Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

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Speaking as a fellow job-displacement-worrier, I don’t think people have answers. But contrary to what a lot of people say, there is a ton of utility in pointing out a problem without having a solution. In this case, I think a lot of people who might have good ideas are currently under the mistaken impression that this isn’t a problem.

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.

I feel like people underrate make work a bit. If you look around at our infrastructure in the us, the number of roads and bridges with flaws, decaying buildings, the lack of housing in areas...

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.

Yup, there's a huge number of entirely physical/analogue ways that "many hands" could make the world a significantly nicer and more sustainable place. Public works, environmental works, having the capacity to do more than the bare minimum for the quality of the built environment - there is no shortage of things worth doing, just things worth doing profitably.

>I feel like people underrate make work a bit.

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'd love to see a modern CCC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

>> Universal Basic Income - Probably the best system I’ve heard anyone propose.

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.

Doesn't that kinda show that these services are not actually based on not creating any genuine value, but are rather just parasites that squeeze as much money from their victims as they can based on the victim's income, rather than the product they can offer?

rent control and/or maintain an oversupply of housing by law

(if you have ubi, you also have less of an incentive of having everybody living in the same overcrowded cities)

A simpler answer would simply be that, if you lay someone off on the basis that an AI can replace their entire job functionality, you have to keep paying their salary dollar for dollar until they find something else to do. 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.

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).

So then the corps find a way to fire you for something other than AI displacement, replace you with AI anyway, and you’re on your own. Basically identical to firing someone in a clever way that avoids having to pay unemployment, which already happens quite frequently.

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.

>I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd.

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.

> A simpler answer would simply be that, if you lay someone off on the basis that an AI can replace their entire job functionality, you have to keep paying their salary dollar for dollar until they find something else to do.

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.

My personal worry about UBI is that it will simply be transferred to landlords. We need to figure out how to solve the housing problem.

there is a 2nd order effect with ubi.

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.

> 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)

The UBI should take number of underage children into account.

If the house turned out to be too much they’d have to sell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

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