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Atlas Smug | Alex Payne | Jacobin

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42 pointsAmadKamali31 comments

A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907535.

Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"

The answer is that everyone is going to own different robots. The whole point is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that could create enough economic production for his whole life.

There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks.

I used to worry about robots a lot more, but I don't really anymore. The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things.

The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI. I can't predict its motivations.

Edit: You guys fundamentally don't get it because you don't understand that I'm arguing about economics.

> This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.

People are going to, at the very least, own their own means of production. Look at it from an economics standpoint, at the margin, why would I buy a chair rather than get my semi-intelligent android robot to cut down a tree, plank it, and build it. The chair would have to be essentially free. Then who cares who owns the means to production. At the margin I could always revert to having my personal robot build it.

Furthermore, I would argue that most of the computers that make most of the value in the world are owned largely by everybody. I have a computer that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on, and it will be the same with robots. People with vision will direct machines of greater sophistication towards and end they desire.

Whether you own something or rent it is always going to be a economic decision. I own my Macbook Pro and I installed Ubuntu on it, but even if I was renting it, that doesn't change the fundamental nature of what I'm saying.

I used to think that we were marching towards this awful grey future where 99.9% of people were going to be treated like cattle and ultra-corps were going to be running the world with all their machines. Most people talk like this is what's coming, and, barring AI, I no long think this is the case.

Edit2: I wrote my first edit when I had negative points, now it seems to have positive points, which is why I opened up the edit with "you guys don't get it".

> Who is going to own the computers?

Most of the computational power I have access to, I rent from Amazon...

There are literally hundreds of alternatives sprouting from the ground as raw materials and services become cheaper and cheaper. Amazon certainly hasn't monopolised on the computational power market.

Increasingly, much of the computational power is becoming decentralised anyway with the blockchain emerging in new and creative ways

Amazon isn't the only game in town, but I would argue that most computational power, like any means of production, is owned by Capital.

Yes, it's a paid service, because they used their initiative, knowledge and finance to physically build their data centers. If that's what you are referring to by 'owned by Capital'

I think if you put finance at the top of the list, we'd be in agreement.

>Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"

You can manipulate bits and bytes at home, great, but these robots are industrial producers that make things, are subject to regulations, etc. This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.

The funny thing is that your answer is antiquated. What computer do I really own? My android phone that is controlled by google, managed by a telecom carrier, and all of my data at google. Or all the servers I work with that are VM's at some cloud provider? We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.

> We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.

This is why I like Plex instead of Netflix. Netflix has more movies after all, for a subscription.

> Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"

An iPhone is a good example of a computer. Did you see this paragraph:

"I paid for my iPhone in full, but Apple owns the software that runs on it, the patents on the hardware inside it, and the exclusive right to the marketplace of applications for it. If I want to participate in their marketplace, Apple can arbitrarily reject my application, extract whatever cut of my sales they see fit, and change the terms whenever they like."

This seems like a moot compliant. You can always buy a rootable android phone, or a Firefox phone.

This is like complaining that your newspaper already has ink on it stating someone else's opinion. If you want it to be blank, buy a pad from an art store.

> You can always buy a rootable android phone, or a Firefox phone.

The relevant party is not "you," it's the typical consumer. They can't just buy a rootable phone and root it because they don't know what it would gain them. The opportunity to exploit this (very understandable and reasonable) gap in their knowledge falls, as it always seems to, with the people who own the means of production.

> This is like complaining that your newspaper already has ink on it stating someone else's opinion.

No, it's like saying that the fact that Rupert Murdoch has veto power over all stories with a national audience might have a negative impact on political discourse.

> If you want it to be blank, buy a pad from an art store.

Have you not heard of the concept "barrier to entry" or are you being disingenuous?

Ah, so this has nothing to do with owning your own phone, and everything to do with being given access to an audience.

It seems to me that I'm not the one who's being disingenuous.

That's exactly what I meant to say -- I don't understand what you think is disingenuous about my post.

Should I expect everyone to be handed an audience on a silver platter? No, that's silly. What I do wish for is that competition is siloed so that leverage in one industry can't be used to arbitrarily dominate another. An actual implementation of such anti-trust policy might be a ban on discriminating against alternative app-stores. This is a very pro-market, pro-competition stance. It's not, as you seem to believe, some form of audience-communism (how would that even work)?

The original point being debated is the idea that you don't 'own your own phone', and the answer is that nobody is preventing you from owning your own phone, and such phones are available, but we also have the option to choose a phone where someone else controls the software if we think that gives us a better experience.

What you are proposing is government intervention to take that right away from people - to limit their choices.

We currently have multiple different options with different levels of corporate control, and the most popular operating system currently allows alternative app stores to be installed.

Your position is to limit the allowable contracts between both consumers and device makers and is strictly anti-market. Since the proposed remedy is already enjoyed by the majority of consumers, there is absolutely no justification for such a position.

...and sell the applications you write to whom? And how?

Whoever else values an open device, and through your own store, just like the way most desktop software is sold.

> I used to think that we were marching towards this awful grey future where 99.9% of people were going to be treated like cattle and ultra-corps were going to be running the world with all their machines. ... I no long think this is the case.

Oh absolutely. Instead we'll all have the option of owning any of a wide range of machines that can connect us all to the google and the facebook. So different!

> The answer is that everyone is going to own different robots. The whole point is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that could create enough economic production for his whole life.

> There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks

1) If they live paycheck to paycheck, they aren't going to have the financial resources to drop $6k on a robot. Even the boldest "Basic Income" proponents don't expect to provide more than basic sustenance to survive. Political realities are in line with that being the level of funding it would provide people.

1b) If basic uneducated labor is valueless due to being replaced with robots, many of those people who live paycheck to paycheck are going to move down to being on the dole and can't afford robots as well. Some people will be too old to have the desire to re-learn, some won't have the ability, etc.

2) Land taxes are simultaneously a tax on renters as well as owners since they aren't based on your ability to pay [profitability]. That means they'll be passed on to renters wholesale who in turn will need a higher amount of basic income to support it.

3) Basic Income has to be funded sustainable in a way that doesn't result in it eating its own tail. That probably will be income taxes on capital + payroll which will cause everyone to scream pretty loudly.

I don't see your utopia working with those assumptions.

I would argue that we already have the technological power to create more than enough economic production for every person. So then why aren't people seeing it? Because the economy is not a magical meritocracy. It is run by people; people who don't necessary feel all warm and fuzzy about sharing wealth. Every avenue of trade has gatekeepers encouraged to limit access. Collusion between businesses and corruption in government keep working wages artificially low, and taxes on the poor disproportionally high. Reality and history take issue with your casual assumption that the rich would find it easy to give poor people free money.

The critical flaw in your position is this: Any increase in personal productivity is meaningless as long as those in power can take as much as they want from whomever they want. Until this is solved, technology will never have an effect on the living standards of the average person.

"The whole point is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that could create enough economic production for his whole life."

I don't think economics works that way.

If the robot can "create enough economic production for his whole life" then either the robot will cost as much as the (present value of the) economic production for his whole life, or the cost of everything else will rise until the production capability of the robot is roughly equivalent to 1/Nth of her life. [Edit: Where 1/N is the proportion of 1/50th the cost of a median house to the current economic production of one life.]

"The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things."

That's not how the psychology of power works, either. Or wealth. (You're not "rich", you are "richer than someone else"---wealth is only a goal when it is relative.) The rich don't have power unless there are poor handy to make do stuff. And historically, "just pay the poor people off" is the last option that anyone tries. Consider the French revolution and the 19th and 20th century class wars that resulted in the 40-hour workweek and unionization. (Hiring mercenaries to break strikes is cheaper than paying off poor people.) What's your opinion of unionization? Satisfactory way of balancing economic inequality issues, or economic atherosclerosis?

"The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI."

Actually, that's one thing I'm not particularly concerned about; I am familiar with computational complexity.

"backed on land taxes, ideally"

That is a brilliant idea! The economic value of the property I currently own is essentially nil. So, either my tax burden (such as it is) drops dramatically, or the price of property nearby does, as the skin-of-their-teeth farmers around get taxed out of business. I'd be able to buy my own fiefdom!

The premise of this article is entirely wrong. We haven't had a 'massive deregulation', taxes across the west have rose, as has regulation and centralisation. THAT is why conditions for workers have declined. THAT is why the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer.

Yeah, there may have been some limited de-regulation here and there, but we are no where near an actual free-market situation. For somebody to come along and decry de-regulation as the problem, in this environment, is absolutely absurd.

Exactly! I've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the problem. Well, I can't think of many countries in the world who have a currency not owned by the state, a banking system entirely independent of the state, a country with a real, none-fiat currency, a country with minimum to no forms of tax etc. It just isn't the case, and it's not heading that way by and means either. I'm not sure where people are getting this from

One can simultaneously have a relatively free market in thumbnails and combs and a relatively closed market in currency and assassinations.

Exactly! I've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the problem.

Yeah, it's a symptom of the kind of elitism that modern day "leftish wing" / "liberal" types (as opposed to classical liberals) are infected with, where they believe that if only we'd let them micro-manage every little detail of society, the economy, culture, etc., then we could live in a "perfect" world where everyone is uniformly happ and "none suffer".

The thing is, that's never been possible and I don't think it'll ever be possible... and if it were possible, it's not desirable. "Uniformly happy" also means "uniformly sad" and "uniformly oppressed". None for me, thanks.

Perfectly put! I got down-voted to -6 karma for challenging that attitude, good to see someone who agrees at last.

What baffles me the most if when they refer to what we have now, in the west as a 'free-market'. What we have is the end product of the social-democrat era of conflating big business and big government.

Just because we aren't near a given unprecedented extreme doesn't mean that we can't talk about the effects of movement in that direction.

But we aren't moving in the direction of less regulation. Take a step back and look at the big picture and it's obvious. The size and scope of the State, and the amount of red-tape and regulation, is pretty much always growing in general.

What all these anti free-market people are missing (intentionally or not) is that it makes no sense to watch the State create 20000 pages of regulations, and then yell "de-regulation" when they remove 7 of those pages. Especially when 4 years later they turn around and add another 3377292751 pages of regulation and the cycle repeats itself.

> Take a step back and look at the big picture and it's obvious.

If you think that it's obvious, you clearly don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.

> it makes no sense to watch the State create 20000 pages of regulations, and then yell "de-regulation" when they remove 7 of those pages.

It makes no sense to use number of pages as a proxy for regulation (either for or against). You measure regulation by watching the big players exploit loopholes. The market allows all sorts of well-known varieties of cheating by default. Are the well-known traditional types of cheating still being used effectively?

http://chartingfinancials.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/us-bank-m...

Yep. Therefore they lack appropriate regulations. That's what we mean when we say "deregulation." We don't mean "the number of pages on the law books is decreasing, clearly we must increase it because more pages are better." That's a straw man, and you do everyone (yourself included) a disservice by invoking it.

Reagan and Clinton both presided over massive deregulation efforts across wide ranges of industry, and there is very obvious correlation between those efforts and the economic changes in the last 30 years. The widening of the gap between rich and poor maps very closely with tax reduction policies that disproportionately help the wealthiest and industry deregulation, particularly of the finance industry. The housing crisis of 2008 would not have happened under the regulatory regime of 1988.

And no, correlation is not causation. (The housing crisis of 2008 was not caused by deregulation, and there's a lot of blame to be shared across the political spectrum.) But it's hard not to notice over the long term that when the crazy leftists predict X will happen after a given massive act of deregulation and the sane rational libertarians predict Y, for the last thirty years we've almost always gotten X. And the libertarian response is always, "It's because you just didn't deregulate enough." Well, yes, that's one possible conclusion...

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