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Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

I was struck by this when I went to visit Shanghai in 2002. I was sitting beside a recent MBA grad who was originally from China.

We got to talking. At one point in the conversation he asked me a hypothetical question about how I would design a system to determine traffic conditions. I responded with an answer laying out cameras at intersections and software to make sense of the video.

He responded that in China they’d just put a person at every intersection who would send a text message to a team of humans who would update a webpage. It drove home the point to me that labour was so abundant and cheap there that you could often throw more bodies at the problem instead of writinf software... and probably solve the problem better.

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China is interesting from this respect, there are so many people, and it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention. The first time I visited I was shocked at the number of people employed to man the tollbooths and the number of people working in every restaurant until I realized why.

it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention.

What is useless to one man is a lifeline to another.

I saw a documentary on NHK, and one of the points it made is that there are millions and millions and millions of people in China who need a job — any job — just to put food on the table. These are people who are so poor and poorly educated that they don't even know how to write their own names. Signatures are done with a fingerprint in red ink.

This one guy was so very happy to be employed full-time clearing sidewalks. With a broom made of twigs during the warm months, and with the same broom made of twigs to slowly clear deep snow in the cold months. But he was employed, by an organization that will pay him regularly and won't cheat him on his wages. So he's grateful to be better off than most of the other people he knows.

Those people don't need jobs, they need money. If your system is autocratic enough to just "create" jobs out of nothing, it could also give everybody a stipend. That's just not how they want to do it.

Employment helps social stability but money-only doesn't. While stipend for low-incomers also exists in China, gov really wants more people earn a living through working. IMO, the benefits are: 1. It puts people into time schedules, not floating around. 2. Makes them integrated into a "work community". 3. These jobs still help, not purely "created". 4. Employer will have some insurances and coverages.

Over years I agree that many jobs diminished with the introduction of machines (vacuum trucks, etc.). It would be a tough job for the government to find more positions in this kind.

This is a worthwhile point really - job scheduling is a good way to pacify a population, which helps everyone. Having people hanging around bored is one of the sure-fire ways to get unrest.

Especially when "people" are young, single men.

seems to have helped everyone in this board during yours childhood and teen years, when you could just play games and learn to code, which became most people here trade. but yeah, if you missed that by not being born rich, work until your back break, to build character or some other bs.

If you are playing games and learning to code, you are not bored and definitely not the type of young men I was talking about.

you probably will not be able to complete that sentence without being called racist, xenophobic or both.

Or, you could simply pay everyone a stipend and then drug them into barely functional stupors for 10 hours a day.

Same result.

The missed point in "someone spending time on a meaningless job promotes social stability" is that you're forcing (via money and requiring same for sustenance) an individual to spend most of their life in a meaningless way in order to survive.

Is it a solution to resolving social unrest? Yes.

But let's not kid ourselves about what's actually being done.

* To say nothing of the argument that by artificially depressing wages you make your economy dependent on manual labor, limiting re-investment in automation, thereby eventually dooming yourself when other countries have cheaper labor / cost-effective automation

The CCP does a really good job at keeping (enough) of the populace happy so that there is little to no risk of unrest that could affect their power. A main pillar of this is the social benefits of having people employed in particular your points 1 and 2.

Plus they have a really really big stick they don’t hestitate to use. It’s not all carrot by any means, it’s more along the lines of “plomo o plata” with a demonstrable history of going massively overboard with the lead.

I don't think ccp throws anyone overboard for not working. Could you please elaborate?

I think he was referring to the stick to combat unrest. See, for example, the hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs imprisoned in internment camps in Western China. https://www.vox.com/2018/10/24/18018282/china-reeducation-ca...

In my opinion it's more about removing 'rabble rousers' than keeping people happy. We have a lot of internal strife in the US, but I'd be extremely surprised if all of the upset and discontent was not being fomented by something like 0.1% of the population. This is one thing that bothers me. I value free speech above all, but that comes at a massive price since it, without doubt, can have a major and negative destabilizing force on a nation. Perhaps the solution is not having nations with hundreds of millions of people under one government.

The US grew "organically" into what it is today. The population leans left in more urban areas, and leans right in more rural areas, to varying degrees. This doesn't lend itself to a geographical solution.

I don't think a solution to internal disagreements can or should exist.

I'm not sure what's happened in the US has been entirely organic. There is a tremendous amount to be politically gained by dividing people. Imagine I'm a politician who cares nothing at all except about staying in power. One way to do this is to just do a really good job. But doing a good job is hard, and even harder when I'd like to taste of the fruits of my power on occasion, which tend to make people a bit upset. What am I to do? It's not hard. I completely remove myself from the picture. Instead if I can people completely fear, despise, and hate the other side as much as I possibly can - it works just as well. If I can make people think any alternative to me is just simply evil incarnate, then I can do whatever I want. People will still elect me because I'm 'better than the alternative', an alternative which I make sure becomes reprehensible. I can pick issues that aren't necessarily that important, but do a great job of dividing people - and just focus all my efforts on dividing people along these issues.

And this isn't a one side or the other thing. Division benefits both sides, and so playing up to their villainy works in a nice symbiotic relationship. Both sides in office are playing the exact same game, and they play it very well. There was an email from the DNC leaks from Bill Ivey, former chairman of the national endowment for the arts, to John Podesta [1]. I think he phrased things quite succinctly, "We've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.".

How many people voted for Clinton thinking, "Yes - I think this politician is somebody that stands for what I truly value and will make a very good president." How many people voted for her because the alternative was completely unthinkable? And similarly for Trump voters. It's not really a conspiracy so much as the fact that politicians obviously have massive full time teams working to min-max elections, and it turns out that getting people really pissed at each other is apparently one of the best ways to do that.

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599

Rather than just any old divisions, politics is increasingly steered toward divisions over things that elites don't actually care about: gun rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, manufactured "religious freedom" debates, "tough on crime" policies, etc.

These things actually are important, because regular people do have strong feelings about them, but they matter to elites only to the extent that they can be used to gin up votes without having to dissent on any of the things that they all agree on: killing lots of foreigners with expensive weapons systems, preventing anything resembling a realistic safety net, pro-capital/anti-labor tax and immigration policies, unlimited dark money in politics, etc.

First-past-the-post systems like the US make this particularly easy, since third parties have no chance. If policies like universal healthcare and non-interventionist foreign policy are simply never adopted by either party, voters are forced to make their voting choice based on things that at least are different between the two parties, and elites have arranged for these to be things that barely matter to them at all. They don't have to interact with our barely-there social safety net, worry about health insurance, send their sons to die in foreign wars, or tolerate any of the daily parade of indignities that constitute life for working people.

In short, it's good strategy to manipulate the poors with cheap rhetoric about the 2nd amendment, so that you don't have to have messy debates about expensive things the elites oppose, like universal healthcare.

Employment also gives him purpose and dignity.

Humans are bad at doing nothing. Something like basic income will definitely be needed in the future, but there's something to be said for the "dignity of work."

Even if it's something like "10 hours of community service per week in exchange for basic income," contributing something to their tribe or society is an important part of a complete human being.

> contributing something to their tribe or society is an important part of a complete human being.

contribution can be made via arts and science, rather than making up pointless work or work the person cannot enjoy.

I agree, but it's not either/or. Some people will probably earn their basic income+extra doing science/engineering/etc, some will do art, and some will do the bare minimum.

If we successfully decouple work from sustenance, I'm pretty sure there will be a non-negligable percentage of humans who would just take the basic income and passively consume. However, letting a person consume without any "skin in the game," I think would create a sense of entitlement among the bottom tiers, and resentment among the productive segments of society.

Also, there will still probably be a bunch of stuff that needs to get done cheaply (i.e. 100% automation is not practical), but not enough people want to do, like picking up trash, or cutting the grass, or sorting files at a courthouse.

I just don't see a world where everyone does exactly what they want to do at all times forever, unless we build personal VR universes for everyone.

Also, I've spent a good deal of time thinking recently about how to quantify art and other "indirect" contributions to society under a basic income system. Like if there's any work requirement, even if it's minimal, how much art qualifies? A couple of doodles? Could I just randomly scribble some blotches on canvas and call it a week of work? Could there be enough qualified art judges to determine if everyone who will inevitably try to phone it in has contributed "enough?"

I don't know. This came out kind of rambly, but there's a lot of non-binary, non-obvious aspects to basic income, and I've struggled to find answers to a lot of the questions I've come up with.

Ultimately, I agree with you. The system should support people contributing in the way the enjoy the most.

> Could I just randomly scribble some blotches on canvas and call it a week of work?

if you had to qualify your art with somebody to receive the benefit of the basic income, then it's not basic income. Art should be for art's sake - the artists themselves know if they are making art (they can't lie to themselves).

There should really be no obligation to work, and if those who don't feel like working (to produce anything, art included), they should be free _not_ to. Basic income should cover the bare minimum of living expenses. The incentive to work/produce should be an innate desire for more than the basic income. Society should encourage it, but not force it.

Some people need a task, not everyone has the desire to pursue artistic endeavors. It's part of the reason you see trust fund babies that are borderline useless human beings. They've got everything in the world besides a reason to get up in the morning...

"If your system is autocratic enough to just "create" jobs out of nothing, it could also give everybody a stipend."

No, creating jobs out of nothing doesn't mean they are not creating value.

The man was sweeping the streets. Meaning the streets are cleaner.

Clean streets have value.

Also, people develop identity, integrity etc. from their jobs.

Right; I'm convinced that a basic income has to be paired with some social contract, to replace the feeling of being usefully employed. Else we get restless people. How about a requirement to be socially involved, as a mentor or club member or team member or something that gets you out and contributing. Event just to a team or family.

Basic income requires mandatory colonization draft enrollment.

Or in Heinlein's words, re: citizenship:

"Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage."

And what about the street that needs sweeping?

You could think of the job as the means to distribute wealth and keep people happy, and getting a task done is just the means to that end.

In the scenario where we replace them with software that wealth travels upward instead of downward along the social and wealth ladder and you have citizens with nmidle hands.

Normally I would say investment in infrastructure is a good way to make that happen but China is no slouch in that regard either. They just have an unfathomable amount of people.

It’s useless because you don’t think of social cost because you’re probably a middle class professional. We’re all a type of factory drone optimizing capital allocation.

End of the day, our policy of exporting value from the United States will come home to roost. When I was a kid in the 90s, you worked at fast food or restaurants and often hung out there too. Now most of those jobs are filled by more easily exploitable immigrants, and slowly but surely those jobs are attriting away too.

Who will be buying stuff in 30 years?

It's the same here in India too. People manning toll booth, security at malls, airports and other seemingly useless tasks that can be automated easily, are kept on because a) it's cheaper, and b) employment

Japan too. Maybe it's an Asian thing

Well, our city (far smaller than Shanghai) has installed few devices to monitoring traffic jam many years ago, probably because nobody actually wants to take stand beside a road for a whole day as a carrier.

It's very interesting point, but not just because abundant and cheap I think.

I was discuss a potential business model with my boss years ago for fun. It's about a breakfast deliver service. My point was, if we have enough data, then we can optimize the process so we can deliver all the breakfasts in the time window (to make sure people can get their breakfasts once they wake up in the morning, and the food itself is still in the "best by" time when they enjoying it)

My boss ask me back "Why would you think those delivery staffs cannot figure it out by themselves?"

Sometime we just forgot how flexible and intelligence human labors can be, and that level of flexible and intelligence is something current automation still can't bring to the real world.

It's an open secret that AI startups in Silicon Valley are using human labor initially to mimic the AI component.

There's still a lot of room for automation with human labor.

I have a friend who's running an ads optimization startup. His words: "We are an artificial intelligence company, in which "artificial" comes first and "intelligence" comes second...

He's running two divisions, one employs experienced "ads buyers", one tries to tune models to catch up with the former. :P

It's actually the way they do it in Japan too, so it's not only a labor cost problem that is at play.

Funny, because I was in a tier 2 or 3 Chinese city a couple of months ago and there were cameras at every single intersection!

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