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> Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all. One technicality that blocks me is something

> Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all. One technicality that blocks me is something I encountered not that long ago... How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house's clogged pipe? I had to do that: toilets wouldn't flush anymore, shits floating and all. I didn't know where the pipes were exactly and one them, the last one before the sewers, was clogged. So basically 40 meters of shit blocked inside the pipe, which then started overflowing on the property, for weeks (or months), unnoticed. The plumber couldn't come immediately (it was a sunday late in the afternoon) but would be there next morning. So for five hours I dig into human manure to find the damn pipe (which I more or less knew where it was located). It saved the plumber five hours of digging into, literally, shit and piss (saved me five hours of billing and five hours of waiting for things to be fixed too). In that "without working" society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working? That's what I don't get.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
"Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working?" I think the argument is that there is inherent value in helping fellow man/woman, self actualization, etc - and that is the reward in itself. I do not agree with this.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I think the UBI argument is that the cost of those shit-digging jobs will have to significantly rise to the actual price of finding someone willing to do them. If I have to do work or starve, maybe I'm willing to dig shit for $15/hr. If nobody has to do work to survive, suddenly you have to shell out $300/hr to motivate someone to do it.
  - one_level_deep 3y ago
    [dead]
  - dudeinhawaii 3y ago
    That's a good point. My hope would be that AI/Robotics would automate away the shit jobs and the toil-work.
- andrepd 3y ago
  I don't understand, jobs don't become pro bono if there's UBI lol. Salaries still exist. Actually, if anything, they become more valuable. And tbh, the kind of person that would study medicine for 10 years is probably not gonna be the kind of person to settle for the survivability-level income of UBI.
bovermyer 3y ago
The false assumption here is that people are naturally inclined to do nothing unless given money. In the situation you describe, I would have a pretty strong motivation to fix the problem if it was my property (deeply unpleasant living conditions). If it was my neighbor's property, I would also have a strong motivation to fix it (sense of community). Neither of those things is tied to money. Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Avarice is not the root of all industry.
- euroderf 3y ago
  "Avarice is not the root of all industry." Eminently quotable.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
That's how robots will take over the world. We know that giving robots intelligence, agency and physical power is a bad idea, but if we don't do that we'll have to dig the shit ourselves.
one_level_deep 3y ago
[dead]
rcarr 3y ago
These are the exact things we should be trying to automate rather than automating away writers, artists, actors etc. Personally I think it all depends on getting a humanoid Boston Dynamics style robot made. Once you've got that done, you hook it up so it can be controlled remotely via VR. Then you get trades people and workers of menial jobs to control these robots and start doing these unpleasant tasks. Once you've done that enough years and collected enough data, then you can build an AI for plumbing, garbage collecting etc. Then you can have robots that can do literally any task, you just have to load the right module into them like Neo in the Matrix. Society then probably gets restructured so that everyone is expected to get at least a PhD rather than a bachelors. Mathematic literacy matches that of linguistic literacy - it will no longer be socially acceptable to claim you are bad at math the same way it's no longer acceptable to be unable to read or write. Almost everyone will have the engineering knowledge necessary so they know how to fix and program the robots. Everyone learns multiple languages and does part of their studies abroad so there is less destructive nationalism. Society starts to value knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge more than the accumulation of capital and wealth which only leads to the destructive forces of extreme inequality and wealth. We start moving towards a more utopian Star Trek vision of the world, hopefully culminating in the creation of a machine like the replicator and the ability to perform interstellar travel which would truly be the end of the scarcity dynamic and a new era of humanity based on abundance and scientific exploration.
- greedo 3y ago
  Expecting everyone to get a PhD is ridiculous. Even granting people enough time and enough Universities to manage this, there's a limit to half the world's intelligence. Unless you dumb down the meaning of a PhD, this isn't a realistic goal.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    A few hundred years ago expecting everyone to be literate was thought ridiculous. Many people today think that everyone learning to code is ridiculous, yet I would wager that in 100 years, people will look back and wonder how people could get by when only 10% of the country were code literate. The standard of education rises continually throughout time. The PhD will become the new normal, just like the Masters degree is increasingly becoming the new normal today. Number of People with Bachelors degrees continues to grow: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/22/new-from-us-census-bureau-number-of-americans-with-a-bachelors-degree-continues-to-grow/?sh=6df798d17bbc https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/22/new-... Number of People with Masters and PhD degrees doubled since 2000: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-people-with-masters-and-phd-degrees-double-since-2000.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...
andrepd 3y ago
Easy, if you do nothing the market deems productive, be it playing games all day or tutoring poor kids in maths, you only get the UBI which equals ~minimum survivability income. If you do 30 hours of plumbing a week for 80$ an hour, you make that UBI + 2400$ a week (or wherever the market seems your work worth). There is always an incentive to do more, and especially as long as the market incenctivises/rewards more or less useful things (e.g. externalities get properly accounted for), then people which aren't content with bare survivability will at least for part of their time do something deemed "useful" or undesirable.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house’s clogged pipe? Same as today, with money. Unlike today, someone receiving poverty support who does this won’t lose nearly as much in poverty support as they make digging in shit, so the marginal return on digging in shit will be greater. UBI (under some different names) was initially proposed as a conservative alternative to means-tested poverty support, specifically because it relieves perverse incentives and reduces duplication (with the tax system) of function in means-tested benefit programs. > In that “without working” society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren’t working? Being able to minimally survive without working and not being punished by having the support rapidly, at a high ratio, reduced when you have outside income separate from the basic support does not mean not working is the norm in society.

JimtheCoder 3y ago

"Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working?" I think the argument is that there is inherent value in helping fellow man/woman, self actualization, etc - and that is the reward in itself. I do not agree with this.

ryandrake 3y ago
I think the UBI argument is that the cost of those shit-digging jobs will have to significantly rise to the actual price of finding someone willing to do them. If I have to do work or starve, maybe I'm willing to dig shit for $15/hr. If nobody has to do work to survive, suddenly you have to shell out $300/hr to motivate someone to do it.
- one_level_deep 3y ago
  [dead]
- dudeinhawaii 3y ago
  That's a good point. My hope would be that AI/Robotics would automate away the shit jobs and the toil-work.
andrepd 3y ago
I don't understand, jobs don't become pro bono if there's UBI lol. Salaries still exist. Actually, if anything, they become more valuable. And tbh, the kind of person that would study medicine for 10 years is probably not gonna be the kind of person to settle for the survivability-level income of UBI.

bovermyer 3y ago

The false assumption here is that people are naturally inclined to do nothing unless given money. In the situation you describe, I would have a pretty strong motivation to fix the problem if it was my property (deeply unpleasant living conditions). If it was my neighbor's property, I would also have a strong motivation to fix it (sense of community). Neither of those things is tied to money. Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Avarice is not the root of all industry.

euroderf 3y ago
"Avarice is not the root of all industry." Eminently quotable.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

That's how robots will take over the world. We know that giving robots intelligence, agency and physical power is a bad idea, but if we don't do that we'll have to dig the shit ourselves.

one_level_deep 3y ago

[dead]

rcarr 3y ago

These are the exact things we should be trying to automate rather than automating away writers, artists, actors etc. Personally I think it all depends on getting a humanoid Boston Dynamics style robot made. Once you've got that done, you hook it up so it can be controlled remotely via VR. Then you get trades people and workers of menial jobs to control these robots and start doing these unpleasant tasks. Once you've done that enough years and collected enough data, then you can build an AI for plumbing, garbage collecting etc. Then you can have robots that can do literally any task, you just have to load the right module into them like Neo in the Matrix. Society then probably gets restructured so that everyone is expected to get at least a PhD rather than a bachelors. Mathematic literacy matches that of linguistic literacy - it will no longer be socially acceptable to claim you are bad at math the same way it's no longer acceptable to be unable to read or write. Almost everyone will have the engineering knowledge necessary so they know how to fix and program the robots. Everyone learns multiple languages and does part of their studies abroad so there is less destructive nationalism. Society starts to value knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge more than the accumulation of capital and wealth which only leads to the destructive forces of extreme inequality and wealth. We start moving towards a more utopian Star Trek vision of the world, hopefully culminating in the creation of a machine like the replicator and the ability to perform interstellar travel which would truly be the end of the scarcity dynamic and a new era of humanity based on abundance and scientific exploration.

greedo 3y ago
Expecting everyone to get a PhD is ridiculous. Even granting people enough time and enough Universities to manage this, there's a limit to half the world's intelligence. Unless you dumb down the meaning of a PhD, this isn't a realistic goal.
- rcarr 3y ago
  A few hundred years ago expecting everyone to be literate was thought ridiculous. Many people today think that everyone learning to code is ridiculous, yet I would wager that in 100 years, people will look back and wonder how people could get by when only 10% of the country were code literate. The standard of education rises continually throughout time. The PhD will become the new normal, just like the Masters degree is increasingly becoming the new normal today. Number of People with Bachelors degrees continues to grow: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/22/new-from-us-census-bureau-number-of-americans-with-a-bachelors-degree-continues-to-grow/?sh=6df798d17bbc https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/22/new-... Number of People with Masters and PhD degrees doubled since 2000: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-people-with-masters-and-phd-degrees-double-since-2000.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...

andrepd 3y ago

Easy, if you do nothing the market deems productive, be it playing games all day or tutoring poor kids in maths, you only get the UBI which equals ~minimum survivability income. If you do 30 hours of plumbing a week for 80$ an hour, you make that UBI + 2400$ a week (or wherever the market seems your work worth). There is always an incentive to do more, and especially as long as the market incenctivises/rewards more or less useful things (e.g. externalities get properly accounted for), then people which aren't content with bare survivability will at least for part of their time do something deemed "useful" or undesirable.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house’s clogged pipe? Same as today, with money. Unlike today, someone receiving poverty support who does this won’t lose nearly as much in poverty support as they make digging in shit, so the marginal return on digging in shit will be greater. UBI (under some different names) was initially proposed as a conservative alternative to means-tested poverty support, specifically because it relieves perverse incentives and reduces duplication (with the tax system) of function in means-tested benefit programs. > In that “without working” society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren’t working? Being able to minimally survive without working and not being punished by having the support rapidly, at a high ratio, reduced when you have outside income separate from the basic support does not mean not working is the norm in society.