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Comment by Scirra_Tom | Hacker News Reader

Not only are jobs being lost through robotics on factory floors, they will also be lost through self driving vehicles. Massive swathes of people are at the risk of facing unemployment, and I think it's going to catch a lot of people off-guard.

Increasingly to me a universal income guaranteed by the government seems like sensible policy to ease in sooner than later. I see no other option, lobbying to allow lower minimum wages or eradication of minimum wage to keep humans competitive against mass produced robotics and AI is quite frankly idiotic.

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> Not only are jobs being lost through robotics on factory floors

That is at least theoretically debatable.

Demand is a function of price. Imagine a human driven factory producing 10 parts for $100 in wages, and a competitor using humans and robots that can produce 11 parts for $100 in wages. The competitor can bid prices down, and not only capture the human only factory's orders, but create new orders as it becomes cheap enough to use the part in new ways.

The empirical question is whether that increase of orders makes up for the decrease in labor demanded per unit. It's not immediately obvious which way that goes, and there's multiple anecdotes provided law professor James Bessen of cases where increases in labor demand occur http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/automati...

Nothing I've read of his suggests a conclusive 'more bots always means more jobs,' and perhaps his anecdotes are carefully chosen, but a blanket assumption that more computers implicitly means fewer people working is unwarranted.

Perhaps we've overstated the benefits of linking our personal fare to the economy. Humans have lived for many years in autonomous or small tribes, living off the land. I'm not advocating a return to ancient times, but I think we can reduce our dependency towards the economy. The only thing that is really needed is land. Food is nearly free if you have the land to grow it on and the time to tend to it.

Shelter, well that's a huge variable: building your own house is almost impossible with many regulations that require a certain expertise to navigate. But once you have food, shelter—and friends/family—you're in a decent spot from a survival standpoint.

We don't have to live like the Amish, but perhaps a happy medium can be found, by being less dependent on the economy. Instead of buying 100% of your survival needs, perhaps it's possible to buy 50% of them and make the rest yourself. With the better telecommunications we have today, I often wonder about a society that's only 50% plugged in to the economy—and 50% self-reliant.

Disclaimer: I'm no macro-economist.

I think it's a bit naive approach. The food is cheap because of the highly efficent agriculture. If you are going to grow stuff yourself your output per square meter is probably going to be much lower and it's going to take a lot of time and energy than if you were to rely on the economy. It's simply not feasible for masses to go back, without changing their diet, ie having to eat less with smaller variety of food. And if you take into account the impact on the country's economy due to this shift, it would be disastrous and put your country behind every other country in the world. It would also mean that you were going to be exposed militarily because of the inferior war technology caused by the inefficient economy. And so on.

You can analyze it in terms of your time budget.

Say growing your own food while limiting inputs from the broader economy would take 30% of your available time. You can compare that to how much time you are currently spending earning money to pay for food (probably less than that).

Is the greater certainty that comes with the self reliance a good trade?

It would be interesting to see studies on the overall happiness of individuals that are 100% "plugged in" or dependent and individuals leaning more towards the self reliant Amish living. If all the modern conveniences of a plugged in world aren't making us happier/healthier, maybe we should look at a major shift in the way we interact with the world and people around us.

Yes, undoing hundreds of years of development sounds like a fantastic idea.

Here's the rub: The people who are the least dependent on getting a job in order to survive are the best positioned to succeed in the economy. They can take time to educate themselves. They can spend time networking, and building relationships. They don't have to struggle to be well fed, well clothed. They have lower levels of stress.

Contrast that to someone who is 100% self reliant. They don't have friends or family to lean on. Every day they have to figure out where their next meal comes from, where they will sleep. Basic safety is not even guaranteed. (You can't be 100% on guard, without break.) The constant demand to take care of one's basic needs slowly wears them down. They have to struggle just to stay clean and well dressed. If you live in a city, you see people like this all the time. They're not part of social support system that benefits economically successful people – and the results are tragic.

There's another point, which I should mention: the kind of job that is most suitable to part-time remote working is also the kind that happens to pay very well and, as you point out, not the lot of those who are the most dependent on getting a job.

So yes, there's a bias in my proposition.

There simply isn't enough land on earth to support substantial farming for 7 billion people. What you are advocating is to kill well over half the world's population.

If enough people lose their jobs they will vote for a government that solves this problem.

Hopefully many countries will get an unconditional basic income and only a few become new Nazi Germany :\

I don't know you implement a basic income scheme on a nation-state by nation-state basis.

If one nation taxes the robot overlords and gives the money to unskilled humans... then the robot overlords will move to a friendlier nation, while also seeing inflows of unskilled humans immigrating.

The immigration issue is a difficult one, because the nations most likely to embrace basic income are also the least likely to embrace draconian immigration controls. The movement of capital issue is more difficult still, and perhaps outright impossible. How do you break the race-to-the-bottom cycle if some nations opt-out of the new order?

Basic income is an interesting idea, but I haven't heard any plausible proposals for it that wouldn't depend upon nations giving up sovereignty and moving closer to global governance. Back here in reality, Europe is struggling to keep a single continent loosely tied together.

> then the robot overlords will move to a friendlier nation, while also seeing inflows of unskilled humans immigrating.

This is a bad assumption, the robot overlords can't just move to another nation, markets don't work that way; they're here because they're selling in this market, you don't just say oh well I'll stop selling stuff in the US and only sell stuff in Germany because they're going to tax me less as it's a much smaller market and a culturally different one as well. What sells in the U.S. won't be what sells in another country, and other markets are much smaller and/or would require complete culturally relevant re-branding to a large degree that might not be possible. The U.S. is a huge basically mono culture market, the E.U. is not, you can't just move shop, you have to change the entire way you do business.

tldr; markets are sticky, the rich people don't/won't/can't just leave when tax policy doesn't swing their way because their money machines are tied to those markets.

Yes, I agree that a human can (even with massive cuts to minimum wage, and/or subsidies to companies) never catch up to automated workers.

Not only should we not try because we can't win on economic grounds (I think). It'll probably force the people that must compete into inhumane working conditions for negligent compensation before we admit that we lost. Banning automation is also not ethical. Because increased efficiency also indirectly translates into increased quality of life, and directly translates into better health care and lower mortality rates.

You're probably right about the basic income, though I wish we could skip that part. My personal crystal boll says that we'll end up with a system more aching to that in the star trek universe anyway. Where _things_ are free, instead of giving people free money.

Star Trek never really explains its economy. Why does Picard's family own a vineyard[1]? Presumably other people would like to have that. Why does starfleet headquarters get to be in the middle of SF. Don't they know that real-estate is expensive?

Even in post-scarcity world of things, there are non-divisible goods, like land, access to people (think, concert) and so on. So some form of allocation of resources would need to happen. Money is one way to do that. Others exist too like lottery, or government ownership are options too.

I'm all for post-scarcity, and think we can go a long way toward just having things be allocated and free, but you'll never get away from the miserable business of allocating scarce resources.

[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Chateau_Picard

> My personal crystal boll says that we'll end up with a system more aching to that in the star trek universe anyway.

The economics of Star Trek are the incoherent and inconsistent mass of contradictions that one would expect of a system in the background of fiction where the focus is elsewhere and no one was doing detail socio-economic worldbuilding in constructing the setting.

I mean, on the most basic economic element: the Federation both explicitly does not have money, and explicitly has a defined unit of money (the Federation credit) to which there are several references to its use in trade.

High minimum wage is what prompted this automation in the first place. UBI will solve some problems and create new ones. So we will likely have the same amount of problems or possibly more after UBI as before. How UBI will be funded is another matter, also how much $$$ will it provide? What is a necessity anymore, internet in my home? A cellphone? What a can of worms UBI is.

> High minimum wage is what prompted this automation in the first place.

`High` is subjective. $x minimum wage did not prompt automaton, a rising minimum wage catalyses R&D into automaton with better incentives. It's inevitable, and Mr CEO was always going to fire everyone and replace them with robots the moment it became cost effective.

> How UBI will be funded is another matter

Larger profit margins for big corporations turning to automaton, let's tax them more.

Ok so say the minimum wage didn't go up. Wait 2-5 years for the price of robots to come down. Now can we fire the workers? These jobs are going away. Now or later its just a matter of a handful of years for big job losses.

Raising minimum wage is for workers who are not going to be fired because of automation in the next 5+ years.

It's a can of worms that really needs to be explored. Maybe the answer is not UBI, but there needs to be some good ideas on the best ways of transitioning to a "post-wage" world, if such is indeed happening (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-wi...)

Mind you, the robots-are-taking-our-jobs predictors have been wrong before. But if they aren't, the issue I see is that a big spoke of the modern capitalism wheel revolves around employment. Employment provides income that supports a wider range of people than mere rentiers can. These employees can in turn spend this income at businesses. If there is no consumer income, any business that depends on consumer demand... well, they have a problem.

I guess it's easy to envision things being pushed a lot further, where automation has eliminated huge amounts of work. The main economy would thus largely be revolving around rentiers, who are unaffected by a lack of jobs, people that support the automation (which so far has been a relatively small group), and any other employment which can't be automated (in an extreme scenario this would be very little). From my perspective, such an economy would hardly look like modern capitalism at all, it would potentially look more like previous rentier-dominated economies. Because jobs are such an important pillar in 20th century life, there will probably also be a culture shock on top of that. Without some changes, it's possible that this transition will be rather rough (even if the automation doesn't quite go so far as some predict).

Low interest rates are another culprit that few seem to identify. If that robot purchase can be financed with a 0.5% loan then it is suddenly very cost efficient to replace workers.

There are other factors that come into play as well like overtime pay rules, medical costs/regulations for workers etc.

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