5 ms·

If there were a basic income guarantee, which I'm in favour of, and if it were sufficient to fulfil my basic needs (food, clothing, housing, electricity) then I

by motters 12y ago

If there were a basic income guarantee, which I'm in favour of, and if it were sufficient to fulfil my basic needs (food, clothing, housing, electricity) then I'd use second hand hardware and become a free software developer full time. I would be working, but what kind of work I was doing wouldn't be decided by anyone other than myself. I suspect that the JG schemes (one is proposed by the Labour party in the UK) would indeed be make-work schemes producing nothing much of value. If I had a BIG the kinds of software I'd work on would be: - Making self-hosting easy - Making encrypted communications easy for anyone to use - Mesh networking systems to diminish ISP dependency - Simulations of ecosystems, including climate modelling In other words I'd be able to work on things of real value rather than having to work on things of little value just to have basic needs met.

S4M 12y ago
I would tend to think like you, but what would probably happen with me is that I would try something cool that I'm interested in and could benefit others (I am now working on an intelligent software to teach maths to Junior High School/ High School, so I would probably do that), but without the economic incentive to deliver something tangible and usable, odds are that I would probably give up at some point after encountering something I can't solve, and most likely I would end up with an half assed project before trying something else. My guess is that the majority of the people would do just like that, and while we would probably have more Linus like people who start building things by sheer curiosity, we would lose lots of industrial work and research, and I am not sure we would end up winning. So I don't know. I am genuinely interested in the BIG, and think it could unleash the creativity of some people, but I am afraid the majority of us would just waste time into useless distractions. Maybe the BIG should last a given period (like one year), at the end of which it can be renewed if the beneficiary can prove that he or she has spent enough time on something "interesting" - it can be the kind of things you mention, something artistic, doing some studies, traveling, etc. The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  'The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.' Presuming that the time spent on youtube and facebook was not actually valuable (and I will quickly grant that there are ways to spend time on both that are not) I think this is part of a much larger issue we have with motivation and addictive/avoidant behavior. Push to "get a job" can help some people with this, but I think it's actually destructive to others; I think in general we need some better approach - which might be as simple as better mental health care (at the level of helping people meet their goals most effectively) but I'm open to ideas. I think this is needed whether we implement BIG or JG, or not.
- motters 12y ago
  I think the situation today is that many of us do waste time with unproductive distractions in the workplace. It's my observation that if you monitored people in offices much of the time what they're doing is not actually "working" in any meaningful sense, and when they are working the kinds of output which they're producing are not useful to many people. That kind of situation was of course famously satirised in the TV series "the office". So I don't think it's a clear cut situation that wage labour automatically means a good and productive society and that BIG means a bad and unproductive one.
  - S4M 12y ago
    I totally agree with you that many of us could be more productive at their workplace, but they still could be less productive. In fact, let's say that someone productivity goes between 0 and 1, productivity 0 means that you don't do anything at all and just waste your time. Productivity 1 means being as efficient Carmack. I would say that the current productivity is quite low for the employed people, maybe 0.1 in average, and follows some kind of log-normal distribution (all of this are super rough approximation). If we adopt BIG, we would have lots of people who will have 0 productivity (maybe 95% of the population, much more IMHO), and the rest will have a higher productivity. Would we be better off? It's not clear to me, especially at the beginning - maybe after one generation people will get used to work on what they really like - but I would really like to see some experimentation in that direction.
RyanMiller 12y ago
It's so hard to get people to understand the importance of the current Job Expectation not being relevant in the not too far distant future. Working as an old fashion wage-slave will be overshadowed by the coming wave of automation. Tens of millions of redundancies will occur just from self-driving cars. The notion a Job Guarantee will be outdated (if it isn't already), not to mention impossible & quite possibly harmful for technological progress. I reckon people will become like you, working to improve the systems that support our infrastructure. Where the work of one provides for many. Where schooling isn't some odd prepping for ye old industrialization period but directly launching us into reinventing agriculture, energy grids, transportation, space exploration, production & knowledge. Where we will become not to a resource economy or a services economy. But a research, knowledge and engineering (automation) economy. When everyone's expectations of conventional capitalism dies down. We will truly transform as a civilization.
- avz 12y ago
  I doubt we will all become engineers, scientists and technologists working on reinventing agriculture and energy grids in any foreseeable future (quite possibly any future at all). The wave of automation you're talking about has already been happening for a long time and is the reason we live in a services-based economy. We automate (and outsource) manufacturing, but increase the direct human-to-human exchanges called services. Starbucks provides a startling example: making a coffee was automated a long time ago, but people still would rather have another person make their coffee. I'm pretty sure the same is true about hairdressers, stylists, nurses, personal trainers and glacier guides. (Note: I'm not advocating a policy or direction, merely stating an observation)
  - RyanMiller 12y ago
    True and it's a fair observation. But I'm sure that modern and future automation will create a fundamental shift in how we see ourselves. Understandable that it's jarring to most people. My biggest concerns are that not enough will change to accommodate this future. Given how customarily slow government is to accurately and appropriately re-access policies/laws when new technology dramatically changes our civilization. If I think enough about it I realize just how blindly optimistic this all is. Frankly thinking like this might be one of the reasons we may help us reach beyond the coal and sky. You're probably right that this isn't the future we'll get. Just like that old prediction that the Radioisotope generator would power all electronics since it was the superior energy source at the time. Then Chernobyl hysteria changed our future. Probably just like some famous automated car crash that will likely occur. Or a neo-luddite media circus. Who knows what's gonna happen in 50 years. I don't think automation means removing human interaction out of the picture. And I think people's desire for a person to do this work is going to subside as more interactions are personal instead of commercial. It'll free up us to do activities that are more creative, experimental & empathetic with each other. So if anything, it'd be redistributing human interaction into more social roles than compared to a face punching buttons and pulling levers. The whole giving people in Retirement homes electronics animal things to cover the basic human requirement of physical touch and simulated bonding would become unnecessary (hopefully). Since families lifetimes wouldn't be devastated/adsorbed by trying to sustain your bodies physical requirements and running the financial treadmill optimized by bankers. "I doubt we will all become engineers, scientists and technologists" We don't need to all become those things. But to orient our education in new ways to supports primarily these groups and the rest of people learn value creating activities that support each other & themselves. There will probably be some kind currently unimaginable creatives economy where large parts of society are centered around art and media. Yeah this turned into a huge stupid rant. Time to sleep the stupid off. For instance, automation of carpentry won't destroy carpentry as a skill. Because people like doing these things and when they aren't forced do it. As a wage as it's often a creative outlet. Many love their jobs as a hobby but it just becomes work for a wage. Then the hobby become a chore and no longer satisfying or valuable personal time investment. Especially if we start considering how little time we have on Earth. This could be as significant as the step from Slavery to Workers. Except instead of soft-choice, this would put voluntarism as the center piece. Which would then lead to society's institutions being also based on charity/voluntarism.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
And those without your skillset will certainly collect garbage from public spaces, repave roads and fill in potholes, and all the other boring and unpleasant tasks that our civilization needs. This is something I don't understand. All the potholes are filled, all government buildings are perfectly clean, no new infrastructure projects can be productively performed? Productively working women already have free child care provided? The government is already doing everything we want it to do, and there is no use whatsoever for low skill labor?
- motters 12y ago
  I don't know where you're living, but here in the UK the government only does a fraction of what ideally people would want and as time goes by it does less and less. There is indeed plenty of work to be done as you say, but typically you can't fulfil basic needs while doing those jobs which would enhance the neighbourhood. This is evidenced by the current phenomenon of the "working poor" (i.e. people who are working in the private sector but who still critically depend upon income from the state).
- dllthomas 12y ago
  One can easily believe the proposition "we should be hiring more people to address public needs that are currently not well attended" and not believe "we should be promising to find some such thing for anyone who applies."
avz 12y ago
You and a lot of other people on HN are very self-driven and would definitely maintain or perhaps even increase their contribution to society and civilization if given a free ride. A lot of inventors and discoverers of yore were wealthy aristocrats who did precisely that. There were however a lot more other types of wealthy aristocrats who engaged in less productive activities (binge drinking, gambling, building personal militias, etc). When assessing a policy like basic income we need to consider how society will change, not only what we as individuals would end up doing. I'm not saying the disadvantages outweigh the benefits of basic income. I'm undecided. But I'm also disappointed with how the risks are often brushed off.

by motters 12y ago

S4M 12y ago

I would tend to think like you, but what would probably happen with me is that I would try something cool that I'm interested in and could benefit others (I am now working on an intelligent software to teach maths to Junior High School/ High School, so I would probably do that), but without the economic incentive to deliver something tangible and usable, odds are that I would probably give up at some point after encountering something I can't solve, and most likely I would end up with an half assed project before trying something else. My guess is that the majority of the people would do just like that, and while we would probably have more Linus like people who start building things by sheer curiosity, we would lose lots of industrial work and research, and I am not sure we would end up winning. So I don't know. I am genuinely interested in the BIG, and think it could unleash the creativity of some people, but I am afraid the majority of us would just waste time into useless distractions. Maybe the BIG should last a given period (like one year), at the end of which it can be renewed if the beneficiary can prove that he or she has spent enough time on something "interesting" - it can be the kind of things you mention, something artistic, doing some studies, traveling, etc. The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.

dllthomas 12y ago
'The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.' Presuming that the time spent on youtube and facebook was not actually valuable (and I will quickly grant that there are ways to spend time on both that are not) I think this is part of a much larger issue we have with motivation and addictive/avoidant behavior. Push to "get a job" can help some people with this, but I think it's actually destructive to others; I think in general we need some better approach - which might be as simple as better mental health care (at the level of helping people meet their goals most effectively) but I'm open to ideas. I think this is needed whether we implement BIG or JG, or not.
motters 12y ago
I think the situation today is that many of us do waste time with unproductive distractions in the workplace. It's my observation that if you monitored people in offices much of the time what they're doing is not actually "working" in any meaningful sense, and when they are working the kinds of output which they're producing are not useful to many people. That kind of situation was of course famously satirised in the TV series "the office". So I don't think it's a clear cut situation that wage labour automatically means a good and productive society and that BIG means a bad and unproductive one.
- S4M 12y ago
  I totally agree with you that many of us could be more productive at their workplace, but they still could be less productive. In fact, let's say that someone productivity goes between 0 and 1, productivity 0 means that you don't do anything at all and just waste your time. Productivity 1 means being as efficient Carmack. I would say that the current productivity is quite low for the employed people, maybe 0.1 in average, and follows some kind of log-normal distribution (all of this are super rough approximation). If we adopt BIG, we would have lots of people who will have 0 productivity (maybe 95% of the population, much more IMHO), and the rest will have a higher productivity. Would we be better off? It's not clear to me, especially at the beginning - maybe after one generation people will get used to work on what they really like - but I would really like to see some experimentation in that direction.

RyanMiller 12y ago

It's so hard to get people to understand the importance of the current Job Expectation not being relevant in the not too far distant future. Working as an old fashion wage-slave will be overshadowed by the coming wave of automation. Tens of millions of redundancies will occur just from self-driving cars. The notion a Job Guarantee will be outdated (if it isn't already), not to mention impossible & quite possibly harmful for technological progress. I reckon people will become like you, working to improve the systems that support our infrastructure. Where the work of one provides for many. Where schooling isn't some odd prepping for ye old industrialization period but directly launching us into reinventing agriculture, energy grids, transportation, space exploration, production & knowledge. Where we will become not to a resource economy or a services economy. But a research, knowledge and engineering (automation) economy. When everyone's expectations of conventional capitalism dies down. We will truly transform as a civilization.

avz 12y ago
I doubt we will all become engineers, scientists and technologists working on reinventing agriculture and energy grids in any foreseeable future (quite possibly any future at all). The wave of automation you're talking about has already been happening for a long time and is the reason we live in a services-based economy. We automate (and outsource) manufacturing, but increase the direct human-to-human exchanges called services. Starbucks provides a startling example: making a coffee was automated a long time ago, but people still would rather have another person make their coffee. I'm pretty sure the same is true about hairdressers, stylists, nurses, personal trainers and glacier guides. (Note: I'm not advocating a policy or direction, merely stating an observation)
- RyanMiller 12y ago
  True and it's a fair observation. But I'm sure that modern and future automation will create a fundamental shift in how we see ourselves. Understandable that it's jarring to most people. My biggest concerns are that not enough will change to accommodate this future. Given how customarily slow government is to accurately and appropriately re-access policies/laws when new technology dramatically changes our civilization. If I think enough about it I realize just how blindly optimistic this all is. Frankly thinking like this might be one of the reasons we may help us reach beyond the coal and sky. You're probably right that this isn't the future we'll get. Just like that old prediction that the Radioisotope generator would power all electronics since it was the superior energy source at the time. Then Chernobyl hysteria changed our future. Probably just like some famous automated car crash that will likely occur. Or a neo-luddite media circus. Who knows what's gonna happen in 50 years. I don't think automation means removing human interaction out of the picture. And I think people's desire for a person to do this work is going to subside as more interactions are personal instead of commercial. It'll free up us to do activities that are more creative, experimental & empathetic with each other. So if anything, it'd be redistributing human interaction into more social roles than compared to a face punching buttons and pulling levers. The whole giving people in Retirement homes electronics animal things to cover the basic human requirement of physical touch and simulated bonding would become unnecessary (hopefully). Since families lifetimes wouldn't be devastated/adsorbed by trying to sustain your bodies physical requirements and running the financial treadmill optimized by bankers. "I doubt we will all become engineers, scientists and technologists" We don't need to all become those things. But to orient our education in new ways to supports primarily these groups and the rest of people learn value creating activities that support each other & themselves. There will probably be some kind currently unimaginable creatives economy where large parts of society are centered around art and media. Yeah this turned into a huge stupid rant. Time to sleep the stupid off. For instance, automation of carpentry won't destroy carpentry as a skill. Because people like doing these things and when they aren't forced do it. As a wage as it's often a creative outlet. Many love their jobs as a hobby but it just becomes work for a wage. Then the hobby become a chore and no longer satisfying or valuable personal time investment. Especially if we start considering how little time we have on Earth. This could be as significant as the step from Slavery to Workers. Except instead of soft-choice, this would put voluntarism as the center piece. Which would then lead to society's institutions being also based on charity/voluntarism.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

And those without your skillset will certainly collect garbage from public spaces, repave roads and fill in potholes, and all the other boring and unpleasant tasks that our civilization needs. This is something I don't understand. All the potholes are filled, all government buildings are perfectly clean, no new infrastructure projects can be productively performed? Productively working women already have free child care provided? The government is already doing everything we want it to do, and there is no use whatsoever for low skill labor?

motters 12y ago
I don't know where you're living, but here in the UK the government only does a fraction of what ideally people would want and as time goes by it does less and less. There is indeed plenty of work to be done as you say, but typically you can't fulfil basic needs while doing those jobs which would enhance the neighbourhood. This is evidenced by the current phenomenon of the "working poor" (i.e. people who are working in the private sector but who still critically depend upon income from the state).
dllthomas 12y ago
One can easily believe the proposition "we should be hiring more people to address public needs that are currently not well attended" and not believe "we should be promising to find some such thing for anyone who applies."

avz 12y ago

You and a lot of other people on HN are very self-driven and would definitely maintain or perhaps even increase their contribution to society and civilization if given a free ride. A lot of inventors and discoverers of yore were wealthy aristocrats who did precisely that. There were however a lot more other types of wealthy aristocrats who engaged in less productive activities (binge drinking, gambling, building personal militias, etc). When assessing a policy like basic income we need to consider how society will change, not only what we as individuals would end up doing. I'm not saying the disadvantages outweigh the benefits of basic income. I'm undecided. But I'm also disappointed with how the risks are often brushed off.