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There's no raw data on ubi in an largely automated economy. It's too radical of a change to know how well it would work. Communism, in theory, worked as well t

There's no raw data on ubi in an largely automated economy. It's too radical of a change to know how well it would work. Communism, in theory, worked as well too but in practice there were unanticipated side effects.

astrange 4y ago
Automation increases employment. Technological unemployment is a myth. The purpose of a UBI isn't for workers whether they're unemployed by AI or not, it's for non-working household members like new parents, elderly and children. (Poverty is a household phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon.)
- Herval_freire 4y ago
  >Automation increases employment. Technological unemployment is a myth. This is not true. It is historically true but every iteration of new technology changes society differently. You can't blindly rely on historical data you need to use common sense and logic as well. Historical data says nuclear bombs killed less people then cars. Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs. Does that work? No. It obviously doesn't. Just like you can't say that AI will cause a rise in employment. You're ignoring the common sense scenario. Can you even work out exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes over? Likely you don't, you're just being impractically data driven.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > Can you even work out exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes over? If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy. That's because the AIs are just more people. They're going to be customers (they need products to survive and probably want things on top of that), will have jobs (they need to pay their power and AWS bills or they'll get turned off), will negotiate pay raises that may make you cheaper, and you can sell things to them. If they're not sentient/agentic enough to be consumerist or want to be paid, then they're capital equipment aka automation, which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive. All nice and theoretical. > Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs. I agree the #3 cause of death in America is more deadly than something that is so safe it has never accidentally killed anyone. (Except for the demon core guy and the people who got cancer from detonation tests.) Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds.
    - Herval_freire 4y ago
      >If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy This claim was never made. The only claim I made is that you can't claim AI increases jobs. My opinion of it is that the situation is so unpredictable that people should prepare for both scenarios. >That's because the AIs are just more people. And unconvincing. If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor replacing us. The situation is too untenable to just rely on your own hypothetical. Other scenarios like mine must be considered. >which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive. Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim. >Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds. So according to that logic we should make millions of atomic weapons and distribute it for free to everyone? No. Data only tells a story for specific scenarios and can function as a rough predictor for hypothetical scenarios. To refine predictions of hypothetical scenarios you need data AND logic. Blind application of data to all hypothetical scenarios is wrong. Remember the real world only exists in the past. A huge portion of the world is an unrealized quantum uncertainty in the future. Navigating the future involves using data from the past as well as logic. Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific. It doesn't address the fuzziness of the future and the fuzziness of the evidence/logic. You anticipate one thing playing out and you plan for that but realistically a good prediction and plan is one involving a multitude of likely scenarios.
      - astrange 4y ago
        > If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor replacing us. Well, that's the capital equipment case then. Is it really a general intelligence if you don't let it be general? It can't handle every possible scenario for you that way. Which makes it incredibly wasteful, just like slavery was, because we used humans as capital instead of participating in an economy with them. Actually this is the reason economics is called "the dismal science" - a slaveowner called it that because he was upset economists kept telling him not to own slaves. If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I don't know too much about that. > Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim. Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't make any empirical claims. Here's some data though: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots-and-lots https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots... > Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific. It's important to do this because approximately all AGI doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking about it really hard and doing probability theory in your head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster, never mind that it can't do real world experiments to test anything.
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astrange 4y ago

Automation increases employment. Technological unemployment is a myth. The purpose of a UBI isn't for workers whether they're unemployed by AI or not, it's for non-working household members like new parents, elderly and children. (Poverty is a household phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon.)

Herval_freire 4y ago
>Automation increases employment. Technological unemployment is a myth. This is not true. It is historically true but every iteration of new technology changes society differently. You can't blindly rely on historical data you need to use common sense and logic as well. Historical data says nuclear bombs killed less people then cars. Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs. Does that work? No. It obviously doesn't. Just like you can't say that AI will cause a rise in employment. You're ignoring the common sense scenario. Can you even work out exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes over? Likely you don't, you're just being impractically data driven.
- astrange 4y ago
  > Can you even work out exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes over? If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy. That's because the AIs are just more people. They're going to be customers (they need products to survive and probably want things on top of that), will have jobs (they need to pay their power and AWS bills or they'll get turned off), will negotiate pay raises that may make you cheaper, and you can sell things to them. If they're not sentient/agentic enough to be consumerist or want to be paid, then they're capital equipment aka automation, which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive. All nice and theoretical. > Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs. I agree the #3 cause of death in America is more deadly than something that is so safe it has never accidentally killed anyone. (Except for the demon core guy and the people who got cancer from detonation tests.) Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds.
  - Herval_freire 4y ago
    >If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy This claim was never made. The only claim I made is that you can't claim AI increases jobs. My opinion of it is that the situation is so unpredictable that people should prepare for both scenarios. >That's because the AIs are just more people. And unconvincing. If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor replacing us. The situation is too untenable to just rely on your own hypothetical. Other scenarios like mine must be considered. >which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive. Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim. >Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds. So according to that logic we should make millions of atomic weapons and distribute it for free to everyone? No. Data only tells a story for specific scenarios and can function as a rough predictor for hypothetical scenarios. To refine predictions of hypothetical scenarios you need data AND logic. Blind application of data to all hypothetical scenarios is wrong. Remember the real world only exists in the past. A huge portion of the world is an unrealized quantum uncertainty in the future. Navigating the future involves using data from the past as well as logic. Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific. It doesn't address the fuzziness of the future and the fuzziness of the evidence/logic. You anticipate one thing playing out and you plan for that but realistically a good prediction and plan is one involving a multitude of likely scenarios.
    - astrange 4y ago
      > If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor replacing us. Well, that's the capital equipment case then. Is it really a general intelligence if you don't let it be general? It can't handle every possible scenario for you that way. Which makes it incredibly wasteful, just like slavery was, because we used humans as capital instead of participating in an economy with them. Actually this is the reason economics is called "the dismal science" - a slaveowner called it that because he was upset economists kept telling him not to own slaves. If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I don't know too much about that. > Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim. Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't make any empirical claims. Here's some data though: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots-and-lots https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots... > Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific. It's important to do this because approximately all AGI doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking about it really hard and doing probability theory in your head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster, never mind that it can't do real world experiments to test anything.
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