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Comment by TheBobinator | Hacker News Reader

If you look at IQ and the kinds of jobs people sub-100 IQ can retain, you begin to realize very quickly that about half of the population is going to need to be retrained in some kind of intellectual job going forward.

That forces public schooling to train children for intellectual persuits, and children who are gifted need to have programs tailored for them.

It also means you are going to have post-scarcity politics. The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property. Universal income is horrific in the fact it dissolves those relationships, and politicans can decide to revoke people's food or shelter on a whim and also the public can decide to support it. You also realize that things like firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level.

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> The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property.

Are you saying that the 'cognitive elite' will live unsatisfied, lonely existences, and that's the price they have to pay for material success?

It seems like you're equating material scarcity with a 'mythic' view of human struggle. I.e: we need to challenge ourselves to grow and become better people.

I'm not denying that struggle is 'good' for bettering yourself, but I think there are ways to provide this kind of challenge that doesn't involve encouraging or maintaining material scarcity for vast swaths of the human population.

> If you look at IQ and the kinds of jobs people sub-100 IQ can retain, you begin to realize very quickly that about half of the population is going to need to be retrained in some kind of intellectual job going forward.

This is a troubling thing to think about. What I can see happening is that increasingly, the utility of the labor of people in that subpar, but still adequate, IQ band is steadily decreasing as automation tears out the bottom of semi-skilled labor. You can take somebody with an 85 IQ and put them on an assembly line, and they'll make a good living in 1970, but you can't realistically send that person to a dev bootcamp and make them into a web developer in 2018. So what do they do? Low skilled service industry work sure isn't the answer. My suspicion would be that the trades are most likely to combine reasonable return and resistance to automation, along with a probable shortage once the boomers retire, but it's a thorny question.

I think it's become obvious that the "Everybody needs to go to college" narrative has been borderline disastrous, given the mountains of student loan debt and stunted development that my generation has experienced.

Its not the bottom we should be worried about, its the middle.

AI is going to outright replace a whole bunch of what are currently decently paying, stable, office jobs: accountants, clerks, schedulers.... and AI-augmentation is going to allow 1 person to do the same work that currently requires 2+ in so many fields.

Law and Medicine, two fields that have historically been good pathways to the middle class, are likely going to see AI hit them first in the middle, with the need for non-senior/non-specialized doctors/lawyers dramatically reduced as AI-assisted tools become standard.

As the middle gets cut out, more people are pushed towards lower-skill jobs that require physical interaction, likely pushing down wages in a buyer's market and decreasing the incentives for robotic automation.

That's going to be a massive blow to the US and global economy, all without having to build a single robot.

It's false to assume AI(and just plain software) won't replace a lot of high-IQ people.

But it's understandable why people on this forum always talk about low/middle skill jobs being automated , when it's just as likely that cognitive jobs will be automated while emotional jobs will still be valuable.

I think part of the reason the trades look attractive is because relatively few people do them. If we had labor-intensive manufacturing then we could add say 100,000 low-skill jobs, but you can't add 100,000 tradespeople as easily without crashing their wages since there's a relatively fixed quantity of trade work that needs to get done.

> firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level

... what? Fear at a basic level, perhaps, but making murder weapons widely available is the opposite of respect for human life.

Furthermore, just because someone is acting respectfully towards you doesn't mean they actually respect you.

Incorrect. Making weapons widely available is indeed compatible with respect for human life. A human life is worth being defended. One may disagree, but the right to self-defense is a natural, inalienable right.

The right to self defense is indeed natural, nobody argues that. What I debate is that _method_ of such defense. Instead of weaponizing someone in a weaponized environment, does it not make far more sense to de-weaponize the environment? Instead of giving everyone glass-proof shoes, why not just sweep the floor?

Taken another way, would you also support publishing your bank account credentials if everyone else did as well?

"Incorrect. Making bank account credentials widely available is indeed compatible with respect for ones wealth. Ones wealth is worth being defended. One may disagree, but the right to protecting ones wealth is a natural, inalienable right".

> The right to self defense is indeed natural, nobody argues that.

I'm pretty sure that you can find people that argue that natural rights are a quasi-religious fiction invoked solely as a discussion terminator in debates about the proper parameters of legal rights.

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