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Comment by 4thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if we should hold onto humans doing things machine's can do better.

Instead, perhaps UBI makes better sense. I know the economics part won't make sense until we're past the need for the current system, but if we don't need people to work, why have them waste their lives with suboptimal labor.

My biggest issue with UBI is that you'll probably just get millions watching Netflix all day. What would be awesome is if those millions were writing books, doing physics, or creating works of art instead. You'd have machines doing the labor and humans being freed up to focus on new contributions to society.

Of course, not to be elitist, but I'm not sure how many truck drivers will pick up work on the grand unified theory of physics, but if even one makes a new and important discovery that would be amazing. Also, I wonder how long until even jobs held by the highly educated (healthcare...etc) are largely automated?

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>What would be awesome is if those millions were writing books, doing physics, or creating works of art instead. You'd have machines doing the labor and humans being freed up to focus on new contributions to society.

There is a really easy solution to this that I have never seen suggested. Instead of giving money to everyone for free, why not raise the budgets of research and art institutions? You can get as many people as you want doing physics and making art as you want, all you have to do is give money to CERN.

Now, a pessimist might say that some people can't advance science or art because they lack the capability. I counter with the fact that anyone can do it at some speed, some are just faster than others. If you greatly increased the amount of money the Institute for Advanced Study had, they would be able to bring people on to their staff that were less efficient on a dollars per fundamental insight scale, I.E. you or me.

Fair point I think. It would also be nice if we truly had free Universities to where you could go and study for free and then apply for one of those CERN jobs you mentioned

This is actually an amazing idea, I like it! Instead of a UBI, take all that UBI money and give it to people who pay people to think. Spread it around to science and art and everything in between. Make it so those institutions must spend all the money they get on salaries. It's basically a jobs program for creatives.

Salaries for the actual researchers and not just millions for the deans. I think we have to make that restriction :)

The problem is that it isn't an income issue. It is a cost issue, which in turn is a power issue. As in who decides what and therefor who society is for. Taking underprivileged people, or even anyone else, and employing them at CERN isn't likely to work (Switzerland isn't exactly cheap or big on taxes). In the Nordic countries there are "folk high schools", which gives you education (paid via taxes), housing and food for ~$650 usd a month. They are mostly in the middle of nowhere though.

Is it a good idea to educate people who gets squeezed out of society? Sure. But most societies are going the opposite way even now. Like many other things it isn't a technical issue, but a social one. There isn't really a need to wait for society to collapse before giving people affordable access to housing, education, health care etc.

I agree that power is everything. Absolutely everything. Most people forget this when they have a good job where they aren't treated badly.

At the same time, it is worthwhile to decouple the problem of power from other problems - so that we can think clearly about how we might go about controlling power. This opens the possibility for solutions which would involve funding the arts and sciences. If we don't think clearly about both problems, we'll never be able to solve either.

I don't see how it can be decoupled. Most programmers have (hopefully) created enough value when in their thirties for basic living the rest of their lives. The reason you can't is because you are, both before and after, paying someone else for opportunities. You could fund whatever human activity you want today if you could pay for housing, food and information at cost.

I'm kind of confused by your comment. I've heard lots of ideas for ameliorating the "power problem" (distribute, weighted votes, various election strategies for decision teams, feedforward techniques, feedback techniques, and lots of ways to choose best decisions.) Many say that Communism and Marxism are fundamentally ways to shift power away from the wealthy.

If power can be made to represent community values, then it becomes possible to use Machine Learning and Robotics to provide all the basics for everyone. And it becomes possible to work on fixing the sustainability problem. So each of these needs to be examined and potential solutions to one impact the other. Things don't have to be the way that they currently are - we live in a time when extensive automation is possible for providing "basics".

People in this thread have essentially been saying that in the future we could pay people to do other things. I am saying that we could already do that today.

Simplified, basics might cost $500 a month, but to live in New York you are paying maybe $5000 a month. The income isn't the problem, the cost of goods isn't the problem and the premium is the problem.

It doesn't really matter which way you do things unless you can remove the premium on success, progress, prosperity or whatever you want to call it. And if we do remove the premium we don't necessarily need these esoteric solutions.

Most, or at least many, people today already have money, it just doesn't go very far. So how is giving people a small amount of money going to change anything? It probably isn't, unless there is social change. Which the lack of is therefor the problem, not providing income as such.

For the record I do think a mixed market economy that keeps the cost of living in check and taxes automation is the most obvious answer. But Sweden already sort of tried that in the 1970's. Unsurprisingly very unpopular.

Is it really unpopular in Sweden? I gave a conference talk there and everybody I spoke with liked their system, and said that all the coverage in the US criticizing it wasn't true. They were all laughing at me (when they weren't feeling sorry for me - since by their standards I live in a primitive pre-Renaissance society.)

Not the mixed market economy as such (though that is losing its meaning as well), but taxing automation.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m...

Those who are greedy and walk over corpses today will not suddenly start sharing once they have even more or "ultimate" power tomorrow. The red flags, the atrocities we see now are nothing compared to what will flare up when it all snaps shut.

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking ( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama... )

> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.

-- Hannah Arendt

> Now, a pessimist might say that some people can't advance science or art because they lack the capability.

Another counter is that this may be caused by our current educational system. With UBI, it may make sense to employ e.g. 20-30% of all workers in education, to enable 1:1 tutoring for all students.

I think you'd still be faced with a lack of truck-driver-to-research-scientist pipeline. There are already a lot of people that are qualified, or if not they're close to qualified, to be in these research roles so that if a lot more funding went toward these areas it'd still be hard for someone making the move from much more unrelated industries and educations at later points in their lives would still be at a disadvantage. The children of these people, given a good education along with having easier access to higher education, might have an easier time getting into these positions. But it seems like there'd be a labor shortage gap for those that aren't remotely qualified for a research position now.

This also seems to ignore that research science itself is increasingly becoming automated, and such positions that are less efficient on the dollar per fundamental insight scale may disappear at around the same time as our hypothetical truck driver's.

Personally, I think that we as a culture need to change our thought processes on the necessity of everyone doing work. So what if some people just end up in the sitting around watching Netflix all the time category? Not everyone's going to do that, there are a ton of different outlets I would pursue if I didn't have to worry about working or money. And they're mostly things that I'm only money limited on because if I didn't work and pursued these things then I wouldn't be able to eat or have a place to sleep.

Work on giving people quality educations and the open-ended opportunities to explore, play, and pursue, and I think we'd all be surprised at what people will end up doing with their time.

> truck-driver-to-research-scientist

They could work on automating their own jobs like software developers and engineers do. Or research for adverse effects of self-driving.

>it seems like there'd be a labor shortage gap for those that aren't remotely qualified for a research position now.

If you are already willing to pay someone's living expenses for the rest of their life, then there's no such thing as a gap due to not being remotely qualified. No how many years it takes for them to learn how to do research, if you are willing to pay the UBI, you are willing to pay their stipend for this time.

>such positions that are less efficient on the dollar per fundamental insight scale may disappear at around the same time as our hypothetical truck driver's

I think this rests on an incorrect view of human nature. People aren't born with a list of jobs that they can fit in to, they just have aptitudes for various things. In a purely capitalistic society, the aptitudes translate into a list of jobs because profit-seeking enterprises will not pay you more to do something than the net dollars you bring in - which is itself determined by your aptitude at that specific task. However, once we're talking about the UBI, this vanishes.

There does not exist a person that is capable of exactly washing beakers and driving trucks. This only appears to be the case because there do exist people who are capable exactly of turning a profit while washing beakers or driving trucks. There is a disturbing view of human capabilities running though this thread, that some people are just truck drivers "by nature," and that like the trucks themselves they must be retired if we no longer need their services. However, this "fact" is only a result of the financial realities that are specifically overturned by the UBI.

This may be the best idea I've ever read on Hacker News. It makes it worth putting up with all the small-minded objectionists who downvote anything they don't agree with. If they downvote you, don't let it stop you from commenting. Thanks for your comment.

Why not? First of all, you are kind of forcing people to do one kind of thing in order to survive. Yes, it’s true that lots of people are not capable of advancing art or physics. But what is also true, and more important, is that most people dont want to do that stuff. Forcing everyone to be an “intellectual” for their survival would be downright dystopian. Second, it wouldn’t produce good results anyway. There would be a flood of bad and incorrect intellectual works. We would see problems arise similar to the ones we see now like the reproducibility crisis and the social justice double-think on campuses. When college becomes a right instead of an exclusive privilege for the intellectually gifted, it no longer serves the purpose of intellectual advancement.

>When college becomes a right instead of an exclusive privilege for the intellectually gifted, it no longer serves the purpose of intellectual advancement.

The amount of intelligence that constitutes gifted is an accident of history and economics. You can't divide people into those who can advance human knowledge and those who cannot, because everyone has some capability to do it. Presently there appears to be a "cut line" of competence that separates intellectuals from regular people, but that only exists because of economic forces that require us to limit the number of professional intellectuals. If budgets contracted the smart-ness of the average intellectual would rise as the lower performers were cut, and if budgets were expanded the smart-ness of the average intellectual would fall as hiring dug deeper into the baseline human population.

> is that most people dont want to do that stuff. Forcing everyone to be an “intellectual” for their survival would be downright dystopian

That wouldn’t be too different from the system today :( It would be a different set of people, sure. But it would actually be a net positive if this subset is smaller than the current subset (of people who don’t want to do x). I’d expect the number of people who are able to find their niche in arts, science, philosophy,etc would be quite large.

I'm not sure I could contribute anything truly important to the sum of human knowledge even if I dedicated my entire life to it. And I work in a so called 'smart' profession.

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