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Comment by sandoooo | Hacker News Reader

Let's say we have machines that will produce an unlimited quantity of any good that is currently on the market today. We put one in every house, since that machine can also produce copies of itself. Does this mean nobody have to work?

You still need doctors. You still need police. You still need yoga instructors. Plumbers. Somebody to fix your internet. And the need to pay those people means you will still need to find a way to earn money. Plus, land is still expensive because physics, and now that people can afford to pay more, landlords will charge more. Want higher density? Zoning is also not free. Nor are architects and builders.

All that happens is that goods are excluded from the economic system, but the system will keep going. The prices for still-limited services will simply go up to the point where you will still need to work 40 hour weeks to afford them.

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I wouldn't mind a robot telling me my medical diagnoses and performing surgery on me. I would actually prefer a robotic humanoid cop over a human one if they are reliable so I don't have to deal with a cop on a power trip or one with twitchy trigger finger. Plumber, fix my internet, why would I care about a robot doing those jobs? Now I might pay for a human yoga instructor or a human therapist for their emotional side, but I think a lot of jobs I would be fine with if a robot did them.

Per land, while it is expensive in certain highly desirable areas, it is also cheap in a lot of places. A big reason people live on expensive land is because their job requires a bunch of people to all meet up in one location and thus everyone has an incentive to minimize their commute driving up demand. No job opens your potential housing locations in a massive way.

Unfortunately no job still does not get rid of the requirement to be near people to fully meet them. We'd need some sort of uploading technology or lotus eater level VR to skip that part.

This is already here to some extent, we have a rentier economy and the bigger it gets the more of a load it will put on everyone else.

I do wonder if rather than UBI we should be pursuing UBH (Universal Basic Housing). Cheap food is a solved problem for everyone but the very poorest, housing isn't.

Of course it is already here. I think this is in fact the core problem of Medicare and why costs are going up and up with no end in sight.

In the same vein, all that a UBI / UBH would do is shift around allocation of actually-limited resources while causing inefficiency, waste and accounting headaches for everybody. What's more, you'll be shifting those limited resources away from the most materially productive segment of society - the middle class - and onto the underclass, who is not going to all of a suddenly take over the burden of mass production, since that requires many years of education and training. So what I'm saying is you'll start to get goods shortages too.

The whole system is an intricate jigsaw puzzle with a billion moving pieces. People keep suggesting we fix it by hitting it with a hammer and setting parts of it on fire.

> while causing inefficiency,

More inefficiency than we already have?

> accounting headaches for everybody.

What headaches would they be?

> goods shortages

In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need. Reducing the supply of new mobile phone designs is not going to materially reduce anyone's quality of life.

A lot of the world just needs the kind of stuff we already have, and we already know how to make that stuff. As William Gibson said "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed"

>More inefficiency than we already have?

Yes, more than there already is. This is the standard thing that happens whenever there is massive redistribution of anything by government fiat. Stuff gets redistributed arbitrarily, people who need it don't get it, poeple who don't need it get too much of it, stuff is lost via administrative error or outright fraud or political finagling, people being careless with billions of dollars in other people's money because it's not in their KPI, etc.

Note that most things are not literally on fire currently and there is no looting. Those things are not guaranteed.

>In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need.

Really, now. Do you think we'll be OK if we stop the mass production of fertilizers and concrete for a while? Just a few months until things settle down? How about meds? Those tie up a lot of man-hours and medically trained people to produce, and we could definitely use those people elsewhere (or they could go take long, UBI-piad holidays).

So what I'm saying is you'll start to get goods shortages too.

So is it better to build enough houses or enough Televisions? Right now the richest parts of the world are flooded with consumer goods but starved of decent housing. This isn't just a problem for the poor, I know plenty of high earning middle class people who have to put up with poor housing.

Concrete. Medicine. Fertilizers. Fuel. Plastic. Electricity. Water. Trucks. Wheat.

Cheap housing is everywhere. The real problem is that cheap housing is useless if you can't find work and work has been centralized into cities so everyone ends up moving to the same locations.

Cheap housing is everywhere.

Tell that to someone living in SV or London.

Why do they live in London or SV and not some village 100 km from it?

100 km from London is not a lot cheaper, especially when you consider the cost of commuting to London if that is where your job is.

Your hypothetical either assumes that machines will never be able to be plumbers/doctors/yoga instructors, OR just takes a snapshot of some point in time between now and the eventual future when machines are superior at all work currently done by humans.

The former is incredibly short sighted and the latter doesn't seem super productive to me.

Do you have the robots today? Do you see them happening by the time the next government rolls around and UBI becomes a real choice?

As a reminder, suffering the problems of UBI for just a few years without an actual, functional, non-vaporeware solution in place is going to ruin a lot of lives and quite possibly burn down all our existing shit.

> Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: “Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.”

You're arguing timeline when that's not what the article is about. A world without work is our likely future, and it's worth talking about.

The context matters. Seen the democrat primary speeches? UBI is on the table. There's people in this thread right now advocating for it. The article is indirectly advocating for it. The whole thing is like advocating we drive 200mph over a bridge that hasn't been built yet.

But _do_ you need doctors, police, plumbers? Robots can handle all of these tasks in this hypothetical future. Even today, AI can better diagnose you than doctors can, according to the leading research.

Can they handle it now? Today? For the whole country? Because the problems are already here and people are advocating UBI so ideally we need those magical robots yesterday.

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