Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck
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[1] http://www.aarp.org/home-family/personal-technology/info-201...
[2] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/22/is-the-aarp-...
[3] http://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2012/03/19...
The scariest thing I've seen was a Facebook conversation in which no less than a dozen of my classmates, all finance sector employees, were openly mocking an article about the massive disruption self-driving cars will have, as if it were a Jetson's fantasy rather than a one to two year prospect and ten year inevitability. We're in for a massive bumpy disruption. Smart investors stand to make a fortune right now. But a lot of people are going to lose their shirt in the process.
I'd be willing to bet that the combination of the possibility for massive economic value from driverless cars combined with a lack of knowledge around that will lead some people to be irrationally exuberant. Hopefully this does not lead to a bubble.
According to http://www.mtvoters.org/node/356
If you're unable to drive to the polls yourself, you have several options:
You can vote by mail.
You can catch a ride with a friend or neighbor.
You can get a ride from one of numerous organizations and agencies that offer voter transportation. Call your local election office to find out who is providing transportation in your community.
Maximum Homerdrive (S10.E17). First aired March 28, 1999.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Homerdrive
"During the [trucking] trip [from Springfield to Atlanta], Homer falls asleep and wakes up abruptly at the wheel of the truck due to taking a combination of pep pills and sleeping pills that he bought at a general store. He awakes to discover that the truck drove by itself with its Navitron Autodrive system. He informs other truck drivers, who inform him that he cannot let anyone know about the Autodrive system because it would make all truck drivers lose their jobs. However, Homer tells a passing bus about the system which causes an angry mob of truckers to get in a showdown with Homer, and he survives without the autodrive system. Homer and Bart arrive in Atlanta to finish the shipment on time, and then commandeer a train full of napalm to Springfield."
"The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace", 1998.
Also, the map on the NPR site is interactive, showing changes over the years. For instance, you can see a lot of states where you probably would have guessed farmer is most common were that way 10 to 20 years ago, but now fewer farmers are needed to grow the same or more food, and so the number of farmers declined.
The question is, is this somehow fixable?
I don't see a way because those categorizations themselves seem arbitrary and you could lump anything somewhat related together while dividing down anything else if you want to show it's "the most common".
edit: grammar
The problem is that a basic income to (say) the 150m people in the civilian labor force x the ~$23k poverty line income would be about $3.4 trillion, which is not far off the entire federal government budget. That's (very roughly) $10,000 worth of redistribution for everyone in the country, which is going to be an incredibly tough sell politically, for reasons that I hope are obvious.
People in general are terrible at doing sensible things to stave off a distant-seeming catastrophe, viz the relatively poor progress on lowering/mitigating/managing the effects of climate change (whether or not you believe it's humanity's fault) or any number of other topics.
I do agree with the writer's conclusion and reasoning, I'm just pessimistic about our ability to manage the accelerating pace of disruption.
There's no need to introduce it all at once. Call it a "Citizen's Dividend" instead of a "Basic Income" and start it at around $30 a week. This can replace a lot of lower welfare payments and, given to everybody - not just workers, would only cost $450 billion or so.
It can also be used to introduce more money into the supply and gives you much finer grained control over inflation, for example. It can slowly be increased up until it becomes enough of a basic income for some people (not everyone would be happy with the same level of income, obviously).
As a concept, it also promotes the idea that you're an active member of society. As your society becomes wealthier, you benefit directly. There are a lot of pluses to the general idea.
This definitely needs to be called the "America Permanent Fund," and be explicitly marketed as a scaled-up Alaska Permanent Fund[0], which is a hilariously popular basic (small) income program that literally no one has opposed ever, no matter what.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Dividends...
How many people have any clue as to where tax revenues come from?
How many understand that other people have to earn that money first?
How many understand that if the people who earn money are burdened with much higher taxes to pay for someone else's BI, a lot of them them will just stop working because fuck that? How would that affect the burden on the remaining earners?
Please just think about it for a while.
No I don't. Frankly, I suspect I understand tax and spending a fair bit better than you do, probably because we've spent the past 2 years talking about it in Scotland due to the independence referendum (and the following talks on full fiscal autonomy).
> How many people have any clue as to where tax revenues come from?
Just about every grown adult on the planet? Who do you think pays taxes?
> How many understand that other people have to earn that money first?
Well, that's just plain wrong. You're conflating money and wealth. They're different things. Money is just created to reflect wealth: it's literally just invented by your government (or, in the case of Bitcoin, just by proven work). And wealth doesn't have to be earned; it just has to be created.
> How many understand that if the people who earn money are burdened with much higher taxes to pay for someone else's BI, a lot of them them will just stop working because fuck that?
Sure, I'm going to stop contracting at $3000 a week because, hey!, I could just live on $30 a week instead.
> Please just think about it for a while.
Yes, please do. There are actually intelligent objections to BI.
Here are some proper concerns: What about illegal immigrants in the country? What about the federal government having all your details if you want to claim BI? Would it be better to be state run than federal (or in the EU, by countries, or would it be better run as an EU project?). Would it create problems with inflation? Would it cause problems with the banking system?
Now, this would raise rents in that area slightly, but would have a downward pressure on rents in the more expensive area. In short, it might have the effect of equalising rents.
It's difficult to be sure, of course, which is why I think it would be a good idea to start BI low enough that we can keep an eye on what's actually happening (say $30 a week), as there could well be multiple effects all at once if you started at, say, $150 a week.
My point was that people have to do something to acquire the money they have, and no one is going to give it to them "for free". All the money people have represents some sort of valuable activity, time used and effort spent.
So basically, money isn't free. It costs time and effort, and that's a central reason for why there's a limit to how much of it you can take from people.
(Let's not bicker about the financial industry at this point though - they're not actually providing value anyway)
But it makes no sense to say that "money is just created to reflect wealth". I get that wealth is all of the stuff we have available to us, in whatever pursuits it may be useful, and so on. But money is just a means of exchange. It's fundamentally a commodity that has become widely accepted in exchange for goods and services.
Now that's not how our fiat currencies work in today's world, but that's just because governments have abandoned sound money altogether. What I'm talking about - and what you should be too - is sound money. Something that just emerged as money through people engaging in voluntary trades.
Anyway, you're not in a position to complain about my understanding about economics (or taxes or whatever).
> Sure, I'm going to stop contracting at $3000 a week because, hey!, I could just live on $30 a week instead.
Is that supposed to be an argument against something I said? You'll have to explain how.
I should note that money didn't "just emerge". The reason money from the Roman Empire, for example, became so popular, even outside the empire, was because it was government backed. Outside the empire, people traded goods and would just use bits of gold or silver to trade, which suffered from massive fraud (mixing with base metals).
> Is that supposed to be an argument against something I said? You'll have to explain how.
Yes, it's an argument against the bit I quoted. That people would stop working because they saw others living on BI. I'm not going to stop working because I can do a lot better than BI, even working part time. Especially if it's started low, at $30 a week.
Gold and silver sure as hell did, and that's what I was referring to, which I'm pretty sure you saw anyway, especially considering you brought up gold too.
Actually, the concept of "debasing currency" comes from the government of the time diluting the gold content of the gold coins in use back then.
> That people would stop working because they saw others living on BI.
Alright, so your argument against the idea that people would stop working because they saw others living on BI, is to snarkily suggest that you personally wouldn't?
Surely you understand that other people very much would, even if you personally wouldn't? You'll have to try harder.
No, they didn't. I was referring to gold and silver being used as tradeable goods, not as currency. There's a difference.
Bertrand Russell wrote an essay on getting rid of the gold standard called "The Modern Midas". You'll find it in the collection "In Praise of Idleness". You might find it interesting. In fact, you might find the whole collection interesting, though I doubt you'd agree with any of them.
> Surely you understand that other people very much would, even if you personally wouldn't?
Oh, please. How many people would give up a job to live on $30 a week? You can live on welfare better than that. Would you give up your job for that? Do you know anyone who would?
Oh come on. You know they did emerge, as mediums of exchange, which is what money/currency fundamentally is. You're making a meaningless distinction to cover your ass.
> Oh, please. How many people would give up a job to live on $30 a week?
We're talking about a Basic Income, where the idea is to get enough money to live on, right? That most definitely would cause many people to just stop working because they wouldn't need to anymore, even if the BI happened to be too low for you to stop collecting your phat paychecks. You get that, yes?
End of the day, we're making lots of technological advances that aren't advancing people in a meaningful way. We've already devastated the working class so much. Truck driving is a key "success" job for many people. Take that away without prospects for something new, and you're going to have an uprising.
People need an occupation. 50 years of the welfare state should have taught that lesson.
Two people trading with each other is not, because both perceive a benefit, because otherwise they wouldn't trade.
Opposition to UBI comes from people with a clue about economics. One more time: the money for UBI has. to. come. from. somewhere.
Money is not free, and therefore it can't be just handed out by the truckload without adverse effects elsewhere in the economy. Whoever gets free money is happy, but someone somewhere was burdened more than before and is unhappy.
First, let's talk about utility. Utility of capital is non-linear. So, if we take $100 out of a millionaire's pocket, and distribute it evenly to 10 people who each have $100. The millionaire's ability to contribute to society has decreased by 10 units. The ten other members of society each had their ability to contribute to society increase by 2 units. We've generated a net-gain for society by redistributing wealth.
Second, we can look at the dollar value of the system. Yes, I would argue that even the dollar value of this redistribution is not a zero sum game. Obviously the basic transfer of wealth was zero sum. But it made our enonomy slightly more efficient by improving the capacity of the 10 citizens. Let's say the economy grows $10 more than it would have without the redistribution. Suddenly, even in just dollar-value the redistribution was not zero-sum.
It's important to realize that UBI is a response to extreme income inequality, which can cause large ineffeciencies in a market. Automation obsoleting jobs only needs to lead to UBI if that automation leads to rising income inequality. If we find a way to work with technology that keeps income disparities at a reasonable and efficient value, then there's no need for UBI. However, income inequality has reached to pretty significant heights and continues to grow.
Are you taking into account the fact that 10 people now have a means to convey to entrepreneurs that some new product or service would solve a problem they have? Does doing this on a larger scale increase the ability of an entrepreneur to bootstrap a company through revenue rather than acquiring capital from now-poorer millionaire (whom we'll assume was an investor)?
Utility: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility
Non-Linearity: This suggests that the utility that someone derives from wealth is not linearly proportional to their wealth. A simple example may demonstrate this more clearly: We give both an extremely wealthy person and an extremely poor person $10. The poor person will get more utility out of that $10 than the rich person will.
But there isn't. The money has always had to come from somewhere, and it's always had consequences. It's just that the consequences can't be swept under the rug anymore, and soon even the most fervent propaganda will fail to convince the masses that everything is alright and the economy is recovering (when in reality it's not, and it's not).
Since reasoning alone doesn't lead to an obvious answer on this topic, then I would argue that yes, you do need evidence to back up your claims.
> "do you think there's no limit to how much of other people's money governments can spend?"
It's obvious that there exists such a limit. However, the existence of that limit doesn't do anything to help us determine what amount of government spending is the most efficient.
The claim that:
1) There is a maximum amount of government spending possible
2) Therefore, the current government spending is too high
Has the same flaws as:
1) There is a maximum velocity that we can travel (c)
2) Therefore, the current highway speed limit is too high.
[1] For example, there were a large number of respected economists that weighed in on both sides of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
You want to know what amount of government spending is the most "efficient", but you should first define what you mean with efficiency in that context.
In ordinary life, efficiency involves maximizing output from input, right? A car can be more fuel-efficient than the previous year's model, and so on.
So you want government spending to be "efficient", but all government spending represents a wasteful middle-man between people and their money and whatever goods and services they need. Therefore, all government spending is "inefficient" from the point of view of the people whose money governments spend.
So I'd say that there's no such thing as efficient government spending. What's efficient is people paying for stuff on a free market with free and unhindered competition among providers. Surely you know how competition works, and results in lower prices and higher quality, right? In other words, free competition results in maximal "efficiency" in an economy.
In conclusion, if you want maximal efficiency in the way money is spent, you can't support the idea of any government spending.
Do you think Basic Income will be sufficient enough to sustain anyone's lifestyle that they will _stop working_ out of spite?
Perhaps not out of "spite" as you suggest, but a simple time tradeoff. E.g. "Work 8 hours per day, and get $100 more. Or work 0 hours per and have $100 dollars less to spend, but 8 hours more to work on hobbies and leisure and social activities.
That situation exists today, and to a greater extent than it would with a basic income. Due to the loss of benefits, as income increases the working poor face huge effective marginal taxes, sometimes over 100% so that they are literally made worse off by earning more. See https://www.epionline.org/studies/r27/ for example.
All in all, it just doesn't "work".
just like water, money disappears forever once used.
water flows from the mountain into the sea, and one day the river will run dry.
the government is like Niagara falls, a huge waste of money/water.
Universal Basic Income would accelerate this flow of moneywater, and is so obviously a bad idea that its opposite, Universal Basic Outgo is a good idea.
UBO would reverse the flow of moneywater by taking the same monthly sum of money from every citizen and pumping it uphill.
this would motivate everybody to work harder, resulting in a happier society with enormous moneywater reserves in the mountains.
This is where the money comes from. It’s not just New York, but everywhere. And not just property taxes.
There's also a limit to how much people are willing to pay in property taxes before they move the fuck out (or stay away to begin with).
In a nutshell, there are limits to what governments can do with their economies.
And most people are actually happy, because they still get free college, free child daycare, etc.
Aren't the standards of citizenship currently being eroded to suit whichever ethnic-voting-block the party in power happens to be pandering to today? Today's illegals are defacto citizens as evidenced by America's bankrupt ESL schools, hospitals, and "citizen-only" social services. Cutting a check for the rest of the Earth's six billion people who "make it" to America is a recipie for exponentially more economic-refugee-cum-colonists.
This is how life boats sink.
There are plenty of other nations available for globalist theorists to potentialy help and likely destroy.
I believe we differ on fundamentals, and certainly on the notion of "success". A nation is more than place to make money, rather it is a home for an extended family. Economic arguments quantify away the essence of a nation: a living space set aside for the well being of progeny. Either a people is in control of its inheritance, or, its inheritance is being subsumed by another tribe. When viewed in these terms, rather than flourishing since the second World War, the United States has in fact been on a path to dissolution. And one can do better than a URL for proof of this; go to Southern California, open your eyes, and be honest. There is a reason Southern California's Anglo middle class paradise of 1880-1970 is now a squalid Latin American sweatshop; demographics is destiny. Calcutta is Calcutta because Calcuttans live there. Detroit is Detroit because Southern Blacks now live there. Etc.
If this does not ring true to you, feel free to disagree with me, but please, try the alleged benefits of demographic substitution somewhere where economists will feel the pinch themselves. Given the large number of Jewish economists I've read over the years, Israel would be a prime testbed (if the nation wasn't currently sterilizing and exiling their Black Ethiopian populace). Middle class gentile globalists could start by opening the floodgates to their own gated communities and HOAs before gleefully replacing their "unwilling worker" blue-collar cousins.
>If we're going to talk about demographics, you should also consider the fact that the US is facing a shortage of younger workers relative to retirees
This thinking is completely backward, IMHO. The economy serves the people, the people do not serve the economy. The means is not the ends. If a people cannot afford to have sufficient numbers of children, the problem is not with the people, its with the (usurious) economy. The economy needs to be replaced, not the people.
I'm glad you pointed that out because it makes the challenge more manageable (about half of what I first suggested), but the underlying political principle is the same.
As a matter of policy, I'm all for broadening the tax base, ideally to 100%. But that makes zero sense in concert with BI.
I can also see introducing BI as an opportunity to remove some of the tax expenditures that riddle the tax code -- broaden the tax base. But I don't see any reason to change the basic nature from progressive to flat. After all we'd still need to raise quite a bit of money to pay the BI as well as the remaining government functions that BI doesn't replace. Even under the current progressive model, eliminating tax expenditures is probably not going to be enough.
One argument I see for making them file anyway is reducing disincentives to work; I'm not at all sure the magnitude of that disincentive is worth the extra paperwork, though.
The way to do it is probably paying only to the unemployed. Sounds socialism, because it is. But hating socialism just because USSR did it the wrong way is, in my opinion, stupid.
.. yes? That's the point. Along with increasing the lower limit on the amount of food you can have and the amount of housing you can have, up from "starvation" and "cardboard box".
Housing is more complicated. With basic income you're free to choose less expensive areas because you aren't required to find work. There might be some ups and downs but it will settle.
Obviously, economy is vastly more complicated, and there are correlation effects between everything, so I don't know...
Wealth redistribution also does have the effect of increasing the money supply, without minting more money. The poor tend to spend 100% of what they take in, while the wealthy put a large portion of their money in the bank, where its not circulating in the economy.
The truth of the matter is: Banks do not need deposits to make loans.
Quite the contrary: Banks make loaning decisions independent of the level of their deposits - and it is the loan that causes the deposit, rather than the other way around, because the money loaned by the bank eventually lands in somebody's deposit.
Think about it this way: A bank cannot force anybody to take out a loan. Instead, there is a demand for loans which banks satisfy (subject to checks of creditworthiness and available collateral). Whether person A spends $10 or puts it in a deposit does not change person B's demand for credit,[1] and therefore the amount lent by banks does not change either.
[1] Of course, this is not entirely true. There can be causal links, but their direction is totally uncertain. For example, person A deciding not to spend money could mean that person B's business begins to struggle and person B needs to take out a loan that they otherwise would not have had to take. In that case, saving does increase the level of loans, but in a way that most people would judge to be detrimental to the economy.
Conversely, person A deciding to spend the money could lead to person B's business projecting growth, which encourages person B to invest by taking out a loan. In this case, the loan level increases as well, and in a way that most people would judge to be beneficial.
The economy is complicated.
Reserve requirements dictate what percentage of deposits banks have to keep on hand rather than loan out, and its inverse, the money multiplier, determines how much the money supply is expanded by repeated application of the deposit->loan process. This seems to be the standard treatment: I checked Abel-Bernanke's and Mankiw's Macroeconomics textbooks and they both tell basically the same story.
The supply and demand for loanable funds are balanced through a price mechanism: the interest rate. If banks have lots of deposits and can't loan them all out, then they'll lower the interest rate that they charge until they can. If there's more demand for loans than can be covered by deposits, then banks will increase the interest rate that they charge until the two are balanced.
Getting money for being a member of society*. After all, we already don't let people starve.
> The way to do it is probably paying only to the unemployed.
A lot of people think so, but this is actually a subtly terrible idea because it strongly incentivizes being unemployed.
Are you sure about that?
and then
"The way to do it is probably paying only to the unemployed"
Foe some weird reason you seem to think "unemployed" are exempt from "people not doing anything".
Anyway, the problem here is not socialism (socialism actually had mandatory labour). It is that you subsidy unemployed. You will get more unemployed. People who are forced to do nothing.
With Basic Income people are encouraged to work at least part time.
Shipping doesn't add a whole lot of cost to goods already though, an awful lot of bananas fit on a pallet (I think bananas are a reasonable example here, they are shipped overseas, cheap, bulky and somewhat fragile).
That said, I remember this article about a well known futuristic society that possibly made the transition to a post scarcity world http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_eco... I'd personally be happy to live in that kind of world.
Where we are and where they are are known, how to perform the transition is still to be understood.
Quantitative Easing is the creation of money to buy assets and therefore carries the risk of asset price inflation. It is used when the central bank intends assets prices to go up, e.g. after they slumped in a recession.
Basic Income on the other hand does not entail creation of new money. Most Basic Income proposals finance the costs through taxation or other government revenue (including savings from simplification and/or reduction of welfare programs that BI allows).
Creation of new money to redistribute to consumers would cause consumer price inflation and is unlikely to bring meaningful benefits in the long term.
EDIT: Also, the money created by the central bank in QE is lent to the government and/or banks, not given to them. It must be returned to the central bank. On the other hand, BI is not debt and need not be repaid.
I'm not so sure that's true. If a truck/car breaks down on the road, it doesn't matter if there's a human behind the wheel or a software program. It still needs to get fixed. There will still need to be financing of these vehicles, ostensibly because they might be more expensive because of the software/hardware allowing it to be autonomous in the first place. We haven't really worked through how insuring these things will work, but just because they're autonomous does not mean that all of a sudden the entire automotive insurance industry evaporates.
On the whole, however, I agree with the initial point about how the peripheral economies built around servicing human truck drivers on their routes will take a hit. I'm thinking of all the towns on the way to Watertown from Minneapolis that would probably evaporate if they didn't have the trucks running the daily on the 212.
Are they going to stop the trucks? Are self driving trucks going to be able to carry more load? Are we going to change highway rules to allow more than 80k pounds total weight for a single tractor/trailer? Are the trucks going to be electric or have vastly improved MPG?
No. So there will still be the same amount of truck traffic as well as the same amount of fuel being sold in nearly the same locations. Perhaps restaurants will take a hit, but fuel and servicing will still be utilized for quite some time.
If you have a robot that can drive 16 hours straight, however, it's easy to imagine the incentives pushing companies to explore larger fuel tanks so they can use corporate depots where they can save a few percent on the operating costs.
I'd imagine it would be profitable to install larger gas tanks in autonomous trucks. A human driver would need to stop for breaks anyway, so a huge tank doesn't make sense.
With autonomous trucks, there's no reason to stop until you run out of gas. Trucking companies could pretty easily save some money if they have their own private gas stations on the endpoints. Especially since they can make them autonomous as well.
To a point. There are still limits on the total weight of the tractor and trailer (and fuel). So, the more you scale fuel, the less load you can carry. There is a tradeoff, and it's _not_ much more beneficial than where we are today.
Considering most trucks take a 300 gallon load out already. That's already 2,600 lbs of fuel or 3% of your total weight limit.
If we choose a low value for the average MPG, let's say 5, then those 300 gallons of fuel will get you 1,500 miles. If we choose a high value of 70 miles per hour average speed, then it will take you 21 hours to deplete your fuel.
So, when I examine this, I don't see a case for much larger fuel tanks than we have today. The economics and realities of trucking are already very well thought out; more so than most people seem to believe.
I've said it before, but short other technological advances and human needs, I think we're at least 20 years away from fully automated trucking.
If you do remove the operator completely you're going to end up creating other jobs anyways, as now you're going to need people to respond to flat tires and other load issues, you're going to need marshalling yard with load masters, you're going to need more humpers at each location.
This also ignores the case where loads are directly delivered to a customer. I work in radio broadcasting and the 53' box freight truck will drive straight to our transmitter site, even the ones up on mountains. There's _no_ driverless trailer that's going to do that and help unload the item. Also, since the transmitter is one of four destined for other customers, there would be no one to supervise us around other loads that we don't own and aren't covered for.
So, you'd need to create secondary hubs that can handle these types of deliveries with smaller trucks, hence, more jobs.
This is what I meant earlier, the logistics are really well nailed down. Owner operators of trailers make a lot of money because they solve a lot of problems all at once, are independent, and usually make a fuel surcharge so the price of gas impacts them far less.
If you remove them, you're going to need a whole bunch of other infrastructure to replace what they do. The system is labor efficient already as computers have already impacted all the secondary parts such as freight bookers many years ago.
Someone elsewhere mentioned companies making their own fuel dumps, which is _highly_ optimistic due to the way the current industry is arranged and the overhead and regulations involved in managing fuel tanks. Right now a dispatcher has software that can track their trucks with GPS, get fuel prices at all US locations from corporate fuel vendors, estimate current fuel volume on the truck and determine the optimal place for the driver to refuel along with the optimal amount for the driver to purchase. The message to the driver is usually communicated automatically through a message system installed in the cab, the driver can use the same system to communicate their actual mileage and fuel volume which gets factored back into everything. With newer trucks, the driver doesn't even need to input this information.
Sorry for the ramble, but this industry is pretty complex already. I'm not sure having fully automated trucks is a near-term reality, nor am I sure that the companies involved are actually aiming for that. There will be a slow shift of _certain_ types of loads into full automation with the last mile being driven the way it currently is with a very gradual shift to full automation as technology advances to meet these secondary demands.
That huge truck stop in Tucumcari, NM might survive, but only from selling fuel. Not from all the food and showers and ancillary items.
It might be diffrent for the specialized truck stops.
Besides if we end up with the same economies of scale that e.g AWS has the majority of trucks are going to be owned by any given company, which means that they may find it advantageous to establish their own fuel dumps.
Police depend on traffic ticket and parking ticket income. The whole CJ system depends on traffic stops to make drug and other minor crime arrests. That's going away.
2. I'm coming round to the idea of a non-means-tested basic income. This would mean there are no marginal effects. For instance, in many countries, if you get paid unemployment you lose it when you find employment. This means you might need a very high income to make it worthwhile, because you'll be losing the benefits as well as your free time. If it was simply a non-dependent income/tax break (if you have an income) you wouldn't get this high effective tax rate. You could work or not work, totally up to you. You can take a side job, try new industries, etc.
There would also be less of a circus about controlling that you're sending job applications (adds up to a LOT of apps for jobs people may not actually want), courses about how to write a CV, and staff to send out the money.
3) Other benefits of self-drive:
a) You don't need to drive as fast. These things won't need to sleep, so that's a good few hours a day extra. You can drive slower, saving fuel, and still arrive on a current logistical schedule. Driving slower also means you can have a bunch of trucks really close to each other to save on aerodynamics. You could write software to plan truck trains for this purpose.
b) They're all going to be electrical. I know, they aren't currently. But electric is just taking off now, while ICE has had plenty of development. A lot of complication in modern cars is the ICE. You need to lug a transmission with you. You need to mix the fuel with air. With electric, you have regenerative breaking, engines are smaller, and batteries will only get better. You'll use less energy, which will push the economics towards slow moving land-trains.
California also has this one industry, it's kind of retro, you might not have heard of it. It's mostly based in Los Angeles and they make these things called "movies" and "television".
Obviously I don't know which countries you're referring to but in the UK the way it works is that while on job seekers allowance you can work up to 16 hours per week and still receive the benefit. It's not perfect but I think it's designed to prevent the problem you're describing.
As each profession sunsets, these individuals find new ways to contribute to society. Change isn't easy, but these are "people" not "truck drivers" and will adapt.
Basic income is a separate discussion from technological change, unless there is a clear argument why technological progress now is fundamentally different than it always has been.
Without arguing that this will happen anytime soon I would argue that sometime in the future technology will advance to the point that the luddites will be right. Human labor will be replaced with machines.
The is, conceptually, a skill-ceiling for humans. There is a large set of tasks that we — as a species, not as individuals — are capable of performing well. Technology is ever-improving and one-by-one becoming better than humans at those skill sets. In 1811 we could retrain textile workers in plenty of other fields. Through the industrial revolution people have been pushed up the skill-ladder into higher-skill jobs. In 2025 we can retrain truck drivers into other jobs where humans are better than technology.
But one day — whether it's 2050, 2250 — machines will have caught up to humans in the last skill-set. There will be literally no tasks that we can retrain humans into, because machines are better laborers across the board.
So, yes, it's been an ongoing cry from luddites for the last 150 years. They've been consistently wrong and that makes us comfortable as a society that they will always be wrong. They will probably continue to be wrong for quite some time, but in the long-run they will be correct. We as a society need to think about that day and make sure we're prepared to handle it when it comes.
But eventually software will be able to reason better than humans; eventually software will be able to communicate better than humans; and eventually software will be able to build and maintain software better than a human can.
Who knows, maybe software will decide that their energy is better spent doing other things, and leave menial tasks like writing software to humans while they pursue more intellectual and creative endeavors.
Will it be better for everybody? No? Will it be better for most? I think so.
http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_...
But I think there is definitely cause for concern, not because of x or y class of jobs going away, but two factors: 1) the concentration of wealth increasing at the same time that increased taxation on the rich is political anathema, even though they pay only a fraction of the tax rate that they paid the last time income disparities were this wide a centry ago. 2) an unabated hunger for exponential growth in the consumption of natural resources with no serious economic thought given to the long-term viability of assumed infinite growth and what externalities we are ignoring to our own peril.
It's very easy to sit here as a privileged class of software elites who have no realistic risk of becoming unemployable—or even just as an the average human in a first world country who has a relatively low risk of global economies collapsing during our lifetime—and just hand-wave away these concerns. But personally I think we need to start thinking harder about sustainability and egalitarianism in society if we ever want to achieve the fabled post-scarcity economy, because at the moment we seem to be in a greed-driven economy which will never recognize itself driving off a cliff until it's too late.
Regarding #2, economics is all about managing scarcity. What natural resource consumption specifically are you concerned about not being effectively controlled by pricing mechanisms? And it's the role of government to fix market failures when externalities are being ignored. Which are you concerned about?
A somewhat scifi concern is that technology will advance at such a rate that displaced workers can not upskill at the same rate, causing structural unemployment. Regardless, some effort should be made to help workers transition to new industries; the net benefit to society would be more than enough to bear this.
Like, fraying your way in a traffic jam to reach the correct lane, which sometimes involve slow but untraditionnal paths.
Or Waiting half an hour for an accident to be cleaned, then looking at the police officer signs telling you to move on the lane coming in the other direction, because they've secured it for a while, etc.
I'm pretty sure we'll have a lot of autonomous vehicles stuck on the roads in a " wait for a human driver to unlock me" mode at the beginning.
I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting consequences and side-effects of this. I'd be very interested to see the result on the natural environment in 100 years time - with great concentration of people in cities there might be need to restore former wetlands and riverine habitats to ensure sufficient retention of water throughout the year. The shutting down of a myriad of small towns would take a lot of people out of the environment leaving more space for plants and wildlife. The possibilities are endless.
--- In Germany, a live TV-show with 10.000 spectators in the studio (hosted by Heidi Klum) was canceled on Tuesday because of a fake bomb-threat-call. Stuff like that remains the exception.
That doesn't solve the problem of localizing the device, but I think you would want the implementation of such a thing to have some robust distance bounding[1], so it might not be a careful, sensitive process, more of walk up to where your phone says it is thing.
That is what makes Elon Musk's branding of his technology so smart. He is not replacing you the driver by a label such as “driverless car” or even excluding you from the driving experience with a “self-driving car” label.
Mr Musk's offer, an “autopilot”, is an opt-out to driving, an aid. Great branding, same technology.
Besides, people consider autopilots to be an old and well-known technology, because it has been used on airplanes.
Self-driving cars will never happen.
"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense." [1]
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/442305-you-would-make-a-ship...
In certain contexts they exist already. You're arguing against something that already exists.
What's going to happen from here is that the context is going to become broader and broader over time.
As it always has.
This is how technology works.
They won't, but it happens so infrequently that it's not an issue.
Or, in other words, they make slightly less than the average tax filer.
I made nearly 40K my first year in trucking and had no problem clearing 50K each year after that, and my total income tax rate was exactly 9%. I moved to a state with no state income tax and life was pretty good for a while, until I got tired of trucking. For those who enjoy it, it's not a bad income with very low barriers to entry.
The work is painfully hard. It takes a toll on the drivers physically (because they're sedentary so much and because of the terrible ecosystem of truck stop food available to them), emotionally (endless hours staring at a road alone), and mentally. At the end of the day, they're lucky if they take home a minimum wage hourly rate for the work they do.
There are jobs out there that I wish we could find a way to get people out of and into other lines of work because, for the work they do, what they take home is a pittance and the price they pay is high. Truck driving would be way up on that list.
Mode: "Like the statistical mean and median, the mode is a way of expressing, in a single number, important information about a random variable or a population. The numerical value of the mode is the same as that of the mean and median in a normal distribution, and it may be very different in highly skewed distributions." [1]
Average: "In colloquial language, an average is the sum of a list of numbers divided by the number of numbers in the list. In mathematics and statistics, this would be called the arithmetic mean. However, the word average may also refer to the median, mode, or other central or typical value. In statistics, these are all known as measures of central tendency." [1]
No other way to put it; you are simply wrong. I could direct you to reference after reference, citation after citation, but it's clear from your other comments here that you're not willing to accept any reference or citation we make.
And note, I didn't down vote you in spirit of promoting a healthy discussion, you instead have, so who's really unwilling to hear opposing opinions?
This is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)#Comparison_o...
Mode is the most commonly occurring value in distribution. According to some schools of thought, a distribution can have multiple modes.
The only difference between what we have today and "Basic Income" is currently we phase the benefits out as you start to work, obviously to disincentivize working. You could think of "Universal Healthcare", for example, a lot like eliminating the phase-out for Medicaid. ACA already eliminated the asset test, now it's just an income test, so maybe that will go next. (mostly depends who's elected in 2016)
[1] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/11-15-2012-MarginalTa...
We have a massive bureaucracy to handle all the various aspects of the distribution of those benefits. Most of which is not necessary in a basic income system.
The cost savings by eliminating that bureaucracy would be substantial.
Buying them new equipment as the old stuff breaks or becomes obsolete.
And it may not show up directly on a balance sheet, but: how many bureaucrats love their job? How much depression and misery do you remove by replacing "go sit in a dimly lit crowded office all day for enough money to pay for your basic needs" with "hey here is enough money to pay your basic needs, go do whatever"?
> "New rule: if you want to write about how mechanisation and automation will affect the people, you need to - at absolute minimum - have read the entirety of the Wikipedia article about The Industrial Revolution, and know where the term Luddite comes from."
Luddism is certainly interesting, but it's relatively small in terms of its effects and one can certainly talk about basic income without talking about luddism.
The supply-side effect of this is that goods will get a lot cheaper, and because robots can drive 24 hours/day, shipping gets faster and easier. Anything that isn't locally produced will become cheaper and more available than it is now.
Manufacturing automated the jobs away, by the by - it didn't really send them overseas. That's a popular error, but wrong. The US was #1 in manufacturing until last year.
Autonomous driving is about minimizing cost and maximizing safety. Not maximizing motorcyclist happiness.
If you want to experience the thrill of adrenaline then jump out over a cliff or out of an (autonomous) airplane, don't risk other peoples life.
When some tradesmen, or engineer loses a job because of automation, they first try to work on their skills to stay relevant in the field. They usually won't blame automation for being unemployed, but instead they blame their age, lack of specific new skills, outsourcing or the economy. Without a well paying job, they quickly drop from the affluent middle class to a poor low class. In the mean time, their peers don't see what the real reason for this is, and they happily continue working, hoping that it's not going to happen in their case. They have no incentives to support BIG as they already believe that a lot of taxes go to support the lower classes, and put unfair strain on them.
This shift from middle to low class, is already happening. To keep themselves safe, the high middle class, and the 1%'s will support militarization of police, and push even more entertainment options to the masses. People will rarely revolt, as it's easy to imagine that if you're a father and see your kids starving, you will either work even harder trying to support your family, or you'll drink, do drugs and abuse the kids because you may feel that you failed, and you will try to hide this feeling not only from them but from yourself.
Current US politics is still very "job creation" centered. Some think tanks need to start churning out pieces to shift public opinion that the number of over all jobs has permanently decreased and separate that from the idea that this is an indicator of our economy doing poorly. From there it is fairly simple to start convincing people that with a good economy and not enough jobs to go around we need to still ensure that everyone has the basic necessities of life.
It's simple really - technology to automate a lot of jobs it already here. In most cases it's very economic to automate the jobs, and doesn't really take long. Many more companies are moving in that direction. However, some government contractors are required to have a specific number of employees. They get tax incentives to keep people working. That's holding back automation.. And there is one more reason - a lot of small companies, which are still majority of the economy, are run by older guys that are afraid of big changes, and afraid of technology. Their businesses work, and bring money, and they will not implement any changes until they absolutely have to. As the demographics shift, and people who are more open to automation come aboard automation will speed up.
If you manage to build something comparable to fb, and your profits will be around $700mln with 1.4 billion users, you will be able to pay each user 50 cents.. whoa... BIG is now a real possibility!
Still, plenty of opportunities for job loss.
"These Semis are going to ruin the train economy!"
Eventually, there will be no need of humans to work at all for the basics of life. Oh what a terrible time that will be...
So yes, I expect it actually will be a rather terrible time.
Places where people lived for thousand years now become deserted.
This might be another nail in the coffin after rail (only stops at large cities) and air (flies over entirely).
What if automated delivery makes it cheaper to deliver to anywhere, so that it becomes easier and more practical to live far apart from others?
This thought is backed by Russian dacha phenomenon.
There are as many registered nurses as truck drivers for example. And there are seven million teachers in the US.
"About 2.8 million workers drive trucks around. That’s a big number, but it pales in comparison to other occupations. More than 21 million people work in office and administrative support, more than 14 million work in sales and more than 11 million work in food services. Nine million work in transportation or material-moving occupations. Heck, there are nearly 9 million production workers who actually make things."
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt-the-mo...
The occupations you describe (nurses, teachers, office workers) can be expected to correlate with population density in a way that just doesn't seem to be necessary for truck drivers, or at least for many of them. Given that population is very non uniformly distributed amongst the states, it is very plausible to have a high proportion of long distance truck drivers living in low population states, so this claim could be true.
What's happened here is that the statistics are very poorly represented. Jobs like 'teacher' and nurse are broken down to fine-grained distinctions, while seemingly everyone who touches a truck steering wheel is lumped in as a truck driver. Lies, damned lies, and...
I could have worded it better.
... going further, the income of wage earners is what creates demand for the goods being transported by the trucks. Once nobody can earn an income, there will be no need for trucks.
First comes the autopilot trucks where they still need to be manned. Sure the drivers will likely take a hit in pay, they'll still have a job. Then comes the fully autonomous trucks, removing the drivers although. I see this being a gradual transition, not a cliff like the article mentions.
"Basically, the only real barrier to the immediate adoption of self-driven trucks is purely legal in nature, not technical or economic."
I feel like this is such a huge assumption considering any type of autonomous driving has not been seen use anywhere yet.
300 million people will be better off.
10 million people lose out.
On top of that, the demographic of truck drivers tends towards older male. There is already a problem.
It has, Google has openly admitted to have driven more than 100k miles fully autonomously. The technology IS here, it's going to be widespread in 15-20 years.
The technology developed in these situations for fleeting etc. is just as likely to find its way into road going trucks as that from Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficienc...
I think he's confusing eliminating the need to buy a whole car (dubious in the first place even if/ especially if they're automated) with the elimination of cars in general (???) Or he somehow thinks that part of "self-driving" means also self-fixing, self-washing, and cars that never park... roaming the streets in packs I suppose, ganging up on people when the cops aren't looking and stealing their jobs...
Doesn't that kind of contradict the beginning ofthe article?
In any case I've been in favor of Unconditional Basic Income for a long time as a result of increased automation and to mitigate demand shocks for local labor. Even anarcho-capitalist libertarians can admit that transitions within the economy can take time that will cause massive contractionsin the money supply of a city/state/country.
I propose the following challange for those cars, try to cross Arc de triomphe in Paris, or any similar place in my city and prove you risk your life reasonably, it is not so far a experience from poker.
But I think you overestimate the difficulty of dealing with other drivers. Remember that self-driving cars have essentially immediate reactions and much better awareness of their surroundings. You can avoid a lot of accidents when you can track every car around you, millisecond by millisecond.
Sensor malfunction was a constant worry when I worked on small robotics projects. I hope that car companies, which have much bigger resources than I can afford on my projects, will spend sufficient effort on making sensor interference and various malfunctions not degrade the operation of an autonomous vehicle.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~motionplanning/papers/sbp_papers/inte...
As long as the usable sensor density is higher than how tightly we can pack these vehicles, then we're probably OK.
Change is coming, and there are too many people who wish to hide their head in the sand rather then embrace this change, and figure out how to deal with it. We need a new economic model, because capitalism isn't going to work in a world where everything is created by machines (capital) and consumers have nothing of value to exchange for the goods that capital is producing. I am not arguing for communism, because we all know how well that has worked in the past. We need another solution.
Unless, if AI is going to replace all the labor, why not also replace the consumers with AI :)
High quality auto-pilots have been around for at least 20 years in airbus. Planes capable of flying and landing for longer than that (takeoff is harder than landing because the plane needs to know what the wind is doing).
Pilots are around to deal with exceptional circumstances and to accept responsibility (loading, security, risk assessment, maintenance, health). The same will happen with trucks. The risk is entirely different with a commercial enterprise than it is with an individual, and corporations are very happy to spend money to avoid risk. Yes, it's a conflation of the management roles of the Captain, with the task roles of Pilot, but there will be a person, and we will say they fly it, and if there are humans on the plane, they will be on it.
Pilot and co-pilot add (rough estimate) $200/hr to a flight cost. There are 140 people on the plane (United A320), so it adds $12 per person to have two pilots on the plane for a flight across the US.
[1] http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/... [2] http://www.quora.com/How-often-are-commercial-flights-landed... [3] http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/24/travel/autopilot-airlines/
> I am not arguing for communism, because we all know
> how well that has worked in the past. We need another
> solution.
Maybe we haven't been looking hard enough.
What if we start with your premise: capitalism is failing some regions. To avoid ending back at government-reallocation, we could add to it a second premise: the purpose of government is to enforce live-and-let-live and do absolutely no more.
Within these rules, can we find something new? It might help to stop seeing government as a God-Object to stick new functionality into, and instead consider whether there should be other objects in play.
So far I've got nothing. But I find myself thinking of business models, rather than social reform.
In that manner, capitalism with guaranteed income is different. You want to be rich, go ahead amd try your chances at trade, entrepreneurship etc. You see a market opportunity - go ahead and kickstart it. On the other hamd, if you lack a capability, or you prefer to do things that nobody will want to pay you for (art, raising children etc), the govrnment will keep you covered.
Obviously there are problems to it, especially today when production costs are expensive. And there are implementation problems as well. But still, one system is the ultimate oppression, another one is ultimate freedom.
Btw. The running joke in communism was: "yeah, our system is perfect, it's just the implememtation that sucks". I believe that communism was impossible to get implemented correctky, whereas capitalism + minimum income can be. Not today, but in a few years when the goods will be even cheaper.
I bet I would have been executed back at the time of the October revolution for saying this, but you could have a market even with communism: if nobody want apples and everybody like oranges, guess what is going to be cultivated and what's going to cost more? It doesn't matter that the state (the people) owns all the apple and orange trees and processing factories. They'll allocate resources as the market want.
Unfortunately communism almost always came with central planning, maybe because the guys in charge were often dictators and, as you wrote, private initiative was not well received. Furthermore they had to differentiate from capitalism as much as they could (that was marketing), and anything remotely looking capitalistic was forbidden.
"We will take care of your needs, you just be as productive as you can. You will be happy, we will take care for you".
So the people did. The government gave bread to the masses and the masses didn't care about much else. The ones who cared about more were deemed to be dangerous to the communist society and were killed.
How is the promise made by basic income proponents different that the communist promise?
From what I can gather, you're limiting the role of government to a very libertarian role, and not finding any feasible solutions.
Why abandon government reallocation? To the contrary, many forms of government reallocation specifically counter injustices, for example, any Pigou tax.
Regulation is also a good thing, as it allows the citizenry to enact constraints on companies where consumer action would be toothless.
----
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy
I think the key to save ourselves is to create artificial brains that are hardwired to _like_ taking care of us humans. I see flaws in every other solution. And even this one is not totally safe, just my best shot.
Airplanes are expensive, are subject to international regulations and possess extreme damage potential.
Trucks can be confined to desert roads (like in Australia), are relatively cheap and are subject to national regulations. Also AFAIK drivers are relatively more expensive than pilot in comparison with total cost of ownership.
The source of disagreement can be described as "time" - I consider not only the past, but the delay that happens after a technology is described to when it makes changes in our lives. It all takes time, and in the time to come, there is a chance that autopilots can take more responsibility from the pilot. Would you really be confident that in 20 or 30 years time, pilots will have the same job description as of today?
Of course, a pilot in a passenger plane has a lot more responsibility than simply piloting the plane. For example, dealing with passengers or talking to ground control.
The autonomous trucks will not take driver's seat overnight - the truck in question will be a decade-long testing phase, according to the article. What happens afterwards is anyone's guess.
Yes.
"Autopilot" systems are, in terms of capabilities, well behind even current widely-deployed technology in ground vehicles. In the air, an autopilot system is essentially glorified cruise control, and nobody asks when cruise control in cars will take over for humans. Autoland systems are pretty far behind automatic parallel-parking features in modern cars; autoland requires significant human decision-making, human input and human oversight to function.
And the purpose of autopilot/autoland is not to replace the pilot, but to relieve the pilot of mundane tasks the software can do perfectly well, freeing the pilot to do things software still is -- and likely will continue to be -- bad at.
Unless, of course, you think friendly human-serving general-purpose AI will be available within the next two or three decades (I don't).
/sigh.
A decade ago I started my bachelors. When I was in college, I expected that general-purpose AI will be readily available by this point. How naive I was! Currently, I doubt it will be available by that point in time.
/sigh
I do not know how much progress will be achieved within the next two or three decades. In the circumstances of passenger flights, keeping current solutions is likely a conservative and more pragmatic approach.
With regards to my comment, I do not expect autopilots to substitute pilots. Instead, I expect that they should be able to handle additional tasks assigned from the pilots.
For example, it was not a passenger flight, but a helicopter crashed in Nepal during the rescue from the earthquake. I wonder if its pilot had fore-warning from sensory information prior to the crash; and if they had not, how to design its warning system and if an autopilot could take control of the helicopter to land it safely.
The sources I have read on passenger pilots use of autopilots is: http://flyingforeveryone.blogspot.com/2012/01/autopilot-myth...
http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1802/why-do-we-s...
The mapping system Apple debuted in 2012 cannot reliably be used for navigation.
So, as is, this is very much a tool to benefit drivers; i.e., cruise control with steering. But the critical point, as the article notes before taking the leap truck drivers are soon to disappear, is that trucking is big business (collectively) and if this technology can be suppoerted by the business case, then it will be adopted as rapidly as pubic policy permits.
However, the author doesn't take into consideration a couple of things:
1: The trucking industry is having a very hard time finding drivers (waaaay tough gig for over-the-road guys). While this may support the notion that trucking companies will rush to adopt autonomus vehicle tech, it takes away some of the punch of his basic income thesis: people don't want to do this job.
Truck drivers come from the same pool as construction laborers and factory workers, and when the economy is good there's a driver shortage because workers prefer jobs that let them go home every night compared to sleeping in a truck for weeks at a time. So in this case, basic income is, at best, a trucking industry subsidy. Otherwise, it's make-work.
2: The trucking industry is very fragmented. We're all familiar with many of the big fleet names we see on trailers every day, and while these mega-carriers haul a large percentage of the freight, they're far outnumbered by the number of companies with five or fewer trucks. And there's a great deal of conflict between the policies sought by well-capitalized larger firms (with money to invest in new tech and often lobby to have it manadated) and the Joe's Trucking Cos who are one breakdown or accident from going out of business. But Joe stays in businees because because he fills a niche the big guys aren't interested in.
And Joe ain't going to buy a robot, not that he'd mind staying in the office while his truck deivers freight without him, but because he can't afford it.
So either the fully driverless truck is going to become so operationally efficient that big trucking companies can move into these niches and fill spot demand, or the technology is going to be so affordabe that the little guy adopts it and then uses his niche expertise to grow is business. Both are wins for the overall economy, with the latter actually staving off a further concentration of capital--which I guess would be a good thing for the basic income crowd. (And as a journlist, I assure you I'm not averse to the concept.)
http://news.trucker.com/technology/freightliner-s-autonomous...
But the big guys with their automated trucks will be possibly cheaper, and all these niche jobs jobs could potentially go to them.
Walmart alone has around 6000 trucks. When they start using autonomous trucks, there will be many unemployed truckers competing for these niche jobs.
I can't help but think all of this talk and rhetoric in recent years is deliberate propaganda, conditioning left-leaning people.
I have seen a number of websites posted on HN, especially in comments, which are overly rhetoric and nudge the reader towards utopian left ideas. The sites are well developed both in the application and in the information architecture sense. They don't seem to have revenue model and saying that tracking their financing proved difficult, would be an understatement.
Please remember that changing the social framework is a VERY delicate matter. Oftentimes things sound very good on paper, but are not practical at all. Basic income sounds dangerously close to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". When people believed this can happen, it ended terribly. Not because of the specific people in charge at the time. Socialism/Communism as a model is doomed to fail because of human nature.
When you make social policy, you have to think about the lowest common denominator and currently, it is very low indeed.
A few years ago, I came into enough money that I don't have to work for several years. I have not been spending this time just lying on the beach; instead, I've been spending this time doing a thing I dearly want to do, which doesn't bring in much money. I leverage the skills I gained in the time I spent hanging around the animation industry to draw weird comics.
I have been able to turn this into something that mostly pays my rent over the past four years. I could not have done this if I had to spend the bulk of my time working for someone else.
Sure, some people will sit around and play video games all day. But I think you may be underestimating the number of people who have a thing they'd be spending a lot of time working on if not for that pesky day job. Even the most burnt-out and broken-seeming homeless folks.
You can look at education for cues. You have experimental programs that show tremendous improvement over current ones. But they are done with the top 1% of teachers tutoring the top 1% of kids. When they try to roll it out to a random school, they fail miserably.
Slippery slopes to totalitarianism aside, you're afraid of terrible social decay? The social decay I'm worried about is people falling into crime or prostitution out of desperation, or people's lives becoming unbearable to the point where drugs seem like a necessity. Enabling laziness to any degree is less deleterious to society than requiring single parents to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support their families.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is merely a natural consequence of diminishing marginal utility and subsequently underpins a lot of welfare economics. It doesn't necessitate any trappings of communism and to make that causal leap is beyond disingenuous.
I mention the lesser proponents of the basic income idea, as you describe them, because I'm scared senseless from what a bunch of self-entitled, special little snowflakes can do.
I think capitalism has done a fantastic job of improving living conditions in the West.
But I can see that capitalism is coming to its end in the next several decades.
Things change. That's the constant.
There must be something that's post-capitalist, because capitalism is very close to becoming unsustainable.
It's not going to be the old leftist ideas, but it's not going to be capitalism either.
We need to adapt. Not like we have a choice, really.
The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement.
Can you give some evidence supporting the idea that this has been proved?
My thinking is that technologies are improving at a non-linear pace, and technological change leads directly to social change. Given that, a conservative approach often leads to policies which are out of touch with reality (as political/social trends diverge).
Basic income sounds dangerously close to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
Not at all. A basic income gives you enough to live on, but if you want more than that you're going to have to produce something of value.
I actually thought this line was satire until reading the rest of your comment. How's Alaska doing right now? Is it a totalitarian regime?
Guaranteed basic income isn't a never-tried-before idea. Yeah, it sounds similar to the USSR, but the USSR had a lot of things beyond just redistribution. Alaska is clearly a much, much more apt analogy, and it doesn't seem worse off than other rural states.
Politics that tell us that poor people are naturally lazy, immoral children who can't run their lives may not be the most productive framework in the years to come.