There’s no real dignity in work that can easily be done by a robot. A lot of these jobs make people miserable anyway, maybe we shouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep them.
/s But seriously, while I think humans will always find some meaning in work, there will come a day when that work is no longer required. Or at the very least, work will look so different that it will be unrecognizable to us currently. I think "work" will look more and more like "art" in the year 4000 for example.
The idea of a person sacrificing some of their time to enrich the person at the top of a company already sounds bad, but we all accept it must happen so we can afford to live. But when robots and AI takes over labor in a significant way, what will be left for those humans that remain? And let's say we converge on something like a universal basic income to fix this, where will humans find meaning?
I'm leaning more towards socialized housing, food, health care, and public transporation now, at least for the basics.
Everyone should be able to at least meet their minimal basic needs without depending on their economic relevance (which isn't a given for many people over the next 100 years). People who want more than the essentials (a house with larger bedrooms, equipment for their hobbies, travel accommodations) can find paid work in positions that still require a human touch.
And if there aren't enough jobs available for everyone who wants one, then start reducing the standard work week from 40 hours, until everyone who wants can find work.
What's the difference between that and UBI? The state giving the people a magical ticket to redeem for food and shelter or simply giving them food and shelter is the same thing at the end of the day.
Both are equally prone to be inflationary as they require workers to provide the food and shelter without receiving anything real in return. In both cases you need to seize real value from the wealthy population if you want to avoid the inflationary effects.
It's the same thing, just different accounting.
> Both are equally prone to be inflationary as they require workers to provide the food and shelter without receiving anything real in return.
I'm not sure I follow why this would be inflationary, but it's also not what I was suggesting.
Even if this does lead to more inflation though, it ensures the government is responsible for securing food and housing for everyone, rather than something like UBI which might result in people who can't find work not actually being able to afford the essentials.
There's also the tough tradeoff that money is useful for more than just food and shelter, and so there's high incentive for unscrupulous people to try to get you to transfer it to them instead of covering your basic needs: for example, by spending millions on advertising campaigns to get you to stretch yourself to buy things you don't need; or just regular, transparently illegal things like extortion, selling addictive drugs, etc. It's not that people are dumb, it's that other people have incentive to try to get you to do things that are bad for you but good for them, if you have money. If you have shelter that can't be transferred, there's just a lot less incentive to try to abuse you.
Not that money is bad, just if we're trying to run an efficient program that covers basic needs (but not much else), directly providing the things we want to provide is IMO likely to be more efficient than cash transfers and unaccountably hoping that the cash is spent on what the package is aiming to provide.
Straight up giving people money is different from living "on stamps". I know it's fashionable these days to call this "shaming" and I guess it is. My question is, is that a bad thing?
If I wasn't shamed/bullied/pestered into being a proper citizen I don't think I'd become one. Maybe I'm just an inferior breed or something, but my guess is this is true for a lot of folks.
The problem with this is that these are all limited resources. That's the whole reason we invented money: to control access to limited resources. If you have free housing for everyone, who decides who gets a luxury penthouse apartment, and who lives on a 20 m^2 apartment on the 1st floor? Not everyone can live in the penthouse, and there's not enough room for everyone to have a 300 m^2 apartment without making the city sprawling. Same with food: some food costs a lot more to make than others. Same with healthcare: while arguably everyone should get basic care and emergency care, should we give free plastic surgery to everyone who wants it? Money lets people decide what's more important to them.
Subsistence housing and food is by definition not luxury. No one who receives social housing is getting the penthouse suite. Luxury is still pay to play. The government would just provide modest housing and food. Maybe the food is Soylent. Maybe the housing is a studio apartment or a tiny home.
I agree that these are limited resources, but in theory there should be enough housing and food for everyone to survive, and if there isn't, making it a social responsibility can hopefully catalyze action to change that. The government has a lot more sway in getting more housing built (and in fact, are often responsible for policies that prevent enough housing being built) than someone who can't afford market rent for an unglamorous studio.
If AI gets advanced enough that it can make art better than humans (not just technically superior, but artistically superior, more inspired/innovative etc.), then humans will be truly obsolete and doomed, because AIs will be just as sentient as humans, but more capable.
If AIs don't quite reach this point, but still do all the other drudge-work, humans are going to have a hard time still. Some humans will do great, because they'll be doing things that AIs can't, and working by telling AIs what to do, but not-so-smart humans will find themselves without any purpose in life, and only UBI to keep them from rioting.
A lot of these jobs also make people happy, though. That is why the loss of manufacturing in particular was such a blow to Americans. People love manufacturing – to the point that having small-scale manufacturing facilities in one's garage so that one can keep on manufacturing things on the weekend is a dream of many.
Moreover that it tends to produce better outcomes than the frantic, often brutal thrust of the greater industrial revolution
This is not to condemn labor-saving ingenuity but to advise deep consideration with regard to social and material technologies
Without labour? None. Without human workers? All of them. That said, everything we label the humanities has plenty of runway apart from automation.
Humans only own and consume while robots (functionally, the capital of this economy) provide the labour. Everyone is a founder, but instead of co-founders and employees, you just command a team of AIs and robots. You're still trying to innovate and provide a product, as are others to you. But nobody is selling labour per se.
One, sure, we can expand the hypothetical envelope to infinity. That wasn't the question.
Two, I'm not sure. Human preferences need not be rational. Given the choice, many would choose the flawed work of a human versus the synthesized product of an AGI.
Three, if we have an AGI that can do everything humans can do we've rendered the question irrelevant. There is no "economy" anymore because everything can be centrally measured, produced and dispatched. By the AGI. (Or it can destroy us.) Either way, we return to production and consumption of non-AI work products being purely voluntary.
One, I don't assume this will happen. I was responding to the hypothetical of an AGI and economic model without workers. Two, I outright assume AI will take the job of CEO. Otherwise, we're still selling labour. What we can provide AI, novelly, is our preferences. In that hypothetical world, most people would presumably let their AI(s) manage their capital. The same way many aristocrats couldn't tell you anything about how their estates generated income.
Surely you mean the top 1%, who have the capital to invest into robots?
Whomever we empower. The people left out of the loop would die, suffer in quiet subsistence or be folded into the society. The first two are the "people are pests" solution. You see it in resource-rich countries where the population isn't part of the economic machinery.
The last is precedented; see how ancient Sparta dealt its public allotments of land and slaves. Which way various societies go will depend, in part, on decisions we take today. (Should such a future come to pass, which, again, is predicated on massive leaps in robotics and AI.)
Also, a totally fictional one.
That said, as limited as AI and robotics are today, they are nevertheless already sufficient to be extremely dangerous.
Everything will become dirt cheap.
People will play with robots for things like space travel, habitat restoration etc, but it will be more like a passion job.
There will be no more self important rich founders.
Making someone work a job that could be done cheaper and faster by a robot doesn’t benefit anyone. You’re destroying economic value and wasting the worker’s time.
I always found it weird that outsiders need to dictate what dignity is, since it is an internal state/feeling about own actions.
I’m not against automating high toil (the definition from the Google SRE book) jobs. But people will find dignity in their hobbies if they can’t find it at work. If they can’t find dignity there, they have been failed by society.
I say this as someone who knows he has been directly responsible for eliminating dozens of jobs through automation. Not all the people affected had lives were improved by the job elimination, even if I truly believe our solution made far more peoples lives better and was a win overall.
—- Edits for typos
There’s already value in the human made and hand crafted. Maybe our society just becomes one where we’re left to the retirement of a civilization.
It makes me think of this series: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
Post-scarcity, post capitalism, post everything.
The issue is training humans fast enough to stay one step ahead of the robots and the LLMs.