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The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death.
by vitally3643 5mo ago
The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death.
- zozbot234 5mo agoHistorically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
- andrepd 5mo ago> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
- SpaceNoodled 5mo agoPollution.
- harvey9 5mo agoIn the towns yes. A wealthy city man could expect to live fewer years than a labourer in the countryside.
- andrepd 5mo agoSurely a factor, but hardly the sole explanation; malnutrition rose, that should give you some pause.
- oblio 5mo agoPollution, malnutrition, maiming by industrial or mining equipment (huge percentage at the start).
- showerst 5mo agoYes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs. After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
- zozbot234 5mo ago> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
- pdonis 5mo ago> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. Such as? AI can't do my laundry, wash my dishes, clean my house, do my food shopping for me. AI can't care for me if I'm sick. > The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable. How is this a benefit?
- heneuehd 5mo ago[dead]
- TuringTest 5mo ago> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable. Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society. By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.
- pasquinelli 5mo ago> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
- bluGill 5mo agoWhile you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- TimByte 5mo agoThe worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go
- verve_rat 5mo agoThere is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
- harvey9 5mo agoDo you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo agoThere's also the worry whether productivity is real.
- harvey9 5mo agoIf you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
- themafia 5mo ago> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
- slg 5mo agoOr we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
- shimman 5mo agoNo, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
- bijowo1676 5mo agowho will redistribute stuff? You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class. Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
- atq2119 5mo agoThis is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class. That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis. At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class. Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo agoThe fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation. So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
- fsckboy 5mo ago>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that. doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
- harimau777 5mo agoI'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
- fsckboy 5mo agoI said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives". I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product. I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
- Starman_Jones 5mo agoComparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
- 5mo ago
- tim333 5mo agoNot necessarily. In the UK: > Over one million young people in this country are now neither employed, in education nor in training... yet no starvation. I'm not sure it's a good situation but it is what it is.
- robotresearcher 5mo agoFor context, the UK unemployment level is pretty low compared to the last 55 years of history. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin... One million is a lot of people, but that's from a population of ~70 million.
- harvey9 5mo agoThe post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
- robotresearcher 5mo agoI chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted. It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate. edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05871/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05... edit 2: Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgwy/lms https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin... I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis. Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
- SpaceNoodled 5mo agoNo, people must be given food or they starve to death. Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
- pdonis 5mo ago> Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal. No, it's not, because food requires work to produce. Someone has to do that work. If you yourself are not one of the people who works to produce the food that we all need, you have only two ways of getting it: (1) Trade something else of value for it; (2) Force the people who do produce it to give it to you. Option #1 is a free market. Option #2 is tyranny. There are no other choices. Which do you pick?
- tonyedgecombe 5mo agoIs it tyranny that my 84 year old parents get free food (via the state pension)?
- pdonis 5mo agoDid they earn the pension by working for many years?
- graemep 5mo agoDo you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years? In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
- pdonis 5mo ago> Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years? I think that we need to be clear about what's going on. The post I originally responded to in this subthread (which was not by you) said that whether or not work is done is "completely orthogonal" to whether people starve to death. My point is that it is not: food has to be produced, so somebody has to do the work to produce it. The question you are asking, and the claim I was originally responding to, completely ignore that part of it, and only focus on the person who needs food, not the people who are producing it. I'll take the US as an example. The US population is well over 300 million by now, but let's take 300 million as a round number. I think about 1 in 20 people in the US are involved in food production in some way. That means 15 million people in the US are producing food. There are indeed a substantial number of people in the US who have never worked in their lives but who are being given at least some sort of income by the government. I'll take SSI as a rough proxy for that since it's explicitly for people who have no work history. From what I can gather, there are about 6 million people in the US on SSI. That's about 2 people in 1000. (Of course, we produce many more things than food. But food is the focus of this subthread, so that's what I'll talk about.) So if 2 people in 1000 are on SSI, i.e., are getting fed at taxpayer expense without ever having worked in their lives, then about 2 in 1000 of the 15 million people producing food in the US, or about 30,000 people, are working to produce the food that those people in SSI eat. So 30,000 people are producing food for 6 million--the same 1 to 20 ratio we saw before. At this level, of course, it seems obvious that this is not a serious problem. The 30,000 people producing food for the 6 million SSI recipients are getting paid, they're just getting paid by the taxpayers in this case instead of the people consuming the food. (We'll leave aside all the issues about whether they get paid a fair price, the various perverse incentives at work in the US food production system, etc., since those apply to all of us, not just those on SSI.) But still, it's important to recognize that there are 30,000 people producing food in the US for people who produce nothing in return. We can say that's a small enough number that we can deal with it, and I don't disagree; we as a society have decided that we can afford to support 0.2 percent of us that way, and that's fine. But it's tempting to just round that number to zero, as if the food the SSI recipients eat just appeared by magic, for free, without anyone having to work to produce it. And that temptation needs to be resisted. Why does it need to be resisted? Because the intuitive sense that "we can afford it" does not scale. We can afford it at 2 people per 1,000. That doesn't mean we can afford it if that percentage goes up. Nor does it mean we can afford it if we keep adding more and more things to the government's largesse, and not just for people who have never worked and can't work.
- RajT88 5mo agoIn unrelated news, we are expelling our agricultural and service industry workforces at the moment.
- singpolyma3 5mo agoOnly if we tie being fed to "working" which is a rather inhumane and untenable thing to do