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>And the pay would obviously go up. Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to
by _-david-_ 5y ago
>And the pay would obviously go up.
Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.
- meatsauce 5y agoI wonder where people get this idea that you should be paid like a rockstar without knowing how to play the guitar.
- jodrellblank 5y agoI wonder where people got this idea that UBI proponents are expecting everyone to be paid like rockstars.
- andi999 5y agoThat would bei URI, universal rockstar income.
- chii 5y agowhich, ironically, would be a pittance since most musicians are starving artists.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoThen roll on automation. Not even the Luddites had a problem with automation; just with the quality of the result and with who reaped the rewards.
- ajuc 5y agoAutomation is good. Automation in a capitalist society with unlimited IP laws results in dystopia.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoNot necessarily. Society is made of people; some things can be automated in a non-capitalist way (e.g. free software) even by capitalists. Though, of course, we will have to struggle to avoid the dystopia.
- worik 5y ago"a capitalist society" is not a binary attribute. There can be elements of capitalism and elements of "socialism". Private property can coexist with government supplied housing for instance. In the "capitalist" USA a lot of the military industrial complex lives off government handouts. Why not the people too? The cakes and cookies we should earn ourselves, the meat and potatoes (and housing) should be a right for every citizen
- godelski 5y agoi.e. > just with the quality of the result and with who reaped the rewards. Maybe we should leave terms like capitalism and socialism out of the discussion because no one can agree on their meanings so they just become fighting words and their usefulness to the conversations are less than meaningless.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoCapitalistic societies still have taxes. Any realistic UBI proposal would have to funnel some of the efficiency gains from automation toward constructing a strong social safety net.
- y4mi 5y agoSounds like a net positive if they're getting basic income and thus don't have to suffer through the abuse anymore
- ido 5y agoThat's a good thing, right? What used to require a human toiling will then be made by a machine!
- Natsu 5y agoSpeaking as someone who has worked in a factory, you couldn't pay me a six figure salary to go back. And most of the things were automated already, at least as much as reasonably could be.
- yurishimo 5y agoI think that is more a testament to the lives we now live as Software Developers more than anything else. It's not uncommon to find anecdotes of others on HN talking about how they maybe work 2-3 hours a day and take home 150k+ a year. I started working my freshman year in high school in 2008 as a busboy at a local restaurant making $4.50/hr + tips from the servers working that night. I couldn't even drive yet so I pocketed most of that money and was grateful for the opportunity. (This ultimately allowed me to build my first PC and I allowed me to get into programming.) I moved from there to another local restaurant with a similar job title, but quickly moved up into working in the kitchen as a line cook. I think I made $8 or $9/hr when I got the "promotion". After graduation I wandered around some and eventually ended up as an asst. manager at a Burger King. Now, over a decade later, I can sometimes look back nostalgically at my time in food service, but I don't know that I would ever go back, for any amount of money. The things I am nostalgic for are structure, a defined start/end time, and being able to leave work at work. The pay was awful, the people were generally nice enough, but there's always a rude customer at some point or a manager with a power trip. I don't miss waking up at 5am to man the drive-thru, or going home after midnight smelling like grease. If I woke up tomorrow with no qualifications to write software, I would sooner go into a back breaking trade than go back to retail. I think we will see automation really start to take over these retail spaces in 2022. In my city (Dallas), pretty much every single fast food restaurant has mobile ordering or a kiosk available. My local Kroger expanded their self checkout lines and after 10pm, there are no more manned checkouts open. I've frequently had to scan and bag a full cart of groceries using self checkout (which sucks). The past two years have opened up a lot of time for these giant corps to invest in R&D as the labor pool shrinks. Through the perfect storm of chip shortages and labor shortages, we haven't seen a large scale roll out, but I'm confident it's coming as soon as parts and installers are available.
- 5y ago
- staticassertion 5y agoGood thing there would be UBI then?
- jjk166 5y agoIf a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it? Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
- _-david-_ 5y agoThey are rolling out computer tellers all around my area. If they haven't done it in your area it is coming. There are a few companies working on automated meal makers and they are slowly being rolled out. It is just going a bit slow right now.
- withinboredom 5y agoI love this in other countries. I don’t always speak the local language well enough but I can tap on pictures and wait for my number to come up.
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago>It is just going a bit slow right now. Ahh yes, as the AI marketing department always says, we're 99% of the way there, it's just that the last 1% is the hardest! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-self-driving-cars-are-99-of-the-way-there-the-last-1-is-the-hardest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...
- _-david-_ 5y agoI don't think the comparison to AI is apt since meal making robots do currently function and are in restaurants right now. It is literally just being rolled out slowly.
- Ekaros 5y agoI love them. Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present... So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...
- wpietri 5y agoDone right, automation increases the value created per labor hour. Which makes both UBI and humane jobs even more achievable. I'm all for it.