As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income

What did you have in mind?

As the fall of Rome, the middle ages, and several other dark periods in human history show, this is now always the case.

>There are lots of things that will likely never be cost effective to automate or are impossible to automate.

Several things, yes. A lot, no.

And even if those types of jobs were many, what matters is the number of positions they give us. E.g. being a brain surgeon might not be easily automated, but we don't need that many brain surgeons anyway.

On the other hand, truck driving can be automated, and when it does, it will take with it 1-2 million jobs. Automating fast-food serving and cooking? There go another 2-3 million. Automating office cleaning? There go some millions more.

As for more artistic jobs, like a musician or painter, those might not be realistically automated (because we value the human source of an art work etc), but they aren't going to pay much either, especially since most people wont have proper jobs and thus much money to spend on music (and even less so on art).

Could you give examples that are capable of providing living wages to 160-250 million people, in the US alone?

Technology has completely destroyed the value in human labor for most industries, in much the way we no longer use horses for farming, and is rapidly doing the same to "white collar" jobs.

I'm honestly curious what you think it is that <95th percentile humans will have to contribute to the future economy.

Which isn't to say that it shouldn't be done, but that any assertion that people will "retrain" or "find new growth industries" with anything like their current quality of life is at best naive, and more often disingenuous. The most likely case is that the losers in such economic shifts will remain so. Any society that leaves them to sort it out on their own should at Leastbe transparent and realistic about what that means.

Discouragingly enough , truck driving itself is a rare example of fairly successful transition to a new industry, as it had a low barrier to entry for people needing to leave a rapidly shrinking workforce in agricultural areas - due to some automation and a larger scale mechanization. One generation of that and it is going to fall off a cliff too, possibly leaving the rural US in a dire employment situation.

The problem is that we seem set on using the minimum wage to ensure a basic level of income. This means that we HAVE to make sure we have enough jobs for everyone, and that all of those jobs HAVE to produce enough economic value for the employer for them to provide that basic level of income.

The result is that we end up effectively paying people to do nothing, while effectively prohibiting jobs that don't produce enough value to justify the minimum wage. This seems blatantly inefficient and idiotic to me.

If we do continue to work, the only scenario that makes any sense to me is if we do work for self-satisfaction rather than need. There's still going to be enjoyment to be had in refining skills and pursuing goals.

As far as societal adjustment, this episode of This American Life, a couple years old already, takes a detailed look at how a de facto pilot program in Guaranteed Basic Income is already being "implemented piece-meal" in the U.S.:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/t...

I've seen this linked here before and it really is a great eye-opening journalistic investigation of the issue.

Will this scale? Would a more transparent implementation be politically palatable in the US?

I think this is one of the fundamental issues starting to get worked out in the current US presidential election with Sanders millenials tending to support an implementation of lifestyles standards like those found in European social democracies and Trump boomers seeming to suggest that protectionism and a re-assertion of vague nativistic principles will restore the lifestyle standards that well-paying blue collar jobs provided for them and their parents in the past.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...

When we were at war. There was also a longer time when there were no taxes.

You know the Rothschild? Rockefeller? In what period they made most of their money?. In those with the higher "rich taxes".

In fact that basically meant in practice that only a few could hold all the power, with no competition, by law.

It is very similar to what happens in Cuba today, when you can't earn more than 30 USD a month or so, no matter how good you are or how much you provide for the state. You could be the one responsible for the famous Che Guevara photo or a baseball player, you will earn millions that the State will take, and give you 30 USD.

An exception has been made recently for small business to this law, but of course some people in power are the gatekeepers to it(and you better pay them a significant part of your profits under the table for getting permission).

Of course the communist in power will spent lavishly your money because they can decide who spends what. No rich people in the country officially. Fidel officially has no money, extra officially it has billions outside the country.

Basic income means most of your money being taken away from you in taxes for someone else to spend for you. This has been already invented and tested before.

If you tried taxing capital that much they'd flee the country.

Why do each of these tax schemes feel like the poor want a consolation, and they would accept a compromise deal wherein rich would be made poor, just in case they can't be made rich.

Never heard a single argument why some human beings getting ahead of others is wrong.

No matter how hard you try there is always some people who are richer, some who can draw better, some who can compose music better, some who win nobel prizes.

This whole idea that losers will happy if the winners are punished seems to be wrong to even begin with.

I don't think you have ever heard of capital gains.

> There's no consistent way to assert the right to violate property rights, without abolishing property altogether.

Is this a false dichotomy? It seem like defining it as a 'violation of property rights' that 'abolishes property altogether' renders things completely implausible by pushing it to it's extremes.

Regardless of if the research done prior to WW2 was funded privately or publicly, that knowledge is part of our shared culture heritage.

The fact is, regardless of how well they run their hotels, the Hiltons could not be where they are without the travelers who pay to stay at their hotels. Without the government regulation, infrastructure and security that makes such travel safe and easy there would not be the market for the Hiltons to have made their money in.

The government has a critical responsibility for keeping our shared economy healthy, growing and stable. Taxation to do this is not a moral RIGHT, but a moral RESPONSIBILITY.

You sound like you think we'd do OK with no taxes, and thus no government. That is more idealistic and unrealistic than even the most ardently blind arguments for BI.

Research is suited to fairly scientific minds but I think programming is totally something anyone who's interested can do.

Software development continues to modernize and become more accessible. If you're motivated, I'd say you can definitely do programming. And the best part is that it applies to virtually any existing job.

Image recognition and other dataset-labelling tasks that can be used to train better AI models.

Natural language translation. Duolingo doesn't look much like a typical video game, but it does have gamifying elements.

There are definitely dead-end jobs that don't make you want to get out of bed in the morning. Maybe something like the CCC would help with the feeling of meaningful labor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

Will they still be happy and fulfilled bagging groceries for half a day and going home to play GTA12 on their MagicLeap...rather than going to the doctor for that weird shooting pain or the cough they couldn't shake after being sick half the summer?

Will they simply opt not to get married? What about having kids? Both would be hard to reconcile with such a life -not saying anyone must or should do those things, but some might feel differently at 35 or 40 and find it hard to switch gears.

This is because of poverty, not idle hands.

Or, in the US at least, not even overseas workers, but prisoners who are able to do the same job for much less because their living costs are paid by taxpayers, not their "employers"

I understand that one may argue that they didn't get the opportunity. But from macro indicators to flagship cases, what we see is that while market brought us a wealth of new products, they are slow to solve acute problems, especially when these problems are hard to explain to the population.

Industry 4.0's path is being charted as we type, and this is posted today in terms of logistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575147

There are things like hospitals that will be tougher to tackle. Money is the currency of power, and I don't see us abandoning power any time soon. So, "Star Trek post-scarcity economy?" I don't think so. However, we will likely experience a temporary(perhaps decades) imbalance between the supply and demand of human labor. In that time, elements of a basic income, or practical equivalents will rise.

I'm not necessarily an advocate of basic income, but an advocate for the basic welfare of everyone.

Are we talking about rats or humans now? Only your fourth assertion is rat specific. All the other observations are true of the human condition. We now have 7.4 billion human beings in the world right now, and it's the developing countries, you know with clan warfare and living in relatively small spaces that have uncontrolled population growth.

> Also, it is incredibly nihilistic to think that human beings need to toil to survive or else life is without meaning or we will collapse society.

Just because it's nihilistic doesn't mean it doesn't hold truth. It seems that your objections are rooted more in your worldview and philosophy rather than objective arguments you're bringing up. They even bring up this point in the experiment, where he mentioned the "beautiful ones", who forgot how to breed and spent all day grooming themselves.

> We already know that in first world countries people reproduce less. That isn't even a function of economic well being directly but a function of education, which relates precisely back to how humans aren't just animals acting on instinct.

I don't think it's a function of education. Do you have a citation? You could easily read this as saying, people in the first world are incented not to have children, as they have seen how children generally make parents unhappier and would prefer against that.

> It is the same mind that elevated mankind above all other animals that can stop us from destroying ourselves as we eliminate survival as a daily concern.

I think that's where the difference lies between our points of view. I think that most people are creatures of instinct, and our conscious mind is constantly trying to justify our actions after the fact with logic. If we really have elevated minds, how come many intelligent and educated people have differing opinions on things? Why are we still debating global warming, and having wars over religion?

Earth.

> * You have uncontrolled population growth.

3rd world.

> * You are using a species that naturally trends towards "clan wars" for territory.

History.

> * They are rats, and thus have nothing productive to do with their time in the absence of survival.

Snapchat doesn't count as productivity.

The sales pitch of "get more money" will also be used to hide and justify taxes going up etc. They will do things like only talk about how you get more money and not mention things like they will tax more. Its an easier more manipulative sales pitch that it becomes capable of.

Also over the course of time tons of changes, additions, etc will be added to it. I am not completely against the idea, it sounds great in practice but I just see way too many things that can go wrong.

I also don't think its wise to put too many eggs in one basket.

I don't get where you can say "no one" since plenty of people want means testing for Social Security, etc. right now.

Marx' theory starts with the same assumption as those arguing for basic income: That labour will eventually - as a natural effect of the drive of capitalism to compete - need to be automated away or squeezed on income, until capitalism faces the dual thread of causing mass unemployment (and so unrest) and too high manufacturing capacity (by driving incomes and employment down and so killing demand). This is outlined many places, but most prominently in the Communist Manifesto.

If that gets bad enough to lead to revolution, Marx "plan" was for a socialist government to use methods such as extremely progressive taxation and the like to basically drive capitalists into the working class. This is outlined in the Communist Manifesto and Critique of the Gotha Programme and many other places.

Once this leads to the end of class rule, Marx believed society would eventually take advantage of the overcapacity built by capitalism to allow distribution according to need. This is also covered in the Communist Manifesto, but expanded on at length in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Marx did make the assumption that class struggle will cease if everyone basic needs are met, but he also cautioned a number of places, and most notably in The German Ideology, that attempting redistribution in a society that was not sufficiently advanced to be able to meet the needs of everyone would just restart the class struggle all over again.

You may be right that the threshold for what people "need" before they will be satisfied may be higher than what Marx may have thought, but the point Marx made was not that people won't want more, but at some point peoples willingness to fight for a bigger share than what others get will be lower than such a society's willingness and ability to resist special treatment. Where exactly that point would be, we don't know.

The more immediately relevant question is whether Marx' prediction of capitalist boom and bust cycles eventually running out of control and driving unemployment so out of control as to trigger revolutions will prove correct.

Basic income would be a simple way of proving him wrong, by creating a safety net that would prevent things from getting bad enough to trigger revolutions.

Marx argument there is that the ruling classes will resist these types of redistribution, with violence if necessary, and that is the reason for the Marxist idea that revolutions are in general necessary - it comes not from any idea that they are desirable, but from an assumption that any working class majority for large scale redistribution will be faced with an army. If that proves wrong, then that pulls the rug under large parts of Marx' historical materialism (the idea that history is defined in part by the predominant modes of production, and that these inevitably evolve in certain ways culminating with the end of class rule).