Who knows how pervasive that kind of system will become. Will it apply to other industries/mediums? Could Reddit or Hacker News find a way to pay individuals for well regarded content? There are some possibilities here.
But I wonder if that kind of system can really support that many people. Most of the content created sucks, right? Then only a really small number would actually be successful. Maybe you'd have to incentivize sorting through content to find the good stuff a la Steam Greenlight (and find a way to pay users for their work).
Anyways, I'm sure people will find something to do. Even if it's just being paid a basic income for nothing in return. I think peoples' standards of living have been improved by technology (nukes and what not notwithstanding). Why expect that trend to stop now? It's just that, from our relatively medieval point of view, it's hard to imagine what that world will look like so we're naturally scared of it. That's also not to suggest that there won't be serious growing pains while we all collectively try to figure this new world out.
At the top, you have often less than 1% becoming wildly successful, making hundreds of thousands to millions each year.
Below that you have maybe 5-10% who are able to make a living at it, but will not pull any spectacular numbers.
After that, you have everyone else. These are people who's apps are rarely downloaded, who have less than a few thousand views on any video they put up, or actors who are out of work most of the time. These section may pull in some revenue, but not enough to survive on. At best its a side job, at least until their main job goes away.
At the core of all this, is that we don't have enough time to consume all the media that is produced. We often end up letting other curate the content that we consume. Whether it be media companies or friends and family. But it tends to create self reinforcing cycles, driving more attention to the hits and less to everything else.
The idea that "this time it's different" seems so vain to me; like somehow NOW we're able to reliably predict the future of society, when we've proved terrible at doing that for thousands of years.
What an amazing coincidence it would be if we all just happen to be alive at the time when all the surprises were over in human society!
The founding premise of the market economy is that we can't predict the future, so we set up systems to be flexible in the face of changing technologies and cultures. Is that really all over now?
That feels like an extraordinary claim, so I'd want to see extraordinary proof, and I'm not seeing it. Employment is actually on the upswing in the U.S. right now, and there are hiring shortages in "jobs of the future" type fields like programming, data analysis, genetic analysis, engineering, etc.
Employment will change, and our training and education systems need to change too. But I think it's way early to declare the end of specialization and employment.
There's no fundamental law of economics that demands there always be new jobs.
There have been in the past, each wave of disruption created new job categories, even new industrial sectors. But that just means there will be new jobs until there aren't new jobs.
Science fiction authors have no trouble imagining scenarios where there are no new jobs for anyone. If that comes to pass, what then? Presumably the same economic forces that creates such a situation will also have allowed some small percentage of property owners to own the automation that makes everything. Depending on the details, this might not even be a Pyrrhic victory... why would they need your money anymore, if they had fleets of yacht-building automated shipyards and robots that kept the wine cellar stocked? If they can manage the transition from "we still need you to buy our products so I can live in luxury" to "the luxuries are produced in my automated factories directly"...
Then quite bluntly, you're fucked.
> Who knows, perhaps in the future everybody can be an artist
There is the cliche of the starving artist. Even today. And we live in a world which only supports less than 1% artists because that's the ceiling on that occupation. That is mostly the amount of art that the rich want in their lives.
Specialties rely on the idea that only a few do them. One specialty trades its goods and services for those produced by another.
If we all make art, then I could trade my art for yours. But neither of us can eat art.
I think that if "art" is a job that keeps you from starving, it requires a market for buying and selling.
If automation is ubiquitous, it doesn't mean you own it. And if you don't own it, you don't own what it produces.
No yachts for you.
Humans are still monkeys. They won't magically shuck off human nature in time for you have it easy.
And those who most ardently feel differently that everyone should share will use the rhetorical tactics that provoke the opposite of the desired reaction. We already see that with some of the wedge issues.
> but why turn the machine off at all?
Because they can. Because they want to. To prove that they can. To make you get off your mooching ass. To help you by forcing you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. By reinventing racism and pretending that they are another species. For shits and giggles. To usher in the end times. To prevent the end times from ever occurring. To see what will happen. To see if anything will happen. Because they don't care. Because they never noticed.
I could list hundreds of reasons, all of which will be at least partly true.
You'll still starve, even if you die knowing the "whys".
A job means you have something to offer that somebody is willing to pay you for. If nobody needs anything from you (or nobody has money), what job can you get?
While there hasn't always been currency trading hands for goods and services on a regular schedule there have always been people creating value for themselves, their family, their community and, ultimately, the world. Trading currency is just a convenient way to trade on that value. I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved.
That's very reassuring :-)
Left to our own, we will after a while of boredom, just get bored of boredom and create - games, dances, arts, softwares, tools, crafts, houses.
Or put in another way we will continue to satisfy our needs.
We already had, those are so-called 'bullshit jobs' - things that have no value for humanity but has "economical value" because they're part of zero-sum games. But I hope that at some point the society will ask itself the question "why are we all doing this nonsense anyway?" and drop the concept of jobs entirely.
?
While I believe there is plenty of inefficiency for bullshit to live in, I am not sure there is enough to create a whole class of jobs. Do you have some examples of what you mean? I am also not sure how you could say that people creating value are engaged in bullshit...
Almost all of marketing today is zero-sum. Unless you're not coming up with something genuinly new and useful, you're competing for a limited pool of customers - and all the resources you put into it work only to undo the work your competitors do. You can scale marketing expenses ad infinitum for no marginal benefit. Political campaigns work similarly - they all cancel each other out (pg described it in [0]).
Note that this creates a whole lot of dependent industries. Graphic design, "growth hackers", printing houses, people manufacturing ink and paper, all are supported entirely or partially by zero-sum marketing. These can similarly scale up ad infinitum, using up fuel, electricity, time and labour we could put to a better use elsewhere.
Going to disagree there. Marketing and sales can grow a market, not just compete for a limited pool.
But that analysis only holds for a nearly saturated market where everyone has all of the information they need to make a decent decision (think Coke and Pepsi).
For almost everything else marketing is just a type of information flow -- a semi-directed broadcast. This task, getting information where it needs to be, is extremely valuable. Therefore marketing, as inefficient and difficult to measure as it is, creates value.
I think your distaste might come from how inefficient it is, kind of like turning on every light in a neighborhood because one person wants to read at night, but the person selling the book and the person reading the book find enough value in the transaction to more than cover the electricity.
But marketing is not "getting information where it needs to be" anymore. If you let everyone know about your product and this didn't lead to at least some people buying it who otherwise wouldn't, you failed at marketing. This is where you enter the zero-sum game, because you don't want to just inform about your product, you want to influence choice - and so do your competitors.
"The person selling the book and the person reading the book find enough value in the transaction" is a nice theoretical sentiment but I doubt it actually holds in practice. I'm yet to find a single person (except marketers themselves) who appreciates the amount of ads being thrown at them.
> I think your distaste might come from how inefficient it is, kind of like turning on every light in a neighborhood
Yes, this is where part of my distaste comes from - ads are broadcast messages today. This can be limited with e.g. targeted advertising, but it doesn't solve my main issue - that they're zero-sum game, so the inefficiency can increase up to infinity.
And to circle back to the discussion about automation - I suspect that, as people will get automated away from their jobs, you'll see a huge growth of advertising sector - because it's one of the few places that can accomodate unlimited amount of low-skill workers (it doesn't take much of training to make a junior social media marketer; I know from experience - my company's PR department is basically a machine for turning interns into people doing content marketing on Facebook).
I'll say what I always say when this objection is raised: Is the rule that "new jobs will always arise to replace the ones automated" an iron law of nature, or just something that has been happening for a while and will eventually stop happening?
And if it will eventually stop happening, what would the early stages of it stopping look like? Perhaps an economic recovery that doesn't produce as many jobs as expected?
Further reading: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/09/2120134/jobs-automatio...
Why can't everyone be an artist? Because you can only consume so much art. I have a page group that is currently ~45 pages of artists on that website whose galleries I need to review and potentially watch. They total up to around 15k works of art, and that pool just grows, I can never get it under wraps, because it would take me probably a full workweek just to get through half of that.
On that, I'm already following nearly one thousand artists. I get probably 1 - 2 thousand pieces of art every month in my inbox.
A lot of these artists are actually living off their creations. Over time my standards had to rise because there are just so many people drawing. That doesn't even touch the writers on fanfiction.net or the thousands of sites dedicated to hand crafted continuities that are hundreds of thousands of pages long. Nowadays I really only follow people on Deviantart who consistently do beautiful full color ultra high resolution art pieces that would have probably bowled a king over half a milennia ago.
And I'm getting thousands of them a month, for free.
Because a lot of those creators are not living off their creations. They are wasting amazing potential flipping burgers at McDonalds because I don't have the money to fund them all. I've probably spent $100 this year on commissions so far, but I do not have nearly enough income to subsidize the (probably) 800 or so artists I follow who are stuck in bottom feeding jobs to survive.
But that is only bad for the 200 making a living off of it.
You see, the problem with a creative economy (beyond the CGP Grey robots will do it) is that a lot of people are creative, and while very few people are good at it, there are a lot of people. Just on this random website that pales in comparison of scale to premiere web ventures HN talks about all the time (of course most folks on here would love to be as successful as DA) is that you can meet everyones creative needs and desires with significantly fewer than the entirety of the population. Our current economy is satiating our entertainment desires to match whatever amount of money we are socially willing to impart to the business today, and we will only get poorer and less capable to fund entertainers of all forms (artists, writers, animators, comedians, etc) in the future as all our other jobs dry up and we lose all our income.
And then there are all those volunteers.
Today, they live off menial labor jobs. Tomorrow, when the jobs don't exist, they will try to make a living off the creativity when there is nothing left, but it cannot be enough. It is not enough today when wealth inequality is where it is at, it will never be enough tomorrow when it is even more random to find a patron with wealth to fund you - you are basically praying an aristocrat blesses you with prosperity in that world.
But they still give all of it away for free. Fundamentally I'm amazed people even spend money on entertainment at all, because I really do not - I have basically stopped watching film, because I don't see the opportunity cost of moving pictures as being worth it over the millions good of works of art and comics I have not seen yet. Music? There are millions of free tracks that could last me a lifetime on top of the collection I amassed before around 2010 of paid music that would last a lifetime. There are more fantastic free stories told than seconds left in my life to consume them all, and more are made every day.
And this is all in the infancy of the Internet. It has existed as a thing for only about twenty years where creative people could impart entertainment upon us through it. And its adoption grows every year. So the next ten years will not generate 50% more entertainment, it will probably generate magnitudes more, and we already have more than enough for a lifetime.
I mean, look at youtube. 300 hours of video every minute. It only .01% of all youtube content is great, then you are still behind spending this minute reading this sentence than watching that minute of great youtube content.
My point is the cat is out of the bag, and the economics would have never supported the cat in the bag in the first place. Art, music, video, even free (freedom and freeware) games, are all available en masse, at such scale that you cannot ever fathom to consume all we have today. There is no way we can create an economy around creating more of this stuff, because the Internet solves a long run problem that enabled the old world TV and radio industries of yesteryear - seamless persistence. All this data is going to be with us forever, always at our fingertips. No cumbersome recording hardware needed to preserve our entertainment, it is perpetually eternal thanks to the Internet Archive at the least. We can only add more from here on out, but until we achieve immortality we will only have so much any one person can possibly consume. And its not like that person is going to have any money to pay for it, if you have a creative economy, where the status quo is free, and all the other jobs evaporate.
It has a chilling effect on the current generations of artists, because we just don't need what they have to offer.
I'm just saying we can never have a creative economy because we already have a creative economy meeting all our creative demands, and that our ability to demand more creativity will only degrade over time as most people get poorer.
There will always be a market for new art, because not everything possible has been drawn yet, etc. Someone will always want something new, and now there are millions of artists at your fingertips to create it for you. The problem is a lot of them are already creating what they want for free to enjoy, and once you have whatever you want made, you have no more money to be spent on that industry.
That seems to be the business plan of Hollywood these days.
That's classic rock. Any new rock musician is in competition with the best ones of the last half-century. Few will beat the best in the past.
When was the last time someone wrote a new symphony and made money from it?
If it weren't for copyright term extensions, all that would be public domain. In the countries which still have 50-year copyright, it is.
I think UBI could be amazing for that. Take risks and try your dreams and you can always guarantee food and shelter at the end of the day. That would be revolutionary.
We have all these artists today, most of them creating art for arts sake, not for profit, yet many of them are toiling day in and out in banal pointless busywork to survive. You would have more artistic creation in that world, but its still a robot driven economy. Everyone just gets to pursue their dreams, profitable or not.
Guaranteed basic income doesn't necessarily give money to everybody: only at the lowest levels of income, where people already have the lowest levels of consumption. It seems like the increase of consumption at the low end from a basic income could be easily projected, and I suspect the impact on inflation would not be overwhelming. Of course I also think we should have a slightly higher inflation target (say 3%), as well.
A basic income would definitely need to be paired with supply-side policies to reduce poverty, to reduce housing prices for example.
As discussed in the article above and as debated in both right- and left-wing political circles, guaranteed basic income does give the basic income to everybody, either in cash benefits or tax credits [1].
Thus, basic income is unconditional. There is no expensive bureaucracy to decide who gets it and who doesn't get it. And there can be no accusations about "those people" receiving basic income, and the accuser not. Everyone gets it.
That's the beauty of the system.
The article is ambiguous, bringing up the idea as Milton Friedman's support for a negative income tax (which IIRC is a form of GMI).
Sure. But will there always be enough jobs for everyone?
Not necessarily, inflation and the price level are more complicated than that. Creating new money in an economy with no idle capital might create 1-to-1 price level increases, but generally a guaranteed income is funded by progressive taxation. You'd expect some prices to go up and others to go down because the beneficiaries will use money differently, but a funded general income should cause no general inflation.
The worthless paper they issue to help their buddies plunder the nations wealth has to stop and we should look for more alternatives to derive meaning for our lives than working to death just to please those greedy capitalists. Enough is enough!
The recalling of the story of Maria Fernandes death always saddens me that a human being had to sacrifice her life for the capitalists to appropriate her work efforts and give her pennies in return just to keep her alive.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737115/New-Jersey-w...