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We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados!

We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.

LanceH 7y ago
If robo cooks are truly inexpensive, we could feed a lot more people in need for less money.
- test6554 7y ago
  People are a lot like stray cats in that the more you feed them and house them, the more of them you have eventually. At some point, before we are all underwater, we are going to need to have a fertility discussion.
  - chillwaves 7y ago
    Long before you tell people they do not have a right to live, you will want to address consumption. Poor people are not consuming as much as rich.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    No, quite the other way around: the wealthier a country gets, the less kids are born as parents don't need as many of them to reproduce successfully. In fact this trend is so strong that countries like Japan or Germany are facing a really massive demographic problem as the working population shrinks over the next decades.
    - pmontra 7y ago
      IMHO the reason is that in rich societies people has many possible activities to perform. They feel that parenting kids is not one of the most attractive ways to spend their time on. Furthermore raising kids cost more in rich countries than in poor ones, so they can't afford as many as their parents or grandparents could.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Not in petro states, generally. And you only need one culturally persistent counterexample for this to end badly.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Cooking at home isn't expensive. Robot cooks will probably cost more than your kitchen.
  - contingencies 7y ago
    We will share them as public infrastructure.
    - JetSpiegel 7y ago
      Should the US Federal Government nationalize McDonald's then? It's already an ambassador for the country anyway.
zanny 7y ago
Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we need to provide for one another, to guarantee a quality of life worth living, even when you yourself aren't necessarily contributing to that productivity anymore. In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  This would be nice if it were true. Since the top 0.1% have figured out how to own the nation via politics and trying to dumb down the general populace to ignore what they're doing I don't have nearly as much confidence in automation as you do.
  - zanny 7y ago
    I'd go insane if I weren't optimistic that we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization. The alternative is our destruction anyway. Its going to happen in much the same way as space colonization or uploading our consciousness if we continue on. And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.
chrisco255 7y ago
Why wouldn't the price of food plummet in an automated world? The cost of labor is priced into everything you buy. I still think we're a few decades from these scenarios, but I am not willing to solve a theoretical problem (permanent unemployment) until it becomes a problem in reality. Right now we've got 3.7% unemployment despite all this tech. So I remain very skeptical of this theory playing out and UBI being necessary.
- desert_boi 7y ago
  Cost disease, i.e. things cost as much as they do because they always have. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  because in this case food prices are going to skyrocket in a climate change world.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  You can't grow food faster. You can only make more of it which requires more resources. The jobs being created today are mostly poverty level jobs or high end jobs and this trend is expected to continue which hollows out the middle class. Pure unemployment numbers aren't useful since the expected date increases with a tighter labor market haven't been happening at all. Once worker wages became decoupled from the value that they actually created, none of the idea that you're paid what your with was valid. Now you're paid what you can negotiate which depends entirely upon how much power you have. Most workers have none.
WalterBright 7y ago
> Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages. Can't make money by paying people to buy your products. Ford raised wages in order to attract better workers and reduce employee turnover.
toomanybeersies 7y ago
Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity, and we move away from the idea every adult should be required to work 40 hours a week to survive?
- lordlimecat 7y ago
  >Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.
  - krapp 7y ago
    What entirely new, previously impossible job does automating away McDonald's workers create, that formerly employed McDonald's workers are qualified for? Are we going to send them all to coding bootcamps so they can program the kiosks and... oh wait, those jobs are already taken, never mind. Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the number of people being automated out of work is sufficiently small that societies can easily reabsorb them into the workforce. But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
    - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
      Automated burger assembly machine operator.
    - balt_s 7y ago
      > What (..) job does automating away McDonald's workers create? This is going to sound like a crude joke, but it's not: baby maker. I am not hopeful about the future.
    - repolfx 7y ago
      But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale. If that were true then we'd see record unemployment and virtually no open job reqs. We see the opposite, therefore, it isn't true. In the UK unemployment is at near all time lows, wages are climbing 3x faster than inflation. It's a good time to be a worker despite equally record levels of automation. As for which jobs are absorbing people whose former work was automated, who knows? If you insist on endless cynicism, a lot of the people freed up by automation of food factory jobs went and got worthless degrees and now sit in comfy offices creating pointless PowerPoints, earning/burning money to justify the bosses departmental budget. Don't assume everyone who started out burger flipping stays in food service forever!
kapuasuite 7y ago
“Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.” This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.

LanceH 7y ago

If robo cooks are truly inexpensive, we could feed a lot more people in need for less money.

test6554 7y ago
People are a lot like stray cats in that the more you feed them and house them, the more of them you have eventually. At some point, before we are all underwater, we are going to need to have a fertility discussion.
- chillwaves 7y ago
  Long before you tell people they do not have a right to live, you will want to address consumption. Poor people are not consuming as much as rich.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  No, quite the other way around: the wealthier a country gets, the less kids are born as parents don't need as many of them to reproduce successfully. In fact this trend is so strong that countries like Japan or Germany are facing a really massive demographic problem as the working population shrinks over the next decades.
  - pmontra 7y ago
    IMHO the reason is that in rich societies people has many possible activities to perform. They feel that parenting kids is not one of the most attractive ways to spend their time on. Furthermore raising kids cost more in rich countries than in poor ones, so they can't afford as many as their parents or grandparents could.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Not in petro states, generally. And you only need one culturally persistent counterexample for this to end badly.
imtringued 7y ago
Cooking at home isn't expensive. Robot cooks will probably cost more than your kitchen.
- contingencies 7y ago
  We will share them as public infrastructure.
  - JetSpiegel 7y ago
    Should the US Federal Government nationalize McDonald's then? It's already an ambassador for the country anyway.

zanny 7y ago

Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we need to provide for one another, to guarantee a quality of life worth living, even when you yourself aren't necessarily contributing to that productivity anymore. In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
This would be nice if it were true. Since the top 0.1% have figured out how to own the nation via politics and trying to dumb down the general populace to ignore what they're doing I don't have nearly as much confidence in automation as you do.
- zanny 7y ago
  I'd go insane if I weren't optimistic that we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization. The alternative is our destruction anyway. Its going to happen in much the same way as space colonization or uploading our consciousness if we continue on. And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.

chrisco255 7y ago

Why wouldn't the price of food plummet in an automated world? The cost of labor is priced into everything you buy. I still think we're a few decades from these scenarios, but I am not willing to solve a theoretical problem (permanent unemployment) until it becomes a problem in reality. Right now we've got 3.7% unemployment despite all this tech. So I remain very skeptical of this theory playing out and UBI being necessary.

desert_boi 7y ago
Cost disease, i.e. things cost as much as they do because they always have. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
because in this case food prices are going to skyrocket in a climate change world.
cannonedhamster 7y ago
You can't grow food faster. You can only make more of it which requires more resources. The jobs being created today are mostly poverty level jobs or high end jobs and this trend is expected to continue which hollows out the middle class. Pure unemployment numbers aren't useful since the expected date increases with a tighter labor market haven't been happening at all. Once worker wages became decoupled from the value that they actually created, none of the idea that you're paid what your with was valid. Now you're paid what you can negotiate which depends entirely upon how much power you have. Most workers have none.

WalterBright 7y ago

> Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages. Can't make money by paying people to buy your products. Ford raised wages in order to attract better workers and reduce employee turnover.

toomanybeersies 7y ago

Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity, and we move away from the idea every adult should be required to work 40 hours a week to survive?

lordlimecat 7y ago
>Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.
- krapp 7y ago
  What entirely new, previously impossible job does automating away McDonald's workers create, that formerly employed McDonald's workers are qualified for? Are we going to send them all to coding bootcamps so they can program the kiosks and... oh wait, those jobs are already taken, never mind. Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the number of people being automated out of work is sufficiently small that societies can easily reabsorb them into the workforce. But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
    Automated burger assembly machine operator.
  - balt_s 7y ago
    > What (..) job does automating away McDonald's workers create? This is going to sound like a crude joke, but it's not: baby maker. I am not hopeful about the future.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale. If that were true then we'd see record unemployment and virtually no open job reqs. We see the opposite, therefore, it isn't true. In the UK unemployment is at near all time lows, wages are climbing 3x faster than inflation. It's a good time to be a worker despite equally record levels of automation. As for which jobs are absorbing people whose former work was automated, who knows? If you insist on endless cynicism, a lot of the people freed up by automation of food factory jobs went and got worthless degrees and now sit in comfy offices creating pointless PowerPoints, earning/burning money to justify the bosses departmental budget. Don't assume everyone who started out burger flipping stays in food service forever!

kapuasuite 7y ago

“Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.” This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.