
Robot Workers and the Universal Living Wage - ph0rque
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/07/1184668/-Future-Politics-The-Automated-Workforce-and-the-Universal-Living-Wage?detail=show
======
dmix
I fail to see in this article where the author backs up this claim:

> automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for
> humans to do that computers can't.

It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge
workers.

At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and
efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.

Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have.

The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china
or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents
worked as labours has exploded.

The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries
that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote
accurately compared to the demands of the market.

~~~
moe
_It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge
workers._

That is true but I think it's not an interesting question to ask.

The interesting question is what we are going to do about the rapidly growing
unemployment of the _unskilled_ workforce.

Case in point: This will jump to a whole new level when self-driving cars
become cost efficient - which seems rather likely to happen within the next 30
years. Automation in other sectors is not standing still either.

"Educate them all" is not a solution. DHL and FedEx just don't need as many
knowledge workers as they need truck drivers today.

~~~
gaius
I am pretty skeptical about self-driving cars, for the simple reason that we
don't even have self-driving _trains_ yet, outside relatively small systems
like the DLR, Heathrow Pod, etc, and it would seem to be that the job of
driving a train (no steering, no collision avoidance, predetermined stops,
etc) would be 100x easier.

~~~
moe
There are actually quite a few driverless trains already[1] and Google's
demonstrations of their driverless car are getting increasingly[2]
impressive[3].

The question is really only _when_ the transition to driverless cars will
happen - we're long past the _if_.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_trains>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRIOE1IZrq4>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE>

------
zeteo
>There will still be a need for computer programmers, but a lot of programming
can already be automated [...] We could [...] flat-out ban certain types of
robots and automated software.

I write software for a living and have no idea what this means. It's either
horribly misinformed, or a call to ban compilers.

~~~
sologoub
WARNING: Sarcasm is present in this statement :)

It seems, according to this article anyways, that the answer to developer
unemployment is to rid us of efficient IDEs, compliers and other non-sense,
and and get back to good old Assembly!

~~~
mjmahone17
Yes, actually: if we wanted to ensure developers stay employed, we should make
writing code less efficient. Yes, you're being sarcastic, but that doesn't
mean your point isn't spot on: this is in fact what unions have been doing all
along, and states like New Jersey don't allow you to pump your own gas,
specifically to create inefficiencies in the market that promote employment.
If the option is between requiring people to work meaningless jobs, or paying
everyone a living wage, which really makes more sense?

~~~
sologoub
Well... The very basis of my understanding of self causes me to say that there
has to be a 3rd option... That said, a living wage would be less wasteful.

As for unions, I believe this is pretty much what killed the Twinkie
manufacturer - they were not able to even optimize routes.

------
sologoub
It seems that similar concerns have been voiced with every advance in
technology that replaced works with machines. The argument generally assumes
that the amount of "work" needed will remain relatively the same. So, if
society today requires 100 works to make one widget, and we can make the same
widget with 1 worker and assorted machines, then 99 works will be left
unemployed.

In reality, what seems to happen is that because the products of that work
become cheaper, society starts to consume a lot more. In the end, something
like 80 works end up supervising the machines, while 9 works maintain them and
the other work is designing the machines.

I can't foresee what will happen if all basic service jobs are automated, but
then again it will not happen overnight. The biggest question in my mind, is
how well will the society repare the future generations with the skills they
will need to remain relevant. Education is everything... and it will remain
everything. (Not formal education mind you, but more so knowledge/training.)

~~~
mjmahone17
The thing is, we've only really been seeing this boom since the 18th century.
And for most of the world, not really until the 20th century. The solution, as
you said, for most of this period was to have people consume more products.
But with the rise of electronics, that trend doesn't appear to be continuing.
We already live in a world where not everyone needs to work: in fact, we
specifically push people out of working once they reach retirement age. That
was one of the points of Social Security and pensions: to stop older workers
from preventing new workers from taking their place.

Also note, our real unemployment isn't 7.9%. In fact, if we look at the number
of non-farm jobs from the last census in 2010, we had 112 million jobs. If we
assume about 3% of employment is farm jobs, then we have ~115 million total
jobs. According to the census, there are 313 million people in the US, and
76.3% of them are adults. Therefore, we have 238 million adults, and only ~115
million jobs. This means our real unemployment rate is about 52% (given the
roughness of my figures, I'd stick it at a range between 45 and 60 percent).
Which means, not counting children, our country is already fully capable of
supporting half the population not working. This wasn't the case in 19th
century America (where yes, even women usually worked in some capacity),
meaning we probably already are in a society where most people don't have to
work, we just don't notice it because most of those who don't work are not
labeled "unemployed."

Edit: Basically, I'm questioning your premise that employment rates have, in
fact, remained relatively constant throughout the last few centuries.

~~~
sologoub
You are questioning whether the current Labor Force Participation rate and
whether it has gone down over the years. The peak in recent history appears to
have been around 2000 at 67.3%. Currently, it's at 63.6%.

The furthest back I could find is 1948 for 58.6 at the start of that year.
Last time we were in the 63% range was in 1980s. Guessing from 19th century,
it has gone up.

Source: <http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet>

The key here is to understand what influences this rate. Many factors go into
what percentage of population chooses to seek employment. For example, if my
wife and I are rich enough, when we have kids, we may want to have one or even
both of us take a few years off to raise them. This is a profound luxury in
the current US society. Some countries have extended maternity leave that
lasts for 3 years and includes some form of pay or other welfare payment. Such
structures would easily drive the participation rate down.

Conversely, public daycares and other child-friendly services promote higher
participation rates by freeing both adults to work.

These examples are meant to show that the "machines are taking our jobs"
discussion to be a gross oversimplification of a much more complex system. So
far, history tells us that we will adapt. That still leaves a possibility of a
black swan event... In either case, I have faith in humanity :-)

------
cpursley
97% percent of us used to be farmers. Did the machines and processes that
replaced us render us irrelevant and without other pursuits? No, it unlocked
massive amounts of intelectual capacity that led to unprecedented scientific
and economic growth.

I don't understand why people don't understand this basic economic principle.
When you free up peoples time from monotonous tasks, we all benefit. These
calls for a universal minimum wages are odd.

------
quasque
Reminds me of this piece of speculative fiction, which explores the theme of
robotic automation in some detail: <http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

~~~
venus
I endorse this work of fiction and encourage everyone to read it. At the very
least it is an approachable, engaging and thought-provoking "what-if"
scenario.

------
mark_l_watson
I mostly worry about this scenario of not enough work for everyone because too
many people in my country (USA) will probably be unwilling to support a
universal living wage.

A social safety net improves the lives of everyone because of lower crime and
a generally more civil society.

The trick will be to provide life long educational and vocational resources.
Hopefully almost everyone would want to produce extra value for society and
improve their own material life style. There would still be room for very
capable people to be "rich" and generally rewarded for skills and hard work.

So, a pure meritocracy with rewards layered on top of a minimal universal ling
wage sounds good to me.

~~~
kunai
I don't know, it sounds too communistic-utopian. While communism is not a bad
thing, and utopias are theoretically a great idea, humans thrive on
opportunity and individualism. The world isn't a fair place _by nature_.
Attempting to equalize everyone's talents and source of income, and not
allowing them to be rewarded for whatever they pursue seems to cause less
incentive for education.

Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000
every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that
require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the
same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress
intellectually, and be an accomplished man.

~90% of people would choose the former.

~~~
thenomad
"golf, and do many things that require little mental facility"

Does golf really require that little mental facility? Would Tiger Woods agree
with you?

People are _extremely_ unpredictable in what they do with their leisure time.
Over 10 years of working to encourage and develop amateur creators in the film
world has left me with the conviction that we simply don't know what would
happen if 100% of a Western country's people didn't need to work to survive
any more.

We'd almost certainly hit a sudden epidemic of depression, to start with. Tim
Ferriss' book "The Four Hour Work Week" has a fascinating section on surviving
the transition to not having to work any more - it's harder than you'd think.

But subsequently? A surprising amount of popular activities in leisure time
right now are actually very mentally engaging. Both watching and playing
sports are actually reasonably mentally engaged activities for a lot of people
- try memorising half the statistics that the average baseball fan has at his
fingertips and see how far you get. The most popular drama television is
getting more complex and sophisticated, not less. And of course games are
actively mentally engaging, and increasingly creative - Minecraft's the
biggest gaming sensation since World of Warcraft.

The fact that the two biggest gaming sensations of the last decade are ones in
which the primary activities are a) working with groups of up to 40 other
people to complete complex, challenging, multifaceted choreographed tasks and
b) building massive structures up to and including 1-1 replicas of goddamn
_cathedrals_ does not lead me to believe that most of the population doesn't
like to use their brain.

Add to that the fact that there's actually a startlingly large number of
amateur musicians, painters, writers, bloggers, artisans, chefs and similar
pursuits out there. Here's a link - <http://www.amateurorchestras.org.uk/> \-
to a list of the _1,121_ amateur ORCHESTRAS in the UK, for example.

You might see a very interesting world develop after about 10 years.

~~~
nitrogen
_The most popular drama television is getting more complex and sophisticated,
not less._

It probably helps that a growing lower tier of entertainment is siphoning off
the viewers least interested in sophisticated plots.

------
lifeisstillgood
I am basing my startup mostly on this discussion / meme - so I am happy to see
it on HN. However the stage I think has been missed by the article (in the
rush to say 2120!) is a transition away from commuting and into massive remote
working, probably in the next ten years. The costs of commuting and office
space is enormous compared to it's benefits for most jobs so we shall see a
sea change in how jobs are measured and managed, leading to the path to remote
working being freed up.

Oddly in software continuous integration / delivery is that sea change. In
marketing? It's AB testing. In everything else? We shall see.

~~~
ph0rque
Can you direct us to your startup's website, or provide a brief description of
it here?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Brief idea: Continuous Integration is a step function in how software teams
can function. By enabling CI or CD one can remove the major impediment to
remote working - managers cannot see what you have done in a day.

If folks remote work in the software department, pretty soon others want to.
The company needs to have the same confidence that people are working and
things progressing daily. So let's say marketing moves to the
technicalmarketing beloved of patio11 - you can have Market department run
tests on it's changes, measure customer behaviour etc. And they don't need to
do it in the office.

Apply the same to every business process. Business people need to interact so
we are not going to abandon cities - but the most valuable interactions are
inter-company not intra-company.

So from little acorns of CI we can see the world of the Race against the
Machine coming to pass - White collar workers automated or their jobs changed
out of recognition.

So my startup, yeah that. I see my one person consultancy not as a lifestyle
business but as a forever company - where I and I hope others will work, but
more importantly experience many new modes of future work - and teach others
and produce products that fill niches we ourselves need or are very well
placed to understand.

To be brutal, I want to turn a one person consultancy into a dispersed
products company, solving the big work ideas of the next twenty years.

First three are the CI consultancy, a data warehouse scm driver and videos of
bug fixes.

Please don't judge the book by the website - www.mikadosoftware.com. Ps - I
think the auto farm is fantastic - keep it up

I have never met any of my coworkers - they are in various parts of the States
and I in Kent. The world has changed, it's just not evenly distributed - I
want to be part of that change - the view is best right out on the edge.

Big long dreams.

~~~
ph0rque
Sounds like interesting ideas to test out in the context of a company... good
luck to you!

------
desas
Robert Heinleins For Us, The Living describes this kind of society. Everyone
gets a "dividend" which is enough to live on and people do what would be a low
wage/non-job such as being an artist for part time fun and high wages.

------
thenomad
One interesting anecdata point on the "everyone would just sit around and
watch TV" front - my girlfriend and I just went through all of our reasonably
close friends, and could only think of one person who might, possibly, not
start or continue doing something challenging and interesting, given a "living
wage" situation - and to be fair, we don't know that person very well.

The "everyone would just sit around" theory seems to be predicated on the
belief that there are millions of people out there whom we don't personally
know, but we somehow know well enough to believe they have no other interests
that might blossom.

------
thomaslangston
While I'm sure the universal living wage will become reality in a few
countries, I'd expect a shorter work week and more vacation time to be more
politically solvent solutions to systemic unemployment in the US.

------
JulianMorrison
The answer is quite simply, we are going to have to STOP having an economy
that contains employment or money, at all. As I've put it before, either we
all retire, or we're all sacked.

The economy, what little of it still requires humans, is going to have to run
on vocations. And the part that does not, is going to have to run on
allocation.

~~~
gaius
You still need some sort of unit to track resource consumption, maybe that's
the Joule instead of the Dollar, but as long as there needs to be decisions
made of the form, which is better/should we do, X or Y, then you need a
quantitative way to think about it. Von Mises called this "economic
calculation".

~~~
JulianMorrison
I'd consider the primary problems of early-Soviet style allocation economics
to be (1) informational (2) computational. Money provides a quantitative (if
not _nice_ ) solution to these because private economic decisions are
intrinsically local, infinitely parallel and they self-aggregate.

Happily, look what happened in the intervening decades: mass connectivity and
big data, plus the normalization of data mining over petabytes of raw
information.

I think, in other words, that we have reached the point where we can batter
down the economic calculation problem with brute force.

~~~
gaius
Even if you are correct, all that computation still needs to be done in some
sort of unit. Money is good because it is abstracted from actual stuff. Joules
are actually a bad unit, because how do you value an information product in
terms of the energy of the computation it does? Hmm.

~~~
JulianMorrison
You use the natural units of the activity. Tonnes of ore or raw material.
Hours of factory time. Joules of energy consumption. Production line machinery
MTBF. So on and so forth. It's a lot of data, but nowadays we have tools to
work with a lot of data.

~~~
gaius
No, that won't work. You can say, right now, and people do, "If we spend X
building this thing, we estimate Y boost to the economy". You can't say "if we
use X tonnes of concrete, we expect Y tonnes of Z to be produced" without the
X/Y ratio _being money_. All money is is a way to abstract the worth of
something from what it actually is.

Oh, and you can't pay your workers in concrete either. Or do you propose not
paying them at all and just giving out rations to people living in
barracks...?

~~~
JulianMorrison
Money abstracts demand-pull from production and supply. But abstraction is a
complexity management tool you don't need if you can crunch the raw
complexity.

What I'm proposing is a "you want it, you got it" economy, basically, that
starts from a premise of equal allocation of resource control (not resource
use) and allows unused allocations to be reflowed to the use of those with
more ambitious projects, with direct-democratic oversight.

For example, if a hypothetical Elon Musk wants to build rockets (a resource
hog activity) then he'd probably end up having to make a public case he was
capable of it to avoid being vetoed, but case made, the resource allocations
of people who prefer to paint at home or study Tudor history other low-
expenditure vocations would be diverted to the rocket project.

No, this would not fall prey to hoarding. Hoarding is stupid and gains you
nothing in a post-scarcity economy. You end up with a huge heap of copper or
whatever that you aren't using, looking like a selfish idiot and with a
trashed reputation that follows you around and makes people not willing to
work with you.

~~~
gaius
What do you think Wall Street is, if not an attempt at "crunching the raw
complexity"? It doesn't work and _can't_ work.

 _would be diverted to the rocket project_

Diverted by whom? The "owners" of those resources, or your central planning
bureau?

Post scarcity relies on the assumption that if we have more than enough raw
materials (and we don't, but let's assume asteroid mining or something), and
more than enough energy (fusion maybe) and instantaneous transport of matter
(otherwise scarcity exists by the stuff you want being _somewhere else_ ) then
we _still_ won't be post-scarcity really, because people/civilizations will
just take on bigger and bigger projects. There will _never_ be a time when
there is no need to make a decision on how to allocate some finite resource to
create some outcome by a quantitative means.

Even in Star Trek, someone needs to be thinking, how many planets do we
colonize this year? How many starships do we build?

------
scotty79
How much jobs we are loosing is not readily apparent. For example you should
add almost all inmates and jailors and possibly half of the laweyrs and some
of the goverment clerks (especialy the ones hired in branches created over
last 20 years) to the unemployed to get the real numbers.

Our societies have a lot of pathological mechanisms for coping with inflow of
people of diverse levels of education that have nothing to do.

I sincerely hope that people will be humane enough to create universal wage
sooner than later.

------
mercuryrising
I'm reading this like 'the singularity is upon us'. We aren't there yet, but
articles like this are very good (even if they are slightly non-realistic at
the moment) to throw a dart at where we, as a civilization, could end up. We
have lost the ability to question where we'll go, because we move faster than
our feet can take us. We are sliding down a snowy hill, holding on for dear
life, hoping there's a nice landing at the bottom that won't end with us
crashing. We've lost control of the sled, but it still moves forward because
there's nothing to stop it.

I have an anecdote from Germany, and one from Uganda that kind of flow with
the idea of 'if you want to, you can, but why?'. We are talented creators, we
can make awesome things. Almost anything you think of now a days can be
created (and likely has). Some of these things shouldn't have been created,
and if every time we want something we ask "but why?", I think it help us to
realize where we're going. These are anecdotes from friends, I have no idea of
their truth, but they're interesting nonetheless (if it's wrong, consider it
fiction).

In Germany, the buses run _on_ time. When the buses are just a couple minutes
late, people start getting mad. Ultra efficiency, where everything is
perfectly meshed together like the gears on a Swiss watch. The timing is
perfect, and it lets life progress with a minimum of fuss and extraneous
endeavors. Get in, get out, get on your way.

In Uganda, when you invite someone over to your place to get together, you can
set up a time. They'll get there, but they might be eight hours late from the
time you set up. They might start walking, and talk to everyone they see along
the way. They'll get the scoop on everyone's life, and share the human
experiences that are happening around them. This lateness would sound like
insanity to most people, but once you realize that everyone's clock is
adjusted to the lag time of getting somewhere, it's not a big deal.

Now we, as humans, can create the most efficient complex world that we want
to. But why? I think we have collectively lost a lot of modesty as our world
has been progressing. We love to play games, we always need a challenge to
solve. There's challenges all around us, and the money from solving the
challenges is ripe for the taking. It doesn't matter what you do to get there
- if you get the money, you get the prize and you won. The ripple effects are
what does us in, and the ripples are the unexpected or unintentional
differences that were created in our society after adopting the solution to
the challenge. Some examples of technology with ripple effects are things like
lead paint, leaded gasoline, clear cutting forests, asbestos insulation, etc.
We might have been able to predict these things would be bad before we started
if we thought a little longer. I'm sure a lot of people knew it would be bad,
but it was the easier one that solved a 'problem' that we had. We're young as
a civilization, and we are going to make mistakes. The mistakes we should not
make though are ones that could have been prevented with a little bit of
thought before jumping in head over heels (drunk driving for instance, if you
don't do it, you will likely live a bit longer). It takes self restraint (from
a person) and conditioning/education (from society) to reduce the number of
drunk drivers. The trouble is that we have no restraint with advancing
technology, and our society hasn't had the change to find the differences that
are created when we advance it.

We're like dogs trying to resist the urge to pounce on a piece of meat. We
simply can not let something pass us by. If there's a forest to ravage, or an
ocean to destroy, we will do it, and we'll do it well. Try this - the next
time you think of something cool to make, DON'T MAKE IT. Think about it, see
it in your head, but resist the urge to make it. It's very, very challenging.

It's easy to know what you've lost after you've lost something, it's hard to
predict what you're going to lose. When we do something, we have to change
society, and we lose parts of society that we had before. Sometimes the
changes are good, sometimes they're bad, but before changing it we should
think about what we're doing.

~~~
dimva
Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the
average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years
longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick
Germany.

You can say technology has its drawbacks, but people overwhelmingly choose
more technology and greater riches over any alternative. And more importantly,
if you don't choose technology and someone else does, they can easily conquer
you (militarily or economically) and destroy your livelihood.

~~~
coldtea
> _Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the
> average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years
> longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick
> Germany_

I'd pick Uganda. And when a had a similar choice to make in real life, I
picked the poorer country.

Screw efficiency and screw societies where people live like robots and survive
on weekend alcoholic binges, while f __*ing poorer countries over to maintain
their wealth and superiority (sometimes literally: from colonialism and
interventions to Nazi Germany and the extermination of the "undesirables").

~~~
thenomad
"screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend
alcoholic binges"

I agree. Not sure what relevance that statement has to Germany, though. I've
spent quite a lot of time in Germany and traveled to a lot of the country, and
I'm certainly not seeing the resemblance.

~~~
coldtea
Well, our experience differs in this case I guess. There are some vibrant
parts of youth culture in Germany (in Berlin, etc), but for the most part it
is work + weekend binges. There is a coldness one cannot really explain,
except if you have leaved in "warmer" societies.

I've heard from people living there that Sweden/Denmark etc are even worse in
this aspect.

~~~
thenomad
OK, that _certainly_ doesn't fit my experience of Denmark - or the United
Nations' "Happiest Countries" index:
[http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/06/where-are-the-worlds-
hap...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/06/where-are-the-worlds-happiest-
countries/) , which rated Denmark as the happiest country in the world last
year.

My experience of Denmark has been that it's a vibrant, diverse, interesting
society with some tremendously smart government policies, a lot of tolerance,
and some really cool stuff going on, from great filmmaking to a massive Live-
Action Roleplaying scene.

------
jwr
For those interested in thinking about issues of a future society where most
humans do not work, I'd highly recommend reading "Limes Inferior"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior>), a thought-provoking book
where many of these issues are raised.

The idea of paying people a basic wage even if they do not perform any useful
work is not a new one.

~~~
hosh
It could go the other way: being able to live and be human without wages.

~~~
jwr
That's basically what Zajdel describes in his dystopian vision: the basic
"red" points that you get allow for a basic existence (e.g. food and shelter)
without performing any work at all. So one might say it isn't really a wage.

~~~
hosh
Not what I mean at all.

I mean, reduce the basic living _cost_. For example, a homestead that ran on
its own power (solar, wind, etc.), can manufacture many basic needs products
through microfabs, and grow enough food.

Reducing costs doesn't do away with capital expenditure. But once acquired,
the ongoing cost of living approaches zero.

If you give everyone a universal income, you are still making people beholden
to the grid of some sort. The red points are still a wage, because ultimately,
you have to rely on someone outside your family group to redeem your needs.

Reduce the cost and make that available _en mass_ , and each household would
be reasonably resource independent. Luxuries, of course, won't go away. Wants
are endless.

------
Tycho
Can everyone be a knowledge worker?

