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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

I used to think this, but I no longer do. If we get mass automation, I think we're going to get one of these outcomes:

1) Individuals have their own robots. For example, everybody gets their own automated hydroponic garden, enough to provide them with sufficient calories.

2) A dictatorship seizes control of the automation and lets the people starve.

I think it's very unlikely that we'll have a welfare-capitalist society where major corporations own mass automation, where the government taxes the corporation so highly that government can pay for everyone else to survive.

Taxing mass automation to pay for basic income is just too fragile. If the people themselves aren't providing wealth through productive labor, then at some point, somebody will try to starve them instead of feeding them, and they'll succeed.

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Some throwaway thoughts:

Having all production automated will result in falling prices, including the cost to automate something. This should result in a lot of competition, driving prices down even more. In this scenario, it is difficult to imagine someone having a monopoly on production for long, unless they are already a dictator.

Dictators tend to have to keep at least a portion of their population happy, otherwise they lose control. A large portion of the population with nothing to loose (as they are starving) tends to result in revolution. If the cost of production (or cost of imports) is close to 0, what motivation (beyond bond style villany) does a dictator have to make their population starve?

If everyone is out of work, no one has any money to pay for the products of the capital owners. What's the point of that?

> Dictators tend to have to keep at least a portion of their population happy, otherwise they lose control.

The portion can be very small. It has to include the military, and it has to include the people involved in creating GDP, but if production is centralized (e.g. because the nation's resources are in digging stuff out of the ground), then the masses can be kept very poor.

Watch the "Rules for Rulers" video I linked above. Resource-rich dictators don't need to provide public education or adequate roads, say nothing of adequate food. "The people stay quiet, not because this is fine, or because they're scared, but because the cold truth is: starving, disconnected illiterates don't make good revolutionaries."

So can production be centralized in the face of mass automation? I think so. Look at farming. Seizing control of all of the farms in the 1880s would be a massive operation spanning the entire North American continent. Seizing control of today's Big Farming conglomerates would be relatively straightforward for a modern dictator.

Which is to say, we'll get through this if the automation is decentralized, but if it's like farming, where a few expensive machines make all of the food for hundreds of millions of people, then we're on a path to ruin.

> we'll get through this if the automation is decentralized

I'm following the 3D-printing and makerspace movement because of this. It's imperative that blueprints for vital objects to be 3D-printed aren't locked up by copyrights.

Dictators tend to have to keep at least a portion of their population happy, otherwise they lose control.

This portion might end up being very small: i.e. a small, highly automated, robotic military, an automated surveillance/intelligence apparatus, and a few elites who own all the big corporations along with their top AI designers, weapons designers, etc. You could probably wipe out 99% of the population and still pull this off.

Bit late replying, but another couple of points:

If a class of resource is cheap and abundant, evil dictators/1%ers don't really have much motivation to prevent people accessing those things, unless they feel it somehow undermines their control.

I also think there would be less motivation to become a dictator if you didn't have to fight everyone else for limited resources.

It would also be much harder for the warlord type to motivate others around them to do their bidding if those others are well fed/clothed/housed.

For as long as the world population continues to increase, land will continue to become more scarce and expensive as a result. Land is scarce even in the so-called utopia depicted in Star Trek. We may reach a point where everybody has an apartment and unlimited food, clean water, medical care, and cheap entertainment (books, TV, video games) but what about access to nature? The ability to go hiking, canoeing, fishing, and camping in a pristine wilderness is rapidly disappearing. At what point do we all end up in a sprawling, dystopian mega-metropolis so commonly depicted in cyberpunk? For many who live in Asia, we are already there.

>> A large portion of the population with nothing to loose (as they are starving) tends to result in revolution.

The typo just triggered the tritism in my head: a person with nothing to lose has a lot to loose.

Solzhenitsyn - when you take everything from a man, and can take nothing more, that man is no longer in your power - he is free again.

Bingo.

I've always held that the people on HN are more of builders than profit maximizeds. As a result you don't hear or encounter people who think in a different manner.

In particular you don't hear people say "why should my factories/effort/investment go to subsidize people who do nothing." Or a variety of similar arguments which have different starting assumptions.

Essentially the BI+automation arguments largely depend on a milk of human kindness in a world where the incentives for a large number of people and nations is not so aligned.

People will always make choices on the margin and the betterment of humanity usually comes a distant last to personal welfare. To balance this out means a huge number of taxes/laws/incentives to prevent that outcome.

You guys (Americans) are going to be fighting over your basic assumptions of society (capitalist with caveats vs "socialists" with caveats) very soon.

But all of this assumes that automation happens and takes away jobs. it likely won't, it will most likely replace well Paying jobs with less well paying jobs.

At this point economists will talk about retraining people but that's bs - there physical limits to how fast neurons can be retrained and that's if you don't have any other time demands/financial issues/health issues/aptitude issues.

It depends entirely on how democratized the robotics are, plus the food.

What if in the future all food's patented? What if due to climate change the traditional stocks don't grow, or due to regulation you can't grow it. Maybe actual cows are illegal, but you can vat-grow beef-like food.

This is why having open-source, affordably licensed technology is imperative. Affordable for some people might mean free, which makes certain licenses absolutely paramount.

If we can build our own robots, design our own food, we're no longer wage slaves. If we can't, if we must feed into some system that extracts heavy taxes from all of us, the opposite is true.

This is why I don't care about using proprietary software. So long as I have options which aren't proprietary I'm content, and if those options are threatened it's worth defending them. This is different from trying to destroy proprietary software.

You've missed one possibility.

Do you pay for the air you breath? Does the government tax corporations to provide a basic air income for people to ensure that everyone gets their fair share of air? No. Why not?

The reason you don't pay for the air you breath is because air is so immensely plentiful, so easy to get, so impossible for anyone from stopping you from getting, that of course it doesn't cost anything.

Imagine if things like food were the same.

See George England's Air Trust: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12826

I hope that's what happens, but the crucial (potential, but I think likely) difference between air and automation is that air is not owned by default. Automation will be, and I can't imagine whoever owns it is excited about sharing the gains.

3) Workers who felt their livelihood threated by automation flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines to stop them. Hence the word...

Can you explain your reasoning? I don't get where you obtain "somebody will try to starve them instead of feeding them" from "If the people themselves aren't providing wealth through productive labor."

Did you watch the "Rules for Rulers" video? The tl;dw is that rulers who need productive citizens promote their well-being; rulers who don't need their citizens to be productive don't.

> Taxing mass automation to pay for basic income is just too fragile.

No no no no. Souvereign investment is not income constrained, taxation does not even need to enter the picture.

With #1, Do you think it will become some form of modern feudalism, with wealthier and powerful individuals owning the local community?

3) 2), except they don't succeed. Reference: Guillotine, France, 1792.

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