The Machines Are Coming
nytimes.com
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While there's much to be criticized about such a naive idea, it seems to me sometimes that despite the tremendous productivity gains we have seen since the industrial revolution, it's not the common man who benefits most from technical progress. Of course, it's indisputable that the quality of life has improved dramatically across the board, and we have more spare time in our lives now than previous generations. But society is still such that you need to work 40+ hours every week if you want to be part of the middle-class.
Machines are not freeing men from labor. They're used to create competitive pressure. At the end of the day, the gross benefit goes into the pockets of a few, while the majority are kept in the same dependence structures as always.
To a huge extent, I think we're going to have a problem until we figure out how to address that tension. How do we gainfully employ people, and have their work respected by the rest of society, when we're automating away their jobs in the first place?
That doesn't translate into "people want to work 50 hours week under constant petty pressure from management". Maybe some people feel valuable if they cook a great meal and share it with friends. Maybe a 2h workday is all what is needed to feel valuable.
For a primitive example of the above in action, try to deprive a German shepherd of a working role. Then do the same with a pug and observe the differences in responses.
Only because most others work and a person's value, or perceived value, is largely tied to them working, their work, etc.
The perceived value comes from essentially not relying on others to work to support you while you don't.
If machines were doing the work and trying to make additional money was optional I don't think the vast majority of people would be opting in. Indeed, it could even be seen as a negative trait if you're one of the few chasing money.
I think man might be doomed because of this. We are naturally apocalyptic, and will make sure it comes about one way or another. As a case in point, consider all the sci-fi movies. What's the last movie you've seen that depicted a really great future for mankind?
Star Trek much more so. Post-scarcity, post-currency, where citizens participate in Starfleet not out of need but out of a sense of duty.
For half your life or less, in the west.
People tend to forget that life expectancy has gone up dramatically over the past 100 years whilst the retirement age has been largely left alone. My mother retired recently and she has decades of life left, which will be largely spent as a life of leisure - just as the utopians predicted.
Additionally, the economic pattern in the last century or so has been richness and growth followed by a recession in which the workforce participation rate drops permanently. After the recession, there are always fewer people in work than before. So over time fewer and fewer people are working, and more and more people are being supported by welfare programs. Although they may feel their life is hard, a Victorian would undoubtably see their life as one of utopian leisure (they have entertainment on demand, in the UK free and great healthcare, can travel easily etc).
As society gets richer, the number of people in retirement or studying or living on welfare will steadily increase until one day we wake up and realise that most people don't work, or don't work very much, or don't work for very long, or who pass in and out of work as they wish. It won't be a big bang one day we're in utopia sort of thing, it'll just be a gradual recognition that the percentage of people who work and who are supporting other people who spend the bulk of their life in university+welfare+retirement has got really low.
Due to the economic downturns of recent decades and some poor decisions, both my parents, and at least a half dozen other 50-60+ people I know will never be retiring because they have no personal retirement funds left, due to having spent them all due to cost of living increases, job insecurity, medical expenses (hahaha USA) forcing them to consume their IRAs, where both had 15+ year single-position careers, but got 401Ks instead of pensions.
Its only going to get worse for newer generations.
> studying or living on welfare will steadily increase
But thats not what is happening. It is an outlier and a corruption of the current political paradigms (again, US) to be able to break out of wage slavery. Social Security Disability is, if anything, a necessary evil for the rich and powerful to somehow avoid 40%+ unemployment overnight. But it is a horribly broken and wrong system to have. Same with all the other benefits programs. In reality many people are working 2+ dead end jobs, and cannot retire at all, almost exclusively due to a lack of connections or social wit to get on welfare programs or into cushy jobs.
We should have a UBI, one that is tied to the real growth of automation and technological efficiency, that can start however low it needs to be (look at the Alaskan oil dividend) and as we automate more (and thus put more and more means of production ownership in fewer and fewer hands) the benefits can actually uplift society.
Good luck ever passing that, even in the most socialist European countries like Sweden. There is just too much profit in keeping 90% of the first world population on a downward spiral of insecurity and desperation.
For the last few decades we have been making up for job loss due to automation by creating ever larger bureaucracies. Consider how much paperwork is now involved in healthcare compared to 50 years ago. While we might be able to continue this foolishness for some time (after all, what's 100,000 pages of tax code compared to 100,000,000?) we only hurt ourselves as a whole by doing so.
Thats how it works today it's just conditional rather than unconditional and a lot of those money are being given to corporations as tax deductions and subsides not to those who actually need it.
Same amount to everyone unconditional. Thats basically a large part of what the bureaucracy normally spend their time on. Further more it will always be beneficial to work since it's unconditional.
Where will this income come from? Who will determine it? Who will distribute it? How will it be regulated? What if other nations don't do the same? How does that impact immigration policy? What will be done to address current outstanding national debts? Income tax is the US's primary tax revenue source. How will this account for cost of living (e.g., NY vs WV)? Do we need a basic rent, too? Who will determine that cost of living?
The questions go on.
On the whole, this sounds like just a more comfortable form of serfdom.
Largely where it already comes from. The U.S. currently spends around $1 trillion on welfare at the combined state and federal level.
> Who will determine it?
It should be pegged. I believe the best marker is minimum wage. BI can be pegged to a part-time job (between 16 and 20 hours) at minimum wage.
> Who will distribute it? How will it be regulated?
I have given this a great deal of thought. I believe jurisdiction of the program might be best suite to the Federal Reserve in partnership with the Treasury Department. Every citizen would become a common stake holder (1 stock per person) in the FED, entitling them to the monthly "dividend".
> What if other nations don't do the same?
That's their problem. But I imagine some will follow suit.
> How does that impact immigration policy?
It needs to be fixed, of course. Just as it needs to be fixed presently. This won't effect that much b/c illegal immigrants are not citizens and therefore will not receive BI.
> What will be done to address current outstanding national debts?
That's a good question regardless. It's already well known that we can never pay the debt off. Dylan Ratigan argued there is no other solution but debt restructuring. Of course our system is now based on debt, so paying it off would actually kill our economy in its current form. Short of redesigning our economy altogether we just need to keep the debt within a tolerable growth path. (Unfortunately too much money is getting tied up in finance... but I digress.)
> How will this account for cost of living (e.g., NY vs WV)?
It must not account for this at all. That's already a problem with cost of living raises, which only worsen the wealth divisions.
> Do we need a basic rent, too?
No
> Who will determine that cost of living?
Already asked in "Who will determine it?"
It's really not a "comfortable form of serfdom". It is actually very much a capitalistic idea. Think of the economy as an engine and there are various adjustments we can make to improve its performance. BI is just another one of those adjustments. Understandably it didn't seem like an adjustment worth messing with in the hay days of industrialism. But with accelerating automation, it's going to prove essential to the future.
Truly, we do not know exactly how much we could save by implementing a UBI, and then realizing we can dismantle the tax hell at all levels to account for the economic freedom it provides. Suddenly price fixing corn syrup to make cheap junk food to fit on food stamps matters less when you can peg individual base income to the entire economies prosperity - ie, the redirected effort keeping coin syrup cheap could be put to whatever naturally more productive use the economy would normally move it towards, and the growth benefits just boost the UBI.
Not to mention that once 50% are on this any politician can win by promising to raise BI, but so can his opponent, which translate to the both of them have to keep promising to raise it indefinitely. Are you prepared to require a net contribution of taxes as a means to get the vote?
A proper BI system will be, at least partially, self-balancing and should have some guards against endless fiddling.
May be we'll finally become OK with some of the people to live on welfare checks? It's not "slacking" when the humanity just doesn't really need your input.
Parts of Europe strike me as the ones most likely to lead the charge (the Swiss had an actual vote on Basic Income just recently) and many existing benefit systems (welfare systems) come fairly close to a ad-hoc de-facto basic income.
Assuming the basic income is sufficient to cover basic needs, I'd be quite happy (as long as I could afford a reasonable computer and internet) to just write open source software for the rest of my life.
The only reason I write any proprietary software is to pay the bills with that incentive removed I'd program just as much.
If machines become better at basic research than humans, then we have achieved one of the key features of Banks' Culture. That's a feature, not a bug.
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."
After that, he lived just enough to see the physics giving birth to modern chemistry and electronics.
This is an example of a highly important and interesting problem that is limited by computational ability, among other things. Knowing some physical constants is important but the macro problem is still hard.
For those of you who haven't read Ian M. Banks "The Culture" series, The Culture is a space-habitating multi-species confederation that has long ago made true general AI, concurred all ageing and illness and now mostly spend their time exploring the universe and trying to improve other civilisations, without too much meddling. Anything at all we can do to become them is a Good Thing.
At that point we just found The Culture and start to build space-ships.
Here's another great piece on that problem: https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba...
What I would hope is that with machines covering the necessities we see a huge surge in the arts, education, and craft.
A perfect example is the craft beer movement (tap rooms are popping up everywhere by people who enjoy their craft - and it is glorious!). It's generating quite a bit of money too.
You don't get the check for doing nothing. You get the check for doing whatever you want. Most people would find that very satisfying.
Either you pay unconditionally, or you hire and pay for specific work.
I was not speaking in absolutes. Of course there are exceptions. All I was saying is that it provides some incentive...
Not only that, but you are applying today's economics to a dramatically different situation in which basic needs are met by machines. I don't think that works.
I'm sure there are plenty of people with an interest in helping people out in similar ways that aren't willing to put up with the low pay.
A paycheck is more than just a paycheck; it's also an estimate of the value of service to others. I feel it's reasonably important to have some mechanism to steer activities by. This is difficult; it's easy to get trapped in careerism.
What I am seeing more and more is that the technology can get in the way. Corporate IT just seems to get worse year by year.
In old stories it used to be called Utopia when people didn't work and robots did everything. Now we call it Unemployment and make it a bad thing. This will have to change.
It will have to change.
Then there's the possibility we just haven't happened on the right reciepe to keep people working. It's a huge shift in the basic assumptions of economics, one of which is "not every thing can get done."
No, because of fairness. Some people will have to keep working while others can have holidays? Those who work will forever be paid more than non-working ones.
One of the biggest illusions of how we humans see ourselves is to think that our function as humans that make us valuable on the job market.
Yet we mostly use just a small subset of our abilities to perform jobs even the intellectual ones.
And so the irony is that a Radiologist spending a decade getting educated and makes 300K a year is more likely to be loosing their job than a cleaning lady.
https://plot.ly/~BethS/8/job-growth-by-decade-in-the-united-...
Its shows something else than the claim that technology replaces the jobs that are lost due to technology.
And even more specific numbers
http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/d...
Shows how production output and employment is separating.
What have been clowding this reality is in fact the cost of products and globalization which made it look like job growth would be steady in the west and then spread to the rest of the world.
The reality is that job growth have been declining decady by decade and even worse so. The jobs that are left are either very very well paid but few or grossly underpaid (but still priced logically compared to it's relative value.
"The ludite fallacy" is in fact itself a fallacy.
How many cars are still occupied as serious transportation means in the West? We are simply a higher level animal than the horse but also our skills can be replaced.
Hardware and software continues to evolve, we don't.
I'd imagine this technology having the potential to enable many people to perhaps start businesses much more easily or cheaply. Is it possible to imagine every single human being a self employed business? Could the economy work that way?
This is the dark side of making products cheaper for consumers. It will always require consolidation to keep having a margin while the products more and more accessible.
There are a couple of friction points with regards to technology and that is dependence on local workforce and industries where people are always looking for a better solution and in areas without any benefits for automation.
But there is no need for more than one taxi company once the cars become self-driving.
What leads you to that conclusion? I'm not saying you are wrong (who knows) but I'm curious how you reached it.
I can't decide whether the transition is likely to be evolutionary or revolutionary, I think a lot of it will come down to how it's handled over the period.
- power is extremely centralized in our Western society and the mechanisms of conservation are much more sound than in the past, because...
- ...the "masses" are generally richer, therefore less prone to really feel a urge to overthrow the current setting. We all have much more to lose, if you want, than the people that took part in revolutions in the past.
- ideologies strong enough to bypass the previous reasons are basically dead
The only sudden transition could come from a planetary war or global-level event (even natural disaster), but the tipping point of our current equilibrium, in my opinion, is much harder to reach today, thanks to technology, global communications, the role of the Media and the intertwined financial interests of all nations.
I'm sorry, but WHAT? Loyalty towards brands is at an all time high. People want personal treatment. Also, we live in a service-based economy, not a product-based one. This makes carving out a niche for yourself even easier.
There are thousands of advertising agencies but only a handful owners of those. There are millions of products but only a few owners like Proctor&Gamle, Johnsons & Johnson etc. This trend of consolidation will continue.
Your comment about advertising agencies is very ignorant. You have no idea what you're talking about there. This leads me to believe you just like to talk nonsense on the internet. That's why I'm stopping the conversation here.
The one and only mention of "free markets" in the book occurs in a description of protectionist restrictions on trade imposed by manufacturers of finished goods -- ensuring no competing imports of foreign products but a cheap supply of raw materials.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341055 for similar discussion.
His claim is that there weren't any new job types after industrialization. The number of new job types is irrelevant. The change was in percentage of the population doing knowledge work vs. manual labor.
It will shift just the same way now. Yeah, we won't magically think of new types of jobs. We will just shift from knowledge to creativity and improving service level like in education and healthcare, for example. A teacher on every 5 kids? Yes, please!
I think it's going to take a clear "line in the sand" event for anyone to actually figure out how to solve this issue.
Discussion is important, but really, this is starting to be repetitious. I can trace back my first posts on this topic, back when I was doing those long form investigative reports, back to 2012 on reddit, and 2013 here.
And the worst part is we now have a literal library of highly qualified writing and video about the topic, and all were doing is reposting links to this stuff every time someone brings up regurgitated complaints...
Maybe HN should just sticky "yadda yadda, UBI fixes economy, blah blah startups".
Normally I wouldn't care but if we stay the current course we may just have a chance of bootstrapping The Federation/The Culture in my lifetime, but if the UBI gets implemented that will permanently destroy the economy and we will die, just a few meters from the finish line.
The siren song of the hype machine is very tempting. But it would be comforting to know that there's some substance to the implication of this article before we start taking baseball bats to technology. There are several compelling social, economic and historical reasons to believe that people will continue creating jobs for other people, for as long as humans exist.
Here is an example of the former http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administr...
But why do we still work as much as we do?
I have mixed feelings about it.
The careers I most hope are replaced soon are politicians. I'm pretty sure my coffee maker currently has the capability to do at least a good a job as Ted Cruz.