively alone would be a best case scenario. If people are free to build and supply for themselves with UBI then life wouldn’t be bad.

Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#83

Post by Fricken »

yannis wrote: post #5

How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.

The US has squandered its advanced manufacturing capabilities, warning bells have been sounding for decades, and yes, those chickens will eventually come home to roost. Not yet but soon.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#84

Post by themaninthedark »

razakel wrote: post #19
RealityVoid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work. I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tell…

>Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives. UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.

I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations.

I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.

People are weird and different.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#85

Post by ben_w »

krapp wrote: post #44
llamaimperative wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount? When minimum wage rises, yes rents rise. When high paying employers come to an area, yes rents rise. These are a lot more random/diffuse in the market than UBI is, but they still cause the same effect. Can you please explain why rents go up at all?

>Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount? What does it matter? You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income. Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage. And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters…

> You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.

I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.

That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.

If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.

This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:

(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest

(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up

(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)

(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.

(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#86

Post by decimalenough »

imtringued wrote: post #6

China is known to scale out in the low end market without having a strategy to go upmarket. Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.

I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here.

Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price:

https://www.xpeng.com/g6

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#87

Post by charlie0 »

outside1234 wrote: post #61
ryandrake wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most participants in mature markets know approximately what percentage of the public's wallet they can grab. Obviously it's not 100% for any of them, but they all know what they can get away with. My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income, landlords would respond by raising rent by about $400-$500 or so, grocery stores would raise their prices by a percentage of that new income, and so on for all b…

One market where we see this effect, I think, is university education. Access to cheap loans has lead to an explosion in costs.

Beat me to it and you're absolutely right. There's no need to guess what's going to happen here, we've already seen what happens elsewhere when the government injects a lot of money.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#88

Post by slothtrop »

ben_w wrote: post #74
markus_zhang wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the comm…

If "meaning" was a good argument against UBI, then nobody would want pensions, because UBI is exactly the same as setting the state pension age to zero.

Leaving aside that older people aren't as enthused about FT work they've known for 30 years, many of them keep jobs or get bored and lonely without them. Not everyone wants to sit around crafting useless projects, or consuming. Creating value for others and connecting (and status signaling) can provide meaning, and granted in retirement there are other vectors for that made available such as volunteering.

It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#89

Post by Analemma_ »

yannis wrote: post #5

How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.

When there's no social safety net and you live in a society which insists on "he who does not work, does not eat", anything which sidelines labor is not "perceived as" an existential threat, it is an existential threat. And recognizing it as such is not paranoia, but straightforward realism.

If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#90

Post by treis »

tartuffe78 wrote: post #2

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
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