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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

> You are essentially making the luddite case.

I'm not, I'm just countering some "don't worry, everything will be fine" idealism.

I don't think we should halt progress, but I do think we should be more intentional about how we go about it. There is not currently a solution on the table to address mass un/under-employment caused by near-term automation. Basic income is thrown around, but even if enacted, does not change the fact that our culture views work ethic ~= value. People want to be valued.

Choosing not to address it in the next couple of years results in a large number of mostly young, angry, disillusioned people with lots of free time. If you've got a history book handy, you can read plenty about what happens after that.

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Completely agree. Can't help myself from thinking that the "continuous economic growth" supported by an ever growing population size is a broken paradigm. The more automation the less people will have an intrinsic value to society unless extremely highly educated/specialised.

"Normal" people simply won't be needed and according to liberal capitalism, they'll quickly be marginalised.

The solution I'd like to see: Enact basic income AND change the fact that our culture views work ethic (narrowly defined in terms of market income) ~= value.

> AND change the fact that our culture views

When has that ever worked? I can't think of a single example.

Things people may raise like racism and sexism, in so far as they are changed, weren't changed per se, but merged with pre-existing values (liberty, fairness, equality) and morphed into a (usually) more consistent new definition. "We can all vote but not women" is more caveats than the new reality. Sexist ideas and elements weren't so much changed, they were contrasted with other values, and the inconsistency removed. Women vote, we can't pay less based on religion/race/gender etc. Same values, inconsistency removed.

So rather than change the view, I think the question is what can we contrast "work ~= value" with so that the inconsistency is clear? Maybe a sense of "money isn't everything"? That's all I've got, but then all the "77c on the dollar" talk puts money front and centre in almost every debate, making the "money is not everything" hard to sell as a deep cultural concept.

I dunno, the protestant work ethic is deeply, deeply ingrained in the west - not sure we really can change it, or what it can be merged with that we believe as strongly.

>> Maybe a sense of "money isn't everything"? That's all I've got, but then all the "77c on the dollar" talk puts money front and centre in almost every debate, making the "money is not everything" hard to sell as a deep cultural concept.

If we can get rid of the consumerism then I guess, we'd able to rein in many ill effects of "money is everything". But again with all these criminally deceptive advertisements targeting the most fundamental animal instincts in us and thus turning us into mindless consumers and thus in turn transforming us into beings which are slaves to their money. Frankly, short of putting ban on the overt and covert advertisement and full implementation of public education in this regard, I don't see any way out of this dire situation. Public education beginning right from the primary school w.r.t. awareness of the ill-effects of advertisements, must be implemented with full gusto.

You frame an interesting dialectic. You might be interested in the ideas of Bifo Berardi. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm

I don't think work ethic = value is ever going to go away to be honest. People will always value hard workers, and rightly so, because hard workers get things done and problem solved.

However, I don't necessarily think that work ethic needs to equal basic income. That homelessness is even a thing is a symptom of this world view; we are in a society that is more than capable of dealing with some problems in the most poverty stricken parts of the world, and yet we don't, because we say these people have no work ethic, and therefore they don't deserve to be clean, to be fed, to have access to sanitary facilities.

However we end up at a solution to this problem, I'm open to explore. I'm sick of us criminalizing the lazy, because the consequence is to also criminalize the disabled, the elderly, the mentally disabled, and occasionally the perfectly great, strong individuals who roll a poor lot in life and can't escape the system.

Laziness should mean a lack of respect, a lack of advancement, maybe a lack of entertainment and privilege. But the primary reason we have so many low wage jobs is because there is an incredibly huge incentive for people to work them; they have no other choice. If you don't work in this country, that's it. You're "worthless."

Rather than eliminate work = value, introduce no value = don't work. The problem is not going to be laziness on the unemployed, it is going to be unemployability. We are going to point at gross overhead in business and every sector of the economy in how we have grown tumorous bureaucracy on everything that saps human labor without producing marginally useful value. Just consider the advertising industry - billions of dollars to just change who people give their money to through psychological manipulation. Absolutely zero value ad to the whole economy, it only gives value to the company who can persuade people to buy from them by taking value from whomever that sale was taken from.

How do you enact basic income when a majority of your population doesn't have an income and thus can't pay the taxes that finance that exact basic income?

The taxes are paid by the people who now own the entire productive economy.

These people would never have enough money especially since the companies they control will have a much smaller consumer base due to higher and higher unemployment rates, a consequence of automation.

Except you have Basic Income to offset that unemployment, so there's still plenty of consumption.

Tax capital, not income, like we should have been doing in the first place.

The opposite side of idealism is cynicism. Further more if there's one thing humanity has proven itself bad at, it's the ability to make economic predictions.

I'm not saying your comment isn't a valuable counter-weight, just that we have a ways to go in this discussion still.

People should want to be valued, and people should be motivated to provide value to others via the market. Basic income is a good thing because it preserves this, while at the same time recognizing and mitigating the harms arising from the fact that automation and fluid market conditions make it increasingly likely that success in providing marketable value will both require periodic adjustments and be intermittent for many individuals.

And giving the people freedom to get away from bad employers destroying their life, helping society to reduce horrible employment conditions.

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