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It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. Of course, in th

by kaybe 6y ago

It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them. I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

som33 6y ago
>I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. Not going to happen under capitalism. Look at the numbers, they are pretty horrifying. https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_worth_and_financial_wealth.png https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_wor... https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
- mc32 6y ago
  Do you think it has a chance of happening in Vietnam or North Korea under communism?
  - omginternets 6y ago
    No, the parent poster does not have Vietnam, nor North Korea, nor even communism in mind. You know this, and we know you know this.
    - mc32 6y ago
      Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism. What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware? Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.
      - lm28469 6y ago
        We have that thing in Europe called socialism, it brought us paid vacations, public health care, paid parental leaves, paid sick leaves, less working hours, &c. In a way all these things are wealth redistribution. It's actually funny to listen to political debates of the 60s and 70s because people were planning that if automation were properly handled we'd be working like 2 days a week while keeping our standards of life and retiring at 40. What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c. By the way, you might want to reassess your way of starting conversations, you're definitely trying to be a smartass. There are answers all over the place if you're willing to search/read a bit, it's not like these societal issues are new, there are literally hundreds of books about this very topic.
        Nimitz14 6y ago
        European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. And regardless, income inequality is also a problem in Europe. The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed. Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
        lm28469 6y ago
        > European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. It is, but it's also very heavily influenced by socialism. You, and many other people, seem to believe it's and "either or" question when it really isn't and it never has been... > The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one What does that even mean ? the current "one" ? Since when there is only one ? Just compare the US and French or German systems they're extremely different, especially for the average workers. > rather than creating a new one Come on, we're not talking JS frameworks here, what kind of rhetoric is that. Nobody is talking about tearing down the whole thing and starting from scratch. > Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c." https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-inequality-tipping-point-2030 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-ineq... https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/world-pension-ages-on-the-rise-when-will-you-retire/ https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/world-pensio... Everything I can find talks about rising retirement age, lowering of pensions, and stagnation of purchasing power. If automation really brought what it was supposed to bring we would see much deeper _positive_ changes when comparing 1970s and 2020s. People got kicked out of factories and pushed into the tertiary sector but for all intent and purpose it's the same shitty working conditions, wages and social statuses. The guy who built cars for ford in the 50s is now driving a uber and has to pay his own insurances and pension, talk about the automation revolution ...
    - tharne 6y ago
      Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end. The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation. It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when talking about redistribution as a solve, that for every Sweden or Denmark, there's a Cuba or North Korea.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live? There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great? Maybe thats the key differentiator?
        tharne 6y ago
        Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it. A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.
        ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        There is no modern state without collectively funded education, police, fire service, justice system, military, reseach, environmental protection, FDA,FAA, etc. So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?
        6y ago
    - SkyBelow 6y ago
      While I would agree they were very unlikely to have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, how does one draw the same conclusion about communism? I've met plenty of people who see communism, or at least a system of government that they would ascribe that label to even if others might not, as being a preferable alternative to capitalism. This leads me to think it is a reasonable assumption that they might have been thinking about communism, even if it is not the only possible reasonable assumption.
      - kaybe 6y ago
        Not that it actually matters for the discussion, just for transparency - I am pretty open about the method. As long as we all get to do less of the undesirable work, our needs are covered and the profits and power of automation are not concentrated in the hands of a few I'd say we reached the goal. 'Evenish' distribution might be sufficient too. There is a lot of literature on ideas and theories about it. The systems used so far had a lot of debugging time already, and I'd expect unexpected effects to turn up when implementing anything new, and thus it is hard to advocate for any specific one. Working with our problematic traits (such as laziness, selfishness and hunger for power) instead of against them (or worse, ignoring them) seems advisable though.
        andrey_utkin 6y ago
        > undesirable work > our needs are covered Human desires and human needs don't work the way you're probably thinking. I'd suggest to take into account Maslow's theory of human motivation. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
        kaybe 6y ago
        *less of the undesirable and more of the desirable work is what I meant but did not specify. Is that more in line with what you mean?
        andrey_utkin 6y ago
barrkel 6y ago
Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them, even if it's only particularly large because there's a big market to sell into and a big winner effect in the market structure. I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite right. People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on capital which alienates people from their work product?
- throwanem 6y ago
  Unearned income is unfulfilling in the context of a default assumption that the ability to earn an income is a valid measure of worth. There are other, better, measures.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    Making something that other people are willing to reward with the fruits of their own labour is about as honest a social measure of worth as you can get outside of friends and family.
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      It's also not something that would be taken away by diverting excess productivity to covering people's basic needs. I can at least imagine a world where doing so spurs a renaissance of creativity and entrepreneurship, because, just like you said, people seem to have an innate need to try and do something productive with their time. If there's a real social fear that I hold, it's that we'd suddenly have supply problems in certain segments of the labor market. I know I, for one, would never have taken that 2nd shift job working in the kitchen of an all night diner if I hadn't needed the money to buy food. I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead.
ajuc 6y ago
> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. In such an economy there's no incentive to work on further automation. In particular if there's a part of world where profits aren't distributed evenly - the innovation and manufacturing will move there.
- Retric 6y ago
  It’s a question of implementation. Consider say a 10% dividend on the economy, in the US that’s 6,300$ per year per person. Which does not sound like much to live on, but historically represents a significant income. Not that the US would adopt such a system, but it could by cutting back other spending like social programs. A tiny group might try to live in it, but more would see seasonal jobs as enough. As automation improves in general people would work less over their lifetime. Critically this would likely slow down the economy in the short term, but the constant minor labor shortage would presumably push for ever more automation to offset this. Unfortunately, it needs to be a pay go system based on a fixed economic percentage to really work. But, assuming it was the general population would suddenly have a huge incentive to promote automation and economic growth.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    10% of billions of dollars is plenty enough to cause the companies to move to some tax heaven. You can fight that with tariffs, but the end game is being outproduced by orders of magnitude and losing any influence over global market.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Automation goes beyond manufacturing. Even a simile spell checker saves a lot of time over doing it manually. That said, labor has been cheaper outside the US for decades, yet manufacturing is still 2+ Trillion dollars per year in the US. In part it’s because you can’t simply move farms, oil wells, or forests etc. But, business friendly regulations, educated workers, efficient transportation, etc are also huge contributors.
    - 6y ago
toasterlovin 6y ago
FWIW, my take away from the recent US riots is that funding a class of idle people is a really bad idea. Edit: Just to clarify, the class of idle people I’m talking about are all the people on (relatively) generous unemployment as a result of Coronavirus shutdowns.
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  They do tend to start looking for easy targets to justify getting their paycheck, zeroing in on minorities and the poor.
- m12k 6y ago
  FWIW my takeaway is that underfunding a whole class of people, especially when it comes to education and healthcare, so they have a much harder time succeeding in the job market and tend to die or go bankrupt if they get sick, is a really bad idea.
  - toasterlovin 6y ago
    I think perhaps you thought I was making a comment about black Americans. I was not. I added some clarification to my comment.
bamboozled 6y ago
> It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. If I had to guess, you have a job, so it's fun for you to sit here and make these comments from your high horse.
- m12k 6y ago
  I don't see what high horse you are talking about. The point is that having to work in order to survive is not inherently a desirable situation for a human to be in. A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. Historically such a life has been possible for a select few in the aristocracy, and they seem to have had a great time - usually at the expense of serfs, slaves or other less privileged classes. Hopefully, eventually we'll all be able to live a life like that, with robots or software instead of slaves. So when someone says that we shouldn't consider jobs to be inherently valuable, they are pointing out that what is valuable is not our labor, but the fruit of our labor. That we should seek to improve results rather than effort. 150 years ago, ~70% of the population in western countries needed to work in agriculture to ensure the food supply - today it's less than 5%, and that's great! So yes, currently human work is still needed to keep society running, and for that reason we have created social norms around it being ethical to work and unethical not to, in order to get everyone to pitch in. But the truth is that there is nothing inherently unethical about not working, as long is it's not at the expense of someone else having to work even harder. As such, if you want to put on the tin-foil-hat a bit, you might even consider that it could be that the class that already lives a life where they don't need to work - the upper class (who make their living by owning things) has over-sold this whole notion of 'work == good' to the middle class (who make their living by working) in order for them to feel better than the lower class (who are unemployed) and ensure any anger is directed downward and those two classes will fight it out instead of questioning the world order.
  - tengbretson 6y ago
    > A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. What you are describing is already a reality for our house pets. I don't find becoming a house pet to some AI/automated machine to be desirable in any way shape or form.
carapace 6y ago
Yes, "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay." Bucky Fuller pointed out that we could apply technology to solve our problems efficiently and wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever. (FWIW, this is the context within which I think UBI makes sense, and we are not there just yet.) Really it's a choice (at least in theory, maybe we are strapped in but I like to think we can affect things at least a little.) We can't un-invent the transistor.
- Hermitian909 6y ago
  > wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever. True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks. People who never aspire to such professions might be spared long working years, but some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
  - carapace 6y ago
    > True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Oh I agree. In the absence of a profit motive those fields would be taken up by the most dedicated, eh? > Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks. Again I agree. I think that one obvious benefit of automation is that it frees up humans for important things that only humans can do. Mark Miller has an adage "Moore's law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable from the CPU's POV." We're not talking about forcing people to retire after two years. We're talking about eliminating drudgery and wasteful processes. > some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on. No, that's the whole point: no one has to put in long hours anymore thanks to the knock-on effects of the invention of the transistor. Just like farming went from ~90% of the population to ~3%, so will our industrial space-age civilization, if we let it.
andrepd 6y ago
>I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. Hm there was a certain German economist which had that sort of idea.
wolfgke 6y ago
> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. Distribution of profits evenly: This is called "company stocks".
- adrianN 6y ago
  "Let them eat cake" Equal distribution is called taxes and social programs.
  - kaybe 6y ago
    Well we could allocate the stocks equally to everyone if we wanted to work with that idea. I'm not sure what to do with the stock market in that scenario though. Maybe we can reallocate annually?
lukifer 6y ago
I think there's an intrinsic human drive to be useful. It makes sense evolutionarily: the tribe can't kick you out if they rely on you for something. It's no guarantee of safety or success, but it's a bargaining chip. Kevin Simler (via Dennett) goes as far as modeling this phenomenon on the level of individual neurons [0]: that conditions like depression and grief can be thought of as neurons and their networks becoming suddenly obsolete, and casting about trying to find new ways to be useful. The employment model is hardly perfect; if anything, it has an uncomfortably feudal flavor in practice, where one is a thrall/vassal for 40(+) hours/week, in exchange for autonomy the other 128(-); and where one has the option to seek a new lord if sufficiently dissatisfied. There are countless other ways to be/feel useful outside that model: entrepreneurship, non-profit/community work, raising children, passion projects. There are also potential perverse incentives: in particular, to maximize the problem one purports to solve. The most obvious parallels are the military- and prison-industrial complexes; planned obsolescence is another milder example. It's easy for unions to tip from collective bargaining into protectionism of industries that we'd like to become obsolete (prison guards, coal miners), out of a very understandable desire for those individuals to not lose their social bargaining chips. So I do think we should celebrate the idea of "employment", as such, becoming optional; I strongly favor UBI. But at the same time, we need to be thinking about new institutions and proactive strategies for people to be, and feel, useful. I dare say, in some cases we want to be spending the economic surplus from the efficiency of automation, on intentionally inefficient pro-social economic activity. One example might be a community garden: it's a safe bet that industrial agriculture will always be an order of magnitude more efficient at producing food; but the community garden has other benefits, of connecting humans to nature and to each other (and perhaps a bit of resilience against supply chain disruption). [0] https://meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/ https://meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

by kaybe 6y ago

som33 6y ago

>I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. Not going to happen under capitalism. Look at the numbers, they are pretty horrifying. https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_worth_and_financial_wealth.png https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_wor... https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

mc32 6y ago
Do you think it has a chance of happening in Vietnam or North Korea under communism?
- omginternets 6y ago
  No, the parent poster does not have Vietnam, nor North Korea, nor even communism in mind. You know this, and we know you know this.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism. What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware? Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.
    - lm28469 6y ago
      We have that thing in Europe called socialism, it brought us paid vacations, public health care, paid parental leaves, paid sick leaves, less working hours, &c. In a way all these things are wealth redistribution. It's actually funny to listen to political debates of the 60s and 70s because people were planning that if automation were properly handled we'd be working like 2 days a week while keeping our standards of life and retiring at 40. What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c. By the way, you might want to reassess your way of starting conversations, you're definitely trying to be a smartass. There are answers all over the place if you're willing to search/read a bit, it's not like these societal issues are new, there are literally hundreds of books about this very topic.
      - Nimitz14 6y ago
        European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. And regardless, income inequality is also a problem in Europe. The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed. Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
        lm28469 6y ago
        > European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. It is, but it's also very heavily influenced by socialism. You, and many other people, seem to believe it's and "either or" question when it really isn't and it never has been... > The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one What does that even mean ? the current "one" ? Since when there is only one ? Just compare the US and French or German systems they're extremely different, especially for the average workers. > rather than creating a new one Come on, we're not talking JS frameworks here, what kind of rhetoric is that. Nobody is talking about tearing down the whole thing and starting from scratch. > Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c." https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-inequality-tipping-point-2030 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-ineq... https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/world-pension-ages-on-the-rise-when-will-you-retire/ https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/world-pensio... Everything I can find talks about rising retirement age, lowering of pensions, and stagnation of purchasing power. If automation really brought what it was supposed to bring we would see much deeper _positive_ changes when comparing 1970s and 2020s. People got kicked out of factories and pushed into the tertiary sector but for all intent and purpose it's the same shitty working conditions, wages and social statuses. The guy who built cars for ford in the 50s is now driving a uber and has to pay his own insurances and pension, talk about the automation revolution ...
  - tharne 6y ago
    Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end. The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation. It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when talking about redistribution as a solve, that for every Sweden or Denmark, there's a Cuba or North Korea.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live? There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great? Maybe thats the key differentiator?
      - tharne 6y ago
        Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it. A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.
        ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        There is no modern state without collectively funded education, police, fire service, justice system, military, reseach, environmental protection, FDA,FAA, etc. So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?
        6y ago
  - SkyBelow 6y ago
    While I would agree they were very unlikely to have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, how does one draw the same conclusion about communism? I've met plenty of people who see communism, or at least a system of government that they would ascribe that label to even if others might not, as being a preferable alternative to capitalism. This leads me to think it is a reasonable assumption that they might have been thinking about communism, even if it is not the only possible reasonable assumption.
    - kaybe 6y ago
      Not that it actually matters for the discussion, just for transparency - I am pretty open about the method. As long as we all get to do less of the undesirable work, our needs are covered and the profits and power of automation are not concentrated in the hands of a few I'd say we reached the goal. 'Evenish' distribution might be sufficient too. There is a lot of literature on ideas and theories about it. The systems used so far had a lot of debugging time already, and I'd expect unexpected effects to turn up when implementing anything new, and thus it is hard to advocate for any specific one. Working with our problematic traits (such as laziness, selfishness and hunger for power) instead of against them (or worse, ignoring them) seems advisable though.
      - andrey_utkin 6y ago
        > undesirable work > our needs are covered Human desires and human needs don't work the way you're probably thinking. I'd suggest to take into account Maslow's theory of human motivation. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
        kaybe 6y ago
        *less of the undesirable and more of the desirable work is what I meant but did not specify. Is that more in line with what you mean?
        andrey_utkin 6y ago

barrkel 6y ago

Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them, even if it's only particularly large because there's a big market to sell into and a big winner effect in the market structure. I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite right. People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on capital which alienates people from their work product?

throwanem 6y ago
Unearned income is unfulfilling in the context of a default assumption that the ability to earn an income is a valid measure of worth. There are other, better, measures.
- barrkel 6y ago
  Making something that other people are willing to reward with the fruits of their own labour is about as honest a social measure of worth as you can get outside of friends and family.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    It's also not something that would be taken away by diverting excess productivity to covering people's basic needs. I can at least imagine a world where doing so spurs a renaissance of creativity and entrepreneurship, because, just like you said, people seem to have an innate need to try and do something productive with their time. If there's a real social fear that I hold, it's that we'd suddenly have supply problems in certain segments of the labor market. I know I, for one, would never have taken that 2nd shift job working in the kitchen of an all night diner if I hadn't needed the money to buy food. I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead.

ajuc 6y ago

> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. In such an economy there's no incentive to work on further automation. In particular if there's a part of world where profits aren't distributed evenly - the innovation and manufacturing will move there.

Retric 6y ago
It’s a question of implementation. Consider say a 10% dividend on the economy, in the US that’s 6,300$ per year per person. Which does not sound like much to live on, but historically represents a significant income. Not that the US would adopt such a system, but it could by cutting back other spending like social programs. A tiny group might try to live in it, but more would see seasonal jobs as enough. As automation improves in general people would work less over their lifetime. Critically this would likely slow down the economy in the short term, but the constant minor labor shortage would presumably push for ever more automation to offset this. Unfortunately, it needs to be a pay go system based on a fixed economic percentage to really work. But, assuming it was the general population would suddenly have a huge incentive to promote automation and economic growth.
- ajuc 6y ago
  10% of billions of dollars is plenty enough to cause the companies to move to some tax heaven. You can fight that with tariffs, but the end game is being outproduced by orders of magnitude and losing any influence over global market.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Automation goes beyond manufacturing. Even a simile spell checker saves a lot of time over doing it manually. That said, labor has been cheaper outside the US for decades, yet manufacturing is still 2+ Trillion dollars per year in the US. In part it’s because you can’t simply move farms, oil wells, or forests etc. But, business friendly regulations, educated workers, efficient transportation, etc are also huge contributors.
  - 6y ago

toasterlovin 6y ago

FWIW, my take away from the recent US riots is that funding a class of idle people is a really bad idea. Edit: Just to clarify, the class of idle people I’m talking about are all the people on (relatively) generous unemployment as a result of Coronavirus shutdowns.

kspacewalk2 6y ago
They do tend to start looking for easy targets to justify getting their paycheck, zeroing in on minorities and the poor.
m12k 6y ago
FWIW my takeaway is that underfunding a whole class of people, especially when it comes to education and healthcare, so they have a much harder time succeeding in the job market and tend to die or go bankrupt if they get sick, is a really bad idea.
- toasterlovin 6y ago
  I think perhaps you thought I was making a comment about black Americans. I was not. I added some clarification to my comment.

bamboozled 6y ago

> It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. If I had to guess, you have a job, so it's fun for you to sit here and make these comments from your high horse.

m12k 6y ago
I don't see what high horse you are talking about. The point is that having to work in order to survive is not inherently a desirable situation for a human to be in. A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. Historically such a life has been possible for a select few in the aristocracy, and they seem to have had a great time - usually at the expense of serfs, slaves or other less privileged classes. Hopefully, eventually we'll all be able to live a life like that, with robots or software instead of slaves. So when someone says that we shouldn't consider jobs to be inherently valuable, they are pointing out that what is valuable is not our labor, but the fruit of our labor. That we should seek to improve results rather than effort. 150 years ago, ~70% of the population in western countries needed to work in agriculture to ensure the food supply - today it's less than 5%, and that's great! So yes, currently human work is still needed to keep society running, and for that reason we have created social norms around it being ethical to work and unethical not to, in order to get everyone to pitch in. But the truth is that there is nothing inherently unethical about not working, as long is it's not at the expense of someone else having to work even harder. As such, if you want to put on the tin-foil-hat a bit, you might even consider that it could be that the class that already lives a life where they don't need to work - the upper class (who make their living by owning things) has over-sold this whole notion of 'work == good' to the middle class (who make their living by working) in order for them to feel better than the lower class (who are unemployed) and ensure any anger is directed downward and those two classes will fight it out instead of questioning the world order.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  > A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. What you are describing is already a reality for our house pets. I don't find becoming a house pet to some AI/automated machine to be desirable in any way shape or form.

carapace 6y ago

Yes, "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay." Bucky Fuller pointed out that we could apply technology to solve our problems efficiently and wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever. (FWIW, this is the context within which I think UBI makes sense, and we are not there just yet.) Really it's a choice (at least in theory, maybe we are strapped in but I like to think we can affect things at least a little.) We can't un-invent the transistor.

Hermitian909 6y ago
> wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever. True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks. People who never aspire to such professions might be spared long working years, but some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
- carapace 6y ago
  > True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Oh I agree. In the absence of a profit motive those fields would be taken up by the most dedicated, eh? > Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks. Again I agree. I think that one obvious benefit of automation is that it frees up humans for important things that only humans can do. Mark Miller has an adage "Moore's law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable from the CPU's POV." We're not talking about forcing people to retire after two years. We're talking about eliminating drudgery and wasteful processes. > some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on. No, that's the whole point: no one has to put in long hours anymore thanks to the knock-on effects of the invention of the transistor. Just like farming went from ~90% of the population to ~3%, so will our industrial space-age civilization, if we let it.

andrepd 6y ago

>I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. Hm there was a certain German economist which had that sort of idea.

wolfgke 6y ago

> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. Distribution of profits evenly: This is called "company stocks".

adrianN 6y ago
"Let them eat cake" Equal distribution is called taxes and social programs.
- kaybe 6y ago
  Well we could allocate the stocks equally to everyone if we wanted to work with that idea. I'm not sure what to do with the stock market in that scenario though. Maybe we can reallocate annually?

lukifer 6y ago

I think there's an intrinsic human drive to be useful. It makes sense evolutionarily: the tribe can't kick you out if they rely on you for something. It's no guarantee of safety or success, but it's a bargaining chip. Kevin Simler (via Dennett) goes as far as modeling this phenomenon on the level of individual neurons [0]: that conditions like depression and grief can be thought of as neurons and their networks becoming suddenly obsolete, and casting about trying to find new ways to be useful. The employment model is hardly perfect; if anything, it has an uncomfortably feudal flavor in practice, where one is a thrall/vassal for 40(+) hours/week, in exchange for autonomy the other 128(-); and where one has the option to seek a new lord if sufficiently dissatisfied. There are countless other ways to be/feel useful outside that model: entrepreneurship, non-profit/community work, raising children, passion projects. There are also potential perverse incentives: in particular, to maximize the problem one purports to solve. The most obvious parallels are the military- and prison-industrial complexes; planned obsolescence is another milder example. It's easy for unions to tip from collective bargaining into protectionism of industries that we'd like to become obsolete (prison guards, coal miners), out of a very understandable desire for those individuals to not lose their social bargaining chips. So I do think we should celebrate the idea of "employment", as such, becoming optional; I strongly favor UBI. But at the same time, we need to be thinking about new institutions and proactive strategies for people to be, and feel, useful. I dare say, in some cases we want to be spending the economic surplus from the efficiency of automation, on intentionally inefficient pro-social economic activity. One example might be a community garden: it's a safe bet that industrial agriculture will always be an order of magnitude more efficient at producing food; but the community garden has other benefits, of connecting humans to nature and to each other (and perhaps a bit of resilience against supply chain disruption). [0] https://meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/ https://meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/