To the extent that I’ve heard people propose solutions, many of them have pretty big flaws:
- Retraining - AI will likely swoop in quickly and automate many of the brand new jobs it creates. Also retraining has a bit of a messy history, it was pretty ineffective at stopping the bleeding when large numbers of manufacturing jobs were offshored/automated in the past.
- “Make work” programs - I think these are pretty silly on the face of it, although something like this might be mecessary in the really short term if there’s very sudden massive job loss and we haven’t figured out a solution.
- Universal Basic Income - Probably the best system I’ve heard anyone propose. However there are 3 huge issues: 1 - politically this is a huge no-go at the moment (after watching the massive Covid stimulus happen in 2020 I have a sliver of hope, but not much). 2 - Even a pretty good UBI probably wouldn’t be enough to cushion the landing for people who make a lot right now and have made financial decisions (number of kids, purchasing a house, etc) on the basis of their current salary. 3 - Even if this happens in America (presumably redistributing the wealth accruing to American AI companies) it would leave non-Americans out in the cold, and we currently have no globally powerful institution with the trust and capability to manage a worldwide UBI.
You’d counterbalance that - and solve the other problem - by offering massive tax relief for companies who hire junior employees. In the same way that we use tax relief to encourage real estate and infrastructure investment in underserved areas, we can use it to tip the scales of economic rationality toward continuing to employ young people with no experience or specialized expertise.
Notice that neither of these proposals requires redistribution as such (seizing wealth).
I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.
HN is filled with lots of temporarily depressed millionaires and many actual millionaires too. These are the ones that have bought into zero tax, government is all bad, free market capitalism for me Rand'ian ideas without any systematic thought on how their ideas would work out in practice.
Add to this that a lot of media, and pretty much everything on TV, is owned by billionaires these days that use the news as their platform to propagandize on why they should own more of everything and become richer, so it's not exactly surprising we're at this place.
This just incentivize them to find different official reason for firing. Like missed deadlines (that sudently became shorter) or in computing job code quality (due to reduced deadlines).
> This incentivizes companies to try and figure out creative ways to continue using their existing workforce to maximize the value they get out of AI systems.
This doesnothing for the current issue of job market entry positions, where there is the most pressure from AI. Only help people only in position.
It's clear there's some things out there that aren't economically very profitable to do but would be nice to have done. So public works programs could soak up a lot of that and turn labor power on various stuff pretty easily I think.
I think those are the same people that ignored the history of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal and the massive amount of infrastructure it built in the US that we still use to this day.
I can't understand how that would work. If you put an income floor under everyone, their rents and other basic bills will simply increase to eat the free money. None of the experiments on how people will use UBI have taken that into account since the experiments were on relatively few people in an area. The other issue is how to pay for it - it has to come from taxes somewhere.
(if you have ubi, you also have less of an incentive of having everybody living in the same overcrowded cities)
you have less of an incentive of having everybody in the same overcrowded cities (reducing rent and making ownership easier).
you can also do rent control and/or maintain an oversupply of housing by law.
The UBI should take number of underage children into account.
If the house turned out to be too much they’d have to sell.
That said, in face of a particularly disastrous (and yet predictable) outcome it is not enough to call for solving of such underlying issues; it is vital to solve such underlying issues before we introduce respective technology all over the place—and if that is not possible, make corresponding adjustments of how that technology is rolled out.
As for your idea, I see no signs of their striving for redistributing their wealth.