6 ms·

This guy frankly sounds like a monster, willing and eager to put company profits above all else. That said, he raises valid points. If a machine can do a bette

This guy frankly sounds like a monster, willing and eager to put company profits above all else. That said, he raises valid points. If a machine can do a better job for less money, why shouldn't a machine do it? But he fails to mention hidden costs. What do we do with the workers who lose their jobs to machines? Eventually there will be no work to retrain them to do. I can envision a future where machines build other machines and there's just a few executives remaining at the top of some companies, collecting ever-increasing profits as workers are eliminated. I want to say that a universal basic income will alleviate the problem, but are there other options? How do we live in a world where work has been mostly eliminated?

bcherny 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ownership This doesn't work so well when goods are scarce, but...
awa 10y ago
Its not company profits, he clearly makes the point that customers in many faces prefer to interact with machines than humans and its cheaper to have machines than humans. The work of human in the author's world is designing machines and automate the next step of tasks that haven't been done or spend time on doing more creative tasks and be more inventive.
- freshyill 10y ago
  It's both. Note, I did say "do a better job for less money". As someone who is a bit of an introvert with bad hearing, I often dread simple interactions where there's a potential for confusion or a language barrier, so I love a self checkout or a touch screen ordering experience. Cheaper or not, this is usually a better experience for me. Still, that doesn't solve the problem of how do people put food on the table? We can't all build and design machines.
mod 10y ago
I don't know how far it will get anyone, but I like to think that craftsmanship will be greatly valued. I truly enjoy things that someone made by hand. The quality isn't even always important. I buy chests and trunks and shop-built tools even when they're not particularly good quality. I enjoy them, they're unique, and they have a story that you can sometimes decipher from the tooling marks and clues left in the wood. I think such things will always fetch a premium, and perhaps when robots can take care of all the immediate issues--manufacturing, delivery, food production, whatever--then we will see a sort of reversal and people will start to pursue some more intimate, small-scale creation. Off the top of my head, I can think of quite a number of things I enjoy that robots can't provide for me (yet?): home-made baked goods, pasture-raised eggs, hand-created furniture/kitchen items/artwork, learning, creativity (with a personal story, especially!), well-trained animals, etc. That said, I'm not a typical consumer, and those things I'm interested in are also things I am interested in producing myself. Still, I would not be surprised to see a barter type of economy spring up alongside a basic income.
- willholloway 10y ago
  I agree and like those things too. Sadly the economics of producing those things in the current environment typically lead to subsistence levels for the crafstmen. In the American economy of 2017 if you don't have scale, pop, leverage, access to the discount window etc... you are going to be poor or close to it.
brokenmasonjars 10y ago
Basic income is a start. Then they figure out what to spend it on. Ideally PhDs. Of which you use that to work in that specialization; solving problems, figuring things out. Patenting discoveries, selling patents, patents will go up as companies rich in cash by not having employees will bid on said patents .. or copyrights, thus those will increase and enrich those who filed such to pay for more research. Partly I feel one of the best things we can do is redesign grade school, say from 7th-12th grade. The majority of it would be the same I guess..but there would be a strong orientation towards teaching individuals how to invest and trade; let them get hands on experience in actually doing it and so forth. We'd develop a universal basic income that people would start getting after graduation. They can invest/trade with it. This is not going to be the sole income point, but instead they can use that to pay for school. Some wont want to get an education, which I understand. So they do other things that young adults attempt to do, start bands and what not. Many will fail at that particular attempt; but hey they get basic income and know how to trade with it so they at least wont starve. I think skills like crafts will be important too despite robots. One if you know how to make a good hand made suit you are set, the rich are your clients. Blacksmithing odd items could be something in demand. A hobby of mine is working with metal, I make a lot of cool stuff, sometimes I sell or trade, but usually I keep and forget about it.. usually until someone offers to buy it. Either or, I think the future is not so bleak, we just need basic income, maybe fix the schools a little bit, encourage people to get PhDs, and also spread y combinators about.
edbaskerville 10y ago
Short version: how about we just literally give everyone a job that needs one? Long version: As Hyman Minsky* points out, financial capitalism is inherently unstable, in the sense of having perturbations that are big enough and frequent enough to transform the lives of individual human beings. Our impending wave of automation is one of those perturbations. We're probably not going to get rid of capitalism anytime soon, and even if we did that through violent revolution, the resulting perturbations would almost certainly be worse. So we've got to adjust what we've got. Plus, capitalism does have some good features. We could literally ban robots from taking some kinds of jobs, but that's a temporary fix, and do we honestly want people driving trucks all night, hopped up on drugs, in order to feed their family that they never see? We should get rid of shitty jobs where we can. I'm not sold on universal basic income. It's really expensive, and it eliminates one of the best features of capitalism, which is working for your money. Working for your money gives people meaning, purpose, and a network of human relationships, which help promote a healthy society where people feel valuable and valued. So how about this: universal basic employment. The government literally guarantees everybody a job. At a living wage, for a reasonable time commitment (less than 40 hours a week, I hope). As the capitalistic side of the economy shrinks, government automatically creates jobs to pick up the slack. Capitalism coupled to an adaptive socialist job-creation program. BUT WAIT, you scream, THAT WILL JUST EXPAND FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY AND EVERYONE WILL END UP EMPLOYED IN A SOCIALIST HELL! Devil, details. I would argue that a related deep issue in American society is the breakdown of our local communities. So let's kill two birds with one stone: build an adaptive hierarchy of taxpayer-funded job creation driven from the bottom up. Local councils meet with their neighbors, figure out the kinds of things that need to be done, built, whatever in their communities, match their needs with the local unemployed talent pool. Counties monitor the local needs. States monitor the county needs. And the feds feed money as needed and operate with a light touch. All these local community jobs pay the same, and it's a living wage. This serves as a soft wage floor in place of a hard minimum wage. It's a bit like an Americorps that pays enough to support you and your family, all the time, for anyone that needs a job. It has a lot of features of the New Deal, actually. * Underappreciated economist, newly resurgent since the 2008 financial crisis. If you took some economics classes in college, you should be able to understand his writing, but he's not a great writer. I'm just barely getting familiar with standard economic terminology, so his stuff has been a really hard slog.

bcherny 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ownership This doesn't work so well when goods are scarce, but...

awa 10y ago

Its not company profits, he clearly makes the point that customers in many faces prefer to interact with machines than humans and its cheaper to have machines than humans. The work of human in the author's world is designing machines and automate the next step of tasks that haven't been done or spend time on doing more creative tasks and be more inventive.

freshyill 10y ago
It's both. Note, I did say "do a better job for less money". As someone who is a bit of an introvert with bad hearing, I often dread simple interactions where there's a potential for confusion or a language barrier, so I love a self checkout or a touch screen ordering experience. Cheaper or not, this is usually a better experience for me. Still, that doesn't solve the problem of how do people put food on the table? We can't all build and design machines.

mod 10y ago

I don't know how far it will get anyone, but I like to think that craftsmanship will be greatly valued. I truly enjoy things that someone made by hand. The quality isn't even always important. I buy chests and trunks and shop-built tools even when they're not particularly good quality. I enjoy them, they're unique, and they have a story that you can sometimes decipher from the tooling marks and clues left in the wood. I think such things will always fetch a premium, and perhaps when robots can take care of all the immediate issues--manufacturing, delivery, food production, whatever--then we will see a sort of reversal and people will start to pursue some more intimate, small-scale creation. Off the top of my head, I can think of quite a number of things I enjoy that robots can't provide for me (yet?): home-made baked goods, pasture-raised eggs, hand-created furniture/kitchen items/artwork, learning, creativity (with a personal story, especially!), well-trained animals, etc. That said, I'm not a typical consumer, and those things I'm interested in are also things I am interested in producing myself. Still, I would not be surprised to see a barter type of economy spring up alongside a basic income.

willholloway 10y ago
I agree and like those things too. Sadly the economics of producing those things in the current environment typically lead to subsistence levels for the crafstmen. In the American economy of 2017 if you don't have scale, pop, leverage, access to the discount window etc... you are going to be poor or close to it.

brokenmasonjars 10y ago

Basic income is a start. Then they figure out what to spend it on. Ideally PhDs. Of which you use that to work in that specialization; solving problems, figuring things out. Patenting discoveries, selling patents, patents will go up as companies rich in cash by not having employees will bid on said patents .. or copyrights, thus those will increase and enrich those who filed such to pay for more research. Partly I feel one of the best things we can do is redesign grade school, say from 7th-12th grade. The majority of it would be the same I guess..but there would be a strong orientation towards teaching individuals how to invest and trade; let them get hands on experience in actually doing it and so forth. We'd develop a universal basic income that people would start getting after graduation. They can invest/trade with it. This is not going to be the sole income point, but instead they can use that to pay for school. Some wont want to get an education, which I understand. So they do other things that young adults attempt to do, start bands and what not. Many will fail at that particular attempt; but hey they get basic income and know how to trade with it so they at least wont starve. I think skills like crafts will be important too despite robots. One if you know how to make a good hand made suit you are set, the rich are your clients. Blacksmithing odd items could be something in demand. A hobby of mine is working with metal, I make a lot of cool stuff, sometimes I sell or trade, but usually I keep and forget about it.. usually until someone offers to buy it. Either or, I think the future is not so bleak, we just need basic income, maybe fix the schools a little bit, encourage people to get PhDs, and also spread y combinators about.

edbaskerville 10y ago

Short version: how about we just literally give everyone a job that needs one? Long version: As Hyman Minsky* points out, financial capitalism is inherently unstable, in the sense of having perturbations that are big enough and frequent enough to transform the lives of individual human beings. Our impending wave of automation is one of those perturbations. We're probably not going to get rid of capitalism anytime soon, and even if we did that through violent revolution, the resulting perturbations would almost certainly be worse. So we've got to adjust what we've got. Plus, capitalism does have some good features. We could literally ban robots from taking some kinds of jobs, but that's a temporary fix, and do we honestly want people driving trucks all night, hopped up on drugs, in order to feed their family that they never see? We should get rid of shitty jobs where we can. I'm not sold on universal basic income. It's really expensive, and it eliminates one of the best features of capitalism, which is working for your money. Working for your money gives people meaning, purpose, and a network of human relationships, which help promote a healthy society where people feel valuable and valued. So how about this: universal basic employment. The government literally guarantees everybody a job. At a living wage, for a reasonable time commitment (less than 40 hours a week, I hope). As the capitalistic side of the economy shrinks, government automatically creates jobs to pick up the slack. Capitalism coupled to an adaptive socialist job-creation program. BUT WAIT, you scream, THAT WILL JUST EXPAND FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY AND EVERYONE WILL END UP EMPLOYED IN A SOCIALIST HELL! Devil, details. I would argue that a related deep issue in American society is the breakdown of our local communities. So let's kill two birds with one stone: build an adaptive hierarchy of taxpayer-funded job creation driven from the bottom up. Local councils meet with their neighbors, figure out the kinds of things that need to be done, built, whatever in their communities, match their needs with the local unemployed talent pool. Counties monitor the local needs. States monitor the county needs. And the feds feed money as needed and operate with a light touch. All these local community jobs pay the same, and it's a living wage. This serves as a soft wage floor in place of a hard minimum wage. It's a bit like an Americorps that pays enough to support you and your family, all the time, for anyone that needs a job. It has a lot of features of the New Deal, actually. * Underappreciated economist, newly resurgent since the 2008 financial crisis. If you took some economics classes in college, you should be able to understand his writing, but he's not a great writer. I'm just barely getting familiar with standard economic terminology, so his stuff has been a really hard slog.