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Comment by Practicality | Hacker News Reader

At this point I've already come to accept that fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. We just don't need it.

The big question is will the majority be able to maintain enough power to obtain income for those who aren't working, or will we see some kind of serious class warfare/starving populations?

This is a huge question in human history and it remains to be seen how we as a species are going to answer it.

[My hope regarding the labor is that it meaningless work can be replaced with research and development]

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> fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. We just don't need it.

and from the article

> there’s not enough work to go around

I disagree.

There's not enough paid employment to go around, but there is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done!

Our entire society needs to be weaned off its carbon dependence if we want humans to survive the next century. This will involve at the very least the wholesale transformation of our transport and energy systems, and probably construction too. We should be putting massive numbers of people to work on solving and fixing this, and there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done. Whether we can organise society in time to achieve this is the real question. Once we've fixed the environment and created a truly sustainable civilization, then we can talk about labor that is surplus.

Other work that will be in increasing demand is healthcare and elderly care (especially given the aging populations of most countries). I don't see robots replacing humans for this any time soon, and we are far from the point where we have enough health / personal care for everyone. Plenty more examples of work that's needed but not currently being done can be found with a bit of creative thought...

> there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done

Yes, and the government can compensate for unemployment by investing in public works, at least until the automation reaches a level where UBI needs to be implemented.

The constant supply solar of energy (and finite supply of mineral energy sources) also means that we won't be able to grow the economy indefinitely and need to find a way to transition to a system that thrives at equilibrium.

I'll leave that problem to my great-great-grandchildren. For now, I'm more concerned with pulling off the fossil-to-solar transition without breaking down in the process.

Right now we're using a very small percentage of the total supply of solar energy to Earth. [0]

We could grow our economy by literally 1000x and still not have any worry of running out of energy coming from the sun.

Your comment sounds like someone who says we shouldn't bother doing anything due to the inevitable heat death of the universe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status...

Why would we have to worry about that now?

The economy can grow by a million X before we start running into physical limitations on solar energy.

The rate of CO2 emission per GDP is already decreasing thanks to technological advances. There's no fundamental reason why the same couldn't happen to the ratio of energy use per GDP. So finite supply of resources is not a problem per se, and certainly won't be within our lifetimes, which is what we need to deal with.

You can't be more than 100% energy efficient, so, while there may be some headroom in that direction, there's a hard limit as well.

Edit: Also, while there seems to be a positive correlation between GDP per capita and energy efficiency, the most efficient nations in the world have a very low GDP per capita... I wonder why it is the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity#Economic_ener...

> You can't be more than 100% energy efficient

Yes, you can, practically speaking. The amount of energy needed to produce a given amount of value to humans is not fixed; it can be decreased, and in principle can be made as small as we like given sufficient advances in technology. That means the amount of value to humans that can be produced with a fixed amount of energy can increase, in principle as much as we like. That's what the parent to your post was saying.

Obviously it will be a while before we have technology advanced to the point where, say, the amount of value currently being produced per year on Earth can be produced with one tenth or one hundredth or less of the energy it currently takes. But we also have a while before we hit any hard limits of the sort you are referring to.

Given that the total of humanity produces all necessary food, consumables and other services today, it seems that humanity generates and requires an amount of work that seems to be in some sort of equilibrium right now. The rest is just a matter of distribution.

Humanity is divided, especially around wealth, and the new technologies will make the rich richer in the short to medium term, which will make the poor poorer especially now that they lose their jobs. How will we handle that situation?

I agree, and an extensive program like this might permit for a clean transition as even the make-work disappears; pay for public good work to doing whatever you want and sharing it with the world sounds like the ideal utopian outcome.

> The big question is will the majority be able to maintain enough power to obtain income for those who aren't working, or will we see some kind of serious class warfare/starving populations?

In the United States it will be the class warfare/starving thing. You don't deserve anything here unless you pay for it. Many people believe that taking unemployment compensation is shameful.

I think a lot of us will be fed in prisons.

EDIT: In some places you have to pay to not be vertical. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-ar...

> Sculptor Fabian Brunsing brought a satirical eye to the issue by creating the “pay bench”, an art installation of a park bench that retracts its metal spikes for a limited time when the prospective sitter feeds it a coin. Chinese officials, completely missing the joke, thought that this was a great idea and installed similar benches in Yantai Park of the Shangdong province.

>You don't deserve anything here unless you pay for it.

So true. Even things like safety, cleanliness, education quality, etc. are things we must pay for here, in stark contrast to other countries in the world.

Someone is paying for it...

TANSTAAFL

You mean made to work for insulting wages and subsistence in prison sweatshops. Prison population is a captive source of cheap labor, easily abused and exploited.

And they don't go home at night.

I thought prison food isn't free. Over in America the inmates have to either pay for it or work to pay for it.

>The big question is will the majority be able to maintain enough power to obtain income for those who aren't working, or will we see some kind of serious class warfare/starving populations?

We already have class warfare and mass hunger (the number of people who go partially hungry despite food-stamps and food banks is atrocious, let alone the number who would starve without such programs). The current answer from the lower classes has been the revival of organized labor among Fight for 15 and other movements. It's our job in the "higher" working class, having more education and leeway to operate, to throw out economic and political force behind both the social movements of the lower classes and behind "full unemployment" measures such as universal health-care and reduced working hours.

"At this point I've already come to accept that fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. "

This is not true.

Total workforce participation grew radically through the last 100 years - esp. because the introduction of women into different jobs.

Demographics aside, we have really quite high participation rates - even after 200 years of automation.

Also - because of demographic changes, we're already at a stage of declining labour force participation (since 2000), and we already retire at '60-ish' and live another 30 years not doing a whole lot, but amassing massive healthcare bills.

So - people more than ever need to be 'gainfully and productively employed' while they can, in order to offset the fact they'll be hanging out for quite long time not creating direct value.

We'll have "enough" full time labor when everybody it fully satisfied with what they have and there's nothing more that they'd buy if they had more money.*

Until then, if there's not enough jobs, that's an artificially induced shortage (e.g. austerity).

* Excepting natural resources - e.g. "more" beachfront property.

"everybody it [is] fully satisfied with what they have and there's nothing more that they'd buy if they had more money."

That's the idea. Let's for the moment, just assume that AI and robots and some other technologies are ridiculously productive sometime in the future and we solve all sorts of problems and have the resources to provide everyone with everything they want.

At that point it's not a question of giving everyone jobs it's a question of whether or not we decide to distribute our plentiful resources (and a question of, should we?).

Of course, I don't think the time has arrived yet for all this to happen. But as mentioned earlier, I do think it is going to happen (if we don't have some horrible nuclear war or some other megadisaster that kills everyone first)

> whether or not we decide to distribute our plentiful resources

You can already decide to do this today, and the government will even reward you for doing so. What you're really talking about is redistributing others' resources.

A non-zero number of businesses already do this. For example, where I presently work I don't get paid for overtime or public holidays in spite of the law requiring that I do.

I complained, and I was told that if I don't like it I can quit. I said that I would be going to the regulatory body, and I was outright threatened with physical harm: "Bad things happen to people who do that."

In accepting this position, are you not allowing others to be harmed? I'm assuming you're not uniquely being abused by the powers that be.

> redistributing others' resources

Automation is getting cheaper by the year, and more open. People will be able to benefit directly from automation after the transit period, and won't need UBI forever. At some point it's going to be free to cover the needs, especially if we can use raw materials that are in abundance in nature. After the first self replicating factory is going to be made, any country or region could bootstrap itself out of poverty.

Self replication is closer than AGI, it's just a matter of digitizing the industrial process and developing accessible materials. Human society, the ecosystem and the cell are self replicating factories too. We need to compile a factory in itself, to bootstrap the whole material process. Just like a DNA molecule is replicating all it needs to survive and reproduce, such a factory would be able to make "babies".

Maintaining the system of resource allocation we use today known as "property" takes resources and violence. If we can create one that is cheaper, less cruel, and has better outcomes then the current one, we should do it. Arguing that its wrong because this system says it is wrong is backwards circular thinking.

Right. This star trek utopia is a long way off.

So you're saying there's no way to reach post-labour before post-scarcity?

Hmm, that's interesting, I hope it's not true.

There certainly is!

Prices for goods just need to keep dropping, as they have already been doing to.

If they keep dropping, then our existing welfare system will handle the rest.

If the percent money that society spends in welfare state the same, and goods get cheaper and cheaper, then that means that living off welfare will eventually be a pretty sweet deal, able to provide all your wants and needs.

There are more goods than just smartphones. Arguably more important ones too.

Rent, food, energy, all the things you need to live are getting more expensive with inflation. The welfare system is lagging behind and the benefits need to be bumped a little every year or so or it gets harder and harder to live on them. Unfortunately we apparently can't always seem to afford to increase the benefits. For instance student benefits in Finland were "cut" by simply not increasing them in accordance with the index.

I'm saying that austerity is being disguised as near-post-scarcity. Jobs are hard to come by in the US at the same time that infrastructure is crumbling. That's a lack of jobs not a lack of necessary work.

It's a lack of political will to enforce the deal between the state and corporation (edit: and citizens). Governments grant tax cuts to corporations (edit: and citizens), even thought it hurts the very infrastructure and society that enabled corporations to extract the money from the environment.

The current taxation systems nowhere pays for all the externalities. If a company made a dollar in a country, a fair share of it should get back to the state for providing the environment that made it possible. Education, security, infrastructure.

Got it.

It's a pretty flimsy disguise though. If people are simultaneously complaining about bad infrastructure and high taxes, then they are simply saying that they want their earned money themselves more than they want to use it for shared infrastructure projects. People would just rather have the latest iPhone than good highways. :-/

>If people are simultaneously complaining about bad infrastructure and high taxes, then they are simply saying that they want their earned money themselves more than they want to use it for shared infrastructure projects.

Sure, and the American people picked Trump as leader because they thought he was the most qualified person in the entire country.

I know you're being glib, but a lot of people voting for him actually hold this to be true. He is successful, therefore he is competent.

Very true: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

How it could be not true? What is "fair" income in scarcity?

I can imagine a future where the basic standard of living for everyone is like what we give senior citizens today. Everyone is clothed, fed, has a roof over their heads, and has access to medical care.

But if you want more than basic, then you have to perform labour of some sort. Want to take the trip to Mars? Gotta work for it.

Yes, there will be a difference between those who labour and those who don't, but I still think it would be a huge win if noone in society would ever struggle to put food on their table.

There's a struggle between retired pensioners and everyone else in society about how much retired citizens should get, but there's still an understanding on both sides that past labour has some value, but that that value is less than present labour, so there's a balance. I hope the same would be true in a post-labour society.

And, of course, the difference between the labourers and the not-labourers would be an incentive to reach post-scarcity where that difference is wiped out.

> I can imagine a future where the basic standard of living for everyone is like what we give senior citizens today. Everyone is clothed, fed, has a roof over their heads, and has access to medical care.

This is already a reality in many countries. It would be very easy to also make it a reality in the US. The resources are there.

They are not. Even for the senior citizens — existing pension systems are on the verge of collapse already.

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