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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

> The point of basic income is not as a means to enable anything; it's a natural byproduct of and solution to a problem, the problem of ever increasing automation removing the need for human labor.

I disagree. Humans tend to create new market segments in response to this problem. Service jobs, creative jobs, people are remarkably effective at finding ways to be productive. Basic income almost seems like a measure focused on finding ways for people to be unproductive.

Do you seriously think automation means less human labor is needed? I can think of dozens of segments out there that could really use more human capital.

Automation means less labor is needed to produce certain kinds of goods. We can always find things for people to do.

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> I disagree. Humans tend to create new market segments in response to this problem.

You can disagree if you like, but you're relying on the past to make your presumption that humans will just create more markets; the future of automation isn't like the past, future automation will include AI and is already doing so. AI changes the game, the future is not like the past, humans won't just do something else. Labor based economies must end at some point, there simply won't be enough demand for labor to keep an economy going.

> Do you seriously think automation means less human labor is needed?

If you don't, you're not paying attention to the world.

> Automation means less labor is needed to produce certain kinds of goods. We can always find things for people to do.

Absolutely wrong; the automation that is coming will leave little for people to do as it'll always be cheaper to have a machine do it and an intelligent machine will be able to do anything a human can. All goods, all services, not just "certain kinds" will be done by machines; your doctor will be a machine, your housekeeper, masseuse, waitress, all of them, robots.

The idea that there's always going to be some way to sell your own labor is antiquated and wrong; basic income is meant as a solution to the collapse of labor markets that is coming from our continued increases in production via automation, and it is coming, and no, there won't be some other job you can do... machines will do all the jobs. Humans will leisure or find other means to feel productive but goods and services will not be distributed by means of a labor based economy.

The labor based economies of the world are on their deathbeds; we're currently calling this structural unemployment due to globalization, it's all the same problem, the future isn't based on human labor or labor based economies.

Haha.

Well, let's cross that bridge when we get there.

That way lies pain, we have to cross that bridge as we get there which we currently are already on; hence the structural unemployment. Self driving cars are going to cause mass unemployment, we're already getting there.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Basic income is a hot topic because forward thinking people who see what's going on in the world right now already see it. You say lets cross that bridge when we get there; that's the point, we're there, you just aren't looking very hard.

It's a hot topic on HN and in a few policy circles. In the grand scheme of things, it's a really small issue, far behind, say, gun control or national security.

The topic of this thread is that a "country" is experimenting with it, that's more than a little interest. It's a small issue in America, for now, for sure; that will change as unemployment creeps up with every new technology hitting the market, cars will start it.

There are 196 countries in the world, give or take a few. The US is at the very tip of economic advancement of all 196. That we would care so much about one's experiments is really quite silly. To make a comparison, Obama cares a little bit about what strategy Apple is taking, but he's got much bigger things on his plate.

Plenty of people worry about not being able to find a job, that's why there is so much talk about unemployment, and why politicians always come up with programs and policies to stimulate job growth.

It's even more common if you count people who hate their jobs.

Whether we've found a solution to that problem, is up to debate. But the problem of allowing everyone to have basic security is real.

Haven't people been saying this since about 1848?

No, they haven't; we're talking about AI here, not industrialization, they were talking about a different problem back then. The two are not comparable, industrialization just pushes humans to do different kinds of labor, AI eliminates human labor, vastly different problem.

This is extremely optimistic. We don't have AI that advanced, or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon. People joke all the time about the crazy stuff that Siri comes up with.

What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs. Waiting tables is a good example here: humans do a terrible job of it, and add 10-20% to your food bill in exchange for screwing up your order. Having a tablet computer on the table for you to place your own order would be better, and some restaurants already do this (like Panera) to some degree. Factory work is another: today's factories are filled with automation, and robots produce better-quality products than humans because they don't make mistakes. Taxi driving is another: we're working on automated cars, so pretty soon "Johnny Cab" will be a real thing, and all those cab drivers will be out of a job. This will extend to truck drivers pretty quickly, probably faster than cabs actually. Fast food cooking is another: McD's already has the job of cooking a Big Mac down to something that someone with almost no training can pick up right away because their machines do most of it, they just have to follow some pictorial directions. People have Roombas to clean their floors.

So what happens when you automate all the simple jobs that don't require an education? Now you have a large portion of the population that's unemployed, and they're really not smart enough to get an education and get a higher-level job, or there's not enough higher-level jobs to go around for them if they are.

It's going to be a long time before engineers, for instance, are replaced by robots (and maybe never), but you don't need smart people to cut grass and rake leaves, and jobs like that are going to go away before long.

> This is extremely optimistic.

It's inevitable.

> We don't have AI that advanced

Correct.

> or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon.

That's incorrect. The trend is obvious, watson can already out diagnose a doctor. AI doesn't have to work like a human to out do a human just as planes don't have to flap their wings.

> What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs.

That is coming, but as things like Watson show, it won't be limited to mindless lower level jobs. All but the more pure intellectual pursuits will gone in very short order. Most jobs, even white collar ones, don't take that much thinking.

> It's going to be a long time before engineers, for instance, are replaced by robots

It's not going to be long at all before the bulk of humanity is replaced by robots; that humans are still useful in the highest levels of intellectual fields is for all purposes irrelevant, the labor based economy will crumble far before unemployment reaches 50%. If robots put the lower half of society out of work, it's game over for our current economic system regardless of whether we have strong enough AI to replace engineers.

I have to disagree about AI and doctors, until at least you can get much better sensing technologies. Computers are only as good as the data you feed them, and someone saying they have a pain in some vague region really isn't enough to diagnose anything accurately. It's why doctors tell people to not use the internet to self-diagnose: they quickly determine they're dying of some rare syndrome when really they just have heartburn. A human doctor can interact with human patients (most of whom are not very logically-minded) and figure this stuff out; a computer can't. Remember, a lot of diagnosing depends on the symptoms a patient self-reports, which is bound to be extremely error-prone. Now, if we get to the point where we have Star Trek-style medical scanners, then things will of course be different, but that's a long ways off.

However, I totally agree about the labor-based economy crumbing well before unemployment reaches 50%. If 30% of the workforce is displaced by automation, our economy won't work any more the way it's set up now. It's why we really need a Basic Income.

Religious fanatics believe that coming off the messiah is inevitable. You don't have any more evidence than they do. This belief that general AI will show up soon and change the world is nothing more than a secular religion.

That's a straw-man. There's plenty of evidence that even limited non general purpose AI will harm the job market enough cause massive social issues; I was very clear, general AI is not necessary for these things to be problems. Self driving cars alone will cause massive unemployment across many sectors over the next decade as it becomes common and unemployment need only get so high before social change is forced.

As for the inevitability of general purpose AI, that's not an unfounded religious belief based on nonsense from the ignorant, it's an obvious and practical step that will be taken because there's every reason to believe it's possible and no reason to believe brains are magical and intelligence isn't achievable, and tons of the smartest people in the world are actively trying to do it. Informed and logical predictions are nothing like superstition and to say there's no evidence is just willful blindness.

They've been working on AI for ages now with little to show for it.

People have been saying the exact same thing about fusion, and it's always "20 years away", but we're no closer to having fusion power than we were 40 years ago.

The goal posts are continually moved with AI because AI never seems to look quite like human intelligence (though why should it?). AI and ML coupled with robots that are relatively simpler than Rosie from the Jetsons are cheaply out-competing human labor in many sectors today, and an avalanche of new sectors is on the cusp (within 2-5 years, not 20 years). Driverless cars currently outcompete human drivers, and a enormous number of people are currently employed as drivers. The remaining hurdles are regulatory. AI is intelligent enough today to outcompete a lot of humans in the work which is currently putting food on their tables. And I haven't seen the burgeoning industry that readily turns former taxi drivers into productive workers in other industries. The industries that can readily accept taxi drivers are generally shrinking as well (meaning, they've got all the workers they need, more than they need, in fact).

Maybe you're right, and it will all work itself out. Some huge growth industry to which humans are uniquely (at least at first) well suited may spring up in the next couple years. But the crisis is awfully close (taking into account driving occupations alone), and there's no market solution in sight, so it seems like prime time to start looking for non-market solutions.

>They've been working on AI for ages now with little to show for it.

That's just not true, it's just that every time the AI crowd makes something really cool and it becomes used, we stop calling it AI because it doesn't think like we do.

> People have been saying the exact same thing about fusion, and it's always "20 years away", but we're no closer to having fusion power than we were 40 years ago.

That's also not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

ITER isn't producing any power. If your fusion reactor isn't producing more energy than it consumes, then it's not a useful device. We've had fusion reactors since Philo Farnsworth made his "fusor", but what's always been a pipe dream is one that's actually useful. ITER is not. Go read your own link: they predict it might do something useful in 2027! Whoopee, I can make wild-ass predictions about things over a decade away too, that doesn't mean my predictions are worth anything.

ITER is designed to make more power than it requires, it's now just an engineering problem rather than a theoretical one. You said we've made no progress; that is progress, a plant is in construction, yes these things take time but to deny progress is being made is simply incorrect. Having useful fusion, i.e. producing more power than being input is a matter of scale, it can't be done without building a full sized reactor and that's what ITER is, the first full size reactor. That's called progress.

This doesn't sound right to me. The ITER is going to (supposedly, which of course is probably optimistic) take another 10 years to finish. When you have a workable design for something, it does not take multiple decades to build it, unless it's something on a really gigantic scale (like a continent-spanning highway system). It doesn't take remotely as much time to build a full-scale nuclear fission power plant producing many megawatts of power. That means this thing is not a real design, it's still an R&D project where they really don't know if it's going to work as planned or not, and they're going step by step, collecting data, seeing what works and what doesn't, etc.

So, sorry, you can call it "progress" if you want, but there's no evidence that it's going to work as planned until they actually can demonstrate it doing so.

The trend is obvious, watson can already out diagnose a doctor.

Sure, but diagnosing is actually only a small part of a doctors job. We still need someone to get the input to feed into watson, interpret the output from watson and explain the practical consequences of that output to the patient, help decide on the correct course of action for that particular patient and then make sure that that course of action gets carried out.

> Basic income almost seems like a measure focused on finding ways for people to be unproductive.

You know, this is an old fashioned puritan work ethic thing as well; people don't need to be productive, they need to be happy and if they can be happy without "having" to work due to technological advancement that makes work a moot point, why shouldn't they be?

"Productivity" is something we can get more and more from machines and eventually enough of it that the vast bulk of society can move beyond work and enjoy life. Work that isn't required is called a hobby, and our ultimate goal should be to let our tech replace our need to work; it'd be great if everyone just had hobbies they enjoyed and found fulfilling.

> Basic income almost seems like a measure focused on finding ways for people to be unproductive.

Yet, "the dole" provided for J. K. Rowling as well as Noel Gallagher of Oasis before they became famous. I'm sure there are others. We, as a society, would nominally be worse off without these people.

> people are remarkably effective at finding ways to be productive.

That's not because human nature loves busy work. It's because today's economy requires you to be "productive", or starve.

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