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Comment by esahione | Hacker News Reader

The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable and if the NYT can't see it, I doubt a lot of people outside of tech do. It's my biggest worry right now.

I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.

The repercussions of AI should be worrying every leader in the world right now.

Immigrants? H1-bs? Illegals? Robots? Please, let's have a real talk.

Capitalism will destroy capitalism as we know it.

Edit: Because my post is high up in this topic, I hope to get some attention of people that are more invested than me on figuring out this problem.

One of the least communist solutions I've thought of is a quasi-capitalistic economic system. Each publicly traded company should have profit-sharing-only stocks and profit-sharing/management-voting stocks. Stop all wars and futile spending and buy profit-sharing stocks with our tax dollars. That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.

Let's also ensure the system isn't gamed by stashing profits offshore or having overpaid upper management to decrease profit numbers. Then we keep reinvesting a percentage of profits and future taxes into other publicly traded companies. Use the rest of the profits as the fund for universal basic income.

I think this whole thing is going to be a shit-show even if we can control the AI. If we can't, may it have mercy on us.

View on HN

There is no one to entrust UBI to. It will rapidly stop being universal or basic as people pervert it with exceptions. Controlling everyone's income will attract the greatest power mongers the world has ever seen.

Perhaps the unspoken honest answer is that people without other assets are going to live in 'poverty' (compared to the rich); their brains will operate at better watts-per-compute than the computers for a long time and still be worth something. They will earn a living on this. The people that do have assets (e.g. own the robots), are going to be extravagantly wealthy. It will be a feudalism but without violence, seniorage, or other expectation that the poor work for the good to the rich. Just that there's going to be really poor and really rich.

I and my kids will almost certainly be left behind in this. I am not an asset owner. But I will not attack my neighbor for their wealth. I will not turn over my ability to live to some bureaucrat who steals it from the rich and will eventually make me dance and beg for it. Let the rich asset owners go to the stars even if I will not be joining them. Better to have some of us get ahead than hold all back trying to leave no one behind.

Your predictions are at least 50 years too soon, and several unknowable things will occur between here and there

Agreed. But if I have to show some world given the current trajectory, that's my best bet.

My favorite story is Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. He got the best futurists money can buy to predict what the near future would be.

They had all sorts of strange interfaces and ideas. Newspapers with screens on them, etc.

It was just 3 years before the iPhone came out...

Who else to entrust UBI to than not-humans?

We're talking of robots getting us in this mess, along with extreme automation of everything. Well, lets start looking into automating government.

We have a lot of cruft and crap in our governmental system. Layers upon layers of laws, bureaucrats deciding on felonies. And it's even worse, where we really don't know the boundary of the law. And even less so if you're rich.

So, what would it take to automate law itself?I'm not talking of the judicial, but executive and legislative seems simpler to target for excision and replacement.

I could imagine a world where totally sentient robots keep us tamed with UBI. I might be willing to buy off on that, need to think about it more (morally it checks out since the robots own the wealth and voluntarily give is up to be nice to their creator species). Just not human run UBI or even UBI where humans run the robots that do it.

I was thinking something a bit more complete than just that.

I was thinking of a government itself that was automated, by the people and for the people. Taxes and expenditures could be drilled down to an arbitrary fine level. Laws themselves could come from the public as well as something similar to our current congress.

However, I'm thinking of running proposed laws through a form of a simulator before being wide-spread. Think of it like Jenkins-For-Law. It wouldn't catch everything, but would find egregious side-effects. Laws with too many side-effects would be denied, without some sort of super-majority.

The law itself would be a provable, queryable corpus. There would be no confusion about "Is this legal". Side-effects would be found by lack of correlation and fuzzy definitions.

Obviously, this wouldn't be our government. Or it would require a stark discussion between all 50 states at a Constitutional Convention (yeah, good luck). I like the idea how Estonia is going about E-Government.

I can dream, I guess.

Here's the thing that you haven't taken into account with your post: rejuvenation research.

Let's say we discover/invent AI. What do we set it to do? We solve the world's biggest problem and create the biggest company ever: conquer aging.

Do you think you'd stay on the sidelines if a rich guy could buy immortality and you couldn't?

Yes. Even if I was starving, I want to believe I could not steal from my neighbor (morals). And not sell my kids into state-slavery (the ability to take in trillions of income from some and outlay it to others is the ultimate power and it will ultimately corrupt anyone who tries to own it or live on it).

Revolution without bloodshed is next to impossible, sadly.

Rejuvenation? AI? Those are the biggest revolution-causing triggers humans will ever come to see.

Elections were (IMO) meant to be bloodless revolutions. its just the 1% has captured both primary political parties.

Also, the flawed first past the post electoral system discourages competition (IMO to keep it cheaper for the 1% to own the whole process). I'll post some videos from people smarter then me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erph1L_XwVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU

Taxes are "state-slavery"?

The fight for Universal Longevity is going to be the next big healthcare battle after Universal Healthcare.

I don't think it will be as difficult of a battle, though.

Social Security is an example of a welfare that has run fine without politicians making anyone dance and beg for it. I don't think a lot of other people are going to be fine living in permanent poverty and feudalism while seeing extravagant wealth nearby. A revolution is coming, Trump's promise of making America great again by kicking out Mexicans and restricting trade is just the first salvo in the revolution. It's not going to be pretty but it could have been different if the wealth had been redistributed fairly.

Social Security has one of the most powerful lobbies in the country defending it. Politicians who eagerly take on the NRA won't even mention cutting SS.

It seems likely that basic income would have a similar lobby, once it's been around for a while.

That's primarily because gun bans or gun control are a net benefit whilst letting your poor and old starve is a net negative.

> because gun bans or gun control are a net benefit.

If you really believe that, compare/contrast most dictatorships with the United States, Switzerland, and Israel.

Gun control is something that oppressive rulers always try to implement as soon as possible.

Gun control in Israel is pretty strict for civilians but you make a good point.

This logic is countered by the many peaceful, democratic nations with strong gun control laws - the majority of them, really.

No, I'm saying that weak gun control is not a complete bad. A lot of functional states have all sorts of gun control laws.

However, all (as far as I know) totalitarian states have strong gun control laws. I can't think of a single one which had a permissive attitude toward the civilian ownership of guns.

I'm speaking of course of de jure gun control laws, not the de facto possession of guns by the population.

I for one am glad we have not gone down the path of the hellhole that is Australia.

It also hasn't stopped being universal or basic or perverted with exceptions.

Because Social Security is hard to attack, and easy to defend. The "moochers" attack has been ridiculed enough.

But if everyone receives UBI, soon you'll have mobs campaigning for: "felons shouldn't receive UBI", "rapists shouldn't receive it", etc.

A good question is: if asked, would 50+% of the US population support Richard Spencer receiving UBI? The "anti" argument is strong ("my tax dollars shouldn't fund bigotry") and the "pro" argument is very weak, since it's only based in ideological principles ("everyone should get it"), and most voters are not ideological and do not vote according to principles.

I think one thing America needs to re-learn is how to apply principles equally to everybody. I would support felons receiving UBI, because, like everybody else, if you are on hard times, the UBI is the best (and least discriminatory) opportunity to become a more productive member of society.

Felons shouldn't. This will provide a strong incentive to not commit crime. Or at least felons may get reduced BI. Think of it like a probation (maybe reduced for a period of time as it relates to the severity of the crime).

This is a carrot and stick approach to social order.

This will greatly increase the recidivism rate.

Why is that? Does probation also increase the recidivism rate?

Because it increases the chance that they'll need to resort to crime to survive. It's the same reason that the pervasive policies against hiring felons increase recidivism rate. Once they've paid their debt to society, we need to actually forgive them, or it's much harder for them to rehabilitate.

Thank you for providing a perfect example of the concern around Universal Basic Income. Even to the point of dropping the Universal...

It doesn't even exist and it can still be used to divide society. The exact opposite of its intention.

I really don't understand that line of reasoning. Just because some people may want a different form of UBI is no argument against UBI itself. Any non-trivial policy in government is subject to multiple views - and that is insufficient reason to hold back from offering all policy changes.

Fine, everyone gets universal basic income -- felons are levied heavy fines which they will pay from.. their universal basic income. No one here is arguing against the existence of fines as a punitive measure in society, are they?

Your derision is unwarranted and unconstructive.

Congratulations! You have now improved the recidivism rate to 100%. Because seriously, what's an ex-convict going to do after leaving prison in that system? No UBI and no prospect of a job (look at employment rates for ex-cons today, do you think that's going to get better?) will very quickly lead people back to crime by necessity.

> Think of it like a probation (maybe reduced for a period of time as it relates to the severity of the crime).

Do people read the comments they respond to? I am spitballing here. It's not like we have firm numbers to critique. It seems reasonable to me that there be some punishment for bad behavior. Things like that already exist now. Or how about this: You don't deny basic income you just.. make them repay society by docking their basic income a %.

Felons should receive it. My reasoning is simple, everyone needs money and felons are more likely to hurt people when they don't have it.

It is not a matter of "deserving" or "earning" it, it is the simple fact that everyone is better when no one goes without basic.

Why should they get the full amount? Why not dock some as punitive?

And I am not saying a "deserve" from a moral point of view, but a "deserve" from a cost savings point of view to disincentive crime.

The sun shines on everyone equally.

Isn't prison enough of a disincentive? You now want to take away someone's dignity after they have served the sentence which has been deemed to be the punishment equal to the crime?

Deterrence has never worked on potential criminals.

It is simply a matter of results. Being punitive might hurt them, but it hurts society more.

When a percentage of a society might be lacking for basic needs they will act in bad ways for the society. A UBI doesn't remove all desires to commit crime, but it would remove everyone who would steal to eat or steal to house themselves.

It removes an entire class of threat to society. What does a punitive measure buy for society?

It certainly won't deter crime, because no society has ever been able to punish hard enough to deter crime and there have crime societies that killed petty thieves.

It won't reform the ex-cons. It will make doing things like buying a suit for a job interview more difficult. It will make them less likely to contribute by way of work. Money they might have spent on bettering themselves (books?) must now be spent on survival.

Again, do away with childish notions like "earn" and "deserve" they map poorly onto the solutions for the problems of the real world.

You're proving my point that UBI will become a deeply political and partisan issue, and not only won't just be for everyone, but also will have people endlessly quarreling about who should get it.

Carrot and stick approach doesn't work when it comes to people. Vicious/virtuous cycles are a much better model of human behavior than homeostasis. As another poster said, you'll increase recidivism. It also undermines the "justice" aspect, since even after you got your punishment, you're still not considered a first-class citizen. That's unjust.

UBI would only really work if it was inscribed in the Constitution, and deeply culturally held as something that must remain universal. Otherwise, say hi to more social instability. And what about whistleblowers? Government shouldn't have the power to discriminate when giving out UBI.

As responded elsewhere, fine. Felons just continue to receive heavy fines as part of their punishment, but guess what? Now the state has a means to enforce these judgments by docking their basic income. Surely you are not arguing against fines as a punitive measure for law breaking?

That's a great point, and only makes UBI look more workable. The prospect of UBI becoming a partisan target for bickering doesn't seem so likely when put like this.

Can't edit anymore so I'll reply to myself:

Apparently you meant the government would reduce the UBI that someone receives. I interpreted it as everybody receives the same UBI, but obviously some punishments are accompanies by fines, and the fine for certain crimes may be equal to the amount of the UBI. Everyone would still receive the same amount, but for some, it would be "taxed" before it's actually received. That's still suboptimal but wouldn't turn the UBI into a political crisis.

I think they should, because it's surprisingly easy to bias who becomes a felon. https://theintercept.com/2015/12/09/floridas-ex-felons-strug...

If you think that there aren't already enough disincentives to commit a felony you simply aren't looking.

Felons went to prison, they paid their debt to society. Why are you so insistent on them coming out into as shitty a situation as possible?

DO you like high recidivism?

If you step back and take a look at the history of wealth distribution & revolutions, maybe your outlook will be more optimistic. Today's inequality is troubling, but doesn't nearly compare to situations in the past. Revolution will enter the discussion once the masses are struggling for food.

If you have human level AI, in democracies the people would likely vote in a government to sort out something UBI. At the moment UBI would have a job working because paying people for their work is still how things work.

I think Norway and the way it's managed its sovereign wealth fund is a counter-example.

Governance can be done well.

I've wondered for a while if size invites corruption. The more governmental functions are removed from the public eye, the more easily corruption can creep in. If this is true, then smaller nations (and smaller companies) which have less scale would tend to be better run.

Aye, but as a counter point remember there is safety in numbers. What's Norway going to do when a five million man army comes marching for its riches? Pray for help from allies or die screaming. Such has been the history of humanity from first recording through the invention of the atomic bomb.

Countries with atomic weapons have never invaded another country with atomic weapons. This is a great improvement over WWI and WWII, although it is hard to know what the long tail risk is of killing almost everybody with a full scale nuclear exchange and nuclear winter. I think maybe the best situation would be that each responsible (to be determined) country would be allowed 10-30 nukes on ICBMs only (verified somehow; live cameras plus inspections?). With nukes on ICBMs only there would be no sneak attack where the attacker is unknown. With a small number of nukes, deterrence is still likely and the possibility of a nuclear winter is eliminated. I'd trust Norway with a small nuclear arsenal.

That's not completely correct. During the 1999 Kargil War either Pakistan invaded India or vice versa (depending on where you believe the legitimate border lies). Both countries had atomic weapons as of 1998. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War

I had not considered that conflict. It was in Kashmir and the border was never agreed upon by both sides (as you state). I wouldn't call it an invasion or even really a "war" with the small number of killed at only ~1,000. Others might disagree.

When Russia invaded Finland in the second world war all they got was a bloody nose.

If it's a universal basic income, it should just be automated as well. By the point automation has advance enough to require UBI, it's advanced enough to handle its administration. Pull the human governance aspects out of it.

Who runs the automation for UBI? With Artificial General Intelligence a person needs to run it.

Put another way, A self driving car can put 10 taxi drivers out of work, but it cannot manage a monetary fund. Neither can the mechanic who fixes the car.

My argument would be: UBI could be so simple that it wouldn't allow for corruption.

A dollar amount shows up in your bank account every day. If it doesn't, that's a problem. The one debate should be whether the number should be moved up or down.

If there's exceptions (like criminals not getting it or something), then it's not UBI.

This is exactly th kind of automation the article ignores. This implementation of UBI could be a small python script that fits in single gist, but if implemented even just 20 years ago would involve the labor of hundreds.

Norway and the US are very different in terms of size, diversity, economic output, geography ... pretty much everything. Saying that something works for Norway isn't really a good reason to adopt it in the US.

OK, so why wouldn't it work in, say, Minnesota? It's population, GDP, geography, etc. is similar.

Americans always pull out this excuse. There's a whole world running experiments on how to best do things, but you're unwilling to look at the results because it's not a perfect match.

It's never a perfect match. It doesn't mean you can't adapt lessons learned elsewhere, or that you can afford to ignore what works in other countries.

> as people pervert it with exceptions

As a once landlord, even if government did a great job with it, I don't see why rents wouldn't go up to match it. If my tenants were guaranteed 50k a year, I would instantly raise my rent to 1/3rd that. Other industries would follow. Market rates really just hash out to be whatever the consumer can bear before going bankrupt.

So the government would also need a Communist-level of price controls, which as history has shown us, doesn't actually work.

The welfare system today 'works' because so few are on welfare or fully dependant on welfare, so a more market economy exists with rental pricing. If everyone, or most, are on welfare, then we'll just price against welfare. That means you'll get your UBI check but you'll be living in flophouses and be broke every month for basic things when before you had a nice middle-class house, savings, enjoyable lifestyles, upward mobility, etc.

I have yet to see UBI advocates resolve the inflationary problem short of re-implementing Soviet-style communism, yet they are unable to resolve the various problems with communism the same way the Soviets and others were unable to do so in the past.

Why does it matter if the income comes from a basic income source or not? Rents rise only if there is more demand than supply. And it seems silly to say that we are not capable of supplying enough housing for our current population.

In nations were economic equality is higher, and where government's provide a strong safety net, there is no indication of rents spiralling out of control.

Safety net is not UBI. Safety net expects a working class and a market economy. UBI expects non-workers wholly dependant on the government with set, public incomes.

Supply doesn't matter. The land owning class, me, gives no shit about supply. We'll all just raise rates to match what the government gives. Why wouldn't we? This is exactly what happens with any government entitlement. Medicare covers mobility scooters up to $5000. Guess what? My $2500 scooter now costs $5000. My competitors will do the same. Then in a day that becomes the new norm.

That's only one problem with UBI. The others are worse like in a generation you have people who have no useful skills, so once those robots running everything aren't competitive with robots from market economies that don't do UBI and expect people to work and be competitive and find innovations, then our goods are too expensive and our economy collapses because we all decided to model ourselves after a retirement arts community. Not to mention that history has shown that if you give people enough cash to just get by, they tend to lean towards a leisure lifestyle of drug abuse, gambling, non-education, non-productivity, etc. Why not? If no worries, then you might as well party. People in the ghetto aren't any different than you and me. They just realized that a lifetime of welfare means a lifetime of leisure, so they adapt to a leisure lifestyle and deal with all the problems that brings.

Lastly, robots aren't magically going to remain competitive by themselves. Industries won't magically take care of themselves. Even with heavy automation you still need people coming in day in and day out to make sure we don't fall behind the curve. If a Chinese robot can make 100 dresses in 5 minutes and ours can only make 50, then suddenly we're in a lot of trouble as our per item cost has literally doubled. If anything, the tech arms race is heavily accelerated because the stakes are so much higher. We'd probably have record levels of employment and education to just keep up.

Medicare only allowing specific payments for scooters under specific rules is causing more of a market distortion than more a UBI approach of just giving cash to the recipients and letting regular market forces vs customer choice regulate the market to some level of efficiency. If landlords want to raise rents too high, other developers will address the market (just like the regular housing market now... as long as there aren't other rules warping the market). If anything it point to society needing to tax landlords higher so that rentier behavior is discouraged...

Your picture of UBI paints it as if people wouldn't want to earn more than a minimal UBI. I think that's blatantly wrong - people are greedy, they want more. The people who what more than UBI will find useful skills (and civilization won't collapse).

>Not to mention that history has shown that if you give people enough cash to just get by, they tend to lean towards a leisure lifestyle of drug abuse, gambling, non-education, non-productivity, etc. Why not? If no worries, then you might as well party.

Any sources to back up this statement?

"But it turns out that the effects of a UBI on labor participation weren’t nearly as bad as some had feared. Researchers[1] found that households as a whole reduced their workloads by about 13%, as economist Evelyn Forget explains in a 2011 paper published by Canadian Public Policy. But within each household, the (generally male) primary breadwinners cut back on work hours only slightly. Women who were secondary earners reduced their work hours more, devoting more time to household care and staying home with young children. Teenagers also put off getting part-time jobs to focus on school, leading to a noticeable decline in high school dropout rates in Dauphin, and to double-digit increases in high school completion among participating families in New Jersey, Seattle, and Denver."

[1] https://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf

Article quote is pulled from: https://qz.com/765902/ubi-wouldnt-mean-everyone-quits-workin...

>to focus on school

Yes obviously because school is an investment: school>college>decent job.

What happens when decent job doesn't exist? Its unrealistic to pull data from an economy based on job seeking and say it applies to an economy where jobs are rare/non-existent. You can't eliminate the main incentive for education and then pretend things are going to be the same.

I picked the ghetto as an example because decent jobs aren't available, good schools are impossible to get into due to substandard schooling in those communities, and then when you try and beat the odds you have to contend with things like racial or cultural discrimination from employers. There's a reason so many people in those communities believe in hopelessness, because ultimately a lot of it is hopeless. So if 'decent job' doesn't exit, why would UBI kids bother with school? I suspect they'll just settle for a leisure lifestyle. Remove the goals, then you'll remove the effort to get there.

> I suspect they'll just settle for a leisure lifestyle.

This is basically the crux of the two sides of the UBI issue.

People against UBI believe others are no good and will waste their life if given the chance.

People for UBI believe others will use it as an opportunity to lift themselves up.

Why does the only worthwhile goal in your argument seem to be "get a good job"? People can find fulfillment with many other goals that don't need to be jobs.

As someone else who is a landlord, I would undercut you by a small margin to ensure I'm taking in rental income. Depending on supply (which you care naught about) you may find yourself sitting on empty units priced at 1/3 UBI wondering where all the tenants are.

Medical products can raise their prices because they have almost no competition, not only because there are very few accredited suppliers (much easier to collude), but also because you can't use that money for anything else, hence the consumer has no incentive to find a cheaper option.

Right now, rents are high, because people need to live in very specific places to get jobs. When you can live anywhere in the US and still get an income, you're literally talking about a market with hundreds of thousands of suppliers, offering way more land than what's actually required to live.

Competition plays a role here. On the margin, basic income would make it easier for people to move to relatively cheaper places (much as Social Security does).

I agree that it's unlikely that it would be so generous that most people would stop working. People generally want more than the bare minimum. But not being completely dependent on your job provides some flexibility and bargaining power.

I feel like rent itself is a major problem in current society. It takes 30years for a person to pay off their little chunk of land and house. Some cannot even have that. Land is a natural resource, and as with air and water, it should be distributed. It is a good time for a modern homesteading act. Maybe a citizens dividend.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen's_dividend

> I have yet to see UBI advocates resolve the inflationary problem short of re-implementing Soviet-style communism, yet they are unable to resolve the various problems with communism the same way the Soviets and others were unable to do so in the past.

Soviet-style communism is not the only type of "communism" that is possible, just like American-style capitalism isn't the only way to do capitalism. In fact, some argue that Soviet-style communism was never communism in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

That said, what various problems with communism do you think are not resolved?

Where supply is constrained I can't see any other outcome.

More social housing would probably have a better result.

Social security is basic income and no one has perverted it ecessively.

US Social Security is not 'basic income' - it's a system that pays out variable payouts (based on an individual's lifetime system contributions) to a select group of persons (62+ years old, depends on birth year), and is supported primarily by contributions from members that have not aged into the payout cohort yet. It's far closer to a pension fund than any kind of universal basic income system.

"Controlling everyone's income will attract the greatest power mongers the world has ever seen."

Well, maybe this is our chance of create trustworthy AI politicians (only half-joking).

I'm sure I read a sci-fi short story that examined this idea, where Australia shared the wealth with everyone but America basically put everyone into concentration camps.

Ah, here it is: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Spoiler alert. I think the presentation of "Australia" in that story isn't quite as you describe it. There is another interpretation.

See also https://islandpress.org/book/who-owns-the-sky for another alternative.

I generally try not to get political online; I don't find it very effective (e.g. how many people's opinions have really changed based on their online readings?)

However, in this case, I do want to provide a couple contrarian viewpoints.

One, I am an 'asset owner', and the rent problem is real. Once one reaches a certain threshold of wealth, it becomes almost obnoxious how quickly it grows beyond one's consumption. For instance, I reached the modest 'few million' threshold several years ago, and I have some financial managers. I don't often look at my bank accounts. But, when I do, I am always shocked by how much my net-worth has grown. And, that's after trying to be generous to friends and family (i.e. $10k here, $20k there).

Two, I don't find taxation to be theft. In fact, I pay so little in tax based on what I earn from capital gains, that I never even think about it. And, I'm often surprised that some of my 'average-income' friends are so vehemently ideological about it. But, more to the point, I look at taxation similar to a lease. For instance, I can go rent some capital equipment and use it to build some ROI. And, afterward I pay the owner for the opportunity. I don't think that is theft, so why would I view tax any differently? Or in other words, how would I have been able to profit as much had I lived somewhere else with much less 'social capital'? That isn't to say that I find government efficient or non-corrupt, but those are just the kinks in the system that will always need to be worked out.

I don't expect to change any opinions here. I don't even know if anyone reads this shit. But, I just wanted to point these things out for people who haven't yet formed their ideology.

Agreed on all points. I would like my tax rate to increase. The marginal utility of dollars is drastically lower past a certain point, and could be better used on public works. I think the biggest boost in life quality would be being surrounded by a happier citizenry.

So be more generous with relevant charities while you wait for your taxes to go up. Nothing's stopping people from being more generous.

Except for the fundamental human tendency of greed that is all the more common (for reasons of causation, not failure of character) in those who are above a certain profit margin. No plea for individual charity and philanthropy is ever going to be as effective as taxation in the aggregate.

I have been, but the current administration's tax proposal looks like it would reduce my tax rate, and in order to make a noticable impact on society as a whole is going to require taxation, people probably aren't suddenly going to get a whole lot more charitable than they have been.

Your statement is the equivalent of the oft-stated "every little bit helps". It really doesn't, because it usually serves as a palliative and stops people short of doing the major work that needs to be done.

I want the decimation of public education to be reversed, I want us to figure out ways to help our fellow citizens who are hurting economically and psychologically. Massive unevenness in wealth accumulation is a huge problem. This is going to take a society-wide effort to fix, not a few NGOs.

I find that political solutions tend to stop at the palliative, especially compared to forming friendships and active engagement with relevant charities.

> This is going to take a society-wide effort to fix, not a few NGOs.

The difference between our viewpoints is that I don't see the government as the sole or best face of "society". It's merely one option, and often not the best one.

That's often the case, but it doesn't have to be.

That said, how would you suggest coordinating a large segment of the population to do something if not through government?

I think coordination is often overrated compared to removing perverse incentives and instituting healthy ones.

Coordination leaves very little room for innovation, for instance.

Do we need a coordinated effort to retrain displaced workers? Or do we just need a large and flexible one?

Given than flexibility is one of the issues where employers can't keep up with workers, I suspect a less coordinated but more motivated effort sounds better here.

Guaranteed minimum income compared to a Smorgasbord of targeted programs is also less coordinated but probably better.

Except that for many people it is simply the only option. Disabled Veterans are employed by government at something like 10x the rate of other employers. Minorities are employed at much higher rates as well. Alot of this is because of the way the civil service hiring works, which is perverse in some ways and highly merit based on others.

There are alot of metrics where private enterprise is just plain terrible, and government is the lesser of two evils.

I've worked for several big corps who do exactly the same thing WRT minorities and veterans. The best thing for people isn't to give them a patron but a chance to build a good career. So the next time they apply for a job, they're not a statistic but a competitive candidate.

If private businesses need help here, let's form groups to work toward that.

> I pay so little in tax based on what I earn from capital gains, that I never even think about it.

This is really interesting. Contrast this to how, say, a middle-income self-employed tradesperson feels when they do the following calculation. I'm using the UK tax system because that's what I know, but I expect it's similar elsewhere.

Say a customer pays them £1000 for some work. First VAT is assessed on this, which is ~£167, leaving them with ~£833. Then they pay for materials. Let's pick £400 as an arbitrary figure, which I don't think is unreasonable. This leaves a profit of £433. Then they pay class 4 national insurance contributions on this profit, which has a marginal rate of 9% assuming you make a normal amount of profit, so £39. You also pay income tax on this, which once you're over the 0%-rate threshold comes to ~£87. All told, your £1000 you took from the customer has resulted in £400 going to your supplier, ~£292 going to the tax man, and ~£308 for yourself. That's a marginal tax rate of ~49%, which, to me, feels like a lot.

"For instance, I can go rent some capital equipment and use it to build some ROI. And, afterward I pay the owner for the opportunity. I don't think that is theft, so why would I view tax any differently?"

I don't really hold this viewpoint myself, but renting capital equipment is voluntary but taxation isn't. That is a pretty significant difference.

Could you elaborate more on that? I'm not discounting it, but the viewpoint is unfamiliar to me.

I don't see taxes as involuntary. In fact, it's clearly documented how much tax I'm expected to pay in order to receive the services that I will receive. And, I'm (theoretically) free to immigrate to somewhere else that has a different tax structure. For instance, there are several countries that don't have income tax. So, before I choose to produce income, I could choose to immigrate (ignoring the complexities of that, of course). How is it involuntary? In the US, there are even people who pay zero taxes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the issue many people seem to have with taxation is the monopolistic reign of government. Sure, government is a monopoly. But, at least I know that I have some oversight over it. And, I know that there are people actively monitoring it. That gives me more comfort than if, say, Comcast was running the government.

What would be cool is if I had more choice in service providers. But, to be honest, I'm lazy, and I really don't want to be comparing different service providers for different services. It's much easier for me to pay one provider. Now, if people could figure out how to make it work so that I had different options, that'd be really cool. But, that's theoretical political science type stuff that's beyond me. At the moment, I'm content.

Ok, that's enough online political discourse for me, for the month. lol. But, I'm eager to read the responses, if there are any. There are a lot of people on HN way smarter than me, so I'm sure you guys have some interesting ideas.

In order for taxes to be voluntary, not only do you need to know in advance what the rules for calculating them as well as what you would receive, but you would also need the ability to opt out of paying for and receiving the service. Being able to emigrate is irrelevant because:

1. You would still have a tax burden (at least if you are American)

2. If your only option to avoid something is being expelled from your home, it hardly qualifies as involuntary.

I am also generally content with my tax burden, however I still felt the need to defend people who aren't because at a theoretical level they are correct.

The weirdest part of your comment is that you have seething disregard for anything resembling socialism, yet you accept without question the synthetic notion of "asset ownership"

Nothing will work unless we do a complete remodel to all our assumptions about money, society, a person's worth, etc. We need to take a big sledgehammer to all our old ideas, and the time to do it is now.

It's an entirely new world ahead of us. The changes will be tremendous, unprecedented in history in a literal sense. Now is not the time to be ideologically lazy.

I think it's naive to assume the "without violence" part

The world economy will crash if we don't have universal basic income in the future as simply put the owners of robots will need humans to buy the products and services produced. Socialist economies will prosper and with current barriers coming up on world trade etc. Purely capitalistic economies will be hurt the most as with ai and robots capital will accelerate towards the few. In the end the many wont have anything to give to the few.

This is just hypothetical I think long before that you will see huge social unrest and civil war a smidgen of which you are seeing in the US and is one of the main reason Trump got elected. Sadly he is someone that will accelerate this instead of stopping it

>The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable

Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office.

I certainly see AI changing things, but these hysterical futurist articles tend to lean more pie-in-the-sky techies than managerial types. Managers and executives know that employment, today, is a mostly a fiction. A lot of what drives employment could be automated right now, but isn't for political reasons. Not the least of which is internal company politics on having as many direct reports under you as the threat of becoming a 'small' department means becoming eliminated by outsourcing or in-sourced/absorbed by another department or simply a loss of prestige. The idea that employment numbers are purely meritoriousness is fairly questionable. Its bureaucratic and political primarily.

The larger issue is, how much will this change things from the norm from a reasonable perspective. We can't automate most things and that probably means a certain class of jobs will be threatened but most will be fine. So even if that doubles or triples unemployment, that means we have unemployment rates closer to European economies or perhaps higher, but still doable without a radical restructuring of our economy. The futurist dream of 100% unemployment in ten years and everyone on UBI simply isn't happening.

My worry is that we'd probably need a very liberal government to handle this as it will put it quite the load on welfare, but currently the US has a radical conservative administration as well as a conservative congress, which means the political fight to raise taxes and expand welfare for displaced workers is going to be tough or impossible. The problem is that angry voters put in isolationists and those who they perceive have and can build wealth, but those types of people are often very anti-social services and very anti-welfare. So the voters took a big gamble. They think the Trump admin will 'fix' jobs. Jobs that are destined to go away. But if he fails, and he probably will, then they will lack the social safety net to fall back on. Those in vulnerable industries, often in rural and less urbanized communities, simply voted the wrong way and most likely will be punished economically for it.

"Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office."

I'm sure I read in the economist that the number of people doing office work has been falling for some time.

Right, but the USA has a 4.7 unemployment rate, which is one of the lowest in the world and a far cry from the 100% unemployment futurists keep claiming will happen 'any year now.' Jobs continue to exist, continue to be created, etc. This stuff is a lot more complex than "automation will eat jobs." If anything, automation has created vastly more jobs than anyone thought possible due to a variety of factors not the least of which is a shift to IT/technical trades, service-based trades, and the massive amount of human power you need to run a competitive bureaucracy to run those factories and services.

Then all that excess money from 'decent' jobs goes towards more goods and services that otherwise wouldn't be possible. I mean, people casually blow $300+ on a robot vacuum cleaner or $600+ on a phone. And now you have more jobs in industries no one predicted possible 30 years ago and so on.

Not to mention, generally, the more competitive the industry the most staffing it needs. I'm sure there's some rule named after someone about this, but hot industries go on hiring sprees and when your economy is as innovative and wealthy as the US's that translates into a high demand for qualified candidates. That offsets a lot of job loss in dying sectors.

> Right, but the USA has a 4.7 unemployment rate

When talking about the headline unemployment rate, it's a good idea to view this seemingly rosy figure in the context of our current ~40 year lows in the labor force participation rate[0]. It's misleading to look at one without the other, IMO.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

And a record level incarceration rate.

and record lows in crime. I don't see this as a problem.

Other countries have seen similar falls in crime without the high incarceration rates of the US.

The NYT article is quite lucid about it. They do argue that this gigantic wall should not be avoided, but dealt with through legislation and better sharing of wealth.

That's a pretty logical answer, and they support it with good examples of past policies to ease the social pain of economic changes.

I don't think that they quite grasp or explain the enormity of it.

The two biggest strongholds humans have against automation are thought and manual, but complex, labor. Soon they will all be automated.

> Soon they will all be automated.

and that's all good and fine, as long as the wealth created by the robots is redistributed and not funneled to a handful of executives' bank accounts in tax havens.

Who honestly thinks this extra value will be captured by more than the tiniest handful of already-rich people?

If that's the case then it will probably devour itself, you can't have business without customers.

> I don't think that they quite grasp or explain the enormity of it.

I believe they do. They just remember people (and we all should) that this was supposed to be the pinnacle of our society, and not it's darkest hour.

I agree with most of your comments. However, I wouldn't think of this as a capitalist-communist spectrum. In fact, I wouldn't think of either of them as long term solutions in this future.

What both systems have in common is that they are built around scarcity. For capitalism, it is a method of price discovery. For communism, it is rationing by the state ("From each according to his ability...").

When there is no more scarcity, then there is no more need for either price discovery or for rationing.* Therefore, will need to create a new economic model that is not built on scarcity.

*Footnote - there are some things that will always be scare, such as location. Having a view of a calm beach, or of boundless nature, or a city skyline will always have a scarcity issue. It will be interesting to see how that scarcity is dealt with in this future.

I think the fallacy here is similar to Malthusianism in the 19th century. In that case the problem was the assumption that agricultural yields wouldn't improve over time, and your argument is assuming that improving technology won't create more jobs than it obsoletes. We're not going to wind up with companies that consist of just a CEO and a dozen factories.

(NOTE: than I'm only talking about automation, not the creation of hard AI, which you allude to. That's a whole other kettle of fish)

I think in part your solution is on the right track but not the complete answer (hell, I don't think I have a complete answer myself). In my opinion, the additional work would need to be done to focus on further decentralization of governments and businesses since both have been on a trend toward further centralized bureaucracies that rarely respond to their respect stakeholders (citizens and consumers). In my view that would mean businesses should be held in common by the workers as a term of employment. Think of it was a credit union but you just happen to work there. Entrepreneurs and managers will always be in the mix of this because honestly individuals sometimes get good ideas but they shouldn't be off the hook with incredibly vast sums of wealth as to allow them to create their own fiefdoms. After all, they too are just one person in an ocean of people.

What's funny about this idea is that it's not mine. I remember a long time ago that I use to go on a web forum on the New Speak Dictionary site. The site owner styled himself a Libertarian Syndicalist and he espoused very similar views here. I think it's inevitable that this might become the normal state of things if people become aware of this possible alternative to centralized state vs centralized business.

This sounds like the definition of socialism.

In as much as it's pre-Marxist and pre-Utopian socialism, sure. But if you told a hardline ML that this was socialism they'd probably call you a deviationist or some other buzz word.

> I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.

Nitpick. UBI is not socialism. It's still capitalism.

I don't think Universal income is necessary but a more complete redistribution system would certainly be needed. At the very least one in which e.g healthcare isn't tied to employment, for example.

The people the article is discussing are already receiving a free money and do not need to work. How will writing "basic income" rather than "disability" or "welfare" on top of the check change anything?

Simple: with UBI, you can eliminate a gigantic amount of bureaucracy in administering those programs. How much time and money is wasted in employing armies of public servants to go chase after welfare recipients and make sure they aren't "cheating" by making money somehow, or that disability recipients aren't "cheating" by not being as disabled as they claim? It doesn't help that welfare punishes people who want to work.

So the current leisure class will not be helped at all by a BI, relative to what they already have.

Since you think a BI will save money, could you do a back of the envelope calculation illustrating how that would work? I can't see how (for example) 10M on welfare + 1M administrators could possibly be cheaper than 100M on welfare.

Relevant:

If We Can Afford Our Current Welfare System, We Can Afford Basic Income

https://medium.com/basic-income/if-we-can-afford-our-current...

Those numbers suggest about 10% overhead. Giving free money to 900% more people in order to save 10% on overhead is not a cost saving strategy.

Your article proves my point, even though it goes to great effort not to admit that.

One of the least communist solutions I've thought of is a quasi-capitalistic economic system.

The US and various countries around the world have this.

That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.

In other words, taxes? Your "government pays for shares to get money" scheme will be gamed as much as the current tax code is.

There's zero chance our political spectrum will ever increase taxes to allow for UBI to be widespread and sufficient.

This way we compensate innovators and entrepreneurs for their work. That is, we give them the leeway to innovate, improve their own income, etc.

It's a lot more palatable than 'let's tax everyone at 85%'.

I think that's a very Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged type of analysis. I also think that falls short of accounting for the full spectrum of human behavior.

There are numerous innovators, artists and creators who are driven by more than financial rewards.

If there was a re-balancing of economic priorities, I'm not sure I agree that 'innovation would stop' (which isn't precisely what you said, so forgive the straw man).

On the whole I think you might see different people driving the world forward, but you wouldn't see the world stop.

Larry Page tinkered with computers before he knew he was going to be a bajillionaire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page. Would Zuckerberg still have created thefacebook? What about all those school-teachers who give everything they have for a $30k salary (and hugs from snotty faced kids)?

I may be misreading your point - so forgive me if that's true - but there are a lot of places where BI is making and is moving forward. They're also doing it without the 85% tax rate you're quoting.

I'm not sure what that middle part means. A lot of businesses were started recently that would not have been viable without the ACA. If we expand the safety net, more people can take chances, and there will be more (in absolute numbers) wild successes which can be taxed to fund the safety nets. There's probably diminishing returns somewhere but I don't think we're near it yet.

Exactly, we don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Tax personal and corporate incomes, just like we do now.

>I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.

UBC without any social contract in place may further allow immigrants to be alienated into language communities. Alienation breeds ill sentiment.

I really wonder what the solution should be.

So my Girlfriend (Monica) is currently doing her Master's at UPENN in social-policy & data science. Her major area of research and focus is on the impact of technological unemployment (which is an umbrella term which represents job loss due to robots and AI)

(we're currently looking for an internship by the way, so if you're in this area, please feel free to reach out!)

Some of the estimates of job-losses approach >50% which, for context, the great depression was 15% to 25%

So we're looking at the rough equivalent of 2 to 3 great depressions in terms of unemployment, but productivity should be equal or higher.

A lot of the solutions being looked at center around basic income, but there are some really interesting questions around BI like "how do we help people deal with the emotional impact of 'freeloading'?" or "how do we deal with 'life without purpose'?"

She's thrown out some interesting solutions (I think). There is expected to be a lot of focus on subsidized training.

One sort-of "out there" idea which I don't think I've heard anywhere was 'framing' the BI payments as a 'royalty' on the data they provide merely by existing. Since marketing, science and government with the help of big-data tracks everyone so deeply then turns around and re-sells that data, the people being reported on 'deserve a royalty' on the data they provide. (I'm paraphrasing and she is way smarter than me, so the way she put it was a lot more convincing).

If you're looking for more information on the coming tsunami of technological unemployment there were some incredibly interesting whitepapers published by the white-house on the policy impact of this stuff.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - oct 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/whi...

Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy - dec 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...

Monica's papers really echoed those whitehouse ones, though she hasn't published any of them yet, but the professors seem interested in publishing with her on a few things.

Anyways, this stuff really is a pretty big deal. You'll see Elon Musk talking about the 50% unemployment figure and the need for BI.

Who knows where today's whitehouse is going to go on this stuff, but we're really going to have to be prepared. Ontario Canada is kicking off a project in this now and a few other countries around the world have pilots brewing.

When I hear people talking about the mass unemployment, all I can do is yawn. Wind back the clock 100 years and replace "robot" with "tractor" or "factory machine" and people made the same claims.

They didn't see the jobs that would replace the jobs eliminated by the tractor. Centuries ago most Americans worked (many involuntarily) in agriculture. Most of those jobs were eliminated and replaced with jobs that didn't exist years ago. Even years ago, people were leaving the farm while other jobs were being created...like telephone company lineman or operator.

Certainly jobs will be eliminated by automation. That's easy to see. But new jobs are always being created. The problem is that we don't know which jobs will be created, while the jobs being destroyed are tangible and exist right now.

You can already see it is different this time, if you are unskilled then the opportunities are very thin and have been for some time.

I mean yes, to some extent you are right. People are generally resilient and society as a whole will undoubtedly bounce back over the course of the billions of people on the planet.

With that said, there's nothing to say that we can't help manage the transition for the massive numbers of people who ARE expected to be effected by this.

Consider the cost of retraining. Who would support going back to school? As a society we have the ability and resources to ensure people who do have their livelihoods automated aren't rendered homeless by a sudden unexpected loss of income.

We see the job losses on the horizon and we can plan ahead for it. We can yawn "because tractors" or we can start building out the social safety net now so we get out ahead of it.

New jobs will undoubtedly arise to take the role of those jobs being automated now, but the change isn't necessarily immediate, 1:1, or optimally geo-located.

We need schemes in place in order to support the transition period. Retraining, mobility, nutrition, shelter could all need stop-gaps to prevent catastrophe for some populations.

Much of Monica's research is finding that women, minorities and populations which are currently "at-risk" already are expected to be disproportionately affected by the coming wave of automation. Lower education & working poor are going to get hit badly by this.

Consider for example Detroit, Consider "coal country" - the it's not as easy to say "because tractors" to the real people who are suddenly out of work in a city or state where the entire economy just dried up.

Maybe they were already living paycheck-to-paycheck, maybe their nest-egg investment in their house suddenly became worthless because nobody needs to move to town anymore. Maybe after 30 or 40 years at the plant they're close to retirement, but have deeply specialized in something where they can't generalize their existing skills. And so on. "because tractors" is very little comfort to them.

"People" will be fine in general, "these people" quite specifically will be devastated.

Maybe there's a role for legislation that requires companies reducing workforce to support those former employees for longer?

> Certainly jobs will be eliminated by automation. That's easy to see. But new jobs are always being created. The problem is that we don't know which jobs will be created, while the jobs being destroyed are tangible and exist right now.

How about more prison guard jobs? Incarceration rate has quadrupled since 1925, so that's a nice way to take care of unemployment twice -- for both inmates and their guards.

Tractors still needed to be driven by humans. It's like the horse carriage example. Yes, horse carriages were replaced by cars, and human horse carriage drivers were replaced by human car drivers. But what the hell happened to all the horses? With AI, humans are the horses!

If you don't think that effects of automation are felt yet, you should check out the last presidential election.

I think this is naive. All of your historical examples involve the replacement of unskilled labor with more unskilled labor. Now we're talking about automation removing unskilled labor entirely from the job pool. Sure, there will be jobs that remain, but those will require a high degree of education/training, and the question is what do we do with the people that don't have the skills to get any of those jobs?

I think the perspective of "this time it's different" could very well be true when it comes to labor and automation.

The point the article is making is that the changes in income distribution so far is not due to robots, it is due to policy decisions that can be changed.

The impact of automation is a profound topic. But it doesn't preclude us from making the policy change that would have altered income distribution in the last ten years, and the next ten years as well.

end game will be massive population reduction. Universal income doesn't change the fact that our resources are finite and humans reproduce exponentially. UNs top agenda is population control, read between the lines.

The UN?

Which lines am I supposed to be reading between?

Your idea sounds interesting but I thinks it's equivalent to a corporate tax. It's basically identical if you think about it.

They aren't equivalent. While both may give identical cash-flows, one has a financial outlay in the beginning while the other has a political outlay.

I just don't think it is likely that the current political class in America will raise taxes to the levels necessary to subsidize UBI.

Capitalism is supposed to cannibalize itself.

A primary focus should be on overthrowing the military industrial complex, which seems to be the source of a lot of waste - both of human focus and capital. Anyone doing their research will reach the conclusion that there are many factors of misalignment and sabotage within the US government. If the US didn't have its fingers in so many other governments, then it would be safer to ignore this fact.

>A primary focus should be on overthrowing the military industrial complex, which seems to be the source of a lot of waste... If the US didn't have its fingers in so many other governments, then it would be safer to ignore this fact.

The only problem I have with this idea is that, if the US weren't the superpower pulling strings, surely someone else (Russia or China) would be. Would that be any better for the world? How much waste was there during Soviet times, when so many nations had so little productivity under Soviet management, and their economies were closed to the rest of the world?

Personally, I'd rather see a more equal alliance among western nations, but for some reason that just doesn't seem to be happening.

We can have the conversation about which country (if any) should be the leader of the free world once we have liberated the facts about the US military industry complex's world influence to a mainstream status.

"Capitalism will destroy capitalism", very good! Maybe it always does by definition?

No, that's a theory.

Most kids coming out of college will go into careers their grandparents have never even heard of or don't understand.

That's the way it's always been, while old jobs get replaced by technology, new jobs get created.

It's not unique to this generation.

Grandparents aren't that dumb.

Go dig up US employment statistics (BLS is good source). There are a lot of people doing jobs that are really easy to describe. "Driver". "Clerk". And so on.

Not only that, but if you describe something very minutely and exacting, it will seem very difficult. But if you describe it as "A game with 2 opposing sides, with a shared oblong ball, and each team tries to get it to the other side past their opponents." And I just described US football.

When has thought ever been automated before? When have we had a tool that can build tools? How can capitalism survive with 80+% unemployment?

It's as inevitable as gravity.

"That's the way it's always been" works great, right up until it doesn't. History is full of periods of great upheaval, and there's no reason to think those are over, either. This is a problem we need to pay attention to.

> while old jobs get replaced by technology, new jobs get created.

But always significantly fewer than before, that's the entire point of the technology, to reduce the number of humans needed for the process.

And yet somehow the employment and unemployment rates in the developed world are pretty healthy, and there are more manufacturing jobs in the developing world than ever.

The point of technology is to reduce the number of people doing a given task, freeing up that labor to perform higher value activities, or the same activity to a higher value. So fewer people need to be sailors, road work gang members or field laborers and more of us can be TV presenters, computer game artists and SCUBA diving instructors. Occupations representative of whole industries the world couldn't have afforded to support a hundred years ago. Vast swathes of the population back then were doing jobs that hardly even exist anymore, yet somehow we don't have vast swathes of the population out of work. That doesn't even factor in the massive transfer of female labor from household work to the working class and professional labor markets.

You are only talking about recent history. Historically, the vast majority of humanity lived in abject poverty. I expect the vast majority of new jobs to be low skilled, low pay jobs like cleaning the robots. or gig economy where people are paid by the minute and screwed over by Uber like companies.

> And yet somehow the employment and unemployment rates in the developed world are pretty healthy

...if you ignore half of Europe

> the employment and unemployment rates in the developed world are pretty healthy,

"In 1948, the labor-force participation rate was a staggering 96.7% among men in their prime working years. That statistic has been steadily declining ever since"

Since 2000, the labor force participation rate has steadily declined for women as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/13/a-rec...

"One in six prime-age guys has no job; it's kind of worse than it was in the depression in 1940," says Nicholas Eberstadt, an economic and demographic researcher at AEI.

http://www.npr.org/2016/09/06/492849471/an-economic-mystery-...

As an active scuba diver myself, I know that very few people can ever make a living as diving instructors. The market is just too small and isn't growing. The vast majority of instructors do it as a side job.

> Capitalism will destroy capitalism as we know it.

Capitalism will not destroy itself. Capitalism will reach its conclusion. We should let it. Herald the dawn of the new age.

Harold is a ghoul with a tree growing out of his head.

Herald is the word you were looking for.

I wonder sometimes if the hype surrounding AI/Automation isn't just a clever way for socialists to push their agenda.

unfortunately, it's not a concerted effort. We haven't been well enough organized to create a campaign like that. However, it does provide a really good talking point. We have, however, known that a development like automation was inevitable.

The logic is irrefutable.

At some time in the future the drive to increase profits by automation will increase unemployment in ways that will lead to the biggest recession we'll ever see if we don't have basic income.

Can you see a capitalistic world working with 30% unemployment? How about 80%?

This, combined with the worldwide rejection of neoliberal capitalism at the ballot box, should be really strong indicators that the status quo is unsustainable and you're not going to be able to reestablish it.

UBI via a sovereign wealth fund is a good goal to work towards if you want to avoid some miserable dystopia.

What percentage of the labour market in 1900 were doing jobs that don't exist anymore? In the 1920s the UK employed 2 million miners, yet nowadays we don't have 2 million unemployed mine workers on the dole campaigning to be let back down the pits so they can have their jobs back. Same goes for vast swathes of the employment landscape back then.

Instead we have vast swathes of people employed doing jobs that didn't exist back then and in many cases were unimaginable. Looking at the UK, many times more people do service sector jobs now that didn't exist back then than the entire population of 1900 Britain. Almost a million people work in the 'Creative and Media' sector alone.

You could argue that all those jobs could be done by AIs. Well, maybe, but I don't believe we'll have AIs capable of that for at least another 100 years. The last 50 years of AI research have barely even scratched the surface of the problem. So I believe the transition is going to be slow enough that we'll have several generations to adapt. It's not a problem we have to solve in 5 years or 10 or we're toast. Society is going to change so much, in ways that we can't anticipate, that trying to solve it now is futile.

What we need to do is focus on the actual problems before us as they occur in the real world. There are enough of them, after all. Maybe Basic Income can be beneficial, even today with near-full employment by historic standards. I'm hopeful. But I'm skeptical that were anywhere near an automation-lead employment crisis. After all the world just absorbed adding a Billion Chinese people to the global work force pretty well.

>even today with near-full employment by historic standards

There's quite a difference between the "employment" figures and the labor force participation rate[0].

The employment figure does not take into account people who have stopped looking for work, or people who have a part-time job that they wish was full-time.

[0] http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/563caf319dd7ccfc418...

Of course, but are you contending that in the past those factors were significantly different, and that the reason for the difference is primarily automation?

It's not necessarily about the jobs, it has more to do with the economic engine.

The economic engine has been in a virtuous feedback loop for hundreds of years. People are born, get educated, find work, and become consumers and savers, thus generating the sales companies need to innovate and lending the capital for others to start new ventures.

Step by step we've built this whole engine simply because we were born in this system.

If jobs are lost fast enough, the whole engine shuts down: as AI replaces jobs faster than new economic sectors are created levels of spending in society will decrease, leading to reduced profits (or increased losses) and increased layoffs, thus speeding up the process.

The thing is that AI has the potential to replace all jobs any human could ever have.

Now, your second point regarding jobs that can't be replaced: every job can be replaced. The human brain isn't special it's just a machine.

And you're looking at AI research in a linear fashion. At some point enough computational power breaks through any problem.

Irrefutable? "I do not think that word means what you think it means." (Or else, I rate that logic as considerably less airtight than you do...)

At one point the logic of Communism was irrefutable. And yet they turned out to be wrong all the same. Don't be so confident that you can't predict the future.

I think it is genuine belief and a desire to find a solution to what looks like it could be a very chaotic future outcome. I've puzzle on it myself and find several options I come up with sounding socialist. I don't have an answer that I think is viable or that I even like but I believe that we could be quickly heading in the direction of 'robots' taking a on many more jobs.

It really isn't. AI and automation are both advancing so fast currently that even the tech-aware are, well, unaware at its speed, and what the coming social effects will be.

> AI and automation are both advancing so fast

In what ways/areas are they advancing fast?

https://www.wired.com/2015/01/ai-arrived-really-worries-worl...

and

https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-08-28/how-advances-automati...

will get you started.

The agenda that everyone should have the option to not be homeless? These socialists ... now they even use reality for their evil plans.

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