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Comment by wallace_f | Hacker News Reader

It's a real possibility, but consider thinking about it this way: Many jobs do not provide (marginal utility > income) to society, and many even produce negative marginal utility.

Everything from utility companies to the financial sector to government to even academia has a heck of a lot of perverse incentives and corruption.

Over half a century ago John Maynard Keynes--one of the most influential intellectuals to shape the world today--said "it's better for people to toil over their bank account than each other."

I would easily wager it's better people toil over their virtual realities than their bank accounts, provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).

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> provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).

I'm curious as to how we can pull that off given that an ever increasing percentage of young smart capable people are opting out of solving real world problems in favor of "toiling over their virtual realities"...

I really dislike the romanticizing of employment as "solving problems." The effect of employment is that somebody's problems get solved, but as the employee, they aren't my problems, and subjectively it feels like mostly solving a lot of meta-problems like how to follow somebody else's process and get along with all kinds of coworkers. If employment felt like object-level problem solving, I'd be employed.

I'm with you, to some degree. By "solving problems" I was referring to the parent comment's phrase "provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved", which I read as "let (vague, unidentified) them solve the scarcity problem while I play video games".

Your objective is to get a paycheck. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Then, use your off time do things more important to you.

Getting that paycheck saps the majority of the time and energy of a given person. Using a paycheck as a side effect to actually do something useful seems like a very strange system.

It's the capitalist system. If you want to set the objective, then get to work and create the means for yourself to do so. It's so easy to blame the boomers, but in my day job, all I see are younger people who expect a promotion after 6 months, while the boomers are happy to have a job, come in, do what's expected, and don't complain.

Because technology give us massive leverage. The economic opportunities aren't going away, and to the extent that we still need labor, compensation will adapt to what makes it worth an individual's time.

> Many jobs do not provide (marginal utility > income) to society, and many even produce negative marginal utility.

What are some examples of this? Why are people paying those workers?

A lot of middlemen roles - real estate agents, recruiters etc fall into this. The role starts out with utility (instead of selling your house yourself get someone experienced to do it!), but as using a middleman becomes ubiquitous and is maintained with rent seeking (you can't list on this real estate site unless you're a registered RE agent), there's no reason for them to do anything more than the bare minimum.

>Why are people paying those workers?

In short, in modern, mainstream economic theory the ideas that explain this are what's called Market Failures. In 2001, the Nobel Prize in economics went to people who studied information asymmetries, which lead to market failures.

A concrete and classic example is the Tragedy of the Commons.

My earlier example of the financial sector, which in 2008 showed everyone how private gains created public losses in the form of subsidies, recession, inflation, bail-outs, moral hazard, public-sector risk, was created despite (and many argue in part, because) of government-oversight.

Another, more benign example, is one I was reminded of while on vacation in France. A toilet bloc was guarded by an unhappy attendant who took 1 euro per use. It would be better to install a 100euro toll gate and give her the remaining profit to buy a computer to play video games (or art supplies, whatever she wants to do), in the hours between cleanings. Everyone wins. This is what's called pareto-efficient. Someone is made better off and no one is made worse off (tourists don't need to encounter an unhappy attendant, either).

How would UBI solve this? If the jobs were still profitable to the employer, they'd be done. It's not clear to me how UBI solves market failures.

Not all jobs are necessarily done because they are profitable to an employer. Mainstream economic theory supports this idea as my previous post explains.

However, to address your general sentiment: First let's establish the premise that the most important thing to ones survival and welfare in the world today is money.

Without that--and therefore by separating the relationship between survival, social status, welfare and money--it could be argued that we would take a step in the direction of fixing incentive alignment.

> In 2001, the Nobel Prize in economics went to people who studied information asymmetries, which lead to market failures.

People might know part of this work better by the paper title / catchphrase "market for lemons" [1]. This inspired "lemon laws" in several countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

How about the 2 million truck drivers that are about to get replaced by robots?

They'll take up gaming. The gulf between being a truck driver and, say, a programmer is vast. Imagine losing your truck driving job and suddenly trying to figure what the hell else you're going to do to support your family. Yikes!

> The gulf between being a truck driver and, say, a programmer is vast

It really isn't. AI might not be able to take over 100% of our jobs anytime soon, but if even half of the things we spend time on, things like understanding requirements. If an AI system can coax users/managers to provide better requirements, maybe even create tests for those requirements, then every programmer could be twice as productive. That means half as many of us are needed.

AI in the future will also write the majority of the kind of code that is written today

Lots of jobs produce pollution because it makes someone money.

Lots more jobs (medical billers) exist mostly in opposition of other people (insurance adjusters).

> Why are people paying those workers?

Because in any large organisation they are indistinguishable from the productive ones. Sometimes even in your own team there might be someone that appears very productive but creates long term maintenance costs.

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