Comment by jrogers65 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrogers65 | Hacker News Reader

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I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does the demand that people have jobs persist? Surely if there's less work to do then everyone should be working less, not finding new things to do. There's an implicit assumption in our society that everyone must work, even when there is nothing to be done. Productivity is put on a pedestal when it is just a means to an end - undesirable means, at that.

I strongly believe that putting people out of work and allowing them to continue living comfortably will bring hidden benefits. There will be more time to think, reconcile and determine the best path to take as opposed to mindlessly doing as much as possible just to earn enough for bread and shelter.

Bertrand Russell wrote a good essay on this - In Praise Of Idleness: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

As a software developer, someone who will stay employed in the coming years, I'm willing to give up some of my salary so that the newly unemployed can continue to survive and do what they want with their free time. They pay people in our profession more than enough to live well. Unfortunately, I haven't found a decent mechanism to make such a contribution, aside from helping family and friends. There really ought to be one - a voluntary communism, so to say.

The main problem is then you have people that work and envy the ones that don't.

Let's be honest, wouldn't you prefer for someone to just pay you and you could do whatever you wanted? Go skiing, hiking, learn Ember or Haskell? Bu in this scenario, you are working on another CRUD application that will make a few more data entry people redundant which will go skiing, hiking, learn the guitar, and you will be stuck at the office in Java land cursing Hibernate (or whatever framework you hate).

We as people are quite jealous of each other, promoting a society where this would happen as standard either grind it to a halt (those that can work would refuse).

That's a great point. Perhaps one resolution is to take turns working instead. One person goes on the grind for half a year, then the one they were supporting takes over and they get to indulge in life instead. The sense of fairness would remain that way. Only issue is that both people need to be highly skilled (since low skill jobs will be the ones to go). Another approach might be that in every family there will be at least one person who is capable of doing complex technical work - they could support their family and, in turn, their family could take care of some of their immaterial needs. In other words, the giving would be an act of love, not a transaction which is balanced on the books.

I really don't have a good solution for this, have not given it much thought. It's a complex problem. Perhaps the issue is that we are currently locked in this state, as a society, and need to reach a certain threshold before the character of it changes. I'm not quite sure what that looks like or how to get there, but I get the feeling that it is achievable. There must be better ways to live than this. What we have now just isn't good enough.

The disparity between what is paid out for "guaranteed income" (welfare) and what one would get for having any paid position should rise.

Also, if everyone under a certain earnings gets $30000 a year - having a part-time job or a job making $30000 more - makes perfect sense. They are making more than those who don't work and their employers can use them and pay them accordingly.

The real problem right now is that it's a half way system... Minimum wage positions can be a worse deal than going on disability or accepting a generous state's full benefits.

On the other side, employers are supposed to provide a form of welfare to part of their workforce.

Alternately, we could just shit-can Reaganism. (in the US)

We still have an energy and resource problem, and a decaying commons in the US. Raise tax rates back up to what they were before the 1980s, then use that money, NOT to hand out "for doing nothing", but to pay people to do the very real jobs of maintaining physical infrastructure or (and?) doing research and development into things like materials science, nuclear fusion, medicine/biology, etc. Some things, in some periods of time, work better in the public sector, and some in the private sector. Either extreme of saying everything should be private sector, or that the government should own everything, is foolish. Increasing public sector jobs would also spill over into demand for private sector services.

I suppose this sounds a bit Keynesian, but I'm not saying "borrow the money", just that we tried things Reagan's way for a few decades, and it sucked. Live and learn.

I'm not a big fan of "money for nothing", whether it's being on the dole, or just collecting dividends from grandpa's holdings.

Yes, the nature of advancing technology means the particular jobs will change. I think we are still a few decades, if not more, from AI good enough to decide that it can just get rid of all of us and take care of itself :-)

"I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does the demand that people have jobs persist?"

This is a interesting question - and something I have seen brought up on HN before. Some have brought up future policies:

- Guaranteed income (something perhaps like the equivalent of $30000 to everyone) - The end of minimum wage

I surmise that real human potential is actually wasted for the sake of "people having jobs" - whether that is them acting like automatons or going through the motions (example: driving 50 miles to sit at a desk and browse social media).

Finland is in the midst of very seriously debating a "citizen's income", which is a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens[0]. I believe that there are also serious movements in Iceland and Denmark promoting similar guaranteed income initiatives.

0. http://binews.org/2012/04/finland-launch-of-a-basic-income-c...

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