Automation is reaching more companies
wired.com
wired.com
Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.
Even before you need language models, though, there's an insane amount of "digital manual labor" that involved people shuttling files around and validating / cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.
THIS 100%!
A lot of people would be out of jobs if data was truly interchangeable, and there were robust ways of formatting data that would work for everything people wanted to do, and software was bug-free and exported/imported perfectly every time, but... even something "standard" like date/time data is all sorts of hard to have people and their systems actually do correctly in a general way.
I volunteer my time for various pandemic assistance and basic income work and the number of finance companies (banks, payment processors, etc) that rely on a human being regularly downloading a CSV from one system and uploading it unchanged to another is _absolutely_asinine_.
I am reminded of the Reddit thread[0] where one guy confessed to having automated his entire job.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_...
The problem is, it's hard to automate stuff for people in a scalable way. There is recent YC startup Axios, but when I tried to automate something with their software, the learning curve was too big.
I think the best way to automate the office work would be "automation houses" where people sell software that automates stuff. I think we have this for big companies, but smaller ones are left doing boring jobs
Unfortunately, that's something that almost no customer is mature enough to ask for, so down it goes on the priority list, if it makes it at all.
At least web apps are slightly better, as some sort of data packet is actually transmitted (even if user-action initiated), so easier to draw an interface line.
What makes low-code/no-code different from everything else?
Disclaimer: my intention with low/no-code tooling is likely broader and includes everything from WYSWIG form builders to Airtable automations, etc. The key to me is the usage of (1) syntax-free (2) domain-specific tooling to (3) configure software to meet (4) custom business needs (what a mouthful).
Seems quite probable to me, as it's their entire goal.
Excel is a great example of how new technology created more jobs than it destroyed.
The majority of the jobs people do are updating crap in spreadsheets that don’t need to be there. If it weren’t for SOPs and audits, this stuff could be wiped out easily.
The only protection for these office workers is the status quo and inertia to change. Excel provides some task automation but still requires recurring human input and maintenance. The new wave of AI does NOT.
It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
There are types of jobs that don’t necessarily get reduced even though productivity is increased.
For example the number of military soldiers is mostly a political decision. Managers, lawyers and other bureaucrats are increasing in numbers and power despite having better educated workers and more sophisticated tools.
The economic and political games we play are not aligning with reducing work time to pre industrial levels. Technological progress cannot be thought of as independent of societal factors.
https://historyinpieces.com/research/us-military-personnel-1...
I'd say this has more to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Count how many deals moved since last day. Count deals value in the basket for specific stages.
It would take me 15 minutes a day, before I spent 15 minutes automating it. I know this is extreme example, but one that happened in my job. That was a startup with some of the best VCs in Europe.
Another international unicorn, had me create a marketing campaign and then copy the data from the marketing software into an excel. Just copy it like date, name of campaign, number of target users.
I guess I spent like 30 minutes a day doing this. Just copying stuff from one web app to a spreadsheet.
Automating customer service is hard, but work is so manual people in the programming field I think have no idea. Also made me unable to work in marketing or sales as I would just want to spend time automating stuff.
Physical labor has reasons to be focused first compared to office jobs because as a society we've scaled that up far more (more jobs that involve physical labor than office jobs/those that don't), all that physical labor and scale comes at a large cost, and physical labor is at times easier to automate compared to office work. You can decompose the steps of delivering food to a table or lifting a box and dropping it down somewhere else. Naturally, we've converged to optimize for simplicity when it comes to physical labor because people in physical labor don't like wasted effort or operations that change all the time, whereas office jobs can have many conditional branches unpruned.
For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call "Office".
That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons.
[0] Or if you're Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.
If said automation works like most corporate initiatives I've been a part of, it'll require 5 employees to implement, update, and maintain for every 1 that it saves, meanwhile costing millions of dollars per year to some vendor for a support license. Some workers might be let go but they were on the chopping block anyway. A few years later the whole thing is scrapped and the cycle starts over again.
Except the reason they had so many calls in the first place was largely because every other business process was fucked, which kinda meant you needed a human.
"Broken process vs broken execution?" is one of the first questions everyone should keep in mind during automation discovery. But it's (usually) a nuanced call.
The fear of wages and workers, not just idle "gee more profits would be nice", is what makes automation actually go, vs floundering out as some middle managers doing a b2b steak dinner grift
Just to build on this a little. Even if they do work, general population will have little to no understanding on how they work. They will be little black boxes that govern our daily lives with little to no way to correct it if things go awry. As much as I am amazed by what ML can do already, we need some basic customer facing documentation on how it is supposed to work.
We've already seen this with legacy code. Whereas a manual process featured someone you could have a conversation with, how many 10+ year old apps are there that have some quirk that nobody remembers or understands?
Automation is going to make that worse, because it goes from "that process 3 people know about" to "that process no one has thought about in 5 years."
“For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type.”
It’s true that executives now do their own typing, but that is not automation. It’s actually a rare case of modern work becoming less specialized, with a whole category of highly specialized workers (typists) ceasing to exist.
If the executive uses voice-to-text technology, then that would be a case of automation.
(1) Typewriter keyboards were actually physically strenuous... find an old manual typewriter and type a couple pages on it and see how whether you feel like typing a dozen more. This was rectified beginning in the 60s I think, but manual models were still around for a while due to cost.
(2) Even once electric typewriters were invented, dealing with minor typos, let alone more major textual surgery, remained a huge hassle until the personal computer / full word processor came about allowing on screen editing... Just imagine typing most of a page only to realize you forgot a sentence near the middle, or even made just a small typo. which is around when typists stopped being a thing, because then, and only then, typing had become so automated that a reasonably skilled bureaucrat wasn't really saving much time (and losing latency) by using the typing pool, especially for brief, urgent memoranda.
It is a case of automation working so well, you don't even notice it at all and thus think nothing was automated, until you think about it in more detail.
heck, it wasn't just retyping the page you wanted to change. It was all the pages after that too!
When I first used a word processor, it was so liberating.
Whenever a tool becomes easier to use, more people can use it unassisted.
Electric starters and automatic transmission probably eliminated the need or desire for some to have a driver.
That's happened with lots of things.
You should look up how the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios works.
Always useless.
That's worth at least 100 votes!
To extend your excellent summary of office automation, you can think of most government functions as a manually operated AI. There are piles of rules and regulations to administer, and that is ripe for automation. However, can you imagine the horror of, say, a machine efficient IRS? The only thing that makes a lot of the regulatory regime survivable is the inefficiency of the bureaucracy. A hyper efficient bureaucracy would be suffocating.
This automation is not new.
They were eventually replaced with ... computers.
Twilight is a big hit, and suddenly they want a bunch of teen paranormal romance, and it's even fine if it's poorly written by normal standards if it has the right themes. Your AI from before is largely useless.
Humans can fail to grasp all that too, but I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of culture and it's tendency to change rapidly.
I would like to hear peoples' experiences with taking non-programming jobs and automating them.
On one hand, automation will help bring back manufacturing competitiveness in the West because the capital expenditure is going down (a dobot mg400 which is ~$4k) and labour is essentially $0. On the other hand, what will happen to all the low cost labour in the developing nations? Such as the migrant workers in China?
Forget about here in North America where UBI is a possibility - I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
One thing about all this is that Trades or service jobs such as salons - I don’t see that being automated anytime soon.
Btw whenever the topic of Amazon workers comes up I think about the movie Nomadland. Check it out if you haven’t watched it yet.
This got me wondering, what is the best analysis of whether UBI is feasible economically for a given country? How low is too low? Does it boil down to something like the difference between average per capita income and average per capita GDP? Or something else; is it possible to afford UBI even if GDP is lower than personal income?
I might contend that all countries might be able to afford universal healthcare, that universal healthcare is actually less expensive than private for-profit medicine regardless of the size of the economy. While people do contend that publicly funded healthcare might be more expensive, it seems like the main argument these days is that the quality of public healthcare is lower than free-market healthcare. Unfortunately, the US is one of the biggest and best examples of being both more expensive and worse quality than a decent sized list of countries with public healthcare.
There’s a lot of countries that provide free healthcare, like Cuba. So UBI should be possible in places like Cuba?
At the same time, the robots haven’t taken people’s jobs in Cuba yet.
Another question. Shouldn’t some sort of Universal Healthcare come before UBI?
Good question, I don’t know, but maybe yes, especially if it takes longer to implement UBI than healthcare. OTOH, if a UBI was enough money to cover both healthcare and living expenses, and if it was achievable and could be implemented just as quickly, then there’s nothing wrong with that. Realistically UBI is probably much more difficult politically, and more expensive, so you’re probably right.
My first thought is why don't we see more food automation? ex. retrofitting these in a mcdonalds kitchen should be in the realm of possibility. Food is my largest expense behind rent and taxes, I imagine the same is true for most.
The fidelity and affordability of these machines has definitely taken a huge leap forward in the past few years. Many will echo "the technology isn't there yet", but it certainly feels like we're on the cusp of full robo revolution. Excited to see how far this will go by 2030.
The main part holding it back now is not the capital cost of the equipment, its the NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs in making all of the equipment operate together as there is not a standard platform to make various pieces of equipment easy to plug together.
I’ve been looking at the Epson Scara arms but those go for like 10k I can’t afford it lol.
Yea I see a lot of small startup types but no big chains like macdonalds, even with a POC to fully automate! Surprised Uber Eats isn’t in on it with their ghost kitchens and autonomous car endeavours.
The main ones that seem to be lowest hanging fruit are coffee, pizza, and stir fry.
Also, sushi/maki machines have been widely used for a long time!
Automation isn't going to happen overnight. It is a generational change.
No, we won't agree. Any country can tax its industry (GDP) by certain percentage and redistribute this among its population as an UBI. It might not sustain you, but it is a form of universal dividend.
The actual percentage is only a matter of political choice. I don't think any country (unless there is like a disastrous famine, and even most famines today are actually redistribution problems in disguise) can really say that redistributing 100% of its GDP would not be able to sustain its population. So there must exist a lower percentage from which this is possible.
I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
UBI is much more than just taxation - a UBI at 20% of GDP would almost certainly cause massive inflation. That's ~$10000 per person per year in the US.
And that's not to mention that a 20% UBI would have to be on top of already existing government spending to maintain infrastructure and services. If it replaced social benefits in the US, it'd add an extra trillion or two to the federal budget (already 25% of GDP!) depending on which services you allowed it to replace.
Automation always reduces labor costs. If the company wants to spend the savings on a human doing something else that's an option, but the notion that automation creates more jobs is false.
This is true in the first-order analysis but history has shown that people with free time will find a way to use their newfound time to create new industry. It wasn't all that long ago that >50% of people were farmers. We don't have 50% unemployment now that we have mega-combines and all the other machinery that has made it so <1% of people need to farm. We won't have 50% unemployment when the robots come to do factory jobs and drive trucks.
Automation kills jobs. We know this because the businesses paying for it understand TCO. And even though higher paying jobs are "created" in the form of robot builders and maintainers, there are fewer of those needed than are replaced. So even if the TCO was the same, there would be strictly fewer man-hours worked with automation.
The middle jobs are under attack. Future jobs will just be feeding the AI til it no longer needs us.
Rising wages means more competition over the same resources, leading to inflation. Even inflation in some industries/products will affect the CPI.
Where would the UBI come from? Presumably it would be from those who automate. This means your claim of lower prices will likely be marginal - the people need to support themselves whether they or a robot does the work. So UBI would mostly offset.
Inequality shouldn't be that out of whack anyways and having a max speed on it could encourage better equality.
Personally if I had UBI I'd work more on side-projects and try to get some recurring income coming in...I'm still trying to do that but it's harder w/ all the distractions of doing client/freelance work..and the depression when I can't meet bills because I'm having a ADHD poor-motivation month, or anti-social-can't be bothered w/ marketing to find new clients month... both of which seem like every month since the Pandemic began...
I'd hope a lot more people would actually go into science fields and do research when they can afford to go to school and have a guaranteed home and basic necessities...
Honestly a utopia to me would see 95% of kids becoming scientists and technologists, the rest in the arts... and everything else being automated and we work on solving things like aging, space travel, and climate change.
It makes sense to tax money where there is money - income and gains.
Ah, "you will own nothing" accelerated! This seems like the fever dream of a World Economic Forum plutocrat. Let's make it so people will literally never be able to own a house because of prohibitive taxes. This will solidify the domination of those who already have houses, like older generations, while completely selling younger people down the river with the promise of a tiny handout that will be totally devalued by time it reaches you.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works beyond a small $ amount.
Nobody just keeps millions of dollars in a bank account. When you have lots of money, you own businesses which generate income. The value of those businesses is not fixed, but constantly changing, and dependent on the values of other businesses. So it’s very difficult to assess “PersonX has $Y million” because the value of the companies that they own changes all the time.
They might have $300k in cash, $700k in stocks, and be the founder of a company worth $40m, but they can’t just spend or be taxed on that $40m. The company is significantly less valuable without them running it. And if they tried to sell some of it, then the value would drop and they’d be worth even less. But their net worth still says $41m. How do you tax that?
We don’t tax ownership of companies today because it’s WAY too complicated and convoluted, and would cause significant problems. Instead, we tax the transactions. Meaning that if they sell half of their $40m company for $20m, then they have to pay taxes on that $20m that got converted from “fake money” (company valuation) to “real money” (cash from selling). That’s “Capital Gains” and is taxed today.
Or we also currently tax payments, aka dividends. When a company converts value within itself to cash for its owners. If the $40m company makes $4m in profit and pays that out to the founder, they pay income tax on it.
But the fact that they own a company that’s “worth” $40m shows up in their net worth, even though that’s not real money.
If it is funded by eliminating the preference for non-labor income in taxes by bringing up taxes on other income (which also itself reduces the incentive to automation created by premium taxes on labor), that's not true.
If you want Netflix, eating out at a restaurant, playing Games or any sort of entertainment? If you want a life, you need to work. There is nothing disincentivized against work unless those people want to live like zombies.
If it's half the price to run a robot compared to using a human, then jobs can be eliminated even if the people want to work.
I hate my job. If they started a UBI that actually covered all the basics - food, housing, healthcare, etc... I would quit and I'm not even in a low paying job.
That is what I would considered as basic. It is suppose to keep you alive. Not for you to afford meat, fruit or coca cola. Housing enough to keep you warm and sleep. Not enough space ( hardly any at 6m2 ) to let you move around. And this means workers would have to be treated better now they have an option to quit without begging for food on the table.
It'd have to be some sort of partnership w/ govt and localities to workout making it so people who need homes the most have easier access to them, by freeing up the land, so they don't need to relocate across country or so it doesn't seem like they're being put in concentration camps or something horrible like that... If I live in a rural town, they need to do something to ensure there's homes for everyone who wants one there somehow. If they need to buy or lease land and throw up some 30k yurts, so be it...
On the bright side those who pay higher rents will probably pay less as there will be a lot more rentals available.
Even if the vast majority did make that decision (which I don't think is plausible under any UBI that would be sustainable in even the very short term in the near future) it would eliminate wage signals it would be a result of shifted wage signals, and the response of the market to those signals.
Basically, what we had during the pandemic was a mini-UBI experiment (even though it was not universal). Wages at the low end went up - exactly what you would want to see under a successful UBI program (because of giving people alternatives). Unfortunately, we funded this one via deficits (hence why the rich also got richer). If it was funded via a tax, we'd see the lower end wages increase, and the upper middle/upper class get squeezed a bit (which is completely intentional).
The last effect would likely trigger a voting backlash (since upper-middle/upper class folks have lots of voting power), but it's still UBI working as intended
So, a classic means-tested benefit experiment?
Do you honestly believe that is not happening now in ghastly amounts?
That is basically the definition of market failure, which is of course an acknowledged problem with the current economic system we have. That's why people are discussing alternatives.
Compared to means-tested aid with duplicative bureaucracy to that which already exists for income taxation? Depends on a number of factors, including whether you find it by closing the gap between labor and non-labor taxes so that you aren't punishing people for hiring, whether and how you adjust minimum wage in light of it, how you set the level of basic income relative to productive capacity, whether you index it to a revenue stream divided among the eligible population, or target a constant real income level, or set the level by some other means, etc.
The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
Imagine if you went back in time 200 years and explained how current farming and current manufacturing work, and explain that's how it will work in 200 years time. A reasonable person would likely assume hardly anyone was working in this future state, that there would be no jobs.
Nobody could translate in all the languages 50 years ago; today, anyone do it, without any particular cognitive requirement.
So the tasks in your example are easier, but the easier jobs have been eliminated or replaced with harder jobs.
This is a radically misinformed statement. These are the real-world experience I've had with translators:
- translator with degree in languages, occasional translator: never mentioned Google Translate
- semi-professional translator (significant source of income coming from it): said that most professionals nowadays use GT as first pass; never mentioned GT being a threat
- multiple gigs I've requested for official documentation: those can't be done via GT, as they require a certified translator
- realtime translation I needed: again, can't be done via GT, as a certified translator is required
The idea that GT is eliminating translators is nonsense. It actually augments their capacity (re-read above, this is a real-world opinion of a translator).
> The jobs replacing it are much fewer and higher skilled (software dev).
Even assuming the (wrong) argument that GT eliminates jobs, SW devs are just one of the options. This actually reflects the ancestor comment: "Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination". Computer translation surely helped businesses around the world in communicating on a global scale, in a way that previously was not resource-effective (e.g. lookup on the dictionary); while this can't be quantified, it's the opposite of "reducing jobs".
Automation started around 300 years ago, not 30. If the automation-pessimists were right, essentially no jobs would exist by now. See lump of labour fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour.
Or you could just realize that real estate is a broken industry and why does there even need to be a broker at all... List your home yourself, have software that does the rest...
I mean, lawyers, doctors, software programming, can easily be placed in the next 20 years. All fast-food, grocery, freight(depending on self-driving cars, or perhaps better train systems that have direct to store delivery)..
I look forward to the day when only 5% of the population is employable, because we'll have to figure out someway to live post-scarcity or just let people starve, but if 5% work, 5% then are consumers too...and that leaves out a lot of power, control, and economic potentiality.
I don't buy that doctors, lawyers, software engineers or real estate brokers will be automated away in 20 years. As a society there has been 15 solid years put into automating driving a car - a skill so simple we allow 16 year olds with no formal training and half of who have an iq less than 100 to do it. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers and real estate brokers have jobs which are very complex compared to driving a car.
No, you can't get an equal share with every other citizen that way, especially if you are a lower-class worker without substantial surplus income.
I mean, it's literally not working, even a little bit, for the vast majority of the people who would be net beneficiaries under a UBI. This is “let them eat cake” levels of out-of-touch.
Capitalism is very bad at increasing the "floor" of the human experience. Almost by definition, there is some threshold, X% of the population, where the marginal reward is no longer worth the effort (in lay terms - its not "worth it" to R&D and innovate to build amazing and cheap products for poor people). Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen[0]. This band typically is the target and victim of rent seeking - i.e. stagnation with a higher long-term price than innovation. Historically, Capitalism has always just exploited the floor through rent seeking until that "floor" dies a few decades later, then continues to exploit the new "floor".
UBI is a focus on improving that "floor" of the human experience (different than other government programs by reducing stigma and increasing guarantees).
If you can think of it, I would love to hear about a way to incentivize Capitalism to increase the "floor" of the human experience. If you want more capitalism, we need to figure out how do we incentivize more "Altruistic Capitalism" (maybe a different name?). There are some companies kinda starting to do this, I've heard them called "For Purpose Capitalism"/"For Purpose Companies" e.g. Tom's shoes, etc.
[0] https://usafacts.org/articles/internet-access-students-at-ho.... and this is in the USA in-spite of charity, government subsidies and regulations for getting more access to the internet.
> Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen
Is that why basically everyone in America has some sort of always-connected smartphone with more computing power than a laptop from 2008 did? Citing telecom infrastructure as your example is just arguing in poor faith as it's well known American telecom infra is an oligopoly/monopoly. Just because there are some market failures doesn't mean we should throw the entire market out the window by implementing UBI.
For example, not everyone in the USA has smartphones[0]. The biggest discrepancy is by age, which we can possibly factor as a choice. The second biggest discrepancy is by wealth. There is a 2000bps difference in rates between people making more than $75k vs people making less than $35k. There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan. So the poorest will consistently be excluded.
This isn’t a market failure. Markets are in their nature utilitarian on a single metric and truly aren’t designed to improve the floor of the human experience.
Take the trolley problem for example. It’s supposed to be a hard problem because of all the nuance. The market “solves” the trolley problem trivially by running over the least wealthy group of people.
Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor. At best, the market is punting the problem (until that group of least fortunate dies) and at worst the market is rent seeking, exacerbating the problem.
> There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan
$15/mo plans with multiple gigabytes of LTE + unlimited 3G exist (Mint Mobile). There's an entire class of MVNO dedicated to the low cost market. I myself pay $25/mo for 10GB of LTE through AT&T. And the reason the price isn't lower is because the carriers (who are an oligopoly - that's why they pay massive dividends) lease time on the towers to the MVNOs and determine the price at which the time is leased.
> Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor.
In the long run, they are. Smartphones coming into existence did more for the vast majority of poor than any amount of government subsidy of telecom bills did. (If you didn't know, the FCC subsidizes low income Americans' wireless bills!) The reason internet prices haven't been a race to the bottom yet like smartphones is precisely _because_ there is an oligopoly and a non-functioning market.
If you compare markets where Google Fiber entered to ones where they didn't, the impact of a competitor actually trying to win market share and compete is obvious.
Can you give me an example of a market with substantial competition that has ignored the 10th percentile of customers?
Not a coincidence but education, health and housing are heavily regulated everywhere and even governmentally run in some places. De-regulate them, allow the free markets to do their magic to find solutions, reduce prices and thus raise that floor.
Then remove artificial barriers in the jobs market like minimum wages. Allow people to be employed no matter how little their added value is worth. Free companies from onerous regulations and make creating a competing company easy and cheap instead.
Finally, separate the Economic power in state, just like Executive and Legislative powers are separated. Make it illegal for governments to engage in, regulate or influence economic activity. Focus their role on ensuring freedoms and applying externalities to markets through taxation. Also accept and use taxation's role in shaping societal behavior.
Oh, and re-energize private charity by removing the corrupt and ineffectual state welfare crutch.
Libertarianism/neoliberalism is the ideological model that doesn't care about the poor - social democracy isn't perfect but it is an improvement over just letting people die.
Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating. The balance is being tried indeed but it’s a slippery slope in a democracy where people just learn that they can vote more money in their pockets.
If eliminating poverty is the end goal then we need a safety net for those who fail.
It's still capitalism in much the same way that capitalism is still feudalism.
Given that redistributive taxation and benefit systems labelled “social democracy” designed specifically to mitigate the adversity that provides the whip behind the capitalist mode of production modify both the property system and the mode of production that together are labelled “capitalism”, social democracy literally is not capitalism. It retains substantial elements of the property system of, and it's mode of production has important similarities to that of, the system for which the term “capitalism” was coined (as does that system with pre-capitalist aristocratic systems), but it's not the same system.
It's not Marxist socialism, either, and I know Marxists like to deny that any system that isn't pre-capitalist that fails to be Marxist socialism can be anything other than capitalism-under-a-different-name, but that's a giant false dichotomy.
Bearing in mind that I'm using "capitalism" as a descriptor, not a snarl word. The snarl one is "neoliberalism" ;)
We’ve seen countless state welfare programs growing out of control and eating more and more funds and we are nowhere near eliminating poverty.
You’d think that if it was just a matter of throwing money at the problem, we would have solved it by now.
I'd also like to know how you think we should maximise people's happiness and wellbeing. Because that's my primary interest, and economic productivity is valuable insofar as it enables that utility maximisation.
You can't maximise happiness by definition. Happiness is fleeting, a peak, it exists only through comparison to our regular state. Evolution made sure of that, or we'd've stopped evolving. The only way to cheat it is with drugs.
I want to maximise humankind's potential instead. Gain infinite knowledge, spread through the stars. I think that is a much more worthwhile goal than happily dying out on a small planet at the edge of the galaxy.
I don't think "potential" is worth anything if it isn't used to benefit people and make their lives better. The imperium from 40k has much greater technology and planet span than us but it's deeply dystopic - I'd rather live here than there.
But I believe becoming multi-planetary is imperative and urgent for mankind. The dangers while all of us are on the same planet are simply too great to sit and enjoy the view.
I do agree about becoming multiplanetary too, but if we're talking about existential risk then climate change is the most urgent one and we need state power and institutional change to avert that one.
The only way to solve climate change is through technological evolution. I see almost zero progress with policy changes. BTW, we wouldn't even be in this mess if would've completed the previous energy tech transition from hydrocarbons to nuclear as planned. What stopped us? Politics.
We'd also need to move off of ICE cars, and it was the car industry that tried to suppress that. Also the fossil fuel industry that puts out propaganda against new forms of energy - capital and the state are in alliance. Some parties can be better (left wing ones) but there's a ton of propaganda against them by corporations too.
Politicians are by definition corruptible - that is why they are there. They failed to succeed through merit in the free market so politics is their last resort. That is why power to the State and politicians means yielding to corruption.
The biggest opponents to nuclear were not corporations but parties: greens and ecologists. Ideologists and luddites. We are living the world the anti-nukes protests of the 60's built.
Politicians are corruptible, but the free market actively promotes corruption - when the only motive is profit, morality goes out the window in favour of the dollar.
As I said I'd rather we had neither, but between the two only politics has the possibility of significant change in any direction that isn't inherently profitable.
Profit is the only motive for everyone, all the time, no matter what. The only difference is that in a free market that motivation is aligned with societal goals and it is in the open, a game with rules and laws. Free markets allow you to make a profit and keep it, legally.
Without free markets, the deals are made in power and influence, in fiefs and networks. Leftist politics are not only ipocrit (no left politician cares for "the poor") but also feudalistic and corrupt by default, from definition, because that is the only way to make a profit in such a sistem.
They were also very frustrated that the regular people were… simply not like that.
If you don't care whether your friends, neighbours or kids in Africa live or die, that's a you problem. For the rest of us, we'd rather reduce the suffering of others.
Today's Western people, in comparison, are angels.
You know why communes failed? Because everyone was stealing - from workers to guardians, even those in charge were stealing. You know why they stole? Because they were starving. You know why they were starving? Because they couldn't buy the food they needed. Why? Because there was no profit motive for others to provide that food.
People don't work the way you think they do. Until you understand that, you'll spread suffering instead of reducing it.
That doesn't invalidate the point that capitalism has some significant flaws that we should be trying to address. As an anarchist I believe that these flaws cannot be fundamentally addressed by just changing our masters. In the short term (as in, my lifetime) all I can hope for is an increase in the prevalence of worker cooperatives and unions, nationalisation of naturally monopolistic necessities like healthcare and public transit, improved welfare systems (UBI would be good) and improved community bonds. In the long run I think the ideal human system would be without coercion, oriented around cooperation and coordinated from the bottom up - but as ideals should be, this is something to guide efforts towards to the degree practical, not to throw human bodies at in the pursuit of power and a fever dream (plus little power over others is to be begin with in anarchism, that's the point).
But when there is no more land to grant, what happens? When there are no more tribes to conquer, what happens?
When there is massive abundance and most of it is owned by 1% of the population... What happens?
> Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating
... to the people who end up with less. They seem to be motivating to the people who end up with more. [https://singularityhub.com/2020/05/18/here-are-the-results-o...]
In a country where 1 in 100 people own a total of 40% of the nation's total wealth, a back-of-the-napkin guess strongly suggests the net motivation of spreading that wealth around would be positive.
> demotivating... to the people who end up with less
No, demotivating to the people creating value.
> spreading that wealth around would be positive
That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
What systems have we tried, and who and when are you talking about? What are you comparing to? Some of the best examples we have today are the ones that aren’t exactly pure capitalism, like Norway and Finland. If capitalism is so great, why are countries that hold capitalism back and provide more social services raking better than the US on nearly all economic, development, and social measures?
> it incentivizes value creators by allowing them to keep a large share of the value they create.
Do you recognize this spin, or is it unintentional? It’s motivating to lose some of the value you create by working to someone else?? Wouldn’t it be a lot more motivating to keep all the value you create? Wouldn’t it be even more motivating to not work, and get to keep some of the value other people create? Yeah, I think it probably is.
> That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
This feels like the McCarthy school of economics. Russia’s problems didn’t stem from lack of proletariat motivation, it came from authoritarian abuses of power. You seem to be forgetting about China entirely.
There were a lot of overlapping factors that killed the Soviet experiment. A major one, and the real root cause of "people started starving," is that Russia is a massive country that is historically vulnerable to famines because food is relatively hard to grow at those latitudes; people had starved under the czars of the past, and the main reason we think starvation will be minimized in the future is a global revolution in how agriculture is done of which Russia was a part, not anything particularly virtuous in the modern Russian practice of capitalism.
Another major factor was a combination of central planning and failure to grasp modern science which resulted in error being expanded. Stalin famously supported a Michurinism view of trait growth through stress over the Darwininan view of natural selection, which led to some bad conclusions when agriculture was centrally-planned under a bad model. While central planning can aggravate error (and there's a reasonable discussion to be had about how tax dollars are allocated), a capitalist society is extremely vulnerable to similar failure modes; while ideally, damage gets contained via the "firebreak" of a few companies failing when their heterodoxy proves wrong (or succeeding and displacing other companies when their heterodoxy proves right), bad memes spread widely still cause damage. Consider the dust bowl, or the housing crash; both happened under capitalist models.
But all of this is a bit of a distraction because the fact the communists spread wealth around doesn't imply spreading wealth is communist. Indeed, the US, while actively engaging in McCarthyist anti-communist suppression of free speech, had a maximum marginal tax rate of 91% and was fifteen years into its own project of guaranteeing a basic income (via social security) for the elderly, because we as a society had grown weary of the elderly dying from poverty when the winds of fortune had blown them to a circumstance where they had no savings and no ability to work. Even capitalist societies agree that taxation and use of taxes for social benefit is a good thing; the only argument to be had is how much, and "taxing the rich is communist" is a doorstop meme that doesn't contribute to that conversation.
There is nothing to redistribute when we all have nothing - and that is our initial state. Then through capitalism value is created. Part of said value is retained by its creator - thus providing the motivation to create it in the first place. But the most value is distributed in the society (through regular consuming of goods and services), raising its level and thus pulling more people out of poverty.
Just check out how dramatically poverty was reduced when Eastern European states switched from communism to capitalism.
Working people trade labor for money. Are you claiming that you cannot make surplus from a salary? It seem you're claiming agreed upon salary is preventing you accumulating capital and the rich are to be blamed somehow.
If the initial state is nothing, where, exactly, does the “capital” in capitalism come from?
> Then through capitalism value is created.
That is an amazing magical sentence. Capitalism creates value? How does it do that?
Of course they do, but they aren't allowed to use them to their full potential.
I don't think you have read your own links. Hint: read the first sentence of your wikipedia link. And yes I have partially studied economics and have family members who are trained economists.
How is that physically possible, when poor people have nothing?
That's the core mode of capitalist production, better known as the M-C-M' cycle.
> buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index
There are some pretty big differences between these
With basic income, that's still true.
With fair (rather than preferentially lower) taxes on capital income, that potentially changes, whether or not you have basic income; funding BI with it is just a way of making sure that the taxation isn't redirected back to benefit the same elites.
So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers.
This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free.
That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
The way tech has been heading I'm guessing robots will primarily benefit the manufacturers. Sure, the wealthy will be able to afford to replace workers with machines and use robots for domestic labor, but the entire time those devices will be spying on their "owners" and reporting everything back to the manufacturers and the state. All of that data will be used by companies to make themselves richer at every opportunity and used by the state to keep uppity citizens in line or discredit them before they can threaten the establishment.
I can't say if we'll need basic income or if such a scheme would work (I'd like to see even one example of it working in a society somewhere) but no mater what it means for the workforce I'd be willing to bet the future of automation is going to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of the vast majority
In "the broken glass fallacy", windows are smashed. In "the broken glazier fallacy", it's the glaziers who essentially have their arms broken (or at least, their modern tools are confiscated).
Automation does not harm the economy or populace at large.
The issue is not automation, but the *speed* of automation.
We just need to create new jobs faster than we displace then.
Edit: new title is much better.
So they hired Bender Bending Rodriguez. Fair enough.
More seriously, seems like the job market is in a perfect storm for more robots to be hired in workers’ steads. They’re not subject to “vaccine or testing mandates”, in fact they won’t even get COVID, they’re not going to unionize, and they’re not going to quit on you.
This assumes we keep them just complex enough for the job. If computer scientists and developers make Bender too smart or cloud connect them, they may decide to hold a union vote. There was a trial in the science fiction show Star Trek the Next Generation to decide if Lt. Commander Data an android had rights and he won. Curious how far away such a scenario might be.
No, but in this article they are being rented by the hour. Once you become dependent on them, their price will go up to whatever some outside company wants it to be - probably a bit above minimum wage and that's only in places where the work area hasn't yet been redesigned with the robot in mind. This will be danger until the robots become more of a commodity item, but that may eventually happen.
Wages are also not the only cost of employees.
And, unlike labor with payroll tax, you don't pay special supplemental taxes on automation rental.
Although I should at least point out that while true now, there’s nothing inherent to robots that insulates them from this. Tax policy is a human choice, so while not paying payroll taxes is an advantage for hiring a robot over a person today, that doesn’t stop human governments from enacting robot taxes.
If automation really takes off and entire factories can be run by a handful of people it might make sense to move them to whatever low-tax country with a port. Pay the 5 employees running it extra to fly in there for a few months a year each (like oil workers) and if it's in a lawless region add some automatic turrets that shoot at anything unauthorized entering the perimeter. Makes sense as long as extra pay+extra shipping+ammo costs is less than the hypothetical robot taxes.
This is ignoring all the problems with these systems. Workplace injuries are completely ignored, and I have never worked somewhere with a physical robot that did not harm someone at some point, no matter how seriously safety was taken. The reality is, with current tech (which is always improving!) that robots are more dangerous - full stop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54355803
It talks about the simplicity of these systems which is true, but the problem is they're so simple something as weird as changing the color of the box can completely break the system with no resolution. I made up that example because I can't talk about real things that broke the workflow for warehouse automation companies due to NDAs, but they were equally stupid. Basically if you wanted to change anything then the robot usually had to be scrapped and redesigned, which costs millions and takes months or even years.
It mentions the theoretical gains of using cheaper robots to replace expensive labor, and this is how these systems are sold to everyone who has never really worked with robots. Speaking for the robotics company, the upfront cost of the robot was usually more than they ever recouped from revenue. When you factor in the cost of maintenance (these robots are monitored by people that make a lot of money), not to mention the R&D then it never turned a profit. Speaking for the warehouses, they would frequently complain about the robots breaking, the inability to get work done, and the biggest complaint was "it's worse than the humans it's supposed to replace."
The technology just isn't there yet. I don't know when it will be. If you are interested in research then robotics is a fascinating field. If you are trying to make money by solving real problems that aren't subsidized by VC then it's demoralizing as hell. Most robotics companies never make a good product. Amazon has Kiva Systems which work great, but you'd be surprised that most of their competitors still never figured out how to have positive margins on their products. iRobot had the Roomba which is still going strong with lots of competitors. There are a handful of companies that sell robotic arms that make money. There are a handful of companies that sell sensors that make money (a lot less than you'd think). There are contracts you can get with the military that usually go nowhere. Rodney Brooks, who cofounded iRobot, failed with his cobots approach at Rethink Robotics. There are lots of other failures I haven't mentioned as well.
Robots have a long way to go before they're seriously competing with humans.
Interesting.
Why is that?
The Fukushima reactor exploration for example is only possible because of robotics. Those things are failing like flies due to radiation but it's clearly worth it.
> When looking at robotics is also good to consider not just economics but safety.
The problem is the companies paying for the robots only care about economics, at least in my experience. I'm glad your experience differs from mine.
Is that really the worst thing in the world? In an age driven by hyper consumerism and buying new shiny iPhones and other gadgets, do we really need to do more? Can't we just be happy with our accomplishments as a human race and just enjoy? I for one would welcome a stagnant society.
Also, humanity's eggs are currently all on one basket - we're one major cataclismic event from complete obliteration.
No, the challenges ahead require us to keep evolving, we cannot afford to stagnate.
Or some machine...
There's a lot of great stuff that could happen if people weren't chained to wage slavery and could lean on UBI to pursue passions. Sure there will be people that sit on their ass and do nothing, but there will also be people who use their new found freedom to create great things that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
I'd also like to point out that even the most radical UBI proponents aren't pushing for a truly substantial benefit. Most of the proposals I've seen are payments that would be near poverty level if it was treated as a sole income for any length of time.
And most of the ones pursuing their passions will do redundant, useless crap like countless blogs and TikTok videos.
We are the result of evolution and without evolutionary pressure we will fail.
As natural life, everything we do is inherently natural.
Dubious assumption indeed.
The assumption that a company cranking out an iPhone every year is inherently "better for the evolution of humanity" than more people writing or making videos is one I'd question.
Evolutionary pressure seems to mainly create animals that focus more plainly on food and reproduction than modern humanity, after all!
I'm suggesting that "useful to a business" is currently over-prioritized compared to "useful to an individual." (And yes, it's driven by consumers, but if one's basic needs were met without working 8+ hours a day, maybe those individuals would have different preferences.)
And I think the claim that it's evolutionary necessary for us to have today's model of firms and full time employment is particularly out there.
Perhaps it's been a long day, and for some reason I'm not seeing this?
Given time off and no obligations, I always intend to use all of it on that... but damned if I don't start doing useful things on day 2, instead.
[EDIT] FYI, last I heard, states have been quietly letting people scam their way onto the disability rolls to make up for our official social safety net being totally inadequate, after the '08 financial crisis. You might look into that.
I have a friend I made in college who is now on disability. She's using the time to learn and create, and preparing to start a business teaching others what they know. They could easily smoke weed and play video games all day, but that gets old very quickly.
And to add on to that - what makes you think UBI simply won't cause rents to go up to match? We have strong evidence from the current inflation situation that broad based wage gains get eaten up by price increases of goods with limited supply (i.e. the housing situation in every coastal city). Existing UBI experiments aren't widespread enough to materially shift the housing market. You can't go off evidence from giving a few hundred people extra money. And basic economics tells us that oligopolies (the rental market in coastal cities) extract all consumer surplus (the UBI money) because an oligopoly is not a properly functioning market.
As opposed to the army of software engineers developing the platforms to post said useless crap?
Who cares if they do nothing, write blogs, and post to TikTok? This feels like a get off my lawn type of grievance.
We have endured far worse as a species than a mass of people with time and money to do whatever they want. It is pure arrogance to even meekly assert _you_, someone occupying such a thin sliver of time in human history knows what precise machinations will irreversibly ruin us as a species.
Weed and games are fun. Spiritually fulfilling work is fun until about 10%, then you have to document the code, write tests, do marketing, answer support and so on…
However the danger is if you cut human input/involvement altogether. That is what AI will be if successful. Everyone except the business owner will be uninvolved (apart from futile protests).
Why would eliminating the benefit cliff produced by means-tested welfare result in fewer people working for income above the basic support level? Reducing the disincentive for additional work on top of minimum support is a major motivation for moving to BI from means-tested welfare.
Given that most creative output comes from a very small number of people, releasing even a tiny fraction of those people from the basic drudgery of life should result in a cultural explosion.
I would even argue that it would significantly help our current political problems. A lot of political discourse is driven by people who have unstructured idle time--retired or unemployed. UBI would allow people who currently have to struggle to support themselves to engage with the political system.
Besides, don’t artists need the struggle to create? Isn’t best art born of pain and suffering? Isn’t the artist soul a tortured one?
I dont have sources but I've read studies of the creative output of people who only do work when feeling inspired creative motivated and whatnot vs those who do purely out of discipline and habit. And even same people in different moods. And there is no discernable difference in output. Its a feel good assumption but you don't need any of those things to create beautiful things
Sounded like this was win/win here.
If your not overly picky (beans and rice) have gotten so cheap that world hunger is already a solved problem. Distribution less so.
If you can setup a Von Neumann machine that worked In the middle of the desert. eventually you could have hundreds of cities ready for move in. So very cheap.
In the case of healthcare, it's partly the cost of technology - a generation ago there were no MRIs, drugs were less complex, etc. The quality and outcomes have massively improved in many areas.
Even with housing, you have material costs and labor costs. Everyone talks about density, but if someone isn't working with a UBI, then they can live in the middle of nowhere. Most of the housing issues are really a personal choices and labor location.
I guess we will have a lot more public sector jobs.
* Some people who receive an UBI that covers their basic needs may do some of these jobs for a lower wage than the current one