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Whether it’s automation or something else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs a
by tempsy 7y ago
Whether it’s automation or something else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc. People in those jobs are the ones that could be most helped by UBI.
Of course you need to think about how to replace shitty jobs with better ones over time, but UBI smooths out societal issues created during those transition times.
- goatinaboat 7y agothose shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc Most of those jobs will be the hardest to automate because Moravec’s Paradox. Automation will wipe out lawyers and accountants long before it reaches sewer maintenance and refuse collection.
- harimau777 7y agoI'm not an expert, so I may be mistaken. However, my understanding is that, as it applies to motor skills, Moravec's Paradox applies to skills that require either fine sensing (e.g. manipulating something delicate) or adapting to a complex environment (e.g. navigating a room or painting). It seems to me, that the success of robots in manufacturing demonstrates that this does not apply to many (but not all) unskilled labor jobs. It also seems to me that in many cases it may be possible to modify the job to fit the capabilities of a robot rather than the other way around. For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl or give the robot a pipe-style brush that it big enough to clean any bowl.
- goatinaboat 7y agoFor example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl Sure, this is an argument often made by self-driving car enthusiasts, let’s just remake all the roads, ban all pedestrians and non-self-driving vehicles and so on. But it’s another instance of the same paradox, instead of radically underestimating the computation involved in actions that nature has given us dedicated hardware for, underestimating the vast cost of doing so. In this case not only would you need to standardise the toilet bowl, but the route through the house to get to the bathroom and what to do about any unexpected obstacles... The paradox in general applies to everything that humans take for granted that we can do without fully appreciating that it took us a billion years of evolution to get here.
- maxerickson 7y agoMy town went from, I believe, 3 trucks with 3 people each to 2 trucks with 1 person each for garbage collection. The last step will take a long time, but the amount of labor has already been dramatically shrunk.
- nopriorarrests 7y ago>there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc Shitty jobs are not must vulnerable, quite opposite in fact. Automating some 400K/year quant job at hedge fund makes morse sense than automatng MCjob that pays 40K/year. More to that, shitty jobs are hardest to automate (we are nowhere close to good janitor robot, for example). Also, you can not outsource cleaning toilets or hairdessers, but you can software development or building trading models.
- jrs235 7y agoThere are "1000's" more 40k/yr jobs than 400k/yr ones. Automating a 40k/yr job that 1000 people do makes more sense than 10 400k ones. In aggregate, there is more money to be saved automating the 40k jobs. Also, typically lower paying jobs are physical labor jobs, trading time for money, not "thinking" jobs that deal with exceptions to the rules. Robotics are suppose to automate lower labor physical positions, AI is suppose to replace our thinking and mental positions.
- didgeoridoo 7y agoAre there a significant number of physical labor jobs (in high-income countries at least) that do not require 1) intelligent human interaction or 2) detailed visual inspection and fine motor control? There appears to be a huge hump in difficulty of robotic “automatability” caused by the fact that humans are just so much better at these two tasks than machines are. “Thinking” jobs that essentially entail transformation of one type of data into another seem no more difficult to automate (if not perhaps even easier) than most manual labor that has not already been automated. My uninformed guess is that we will automate low- and mid-level “thinking” jobs and the remainder of physical jobs at around the same time, because both require near-human perceiving, communicating, and manipulating capabilities.
- maxerickson 7y agoYes, McDonald's automates tasks across a massive labor force, they aren't trying to automate everything that a given employee might do.