15 ms·

Wouldn't there always be new jobs? I mean, sure, technology has automated lots of things. But that's a good thing. We just need new kinds of jobs - ones that ca

by sktrdie 12y ago

Wouldn't there always be new jobs? I mean, sure, technology has automated lots of things. But that's a good thing. We just need new kinds of jobs - ones that can't be automated. Who knows, perhaps in the future everybody can be an artist. Not sure a universal basic income would work from a mathematical point of view. Giving money to everybody would only increase the price of things.

alandarev 12y ago
Alternatively, not giving the money to majority, yet producing enough food for everybody will drive prices to zero.
marksbrown 12y ago
CGP Grey covered a few of your points in his video 'humans need not apply'[1]. The main argument against new jobs filling the void as it were, was the prevalence of the kinds of jobs that most people currently perform and the lack of any industry requiring millions of people in the future. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I find these arguments incredibly short-sighted. A typical American in 1850 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that employed a typical American in 1950. And a typical American in 1950 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that people here on HN hold. The idea that "this time it's different" seems so vain to me; like somehow NOW we're able to reliably predict the future of society, when we've proved terrible at doing that for thousands of years. What an amazing coincidence it would be if we all just happen to be alive at the time when all the surprises were over in human society! The founding premise of the market economy is that we can't predict the future, so we set up systems to be flexible in the face of changing technologies and cultures. Is that really all over now? That feels like an extraordinary claim, so I'd want to see extraordinary proof, and I'm not seeing it. Employment is actually on the upswing in the U.S. right now, and there are hiring shortages in "jobs of the future" type fields like programming, data analysis, genetic analysis, engineering, etc. Employment will change, and our training and education systems need to change too. But I think it's way early to declare the end of specialization and employment.
facepalm 12y ago
Historically there haven't always been jobs, so why should there be in the future? A job means you have something to offer that somebody is willing to pay you for. If nobody needs anything from you (or nobody has money), what job can you get?
- clavalle 12y ago
  Perhaps that definition of job is too narrow. While there hasn't always been currency trading hands for goods and services on a regular schedule there have always been people creating value for themselves, their family, their community and, ultimately, the world. Trading currency is just a convenient way to trade on that value. I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved.
  - facepalm 12y ago
    "I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved." That's very reassuring :-)
    - antocv 12y ago
      I believe in fact that is the natural state of people - to create some value for themselves, others and the world. Left to our own, we will after a while of boredom, just get bored of boredom and create - games, dances, arts, softwares, tools, crafts, houses. Or put in another way we will continue to satisfy our needs.
      - facepalm 12y ago
        Have you watched the news lately? Millions of people fail to satisfy their needs every day.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved. We already had, those are so-called 'bullshit jobs' - things that have no value for humanity but has "economical value" because they're part of zero-sum games. But I hope that at some point the society will ask itself the question "why are we all doing this nonsense anyway?" and drop the concept of jobs entirely.
leaveyou 12y ago
"Wouldn't there always be new jobs?" No there wouldn't. And even if there were, this article talks about when there will not be.
pachydermic 12y ago
Look at all the people making and selling hats for TF2 or gun skins or whatever. Valve already started the idea of creating value from its software users - creating an entire economy. People get the tools and game for free and only have to invest their time to make money. Epic is doing something similar with Unreal Tournament. Making it open source and creating a marketplace to sell your own games/modifications. There are a lot of examples like this. Who knows how pervasive that kind of system will become. Will it apply to other industries/mediums? Could Reddit or Hacker News find a way to pay individuals for well regarded content? There are some possibilities here. But I wonder if that kind of system can really support that many people. Most of the content created sucks, right? Then only a really small number would actually be successful. Maybe you'd have to incentivize sorting through content to find the good stuff a la Steam Greenlight (and find a way to pay users for their work). Anyways, I'm sure people will find something to do. Even if it's just being paid a basic income for nothing in return. I think peoples' standards of living have been improved by technology (nukes and what not notwithstanding). Why expect that trend to stop now? It's just that, from our relatively medieval point of view, it's hard to imagine what that world will look like so we're naturally scared of it. That's also not to suggest that there won't be serious growing pains while we all collectively try to figure this new world out.
- datasage 12y ago
  Its unlikely that would be enough to offset the scale of disruption that will be occurring with automation. With ever creative or content industry we have so far (wether it will be with actors, app stores, youtube celebrities) a similar pattern always emerges. At the top, you have often less than 1% becoming wildly successful, making hundreds of thousands to millions each year. Below that you have maybe 5-10% who are able to make a living at it, but will not pull any spectacular numbers. After that, you have everyone else. These are people who's apps are rarely downloaded, who have less than a few thousand views on any video they put up, or actors who are out of work most of the time. These section may pull in some revenue, but not enough to survive on. At best its a side job, at least until their main job goes away. At the core of all this, is that we don't have enough time to consume all the media that is produced. We often end up letting other curate the content that we consume. Whether it be media companies or friends and family. But it tends to create self reinforcing cycles, driving more attention to the hits and less to everything else.
Zigurd 12y ago
There is no reason to believe jobs with significant cash wages will always be around. If we eliminated prisons and police we don't need, the TSA, a significant part of our military, and other make-work and counterproductive jobs we would have higher unemployment rate, even after the economy rises from having the unproductive drag lifted. That is, our current employment picture is highly manipulated. The people in jobs that could readily be eliminated only have an illusion of worthwhile work.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  I'm not convinced arguments about worthwhile are useful. If you're not involved in basic industry, then any job is the same, right? We don't NEED anything but food, housing and ... that's about it.
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    There are jobs that are objectively make-work positions, especially in the public sector, and the penumbra of "beltway bandits" where there is no individually expressed demand that directly or indirectly caused a requisition for an additional worker to, for example, touch your balls with a blue glove.
jchrisa 12y ago
It might actually lower prices due to there being an addressable market below the middle class.
panglott 12y ago
Whether there will always be new jobs is impossible to predict. There may be, or not. Guaranteed basic income doesn't necessarily give money to everybody: only at the lowest levels of income, where people already have the lowest levels of consumption. It seems like the increase of consumption at the low end from a basic income could be easily projected, and I suspect the impact on inflation would not be overwhelming. Of course I also think we should have a slightly higher inflation target (say 3%), as well. A basic income would definitely need to be paired with supply-side policies to reduce poverty, to reduce housing prices for example.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  > Guaranteed basic income doesn't necessarily give money to everybody As discussed in the article above and as debated in both right- and left-wing political circles, guaranteed basic income does give the basic income to everybody, either in cash benefits or tax credits [1]. Thus, basic income is unconditional. There is no expensive bureaucracy to decide who gets it and who doesn't get it. And there can be no accusations about "those people" receiving basic income, and the accuser not. Everyone gets it. That's the beauty of the system. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
  - panglott 12y ago
    I'm thinking guaranteed minimum income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income The article is ambiguous, bringing up the idea as Milton Friedman's support for a negative income tax (which IIRC is a form of GMI).
  - derekp7 12y ago
    Except that basic income has to be paid for with taxes. So everyone that works has a higher tax that they pay. Now below a given yearly earned income, the money you get from BI exceeds the additional increase in taxes. But above that threshold, you would be paying more in taxes than what you get back from BI. The real question, is where do you draw that line? At 50K a year? 100K? Or do you get it from property tax (and include all assets someone owns, including foreign holdings, as taxable)?
zanny 12y ago
So I have a counterclaim that exists today - Deviantart. Why can't everyone be an artist? Because you can only consume so much art. I have a page group that is currently ~45 pages of artists on that website whose galleries I need to review and potentially watch. They total up to around 15k works of art, and that pool just grows, I can never get it under wraps, because it would take me probably a full workweek just to get through half of that. On that, I'm already following nearly one thousand artists. I get probably 1 - 2 thousand pieces of art every month in my inbox. A lot of these artists are actually living off their creations. Over time my standards had to rise because there are just so many people drawing. That doesn't even touch the writers on fanfiction.net or the thousands of sites dedicated to hand crafted continuities that are hundreds of thousands of pages long. Nowadays I really only follow people on Deviantart who consistently do beautiful full color ultra high resolution art pieces that would have probably bowled a king over half a milennia ago. And I'm getting thousands of them a month, for free. Because a lot of those creators are not living off their creations. They are wasting amazing potential flipping burgers at McDonalds because I don't have the money to fund them all. I've probably spent $100 this year on commissions so far, but I do not have nearly enough income to subsidize the (probably) 800 or so artists I follow who are stuck in bottom feeding jobs to survive. But that is only bad for the 200 making a living off of it. You see, the problem with a creative economy (beyond the CGP Grey robots will do it) is that a lot of people are creative, and while very few people are good at it, there are a lot of people. Just on this random website that pales in comparison of scale to premiere web ventures HN talks about all the time (of course most folks on here would love to be as successful as DA) is that you can meet everyones creative needs and desires with significantly fewer than the entirety of the population. Our current economy is satiating our entertainment desires to match whatever amount of money we are socially willing to impart to the business today, and we will only get poorer and less capable to fund entertainers of all forms (artists, writers, animators, comedians, etc) in the future as all our other jobs dry up and we lose all our income. And then there are all those volunteers. Today, they live off menial labor jobs. Tomorrow, when the jobs don't exist, they will try to make a living off the creativity when there is nothing left, but it cannot be enough. It is not enough today when wealth inequality is where it is at, it will never be enough tomorrow when it is even more random to find a patron with wealth to fund you - you are basically praying an aristocrat blesses you with prosperity in that world. But they still give all of it away for free. Fundamentally I'm amazed people even spend money on entertainment at all, because I really do not - I have basically stopped watching film, because I don't see the opportunity cost of moving pictures as being worth it over the millions good of works of art and comics I have not seen yet. Music? There are millions of free tracks that could last me a lifetime on top of the collection I amassed before around 2010 of paid music that would last a lifetime. There are more fantastic free stories told than seconds left in my life to consume them all, and more are made every day. And this is all in the infancy of the Internet. It has existed as a thing for only about twenty years where creative people could impart entertainment upon us through it. And its adoption grows every year. So the next ten years will not generate 50% more entertainment, it will probably generate magnitudes more, and we already have more than enough for a lifetime. I mean, look at youtube. 300 hours of video every minute. It only .01% of all youtube content is great, then you are still behind spending this minute reading this sentence than watching that minute of great youtube content. My point is the cat is out of the bag, and the economics would have never supported the cat in the bag in the first place. Art, music, video, even free (freedom and freeware) games, are all available en masse, at such scale that you cannot ever fathom to consume all we have today. There is no way we can create an economy around creating more of this stuff, because the Internet solves a long run problem that enabled the old world TV and radio industries of yesteryear - seamless persistence. All this data is going to be with us forever, always at our fingertips. No cumbersome recording hardware needed to preserve our entertainment, it is perpetually eternal thanks to the Internet Archive at the least. We can only add more from here on out, but until we achieve immortality we will only have so much any one person can possibly consume. And its not like that person is going to have any money to pay for it, if you have a creative economy, where the status quo is free, and all the other jobs evaporate.
creshal 12y ago
> Wouldn't there always be new jobs? Sure. But will there always be enough jobs for everyone?
raisedbyninjas 12y ago
How big is the market for art and other entertainment? We already having "starving artists" with the limited pool of artists that we have now. Even supposing art consumption exploded, people generally don't consume a lot of lower quality, amateur art. Compare the earnings of a musician on the billboard charts to, say, the most popular local band in your city. Similarly, compare the revenue of a major league sports team with a minor league team. Both of these demonstrate that only the elite entertainers have enough success to quit their day job. I don't expect this pattern to change, only for the number of elite to grow slightly.
timepiece 12y ago
We need asset/wealth re-distribution and not fiat currency issued by those Fed wolves. The worthless paper they issue to help their buddies plunder the nations wealth has to stop and we should look for more alternatives to derive meaning for our lives than working to death just to please those greedy capitalists. Enough is enough! The recalling of the story of Maria Fernandes death always saddens me that a human being had to sacrifice her life for the capitalists to appropriate her work efforts and give her pennies in return just to keep her alive. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737115/New-Jersey-woman-trying-nap-car-working-four-jobs-dies-fume-inhalation.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737115/New-Jersey-w...
vijayr 12y ago
There will always be some jobs even if everything is automated - to maintain the robots, fix them, make new ones etc. But the number of jobs would be much less than it is now. For example, once self driving cars become common, imagine how many people would be out of jobs - millions of cab drivers, truck drivers, people working in parking lots, insurance companies etc. Sure some of these jobs would be replaced by engineers, specialized mechanics, urban planners etc but the number would be far smaller and would require specialized knowledge and skillset. It wouldn't be easy for today's cabbie to get any of those jobs. What happens then?
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> Wouldn't there always be new jobs? There's no fundamental law of economics that demands there always be new jobs. There have been in the past, each wave of disruption created new job categories, even new industrial sectors. But that just means there will be new jobs until there aren't new jobs. Science fiction authors have no trouble imagining scenarios where there are no new jobs for anyone. If that comes to pass, what then? Presumably the same economic forces that creates such a situation will also have allowed some small percentage of property owners to own the automation that makes everything. Depending on the details, this might not even be a Pyrrhic victory... why would they need your money anymore, if they had fleets of yacht-building automated shipyards and robots that kept the wine cellar stocked? If they can manage the transition from "we still need you to buy our products so I can live in luxury" to "the luxuries are produced in my automated factories directly"... Then quite bluntly, you're fucked. > Who knows, perhaps in the future everybody can be an artist There is the cliche of the starving artist. Even today. And we live in a world which only supports less than 1% artists because that's the ceiling on that occupation. That is mostly the amount of art that the rich want in their lives. Specialties rely on the idea that only a few do them. One specialty trades its goods and services for those produced by another. If we all make art, then I could trade my art for yours. But neither of us can eat art.
- cafebeen 12y ago
  I think you're assuming that art requires a market for buying and selling. Most people mostly make art because it's fun and personally fulfilling, not so much for rich folks to enjoy.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Isn't that circular? We all do that, because there's no money in it. If there were, many folks would do it for a living.
    - cafebeen 12y ago
      Not sure what you're getting at. Just pointing out that most art isn't for monetary profit, it's just people enjoying the process at home and with friends.
drabiega 12y ago
>Giving money to everybody would only increase the price of things. Not necessarily, inflation and the price level are more complicated than that. Creating new money in an economy with no idle capital might create 1-to-1 price level increases, but generally a guaranteed income is funded by progressive taxation. You'd expect some prices to go up and others to go down because the beneficiaries will use money differently, but a funded general income should cause no general inflation.
SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
> Wouldn't there always be new jobs? I'll say what I always say when this objection is raised: Is the rule that "new jobs will always arise to replace the ones automated" an iron law of nature, or just something that has been happening for a while and will eventually stop happening? And if it will eventually stop happening, what would the early stages of it stopping look like? Perhaps an economic recovery that doesn't produce as many jobs as expected? Further reading: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/09/2120134/jobs-automation-engels-pause-and-the-limits-of-history/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/09/2120134/jobs-automatio...
megaman22 12y ago
The way things are going, the floor level of intelligence and skill required to be a productive and comfortable member of the economy (i.e. not stocking shelves at Walmart, tending bar, or doing other minimal-skill drudge work) is rising steadily. Somebody with an 80 IQ is not ever going to be a software engineer, or a doctor or a lawyer. We used to have jobs that allowed these people to at least enjoy a lower-middle class existence, now they are scraping just to survive and stay off the streets.

by sktrdie 12y ago

alandarev 12y ago

Alternatively, not giving the money to majority, yet producing enough food for everybody will drive prices to zero.

marksbrown 12y ago

CGP Grey covered a few of your points in his video 'humans need not apply'[1]. The main argument against new jobs filling the void as it were, was the prevalence of the kinds of jobs that most people currently perform and the lack of any industry requiring millions of people in the future. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

snowwrestler 12y ago
I find these arguments incredibly short-sighted. A typical American in 1850 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that employed a typical American in 1950. And a typical American in 1950 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that people here on HN hold. The idea that "this time it's different" seems so vain to me; like somehow NOW we're able to reliably predict the future of society, when we've proved terrible at doing that for thousands of years. What an amazing coincidence it would be if we all just happen to be alive at the time when all the surprises were over in human society! The founding premise of the market economy is that we can't predict the future, so we set up systems to be flexible in the face of changing technologies and cultures. Is that really all over now? That feels like an extraordinary claim, so I'd want to see extraordinary proof, and I'm not seeing it. Employment is actually on the upswing in the U.S. right now, and there are hiring shortages in "jobs of the future" type fields like programming, data analysis, genetic analysis, engineering, etc. Employment will change, and our training and education systems need to change too. But I think it's way early to declare the end of specialization and employment.

facepalm 12y ago

Historically there haven't always been jobs, so why should there be in the future? A job means you have something to offer that somebody is willing to pay you for. If nobody needs anything from you (or nobody has money), what job can you get?

clavalle 12y ago
Perhaps that definition of job is too narrow. While there hasn't always been currency trading hands for goods and services on a regular schedule there have always been people creating value for themselves, their family, their community and, ultimately, the world. Trading currency is just a convenient way to trade on that value. I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved.
- facepalm 12y ago
  "I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved." That's very reassuring :-)
  - antocv 12y ago
    I believe in fact that is the natural state of people - to create some value for themselves, others and the world. Left to our own, we will after a while of boredom, just get bored of boredom and create - games, dances, arts, softwares, tools, crafts, houses. Or put in another way we will continue to satisfy our needs.
    - facepalm 12y ago
      Have you watched the news lately? Millions of people fail to satisfy their needs every day.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved. We already had, those are so-called 'bullshit jobs' - things that have no value for humanity but has "economical value" because they're part of zero-sum games. But I hope that at some point the society will ask itself the question "why are we all doing this nonsense anyway?" and drop the concept of jobs entirely.

leaveyou 12y ago

"Wouldn't there always be new jobs?" No there wouldn't. And even if there were, this article talks about when there will not be.

pachydermic 12y ago

Look at all the people making and selling hats for TF2 or gun skins or whatever. Valve already started the idea of creating value from its software users - creating an entire economy. People get the tools and game for free and only have to invest their time to make money. Epic is doing something similar with Unreal Tournament. Making it open source and creating a marketplace to sell your own games/modifications. There are a lot of examples like this. Who knows how pervasive that kind of system will become. Will it apply to other industries/mediums? Could Reddit or Hacker News find a way to pay individuals for well regarded content? There are some possibilities here. But I wonder if that kind of system can really support that many people. Most of the content created sucks, right? Then only a really small number would actually be successful. Maybe you'd have to incentivize sorting through content to find the good stuff a la Steam Greenlight (and find a way to pay users for their work). Anyways, I'm sure people will find something to do. Even if it's just being paid a basic income for nothing in return. I think peoples' standards of living have been improved by technology (nukes and what not notwithstanding). Why expect that trend to stop now? It's just that, from our relatively medieval point of view, it's hard to imagine what that world will look like so we're naturally scared of it. That's also not to suggest that there won't be serious growing pains while we all collectively try to figure this new world out.

datasage 12y ago
Its unlikely that would be enough to offset the scale of disruption that will be occurring with automation. With ever creative or content industry we have so far (wether it will be with actors, app stores, youtube celebrities) a similar pattern always emerges. At the top, you have often less than 1% becoming wildly successful, making hundreds of thousands to millions each year. Below that you have maybe 5-10% who are able to make a living at it, but will not pull any spectacular numbers. After that, you have everyone else. These are people who's apps are rarely downloaded, who have less than a few thousand views on any video they put up, or actors who are out of work most of the time. These section may pull in some revenue, but not enough to survive on. At best its a side job, at least until their main job goes away. At the core of all this, is that we don't have enough time to consume all the media that is produced. We often end up letting other curate the content that we consume. Whether it be media companies or friends and family. But it tends to create self reinforcing cycles, driving more attention to the hits and less to everything else.

Zigurd 12y ago

There is no reason to believe jobs with significant cash wages will always be around. If we eliminated prisons and police we don't need, the TSA, a significant part of our military, and other make-work and counterproductive jobs we would have higher unemployment rate, even after the economy rises from having the unproductive drag lifted. That is, our current employment picture is highly manipulated. The people in jobs that could readily be eliminated only have an illusion of worthwhile work.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
I'm not convinced arguments about worthwhile are useful. If you're not involved in basic industry, then any job is the same, right? We don't NEED anything but food, housing and ... that's about it.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  There are jobs that are objectively make-work positions, especially in the public sector, and the penumbra of "beltway bandits" where there is no individually expressed demand that directly or indirectly caused a requisition for an additional worker to, for example, touch your balls with a blue glove.

jchrisa 12y ago

It might actually lower prices due to there being an addressable market below the middle class.

panglott 12y ago

Whether there will always be new jobs is impossible to predict. There may be, or not. Guaranteed basic income doesn't necessarily give money to everybody: only at the lowest levels of income, where people already have the lowest levels of consumption. It seems like the increase of consumption at the low end from a basic income could be easily projected, and I suspect the impact on inflation would not be overwhelming. Of course I also think we should have a slightly higher inflation target (say 3%), as well. A basic income would definitely need to be paired with supply-side policies to reduce poverty, to reduce housing prices for example.

jnbiche 12y ago
> Guaranteed basic income doesn't necessarily give money to everybody As discussed in the article above and as debated in both right- and left-wing political circles, guaranteed basic income does give the basic income to everybody, either in cash benefits or tax credits [1]. Thus, basic income is unconditional. There is no expensive bureaucracy to decide who gets it and who doesn't get it. And there can be no accusations about "those people" receiving basic income, and the accuser not. Everyone gets it. That's the beauty of the system. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
- panglott 12y ago
  I'm thinking guaranteed minimum income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income The article is ambiguous, bringing up the idea as Milton Friedman's support for a negative income tax (which IIRC is a form of GMI).
- derekp7 12y ago
  Except that basic income has to be paid for with taxes. So everyone that works has a higher tax that they pay. Now below a given yearly earned income, the money you get from BI exceeds the additional increase in taxes. But above that threshold, you would be paying more in taxes than what you get back from BI. The real question, is where do you draw that line? At 50K a year? 100K? Or do you get it from property tax (and include all assets someone owns, including foreign holdings, as taxable)?

zanny 12y ago

So I have a counterclaim that exists today - Deviantart. Why can't everyone be an artist? Because you can only consume so much art. I have a page group that is currently ~45 pages of artists on that website whose galleries I need to review and potentially watch. They total up to around 15k works of art, and that pool just grows, I can never get it under wraps, because it would take me probably a full workweek just to get through half of that. On that, I'm already following nearly one thousand artists. I get probably 1 - 2 thousand pieces of art every month in my inbox. A lot of these artists are actually living off their creations. Over time my standards had to rise because there are just so many people drawing. That doesn't even touch the writers on fanfiction.net or the thousands of sites dedicated to hand crafted continuities that are hundreds of thousands of pages long. Nowadays I really only follow people on Deviantart who consistently do beautiful full color ultra high resolution art pieces that would have probably bowled a king over half a milennia ago. And I'm getting thousands of them a month, for free. Because a lot of those creators are not living off their creations. They are wasting amazing potential flipping burgers at McDonalds because I don't have the money to fund them all. I've probably spent $100 this year on commissions so far, but I do not have nearly enough income to subsidize the (probably) 800 or so artists I follow who are stuck in bottom feeding jobs to survive. But that is only bad for the 200 making a living off of it. You see, the problem with a creative economy (beyond the CGP Grey robots will do it) is that a lot of people are creative, and while very few people are good at it, there are a lot of people. Just on this random website that pales in comparison of scale to premiere web ventures HN talks about all the time (of course most folks on here would love to be as successful as DA) is that you can meet everyones creative needs and desires with significantly fewer than the entirety of the population. Our current economy is satiating our entertainment desires to match whatever amount of money we are socially willing to impart to the business today, and we will only get poorer and less capable to fund entertainers of all forms (artists, writers, animators, comedians, etc) in the future as all our other jobs dry up and we lose all our income. And then there are all those volunteers. Today, they live off menial labor jobs. Tomorrow, when the jobs don't exist, they will try to make a living off the creativity when there is nothing left, but it cannot be enough. It is not enough today when wealth inequality is where it is at, it will never be enough tomorrow when it is even more random to find a patron with wealth to fund you - you are basically praying an aristocrat blesses you with prosperity in that world. But they still give all of it away for free. Fundamentally I'm amazed people even spend money on entertainment at all, because I really do not - I have basically stopped watching film, because I don't see the opportunity cost of moving pictures as being worth it over the millions good of works of art and comics I have not seen yet. Music? There are millions of free tracks that could last me a lifetime on top of the collection I amassed before around 2010 of paid music that would last a lifetime. There are more fantastic free stories told than seconds left in my life to consume them all, and more are made every day. And this is all in the infancy of the Internet. It has existed as a thing for only about twenty years where creative people could impart entertainment upon us through it. And its adoption grows every year. So the next ten years will not generate 50% more entertainment, it will probably generate magnitudes more, and we already have more than enough for a lifetime. I mean, look at youtube. 300 hours of video every minute. It only .01% of all youtube content is great, then you are still behind spending this minute reading this sentence than watching that minute of great youtube content. My point is the cat is out of the bag, and the economics would have never supported the cat in the bag in the first place. Art, music, video, even free (freedom and freeware) games, are all available en masse, at such scale that you cannot ever fathom to consume all we have today. There is no way we can create an economy around creating more of this stuff, because the Internet solves a long run problem that enabled the old world TV and radio industries of yesteryear - seamless persistence. All this data is going to be with us forever, always at our fingertips. No cumbersome recording hardware needed to preserve our entertainment, it is perpetually eternal thanks to the Internet Archive at the least. We can only add more from here on out, but until we achieve immortality we will only have so much any one person can possibly consume. And its not like that person is going to have any money to pay for it, if you have a creative economy, where the status quo is free, and all the other jobs evaporate.

creshal 12y ago

> Wouldn't there always be new jobs? Sure. But will there always be enough jobs for everyone?

raisedbyninjas 12y ago

How big is the market for art and other entertainment? We already having "starving artists" with the limited pool of artists that we have now. Even supposing art consumption exploded, people generally don't consume a lot of lower quality, amateur art. Compare the earnings of a musician on the billboard charts to, say, the most popular local band in your city. Similarly, compare the revenue of a major league sports team with a minor league team. Both of these demonstrate that only the elite entertainers have enough success to quit their day job. I don't expect this pattern to change, only for the number of elite to grow slightly.

timepiece 12y ago

We need asset/wealth re-distribution and not fiat currency issued by those Fed wolves. The worthless paper they issue to help their buddies plunder the nations wealth has to stop and we should look for more alternatives to derive meaning for our lives than working to death just to please those greedy capitalists. Enough is enough! The recalling of the story of Maria Fernandes death always saddens me that a human being had to sacrifice her life for the capitalists to appropriate her work efforts and give her pennies in return just to keep her alive. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737115/New-Jersey-woman-trying-nap-car-working-four-jobs-dies-fume-inhalation.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737115/New-Jersey-w...

vijayr 12y ago

There will always be some jobs even if everything is automated - to maintain the robots, fix them, make new ones etc. But the number of jobs would be much less than it is now. For example, once self driving cars become common, imagine how many people would be out of jobs - millions of cab drivers, truck drivers, people working in parking lots, insurance companies etc. Sure some of these jobs would be replaced by engineers, specialized mechanics, urban planners etc but the number would be far smaller and would require specialized knowledge and skillset. It wouldn't be easy for today's cabbie to get any of those jobs. What happens then?

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

> Wouldn't there always be new jobs? There's no fundamental law of economics that demands there always be new jobs. There have been in the past, each wave of disruption created new job categories, even new industrial sectors. But that just means there will be new jobs until there aren't new jobs. Science fiction authors have no trouble imagining scenarios where there are no new jobs for anyone. If that comes to pass, what then? Presumably the same economic forces that creates such a situation will also have allowed some small percentage of property owners to own the automation that makes everything. Depending on the details, this might not even be a Pyrrhic victory... why would they need your money anymore, if they had fleets of yacht-building automated shipyards and robots that kept the wine cellar stocked? If they can manage the transition from "we still need you to buy our products so I can live in luxury" to "the luxuries are produced in my automated factories directly"... Then quite bluntly, you're fucked. > Who knows, perhaps in the future everybody can be an artist There is the cliche of the starving artist. Even today. And we live in a world which only supports less than 1% artists because that's the ceiling on that occupation. That is mostly the amount of art that the rich want in their lives. Specialties rely on the idea that only a few do them. One specialty trades its goods and services for those produced by another. If we all make art, then I could trade my art for yours. But neither of us can eat art.

cafebeen 12y ago
I think you're assuming that art requires a market for buying and selling. Most people mostly make art because it's fun and personally fulfilling, not so much for rich folks to enjoy.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Isn't that circular? We all do that, because there's no money in it. If there were, many folks would do it for a living.
  - cafebeen 12y ago
    Not sure what you're getting at. Just pointing out that most art isn't for monetary profit, it's just people enjoying the process at home and with friends.

drabiega 12y ago

>Giving money to everybody would only increase the price of things. Not necessarily, inflation and the price level are more complicated than that. Creating new money in an economy with no idle capital might create 1-to-1 price level increases, but generally a guaranteed income is funded by progressive taxation. You'd expect some prices to go up and others to go down because the beneficiaries will use money differently, but a funded general income should cause no general inflation.

SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago

> Wouldn't there always be new jobs? I'll say what I always say when this objection is raised: Is the rule that "new jobs will always arise to replace the ones automated" an iron law of nature, or just something that has been happening for a while and will eventually stop happening? And if it will eventually stop happening, what would the early stages of it stopping look like? Perhaps an economic recovery that doesn't produce as many jobs as expected? Further reading: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/09/2120134/jobs-automation-engels-pause-and-the-limits-of-history/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/09/2120134/jobs-automatio...

megaman22 12y ago

The way things are going, the floor level of intelligence and skill required to be a productive and comfortable member of the economy (i.e. not stocking shelves at Walmart, tending bar, or doing other minimal-skill drudge work) is rising steadily. Somebody with an 80 IQ is not ever going to be a software engineer, or a doctor or a lawyer. We used to have jobs that allowed these people to at least enjoy a lower-middle class existence, now they are scraping just to survive and stay off the streets.