From Poverty to Prosperity: A conversation with Bill Gates [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

From Poverty to Prosperity: A conversation with Bill Gates [pdf]

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111 pointsmikeevans177 comments

To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee or a negative income tax. If we don't need people to work, why should the government bend over backwards and "get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms"?

The whole point of automation is to make less work. But in the immediate past it hasn't meaningfully translated to less work for most people. We're even afraid of it! I think that's a structural issue with society, which we can only really fix with broad changes and a completely different attitude. The broad fetishization of work and the obsession that everyone has to work is really standing in the way of progress.

We have more and more technology. It's time to start taking advantage of it. Unemployment should be a goal, not a menace.

> To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee

Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.

> If we don't need people to work,

This is at the heart of the confusion. There is no "we". Other people do not need the workers. Those workers? They need to work.

> Where will the money come from?

Taxes.

> The math doesn't work.

If automation is really more efficient than employing workers, than letting firms automate instead of employing workers, taxing the firms, and providing goods to the non-workers with the taxes will actually be more efficient than any form of make-work labor-based economy.

> Those workers? They need to work.

They don't need jobs, they need goods and services. To the extent that their labor is an efficient method of production, its socially useful for them to work to get it. To the extent that it is not, however, it is socially costly to require them to do make-work to get it.

>> To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee

>Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.

I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation. This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. I'm not arguing for or against this here.

The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.

>This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something.

Seems reasonable. Also, seems like the exact opposite of what Gates was recommending?

> I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation.

Then he needs to do some math. There are just under 300 million people in the United States, for instance. He doesn't have to give all of them an income. Just tell me which demographic slice, and how much they're being given.

Either it's not "universal", or it's so low it's not income.

> This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something.

Businesses would be asked to shoulder even more of the national revenue at that point. Unless you're suggesting that your $12,000/year universal income should be pissed away right back to the IRS... at which point it's not enough to survive on.

So they're shouldering all of burden of what used to be personal income tax, extra on top of it, and somehow will still have the money to buy the robots that will make it all happen?

The math just doesn't work.

> The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.

How do you intend to extract that extra revenue? Besides, this illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how it will all play out.

The increased productivity will happen simultaneously with a reduced demand (no one can afford to buy the products). We'll get all sorts of fluctuations, but eventually the robot owners realize that they don't need to sell things to remain wealthy. The robots are the perfect slave, and they turn raw materials (which the wealthy own) directly into luxury products. Why sell something for cash, to turn around and use the cash to buy luxury products that you can just have made to order?

This even avoids all sorts of taxes. If you have no income, there is no income tax.

A better way to envision this is to think "soon, the important and rich people won't need you at all". Well, maybe not the audience here at HN, I imagine there are lots of robot software types reading my comment. You guys have a few more decades, I think.

All this is based on the fact the the effectiveness of automation at a given price point is growing.

If I replace 100 employees with a machine that has a TCO of $100k yr and I was paying them each $30k. I am $2900k ahead, should the government require I supply $15k basic income for 30 people I would still be $1640k ahead, not to mention less overhead for HR, recruiting etc.

The real trick is in distributing this burden so the businesses benefiting from the automation are paying it.

The math doesn't work at the moment, but if robots take over the jobs, we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production, and give the money to the people who would have been doing the work, we'd have about the same overall balance of payments as now.

That assumes the robots don't cost a significant fraction of what employees did, but long-term I think that's a good assumption, and shorter-term it just means the people will make less than they did as employees.

> we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production

Those corporations will have less revenue. There won't be many blue-collar types buying new clothes dryers and bigscreen televisions. They can reduce prices to try to increase demand, but there on the wrong side of some sort of reverse Laffer curve.

Assuming no basic income, you're right.

> Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.

This is of course a ridiculous argument when the parameters of the discussion haven't even been established.

For example, we could get rid of all our social services and use the outlays and administrative costs on a basic income (minus the administrative costs of the basic income itself). That might not be a good idea for various reasons, but there's no law of mathematics preventing it.

Get rid of all the welfare. Sure.

But quite a bit of that was paid for through personal income tax. So you're not saving anything there... it will be money you no longer have to pay for universal income with.

When you do the numbers, no matter what you cut, there's not enough to go around. You either make it not universal (in which case what little political support there is evaporates) or you make it so low that it's not enough for someone to live in a cardboard box eating Chinese-melamine-poisoned dogfood.

The math doesn't work. Your taxbase is eroding at a faster rate than your employment.

To make a basic income work you need to change what you are taxing. If the premise is that work is no longer necessary, it no longer makes sense to have a tax system that taxes primarily labor income (both as "income tax" and then again to provide benefits in the form of "payroll tax") most heavily and gives preferential lower rates (as "income tax", and excludes entirely from taxation to support major benefit programs) to capital income. You have to shift your revenue base to focus on taxes on capital income as the primary source of revenue (especially if, in addition to funding basic income, you also want to slow the transition away from employment-as-a-norm -- heavily taxing employment encourages that transition by making employing people expensive for what the employee receives.)

The current tax system is based on the premise of employment-as-a-near-universal norm as much as any other feature of society is.

Have you done the math?

Currently, the total wealth of the US is somewhere around $100 Trillion. If we abandoned income tax for wealth tax (say 10% flat tax), everyone would get a check for ~$30,000 to ~$35,000, a year (2014). This would stimulate GDP growth and thereby increase future national wealth.

The challenge, of course, would be the logistics of taxing wealth over income. But, we'd be reducing the operational cost and size of government significantly, so we could afford the additional logistical costs.

No money is going away. Say I have a factory today, and I have to pay x workers $7/hr. If my factory is big, that's a lot of money.

Now if I replace them all with robots, aside from the upfront and maintenance costs, I don't pay anybody anything. Now, a lot of people are going to say that the owner deserves to pocket the difference because he was innovative or reduced costs or whatever. But either way, notice the factory still makes the same amount of money. It just doesn't have to pay workers anymore.

So now we have a political debate, and you get all these people saying that those workers should just find a new job, and if they don't have the skills they're just lazy, don't deserve handouts, etc. I think it's sad that people think this way, but I'm not going to try to argue it because it's pointless. But if this side wins out, you'll find in the future that our country looks very 3rd world. A large wealth divide, lots of crime, little opportunity for advancement if you're not already wealthy.

So how do you stop that from happening? Well, the factory owner probably deserves something for being innovative, sure. But the people that lost their jobs do too. If we get to the point where the population is a lot larger than the job pool, you basically get to pick basic income or 3rd world. There's really no other option.

You can deny this all you want now - go ahead. If you want to do this, I'm not going to pretend I can convince you otherwise.

One more thing though - people have jobs today not because they inherently need them, it's because some entrepreneur needs to hire people to get things done. No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to, so if we get to the point where most jobs can be automated, then we have a mostly unemployed society. We can decide how we want to handle that, but we can't really stop it from happening.

>> No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to

This.

Every time I hear an organization brag about how many jobs they "create" I can't help but think about how much of an oxymoron that is. Any half-decent business owner wants to get a specific job done at the lowest cost possible -- if it can be done equally well themselves without paying anybody for anything, thats the best possible scenario. Bragging about creating jobs is basically bragging that your costs of production have gotten higher.

It wasn't the factory owner who was innovative.

- Did the factory owner build these labor saving machines? - Did the factory owner design the circuit boards or software powering these machines?

Wage Workers designed and built these machines. The factory owner has a certain skill set. These include administration, accounting, marketing, perhaps economics. But these skills are certainly no more difficult to acquire than those of an engineer or doctor.

The only reason an owner is able to extract so much wealth from his workers is the exploitation of private, productive property. He owns the factory, therefore he owns everything produced in that factory. This is the logic, and I believe we should oppose it.

That math works fine, as we can verify by looking at the numerous prior societies that successfully did this. It's easy to overlook them, because they didn't call their workers "robots". They called them "slaves" or "serfs".

> The math doesn't work.

Sure it does. Just lower your expectations.

The main problem is that a lot of the middle income jobs will disappear or be replaced with low income jobs that won't pay a living wage. At the same time need for highly skilled people will increase and therefore pay for the highly skilled will increase.

The Nordic system falls apart in this situation. The unemployed do not have an incentive to work in a low paying job, if welfare pays the same.

A system where everyone is guaranteed a basic goverment income that isn't affected by your other income incentivises work and produces a more productive system overall.

It's weird, the industrial revolution definitely reduced the amount we work. Two day weekends and forty-hour work weeks were not possible before the rise of machines (and also unions). For some reason we stopped striving to work less once we reached our current state and it's been like that for almost 100 years now.

We are substantially reducing the number of hours we work as a society. Most of the reduction has come as an increase in retirement length (because we're living longer), but some of it has come because people are entering the workforce later (due to post-secondary schooling). Since 2007 there has also been a massive increase in the number of working age people who have dropped out of the work force.

I'm not sure I get your logic. During the last 50-100 years: the population was continuously growing, the percent of employed population was continuously growing (women entered workforce like never before), the retirement age was always growing together with life expectancy. Do you really think all that growth is negated by "some percent of population entered workforce ~4 years later" and "some percent of people got fired since 2007" ? edit: I no longer bet you are an employer.

If you live longer but you retire at the same age or more, there is no reduction of work. It's just longer retirement but nothing even close to "substantially reducing the number of hours we work".

I'm not sure I follow? I get that it would be preferable to reduce the number of hours per day worked, but a drop in total hours as a fraction of a lifetime is still a good accomplishment so long as some of that extra time is healthy time.

Don't mix absolute hours of work with the ratio of hours of work relative to hours of retirement. The parent comment tried to argue that the former is decreasing because the latter is decreasing which is false. You point that the latter is decreasing and say "at least somenthing is decreasing, yay" but that is not relevant for what I and the parent comment argues about.

In Australia, a later retirement age is to be phased in. It will go from 65 to 70 by 2035.

Living longer and working longer.

According to the Social Security Administration, life expectancy at 65 in 1940 was another 12.7 years for the average man. In 1990 it was 15.3.[1]

This makes me skeptical of arguments that boil down to "but retirement is longer" - sure, but not by a whole lot. Women got a little bit better of a bump - five years.

Additionally, life expectancy is correlated with wealth, and life expectancy trends in the US are not positive among all groups.

[1] http://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html

> It's weird, the industrial revolution definitely reduced the amount we work. Two day weekends and forty-hour work weeks were not possible before the rise of machines (and also unions).

Actually, long year-round work weeks generally weren't possible before the industrial revolution; the industrial revolution made them possible, which was among the problems facing the concentrated industrial labor force that led to the rise of unions, which then led to limited working hours.

And lots of work used to be seasonal.

That men always worked more then today's men is a common misconception. The Industrial Revolution 80 hour week was a local (if not global) peak in the time series.

Unfortunately data is sketchy, but there are accounts of 9 hour workdays and dust till dawn workdays with breaks. In contrast at 80+ hours of work you would not even see the sun. In the winter more so to a point that it is true even without weekends and breaks.

Further reading: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...

I tell you why "we" stopped striving to work less. The industrial revolution and the productivity it brought with it, allowed more people to get richer faster than ever before and that is a good thing but this led to a snowball effect: more and more people than ever were and are professionally chasing the richness and the surplus of wealth that is generated by the increase in productivity, innovation or work hours is directed predominantly to this class of people and they have no incentive to slow down the rhythm of economy. No matter how much you work or how much more productive you get, there will always be someone to pocket the surplus.

"The broad fetishization of work and the obsession that everyone has to work is really standing in the way of progress."

nailed it!

Unfortunately, we don't really have more and more technology. Business owners do, and they're just going to use it to earn more money for themselves and their shareholders. That's just how capitalism tends to operate.

I'm going to come right out and say that at some point, maybe we should re-evaluate communism. Of course it's going to need a massive rebranding, and we'll need to figure out how to prevent all the recurring themes of corruption and "making people disappear".

My colleague highly recommends Capital in the Twenty-First Century [1], which I'm looking forward to reading.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Pi...

Wouldn't increasing the progressivity of taxation improve redistribution without removing the efficient incentives that capitalism provides?

One of the many problems which this idea has is that it redistributes money away from people who are good at investing in growth, and gives it to people who are likely to spend on consumption goods.

...which is fine, really, because spending on consumption goods is the basis of the modern economy anyway. Giving money to the poor is one of the most effective ways to give money to the rich, and has the nice side effect of feeding a few mouths along the way.

Money invested in growth has different economic effects from money invested in consumption goods; the former is likely to be spent on capital goods, and thereby increase production and reduce prices in the future, whereas the latter is likely to be spent on raw materials and labor (or possibly just driving up prices), with fewer long-term benefits.

Your ignoring the most profitable use of capital which is bribes. Current tax laws are vary focused around letting rich people keep there money but there is little evidence US growth is particularly capital constrained. Overall economic growth tracks vary closely to population growth long term Per capita economic growth tending to hover around 1%.

Economics 101 is a vary limited model of how real world economy's work. In the real world ultra rich people tend to cause a lot of long term economic harm because there goals tend to be vary different from most people.

PS: Bill Gates sending aid money to developing areas may be a 'good' thing but it's not investing in the way your thinking.

Large corporations (such as those listed on the stock market) are not capital constrained, but the small, new and potential companies which are most important to growth are highly capital constrained.[1][2]

Some have argued that it is good that rich people often get their way, because the alternative is far worse.[3]

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/the-30-y...

[2] http://www.nber.org/digest/feb11/w16300.html

[3] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/why_is_democrac....

Small companies may be capital constrained, but the constraints come from friction more than from limitations on capital supply. If DD on the proposal for Joe's Diner is going to cost more than the pre-DD profit expectation, it doesn't matter how much capital is in the pool, Joe won't be getting funded.

There's a nifty way around this: if Joe self-funds, he need not worry about his own principal agent problem. What kind of economies encourage self-funding? Those that provide employment opportunities sufficient for the purposes of saving and serving as a safety-net. NOT economies that systematically de-leverage the bulk of the working population.

Past performance does not equate to future growth.

Why don't we teach more people to be better 'investors in growth'?

This is because at some point ( like ... about now ) consumption becomes the bottleneck* for production.

*actually becomes the bottleneck for the transfer function between consumers and producers we call markets...

No it doesn't. People like to receive a benefit for the work that they do. When a person works and produces a surplus and it is stolen to give to people who produce nothing, it has a tendency to reduce their future output. This is the reason that communist states have a tendency to hold guns to the heads of their people and MAKE them produce for the government.

Possibly, but the internationalization of capital has made this much harder.

Throw in that governments have lousy track records at actual redistribution... it's much harder than it looks. You have to have government-levels of instrumentation of the processes, and that's expensive. This isn't just governments, either - public charities can run into this problem as well.

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"

With communism, wealth is redistributed and centrally controlled by the government (or governments). I can't even trust my government will put my money to good use now.

It will also have a negative effect on innovation and technology. Some of the greatest technologies we have today is a result of fierce competition in the marketplace.

I run my own business now (it took many years of working for many terrible bosses and managers). I have many freedoms. Why would I want to take away the chance for anyone to ever have the chance to also achieve this freedom?

The answer is to invest more in education and bring more people to a level where they can make a living. Not to completely destroy the current system and bring everyone down to nothing.

I hope I'm not still around ever see this happen.

just because you benefited from the current system doesn't mean that everyone else can or even wants to. (just playing devils advocate).

Things are going to change very soon. I've yet to meet anyone in a currently stable industry that I couldn't replace with a robot in the next 20-30 years.

Hell, programming has gotten SO tremendously easy now that _almost_ anyone can do it. We're quickly approaching an age where learning how to code is the equivalent of knowing how to read.

So once we've automated everything. and everyone knows how to program things. Where do we go?

Sure, you can teach just about anyone to perform simple programming tasks but that doesn't mean they possess the knowledge, experience, and problem solving ability to actually be a competent programmer.

The thing you're forgetting is that development involves a lot of abstract thinking and years of understanding how "A" fits into "B". People with basic knowledge of a programming language can bang out easily conceptualized tasks like plotting their car's monthly gas mileage but ask them to write a simple Twitter clone and you're likely to receive blank stares. A seasoned developer could knock that out in an afternoon though (not at real Twitter scale of course!) because they have years of experience knowing how dozens of loosely-related systems and libraries can be assembled to create the bigger picture.

Saying that knowing how to "code" means anyone can create anything is like saying that anyone can paint the Mona Lisa given a canvas, paint, and a six week bootcamp session.

You spend your time fixing bugs. You can teach that but it takes up to decades.

And for the record I'm absolutely with you on not being able to trust the current establishments with my money.

We can easily change that with computers and diplomatic voting... and much MUCH better transparency.

> The answer is to invest more in education

Suppose that you could snap your fingers and give every person in the United States a college education. Not just a degree, but the knowledge that comes with a degree (a high-quality degree for the sake of argument). What do you think would happen?

1. Employers would use the increased leverage to play members of the new labor force off one another until none of them were earning more than minimum wage, if that. By "employers" I mean to include venture capitalists because supply and demand still applies in VCistan -- a flood of entrepreneurs fleeing a crummy labor market means that VCs have all the leverage and can impose similarly crummy terms.

2. Enough new positions would appear (either through companies growing their staff or through investment in new companies) that everyone could earn a decent salary.

I'm 90% sure the answer is #1 and that your "solution" would have the effect of "bringing everyone down to nothing."

The supply of labor is fixed (everyone needs to eat) but the demand for it is not (and lower every day in aggregate). It's that simple. The game is rigged. In low-growth sectors of the economy, capital concentrates no matter how educated the players are (see: non-CS, non-petrol engineers). Just because we can run fast enough to win a slice in our sector (which is high-growth right now but won't be forever) doesn't mean that teaching others how to run fast is a strategy that leads to asymptotic success in the limit of teaching everyone how to run.

You don't have to implement a communist system to shut down the mechanism that rigs the game. BI/MI will suffice. So would some kind of total-employment system. But I see no reason to believe that the supply/demand gap for "average" labor would close for any realistic definition of "average" in a "free" market (I put scare quotes around "free" because Maslow's hierarchy ensures that no BI/MI-less market system is ever "free"). If it somehow did happen it would certainly go against the historical trend. Do you have a narrative to explain why the post-educational-revolution employment landscape would be fundamentally different from today or is it all wishful thinking?

More people would be able to create their own economies, create their own businesses.

Yes, but would the growth in new businesses suffice to absorb the deluge of educated labor? I strongly suspect that it would not, which would make the proposition a big win for those looking to purchase labor and a huge loss for those looking to sell labor.

With communism, wealth is redistributed and centrally controlled by the government (or governments). I can't even trust my government will put my money to good use now.

What? No! Communism doesn't even have a state, let alone a powerful central government.

[citation needed]

This differs from all the existing and previous Communist states. You can't just "no true Scotsman" your way round the problems of government under communism.

Most states which were controlled by a communist party did not see themselves as communist states, but rather as socialist states on the way to communism. (State) socialism was/is seen as a form of bootstraping mode to communism but communism itself is mostly state-less in marxist theories.

That does not preclude the fact that once there is a elite that runs the socialist state, they will put every resource, big and small, available to them to the task of perpetuating "bootstrap mode" forever.

Meanwhile, intellectuals who dream about the next coming of Communist Paradise on Earth will do nothing. Dreaming is cheap after all.

Citing examples of Communist states is a bit disingenuous when we're talking about Communism which is stateless by definition.

This time we'll kill the right people... :)

Be careful with your terms there, communism and associated structures are rife with problems, ideal in theory only and all but impossible to implement using real-life humans.

I think we should start by re-evaluating capitalism (at some point in the next 500 years or so when we run out of steam on the current system), and then see what needs fixing rather than to throw caution to the wind and have a re-run of the 20th century.

Communism per se is badly, badly broken. Piketty seems to be drawing to trying to get the genie of international capital back into the bottle. I doubt that's do-able.

Megan McArdle has, I think, a fine treatise on how the globalization of capital killed off the equilibrium that made even organized labor possible: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/e023c820e0110130a0d758...

In the world described by JK Galbraith's "Modern Industrial State", organized labor sorta made sense. Now? Not so much.

Hayek and Milton Friedman ( generally considered economists of the Right, although that has problems ) have both espoused a basic income/negative tax. That's quite distinct from Communism.

The fixation on working more and more is much weaker outside America.

See France passing a law banning company emails outside work hours, and European countries passing laws about shorter work weeks.

Here in Northern Canada, working the least amount possible to have the lifestyle you want is the norm, not the exception.

France never passed such a law... But we did pass a 35 hour work-week law though.

True enough, but there was an accord signed with the unions substantially limiting the use of email after hours, which I imagine the OP wax referring to.

Yes, I think we should have a basic income guarantee, but that only solves the problem of persistent hunger and homelessness.

In order to provide a dignified living for a large number of people, wage earners need to take over decision-making in production.

Under the current organization, automation and "labor-saving" means more profit for the owners while the mass of people struggle with unemployment, poor education and poverty.

If workers made decisions about their own workplaces, labor saving could actually mean less labor without a reduction in wages. Or the surplus profit could be directed to benefits like higher education for the workers.

The classic union model has been successful to a point, but has often suppressed by police violence or legal machinations. While I support unions wholeheartedly, I also think new organizations should be started on a democratic, cooperative model. That way the problems of equity are solved upfront, rather than trying to expropriate powerful elites after they've gathered up the profit.

As the power of cooperative enterprises grow, workers will be in a position to directly antagonize traditional businesses. Some means include consumer boycotts, workers refusing to work for anti-democratic organizations, and pressuring the state for favorable legislation.

This is a long struggle, but I think the alternative is roughly what Gates described: Meager wages, extraordinary unemployment, and Oligarchy.

The GBI can solve more than that, I believe. A nice property of a system that has both that and a high level of socio-cultural development (i.e., lots of art, music, sports, etc.) is that it can free people to participate in an "arts, sports, and leisure" society. People will play games - cheap ones, and lots of them. We do this now, and has Cowen has pointed us, the western world is excellent at developing an endless supply of cheap entertainment. We'll likely do a whole lot more of that. How many people would play WoW or such 12+ hours a day at 15/month if they didn't have to work, and had all the basics taken care of? A lot, most likely.

Other things we'll probably be looking at will be extremely powerful, long-lasting, side-effect-free (or tolerable-side effect-having) drugs. That road of course leads to wireheading, but I think that collectively denying that as a possibility now is extremely naive.

Another nice property (especially if you throw in things like a real universal health care system) is that the "sharing economy " jobs go from looking borderline exploitative to perfectly acceptable, along with all other kinds of freelance and part time work.

With the GBI obviating the need for a minimum wage, people who are marginal in the current system wage-wise would simply be able to opt out, which would likely bring the wages of those jobs up as it would be much harder to find people to do them. This would also apply to jobs up the wage chain; all the econo-dreams about "perfect labor fluidity" (sans perfect mobility) would be possible. Job sucks? Quit. Go elsewhere. Can't find another? Sit around and study new things, then go get a new job. Or don't. All possible with a (properly indexed and region-specific/cost-of-living-adjusted) GBI.

It'd be a different kind of freedom than we're used to in the US, but one that would be much more appropriate given the way things are going.

That utopian world sounds very Brave New World dystopian.

Of course having something is better than nothing, but part of me feels like people wasting their life away chasing simple pleasures like games and recreational drugs is dehumanizing in a way. Is that really what we should aspire to?

The larger question is: what do you aspire to when the world just keeps going on its own every day (so you're not needed for that) and the Big Accomplishments in fields like science are getting ticked off the checklists as quickly as skilled people can organize to get through them (so there's no guarantee you'll have some Important Task waiting for you).

If we want to talk Huxley, his answer was: when all else is done, time for spiritual enlightenment.

I like the Buddhist perspective, that we should all try to reduce suffering for everyone in the world.

I support unions, but i think they need to be in the model used in sweden:one union for blue collar worker, one for white collar workers , which leads to distribution of power among all employees(and far greater negotiation power) .

This is far better than the union per company , because some unions get rich and powerful , and abusive , while other suffer.

Most unions in the US are associated with their particular trade, not a particular company, as far as I know. There is SEIU for service employees, UAW for auto workers, USW for steel workers, etc. In addition to these, there are federated organizational bodies such as the AFL-CIO and Change To Win which determine certain union strategies/positions.

I don't understand why you draw a distinction between "white collar" and "blue collar" labor. All wage labor is fundamentally about an individual or small board of directors dictating the terms of production for everyone else. The Board then makes all the decisions about what to do with the output of that production, and what to do with the profits which come from selling those outputs. Under the current economy, workers have no right to make any of those decisions, which are critical to their lives.

Wage workers should not be divided as 'blue collar' and 'white collar'. Instead, they should be united against this system of wage work. Their interests are the same: shorter hours, a better standard of living, and more personal autonomy.

The elephant in this argument is that "work" means many different things to many different people. Some people actually do like their jobs and don't feel that "working" 40 or 80 or 100 hours means anything good or bad to them.

As an adult, I do feel more accomplished now, but definitely not as fulfilled (and in turn, not as happy) with my career. This is not because I lack recognition, pay, or a cool project - but because day in and day out I’m forced by society to meander with the horrible details of doing business (“going to work”) that what I actually like to do, solving tough problems via technology, is so buried underneath it all that it makes it feel that most of the effort of my life and career has been based mostly around non-sense. There have been golden nuggets of experience and wisdom to cherish here and there, yes, but mostly it’s all been non-sense.

In essence, working is not the problem – but what and how we do it is what is broken.

I’ve always believed this is a problem that needs to be broken down into its more immediate and solvable root causes: monotony, disinterest (lack of learning or doing), no autonomy (middle management can and should be automated by machines), time and money lost commuting, etc.

Everything about modern-day work life violates all the aspects of human nature we all instinctively hold dear. But what do you expect from a system born out of the industrial revolution? It’s like we moved on to being a service-based economy, where the machines handle all the dirty work, but we never thought of evolving the workday and educational systems that support it.

A new world requires new ideas, not old shoehorned ones that keep proving time and time again how broken society is. Minimum wage, for example.

I believe people should only do in life what they actually want to do, not what they have to do because of money and quality of life issues. Humanity needs to be outside enjoying the abstract universe that surrounds us. Non-sense?

Maybe, but striving for ideals and perfection is also in our nature.

Unemployment is a goal for lots of people. Many people save money in order not to have to work in the future.

So the problem is about what to do with people who are unable to save money and thus need a job. The basic income idea seems to assume that those people should be assisted and given the capital they were unable to buy by themselves.

It's not much a different issue than with current unemployment and welfare programs. Only the scale is different.

The incentive structure and social dynamics are also different.

But we've (ab)used labor as a trade good for income. We have an entire ... "geometry" built on that "axiom".

If we don't replace wages as a social mechanism, then it's Arnold Kling's interpretation of Vickies and Thetes of "The Diamond Age".

This is breaking down, and people like Charles Murray write (frequently perceived-to-be) incendiary texts that lay a perceived more general breakdown in society at this breakdown's feet.

And in hiring, we see a lot of employers who don't have to hire well using personal preference instead of predicted employee effectiveness. Got tats? No job for you. Buy birth control? Not on my health plan. No BSCS? No thanks.

Murray at least gets the arrow of causation right here; some people who hold to a fear of rising barbarism think the decline begins with the population and employers are simply forced into this. They think we were okay when iron discipline reigned. I think many employers have a massive narcissism problem. But what else do you expect in a world where "social" means "selfies?"

I'm trying to automate industrial processes in a ... price-dynamic industry , and it's really bleak. You have actual Luddites out there. And, frankly, corporations seem to enjoy encouraging this.

I'm an industrial automation engineer.

Everyone from middle-managers up to CEOs think that robots are these magical things that just take care of everything so you can fire all your line workers. Doesn't work that way. It's incremental, methodical and excruciatingly slow work. You cannot simply throw money at it. It's expensive because it requires many experienced automation engineers ($$$) to do all this automation, but first you have to find and train those engineers.

What is automation exactly? It's learning a process so well that you know every single possible thing that might go wrong with a machine and then have some other machine to fix all those things automatically on the fly. Building self-diagnosing and self-repairing machines is very complex. The end goal of all those machines is to produce and ship a product. If the product changes, now you have to build a machine that can automate the process of on-the-fly SKU changes which further complicates an already complex machine.

In other words, automation is basically the flying car that futurists of a century ago predicted we would have today. So, where is my flying car?

In a hundred years automation will definitely have made massive strides, yes. Some jobs can be automated today, some tomorrow, but the numbers we're talking about are not significant compared to the entire workforce of a nation and compared to the massive capital investment it takes to accomplish that automation. A century from now the CEO's of the world will still be asking, "Where are the autonomous robots I was promised that can automate my entire workforce?" It's not as simple as they think.

From what I've heard, automation is actually, really on-the-way. I've forgotten the exact conversation and this is certainly hearsay, but a friend of mine was describing a conversation with a upper level person (VP, CxO or board member) and was hearing about how 2014 was the year Starbucks would start to get rid of the "barristas". [Yeah, they used to be icons of Starbucks...]

>then have some other machine to fix all those things automatically >on the fly. Building self-diagnosing and self-repairing machines is very complex.

So only do the first part of the automation: automate the garbage collection truck and have the truck pull over when it's sick... That captures 95% of the value; we can leave self-repairing for later.

>So, where is my flying car?

1) waiting on a suitable power source; 2) waiting on automated driving. It'll probably still be waiting on (1) and not (2) in 10 years.

The thing about automation as it regards to economics is that it doesn't have to be anywhere near a complete solution to have a huge impact. You don't need factories full of fully self-sustained robots to cause massive underemployment.

If you can partially automate a task to the point where 1 person can do the work that 2 people used to do, you've potentially eliminated 50% of that job's market. People are somewhat adaptable, so some amount of this sort of change can be absorbed (and has historically been absorbed) as people retrain for other types of jobs, but we're quickly approaching a point where the changes brought upon by automation are going to outpace people's ability to adapt to the changes, IMO.

Absolutely true. I think when people say that robots are going to replace low-skilled workers only the uninformed are imagining an entirely self-sufficient factory that only has one door that the raw materials goes into, and another door that the product comes out of.

What we really should be imagining is a factory floor where instead of 50 people on an assembly line, or instead of 20 waitstaff at a restaurant, you only need one or two guys who know how to replace parts on the robots

If it takes 50 automation engineers to figure out how to automate a factory... once they figure this out, it doesn't need to be figured out again. (Not a big problem for them, there's always another problem to solve.)

But not only is the entire factory out of work... all factories doing the same task are.

If someone perfects a shelf-stocker, it doesn't matter that they needed the help of 1500 engineers... at that point, all grocery stores need far fewer employees. So does Walmart and Target. Even those crappy little stores hanging on by a thread... if they can scrape together the $50,000 for a robot, that's what they'll do.

These things only have to be figured out once.

It'd take 50 automation engineers a year to figure out how to automate a single step in a factory... just in time for the product redesign that may make the step irrelevant.

These things may have to be redesigned from scratch every time a product is updated. iPhones don't have all of their screws, screens or cables in the same spot from revision-to-revision.

You can only automate product development when things barely change.

> It'd take 50 automation engineers a year to figure out how to automate a single step in a factory..

Higher levels of abstraction make the process easier. What was nearly impossible to automate 10 years ago has become nearly commonplace today. The pace of this abstraction is only increasing as the availability of robotics increases.

I doubt that but like everything else better tools will make this process more efficient...

I've seen SMD pick-and-place robots at work that would make you believe you're living in a science fiction novel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRu02F6AOmg

For example. There are faster ones but with this one you can still follow the action. (est. about 8000 cph, 20K cph is available right now and is too fast to follow directly, you'd need to videotape it and then slow down the movie, it places 6 parts per second, when you look at one up close it looks like parts simply appear on the board out of nowhere). Not all that long ago that work would have been done by a small army of people, and that board would have been 10 times the size. Automation works iteratively, after enough steps it becomes worth it to design to the tooling rather than the other way around. So at some point your phone won't have screws or cables, and the screen will be sandwiched right on top of the board if that's the most economical. Cables are a source of unreliability anyway and screws are made for dis-assembly whereas the trend is to concentrate on the assembly phase with dis-assembly (and repair) becoming ever more difficult.

Reballing BGA's is so much fun.

PCB creation has been extremely automated for a long time now. Between pick-and-place (around since the 1980s) and reflow soldering (auto-magic soldering), its safe to say that PCBs have been automated for the last 30 years at very least.

So yes, its impressive that modern pick-and-place is so fast, but really, it was a solved problem that has only become "more solved" as the years have passed.

In contrast, actual _assembly_ work is still very human based. The iPhone is famous for this. There are exceptions of course (the Sony Walkman was famous for being a purely automatic design from start to finish... the Tesla Car is mostly automated IIRC as well). But the typical products of the modern person (iPhones and Ford Cars) are still largely assembled in human assembly lines.

I appreciate the realism you bring forth.

Nonetheless, I don't think people are talking about lights-out levels of automation (which exists, but is horribly complex for reasons you've mentioned).

Realistically, we're looking at robots that are going to take over a ton of jobs. The new-fangled example is the Fully Automated Cow Milking Machine, which will be the bane of milkers everywhere within the next few years.

http://www.lely.com/en/milking/robotic-milkingsystem/astrona...

Sure, its a $200,000+ piece of equipment, but costs are going to drop and it will eventually become commonplace in farms.

Similarly, lawyers have already lost a ton of money to automation. Creating a company no longer requires consulting with a lawyer... instead you can purchase a 1-2-3 piece set from a website.

http://www.legalzoom.com/additional-business-services/s-corp...

I think you may be discounting non-linearities in the progress of automation due to machine learning and AI; assuming AI makes massive strides in 100 years (which seems almost certain), there may be very very little (if anything) that humans can do better (or more cost effectively) than intelligent machines.

In virtual space that is more meaningful than in physical space. Manufacturing automation relies on fixtures, tooling, and material movement. Having been a industrial engineer in a variety of industries, I can think of only a small handful of products that would lend themselves to full automation, and even those would require enormous upfront capital costs.

I appreciate your point, but I think you're wrong, given a sufficiently powerful AI -- one that is truly more intelligent than a human, which is a real possibility in the next 100 years.

The smarter-than-human AI would be better than us at everything, including designing, controlling, repairing, programming, etc., a general-purpose humanoid robot

here is your not-so-cheap flying car that is probably not available yet: http://www.gizmag.com/flying-jet-car/32287/

First of all: you don't have to automate the entire workforce in order to have devastating unemployment, inequality and poverty. Every automated job means one fewer job on the market and one more unemployed person competing with everyone else for a job. You don't need self-diagnosing and self-repairing machines to wipe out entire classes of jobs. Retail, fast food and delivery/freight are huge examples of job categories that are coming perilously close to total automation.

Secondly: automation, like blackhat hackers, never gets less sophisticated. When a problem is solved by automation it stays solved. The sum total of the capability of all automation in the world increases monotonically over time. Human capability, on the other hand, tends not to increase at all.

Here is a link to the actual video of the talk:

http://www.aei.org/events/2014/03/13/from-poverty-to-prosper...

And the transcript:

http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transc...

I think this might be considerably more enriching than a link to yahoo news that got it from bgr that got it from businessinsider that reported on the talk.

Thanks for the links, hopefully dang will change the story link :)

The Yahoo article reads like it was yanked from the Onion

The point in the video when he talks about labor and automation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qYS9l...

Thank you for posting these!

Reading the transcript, Gates is really talking about a very similar concept to what the "helicopter" reference Ben Bernanke made talks about - maintaining demand and levels of consumption.

The idea of a universal income has been widely discussed on HN in the past. Gates is simply proposing to start rolling this out via a larger earned income credit, while funding it via a progressive consumption tax.

It's less controversial than the universal income, but personally, I'm not sure that creating useless work just to make sure consumption is propped up makes sense. If we are reaching the end of scarcity in basic needs, it seems to be more efficient to provide a baseline and then let people truly compete for the extra-ordinary lifestyle.

"I'm not sure that creating useless work just to make sure consumption is propped up makes sense.".

That's not what was suggested. What Gates suggested is to move away from income tax, in order to encourage employment. The employment would still be useful, it would just be less costly due to reduced income tax. His mention of robots replacing jobs is part of that argument, to balance out areas where the economics of jobs vs automation may tip in the future.

He suggested a progressive consumption tax as a replacement, but I'm not sure how to make a consumption tax progressive in a practical way, except to exempt basic foods for example.

Interesting point. Not exactly how I read it, but this makes sense as well.

For the progressive consumption tax, to make it really meaningful and fair, you have to have very reliable data on what price range for given type of good is excessive. Alternatively, you could just tax classes of goods, such as luxury cars, etc.

The one problem with such a tax is that it enables people to save a lot more instead of spending it. If the money sits in the banking system, it at least does some work, but if the saving happens in the form of physical goods of perceived high value (such as gold or jewelry), it doesn't actually help the economy beyond the initial purchase.

That said, I would love to not have to pay income tax :)

We changed the url to this from [1], which was indeed "a link to yahoo news that got it from bgr that got it from businessinsider that reported on the talk". Thanks for both the original link and brilliant description.

Submitters: HN has a strong preference in favor of original sources and also a strong preference against blogspam, or whatever you call [1]. Please do your due diligence before posting. We'll all appreciate it.

1. http://news.yahoo.com/bill-gates-yes-robots-really-jobs-1804...

"Business Insider reports that Gates gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, DC this week and said that both governments and businesses need to start preparing for a future where lots of people will be put out of work by software and robots."

We already have. It's called the 8.5h day where you're simply present in your office, paid to be off the street, employed by the state, browsing facebook and doing mundane jobs once in a while.

It's funny that they pick out the part where Bill Gates says we shouldn't have a minimum wage, but skip the parts where he says we should have a basic income and a progressive consumption tax.

That sounds interesting. Do you have a source about him supporting basic income?

The closest I found in the transcript of the talk was this piece:

MR. BROOKS: So something like a guaranteed minimum income for people who are working full time through an expansion on the EITC or a wage subsidy seems like the right way to go.

MR. GATES: Yeah, one of my favorite AEI papers – I didn’t get time to look it up last night

Source: http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transc...

Edit: after re-reading it, I think this has nothing to do with basic income since it's for people who are working full time.

Right, he seems to be saying that instead of a minimum wage that corporations have to pay, there should instead be something that looks like a minimum wage to employees, but where employers can pay as little as they like and the government will make up the difference between that and the minimum, but if you don't have an "employer" or they don't certify that you've "worked" sufficient hours, you don't get the subsidy, either.

So, like a basic income, except that you have to swear fealty to an employer to get it. I see one of two possibilities:

(1) Either the restrictions on qualifying employment are tight enough that it serves as a subsidy for select existing operations and a competitive disadvantage to new business with smaller scale (because of compliance costs) or new models (because of regulatory assumptions), or (2) The restrictions on qualifying employment are so loose that this is basically unconditional basic income with a whole lot more administrative costs and failure modes that exist just to satisfy the desire to create an illusion that it has something to do with "work".

Pages 16-17 of the transcript PDF linked by wcarss above has something similar. He didn't say "basic income", but it's relatively close.

On page 17 of this transcript of the interview, he states that he supports a guaranteed minimum income for people working full-time.

http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transc...

edit: I got that link from wcarss.

That's a glaring error of selection. Because with basic income, the idea of removing the minimum wage makes complete sense. Without it, what he says sounds completely insane.

Gates has never supported a basic income.

He and Buffett both however support increasing the earned income tax credit instead of raising minimum wage.

I find it quite amusing that it is described as earned income, when basically they are just living on invested money producing more money at this stage. (Not saying that founding Microsoft isn't an achievement, just that the I don't think that the disproportional wealth at the top can ever be described as earned).

Looking forward to mass automation. Free up a lot of time and hopefully we'll create better things instead of doing mindless chores.

Predictions about mass automations are at opposite sides of the spectrum. Either most of the population is poor without a job, or it's a utopia where no one has to work (everything is provided) and concentrate on bettering ourselves.

I don't see how Gates' recommendations do anything to push us toward the latter.

"This means eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also scrapping the minimum wage so that businesses will feel comfortable employing people at dirt-cheap wages instead of outsourcing their jobs to an iPad."

That kind of sounds like a bunch of broke people on the bottom end. They might be able to save their jobs if they take much less than minimum wage which isn't a livable wage to start with. I'm all for a utopian future where people can spend time doing things they are good at or love instead of working but that will require a major change in the mindset of the people (especially in the US). Right now there is an anti-welfare movement and they say the alternative is to get a job. There aren't enough jobs for everyone and there will be less jobs and more people in the future.

It has the potential to be good for humanity. All the most dangerous/degrading jobs accomplished by robots. Allow people shorter work days and allow people to do "less essential" jobs. More artists, more psychotherapists, more people building affordable housing, more nannies and helpers, people working on just improving life for everyone else out there.

But then, unrestrained capitalism isn't compatible with this. The way it's been going in America for the past 40 years, productivity has gone up but salaries have gone down relative to inflation and work hours have stayed the same or gone up. Many people need 2-3 minimum wage jobs just to feed the kids and pay the rent, no free time. The rich, the corporations, are trying to milk the people for all that they're worth, to try and maintain the elite at absolutely insane levels of wealth.

The predictable outcome, in the next few decades, is that we'll get worse jobs, higher rents, smaller apartments, more cost increases on food and electricity, longer work hours. The middle class will keep getting squeezed until things reach some kind of breaking point. The rich will have to provide the rest of us with enough distraction and a minimum level of comfort required to prevent famine, disease, civil war, and revolution from happening.

We could have some kind of utopia, we have the technology, but the wealthiest capitalist are too near-sighted, it seems, to understand that it would be in everyone's best interest to make sure that everyone is comfortable and safe. Rampant poverty, hunger and crime aren't going to make their lives better. Being some rich elite living in a world filled with miserable, diseased, violent and uneducated masses doesn't sound all that fun.

Assuming that we aren't living in a Culturesque post scarcity society how do you allocate stuff if economic output is no longer important? I don't think that there is an easy solution to this, but my gut feeling is that the world is going to get a whole lot uglier if we don't figure it out.

The problem is that the worker who is going to be out of a job doesn't own the company that buys the robots to replace him/her. Ever heard of a lights out factory that has all the former assembly line workers at home with full salary? Didn't think so. What Gates is describing will only make those that have the money stronger.

I do not predict a utopia.

People in the bottom 50% survive because they are an economically valuable resource - the elite can profit off of them from labor and taxes, while giving them barely enough money to purchase food and shelter to survive.

Once people are entirely useless, and machines can do everything better and cheaper, there will be economic pressure to purchase and/or take any assets the poor folks might have (to create more machines), and to let them waste away and starve.

Revolution will be out of the question, because machines fight your wars for you.

But hey, once all the poor people die off, the average life expectancy and GDP per capita figures will be way up!

His recommendations seem ridiculous. Why force employment when it offers no real return except keeping an anachronistic standard of 40 hr/week employment?

I am likewise confused by this, I would think that something like universal income would be the logical response to this but removing minimum wage just seems like a way for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. I'm just a developer so I don't know if removing the minimum wage would be good for the economy in fact IIRC raising the minimum wage helps the economy (Again I am not an economist). Could someone smarter in these areas expand on this?

For the same reason we in America force people to buy private health insurance rather than having a national health service, which all the evidence suggests would be both more cost-effective and provide an overall better quality of service: it allows The System to adapt to changing times without anybody having to admit that anything has actually changed.

People fear change -- a lot. So proposals that start with "first, admit that sweeping change is necessary" tend to get less support than do those that let the old forms be preserved, even if they've become completely meaningless.

A centralized system could (on paper) be cheaper, but I don't trust the federal government not to screw it up. I'm not even saying I like the current system - or the pre-ACA system either - but I am not convinced that our government is corruption-free enough to be any good at handling that much money.

Is the US government so much worse than governments of other countries which have nationalized healthcare? Why would you trust them to run the biggest military in the world, including a large military healthcare system, if they are that incompetent?

If you haven't heard, the VA (Veterans Affairs) is in the middle of a huge scandal involving gross inefficiency and bad care. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7800979

Do I trust them with the biggest military? All other issues aside, in terms of not wasting money, I think it's awful.

> we in America force people to buy private health insurance rather than having a national health service, which all the evidence suggests would be both more cost-effective and provide an overall better quality

You lost me at the 'evidence suggests' but. Cost effectiveness of the private system has been clearly debunked. Quality is questionable too but harder to measure comprehensively, and I know in some areas is good.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-american-health-care-s...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...

I agree - He is right that robots will take over jobs, but it is ridiculous to suggest that we should go backwards and beg employers to choose humans over robots. Instead, automation will bring about a new standard of wealth and living - people won't have to focus on the "boring" jobs anymore. This has already happened with farming - the US used to be 50 percent farmers, now it is less than 2 percent. With enough automation, food and housing could be "free" - at least for the basic standard of living (I'm not preaching communism). The real problem will be how to control population growth once food and housing are taken for granted. At least, thats the only feasible solution I see moving forward, I have no idea how else you would cater to "unskilled" workers without moving backwards.

I'd argue that - to some extent - "work" in the traditional, contemporary sense is good for people.

Now it's 4:30 EST so maybe I'll get downvoted for this, but I do think the idea of getting up at a prescribed time and doing a prescribed thing ostensibly for the benefit of something helps keep us satiated in some odd aspect of humanity.

What I feel like will happen is the very nature of work will change - obviously it will be a long time before robots can self-innovate, so we'll have some period wherein it will still be our responsibility to think "next step" (even if we're not thinking it).

The problem, of course, is not everyone is qualified to contribute to that end - what happens to those people in the relatively short timespan I can't say. They won't be in a position to enjoy some sort of universal acceptance of leisure as the way we spend our time.

>"Why force employment when it offers no real return "

That's a reductionist [1] way to look at it. But I believe the bottom line is that a high unemployment rate is harmful to everyone and hence there is an incentive to try to avoid that situation. A high unemployment rate decreases the sales, it would impact negatively the prices (hurting the middle class) and even the rich 1% of the population would prefer to have more people with money that buy goods.

His recommendations are not a solution either since the big government model is not sustainable (and I would argue that communist regimes are an example of that).

There is an open question about if anybody can be trained to execute properly any task (i.e to write programs) but in any case the low income jobs are going to require more skills for sure. I suspect that software development is going to the low wage job of tomorrow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

If he thinks accountants and the like will be put out of jobs, he's not taking into account the power of unions and luddites.

Here in Uruguay we have a lot of jobs that could be replaced by today's tech, which will probably last for decades due to unions pushing for inefficiency (and they introduce incredible bureaucracy and friction).

For example, to buy and sell a car in my country, you need an "escribano" (closest US equivalent is notary), a specialized lawyer that has to "witness" and certify that you actually own the good being sold, with a staggering amount of paperwork, which is only legal if it's affixed with the proper amount of seals and signatures, and the paperwork itself costs more than an used car in the U.S. :P .

There are lots of incredibly useless paperwork, one of my former teachers was put in charge of the IT department of the Judiciary Branch, and he was thwarted at every corner by unions and obsolete laws, he was unable to automate anythign and ended up resigning.

The real estate agents' experience is also very bad, I've had some that actually removed value, I hope something puts them out of work soon.

Commercial pilots might be a concern, but I worry about truck and bus drivers... those have very powerful unions - see in Argentina where the most powerful lobby is the truck drivers' union led by Hugo Moyano, same here in Uruguay, some truck drivers make the same money as a software developer (at least the same or better than I do).

>Here in Uruguay we have a lot of jobs that could be replaced by today's tech, which will probably last for decades due to unions pushing for inefficiency (and they introduce incredible bureaucracy and friction).

Yeah, same for those people wanting jobs to feed their families...

If you didn't understand the gist of what Jobs said, here it is: new jobs WONT replace the majority of the old automated jobs. People would literally have NO jobs.

*Gates

Damn, yes! I typo-ed it by focusing on "jobs"!

If we really do get to the point where society doesn't need low skilled workers we ought to start giving out a guaranteed minimum income. If we don't care about the potential disemployment effect the case for it becomes a lot stronger.

I kind of agree, but providing a poverty threshold was probably the worst thing to happen to our welfare system. It's a completely exploitable concept and is much less equitable than other (perhaps more invasive) quality standards.

Does the fact that it is exploitable make it bad? What is worst? Having N people living off society, half of them without having the need to; or let N/2 starve?

> much less equitable than other (perhaps more invasive) quality standards.

Such as?

I saw a post in the past that suggested a minimum income where the amount of assistance reduce as you got paid more. So if the minimum was $40k a year and you made $20k working some job you'd get $20k in subsidies. This help give some incentive to people to get jobs. In some cases if you stay on welfare you'll make more money than if you get a minimum wage job. If you made $60k you'd get no subsidy. We're definitely going to have to change the model we have now once we get to a point where a large number of people don't need to work. I'd say we're close to that now. If everyone in the US wanted to work would we have enough jobs to support that?

This still has a flaw that it makes low wage jobs pretty unappealing. Why work fulltime for 50k a year when you can make 40k without working? Or even worse, who would ever work fulltime for 40k a year? Perhaps this means that there won't be low wage jobs, but this seems somewhat odd, as the taxation structure would be strange (need to tax enough for basic income, but companies would need to be paying probably 60k or greater on any job just to get someone to fill it).

Better to give a guaranteed income to everyone, and then let wages get as low as they want. The upside is that it changes the incentives so that work that is necessary (but undesirable) becomes more highly compensated, whereas work that is desirable becomes less compensated (and/or working for free becomes something that isn't just the domain of the wealthy).

It probably wasn't dollar per dollar as the other poster suggest but at a certain point there was no assistance.

> I saw a post in the past that suggested a minimum income where the amount of assistance reduce as you got paid more. So if the minimum was $40k a year and you made $20k working some job you'd get $20k in subsidies. This help give some incentive to people to get jobs.

No, a dollar for dollar reduction in benefits for outside income does not "give some incentive to people to get jobs", its gives a disincentive to people to get jobs. Working has a disutility -- otherwise everyone would do it for free -- so if you have a choice of $X from a minimum guarantee with no work or $Y from work and $min((X-Y),0) in subsidies with work -- you have a net disincentive to work for any Y not greater than X by an amount sufficient to account for the disutility of work.

Benefits that reduce with income are how a lot of current programs work (and have worked for some time), which is why various complicated measures to try to combat the disincentives that structure can create have also been built into them (which further increase the administrative costs), and one of the key motivations for unconditional basic income is eliminating the problems that that causes.

I don't think it was exactly dollar per dollar but it was some type of decrease as you made more and stop at a point.

Actually I don't think low paying jobs will be replaced at all, they are actually often fairly difficult to replace.

All those middle class people working in offices though whose jobs in some way exist merely as a way to outsource tasks software isn't good at or can't really do? These jobs are going to be eliminated with better AI etc. pretty much entirely.

If anything software in the 21st century might reproduce the social effects of the industrial revolution. It won't necessarily harm the people who are already poor, it will simply create a lot more of them, shifting power to the people with the means to get a significant stake in the companies that will survive before that happens.

Do you have some examples of low paying jobs you think are hard to replace? There are definitely some service jobs that aren't paid a very high wage, but are in some intangible way preferred to be performed by a human, but they tend to just be the customer facing tip of a business that employs a lot of low wage people behind the scenes as well.

Ie. the person on the till at McD's might last longer than the person who listens for a beep and then raises the burger griller (they don't even flip burgers anymore, they just cook both sides at the same time in a contraption) and moves them to the warming tray, but that's only about 3 people in a 10 person shift.

Oh man, you couldn't be any more wrong. They are already moving kiosks and mobile purchasing into fast food restaurants.

http://www.neowin.net/news/mcdonalds-orders-7000-touchscreen...

This is from 2011, so it doesn't seem like it's going terribly well.

It's difficult to automate the remaining steps in food prep (though it's possible and they are working on it) for a host of reasons. Food prep involves insuring that the food is properly loaded, set at the right temperature. There is a visual inspection of the food itself by the line cooks that probably would still need to be done.

It's cooked on no less than 2 grills, and 3 vats (fries, fish, nuggets are all usually kept separate), an oven, a microwave, bun toaster and pancake grill. That doesn't get into the host of drink machines, salads and non-grill items being made. Now theoretically, you can get rid of the warmers as there won't be a need to queue things (even this is not certain as margins are tight to be wasting money on idle machines just to handle peak hours). Also all of this equipment must be completely cleaned top to bottom -- in particular between the switchover from breakfast to lunch and vice versa. Vats of oil and grease must be dealt with.

Right now, minimum wage employees are pretty cheap compared to design and implementation of machines that can handle the breadth of most fast food restaurants. Most of the work of automation of cooking has been to do the work prior to sending it to the restaurant (precooked fries is one example). Lots of that simply can't be done without seriously sacrificing quality. I realize people think that McDonalds doesn't care, but they know boundaries they can push, and things like precooking meats apparently hasn't taken off much because it makes a terrible product and they lose sales.

It will be a while until you say goodbye to the two (maybe three!) cooks working for 9 or 10 dollars an hour making food. It will happen, but it's more likely to happen first at restaurants that offer a much, much smaller menu than the big fast food restaurants have right now.

I agree with Bill Gates on what will happen.

I disagree very strongly with his solution. Governments begging corporations to employ people doing very little and paying the minimum wage (oh wait, minimum wage gets eliminated...so presumably paying them less than minimum wage)? When have corporations responded to begging? Why is this good for anyone?

Who is going to buy the stuff produced when people are bringing home less than minimum wage huh Bill? You? How many plastic spaghetti strainers do you need in all your many houses? Hmm?

No, the answer is not corporations in full control and paying whatever they wish. That will never work. The system will break down all together. It must stay balanced. The balance can be achieved by corporations and individuals paying their fair share. My opinion is that land/resource taxes are the way to achieve this. Not payroll or corporate taxes which serve to punish innovation and hard work.

Am I the only one thinking that begging business to keep employing people will, if anything, only worsen the social issues caused by this change? Scraping the minimum wage? Cheap labour? Is that what we're developing machines for? Is that civilisational progress? What next?

I hope Bill Gates is as right about this as he was about the "famous"[1] 640KB, but can't we, as a civilisation, think of better solutions? Like e.g. not working and using automated means in order to provide a minimum of food/resources to everyone? Am I dreaming,does this idea seem as unreasonable as a self-driving car did a century ago?

[1]: and possibly apocryphal

I don't think governments will have to beg for anything. The less people businesses employ, the less power they will have. So either they'll employ people or they'll have to put up with whatever solution governments come up with (higher taxes, guaranteed minimum income, etc.). Either way, they'll still need customers, right?

This reminds me of a story about a new Ford factory full of robots. The manager invites the union boss for a guided tour then asks him if he can convince the robots to join the union. The union guy then asks if the manager can get the robots to buy Fords.

Did the manager reply, "Does not compute." to the last question?

I personally enjoy work.

I wouldn't say that what I do from 9-5, M-F defines me as a person, but I enjoy solving problems and exerting myself.

If software 'eats' my job, I'm not going to simply stop working, I am going to learn how to be good at something else. I can't imagine my life without some challenges and struggles.

Quotin Calvin (the Bill Watterson one), work is what someone else makes you do.

And I think that is OK.

I have worked on (other people's) projects, and been pulled into learning/doing something I otherwise would have shied away from.

It doesn't always work out this way, but sometimes having someone else push you out of your comfort zone can be ultimately beneficial.

I think a little bit of wisdom from one of my favorite writers might be appreciated here:

"""We have created a lifestyle that makes injustice permanent and inescapable.

We have created a world where robots produce robots. Where capital breeds capital with very little need for the Eastenders of the world.

Tell me what will happen when the majority of mankind has become technologically superfluous.

At the same time rebellious with hunger and economically unimportant.

What will then stop a final solution of the world problem?

In People of the Abyss the Eastenders already saw it coming.

They are, Jack London wrote, “encumbrances”, of no use to anyone, not even to themselves. “They clutter the earth with their presence and are better out of the way”."""

Taken from http://www.svenlindqvist.net/text_only.asp?cat=1&lang=2&id=2...

I can't recommend People of the Abyss highly enough. Read it for free on Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

"The Day of Judgment! More than he want it. From all the land rises the hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward, from asylum and workhouse—the cry of the people who have not enough to eat. Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind, the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners and paupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have not enough to eat. And this, in face of the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000."

The need for employers in society overstated here. Anyone can buy and sell for a living without being employed, and now with the internet it's even easier to do that.

True, you may not be able to fulfill all of your needs by buying and selling. People who do that usually experience some level of poverty. But it is and always will be an option available to unemployed people.

How many stories are there of people starting at flea markets and yard sales and ending up with investments worth thousands of dollars?

Folks got along fine without corporations and 9 to 5 jobs for many centuries. Individuals and families still became as rich as Gates is, relatively speaking, or even richer. I'm confused that he doesn't seem to know this.

But I think he's mostly right in what he says about automation, and he of all people certainly would know.

What does an economy that deprecates most of humanity look like? What happens when the economy doesn't demand people?

I do not see a future like Star Trek with its Utopian ideal of every person choosing to follow their dream pursuit. Large parts of society already receive no access to opportunity ensuring a lifetime sentence of poverty. When robots prepare meals, drive cars, pave roads, fix power lines, haul cargo, process paperwork, educate students, harvest crops, and enforce peace you may think you have a uniqueness to prosper. Perhaps, and good luck.

> And it’s not just “low-skilled” workers who will have to worry about automation.

If it weren't for some political ideology, automation would be a blessing for every one and not something to worry about.

People fear change. This revolution will require adaption and there will be pain involved, but mass automation will create vast wealth.

Prehistorically we spent our entire lives simply collecting enough food to survive. Since then we've gradually been able to devote a smaller and smaller portion of our lives to fulfilling the requirements of survival. Mass automation will continue to reduce this. There will be growing pains but the trend certainly continues in the right direction.

Who maintains the machines? Who produces the replacement parts and sources the materials for the machines? What happens when the power goes out? So many flaws in the plan of a completely or even almost robot/algorithm based job future I don't know if it'll really happen. We've had automation in the automotive industry for how long now and look at the amount of people required to ensure the process works along the way?

Having said that, I am all for automating things. As a developer, I've seen a dramatic shift in the last 5 years alone with tools for handling tasks and automating things are a dime a doze. Automation definitely has a place, but I think it's too far to suggest that robots will take everyone's jobs, just a few. You're not going to be served coffee from a Starbucks robot barista any time soon.

A future where everyone doesn't have to work sounds nice in theory, in practice it cannot and will not work.

Robots in the car industry have removed very many jobs! Sure, you need people to build, sell, deliver, install, program, operate and maintain those robots but those jobs are still fewer than the numbers of people who ised to be on the production lines.

You still find many people in electronics factories, but surface mount pick and place machines are throwing 30,000 components per hour onto PCBs. These machine shave replaced benches of people stuffing components onto PCBs with one or two people operating the machine.

Barista work is low pay low status. Social interaction is the reason we don't see barista robots in coffee shops, although we do see them beginning to enter supermarkets and roadside service stations. (Often with foul coffee).

And job descriptions change. "Baker" used to mean someone who used recipes to make breads. Now it appears to mean someone who takes presupplied gloop out of the tub, shapes it; and bales it for the time specified.

In another thread a user argued that "technology is what drives society to a more mature state". I wish that was true, but to me technology and society's advancement at social/human level are disconnected.

I really hope that the decline of the average working hours per week in the "western world" becomes a central point of discussion, the next decade. We don't need to work many hours to get the essentials to live a comfortable life.

We have all the technology we need to produce food and shelter at extremely LOW prices.

Of course if someone wants to be Elon Musk ( I wish I was), he should be free to pursue his interests, but average Joe who only wants to support his family and enjoy friends and baseball, should be working a lot less when we will have robots, not feel threatened by unemployment.

I think are more accurate quote would be "Technology is what allows a society to achieve a mature state."

Just like freedom and basic human rights don't necessary make one happy, they do set the conditions to allow happiness to exist. I think technology has a similar "enabling but not guaranteeing" property for various societal metrics.

The challenge, perhaps, is to make sure technology serve the majority, not just further the select few whole control and horde it.

With the full risk of generalization, average Joe also want bigger car,bigger lawn and more bedrooms than average Bob, and that's where the problem arises.

Good point.

Hm, there is Maslow's pyramid that could be seen as a general model[1] along with the human rights[2].

The problem is not the car. The problem (in the US and now in Europe too) is healthcare, food and shelter (own home). These things, given the tech, should come for almost free IMHO, for any individual who lives in a "civilized country".

Of course, there are many problems: illegal immigration[3], health care costs, etc. But technology should be used to do all these things cheaper for the masses, leading to a higher average standard of life.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

"If we don't need people to work, why should the government bend over backwards and "get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms"?"

I respect Bill Gates' ideas but this one is totally wrong. His solution is neither practical nor logical. The same solution could have been presented 100 years ago when people were being laid off due to the industrial revolution. We would not have progressed this far if we had given people's employment priority over power and efficiency of machines. In many cases algorithms are simply better and faster over humans and they are just going to get even better and faster. They will not only get things done safely but also reduce human errors and reduce energy consumption.

Oh look, more asshole libertarian scare tactics. The solution isn't to force people to work shitty jobs for even less pay.

If our productivity is high enough people don't need to work we should provide basic income, not artificially force people to work so they don't starve to death.

> If our productivity

The word "our" is misplaced in this sentence.

The companies that purchase the labor own the productivity of the labor. If their productivity is high enough, they will simply buy less labor.

Do you have anything to sell other than labor?

> we should provide basic income

No matter how you slice it, there's not enough money. You end up being able to give each adult in the US a couple thousand a year. If you try for more, you strangle the economy so effectively that it can't afford the robots that are supposed to pay for everything.

How does giving money to people, no strings attached "strangles the economy"? What do they think they will do with basic income?

They will buy things, which by definition is an economic stimulus.

> The word "our" is misplaced in this sentence. wat.

I don't buy the idea that increased efficiency automatically means lower quality of life. That's a pretty narrow (not to mention twisted) worldview.

> No matter how you slice it, there's not enough money.

A basic living wage would be cheaper than all our other low-efficiency, high overhead social programs with the added bonus of giving the recipients money to put back into the economy. I don't agree that there's not enough money.

On the other hand, making workers so poor that can't afford to actually buy anything is pretty much the worst thing you can do for an economy.

Good. We need to get away from this notion that x hours per day at a job = value.

i say bring on the robots.

I think a useful conversation to have is, "how quickly we can replace politicians with robots?" A political discourse addressing the topic would necessarily acknowledge the radical changes most technology enthousiasts expect to take place in our lifetimes.

The most common response to hearing that a machine can do your job is disbelief (http://kk.org/thetechnium/2011/09/the-7-stages-of/). Fertile ground for dismissing the imminently possible as science fiction.

I wrote a short essay about this the other day -- Robots are taking our jobs, so what... http://softwarebyjoe.com/essays/robots-are-taking-our-jobs-s...

The solution to this problem may be a massive increase in insurance salespeople and HR department employees. And lawyers. Stuff like that.

I can hardly wait.

Pft, I'll get concerned when robots can act as surly, smarmy and as entitled as I can. Until then my job is safe.

we are at least a second time through that - first being the Industrial Revolution - and still at loss what to do and with the same luddites and the same other cast of characters in the show... I guess 3rd time will be a charm... for the AI/robots that will completely replace our species.

Chrome for a past few days was crashing I dunno why, but I know it's pdfs :(

Yes robots have been gradually taking away jobs since the 1970s.

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