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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

I wish, we will not create world with robots as shown in movie Elysium. I wish we could create a world with universal basic income where warehouse slaves are replaced with robots and people can do something better than picking orders in constant fear of being too slow.

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UBI and full automation sounds nice but it leaves you with no leverage. You will end up relying completely on the compassion of your rulers.

This is why UBI is the capitalist solution to a post-scarcity world; it still places capitalists at the top of the pyramid as the owners and beneficiaries of capital. The solution we should be striving for in a post-scarcity world is democratic ownership of capital like robots, so that we may all share in the fruits of their labor.

And how does one argue for that future without immediately being labeled a communist/socialist seeking to nationalize the (robotic) means of production?

Sidestep and don’t engage with any labels. In my experience 99% of people who throw that word around as a pejorative can’t articulate what socialism is and how it upsets them. If you avoid any overt labels and stick to substantive topics, it’s very possible to have deep conversations with such people where they reveal they agree with some socialist ideas without even knowing it.

Someone is going to build the robots. You have gall to suggest seizing them all. It would require lots of violence and force.

Yes, I agree the people who build the robots should share in the wealth of the things they create. I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.

> Yes, I agree the people who build the robots should share in the wealth of the things they create.

Good! I hope you also agree share people who actually produce the goods are entitled to bigger share?

> I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.

I assume "people who create robots" will be tiny minority, so what you are describing is exactly what OP said: bunch of people who create nothing vote to seize the robots (from their creators) and redistribute it (to themselves). All through democratic means, of course!

How do you get from an individual owning something to everyone owning it?

You have to take it from the individual.

You can do lots of things that aren’t violent. You can convince them, first of all. Why isn’t that an option? Or we can compensate them. We can use social pressure. We can use the justice system. We can pass laws. There are plenty of options aside from violence.

Unlike now, where low income workers are notorious for their leverage

They can still strike, which throws a spanner in the works of production. So they have some leverage. But who cares if people on UBI strike? What, will they stop watching TV for a day?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's a real risk. For example, Saudi Arabia, which practices UBI [1] and otherwise transfers a lot of oil wealth to citizens, also is pretty low down on ratings of citizen freedom. [2] Many observers see it as Saudi royalty buying political compliance.

Given that the US is now on the list of backsliding democracies [3], and given the era in US politics where government money was used to cement political loyalty [4], any sort of serious UBI plan has to have a plausible story of how it won't end in anti-democratic corruption or worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_Account_Program_(S...

[2] E.g.: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freest-co...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/22/united-state...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

Through this lens I'm kind of surprised it's not a more popular policy, I'd never thought about it like this.

There are certainly ways to do it that are less risky than others. I think the closest thing the US has now is the Child Tax Credit: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/Treasury-and-I...

That's relatively hard to corrupt, in that it's a federal program with clear numeric criteria drawn from a system that is robust because it's a big slice of government revenue.

Also, as far as popularity goes, at least in the US there's a strong allergic reaction to The Wrong People getting government money. So the mortgage tax credit is seen as fine and reasonable, but "strapping young bucks" getting food stamps is a deep outrage. So I think UBI won't become truly popular until politicians can find a way to get enough control over who gets it such that only the right people (wink, wink) get it.

A current fully-automated restaurant uses 46 different types of robots [1], costs $29M USD [2] to deliver a 600 seat venue serving a 200 dish repertoire. The opex costs on that alone are going to draw out the capex payback quite a bit, before even getting into how the startup cost was around 5-10X conventional restaurants' startup costs. There isn't a Moore's Law for robots and their opex costs that lets us wait around for 10 years and then start innovating at 1/10th cost basis.

Someone please correct me where I'm going wrong here, because with my investor hat on, I can't make the numbers pencil out in these pop press robot-replacing-labor scenarios. In continuous manufacturing, high-risk environments, and all that sort of existing problem spaces, sure, but general Moravec's Workforce type activities, the numbers are nowhere near adding up for me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoZ7lWzl6tk

[2] https://www.nspirement.com/2020/09/27/china-just-opened-the-...

I can only speculate, but the 40 robots does not like to cost more than $4M: https://cobotsguide.com/2016/06/universal-robots/ The software can be reused in 2nd restaurant reducing the cost dramatically. And then buying another 10 set of robots reduce unit cost by another ~30%.

In the video, they showed a conveyor system with lots of elevator stations, and pull-up dumb waiter stations. Conveyor systems with precise controls like that in general get spendy in a BIG hurry. I also see they don't show how the cleaning robots work; that would be news to me if there is a generalized cleaning robot that does as well as a fast food bus person. I can believe a huge chunk of change was dropped on real estate alone, but there were some pretty specialized robots in that video instead of the universal robots you were pricing out.

I'd like the pricing story to change, as I know a ton of households would pay for a general cleaning robot for their homes.

Sadly, unlike technology our social structures will never advance.

I'd say we've come a long way from chiefdom

Such a tech fantasy. Not everyone has a forlorn passion just waiting to escape once they don't have a workweek taking up time.

Menial jobs give meaning to leisure for many and are another form of socialization.

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