Hacker News Reader

Comment by trapperkeeper74 | Hacker News Reader

Robots aren't capable of doing everything people can do yet, but as they become more capable, what and how are displaced unskilled workers supposed to do if they can't get any job at all? Starve to death under a bridge? Not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor. I think this is why UBI is essential: prevent riots and meet people's basic needs so they're not pennyless and sleeping rough.

View on HN

UBI is a bad attempt to patch a broken capitalist system that has no regard for the humans within it. It may delay riots, but people's basic needs still won't be met.

What would you suggest as an alternative if there were only enough jobs to support 20-30% of people .. including professional jobs like doctors/radiologists/lawyers being displaced?

Sounds like it could be great, terrible, or somewhere in between in the future you describe. I'm a socialist by upbringing, hopefully we would be smart enough to organize our society such that we take care of those most vulnerable among us. Currently we make a modicum of effort towards this, and vilify the working poor as lazy, no good scum, despite how they often work much more than those who earn more than them.

Honestly, I look beyond socialism/capitalism/consumerism to something more like the Venus Project or Resource based economy as something we should attain to, though it's a bit utopian to think we'll ever get their in the current political climate...maybe someday...

I voted for Bernie personally -- not a full out socialist... but I do think single payer + ubi + free college makes sense -- take the stress out of living paycheck to paycheck... at least somewhat... Not saying make everyone a millionaire and inflate the crap out of thnigs...but there needs to be some equilibrium...

One good policy might be capped CEO pay at say 200 * average employee salary. In this way - for CEO to get a raise, average salary must go up -- this can happen either by raising across the board or by moving more people to management and increasing upward mobility. Any money the CEO makes over 200* from that company is taxed at 100% including benefits, stocks, etc...

I used to be inspired by the Venus Project years ago. Unfortunately I realized it is extremely utopian and things needs to change in a more practical sense if we want a good chance of succeding.

I'm currently very impressed by the work of Prof. Richard Wolff, an economist that heavily criticizes Capitalism and tries to make actual practical changes in the lives of people starting from their workplaces.

Here is a talk he made in front of Google employees (the irony): https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc

I'll take a look... let me rephrase that the Venus project...which I just heard about a few months ago..intrigues me quite a bit... but I don't see it really being feasible till we're an interplanetary species and even then maybe not...But there are good concepts and maybe when general AI hits, who knows what will change...

I do like UBI though along with (the pragmatist in me) believes gov't should work like agile dev teams... push changes up to a github like interface for bills.. the all bills should be VERY succinct and serve 1 goal, and that they should be repealable pretty easily like reverting a change on github... I think we have WAY too much bloat, and omnibuses just don't make sense at all and should be illegal.

Congressmen make very good money and benefits -- and have lots of perks so they should be required to work as hard as the next guy in America - -40 hours per week IN congress discussing bills and voting - -anything to 'market' themselves for future elections is NOT part of their job and outside their 'paid' duties and should be done on their own time.

I think automation, etc will disrupt the entire fabric of society soon, and honestly I hope we can move back to middle-age work days... they worked maybe 20 hours a week, if that and some weeks not at all - if farming the winter was pretty much just don't freeze to death... While their lives weren't long, I have to think they enjoyed life more than we do today.

>take the stress out of living paycheck to paycheck

If I could live for free (no rent, free food, free electricity, etc), I probably would quit. I don't have much savings and my quality of life would drop a little, but I would probably take 6-12 months vacation and just dick about, playing video games and concentrating on my hobbies.

I'd definitely take a vacation--but then I'd work on sideprojects--and be my own boss, because that's way more fun than working for someone else and I still want fun toys and things... I'm a jr dev and even at 60k/yr money is tight... when we made $30k, we really struggled..I don't think people should have that kind of pain and struggle, i think life could be easier for most people and as a society we could make it so..sure a small fraction might use drugs or something w/ their money -- but you know if they use up all their rent money and get evicted then they don't GET UBI (stipulation is you have to have a home address to receive the check and must live there..i.e. no vagrancy/etc... that's really the only requirement).

Why do people who call out capitalism for being a broken system, fail to acknowledge socialism (in all of its purest forms tried so far) is also broken and doesn't work when you have non-altruistic self interested humans in the mix or at least people who will look out for others but mostly people in their social proximity. I'm all happy for an alternative, and something better than capitalism. but at least suggest a working alternative. Capitalism for all its faults seems to have the highest chance of success, especially when you hybridize it with some socialist policies which is more or less what most western countries have done and even then there are basic issues, but neither extreme capitalism or socialism works. Both have a tendency to encourage different forms of corruption and different levels of inequality, or just short lived gains.

Slightly offtopic, althought maybe not: Is it any political party's goal to close all tax loop holes, so as to virtually eliminate the possibility of another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, at least on their scale?

What makes you think that Gates and Bezos were created by tax loopholes? And, what do you even mean by tax loopholes? Is postponement of capital gains until a sale event a loophole? Most of Bezos' wealth comes from his ownership of Amazon, which won't be taxed until he sells his shares. Changing that rule would mean Bezos might be less rich, but it would also mean that you would have to pony up tax money every time your house appreciates in value ...

I technically do, it's called property taxes which are directly tied to the assessed value of my house.

That said, I agree with your point, just bad example.

Rome has kept entire population on Universal Basic Income for hundreds of years. Some of best an most peaceful years in the history of Europe.

Wars of I BC century and Roman laws that put people into slavery for debts had brought hundreds of thousands of slaves into economy bringing cost of labour close to zero. Conquest of Egypt and North Africa flooded markets with cheap grain.

That market disruption made artisan shops and small farms unable to sustain/compete on the market with larger enterprises based on slave labour.

Majority of citizens of lower class had been then entitled to free food and free entertainment (bread and circus). It was necessary for keeping their votes and for keeping appearances of the republic. (Even what we call Roman Empire were still nominally a Republic with Senate and elections held for various offices every year at Fields of Mars).

I recommend everyone reading Rubicon by Tom Holland. https://www.amazon.com/Rubicon-Tom-Holland/dp/1400078970

Your statement "not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor" is a larger sociological problem. If we insist that the only people allowed to participate in the labor market are college educated white guys, maybe; I don't see that statusquo continuing.

The hoops some members of this forum will jump through to convince themselves that building CRUD apps is some zenith of intellectual might just continues to astound me.

Seems a strange complaint when janitorial positions (which aren’t often held by college educated white guys) are under discussion.

Presuming we want people to have good lives who aren’t able or inclined to do jobs requiring much higher intellectual demands than janitorial ones (and I certainly do want us to presume that!), we need to figure out how to in the short term allow people doing those jobs to have good lives and in the long term allow them to have good lives while robots do those jobs.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your comment.

There are massive economic upheavals occurring right now, and we as a society have decided that most people get to live a hardscrabble existence where an unexpected $500 expense will ruin a person or family financially.

This economic system isn't working for the vast majority of Americans, hence the support for Bernie and Trump.

I mean that's the point. The difference between someone that ends up as a janitor and someone that ends up as a software engineer has a lot more to do with their parent's money and the color of their skin than any variation in intelligence. Pretending differently just leads you to the comforting arms of the "just world fallacy".

I think your position needs to be defended just as much as the position you're arguing against, and right now you're not doing a convincing job of defending it.

As someone above asked: have you spent significant time teaching / tutoring? There are enormous differences in how quickly people learn mathematical concepts, even given varied teaching methods. Becoming a software engineer requires both intelligence and luck (though one might also argue that intelligence, being the result of genes and environment, is also primarily luck).

I'm not a professional educator no. And I do think there's a whole separate discussion to be had about how generally awful most software education is that Im not going to get into.

However, small sample size notwithstanding, I have been involved with mentoring in an outreach program targeted at people with little to no CS experience. And these students were coding circles around "CS" grads in under 6 weeks. Sure the theoretical foundations aren't there yet, but, do you really need that much math to stand up an app, build a website, or do any of the work expected of a junior dev?

I 100% agree with you in that most people don't have the aptitude to become the next John Carmack, but, at least in my experience, that's not where the jobs are anyway. You don't need to be Linus to generate business value using Linux, and you don't need to be James Gosling to working Java enterprise apps. The jobs of the future need an army of people to modernize infrastructure and build using existing tools. These are the middle class anchors of the 21st century; I'd say look no farther than the "analyst" pipelines of the American finance industry to see this happening.

I'm inclined to agree with that.

Maybe if jobs for all skill-sets were still growing (in availability and compensation) it'd be easier to write off a good portion of the population as mentally inferior, but now that knowledge jobs are gaining a monopoly on living wages/salaries I don't think it's as easy to be that glib.

We need to do better as a society.

We're not that glib when it comes to children and early education, and I don't think we should change attitude just because a person has reached adulthood. Laziness and/or the attribution fallacy seems to get the better of a lot of us on HN.

>Your statement "not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor" is a larger sociological problem.

Have you ever been in any kind of teaching role, or observed some students at tutoring labs? Some people are just unteachable/not cut out for it.

"Not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor."

then they can become janitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

but you're right, ubi is essential. not everyone can handle janitorial work. ;)

Its not just janitors, this happened to me in a highly technical call center.

that's kind of what i'm getting at. there's a presumption that the future will be for tech workers, and everyone else will have to starve or, preferably, be supported. i think that's optimistic. i think the future will be for janitors, and everyone else will have to starve or be supported.

manufacturing went away, agriculture went away, mining went away, all through automation. coincidently, this corresponded to growth in the people working in tech and other intellectual labor. but it's sloppy thinking to say that automation causes growth in intellectual labor, which seems to be the presumption. automation causes whatever it automates to shrink. intellectual labor will be automated-- possibly before janitorial work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com