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> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do

> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard RMS make. What the hell.

agildehaus 12y ago
It's nearly in the job description of every software engineer to create things that ease people's workloads or replace their jobs entirely. I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.
- glesica 12y ago
  > Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive. Seems like this is really his point, if it isn't going to be preemptive, then (he feels) we should stop the jobs from going away.
  - baddox 12y ago
    And that's the problem. If basic income won't happen until technological advancement causes mass unemployment, and governments ban technological advancement that might lead to mass unemployment, then we will get neither technological advancement nor basic income.
    - tharga8616 12y ago
      Absolutely right
    - glesica 12y ago
      Why can't basic income happen first? Or why can't basic income be phased in smoothly? I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree with you that basic income is unlikely to happen until there has been an incredible amount of pain and suffering, but does it have to be that way? Not necessarily. If we, as a society, set compensating policies as a condition for technological progress, then the progress might come more slowly, but it will still come. Of course I'm probably being a crazy person thinking that our government might act rationally. :(
    - ThomPete 12y ago
      It's not just about job loss it's as much about salaries stagnating and thus making people poor. Especially here in the US it's a problem since it in return affect things like ones ability to pay for healthcare.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    >>we should stop the jobs from going away. We can't stop anything from going away. Technology progress by and large has always been incremental. Large changes haven't occurred since the time of Industrial revolution. And I guess the next one won't occur until we get Artificial general intelligence. Until then affairs of the world will go on as they always have. AGI would alter the very course of economy in a way the whole concept of a job and a income would be very largely irrelevant. Heck you may not even need a basic income, because you only need to bootstrap a few machines and from there on they are going to do every single thing for you.
- pdpi 12y ago
  "I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." Indirectly, perhaps. Application-level software projects do tend to have the "automate people's jobs away" effect, but AFAIK, Stallman has been mostly involved in infrastructure-ish "enable some people to work (on automating away other people's jobs)" projects.
  - agildehaus 12y ago
    Exactly. He's responsible for many of the tools which make it much easier for everyone else to automate jobs away.
- larrys 12y ago
  " I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." No question about that. As someone who back in the day paid thousands for business software that is now almost always free, money went from our company to a company that had employees, sales people, programmers who made a living off the software that was being offered. Not to mention obviously the people that we didn't need anymore as a result of that software. (Bookeepers, anyone?)
  - xsmasher 12y ago
    That sounds remarkably like the broken window fallacy. What does your company do with that extra money now? Throw it in a barrel and burn it?
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      What are Uber and passengers going to do with the extra money? In both cases, we see the loss of specific jobs and (at least) short term pain for the people who were relying on them.
      - xsmasher 12y ago
        Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use. The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy.
        dllthomas 12y ago
        "Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use." Right. Which isn't to say we shouldn't be considering it. The short term matters - we spend a lot of time there. "The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy." Well, there's nothing to say the money is redistributed to labor, and it's hard to run a consumer economy when only a few people have any money to pay for anything. That said, I don't really get that vibe from the parent comment in the first place...
- macspoofing 12y ago
  >I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Great point. It's hard to quantify though. OSS gives companies access to a quality software stack for minimal cost. On the other hand, those companies are not now buying software from proprietary vendors. I don't know which is more: jobs created by having access to inexpensive quality software, or jobs lost due to less spending on application code.
Thlom 12y ago
He could just go the non-free software route on this point as well ...
rando3826 12y ago
First off, that's not what he said. Secondly, lots of smart people have been talking about the need for basic income when robots take over large portions of the labor force. I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.
- cjbprime 12y ago
  > First off, that's not what he said. Can you elaborate on the divide between his claim and my interpretation, operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow? I honestly don't see it. For the record, I also advocate strongly for basic income. But I don't think that robots taking jobs leads to particularly poor outcomes. For example! Driving a car 17 hours a day (or at all!), as described in the Uber article, is a needlessly dangerous activity for a human to be performing.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow" Uber is not automating its fleet tomorrow, either.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    Basic income was included to show that removing jobs is not necessarily bad, but it can have immediate negative effects. This is just an instance of consolidating wealth. It is moving a system which distributes wealth to many taxi drivers into a system which distributes wealth to a few people who run Uber. When there's no system in place to correct this imbalance, it contributes to the wealth gap between rich and poor which is accelerating in many other ways. When we see a massive shift of resources to just a few people, it leaves everyone worse off, even the wealthy ones, because we all have to live in a world in which more people are more disempowered and desperate. He just didn't go into detail because he likes short statements.
- gnaritas 12y ago
  > I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy. Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist. Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?
jeremiep 12y ago
> unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. This. There's far more to his argument than merely "lets prevent people from losing jobs."
- cjbprime 12y ago
  If I were to argue "We should declare war on Canada, unless/until everyone in the US has free healthcare", you would be right to respond with "What? Declaring war on Canada is a terrible idea!" rather than "Well, there's more to his argument than merely declaring war on Canada".
geofft 12y ago
What happens if the digital meter/dispatch thing in the taxi runs non-free software, and there's no free replacement? Wouldn't it be an ethical imperative for all taxi drivers to quit their jobs rather than use non-free software?
baddox 12y ago
It's an extremely common liberal argument.
skylan_q 12y ago
I'd take this all with a grain of salt. Reading this from RMS is like taking financial advice from Michael Jordan or medical advice from Albert Einstein. This is Russel Brand level thinking.
- thizzbuzz 12y ago
  MJ is a billionaire and most of that is not directly from his NBA salary. I'd take financial advice from him.
eastbayjake 12y ago
The argument for Basic Income was a Hacker News thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265
rokhayakebe 12y ago
You have TRULY misquoted the author. Actually you did not, you said something entirely different. He said "let's ban this," with this referring to Uber. Secondly even if he said "let's ban ANY techno...," he did add "Unless/until every ..," which is more than a valid argument.
deeviant 12y ago
I agree. Also, if Uber doesn't introduce robotic cars, some other company surely will. Uber seems to be the cool company to hate, but when I talk to Uber drivers that unanimously seemed to think it was a good gig. The talked about the money(how it was much better than what they were doing), they talked about the hours(whenever they would like to work), and they talked about the pleasure of working for themselves. When the switch to robotic cars comes, in it will impacts the world over, and Ubers interaction with the robotic car revolution will be a very small part of the impact self driving cars have, in my own humble opinion. I'm not even convinced Uber can hold onto it's market share when self-driving cars take over, the space will seems ripe for competition.
- kazagistar 12y ago
  The kids working at sweatshops probably think it is a good gig too; it pays more then digging through piles of trash.
MaysonL 12y ago
Fuck banning technology; isn't the logical thing to do to make it a free (i.e. tax-supported) public good, like health care should be, or roads? I mean, why should the roads be free, and the cars not?
asdrty 12y ago
that is pretty much what Orlando just did... a taxi lobbyist made them introduce a minimum price for rides provided by Uber and Lyft that I think is higher then taxis... http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-lyft-changes-orlando-20141215-story.html http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-ly... but I think that Lyft and Uber still have a chance to appeal the ruling...

agildehaus 12y ago

It's nearly in the job description of every software engineer to create things that ease people's workloads or replace their jobs entirely. I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.

glesica 12y ago
> Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive. Seems like this is really his point, if it isn't going to be preemptive, then (he feels) we should stop the jobs from going away.
- baddox 12y ago
  And that's the problem. If basic income won't happen until technological advancement causes mass unemployment, and governments ban technological advancement that might lead to mass unemployment, then we will get neither technological advancement nor basic income.
  - tharga8616 12y ago
    Absolutely right
  - glesica 12y ago
    Why can't basic income happen first? Or why can't basic income be phased in smoothly? I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree with you that basic income is unlikely to happen until there has been an incredible amount of pain and suffering, but does it have to be that way? Not necessarily. If we, as a society, set compensating policies as a condition for technological progress, then the progress might come more slowly, but it will still come. Of course I'm probably being a crazy person thinking that our government might act rationally. :(
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    It's not just about job loss it's as much about salaries stagnating and thus making people poor. Especially here in the US it's a problem since it in return affect things like ones ability to pay for healthcare.
- kamaal 12y ago
  >>we should stop the jobs from going away. We can't stop anything from going away. Technology progress by and large has always been incremental. Large changes haven't occurred since the time of Industrial revolution. And I guess the next one won't occur until we get Artificial general intelligence. Until then affairs of the world will go on as they always have. AGI would alter the very course of economy in a way the whole concept of a job and a income would be very largely irrelevant. Heck you may not even need a basic income, because you only need to bootstrap a few machines and from there on they are going to do every single thing for you.
pdpi 12y ago
"I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." Indirectly, perhaps. Application-level software projects do tend to have the "automate people's jobs away" effect, but AFAIK, Stallman has been mostly involved in infrastructure-ish "enable some people to work (on automating away other people's jobs)" projects.
- agildehaus 12y ago
  Exactly. He's responsible for many of the tools which make it much easier for everyone else to automate jobs away.
larrys 12y ago
" I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." No question about that. As someone who back in the day paid thousands for business software that is now almost always free, money went from our company to a company that had employees, sales people, programmers who made a living off the software that was being offered. Not to mention obviously the people that we didn't need anymore as a result of that software. (Bookeepers, anyone?)
- xsmasher 12y ago
  That sounds remarkably like the broken window fallacy. What does your company do with that extra money now? Throw it in a barrel and burn it?
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    What are Uber and passengers going to do with the extra money? In both cases, we see the loss of specific jobs and (at least) short term pain for the people who were relying on them.
    - xsmasher 12y ago
      Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use. The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy.
      - dllthomas 12y ago
        "Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use." Right. Which isn't to say we shouldn't be considering it. The short term matters - we spend a lot of time there. "The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy." Well, there's nothing to say the money is redistributed to labor, and it's hard to run a consumer economy when only a few people have any money to pay for anything. That said, I don't really get that vibe from the parent comment in the first place...
macspoofing 12y ago
>I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Great point. It's hard to quantify though. OSS gives companies access to a quality software stack for minimal cost. On the other hand, those companies are not now buying software from proprietary vendors. I don't know which is more: jobs created by having access to inexpensive quality software, or jobs lost due to less spending on application code.

Thlom 12y ago

He could just go the non-free software route on this point as well ...

rando3826 12y ago

First off, that's not what he said. Secondly, lots of smart people have been talking about the need for basic income when robots take over large portions of the labor force. I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.

cjbprime 12y ago
> First off, that's not what he said. Can you elaborate on the divide between his claim and my interpretation, operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow? I honestly don't see it. For the record, I also advocate strongly for basic income. But I don't think that robots taking jobs leads to particularly poor outcomes. For example! Driving a car 17 hours a day (or at all!), as described in the Uber article, is a needlessly dangerous activity for a human to be performing.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow" Uber is not automating its fleet tomorrow, either.
- ewzimm 12y ago
  Basic income was included to show that removing jobs is not necessarily bad, but it can have immediate negative effects. This is just an instance of consolidating wealth. It is moving a system which distributes wealth to many taxi drivers into a system which distributes wealth to a few people who run Uber. When there's no system in place to correct this imbalance, it contributes to the wealth gap between rich and poor which is accelerating in many other ways. When we see a massive shift of resources to just a few people, it leaves everyone worse off, even the wealthy ones, because we all have to live in a world in which more people are more disempowered and desperate. He just didn't go into detail because he likes short statements.
gnaritas 12y ago
> I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy. Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist. Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?

jeremiep 12y ago

> unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. This. There's far more to his argument than merely "lets prevent people from losing jobs."

cjbprime 12y ago
If I were to argue "We should declare war on Canada, unless/until everyone in the US has free healthcare", you would be right to respond with "What? Declaring war on Canada is a terrible idea!" rather than "Well, there's more to his argument than merely declaring war on Canada".

geofft 12y ago

What happens if the digital meter/dispatch thing in the taxi runs non-free software, and there's no free replacement? Wouldn't it be an ethical imperative for all taxi drivers to quit their jobs rather than use non-free software?

baddox 12y ago

It's an extremely common liberal argument.

skylan_q 12y ago

I'd take this all with a grain of salt. Reading this from RMS is like taking financial advice from Michael Jordan or medical advice from Albert Einstein. This is Russel Brand level thinking.

thizzbuzz 12y ago
MJ is a billionaire and most of that is not directly from his NBA salary. I'd take financial advice from him.

eastbayjake 12y ago

The argument for Basic Income was a Hacker News thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265

rokhayakebe 12y ago

You have TRULY misquoted the author. Actually you did not, you said something entirely different. He said "let's ban this," with this referring to Uber. Secondly even if he said "let's ban ANY techno...," he did add "Unless/until every ..," which is more than a valid argument.

deeviant 12y ago

I agree. Also, if Uber doesn't introduce robotic cars, some other company surely will. Uber seems to be the cool company to hate, but when I talk to Uber drivers that unanimously seemed to think it was a good gig. The talked about the money(how it was much better than what they were doing), they talked about the hours(whenever they would like to work), and they talked about the pleasure of working for themselves. When the switch to robotic cars comes, in it will impacts the world over, and Ubers interaction with the robotic car revolution will be a very small part of the impact self driving cars have, in my own humble opinion. I'm not even convinced Uber can hold onto it's market share when self-driving cars take over, the space will seems ripe for competition.

kazagistar 12y ago
The kids working at sweatshops probably think it is a good gig too; it pays more then digging through piles of trash.

MaysonL 12y ago

Fuck banning technology; isn't the logical thing to do to make it a free (i.e. tax-supported) public good, like health care should be, or roads? I mean, why should the roads be free, and the cars not?

asdrty 12y ago

that is pretty much what Orlando just did... a taxi lobbyist made them introduce a minimum price for rides provided by Uber and Lyft that I think is higher then taxis... http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-lyft-changes-orlando-20141215-story.html http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-ly... but I think that Lyft and Uber still have a chance to appeal the ruling...